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Valyrian Steel

Summary:

'She was ashamed to have let them down. She was supposed to look after them, after Brandon and Rickon. She was not a Stark; but Robb had entrusted Winterfell to her, to her and Luwin and Bran… She had sent Rickon off with Osha and Shaggydog and knew she would never see them again; she felt it in her marrow. She had Bran alone; and he was forgetting who he was.'

Jon Snow's twin-sister was left behind at Winterfell. Years after fleeing the Ironborn, Larra returns.

*Also on Fanfiction.net under my account. Please let me know if you find it posted anywhere else.

Chapter 1: Beneath the Tree

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

 01

Beneath the Tree


It was warm, under the great weirwood. Warm, and musty; like living inside an acorn, tucked neatly under the earth. She was as blind as a buried acorn here, surrounded by ageless roots and the soft, relentless cawing of ravens; she didn’t wonder why the gods wanted faces carved into the trees to look out over the world of Men. It was dull in here.

Dull, and timeless: The world went on without them. Days had bled into months: She wondered how many years they had wasted inside the hollow.

It was beautiful outside, in a starkly brutal sort of way. Here in the land of always-winter the winds howled, or whispered, and the snows buried the cave entrance, and melted in the glare of an impossible sun, and through it all, its great ivory trunk groaning in the wind, its fiery leaves like so many bloody hands, the weirwood endured.

Beneath it, impossibly, so did they.

Bran held onto the tangle of roots, the Three-Eyed Raven guiding him in his visions. Bran learned, and she waited.

She waited for Bran; and she waited for the dead. With every scream of the wind, every avalanche of snow roaring across the valleys, her heart leapt, anticipating hordes of the dead pouring through the caves, crashing over them like waves against the shore, destructive, unceasing, tireless.

She was utterly powerless.

And she knew it.

The longer they remained, the more Bran learned; and the weaker she became, waiting, wasting away. She could feel it. The long journey had strengthened her, every last ounce of fat lost as her muscles burned and her blisters turned to calluses and her bones ached and they struggled forever northward.

But with inaction, that hard-earned muscle was wasting away, leaving her emaciated. She saw it in Meera’s face, in the hollowed cheeks and distracted brown eyes losing all hope. They tried to keep themselves busy; to distract them from the aching hunger, the desperation, from wondering…what happened next? How much time did they truly have? How long could they linger beneath the tree, waiting? In a barren wasteland of ice and snow, there was little to distract them: only the Children.

She wished she could tell Maester Luwin. While Brandon learned from the Three-Eyed Raven, she and Meera listened to stories from the last of the Children of the Forest. What she wouldn’t have given to tell Maester Luwin a lot of things - and Old Nan: the Children were not gone, and dragons had come into the world again.

Bran had seen them.

While Bran was tutored by the Three-Eyed Raven in green-seeing, the Children trained her, and Meera, using staff and spear, using throwing-knives with lethal precision. Small, tactile blades of dragonglass. Maester Luwin had called it obsidian, and he had a link of it on his heavy chain. The frightened, brave Night’s Watch boy Samwell Tarly had given Larra her first dagger; it had been left at the Fist of the First Men, the last place wights had been seen in vast numbers… She learned how it was that the White Walkers could be killed by it…the origins of the White Walkers themselves… A weapon, created by the Children…to wipe out the First Men.

The Long Night had broken into a new dawn, but the Night King had not died: He had slept.

And now he had awoken.

And they waited. Here, under the weirwood, where the ancient magic of the Children protected them. The Night King could not enter, and nor could his legions of wights.

As Bran learned to embrace his visions, even steer them, she and Meera sparred, and tried to forget their hunger, their dread. The helplessness. They tried to keep their spirits up, in this desolate place, for Hodor’s sake, if not their own. All the way from Winterfell, she had carried the small doeskin pouch that opened into an embroidered game-board, which her twin-brother Jon had gifted her on their fourteenth name-day; they played the game with pieces made from carved bone, bear-fangs, polished conkers and interesting pebbles they had picked up along their journey.

It kept Hodor content: He played that game for hours on end, and she could believe he had no cares in the world, watching him play with the Children, Summer curled up beside him, his great head resting in Hodor’s lap. Sometimes he let Hodor scratch behind his ears and pet his shaggy pelt.

Other times, like now, Summer stood at the entrance to the caves, his breath hot on her neck as she squatted in the snow and watched. They watched for his sister. Summer and Last Shadow: She had sent her dire-wolf into the wilderness… A wild thing should be free.

That was what the wildlings had told them. The small family, all that was left of a clan that descended from the First Men, too proud to unite with the crow who flew down from the wall and became King beyond it. They had tried to convince her, convince Bran and Jojen and Meera, even simple Hodor, that south was the only way: North was death.

Sometimes she wondered whether they had made it to the Wall, but couldn’t bear to ask the Raven.

She knew she would never forget their faces. Nor their kindness, in this desolate place. What little they had, they had shared, against all their instincts for survival, contradicting every story she had ever heard growing up. She hoped they had opportunity to barter her brother’s name for their passage south; it was all she could give them.

Because the Wall was all that stood between the living and the dead.

She wondered where Last Shadow was; and whether Jon had made it back to Castle Black.

Outside the eerie keep that echoed with the screams and whimpers of abused women, she had watched him fight as the snow fell - yards from him, she had almost bitten off her own tongue to stop from screaming for him.

Her Jon. Her twin-brother. The brother she never thought to see again, so close she could see the sweat blinding him as he fought Night’s Watch mutineers. She’d thought, He needs a haircut. And he’d grown his whiskers out. He had looked exhausted, and older than she remembered - and so like Father and Uncle Benjen it made her heart ache.

Walking away from Jon was the hardest thing she had ever done.

But it was necessary. Whatever she had to do to keep her little brothers alive, she had done. Nothing else mattered. And that meant she had had to make some terrible decisions.

There was the softest rustle behind her, and her hand curled around the obsidian dagger tucked into her belt. The Children and Meera always left their weapons at the entrance to the caves, but she could not sleep without hers. If they had to move quickly, she wanted the assurance that she had something to defend herself or hunt with… She had been caught out before; and Maester Luwin always said she was a quick learner.

It was Leaf. Nut-brown skin dappled like a fawn, vines and leaves woven into her strange hair, nimble and elegant with three fingers tipped with claws black as her obsidian spear, with large ears that heard more than Summer’s, and keen amber-green eyes that had watched the ages pass. One of the last of the Children of the Forest. Her songs in the True Tongue had made them weep, even though they couldn’t understand the words. In translating, they discovered Larra’s gift for languages; the Children had been teaching her words and phrases, songs.

“Are we to have another lesson?” she asked hopefully.

“The Three-Eyed Raven wishes to speak with you,” said Leaf, in her gentle voice like a summer breeze soughing through fresh leaves. Behind her, Larra could see Meera, waiting patiently.

“Has Bran eaten anything?” Larra asked.

“More than you,” Meera replied, and Larra gazed out over the brutal, unforgivingly beautiful landscape. She would never forget the awing beauty of the true North. She sighed. She was starting to forget what hunger was; she was clinging to the memories of what being warm felt like.

“More blood-stew,” she sighed grimly, but not ungratefully. The stew the Children made was all that sustained them, thickened with barley and onions and chunks of meat. If not the stew, they subsisted on hundreds of kinds of mushrooms, or the blind white fish the Children plucked from the black river, with cheese and milk from the goats that shared the hidden cramped warrens.

What she wouldn’t give for an apple. Blackberry and apple pie with buttery pastry and lashings of fresh custard.

They were not starved here, but it was not their home; and the Children were wary of her.

“I like to imagine I’m sitting at my Father’s table, during a name-day feast, eating all my favourites,” Meera smiled, though it barely touched her eyes. They kept up appearances for Hodor’s sake, and because Bran needed no other excuses to be petulant and aggressive; together, they were allowed to be angry, to be frightened, and fraught. They didn’t have to hide from each other. Meera could grieve Jojen; and she could fret for Rickon, leagues away with a wildling woman who looked upon him like a son. But she and Meera also buoyed each other; they stopped the other from sinking into melancholy, from drowning in her dread and despair.

How long before Bran became like the Three-Eyed Raven? Able to witness everything that happened in the world, and remain wholly disconnected from it. The Three-Eyed Raven saw every tragedy and yet felt no grief; witnessed delight, yet felt no joy.

The Three-Eyed Raven had been waiting for them. For Bran.

Larra had merely helped Bran get here.

She wondered what the Three-Eyed Raven wanted with her.

He was easy to find, of course; he never moved. He and the tree were one: The bleached roots spread and twisted from the cavern ceiling like an eerie chandelier, the cave larger than the Great Hall at Winterfell, and as cramped as a feast-day, murders of crows cawing incessantly, the uneven ground littered with the bones of the dead - animals, the Children, even giant’s bones, the skeletons of monstrous bats draped from the ceiling… Had there been any natural light within the caves, it would have shed eerie shadows across the walls. But there was not: No starlight, nor daylight penetrated the caves. And nestled within the gnarled roots, on a throne of woven weirwood, was an old man, his vellum-brittle skin colourless, except for the mark on his face. His hair was pure white, and his one eye, when he was not greenseeing with Bran, was blood-red. An albino. And a Man. He was not one of the Children; but he had lived amongst and been attended to by them for years, here under the weirwood, waiting.

The Three-Eyed Raven raised his head slowly when she entered the cave. It was musty and close, ageless bones crunching underfoot, and she felt the fine hairs at the back of her neck prickle with awareness, sensing eyes on her. Not just the Three-Eyed Raven’s, but the birds’ and Hodor’s.

Brandon was looking at her in a way he never had before.

“What has happened?” she asked, frowning, her hand immediately going to her belt, to her dagger. She had lost the one sword they had chanced to steal from Winterfell’s forge, just before reaching the hollow: But she had her new obsidian weapons now, daggers and a hatchet, a double-ended staff, and arrows. As many as she could make, and carry; the Children had taught her. Dragonglass arrowheads; glossy black raven fletching; and shafts of bone-white weirwood.

“Alarra!” Bran panted, staring at her. She frowned, still grasping the dagger at her belt. “I saw.”

She shot a glare at the Three-Eyed Raven. “Where did you take him this time?” Brandon always returned from his visions frothing with excitement - or dug into his resentment like a tick: The more the Raven showed him, the more he wanted to see. The more he saw, the longer he wanted to stay. She was losing him. Her brother Brandon Stark, the fearless boy who loved to climb and wanted to be a Kingsguard, he had died the day he fell from the tower; another, angrier boy had woken to find his back broken and his mother gone. And now Brandon Stark was changing once more; the longer he stayed locked inside his mind, inside his visions, the less he was like Bran when he woke.

Bran wanted to stay inside those visions.

At her darkest times, she believed she was here merely to stop Brandon from drowning in them.

And her dark times were dark. At her worst, she missed Jon so fiercely she thought her heart might burst: She resented Bran, for insisting they risk their lives to get here, for being a cripple, for being unable to help her keep Winterfell, or take it back. She hated Theon with a venomous passion that seemed to make her blood boil; and she was angry with her father, and tucked in her furs in this unyielding darkness she wept bitterly for him, and for the mother whose name he had denied her, forever lost - he had never given her a name, not once uttered it, not even to her own children, the only people who had any right to it.

Alarra had always dreaded being forgotten: It broke her heart to be left behind. Now she was the only one left to remember. She had to live with all that had happened to her family.

And she was ashamed to have let them down. She was supposed to look after them, after Brandon and Rickon. She was not a Stark; but Robb had entrusted Winterfell to her, to her and Luwin and Bran… She had sent Rickon off with Osha and Shaggydog and knew she would never see them again; she felt it in her marrow. She had Bran alone; and he was forgetting who he was.

“I have a gift for you,” said the Three-Eyed Raven. For once, his one eye was red, not milky-white: And he reminded her of Ghost, her brother’s albino direwolf.

“A gift, my lord?” she asked sceptically, and the Raven chuckled softly. He had a dry sense of humour, even in this forgotten place; perhaps he was just grateful for the company. His visions were all very well, and as he had told Bran, in them he was always with the brother he loved, the woman he desired - but they never heard him: They existed now only in memory. The world’s memory; and he was its keeper.

Bran remained quiet, and she didn’t understand the look on his face when she glanced at him: As if he did not know her. There was something like…awe. No, she did not understand it. And he did not speak, only watched, as several of the Children appeared. One approached Larra, carrying something bulky. In the flickering light of their torches, Larra discerned the shape. It could be only one thing: A sword, complete with scabbard and belt, both of leather, and glinting with the familiar sheen of obsidian.

But it was the pommel of the sword that drew her eye, the eerie light bringing to life a flower of flame crackling silently. A sense of something prickled in the pit of her stomach, recognition or dread or anticipation; it felt…momentous.

And she knew instantly…it was not just the sword the Raven was gifting her. The axe had to fall…

But she took the sword all the same, frowning at the pommel, and the fat ruby set into the cross-guard, etched…with a three-headed dragon. The Targaryen sigil.

Carefully, she unsheathed the sword a few inches, and in the torchlight, the ripples and folds of steel imbued with forgotten magic seemed to move like smoke in the shadows. Valyrian steel, bearing the Targaryen sigil.

“Dark Sister,” she whispered. How many times had Arya asked her to read the Targaryen histories to her when she was little? A lost longsword, once wielded by Queen Visenya Targaryen, and with which she had founded the Kingsguard of legend when she cut the Conqueror’s face with it before his protectors could react; wielded by the Dragonknight - always Larra’s favourite; and by Jaehaerys the Wise; by the Spring Prince and the Rogue Prince; and by…

She raised her eyes to the weirwood sharply.

“You are Lord Rivers. Brynden the Bloodraven, Master of Whisperers. You were Hand to King Aerys the First and to King Maekar. You were Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch,” she whispered, stunned, and gasped, realising, “Lost beyond the Wall…”

“Once, I was Brynden Rivers,” the Raven nodded sadly. “He dwells within me, but I am the Three-Eyed Raven now. There is little room for the Bloodraven.” Her eyes slid to Bran, just for a second: Was that not Bran’s fate? To become what the Three-Eyed Raven was? The apprentice must at some point become master. Would some fool boy one day seek this cave, and find an elderly cripple calling himself the Three-Eyed Raven, last of the great greenseers, to learn all that ever was and is, everything that might ever have been and never was, like stillborn babies?

We have to survive that long, she thought grimly, and her eyes flicked back to the Three-Eyed Raven.

“You cannot give me this sword,” she whispered, wanting to pass it back to the Children; but they had melted into the shadows. She gazed at the Raven - Lord Rivers, the Bloodraven of her storybooks.

A thousand eyes, and one… The old nursery rhyme about the notorious Master of Whisperers…the Three-Eyed Raven… Rather, two-eyed… The Bloodraven had lost his eye to his half-brother Bittersteel…

“To my shame, I took the sword with me when I journeyed to the Wall, though it was not mine to keep,” said the Raven. “My brother had bestowed it upon me, you see - I could not bear to part with it.”

Lord Rivers, one of the legitimised Great Bastards of Aegon IV - the Unworthy…

“This is a Targaryen sword - a king’s sword,” Larra said, shaking her head. “I cannot take it.”

“Once, Dark Sister was wielded by a firstborn Targaryen daughter, older sister to a king…now it shall be again,” said the Raven. Larra blinked at him, waiting…the churning sensation in her stomach, the veiled hint… “Dark Sister is yours by birth-right.”

Larra went cold, refusing to listen to what the Bloodraven hadn’t said, but had implied.

“I have no birth-right,” said Larra crisply, honestly. One bastard to another, he should remember… Bastards lived half-lives, no true place in the world except one they managed to carve out for themselves. She had been left behind at Winterfell because she had no place in the world: She could not join the Night’s Watch and earn the honour her birth had denied her due to her gender - nor could she be used by Father to secure the allegiance of his bannermen. They would consider any proposal to wed her an insult, when he had two lawful daughters. She had no place, and no value, and so had been left behind, to raise the children and aid Maester Luwin. And she knew it.

“You do.” It was Bran who spoke, quietly, and it was the gentleness in his tone that made her wary. Brandon was rarely gentle anymore, reminding her more and more of Rickon, the wildest of them all. “Larra…I’ve seen. The Three-Eyed Raven has shown me…so many things - things about the Rebellion, and Father…and your mother. I’ve seen your mother, Larra.”

Her heart stopped, and resentment coiled like a volcanic beast in the pit of her stomach, a baby dragon writhing and clawing and burning her insides. All she had ever wanted, for as long as she could remember wanting anything at all, was her mother’s name.

And Bran had seen her.

All her life, she had wanted to know, ached to learn her name, and whether she had curly hair like theirs or pretty eyes or liked to dance…she had wanted to know if Ned Stark had loved her; she had wanted to know her mother was beautiful, and kind, and clever, and had loved Father. Growing up, it was all she had: That Ned Stark had loved her mother more than he had ever loved Catelyn Tully, that nothing his wife could say or do would ever provoke him to send them away, because he had loved her so very much, and loved her still. It had been a dream, a fantasy, that her parents had loved one another more than they loved anything else in the world.

“It doesn’t matter now,” she said quietly.

“But it does,” Bran said gently, and the gentleness unnerved her. “It has always mattered. And that is why Father kept it from you, and from Jon. From everyone.”

Their way was the old way: He who passed the sentence should swing the sword.

A blow was to be dealt: Bran made sure he was the one who delivered it, not some stranger lost to legend. She stared down at the sword, at the whispers of gold and silver glinting amongst the steel grip, the fat glowing ruby set into the rain-guard. It was an exceptional sword.

“Lyanna.” Bran spoke quietly, but she heard the name, and the silence in the cave was deafening. “Your mother was Lyanna Stark.”

She flinched, and anger blistered her insides.

Lyanna Stark, who had died in Dorne after Rhaegar fell at the Trident; whose bones were interred with the ancient Kings of the North. It wasn’t just an empty tomb: Father had brought her home.

He had returned from the war with a corpse and twin babies.

She used to see Father lighting the candles around Lyanna’s statue.

And his rare smiles always faded whenever someone remarked how similar Larra was to the wild Northern beauty famously carried off by the Last Dragon.

She knew the stories; they all did. How could they not? Their House had almost faced extinction. Seven kingdoms had bled because of Rhaegar’s infatuation with a Northern wolf-girl; a dynasty three-centuries in the making had ended with fire and blood.

“If Lyanna was my mother, then you are telling me Ned Stark was not my father.”

“In the ways that matter, Ned Stark was indeed your father,” said the Bloodraven solemnly. “He raised you, educated you, protected you. But the man who fathered you, the man who took Lyanna Stark into his bed…that was the Last Dragon. Rhaegar, Prince of Dragonstone.”

Larra exhaled a breath she hadn’t realised she was holding, feeling hollow.

“Rhaegar never kidnapped Lyanna,” Bran said softly. “He loved her, Larra… He saw the iron beneath her beauty; he saw her strength and her kindness… You remember Meera’s story, about the Knight of the Laughing Tree?”

Larra frowned, glancing over her shoulder at Meera, who lingered, her eyes wide, lips slightly parted. “I remember. At the Tourney of Harrenhall, he defended the honour of Howland Reed.”

“He did. Only it wasn’t a ‘he’; it was Lyanna,” Bran said, eyes sparkling with enthusiasm. “King Aerys commanded his men to find the mystery knight; Rhaegar found the weirwood shield up a tree…and Lyanna. I saw it. Larra, I saw them. I saw the whole thing - how they met; when Rhaegar crowned her his Queen of Love and Beauty. Rhaegar never kidnapped Lyanna, or raped her: She chose him. He saw exactly who Lyanna was. And he married her.”

“Rhaegar was wed to Elia Martell, Bran, everyone knows that. He carried off Lyanna when he tired of the Dornish princess.”

“Elia was ill; another pregnancy would have killed her. Rhaegar had his marriage to her annulled, he wanted Elia to retire to Dorne,” Bran told her, shaking his head in his urgency. “The High Septon wed Rhaegar and Lyanna in a private ceremony on the Isle of Faces, a ceremony of the Seven, in front of a heart-tree; Rhaegar’s friends witnessed it, Ser Arthur Dayne, all of them. They escorted Rhaegar and Lyanna to Dorne, to the tower Rhaegar called Joy…where you and Jon were born after Rhaegar fell at the Trident.”

Ned Stark had ridden south after lifting the siege of Storm’s End: And when he had found his sister, in a Dornish tower, she had been guarded by the most legendary swordsmen in the Kingsguard for generations. Ser Oswell Whent, Lord Commander Gerold Hightower, and the Sword of the Morning, Ser Arthur Dayne…

Ned had returned from Dorne with his sister’s dead body, and twin babies.

Lyanna…

The only person Ned Stark would ever have loved enough to sacrifice his honour. To protect hers.

To protect them.

She had finally learned her mother’s name.

And with it, all hope had died.

She remembered, vividly, sobbing bitterly at the unfairness of Lady Catelyn’s hatred of her; at having no mother. She had sobbed for missing her; ached to know her name; and dreamed of the day her mother would come to Winterfell and take her and Jon away, somewhere they would be safe, and happy, and know a mother’s love.

After years, she finally knew her mother’s name. And she knew that her mother had been dead and gone for decades.

The only hope she had ever had was that one day, she and Jon would meet their mother, and know that they had been loved, even from afar. She would look at them, and her kind eyes would crinkle as she smiled, the way Jon’s and Uncle Benjen’s did, thrilled to see them, relieved they were healthy and strong and good.

Lyanna Stark.

Dead in the tower of Joy years ago. The last of the great casualties of Robert’s Rebellion.

Had she known Rhaegar was already dead, as she laboured to bring Larra and Jon into the world? That Robert had been proclaimed king and all hope was lost for the Targaryen dynasty?

Had she given up?

“Why are you telling me this? Why now? Father kept Lyanna’s secret, he kept us safe, what does it matter now?” she asked, and her voice rang around the echoing cavern as she panted, her blood boiling in her veins. Father had always called it the wolf-blood; he had warned her that Lyanna had touch of it, her uncle Brandon more than a touch…

“Because you ought to know…” Bran said, staring at her in that way he never had before. He was truly looking at her, as if he had never seen her before, as if he was looking for something in her face - and had found it. His lips parted. “He loved her. And she loved him.”

“It doesn’t matter. Jon and I - we don’t matter,” Larra said fiercely. But even she heard the crack in her voice, the desperation.

Father had found Lyanna dying in her birthing-bed in Dorne…and brought his bastard twins back to Winterfell. Because their mother…was dead… Her mother.

“But you do,” Bran said softly, staring at her. “You always have. After the Siege of King’s Landing, Father journeyed all the way to Dorne to find Lyanna. She was protected by three of the most lethal Kingsguard to wear the white cloaks in generations… Father told us the story, how many times? But he never told us all of it. But I have seen it. Father found Lyanna, bleeding to death in her birthing-bed, her newborn daughter in her arms as they wrapped her son in his swaddling-cloth.” Larra could not meet his eye; hers burned, as she scowled at the longsword in her hands, too hurt, too devastated by the loss.

Her mother, snatched away from her the moment she learned her name.

“Larra… You were wanted, and by no-one more than Rhaegar and Lyanna,” Bran said firmly. “Rhaegar was gone before you were born, as was Aerys, and Rhaegar’s children by Elia Martell. The Queen was in exile on Dragonstone, expecting her last child, her surviving son still a boy. All Lyanna could do, as she lay dying, was hold you - and make Father promise.”

“Promise to what?” she moaned, heartbroken. If all this was true, and she knew it was, then her father’s life had been more honourable, his death more tragic than anything she had ever heard.

“To protect you. To protect you, and your twin-brother…the heirs to the Iron Throne,” Bran said quietly, and she flinched again. “She was dying, and she was brave, Larra… She made Father swear, she refused to die until he had sworn an oath to her, to protect you. The heir to the Iron Throne; the future of House Targaryen.”

And he had.

Ned Stark had loved his sister more than anything and anyone; more than his own honour.

Even the Dragonknight had never protected his beloved as well as Ned Stark had protected his sister.

He had protected them all their lives; and he had died, protecting his sister’s secret. He had let her die, virtuous and tragic, forever young and beautiful, songs sung of her tragic romance with the brilliant, noble young prince.

But Lyanna had died. And Rhaegar had been murdered at the Trident: His infant son Aegon and daughter Rhaenys had died gruesomely the same night as the Mad King…

With a horrible sense of finality, Larra accepted the devastating truth; that all Bran was telling her was irrefutable.

It all made far too much sense to deny.

Her mother was Lyanna Stark, the wild she-wolf of the North; and her father…the Last Dragon, Prince Rhaegar.

They had never been bastards.

Jon had been born a king.

They had a claim to the Iron Throne. Jon had the only claim to the Iron Throne.

And that frightened her more than any Night King’s army of wights: The dead could only kill them.

“Lyanna lived long enough to name you. Jon she named Aegon, after Rhaegar’s great-grandfather, Aegon the Unlikely… And you, Larra… Lyanna named you for Rhaegar’s mother…Aella…”

“Aella,” she whispered. It sounded foreign on her tongue. Because it was. An old name, a Valyrian name, remnant of a lost culture, the ghost of a lost age. And the name her mother had given her…meant nothing. She was Alarra Snow: The name her father had given her. The name she armoured herself with, the name that at once meant a lack of honour, and freedom - to carve out her own fate.

She unsheathed Dark Sister, the light glinting off the impossibly sharp, smoky blade, rubies glowing.

Dark Sister was wielded by a firstborn Targaryen daughter, older sister to a king…now it shall be again…

Dark Sister had been forged for a woman-warrior, in the days before the Doom of Valyria, before the Targaryens had occupied the last Valyrian outpost, Dragonstone… A slender blade, expertly forged, exquisitely decorated, but lethal, thirsty for blood, wielded by warrior-queens and heroes…

A Valyrian steel sword, given to a ferocious warrior sister, to protect her brother-king.

She lowered her eyes to the Bloodraven. His ancient face was saddened.

Lord Rivers had gifted her Dark Sister, not just to protect Bran, she knew, or to help in their fight against White Walkers and their legions of the undead…

He had returned the blade to a true Targaryen. If they survived the dead, it fell to Larra to protect her brother, as Queen Visenya had Aegon, with this very blade.

The Bloodraven’s face was sombre, but his eye glittered as he watched her swing Dark Sister from one hand, her wrist like water, practicing thrusts and parries to learn how she weighed in Larra’s hands, the balance beautiful. The blade sang through the still air.

Father had allowed her to learn alongside Robb and Jon and Theon how to wield weapons: He’d told Ser Rodrick that wild girls had to learn to protect themselves. And those who could not wield a blade often died upon them: As a bastard, Larra had been allowed what Lady Catelyn refused Sansa and Arya - the right to defend themselves.

The Bloodraven’s ancient face was alight with admiration and dread as he watched her, and he murmured, “Dark Sister looks as if she were forged for your hand by the gods themselves… She has been idle too long, and has a thirst for blood… May she bring you good fortune, in the wars to come.”

Chapter 2: Hold the Door

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

02

Hold the Door!


Hold the door! Hold the door! Hold the door!

Holdedoor! Holdedoor! Holdedoor!

Holdoor! Holdoor! Holdoor!

Hodor! Hodor! Hodor!

Hodor… Hodor… Hodor…

Hodor…

Hodor.

Chapter 3: White Winds

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

03

White Winds


Even months and years later, she could never recall exactly how they made it to the haunted forest, two wraithlike girls laden with furs and weapons, dragging a sled and a broken boy on the cusp of manhood: Headfirst into the worst storm they had experienced in all their wanderings of the true North. The white winds had snatched at their furs and torn at their exposed skin, stinging where ice had frozen in the air, pelting them, the snow gentling each sting as flakes the size of daisies swirled around them, blinding them. They whispered against her skin like forbidden kisses.

All she could remember, after turning her back on her sweet giant, was that her eyelashes had frozen.

It took days to realise it was because she had been crying.

Hodor’s fate battered her mind, attempting to turn it inside-out, and grief at Summer’s sacrifice threatened to overwhelm her, aching for Last Shadow, sorrow for the last of the Children meeting their fates so valiantly, uselessly, to give them precious time, in a place where time had not existed for millennia, made her hollow - and angry. Grief and terror and hope kept her moving.

Hope was the only thing more powerful than her dread.

In the snowstorm of the Night King’s creation, they did not dare let go the harness lashing them to Bran’s sled: To let go was to lose one another. And to fall behind was to be left behind: They could not afford to stop. They would never meet again: Unless it was on opposite sides of the inevitable war. The only war that mattered. The war for the dawn. For life.

When people asked her, years later, how they had escaped the Night King and his army of wights, her answer was simple, and confounding: I put one foot in front of the other.

There was no magic to it. There had been no miracles, no heroes but a simple-minded giant who held the door. Just her and Meera. And they had simply refused to give in: They marched, and they dragged Bran, his eyes still milky from visions, and they fought against the howling white winds and raging snows, not daring to look back and see how close the army of the dead was. In the snows, they couldn’t even smell the dead, and that was something. Meera had noticed the cold: Larra had noticed the smell.

They had each killed a White Walker, with weapons of obsidian: But they had paid for their escape with the lives of Hodor and Summer, Lord Bloodraven, Leaf, and the other Children. The last of their kind.

The wind almost knocked them off their feet, snatching at loose curls, slapping and slicing their exposed skin, and her bones ached to the marrow; her legs shook violently, and she was sure her feet bled. They were weak. Weaker than she had suspected.

Had the Night King been sated enough by the murder of the Three-Eyed Raven, by the Children, to not give chase? His generals were one thing: But Larra had looked the Night King in the face, and known she looked upon an ancient god from a forgotten age. A god of Death.

She could not defeat Death. She could only outrun it, for as long as she had strength in her body to put one foot in front of the other.

They weaved through the trees, the haunted forest echoing with howls and screams as the winds tore at barren branches, saplings groaning and creaking as they bowed in the gale, and Meera struggled, and lost her footing. The sled lurched, and Larra panted, tugging.

They hadn’t stopped for hours; but the dawn would not come. The night…the night chased them…and its King had sent his soldiers after them. She dared not stop, dared not look back.

“We have to keep going!!” she shouted, tugging sharply.

“I can’t!!!”

“You must!”

Whimpering, devastated and exhausted, knowing that to stop was death, Meera struggled to her feet; they tugged at the sled, and freed it from a hidden gnarl of tree-roots. She saw the look on Meera’s face just as they heard it: The first snarl, carried on the wind. They were sheltered from the worst of the elements amongst the trees, finally, blessedly sheltered, but even the woods would not stop the dead, any more than the shore could stop the sea.

“I’m sorry!” Meera cried, her face crumpling, as she panted and shook with exhaustion, guarding Bran with her body. His eyes were still milky-white, sightless - seeing everything.

For how long?

“Meera, take Bran and go!” she shouted over the wind.

“What about you?” Meera screamed, and her face fell, her eyes widening in horror as she gazed past Larra.

The dead. The sight of them sucked the breath from her lungs, and filled her with dread…but worse, worse than the decayed corpses wielding broken weapons, tearing ceaselessly through the storm…the lone White Walker. Not the King; one of his long-haired generals. Armoured and armed, his pace was slow and unyielding as a glacier, the wights all the more chaotic around him for his stillness.

“Meera…your bow,” she wheezed, and Meera reached for it, nocking the first obsidian arrow.

They would die: But they would fight.

She refused to give in. From the moment the Ironborn took Winterfell, her sole purpose had been to survive: And to survive, because she had to protect her brothers. She lived for them. They gave her purpose. Protecting Bran was all she had: And she would fight to her death to protect him. With her last breath, she would defy anyone who attempted to harm him.

As the wights descended, she unsheathed her new sword to wield it in battle for the very first time. She was exhausted to her marrow, every muscle burning…but she had been trained for this. For exhaustion, and hunger, and desperation…

Those without swords still die upon them, Father had once told Ser Rodrick, who hadn’t wanted to train a woman for war, bastard though she was. But she was a daughter of the North: They were made of tempered steel and unyielding ironstone.

Arrows whistled past, wights stopping in their tracks, but the White Walker strode on, his face ice-white and still, his blue eyes glowing in the half-light.

Dark Sister felt as if she had been forged for Larra alone, an extension of her arm, and the blade sang through the air. She killed one, two, another, and another - she fought for survival, her exhaustion forgotten, blood flowing through her veins like liquid fire, fierce and good. Her blood was up: It was all she had. The burning desire to fight - to live. It was all she had, and it was not enough, but she fought. As Meera emptied her quiver, Larra cut down more wights, keeping them at bay.

But there were too many.

Too many, and too fast. Unrelenting.

A White Walker before her eyes. She thought of Old Nan’s stories. And then she fought, and no other thought entered her mind but anticipating the next strike, and avoiding each blow. She was too exhausted, too weak to block; but fear made her nimble.

Dark Sister came alive in her hands; her body moving as if without thought. The Children called it dancing.

She danced with a White Walker.

Larra heard the wights, heard Meera’s bow singing, the crunch of shattering wights as dragonglass killed whatever magic animated them, she heard the winds howling, but it was the howling of a direwolf that cost her - almost everything.

The familiar howl of Last Shadow filled her with strength - with hope, with memories, with determination - fuelled by love - to survive; for half a second, she was distracted. A giant black direwolf leapt out of nowhere, over Bran, bundling into three wights advancing on him.

Last Shadow. She had grown - and she was not alone. More wolves appeared out of nowhere, leaping out of the snows at wights, tearing them to pieces, and someone astride a great black horse swung a flaming thurible on a long chain at any wight within range as the horse galloped around the trees.

But she lost focus, her arms shook with the impact of the blow she just blocked in time - she stumbled, overbalanced in the snowy terrain, and screamed as the Walker stabbed at her with his ice-white blade. Seven hells!

It was a scream of fury - and pain. Had he broken ribs? Her breath came so painfully, she thought so; she would be bruised.

But she was not dead. Not yet.

The White Walker showed no emotion, only lethal purpose. He was a sword in the storm.

She bared her teeth and screamed in fury as she clamped her arm down over the white blade still tangled in her furs, raising Dark Sister to use the flaming pommel and break the brittle ice-blade in half. She fell back as if to fade - and screamed as she leapt forwards, knocking his broken blade out of the way to plunge Dark Sister deep into his heart.

Larra looked into his glowing vivid-blue eyes and saw nothing. No emotion, no desire, no life. She did not smell a putrid corpse, as the stench of the wights made her eyes water even in the storm; only ice. Cold.

The sound of ice creaking and cracking seemed to quieten the storm raging around them; she heard every fissure as they appeared on his snow-white skin, bluish-silver and white, awing. She clenched her eyes shut as she fell to the ground, ice shattering, raining down around her as she landed heavily in the snow.

Panting, her side agony to her, she raised her head, fingers tight around Dark Sister’s grip, wary for the next attack, and gasped, watching, stunned, as the wights dropped where they were, disintegrating, dust on the wind, rusted weapons dropping into the snow with piles of old bones and mouldy furs. For a second, she only stared, taking it all in: Then she realised. The wights had met their true death with the defeat of the White Walker who commanded them, had maybe created them.

Panting, she collapsed against the snow, turning onto her back, hissing in pain, staring dazedly into the endless grey-white sky, bare trees waving and groaning in the wind, snow flurries eddying around her. She blinked, and focused, and smiled humourlessly at the ravens clinging stubbornly to the branches. Wherever there are wolves, there are ravens, Maester Luwin used to tell her.

The shrouded man on horseback trotted over, the stench of his sweating horse acrid on the crisp air, looping the coils of his chain carefully, the thrurible extinguished. His voice tickled her memory when he said, “On your feet…the dead do not tire.”

Last Shadow snuffled as she prowled over, bigger than Larra ever remembered, and gave Larra’s ear a lick, tucking her nose under Larra’s chin for a moment, whining softly, and Larra might have burst into tears of relief had she the energy.

“Shadow,” she wheezed, and her dire-wolf, her companion and sister, chuffed softly. Intense heat roiled off her in waves, and the familiar, comforting scent of wolf swept memories of better times through Larra’s mind. She knotted her fingers in Shadow’s impossibly thick jet fur, and the enormous direwolf gently pulled her to her feet. Her legs shook violently, her arms felt like dead weights, bruised from the impact of fighting the White Walker, and her side protested, in absolute agony…but she was alive.

And Meera was alive. And Brandon was alive.

Meera was hurriedly gathering as many arrows as she could reclaim from the fallen wights, already disintegrating in the vicious winds; Shadow guided Larra to the sled, to Bran, whose eyes were dark once more. He stared at her unblinkingly, simply reaching to lift the harness Larra had fashioned under the weirwood, fastened to the sled. She had fit it to Summer. She had designed the sled, crafted from dead weirwood branches, so that Bran could skim across the snow and ice in comfort, using reins to guide Summer, who had been large enough to draw the sled like horses did wagons. It was supposed to ensure that Bran had a means of transportation he was not completely reliant on other people for; but there was capacity for someone to stand behind, and take the reins. They hadn’t time to test the harness and the sled together.

Last Shadow padded in front of the sled; Larra sheathed Dark Sister before securing the harness around her direwolf. There was no blood on the blade; no indication at all she had slain a White Walker, a monster from legend. Shadow stood still, waiting patiently, as Larra adjusted the harness: Summer had been smaller than his sister, and Larra fastened the buckles with stiff, bruised fingers. Meera helped her right the sled, Bran jostled inside his furs, and Larra wondered, fleetingly, whether Bran had called the wolves to him. He was a skinchanger, far stronger than Larra - she could change skins with wolves, but wouldn’t dare try and see through another man’s eyes; the Children had taught her, making her practice every day. Skinchanging left Bran’s body vulnerable while he inhabited an animal’s skin: It left his mind vulnerable to the death of his host. It was a dangerous and erratic power; Larra didn’t trust it.

The shrouded man called to them, but the sound was lost on the wind; as Larra stepped on the footboards, he helped Meera onto his horse, and started galloping away. South. Always south now.

They couldn’t have outrun the dead without Shadow, without the mounted stranger.

But they did. Somehow, they did.

Theon Greyjoy used to talk about sailing. Odd that she thought about him then, after everything: She had only thought about Theon in anger ever since he took Winterfell, took her brothers’ home from them, betrayed Robb’s trust. Theon used to talk about the sea. Pyke. The Ironborn; piracy. Freedom. She imagined sailing the high seas felt a lot like skimming across the oceans of snow and ice at high speed, exhilarating and fast, breathless - and a little painful, trepidation niggling at the pit of her stomach as she held on to the handle-bar and gritted her teeth against the cries of pain that threatened to burst from her, the snow and ice biting her face, her legs like fresh-forged lead, still burning. The White Walker hadn’t killed her, but she knew her own body: He had done her some damage, in the act of stabbing at her, if not actually skewering her.

She clung onto the sled, not daring relax her grip, and focused on nothing but Bran, and Meera, and their cloaked companion - and their honour-guard of direwolves.

Last Shadow had found a pack. At least twenty direwolves, of different colours and sizes, different ages. Even a couple of pups, close to their mother. Impossibly, she remembered Shadow that small, gangly and excitable, loping through the snow. And Shadow was in her element now, in the true North, amongst a pack. The direwolves formed a protective ring around them, guarding them on all sides, the more vulnerable wolves inside the circle, next to the sled and the horse that was unfazed by their nearness. To see a true wolf-pack in nature, in its element, embracing them as their own, vulnerable pups to be protected…it was extraordinary.

With the cloaked stranger on horseback, and Shadow pulling the sled, they covered a great distance at speed. She wondered how Shadow had known where she was…whether she had called to her across so great a distance, whether their bond truly was as strong as she had always believed. The Children had been teaching her, strengthening her warg abilities…like a muscle, the more she used it, the stronger it became, though without Shadow she had tried to strengthen her bond with Summer. Sometimes she dreamed through Shadow’s eyes; the Children had encouraged it.

They put as much distance between them and the dead as the animals could provide; but even direwolves tired eventually, especially when they were hungry, and the cloaked stranger’s horse was not a Dornish stallion, bred for stamina.

Eventually, they had to decide to stop, to rest. They all needed it; and the wolves took opportunity to hunt what little could be found in the snows. Sheltered by trees, the cloaked stranger had found them a derelict hut, erected by wildlings and abandoned - possibly they were with Mance Rayder, or perhaps they fought for the Night King. Either way, the empty home was a haven: It shielded them, for a few precious hours, from the perils of a night that was getting steadily more dangerous, a night that refused to end. They enjoyed a couple of hours of daylight, and that was their lot: They could not get South soon enough.

Every muscle in her body wound so tight she feared they might snap her bones, Larra inched off the footboards of the sled. She had thought she knew what pain was: She had been educated in their flight from the Night King. It was all she could do to keep hold of the handle-bar, and the reins, to keep herself upright. Her face felt as if it had been flayed by the snow and ice, and if she kept her nose, she would be surprised - and grateful. Meera grimaced in pain as she dismounted, with the cloaked stranger’s help: It had been a long time since either of them had ridden. Together, they manoeuvred the sled into the shelter, and Meera groaned as she sank onto the snow-strewn ground, where pine-needles had once formed a carpet, instead of rushes. Precariously, Larra leaned against the wall of the shelter; she could no more bend her legs to sprawl on the ground as Meera had than she could perform twenty cartwheels for her amusement. Inch by inch, knowing she would pay for it when they started off again, she let her muscles relax, slowly, agonisingly.

In the time it took to sit on the ground with her legs outstretched and shaking, gripping her side and fearful of examining herself for injury, her mind slowly settling from the anxiousness that had plagued her since smelling the dead in the Children’s caves, the wolves had disappeared…and returned, only a few hours later, herding a young, frightened elk. A gift. The gift of food; the gift of life.

They left the kill for the cloaked stranger - and waited patiently, prowling around the shelter like guards, lifting their noses to the wind, communicating constantly: The little pups had to be kept in line by the older ones, and Larra took the time to watch them, learning each of the direwolves, and Last Shadow amongst them. She was among the largest and strongest of the direwolves; there were others, a russet-coloured one that made Larra’s stomach hurt, thinking of Robb the last time she had seen him, with snow melting in his auburn hair, bearded, a man before his time, off to war…

It was the cloaked stranger who handled the elk, carving meat for them to roast over a spit, enough for a meal and enough to tuck into the sled for later; packed with snow, it would not spoil for a while.

When he had taken their cut, the wolves set in; and Larra watched the social structure of the pack, the family of direwolves Last Shadow had been adopted into. Born one of seven pups to a dead mother, Last Shadow’s eyes had already been open, she had been fending for her little-brother Ghost, an albino rejected by the others… Now she was enormous, larger than a pony and elegant, ferocious - wily. She always had been the canniest of the direwolves. Lady had been gentle; Grey Wind was unsettling in his swiftness and purpose, clever; Ghost was quiet and unnerving as his name implied, but ferocious and deeply loyal to Jon; Nymeria had Arya’s mixture of impishness and danger; Summer had been intuitive; and Shaggydog was the wildest, the untamed wolf, the feral monster men feared - with good reason. But Last Shadow…she had grown up in the wilds of the wolfswood, hunting by Larra’s side, or protecting the babies - she had put Shaggydog in his place, and from the very beginning had nurtured her siblings, bringing Ghost food, licking Summer’s muzzle as he cried for broken Bran.

But she had never been at home at Winterfell, the same way Larra had known she was not truly wanted, was despised and even dreaded by her father’s wife - she feared Jon might steal Robb’s inheritance of the North, did her level best to place a wedge between her lawful children and her husband’s bastards… Look at us now, Larra thought, not for the first time: There was no difference to them, now. They had no home, no lands, no titles. Just their lives, and it was their lives that mattered to her. She wondered what Catelyn Tully would think, her precious boys left in the care of her husband’s bastard daughter… That the bastard she despised had kept her sons safe where her husband’s bannermen, with all their armies, had failed to.

She watched Last Shadow: Now, she took precedent. The smaller wolves waited, quivering with anticipation, but it was Last Shadow, the largest female, black as night and as dangerous, who fed from the elk first, with the hulking male, a grey and cream male with piercing amber eyes and scars on his muzzle, the size of her favourite mare… As the meat cooked over a small fire, and the smell roused a dozing Meera as nothing else in this world might, Larra watched the wolves… Even in the storm, even as the night grew longer, they lived… They hunted, and they fed, and they thrived, and she couldn’t help wonder whether any of the young pups in the pack were Last Shadow’s. She didn’t know how long they had lingered beneath the weirwood, just that Bran had become a man while they were there.

There were a few jet-black pups with amber and snow-blue eyes, one of which was bold enough to lift its nose their way, and pounce on her boot, playful as she remembered Last Shadow being, delighted to find a sister, a friend. The russet-coloured wolf Larra had seen before, an elegant female with piercing eyes, prowled closer, its muzzle red with blood, watching Larra shrewdly, before batting at the pup with her paw, nudging the pup back toward the elk, and their dinner. The she-wolf stared at Larra, steaming in the cold, eyes piercing, cunning; she raised her muzzle to scent the air, scent them, and Larra remained still as the strange direwolf inched closer, finally scenting and licking her face, lowering her nose to sniff and scent her furs. The elk-blood had frozen in her fur but her rough tongue was hot as she licked Larra’s aching face.

The she-wolf cocked her head at Bran thoughtfully, scented Meera, and loped back over to the elk to growl at one of the larger pups so the little ones could sneak up and tear some meat away. The direwolves weren’t going to leave anything of the carcass, not this far North, not in these winter storms.

The cloaked stranger pulled his knife, and started to carve the cooked meat from the spit. Succulent, dripping with fat, the juicy meat had Larra’s mouth watering.

The stranger crouched in front of her, the hood pulled low over his eyes, to offer her the meat.

“That Walker’s blade should’ve skewered you.” That voice again, rich and mournful and understated - she knew it; she knew she knew it. She just couldn’t place it. Memories flirted with her bone-deep tiredness in the back of her mind: She wriggled in her furs, and finally got free of them, just long enough to show the stranger what she wore beneath: A chain-mail vest made entirely of obsidian. Tiny rings, thousands of them, hand-carved, smooth and beautiful, sewn on to a vest of bear-hide using direwolf hairs - Summer’s shed hairs.

In the little hut, the vest shimmered and came alive in the firelight - as if she was wearing dragonscales…

She caught Meera’s eye, and hurriedly bundled herself back under her furs, Bran’s revelation about her parentage still too fresh, too painful a wound.

The stranger laughed.

It was more of a chuff, something soft and wild, unpractised - something wolflike.

Larra looked up sharply, into the stranger’s hooded eyes.

“Uncle Benjen!”

Chapter 4: Lost

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

04

Lost


Her aches and pains were forgotten as she flung herself at her uncle. Benjen.

The last time they had embraced, he had arrived late after a hard day’s ride, flying down from the Wall: Grim Benjen with his long face and handsome nose, his rich solemn voice, her heroic uncle who had committed his life to a cause greater than his own, a ranger and hardy warrior.

Their hero - hers, and Jon’s.

A rare visitor at Winterfell who had always treated them with kindness and respect: They had admired him with something close to idolatry, anticipated his visits, and regretted his return to the Wall, to the true North, ranging in the unknowable wilderness, back then only shaped in their minds by Old Nan’s stories - and Benjen’s… He had left out some crucial details…

Jon had followed their uncle’s footsteps to the Wall, and beyond it; Larra had been bitterly heartbroken to be left behind, with no place in the world, left to look after her brothers - little had she known, then, that she too would follow in her uncle’s footsteps, trudging all the way to the Wall and beyond it, dragging her stubborn, crippled brother.

Uncle Benjen.

He had been thought lost, lost beyond the Wall, lost to the true North, with no word, like so many hundreds of thousands of nameless, forgotten men who took the black, highborn and low alike lost to the ravaging blizzards of time and memory. Their pain, unknown, their sacrifice, unrewarded, ignored. Futile.

She had seen the true enemy. The winter of her family’s warning. The entirety of Westeros knew it: Starks were always right in the end. Winter is coming, indeed.

They had endured the winter, and survived: But it chased at their heels like starving direwolves. They were an impossibility - two waiflike girls and a crippled boy, somehow they had survived the true North and its most horrific dangers - besides the dead, and the generals of the army of the night, chasms and glaciers and hidden fissures, mangy snowcats and the worst of the Free Folk… And here, another impossibility: Uncle Benjen, alive.

Or close enough to it.

She squeezed Benjen with her tired, thin body, as tight as she could, her heart breaking. Uncle Benjen. He didn’t expect it; she wondered when he had last been embraced, by anyone, because he froze…and thawed, tucking his arms around, strong as tempered steel.

Slowly, almost as if he were ashamed, Benjen lowered his head, raising his blackened, heavy hands to drop his hood, and carefully unwound the cowl around his face, revealing high cheeks savaged by frostbite, dark eyes shadowed with grief, lips blue and cracked. His skin was paler than snow, with an unhealthy greenish-grey tint that might have reminded her of the Children…if she wasn’t acquainted with rotting bodies, disintegrating skin…

Uncle Benjen was not dead…but he was not truly alive, either. Much as she and Meera and Bran and Hodor had been for however long they lingered beneath the great heart-tree. Halfway between death and life. They were closer to life than Uncle Benjen, she could see it…

Sadness filled her, replacing everything else.

Benjen was altered.

She glanced at her brother. Bran. The last time they had seen Benjen, the King had arrived at Winterfell to ask their father to become Hand of the King…had divided their family irrevocably. Benjen had flown down from the Wall, and taken Jon back with him. Father had taken their sisters south… Larra had been left behind, with three brothers - one overwhelmed, one wounded, and one wild… Larra had been a wild girl herself, her back a tangle of ruby ribbons from Queen Cersei, half-feral and furious; Bran had been a tiny broken boy, sweet-faced, kind and full of warmth. She remembered that boy…in this desolate place, Benjen must remember them so vividly it hurt; she knew her own memories shone as vibrantly as any of her paintings in comparison to the barren icy wastes of the North.

If Benjen had changed, so had they.

She wondered if it hurt. If looking at them hurt, the same way looking at Benjen hurt - and the cramping worry deep in her belly, the slow dull ache that strengthened as she thought of Jon. Jon, fighting wildings in the rain by the abandoned windmill; Jon, outside the keep of wailing women… Why had he been wearing a wildling’s furs at the tower, only to be back in black at the keep?

Did he know Benjen was still beyond the Wall?

Had Bran known?

Bran’s eyes were dark, and they lingered curiously on Benjen’s frostbitten face.

But Benjen’s eyes lingered on Larra. He looked at her…the way she always remembered, whenever he visited Winterfell…as if it was the first and last time he would ever see her face, and had never seen anything he wanted to gaze upon more than her face…

She realised…in her face, he saw his sister. The sister he had lost, the sibling he had been closest to. Lyanna.

His sister. Her mother.

Their secret.

Ned’s, and her mother’s, and perhaps Uncle Benjen’s, too.

Benjen had been barely Bran’s age when the Rebellion began - Lyanna, only sixteen when she had died…giving birth to her twin children raised at Winterfell as her brother’s bastards…

Benjen had not been wearing the black then. He had been…the Stark in Winterfell. There must always be a Stark in Winterfell...

Benjen had been the Stark in Winterfell when Father returned from the Rebellion with twin babies… Lyanna’s babies…

Every time he flew down from the Wall, Benjen sought out Jon and Larra. He always had a smile for her, always. He had always, from her earliest memory, held her face tenderly in his large, scarred hands, learning every curve and plane of her face.

She wondered how alike she was to her mother…her mother…

Benjen was the only person living who could tell her anything about her mother…and her father…

It explained why he had always been so kind to them, eager to learn even the most mundane details of their lives, smiling at Larra’s paintings and embroidery and her bow, sparring with them in the yard - a seasoned Ranger of the Night’s Watch playing with sparring-swords! Patient and implacable, that was her memory of Benjen, solemn as Father and kind, as troubled by his responsibilities to the Watch as Father was by his to the North…

If Benjen looked at her and saw Lyanna, then Larra looked at Benjen and saw Jon. Saw Father. It hurt, worse than any hunger. She was too exhausted to weep, but inside, she was in agony.

She disentangled herself from her uncle, stepping back, eyes burning as she gazed at him, overwhelmed by the memories that swept through her, searing like wildfire, warming her from the inside out.

“The last letter Jon wrote us said you’d been lost beyond the Wall,” said Bran, in his new soft, careful voice. She remembered his easy laughter and quick chatter like a squirrel, teasing Arya and cooing to baby Rickon, talking with Summer before he had been named, before Bran had fallen…

That little boy was gone: So was the brooding, isolated young man Larra remembered as her twin: And this was not Uncle Benjen who visited Winterfell.

This was the First Ranger of the Night’s Watch.

Grief and remorse flickered across Benjen’s face, his jaw working as he fiddled clumsily with his gloves.

After a moment, he spoke hesitantly, his voice soft as Bran’s but a thousand times more sorrowful. “I led a ranging party, deep into the North, to find White Walkers… They found us. A White Walker stabbed me in the gut with a sword of ice…left me there to die, to turn… The Children found me, stopped the Walkers’ magic from taking hold.”

“How?” Meera breathed, gazing at Benjen with eyes glinting wetly in the firelight.

“The same way they made the Walkers in the first place,” Benjen sighed, turning his sharp dark eyes on Bran. “You saw it yourself.”

“Dragonglass,” Bran said, shifting awkwardly in his sled, his expression pinched. “A shard of dragonglass, plunged into your heart.”

They stared at Benjen, at his chest, buried beneath layers of wool and matted fur. The Children were likely gone from their world forever, but here a relic remained, an echo of their last act, lingering in the world, continuing their work.

“Why did they save you?” Meera asked, her face haunted, remembering Jojen. Jojen, whom they had abandoned, whose own sister had delivered him mercy in the snows as wights descended upon him, Jojen, whom the Children could not - would not - save, not when Bran’s life was at risk as they fought to protect Jojen. Bran, the Three-Eyed Raven. The Children had not saved Jojen, but they had found Benjen dying in the snows far from the great heart-tree…

Benjen glanced at Larra. “To the Children, it was but yesterday they united with the First Men to stop the White Walkers…it was Brandon who raised the Wall, who built Winterfell, and it is his blood that runs through our veins,” Benjen murmured; every Northman grew up on tales of Bran the Builder, high-borns and bastards alike. “Brandon wielded the magic of the Children to reinforce the Wall, to stop any White Walker or soldier they created from passing into the world of Men.”

“The Children are gone,” Larra murmured, Leif’s sacrifice still too fresh a wound. She had spent months, years, training with Leif, with the Children, learning to dance as they did with their weapons of weirwood and dragonglass, learning their songs.

“But their songs are not,” Benjen said, gazing meaningfully at Larra. “And magic is not gone from this world.”

“But - oh,” Larra breathed, staring at her uncle, her tired eyes widening with realisation. The Children had taught her their songs - their spells, their magic…

All magic was gone from the world…except dragons.

And those who rode them.

Valyrians.

An ancient race of Men whose blood was steeped in magic - kept pure for centuries in the very last of them, by the incestuous marriages of the Targaryen dynasty, wedding brother to sister for centuries to preserve the purity of their blood…their magical blood…

Blood that ran through Larra’s veins - and Jon’s…

They were the last of them.

The last of the Targaryens.

The last of an ancient race with magic flowing in her veins…a Targaryen with the blood of the First Men, the blood of Bran the Builder, who had wielded the magic of the Children against the Night King…

Leif had told her that strong magic protected Winterfell, magic that was lost to the world…except to her. And Jon.

They were children of the North, of ancient Valyria.

They were children of ice and fire.

And the song… The songs the Children had taught her, they were not just songs…they were spells, the magic of the Children, preserved in Larra’s memory, just as the history of the world was preserved in Bran…

Bran was knowledge, now, living memory in a man’s form… But Larra and Jon…they were magic made flesh…

The Three-Eyed Raven had tutored Bran… The Bloodraven was gone: But the Three-Eyed Raven lived on. Just as there was always a king, there was always a Three-Eyed Raven. No sooner had one breathed its last than the next took a gasp and plunged on.

The Children were gone - but they had passed on their knowledge to Larra the only way they knew how - in song.

Leif had made Larra memorise one particular song… She had called it Larra’s song…she had called it a song of ice and fire…

Confronted with the horror that was the Night King and his army, it was an oddly comforting thought, realising that it was not only Bran that the Three-Eyed Raven and the Children wanted to get safely North to the great weirwood.

They had needed Larra, too.

Her time had not been wasted, deep beneath the tree.

She had been waiting, and watching, but she had also been learning - without ever knowing the significance of what she had learned, until now.

The Children were gone; but they had left their last, best hope for the future of Man with Larra…

With her, and with Jon. The same blood ran through his veins as hers. Northman, Valyrian: Stark, Targaryen.

Bran the Builder had stopped the Night King once.

They would again, for the last time.

They had to: There was no other option. How could they let him cover all the world in shadow?

Benjen nodded slowly, knowing she had understood him. He turned to Brandon, the last Stark child named for their legendary ancestor.

“You are the Three-Eyed Raven now,” Benjen sighed sadly. “You must help Larra and Jon, in every way you can. The three of you…you are all the world of Man has left.”

“I didn’t have time to learn, I can’t control anything!” Bran said plaintively, and there was something like amusement and sorrow glinting in Benjen’s dark eyes.

“You must learn to. Before the Night King comes,” Benjen told him gently. “One way or another, he will find his way into the world of Men. And when he does, you three shall be there, waiting for him. And you will be ready…” His eyes lingered on Larra, and in the firelight they glinted like a raven’s. “You must be. You know what the Night King wants?”

“The end of all things,” Larra spoke softly, her voice almost lost to the wind. Benjen nodded slowly.

“He intends to undo this world, the world of Men.”

“But I don’t understand…he was a man, once,” Meera said, glancing at Bran for confirmation.

“The Children made him…” Benjen said sadly, his eyes lingering on Bran. “Only the Three-Eyed Raven had the knowledge to unmake him. Until you.” He glanced from Brandon to Larra. “Three-Eyed Ravens throughout history have waited and watched, ensured that you found your way to the heart-tree.”

“Me?” She glanced at Brandon, whose eyes were as solemn as they had been when the Bloodraven had told her the truth of her parentage.

“Targaryens have always had dragon-dreams…the Sight, borne of the magic in their blood,” Benjen sighed softly. “Centuries ago, the Three-Eyed Raven gave Daenys the Dreamer a glimpse of the world as it would become…”

“Daenys the Dreamer? She was centuries before the Conquest,” Larra whispered, remembering her histories. How many times had she read the stories to Arya? Stories…legends… People lost to the ravages of time…her ancestors…

“Twenty generations of Targaryens ago,” Brandon said thoughtfully. “Your direct ancestor… That explains your dreams.” Larra glanced sharply at Brandon. She had never told Bran about her dreams - only Jon, and Father, who had instructed Maester Luwin to teach her how to paint, and purge the horrific and exquisite images from her mind…

“The Three-Eyed Raven ensured the Targaryens sailed to Dragonstone, the last annex of the Valyrian Freehold,” Benjen said. “Barely more than a decade after they made berth on Dragonstone, Valyria was lost to the Doom… Generations later, Aegon turned his eyes westward…a dynasty was forged in fire and blood…as it ended…and two tiny dragons were secreted away deep in Snow, until they were old and strong enough…” The tiny quirk of Benjen’s lip was tragically ironic; he sounded far too lyrical not to be quoting someone - he sounded like Lord Bloodraven.

“Are we?” Larra asked her uncle.

Benjen’s smile was awful.

“You must be.”

They rested for only as long as the fire lasted. Bodies screaming their protest, Larra took to the sled while Meera climbed behind Benjen on the horse; their honour-guard of direwolves escorted them, ever southwards, fighting the storm. Brandon indicated by signals each time they needed to alter their course: He had ravens spying out the Night King’s armies, knew when to evade and when to wait.

If it took days, Larra could not recall how many. They travelled in silence, but for Bran’s directions and the grumblings of hungry direwolves, the boldest and best hunters disappearing, to return herding their rare prey for Benjen to butcher and prepare for them, wherever they could find some brief respite from the elements. The little red direwolf became bolder, a favourite, loping beside Larra and the sled, a constant companion.

Bran watched the snowy sky unseeingly, his eyes milky, nestled in his furs as they slipped over the snow, following Benjen’s sure-footed horse. He was learning, preparing. Doing what he should still have been doing beneath the weirwood, had he not been so foolhardy… Had he not been so desperate to see their family again. Larra could not blame him, not entirely: He had seen her mother, after all…he saw them all. She wondered what he saw, whether he knew Sansa and Arya’s fates, if Rickon and Osha had reached the Umbers, and how Robb’s war was waging.

But she did not ask. Likely, Bran was not looking for their family: He had work to do. And he was no longer only Bran Stark: He was the Three-Eyed Raven.

The Bloodraven had told Larra, early on, that the man was lost to the myth: Bran would lose himself, for a good long while, as he learned his powers and indulged in them, and as time passed, he might forget where he belonged in the story… But he had every reason to fight his way back: They needed him. Not just his family…everyone. The world of Men needed Bran. He could not indulge in the past.

They headed south, toward the Wall…they were headed home.

Where else could they go?

Winterfell.

It made her stomach ache and her blood simmer with anger to think of her home, now, mired with so many hateful, pain-drenched memories, the ghosts of people she had loved, and left behind - the ones who had left her behind…

She had wondered very often what had become of Winterfell, of the smallfolk who had made it their home for generations; she wondered whether Winter’s Town was filling up, as it only ever did when the snows fell dozens of feet thick upon the moors. She could barely remember the last winter; Brandon had been the first of her siblings born in summer, it was all he had ever known until they breached the Wall and headed north toward the Land of Always Winter. But she remembered snow up to the ramparts, the dull hacking and creaking of the trees always planted in spring being felled, for winter firewood; she remembered a haze of smoke lingering above Winter’s Town like a blanket, firelight glinting like jewels in the grey winter days. She remembered cuddling with her Father, and sharing the great box-bed with Jon and Robb when they were so little it hadn’t mattered, long before Arya and Rickon and Brandon, long before Theon had ever come to Winterfell…

The last time she had seen the great grove of weirwoods, Brandon had still been her brother, a hungry, irritable boy frustrated by his broken body while his active mind tormented him with visions and portents.

Whether by nature’s magic or by the Children themselves, the weirwoods had grown in a perfect spiralling circle, and in their centre, the heart-tree, its carved face weeping ruby sap. In the gale, the boughs of the tree seemed to groan a lament to the Three-Eyed Raven they had lost, the leaves like bloody hand-prints whispering a sigh, greeting the new one.

It was this grove, in front of this very heart-tree, that Jon had sworn his oath to the Night’s Watch.

They were close to the Wall, now - so close, Larra had been shocked when it suddenly appeared, in a break in the storm, the snows gentling just long enough to see the glimmering blue-white curtain cutting across the silver sky, imposing and awing.

They were so close to the Wall, they seemed to momentarily lose their dread of the storm chasing them. Meera climbed down off the horse, stretching her legs and groaning, plucking at the strings of her bow with chilled, stiff fingers. There were two snow-hares tucked into her belt, barely a speck of blood on their pristine fur: Meera caught Larra’s eye, and they exchanged the briefest of looks before Meera started to dig a small pit to protect a fire, starting to prepare the rabbits for skinning. Larra stepped gratefully from the sled, taking a risk by unbuckling Shadow from the harness; they were both relieved, and Shadow shook herself thoroughly, padding off to the other direwolves as Larra turned to her uncle. He had climbed off his horse, and gazed sorrowfully at the Wall as the fog and snow cleared, giving them tempting glimpses.

Jon was beyond that absurd structure.

It was all that now protected them from the storm chasing at their heels.

She hoped it held.

The snow crunched softly beneath her feet, and the wind seemed to drop as she approached her uncle, leaving everything in breathless silence.

It didn’t matter, truly, not now, but she couldn’t help ask something that had been on the tip of her tongue since she had learned the truth.

“Did you know, all this time?” she asked softly. Benjen sighed, gazing sorrowfully at the Wall. It wasn’t weeping today, as it had the days when she had approached it from the south with Jojen and Hodor and Meera and Summer: It looked glassy and impossibly solid, unyielding. Uninviting - she wondered how the Free Folk felt when they looked upon it. She knew some climbed over it, so desperate were they to escape the Night King’s hordes…any life was better than that fate, even a life on their knees.

His dark eyes rested on her face, and Larra knew, before he ever said a word. “When we were children, I was as close with Lyanna as you were with Jon and Arya. I might’ve even been her favourite… We used to spar together in the godswood, though Father didn’t like Lyanna to wield weapons… She was very good.” His eyes twinkled as he gazed at Larra, at the pommel of Dark Sister glinting in the meagre winter light. “Harrenhall was the first time we had ever seen royalty, the famous Prince of Dragonstone… He was otherworldly. We read about them in our histories but to see a Targaryen, one of the Valyrians of legend, with his indigo eyes and his pale silver-gold hair… He was handsome, and frustrated - I remember thinking, he seemed to be wearing a mask to conceal his anger, as Brandon - my brother Brandon…as Brandon so often did, his smile carved in a handsome face as if he were made of stone.”

Sometimes Father had spoken of the Rebellion - especially to her brothers, when they had been young enough to still glorify war and slept, dreaming of themselves as heroes listed alongside the likes of Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning, and Ser Barristan the Bold… But she had never heard Benjen speak of it - he had been the Stark in Winterfell, after all, his father and brother - Brandon - murdered by the Mad King: But he had grown up with Lyanna at Winterfell while Father fostered at the Eyrie…

It seemed important not to interrupt, but Larra couldn’t help wonder: Rumour had spread, after the Rebellion, that Rhaegar had secretly funded Lord Whent’s tourney at Harrenhall, hoping to amass the high lords of Westeros to settle the matter of his father’s madness - and, perhaps, a regency. King Aerys had caught a whisper of sedition and insisted on attending the tourney: And history had been made. Instead of a regency to curb the Mad King’s tyranny, Rhaegar had been diverted by a dark-haired, wild beauty from the North, sparking an ember that became a blaze of wildfire, setting alight a dynasty. One way or the other, the Mad King had been dethroned, but Larra couldn’t help think, thousands of lives would not have been wasted had Rhaegar simply forged ahead, and taken direct rule from his father, and lived up to the potential everyone, decades later, was still bemoaning he never lived up to.

Lord Whent, Rhaegar, Aerys, Elia, Lyanna… What a bloody mess.

“Ned teased her for weeping when Prince Rhaegar sang… He had a handsome voice. I couldn’t help but see him, when you stood in front of the feasters to sing before King Robert. You have the same gift…he mesmerised everyone, even those who had no time for songs… I laughed when Lyanna upturned her wine over Ned’s head… She hummed Rhaegar’s song for months, after - I don’t think she even knew she was doing it… When the squires attacked Howland Reed, Lyanna had the idea to put them in their places; I helped her piece together a suit of armour from bits and pieces we found around the Northern lords’ camp outside Harrenhall…I cheered my sister on when the Knight of the Laughing Tree championed in the lists… Only Ned and I knew who it was, of course. That night after the feast, Lyanna seemed…thrilled, excited, more vibrant than I had ever seen her…she whispered to me that Prince Rhaegar had found her out. I’d heard about the Mad King; I worried she’d be burned alive before the melee next-morning… Rhaegar told his father that they’d found the mystery-knight’s shield, nothing more… Snow was starting to fall as we walked to our tents, everyone complaining of the cold - her laughter echoed through the camp; it was like a summer’s day to us, so used to real winters… I still remember the snow melting in her braids, threaded with tiny white day-bells to match her silver-grey velvet gown… They’d spoken for hours, Lyanna told me, her and Rhaegar, nestled away in the overgrown godswood… They spoke long enough to fall in love…

“The next morning, a squire found me, and asked me whether Lyanna had a favourite flower; I told him it was the winter rose… Lyanna had always admired them: Striking because of their simplicity, and unyielding. They endured the harshest winters, buried beneath the snows, and came back time and again… I remember you braiding them into your hair as she used to, for feasts… When Rhaegar crowned Lyanna his Queen of Love and Beauty, the roses were still crisp with frost, they seemed to glimmer like crushed glass… She wove those flowers into her hair for days before the blooms withered…we had returned to Winterfell by then, and the first of Rhaegar’s letters arrived. By rider - never by raven; and delivered right into Lyanna’s hand - they would wait for her in the godswood…”

“He sent letters to my mother?” Lyanna breathed, something fluttering in her chest. “What happened to them?” Benjen glanced at her, his eyes so cunning.

“When she ran away to meet Rhaegar at Harrenhall, she took the letters with her,” he said, wincing apologetically, as Larra’s heart sank. “She didn’t want Father to think less of her.”

“Less of her?!”

“Rhaegar was still married to Elia Martell, after all; and Lyanna was betrothed to Robert, though she had no fondness for him,” Benjen sighed, and Larra noticed that his breath didn’t fog in front of him as hers did.

“But…Bran saw them married by the High Septon, in front of a heart-tree,” Lyanna frowned. “Did she suspect Rhaegar might not wed her?”

In all her life, she could not recall a single occasion when her father had ever spoken poorly of Prince Rhaegar, not ever…because he was her father. Hers, and Jon’s. Ned’s brother by the laws of Men and gods, though no-one knew it.

“In spite of what others have believed since the Rebellion, Rhaegar was a man of honour,” Benjen said, his expression solemn; and it said a lot, that Benjen Stark had said it. As if Ned Stark himself was reassuring Larra that her father by blood had been as good a man as Ned himself, who was the very best of them. She knew it, in her heart: Ned was irrefutably the bravest, most loyal, most honourable man she would ever know. And that was a devastating thought.

“But he wrecked everything.”

“Coaxing Lyanna to run away was ill-advised, perhaps…but Lyanna knew our father: He was stubborn as an aurochs, and had already pledged her hand to the Lord of Storm’s End, though everyone knew Robert had already fathered a bastard, and we all suspected he would never be loyal to her.”

“Your father wouldn’t yield even to the heir of the Iron Throne?” Benjen’s eyes lit up with irony, his smile brief but almost impish.

“You know Northmen better than to have to ask that,” he chuckled. “No, it was foolish of them to act in secrecy: But it was Brandon - my brother Brandon - who ruined whatever future Lyanna and Rhaegar had planned…a rider appeared, perhaps he had even crossed paths with Brandon and his friends on their way to King’s Landing - asking Father for his blessing, and his support. Rhaegar couldn’t trust the Southern lords, not with the King’s Master of Whisperers - but the Northmen are a different breed, and Rhaegar knew it. They are loyal to their own; and they respect a strong woman who takes control of her fate… Rhaegar and Lyanna both hoped Father would unite the North behind Rhaegar’s claim as Regent for his father; they wrote that Elia Martell would be retired to Dorne for her health, her children dividing their time between Sunspear and King’s Landing, while Rhaegar and Lyanna began their family…”

“They wrote your father about this?” Larra asked, marvelling. “He knew they were wed?”

“The rider delivered the letter into my father’s hand, bearing the seals of Rhaegar - and of Lyanna… She had joined the Stark direwolf in a single ouroboros with a dragon, a winter rose inside it with her initials… He’d had the wax seal made for her before they met at Harrenhall… Princess of Dragonstone, she had signed the letter… Brandon only heard that Lyanna had disappeared with Rhaegar and flew into one of his rages; I’d never seen my father shocked. Before he knew it, Brandon had taken to the Kingsroad… The rest we know; but my father knew Rhaegar had acted honourably toward Lyanna, had wed her, before witnesses - his most trusted friends and protectors, the High Septon… When Brandon was imprisoned, and the Mad King summoned Father, he went south to King’s Landing, hoping to speak to Queen Rhaella about Rhaegar’s marriage to Lyanna…that the Starks were not enemies to the Crown, but that they were bound by marriage, perhaps the only allies the Targaryens had left after King Aerys’ behaviour…”

“He never spoke to the Queen, did he?” Lyanna guessed sadly. In her mind, Rickard Stark looked very much like Father, grim and deeply loving, and fearful every waking moment for his children’s happiness and their futures, and the safety and happiness of his people.

Benjen stared sadly at her; he didn’t have to answer. They all knew what had happened next. Rhaegar, ensconced in the Tower of Joy with Lyanna, might never have known about Brandon and Rickard’s arrests until it was too late, and the Rebellion had ignited across the Seven Kingdoms like wildfire.

“What happened to the letter?” Lyanna asked. It was important: A letter, written by Rhaegar, bearing Lyanna’s new seal, and her title, in the possession of the Warden of the North… It was proof…proof of her lineage, proof she and Jon were not bastards.

It didn’t matter to her that, by blood and by law, she and Jon had a greater claim to the Iron Throne than anyone living.

All she wanted in that moment was to shove that letter under Lady Catelyn’s nose, and see the horror dawn in her eyes as she realised she had punished her husband for being the most honourable man in living memory, that she had despised innocent children born higher than any of her own - that she had been needlessly cruel to those who had posed no threat to her son’s inheritance, for their own was far more illustrious… She wanted Lady Catelyn to know she had never deserved Ned Stark: And that the woman who had always had Ned’s heart was his only sister, who had died tragically young, holding his hand as her babies mewled for her.

Perhaps she wanted Lady Catelyn to beg her forgiveness, for years of mistreatment, hatred and coldness.

All Larra had ever wanted was a mother. Once upon a time, she had hoped it might be Lady Catelyn: If she had so much as stroked her hair or kissed a cut on her finger, Larra would have been hers, absolutely.

Unkindness left its mark: And Larra wanted the satisfaction of seeing Lady Catelyn Tully brought low by the dreadful, exhilarating truth - that Ned Stark was a better man than even his own family had ever known… Larra had thought her opinion of Ned Stark could never get any better: She had been proven wrong.

“My father took it with him to King’s Landing, as proof,” Benjen sighed, his eyes shuttered. For the briefest moment, Larra realised that they had both experienced the same, brutal thing: Their fathers had both been summoned to King’s Landing, and murdered as traitors. They had both been left behind at Winterfell to look after the North while their brothers went off to war…

“I wonder if Queen Rhaella ever saw it,” Larra sighed, her breath gusting before her in a great plume.

She should know better, after years with the Three-Eyed Raven, than to dwell on the past. The ink is dry… But what if…?

It was human-nature to wonder what things might have been like…to regret that they would have been better than they were…

There was no changing it, though; as the Bloodraven had said, the ink was dry.

It did not do to dwell on dreams, and forget to live.

Larra glanced at her uncle. “Was she beautiful?”

“She was,” Benjen answered softly, his dark eyes flicking over her face. “You look so like her, it hurts. You and Jon look more like Lyanna than you do Rhaegar, but he is there, in your faces, sometimes. I’ve seen it. The shape of your eyes, your hands aren’t Lyanna’s. They are all Rhaegar; I remember his nimble fingers plucking the lyre as he sang… I see him more in Jon’s nature; he’s excellent at killing - and hates it. Rhaegar never liked war. He liked singing, and he liked reading - like you. But your mother…Lyanna was fierce, and good, and she was gentle and kind. She loved flowers and dancing, and Old Nan’s stories, and galloping over the moors, exploring the wolfswood. She was sweet to Hodor and liked to tease me, but she was protective, too. A she-wolf…like you.”

“We’ve had very different lives,” Larra said softly. She had never fallen in love: Her mother’s love had destroyed a dynasty.

“Yes,” Benjen agreed. “I can tell you, as the one who knew her best… Lyanna would be so proud of the woman you’ve become - of the man Jon has become.”

“Was it really worth it? All the horror, the death…”

“Were you worth it?” Benjen asked softly, stepping closer, to cup her face in his hand. His eyes were solemn; hers burned. “Always. Absolutely.” His smile was pained.

“Why…why did Father never tell us?”

“You don’t know how hard I battled to take you and Jon to a holdfast, and raise you,” Benjen sighed, his eyes grief-stricken. “Ned returned from Dorne with you and Jon… I knew. How could I not? Ned told me it was he who had vowed to Lyanna you would always be safe, protected from Robert Baratheon, from everyone…”

Larra’s eyes burned, caught up in the dream of growing up with Jon and Benjen in some small, warm holdfast, just the three of them, happy and content and loved. “We would’ve been happy.”

“We wouldn’t have ended up here,” Benjen said quietly. “And here is where we were both always meant to be.”

“Are you coming with us?” Larra asked; she hoped so, but knew, in the pit of her stomach, that the magic steeped through his body would prevent him passing the Wall.

“You know I can’t,” Benjen said softly, his smile sorrowful. “But I still fight for the living. And I will fight, for as long as I can.”

“Thank you for telling me about her. About my mother.”

“I wish I had more time to tell you about her. I wish you’d known her… You’re so much like her, Larra,” Benjen said, cupping her face, gazing at her. Looking upon Lyanna, one last time.

He leaned forward, pressing a cold kiss to her forehead.

“Thank you, Benjen.” Her eyes burned, filling with tears: His black eyes glinted and he pressed his forehead against hers, breathing calmly, before pressing something into her palm. He gazed at her one last time, before turning to his horse.

Benjen galloped away, as if he could not bear to spend one moment longer with them - with her, with the ghost of his sister reborn.

He tore himself away, as if knowing he might never leave if he let himself gaze at her any longer.

Benjen missed his sister, had had no-one to talk about her to for decades; and had no time, now, to talk to her only daughter about her, the one person in the world who desperately wanted to hear about her.

Did it really matter?

Larra was who she was, because of Ned Stark - because of Benjen, even. Because of growing up a bastard of the North, with a twin-brother she loved, and siblings she had adored and envied in equal measure. Did it matter what her mother had been like, when Larra knew herself to be tireless, kind, gentle, resilient, brave, stubborn, protective, talented, educated and sometimes charming? She was who she was: And those who had known and loved Lyanna had told her that her mother would be proud of her. Lyanna was dead, and most who had known her too: Larra was herself. She was Larra Snow. Her blood did not change who she was, not when she had fought so hard to become this person.

Soon, Benjen was a speck far in the distance, flickering amongst the snowflakes and concealed by the fog - and then, gone.

Larra wiped her face, and eventually turned toward the heart-tree, where Bran lay, eyes milky-white, hand splayed against the bone-white bark of the tree-trunk. Communing with the weirwood, with the world’s memories.

She shared a small meal with Meera by the fire: Meera didn’t ask after Benjen, or comment on Larra’s tear-stained face. They sat beside each other, sharing what little warmth they had, waiting for Brandon to free himself from the heart-tree.

“Where do we go from here?” Meera asked softly, her eyes turned toward the Wall.

“To Jon.”

Chapter 5: Two Blasts

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

05

Two Blasts


The horn rang out, once…twice…

Everyone in Castle Black waited, filled with dread, for a third blast that never came.

Two blasts.

Wildlings.

Edd had fought at Hard Home, had survived it against all odds. He had been one among thousands of survivors, though thousands too few, to board Stannis Baratheon’s ships and sail southwards. They had covered the frozen wastes of the North on foot to Castle Black, where Jon had left orders as Lord Commander to open the gates.

And in spite of his hatred of Jon, and even older hate of the wildings, Ser Alliser had opened the gate.

Thousands of wildlings had been allowed through the Wall, for the first time since Bran the Builder raised it. But the Night’s Watch had been forced to leave thousands more wildlings to join the Night King’s army.

He remembered what Sam had once said, that the Night’s Watch vows meant they had a duty to protect the realms of Men, no matter which side of the Wall they were born. Their duty was to Men. The Night’s Watch had not been forged from the Age of Heroes to police wildlings; they were the sword in the darkness - and the darkness was the coming storm. The Night King and his legions.

Edd would remember the dead rising on the shores of Hard Home until his last breath. The silence, after the screams… It haunted him still. How had any wildling survived the Night King’s army, when he had tens of thousands of soldiers at his command - more - scouring the lands beyond the Wall?

Eddison Tollet, Acting Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, picked up a flaming torch and trudged through the tunnel to the gate. It had been reinforced, three-fold, since Grenn fell defending it from the last King of Giants. He wondered if they should have blocked the tunnel, as Jon had advised Ser Alliser so long ago…but it hardly mattered now. If the Night King wanted past the Wall, one way or another he would find a way to do it.

It was a strange thing, to realise they had kept the tunnel unblocked so that any last wildlings fleeing the army of the dead could get south beyond the Wall to safety. When he had arrived at Castle Black, so long ago, he’d thought he’d be training to kill wildlings. And he had fought them, and then fought beside them, and then fought to protect them, and realised the only difference between them was which side of the Wall they had grown up. He was the shield that guarded the realms of men, and they had all learned that a Night’s Watchman’s vows needed to be fluid: How could Jon unite the armies of the North from the Wall? He had reclaimed his home, and reunited the North under one banner, to protect the wildlings, and to prepare.

Jon needed him here. Jon needed to unite the Northern lords to fight the real enemy, but any force Jon could muster with his pretty, fire-kissed sister couldn’t be caught unawares by the coming storm…

Ice exploded in small volleys as the chains rattled and groaned, protesting in the cold: His torch flickered violently as a gust of wind blew snowflakes in his eyes, biting his skin. He never got used to the cold, but it was almost gentle today. The sky was an endless white, and a weak sun made the high banks of snow shimmer like a maiden’s silk name-day gown.

From the top of the Wall, he had seen the small formation approaching the Wall at some speed. There were no horses, as he had thought, and Edd stood, stunned, realising as the gate lifted that a pack of direwolves had approached the Wall, encircling two people trudging on foot, a small sled between them pulled by a giant black direwolf almost as large as a dray-horse. The slender figures on foot were shrouded in furs, skins out, fur turned inward for more heat, the wildling way, but carrying suspiciously fine weapons in pale, slender hands scarred and calloused, and the wind teased a few curls loose from under their hoods. He could just see a pale face with sombre black eyes staring out from a pile of furs in the sled, a young man’s face, surrounded by freshly-cropped dark hair.

He was reminded inexplicably of Benjen Stark, of Jon: A long face, sombre features and a stern nose. He wasn’t yet a man, Edd thought, certainly years younger than Jon… And Edd remembered, years ago, Sam bringing a wildling girl and her babe through the Wall with stories of a crippled boy, a giant, and a ferocious, beautiful girl who sang to them as they shared a fire in the abandoned Night Fort to chase the ghosts away…Jon’s twin-sister.

“Are you wildlings?” he asked dubiously, looking at the two on their feet. He could only see their eyes; their faces were protected with furs.

The taller of the two pushed back her hood, revealing a white oval face that reminded him of statues of the Maiden in his village’s small sept. Pale, and sorrowful and beautiful, carved from pure white stone. Her eyes were breath-taking, a deep vivid blue that was almost violet, beautiful and sharp as daggers, ringed with thick, blunt lashes. Above them, thick dark brows hovered sternly. Short locks of her dark hair curled wildly around her temples where they had escaped a thick, messy braid tangled with curls the colour of treacle, wound around her head like a crown. She had a pretty nose, high cheekbones and beautiful plump lips like tight rosebuds about to burst into bloom, drawn into a grim line.

Those eyes were the most vibrant thing he had seen in years.

She was shockingly beautiful.

She looked so like Jon that he stared. She was even tall like him.

“Samwell Tarly,” she said, in Jon’s Northern accent. “We need to see Sam.”

Edd gaped. She knew Sam’s name? He glanced from her to the other girl - she had lowered her hood, revealing cropped curls, dark eyes and a face far less beautiful than the taller girl’s, though still pretty in her way. She looked tired and gaunt - they both did, and she crept closer to the sled, where the young man gazed calmly at Edd.

“How do you know Sam’s name?” he asked, bewildered; no wildling would ever have left Sam alive. The brothers of the Watch, those who honoured the Old Gods, believed Sam must have been favoured for swearing his Night’s Watch vows before a heart-tree, for how else could the craven Samwell Tarly have killed a White Walker with only a shard of dragonglass?

But he had. Sam was no liar.

“He showed us the way through the Wall years ago,” said the first girl. She looked older than the other, the one with the short hair; she looked so like Jon it was startling - and it was amusing to Edd to realise there was someone in the world prettier than Jon Snow. “This is Lady Meera, daughter of Lord Howland of House Reed, and Brandon, brother of Robb Stark, King in the North. And I am Alarra Snow.” She added her name as an afterthought - only after introducing the true-born nobles as if announcing their appearance at court.

He remembered Sam telling them about a cripple - but where was the giant? And the skinny lad from the Neck who had been with them, sickly and pale? Edd knew, without asking: The storm had claimed them.

They were not lacking for direwolves; Sam had told Jon that two had been with the cripple and his sister. Now there was a huge pack of them, and he was aware his men were unnerved by them waiting, patiently, clustered around the gate, monstrous adults and huge, spindly-legged pups showing their lethal fangs as they yawned and yelped and played in the snow.

Alarra Snow…

Larra…

If he ever needed proof this young woman was Jon’s sister, it was in the direwolves guarding her so fiercely.

“You’re Jon’s sister,” muttered Edd, and his men shifted behind him. Everyone knew and respected Jon - the ones who had lived after the mutiny, of course; and even the ones who had surrendered grudgingly admired him. Those intense violet eyes lanced to his face, and Edd almost flinched. Where Jon was solemn and hid a sense of humour behind his profound sense of duty and loyalty, his eyes were always thoughtful, and usually kind. Hers were sharp like a Valyrian dagger and as dangerous as the direwolves circling them, filled with the kind of tension he remembered in the men before the wildlings’ first attack on Castle Black, all that long time ago. Coiled with tension, like any of the direwolves surrounding them, waiting to attack their prey.

She had been beyond the Wall for years.

He could only imagine what she had survived.

“You were at the Fist of the First Men. You were at Hard Home with our brother,” said a soft male voice; the young man in the sled spoke blandly, and he was staring at Edd - or, through Edd. His dark eyes were turned toward him but Edd didn’t think the lad really saw him at all. “You’ve seen the Army of the Dead. You have seen the Night King… He is coming for us. For all of us. We must be ready.”

A tiny frown had appeared between Alarra Snow’s dark brows when Edd glanced at her, shocked. How did the lad know that? He didn’t understand the look on Alarra’s face, something like annoyance, almost distrust, as she gave the lad a sidelong look: But she lifted her vivid eyes to his and something like sorrow flickered in them - not pity. Respect. Edd had seen a lot, beyond the Wall: And so had she. He knew that, just from looking at her, just from the sight of her stood at the gate, wrapped in furs, alive. Jon smiled, laughed richly, on occasion - this girl, his twin-sister, looked like she hadn’t smiled in a good long while, perhaps had even forgotten how to. She looked all the more beautiful because of it, even shrouded in furs, grubby from her journey.

A true Northern beauty, strong as steel, unyielding as a snowstorm, implacable as a glacier.

“Where is Sam? We need to speak with him - he is still steward to the Maester, isn’t he?” Alarra pressed, her crisp Northern tones bordering impatient. Behind her, the great expanse of the North seemed to loom, barren and haunted.

“Maester Aemon…he died, and Jon sent Sam south to the Citadel to train as his replacement,” Edd said, and Alarra Snow stared at him, something making her intense eyes spark like the embers of a violet fire.

“Maester Aemon?” she breathed, glancing briefly at the young man in the sled. Brandon Stark did not look back, but gazed blandly at the furs tucked over his legs. If Edd had thought Alarra Snow’s face showed no emotion, she was a novice compared to the boy, his features still and detached, carved from marble. Alarra Snow frowned, and glanced up at Edd. “And what do you mean, Jon sent him south?”

She had a Northern accent, but she had been raised a High Lord’s daughter, even a bastard one; she had a different accent than the smallfolk of the North, but then again, a different accent than her half-sister Sansa, educated by a septa and raised at court. Her words were crisp, though, as if she faintly remembered having her words minded. Polite, though: Courtesy went a long way.

“Jon… He reclaimed Winterfell, but he left me in charge of the Watch,” Edd told her. She stared, as if his words were absurd.

“What do you mean?”

“Jon Snow was named the nine-hundred-and-ninety-eighth Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, after Jeor Mormont was butchered during a mutiny beyond the Wall,” said one of Edd’s companions, a big burly man with an enviable salt-and-pepper beard. He was Northern, Edd vaguely remembered. Every Northman respected the Starks - and she was Ned Stark’s blood, even if she didn’t have his name. More than that, Edd’s brother respected Jon.

Alarra Snow’s eyelashes fluttered as her eyes widened, the only indication of her shock. Her pretty lips twitched toward something like a smile, but it radiated from her eyes, more than her mouth; they glittered with something joyous and warm - pride - and for a second the terrifying wolf-warrior melted away, and Edd saw her brother’s smile in her eyes.

“Jon was voted Lord Commander?” she breathed, and then her brows drew together, her lips parting. Hesitantly, she asked, “How could he retake Winterfell? He was sworn to give his life to the Watch.”

“He did,” said the boy in the sled, before Edd could open his mouth. The lad did not look up from his furs, but Alarra Snow seemed to sway on her feet, and all around her, the direwolves started to fidget, agitated. The enormous black one pulling the sled went rigid, fur on end. The boy sighed, and finally lifted dark, ancient, empty eyes to his half-sister. “He killed the boy, Alarra. He let the man be born.”

Edd stared at the boy, shaken. It was common knowledge at the Castle, what happened to Jon Snow - the mutiny; and the Red Woman using fire-magic to bring him back after they butchered him. But Jon did not speak of it - Edd didn’t know if he had even told the beautiful red-haired sister who had appeared at Castle Black all those months ago, pale and desperate but fierce and proud. She’d been the finest thing anyone at the Castle had seen in years, perhaps longer. A great beauty, kissed by fire.

First one sister, now another. Jon had three, Edd knew. Jon had thought two of them dead: One stood before Edd now.

Brandon Stark turned to Edd. “There is much you must tell my sister about the King in the North. But we should not linger beyond the protection of the Wall…” His pointed chin tucked down, to the side, as if he was listening behind him for the sounds of the Night King’s army groaning and snarling at their heels. Perhaps they were: The Watch could not afford to send men out to cut down the woods, though Mance Rayder’s great fire had gone a long way in clearing the terrain immediately beyond the Wall. As long as the snows and the fog were not too heavy, they would see the armies of the dead coming… And then Edd had no clue what he’d do.

“What has Robb got to do with this?” Alarra asked, her dark brows drawing together, and Edd glanced at his brothers, suddenly uneasy. Robb Stark, the Young Wolf. King in the North… She had been beyond the Wall for years…

Did she not know?

The Red Wedding…how could she know? He remembered Grenn gently breaking the news to Jon with Maester Aemon, before that very first attack of wildlings from the south, led by Tormund Giantsbane, and Jon’s redhead wildling girl… Stuck through with arrows, Jon had had to be told about the sacking of Winterfell, Theon Greyjoy’s betrayal…his brothers’ and sister’s murders by his own brother… First that, and then the ginger wildling lass, shot through the heart, dying in Jon’s arms… Jon had to think the gods had no love for him at all.

Turned out, perhaps, they…did.

The lad did not raise his eyes from his furs; Edd stood helplessly, remembering Jon’s reaction to the news, dreaded having to deliver the news to his sister… And what about the younger brother Jon had lost on the battlefield outside Winterfell? He’d been too little, had been left at Winterfell, Jon had told them, his wild younger brother who had wept bitterly and lashed out at Jon in a rage when he went to say goodbye before journeying to the Wall…

There had been little hope of saving the boy from Ramsay Bolton’s dungeon, but Jon had been determined to do it.

It was one of the many reasons men respected him, chose to follow him.

At least Edd could say Sansa Stark had escaped King’s Landing. That was something, at least. He remembered Jon’s reaction when she’d appeared in the yard, grubby and cold; Jon’s heart, warmed by the Red Woman’s fire, had stopped once again.

“Come on, let’s get you inside,” Edd sighed, glancing past the girls to the snows beyond. “You must be hungry.”

“What about them?” one of his men asked, nodding at the direwolves, who were padding over the snows to form a guard around the slender women and the sled-bound boy.

“I’m not trying to stop them,” Edd muttered, eyeing the direwolves warily. They were larger than any of the Watch’s rugged ponies, lean from snowstorms, and he had seen Ghost fight too many times not to be wary of their strength and ferocity - it was no wonder the ancient Starks had used them in their sigil. Vicious, dangerous, hard-to-kill, monstrous wolves from legend, for implacable, dangerous hard-to-kill men from legend. Even in the Vale he had grown up with stories of the Starks and their direwolf sigil.

Winter is coming… From the Vale, born and bred, Edd had never thought he’d live by the Northmen’s words. The Watch was bonded more strongly with Winterfell than any other House in the Seven Kingdoms, and it showed; he remembered Maester Aemon muttering that ‘Starks are always right in the end…winter is coming…’ He sometimes wondered what the Maester would have said about all this…and was glad, somehow, that he wasn’t around to have to survive it. Would they?

As the last pup pelted along the tunnel, followed by a grumbling elder, the gate creaked and groaned, lowering, leaving the tunnel darkened, eerie, glowing with a soft blue light that reminded Edd all too clearly of the Night King’s army. Alarra Snow turned to Edd, as the other girl mounted the sled, guiding Brandon Stark toward the castle.

“Lord Commander,” she said quietly, with a stern, respectful bite, her brows knitting together as she gazed back down the tunnel toward the gate. “Anyone caught behind us fights for the Night King now.”

He liked that she did not mince words, though it filled him with dread to hear them.

“How long do we have?” Edd asked, after sighing heavily. He had to have seen the Night King to believe his strength; perhaps that was why Jon had left him the Watch - because Edd had seen, and knew the truth of the danger they all faced.

“Not nearly long enough,” Alarra told him. She had Jon’s long legs, and though she limped, her gait was swift - she walked as if she was determined to not let anything get in her way, not even physical pain. Her hand was curled around the hilt of a precious sword, a great shining red stone set into the pommel, etched with something Edd couldn’t quite see. Jon had never said House Stark had more than one Valyrian steel sword, the one his father wielded, named Ice: Jon had regretted his father’s - his family’s - sword had been lost in King’s Landing when they beheaded his father. “Moon-turns, perhaps, if that. I would not wager against more than six. The dead do not tire.”

“The Wall has stood for thousands of years,” Edd reminded her, reminded himself. He slept infrequently, and badly, and woke choking on his terror, blue eyes glowing in the shadows of his chamber.

“Let’s hope it doesn’t fail us before we’re ready to face the storm,” Alarra muttered, her expression dubious as she lifted those violet eyes to the icy tunnel around them.

“You really have seen him.” Those uncanny, almost wolf-like, dangerous blue eyes pinned Edd in place.

“We escaped him. Just,” Alarra admitted, gazing ahead at the sled, surrounded by Night’s Watch brothers and direwolves. She turned back to Edd, and something in her eyes had softened. Grief seemed to seep from her, like waves of heat from a fire. “The Watch has existed for thousands of years; but it cannot fight the Night King from the Wall.”

“Where else would we fulfil our vows?” Edd frowned.

“Winterfell,” Alarra said, after a moment, glancing down the tunnel again. “Lord Commander… All the living North must unite if they want to survive the Long Night - and we can only protect our most vulnerable from Winterfell.”

She sounded like Sansa.

They had such profound faith in their home.

To them, Winterfell was not just a castle. It wasn’t stones and towers, forges and glasshouses and libraries and a godswood. It was safety. It was strength. It was home.

They had fought to reclaim it - Jon, and Lady Sansa.

Fought with all they had, and less than they needed. And won.

Starks had not ruled the North for thousands of years by being soft. Jon had not survived this long by being soft. Starks were stubborn as aurochs and vicious as direwolves, and they fought together. Edd knew the value of Jon’s loyalty: He had exchanged his family at Winterfell for his brothers at the Wall - and when those brothers betrayed him, he had taken on the mantel of protector - not just of his sister, but of the entire North, of the Free Folk he had let through the gate to protect them from true monsters, of the smallfolk who knew nothing of the world beyond the borders of their hamlets, of the lords who had sworn their swords to protecting the North for centuries under the Stark banner.

The Starks had reclaimed Winterfell, erasing their enemies’ names from history, reminding Westeros that their great House had endured for so long for a reason, and that strength meant they were one of the few great Houses left in Westeros left to recover from the recent turmoil. The King in the North was allied with the Free Folk for the first time in thousands of years, and had asked them to man the abandoned fortresses along the Wall: The Northern lords had strengthened their bonds with the new King in the North they had named after he avenged the Red Wedding: A battle-bond had been forged with the Knights of the Vale - Lady Sansa was cousin to Lord Arryn through her murdered mother, but the knights respected Jon Snow for his stern, fair leadership and earnestness.

Together, Jon and Sansa had reclaimed the North. Together. They had buoyed each other, encouraged and strengthened by each other’s nearness. They were family. And Jon Snow had always spoken of his father’s influence, that Ned Stark had considered every man, woman and child in the North his personal responsibility to provide for, and protect.

They had lost their brother in taking Winterfell back, but thousands of other brothers had been saved, and as great as Edd knew Jon’s grief would be over his brother’s death, it would be nothing to the relief that he could fulfil the vows he had sworn in the weirwood grove beyond the Wall… I am the sword in the darkness. I am the watcher on the walls. I am the fire that burns against the cold, the light that brings the dawn, the horn that wakes the sleepers, the shield that guards the realms of men…

“Why Winterfell? There are other castles between there and the Wall - although none so big.”

“Bran the Builder raised the Wall…but he also laid the foundations of Winterfell,” Alarra told him earnestly. “The same magic that holds the Wall protects the ancient keep of Winterfell. If we want to survive, we must all unite there - and that includes the brothers of the Night’s Watch. To leave you scattered along the Wall is a waste; we will need every able-bodied person we can get.”

“Jon sent wildlings to man the Wall’s outposts - he sent them to Eastwatch-by-the-Sea,” Edd muttered. “It’s closest to Hard Home; the Night King will likely march on the Wall there.”

“Recall them - send ravens, today, now, before the snows hit again - they must head south to Winterfell, with anyone they can find,” Alarra said plaintively.

“We must keep watch -“

“Everyone. Everyone must go to Winterfell,” Alarra said urgently. “We will know, if they breach the Wall…we will know…” Her vivid eyes lingered on the sled.

“How?” Edd asked. The soft blue-white light at the end of the tunnel grew brighter as they approached - he could hear the clangs and shouts and echoes of the yard, the smithy, as they neared the Castle, the last of the direwolves disappearing into the brightness.

“You have seen things, Lord Commander, beyond the Wall. Giants, and worse.” He couldn’t help but like it when she called him Lord Commander.

“Aye.”

“When I tell you that my brother is the last of the great greenseers, would you waste our time disbelieving me?”

“Greenseer? He…has visions?” Edd frowned, and realised the lad could only have known Edd was at Hard Home and the Fist of the First Men if he did have visions… Those who’d known about Hard Home were either far south of the Wall, or marching among the dead. Hadn’t they all heard stories about those struck mad with visions of the future - or the past? Greenseers came from legend - but then, didn’t giants belong there, too? Didn’t he wish White Walkers had remained confined to stories of the long-distant past? He had fought and survived both.

He’d seen Jon raised from the dead by a woman who sang in a foreign tongue and saw visions in the fire. If Jon Snow’s twin-sister was telling him that greensight was real, and that her brother had the gift, who was he to argue: He was going to believe her.

“He is the Three-Eyed Raven. Brandon sees all that ever was, and all that is,” Alarra told him, with the same seriousness that Jon had always spoken about things he was truly passionate about, believed in wholly. “We must get to Winterfell: When the Wall is breached, Brandon will tell us. But we must be leagues away from here before then, with as many people as we can save. Otherwise they will only join the Night King’s army, as all those lost at Hard Home did.”

He remembered Tormund Giantsbane weeping as the Night King raised the dead on the ice-encrusted shores of Hard Home, the silence, the horror… If they’d only gotten there before, if they hadn’t fought so hard against the wildlings that they’d facilitated the Night King’s campaign without realising it…if only they could have known, if only they’d had time…

They entered the yard, and Edd gazed around. Half the courtyard had gone still, watching. Even with everything they had witnessed the last few months, it was not normal even for them for a pack of direwolves to pad their way through the snow into the training-yard, guarding a cripple, a lady from the Neck, and the twin-sister of the King in the North, their sworn brother. With her hood down, they could all see Alarra Snow’s stark beauty. She looked so like Jon, even the way she wore her sword-belt, her curls teased by the wind, that the men stared.

First Sansa Stark, and now Alarra Snow.

Was there anyone in the Stark family who wasn’t beautiful?

Edd sighed, eyeing the gate critically. He nodded to himself, making a decision.

“Your brother will tell us, if the Wall is breached?” Edd asked.

“Brandon will see it as it happens,” Alarra told him grimly. He sighed heavily, and indicated some of his brothers with a nod of the head. They trudged over, mindful of the direwolves - even the smaller ones were the size of ponies, could tear a man’s limbs with little effort. Ghost had fought when the wildlings attacked Castle Black; he had attacked when the mutineers turned on Jon’s friends.

“Lord Commander?”

“Seal the tunnel,” Edd commanded grimly. His brothers exchanged uneasy looks.

“There’s no need,” said Brandon Stark gently, and Edd glanced at him: Alarra frowned.

“Why?” Edd asked. He wasn’t going to mince words, not about his duty to protect the North from what lay beyond.

“The Night King will not bring his assault on the Wall here at Castle Black,” said the boy with the ancient voice. He was not looking at him; he gazed into the distance, his eyes glassy and sharp at the same time. Eerie, like a raven staring at him. “Not when there are so many more vulnerable places to choose from. Jon was right, sending the Free Folk to Eastwatch; but they’ll die there, if they stay.”

Edd stared at the boy, because he was barely more than a boy, even if his eyes seemed ancient. Ancient and cold and tired. Edd didn’t know what they had survived beyond the Wall, only that Samwell had let them through a secret door in the Night Fort years ago, leaving Jon and anyone else who heard the story to believe that Jon’s brothers and sister were, truly, dead. Because how could they have survived what was beyond? But they had. And they were here, now, warning Edd.

He’d wished many times that they’d reached Hard Home sooner. Facing that, what did it matter that he wore black, and they wore furs and chainmail of muscle-shells? They were alive. In that moment, there had been no wildlings and no Night’s Watch, just the living, and the dead. If he’d had some warning, some way to know the fates that befell all those at Hard Home who could not be saved, if he had had some foresight, some way of getting there sooner…wouldn’t he have acted, without thought?

Jon would have.

The unlikeliest survivors of the bitterest place in the world were on his doorstep, telling him they would die if they did not get south - the sad irony that the Wall was now Hard Home. Only, they had prior warning.

He summoned an officer over with a twitch of his fingers.

“Lord Commander?”

“Send a lad up to the perches: Everyone’s to meet in the hall for nightfall.”

“What about the watch?” another brother asked.

“Everyone, in the hall, before nightfall,” Edd repeated. “In their thickest clothing, every one of them armed. Have the larders emptied into wagons, and as soon as they’re full, send them on to Last Hearth with the young, trained lads.” He watched as the men dispersed, and glanced at Alarra Snow. “Castle Black has been home to many of us for longer than we were ever with our families… It’ll unnerve them to abandon it.”

“There is no reason to stay here,” Alarra sighed sadly, her breath pluming around her face like a veil as she gazed around the courtyard, her features grim, and so like Jon, Edd almost smiled. He wondered if she was as disappointed by the Night’s Watch as Jon had been when he first arrived, his head full of stories of the glorious sacrifices made by the heroic Night’s Watch… Word spread around the courtyard, and the armoury and stables, that a meeting had been called; all other work was to cease, to get the wagons loaded.

And word spread that Lady Alarra Snow, sister to their brother the King in the North, was among them. He was conscious of the fact that Alarra Snow was the most beautiful woman any of them had seen since Sansa Stark - maybe even including her, depending on preference - and Jon wasn’t around this time. Jon’s blood still ran black, for all he was King in the North now - that made Alarra Snow his sister as much as Jon’s. Knowing his stubborn brothers as he did, Edd wondered if half the reason most of the men had gathered without complaint, waiting patiently as night fell in the hall, was to get a glimpse of her. Lady Sansa had been a sight for sore eyes, in her tired wool gown and vibrant hair: And Alarra, in her furs, with her rosebud lips and intensely violet eyes, was awing in her beauty, the candlelight making love to her ivory-white skin as she waited at the officer’s table, patiently listening to Edd, and Brandon Stark, who murmured so softly people were reminded of soft-spoken, wise, ancient Maester Aemon… Maester Aemon had spoken little, and so quietly most had to strain to hear, but what he had said was always careful, and wise, and right: Brandon Stark, a century younger, was the same.

“We’re headed south, lads,” he announced, sighing heavily. “The army of the dead marches on the Wall; if it falls, the only place we can fight, and fight together to defeat them, is Winterfell. Jon’s there. He’s gathering armies from across the North; he has the Knights of the Vale; he has the wildlings. We’re sending ravens tonight, everyone must abandon their posts at the Wall and retreat to Winterfell, with anyone they can find along the way.” Agitated murmuring, but generally, the men agreed; they were superstitious, and believed honest men. Jon and Sam and Edd were honest men: They also believed the word of battle-hardened, mad fuckers like Tormund Giantsbane, the last man to run from anything, let alone a fight - and he had told them to flee as far south as south goes… Jon had told the Night’s Watch that the Wall would fall, and the world would end; and they had to stop it. So, they would. Edd was just the man left in charge to make the decisions he thought Jon would. And Jon would tell him to get their brothers to Winterfell to join with the armies making a stand against the Night King.

“You’ve already started clearing out the larders. I want each of you to carry rations, and weapons,” Edd said, “even if you’ve not been instructed how to wield them yet. You’ll learn.”

“Lord Commander?” A woman’s soft, low voice, quiet and polite. Edd glanced at Lady Alarra. “Might I make a suggestion?”

“My lady?”

“Unless you’ve a cache of Valyrian steel in your armoury, your weapons are nigh on useless against the army of the dead,” Lady Alarra said, and his men shifted uncomfortably. To be told they had to fight was one thing: To know they would lose, regardless of how fiercely they fought? That was another. But the lady wasn’t finished: And the only thing stronger than fear was hope. “You have fletchers among you,” Lady Alarra said, gazing out over his brothers, and a few of his brothers nodded, murmuring. She had the same stern Northern face as Jon - and a good many Northern faces stared back at her, listening to her, an educated lady, the daughter of their respected liege-lord. It didn’t take long for his brothers to quiet: She had that same stern presence Jon did, regal and implacable - and it helped she was the most beautiful thing any of them would likely see before they died. She lanced those violet eyes to Edd. “Grant the fletchers room in the wagons; they are better served making arrows than marching with idle hands.”

Simple, really. Why hadn’t Edd thought of that? Jon had taken the only Valyrian steel sword south. They couldn’t light their swords on fire - but they could unleash a torrent of flaming arrows to keep the dead at bay. Fire and dragonglass were all that stopped wights and White Walkers.

“Hear that, lads; keep your hands warm,” Edd said, and the fletchers nodded. “Take some of the boys, too; teach them.” He glanced at Larra. “Before he went south, Jon ordered us to start drilling daily with bows. Seems you think alike in spite of the distance between you.”

“Experience is a brutal teacher,” Lady Alarra said sorrowfully, and Edd nodded. “How much pitch do you have?”

“Almost a thousand barrels,” said one of his brothers. “The Shadow Tower and Eastwatch each sent half their cache after the wildling attack on Castle Black, Stannis Baratheon left more behind, what with having the Red Woman alongside him.”

“We’ll need it,” Lady Alarra said simply, and Edd’s brother nodded, turning to murmur to the men around him.

“Right, lads… You know your orders. Put on all your warmest clothes. The first of the wagons should nearly be ready to go,” Edd said, over the low murmur groaning through the hall. “Fletchers, go now and get your things. We can’t wait for first light; we can’t risk another snowstorm won’t hit. The wagons leave as they’re filled. Every man’s to carry his rations, his bed-roll, a sword, a bow and quiver, a flint and torch. Stewards going through the library - pack up the scrolls, and you can keep reading as we go; I want three of you on the wagon, taking shifts to read and drive. And don’t forget ravens.” Edd sighed, but turned to Lady Alarra as he sat down heavily beside her, his brothers scraping back their benches and murmuring - but carried out orders. Under Jeor Mormont, under Jon, the Watch ran itself: Every man knew what was expected of him, and their leadership showed itself now, a small army mobilising at a moment’s notice. “Sam’ll murder me for leaving half the library, but what can you do?”

“Why only half the library?” Lady Alarra asked curiously.

“The lads’ve been digging out any manuscript or scroll referencing dragonglass or obsidian; Jon’s orders. It’s the only thing -“

“The only thing that can kill wights and White Walkers, besides Valyrian steel,” Lady Alarra murmured, nodding to herself.

“S’pose you can’t’ve made it this far without learning how to kill them yourself,” Edd ventured, not wanting to ask about their experiences beyond the Wall - after all, not all of them had made the return journey. She gave a nod, agreeing, but not giving any information either. Instead, sat upright and queenly in her chair, she turned to Edd, and asked, “What is it you’re so reluctant to tell me?”

Edd stared at her, and sighed heavily. He reached for a flagon and filled her cup.

“Here. Drink,” he said heavily. “Best light a fire in your belly before I tell you.”

Alarra Snow exchanged a glance with her companion: Lady Meera nodded, and followed after Brandon Stark without a word as several of Edd’s brothers carried the lad to the Lord Commander’s tower.

“It shouldn’t be me, telling you all this,” Edd sighed, agitated and uncomfortable. “It should be Jon.”

“What happened?”

“What’s the last thing you’d heard? About Winterfell - about - anything -?”

He told her.

She took the news stoically, her face betraying no emotion: But her eyes seemed to glow with purple fire, glinting in the candlelight, and a muscle in her jaw ticked, as if she was clenching her teeth so tightly, no scream of grief could ever pass.

But she didn’t cry. She didn’t scream, or rage. She simply closed her eyes, and let out a soft, broken gasp. She croaked a thank you, to Edd, for telling her.

But it shouldn’t have been Edd telling her. It shouldn’t even have been Jon.

It should have been Bran to tell her everything.

Chapter 6: The Sharpest Blades

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

06

The Sharpest Blades


“Jon…”

He looked up from the table, littered with raven-scrolls and papers from the maesters, sums and estimations, and set down the census Maester Wolkan had gathered on all the able bodies who had arrived at Winterfell since he called the banners - their trade, their children, any skills with weapons. As much as he wanted to ensure every able-bodied person in the North could wield an obsidian dagger against the coming storm…a little voice inside his head, that had sounded suspiciously like Larra, had reminded him that they still had to believe that they might survive the Long Night, and that…they couldn’t risk losing their craftsmen - their blacksmiths and joiners, crofters and carpenters, their hunters and tanners, cooks, butchers and millers. They had to go on planning for the future - even if it might never come.

Because there had to be that glimmer, that faint spark of hope…that maybe it would - maybe they could survive, maybe it would be enough…

They had to be prudent about who they risked.

So, a census. To figure out who…who they sacrificed.

Larra had called them her ‘designated survivors’.

As children, Maester Luwin had taught them cyvasse. Robb had been especially brilliant at battle-strategy; Larra, cunning and cautious about committing to anything that would cause significant loss of life. And she always had her list. Her designated survivors - those who would be intrinsic in rebuilding after any significant conflict. And because it made sense, however horrible it sounded to place one person above any other, they had started to adapt their own strategies.  Learning…they had always learned from each other, as much as Maester Luwin. Now, Jon was applying what he remembered from those cyvasse games, Larra’s strategies for minimum-casualties…

His father had always told them, never ask a stranger to fight for you. Jon was asking them to die for him. For all the living North; for the world, truly.

It was a hateful thing to have to do. But it was necessary.

But…

Eyes aching in the candlelight, he knew it was well past the hour of the wolf. He’d get no rest, though, until he had faced the Night King. One way, or another, he’d rest.

If it didn’t leave him sick to his stomach to think what might become of Sansa if he did, Jon would have given in to the desire simply to rest a good long while ago…

He’d been fighting since he left Winterfell, and even his return home had been marked with violence that had reached legendary status - the Battle of the Bastards. He had avenged the Red Wedding… He had fought on the moors before Winterfell; and now he fought almost daily in the Great Hall, arguing with, and trying to convince, his lords and ladies… Trying to convince them that a threat they didn’t believe was real, could barely imagine, was real, and set on ending everything they held precious to them…

He was still fighting.

He almost wouldn’t mind being one of those sacrificed to stop the Night King. If it meant his work was finished, his fight was over…if it meant Sansa was safe at Winterfell…but it was Sansa that kept him from giving in. As he’d said to her, the day she arrived at Castle Black, if he didn’t watch over her, Father’s ghost would come back and murder him…

After his own men had murdered him, his brothers, all Jon had wanted when they dragged him back was to walk away. To leave the Wall, leave the North, and just…rest. Stop fighting.

Go back to that cave…

It was the flicker of red hair. Sometimes he caught Sansa in the right light, and the glint of her hair shining like firelight made his heart clench in his chest, feeling the knife twist a second time. Like now.

She was no warrior, but sometimes, Jon could be forgiven for thinking Sansa shared some of Ygritte’s ferocity. Tenacity, sternness tempered by her pain and strength and grief and hope, paired with the elegance he always remembered as intrinsic in Sansa. She had always been beautiful; now there was something cold and untouchable about her, something hostile and strong and warning, gentle to him and protective. Wolflike. She was more beautiful than he even remembered. And he hated - hated - that she sewed herself into her new dresses, lashed in by fiddly straps and thick leather belts and sharp needle-pointed chains, layers and layers of fabric - to protect herself. Here, at Winterfell, in her own home, she still came to the solar in the dark of night, her hair casually braided over her shoulder like a wolf’s tail, as she would wear it to bed, but she was shrouded in a heavy wool cloak, wrapped around her quilted dress, into which she was tightly laced.

Jon, a practical Northman, with experience at the Wall, wore the same leathers in Father’s solar as he wore on the battlefield: Sansa wore her quilted dress, tufted with raven-feathers, a tiny needle in her fist and leather bracing her waist, cinching everything in, the belt difficult to unbuckle, the dress impossible to wriggle out of. Even now, months later, she would not walk the halls of their home without her armour. Not even to see him.

Not when Littlefinger lingered, gazing hungrily at the Lady of Winterfell.

Jon wasn’t stupid. His worst imaginings couldn’t compare to what Sansa had endured - and she had; she had survived horrors beyond imagining, and proven that she was strong, and could never be broken… And he couldn’t bear to ask her; knew she would never tell him. How could she? He couldn’t put into words what it felt to be murdered: How could she tell him how it felt to be tortured?

In spite of all that…here she was. The Lady of Winterfell. The Stark in Winterfell.

If it hadn’t been for her, they never would have taken back their home. They never could have protected the North. Never could have united to fight the Night King.

He would have left the Wall and never looked back. He was tired.

And then she had appeared in the yard, tired and cold and pained, the look on her face like her heart was breaking with relief at the sight of him. He’d never forget that day in the yard, as the snow fell gently, in her grey dress, and her bright braid draped over her shoulder, the way her blue eyes filled with tears warm against his lips as he kissed her frozen cheeks, the way she shivered in his arms as he held her so tightly he could feel how thin she was, and saw the grimace of pain she tried to hide. Sansa.

Sansa had changed everything.

Lady Melisandre had warmed his heart again with her Lord’s magic: But Sansa had given him a second lease on life. Given him a dose of whatever it was he had been fighting so hard to reclaim, something he couldn’t even name or describe but knew when the well was running dry… He was tired: She gave him strength. Reminded him of his purpose.

Her gentle smile, now edged with steel, gave him that spark he sometimes needed. Whether she was frustrating him to the point of distraction, or making him laugh as she choked on bad ale… He sometimes needed the reminder why he had been fighting so hard.

He’d been so tired for so long.

“You should be in bed,” he sighed, kneading his aching eyes.

“I wonder you’re not in bed,” Sansa sighed, bolting the door to the solar behind her. She strode around Winterfell in the quilted dresses she sewed herself, but at least, with him, if him alone, she peeled off the heavy cloak she draped around herself, revealing herself. She lay the cloak over one of the chairs in front of his work-table, and went to stoke the fire. She turned to him, her hair glowing in the dark. “You’re going to fall off your horse if you don’t rest.”

“I’ll try and get a couple of hours’ sleep before dawn,” Jon muttered, shrugging unconcernedly, though his body ached. The gods knew he’d stayed awake longer, doing more arduous tasks than deciphering Maester Wolkan’s tiny scribble. If he’d stopped to rest while scaling the Wall, he’d have been flat as a drop-scone at the bottom of it…

Sometimes he felt as if he was still scaling that impossible sheer wall, no end in sight, his body aching and his mind ensnared by thoughts of pure terror, exhilaration - determination…

Sometimes he forgot that he’d seen the dawn break as he reached the top, and never seen anything more welcome. It was the climb he remembered; the kiss lay in the realms of his memory where he daren’t venture to linger too long, or be lost. That was where Ygritte lived. And Robb, and Larra, and Bran and Rickon and Arya and Father and every brother he’d lost since he left Winterfell those years ago.

“Perhaps some mulled wine would help?” Sansa pondered. It was their drink of choice, here at home, at Winterfell: She couldn’t abide the taste of ale, and he would drink anything. He’d had to teach her how to prepare it, though, the Northern way, after so long in the capital - the same way he used to prepare it for Lord Commander Mormont. It was a ritual they had: If something was bothering her, Sansa would come and sit in the solar, prepare mulled wine, and share a single cup with him. A single cup, no more, no less, passed between them: She never finished it if it had gone cold - he hated to waste it, so drank it even if it was cold, and the spices tasted strange on his tongue.

The wine was Sansa’s way of getting him away from his work. He had to set the papers down, and join her at the high-backed settle before the fire. It was freshly-upholstered with a cushioned leather seat, the high back engraved, at Sansa’s request, with a motif of the Battle of the Bastards. No flayed men, though: It showed the Starks’ conquest, the Free Folk, Wun Wun the last giant, and the Knights of the Vale riding in. Their enemies were featureless, their uniforms unmarked, no sigil upon their tattered banners. As Sansa had told her husband, all memory of him would disappear: She would ensure it. Feather-stuffed cushions embroidered with rich symbolism, gifts from the Northern ladies ensconced at Winterfell for their safety, made the settle one of the most comfortable places to sit in the solar. One of Sansa’s heavy knitted blankets, and a fur throw, Sansa’s little footstool, made it the cosiest Jon remembered ever being, with Sansa tucked up beside him, passing a cup of mulled wine between them as they watched the flames flickering back into life in the grate. Sometimes Sansa would sew, but she didn’t sing anymore.

Usually she relaxed; tonight, she was sat bolt upright, hand around the steaming cup of wine, staring at the fire as if she couldn’t bear to look at him. The flickering light illuminated her eyes, stark and far-away, her face bleached of expression.

“I don’t want you to go,” she finally said, softly, gazing at the flames. He grimaced as he sipped the wine, though the flavours coated his tongue and fire warmed his belly.

“I know,” he told her grimly. In the quiet of the room, he could hear Sansa’s breathing, quick and shallow; he could read her well, now. Knew she was anxious. Perhaps even terrified for him. Dragonstone. In his role as Lord Commander, he had been so focused on the Free Folk and the Night King that he’d rarely given second thought to the politics of the world beyond the New Gift, news brought by ravens, or by the wandering crows bringing fresh recruits. And while his gaze was turned north, a new Queen had appeared in the south. Another queen. There were two, now. The Queen of the Seven Kingdoms, Cersei Lannister; and the Targaryen girl they called the Mother of Dragons, who had made berth at Dragonstone after setting sail from her colony in Essos, declaring herself rightful heir to the Iron Throne.

A Targaryen. The Mad King’s daughter.

She had taken Dragonstone, her birth-right - and an inconvenience: They needed obsidian. Needed a mountain of it. And now the Targaryen girl sat atop it, with, they said, an army of Unsullied, a horde of Dothraki screamers and three dragons.

Ser Davos thought Jon might convince her to ally with them: Jon was sceptical.

Daenerys Stormborn had not sailed across half the world to commit her troops to fighting the Night King: She had come for the Iron Throne.

To reclaim what was snatched from her family after centuries of their madness and brutality finally came to a head. Father and son had almost destroyed the Seven Kingdoms to get what they wanted.

Jon Arryn had called his banners to protect his two wards, Ned and Robert: But it was Aerys and Rhaegar who, combined, provoked a rebellion that overthrew a dynasty - their own. One burned father and son alive: The other, abducted and abused their daughter, their sister. Rickard and Brandon and Lyanna…

All dead because of one Targaryen or another.

And Jon had to go and ask for help from the last of them, and offer nothing in return: He could not yield the North - would not. Not to a Targaryen. Not when his adviser, not when every lord and lady in the North remembered the Mad King, remembered Jon’s grandfather, his uncle, his aunt, and vehemently opposed Jon risking the journey south to meet the Mad King’s daughter - but they hadn’t seen, couldn’t know, only his brothers and the Free Folk who’d fought and fled them ever could: He’d risk the dragonfire if it meant getting them dragonglass.

Or they were all lost.

It didn’t mean he wanted to go. Didn’t mean he didn’t dread leaving Winterfell - and Sansa. Not after all the horrors and years they had endured to return to each other.

“You know I’ve no choice,” he sighed heavily. Truly, he knew, instinctively, that Daenerys Stormborn would never capitulate to one of his lords or ladies. She had declared herself Queen of the Seven Kingdoms: Jon had been named King of one of those kingdoms, independent of the Iron Throne. The Targaryen queen would just as likely incinerate any emissary than consider gifting them dragonglass for their trouble in journeying so far south. “I wouldn’t be going if I could think of any other way…we need the obsidian.”

“But do you have to go yourself?”

“You know I do,” Jon said gently. “If it costs my life to secure the dragonglass, so be it; I’m just one man among many. Just because I’m your brother doesn’t mean my name should be added on to the list of designated survivors.”

“The what?” Sansa asked, frowning delicately. Jon sighed, and reached behind him for the maester’s census. He showed Sansa the scribbles, and his own annotations. “When we were still in the schoolroom, Maester Luwin taught us cyvasse. A war-game of strategy and conquest and risk… Larra…used to keep a list, her ‘designated survivors’, the people she’d never risk, even in the event of open war, when every last man counted. She used to say you have to strategize as if you’ll win; but assume that the effort to rebuild will be more arduous than the war itself. Especially if all your tradesmen and their apprentices are dead.”

“Jon…you’re the King,” Sansa murmured, eyes widening. “We need you.”

“You don’t need me,” Jon said, shaking his head. “Not now. I’ve done my part. Winter is coming, and you’ll meet it when it does. You, and all the living North…” Sansa stared at him, her eyes glowing in the firelight; she looked at once furious and heartbroken. He frowned, biting his lip, gazing back at her, realizing. “Sansa…you know what to do, if I don’t return. You can’t let anything distract you, nothing, not even my death, not vengeance or politics - nothing else matters. Not Cersei, not Daenerys; only this fight. We fight for the living.”

“Jon…”

“If I don’t return, work with Lord Royce and Lord Manderly, they’re experienced commanders; work with Karsi and Tormund, they’ve faced the wights and the Night King before,” Jon said, reaching out to rub her shoulder; she looked so distraught, overwhelmed. But why shouldn’t he plan for his execution? He needed to make sure she understood - it wasn’t about southern politics. It was about the living. “They’ll make sure the threat isn’t underestimated… You remember what I taught you. ” Sansa blinked, and he gave her a look. “Where is it?” She grimaced subtly, but reached down and unsheathed the slender dagger tucked into a neat sheath sewn into her thick wool stockings. “You’re still not happy to conceal it on you.”

“It’s…unfamiliar,” Sansa said, delicately holding the slender blade. It wasn’t much, nothing to Long Claw, but after the little needle he’d first seen her wear on the chain around her neck, he’d asked one of the new smiths to forge it in likeness of a Braavosi stiletto blade, a sister to Arya’s Needle, delicate but deadly. Sansa eyed the blade critically as the firelight flickered over the steel. “I don’t think it would do me much good, anyway.”

“Those who don’t know how to use them often end up dying on them,” Jon said grimly, taking the knife from Sansa to twirl it around his fingers. She watched his fingers move, frowning subtly, as if trying to work out how he handled the blade so confidently.

“Larra knew how to wield a weapon…Arya was training in King’s Landing,” Sansa said, and a muscle ticked in her jaw as she clenched it, her eyes turning cold and hard as she stared at the blade.

Jon flinched, and sighed heavily. “Lady Brienne said she saw Arya alive…and Larra - she went beyond the Wall with Bran.” Sam had told him, years ago, that he had come across Bran and Hodor and Larra at the Night Fort…the mutiny had just happened at Craster’s Keep, and he’d been set on avenging Jeor Mormont - and preventing scouts from Mance Rayder’s army from finding the brothers who had betrayed them, feeding them information to the wildling army… He’d returned, and Sam had told him: And he’d grieved more, perhaps, for the fate of Larra and Bran and Hodor, far in the desolate North, than he had about Father, or Robb. He could only imagine their fates; but he knew what happened to those who surrendered to the storm.

“Mance Rayder united the Free Folk to march south and flee the Night King’s army; and Larra and Bran went north headed straight for them…” Sansa said thoughtfully, that stern, thoughtful bite to her tone. “Do you think Larra could fight her way through the dead - even our Larra?”

Jon smiled grimly, at the implication - that their Larra was fierce beyond belief, a she-wolf of Winterfell if ever there was one…the faith in their sister… But against the Night King? Did Jon have any hope she and Bran had survived the true North with only a pair of direwolves and a simple giant?

“Sansa,” he said, pained, because thinking about Larra hurt. “I’m not worried about the Night King. Not while the Wall still stands between us and the dead… I worry about you with him.” Sansa’s eyes locked on his, and he knew she understood. How could she not; they had been discussing Lord Baelish’s presence at Winterfell for weeks. “I know he wants you. Men like him have a way of always getting what they want.”

“If Littlefinger got what he wanted, you’d be burned alive on Dragonstone, Cersei and Daenerys Targaryen would tear each other to ribbons, and at the end of it, I’d be sat on a little stool gazing up lovingly at him on the Iron Throne with my belly fat with his heir,” Sansa said tartly, making Jon raise his eyebrows. It had never been like Sansa to be blunt: She had always been a romantic, spending her afternoons daydreaming about handsome princes and the dozen babies she’d name after her favourite heroines from the songs. It wasn’t easy, not with who she was now, not wrapped in her armour, with her simple braids and furs and stern beauty, but sometimes Jon did forget; and it was jarring to hear this clever, curt, fierce Sansa speak plainly…but after what she had endured…

“Sansa,” he winced, because it wasn’t like her to talk like this, and he knew she had to have been thinking a lot about this, more than he’d thought. He was worried the Night King would destroy the North, the world: She was worried Littlefinger would destroy their family, just as it was rebuilding.

“You can be certain if we survive the Night King, you will not long survive Littlefinger,” Sansa said plainly, her eyes not accusatory but solemn, warning. “You’re in the way.”

“And you’re the key to the North,” Jon said, gazing back at her. Anyone would be a fool not to realise how beautiful Sansa was; and how talented. While Jon prepared for war, she ruled Winterfell. He didn’t want her worried about anything else, not him, not Littlefinger. Just the people. Their people, who mattered, after all was said and done. “I could take him south with me.”

“No. I wouldn’t let him anywhere near that Targaryen girl,” Sansa said coolly. “He’s far too dangerous to let him leave Winterfell!”

“Alright…then I’m trusting you to do what you need to. The North is yours, remember that. You act in the North’s interests. And you protect yourself, from any threat,” Jon said solemnly, gazing into Sansa’s eyes, as he handed back the knife. “Promise me…if you need to use it, you won’t hesitate.”

Sansa sighed, but accepted the knife back, relaxing slightly. He could tell just by the way she held it that she wasn’t happy it rested in her grasp. She was not a natural swordswoman, and never would be; but he’d been determined she have some way of defending herself if it fell upon Sansa alone to keep herself alive. “I promise… Perhaps I shall ask Podrick for some private training; I watched him training with Lady Brienne on our way to the Wall. They are both sworn to me. And he is discreet.”

Jon nodded slowly. He’d watched the quiet squire, determinedly training with Lady Brienne day and night. There was something quietly dignified about the way he just kept trying, no matter what, unfazed by setbacks, learning from them. Lady Brienne seemed content to have him around; and as Sansa said, he had journeyed with her to the Wall. Jon knew he had been squire to the Imp when Sansa was briefly married to him. That was interesting in itself; but Jon had no time to pick apart Sansa’s marriage to Lord Tyrion, or question how his squire had ended up in the service of a Stormlord’s daughter, so far North. “Aye, he seems a good man,” Jon said, because he’d know a bad one a mile off. Sansa tucked the knife into her stocking again, her skirts billowing over her knees, and she rested against the settle, close to him, watching the fire burning low again. She didn’t move to stoke the embers, and neither did he. He could almost fall asleep, and Sansa’s breathing slowed, relaxed. He ruined it.

“Sansa…if I don’t return…if there is no obsidian…fire is the only way to fight the armies of the dead.”

Sansa reached over, and placed her hand over his. Her fingers were long and white and elegant, unscarred; her nails were clean and neat. A lady’s hands. But meticulous, and strong: How many gowns had she sewn, how many tunics had she gifted him, emblazoned with the Stark direwolf? Needles were her weapon: She used them to create armour, to illustrate warnings, show her story on her sleeves. They didn’t look a traditional warrior’s hands, but there was skill and precision in them, courage and tenacity.

She squeezed his hand, and turned to gaze at him solemnly, her eyes glinting with fervour. “We’ll do it, Jon. We’ll stop the Night King. We’ll protect the North.”

“I wouldn’t entrust it to anyone else…” he said earnestly, placing his hand on top of hers and stroking his thumb tenderly. Rare moments like this, he cherished; how long had it been since he had contact like this with someone he loved? He remembered cuddling with Bran and Rickon; mussing Arya’s hair; Larra sprawling over his bed annoying him, and burrowing under the covers during storms, cosy and content and protected… Never many memories of Sansa, but then, she’d been her mother’s daughter, had learned disdain for Jon at Lady Catelyn’s knee… He savoured their moments now. The embers burned low, twinkling like half-forgotten stars, and coolness started to seep through the chamber - not true cold; the natural hot-springs piped through the walls of Winterfell made it a refuge during the winter years, comfortable even in the worst snowstorms. But it was enough; and Jon had to pick his head up, finally exhausted, and rub his eyes. He gently roused Sansa from a doze, and they clambered off the settle, regretting it; it was a very comfortable seat, and Jon was glad Sansa had commissioned it for the solar. It had been her second gift to him - the first, the cloak she had stitched for him, just like the one Father used to wear, the Stark sigil embossed on the leather. She’d had the settle made as somewhere they could sit and spend time together - somewhere that wasn’t around a table spread with siege maps and war preparations. Something that reminded Sansa, at least, of cosy snowy evenings ensconced in warmth and candlelight and heavy blankets and the sound of Father’s soft laugh and her mother humming songs of the Faith, her brothers and sister playing at the hearth, Robb’s long legs outstretched as he and Theon laughed at a joke she was too young to understand… Jon had always been made to feel an imposter on nights like those; he often receded to his own chamber, where usually Larra would have found him, with a scroll from the library, a flagon of ale and a game for them to play, cuddled up together, the two bastards of Winterfell.

Larra and Robb and Father and Lady Catelyn and Bran and Rickon and Arya, even Theon - they were all gone.

There was no-one now but them. Just him and Sansa. It was theirs, now; their home. They had fought for it; and Sansa seemed determined to remind Jon that it was his home, and always had been.

“Will you see me off in the morning?” he asked, pinching some of the candles still flickering stubbornly. He shouldn’t use so many, he knew.

“Of course I will…” Sansa gazed at him, and Jon turned to look at her, tall and queenly, shrouded in her dark dress, her hair glinting like the dying firelight. Her expression was stark, almost tearful. “Promise you’ll return.”

“I promise.”

“I really wish you didn’t have to go…but I understand why you feel you must,” Sansa finally acknowledged, on a long sigh, as if it cost her to admit it. “If this Targaryen girl is anything as prideful as Cersei, she would consider it an insult to be met by anyone less than the King in the North. She’ll do all she can to undermine and manipulate you, Jon, intimidate you. She has Unsullied and Dothraki and dragons.”

“I know.”

“But the best weapon she has is between her legs.”

“Sansa!” It caught him off-guard. But she looked stern and unrelenting, and he gaped at her.

“It’s true. She can’t have come this far in a world ruled by men without learning how to control them, and she can’t use her dragons for delicate political negotiations,” Sansa said sharply, any exhaustion forgotten: She seemed determined to impress the seriousness of this on him. “Never forget that you’re in control; that no matter what she offers, or how she approaches you, what she demands of you - you let her believe she is manipulating you to get what she wants.”

“I can’t believe we’re having this conversation - so what would you suggest I do?”

After a moment’s consideration, Sansa gave him a measuring look, a sweep of her blue eyes up and down him, before they narrowed subtly. “Give her what she wants. Without giving her anything.”

“You were in the capital too long; you’re starting to pose riddles like the southerners.” He frowned, though he knew what she was implying.

“I can’t speak plainer: If she wants you in her bed hoping you’ll cede the North, by all means, ride the dragon - but never forget why you’re there,” Sansa said, and Jon gaped, lost for words. He might even be blushing; he was glad at least the candles were almost extinguished.

“You don’t half frighten me sometimes,” he admitted wearily.

“Because you know I’m right.”

“Aye. Sometimes I miss that little girl who sang and danced and dreamt of having a dozen babies in a sunlit southern castle…” He sighed, and reached forward, to take Sansa’s hand. She gazed up at him, sorrowful of the girl that was lost, but stubborn. “But I prefer this woman before me. I know I’ve made the right choice - I want you to know that. No matter what happens, I don’t regret going south, and I’d never second-guess leaving the North to you. Here.”

And he handed her the document he’d kept hidden for weeks, until it was ready, until he could give it to her, without promises that might never be fulfilled. She’d had too many of those in her life.

“What’s this?” He brought the last candle closer.

“I had Maester Wolkan draw it up. The Northern lords and ladies have all signed it and witnessed. I’m not just leaving you in charge while I’m gone. Sansa Stark, I hereby name you my heir. The heir to Winterfell, the heir to the Northern kingdom,” Jon said solemnly. “In the event of my death, or my abdication, you will succeed me as Queen in the North. Copies have already been sent by raven to all the High Lords of Westeros.” Sansa’s lips parted, her eyes widening, and she blinked from Jon’s face to the parchment sealed with the sigils of the Northern lords and ladies, Jon’s scrawl beneath the Stark seal.

Her lips parted, and closed, and she blinked, and he thought her hands might be trembling, making the parchment shiver. He offered her a kind smile.

“Daenerys Targaryen kills me, and she’ll have the She-Wolf of Winterfell to deal with - and after she’s finished destroying the Night King, a dragon will seem like child’s play,” he said playfully, and Sansa’s lips quivered toward a smile.

“You have such faith in me.”

“That little girl I remember is gone,” Jon said, sadly, because though they had never been close, though she had been a brat at times and a dreamer, he still regretted all that Sansa had gone through that had killed that innocent girl in her. “Sansa Stark will weather any storm, and show her strength through it.”

He rubbed his face, and made his way to the door, unbolting it. The guard stood at attention beyond, a torch flickering in the brazier. “Jon…you’ve not changed,” Sansa said, and Jon glanced over his shoulder at Sansa. “You’re still just as brave and gentle and strong as I remember.”

Jon smiled softly. It was one of the kindest things she had ever said to him.

“Let’s get some rest, while we can,” he said gruffly, a pain in his stomach at the thought of what tomorrow would bring. To leave Winterfell, to leave her…to play supplicant to a Targaryen…

A Targaryen queen.

The Mad King’s daughter.

The best weapon she has is between her legs…

Larra had once teased that the sharpest blades are sheathed in the softest pouches.

Forbidden swords, a woman’s greatest weapon - if she was denied an education - was her body. And she had three brothers: Larra had appreciated the way men thought, and how easily manipulated they were. She had been much more tongue-in-cheek about phrasing it than Sansa, but the principle was the same.

Women had to find other ways of getting what they wanted, without swords - or dragons - and few things were as effective in making men lose reason as lust.

They said the Dragon Queen was beautiful. In the back of his mind, Larra snorted that powerful women always are beautiful, aren’t they, even when they’re not.

If Sansa was right…a beautiful woman who knew her way around a man, and had no compunction about going after exactly what she wanted - no matter what got in the way…or who… He half wished he was being sent to treat with the Night King.

At least Jon knew exactly what he was getting with the White Walkers. Non-negotiable, wholesale slaughter. No politics, no pleas, no ancient history or guile…just death. It was comforting, to know that’s all the Night King wanted. Just death. The end of all things.

Not games. Games and seduction and dragons and ancient oaths and madmen and promises he couldn’t keep to the sister he desperately wanted to protect.

He was venturing south. He was headed into territory Sansa had gracefully navigated for years: How could she distil years of experience into a few days’ preparation for him? Treating with Mance Rayder, negotiating with Stannis Baratheon were very different to meeting with the Mad King’s daughter. There was too much history; too much at risk. And in spite of all that, he had to do it. He had to try…

“Goodnight, Sansa,” he said softly, her hair glinting as she smiled softly and turned: He watched her long braid sway down her back like a wolf’s tail as she walked away, and he couldn’t help but think, the little girl of his memory was gone…and in her place, a direwolf prowled Winterfell, protecting her family, cunning and cautious and loyal.

Chapter 7: Progress

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

07

Progress


“My lady?” The sound of footsteps stopped, and she sighed, drawing her gaze away from the gates, through which Jon had disappeared. Lord Royce stood before her, breastplate glinting in the insipid sunlight, his yellow cape wrapped around him for warmth, the hem stained by the snow and the mucky yard. Lord Royce was a guest of the King in the North; he was also earning his bed and board through contribution to the war-efforts.

The snow was falling gently, and she felt eyes upon her; in the yard below, Lord Baelish lurked. Always lurking, always watching. The Stark and Manderly banners barely out of view on the horizon of the misty moors, he was already plotting how to use Jon’s absence to his advantage.

Sansa took a breath, and raised her chin, and met Lord Royce’s eye. “Hopeful as I am that Jon will return to Winterfell, we must continue to prepare for the war as though he may not. I was not tutored in the arts of war, Lord Royce, as I am sure you will appreciate,” she said, a tiny smile lingering at the corners of her lips, and Lord Royce gave her an indulgent half-smile, the closest he ever came to mirth. “As Lady of Winterfell, I must learn. I wish to know every detail about the siege preparations.”

“Very good, my lady,” Lord Royce inclined his head, ever courteous. If he felt a woman had no place at a war-council, he did not betray his thoughts. The truth of the matter was, they needed everyone to work toward the common goal of defeating the Night King: And that meant that Sansa now had to learn, and learn very quickly, how to plan for war. “Shall we begin now?”

“Yes, I think so,” Sansa agreed, letting out a gust of breath. She was no military strategist - no Robb. She had no experience in fighting, like Jon, no experience in defending anything - least of all herself. As Cersei had once muttered drunkenly to her in Maegor’s Holdfast, ‘l was taught to smile and sing and please’… Sansa had been raised a lady. But she had learned how to rule. And her weapons were her mind, her words, her courtesy, the accumulation of her experiences. Under her influence, and while Jon was consumed with thoughts of the upcoming battle - and rightly so, if all he had told her was indeed true - Winterfell was starting to regain the look and feel of the castle, the home, she remembered. In spite of the war preparations and the threat of siege, the choke-hold of terror that held its grip on Winterfell for months was starting to ease.

The smallfolk were settling in; they were becoming comfortable. Content. They were working, of course, always working, but they talked happily amongst themselves as they worked, smiled at her as she strode past with Lord Royce. She heard some of them singing, and laughter. There had been none of that, before; she remembered it, during her childhood. Under her parents’ rule, people had been cared for, and had known they were safe, valued, that they were protected, and provided for. They were starting to remember. There was a Stark in Winterfell once more.

And they were recovering; they were regaining strength and confidence after the horrors they had endured… And yet, though the castle began to take on its old feeling of safety and familiarity, the war preparations could not be ignored. As the castle prepared for winter, so too it prepared for war, and Sansa couldn’t help think ahead, as she was guided through the preparations, concealing how unsettling it was to realise she was completely underprepared. Her time in King’s Landing had taught her that courtesy was her best asset for her own survival. She had learned that truth or lies in the context of her courtesies could be used as a weapon effective as Jon’s Valyrian-steel sword - hadn’t Cersei used such weapons to murder her father? Cersei had been Sansa’s first instructor; Tyrion her second, indirectly; and Littlefinger the last, actively tutoring her. They had taught her to hone the natural instincts that had kept her alive, to wage wars of the mind, to play the game of thrones.

As she was guided through the castle, given a brief, first view of the War Council’s plans to defend Winterfell against incursion, Sansa started to understand that they were not so very different, the game of thrones and the arts of war. The skills of courtesy and mental dexterity she had honed in King’s Landing were directly applicable to military strategy, though, she acknowledged, perhaps not against the Night King, who shared none of the motivations of the likes of Cersei or Littlefinger or even Jon.

War was about anticipation. What was it Littlefinger had advised her weeks ago, about learning to fight every enemy in her mind, all of the time - to consider everyone her friend, everyone her enemy, to anticipate their motivations and reactions - that, to learn to think that way, there would come a time when everything that happened would eventually become something she had seen before. It sounded rather unexciting, but then perhaps there was safety and certainty in that.

Sansa couldn’t help but think that the Night King was a far less dangerous enemy than the likes of Cersei or Daenerys Targaryen: His sole purpose was to destroy Man. No tricks, no politics, no games, just his purpose. They knew what he wanted, and how he would go about getting it. There was some comfort to knowing exactly what the enemy wanted. She knew what her enemies wanted. If they survived it, they still had to contend with Littlefinger, Cersei Lannister, and this new Dragon Queen. It was starting to look like the War of the Five Kings all over again, only with women fighting tooth and nail to take the Iron Throne - and destroy everything in their paths to get it.

If they were to survive the wars to come, if she did not want to rely on the wisdom of others to make her decisions for her, if Jon did not return, if…if she alone survived, Sansa needed to learn how to understand war waged on a grander scale, on battlefields and in cities, war waged with weapons. And Lord Royce would teach her: To ignore a proud man was dangerous, but an experienced man put to work felt respected. And was more easily wielded as a weapon himself.

She was aware that few in Winterfell distrusted or despised Littlefinger more than Lord Royce, except for Sansa herself. She was also aware that since she had been complicit in concealing from the Lords Declarant of the Vale, of whom Lord Royce was paramount, that Littlefinger had murdered Lady Arryn, Littlefinger had what he needed to implicate Sansa if he so chose. He had what he needed, a half-truth to build lies upon to tear away everything she and Jon were building.

Sansa was certain what she had told Jon was correct: If they survived the Long Night, they would not long survive Littlefinger. Jon, King in the North, would not long survive Littlefinger.

Littlefinger, who had conspired to murder the Lord of the Vale with Lysa. Littlefinger, who had murdered Lady Arryn, who had manipulated Lord Arryn’s heir to take control of the Vale, usurping regency from the Vale’s most loyal families, engaging the Knights in open war against their better judgement…

If Littlefinger wanted to use her as a piece in his game, well…he underestimated just what lengths she would go to protect herself. Protect Jon. She knew his game. She knew what he wanted. Sansa knew that Littlefinger was just as dangerous now as he had always been, just as Cersei, so far to the south beyond snowdrifts and storms, was capable of doing more harm than they would ever dare contemplating. She was as ruthless as her father, and after Tommen’s suicide, had nothing but her life to lose - and she would fight to the death for her survival. At the moment, Littlefinger was far more dangerous than Cersei; he had caution, patience and… ‘Fight every battle everywhere, always, in your mind. Everyone is your enemy, everyone is your friend. Every possible series of events is happening all at once. Live that way and nothing will surprise you. Everything that happens will be something that you’ve seen before…’

The advice he had given her, perhaps the first earnest insight he had entrusted to anyone into the way he viewed the world - the way in which he worked and the way in which he would rebuild the world in likeness of the one envisioned… Littlefinger was meticulous in crafting lies built upon terrible truths. She knew he wanted her; and he wanted the Iron Throne. She knew he was ruthless and meticulous and, as Jon had said the night before he departed Winterfell, Littlefinger got what he wanted.

She wondered very much whether Littlefinger thought she had the nerve to start playing the game against him. Whether, ensconced in her family home, the ghosts of her honourable parents drifting about the halls, he might believe she could be lulled once again into his confidence, once again used and manipulated to get what he wanted…

“I never did thank you, my lord,” Sansa said, hours later, as she and Lord Royce sat in the Great Hall to take their evening meal, “for remaining at Winterfell after the Battle of the Bastards.”

“A single battle does not define the war,” Lord Royce advised her, his eyes shrewd as they rested on Littlefinger, turning his nose up at his companions. He was not, and never was, invited to dine at the high table with Jon and Sansa: They followed Father’s practice of inviting strangers to dine beside them and learn of their lives - and of their contribution efforts to the care and keeping of the castle - and now, the war-effort.

“I had been led to believe that sometimes, that was indeed the case,” Sansa frowned gently, watching the servants doling out stew. The hall was filled with the savoury scent of beef and barley stew, laden with the colourful root vegetables southerners considered fodder for animals, and which were essential to Northern households for their survival. The stew was rich and hearty and served with crusty sourdough bread. Northerners maintained austere households, and winter had come: Sansa would indulge no-one’s vanity that they deserved choice cuts of meat - not when there was so little of it, and so far to stretch it. Stew and bread was more than most smallfolk could boast at their table, and it was good, flavourful food, rich and hearty and warmed the belly. It was what they needed; if they wanted rib of beef or spiced roast goose, or lobsters gently poached in butter, the guests of the King in the North were welcome to try and outrace the storms and head south.

“It happens, on occasion. One decisive victory may turn an army against its commanders, the chaos costs the war…or a significant loss among the commanders - Rhaegar Targaryen fell at the Trident and the war was lost for the loyalists… But as we’ve seen, my lady, there are many other forces at work during wartime beyond military campaigns,” Lord Royce muttered heavily, alluding to the Red Wedding. She wondered for how long her family’s tragedies would remain a warning to Westeros, one of the greatest horrors of recent history. The Red Wedding, and the Bombing of Baelor’s Sept. Two defining moments of perhaps the last century, distilled within the same decade.

Sansa smiled gently. “All the same, it is not the responsibility of the Knights of the Vale to protect the North, my lord. No matter how much your presence is appreciated,” she said. “Lord Arryn committed your aid to help my family reclaim Winterfell; you need not have remained so long.”

“Lord Arryn was a great man. I never knew another Lord of the Vale until his son inherited the title,” Lord Royce said staunchly, though Sansa heard the undercurrent of disappointment. Sansa’s cousin had made little impact on Sansa when they had met, beyond her shame at smacking him for his brattishness - he had reminded her a little too much of the spoiled child she had once been. It was not truly his own fault; her Aunt Lysa had raised him as she saw fit…the same way her mother saw fit to raise her own children, ignoring the bastard she should have loved as a son.

The bastard who had avenged her. Had avenged them all.

The bastard who had stepped back, and acknowledged that no taunts and no loss of life on a battlefield, not even their brother’s death, could measure up to the torment inflicted upon Sansa for months. He had stepped aside. The Northern way was the old way: Those who passed the sentence swung the sword. The Bastard of the Dreadfort had been sentenced to death by Sansa; Jon would not deprive her of her justice.

“It must grieve you, to see the horrors Lord Arryn’s great House has endured recently,” Sansa said, her eyes lingering on Littlefinger as a servant doled out stew for them both. Fragrant steam rose from her bowl, savoury and mouth-watering.

“Not the legacy such a man had earned,” Lord Royce muttered grimly, averting his gaze to the trencher of warm sourdough bread being set between them by a servant, who placed a warmed earthen plate of small butter pats shaped as direwolves in front of Sansa. Dairy was rationed; it was an indulgence. She savoured it; she savoured her hearty meal, as any within the Hall or outside in the yards savoured theirs. She did not take it for granted that she was fed, and fed well; that she was warm, and safe. “Nor your own excellent parents’ legacies. I am glad only that Lord and Lady Stark may rest easy in the seven heavens, knowing their legacy is preserved in you, and in your father’s son.”

“It would make Jon proud to hear you say that,” Sansa said earnestly.

“He reminds me of your father a great deal,” Lord Royce said heavily; he had known Sansa’s father when he fostered at the Eyrie, had grown up with Ned Stark, and fought beside him during the Rebellion.

“And that would make Jon prouder still,” Sansa smiled earnestly; she knew it was true. All Jon had wanted since childhood was to be looked at and beloved as Robb was by their father. Sansa sometimes believed grief at parting with his lover to honour the marriage vows with her own mother had caused Ned Stark to be so conscious of how he favoured his two eldest sons - or perhaps he did not wish to incur his wife’s wrath toward Jon any more than it already was.

Both Sansa’s brothers had been murdered in cold-blood; only Jon had returned.

And he had gone south…to meet with a Targaryen, just as their grandfather and uncle had so long ago.

“It is as much love for Ned Stark as respect for Lord Arryn’s son that the Knights of the Vale remain the guests of the King in the North, my lady,” Lord Royce said.

“And the North shall not forget that the Vale came to its aid in its moment of greatest need,” Sansa assured Lord Royce. Lifting her spoon to her bowl, she gazed out over the Great Hall, the heads bowed over their bowls, the candles burning, people talking, and she rested her eyes on no-one in particular as she said, “Should the Vale ever find itself under threat, the North will do all in its power to protect the legacy of Lord Arryn.”

Lord Royce was quiet for a few moments, as they both tucked into their stew. It was rich and the meat was tender; she could taste mustard and ale and bay leaves and herbs, and the gravy-soaked carrots melted in her mouth. She let Lord Royce enjoy the first few mouthfuls of stew, let him think over what she had said. A servant poured them a cup of red wine each. It was not served in crystal but she did not think Lord Royce minded; the wine paired beautifully with the rich stew. She hoped she would sleep well tonight, after spending all day marching about the castle in the crisp air. She could finally breathe again.

“If I may speak plainly, my lady,” Lord Royce said quietly, and she turned to him, lifting her cup of wine. “I do believe it beneficial that the Lord Protector of the Vale remain at Winterfell, as long as he is welcome, of course. The Lord of the Vale may yet live up to his father’s legacy.”

Sansa’s smile was grim. “I believe I understand you, my lord. However, the Mockingbird still plays its clever little games in the Vale, as it attempts to do in the North, flitting about from person to person, learning to mimic their voices, until it can speak for them.”

“A wonder no-one has yet cut out its tongue,” Lord Royce grumbled, and Sansa smiled into her stew.

“Better to kill the beast than let it live in anguish,” she said softly, and for some reason, she thought of Cersei. In killing Joffrey, Littlefinger had left a lioness wounded, vengeful, and far more dangerous because of it. Had the Tyrells wanted true power, they should never have left any Lannister alive: Cersei had always been the most dangerous of them, and now she sat upon the Iron Throne, queen in her own right after decades perched beside it, just out of reach. “A maimed beast is far more vicious.”

“I am sure your lord cousin would be devastated if anything were to happen to his Uncle Petyr,” Lord Royce said, and there was almost something snide in his tone that Sansa would not have believed if she had not heard it himself. The Knights of the Vale prided themselves on their honour, their reputations; but Littlefinger was dangerous, had inserted himself amongst the Vale and even now attempted to turn it against itself…as he had with Sansa’s aunt and mother…

“And yet in every battle there are casualties,” Sansa said grimly. “Best to ensure the losses do not cost us the war.”

“What is one little mockingbird to an Eyrie of falcons?” Lord Royce asked airily, and Sansa smiled into her supper.

“Or to a direwolf?” she said, and smiled as the servant took away their empty bowls. “However…mockingbirds have been known to kill a falcon…sometimes they prefer to hunt trout.”

Lord Royce stared at her, scowling, as the servants cleared away the savoury course. Few left anything in their bowls. She could see Lord Royce thinking it over: Realising what she implied - that his instincts when Lysa died were correct… “One does wish one’s instincts had been confirmed months ago, my lady.”

“I am ashamed to say that even direwolves may dread mockingbirds in certain circumstances,” Sansa said honestly. “They are dangerous, after all, but perhaps the direwolf should have remembered she has fangs… Perhaps the mockingbird was not as powerful as she had dreaded… Perhaps she need not have been sold to be the plaything of torturers who collected wolf-pelts for gold.”

“What is one little mockingbird to an Eyrie of falcons, and a pack of direwolves, even a small one?” Lord Royce asked, his face stormy. The Knights valued their honour: They had heard the whispers, the rumours, talk from the smallfolk about the atrocities committed to Lady Stark in her own home, atrocities so violent and traumatic, she had risked death in the snowstorms to flee to her brother at the Wall. No true knight would ever have betrayed Sansa: Any Knight would now avenge her honour. The honour Littlefinger had sold to her enemies. The honour she herself had avenged when she set loose the hounds.

Sansa raised her cup to clink it delicately against Lord Royce’s. “What indeed, Lord Royce…”

A small dessert followed, flaky pastry stretched thin and baked until crisp, wrapped around apple sliced small, dotted with sugar and butter and spices and raisins, dusted with sugar. It was rich and flavoursome, delicate after the heavy stew, tangy and sweet at once, and reminded Sansa sadly of Margaery, who had, after all, given Sansa many lessons even as she manipulated her way closer to Joffrey, manoeuvring Sansa aside to take the crown. Still, she had been the closest Sansa could call to a friend in King’s Landing, teaching her the high harp and even the new pianoforte imported from Lys, coaxing her to join her cousins in embroidery and song, walking the dusty gardens of the Red Keep full of strange bird-calls and spiders and more than a few drunken fools.

Word had reached them of Tommen Baratheon’s suicide, one raven among many. Flinging himself from a window of the Red Keep while the crater that had been Baelor’s Great Sept still smouldered… The Lannisters who conspired to murder her family; the Tyrells who had the nerve to try to outmanoeuvre power from Cersei; the courtiers who mutely watched her torture at Joffrey’s hands. Dust.

She was glad the Sept was gone, and the monsters within it. Her father had been murdered on its steps. She could not think of the Seven without thinking of her father’s blood coating Ice as his body crumpled in pieces down the steps of the Sept.

It did not upset her nearly as much as she might have thought it would, thinking that Margaery was now no more than ash. Hadn’t Sansa merely been a tool for Margaery to utilise, to get what she wanted? And yet…

Courteous and smiling, Sansa could never compare with Margaery’s airy beauty, her bare arms and brazen prettiness, her overt sensuality paired with immaculate grace, sweet and tart and clever, concealing the thorns beneath soft petals, mesmerising and diverting, while the thorny vines encroached, entwining themselves unseen, clinging on for strength and support… But Sansa could emulate what she had learned from Margaery, to wield her smiles as weapons, make people fall in love with her, to…underestimate her. People had seen Margaery’s bare arms and high breasts and been diverted from how cleverly Margaery manipulated people, with smiles and twinkling blue eyes utterly lacking any guile.

Had not people also consistently underestimated Sansa’s ability to survive?

Here she was. At the high table at Winterfell, her home, regent for the King in the North. Named his heir…

It hurt her stomach, after the rich meal, in spite of the relief she felt after her layered conversation with Lord Royce, to think about Jon…that he had named her his heir, that he had prepared that signed, sealed document without her knowledge - without Littlefinger even knowing about it… Had he? Or had Littlefinger kept quiet simply because it was in his interests to let Jon leave, naming Sansa heir to the North…because Sansa, as Queen in the North by her own right, was the first step in seven to claiming each of the great seats of Westeros… Remove Jon, and capitalise upon the strength of the Vale, backing his claim to Sansa…

She wondered, would Lord Baelish marry her beneath the weirwood tree? Clothe her in heavy white silk-velvet, drape a cloak of mockingbird feathers about her shoulders, and rape her as the snow fell outside the diamond-paned windows of Winterfell? She did not underestimate how dangerous Littlefinger was.

But perhaps he should not underestimate how silly Sansa had made herself appear to be, to survive King’s Landing, how foolish and naïve. She had been, at times, she freely admitted it; she had been duped more than once, in spite of her warnings to herself since the afternoon her father’s head rolled down the marble steps of Baelor’s Sept.

Jon had told her to do anything that was necessary to protect herself, and the North: And Littlefinger was, at present, the most deadly enemy she had to account for, at least, the most immediate threat. If Jon died in the south, and she became Queen, it would not be long before the Northern lords would start murmuring amongst themselves that the North needed an heir, and wouldn’t the Lord Protector of the Vale make a valuable ally in the wars to come against Cersei Lannister? They needed men…

If Jon fell to the Dragon Queen, Littlefinger would do his utmost to divert the war-efforts being arranged against the Night King; Sansa was certain Littlefinger would do all in his power to undermine Jon’s warnings...

By the time Jon returned, Sansa would have dealt with Littlefinger.

She would not allow him to take what he wanted from her, or from the North. If Jon did not return, she would not allow Littlefinger to undo everything Jon risked his life for - risked his life, to protect them, protect her.

Littlefinger had promised to teach her how to lie, to play the game of thrones.

First Jon, and now Lord Royce, had started to teach her military strategy. Lord Royce had taken her on a tour around the castle, the walls: He had shown her what was being done, but not only that, why, and why it was important certain things had been done. He told her of the debates in the library, experienced commanders arguing with the wildings over their own experiences, and Jon, who had settled certain disputes in such a way, the Northmen - and, indeed, Lord Royce - mistook him for Ned Stark.

She had been learning. All day, she learned to ask questions. To be critical. To consider things. The implications of certain decisions being made, certain strategies favoured over others. The strategies decided upon were tailored to their enemy, to the Night King. On a grander scale, battle preparations had to be adaptable.

She had to learn to use what she had to get what she wanted.

She knew what Littlefinger wanted: The Iron Throne, and Sansa, to enjoy breeding his heirs on.

Sansa would use that to get what she wanted from him. She knew how he worked. He had told her. She was his enemy, and his friend. He would use her to get what he wanted, as he already had, as he used everyone: He watched, he waited, he bided his time and he plotted, before he acted, always too many steps ahead to catch…

But direwolves were swift, and cunning.

And brutal.

The little bird that had fled King’s Landing and flown north had morphed during its journey…a direwolf had padded quietly through the gates of Winterfell as a bloody battle ended, and ripped apart her enemy.

The bastard had raped and brutalised her; and Littlefinger had sold her to be raped and brutalised.

She did not forget.

She watched, she waited, she bided her time, plotting, gathering friends and enemies around her, meticulously crafting alliances and whispering the birth of ideas into the ears of would-be allies, shifting their allegiances from a man they distrusted to a woman they perhaps wanted. Even swathed in heavy black cloth, no matter how fine that black cloth was, Sansa knew she was desirable.

I like her pretty…

He needed my face...

You’re more beautiful than your mother ever was…

I know he wants you.

The bolt slid heavily into place; two guards stood outside the heavy, reinforced oak door. Her lady’s maid had slipped away after arranging Sansa’s hair into a neat plait down her back, taking her linens to be laundered, and her frayed petticoats to be hemmed. The diamond-paned windows were shuttered; the fire blazed, and candles made the chamber glow golden, warm and comforting. But Sansa could not relax, too anxious thinking of Jon’s journey south, of the implications to herself and the North if he did not return, trying to decide how best to deal with Littlefinger, half-expecting a knock on her door in Jon’s absence. Lord Baelish was cunning; he was also lustful of Sansa.

She wondered, at the back of her mind, whether it would matter to Lord Baelish that she had been broken in. If, as a brothel-keeper, Lord Baelish even preferred that she had been. He would - had - treated her as he did his whores, sold to be brutalised, though she had escaped with her life at least.

The crackle of the flames was lulling, but she couldn’t help think of dragonfire, and her heart stuttered, her nerves making her jumpy, and she could not rest beneath the linen sheets and furs in what had once been her parents’ bed, the bed in which she had been born, the bed in which she was certain her grandfather Rickard had once rested - before he went south and was burned alive by a Targaryen.

She worried for Jon.

She worried that he would return, and she could not protect him from Littlefinger. She worried that he would not return, and she would have to take on the role of Queen in the North, and do battle with their bannermen, to try and survive the Night King…to rebuild after the battles were won…if they were won…to wage war against Cersei Lannister, or Daenerys Targaryen, whichever survived their conflict…

Yes, Sansa had learned to play the game from watching Cersei’s ineptitude, from observing Tyrion’s ruthlessness and consideration, from Margaery’s vicious sweetness and guile. She had learned more than she realised, watching her parents rule Winterfell as she grew up and took lessons in embroidery and dancing from Septa Mordane - but she knew titbits, she understood implications and tried to remember things she had once heard Robb and Theon and Jon and Larra debating as her older siblings took complicated lessons on economics and strategy with Maester Luwin; she remembered Tyrion’s preparations for the Blackwater; and the Tyrells making it known Margaery had brought with her engagement to Joffrey the food that kept them alive.

But she had never had any power; never had any influence, or responsibility - except to herself, to keep herself alive, in spite of everything flung at her.

Sansa had not been educated, had not been prepared to be the kind of Queen she now wanted to be. She knew how to become loved, and respected - she knew she was desired, even if most weren’t as overt as Littlefinger about telling her - but if…if Jon did not return, she would be Queen in the North. There was more to being Queen than feeding the smallfolk and keeping the respect of the nobles: An independent sovereign nation, she would have to start acting as Queen now, as if they would survive the war, as if they would have to rebuild, and rebuild without the (now diminished) might of the Iron Throne behind them.

The North had snatched back its independence with its bared teeth: Now, they had not only to defend that independence, but learn how to exist as an independent sovereign nation.

She needed to learn how to be, not just a Queen, but a ruler.

Where could she possibly start, at this late stage?

She had asked Maester Wolkan, days ago, that very question: she had wanted to assure Jon that while he prepared for war, she would do her part to support him as King in the North, whatever he needed. To be able to think of the things that he might overlook. When they had retaken Winterfell, Sansa had assured him that he was not doing so alone: They worked together… And they still worked together, though he was heading south. She had to think of all the things she knew he was too distracted to remember.

By the hour of the wolf, she was still restless; perhaps she had managed to snare a couple of hours’ sleep, too anxious and unnerved and sick to her stomach at the prospect of what she had to do, terrified to even contemplate Jon’s fate - she didn’t know the Dragon Queen at all, and that unsettled her. She could plan for Cersei’s malice; she could not anticipate a stranger’s reactions…she had to learn how to.

Huffing, she flung back the furs and linens, wrapping her quilted nightgown around her over her simple linen shift, and unbolted the door. The torches had burned low, and flames flickered off the helmets of her guards.

“I should like to break my fast,” she told one of them, and if she was more well-rested she would have addressed him by the name she remembered, but was too impatient and anxious to say, “and as soon as Maester Wolkan has risen for the day I will see him in the solar. If you could pass on the message that I wish to discuss the question I posed him days ago.”

Dressing herself in the firelight, Sansa headed to the solar, a guard accompanying her, and took up his vigil outside the door.

She had work to do.

Long before the birds first started to chirp in the godswood, the windows still shuttered, a fire blazing, her hands shaking as she paced the room, Sansa started as a maid brought her breakfast. She insisted on modest portions: Porridge, thick and creamy in spite of the lack of dairy added to it, just oats and water as she had grown up with, and a soft-boiled egg and some toast cut into soldiers - the way her brothers used to take their eggs, the better to dunk toast into the runny golden yolk. A pot of chamomile and lavender tea warmed her trembling hands, and settled her overactive mind; her mother used to drink it when she was restless.

And she found that reading through Jon’s papers soothed her: He had known she would come to the solar, and sit behind the desk in what had once been Father’s chair. Jon had left everything neat, ordered into piles - Maester Wolkan’s census, correspondence and raven-scrolls, the last of the ledgers, which still bore the scratchings of Lord Bolton’s steward, and the neat hand of her sister before that, Larra Snow. Sansa sat, and examined the lines of the ledgers. Sums had never been her strong point: But she was determined to learn, and in combing meticulously through each line, she realised that the ledgers were merely a matter of organisation. Larra had known every line of the ledgers; loose leaves of parchment showed sums in Larra’s hand, indicating calculations she had made in anticipation of Robb’s march south to free Father. The cost of hosting the Northern lords, while Robb called the banners; arming and feeding Northmen…the cost to those left behind, the poor yield at harvest indicated by the comparatively lower sums annotated in Larra’s hand from the taxes collected.

It had made her heart stutter, the first time she saw Larra’s handwriting on the page, startling and unexpected. And it made Sansa’s eyes burn to realise she and Larra, always so different, wrote their T’s the same way, their F’s and their J’s - hadn’t Septa Mordane instructed them both in handwriting?

Sansa had secretly enjoyed the afternoons Larra joined her and Arya for needlework and dancing. Especially Larra teasing Jon and Robb while they were forced to learn the steps of vigorous Northern folk-dances, the refined court dances popularised by the Reach, and the elegant waltzes of the Vale that Father sometimes, rarely, had come into the schoolroom to teach them. She still remembered dancing with her father. She remembered dancing with her brothers, and her sisters. She remembered enjoying her lessons with her older sister.

Sansa…do you remember your lessons?

She’d been a foolish girl annoyed by her strange, fierce little sister, but Septa Mordane had heard the clashes and known, ordered Sansa to bar her bedchamber door…she had known.

But Sansa remembered her lessons.

Her father, her mother…she knew Septa Mordane would be proud of her, too, of the woman she had become, and of the ruler she wanted to be.

She traced her fingers over Larra’s handwriting, her eyes burning.

She used to disdain Larra for her interest in politics and economics and all of the things that men took for granted they were educated about; things Sansa, a lady, never should have had to concern herself with. But Larra had always been clever, always respected that she was a bastard, that with two true-born sisters she was unlikely to be married off well, and had contented herself with the knowledge that, long after Sansa’s mother was dead, Larra would help their brothers’ wives raise their children and rule the North when Robb and their brothers went off to war… Larra had insisted on a proper education, and Father had ensured she got it: She had been Maester Luwin’s best student.

As the birds started to chirp, the servants came to open the shutters, and Sansa took a brief reprieve from the ledgers, sipping a fresh cup of tea, to gaze out of the window into the pale dawn. Snow was falling softly, and the sun was glinting beyond the walls of the castle, the castle that had not yet truly woken; everything felt sleepy, and soft. At least, it felt so; she knew that men were already out working on the great trench around the perimeter of the castle, carpenters working tirelessly on trebuchets to launch flaming projectiles into the enemy’s midst.

Jon had told them that the dead had no war machines, no cavalry, and no archers. The living did not have to worry about projectiles being launched into their midst - but every man lost was another soldier in the Night King’s army. The dead did not need weapons when they had numbers, when they themselves were the weapons.

If she thought about it too much, it seemed impossible.

But she had to go on believing that it was possible. For Jon’s sake. For the sake of her people.

A soft knock on the door, and the timid Maester Wolkan emerged from the shadows, his arms laden with heavy tomes bound in leather. She gave him a gentle smile. He had always been kind…had done what little he was able to try and protect people at Winterfell, and, she was sure, the people of the Dreadfort. And that made her think…

“Good morning, Maester Wolkan,” she said softly. “I have just spent a few hours combing through the ledgers. I’m rather cross-eyed. Would you join me in a cup of tea?”

“Thank you, my lady,” he said gratefully. She knew he was not accustomed to kindness, consideration, that he had in fact lived his life in sheer terror: Sansa had been raised with a profound respect for the Maester of Winterfell. She had endured Grand Maester Pycelle, who made her skin crawl; while in King’s Landing, any ailment Sansa had kept to herself, or had taken the advice of her lady’s maid Shae to alleviate. Pycelle, who had been bought decades ago by Tywin Lannister; who served no-one but Tywin Lannister, and his own interests. Maester Wolkan reminded her of Maester Luwin. He was timid, yes, but clever and kind, and resilient, she had to think, after so long under the tyranny of the Dreadfort.

“The implication from the ledgers is that a great many of the improvements to Winterfell since the sack of the Ironborn have been paid for with Lannister gold,” Sansa said softly, and the maester glanced uncertainly at her as she passed him the cup of tea. She considered it a delightful irony that what the Lannisters had fought so hard to destroy, they were paying for her and Jon to repair.

“Yes, my lady,” he said softly. “The…payment was sent directly to Winterfell after the…”

“After the Red Wedding,” Sansa said coolly, and the maester nodded. “And my former stepmother’s weight in silver, I presume, was also sent directly to Winterfell’s treasury by Lord Frey. Has the treasury of the Dreadfort been emptied?”

“The last of the wagons have crossed the White Knife, my lady, along with the contents of the granaries and larders.”

“And the people?”

“Making their way, by wagon and on foot,” Maester Wolkan said, “driving the livestock.”

“Any hint of trouble upon their arrival, Maester, and I wish for the perpetrators to be dealt with swiftly, and justly,” Sansa said coldly. “I do not wish to inspire fear but I shall not tolerate the kind of cruelty I know was prevalent throughout Bolton lands.”

“Of course, my lady. If I may…people model their behaviour after the example of their leaders,” Maester Wolkan said gently. “I do not believe you need fear the taint of the Dreadfort shall continue within the halls of Winterfell.”

“Thank you, Maester,” Sansa said, with a sad smile. “I…have not thanked you as I should have, for your tireless efforts after the armies reclaimed Winterfell. Your contributions made the transition seem almost seamless.”

“I serve Winterfell, my lady,” Maester Wolkan said, nodding slightly in deference.

“Well, I hope you have started to consider Winterfell your home,” Sansa said. “Our former maester, Luwin, would appreciate all your efforts. You are an exceptional reflection on the Citadel, and a credit to Winterfell.”

“Thank you, my lady,” Maester Wolkan smiled. “I imagine those of the Dreadfort will come to regard Winterfell as their home as much as I have. It is a very different place to what we have become accustomed to.”

“Under the Boltons, the truly abhorrent became accepted, and then it became commonplace - and celebrated,” Sansa said coldly, trying and failing not to think of her husband, his father… She tried not to linger too long over the fate of Lady Walda who, despite being the daughter and wife of her family’s murderers, had been a courteous, kind lady, who had always tried her best to be kind to Sansa. She had had her baby, they said, a little boy; she had been utterly entranced with him…for as many hours as Ramsay had allowed them both to live. It was not only justice for herself that Sansa unleashed Ramsay’s hounds upon her husband; it was justice for Walda, and her tiny boy, and for Theon, and anyone Ramsay had ever tortured to death for sport. “A pity we cannot spare the men to tear down the Dreadfort. Thousands of years of rivalry, finally come to a brutal end…and they deserved their end, a thousand times over. I am glad few others had to suffer before Jon and I reclaimed our home, and the North.”

“As am I, my lady,” Maester Wolkan said sombrely.

“The war efforts have filled your hours, I am aware, Maester,” Sansa said, encouraging the maester to drink his tea. She wished there were some little biscuits, so she didn’t start sloshing from drinking too much tea to keep herself warm, but it was she who had insisted on rationing the flour. Her days of indulgence were gone. “However, I was hoping you had given consideration to the question I posed to you some days ago.”

Maester Wolkan smiled, now, and his dark warm eyes crinkled at the corners, and for a moment, Sansa could be forgiven for seeing Maester Luwin’s smile in his face.

“Indeed, I have, my lady,” Maester Wolkan said, with subtle enthusiasm. “Although I cannot credit myself with the idea.”

“And why ever not?”

“If I may show you, my lady…” The maester stood, approaching the table, and the stack of heavy books resting on it. “Maester Luwin was meticulous in his record-keeping, Lady Sansa. Especially where his observations concerned the education of your siblings. From their earliest childhood, Maester Luwin devised lessons and exercises to cultivate their learning. These…these are records of their progresses. These tomes in particular pertain to the education of Alarra Snow, my lady. She is your sister, isn’t she?”

“Larra,” Sansa murmured, her insides twisting painfully, her throat burning as she added, “She was Jon’s twin… What did Maester Luwin teach her?”

Everything, apparently.

From the time she was four years old, Larra had taken daily lessons with Maester Luwin. The heavy tomes, tucked with loose sheaves of parchment with Larra’s developing handwriting, her drawing skills, her comprehension of High Valyrian poetry, charted Maester Luwin’s education of Alarra. He had outlined her progresses, her lessons in everything from gardening and botany to economics, trade and histories, complex mathematics and budgeting, foreign languages, strategy and patience, theology and woodworking, blacksmithing and cooking, military history, law and chivalry, sagas and Valyrian poetry, geography and High Valyrian, art and architecture and irrigation, siege defence and tickling trout, horsemanship and culture and customs of foreign lands.

Maester Luwin had annotated lesson-plans, referencing tomes in the library and mixing lessons inside with practical applications of knowledge in and around Winterfell. He had mixed practical out-of-doors experience with collaborative discussions in front of a fire, frequently making notes that his students had played cyvasse and knitted while they debated hypotheticals about definitive moments in history that had shaped the world in which they lived.

“Maesters are prone to praising themselves, my lady,” Maester Wolkan said, with a touch of humour, “but I am truly in earnest when I say that Maester Luwin turned the education of your siblings into an art-form. His lessons are extraordinary, and a pleasure to read.”

“My sister loved to learn,” Sansa said softly. “I am sure a good reason for that is because she had such a wonderful teacher; or did Maester Luwin develop his lessons so wonderfully suited to her, because Larra was such a wonderful student?”

“Either way, I would never waste these lesson-plans,” Maester Wolkan said fondly, and Sansa smiled.

“Perhaps we should put them into wider practice,” she said softly. “Make a system of it. Larra and Maester Luwin would both have liked that. And we shall soon have a good many children getting underfoot and becoming boisterous and irritable, cooped up within the halls of the castle during the worst of the storms; it would do well to keep their minds engaged and excited by learning.” Maester Wolkan chuckled softly. “Although…seven tomes? You’ve not had time to read all of them?”

“No, my lady; I began with the very last of them,” Maester Wolkan told her. “When your brother Lord Robb Stark called his banners and went to war, Alarra Snow remained at Winterfell, acting as steward to your brother Brandon... Maester Luwin kept records of their discussions relating to the war efforts and the preparations for winter, taking into account continued contributions to the Night’s Watch.”

Sansa smiled to herself. Larra had done exactly what she knew she would be left to do: Rule Winterfell, and raise the children. Her mother had gone south, provoking war; but Larra had stayed to be a mother to Brandon and Rickon, to rule Winterfell in Robb’s stead. And she had done the thing well; Sansa asked the Maester if he didn’t mind leaving the tomes with her, and made herself comfortable on the settle before the fire, her feet up on the little embroidered stool, reading through some of Maester Luwin’s last assessments of Larra’s capable rule of Winterfell. He had made few notes after the Ironborn attack.

She set the heavy book down and sipped her cold tea, upset by one observation; the Ironborn had attacked Larra.

Larra had killed three Ironborn intending to rape her. She had ripped the throat out of one of the Ironborn with her teeth, gouged the eyes out of a second, and impaled the third with a meat-hook through the jaw - before Theon had attempted to subdue her, and been found by more Ironborn, knocked out cold and bloody but alive. Sansa’s brothers had disappeared after that: Two farm-boys had been killed in their stead and passed off as Bran and Rickon, a young whore from Winter’s Town too - after the Ironborn had tired of her, butchered and burned and strung up for the smallfolk to break their hearts over.

But the note, the very last words Maester Luwin had written, read simply: They live!

She knew Larra had always been fierce - had been trained with weapons alongside their brothers since she was a child - but to read it, in Maester Luwin’s meticulous, careful print… Sansa could almost hear his voice inside her head, soft and careful and warm. It was all the more horrible to hear his voice telling her such awful things…

It had been a long time since Sansa had ventured to the other parts of the castle, where the ghosts of her family lingered, haunting. Before, she had not been permitted freedom from the single chamber in which Ramsay imprisoned her; now, she could not bear to see the destruction wrought by the Ironborn on her home. To see the direwolves guarding the crypt decapitated by the order of the petty Boltons made her blood boil, and her heart sink: She did not know what they would have had done to her siblings’ chambers.

Separated from the rest of her siblings’ chambers, as they always had been, Sansa was shocked to find that Larra’s chamber was untouched.

It had survived the sacking of the Ironborn, and the scourge of the Boltons. It was just another heavy door and a room full of furniture. Larra’s room had always been close to Jon’s: Sansa could tell he had not set foot inside it since they reclaimed Winterfell. The dust was undisturbed.

But there it was. Larra’s room. Her modest bed, laden with linens and furs, and a silk-lined wool throw with a border Sansa herself had helped Larra embroider with every kind of Northern flower they could find in the godswood and the glasshouses. A trunk at the foot of the bed with an upholstered lid, full of Larra’s neatly-folded gowns - there were folds of dark fabric Sansa did not recognise, gowns Sansa had never seen her sister in. A work-table laden with Larra’s sketches and paintings, covered in a layer of dust; the box of paints and brushes Lord Manderly had always gifted Larra on her name-day since she was a girl. A handsome rocking-chair beneath the diamond-paned window, and a woven basket full of yarn and embroidery hoops and folds of fabric, half-completed projects. Beside it, a tiny, upholstered footstool embroidered with snarling direwolves, on which Sansa vividly remembered Arya sitting as a girl, listening to Larra sing as she combed Arya’s damp hair, the only one who could gentle Arya long enough to untangle her mane, and the spot where Rickon used to sit, and suck his thumb, leaning against Larra’s legs as she told stories, the fire crackling as her knitting-needles clacked gently. Larra could knit without looking at her hands, like Old Nan.

A mobile of weirwood branches hung before the window, strung with ornaments and treasures Larra had collected, or was gifted: Sansa had always envied it. She dusted the rocking-chair and sank into it, against a feather-cushion embroidered with direwolves and winter roses, and gazed at the mobile. Larra’s treasures caught the light, though they were dusty: Pretty things she had picked up on walks or while out hunting, interesting things their brothers had gifted her, presents from their bannermen. Pine-cones and conkers; silver bells strung up with velvet ribbon; sea-glass and beautiful shells and a shark tooth and a pearl from White Harbour; beads from old gowns and wooden carvings of direwolves; feathers and a small crystal geode; a small pendant carved from antler; a chunk of amber with a dragonfly trapped inside it; even an obsidian arrowhead; small bundles of dried herbs; and a silver-and-gold ring that caught Sansa’s attention, remembering the burning envy that had overwhelmed her when Robert Baratheon presented Larra with it at feast.

The ring was silver-and-gold, the elegant band figured like a rearing golden stag and a silver direwolf, meeting to cradle a multi-faceted stone of obsidian striated with silver-quartz - a very rare stone, they had said.

In front of everyone, King Robert had told Larra that the ring had been intended for Lyanna Stark as a bride-gift: But Larra looked so like her, and was so vibrant, he couldn’t bear to bury the ring in the dark with his beloved’s bones. He wanted to see Larra wearing the ring, with flowers in her hair and the sun shining down upon her.

Queen Cersei had had Larra flogged for it.

Larra had still been healing when Sansa and Arya had left Winterfell with Arya.

Sansa’s sister had laughed that the King had gifted her a ring; and the Queen had given her fine red ribbons.

Thinking back, Sansa didn’t know how Larra had laughed.

The ring glinted, and chimed against the silver bell, when Sansa reached up to open the diamond-paned window, to let in sunlight and the scent of snow - a natural perfume Sansa had always associated with her sister, who had always smelled to her of sunlight and white winter flowers and heather in frost.

She sat in Larra’s rocking-chair, examining the mobile in the sunlight, and silently wept.

Chapter 8: Last Hearth

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

08

Last Hearth


She had mistaken the flame-red for weirwood leaves, at first, vivid against the snow-covered evergreen of the ancient forest. A giant roared, brown-haired and wrapped in a skin, broken silver chains glinting at its wrists. House Umber’s sigil, flying high over the great keep of Last Hearth, whipping and snapping in the high winds. The dawn had greeted them, cold and fair; she could not remember her last sunrise. Beyond the Wall, they had lingered in a perpetual twilight, the moon glowing off snowbanks and frozen lakes, but no sunlight. It had only perpetuated the timelessness Larra had become accustomed to beneath the weirwood.

Sharp and bright, the brittle sunlight filtered through the bent evergreen boughs laden with a mantle of fresh snow. Here and there, hellebores poked their heads out of the frozen underbrush, snow-white and fresh crisp green, occasionally a rich velvety purple, their petals downturned, resilient as any direwolf in the snows. Mist rose from a stream beside the weirwood fed by a hot-spring, glowing as the shards of sunlight caught it, making the ancient godswood eerier for it. Only birdsong punctuated the breathless, reverent silence of the godswood. There was no snow falling this morning; only stillness. It was lulling, almost gentle. Flashes of red darted about amid the snow-white and umber brown and evergreen; a worship of weirbirds drew her eye, and as the sun shone, they sang. Small songbirds, they were startling in their colouring, with vivid scarlet beaks and plumage, and snow-white faces; the females were snow-white. A group of the songbirds was called a worship in the North: Sometimes the females would conceal their nests among the leaves of a weirwood, as if trying to get as close to the Old Gods as possible. Their song was beautiful: Larra hadn’t heard it in years. She remembered few but the largest birds of prey living beyond the Wall.

It seemed even the wildlife had been fleeing the White Walkers. But then, hadn’t the appearance of a direwolf in the woods heralded the beginning of the Starks’ troubles? She remembered the beast in the snows, maggots crawling out of its eyes, its pups birthed after its death mewling and wriggling blindly for milk, the broken antler of a great stag lodged through their mother’s jaw.

Freak, Theon Greyjoy had called it.

Jon had told Father his children were meant to have the pups. Three boys, two girls - the same as Ned Stark’s children. An albino, pushed away by the others, for Jon: And the largest, wiliest and perhaps the kindest of them, eyes already open, a jet-black that had pounced on Larra’s boot, claimed by Larra.

Their direwolves had been companions and occasional protectors ever since.

Larra didn’t like to think how their lives would have unfolded had Father allowed the men to butcher the pups, all those years ago. Sansa and Arya had lost Lady and Nymeria before they even reached King’s Landing: And Arya was still presumed dead. Larra knew hints of what Sansa had endured, but no more.

Brandon sat beneath the heart-tree, communing with memory: Larra padded through the virgin snows, a foot deep, and sang back to the weirbirds.

As a girl, she had learned to identify and mimic the song of every bird in the godswood. When she had nursed a harpy eagle to health, she had learned how to mimic its cries - and terrified her little brothers in the godswood, launching herself at them from the topmost boughs of trees, after Jon and Robb and Theon had wound them up that great harpy-eagles would swoop down and carry them off for dinner. She smiled to herself, watching the worship of weirbirds singing in chorus, responding to her own whistled song, remembering the black eye Bran had accidentally given her, thumping her out of pure reflex: She had to think she and her brothers had taken a few too many liberties frightening Bran and Arya.

Larra had argued to Father that they were teaching their younger siblings resilience.

Maester Luwin might have regretted teaching her what that meant, and why resilience was important in all aspects of her education, and her life.

She sighed, and thought about the little boy Bran used to be, the sweet-faced, clever, kind boy he had once been, the one who scuffed his boots and looked down every time he fibbed; and the young man he had become in the last fortnight alone, ever since his communion with the heart-tree in the weirwood grove beyond the Wall.

Bran her brother had become a different person since. She had noticed, the day they walked through the Wall; she had known, as Edd told her the truth of their family’s tragedies, of which their own had been one of the first, and perhaps more certainly, the least. He had become Brandon the Broken, for the first time; there was something fundamentally fractured in Bran, and she did not mean his spine. He was not as she knew him to be anymore. She wondered how long it would take Bran to return to himself, if ever. If he would achieve that, before the end of her lifetime. And if there was anything she could do to speed up the process.

It would not do to have this stranger return to Winterfell with her: They needed someone invested. They needed Bran.

Regretfully, she turned away from the birdsong, padding through the snow to the heart-tree. Bran’s eyes were as colourless as the weirwood tree behind him; there was a soft pink flush in his cheeks from the cold, his hands red from exposure as he pressed his palm to the trunk. It was an unsettling vision, that still, emotionless face and lifeless white eyes; not the brother she had raised.

Larra had risen before dawn, gaining perhaps three hours’ rest. She never slept for long nowadays, not even beneath the weirwood, where the Children had assured her of their safety. She fell into restless dozes with fear clutching at her lungs, and she woke with terror gripping her throat. And constantly, constantly the worry about Bran.

It had been conditioned into her: Look after Bran.

“Brandon,” she said gently, and reached out to rub Bran’s chest just beneath his throat. Over the last few days’ travel, Bran had spent a good amount of time with his eyes colourless, communing; it had unnerved the brothers of the Watch, but they were becoming accustomed to him. There was no other choice: Until they reached Winterfell, they all had to muddle along. “Come on, it’s time to come back. We must move on.”

They had remained the Umbers’ guests only overnight, to give the horses a rest, and the men a warm, dry place to lay their heads - a luxury. It had taken closer to ten days than a week to reach Last Hearth: A storm of sleet and lightning had cost them a day’s travel and several terrified horses, thankfully hunkered down in an abandoned holdfast in the New Gift. But two brothers of the Night’s Watch had died of sickness during the first few days’ march. They had been coughing for years, Edd told them; the order to retreat to Winterfell had not brought their deaths nearer.

They had been burned where they fell. It was not respectful, they all knew, but they could not afford to linger.

Perhaps it was the pain in her side, the bruise still angry and flourishing purplish-red beneath her furs and obsidian chainmail, the weight of Dark Sister sheathed at her waist, the absence of Hodor and Summer, that settled dread in the pit of Larra’s stomach. She had been so long beyond the protection of the Wall that she forgot the army of the dead chasing at her heels could not move past it. It would take a very long time before she did not dread looking over her shoulder, did not listen for snarls and groans on the wind. So long as the Wall held true, they could indulge in a feeling of relative safety.

Relative…

He was getting better at returning. He still didn’t like it, though.

“I was learning,” Brandon murmured in protest, his eyes dark once more.

“We’re moving on. You can commune once you’re settled in the wagon,” she told him, half-reminded of Rickon. She had been his primary caregiver, his mother, since Lady Catelyn had left Winterfell for King’s Landing on a fool’s errand, never to return. It had fallen to Larra to discipline and coddle Rickon in equal measure, to raise him, to care for him, to love him, and teach him compassion, dignity and respect. It had fallen to her to gentle some of the wildness, without breaking it. She had learned a very specific way to address Rickon: Stern, unyielding, but kind. She used that mother’s voice now, with Brandon, more than twice their brother’s age when Rickon had been left wild and confused, fearful and lost. “You know I will not move you from the weirwood while you’re communing; but the world does not stop while you dive into visions. I hope you were watching something illuminating.”

“It was,” said Brandon softly. He raised his dark eyes to her. “I shall show you, in a little while.” Larra stared at Bran. Show her?

Her stomach cramped, and she thought of Hodor.

Hodor, whose name was Wylis.

Hold the door…

Hodor’s fate had given her more than one nightmare, and for more than one reason than simply becoming fodder in the Night King’s army. They had left him… Her gentle giant, simple and sweet, kind and considerate, easily frightened…they had left him to a monstrous fate. They had abandoned him to save their lives.

And she believed Brandon, somehow, had caused their sweet giant’s simple-mindedness.

The last words he had heard, Hold the door…truncated, didn’t those three words sound similar to the only word Hodor ever spoke, had become known by?

Brandon sighed, his breath pluming before him, and folded his hands neatly in his lap. She gestured to the two Umber guards waiting for them beyond the grove of trees encircling the weirwood. She could carry Bran, if she had to: With grown men to share the burden, she chose to save her strength. They had a long ride ahead of them; they would push through until dusk before setting up camp. Dusk, and dinner. To eat every day was a luxury she was no longer accustomed to.

“You’re not ready,” said Brandon softly.

“No,” Larra said brusquely. Sometimes she had to speak to him in her mother’s voice, the same way she used to speak to little Rickon. Other times, she might have been spoken to by the oldest, wisest of maesters. She never knew which Brandon she would get. The reflective, dispassionate one unnerved her. “I don’t think I am.”

“We should say goodbye to our hosts,” Brandon said, and the two guards approached him. Larra frowned at Brandon; his face betrayed nothing.

The ancient keep of Last Hearth was a long, low rectangle, the castle’s namesake, an ancient stone hearth dominating the far wall, was engraved with scenes of battles from the Age of Heroes, when the Umbers had been petty-kings. The hearth itself, and the doors into the great keep were the most elaborate thing about the northernmost House: The Umbers’ giant was carved into the huge oak doors, the heavy chains of their sigil made fanciful in the design of the locking mechanisms. Snarling giants’ heads functioned as gargoyles, and ravens perching atop them glared down into the square yard at the foot of a sweeping flight of frozen steps up to the doors, which stood open but guarded, people bustling in and out.

Last Hearth was emptying, only a handful of people remaining - Edd murmured that the Watch called it a skeleton crew. The absolute least they could get away with, and yet still function. The bare bones.

Ned Umber, eleven years old, was one of the few who refused to leave, but he was doing his part, stood in the yard, ensuring his people had what they needed, and assuring others that he would be following as soon as the northern clans had gathered to Last Hearth before the final push to Winterfell. He would not leave them behind: He knew that, just as the Watch had stopped at Last Hearth before pushing ahead to Winterfell - a journey that may take them just as many days again, if not more - many others would need the protection of the castle if they were to survive.

The Umbers’ sigil hung either side of the doors. Larra stared at them, whipping in the winds, briefly allowing herself to wonder whether, so many years ago, she should have fought more fiercely to bring Brandon and Rickon to Last Hearth after the Ironborn sacked Winterfell.

Crowfood and Whoresbane Umber stood in the yard with their great-great nephew, one huge and bearded, a patch of white leather worn over an eye he had lost years before; the other, with a face like ice, implacable and unnerving. She remembered them vividly from her childhood, from feasts in her father’s hall: The two eldest Umber uncles seemed more animated now than she could ever recall, and the look on Ned Umber’s little face said he wasn’t used to their enthusiasm.

A quiet word from Brandon when the Watch had been welcomed had altered their attitudes dramatically.

“Ravens have been sent to all the great Houses in the North to retreat to Winterfell,” Edd said, frowning at the number of people gathered in the hall. “The mountain clans will know to head to the Starks. You must prepare for the journey south.”

Ned Umber spoke for his elderly uncles. “House Umber will not flee, when our people linger beyond our protection. Grain is due from our lesser lords, we must contribute.”

Larra frowned gently. “The dead don’t care about your larders, boy,” she said sadly, staring at the young lad in the high chair between two monstrous uncles who made him look all the smaller. “Most of us will be dead long before the last of the winter rations must be tapped. You can be certain of that. You’re the future of your House, my lord, a House that goes back to the Age of Heroes, unbroken.”

“If this is to be the end of our House, we shall make such an end as to be worthy of legend. We may not survive the Night, but others shall; they will know it was House Umber who looked death in the eye and fought to give the North precious time, so they might live,” Ned Umber said stoutly, lifting the little chin that would never know a hint of a whisker. Larra stared at him, and at the two wizened men flanking him, her face hard.

“You put this in his head,” she said coldly. Ned Umber was the same age Bran had been when he had been left the Stark in Winterfell by Robb, off to war to rescue Father. War turned boys into men before their time, either on the battlefield or climbing into their father’s seat. But even a boy left to rule was still a boy; and echoed what he heard from those he respected. Had not Bran echoed Maester Luwin, and Larra herself?

“Umbers don’t flee,” growled Crowfood Umber, the chunk of obsidian nestled in his empty eye-socket glinting in the light of the hearth.

“House Umber will not abandon its people,” Ned Umber said determinedly, and she was impressed, for a second, that he held her gaze so unflinchingly. “We wait for the last of those who rely on our protection…” He sighed, and shifted uncomfortably in his grandfather’s large seat. He winced, and glanced at Larra, his face so young, overwhelmed - but stubborn. She looked at him and remembered Bran, as he was. “I owe my life to the King in the North, my lady.”

Crowfood Umber had committed men to Stannis Baratheon, on condition his brother was granted forgiveness: Whoresbane had sworn fealty to House Bolton, to protect the life of their nephew the Greatjon imprisoned at the Twins.

On the battlefield outside Winterfell, Umber men had turned on the Bolton forces before they knew what was happening: The Bolton forces had penned in the Starks, and the Umbers had ruthlessly cut through the Boltons, just as the Knights of the Vale appeared on the horizon, to ride down the rest.

Jon had forgiven House Umber their disloyalty, and more importantly, had absolved the young Lord Eddard Umber of any guilt or blame for his uncles’ choices, as he had Lady Alys Karstark, niece of Cregan Karstark who had died on the battlefield outside Winterfell. Jon refused to snatch homes from young children, the same way his own brothers and sister had had their home taken from them because of the actions of a few ambitious, misguided men - from situations beyond their control.

“From what I understand, Lord Umber, it is your uncles I must thank for my brother’s life, as much as I must thank the Knights of the Vale and the Free Folk,” Larra said softly, with a hint of a smile. She noted the two miserly old men’s reactions at her mention of the Free Folk. She had purposely not called them wildlings, waiting for their reactions. Few families but the Starks had as much history with the wildings as House Umber, so close to the Wall. It was often they who had been called upon to raise banners and sent men North to fight incursions of Kings-Beyond-the-Wall. Their losses were many. Old Nan had told Larra, long ago, that Mors Umber’s only daughter had been carried off by wildlings many years ago. Larra could not imagine Jon’s support from the Umbers had been easily won, after he had allowed the last surviving Free Folk past the Wall, through Umber lands.

“Free Folk,” Mors Umber growled. He swept his one good eye over Larra’s furs. “I’d heard the King in the North had bedded wildling whores and clothed himself in their furs to make war on them, but I didn’t believe he’d allied with them ‘til I saw them on the battlefield.”

“And how did they look?” Larra asked coolly. “Flesh and blood, just as you are.”

“No better than monsters, wrapped in their furs, using sharp sticks and their bare teeth to kill.”

“We have both used our bare teeth to kill, my lord,” Larra said fairly, a smile radiating from her eyes, and Mors Umber chuckled in spite of himself, “and as for the furs, how else do you survive the snows? You are hard men, my lords…I imagine the Free Folk made Umber men look like summer lads.”

“They say your brother was murdered for his love for the wildling scum,” said Whoresbane snidely, his eyes hard as flint. “Do you lie in the mud with wildlings, as he does?”

Larra’s grin was not a smile; it bared her teeth in a threat every man recognised. She looked like a direwolf, and Mors Umber shifted uncomfortably in his seat, beard shimmering in the candlelight as he swallowed: He exchanged a brief look with his nephew, before turning to his brother they called Whoresbane for the pretty boy he had killed in Oldtown decades ago.

“I thank you to mind your manners, Whoresbane,” she said icily, drawing her shoulders back, glaring at the old man, remembering her lessons with Septa Mordane. “I am still my father’s daughter, regardless of how I dress. Would you ask me such a thing before him?”

“My uncle craves your pardon, Lady Alarra,” Ned Umber said plaintively, his voice so young, his eyes so wide. Whoresbane Umber said nothing, only glared at Larra, who gave him a very haughty look, and turned to give Ned Umber a half-smile she hoped was conciliatory.

In truth, she had rutted in the mud with wildlings, and of the last few years, could remember nothing else that set her body afire and made her toes curl. That made her feel alive. They weren’t to know that: And she was no longer in the land of the Free Folk. Down here, beyond the Wall, things were expected of her; and of how others treated her. She was Ned Stark’s daughter, after all, if not lawfully born…as far as anyone knew…

“Never thought the Stark Kings would ally with murderers and rapers,” Mors Umber growled, almost reflectively. There was a hint of accusation; but they all heard it.

“The King in the North is brother to murderers and rapers, all in black,” Larra said lightly, a challenge in her intense violet eyes.

“Moyra was well-suited to life beyond the Wall,” said a gentle voice, and all eyes went to the crippled boy nestled before the hearth in his furs, his long slender white fingers curled around a cup of steaming mulled wine, utterly disinterested in it. He gazed thoughtfully into the hearth, the flames dancing in his dark eyes, impenetrable and unfeeling as the obsidian filling Mors Umber’s empty eye-socket. “She could have returned a dozen times over; she was free.”

Mors Umber gaped for a moment. Was this the first time Mors Umber had heard his daughter’s name on anyone’s lips in decades? “You shame my daughter’s name. Wildling filth raped and dishonoured my Moyra. She was not free.”

“The Free Folk fought each other for the honour of claiming her as their spearwife,” Brandon said, turning his pale face to Mors Umber, who stared at Bran as if held under some spell. The worst thing, Larra knew from personal experience, was the uncertainty. A tiny smile played at the corners of Brandon’s lips. “And when they were finished hacking at each other, they had to fight her. She chose who had the honour to father her children, which is more than was ever offered her south of the Wall.” Bran’s smile grew softly, the thinly-veiled accusation levelled at Mors Umber, whose beard quivered as he ground his jaw. “Her sons are encamped at Winterfell under the King in the North’s banner and protection. Bors, and Umber. Bors wields Moyra’s great axe. Hoar and his spearwife Johnna fell at Hard Home, but their children survived to board Stannis Baratheon’s ships - Moyra’s grandsons Ivar and Hvitserk, and her granddaughters Freydis and Gudrun. They train with bow and spear at Winterfell even now.”

Mors Umber’s face had turned white as new snow. Beside him, the icy-faced Whoresbane betrayed no emotion.

Sat in his grandfather’s seat, young Ned Umber frowned, confused. He was so young, he might never have heard the stories. Brandon turned his dark eyes on little Ned. “Your cousins await you at Winterfell…and your grandfather rides the Kingsroad past White Harbour to return home.”

“Jon?” Mors blurted.

“After the Twins’ Feast, those Northerners imprisoned within the bowels of the castles found themselves inexplicably released, armed and armoured and provisioned and have turned their feet homeward,” Bran said softly. “The Twins now smoulder as ruins; my uncle has been reinstated as Lord of the Riverlands, in open rebellion of the Iron Throne. The Greatjon seeks forgiveness at Winterfell, for his failure in protecting the King in the North he named and swore his life to…”

A wagon-train already wound out of the yard out of sight through the ancient forest, carrying grain and supplies and the vulnerable, with livestock driven on foot, flocks of grey Northern geese and pure white ducks using the channels in the snow made by wagons, by hardy, shaggy orangey-red cattle and Northern Blacknose sheep with their fluffy white coats, whose wool was particularly prized for its softness and excellent dye retention. The Umbers also boasted a breeding herd of aurochs; the bull was complacent, enormous, and slow: Larra saw Edd looking at him sadly, and Edd had told the story of one of his brothers, Grenn, nicknamed the Aurochs, who had been tasked by Jon with five of their brothers to hold the gate at Castle Black against the last giants. He had sworn his life to the Watch: That night, he given it, stopping a giant.

There was a song in there, Larra was sure: She just hadn’t the heart to set to writing it.

The Umber men carried Brandon to a covered wagon. Small children and young mothers were already nestled in the straw, with blankets and clothes bundled up: Brandon reached out and opened the fastenings of a raven cage, there by his request. The bird cawed, once, and hopped out onto Bran’s legs, perching on his knee. Brandon smiled contentedly, and stroked the glossy black feathers.

Larra stared at a baby.

In its mother’s arms, it had wriggled an arm free of its swaddling. Enormous blue eyes shone with innate joy as it gave her a gummy, wet smile, its fingers opening and closing like petals in the sunlight, tiny and dimpled, waving toward her. The baby could not have been more than a few months old.

Larra reached her finger out, offering it to the baby; it grinned toothlessly, focusing with effort on her hand, which it grabbed, cooing and gurgling as it wrapped its tiny little strong fingers around her long, bruised, scarred one. The contrast of her hands, covered in webs of pink and white scars, her middle-fingernail blackened by bruising, the skin rough and calloused, with the baby’s soft, unblemished hand on hers… Once, her hands had been like ivory, clean and meticulous; she used to keep her nails. She used to do a great many things.

She also never thought she would ever see another baby.

Here she was, at Last Hearth with Brandon and Meera, a blue-eyed baby grinning at her, and Northmen fleeing south to Winterfell to fight the White Walkers she had outpaced. There was much to be thankful for.

In that moment, staring at the baby’s open, joyful face, Larra’s eyes burned, and she allowed her lips to twitch toward a smile.

She leaned forward, hiding the tears that dripped hotly to her cheeks, as she kissed the baby’s tiny hand, freeing herself from its strong grip. She smiled and stroked its cheeks, making it gurgle and smile gummily, kicking its legs, dimpling at her.

Larra shrank away, heart-broken.

She asked one of the women to keep an eye on Brandon, and left the wagon. Meera caught her eye briefly, and mounted a hardy pony to follow Brandon.

Larra would ride beside Edd. She needed some distance.

She needed to train herself to step away, now that she could.

Now that it was not her, and her alone.

Jon had not been at Castle Black, but because of him they had gained hundreds of brothers. Because of him, they had a guard of thousands to journey to Winterfell with.

It would make for slow going, but it was worth the annoyance.

Larra hadn’t been near so many people in a very long time; proximity to the brothers of the Night’s Watch were the first crowds, the first people besides Bran and Hodor and Meera she had mingled with in years.

She had not forgotten her courtesies, but it would have been the easiest thing in the world. To forget who she was, where she had come from, to forget that she had a family, and was clever and highly educated…because up there…beyond the Wall, none of that had mattered. Her mind had been stagnating for years, as her body had become more and more emaciated, learning to live purely on instinct alone: Find shelter, find food, survive.

It was good to be among people again.

Even as she knew a good many of them would die, if not all, before the Dawn came again.

A groom led a fine mare across the yard, black as night, her coat glossy, shimmering like fine velvet, tall, strong but elegant - and one of the Umbers’ prized mares, she was certain of it. To breed on her would create stunning foals. With the right sire, she would breed fierce coursers, perhaps even a destrier; she had the height, strong hindquarters and a muscular back. Her face was beautiful, too, with the inky eyes Larra had always loved in horses, dark hair falling into them. She snorted as she was across the yard, stamping her feet irritably and tossing her head; she had fire, Larra could tell, gazing at the horse.

“She’s one of our finest mares, my lady,” said Ned, and Larra turned from the mare to find Ned Umber at her elbow. She hadn’t realised that she had forgotten how little Rickon was: He would always appear under her feet when she was least expecting him to be there. It made her stomach hurt to look down and gaze into Ned Umber’s young face.

“Lord Umber,” Larra murmured, dipping a polite curtsy that lost some of its elegance due to her furs. “She’s beautiful,” Larra added, reaching out to stroke her knuckles gently down the mare’s elegant nose. She stamped her foot, snorted, but nuzzled her nose closer, letting Larra stroke her face, scenting Larra’s furs for food.

“Her name is Black Alys,” said Ned quietly, and Larra noticed he stood a little behind her, watching the mare carefully. “She does bite, but I think she likes you.”

“We all nip when we’re afraid or annoyed, hey?” Larra murmured, shushing Black Alys gently as she snorted, tossing her head, and stroked the horse’s face tenderly. The Watch had given her a horse, though Larra craved riding a truly superb mount again: She had always loved to ride, had been as natural on horseback as a centaur on their four legs. And Black Alys was a gorgeous mount.

“My uncles say the stable-master will have her put down if they can’t break her,” Ned said sadly, gazing watchfully at the mare. “She’s too wilful.”

“Wild things should never be broken,” Larra murmured, almost to herself, turning to glance down at Ned. He seemed very young, staring wistfully at the admittedly rather haughty, terrifying-looking mare, whose hoof was the size of his head. “Wild things should be free…but sometimes…sometimes they can be gentled, befriended.”

“Like your direwolf,” Ned Umber said, his eyes sparkling with enthusiasm. “I’ve seen King Jon’s direwolf, Ghost, in the godswood at Winterfell. He looks like a weirwood. Do you think you could befriend Black Alys?” Larra murmured under her breath to the horse, praising her, letting her know her voice.

“We are friends,” Larra said softly, smiling gently to herself as she stroked the horse’s face and neck. Something uncoiled in the pit of her stomach, a tension loosening, and Larra sighed, stroking Black Alys’s neck. This was familiar. Admiring fine horses in the yard of a holdfast, the sounds of work echoing around her… “Sometimes we just need to take the time to introduce ourselves…learn some of each other’s secrets…”

“Do horses have secrets?” Ned asked, and Larra turned a mysterious smile on him.

“Of course…every creature in the world has secrets… There is a legend in the North, that sometimes mighty warriors who fall in battle are reborn as great horses,” Larra said gently. It had always been one of her favourite legends of Old Nan’s. She used to think her gelding was Ser Arthur Dayne, reborn to be her companion and protector as she hunted on horseback through the wolfswood. She had always been half in love with the Sword of the Morning, for all her disdain of Sansa’s wholehearted belief in songs and legends.

“Do you think my father might be reborn as a great horse?” Ned asked curiously.

“The Smalljon? A destrier, absolutely! Nineteen hands, at the very least,” Larra smiled tiredly, and the little boy beamed, standing up just a little straighter.

Little Lord Umber glanced around, and leaned in closer uncertainly, after checking his uncles were across the yard. He said conspiratorially, “They say you killed Ironborn with your bare teeth to protect your brothers.”

Larra blinked. It seemed so long ago now. She had still worn her wool dress and hose then, not the furs she shrouded herself in now. Rickon was a boy, Brandon, barely older. They had not yet met Meera and Jojen, not yet ventured so far north that going beyond the Wall had ever entered Bran’s mind… She had murdered Ironborn who attacked her. Three of them. Sometimes she still tasted their blood in her mouth; marvelled how easily eyeballs burst beneath her fingernails; how the sound of metal grinding against jawbone had reverberated up her arm on impact.

“Yes, my lord,” she murmured, watching the boy warily. Ned’s eyes widened; she wondered how he would react to his father’s, grandfather’s and uncles’ battlefield feats. They said the Smalljon lost his life to two swings of an axe - only after overturning a table to shield the wounded King in the North.

“My uncles said King Jon’s direwolf fought beside him on the battlefield,” Ned Umber said, his eyes sparking with excitement. “White and blood-red as if the gods’ wills were made flesh and blood in the Starks’ sigil.”

“Their will was made known that morning,” Larra mused. And it was certainly fateful that the Stark and Snow children had found those seven pups in the wolfswood that horrible misty day when Bran had witnessed his first execution unblinkingly, and in spite of his mother’s protests. The execution of a Night’s Watchman who swore to his last breath that he saw the White Walkers…

“My uncles used to tell me the King in the North’s sister was fiercer than any direwolf.”

“That is high praise indeed. To have the respect of warriors like your uncles means much,” Larra said honestly: She had always known that her family would not get far without the respect bordering reverence of their bannermen. Only Bran’s dreams and insistence had muted her arguments to take Bran and Rickon to the Umbers, and beg their protection.

Ned Umber flashed her a quick, shy smile, and he gave her a furtive glance before turning and gesturing at someone. He had to repeat the gesture a few times: A small boy joined him reluctantly. Where Ned Umber’s eyes were pale, with soft brown hair, the other boy was dark-haired with fierce black eyes - Larra stared at him, reminded so vividly of young Bran, of young Jon, that her heart stuttered. He bore no resemblance to wild little Rickon at all, but…it was the youth in his face, the mercurial stubbornness in his chin, suspicion in his eyes, and a deep sense of brotherly love and loyalty when he gazed at young Ned Umber that made Larra’s stomach hurt with homesickness for the family she had lost, the brothers she missed. There was some resemblance between the two boys, in the shape of their eyes and noses, the curve of their ears, though the younger boy’s face was slimmer, and Larra couldn’t help think of the Stark women who had married into House Umber over the centuries, with their slender oval faces and solemn beauty. She realised the other boy must be quite a bit younger than Ned; though he was nearly the same height.

“Who is this young warrior?” she asked gently, and the younger boy stood up straighter, puffing out his chest proudly, showing the Umber sigil stitched lovingly onto the breast of his fur-trimmed cloak, wrapped over a leather-studded brigandine Northmen favoured in war and especially in winter, and a quilted tunic beneath that for warmth and protection from the armour. He was a boy dressed for the battlefield; he lacked only weapons.

“This is Little Jon.” Another stutter. Of course, Jon was a common name among the Umbers: his father and grandfather both bore the name. It was not unique to her Jon. Though looking at him, he could have been her twin’s miniature. “He’s my brother. And he’s seven.”

“Seven? I almost took you for a man,” Larra said, reaching out to muss his hair, the way Jon used to muss their younger siblings’ hair, and Little Jon grinned impishly for a brief moment. “I’d wager you’ll be taller than the Greatjon by the time you’re grown.”

“My brother and I wish to make the mare a gift to you, my lady,” said Ned Umber, his eyes earnest as he gazed up at her. Larra blinked. To give a guest a gift as they left the safety of your holdfast signalled one of two things: Either a token of friendship, or a declaration that the safety of guest-right had ended with their departure.

She had been a guest of the Umbers only overnight, refusing a feather-bed to sit by the hearth all night, dozing by the fire. And the Umbers had sworn their fealty to Jon at Winterfell - Mors, Hother and Ned alike, the joint-castellans and assumed Lord of Last Hearth with the Greatjon’s imprisonment.

A token, then.

“The King in the North placed me under his protection, my lady, and my brother as well. We owe our lives to him. I hope I do not insult him or you in asking this favour, to ask your protection for my brother until you reach Winterfell.”

Larra stared at Little Jon Umber, her heart breaking. She looked at him and saw Rickon; she saw Bran. You must protect them. You’re the only one who can… She flinched, thinking of Rickon’s brutal death; and her heart throbbed, regretting the changes in Brandon that had made him unrecognisable to her.

Still…Brandon was alive, wasn’t he? What she had committed herself to, keeping him alive, she had succeeded in. It was a simple goal, really: One that had consumed her every waking moment for years.

What she attempted, she conquered.

She had once overheard Maester Luwin telling her father that. She remembered it now, and it still filled her with pride: She looked at the guileless little face of Ned Umber, looked at the dark eyes of Little Jon, and was filled with grief at brothers she had lost, and the fates of these two boys before her.

They would never see each other again.

She sank to a knee, putting herself at a level with Ned Umber, her brother’s bannerman. A boy. A boy who wanted to know his brother would be safe, and looked after. Who was willingly yielding his brother to Larra’s care because of the respect Ned himself had for Larra’s own brother, his king, who had cloaked him in his protection…

“One thing I excel at beyond all others, my lord,” she said, her voice low to stop it breaking, “is protecting little brothers.”

She gazed into Ned Umber’s eyes, and conflict flickered across his face: Fear of the unknown, grief at parting, stubbornness at refusing to give in to his dread or his own desires to keep his brother close, where he would not be safe, relief, gratitude, and sadness. Perhaps Ned knew what she did; that he would never see his little brother again.

“I’m not going!” Little Jon cried vehemently, his face furious and beseeching at once as only a child’s could be. He implored his brother, “I have to protect you!”

“You’re my little brother, Jon, I protect you,” Ned said with feeling, his hands on Little Jon’s shoulders. Though younger, Little Jon was already nearing his brother’s height, spindly-legged and broad-shouldered like a direwolf pup growing too fast. Larra’s heart broke to see them, the rhyme of memory ringing in her mind. “Father told me so before he went off to war with King Robb. You have to go to Winterfell: You’ll learn how to rule Last Hearth after me, and they’ll train you as a warrior.”

Little Jon’s breath hitched, his dark eyes widening. “A warrior like Father?”

“Even fiercer than Father, I’ll bet,” Ned Umber grinned, and for a second, mirth and cunning flashed across the brothers’ faces. Ned reached for something, and presented his little brother with a small, shining, fresh-forged hatchet, and a bone-handled hunting knife. “I’ve had a hatchet made for you. I know you like throwing Uncle’s. And a hunting-knife for your very own. The handle’s made from bear-bone.”

Larra, still sunk on one knee, turned to Little Jon. “Do you know how to use that? No?” she asked, and Little Jon gave her a reluctant look, a thoughtful frown. He looked sternly at the weapons strapped to her, the jewelled hilt of the sword belted at her waist, and seemed to decide she was worthy. He shook his head. “We shall have to remedy that. Lady Meera over there could teach you to shoot an arrow right into a snow-hare’s eye at forty paces if you ask her sweetly.” She nodded over at Meera, who had mounted her pony, looking tired but less gaunt after ten days of Hobb’s cooking - it was astonishing what the cook of Castle Black could dream up out of the kitchen-tent.

Every day, she and Meera and Bran ate a little more than their last meal; slowly, ever so slowly, they were starting to remind their bodies what proper food tasted like, and every day, Larra could eat a little more. To begin with, the food had been so rich it hurt her stomach to eat it: Bread was utterly foreign now.

Before they had left Castle Black, Meera had eaten her egg, fried in butter, with a rasher of bacon and some blood-sausage: It was the last time Larra could remember Meera truly enjoying anything. She hadn’t been able to finish it; they’d shared it. And the rich food had seemed to turn to ash in their mouths as they thought of those who could not share their meal. Hodor, Jojen. Uncle Benjen. Father. Robb. Rickon. The list would get longer before the end.

She turned to Ned Umber, and saw Bran in the tower, embracing Rickon for the last time.

Bran, who could still see Rickon, if he chose.

Larra gazed into Ned Umber’s face. “You’re a young boy, and already a good man, Ned Umber,” she told him solemnly. “Until the Dawn comes, I will not let Jon out of my sight.”

“I wish you good fortune, in the wars to come, my lady.”

Chapter 9: Playing with Dolls

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

09

Playing with Dolls


I haven’t played with dolls in years…

Sansa sat at her dressing-table, tiny pots laid out, some of them scented prettily, reminding her of a bouquet of Tyrell roses drifting about the gardens in King’s Landing, candlelight glinting off the mirror before her. Her face was the same as it had been in King’s Landing, though a little older admittedly. She had become a woman during her years as a hostage. There was a glint of steel in her eyes now that she had never developed through all her torments under Joffrey’s tyranny. She sighed, setting down her fine silver-handled brush with its soft bristles, and savoured the quiet crackling of the fire in the great hearth, the snap and pop of the white-hot logs and the soft hiss of chestnuts as they cooked in the embers, a treat to warm her as she worked late into the night in the privacy of her chamber, without her constricting gowns, without her corseting and braids.

In her parents’ chamber, hers now due to Jon’s thoughtfulness and sense of guilt at taking Sansa’s place as heir of Winterfell, Sansa allowed herself rare moments of peace. She left her hair unbound, past her waist, and closed her eyes, savouring the quiet, and the warmth, tiny snow-kisses from the window left open a crack dusting her skin; her father could never breathe with the rooms closed up and stuffy, and she had found that being in the North again, she preferred the crisp air more than unbearable heat. The smell of snow was home; it was also freedom. The snow had saved her from the fall; had also slowed down those hunting her. Eyes closed, she reached in front of her, her fingertips brushing against the tiny figures arranged neatly before her mirror.

Reading Maester Luwin’s progresses on Larra’s education, Sansa had discovered that a good deal of her siblings’ learning in matters of war had come from a game. Cyvasse. She had heard of it in King’s Landing, of course, but there was no one at court who had wanted to be seen to be befriending Sansa Stark to play it with, let alone learn the game - until Margaery, of course, and she had hardly needed little figures and a carved board with moveable tiles when she was so adept at manipulating people wherever she wanted them to be, moving deftly across a continent to claim what she wanted. Yes, Margaery had been skilled at the game; the Tyrells had underestimated Cersei’s careless wrath. Robb had been adept at war; but had forgotten the principles of the game itself. There was always more going on that the board did not show.

Sansa had been learning how to play cyvasse.

She had discovered in Maester Luwin’s progresses that he had taught Larra and their brothers carpentry, as a means of teaching them the value of craftsmanship; and they had used their skills to make their own set of cyvasse pieces. But the Knight of the Vale who had professed himself a lover of cyvasse and committed an hour every day to playing with Sansa in the solar with a cup of tea and a biscuit, had told her that the sets her siblings had carved were utterly unique. A standard cyvasse set consisted of various quantities of ten standard pieces: Rabble, spearmen, crossbowmen, light-horse, heavy-horse, trebuchet, catapult, dragons, elephants and kings. Her siblings’ cyvasse sets were utterly unique, and tailored to their lessons of history, geography, economics, trade, strategy and religion, among other things. Each of their campaigns had been meticulously recorded by her siblings in one small tome Maester Wolkan had unearthed from the Maester’s Tower, from the very earliest lessons in basic strategy to the last, most complex campaigns her siblings had spent months planning and completing. There were also unique pieces Maester Luwin had had carved by Winterfell carpenters: With each throw of the dice, new obstacles and challenges altered the wars, and her siblings had had to adjust their strategies. Sometimes they had started with a familiar scenario, the sequence of events leading up to significant conflicts, and how they would have reacted with their benefit of hindsight, and how those strategies played out; how they might have affected the world in which they lived, if they would have lived at all.

With each new campaign, Sansa’s siblings had created new pieces for their cyvasse sets, and Maester Luwin had created more complex obstacles, introduced new challenges. Sometimes they had been forced to consider how to rebuild after a conflict, using what little resources remained, considering their allies. Maester Wolkan had presented her the cyvasse sets where Maester Luwin had always kept them: in a tall, slender inlaid chest that Maester Luwin had had made especially, half Sansa’s height, a door concealing several drawers. Each of her siblings had one drawer where their pieces were stored together, nestled in velvet; there were other drawers full of the carved and painted tiles they used, and added to with each campaign. The lowest drawer contained the stratagems her siblings had written in response to each campaign, meticulous planning, including vulnerabilities, allies, neutral regions and potential alliances, ledgers, and the phrase Jon had mentioned before he left Winterfell - Larra’s designated survivors.

The Knight of the Vale had taken to reading the Maester’s reflections and her siblings’ stratagems, absolutely infatuated with the meticulous devotion to the art of learning this altered version of cyvasse - its place in their education and the real-world application that had made Robb Stark undefeated in the field of battle when he was murdered; and Jon, a Night’s Watch steward, King of the North allied with the Free Folk for the first time in thousands of years.

Sansa had taken her favourite pieces from each of her siblings’ cyvasse sets, and they stood side by side in front of her mirror, in pride of place. The tiny ship with a kraken figurehead on the bow, the tiniest cotton sail stitched with a kraken sigil - she recognised Larra’s stitching, though it was Theon’s piece. Robb had a running direwolf carved from boar tusk, possibly the first boar he had killed himself on a hunt. Jon had a faceless horseman charred by the fire to appear all in black: He had always known he would join the Night’s Watch, to die in anonymity.

And Larra…Larra’s pieces intrigued Sansa and her Knight of the Vale equally, the Knight because they were so unusual, and Sansa because they were so exquisite. In Larra’s progresses, which Sansa was still reading, Maester Luwin had often commented that Larra devoted herself wholeheartedly to any given task set her, once she was shown the basics and was allowed to fly: What she attempted, she conquered, and once Maester Luwin had started teaching her patience, it had been drilled into Larra to devoted herself to completing every task, no matter how small. Sansa remembered sitting for portraits: She remembered how meticulous Larra was, and how hard she was on herself if she did not meet the standards she held herself to. Every one of Larra’s pieces was a work of art in itself, utterly creative and meticulously designed, flawlessly rendered. Sansa often wondered how many times Larra had had to practice before getting the pieces just as she liked them.

From Larra’s set, Sansa had taken the perfect, miniature weirwood tree. Its trunk and branches were carved from a single chunk of weirwood; scarlet silk had been cut and stitched into the tiniest five-pointed leaves, barely bigger than the nail on her little finger, stitched and coiled around the branches with invisible white threads.

When Sansa sighed, the ruby-red silk leaves shivered as if in a breeze in the godswood.

Every midday, Sansa sat in the solar with a cup of tea and played cyvasse with a Knight of the Vale. Every evening after braiding her hair to turn to her bed, she looked to the four tiny figures before her mirror, touching each of them with her fingertip, thinking of the ones who had created them. Almost a prayer. Robb, Larra, Theon, Jon. Two were gone. Two were absent; but Larra’s touch lingered in the pieces they had all left behind - a hairpin that had been transfigured into a sword for Jon’s Ranger of the North; the kraken stitched lovingly onto the tiny sail of Theon’s ship; the meticulously-carved handsome face of the direwolf and even the pads of its paws, a touch only Larra would have had the artist’s eye and patience to even remember.

She reflected on the tiles Sansa had asked the carpenters to make her, alongside their other war preparations: the pieces she had commissioned that were not to be found among those her siblings had left behind. Most of them were gone, but their legacy was what they had left her to learn from.

I haven’t played with dolls in years, she thought, reflecting on her day, with Littlefinger skulking in the shadows, doing what he did best, using her servants to gather information she did not drip-feed him. Now my dolls are living and breathing and most of them are set upon murdering me.

Cersei’s last raven-scroll was coiled neatly beside her candleholder, demanding Jon go south to swear fealty - or die by Cersei’s design. She kept it as a physical reminder. Beside the tight cylinder, a small vase of herbs from the glasshouse kept another raven-scroll unfurled; it was from Lord Manderly, telling Sansa that Jon had set sail safely from White Harbour, with a small fleet of ships Ser Rodrick had tasked the Manderlys and Umbers to build when Robb had headed south with the Northern bannermen.

Robb had never used the ships, but they bore the Stark sigil on their sails.

Jon was the first King in the North to have a fleet of his own for centuries.

She would have rather had her brothers and sisters back than a fleet of ships, or news that Jon had safely departed to one of the most dangerous places in Westeros; the bowels of a dragon.

A small pile of raven-scrolls rested beside Lord Manderly’s unfurled scroll. She kept it open to reassure herself. But the others demanded her attention, no matter that it was nearly the hour of the wolf, and she was to take a dawn progress around Winter’s Town, which had been rebuilt in the years since the Ironborn and Boltons sacked it. During any given winter, it had been customary for most Northmen to turn to Winterfell for shelter and sustenance - full to bursting, it could house at least twenty-thousand. Every one of them would need to shelter within the walls come the inevitable battle against the Night King. Sansa was learning more every day, thanks to the combined efforts of Lord Royce, Master Wolkan - with whom she took three hours’ instruction every morning after breaking her fast early - and Larra, who had kept her own observations and lists and plans in a small diary in her sewing-box in her bedchamber. Larra had been left to rule Winterfell with Maester Luwin, until Bran reached manhood, and winter was coming; she had had to think ahead, and Sansa combed through her sister’s notes, learning as much about her sister’s cleverness as preparing for winter in the midst of wartime. By the time Maester Luwin’s last notes had been scratched hastily into Larra’s progress, the North had been actively engaged in a war to the south, which had already cost them the autumn and a good deal of the manpower for harvest; and winter was coming.

It was Larra’s notes, and her memories of the bouquet of Tyrells in King’s Landing, and their cooks from the Reach with their unusual, flavourful dishes, that had Sansa, early the next morning, writing a raven-scroll and signing it as Sansa Stark, Lady Regent of the Northern Kingdom. She sealed it, and fed a raven before sending it on its way to the Reach, where it arrived, ten days later, just in time to catch Lady Olenna Tyrell before she climbed into her wheelhouse, bound for the eastern coast and a Tyrell ship to Dragonstone.


The great beasts swooped and soared, banking and diving sharply. Three of them.

How long was it since last dragons hunted the lands and waters surrounding Dragonstone? Centuries? She could not remember. Every sailor manning the small but richly-laden Tyrell fleet gazed in awe and no small amount of dread as three dragons beat their enormous wings - green with a glint of bronze, like their own sigil; onyx striated with blood-red, the Targaryen sigil brought to life; and snow-white and glinting like gold - circling the last relic of Old Valyria. Dragonfire had shaped the fortress - dragonfire and sorcery. Even her tired eyes could discern the features wrought by magic to make the towers resemble dragons.

Targaryen posturing, she thought disdainfully. She remembered the Targaryens, when the family had still been strong, when Aegon the Unlikely had sat the Iron Throne. She remembered the Last Dragon. Handsome, exceptionally clever even by her exacting standards, and a fool, dead in the mud with a woman’s name whispered from his lips as blood sprayed from his broken body. Rhaegar. The last true hope House Targaryen had. She remembered the Prince of Dragonstone; this had been his home, during his marriage, where both of his tragic children by the Dornish princess had been born.

His mother Queen Rhaella had died here.

Accompanied as Olenna was by a selection of her surviving grandchildren she had meticulously chosen, for the first time she felt a flicker of compassion for the Queen. Dead during childbirth, bringing forth the last of the Mad King’s seed taken root in her belly. After such devastating loss, Olenna now realised the toll it took to carry on: How wonderful, to give in. To rest. To join the ones who had gone before her.

She should never have lived this long.

Fury kept her animated. Fury, and a lust for vengeance.

Queen Rhaella had given in: Olenna Tyrell would never concede.

Now the selectively blind, duty-bound Queen’s daughter had come to reclaim her family’s ancestral seat. The very last of noble Valyrian dragonseed left to the world.

With three dragons.

One alone could lay waste to King’s Landing within a fraction of an hour. What Cersei had left intact of the city, of course. Olenna dreamed of Harren and his great castle: Every time she closed her eyes, she saw Cersei roasted within the halls of the Red Keep, smirk seared from her face by dragonfire.

From what Olenna had heard, the Dragon Queen had no qualms turning her dragons loose to get what she wanted. She had fed Meereenese nobles to them, to instil fear and try and subvert a revolt.

Was that any better than Cersei Lannister using wildfire to blow up the Great Sept? To murder not only Olenna’s son, and grandson and granddaughter, her nieces and nephews and their children - but Cersei’s own family. Her own Lannister ladies-in-waiting, her cousins, her uncle. Any Lannister who reminded her that she was not nearly as clever as she thought - she was hardly her father’s daughter: Cersei was all fury, no finesse. Tywin had been ruthless and implacable and Olenna had been amused to find herself respectful of him: It was rare to find her match, and she had luxuriated in the excitement, the spark, after so long, to have to stretch her wits.

It was dreadfully dull being the cleverest person in the room all of the time.

It had been almost pleasant to be outmanoeuvred, when it had been the Stark girl they were fighting over like spoiled children in the nursery who would rather tear the doll in two than let the other have it.

She had heard that Tywin’s deformed monster of a son had been named Hand of the Queen to Daenerys Targaryen. He had been a disappointment, a browbeaten Master of Coin, not at all the drunken whoremonger she had been amused to hear stories of, with wits as sharp as Valyrian steel. Once again she had found herself utterly disappointed.

Olenna wondered very much how this Targaryen girl measured up.

She did not anticipate much.

After all this time, Olenna was an excellent judge of character and intellect - and after recent experience, was the unlikeliest person in the world to underestimate those she believed lack intelligence or charisma.

Cersei had her wildfire, and the Targaryen had her dragons. They would burn King’s Landing to the ground to claim what little remained of the Iron Throne once the fires had burned to ash. But how much wildfire could Cersei’s pyromancers make, especially when the Targaryen girl’s dragons had burned King’s Landing and her armies of savages and eunuchs had laid siege to the city’s gates and harbour.

The Targaryen girl would get what she wanted, Olenna was certain of it.

How she got there made little difference to her: Olenna only desired her House to survive whatever onslaught was coming, to see her family thrive after Cersei’s best attempts to rip the roses out of Westeros root and stem.

She had often disdained the words of the family into which she had engineered she be married into. Growing strong.

Not dangerous words. Not the grim warnings of the Starks, nor the disdain of the Ironborn, We do not sow, or even the taunts of the Martells, Unbowed, unbent, unbroken… Those were arrogant words - but true. Princess Nymeria had once been a great heroine of Olenna’s in her childhood. No. The Tyrell words were Growing Strong. As the men lowered a little boat from the side of their ship and rowed her and her eldest surviving granddaughter to shore, Olenna observed the girl and reflected on the Tyrell words. There was a certain stubborn resilience to them. For all they decorated everything within her sight with roses, it was the vines beneath that mattered; cut back, they returned, spring after spring, supporting the exquisite blooms year after year.

The girl was no Margaery, but of course, who could compare? Margaery had been exceptional. Her eldest cousins had stood in as her ladies-in-waiting at court, the prettiest, wiliest of Olenna’s granddaughters plucked from Highgarden to place themselves strategically at court, using their pretty petals to coax would-be allies close enough to wrap their vines around, before they even realised they were ensnared, thorns in their sides, and supporting the Tyrell roses.

Burned to ash, in a single moment.

Olenna would have been, too, if not for her granddaughter’s note. A single, poorly-etched Tyrell rose, sketched in charcoal from the fire on a scrap of parchment ripped from the Book of the Seven. Olenna had it folded and tucked against her breast over her heart, still. Margaery’s warning to leave King’s Landing - her warning had been against the High Sparrow and his pestilential Faith Militant, not Cersei…either way, Olenna was alive and Margaery was dead and she could not help but grieve that it was so. It should be Margaery in her place, ruling Highgarden in her own right as Lady of the Reach, and Olenna no more than ashes carried on the wind.

It should have been Margaery tutoring her surviving cousins; it should have been Margaery sending emissaries to Dragonstone.

As it was, Olenna would teach her last surviving heirs through her example. Her granddaughter, Alynore. She had been one of the younger ones, too young to attend court when Margaery became Queen; and, the youngest of five sisters, she had always been a delicate little bud overlooked because of the larger blooms with luxurious petals and decadent beguiling perfumes. She lacked Margaery’s seemingly guileless blue eyes and sweetly smirking rosebud mouth and insouciant little chin, but Olenna could not deny her granddaughter Alynore had her own beauty.

Sometime between the start of the War of the Five Kings and Margaery’s wedding to Tommen, Alynore Tyrell had grown up. Olenna could not quite put her finger on when; truth be told, she knew so very little about this granddaughter.

Alynore had the most exquisitely virginal face Olenna could ever remember seeing. As if the Maiden herself were personified in her granddaughter.

Margaery’s blue eyes had glinted with shrewd charisma: Alynore’s delicate green eyes were beguiling in their sweetness, framed in lashes that fluttered, the tips glinting gold. Her nose was far prettier than Margaery’s, her features almost perfectly symmetrical, and her lips were lush and rose-pink. She was blessed with glowing ivory skin, and cheeks that flushed naturally. Her hair was a soft, pretty brown that glinted with rich gold tones even in the cold island sunlight, and she wore it twisted away from her face with intricate little braids, the rest loose, shining to her waist in gentle waves. Her smile was modest and inherently kind.

As the eldest surviving Tyrell granddaughter, mothers all over the Reach would look to Alynore as a model for their daughters’ modesty and sweetness.

And men would tear each other to pieces to be the first to mount her. Their lust for temptresses who brought to life every dark fantasy was matched only by their lust for untouched maidens who yielded to their advances, eyes wide and thighs soft.

Where Margaery had been playful and coy, Alynore was gentle and unsettlingly earnest. Alynore was soft-spoken and naturally shy, where Margaery had become accustomed to being fawned over, always the centre of attention. Margaery had had exquisite self-assuredness and poise, while Alynore was modest and showed her emotions in endearing little ways.

She was shy; but Olenna was privately impressed how gracefully Alynore was adapting to her new position - eldest heir to the Reach, after her younger brothers at Highgarden. Olenna was not an easy woman to be near to: Alynore endured her tyranny with a seemingly bottomless well of patience.

It rather shamed Olenna to think it, but she knew so little of the girl Alynore truly was behind that virginal face and her mild manners. Was she only calm, and helpful, taking the initiative, anticipating what Olenna wanted or needed, to keep her happy, to help Olenna’s work, to have meals prepared before Olenna realised she was hungry… Alynore would have made a wonderful lady-in-waiting - a role she had truly been trained for by her mother and her septas as soon as Margaery had set her eye on Joffrey - but the eldest female heir of House Tyrell? That was a different role entirely.

She was now the prize rose in the garden.

Alynore had to learn.

“Close your mouth, my dear,” Olenna said, with a touch of impatience, reaching out to gently stroke her granddaughter’s delicate little chin to soften the sting of her words. “You must learn to disguise your reactions - let nothing appear to shock you, no matter how gruesome. Never betray amusement if it costs another person their dignity, for it will be remembered. You must become a swan, my dear. No matter how madly you must scramble beneath the surface to remain afloat, to the world you are nothing but serene and elegant, unflappable.”

Alynore closed her mouth, but her eyes flickered back to the dragons careening overhead, larger now as the little boat carried them to the little dock. A small island, reliant on fish for survival during the winter, Olenna observed the miniscule fleet of fishing boats docked in the small harbour.

“Now that we know the rumours are true, how do things change, Grandmother?” Alynore asked, grimacing subtly as the boat jolted against the wall, some of the smallfolk lingering offering their aid, in the hopes of a coin. They earned it, helping Olenna to solid ground once more. With the benefit of youth she would always take for granted until it was inexplicably gone, Alynore ascended elegantly from the little boat, offering the rough fishermen a smile that had them half in love with her, all thought of coin forgotten as they drank in those rosy lips and gentle green eyes, had her murmur of thanks - perhaps the kindest word any of them had ever had from a highborn - especially one so fine.

Olenna watched the girl, and raised an eyebrow. Perhaps she had it, after all.

Appearances were deceiving.

However, there was nothing duplicitous about the Unsullied patrolling the harbour, like a small regiment of featureless beetles; there was nothing but undisguised threat and hostility from the shabby Dothraki with their deep copper skin and oiled braids threaded with silver bells of victory, longer than any of her granddaughters’ hair. There was nothing confusing about the threat of those three dragons.

As for their mother…

She made note of the eerie silence in what should have been a bustling harbour bringing in fish to overwinter the smallfolk. Salt should have been shipped in from the Saltpans to preserve it. She saw precious few faces belonging to natives of the island: Those she saw were drawn, suspicious, harried.

It could not be plainer that Daenerys Targaryen was occupying Dragonstone, in only the worst connotations: She knew enough of the smallfolk to read the signs. The Dothraki and Unsullied were not welcomed, not wanted: They were feared, and tolerated only… Dragonstone had not been liberated…its people were oppressed by fear with the mere presence of the Breaker of Chains and her armies.

The smallfolk of Dragonstone, some of whom may have been descended from Valyrians themselves when the Targaryen dragon-lords first claimed the island as an outpost of their empire, were too afraid of the invaders to prepare for winter.

“It makes things rather simple. The Targaryen girl will use those dragons to take what she wants with fire and blood. Oh, I am sure she may have some qualms about burning King’s Landing. But, when one gets what one truly desires, does one linger on doubts and guilt about how it came to fall into your lap?” Olenna tutted. She hadn’t lost a night’s sleep over Joffrey’s death: She had slept the sounder for it.

“The raven-scroll said Daenerys Stormborn intends to liberate the Seven Kingdoms from the tyranny of Cersei Lannister…”

“They say this Dragon Queen is an idealist, a champion of the enslaved and downtrodden…a slippery path to tread, utterly treacherous to the unwary - and the unwise. One day her quest to reshape the world will see her people cowering before her whims, as any slave who values his life minds his owner’s will…”

“I saw a Martell ship in the harbour. I wonder why Prince Doran has sent an emissary: The Mad King kept Elia Martell and her babies hostage. Dorne will not have forgotten that. They will never forgive that the Targaryens cost them their sister,” said Alynore thoughtfully.

“House Lannister butchered Elia Martell and her children. House Lannister cost Dorne their favourite prince. Do you imagine the Dornish will ignore the opportunity to eradicate the last of House Lannister?”

“But Tyrion Lannister serves as Hand to Daenerys Targaryen; and he was the one the Red Viper was champion for in the trial-by-combat that claimed his life,” Alynore frowned gently. “Why would the Dornish ally with Daenerys Targaryen if her advisers are from their enemy’s House?”

“Hand of the Queen! Their working days are too long, their lives are too short,” Olenna smirked. “Do you know how many Hands Aerys burned before the Kingslayer opened his throat in the Throne Room? Unlike the Kingslayer’s own maiming, these Hands are easily replaced.”

“I’ve heard Prince Doran is cautious. Why wouldn’t Dorne stay out of any conflict, if it’s in Dornish interests to remain neutral and preserve their strength?” Alynore pondered. “The North has declared independence from the Iron Throne. They have already liberated themselves from Cersei Lannister.”

“After she has claimed the Iron Throne, how do you imagine Daenerys Targaryen, Mother of Dragons, Breaker of Chains, recovers the North as one of the seven dominions she covets?” Olenna asked tartly. Alynore gave her a look. It was a look Olenna had given many times: It spoke much more than words. It said her granddaughter, for all her virginal looks and gentle manners, was no fool.

“How is this Targaryen queen any different if she uses the threat of dragons to get what she wants, instead of wildfire?” Alynore asked.

“Oh, she uses more than the threat of them, my dear; she has burned people all across Essos and the Dothraki Sea, nobles and smallfolk alike, for getting in her way,” Olenna said airily. “I imagine this sovereign is no different than any other. Using cunning and admiration in equal measure to take what they want, and keep a rigid hold on it no matter the cost.”

“Margaery did that,” Alynore murmured. Olenna glanced at her granddaughter. “Daenerys Targaryen will take the Iron Throne. Grandmother, why are we here?”

“When she unleashes those monstrous creatures, she will take King’s Landing in a heartbeat, and the rest of Westeros will fall at her feet within the week,” Olenna said certainly. “And it will be remembered who stood by her side on her journey to the capital, long before all the other lords started to grovel for forgiveness and favours.”

“Why do you not have my brother declare independence, as the North has done?” Alynore asked quietly, glancing around, as a small carriage appeared: They were expected, after all. Alynore’s grip was strong as Olenna used her for support to climb in. It was musty from disuse. She imagined most things in Dragonstone were, after Stannis Baratheon’s exodus north. The Targaryen girl had merely commandeered them. “Let dragons and lions kill themselves to destroy each other.”

“Listen closely, my dear,” Olenna said shrewdly, as they settled and the carriage jolted into motion. “We are here to meet with this Targaryen girl, and get the measure of her. There are ways and means of handling impracticalities if she proves unsuitable. While you are at Dragonstone you will listen, and you will observe. They will be too busy being affronted by me to pay much attention to you; their tongues will be looser around you if they believe you’re sweet and docile and about as threatening as the rosebud you look. For all I thought Sansa Stark was a simple, dull creature, she survived Cersei Lannister for years; now she rules the North as Lady Regent for her baseborn brother. She kept her mouth shut, except to say what people wanted to hear; you must learn to survive, my girl. Learn to play the game better than anyone. Better than Margaery…anticipate the likes of Cersei…and learn to get the measure of a person yourself, rather than rely on their reputations. Do their actions match their philosophies? I want you to watch Daenerys Stormborn. I want you to question how she acts, and why; and every decision she makes; learn who she listens to, and understand the bonds between them to get the measure of their influence; anticipate how she will react, and what she will demand. What did you observe in the harbour?”

“It seemed strangled with dread. No-one was working,” Alynore said, and she flicked her gentle green eyes at Olenna before murmuring, “There was a girl…I think they were Dothraki.”

“They take slaves as dogs rut on bitches,” Olenna said coolly. “They believe their braids entitle them to take whatever they wish. Westerosi lords are no different, of course; but not nearly so brazen about it - with a few exceptions. She will not be the first on this island to be raped before the Dragon Queen takes her conquest to the mainland. Copper-skinned bastards will abound throughout the Seven Kingdoms before the Targaryen girl is done. Within a generation perhaps Westeros will become the heart and home of the khalasaars. They say Vaes Dothrak still smoulders, a ruin.”

She tucked the observation away. Breaker of Chains indeed.

Under her very nose, the Dragon Queen’s soldiers abused those she had vowed to liberate.

And her granddaughter had noticed it in a moment’s glimpse of the harbour. Thinking on it, didn’t Alynore have to be observant to anticipate what Olenna wanted in any given moment? She settled back in the carriage, as it trundled up the side of a volcanic mountain toward the monstrous castle, and rested, as much as she was able, before the inevitable meeting with Daenerys Targaryen.

Chapter 10: Expedience

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

10

Expedience


The first hanging cage appeared two days’ ride from Last Hearth, outside the boundary walls of a small holdfast clinging to the frozen shore of Long Lake. The poor man had frozen to death long before thirst or hunger could claim him. A handful of men lowered the cage and prised it open, at Larra’s request: She would not risk leaving any dead unburned. And the cage was decent steel. Before the flames caught alight to burn the body, Larra noted the muscle-shells sewn to his ragged furs. One of the Free Folk, the last of only a handful of thousands to survive Hard Home, to survive the North: The last of the Free Folk.

“They say it’s almost pleasant to freeze to death,” Edd murmured. The wagon-train continued out of their sight, the sun low but bright, the evergreen trees laden with fresh snow and the lake to their right frozen solid. “You’re warm again, before the end. It’s gentle.”

Larra remembered Benjen’s frostbitten face, and flinched. She had heard that, as well. The burning body crackled and smouldered, and they moved on, as they had with the Night’s Watchmen who died during the first leg of their journey from Castle Black. They could not afford to linger.

They were nearing Winterfell: Had not Jon pledged the safety of the Free Folk when they came south, and reclaimed Winterfell, and the North, so he could exert his influence over the Northmen to comply?

One man, alone, Larra might tolerate, maybe if he was a convicted rapist or murderer.

As the nameless man burned, Larra couldn’t help remember her History lessons with Maester Luwin, arguing with her brothers: “To put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained. And if it can be explained, that it can be explained away.” Some things should never be understood…should never be explained…or explained away.

Before nightfall they were within sight of the holdfast. And perhaps Mors Umber, before Brandon’s nugget of information about his surviving wildling grandchildren and great-grandchildren, may have put the Free Folks’ capture and torture and death into the context of the Northmen’s historic hatred of and ongoing wars with the plundering wildlings. To explain the string of hanging cages and crucifixes strung up with people in ragged furs - or nothing at all - was a step behind explaining it away. Larra would not do that. She could not tolerate senseless cruelty.

Her hands gripped the reins tighter, Black Alys unnerved, perhaps by the scent of death or by her bond with Larra; Larra was upset at the sight of the disfigured bodies nailed to crucifixes, hulking birds of prey feasting on their remains, opportunistic hunters in the heart of winter.

It was the yard that did it. A small holdfast, the cottages of its smallfolk enclosed the great yard in a large square full of mucky sludge. A woman had been stripped naked and locked at the stocks, for the use of any man who wanted her, her face slack with grief and confusion, her body collapsed with exhaustion, eyes glassy. A young man’s back had been opened by the lash, still strapped to the pillory, legs weak beneath him, the blood frozen on his skin and matting his furs. Inside the hanging cage, a half-naked child had frozen where he had curled up for warmth. More of the Free Folk were shackled to rings on spikes embedded deep into the great stone wall of the yard beside frozen steps up to the oak doors.

Little Jon Umber, perched in Larra’s lap with a fur cloak wrapped around them both, turned his little face to hers, red-nosed, his eyes wide as an owl’s.

“Free them. Let them burn their dead with dignity,” Larra murmured to Edd, who had looked to her for direction. Ever since leaving Castle Black, he had started doing that more and more often; perhaps because she had advised about putting the fletchers to good use on the journey south, or because she was Jon’s sister and he had assumed she knew what she was about. Either way, she had proven her instincts to be sharp, and several of the stronger men set about freeing the chained wildlings. “Don’t approach the stocks.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re men,” Larra muttered darkly, but she needn’t have worried: The woman was dead. She asked several of the men to find something to cover her modesty when they freed her, and set her down gently, covered in an empty burlap sack, before they freed the man at the pillory. He was still alive, against all odds. “Gently, with his arms. Lower them slowly. Have the maester prepare herbs for a snow-coat. And Hobb shall warm some soup, if he can sit long enough to eat a few mouthfuls.”

Her own back seemed to burn with compassion, remembering all those years ago, the snap of the leather against her back, the ache in her arms, the cold kissing her bare breasts as the yard looked on sombrely, the people who knew and adored her weeping silently as the Queen smirked on. She remembered smiling dazedly at her in response, and the Queen striding out of sight, bored when the pleasure of inflicting punishment was deprived her. She remembered the snow-coat Maester Luwin had treated her with, the discomfort of sleeping on her belly on a wooden board, the scent of snow and herbs and blood mingling in the air, groggy from milk of the poppy Maester Luwin had slipped into the mouthfuls of stew she had managed, before the fever set in, and she lingered for days in a dreamlike state of pain and memories…

She didn’t look too closely at the man’s wounds, even as her own healed ones seemed to prickle and sear with burning pain, recommitting the pain to memory. She had recovered. She had deprived the Queen’s victory through resilience alone.

Cersei had had her flogged, twenty-five lashes inflicted by the expert precision of Ser Ilyn Payne…for the crime of reminding Robert Baratheon of his beloved. For being Lyanna Stark reincarnated.

She felt a grim satisfaction, thinking, Oh, if they had but known… Lyanna’s daughter. The girl Rhaegar had died for; the girl Robert had gone to war for. The girl every man in Westeros seemed to have preferred over Cersei Lannister, who had become Queen simply because, at the end of it all, she was the last of them left. The last, and the worst. It wounded Cersei’s pride to be reminded of that.

The stunned wildling was carried to a wagon, arms draped around the shoulders of two Night’s Watchmen. Larra stared at the hanging cage; none of the men seemed to want to dare go near it. Grown adults was one thing…a child…

He was a fragile-looking thing, no older than Little Jon, and quite a bit smaller. A mop of dark golden curls - like Rickon’s unruly mane. Lush lips that would have been the envy of any girl who saw them. Vivid blue eyes stared unseeingly back at her, framed with curling black lashes a mile long.

He blinked.

“Shit!” Larra swore, startled back, heart in her mouth. “He’s alive! Help me get him down!”

“How the fuck is he alive?”

“I don’t know - but his arm is broken,” Larra murmured, eyeing the boy, who started trying to unfurl from the tight little ball he had tucked himself into at the foot of the cage. His forearm was bruised blackish-purple, and bent at an unpleasant angle.

“Were they his parents, d’you think?” Edd murmured, as the cage was lowered. The cage was broken open by several hits of a hatchet wielded by one of the Night’s Watch carpenters. The boy froze when one of the men leaned in to lift him out; Larra laid a hand delicately on his arm, and the carpenter locked eyes with her, and stood back.

She wore wildling furs.

At a glance, she thought these Free Folk originated from the Frozen Shores. To survive Hard Home, only to meet such an end…

Carefully, she spoke a few words in a dialect from the Frozen Shores she had picked up from wildlings fleeing south as Jojen and Brandon had spurred them further north. It was a strangely beautiful sound, guttural in places, the sound coming from the back of her throat as if she were about to spit, rolling her Rs musically, lots of soft V sounds, almost like the rushing of waves. It was a dialect of the Old Tongue.

The boy’s lower-lip quivered as he reached out to her, his eyes on the bent arm. Carefully, she manoeuvred him out of the cage, helping him unfold from his crouch, and lifted him into her arms. He was frail as a fledgling, all skin and grief, with his broken arm and vivid blue eyes.

“Get Jon down off Black Alys, thank you. Chuck him in the wagon with Bran,” Larra said gently, nodding at the boy, and one of the Watchmen helped the boy off her mare. “Jon, strip to your smallclothes and climb beneath the furs. You’re to cuddle the boy as you would your brother; share your warmth, or he shall die.”

“But he’s a wildling-!“

“Don’t give me that,” Larra said sharply, as Jon rolled his eyes, sighing heavily as he tugged at the fastenings of his cloak. Brandon watched benignly from his bed of straw, draped in furs and cloaks. They couldn’t risk his limbs getting frostbite; Larra didn’t know he’d survive the amputation. Slowly, Brandon himself started to shift the furs and blankets from his own legs, his hands like pale spiders against the furs. “I won’t tolerate that ignorance. Clothes off, now. Don’t give me that look; your uncles gave me leave to smack you if you’re foul. Ask Brandon if you think I won’t. The back of his head has my handprint embedded in it!” She managed to climb into the wagon, setting the boy down beside Jon, who looked positively plump next to the frail, strong wilding boy. “Mind his arm, Jon. It’s broken. Once he’s warmed we’ll have the maester set the bone, if he can. And I shall have Hobb warm some broth.”

“He’s freezing!” Jon cried indignantly, shivering away. She raised an eyebrow, giving him a stern look, and tucked the furs and blankets and extra clothes over the two boys, careful of the wildling’s arm. She spoke gently to the wildling boy, offering her name, and asking for his in turn.

“Ragnar. His name is Ragnar,” Larra murmured. “Keep him warm, Jon. I’ll come back.” She tucked the heavy cloaks and furs over the two boys; vivid blue eyes watched her as she climbed out of the wagon.

“The fuck are you doing?” The bellow rang out across the yard. On the steps to the holdfast, a man in a heavy cloak appeared, the links of his brigandine glinting in the meagre sunlight, just like the unsheathed blade in his hand. His expression was murderous; few of the Watchmen paid him any mind, nor did the Umber smallfolk or the lesser lords who had gathered at Last Hearth before journeying southwards toward Winterfell with the Night’s Watch.

What was one angry little man against thousands?

Larra stilled, watching the lord, reminding Larra herself of Last Shadow when they had hunted the wolfswood together. She had gained sight of her prey. She remembered this lesser lord. Not quite a Bolton, but not a pleasant companion to sit beside at feasts. Rumour said he could only get hard to rape his wife when he beat her, when she cried in pain.

“Ah… Black Jack,” Larra said softly, a silky whisper that had Edd glancing at her out of the corner of his eye, wary. Black Jack strode down the stairs, heavy cloak whipping in the wind, fresh snow carried on it. “I should have realised this mess was of your making.” She knew where she was, now. She remembered avoiding these lands on her journey north: Black Jack had a brutal reputation.

Her eyes flicked beyond Black Jack, to the figures huddled in the protection of their great hall. Two women stood huddled together, one young and pretty, one older, half her face swollen and purple from bruising. Her shoulders were thrown back, though, and she had her arms protectively around her daughter’s shoulders. Beside them tottered an elderly man whose sigil Larra could just make out on the breast of his richly quilted tunic. Another local lord, one she remembered from the harvest feast. He’d gone through his fourth wife and sought another. His meagre lands made for rich fur trapping. A nasty, mean little man, she recalled; he had smelled of kippers and unwashed flesh.

Edd’s pointed chin rose, his sharp eyes flitting to his brothers, all of whom were armed. To greet anyone with your sword unsheathed was a display of open hostility; Larra should not have been surprised, remembering Black Jack’s reputation for cruelty and stupidity, that he had come charging down the stairs swinging his sword.

In a moment, one of the seasoned Rangers had Black Jack disarmed, flat on his back.

“The Free Folk were invited south beyond the Wall and are under the protection of the King in the North,” said Edd, as two Night’s Watchmen lifted Black Jack to his feet, restraining him. A small crowd had congregated, smallfolk daring to open their doors to watch their lord’s humiliation.

“King in the North?! A bastard,” Black Jack sneered. “No more than a whore’s get.”

“Why are your people still here?” Larra asked sharply, dread settling in the pit of her stomach. “The Starks have called their banners. All the living North are to make their way to Winterfell.” Black Jack squinted at her, recognition seeming to flare in his eyes.

“You… I remember you, the bastard whore of Winterfell,” he sneered, and spat at her feet. Larra raised her eyebrows, unimpressed. She’d befriended direwolves, killed White Walkers and bedded a Thenn. There was absolutely nothing intimidating about this hateful little man. She scoffed in disdain, giving him the kind of look he deserved - the kind of look she had, admittedly, learned from Lady Catelyn - seething, burning disdain.

“You ignore your King’s summons and commit treason in harming the Free Folk under his protection,” said Edd dangerously, hand on the hilt of his sword. “You willingly place your own people in harm’s way in spite of the warnings of a threat of imminent war.”

“Only threat I see is the bastard who calls himself King, who let the wildlings roam free beyond the Wall,” Black Jack sneered. Edd shared a glance with Larra. It was quick, and decisive: They had no time to argue.

“You refuse the call, and willingly endanger Northmen?” Edd said quietly. Black Jack spit again. Edd sighed. “I, Eddison Tollett, acting Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, so named by Jon Snow, King in the North, charge you with treason against your king. I hereby sentence you to die by beheading. Hold him.”

The Watchmen held Black Jack still - for all his cursing and screaming - and Edd struck true. One clean swing of his sword, and Black Jack’s head landed with a dull, wet thump on the slush. His body was dragged beside that of the frozen wildling woman for burning.

There was a brief ruckus in the square, over before it started: On the steps of the holdfast, Black Jack’s wife had taken a blade concealed by her daughter, and stabbed the elderly man in the gut a half a dozen times. The brute died clutching his belly, his expression of utmost surprise. Mother and daughter embraced, as the Night’s Watch stared, and got to work, shepherding the smallfolk. Granaries and root cellars were emptied as quickly as possible, livestock driven ahead, and the vulnerable were bundled into whatever wagons were to hand, wearing every article of clothing they possessed, anything else left behind.

The pieces of Black Jack were left to burn beside the body of the wildling woman he had murdered.

In the wagon, trundling ahead to reach a convenient place to shelter that Larra remembered from her journey northwards, she checked on the boys. They were curled up together, as brothers might, wrapped in furs and blankets, Ragnar’s eyes closed, head nestled against Jon’s chest, his features relaxed in sleep; Jon’s were turned on Bran as he told a story in his calm, eerie voice. Larra checked whether Ragnar had gained some body-heat, worried that he might take on a fever if he didn’t die of hypothermia - that was the word Maester Luwin used. As soon as they reached the sheltered place in the woods Larra remembered, she would wake Ragnar for broth and have the maester see to his arm. She ducked out of the wagon again, and climbed onto Black Alys, who snorted and stamped her feet restlessly; she trotted ahead to catch up to Edd.

“How’s the boy?”

“Warming up nicely,” Larra said softly. She adjusted her furs, squinting in the gentle snows. At least they would have a mild night: It only ever snowed when it was mild, never when it was freezing. Snow was a good sign. She had to bat her eyelashes to get rid of the snowflakes clinging to them. “How are you?”

“Don’t know how Jon did it. The boy…even in the circumstances.”

“Still, it was right you swung the sword.”

“Aye. I know; your way is the old way,” Edd nodded. “I passed the sentence.”

“Why did you?” Larra asked curiously. She knew why she had given her support.

Edd sighed. “There’s what, two hundred more of us, just from that holdfast? That’s two hundred people who won’t be joining the Night King’s army. Two hundred fewer we have to fight if we want to live… His wife and daughter seem to be bearing their grief well enough.” He gave her an ironic little smirk. “Have you seen them?”

“His wife apologised for his rudeness; how she managed to with a face that bruised…the maester’s had a look at her. Her cheekbone will heal,” Larra said, eyes widening slightly. “If there was the time I’d teach knife-skills, the maester had to bandage a wicked cut on her palm.”

“Jon used to tell us stories about your training in the yard,” Edd chuckled. “Said you learned through experience. That’s why you fight with sword and knife.” He had never seen her fight to know that: Jon had talked about her among his brothers.

“Not because I was any better than them,” Larra said quietly, as they ambled along. She sighed. “Quite the opposite; I was a danger to myself if I had nothing in both hands. I almost lost fingers because I tended to grab out in the midst of a skirmish. When we were twelve, Maester Luwin managed to save my finger; I still have scars from the stitches. Couldn’t do anything with the hand for weeks.” She fell silent, lost in memories of the training-yard, of Ser Rodrik and Mikken, of Tomas her stable-boy, and Hodor, of her brothers hitting each other with sparring-swords and shields, Arya being chased by Bran as Rickon’s giggles echoed on the gentle summer air and Father watched from the walkway above, a content smile on his tired face…

“How long since you’ve been home?” Edd asked, guessing where her thoughts were.

Larra sighed. “What is the year?” she asked. Edd told her, and she stared at him. The snow started to fall more heavily, but she didn’t see it.

“Six years,” Larra croaked disbelievingly, and Edd nodded slowly. “Nearly six years since we fled Winterfell.”

Seven since she had last seen Jon.

She wondered whether they had passed their name-day. Were they twenty-three or twenty-four years old?

“How many more miles’ve we got, d’you reckon?” he asked thoughtfully, gazing out at the horizon, limited by the mountains surrounding Long Lake, and the snows.

“Two hundred and fifty miles, give or take a dozen, once we reach the southernmost shore of Long Lake,” Larra said, doing the sums in her head. Her journey north all those years ago had taken far longer, even without the thousands of refugees and livestock. A would-be castellan bastard-daughter of a High Lord; her crippled brother and his simple giant carer; her wild, wrathful baby-brother and his earthy wildling surrogate-mother; two Reeds; and three direwolves. They had made an odd party, even before reaching the great heart-tree… And they had been on foot, avoiding any main thoroughfare or holdfast, hunting to survive and hoping not to get caught for poaching - on her father’s land! The blisters on her feet had long since turned to tough leather; her wool dress and hose and cloak she had traded for furs; and less than half their party might ever see Winterfell again.

She would see Jon again.

Chapter 11: Beneath the Sea

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

11

Beneath the Sea


A crumbling holdfast provided their shelter, when Larra felt the threat of an ice-storm in her marrow. Like the wildlings, Larra had learned intuition when it came to the hints that nature provided when a storm was brewing. And they were lucky to reach the holdfast when they had: As it was, they lost near a dozen people overnight, from sickness and age and one from cold.

Not Larra’s boys, though. She would not lose another.

Little Jon Umber and the wildling boy Ragnar were thick as thieves and perhaps it was Jon’s influence that helped speed Ragnar’s recovery, beyond the physical mending of his arm, which had been set and splinted and bandaged expertly by a quiet, half-blind maester who never spoke above a murmur. During the ice-storm that shook the rundown walls of the holdfast, Larra watched them in the firelight as Little Jon and Ragnar giggled, and spoke together in hushed secret whispers and played the simple game Larra had carried past the Wall and back, bone die and carved wooden tokens and etched conkers wrapped in a painted doeskin pouch that opened to a game-mat made of scraps of embroidered silk.

She had invented the game long ago, with Maester Luwin’s help. Septa Mordane had helped her with the stitching.

It was her little-brothers’ favourite game, long after Robb had gone off to war with Theon, and Bran and Rickon had wiled away their last hour before an early bedtime playing at a table by the hearth in Father’s solar, as Larra worked and sipped blackcurrant and liquorice tea, and kept an eye on them.

She watched the two little boys, one dark and sombre and one fair and unruly and her heart hurt. And she realised the boys had learned to communicate. Without realising it, and with stunning speed, Little Jon had learned some of the Old Tongue dialect from the Frozen Shore; and Ragnar had learned enough words of the Common Tongue for them to design their own language to communicate. To play. Larra remembered the ingenuity of her siblings at play. What had ever been out of their reach that they could not imagine a way to climb to? They were not the only ones: All around Jon and Ragnar, little children seemed to congregate, for games and play.

Larra loved it. She loved the chaos of the children gathered around her like honeybees swarming to wildflowers, buzzing with excitement. She had forgotten how much she missed her little brothers.

As the winds howled, and the babies whimpered, the men argued and the Watch were looked upon to maintain order among the fractious and frightened, and the horses whickered and neighed at another loud clap of thunder that seemed set on bringing the roof down around them, Larra glanced around in the half-light. It was near noon, but no-one would know it, inside the abandoned holdfast, the storm raging, black clouds illuminated silver in brief flashes of lightning, putting their hearts in their mouths as thunder rumbled to a roar, exploding overhead, and sheets of ice-rain thrashed down. The simple luxury of fires made the large rooms close and almost humid, chasing away the cold, with the refugees of the North somehow managing to make the most of the brief respite from their march southwards, cooking, singing, celebrating…

Her stomach ached with loneliness.

Larra glanced up as a familiar silhouette appeared beyond the flames.

“He’s asking for you,” Meera said tiredly.

“Get some soup,” Larra told her quietly, nodding toward a cluster of people tending to a cauldron over a fire, savoury smells wafting from it. She stood slowly, massaging her sore muscles. She had been so long on foot, and on Brandon’s sled, that her muscles had forgotten that they had been trained for riding since Larra was old enough to sit a saddle by herself. Her body had forgotten; and reminding it was painful work. Still, it was necessary, and she preferred riding Black Alys to riding in that blasted wagon. She preferred being away from the strange man-boy who had replaced her brother Bran. It was an unkind thought, but it was an honest one: She didn’t know who Brandon Stark was any more, or if he even still existed.

Meera had been with him all morning: Larra had made the conscious decision to let her, while she looked after Little Jon and Ragnar.

She had made the decision to put her choices first, not Brandon’s needs. Now south of the Wall, and headed to Winterfell, surrounded by people who were happy to help them…it wasn’t just her anymore. And Larra knew there was more to the coming war than Brandon, though the Night King would savour the victory of finding and killing Brandon too…

Larra was choosing to make her own choices matter once again. For…nearly seven years, her life had been all about her younger brothers - nearly all her adult life so far. At sixteen, her family had divided; by eighteen, she was fatherless, and in charge of his castle and lords and lands while her eldest brother was off at war and her younger brothers grew up too quickly, broken and bewildered. Since Lady Catelyn cloistered herself away in Bran’s chamber, ignoring her youngest, most bewildered child, Larra’s entire world had been Rickon - and then Bran, when Lady Catelyn had gone south and never returned, and Bran had awoken, broken. Nothing else had mattered.

Rickon was dead. Brandon was altered.

But then, so was she.

If Bran had been replaced with an unrecognisable Brandon, then so too had Larra been replaced by a different version of herself, honed and fashioned for survival, not…not thriving. Just scraping by, by the edge of her sword, had been enough; and she had become as sharp and unyielding as a blade, a weapon, a tool…a tool to protect Bran, and to provide for him…

Headed to Winterfell, which she had never thought to ever see again, Larra had decided that enough was enough.

She could not go on for much longer as she had been for too long. It would kill her.

Larra wondered if Bran knew it. She was never quite certain whether he knew her thoughts, or merely her actions.

The holdfast had a godswood, as all Northern castles did, and the weirwood had been the marker for Larra on their journey: They had camped beneath the great scarlet boughs of the weirwood on their way north all those years ago. The holdfast was crumbling, but the weirwood was still growing, enormous, and moving the walls out of its way, its roots rupturing the foundations of the holdfast, and in places holding up the walls, a great canopy of scarlet leaves glowing in the firelight among the ancient hammer-beams, hazy in the rising smoke of the fires below. At the foot of the curling bone-white roots digging through the walls sat Brandon, wrapped in his furs, his eyes for once dark, glinting with dozens of sparks of fire reflected from the fires blazing around them. It made his eyes seem as beady and dark and glittering as a raven’s, and eerily older than his sixteen years.

He always had a guard from the Watch with him now, a favour from Edd though Larra had not asked. She was well aware that Brandon unnerved people. And when they were unnerved, they became frightened and confused, and did things they would later regret. She handed the guard a bowl of soup as she passed; he took it gratefully, offering a murmur of thanks. Larra was known by sight, but not as well-known the way Jon was to his brothers: She was Jon’s sister, no-one could deny that with their looks, but she was a stranger to the men who had claimed her as their sister, as Jon was their brother. She approached Bran, who waited patiently.

“You were gone a long while this time,” she warned carefully.

“I was learning,” Bran murmured. “You needn’t worry.”

“I always worry,” Larra told him, and he nodded subtly to himself as she perched on the bone-white weirwood roots. The earthy, musty smell of organic detritus hit her, and for a second she could believe they were back in the cave again, Brandon entangled in weirwood roots, the cavernous ceiling full of eerie shadows, the ground littered with skeletons, and the whisper and crackle and muted rush of an unknowable language constant around them as a river… They were not in the cave any longer, and only she, Meera and Brandon had escaped it.

She had one, horrifying moment wondering whether the Night King now commanded the Children… Lord Bloodraven… Hodor…

If so, she was glad the Night King’s hordes were so large; there was no way Larra would ever see their decomposing, reanimated corpses with glowing blue eyes…

“You need not worry about Bran, any longer,” the Three-Eyed Raven told her, gazing solemnly at her. “The boy is gone.”

“That is quite clear to me,” Larra said, with a bite. “Where were you today? Watching something illuminating, I hope.”

If he was going to drift off, he had better well make his ventures useful to the rest of them. After their loss, her effort, she thought it was their due. She would not allow Brandon to create a cavern in the wilderness at Winterfell: They needed him to share his knowledge, not hoard it like a miser.

“Yes. I should like to show you,” Brandon said, and Larra watched him cautiously. Show her? She frowned, thinking…of Hodor… He gave her a bland smile, knowing. “Bran Stark had no control over his powers. I am Brandon the Broken, the Three-Eyed Raven. I know you dread my power for what it did to Hodor. I have learned much since then.”

It was on the tip of her tongue to argue that a full moon’s turn had not yet occurred since they fled the cave, so how could he have learned so much? But she did not say it. She was too startled that he realised she blamed him for Hodor. She had never said it aloud…perhaps her Bran was still in there, behind those dark stranger’s eyes…that Bran would have blamed himself too…

“What is it you’d like to show me?” she asked quietly, eyeing him shrewdly.

“Things that were. Things that are… Some things that may yet come to pass,” Brandon said evasively. He held out one large, pale hand that had long ago lost any callouses from training with a sparring-sword in the yard with Ser Rodrick. Now Bran’s greatest weapon was his mind, his awesome, unknowable power… She eyed his palm. “He had no sight.” She flicked her eyes to Brandon’s face, and there was a flicker, just a heartbeat’s familiarity, a ghastly sense of grief and guilt, it was Bran staring at her, trying to explain. She blinked, and he was gone, Brandon the Broken in his place. But her brother was there, hidden however deeply.

“You mean Hodor.”

Brandon nodded. “But you have the wolfblood. And you have blood of Old Valyria. Dragon-dreams, they were called…you need not fear the deep,” Brandon said.

“Are we to go swimming?” Larra asked; she remembered Lord Bloodraven’s warning - it is beautiful beneath the sea, but if you stay too long, you’ll drown…

Brandon’s smile was sad and amused at once. “Unless you have something better to pass your time. The storm shall not break before midday tomorrow. And the boys have not noticed your absence.” Something twisted in her gut, a small, searing stabbing pain, and she flinched, glancing across the hall where she thought she could see the two boys bent over their game, with Meera watching over them as she ate her soup. They had been in Larra’s care fewer than ten days but she had taken on the responsibility of protecting and providing for them. She looked at them and saw her brothers, as they once were; it hurt to think her loyalty and care was not reciprocated…because she felt it was not reciprocated by Bran…

Ungrateful as they had been, in their youth and inexperience, she would not give her brothers for the world: She had given Winterfell and the entire North for them.

Larra looked at this unfamiliar Brandon before her and felt a swell of anger writhing hotly in the pit of her stomach, her hands clenching in her lap. She fought very hard to rein in her temper, to be constant, to be what her brothers had needed her to be after their abandonment; her fingernails dug into the toughened skin of her palms, and she thought of Father’s warnings of the wolfblood in her veins… Not just wolfblood…dragonfire…

She stared at Brandon’s hand for who knew how long; and when she unfurled her fist to place her smaller hand in his, her palm smarted from freshly-reopened wounds that reminded her of childhood, of the wolfblood, of her rage that was so familiar to her in Rickon, of unfairness and pent-up fury and pain…of loneliness, and disdain and unmasked hatred… Scars had torn; tiny, bloody crescents had appeared in her palms, her fingernails biting so deeply into her skin, the only way she used to have of channelling her anger and pain without hurting anyone else. Her fingers shook as she unfurled her clenched fists; she let out a slow, ragged breath, and placed her blood-spotted palm in his. It was startling, to see how small and pretty her hand looked in Brandon’s paw - his skin was unblemished, hers was calloused and tough, but she had fine elegant fingers and except for the colour of one bruise-blackened fingernail she had pretty nails, and slender wrists.

Bran had a man’s hands. He was almost a man. Her little brother…

She glanced into his eyes, and saw Bran there, just a hint of him, the earnestness and stubborn tilt to his chin, the endearing impishness glittering in his eyes mingled with sorrow and wisdom beyond his age. Beneath the icy sheen of a brittle façade, the Three-Eyed Raven was still, at heart, her brother. She had to trust him.

Larra placed her hand in his. She blinked.

And she stood amid an inferno.

Her heart flew to her mouth with the shock of it. One moment, they sat listening to the sleet-storm, the next, they were half a world away. She could feel the searing heat of the flames, but they did not touch her; could taste the dust and smoke on her tongue, but was not choked by it; could smell horse and excrement and exotic spices, sex, wine and sun-baked earth. She had the memory of those smells and the heat and her sight, knew by intuition and memory that some smells meant one thing, others another, though she had never been to this place, never seen Dothraki, had no personal knowledge of sun-baked dusty earth and throbbing bazaars full of exotic wares, only rippling seas of fresh green grass vibrant with the scent of new summer snow…

Copper-skinned men screamed and cursed in a guttural tongue, their oiled braids, meticulously plaited with tiny silver bells, catching alight in the blaze as they tried the great curved doors, barred against their escape. Copper-skinned, rippling with muscles, their goatees braided and dark eyes wide with an unfamiliar terror as flames consumed the great, dusty hall. Braziers had ignited the conflagration: As the khals of the Dothraki screamed and fought against an impossible enemy no blade could subdue, a small woman stood in the very centre of the burning temple - and it was a temple. Larra knew where she was, without ever having been there herself. Those were khals, and this was their most holy temple, the home of the dosh khaleen - the widowed wives of every khal to come before them. She was in Vaes Dothrak, the only city of the horse-lords.

And the khals were being burned alive by a tiny woman with pale silvery-gold hair shimmering and sparkling in the firelight. She stood serenely in the heart of the dosh khaleen as fire raged around her, illuminating her purple eyes until they glowed. She had a heart-shaped face, with a delicate chin and expressive dark eyebrows, a pretty nose and lush lips; it was a haughty face, very beautiful. Queenly.

As the roof came down, the last of the khals huddled at the great door, using all their brute strength to try to open it; it held fast. The woman approached the last standing brazier, the flames burning merrily to join the rest, and as she did so, she smiled at the tallest and strongest of the khals, whose mouth stood agape as he watched the woman’s clothing - Dothraki raiment of a woven grass vest and painted silk trousers - catch alight. The woman lifted her slender hands to the brazier, and heedless of the burning metal, placed her palms upon it: She smiled benignly, and the khal’s eyes widened as the flames roared toward him.

Larra had seen men swiftly, cleanly beheaded. Seen them skewered by sword and spear. Seen them torn apart by mindless corpses. Seen them drowned. She had never watched men burning alive. The way their hair caught alight, the way their skin smouldered and blistered before it blackened and cracked with angry red fissures, the stench of their burning skin and their hair, the way their eyeballs melted down their cheeks as their screams turned high-pitched as all sense fled them, leaving only pain…

She felt bile rise in the back of her throat, burning, but refused to look away.

The woman’s clothes burned away, leaving her smooth pale skin unmarred, baring her small, high breasts and the pale golden hair between her legs. She did not see Larra; she stared benignly at the khals as they screamed and died in agony, their horsehair vests and oiled braids feeding the fires that consumed them. The largest of the khals glared, and tried to dodge the flames long enough to reach her, his huge hands twitching to choke the life from her.

Weapons were forbidden in Vaes Dothrak, where all khalasaars were one blood. But a khal knew how to kill without one. The flames caught him, before he could reach her. The woman stared with unflinching, bored detachment as the fires consumed him before her eyes: It was the detachment, almost amusement, that made a shiver go up and down Larra’s spine.

Don’t look away. Father will know if you do… Father had always taught them that if they were to take a man’s life, they owed it to them to look them in the eye; if they found they could not, perhaps they did not deserve the fate you had condemned them to.

But this…

This was…something else entirely.

There was…righteousness, amusement in this woman’s eyes that Larra found unsavoury.

Cloaked in the protection of pure zeal, she seemed to be revelling in the deaths she was causing, wielding fire as a weapon. The flames licked at her skin almost lovingly, the khals’ screams died, and the great fiery structure started to groan, embers raining down.

Larra was reminded of the Red Woman whom Edd had told her about. A priestess of R’hollor, the Lord of Light. Only death can pay for life… She had said so to Jon when she resurrected him, Edd had told Larra.

The woman had burned the khals; intending to or not, she had offered them up to the Red God. And he had granted his protection of her in turn, leaving her unharmed by the flames that consumed the Dothraki’s most sacred temple.

Huge doors cracked and groaned and fell; the roof started to crumble, and the woman strolled to the entrance. The great fire could be seen for miles; every man, woman and child in Vaes Dothrak gathered to weep and scream and stare in awe and horror as a single small woman traipsed past the smouldering, cracked, unrecognisable bodies of the fierce khals to stand naked before them, her shoulders thrown back, staring imperiously - expectantly - around at the masses gathered, their faces shining with tears at the ruination of their most sacred place, the deaths of their leaders… A single, tiny woman with small tits and shining silver-gold hair and a cool demeanour in the face of true horror, surrounded by fire, and the masses fell to their knees.

She had killed the khals and stepped unscathed from the monstrous pyre she had made for them.

Larra might have been impressed, if she wasn’t so sceptical. If she did not dread that eerie serenity, the glitter of arrogance in the woman’s eyes as she had pushed that last brazier at the khals…if she had not smiled as she set men alight.

It was that glimmer of relish, almost amusement, victory that unsettled Larra, had Father’s softly-spoken stories of the Mad King murmuring through her mind.

There was nothing amusing about death, nothing to relish in acts of violence. It was destructive; it caused dark spots to appear on the heart, plaguing the mind…or it should.

She distrusted anyone who smiled in the face of suffering of their making.

“Daenerys Stormborn,” said a gentle voice in her ear, and Larra jumped, glancing around. Her jaw dropped.

Bran stood beside her.

His hands were clasped loosely behind his back, watching the tiny woman with a detached sort of curiosity, as if she was an unusual beetle he was not quite certain of.

Brandon stood, several inches taller than her, lean as a young wolf. He seemed taller to her because it was so startling to see him fully upright. She had become accustomed to looking down to speak to him. And he was clothed, not in the furs they had wrapped themselves in for years, but in the Northern dress he had grown up in: a quilted tunic under a leather doublet, linens beneath, his boots polished to a shine. Still finer than what Jon had worn. No armour, though. It struck Larra that, especially in his visions, Brandon was still very much vulnerable to harm. He did not wear the direwolf-embellished collar he had donned as de-facto Lord of Winterfell. Nothing about his dress indicated his Stark heritage, only the Northern cut of the doublet. Nothing denoted his allegiance.

Her lips parted, to ask, but she realised even as the thought came, it didn’t matter. Inside his mind, Bran was whole. It is beautiful beneath the sea…

“Daenerys Targaryen,” she said softly, clearing her throat, turning back to the woman. She was similar age to Larra, perhaps a little younger - she looked younger, due to circumstances that never calloused her palms or bruised and scarred her body, sapped the joy from her mind. Larra felt years older than her true age. She was certain she looked them, too. Pain and despair took its toll on the body. “Why did she burn the khals?”

Brandon turned dark, glinting eyes on her; behind him, the fire raged, consuming everything, and the temple of the dosh khaleen collapsed, sparks flying a hundred feet into the air, spitting at the crowds pleading supplication to Daenerys Stormborn.

“When her husband died, the wife of Khal Drogo should have returned here to live out her days with the dosh khaleen,” Brandon murmured, watching Daenerys Stormborn carefully. “She did not: The khals were discussing her fate when she set them alight.”

“Her fate?”

“She was their khaleesi: Her place was with the crones of all the khals who came before,” Brandon said softly. “She dishonoured their traditions when she refused to take up her place as one of the wise-women of the dosh khaleen.”

“She dishonoured worse when she burned their sacred temple,” Larra murmured darkly, frowning at Daenerys Stormborn. A quiet smile haunted the corners of Brandon’s lips.

“Daenerys Stormborn killed the khals - all of them. She proved her physical strength to every khalasaar gathered at Vaes Dothrak.”

“Even if it is an illusion?” Larra frowned, and Brandon’s smile widened.

“Now, why do you say that?”

“What the Red Woman told Edd…only death can pay for life,” Larra said. “She offered those men to the flames; the Lord of Light accepted the offering and granted her protection.” Brandon gave her a measuring look, smiling contentedly.

“The Dothraki follow strength. And the most powerful blood-rider gains the best mount. And Daenerys Stormborn…her mount is the most fearsome any khal could ever dream of. Balerion reborn…”

She blinked, and the vision changed. A pure forget-me-not sky made her eyes water, the sun high and hot above. Behind, a column of black smoke rose a thousand feet into the sky, and a river of bodies throbbed as it wound through two enormous horse statues glinting in the sunshine that made the rocks around Larra hiss with the heat, as if they stood among burning embers. Blood-riders on fiery stallions formed the head of the column, led by a dragon.

Larra’s breath caught in her throat. A dragon. A real, live dragon. He was extraordinary. Hulking, reptilian and predatory, elegant and sleek, there was a terrifying beauty to him. Any mammoth Larra had seen in the True North could have walked comfortably down his gullet, and his wings must have spanned two-hundred feet unfurled. They were leathery and black, the tough membranes washed with blood-red as the sun shone through them, his wings snapping and unfurling with the sound of thunder-claps; his horns and spinal-plates were blood-red, and his eyes smouldered like fiery red embers. As he snarled and roared to the sky, Larra saw his teeth, triple rows of fangs longer than her forearms, black as onyx and lethal as the Valyrian steel sword belted at her waist.

Queen Visenya’s sword. Her ancestress.

Also the ancestor of Daenerys Stormborn, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea. The first dragon-rider in centuries.

“She rides Drogon, named for her dead Dothraki husband,” Bran murmured, standing placidly beside Larra as she gazed in wonder, drinking in the dragon, almost aching with grief at the thought that…Bran would’ve loved to see it; her Bran… So would Arya… She was so consumed with grief over her dead siblings that Larra barely noticed the tiny speck on the dragon’s back; a woman with her silvery-gold hair coiled in elaborate plaits that made Larra’s fingers twitch to pat her own unkempt braids. It was the first time in a very long time she had considered her appearance at all; she knew she looked half a wildling herself, and it had never mattered until now, narrowing her eyes at the impeccable Khaleesi.

Riding on Drogon’s back, Daenerys Stormborn called to the Dothraki blood-riders. “What’s she saying to them?” Larra asked, turning to Brandon. He smiled serenely.

“Listen,” he said simply, and Larra frowned in the blazing sun to stare at the Khaleesi. Her lips parted in wonder - but of course, these were Brandon’s memories now, and he had coaxed her into them; she understood the guttural Dothraki tongue, because Brandon now did.

Her voice raised so the masses could hear, Daenerys Stormborn addressed the column of blood-riders. And Larra listened, and understood: “Every khal who ever lived chose three blood-riders to fight beside him and guard his way! But I am not a khal! I will not choose three blood-riders. I choose you all!” The blood-riders roared their approval, arakhs raised to the air, their mounts snorting and prancing at the ruckus. “I will ask more of you than any khal has ever asked of his khalasaar!” Another roar, more arakhs raised to Daenerys Stormborn, dust churning, and the great black dragon shook his spiny head, adding his roar to the din.

Daenerys Targaryen smiled in satisfaction, her eyes a darker purple due to the black vest she wore, a pearl ring draped on a leather thong around her neck, and raised her voice once more: “Will you ride the wooden horses across the black salt sea? Will you kill my enemies in their iron suits and tear down their stone houses?”

Larra narrowed her eyes on the Targaryen girl. Kill my enemies in their iron suits and tear down their stone houses…

Stone houses. Castles. Westeros.

“Will you give me the Seven Kingdoms, the gift Khal Drogo promised me before the Mother of Mountains?” Daenerys Stormborn bellowed, and the khalasaar screamed its support. “Are you with me? Now…and always?”

“You are dissatisfied,” Brandon murmured to her, and Larra turned her eyes from Daenerys Stormborn with her elaborate braids and terrifyingly beautiful dragon and frowned.

“Yes. Did she succeed? Has she brought the Dothraki across the seas?”

“Yes,” Brandon said softly. “One hundred and sixty thousand Dothraki screamers. Seven and a half thousand Unsullied infantry sword- and spearmen, with three thousand training boys. Two thousand Meereenese freed slaves who have taken up arms to support the Breaker of Chain’s cause. One hundred ships from the Iron Fleet and three thousand men to crew them, led by Yara and Theon Greyjoy. A combined fleet from Yunkai and Astapor commandeered, along with their crews, after an unsuccessful attack on Slavers’ Bay… Even now, an emissary from Dorne resides as guest to Queen Daenerys Targaryen on Dragonstone while they negotiate a potential alliance through the Queen’s hand, Tyrion Lannister, and her new Master of Whisperers, Lord Varys: Lady Olenna Tyrell determines to get the measure of the Dragon Queen before committing the forces of the Reach to her cause.”

Larra wanted to sit down. She could not catch her breath as she gaped, watching the khalasaar surge past her in the dust.

Over two hundred thousand men at the command of a dragon-rider.

She frowned, glancing over her shoulder, at the dragon now snapping its wings straight. With a sound like the clap of thunder, he launched himself into the sky, beating his wings, churning up dust; Larra raised her arms to guard her face against the sting of sand and dust, but felt nothing. Brandon stood beside her, unflinching.

“It is only memory,” he told her gently. “It cannot harm you.”

She blinked, lowering her arms. The dust never settled; the greatest khalasaar the world had ever known followed their new Khaleesi on her fierce mount, churning the dust and sand beneath hundreds of thousands of hooves, slaves on foot beside their masters. Vaes Dothrak had emptied.

“Why the Dothraki?” Larra mused, narrowing her eyes on the speck that Drogon had become. “One dragon and half a thousand Unsullied would suit her purposes.” She remembered her lessons with Maester Luwin, the convoluted, frustrating, months-long campaigns she and her brothers had designed and played out in cyvasse. “Kill her enemies in their armour, and tear down castles? She doesn’t need nearly two-hundred thousand Dothraki screamers for that. Why seize leadership of them? What are they, but a deficit to her resources? She intends to invade. Winter is coming.”

Brandon smiled blandly, and touched her shoulder. She blinked, and started. Robert Baratheon sat at a table, sheer curtains billowing softly in a breeze carrying birdsong into a light, airy room with pale gold stone floors and painted walls, a grand bed carved with vines and antlers, dressed in cotton and richly-embroidered silk. A squire in red was just disappearing through a secret passage, taking away an empty carafe; a full one sat on the inlaid table by Robert’s hand, his wine glass full almost to the brim. The door opened, and Cersei Lannister appeared, pausing on the steps. In the soft golden light, the Queen looked almost pretty, with her hair shimmering to her waist, and a layered pink silk gown draped elegantly and belted at the waist with gold plate links. An elegant locket of gold glinted at her breast, a Lannister lion roaring on its face. Hers was drawn in the characteristic frown Larra remembered.

“I’m sorry your marriage to Ned Stark didn’t work out,” she said gently. “You seemed so good together.”

“Glad I could do something to make you happy,” Robert said despondently. Even half-drunk, he looked troubled. Cersei sauntered into the chamber, pretty hands clasped before her, a delicate organza shawl draped from her elbows, glinting gold.

“Without a Hand, everything will fall to pieces,” she warned, resting her hands on the posts of the empty chair opposite Robert.

“I suppose this is where you tell me to give the job to your brother Jaime,” Robert grumbled irritably.

A tiny smile played at Cersei’s lips. “No. He's not serious enough. I'll say this for Ned Stark; he's serious enough. Was it really worth it? Losing him this way?” Larra frowned at Brandon; he was watching Robert carefully.

“I don't know,” Robert sighed, and set his wine-glass down, rising from his seat. “But I do know this: If the Targaryen girl convinces her horse-lord husband to invade, and the Dothraki horde crosses the Narrow Sea, we won't be able to stop them.” Again, Larra glanced at Brandon. This was many years ago; Father was still alive, she was sure, and serving as Robert’s new Hand following the death of Jon Arryn.

Robert had predicted Daenerys Targaryen’s invasion.

“The Dothraki don't sail, every child knows that,” Cersei said, and Robert turned away from her, gazing out of the open window, the pretty balcony that oversaw all of King’s Landing, a great, glittering, stinking city of orange and terracotta roofs, sprawling markets, a thriving port-city with the best brothels on the continent and more work for the smallfolk who flocked there hoping for a better life, more entertainments for the indolent and wealthy. “They don't have discipline, they don't have armour. They don't have siege weapons.”

“It's a neat little trick you do,” Robert sighed. “You move your lips, and your father's voice comes out.”

Even as Cersei scoffed gently, Larra smiled to herself: Did they not all become their parents? She echoed Father often enough, as she knew Jon always did. “Is my father wrong?”

“Let's say Viserys Targaryen lands with forty-thousand Dothraki screamers at his back… We hole up in our castles, a wise move. Only a fool would meet the Dothraki in an open field… They leave us in our castles. They go from town to town, looting and burning, killing every man who can't hide behind a stone wall, stealing all our crops and livestock, enslaving all our women and children,” Robert said fiercely, and Cersei moved to the table, pouring herself a glass of wine. Robert’s voice turned soft, sorrowful, as he asked, “How long do the people of the Seven Kingdoms stand behind their absentee King, their cowardly King hiding behind high walls? When do the people decide that Viserys Targaryen is the rightful monarch after all?!”

Cersei thought before answering, sitting herself down before the table. It struck Larra as an exquisitely intimate moment between Robert and Cersei - between the King and his wife. No courtiers, no servants, just them, sharing a glass of wine, and discussing the greatest threat to Westeros in three centuries. “We still outnumber them.”

“Which is the bigger number?” Robert asked her. “Five or one?”

Cersei rolled her eyes impatiently. “Five.”

“Five,” Robert said, holding up his hand, fingers splayed. His other hand, he raised as a fist. “One. One army. A real army united behind one leader, with one purpose…” Robert refilled his glass, shaking his head. “Our purpose died with the Mad King. Now we've got as many armies as there are men with gold in their purse. And everybody wants something different. Your father wants to own the world. Ned Stark wants to run away and bury his head in the snow…”

“What do you want?” Cersei asked. Robert smiled sadly, raising his wine-glass. The Queen rolled her eyes, barely hiding her disdain. Robert drained half his glass before he sat, sighing.

“We haven't had a real fight in nine years,” he sighed miserably. “Backstabbing doesn't prepare you for a fight, and that's all the realm is now. Backstabbing and scheming and arse-licking and money-grubbing… Sometimes I don't know what holds it together.”

“Our marriage,” Cersei mused, and Robert started to laugh. They caught each other’s eye, and Cersei joined him, smiling. She looked almost pretty.

“So, here we sit, seventeen years later, holding it all together,” Robert sighed heavily. “Don't you get tired?”

“Every day,” Cersei admitted.

“How long can hate hold a thing together?” Robert pondered miserably.

“Well, seventeen years is…quite a long time.”

“Yes, it is,” Robert agreed, raising his glass in a toast tinged with irony.

Cersei raised her own glass. “Yes, it is… What was she like?”

Robert went still, staring at his wife. “You've never asked about her, not once. Why now?”

“At first, just saying her name, even in private, felt like I was breathing life back into her. I thought if I didn't talk about her, she'd just…fade away for you,” Cersei said softly, and Larra knew who she was speaking of. Lyanna. Her mother. The reason Cersei had had Larra flogged all those years ago; she had breathed life into Lyanna again. “When I realized that wasn't going to happen, I refused to ask out of spite. I didn't want to give you the satisfaction of thinking I cared to ask. And eventually it became clear that my spite didn't mean anything to you; as far as I could tell, you actually enjoyed it!”

“So why now?”

For a long moment, Cersei did not answer. When she did, her words were tinged with sadness and regret. “What harm could Lyanna Stark's ghost do to either of us that we haven't done to each other a hundred times over?”

“You want to know the horrible truth?” Robert sighed, leaning heavily over the table. “Until I saw Ned’s bastard girl at Winterfell, smiling, with flowers in her hair…I couldn’t even remember what she looked like. She was the one thing I ever wanted. Someone took her away from me, and seven kingdoms couldn't fill the hole she left behind.”

Cersei pondered this, then said, “I felt something for you once, you know.”

“I know,” Robert said sadly.

“Even after we lost our first boy...for quite a while, actually,” Cersei said softly. “Was it ever possible for us? Was there ever a time, ever a moment?”

Robert’s honesty was terrible, and may have sealed his fate. “No. Does that make you feel better, or worse?”

“It doesn't make me feel anything,” Cersei admitted. She set her wine-glass down, and left the King’s chamber. She left Robert to his wine, and his regret.

And Larra was left reeling. He had been a reluctant King, but Robert Baratheon had been one of the best military minds of the age. Only once defeated in battle, by Lord Randyll Tarly. He had laid waste to the royalists’ armies, defeating every other enemy, he had slain Prince Rhaegar in single-combat in the rushing waters of the Trident, caved in his breast-plate, crushed every rib he had…

If there was one thing Robert Baratheon knew, it was war. He had proven himself an immense warrior, a skilled commander, and a completely disinterested monarch - he had given the Seven Kingdoms nearly eighteen years of almost unbroken peace, but bought that peace at a terrible price, considering all that came after, and all that had happened before.

She had never been to King’s Landing, of course, never set foot inside the Red Keep. Had this always been the King’s chamber? Would Robert have rested easy in the Mad King’s chamber? From what she knew of Robert’s bloodlust for dead Targaryens, she thought he might; this might even have been Rhaegar’s chamber.

Had her brother and sister played in this room? Rhaenys and baby Aegon. Had their giggles and coos echoed off the golden stone, their mother singing to them, perhaps, as her ladies flocked about her? Perhaps she sat out on the balcony, enjoying the sunshine, yearning for the Water Gardens of her home.

Larra sighed, and turned away from Robert, still drinking his wine, staring morosely at the inlaid table.

“Daenerys Targaryen’s husband was dead before his khalasaar could sack enough cities to fund her campaign,” Brandon murmured, “but she achieved her aim regardless. Now it is she who rides at the head of the khalasaar, who brought Dothraki to Westeros for the first time in our history… How shall Cersei proceed?”

“I know Cersei Lannister very little,” Larra frowned, “and the Targaryen girl even less.”

“True; but you trained for this with Jon and Robb and Theon,” Brandon murmured. “Westeros faces invasion. How would a monarch proceed?”

“Robert made a disinterested king, but he was a strategist to rival Tywin Lannister. I imagine… I imagine he would have been impressed the lad named for him died undefeated in battle,” Larra said, thinking of Robb with a twisting, painful, hideous feeling in her gut. “Cersei was foolish and impetuous but has maintained her position this long for a reason. When she learns Daenerys Stormborn has landed in Westeros with armies of Dothraki screamers…she will remember what Robert said; how could she not, when it was the only time she ever asked about Lyanna…”

“So what will Cersei do?”

“She will not allow her armies to hole up behind high walls; but she will remain protected behind them. After all, she is not a warrior-queen. Certainly her brother the Kingslayer will lead her armies,” Larra said, after a moment’s consideration. “If I were Cersei I would devise a way to destroy the Dothraki without ever having to meet in the field of battle; as her father destroyed the Northern army when he arranged the Red Wedding… I would find a way to kill the dragons before they could turn King’s Landing to ash. History tells us they are not invulnerable. Use the past as a weapon against the Mad King’s daughter…destroy any credibility before she lands on our shores, unite the lords of Westeros against her to fling her back into the Narrow Sea. Less than Cersei Lannister on the Iron Throne, the lords of Westeros want a return of the Targaryen dynasty.”

Her family.

“Brandon… We must learn more about Daenerys Targaryen,” Larra said softly, dread curdling her stomach as she fully evaluated the implications of Daenerys Targaryen’s invasion. She had come to claim the Iron Throne. The Seven Kingdoms. Jon was King in the North: the North had declared its independence from the Iron Throne when Robb marched south with the Northern army.

It was always the Starks, who acted as catalyst for rebellion. Rickard and Brandon Stark: Eddard and Robb Stark. A father had gone south to plead for his son’s life: A son had raised an army to protect his father’s life.

The North would not kneel to a Targaryen queen any more than they would the Lannister one.

Gone were the days the North knelt to anyone.

And history told them what Targaryens did to those who refused to kneel…

“How is it Daenerys Targaryen came to be in Vaes Dothrak, to usurp the khalasaars?”

“That is a long journey,” Brandon said softly, his eyes alight with something close to merriment, as if he had been waiting for and was delighted by her request. “And I am gratified you are not so wholly consumed with the Night King that you underestimate the threat brewing in the south… There is one thing I would show you before we go…” He smiled softly, and the memory changed…

Chapter 12: Waking the Dragon

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

12

Waking the Dragon


The Mad King was hideous to look upon. He brought to her mind the Night King’s wights.

Beard untrimmed and wild, matted and unwashed, his hair fell in thick tangles to his waist, glinting a dull steely-silver in the light of thousands of candles. His fingernails were long, cracked and brittle, yellowed, untrimmed. His face was sunken and gaunt from malnutrition, his eyes bloodshot, heavy black bruises hanging beneath them from exhaustion. There was something faraway and distracted in his eyes, but at times they glinted with a sharp, suspicious lucidity. He was richly clothed, and wore on his head a huge, almost ungainly crown of deep red-gold, sitting low and heavy on his head, each of its points a dragon-head set with gemstone eyes that glinted in the candlelight, giving them an almost sentient feel. The crown of Aegon IV - Aegon the Unworthy.

Apt, Larra thought, cringing away from the madman in horror and disgust. She had heard - it was another thing entirely to see…

The King sat at the head table in a grand hall opulently decorated for feasting and celebrations - she remembered the Great Hall at Winterfell decorated with greenery and sweet herbs and white flowers from the glasshouses in preparation for King Robert’s arrival: The garlands of vibrant, unusual flowers wreathed around the hall with sashes of vibrant silks put all their weeks of preparation to shame. The air was redolent with the perfume of tens of thousands of flowers - camellias and rhododendrons and roses of every colour, delicate jasmine and sweet orange-blossoms, unusual irises and elegant calla lilies, dangling chandeliers of orchids of a dozen colours and sizes, deep purple chrysanthemums and velvety white peonies, scented astilbe and hydrangea blossoms the size of her head, honeysuckle and columbines, showy gladioli and foxgloves, penstemons, hundreds of dahlias and alstroemeria, velvety golden-tongued blood-red snapdragons, waxy tuberoses and a hundred different kinds of perfumed narcissi. Their perfume mingled with the scents of the hundreds of nobles gathered, with the aromas of rich foods displayed for the feasters, the braziers burning with sweet herbs and the enormous hearths alive with firelight that sent sparks crackling and dancing, wafting tendrils of fragrant smoke to the older lords and ladies sharing potent tipples on elegant chaises, observing the dancers and playing dice games. It was almost stifling in the great hall: At the high windows, the shutters open and draped with samite, fat snowflakes drifted lazily past, glowing in the moonlight. Fine white linens clothed the sweeping feast-tables, which were groaning with decadence, gold glinting and fine crystal sparkling in the light of the thousands of candles, exquisite delicacies - cherries soaked in liqueur, gilded chestnuts, tiny delicate pastries filled with flavoured cream and glazed with caramel and decorated in elaborate towers with flowers, tiny dishes of sweetmeats dotted about and trenchers of fine cheeses, crusty bread, pickles and chutneys - displayed for the feasters to pick at as they finished the savoury courses and high in a gallery an orchestra played beautifully: Hundreds of dancers ignored their King as they enjoyed themselves, dancing a more boisterous country dance made elegant for the court.

Larra’s stomach jolted. There they were.

Her family.

Benjen was young - perhaps ten, the same age Bran had been when he fell: He had Jon’s narrow pale face and dark glinting eyes, but this was not the Benjen of Larra’s memory - this was the boy Benjen, long before he had taken the black, when his family had been whole, and the world theirs to explore and enjoy. He danced eagerly with a slim young woman with long dark hair and expressive eyebrows, thoughtful, kind grey eyes and a beautiful smile that flashed out of nowhere - wolfish - and stunned casual observers, making them do a double-take. She wore a fine grey gown embroidered from the hem to her knees with silver winter-roses glinting with tiny beads; the modest neckline was decorated with a high collar all Northern noblewomen wore, stormy-grey silk adorned with silver direwolves at the points and embroidered heavily with Northern flowers Larra could name by scent blindfolded. The girl’s hair was loose to her waist, except for the coil of twists and braids drawn from her face to the back of her head, the hairstyle Northern ladies called a crown - the same hairstyle Larra had always adopted for feasts and formal occasions: Lyanna had woven tiny white snow-bells and sprigs of palest purple-white lavender into her braids, decorating her crown.

“’Tis no wonder Father’s smile always died at the sight of me,” Larra said sorrowfully, her heart burning as she gazed at her mother.

For the very first time.

Larra’s heart stuttered.

Lyanna’s beauty was wild, unpolished; her laughter was free, her smiles wolfish and untamed. She danced with an unconscious enthusiasm, and enjoyed herself without constraint. Her gown was not the finest in the hall, by any stretch: She was not the most refined. But there was an earthiness, a natural charisma and joy that lit Lyanna from within. It shone in her eyes and made her smiles earnest and entrancing, and desired; half the men who saw her smile found themselves half in love with Lyanna Stark, wanting to ensure she smiled again - and just for them.

“You are very like her, in many ways,” Brandon said softly. “But you are not Lyanna reborn. Father knew that. You are utterly yourself, and always have been.” Larra turned to look at her brother - Brandon was watching with heartbroken sorrow as Lyanna danced with a roguishly handsome, huge man with the Stark direwolf emblazoned at the breast of his fine wool tunic - he had Father’s impressive square jaw but Benjen’s inky dark hair, and his smile was more boisterous. Her Uncle Brandon. There was a lot of Robb in his face, Larra thought, a blade twisting in her gut as she watched. Clusters of young ladies flocked about Brandon, eyeing him as if they were dying of thirst in a desert, and he was the oasis to save their lives. All around Lyanna, fine silks shimmered and jewelled hair-nets shone, but it was Lyanna, dancing with her wild smile and pretty flowers and modest neckline, who drew the gaze of half the men and women gathered at Harrenhall. 

Including Prince Rhaegar.

Larra could not swallow the lump that rose in her throat when she saw him, staring at her mother across the great hall. Her heart thumped inside her chest, hurting.

This was it. The beginning of their family’s misfortune that had plagued them for two successive generations.

She had always been told Rhaegar was beautiful. He was. Not the way she remembered Jaime Lannister, beautiful and golden, and almost too perfectly handsome, or even her brothers, with fierce jaws and solemn eyes and unexpected grins. Rhaegar’s face was solemn, his features even and masculine, and very compelling to look upon. He had passed his lips on to Larra and Jon, and his cheekbones - high, sharper than Valyrian steel… And he was tall, very tall, deceptively slender-looking in his tailored tunic; he had broad shoulders, and a muscular torso and strong legs. A warrior’s build. Jon had Rhaegar’s broad flat shoulders but was slenderer in Larra’s memory than Rhaegar, and Larra doubted life at Castle Black and beyond the Wall had done much to bulk him up since she saw him last. Jon had the shape of Rhaegar’s eyes, but the colour of their mother’s Stark grey eyes, so dark they appeared almost black in certain light.

Larra had Rhaegar’s eyes exactly. Deep violet, almost indigo.

And his glinted in the candlelight, watching Lyanna as if entranced, sweeping from the glittering hem of her gown to her narrow waist - a tiny hourglass waistline Larra had inherited - to her high, plump breasts and the shine of her dark hair as she twirled and danced and smiled. With a jolt, finding herself weak-kneed and stunned as she gaped, Larra realised Lyanna was dancing with Robert. She had only ever seen him overweight and unhappy. Robert, the Lord of Storm’s End, a young man in his prime, honed for battle, was handsome. Fiercely handsome, dark-haired, with vibrant eyes and an impish, unconcerned air; he gazed at Lyanna as if she was the only woman in the world. Lyanna’s smile had cooled as she danced with him: Her eyes flitted to her older brother, to Ned, who looked down at the floor almost shame-facedly before turning his gaze to a pretty violet-eyed lady in a lilac silk gown, her dark hair glittering with silver jewels. Lady Ashara Dayne, once rumoured to be Larra’s mother…

The music forced a change of partner as the dance changed: Rhaegar sipped his wine, watching Lyanna over the gilt rim of the crystal glass, a yearning, hungry, sorrowful look on his face.

He sighed, shoulders rising and falling, and slipped into an empty chair beside a startlingly beautiful olive-skinned woman with twinkling dark eyes and a delicate demeanour, draped in a glinting blood-red, sleeveless gown cut simply and sensuously, without corseting or darts for shape, a trailing hemline and a neckline cut with sensual elegance to the navel, hinting at her tiny breasts and showing a faint glimmer of silvery-pink scars on her flat belly - the mark of motherhood. Draped from her slender throat, glittering sensuously all the way to her navel, was a necklace of gold filigree sunbursts and soaring dragons linked together, set with rubies and garnets. Her black hair shone as it wove to her waist, tucked away from her face to show off her delicate cheekbones and glinting dark eyes. She wore a gauzy shawl of gold Qartheen lace draped over her elbows, and looked slightly ill but incredibly lovely as she sipped apricot liqueur and played a game of cards with her lady-in-waiting, just about hiding her winces of discomfort as she fidgeted subtly in her high-backed chair piled with cushions.

She made such a striking figure, with her glossy hair and her simple gown and sensuous eyes and that glittering necklace, the rich colours of gold and blood-red so exquisite against her skin, for the first time in years, Larra’s hands twitched to grind pigments and drench herself in the odour of turpentine and paint…

One day she would paint Princess Elia. Hers was an exquisite beauty that deserved to be immortalised… And with Jon declared King in the North, an independent kingdom - they had to think of the future, of overtures that must be made to other sovereign nations: How long could Cersei Lannister maintain dominion over the elusive, dangerous Martells when Targaryens, with all their dragons, could not?

Amends must be made. And no two Houses had suffered more at Targaryen hands than the Martells and the Starks. One sister and her two babies, an uncle: A father, a son, a daughter. Their deaths had forever shaped the world in which Larra lived, in which Jon was now a declared King and had to rebuild from the destruction created by civil wars.

Two civil wars, spanning two generations: Provoked first by the Targaryens, and then by their successors the Lannisters.

It was Houses Stark and Martell who had suffered the brunt of their cruelty. They had lost too much. Though their cultures were opposite as fire and ice, Larra thought they had common ground. That had to be enough to make a start…

As Rhaegar joined Princess Elia, the lady-in-waiting stacked the painted cards neatly and slipped away, leaving husband and wife to lean in to each other and converse under cover of the noise of the festivities. The candlelight glinted off Rhaegar’s pale golden-silver hair, illuminating his eyes to an impossible deep purple, and it was clear to Princess Elia that her husband’s gaze would remain riveted on the girl in the grey gown with her infectious smile no matter what they spoke of. There was an amused, fond, almost indulgent look in Elia’s pretty dark eyes, as she gazed between them, Rhaegar tenderly stroked her hand, murmuring to her in spite of his distraction.

“You are in discomfort,” Rhaegar said finally, when Lyanna had disappeared from his view, to enjoy a drink with her brothers and catch her breath, murmuring quietly with Ned Stark and frowning at Robert Baratheon, who was flirting shamelessly with a cluster of young ladies glittering with jewels and swathed in asymmetric gowns Larra would have associated with Cersei Lannister, had she been in power, and present at the tourney. Larra gazed yearningly after her family, but Brandon remained focused on the royal couple: She had to stay. Rhaegar gave Elia a thoughtful, considerate look, shaking his head. “The journey was too much, and too soon.”

“The decision was made when Lord Varys whispered into your father’s ear of Lord Whent’s tourney,” Elia said, her voice rich and soft and accented, bringing to Larra’s mind spices and exotic perfumes and indolent afternoons lazing in the perfumed shades of a bright hot sun she had never experienced. There was also a bite to her tone, the sting of the poison her family was known for. Her dark eyes flicked briefly to the King, staring agitatedly but unseeingly into the writhing masses dancing boisterously in spite of his presence. Rhaegar’s eyes fell on his father, and a cold rage flitted across his face ever so briefly - a second, and it was gone, but Larra saw it, saw the muscle ticking in his jaw the same way Jon’s did when he was trying to control his fury - and Elia saw it. “This tourney would have been the perfect opportunity to declare you intend to marry again.”

Rhaegar blinked, startled, and turned to his wife, looking appalled.

“I do?”

Elia’s smile was sad but accepting. “You yearn for more children, Rhaegar, I see it every time you are with our daughter; you ache to ensure her childhood, Aegon’s, is nothing like your own lonely one. You would fill the nursery to bursting with babies if you could.”

“El…” he sighed, shaking his head, his indigo eyes wide. “We have Rhaenys and our little Egg, and are blessed to have both. And you. Do you think I am so selfish I’d risk you just to put another babe in your belly?”

“If they take after me, our children shall not live long. Your mother’s luck proves that there is no certainty though the babe survives birth,” Elia said, grimly and honestly, glancing at the King once more as Rhaegar gaped; a chair sat empty beside the King, Queen Rhaella’s seat. He had forbidden her from leaving the Red Keep in years, long before the Defiance of Duskendale, and young Prince Viserys was absent also. Viserys, one pregnancy out of a dozen to come to term after Rhaegar’s birth, Rhaella’s only child after Rhaegar to survive past infancy. And Elia had always endured her fragile health as best she was able, though she had remained bedridden half a year after her daughter’s birth, and delivering her son had almost cost her life.

Rhaegar knew it: He had no answer.

“You need another wife,” Elia murmured, though her anguish at the idea poured into her voice, flinching as she said it. “For the good of the realm you must father more children, and I…I cannot carry another child.” As if to compound her statement, she shifted on her cushions, and a sharp gasp had Rhaegar looking anxiously at her; pain flitted across her face, her cheeks going pale, and she settled back in her chair slowly, breathing out through her mouth, eyes half-closed. “All things must end, love… Tywin would offer his daughter and his support.”

“Tywin has too much strength already,” Rhaegar said grimly, shaking his head. “And I mistrust the girl.”

“Why so?” Elia asked gently.

“There were other ways to spite and insult Lord Tywin,” Rhaegar said thoughtfully, watching his father, who sat festering, blind to the celebrations, not touching the food or drink set before him. “The empty Kingsguard position was not intended for Ser Jaime…Lord Varys mentioned something about Cersei Lannister and her twin-brother, something…worrying. Only a Targaryen would not find it distasteful…”

“Isn’t all news Varys brings distasteful?” Elia asked, with a clipped, almost disdainful tone. She frowned, and glanced at Rhaegar, then across the hall, her lips parting with realisation, as they landed on handsome young Jaime Lannister with his golden hair and irreverent emerald eyes. “You surely don’t mean -?”

“Varys says it was Cersei who approached my father with the idea to naming Jaime Lannister… There were rumours Tywin intended him for Lysa Tully.”

“Take the white cloak of the brothers…take no wife,” Elia murmured, watching Jaime Lannister dancing. “And yet Tywin took Cersei from the capital when your father named Jaime to the Kingsguard.”

“Not quite what Cersei expected,” Rhaegar said, with a twist to his mouth, a glint in his eyes.

“And how would she have been certain she would remain in the capital?” Elia asked, but even as she did, her eyes narrowed. “Ah…Aegon.”

“The entire court awaited news you would survive his birth,” Rhaegar said, an angry undercurrent to his tone that had Elia resting her elegant hand on his arm. “I imagine Tywin would have been the first to offer condolences and a choice bride.”

“He is far more subtle than that,” Elia murmured. “An alliance, with the promise of you un-naming his heir to the Kingsguard, the position of Hand returned to him under your regency… Tywin will always bide his time… He knows what is happening at court, Pycelle will see to that. Tywin will be waiting to see what you do, Rhaegar.”

“I know what I have to do… I should have done it years ago: My Uncle Maester tells me I must kill the boy…’kill the boy Rhaegar, and let the man be born, the man who would be King’,” Rhaegar said miserably. “The man who would depose his own father, no matter how much he loves him…for the good of his people.” Rhaegar watched the Mad King with a mixture of dread and sorrow - in that moment, he was a son heartbroken by the loss of the father he remembered, the mind of the man he had loved fracturing irreparably before his eyes. He was old enough to have witnessed his father’s deterioration - Larra had worked it out during her lessons; Rhaegar had been eighteen years old during the Defiance of Duskendale. The question of how history may have unfolded had not Ser Barristan the Bold single-handedly rescued the King was one that had consumed hours of her and her brothers’ study with Maester Luwin.

“How shall you go about it? King’s Landing is a nest of vipers - and coming from a Martell you know this is not an exaggeration,” Elia murmured, and Rhaegar’s lips quirked with subtle amusement. “Where can you ensure the support you desperately need, to ensure the transition goes smoothly?”

“I don’t know…” Rhaegar looked suddenly exhausted, and he rubbed his brilliant indigo eyes, his expression pained. “This tourney should have provided the perfect opportunity to find out.”

“Perhaps it still shall,” Elia mused, thoughtfully watching the dancers, and a skimpily-clad woman from Volantis tumbling past, amusing several young lords. Elia sighed. “The scandal of you setting me aside to remarry - the mad scurry of all the lords of Westeros rushing to provide your new bride - would give ample concealment of your true intention to solidify alliance to imprison your father and enforce a regency.”

Rhaegar gulped visibly, his indigo eyes widening, and he slowly set his wine-glass down. “Imprison?”

Elia’s face was fierce for a moment, her voice losing its sultriness in favour of a sternness that Larra remembered in the Northern voices of her childhood. “If you do not confine him soon, someone will take opportunity to kill him in spite of all his precautions. You know this. You know there are those at court who are willing to die for you by killing him. You know you do not want an innocent person condemned to death for regicide when you can prevent things escalating further.”

“I know it. I dread it,” Rhaegar admitted, his shoulders drooping with grief. He shook his head, silky golden-silver hair past his shoulders glinting in the candlelight. “You have more faith in my abilities than I do.”

“There’s not a person in the world who could do this…except you. I believe that with every fibre of my being.” Rhaegar leaned in, and tenderly kissed his wife’s lips; he stroked her cheek with his thumb, and sighed, resting his brow against hers, eyes closed, relaxed for the briefest moment with her. “You were gone all day; your father was looking for you. Arthur tells me you wandered the godswood, searching for the Knight of the Laughing Tree. Did you find him?”

“I found the steely strength and honour of a true knight, indeed,” Rhaegar said, settling back in his chair, and betraying himself by seeking out Lyanna Stark among the dancers, an amused glint in his eyes that transformed his entire face, making his compelling features warm, entrancing. “But the Knight of the Laughing Tree was a mirage…”

“Much like this tourney,” Elia murmured, glancing around the vibrant hall with its exotic Volanteen dancers and tumblers, its flowers and fools. Her eyes rested on Lyanna Stark, now dancing with Ser Jaime Lannister, youngest-ever initiate of the Kingsguard, a gilded lion in his prime - and no longer any competition to the young lords gathered at Harrenhall set upon sealing contracts for marriage with the ladies present. Lyanna smiled beautifully as she danced with Ser Jaime, but - and Larra knew it from personal experience - the thrill of Ser Jaime’s outward beauty was dimmed by his arrogance. Lyanna’s smile was wild and bright, her cheeks pink from wine and dancing, and she laughed breathlessly at something, before leaping and twirling to the music, away from Ser Jaime to her new partner. “She has a fierce beauty, doesn’t she? I do not recognise her face from court.”

“Northerners stay in the North,” Rhaegar said, almost miserably, a yearning look in his eyes as he followed Lyanna twirling around the hall. “That is Lyanna, Lord Rickard Stark’s only daughter.”

Elia blinked, and glanced back at Lyanna, now dancing with a young lord from the Neck who was not a natural dancer - Larra recognised the sigil upon his breast, and for a moment, she was startled - it was Jojen. But it couldn’t be… She flicked her gaze at Brandon, who was watching young Howland Reed with a sorrowful, wistful grimace that made Larra think…perhaps he was still in there, her Bran… Realisation flickered in Elia’s dark eyes, and Larra thought of the reputation of Elia’s eldest brother, the cunning Prince Doran. “The Starks honour the Old Gods.”

“They do,” said Rhaegar, giving his wife a sidelong look; they could not keep secrets from each other, Larra realised.

“I have never seen you mesmerised by a woman before…” Elia said thoughtfully, watching Lyanna curiously. “What did you speak to Lyanna Stark about all day in the godswood?”

“Knighthood.” There was an ironic little tilt to the corners of Rhaegar’s lips as he smiled. His eyes glittered with enthusiasm.

“Perhaps the Lady Lyanna desires to be knighted by royalty,” Elia said, hiding a smirk, trailing a fingertip along her husband’s arm. He quirked one eyebrow - a talent he had bequeathed to his twin children Jon and Larra - and glanced at Elia.

“The Northerners pay no mind to knighthood, and even less to southern royalty,” he said, almost gloomily. Elia’s lips twitched.

“And yet you cannot look away. She is intoxicating,” Elia admitted without envy, watching Lyanna, now dancing with Ser Arthur Dayne - she had a breathless awe in her face that Larra would have recognised in a polished glass; Larra had always been half in love with the Sword of the Morning. Elia’s dark eyes twinkled with flirtatious amusement as she turned to Rhaegar: “She has such wonderful hips…and those breasts…how succulent.” The way she said succulent, as if savouring the word with her tongue, lingering and erotic, made Larra shiver from her nipples to her knees, warming everything between. She had always heard of Elia’s frail health and assumed by nature she was also reclining and gentle: But there was the Dornish flair in her after all, a seductive indolence and glimmer of danger - the danger of an educated woman who knew her husband. “I imagine a direwolf would birth you a formidable litter.”

“And what about you? Shall I become Maegor to secure more heirs?” Rhaegar asked, and Larra thought he was angry - almost ashamed, absolutely offended by the comparison, the idea that Elia would propose it to him. “Shall we share Dragonstone, the three of us, and raise our brood of children together?”

“The Faith will not accept it, you know this, though it would be to everyone’s benefit to allow it…” Elia sighed, shaking her head. A whisper of spicy perfume teased Larra’s nose, a direct contrast to the crisp white floral scents she remembered wearing as a girl. It was an exotic and inimitable fragrance that had died with Elia, never to be recaptured.

“I remember your stance on polygamy,” Rhaegar said fondly, his lips almost smiling.

“More damage has been done through your family’s incest than through their polygamy. Maegor was one man: Targaryen intermarriage created a dozen more of his ilk,” Elia said, with a sharpness that surprised Larra, her dark eyes lingering on the King for a heartbeat. Aerys II Targaryen was now named beside Maegor the Cruel and Aegon the Unworthy in terms of his insanity, his cruelty, and his ineptitude as a monarch.

“And what happens to you?” Rhaegar challenged her, turning to his wife after refilling her cordial glass. “What shall I tell your brothers when I cast you back to the Water Gardens, still healing from delivering the last child I gave you?”

“You needn’t tell them anything. I shall,” Elia said benignly, and she smiled beautifully and sighed, closing her eyes. She rested against the high-backed chair. “To be among my family again… It is all I want. To see my children play among the orange-trees with their cousins…”

“Gods. Rhaenys shall wield a glaive before she is five. I do wonder if Arthur would flee from her,” Rhaegar said drily, and Elia’s lips quirked into a beautiful smile, though her eyes were closed, resting, perhaps reminiscing, her elegant hands folded over her navel as if remembering her recent pregnancies, and perhaps yearning for the next child she could never have. Rhaegar watched her sorrowfully; he reached over and squeezed her delicate hands with one of his own huge ones, and Elia’s dark eyes opened to see Rhaegar leaning in for a delicate kiss that became consuming.

Their relationship was complex, as all marriages seemed to be.

“I adore you. You do know that,” he said softly against her lips, Elia breathless, tugging on the sleeve of his tunic, and she nodded her head subtly, her eyes on his as he kissed her again, lazily. Larra wanted to look away, her cheeks warm, a surge of loneliness filling her with sadness.

“You will find a way, Rhaegar,” Elia sighed against his lips, dusting his jaw with kisses. She stroked his cheek with her thumb, a delicate ring with a citrine set into a gold sunburst glinting on her finger. “If there is no precedent, you shall set it. A modern way to manage royal marriage.”

“A modern way?” Rhaegar chuckled, though the warmth of it did not quite reach his eyes. “Preferable to beheadings and war.”

“A modern way that protects our children’s place in the line of succession,” Elia said carefully, a flair of pride and determination tilting her chin up, “and ensures another takes my place to help you fulfil your duties to the crown…just in case… You married me out of duty. This time, you can marry for love. Marry a woman of your choosing, and be happy, Rhaegar. No matter what happens, choose wisely, and let yourself love her - allow yourself to be loved by her. You must let someone past those walls you have built so assiduously.”

He kissed her once more, deep and lingering, and again Larra was reminded of the complexities of marriage, having observed the quiet companionship of Robert and Cersei. She remembered Ned’s marriage to Catelyn, strong and enduring - and tainted by Ned’s love for Larra’s mother; Catelyn loved Ned and despised his children out of jealousy of their mother.

Rhaegar may not have been in love with Elia, but it was very clear he did love her, respected her wisdom and shared companionship with her. They adored their children. They enjoyed each other. If not for the fact Rhaegar was not in love with Elia, and not truly happy, it would have been ideal.

Larra thought Rhaegar was blessed: And taking Elia utterly for granted.

Who was truly happy? And how long did that joy last?

What was ecstasy - a brief moment of brilliant, shocking delight, over too soon - compared to constant, steady friendship, companionship, respect?

How rare was it to find both in one’s partner in life?

Larra had a deep well of joy to draw from, from her childhood - in spite of Lady Catelyn’s best efforts - and her memories were all that had sustained her the last few years, bittersweet as they were.

But Rhaegar’s conversation with Elia added another layer to the mystery of why the Last Dragon, the famed poet-warrior who sang to orphans and tradesmen in the streets, a champion in the lists, respected and admired by the Seven Kingdoms in spite of the Rebellion, had abandoned his wife to pursue a wild Northern girl, and torn the kingdoms apart with civil war - something Larra knew implicitly, from this conversation alone, that Rhaegar was trying actively to avoid.

And she realised why he had not simply seized control, confining his father and imposing a regency: Rhaegar did care what others thought of him. Asking Elia how he could possibly explain his actions to her brothers when he dishonoured her by ending their marriage… Imprisoning his father to seize control: It mattered to him how his reign began. He had married Elia, at his father’s command: He was a dutiful son, and an honour-bound, dutiful prince who worried about the realm. And it was for the realm he held back from taking action, lest it spark widespread conflict beyond his control to maintain…

He had made a colossal error in keeping things secret, in an attempt to prevent a civil war…

Ser Arthur approached, bowing formally to the Princess with a glint in his eye and a smile she returned fondly; he addressed Rhaegar, in a soft, rich voice like velvet and smoke. Subtle and commanding, like the Sword of the Morning himself. “They want a song, Rhaegar.”

“Of course they do,” Elia chuckled, shaking her head and smiling adoringly at her husband, laughing fondly as Rhaegar made a show of groaning, though his eyes were smiling. “Keep them sweet.”

The dancers had stopped, the music gentling; people were murmuring, laughing, turning to the royal couple. It could not be plainer that they were here for Prince Rhaegar: The King’s presence was an unwanted anomaly, and he was largely ignored - dangerous, considering the King’s malleable moods, but in that moment, Larra doubted the King was lucid at all. A gentle, expectant hush fell over the hall, and Rhaegar chuckled to himself as he climbed out of his seat. Everyone rose - he was the Crown Prince, after all, and etiquette demanded it - he glanced around, sipping from his glass and waving his hand to coax everyone to sit.

Rhaegar, their Crown Prince, stood for them, entertaining them at their request. And he looked happy to do so; he gestured at the orchestra gathered in the gallery, and the crowd sighed as he started to sing.

Larra’s eyes burned, her throat closing painfully around a hot lump.

Everyone said Rhaegar had preferred singing to killing: He was excellent at both, but enjoyed only one. He was not Robert Baratheon, honed for war, and left to rust when idle. Rhaegar was a poet, a singer. And his voice…

They said he liked to sing. They said women wept at the sound of his voice. Until Larra heard it, she had no idea, truly, how gifted Rhaegar was. His voice was deep, rich and smooth, and he had been trained, she could tell; he projected his voice above the musical instruments, so that every last child and servant in the hall could hear him, as if he stood beside them, singing only to them.

He sang in High Valyrian, but it did not matter: The music, Rhaegar’s voice, the composition of the piece of music…

Larra knew this song.

She had heard it in her dreams. One day, she had started humming it; dreams had gifted her the words, and she had practiced singing it every day for weeks.

She remembered the look of horror on her father’s bloodless face when she had stood on a table in the Great Hall at Winterfell, singing to the King and his court… This song, Rhaegar’s song. He had a deep voice, what Maester Luwin would have called, in the Valyrian tongue, a tenor vocal range. Larra…she was somewhere between a mezzo and a soprano - and not nearly as well-trained as Rhaegar.

She had never, in all her life, heard anyone sing the way he did. The music, the composition, his voice…

Tears ran down her cheeks, utterly heartbroken.

Besides painting, music was one of her greatest joys: She had always loved to sing, to experiment with the few musical instruments that made their way to Winterfell. There were few at Winterfell to teach her the technique Rhaegar had mastered.

She was not the only one weeping. Old men gazed breathlessly at Rhaegar, shakily catching their breath as the music swelled and abruptly ended in perfect synchronisation with Rhaegar’s voice: Girls wiped their eyes on the sleeves of their gowns, and lords blinked, stupefied. Elia Martell gazed at Rhaegar as every man wanted to be gazed upon by his wife: Utterly, irrevocably in love with him.

Rhaegar’s eyes sought Lyanna in the crowd: His smile was startled and amused and he laughed softly, as he watched Lyanna upturn a glass of wine on her brother’s head, her face shining with tears. Beside her, young Benjen was clapping enthusiastically, smiling with pure childish delight at the Crown Prince.

The Crown Prince bowed to his audience. The song, the bow - simple acts of humility that ceded power to his lords and ladies, and earned their respect.

Showmanship, Larra wanted to call it. Rhaegar knew who his people were, and what they wanted, and chose his moments to give it to them - in ceding power by singing at their request, Rhaegar had only solidified his position with his people.

Very clever.

“He was clever,” she said sadly. She shook her head, and glanced at Brandon, asking miserably, “Why was it always the cleverest of men who make such staggering blunders?”

Brandon smiled sadly, and the hot, perfumed hall melted away. They were in a new place.

It was mid-afternoon, perhaps, in summer - or the South. The stone floor of the chamber was pale gold and the walls were painted beautifully, a sweeping frieze of songbirds - and elegant, stylised dragons that had a sinuous, eerie, spine-tingling beauty. The light was gentle as it filtered through sheer curtains over the balcony, glinting in the froths of pale curls spilling over a woman’s slim shoulders to her waist, soft, warm-toned golden hair with delicate silver lights glinting whenever a shaft of sunlight shone through the sheer curtains, sighing in the breeze that smelled of sunshine, brine and heavily-perfumed flowers.

The woman sat at a chaise, exquisitely elegant, and in spite of a dramatic difference in their colouring, Larra was reminded vividly of Cersei: The cut of her gown had the same asymmetric draping, delicate satin ribbon ties to bind the wrapped layers of shimmering iridescent silk so thin Larra was sure she could read raven-scrolls through it, in soft tones of pale lavenders, lilacs and silver. The billowing sleeves were lined with shimmering opalescent organza embroidered with silver and glinting beads. The woman’s waist was cinched with a sash of citrine brocade, and over this she wore a belt of gilt-embossed silver links etched exquisitely with stylised dragons. Around her wrists, she wore two elegant gold cuffs fashioned like sinuous, winged dragons - the three-headed dragon of the Targaryen sigil. There were hints of old bruises and scratches on her pale skin, revealed by her billowing sleeves as if she had long forgotten to try to hide them: A shawl of finest Qartheen lace, delicate as spider-silk, was draped over her elbows, again reminding Larra of Cersei Lannister. There was the subtlest trim of lilac velvet at the neckline, which came to a high point, revealing nothing but the base of a slender white throat, and the hints of old bruises and even a bite mark, slowly healing. Larra stared at it for a second. She knew, of course, who this woman was.

Set upon her grandmother’s rampant curls was a delicate circlet of silver and gold, not elaborate or heavily jewelled, just pretty, understated. Simple and elegant.

Queen Rhaella. She was breathtakingly beautiful. And the resemblance to Daenerys Targaryen was extraordinary. They were not identical, of course; but Daenerys had the same shape of eyes, and though this woman’s mouth was smaller, her lips were pretty, budding like a rose - Larra’s lips. There was something quiet and dignified about her: This was a woman who did not need to reveal an inch of flesh to have a crowd in thrall to her. Her face was oval-shaped and solemn, and her daughter had inherited her cheekbones, and the shape of her eyebrows; the Queen’s were pale gold, hovering anxiously over delicate lilac eyes.

“Now, you remember the most important thing?” she asked the little boy who stood before her, as she carefully knotted the high, scale-embroidered collar of his tunic with corded ties tipped with silver points like dragon-teeth. He fidgeted in the heat, uncomfortable in a fine, sleeveless overcoat, heavily embroidered with the Targaryen sigil, with sharp peaks at the shoulders that recalled Drogon’s spines, over a tailored leather tunic with split, peaked cuffs. He had the Targaryen silver-gold hair and pale-lilac eyes identical to his mother’s in colouring, though not in shape.

“Mmm…?” the little boy said, glancing away from a large gilded cage that spread across almost an entire wall, where brightly-coloured songbirds hopped and chirped merrily in spite of their captivity.

“You must remember, Viserys, not to wake the dragon,” said Queen Rhaella, with a kind urgency that was terrible to hear, her elegant hands gentle on his slim shoulders, veiled terror mingled with gentleness in her expression, a mother’s love pouring from beautiful eyes that seemed shuttered.

“I remember, Mother!” he chirped happily. “Shall Father give me sweets, do you think?”

“Only if you are very good,” Queen Rhaella assured him warmly, smoothing his shimmering hair, and he grinned. Tiny white teeth glinted in the sunlight.

“Surely he shall! I know all the names of the dragons now!” he said proudly, puffing out his little chest.

“Your father should like to hear them,” Queen Rhaella said softly, her expression as she gazed down at her youngest surviving son. He did not notice the bruises on his mother’s skin, or the bite-mark healing at the neckline of her gown, or the way the warmth and gentleness disappeared from her face in an instant as two septas and a lady-in-waiting appeared, replaced with something stark and terrified and then - nothing. Only her face, expressionless; betraying nothing, not even her own suffering.

Prince Viserys had not noticed the scars of her mother’s abuse; perhaps he saw them so often that they were not remarkable.

But Rhaegar, who slipped into the chamber after the little prince disappeared, noticed immediately. His searing indigo eyes went straight to his mother’s throat, the bruised bite-mark flirting with the neckline of her gown, winking from behind her shimmering curls - thick, heavy, riotous curls that ringleted and coiled, waved and danced wildly with every movement, as pale as her granddaughter’s were dark: Larra had inherited Queen Rhaella’s curls.

In contrast to the little prince who had skipped away with his septas, perfectly groomed, and the memory of Rhaegar at Harrenhall, dressed for a feast, Rhaegar appeared in dusty breeches and boots, the asymmetric collar of his black wool tunic open almost rakishly, his broad chest sheened with sweat, and a sword strapped to his back.

His had a dangerous glint in his eyes as they rested on that bruised skin, for only a heartbeat; then Queen Rhaella seemed to return to herself, saw her son, and Larra could never have accused him of a temper, his face betraying no anger. Mother and son had mastered the same technique of erasing all evidence of their private thoughts from their features. Larra wondered how long it had taken them, and what horrors they had endured to perfect it.

The Queen rose from the chaise in an elegant move Larra would never be able to mimic. One moment she was reclined, the next she was sweeping toward Rhaegar with her arms outstretched, a beauteous smile lighting up her entire face.

“Rhaegar…!” she sighed warmly. Rhaegar embraced his mother, tucking her slim body into his in an embrace that, to Larra, looked incredibly protective - as if he was offering her his physical strength, literally exposing his back to cover her body with his protection. He inhaled deeply of the perfume in her hair, a wonderful scent of jasmine, pear, honeysuckle and decadent Qartheen camellia that whispered around Larra’s nose and flirted sweetly, never overpowering but opulent. Understated, elegant and beautiful, like the Queen herself.

Larra inhaled the perfume deeply, tantalised by the scent. Perhaps a hint of Rhaegar’s memory lingered; to Larra, it smelled of home, of warmth and deep love, contentment - that was what Rhaegar experienced whenever he smelled his mother’s perfume…

“Was that Viserys I saw?” Rhaegar asked, as he released his mother.

“He has been summoned to the Throne Room,” Queen Rhaella said placidly, and Rhaegar gave her a sharp look. It may have been months since Harrenhall; there were stern lines in Rhaegar’s face that hadn’t been there when he was relaxed beside Elia, singing to his court. Something significant - or maybe several significant things - had happened since Harrenhall, something that kept Rhaegar at court, rather than his home on Dragonstone with Princess Elia and their children.

“You won’t join him at court?” he asked gently. Queen Rhaella and her husband the King had lived separate lives within the Red Keep, it was well-known.

“Let us have tea together,” Queen Rhaella said, smiling beautifully, and she rang a tiny silver bell that set the songbirds into a chorus. She watched them thoughtfully, approaching a little inlaid table, and lifted the lid of an enamel box; she dipped manicured fingertips into the box, taking a generous pinch of birdseed, and scattered it into the cage. The jewel-bright birds chirped and sang and put on a display for her. Rhaella watched the birds, and Rhaegar watched her; he seemed to sigh to himself, shaking his head, and turned to carry a carved chair toward his mother’s chaise. She cast him a disapproving look, gazing pointedly at one of the comfortable, upholstered seats.

“I’m covered in sweat and dust, Mother.”

“I wonder you did not bathe before you presented yourself to your Mama.”

“I wanted to see you,” Rhaegar said simply, as a lady-in-waiting appeared bearing a silver tea-tray, laden with elegant tulip-shaped tea-glasses and an etched silver pot steaming subtly over a tiny flame. Clustered around the teapot and glasses were tiny silver dishes of roasted almonds tossed in oil and salt, small sweet figs, tiny oranges, sticky, stuffed dates the size of Larra’s little-finger, tiny thousand-layer pastries oozing with honey and crushed pistachios, and the sweets Larra had seen only once, brought to Winterfell by the royal court during King Robert’s visit, morsels of ecstasy. A delicacy of Old Valyria, brought to Westeros by the Targaryens centuries before the Conquest. Exquisite pink pillows of rosewater and orange-blossom water flavoured gel encased crushed pistachios and chopped dates, each dusted in confectioner’s sugar.

Sansa had graciously allowed Larra to share one of the sweets Princess Myrcella had gifted her in a dainty silver box. Larra had never been bothered by sweets, her tastes leaning heavily toward savoury dishes…but those morsels…

Larra’s mouth watered even now for the unusual flavours, sumptuous, foreign and decadent and deceptively simple: The aromatic rosewater, the delicate tang of lemon-juice, the perfect sweetness and the savoury nuts, the rich colouring from the pomegranate juice, the unusual chewiness, they all reminded Larra of that quiet afternoon in Sansa’s chamber as summer snows had drifted around Winterfell, and they sat on the heavy, embroidered eiderdown on Sansa’s bed, a tiny silver box between them, sharing the contraband sweeties Sansa had hidden from her mother.

She had shared the secret with Larra. It was the one true kindness Larra remembered from Sansa in years, and perhaps it was that rare moment with Sansa, more than the morsels themselves, that made them so wonderful in her memory. She remembered Sansa prattling on about Princess Myrcella telling her that the ladies at court all ate morsels of ecstasy with bitter tea in the afternoons, to tide them over until their evening meal, playing a lazy game of cyvasse, or listening to the high harp, or sewing and gossiping. In her chambers at Winterfell, the Queen had invited Sansa to join her and Myrcella for bitter tea and decadent morsels: They heard of nothing else until Bran’s fall, the first true hurt their family had experienced since Lyanna’s abduction all those years ago.

Larra had always wondered why Cersei, who had seemed to take no genuine delight in food or in company, would sit to tea offering morsels of ecstasy. Now she understood: Cersei, who had spent time at court when she was a girl while her father served as Hand to Aerys II Targaryen, had seen Queen Rhaella luxuriate in the tradition. Cersei associated tea and morsels of ecstasy with the role of Queen: So she continued the custom, though she had not cultivated the tradition or had any personal connection to the treats handed out. It was different for Queen Rhaella: the morsels were her inheritance, the last few scraps of her family’s culture that had survived the Doom, one of the few ways she could retain Valyrian traditions in a strange land. Larra wondered how much of Valyrian culture the Targaryens had taught each other and carried on throughout the generations with quaint customs like this, and how many of them had inadvertently leaked throughout Westeros due to their influence the last few centuries.

It was a strange thing for her to focus on, when Rhaegar Targaryen stood not three feet from her, very much alive… But she did. She couldn’t help it. Were Brandon to show her their father again - the father she remembered, not the boy he had once been - she would have been a wreck, sobbing in a heap on the floor, most likely - but it was like Cersei with the morsels of ecstasy: Larra had no personal connection to Rhaegar. He was a man, like any other - a brilliant, foolish man, it turned out - but not her father. He may have wedded and bedded Lyanna Stark to help create her and Jon, but the man who was her father had raised her, ensured her education, protected her, had lost his head in this very city…

She could not deny that it was not exhilarating to look at Rhaegar Targaryen, the man who had fathered them, now that she knew the truth about her mother - and even Rhaella, her grandmother through Rhaegar. Larra had inherited her grandmother’s lips and curls, through him, and Jon his nose; Rhaegar had given Larra her eyes, and her height, she was sure, and they had both inherited his hands - Jon’s, absolutely, huge palms, long, slender fingers, and Larra’s, slightly smaller, more elegant, with fingers just as long and slender. They even had the same shape nails, and looking even more closely at him, Larra was certain she had inherited the same pattern of tiny beauty-spots on her chest as Rhaegar had on his, and those dusted on his brawny forearms, his sleeves pushed up to his elbows.

Larra looked at Rhaegar, and realised they even had the same shape teeth - good and strong, white and straight. They had his smile - rare, and more startlingly beautiful because of it.

People had always said their mother had left little of herself in Jon and Larra: That they favoured their father, Ned, in looks. The truth of it was, they took after Lyanna in her colouring: But they did share some resemblance to Rhaegar Targaryen, in the details. Larra had always paid close attention to the details: in her lessons, in her cyvasse campaign strategies, in her painting; and in people’s requests, their complaints.

Mother and son sat to tea, the Queen passing the honour of pouring the tea over to her son - the women prepared, the men poured. That was the custom in Old Valyria: And men served guests first, always, ladies and children first - ensuring they were provided for.

That was a quaint custom Larra felt more of Westeros should have long ago adopted.

Rhaegar tried, and Larra could see his frustration - remembered Jon, in the moments she watched Rhaegar trying to coax his mother into speaking of politics, of the fraught nature of court, of…of her husband the King whose paranoia was becoming legendary, only outmatched by his brutality.

“Word is spreading through the city,” Rhaegar murmured, watching his mother carefully, and Larra could see Rhaegar tasting his words before he used them. “They know Father is excited by fire.”

Queen Rhaella could not hide her flinch: If it had been anyone else, Larra thought she might have been able to - though no-one else would have dared bring up the topic. She could not hide from her firstborn, though, her adult son, who was the same age as Larra now was, she realised, as they spoke, though he seemed older than his years due to his size, and his melancholy nature…she wondered what horrors he had witnessed in these painted halls. Yes, people knew Aerys had become sexually excited by the executions-by-fire he commanded in the latter part of his reign… It was still whispered - out of respect for Rhaella - that he had been sexually violent to the Queen after he fed men to the fire.

Daenerys Targaryen, they said, had been conceived by force after Aerys fed his Hand, Qarlton Chelsted, to the flames, during the Rebellion: Aerys had viciously raped Queen Rhaella, resulting in her last pregnancy.

Larra thought of Daenerys Targaryen in the temple of the dosh khaleen, and wondered if she had fucked her paramour that night - Larra had seen him, earthy and handsome, cocky and, relatively speaking, good-natured, standing beside an older man wearing the bear sigil of House Mormont, and a white-haired man even Larra knew as Ser Barristan the Bold.

She wondered if Daenerys Targaryen felt a thrill every time she executed a man.

Larra wondered if Daenerys would be as ready to burn men alive if she knew she would never have been born had her father not lusted for death by fire - had he not brutalised her mother every time he sentenced a man to die…

Rhaella stood to scatter a pinch of birdseed to her songbirds in their gilded cage, her face wiped of all emotion. But her fingers trembled, and Rhaegar noticed. He stood, and Larra observed how careful he was, in how he approached his mother, how he made himself seem smaller, less threatening, did not crowd her, approached her as if she was a wounded, skittish animal that might die of fright rather than bite to protect itself.

Rhaegar reached out, and tenderly moved aside the collar of his mother’s modest, beautiful gown to reveal her neck, bruised and scratched… Inches below her collar-bone, a fuchsia-purple bruise flourished angrily, another bite-mark glared furiously red and ragged against her pale skin, the swell of her white breast above her stays and tissue-thin silk smallclothes. The dangerous glint in Rhaegar’s eyes seemed to catch alight, even as the light flickered and died in Rhaella’s eyes, absence of any emotion replacing the warmth of her smile, the gentle strength of her love.

It struck Larra how large Rhaegar was: He was a good two heads taller than his slender mother - she was taller than her daughter, Larra knew, closer to Larra’s own height - and even in his dark, sleekly-tailored sparring clothing, deceptively slender, Rhaegar was well-built. Beside him, the Queen, who had not struck Larra at all as being frail, or as anything but regal and composed, looked particularly delicate, and young… She tried to remember her lessons, thought Queen Rhaella had not yet seen her fortieth birthday when she died on Dragonstone… She had been married after her very first blood, it was commonly known, with Rhaegar born during the Tragedy of Summerhall soon after, born as his family died in flames and agony as Aegon the Unlikely strove to bring dragons into the world again and bring the Westerosi lords to heel… Larra was reminded again of the temple of the dosh khaleen…

The Queen seemed to ignore the look on Rhaegar’s face; she did not shy away from his hand, but she did not acknowledge it either. “How long have you known?”

“Long enough I am ashamed not to have acted before,” Rhaegar said quietly, and something flickered in his mother’s eyes. He righted the neckline of her gown, and Larra saw him clench his hands into fists as he lowered them.

“The court is like a cache of wildfire,” Queen Rhaella said, her voice gentle but unyielding. Larra had heard people describe Rhaegar as having ‘iron tones’ in his voice - she imagined this woman was where Rhaegar got his strength from, not his broken-minded father. “One careless spark and we shall face another Dance of Dragons. Darling boy, the Seven Kingdoms cannot be drawn into our family’s tragedies.”

“We cannot prevent a civil war, Mother. Soon Father will execute the wrong man,” Rhaegar warned quietly. “All we can do is minimise the damage.”

“We need Tywin,” Rhaella said, almost a moan, as she wrung her elegant hands. “I am surprised he does not return to King’s Landing to take young Ser Jaime’s place as your father’s intended hostage to ensure Lannister loyalty.”

“Ser Jaime is not his father, and Tywin knows it,” Rhaegar said quietly. “And Lord Tywin knows Father would as soon burn him alive as invite him to be his Hand again. What news from the Rock?”

“I receive no word of answer to the ravens I have despatched,” Rhaella said anxiously.

“You are assuming Varys has not diverted them to a brazier.”

“I take them to the ravenry myself,” Queen Rhaella said gently, a flicker of apprehension crossing her face. “Whatever happens, we cannot rely on Tywin’s loyalty. Not with Ser Jaime as your father’s hostage, and such bad blood between them.”

“And with sixty-thousand men at his command if he chooses to raise his banners…?” Rhaegar murmured, catching his mother’s eye. He shook his head. “It will not be Tywin who ignites the wildfire, Mother. He’s far too prudent for that. He’ll wait, and watch…he’ll do what he must to ensure the boy’s safety, but no more… Father has turned a stalwart ally and fierce friend into a man utterly indifferent to his fate.” His eyes lingered on his mother’s bruises. “All those who once loved and admired him see him for what he has always been.”

“He hasn’t always…”

“Been cruel? You best of all know that he has,” Rhaegar said gently. Rhaella turned her lilac eyes on her son, frowning subtly. “You cannot hide it from me as you do Viserys… Yet the more I see, the more you seem to blind yourself to… Now all of Westeros shall know just how broken Father’s mind is.”

A faint tinge of colour touched Rhaella’s cheeks, but she stood tall, her shoulders back, chin level to the floor. Unchallenging, but not cowering either. Confident, but not arrogant. Larra was enthralled by her use of her body to communicate without words. “Should I bar my door and send him to a brothel? Bring whores to his bed for him to mutilate when they displease him? How many shall die so I may sleep painlessly?”

A muscle ticked in Rhaegar’s jaw - the same muscle that ticked in Jon’s whenever he was furious, and trying hard not to give in to his frustrations. “It pleases him to hurt you.”

“I know what people think - I hear what they say… Lord Varys is very good about keeping me informed, just as he does your father, though he feeds us different morsels… People do not realise I have my own influence over the King,” Rhaella said softly, and that tick reappeared in Rhaegar’s jaw. “It is I who can gentle the worst of his obsessive distrust, after he has taken such pains throughout our marriage to ensure I alone can be trusted… But I would endure him every night, my darling boy, if it meant keeping you safe. And Elia, and Rhaenys, and Aegon, and Viserys.”

“It should be me protecting you,” Rhaegar said firmly.

“No, my love…do not deny me a mother’s single purpose…to protect her children. How many generations lingered on Dragonstone before Aegon turned his eyes westward? I will wait…and I will witness a great ruler create an empire the world has never seen before,” Rhaella murmured, resting her palm against Rhaegar’s cheek, her lilac eyes over-brimming with pride and love.

Larra’s heart broke. She had lived her entire life wanting someone to look at her that way. Her heart broke, because this kind, dutiful and resilient lady had died, knowing all but two of her family-members had been butchered as sadistically as any of her husband’s victims had been. A boy with missing milk-teeth had been crowned King at Dragonstone; all Rhaella had to give her daughter was a trailing name she had carried with her to the Dothraki Sea and beyond…

A lady-in-waiting appeared; the Queen cast her a measuring look.

“A meeting of your charities? Or are we to have another ball?” Rhaegar asked gloomily. Queen Rhaella’s lips twitched toward a smile, her eyes glinting, but they didn’t quite make it; a shadow flickered across her eyes, and her smile died.

“Keep the court fed and entertained and they will endure any mistreatment,” she said softly.

“Slowly the unthinkable becomes tolerable,” Rhaegar murmured darkly. “And then acceptable. Then celebrated… Until it is not. Father’s madness will not long be tolerated, Mother.”

“Rhaegar,” Queen Rhaella warned. “These walls have eyes and ears.”

“The Spider can tell Father what he likes; the Gods know he already does, to suit his own purposes,” Rhaegar said, with a touch of impatience rather than disdain.

“Better to keep everyone sweet, my love,” Rhaella warned in an undertone, echoing what Elia had said at Harrenhall. She turned to leave with her lady-in-waiting.

“Would you forgive me, Mother?” Rhaegar asked, and Rhaella paused at the steps. She glanced over her shoulder, that look on her face again, breaking Larra’s heart.

“My first, dearest love… A mother can forgive her child anything.”

That was Rhaegar’s permission; and his pardon.

It dictated the destruction of a dynasty, though that was not the intent of Rhaegar or his mother.

The Queen left, her lady-in-waiting trailing behind her, and Rhaegar let out a pent-up breath, his eyes closed. When he opened them, he unfurled his fingers, and Larra felt suddenly light-headed, noticing the tiny bloody crescents standing out angrily on his calloused palms.

Her own palms seemed to burn, and she glanced down at them, her lips parting. She bore the same scars as her father; had the exact same habit to internalise her rage and prevent herself hurting anyone, or making anyone think less of her for her reaction.

A shadow appeared in the doorway, an unassumingly handsome man with cropped dark hair and violet eyes, clean-shaven, with solemn high cheekbones and a sense of gravitas that made him feel almost Northern to Larra. She knew he wasn’t. Her lips parted, a surge of unexpected delight almost making her smile.

She was uncertain how she felt about seeing Rhaegar Targaryen in the flesh, after what she had learned - perhaps especially because of that. As a girl she had been hyper-critical of Rhaegar’s conduct and apparent contradictions in character when he abducted Lyanna - to know he had acted honourably to Lyanna after all, yet had torn Westeros asunder in the act of marrying her…she had thought him selfish in her youth; now, the same age he had been when he and Lyanna eloped, Lyanna thought him foolish. She was uncertain of Rhaegar, and probably always would be; he was an enigma that belonged to the past.

But Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning?

She had always been half in love with him.

Father spoke so rarely but so highly of him… She now knew why: Ser Arthur had died defending Lyanna - defending her, and Jon, the last of Rhaegar’s legacy. It wasn’t just that Ser Arthur was the best swordsman Ned had ever seen: Father had considered him a noble, honourable man. Rhaegar had taken control of royalist forces fighting in the North, and had left his best, fiercest friend, a legendary swordsman, to defend Lyanna.

Ser Arthur sighed heavily, his eyes on Rhaegar’s hands. He approached, took one of Rhaegar’s hands in his to examine his palms.

“That’s no good. You won’t be able to hold your sword if you continue to maim yourself,” he said, in his smoky, rich voice.

“Did you hear that?” Rhaegar asked glumly, and Ser Arthur nodded.

“I did,” he said simply. “I am with you, always.” Rhaegar lifted his head, his own indigo eyes seeking Ser Arthur’s violet ones.

“Thank you, brother,” Rhaegar said softly. Ser Arthur nodded, clapped a hand on his shoulder, and the memory melted away as they departed the Queen’s painted chamber…

Brandon showed her a great many memories after that. The Queen’s flight from King’s Landing on a crisp morning, the sky cold and blue above, the sea gentle, the city holding its breath as it prepared for siege. A heavily pregnant Rhaella, receiving a raven-scroll from Dorne, signed by Lord Dayne of Starfall Hall, announcing the death of Lyanna Stark, and the Sword of the Morning who had defended her - it was Rhaella’s grief that cemented Larra’s belief that Rhaegar’s mother had known all along what Rhaegar had been up to, that she had known Rhaegar had dissolved his marriage to Elia in favour of marrying Lyanna and gaining Northern support for a coup to impose a regency on his father’s reign… Rhaella, thin and anxious, had sobbed, her belly bulging as she collapsed beside the Painted Table, small wooden dragons clutched in her hands, Viserys, now seemingly a lot older due to the frown of apprehension on his little face, watching from the hearth, roaring with flame as a storm raged around the castle.

Brandon showed her Rhaella nursing her only surviving daughter; and the gentle, strong queen with hands clasped at her breast, in full regalia, dressed all in gold, in the Sept, summer sunlight shattered through crystals that picked up every hue of gold and silver in her hair and gave colour to the death-paled lips small Viserys kissed as a septa waited patiently for him to say goodbye to his Mama.

They watched two small golden-silver haired children in a modest manse in Braavos, with a great bear of a man roaring orders at servants, who stole all of his money and turned out his charges when he died. A tiny meek girl traipsed, weeping, from the house with the red door and her quaint bedchamber with a lemon tree outside the window.

Larra traversed the Free Cities with the last Targaryens, the Beggar King who grew angrier, more desperate, more hopeless, with every door shut on him, every promise proved false…protecting the innocence of his sister against servants and sly hosts, even as he bullied her in his frustration and anger at their circumstances, the one person in the world who was beneath him.

The meek girl turned into a pretty young woman, a pale and delicate wraith who trailed uncertainly beside him, treading on eggshells as she glanced out of the corner of her eyes to gauge her brother’s mood, always heeding the threat - you don’t want to wake the dragon, do you? - the same warning his mother had given Viserys so many years ago: Viserys never realised Rhaella had been warning him against his father’s madness, the insanity Viserys resolutely denied all his life. Rhaegar had been a clever man who saw everything; Viserys had been a child whose family was gone before he could realise the truth for himself. He had passed his ignorance and his anger to Daenerys Stormborn, who turned her gaze away and stopped listening every time her Westerosi advisers warned her against echoing her father’s choices, giving in to her first, worst instincts.

Larra journeyed from the tranquil gardens of Pentos to the endless Dothraki Sea, and found herself thirsty for Daenerys Targaryen’s horse-lord husband, considerate to his fragile bride as he coaxed and petted and adored her on their wedding-night, and mounted her beneath the stars when she whispered a breathless, Yes!

She saw the complexities and paradoxes of Daenerys Stormborn, a meek girl who survived the brutality of the Dothraki, growing in confidence, adopting their harsh culture as her own, embracing their brutality - and simultaneously repulsed and horrified by it.

Larra witnessed the birth of dragons, heard newborn dragons croon and sing in the sunrise as a great pyre hissed and cracked and belched black smoke, and the Mother of Dragons was born.

They journeyed to Qarth, and Larra wished she could explore it: She grew more concerned as Daenerys Stormborn threatened to reduce Qarth to ash if her weak khalasaar was turned away - and did turn Astapor to ash, after reneging on her word to the Wise Masters. She sacked the city, and marched at the head of an army of Unsullied… Through trickery she claimed Yunkai, and her handsome lover Daario Naharis, wise through experience and the only one who did not dread Daenerys’ wrath to speak honestly to her.

She conquered Meereen. Gave proper burials to the child-slaves crucified as mile-markers to the greatest city in Slavers’ Bay - and then crucified hundreds of noblemen, even those who had nearly bankrupted their ancient families outbidding other, notoriously brutal nobles, to protect slaves they considered it their duty to protect, and provide for, within a corrupted institution only time and education could eradicate.

Larra smiled fondly, watching a drunken dwarf invigorate a broken economy, bringing peace to a city at war with itself, all while enjoying his sceptical Volantene whore, and trading barbs with the eunuch Varys, who watched the Dragon Queen shrewdly, and patiently, and disappointedly, as Daenerys continued to undermine her own rhetoric of breaking the wheel… At the first opportunity to nurture true, lasting change in Meereen, with support and peace and men who knew how to rule to guide her, Daenerys had ordered her khalasaar to board ships, Unsullied to leave their posts, and sail for Westeros - leaving a sell-sword company as her proxies in the Great Pyramid of Meereen, her lover with them.

Larra watched everything as it had occurred, attempting to do so without bias, but she was disappointed. Truthfully, she was distrustful, and wary of the Dragon Queen.

Daenerys Targaryen’s actions did not match her words.

Her actions spoke more than words.

The last memory was the most recent, Larra knew.

In a gloomy, high-ceilinged chamber, shards of brittle light glinted off eerie black rock shaped by spells and dragonfire, tall braziers burning as a diminutive court held its breath. At the far end of the chamber, a small woman with long silvery-gold hair sat straight-backed and arrogant on her ancestors’ first throne. This was Dragonstone, and a motley assortment of followers had gathered in the firelight to show their support of her.

Gone was the meek girl in finest Qartheen lace; gone the courageous young-woman in horse-hair vests and painted-silk trousers; gone the woman armoured in exquisite gowns, untouchable and out-of-touch; hints of the woman who had smiled as she burned the khals and luxuriated in the thrill of wielding her dragons as a weapon against the armada sent by Yunkai and Astapor showed in the hard set to Daenerys Targaryen’s face as she waited for someone, her chin raised arrogantly - somewhere between Qarth and the Astapor, Daenerys Targaryen had lost the warmth and courage and fierce earnestness that had defined her as a khaleesi - perhaps it had happened in Qarth, sentencing a maidservant to die slowly and in agony, for loyalty - Brandon had shown Larra that the maidservant Daenerys Targaryen had locked in a great vault to starve to death had been found in Daenerys’ enemy’s bed, where Daenerys had sent her, and where she had been kept, prevented from hearing news of her mistress until the Mother of Dragons had locked her away. The Summer Islander had broken the girl’s neck in the dark, rather than let her suffer.

Daenerys had killed those loyal to her without blinking, without reflection on her own part in what had happened: She had betrayed her word to the Masters of Astapor: And abandoned Meereen to its fate only after failing at establishing the new world she had vowed she was determined to create.

There was a coldness to Daenerys now, a brittle sense of power that Larra disliked immediately. As Daenerys Stormborn had left Essos, the warmth of Essos had left her.

It struck her that Daenerys was fully-clothed for the very first time. She had adopted the black colour-palette of her Targaryen sigil: And her clothes, though still incredibly fine, were of sturdy, thicker materials more suited to winter. The sharp shoulders of her short, pleated jacket recalled her brother Viserys’ embroidered overcoats. And the Breaker of Chains wore a silvered chain of dragon vertebrae from one shoulder to her hip, with a three-headed dragon clasp. Her long hair glinted in the firelight as she waited, unmoving.

Around her were clustered people Larra had never met, but knew where they came from simply by their dress.

A sultry Dornishwoman draped artfully in layers of shimmering fabrics that still managed to hint at the lithe, shapely body beneath, her tanned midriff almost bare, her painted silk trousers and overskirts billowing, embroidery glittering in the firelight as she moved, a sash of vibrant silk protecting her from a wide belt heavily adorned with gold discs embedded with jewels. Her voluptuous breasts were highlighted by a bright, cropped jacket over a translucent silk split tunic that gave teasing glimpses of dark little nipples, flirting with her many pearl necklaces dripping sensuously to her navel, two veils - one heavy, embroidered and beaded brocade, held in place by a heavy chain-and-pearl headdress, the other shimmering, light as air, barely disguising her face and the eyes glinting beneath, smoked with kohl. She held hands with two young girls, similarly though more modestly dressed, in richly embroidered, beaded fabrics draped airily and irresistibly, the elder dressed in black velvet with a Martell-ochre silk veil draped artfully around her, clasped with a sunspear brooch at her breast, the younger dressed much like her mother in warmer, sultry colours, subtly shaking her wrist around which a bracelet of tiny silver bells was clasped.

As the mother spoke to her girls in undertones, she was watched by shrewd pale eyes set into the wizened face of an old woman. She was plump in her old age, but was on her feet, and richly-dressed in a black brocade jacket, intricate thorny, vine-like belt and billowing skirts - she looked attractive and very dignified, wearing a wimple and a crespine adorned with a subtle golden rose motif in metal and a diaphanous pleated veil. The black of her outfit mirrored the mourning-wear of the Dornishwoman, echoing the wintry tones of Daenerys Targaryen’s new wardrobe, and the shell-like black leather armour of her Unsullied soldiers lining the walls.

The only breath of fresh air, of gentleness and softness, delicacy, and colour, came from the veritable bouquet of beauties clustered around the Tyrell matriarch, young girls all under the age of thirteen, Larra would guess, except for the eldest, who stood beside the inimitable Queen of Thorns, with her shoulders back and her chin level to the inlaid floor, deceptively unassuming and exquisitely pretty. The young girls all wore versions of the same gown, cut cleanly and simply, with floaty skirts of organza over silk, a short jacket with a low, wrapped neckline meeting at a point, worn over a gauzy organza underdress knotted at the base of the throat with silk ribbon, almost imitating Lady Olenna’s wimple, softer and more delicate, prettier. The tracery on their short jackets and some of their shawls was of closed, tight rosebuds - not decadent open roses like Lady Olenna’s gold tracery on her black jacket. And, unlike Lady Olenna’s black clothing, the young girls were dressed in soft pale-blue and shimmering icy-greens that had soft dove-grey undertones, still subdued but fresh, clean and crisp like an unexpected frost on the moors.

The eldest girl, the most exquisite of them, with her gentle green eyes and soft golden-brown hair waving to her waist, wore a more adult version of the younger girls’ dresses, not quite Lady Olenna’s jacket and skirts ensemble. Her shimmering gown had full skirts and simple lines, without the excess of organza, cleaner and crisp, the low, pointed neckline and the sharp cuffs of the long sleeves trimmed with velvet and glinting with embroidered vines and tight rosebuds. She showed off her elegant hands, her slender throat, hinted at her pretty breasts with delicate folds of iridescent organza tucked at her neckline, folded almost to resemble the unfurling petals of a rose. A heavy, embroidered shawl covered in almost erotic roses was draped around her for more warmth, and Larra knew the chill was not so much from the weather as the atmosphere in the hall: Superbly uninviting.

It was a small court, jumbled and hastily-assembled, not quite certain of itself. The only ones confident in their place were the Unsullied, and the Dothraki blood-riders who wielded wicked arakhs and whips, moving around the hall, restless, their long braids shining - and catching the young Tyrell girl’s interest, watching them curiously, the subtle chime of silver bells in their long braids adding to the music of the youngest Dornish girl as she huffed impatiently and shot a nasty look at Daenerys Targaryen, who sat unmoving, expectant, cold as ice.

Larra knew the Queen of Thorns by reputation alone: She assumed the Dornishwoman had some personal connection to House Martell.

And there…she recognised him instantly, though he looked older, his hair had grown out, and there was a solemnity to his face that had never been there before. She remembered him smirking and irreverent, irritating beyond belief, but fierce and loyal to Robb… Theon Greyjoy.

They were all waiting for someone.

And Daenerys Targaryen was impatient.

Notes:

A.N.: Sorry this one was so long! I got carried away, and the chapter sort of just ran away from me!

FACE-CLAIMS: There are a few for this chapter, actually for this story!

Queen Rhaella: Lea Seydoux (when she was in La Belle et la BĂŞte)
Rhaegar: Combo of Tom Hiddleston and Chris Hemsworth
Elia Martell: Gal Gadot
Alynore Tyrell: Kristine Froseth
Gendry: Henry Cavill, mmmmm…..

I love the costume designer’s theory on GoT that current Lannister fashions were heavily influenced over the last two generations by Targaryen court dress. The asymmetric cuts and elaborate folds and metal detailing are distinctively other in comparison to the other styles worn in Westeros. I like the theory that the Lannisters, through proximity to the court, with Tywin as the Hand of the King to Aerys for decades, had adopted some of the foreign, Old Valyria, Targaryan styles worn at court; and Cersei, expecting to marry Prince Rhaegar, would have adopted the style of dress she saw worn at court, especially by Queen Rhaella, similarly to how Sansa dressed to please Joffrey and Cersei in the beginning. Cersei was already imagining herself part of the royal family, and would certainly have dressed as if she belonged by Rhaegar’s side - and her family could afford it. Viserys wears a style he remembers from his childhood at court, which shows the same asymmetric cuts and folded, rich fabrics. After the end of the Targaryen dynasty, the Lannisters became the true power in Westeros and their dress was a nod to them usurping Targaryen power, usurping the fashion trends the Targaryens had set and making them their own - especially Cersei. Look at a picture of Viserys, compare it to young-Cersei’s dress, and there are a lot of similarities in the cut, draping and tie details.

Chapter 13: Never Forget What You Are

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

13

Never Forget What You Are


He was glad to be off that fucking ship.

On solid footing at last, the crashing waves at his back, Jon could almost have dropped to his knees and kissed the worn stones of the tiny, paved quay.

“Don’t know how you’ve lived most of your life on the water, Ser Davos,” Jon moaned, grimacing, and the older man chuckled good-naturedly, climbing up onto the jetty beside him. A handful of their men had rowed them to shore, the first Stark ship built in centuries moored in a choice area Davos trusted to shelter their ship from the worst of the elements. Davos was surprised where the Targaryen girl had anchored her armada: One foul storm and she would lose half her ships.

Jon wondered why no-one had warned her.

It struck Jon again, as it had when they first anchored, that the tiny town flirting hesitantly with the unpredictable coast should have been more active. Winter had come: Ser Davos had told Jon that the island of Dragonstone relied on the winter shoals migrating past to warmer waters to feed themselves. There were fewer than a handful of boats in the docks, including Jon’s little dinghy, and only one of them, Davos said, was a vessel built for the open seas, able to withstand the additional weight of net-fishing the shoals. The other boats were simple little dinghies intended to navigate around the island to the other hamlets when the water levels rose and drenched the paved walkways between Dragonstone castle and the port and villages.

“You get used to it,” Ser Davos said cheerfully. “Makes you truly appreciate the times you have solid earth beneath your boots. There are those more poetic than myself who wax lyrical about ships as the embodiment of freedom.”

“Tell that to the slaves transported across the world by them,” Jon grumbled; he was in a foul mood, and had been ever since they had set sail from White Harbour. He’d sent Sam and Gilly and Little Sam south by ship and would never be able to apologise enough. A horse or his own two feet were all Jon needed.

“You’re in a pretty temper,” Ser Davos teased, his eyes glinting.

“Everything’s…still swaying,” Jon moaned, closing his eyes as his vision span, and he ignored Ser Davos’ chuckle as he inhaled slowly, the disorientation subsiding. It wasn’t nausea he suffered from. He opened his eyes, frowning around the small port. “Where are all the fishing boats? Surely Stannis didn’t leave the island unable to provide for itself through the winter?”

“No, Stannis was prudent; and there’s been no-one here since the Targaryen girl arrived,” Ser Davos said, frowning in the weak sunlight. It was still brighter and hotter than anything Jon remembered - except that one, rare sunrise as he mounted the Wall after a long, terrifying climb. “There should be a small fleet bringing in the fish to preserve for the winter. The first true winter storm and the shoals will be gone.”

“So where are the ships?”

“Likely, they’ve been commandeered,” Ser Davos said darkly. “This Targaryen queen won’t want anyone smuggling news to the mainland about her invasion.”

“So the islanders must starve?” Jon frowned. Ser Davos did not answer: He was looking up the hill. Dragonstone, the island, was volcanic: Its earth was rich and arable due to the volcanic soil, Winterfell’s library had told Jon, when he’d cared to investigate with Maester Wolkan’s help. Ser Davos had told Jon that the crops grown on Dragonstone were plentiful - but the fighting men, who would plough and work the fields, had rallied under Stannis’s banners and died for him, either at the Battle of the Blackwater, or outside the gates of Winterfell during Stannis’s failed charge against the Boltons. How were the people of Dragonstone supposed to survive the winter while Daenerys Targaryen played out her invasion? “A poor precedent she’s setting.”

“Jon,” Ser Davos murmured warningly, and Jon followed his gaze. A small party was approaching, led by two pretty girls, one with rich amber-coloured skin, wide eyes heavily lashed and dark reddish hair, the other pale-skinned with high cheekbones, slanting dark eyes and a rosebud mouth, and long, silky black hair. They had been chosen for their beauty, Jon knew: They were both young maids on the cusp of womanhood, and several of the men surrounding them eyed them hungrily, as they carried banners emblazoned with the three-headed dragon of House Targaryen. Both wore their hair in elaborate braids, dressed similarly to a tall, dark-skinned woman taking care not to stride ahead of a familiar, stunted figure.

Tyrion Lannister.

It was the last note in the Imp’s letter that had had Jon believing its authenticity, as was Lord Tyrion’s intention. And here he was, dressed richly, his hair longer, darker, curling wildly, his face almost cloven in two by a deep scar, but smiling irreverently all the same, just as Jon remembered him - a curious mixture of rare human decency and arrogance.

“The bastard of Winterfell,” he said mockingly, and Jon gazed fondly at him, knowing he was mocking those who condemned Jon for his birth. Never forget what you are. Other people will not. Wear it like armour, and it can never be used to hurt you… In Jon’s memory, Lord Tyrion had not been nearly as short as he seemed, standing before him for the first time in nearly seven years.

“The dwarf of Casterly Rock,” he responded grimly, and felt his face unfreezing as he smiled; the Imp grinned, and they reached out to clasp hands.

“I believe we last saw each other at the top of the Wall,” Lord Tyrion said, and Jon nodded. That had been a very long time ago. Before Uncle Benjen had ventured beyond the Wall on his last, ill-fated Ranging. Before the Night King, before Mance…before Ygritte…

“You were pissing off the edge, if I remember right,” Jon said, and Lord Tyrion grinned. It made the scar slashed across his face more pronounced. “You’ve picked up some scars along the road.”

“Well, it wasn’t all feather beds and fine port by the fireside with ancient scrolls to peruse, I assure you,” Lord Tyrion said grimly. “But, we’re both still here.”

“In spite of people’s best efforts to make it otherwise,” Jon said, remembering what Sansa had told him of Lord Tyrion. “It’s good to see you again, my lord. Sansa will be pleased to know you’re safe and whole; she told me of your kindness toward her.” Lord Tyrion didn’t hide his surprise. “Ser Davos, this is Lord Tyrion Lannister. Lord Tyrion, my adviser, Ser Davos Seaworth.”

“Ah, the Onion Knight,” Lord Tyrion nodded, reaching to clasp Ser Davos’ hand. “We fought on opposite sides at the Battle of Blackwater Bay.”

“Unluckily for me,” Ser Davos said quietly and simply. He never spoke of his losses, though Jon knew his son had been killed fighting for Stannis. Jon’s gaze flickered to the dark-skinned woman waiting with her hands clasped, watching. There was a beguiling smile on her face, her dark eyes twinkling. She had froths of tight curls shaping her pretty face, and stood slim and tall.

“My lady…” He gave her a respectful half-bow.

“Ah… Missandei is the Queen’s most trusted advisor,” Lord Tyrion said, introducing the young woman.

“Welcome to Dragonstone. Our Queen knows this is a long journey; she appreciates the efforts you have made on her behalf,” Missandei said blithely. “If you wouldn’t mind handing over your weapons.”

He did mind. Lord Tyrion caught his eye, briefly. Jon sighed deeply, glancing away from the woman to the shore.

“Where are the fishing-boats?” he asked, flicking his eyes back to the woman.

“Pardon?” She blinked at him, bemused.

“The fishing-boats. Ser Davos has spent many years at Dragonstone, he tells me the villagers rely on shoals of fish migrating south, to sustain them through the winter,” Jon said. They wanted his weapons; he would not give them. They intended to unnerve him, to make him impotent by disarming him. He had Sansa sitting on one shoulder, Larra’s ghost heavy on the other, both murmuring advice in his ear. “There’s not a single boat out on the water fishing.”

“The ships have been incorporated into Queen Daenerys’ armada, in preparations for her invasion,” Missandei said coolly, a well-practiced smile never slipping from her face. “They were happy to contribute to Queen Daenerys’ war efforts.”

“I’m sure the threat of a few hundred thousand Dothraki has silenced a good many complaints in the past,” Jon said darkly.

“We have been expecting you,” said Missandei, and repeated, “If you wouldn’t mind handing over your weapons.”

“I do. I’m sure it’s within the realms of your two-hundred thousand Dothraki to put me down if I pose a threat to your queen,” Jon said, his gloved hand resting comfortably around the hilt of Long Claw. “I did not come all this way to provoke war with her.”

Lord Tyrion did not insist.

He could not have expected that Jon would hand over his weapons, or leave his men defenceless. Missandei clearly had: The brutish men accompanying her, the beetle-like faceless soldiers flanking her did, but it was Lord Tyrion who broke the tension, brushed away the issue. He did not press that Jon give up his sword, or that his men remain unprotected. This was how things were done in Westeros.

And Northerners were notoriously stubborn. The Queen could walk her sorry arse down all those steps to treat with Jon at the quay if she felt so inclined; Jon only needed the source of the dragonglass mine, and Ser Davos would take care of the rest. He had come to meet Daenerys Stormborn as a courtesy.

He was not going to tell her that he had no other choice. To let her have the power to destroy all he held precious, just out of spite.

“Come, it is a long walk to the castle, believe me,” Lord Tyrion said, grimacing. “You must tell me of your journey.”

They were flanked by the scuttling soldiers and swaggering wildmen from the Dothraki Sea, but Lord Tyrion gestured to the biggest of the Dothraki and he muttered something in a guttural tongue to his men, and they turned and headed back through the tiny, empty seaside town, to a paved path accessible only due to the low tide, which led straight to a walled path that wound up the side of a mountain to Dragonstone castle. The walled, fortified path looked almost like fangs cut into the side of the mountain, jagged and sharp.

“That’s a lot of steps,” Jon said wearily, though he was glad of the walk: He had been cooped up too long on that ship. Jon glanced down at the Hand of the Queen. “How are your legs, my lord?”

“Better now than they will be at the top,” Lord Tyrion grimaced, and he gave Jon a small, appreciative smile that Jon had remembered how awkward it sometimes was for Lord Tyrion. This world was not fashioned for cripples, bastards or broken things.

“Consider yourself lucky. At least there’s steps,” Jon sighed, gazing out at the jagged walkway.

“You’ve scaled worse?” Lord Tyrion asked, glancing up at Jon, who nodded grimly, his stomach hurting as a flash of red hair glinted in his mind’s eye, the billowing gold-limned clouds parting to reveal a blazing sun over fresh green seas as far as the eye could see.

“Aye.”

“The Wall?”

“Aye,” Jon nodded, and their boots splashed subtly in the puddles along the paved walkway to the castle. As natural fortifications went, the Targaryens who had fortified Dragonstone as Old Valyria’s most westerly outpost had known what they were doing: In high tide, the castle itself was accessible only from the air - the steep, jagged cliffs of the island were impossible to climb, and the sandy beaches were few and far between, protected by impassable bays and submerged rock-formations that had wrecked armadas, their corpses rotting eerily, and haunted by sharks and other monsters of the deep. Every point of the walled path up to the castle was easily defended: Jon recognised the work of genius that was Dragonstone. “Up and over, and all the way down again. Nothing but pick-axes, spikes on my boots - and a lot of rope.”

“I hope that marvellous contraption did not break?” Lord Tyrion said, looking startled. Jon almost smiled: Then he remembered…and the smile died prematurely.

“I wasn’t at Castle Black,” Jon said ominously, and his grim tone was enough that Lord Tyrion, however curious, did not ask for details.

After a moment, Lord Tyrion said thoughtfully, “You have had an interesting journey.”

“My sister tells me you quelled the riots in King’s Landing when the smallfolk were starving, provided for the people,” Jon said, to change the subject. He never dwelled too long on Ygritte…a name that sounded far too much like regret. Better to think of other things. Of a living girl kissed by fire who was relying on him… “That was autumn, after the longest summer in living memory… White ravens have been sent from the Citadel.”

“Winter is finally here,” Lord Tyrion said, with a thoughtful, amused little laugh.

“As my father promised,” Jon said heavily. He frowned at the Hand of the Queen. “It seems a simple blunder to actively prevent the smallfolk from being able to provide for themselves, my lord.”

Tyrion gave Jon a meaningful look, murmuring, “It was not my decision to commandeer the vessels.”

“Surely a Hand’s role is to prevent a Queen from making unpopular decisions?” he asked, aware as he did so that he had made an unpopular decision - but one that was necessary for the survival of his people.

“Did Ser Davos advise against you journeying south?” Lord Tyrion asked.

“Vehemently,” Jon said, his lips quirking with irony.

“And yet here you are.”

“Yet here I am,” he sighed, his legs starting to burn; he slowed his pace to match Lord Tyrion’s, and their honour-guard had to slow down.

Lord Tyrion narrowed his eyes at Jon. “Because whatever you’re here for is more important than the risk to your life.” Jon sighed heavily, and gazed ahead, at the featureless soldiers in beetle-like shell armour of pristine black leather, at Missandei in her neat overcoat and boots, and the two young girls who may never live to womanhood if he failed.

“Is your Queen’s invasion worth more than the lives of the smallfolk of Dragonstone?” Jon asked quietly, glancing back at Lord Tyrion. “They were once her family’s people to provide for and protect… How did a Lannister become Hand of the Queen to Daenerys Targaryen?”

“It’s a long and bloody tale - and to be honest, I’ve been drunk for most of it,” Lord Tyrion grinned, with a hint of his old impishness, but there was a solemnity in his eyes now that Jon did not remember. “I shall share it with you, of course, Your Grace - at some point, I should also like to hear how a bastard steward in the Night’s Watch became King in the North.”

“It’s a long and bloody tale,” Jon echoed, and Lord Tyrion smiled. Jon told him grimly, “My bannermen think I’m a fool for coming here.”

“Of course they do,” Lord Tyrion said lightly. “If I was your Hand, I would’ve advised against it.”

“Everyone advised against it.”

“And you ignored them,” Lord Tyrion said, giving Jon a measuring look. “General rule of thumb: Stark men don’t fare well when they travel south.”

“True,” Jon agreed. There was no arguing with the horrors his family had so recently endured. He thought of Sansa, sewn into her armoured gowns at Winterfell, swathed in heavy fabrics and all but telling the world to keep away…he worried about her for the thousandth time, alone at the castle with Littlefinger lurking and plotting and lusting… “But I’m not a Stark.”

He had never heard such a sound as exploded through the sky - in the North there were few reptiles but even in his marrow, Jon heard the shrieking, reptilian birdlike scream that threatened to shatter his eardrums, heard the crackle and flapping of great armoured leathery wings like the rumble of nearing thunderstorms and knew, by the fire that sparked in his blood and the dread that turned his belly to jelly…dragon.

Jon had battled giants, had fought off wights and killed White Walkers.

He moved to block Lord Tyrion, hand on the hilt of his sword, that monstrous scream igniting every drop of rage boiling in his heart, frustration and anger and desperation, fire dancing along his veins, stubborn and terrified and courageous to a fault, and Jon’s lips parted, and his anger dissolved, and he gazed in heartbroken awe and wonder and dread as a monster from legend soared and whorled and dived for him, monstrous and reptilian, onyx and blood-red like the banners carried before him. Enormous wings beat the air around him, making even the Unsullied stagger in the momentary gale, and Jon gasped, eyes on the enormous creature flapping its great wings as it soared through the air.

“Not the usual reaction,” Lord Tyrion said, gaping at Jon, his cunning eyes narrowed. “For a moment there I thought you may slay the dragon to protect me.”

“For a moment, so did I,” Jon panted, staring at the dragon.

“You’ve impressive reactions, Jon Snow. I wonder if even Drogon may have thought better of provoking you, the look on your face. It would have made a comical song. The King in the North defending the Imp against Balerion reborn,” Lord Tyrion mused. The thought seemed to tickle him; he chuckled happily to himself as he waddled up the steps beside Jon, who stumbled several times, turning to watch the dragon wheel and turn overhead. “Do you know, you’ve quite given me the inspiration I needed for me evening’s entertainments! I shall write the song tonight, luxuriating in Qartheen silk sheets and getting steadily drunk on fine Arbour amber wines while my whore licks my cock!”

Jon grinned in spite of himself, remembering Lord Tyrion’s time at the Wall, bemoaning the lack of female companionship. “Sansa told me you had given up your favourite pastimes, too busy ruling King’s Landing.”

“Ah, Sansa… Does my elegant wife pine for me?” Lord Tyrion asked, grinning, his eyes twinkling. “Don’t worry. T’was a sham marriage - and unconsummated.”

Jon winced. “I didn’t ask.”

“Well - it was,” Lord Tyrion asserted. He frowned. ”Wasn’t.”

Jon gave him a sidelong look. “You wanted it to be. I’m not blind to Sansa’s beauty. And nor is she ignorant of men’s desire for her.”

“Doesn’t matter, either way.”

“Sansa told me about your marriage,” Jon murmured. She had told Jon, but he didn’t want the Queen’s soldiers whispering in her ear. “Your wedding-night.”

“Truthfully, I don’t remember much of it!”

“She does.”

“The North remembers,” Lord Tyrion quoted. “She’s much smarter than she lets on, Sansa.”

“She’s letting on,” Jon said grimly, because he worried. Cleverness could only protect her for so long. At a certain point, swords would be drawn, and then she would be powerless. And he was hundreds of miles away from her. He had to trust she could keep herself safe until his return… He dreaded what Littlefinger plotted in his absence. He worried for Sansa. They had never been close as children; and had been separated for years - yet Jon could not abide being apart from her now.

“Good.”

Jon sighed, glancing down at Lord Tyrion. “Separated from your wife and you embrace the luxuries you once enjoyed…”

“Licentiousness, I have found - through devoted research - is the keystone of my brilliance. You cannot have one without the other,” Lord Tyrion mused, and Jon’s lips twitched. “I endured a brief period of sobriety, Jon Snow, I have no wish to repeat it. Others will agree I am far more useful as a drunken little lust-filled beast than a browbeaten bookkeeper. You must meet my whore! She has a very fine voice. When I have finished your song, I will send her to sing it to you.”

“Thank you for the offer, my lord, but there is no need,” Jon said, hiding his laugh, and his blush.

“Come, winter is here - surely you must have a woman warming your bed?” Lord Tyrion suggested. “There were no women at the Wall.”

“There were more than you’d think,” Jon said shrewdly, and Lord Tyrion turned his lecherous grin on him.

“Ah, one of the ghosts from that long, bloody tale you’ve promised to tell me.”

“You’ve ghosts yourself, my lord?”

“Far too many, Jon Snow,” Lord Tyrion sighed heavily. “Join me for a cup of amber wine from the Arbour, at the very least. I did often think of you while I sat to feast in the sultry warmth of King’s Landing.”

“I thought of you, too, Lord Tyrion, remembering your wisdom,” Jon said honestly, and Lord Tyrion gave a small, sad, satisfied smile.

“How did the lads fare? What were their names…Grenn,” Lord Tyrion squinted in thought, and Jon’s smile died. “What charming nicknames did Ser Alliser bequeath him?”

“The Aurochs,” Jon whispered, gulping.

“That was it. What was the other’s name - the runty looking one?”

“Pyp,” Jon blurted, pained. “He had a fine voice for songs.”

“That’s the way of it, is it?” Lord Tyrion said, noting the pain in Jon’s voice, his face. ”How many brothers have you lost?”

“Hundreds.”

“Myself, I have lost one.”

Jon frowned down at the dwarf. “Ser Jaime was always your champion, was he not? You have great love for each other.”

“The bond between brothers is complicated…but I don’t need to tell you that,” Lord Tyrion said, giving Jon a wry smile that did not touch his eyes, which remained dark and haunted. Angry.

“No…” No, Jon didn’t need reminding that brothers were complicated. He had lost three of his own blooded brothers, and his bond with Robb had always been…what it was.

Lost in thought, Jon gazed at the dragons - three of them, one cream and gold, one green and bronze, the other, the largest, black striated with blood-red - and found himself, unbidden, drawn into his memories of childhood, of Robb and Theon Greyjoy, of pretty Sansa sequestered away with her septa and her sewing, of wild Arya, and impish Bran, and tiny…tiny Rickon. Listening to Larra tell stories of Targaryen dragons that kept the little ones still enough to have their baths before the roaring hearth, mesmerised.

“Jon?” Lord Tyrion said kindly. He sighed, gazing at the dragons too. “I’d say you get used to them…but you never really do.”

“What my sisters wouldn’t have given to see this,” Jon admitted what was at the forefront of his mind, the agony it cost him to voice what he barely entertained thinking about. His sisters. “Arya would’ve loved it. And Larra…”

“Ah…beautiful Larra,” Lord Tyrion grinned, eyes twinkling. Jon had forgotten the Imp was fond of his twin-sister. “Do you know, I have lived some number of years, and the memories do tend to merge together - especially when one considers the perpetual state of drunkenness in which I prefer to spend my days - but some memories are clear as crystal. Alarra Snow, her hair curling to her waist and bedecked with wildflowers, fearfully drunk and arguing the complexities of symbolism in ancient High Valryian odes while soundly thrashing me at dice. Do you know how rare it is to find a beautiful woman who can coherently argue their views on obscure ancient poetry after drinking Arbour strong-wine?”

Jon smiled, heartbroken. “She’d be pleased at least that’s your lasting memory of her.”

“She thoroughly seduced me, without revealing an inch of flesh,” Lord Tyrion grinned lecherously. “Quite the accomplishment… Come, their mother is waiting for you.” He nodded at the dragons, and Jon kept climbing.

He had dealt with worse than dragons.

He had outlived worse than Daenerys Stormborn.

Chapter 14: Bad Blood

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

14

Bad Blood


It was all carefully designed, of course, to intimidate, to set him on edge, to put his men in discomfort. To undermine his power. Effectively, trying to strip it away: To make him impotent.

Jon had expected it.

He remembered Ramsey Bolton snidely muttering that he’d heard rumours: That by the way people spoke, Jon was the greatest swordsman to ever live… Long Claw was not his only weapon: Sansa had hammered it into his mind before he left Winterfell. He had the benefit of an education. And a purpose greater than satisfying his pride.

This was what Maester Luwin had spent so many hours assiduously tutoring him for. Him, and Robb, and Larra, and Theon, the four of them cloistered in the schoolroom during snowy afternoons after drilling in the courtyard under Ser Rodrik’s hawk-eyed instruction. Geography and economics and the histories of Westerosi politics, religious uprisings and civil wars - context and cause and effect - Valyrian sagas, military strategy, patience and reflection, basic medicine, religions, foreign cultures and woodworking… He’d gained a fine education from Maester Luwin. Compounded by his experiences at the Wall. Anyone who knew the Old Bear could see his qualities in Jon’s leadership - consistent, and fair - and from his father… As King in the North, Jon emulated the example Ned Stark had set as High Lord of Winterfell and Warden of the North: Winterfell was strong because Stark leadership was consistent and fair, as the Old Bear’s had been, as Ned Stark’s had been, as now Jon’s was. Consistent, and fair, and inspiring loyalty and love.

He’d left the North relieved that no more talk of stripping lands and castles from ancient Northern families had been grumbled around the Great Hall. With the recent animosities between Stark bannermen and their neighbours, the civil uprisings that had cost Robb the War of the Five Kings as much as Lord Frey’s betrayal of guest-right had, Jon needed unity in the North more than ever, he needed to put their disagreements to rest. He needed the Umbers and the Karstarks especially, and the men loyal to them, to remain focused and loyal to his cause: To their very survival.

Soon, they would all appreciate that Jon was right, no matter their personal feelings about his leadership.

He fought for the privilege of their lives.

Sansa had told Jon that he had a skill with people. He built relationships with them - bastards, Free Folk and lords alike - and treated them as equals, as if they mattered to him.

Because they did, Jon had thought, when she’d told him that over a rich stew one windy night, just the two of them together in Father’s solar with a fire blazing, Sansa’s needle glinting in the light as Jon scratched out yet another raven-scroll and discussed inventory of the grain-stores and success of the root harvests from Winterfell’s great glasshouses. They do matter.

He would have given in long ago, if he didn’t believe that. He was a bastard: And while she lived, Lady Stark would have ensured Jon never had anything to do with any position of authority at Winterfell or in the North that threatened Robb’s inheritance - so, it was the Night’s Watch Jon had committed his life to. Until he lost it.

Now he sat in Robb’s seat, in their father’s seat, and he alone could do anything to stop the coming storm from wiping out the world of Men. Because he had looked the Night King in the eye. He knew what was coming. And he’d fought tooth-and-nail to reclaim Winterfell and piece the North back together, consolidating power to put himself and Sansa in a position of strength - to make a difference: To be in a position to fight the coming storm, not just endure it.

They couldn’t just wait it out and hope the White Walkers marched on past Winterfell.

The Night King didn’t want resources. He didn’t want gold. He didn’t even want power.

He wanted the end of all Men.

He wouldn’t ignore Winterfell because its people were poor, and tired, and had little political power because of both those factors. He wasn’t going to head straight to King’s Landing and take the Iron Throne from Cersei Lannister or Daenerys Targaryen or whoever found themselves sitting upon it. The Night King saw them all as meat for his army, to erase their world.

Jon knew they - lords and low-borns and Free Folk alike - were the only way to stop the Night King.

And after looking the Night King in the eye, after fighting and killing some of his lethal commanders - well, was a girl on a jagged throne truly all that intimidating?

The dragons whorled and careened and spiralled outside, and perhaps Jon could hear their great wings flapping in the corner of his ear, because no other sound echoed through the dank halls of Dragonstone. The fortress forged from Valyrian spells and dragonfire was as impressive as Maester Luwin’s books had always promised, but something felt…wrong. He was used to the hustle and bustle of Winterfell, the pleasant murmur of noise even in the topmost towers, the ring of steel from the forges and the scullions singing in the pantries of the cavernous kitchens, the small halls where the old women spun and dyed wool and worked industriously on tapestries as small children played at their feet and tugged their sisters’ long braids as they sewed tunics and hose and gossiped and flirted with the stableboys who snuck through the laundry to steal a kiss behind the sheets of linen.

Their footsteps echoed off the dank stones, and for a second, the torch-light flickering, Jon couldn’t help but think of Shireen Baratheon, perpetually kind-hearted, gentle and young…this had been her home. A Baratheon stronghold, a backhanded gift from Robert Baratheon to his younger brother for failing to intercept the last Targaryens as they fled this very fortress so many years ago. How had that sweet girl grown up so content, so sweet and kind, in this wretched place?

Was there a person in the world who had deserved her fate less than Princess Shireen?

Strange where his mind went to, perhaps it was Ser Davos’ nearness, or perhaps it was passing stonemasons removing Stannis’ personal sigil where it had been engraved in the wall over a three-headed dragon motif, perhaps it was his first glimpse into the throne room and a cluster of young girls around a stout older woman, but Jon thought of Princess Shireen, and found himself angry enough to raise his chin, set his shoulders, and stride into the room as if he owned it.

Never forget what you are, Tyrion had advised him, so many years ago. Jon knew what he was. Bastard-born twin of a sister he missed with every beat of his heart, a tried-and-true warrior, a brother of the Night’s Watch, their Lord Commander murdered in cold blood, avenger of the Red Wedding, fierce protector of what was right and good, friend of the Free Folk, King in the North.

King in the North. He hadn’t inherited the title, hadn’t taken it by the edge of his sword, hadn’t declared it: He had earned it in his own right.

He had nothing to dread from meeting this self-proclaimed Queen.

Her court was small, mismatched: golden Tyrell roses and the sun-spear of the Martells glinted in the candlelight. On a jagged throne sat a small woman with long silvery-gold hair, hands resting neatly in her lap, back straight, expression imperious, bordering hostile. The Queen’s advisers took their places on the steps leading to her throne, Missandei again wearing that benign smile, Lord Tyrion looking rather uncomfortable as the Dothraki and Unsullied took their places lining the walls, blocking the heavy doors that were closed behind the last of Jon’s men.

Jon saw the Tyrells; he noted the little girls clustered around the Queen of Thorns. He supposed the elegant olive-skinned woman might be Ellaria Sand, paramour of the legendary Red Viper of Dorne, and beside her two of her many children by the prince. Sands. His cousins.

He saw the Queen on her uncomfortable throne.

He ignored them all.

Because Jon’s gaze was fixed solely on the one person he had vowed he would beat to death with his bare hands if he ever saw him again.

Missandei’s clear voice echoed off the dank halls as Jon stared at Theon Greyjoy, heralding her queen. Jon didn’t hear a word.

The details of his brother’s murder whispered through his mind, Grey Wind’s head sewn to Robb’s body after both were riddled with arrows and butchered: The fate of Robb’s wife, and their unborn baby. Even Lady Catelyn, her throat slit to the bone, her body dumped into the river. His siblings’ mother. Northmen butchered by their thousands.

Sansa, brutalised by the family that had betrayed theirs.

Larra, fleeing the very same place, with a simple giant, a broken boy and a tiny feral brother - fleeing Theon.

Sansa, escaping Winterfell, the one place she was entitled to feel safe - guided by Theon.

Theon Greyjoy met Jon’s gaze hesitantly. Tension crackled in the throne room, but Jon didn’t look at the Queen, nor did he give false apologies. He did not bow to her. Did not acknowledge her, too consumed with the rage that roared in his ears, clenching his jaw, as he stared at his family’s betrayer. Robb, Larra, Brandon, Rickon and Sansa.

Robb may yet be alive had Theon fought beside him, rather than betray him.

Larra would never have ventured beyond the Wall with their crippled brother and a simple giant.

Rickon would not have been shot through the heart mere feet from Jon as he galloped to save his little brother.

Sansa…

Sansa may be alive because of Theon.

But Larra… a voice whimpered in the back of his mind, a tiny voice Maester Aemon had coaxed him to silence forever, the voice of his childhood, a tiny heartsick moan of the little lost boy Jon had always been, seeking the love and devotion and companionship of his twin, his equal in every way, his friend, his fiercest love. Larra…

When Ironborn had taken Winterfell and the North was no longer safe, Larra had taken their brothers beyond the Wall…

Who had lit the bodies, to stop Larra and Hodor and broken Bran from joining the Night King’s legions? His heart cracked like a great fissure in the ice-meadows of the true North, depthless and devastating.

He wished there was some way Larra and Bran may have beaten all odds and survived the most hostile place in the world. He wished it, when he allowed himself to dwell on it: The truth was, it hurt too much to linger on his sister’s fate, the fate of Bran who he’d last seen comatose in his bed, his harridan mother telling Jon it should have been him lying broken…

He didn’t linger on Larra’s fate, when thinking about her put him in danger of breaking under the weight of the knowledge that everything he had fought for, ever since he left Winterfell, had been for nothing. Larra was dead. Because their family had been betrayed; and Lady Catelyn would rather he had died at the edge of the world than let him be near his family, be useful, be Robb’s fiercest ally and protector and soldier, defender of his sisters…

Theon Greyjoy gulped as he stepped forward tentatively, until he was barely a foot away from him. “Jon… I didn’t know…you were coming here… Sansa, is she -“

Jon forgot he was strapped with weapons. He forgot soldiers and savages lined the walls of the hall, would skewer him in a heartbeat if their Queen gave the signal. He forgot Ser Davos was beside him; he forgot that his men were behind him.

All he saw, in that instant, was an image of Larra, dead and rotting and icy blue-eyed in the snow.

His long, clever fingers wrapped themselves around Theon’s throat, and he squeezed, his body on fire with rage and grief and guilt.

Jon didn’t notice that he had shot over a whole head taller than Theon Greyjoy, or that a grim-faced woman in kraken-emblazoned leather lazily gripped the hilt of her dagger as she watched Jon strangle Theon with his bare hand.

He only noticed the grief and guilt in Theon’s eyes, and only barely registered that Theon was not fighting him off.

He recalled strangling someone in the crypt before he had left Winterfell.

Littlefinger had sold Sansa to the Boltons.

Theon Greyjoy had saved her from them.

“What you did for her - is the only reason I’m not killing you!” he promised Theon, seething with fury, roughly releasing him, and he thought Theon nodded as he staggered away, massaging his throat and coughing.

“Lord Greyjoy, you know this man?” asked a cold voice. The Queen, trying to insert herself - tired of being ignored.

Wheezing, never breaking eye-contact with Jon, Theon said quietly, sorrowfully, “He’s my brother.”

Jon clenched his jaw, his veins throbbing with pain as fire raced through them, fury, itching to strangle him again. “Robb was your brother. Bran and Rickon were your brothers.” His voice reduced to a whisper as he seethed, “Larra was your sister. And you betrayed them.”

Theon had the grace to look ashamed as he admitted, “I did.”

“Larra…she was the she-wolf you told me about, wasn’t she?” The woman in the abused leather looked thoughtfully at Jon. Her voice was soft, grim, monotonous, but laced with the irony Jon remembered in Theon when they were boys. “She killed three Ironborn with her fangs and claws and a cleaver.”

Theon glanced from the woman to Jon, and corrected quietly, “It was a meat-hook.”

Yara Greyjoy looked fondly at her brother, and then gazed at Jon, not quite a smile on her face. “What we do to protect our little brothers.”

“She sounds like quite a warrior,” said the cold voice. “A wonder you did not bring her south with you to protect you.”

Jon’s gaze did not leave Theon’s face as he said bluntly, “She’s dead. Do I need protection, Your Grace?” Finally, he turned his gaze to Daenerys Targaryen.

“It seems not; you still bear your weapons,” she said coolly, and Jon scoffed softly. He was still strapped with his weapons - and had gone for the kill with his bare hands in spite of the dozens of soldiers lining the halls. “Did my advisor not ask you to hand over your weapons?”

“She did; I refused. I won’t leave my men unable to defend themselves, Your Grace,” Jon said. All this effort, for one man, he thought, and Sansa’s voice murmured, She’s threatened by you.

“To whom am I speaking?” the Queen sniffed, as if she did not know.

“This is Jon Snow. Son of Lord Eddard Stark, brother of Robb Stark, a sworn brother of the Night’s Watch,” said Theon Greyjoy, and there was something new and unfamiliar in his voice when he added, “He is King in the North.”

Almost like respect.

Jon had never heard it before.

“Thank you for travelling so far, my lord. I hope the seas weren’t too rough,” said Daenerys Stormborn, and Jon’s eyes lanced to the Queen. That’s the way of it, is it? he thought, sweeping his gaze slowly from the tip of her silver-gold head to her leather-covered toes, and not hiding his disdain. He had parleyed with Free Folk with more manners.

“He’s not a lord.”

Jon glanced at Theon Greyjoy. He had spoken quietly, but clearly, and Theon Greyjoy was staring defiantly at the Queen, his chin raised. “He is King in the North.”

“I never did receive a formal education, Lord Greyjoy,” Daenerys Targaryen said coldly, and continued with a condescending air that would have immediately put Larra’s back up, itching to verbally slap her fiercely back into her place. “But I could have sworn I read 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 Northmen, Torrhen Stark swore fealty to House Targaryen in perpetuity. Or do I have my facts wrong?”

Glancing away from Theon, Jon said politely, “I wasn’t there, Your Grace.”

“No, of course not.” A cold, condescending smile. “But still, an oath is an oath…and perpetuity means… What does perpetuity mean, Lord Tyrion?”

The old woman in black exchanged a moue with the eldest of her rosebuds, the kind of look Larra might once have given Jon, and the look Sansa had described to Jon when she had told him about the Queen of Thorns. Lord Tyrion grimaced a little, as he remarked, “Forever.”

“Forever,” Daenerys Targaryen repeated, with a poisonous smile. “So I assume, my lord, you’re here to bend the knee.”

Theon Greyjoy’s eyes danced from the Queen to Jon, as his grim-faced sister frowned; across the throne room, the elderly Tyrell raised an eyebrow at the veiled Martell woman.

“I am not.” Jon knew his face was grim, implacable. The face of every Northern king who had come before him.

“Oh. That is unfortunate,” Daenerys Targaryen said. “You’ve travelled all this way to break faith with House Targaryen?”

At that, Jon laughed outright, his earlier rage at Theon swept aside, rankled by this tiny woman with her condescension and arrogance. Jon had allied with and advised and betrayed kings before: And Daenerys Targaryen could have learned much from Mance Rayder, and from Stannis Baratheon. She could have learned from Ygritte, and Tormund, and Lady Mormont, and Sansa, and Princess Shireen, Samwell Tarly and Gilly.

He wondered what Sansa would make of her - and knew, in his heart, that Sansa’s teeth would be set on edge by her - reminded all too vividly, though they shared no physical attributes beyond an untouchable, polished beauty, of Cersei Lannister.

Jon remembered the look on Cersei Lannister’s face as Larra was untied from the post where she had been flogged - for no other reason than because Cersei had taken it as an insult to her beauty that Larra possessed so much of her own, and the King had noticed.

Vicious, cold beauty. Arrogance.

Jon had half a mind to coax her North simply to watch Sansa shred her to pieces.

In her absence, the task fell to him, Larra’s voice echoing in his ears, memories of their debates in the schoolroom with Maester Luwin filling him with warmth, and humour, and sorrow.

“Any Northern oaths sworn to House Targaryen went up in smoke with the bodies of Rickard and Brandon Stark as your father burned them alive. Any bonds of fealty were broken when Rhaegar Targaryen kidnapped and raped Lyanna Stark,” Jon declared bluntly, and Lord Tyrion winced. Daenerys Stormborn did not react. “House Targaryen broke faith; and the North remembers.” Theon Greyjoy smiled sorrowfully, eyes distant as he gazed at the floor. The words of all Northerners, ever since the Red Wedding. Daenerys Targaryen’s pretty features became unpleasant as her face twisted with anger. Jon glanced at Theon, who had been there when Jon had been forbidden the privilege... “And the last King in the North was not Torrhen, the King Who Knelt. The last King in the North was the Young Wolf, Robb Stark, who was undefeated on the battlefield when he was murdered. I’m not certain when Lord Tyrion came into your service, Your Grace, however, I find it difficult to accept he wouldn’t forewarn you of the state of things in Westeros. How else could he help you plan your conquest of the Six Kingdoms?”

“Six kingdoms?” Daenerys Targaryen blinked. “The Iron Throne rules over seven kingdoms.”

“It did. For three hundred years, House Stark honoured its oaths to the Iron Throne. Until the cost of fealty proved too high. The price of our freedom from the iron Throne was paid in fire and blood,” Jon said, and Lord Tyrion’s lips twitched toward a smile as Jon used the Targaryen words against her. “From the time Robb Stark was named King in the North until the end of time, the North will remain a free and independent kingdom, as it was for thousands of years before the first Targaryen conquest.” A bald man near Missandei gave Jon a shrewd look.

“Our Houses were allies for centuries. And those centuries were the best the Seven Kingdoms have ever known,” Daenerys Targaryen said, and Jon thought he could see a glimmer of the woman who might have inspired Tyrion Lannister to become her Hand. Her face started to soften, her eyes widening, a gentle coaxing smile on her lips. Jon saw the smile, and remembered Cersei. Remembered Larra’s back shredded, and his sister’s sluggish, pain-drenched murmur that the Queen wanted new ribbons… Jon saw that smile and remembered cruelty. “Centuries of peace and prosperity, with a Targaryen sitting on the Iron Throne and a Stark serving as Warden of the North. I am the last Targaryen, Jon Snow. Honour the pledge your ancestor made to mine. Bend the knee and I will name you Warden of the North. Together, we will save this country from those who would destroy it.”

Jon stared at this Targaryen girl, this self-proclaimed Queen, frowning. What he had expected, he didn’t know… After the Night King, nothing seemed to measure up, of course, but…he hadn’t expected to be so…disdainful. He thought of Mance, inspiring the Free Folk; he thought of Stannis, who had abandoned his fight for the Iron Throne because he had known the true threat to Westeros came from the North…a righteous man, if poorly advised… This woman…he didn’t know. He was not impressed.

She was either poorly educated, or ignorant by choice.

“I am not beholden to my ancestor’s vows. You say you’ll name me Warden of the North. The Northmen have already made me their king: The Northmen, who united to protect themselves from those who would destroy our country,” Jon said, and he couldn’t keep the scathing condescension from his own voice, that she thought a pretty face and her offer would ever touch him. He couldn’t help narrowing his eyes, and sneering softly as he continued, “And you talk of peace and prosperity under Targaryen rule: Was that when Maegor waged war for decades on the Faith Militant after taking his six Black Brides, wives he tortured and butchered? When he murdered the thousands who toiled to build the Red Keep, in order to preserve its secrets? When the Dance of the Dragons saw the country burned and broken as Targaryen fought Targaryen and their dragons bathed the Seven Kingdoms in fire? When Daemon sacrificed tens of thousands of lives to keep a hold on Dorne? When the Blackfyres rose in rebellion after Aegon the Unworthy caused discord by favouring his bastard over his trueborn son? When your father bathed good men, honourable men, in wildfire?”

As he spoke, Daenerys Targaryen’s face grew colder and colder; those Westerosi around her exchanged speaking looks, that they, too, knew their histories, and remembered. And did not respect her for ignoring the truth of the past.

“The only fair reigns of Targaryen monarchs were those of Jaehaerys the Wise and Aegon the Unlikely - Aegon built upon the laws Jaeherys wrote centuries ago, to protect the people of the Seven Kingdoms. Your Hand will tell you his father unworked everything Aegon fought for when he became Hand to your father,” Jon said, nodding respectfully to Lord Tyrion, who was not his father in spite of their shared brilliance with strategy - according to Sansa. Daenerys Targaryen narrowed her eyes as she observed this indication of respect, glaring at Jon as he said, “You’ve been reading revisionist histories, Your Grace, no doubt written intended to flatter you.”

“Clearly you have no intention of flattering your rightful queen,” she said through gritted teeth.

“I might, if I had one,” he said bluntly, and Daenerys Targaryen’s face leeched of expression. The Queen of Thorns exchanged a smirk with the sultry Dornishwoman across the chamber. “I will not apologise for wounding your pride, Your Grace: I will do whatever I must to protect the people of the North. No Northman will ever kneel to a Targaryen again… Will you burn my people to get what you want?”

The bald man draped in unusual robes flicked his gaze from the Queen to Jon, giving him a measuring, thoughtful look, before glancing at the Hand of the Queen, who was wincing thoughtfully, but staring at Jon as if mesmerised.

“Surely you did not come all this way to insult me.”

“You can take my truth as you wish, Your Grace. You wage war on Cersei Lannister, on the Iron Throne: The North has declared its independence from the Iron Throne, and will defend it - no matter who sits on the Throne,” Jon said, with a fierce bite. “If you truly wish the best for all the people of Westeros, as your people claim, you would be wise to begin your conquest by respecting the sovereignty of House Stark over the North, from Hard Home to the Neck, from Skagos to Cape Kraken. Devote your time to those in the south who do need you. You came to Westeros to war against monsters; don’t take the North from just rulers for the sake of your pride.”

If Daenerys Targaryen could have snarled in anger without it looking undignified for a Queen with a trailing name, Jon supposed she might have. If she might have exposed her teeth as a threat, she would have.

Her reception of him, and her reaction to him, told Jon all he needed to know.

She was here to take the Iron Throne, and would not stop until she had it, and everything she believed belonged to it - including the North.

Daenerys Targaryen would destroy anyone who stood in her way…no matter that they were defending their home, their people - from her.

He sighed heavily, glancing around the chamber.

“It’s been a long journey, Your Grace,” he said, tiredly but politely. “I request food and drink for myself and my men.”

“You did not bring your own?” was the cold, tart reply.

“Oh, I’ve supplies enough on my ship, if your army overextends your own provisions,” Jon told her, meeting her eye. With a sharp, unyielding bite, Jon met her eye and challenged, “It’s guest-right I want for my men.”

“Guest-right.” Her eyes darted to Lord Tyrion, whose lips had parted, and Jon raised his eyebrows. She had to consult her Hand about guest-right? When he knew it was observed in Essos just as much as Westeros - even the Dothraki had their rules about weapons in their sacred city. He exchanged a grim look with Ser Davos, and saw Theon Greyjoy watching the Queen closely, exchanging a look with his sister that had Jon’s stomach aching for Larra, the way they had silently communicated with each other with such ease.

“The only common custom among Westerosi people, Your Grace, irrespective of rank or gods, honoured all the way from the most southerly point of the Arbour to the icy wastes far beyond the Wall,” Lord Tyrion explained. “Guest-right is respected by all.”

“Except the Freys,” Jon said, with a pointed look at Lord Tyrion, whose father, it was widely known, had orchestrated the massacre of the Red Wedding, without getting so much as a speck of blood on his own hands. Grimly, threateningly, Jon said, “But winter came for them.”

“To violate guest-right is to incur the wrath of the gods,” Theon Greyjoy said softly.

“Superstition.” A tight smile from the Queen, dismissive.

Jon narrowed his eyes at her. “They say you stepped into the fire with three stone eggs, and stepped from the ashes with three new-hatched dragons,” he said coldly. “And you sneer at the wills of gods?”

Outside, they could hear the shrieking of the dragons. Jon glanced from the windows to Daenerys Targaryen. “Think they came into the world again to put you on a throne?”

She levelled her gaze on him, but Jon did not so much as blink. He had warred against giants, killed White Walkers, assassinated men he admired, seen his brother shot through the heart feet from him, held his lover in his arms as she died, his name mixing with the blood on her lips.

This Queen was so much more intimidating by reputation.

In person, well…

“What do you think they came into the world for, Jon Snow?”

“As we speak, White Walkers lead an army of the dead upon the Wall,” Jon said quietly. He didn’t have to raise his voice: He wondered if the others had stopped breathing, the better to hear him spar with their lady. “You and Cersei Lannister are children engaged in a game, screaming that the rules aren’t fair.”

The Queen’s expression turned colder. She glared at her Hand. “You told me you liked this man.”

“I do.”

“In the time since he’s met me, he’s refused to call me Queen, he’s refused to bow and now he’s calling me a child.” She sounds like one, Jon thought, watching her carefully. How long since anyone had denied her?

“I do not deny your rightful place on the Iron Throne, Your Grace, only your sovereignty over the Northern kingdom,” Jon corrected. And he would keep reminding them all that the North was no longer under the sovereignty of the Iron Throne. “And a king does not kneel to another monarch. I’m calling all of you children, Your Grace, all of you who are engaged in the game of thrones.”

“A figure of speech, Your Grace,” Lord Tyrion said, giving Jon a careful look.

“Everyone you know, everyone we love, will die before winter’s end if we cannot defeat the enemy to the North.”

“As far as I can see, you are my enemy to the North.” Cold and curt and stubborn. It was no wonder he’d heard rumours she burned what did not yield.

“I am not your enemy. Nor shall I ever be your subject. We will all - Stark, Targaryen, Dothraki, Lannister, Free Folk and Summer Islanders - be dead before winter’s end if we do not unite to fight the incursion from the True North,” Jon said vehemently. “White Walkers march against the Wall, and they will find a way to breach it. Their armies of the dead will march south and destroy the world of Men.”

“The dead,” the Queen said, her voice devoid of anything except disdain. “Is that another figure of speech?”

“The army of the dead?” Lord Tyrion frowned at Jon.

“You don’t know me well, Lord Hand, but do you think I am a liar?” the King asked, and Tyrion felt a subtle thrill at being referred to as Lord Hand - and was reminded of their shared time at the Wall. Of his advice to Jon Snow - and of his uncle’s grim words to Tyrion regarding the North. “Or a madman?”

“No, I don’t think you’re either of those things, Your Grace,” Tyrion demurred: In truth, he had a healthy respect for Jon Snow. There was a reason he had risen from steward to King in the North, and he had no dragons to do the work for him. Many of his brothers had died beside him - not for him: They defended the Seven Kingdoms, and they would do it - Tyrion remembered Benjen Stark’s words - so plump little lords like you can enjoy their summer afternoons in peace and comfort…

“Grumpkins and snarks, you called them, do you remember?” Jon Snow’s lips twitched with a sad sort of irony that did not touch his grim grey eyes. “You visited the Wall and spent weeks combing through rare texts in the library - you listened to my brothers’ stories about their Ranging parties… You spoke with my uncle about what lies beyond the ice.”

“I remember… He gave me an excellent nugget of wisdom handed down by your father, I recall…” Lord Tyrion said, remembering, anything after the word ‘but’ is horse-shit… “He warned me I could not know what he had seen, what he had endured…”

Jon sighed heavily, gazing around the throne room. This had been Stannis Baratheon’s home for years. His daughter had been raised here. Ser Davos had served Stannis here, first as Lord of Dragonstone and then as King…

“A long while ago, now, Stannis Baratheon abandoned his claim on the Iron Throne - because he knew the greatest threat to Westeros lay beyond the Wall,” Jon said, glancing at Tyrion, who had fought Stannis’ forces at the Battle of the Blackwater, and according to Sansa, had received his scars there. “But it wasn’t the Free Folk gathered under one king for the first time in generations… He gave the Watch his ships; we headed to Hard Home to bring the Free Folk south of the Wall to safety. Some we saved; thousands died on the shores when the White Walkers came, commanding their legions.”

“Did they ride on giant spiders pale as ice?” Tyrion couldn’t help it; White Walkers were from myth and legend, and therefore comfortably far-off.

“No. Horses, my lord, icy-eyed and rotting,” Jon said solemnly. “When they breach the Wall, the North will fall first. And thousands more soldiers will be added to the White Walkers’ armies of the dead.” The King in the North levelled Daenerys Targaryen with a look, a stern Northern look that set leaders apart from the rest - the intractable, unyielding looks of men who had been forced to make horrific decisions to safeguard their people, at the cost of something very precious. “They say you’re a liberator, you want to help those who cannot protect themselves: Your dragons will help you take the Iron Throne, I’ve no doubt. But you’ll not sit long on the Iron Throne if you do not help win the war against the White Walkers.”

A moment of silence, Jon Snow’s words settling into the heart of everyone who had been brought up to dread the myths and legends of the White Walkers. It was the earnestness with which Jon Snow spoke that had such a profound effect. He spoke from the heart; he spoke with absolute truth.

And they all knew it.

“I was born at Dragonstone. Not that I can remember it. We fled before Robert’s assassins could find us,” Queen Daenerys said offhandedly, rising from her jagged throne. She gave Jon an accusing look, her tone snide as she said, “Robert was your father’s best-friend, no? I wonder if your father knew his best-friend sent assassins to murder a baby-girl in her crib?”

Jon’s eyes narrowed, and his words made them uncomfortable: “When Stannis Baratheon’s fleet approached Dragonstone to murder your remaining family, my father was in Dorne, seeking the sister Prince Rhaegar had kidnapped and raped. His sister, who died in his arms.”

Daenerys Targaryen may choose to be ignorant of the truth of the destruction of her family’s dynasty - how it had been entirely of their own making - but those gathered in her makeshift court were not: They understood the truth of the Rebellion.

The bald man with his hands lost in folds of rich fabric spoke for the first time. His voice was pleasant, clever, and devoid of any accent: “Lord Stark resigned his position as Hand of the King when King Robert sent assassins to murder you and your unborn child. On his deathbed King Robert knew Ned Stark had the right of it; Lord Stark asked preparations for your assassination be cancelled. My little birds had already flown…”

The Queen’s eyes narrowed cruelly. “Yet I lived.”

“By the will of a Northman,” Jon Snow said: He had heard enough from Tyrion on their painful walk from the quay that it was a Northman, a Mormont, who had stayed by Daenerys Stormborn’s side since her first marriage. Lord Commander Mormont’s only son.

Daenerys Targaryen ignored his quiet remark. “I spent my life in foreign lands. So many men have tried to kill me, I don’t remember their names. I have been sold like a brood mare, I’ve been chained, betrayed and defiled. Do you know what kept me standing, through all those years in exile? Faith. Not in any gods. Not in myths and legends. In myself. In Daenerys Targaryen.”

Jon inhaled, and let out a heavy sigh. As she had spoken, her features had morphed, eyes widening, lips thinning, colour hinting at her pale cheeks, making her look almost mad.

All he could think of was Larra. Of Sansa. Of Ygritte. Of Gilly-flower. Of Arya, and even of Lady Catelyn. He looked carefully at the other women in the room - at Lady Olenna Tyrell; at the Red Viper’s whore, Ellaria Sand - last tenuous connection to Elia Martell, who had endured torment beyond imagining; at Theon Greyjoy’s grim-faced sister, a hard captain of even harder men in a society that distrusted and abused women. He thought of Lady Lyanna Mormont; of Fat Walda Frey whom Sansa never truly spoke of, except to say she had been a kind lady undeserving of her fate - herself and her newborn son ripped apart by hounds…

Jon was not impressed. Perhaps Daenerys Targaryen believed she alone in this world was the one woman who had endured brutality, and emerged from it stronger, capable, fierce and unrelenting.

Jon thought of Sansa in her fierce new gowns, the steely glint in her pretty blue eyes - the iron beneath her beauty.

What had Sansa had, to survive unknown horrors, but her mind, her own agency?

There was a danger in believing too much in oneself, to the detriment of compassion toward others’ struggles.

He caught Theon’s eye, and knew they both thought the same thing, the same name. Sansa. He glanced at Lord Tyrion, and knew the Imp realised it.

Realised Jon was not impressed by this small woman with weapons of fire made flesh, and an army of savages at her command, not when Lady Mormont had led her sixty-two men into battle at the age of ten, fierce and wise far too early in her life; not when his sister had traversed the frozen North in nothing but a cloak to escape her sadistic husband, after surviving court with nothing but her wits and her courtesy; not when Gilly had been wed and bred upon by her own father, and fled, fighting off White Walkers, to protect her newborn son in the most hostile environment in the world, knowing that fleeing south meant certain death just as staying in the North did, because she had been born a wildling. Not when Jon had fought side-by-side with Karsi against the White Walkers, leader of the Free Folk in her own right, picking up the pieces after Mance’s army had been routed, protecting her people, making hard choices for their future.

“I’ve had the privilege to know many women who’ve endured all that and worse, Your Grace, with no great name to cling to, and no dragons to kill for them,” Jon said, looking down at the tiny, arrogant woman who had approached him. She had seemed larger when sat on the throne; in person, she was almost two whole feet shorter than him, and angry. She was very beautiful, yes: But Jon couldn’t look at her without seeing Sansa, and Gilly, and Lyanna Mormont, and Lady Brienne, and Larra. “As far as I can tell, the only thing that separates you from every woman in this room, in this world, is those three beasts circling the island.”

Anger twisted her otherwise pretty features. Coldly, defiantly, she almost hissed, “The world had not seen dragons for centuries until my children were born.”

Jon levelled her a look, and asked her grimly, “And what would you be without them?”

Chapter 15: Objectivity

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

15

Objectivity


“Well?”

Only slightly startled this time, Alynore set her tiny teacup down in its delicate saucer and licked the last of the fragrant Qartheen tea from her lips, thinking quickly. Her grandmother seemed to find the moment when Alynore was at her most relaxed, unguarded, to harangue her with questions - to unsettle her, and see how Alynore responded to pressure and scrutiny.

If she could learn to outwit the Queen of Thorns in verbal sparring, Alynore supposed she would be prepared for any diplomatic situation life threw at her.

“He took command of the chamber the moment he entered it.” To her grandmother, she often said the first thing that came into her head: Firstly, Grandmother was impatient - but she always said there was no ‘wrong’ answer - they discussed Alynore’s observations, and built from there. Alynore, her grandmother was discovering, had inherited her shrewdness.

Her grandmother chuckled softly, shaking her head sadly. “He reminded me of Rickard. The Northmen have such a peculiarly recognisable presence. Of course, half of it is inherited, but Jon Snow has built his through experience. They are grim, and quiet as a breed, yes; but it’s the calmest person in the room you’d be wisest to mind, my dear.”

“He wasn’t particularly calm when he throttled Theon Greyjoy,” Alynore remarked, and her grandmother’s wizened mouth twitched.

“Bad blood, my dear; it gets the better of us all,” she warned sadly. They were here, on Dragonstone, because of bad blood - bad blood between the Cersei on the Iron Throne, and any Tyrell who had survived her. Bad blood had compelled Olenna Tyrell to ally with the Martells; together seeking out the last Targaryen. Formidable allies, allies they needed to wipe out House Lannister. The Queen’s Hand seemed to be the fiercest advocate for annihilating the Westerlands, erasing House Lannister from the tomes of history. Given the trial he had endured for regicide - the trial that had cost Dorne its favourite prince - Alynore wasn’t surprised Lord Tyrion had turned on the family that had betrayed him. “And it is never wise to come between a Stark and his sister.”

“The King is not a Stark.”

“Not in name, but he has the blood,” her grandmother mused. “More than that - he has the respect of his people - and Northerners are a hard people. They are the largest and poorest realm in Westeros, constantly at war with the wildlings beyond the Wall, at war with winter… Hardened, proud, fierce men are not so easily won - yet they named a bastard their king.”

“Ser Davos said the King has united Northmen with the Free Folk from beyond the Wall.” Alynore fiddled with the tiny cake in front of her: They had brought many supplies from their larders, gifts of Arbor wine from her grandmother’s Redwyne relatives, as had Prince Doran’s emissary Ellaria Sand. The Queen had brought strange, exotic delicacies from Meereen and Volantis and even Qarth, and graciously shared some of them, perhaps as hints and enticement of the treats that could be expected when she sat on the Iron Throne and her empire spanned from Westeros all the way to Dragons’ Bay. She wondered whether fear or awe compelled people to provide tribute to Daenerys Targaryen’s conquest: Give her treats and move her on, before she set her greedy dragon’s eyes on their hoards of treasure. “Jon Snow allied with his enemies, and brought them under his protection… They say wildlings advise him in council, just as Northmen and Knights of the Vale do… Daenerys Stormborn freed slaves and conquered Dothraki…but she either abandoned them in economic distress or brought them across the world to make war for her…”

“Interesting, isn’t it, that a woman who proclaims to be devoted to peace and prosperity seeks to enforce it with open war,” Lady Olenna smiled ironically. It didn’t reach her watery blue eyes, which were shrouded now with constant grief. “Jon Snow took a great gamble coming here; was he particularly wise, do you think, in doing so? Why did he not send an emissary?”

“If what he says is true - and the Lord Hand seems to trust Jon Snow’s earnestness, even if he doesn’t believe in White Walkers…” Alynore began thoughtfully. Lord Tyrion was drunk and oozed irony most of the time - Grandmother said he was a great deal more interesting now that he was intent on preserving his still-living body in alcohol - but when he was sincere, even if he was absolutely slaughtered from drink, they knew he was being serious. And Lord Tyrion respected Jon Snow, King in the North. It hadn’t escaped the Westerosi present in Queen Daenerys’ court that Lord Tyrion had from the very beginning and without fail addressed Jon Snow as Your Grace. He respected Jon Snow’s position even if the Targaryen queen refused to. And they found themselves following the Hand’s example. Alynore herself was not…delighted with the Queen’s pride. “I don’t think Jon Snow would risk an emissary’s safety by sending them; that implies he would rather risk his own life than condemn another’s by sending them into hostile territory… He values others’ lives above his own… The Queen said Jon Snow would not bow to her - and he shouldn’t; the North have reclaimed their Kingdom and named him their ruler… But he was respectful that she is a Queen… He has shown respect to her position in coming in person - a King meeting with a Queen…and she was vile to him.”

She was glad of the thick, engraved stone walls to muffle their voices. Grandmother did not trust that there were not ears in the stone, listening; but the truth was, Queen Daenerys had not presented herself at all well this afternoon, and even if the Spider heard their words through his little birds, Alynore wondered what the Master of Whisperers would actually tell the Queen. The Queen had set everything up with her advisors to unsettle the King in the North and get the measure of him while under pressure - emulating Grandmother’s tactics with Alynore during their lessons - but she wasn’t bright enough to realise that while she was trying to get the measure of Jon Snow, her tenuous allies were given opportunity to scrutinise and get the true measure of Daenerys Stormborn.

Alynore…wasn’t impressed.

Initially, she had been awed by the Queen’s beauty, fascinated by the intricacy of her braids, drinking in every wardrobe change, marvelling at the exquisite skill of the Queen’s dressmakers, until Grandmother’s questioning made Alynore realise that she was more impressed with the gowns…than the Queen herself.

That was a problem.

The Queen’s words were very pretty: Her actions so far had failed to match them. With the benefit of her youth, her anonymity, and her non-threatening prettiness, Alynore had the freedom of the fortress and surrounding lands to investigate for herself, to overhear things, to see things others wouldn’t - she was underestimated because of her youth and beauty. Over the last few weeks, she had become less and less impressed by the Queen - Alynore continued to admire her gowns, yes, but the Queen herself…disappointed Alynore. What little highborn girl hadn’t grown up yearning to go to court, in awe of the mythical Queen she heard stories of, praising her beauty and virtue and wisdom and goodness - they had been speaking of Cersei in Alynore’s youth yet it was directly applicable to Queen Daenerys, who was falling short of Alynore’s expectations - especially with her reputation for justice.

Alynore was starting to believe that the stories of the Queen’s justice were purely based on the Queen being the survivor: She had lived, therefore her version of events was told. And because she had lived, she was right. Therefore everything she did was good, and just… That worried her.

It worried Alynore that she had seen the Dothraki raping a girl in the quay, without repercussions: Rapers in the Reach were swiftly sent to the Wall, or cut. It concerned Alynore to see the lack of boats out fishing, to provide food for the locals to preserve for the winter. It concerned her that the Queen’s plans did not include due care for the people she had brought across the seas, who were being given no direction from their leader, struggling to adapt to the island… And Alynore, who walked with her little cousins every morning past the Dothraki camp to the little fishers’ hamlet at the coast, knew first-hand that the Queen’s adopted peoples were struggling. They did not know how to fish the seas: The island could not sustain hunting, and they had little to no experience with agriculture, especially in this climate.

Alynore knew the theories behind agriculture - her House’s wealth was founded in their fields, after all - but not the practical nature of farming: She only knew gardening, a pastime her septas agreed was acceptable for a young lady, especially a lady born of House Tyrell. They were expected to take an interest in gardens: Highgarden was of course named for them, and famed throughout the world for their gardens. They were supposed to contribute. Alynore was a lover of flowers, not a farmer: But common sense told her that a starving people was a dangerous one, and the Dothraki were becoming agitated - they subsisted on horse, yet they could not risk their horses because of the Queen’s invasion. Every bloodrider needed a horse, and another to ride if the first fell: They could not spare the horses to feed their people, and were not being given the tools they needed to find alternative ways to provide for themselves…

Alynore was concerned by the atmosphere in the eerie fortress, and the Queen’s lack of warmth - Jon Snow’s reception was not outstanding in the Queen’s brittle, forced politeness: Consistently, as the Queen’s advisers engaged in battles of wits to sway her one way or another, advising patience and politics, and immediate and unrelenting assault, her impatience gave way to foul moods that set most of them on edge, waiting… Too many of the older people who had come to Dragonstone remembered the Mad King. They had witnessed his malice and his madness first-hand.

With her all-consuming focus on King’s Landing, on the Iron Throne, nothing beyond acquiring the Iron Throne, ‘ruling’ was an afterthought. Lady Olenna had been invited to sit in on the council sessions: Grandmother was not impressed that the Queen consistently refused to plan for what happened after she took the Iron Throne - to think about her policies now, so that implementing them would not take long, to help her establish her rule quickly, efficiently and irrevocably: Taxes, foreign trade, military pensions, justice, agriculture, religious tolerance… Succession.

It was constantly a worry to her Grandmother, who had left Alynore’s cousin Willas at Highgarden to implement their plans: He was the only man in the family Lady Olenna truly respected as having a hefty dose of intelligence and agency, worthy of leading their family through the greatest tragedies it had faced in generations - in spite of his crippled leg, which had done nothing to diminish his wits.

Willas was the future of House Tyrell: Alynore was the eldest surviving granddaughter of Lady Olenna, and the closest thing Willas now had to a surviving sister - she was a precious commodity, pretty and beguiling and of marriageable age - essential for alliances to secure the future of their House, of the Reach.

Queen Daenerys would not speak of the future beyond capturing the Iron Throne: And she either ignored that there was a necessity for it, or had faith that her advisors knew how to rule her people, for she had no interest in learning how to lead them. Alynore wondered whether the Queen even knew her people were bordering desperation. She didn’t know which was more unsettling - a ruler who had no interest in her people; or a ruler who trusted the prosperity of her people utterly to her advisers, lying to herself about their contentedness.

Jon Snow had come to Dragonstone because he didn’t trust that his people could come in his stead and be safe. The rumour was he had left his sister, Lady Sansa Stark, as chatelaine of Winterfell, as de facto Regent of the North in his absence, and according to Lord Varys’ little birds, was doing a splendid job of readying the North for both winter and invasion: Jon had made provision for his people’s security even in his absence, in the possible event of his capture or execution at the hands of a foreign queen. He would not risk their lives; but had risked his to ensure theirs by asking for help against an enemy no-one believed in.

“Do you believe him?” Grandmother asked, looking her right in the eye. “Did you think he was handsome?”

“Very handsome,” Alynore admitted, her cheeks warming, fidgeting subtly under her grandmother’s smirk. And tall, so deliciously tall, his dark curls cropped, his beard clipped neatly, his cheekbones sharper than his Valyrian steel sword belted at slender hips. Broad shoulders, and an implacable look so sharp, so kingly, she didn’t wonder why battle-hardened Northmen had yielded to him, why wildlings had allied with him. She had immediately liked his simple, fiercely masculine way of dressing, boiled leathers and coarse wool, thick, worn and serviceable, and barely of better quality than what his men wore - he wasn’t a man who thought much of his dress, and was certainly not a man defined by his dress…

She imagined he could be dressed in rags and still, people would flock to him as their leader. She imagined he had had little better than rags as a brother of the Night’s Watch, where they flung the dregs of Westeros to be forgotten. And yet the Northmen had named him their king - not because he had acted like one, or dressed like one, or demanded they treat him like one: Because he had earned their respect as their leader.

Alynore sighed softly. “But that’s not why I think he’s telling the truth.”

“No?”

“It would be…reckless to ignore his warning. He has had a difficult life, and after all that, has come all this way to warn people, potential enemies, that their lives are in danger,” she said earnestly, gazing at her grandmother. Jon Snow was either stupid or the most unselfish person she had ever met. “Not because he has anything to benefit from it; he came because it is right that everyone who can be warned to do something about it can.”

“Starks have never historically been scheming by nature but they are brutally honest,” Lady Olenna mused. “It would be far more comfortable to sneer and brush off his warnings, but -“

“He’s come all this way, knowing he’d likely be murdered on the spot,” Alynore said softly, and her grandmother nodded.

“And yet he’s here, just the same,” Lady Olenna said softly. “Starks have always been righteous; one would think them frightfully dull. But I must say I rather enjoyed watching him ruffle feathers in the throne room.” Her grandmother chuckled, eyes twinkling impishly.

“What does Ellaria Sand have to say about him?”

“Nothing very much of consequence, only that her paramour had journeyed beyond the Wall. According to Prince Oberyn the Free Folk are a people more ferocious and unpredictable than the Dornish,” Lady Olenna said, waving her hand enigmatically. “For Jon Snow to have allied them with the Northmen, their most bitter enemies…”

“That takes strength of character,” Alynore said softly, fiddling with her many, delicate little gold rings. Grandmother watched the dragons keening and whirling in the air beyond their windows; they were always flying, and Alynore wondered if they were joyous to be home - more joyous than their mother. Perhaps they sensed they were home, on this volcanic island. She wondered briefly where Daenerys Targaryen had come across three dragon-eggs; the rumour was the last in Westeros had perished in the Tragedy of Summerhall when Aegon the Unlikely died with most of his family, and Prince Rhaegar was born. “Do you think she’ll kill him?”

“Oh, she still believes she’s a woman and queen of immaculate morals,” Grandmother sniffed derisively, waving her hand; the large blue stone, a turquoise, glowed on her finger, stark against the rich black brocade Lady Olenna was wrapped up in. “And she has two good eyes in her head; rumour has it she likes them tall, dark and handsome. She’ll be in heat for the King in the North.”

“Grandmother!” Alynore wrinkled her nose, as her grandmother smirked.

“Save your blushes, my dear,” Grandmother chuckled. “If I were younger…”

“If you were younger, none of this unpleasantness would have happened,” Alynore said, with the conviction of youth. She knew her Grandmother well: And had Olenna warred with Cersei in her prime, the lioness of Lannister would have been annihilated. More than that, Westeros would have prospered, and perhaps risen from the backwards reputation it had suffered for centuries as great city-states like Braavos rose from the swamps and Qarth reigned eternal. Westeros had stagnated.

“It would have been quite something, to challenge Cersei, as I was in my prime,” Grandmother mused.

“You’re still a force to be reckoned with,” Alynore smiled sadly. Less so, since Baelor: Something had fractured irrevocably in her grandmother’s spirit. She was…fragile, in a way Alynore had never viewed her grandmother as vulnerable. “Has the Spider whispered anything about Cersei, and what she intends for the Reach?”

Grandmother cocked her head to one side, her pleated veil swishing silently over her shoulder, and eyed Alynore shrewdly. She pushed her large turquoise ring around her finger thoughtfully, rubbing the stone with her thumb. “What would you do? If you were in Cersei’s position? Facing treason and invasion?”

“Treason? If Daenerys Targaryen wins we shall be celebrated for our defection, the last of the Tyrells, who fought to dethrone a tyrannical queen…” Alynore said gloomily. If the Queen’s conquest was successful. She had been thinking about what happened next ever since Grandmother whisked her away from Highgarden to act as lady-in-waiting and confidante, to be tutored at her grandmother’s elbow in the arts of diplomacy. “As the Starks say, winter is coming. If I were Cersei, and I knew there was an army ready to invade, I would…take all the food, or access to it, at least. Starve everyone else to the point of capitulation and compliance, to feed my armies.”

“The Reach, then; she will set her eyes on the breadbasket of Westeros,” Grandmother sighed, nodding. “Your cousin believes the same.”

“Could our men stand against the Lannister army?” Alynore asked dubiously. The Tyrells were famous for their pageantry, not their strategy. During the Rebellion they had fought for the Targaryens - for Rhaegar - and relied heavily on the military brilliance of their bannerman Lord Randyll Tarly. Alynore hoped her cousin Willas had thought to approach the proud lord. He was an unpleasant man, but he knew strategy.

Lady Olenna sighed heavily: She was in no way ignorant of their family’s pitiful military strength. With Loras dead, the great hope of their family for a warrior was gone: Willas was cleverer, but crippled - their bannermen would not respect him as they should for his brilliance, because he could not sit a horse beside them and lead them on the battlefield. “In favourable conditions, we might have a very slender chance of beating them back. At least long enough for Daenerys Targaryen’s forces to break a siege.”

“Then why are the Queen’s forces not marching to Highgarden, laying siege to the Rose Road?” Alynore asked grimly, and her grandmother’s face crinkled expressively, her eyes twinkling.

“Why not, indeed,” she said softly. Alynore narrowed her eyes at a truly reprehensible thought.

“They won’t take prisoners this time, will they?” she said softly. In blowing up the Sept of Baelor, Cersei had crossed a line. In declaring herself Queen as the pit still smouldered, her son’s body lying broken at the foot of the Red Keep, she had sent a message to all of Westeros, all the world. Cersei had been playing the game for years; now she was setting the terms. She had nothing to lose, now: Her two sons were dead, one in her arms, one by his own choice, and her daughter resided in peace and tranquillity in the Water Gardens of Dorne, never to return to her mother’s embrace while Prince Doran and the Sand Snakes and every Dornishman lived to remember their beloved Prince Oberyn.

“No. Cersei declared to all when she blew up the Sept of Baelor that she places no value in hostages,” Grandmother said quietly. “She will see this out, to whatever end.”

“To whatever end,” Alynore echoed sadly. She was acutely aware at all times that she sat by her grandmother’s side, conversing with her as student and heiress, because her cousin Margaery was gone: Otherwise she would have been left to live out her days as another wallflower in the rose-garden, pretty to look upon but indistinguishable from all the others. There were too many Tyrells.

Had been too many Tyrells.

Alynore glanced at her grandmother. “Are they underestimating her viciousness?”

“The Queen’s advisors? I do not believe so,” Grandmother mused, “however it is one thing to be a brilliant strategist with the benefit of intimately knowing your enemy, and being a proud young thing set against listening to anyone’s advice but your own.”

“She’s ignoring their counsel,” Alynore sighed.

“They give insight, and Lord Tyrion has foresight,” Grandmother sighed heavily, shaking her head, “yet in spite of all warnings, the Targaryen girl has come this far without educated men such as these to guide her, and been triumphant.”

“She burned everyone else, that’s why,” Alynore sniffed, and her grandmother gave her an arch look. “She has no diplomacy.”

“Oh, none whatsoever. She was not raised by them, but she is every inch a Targaryen,” Grandmother smirked nastily. “Hostile, entitled, totalitarian. And utterly, utterly convinced in their gods-given rights to conquer, to inflict their will upon those lesser than themselves. She reminds me of her father, in the beginning.”

“What was he like, before the madness?”

“Oh, I am sure the potential was always there, Duskendale only enhanced it,” Grandmother said, frowning thoughtfully. “He was clever, but erratic. Lacked commitment, above all things. Excellent ideas, no grit to see them executed. Lord Tywin ensured the realm did not suffer, as the king flitted from idea to idea, never settling, never satisfied. He was charming, though, in the beginning. As this queen is charming. But dangerous. You never forgot that Aerys was the king. As she will not allow us to forget she is the Dragon Queen.”

Alynore frowned out of the window, as the green dragon soared past. Terrifying as they were, she could not deny they had a certain awing majesty. “She relies on them.”

“Mm… And what is she without them?” Grandmother asked, echoing Jon Snow. Her pale eyes were twinkling, and she was smirking - she looked almost like her old self, like the sharp-tongued grandmother Alynore remembered.

“You liked him,” Alynore realised, and her grandmother chuckled.

“He is blunt and earnest and it was a delight to see that proud little girl soundly smacked,” Grandmother said, smiling. “I’m not surprised the King in the North is unimpressed by the girl’s monologue…not after everything his family has suffered, all his sister has endured.”

“What was Sansa Stark like?” Alynore asked: She had never set foot at court, never seen Lady Sansa, but her cousins had said she was beautiful. Lady Olenna did not speak for many moments; she rubbed her thumb over her turquoise, her watery blue eyes faraway.

“She survived Cersei,” Grandmother said softly, and Alynore watched her face, reading her expression. Grief, yes: Sansa Stark had accomplished a feat not even Margaery, for all her beauty and brilliance, could pull off. Grief, yes, for Margaery, and their family’s loss: but also respect, for the girl Lady Olenna Tyrell had underestimated.

The Queen of Thorns wouldn’t make the same mistake again.

“We were all so distracted by the vulnerable, tragic beauty and her courtesies, we never saw the wolf-pelt bristling beneath the petals,” Lady Olenna said poetically, but her face fell, grief-stricken, earnestly bemused. Lady Olenna sighed. “Now the she-wolf has been sharpening her claws.”

“Could a wolf kill a lion in combat, do you think?” Alynore asked.

“Oh, certainly,” Grandmother said, waving an impatient hand. She added shrewdly, “A wolf never hunts alone.”

“How does a steward of the Night’s Watch become King in the North?” Alynore wondered aloud. The Queen’s titles told her story: Jon Snow was King in the North, and that was that. It left everyone wondering who he was. It left them curious, wanting… Whatever Jon Snow’s journey had been, it would be utterly unique. After the exhibition in the throne room, Alynore thought she had the measure of the Queen - and of Jon Snow. “Jon Snow was right; nearly every woman on this island has endured the same and worse than the Queen. Jon Snow’s story seems worth hearing.”

“Then ask him to tell it, though I’d wager he’ll be reluctant. Northmen are men of few words,” Lady Olenna smirked. She sighed, shaking her head. “They say the Young Wolf was wise beyond his years…he certainly had strategy, brutalising the old lion across the Riverlands, snaring the golden one… Those boys were raised together.”

“They were brothers.”

“One was a bastard. Lady Catelyn was a proud cow. They were brothers; Jon Snow was threat to her son’s inheritance,” Lady Olenna said, shaking her head. “One wonders how the fate of House Stark might have been shaped had Jon Snow been left behind as castellan of Winterfell as Robb Stark marched to war.”

“Likely he would have been skewered by Ironborn,” Alynore sighed. “They leave no man behind who could ever raise a weapon against them.”

“Happily for Alarra Snow she was no man,” Grandmother quipped.

“But she died anyway,” Alynore said softly, thinking of the pain and fury in Jon Snow’s eyes when he had spoken of his twin-sister. Alynore had never been to the North, never even seen snow, but the wandering crows told stories of the Night’s Watch and the True North beyond the Wall, and she knew the King’s twin-sister had died beyond it in frozen wastes, forgotten.

She couldn’t help wonder, briefly, what would happen to the Night’s Watch now that the North had allied with the wildlings. If Jon Snow wasn’t lying, and the White Walkers weren’t just figments from legend…this was what the Watch had been created for - not to keep away savage men, but to keep away true monsters. What if they were real; what if they could be defeated, with all allied Westeros… What then?

Alynore wondered if Jon Snow had thought that far ahead. If he had allowed himself the luxury of thinking there was even a glimmer of hope that they may survive monsters from legend…if he planned ahead. What provision could he make for the survivors of the Night’s Watch, who had known nothing but honour and service and deprivation in the name of doing what was right.

Had Jon Snow thought it out? Had he sat with his sister, chatelaine and heiress of Winterfell, of the North, and worked out what happened next - every possible outcome? How did they best secure the future of their people, and how did alliances forged in the fires of true terror affect those decisions? What would become of the wildlings after? Had he thought about the economy of the North, poor and largely left to itself, scratching meagre livings off rocks? Grandmother said Northmen were prudent: They lived off what they had, and thanked their old gods for even that much. They were…in shocking contrast to the pageantry and frivolousness of the Reach: Their cultures were absolutely opposite.

And Alynore made up her mind to discover how Jon Snow had become King in the North; and what made him worthy of the crown, and how - or whether - he would continue to earn it.

Because gifts given could always be snatched away.

There was no security.

The Red Wedding had taught them that, long before Baelor had.

“How will the Hand and Lord Varys advise, do you think?” Alynore asked her grandmother, who sat in on the council meetings, though refused an official place in the Small Council until Daenerys had claimed the Iron Throne. The contention between warmongering Lord Tyrion and the more diplomatic stance of Lord Varys was well-known by now: They had enjoyed working together to thwart common enemies to protect King’s Landing from Baratheon invasion and Northern aggression, and were friends, Alynore thought, but advising the Queen was different entirely. They were not protecting: They were conquering. One coaxed for minimal loss of life and diplomacy, cleverness and caution, patience: the other championed wholesale slaughter and destruction to ensure that every trace of the disease that was Cersei Lannister was burned from the land, from the very pages of history.

“Interestingly, Lord Tyrion may champion Jon Snow. They have a past friendship, and a sense of mutual respect,” Lady Olenna mused.

“But allying with Jon Snow would divert their cause from the Iron Throne,” Alynore countered, and her grandmother’s eyes twinkled as she shifted, turning herself toward Alynore more fully, the better to look her in the face, as her Grandmother liked to say, to see the whites of her eyes. “It is more likely Lord Varys will champion his cause, when helping the North defeat its enemy could cement allies in Westeros. The Queen needs Westerosi allies, allies in a position of strength. The Starks are reasserting their strength.”

“A feat none thought possible after the Red Wedding,” Lady Olenna said softly. Her eyes were strained, pained, when she smiled at Alynore. “A lesson to us all.”

“She won’t want to help. Her pride is wounded. She’s come here to save Westeros and the Starks have already saved the North for themselves and their people,” Alynore said. “They wouldn’t have named Jon Snow their king if they didn’t believe in him… She came expecting to be wanted, and needed; the North doesn’t need her.”

“Oh, they need her armies,” Lady Olenna waved a hand. “Lord Tyrion will see they are not committed to any cause but destroying his sister utterly.”

“Do you think it is possible she might actually try and earn his respect?” Alynore asked. “Daenerys, I mean. I don’t believe she’s used to not impressing other people. Jon Snow wasn’t at all impressed by her.”

“He didn’t embarrass himself by panting at her heels, you mean,” Lady Olenna snickered. “Oh, she’s used to men becoming cunt-struck at the sight of her, the thought of bedding her… Night’s Watchmen take no wives, and father no children; they live their lives for a cause greater than their own… They are used to deprivation, to making the hard choices. They are of that rare breed who are trained not to think with their cocks, in spite of having full use of them.”

“The North can’t afford for him to yield to her,” Alynore said, and her grandmother nodded.

“So he shan’t.” Lady Olenna’s eyes twinkled viciously. “It shall be entertaining to watch the tables turned on Daenerys Stormborn. She’s never met a man who hasn’t wanted her; never met one she could not bend to her will.”

“She’d never met a Northman.”

Even in the Reach, the stubbornness and honour of Northmen was legendary. Jon Snow was the last of the Starks to engage in the game of thrones, for the sake of survival and honour - Alynore wondered if he was following in the footsteps of Lord Cregan Stark, who ended the Dance of Dragons during the Hour of the Wolf, defining the Targaryen dynasty by championing and crowning King Aegon III… She imagined he had been warned against coming south, against following the footsteps of his grandfather Rickard Stark, the man whose fiery execution beside his son had sparked the Rebellion.

The Starks had historically had the power to make or break the Targaryen dynasty.

She hoped Daenerys Targaryen realised it would be in her benefit to make a friend of Jon Snow.

Chapter 16: Home

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

16

Home


They stopped at every holdfast and hamlet, helping those who struggled to leave their homes due to the snow, sickness or recalcitrance. The column kept moving, herding cattle, swaddling newborns delivered in the fiercest snowstorms in centuries. Bran guided them, and direwolves guarded them from worse monsters. More died on the journey: Any who fell were burned where they landed. It was a relief, as much as it was tragic: Fewer to fight the winter, but also fewer to feed through the winter.

It was well into their fifth week of travel when she saw it. It wasn’t the snow whirling around them thickly that disoriented them, reducing everything to indistinguishable dark shapes; it was the howling winds. This winter had long threatened to be the worst in living memory. She had seen the eye of the storm to come; it would be. The storms had been getting more and more violent as the weeks passed: She had endured worse, north of the Wall - but anyone who had looked the Night King in the eye would brace against this storm, and realise…his power was growing, his influence over the elements strengthening. Whatever power the Children had bequeathed so foolishly to their creation was building once again: All Man could do was weather it out. Fight. Survive. Rebuild. And remember.

The Wall still stood: Regardless, winter chased at their heels. Larra, who would never forget the unfeeling malice, the pure intent in the Night King’s eyes, kept driving them further, faster: She had empathy for those who struggled but if they sank back into the snows to wail and catch their breaths, they were lost - she would have been taken by the storm years ago. She couldn’t afford to look back.

But then she saw it. There was a break in the storm, the iron-grey clouds parting briefly to shine meagre silver light on the snow-strewn landscape, the sky brightening as the snow gentled, and the wind died. The world became still, breathless almost. And she knew where she was. Intimately.

Their path wended alongside a river, unfrozen even in these storms; it was fed by hot-springs, the same as piped hot water through the walls of Winterfell, the same that fed the pool in the godswood where Father cleaned his sword under the heart-tree, watching the water ripple. In winter, steam rose from the churning water, so thick it looked like fog. Everywhere around the water, around the stream, the ice had melted, the snow did not stick; animals crept to the water’s edge, and high above, in ancient trees bowing their limbs toward the water, tiny dew-kissed buds ready to unfurl into fresh green leaves, were dire-eagles. Hundreds of them, ink-eyed and half as tall as an Umber, a coronet of tufted feathers around its head, talons like meat-hooks and incredible stormy plumage of greys and whites making it perfect camouflage for the winter - for hunting. Hundreds of them, waiting in the trees, watching carefully. It unnerved most who noticed them, made the hairs stand up at the back of their necks. The dire-eagles couldn’t care less that thousands of Men wandered past their hunting-grounds: They had easier prey in mind.

Larra knew this place. It was her favourite place outside Winterfell, and Father had told her stories about the river that defied even winter itself. Maester Luwin had called the phenomenon - of the unfrozen river in winter, a thriving haven to wildlife in one of the harshest places in the world - a microcosm: a meticulously-balanced ecosystem within another, larger environment. In the heart of winter, predator and prey would gather near the water: The eagles waited for Man to pass by, so they could return to their fishing. The river churned not with rapids but with salmon that had spawned during the autumn. The direwolves scented the area as they padded past, marking territory and familiarising themselves with fresh scents the snow had hidden from them for leagues. Larra could see where deer had stripped the bark from trees close to the water’s edge, where the steam had thawed the ice.

Father used to theorise that Brandon the Builder had chosen to build Winterfell where he had because he had likely been following the river, where he and his people could survive the harshest winters. Once, Larra’s ancestors had lived like the Free Folk, migratory, following their food-supply, chasing warmth: It was Brandon who set down stone and built a great keep, using curiously advanced irrigation to pipe hot water from the rivers through its walls to keep the bite of winter at bay.

She marvelled in the river, the first time in her life she had ever seen it in the heart of winter, pure and bare and extraordinarily beautiful, those thousand birds perched patiently, steam drifting in a gentle breeze that started to whistle as their path wended away from the water, through thicker woodlands, and as the last eagle disappeared from her view, Larra glanced around, identifying markers she used to use when hunting, familiar and yet not because the winter had stripped everything she knew from her memory. She sat up straighter in her saddle. She dug her heels into Black Alys’ sides. Edd called to her, his voice tinged with concern. She ignored him. And rode on ahead, weaving her way through the column, past smallfolk on foot and carts laden with grain and meat, wagons full of children and nursing mothers, skirting around herds of cattle, leaving them all behind.

The river wended to the left; she followed an ancient path to the right, curving around and up a steep hill that had forever created natural fortifications for Winterfell - the same natural fortification that had cost King Stannis Baratheon his campaign when he led the assault against Ramsey Bolton. It left attackers blind to Winterfell’s advancing cavalry or infantry, gave the armies precious moments to ready themselves and either be waiting to slaughter, or sneak around the rises and take advancing enemies unawares from behind, using the ancient wolfswood as protection. Yes, Brandon the Builder had been canny indeed when he chose to lay the foundations for Winterfell where he had.

Larra crested the hill.

There it was.

Home.

Nestled comfortably and conspicuously among the flawless white moors: Winterfell.

Even from her vantage, Larra could see the vibrant, violent red of the weirwood heart-tree dominating the ancient, sprawling godswood.

Her heart cracked, and she stared at her home in grief and stunned disbelief - she was home. There and back again… The last time she had seen the heart-tree…she had been sobbing into Maester Luwin’s bloodied grey robe, a part of her heart withering and dying as the life-blood seeped from that marvellous man, her hands shaking as she gripped the coarse material of his cowl, the sting of metal cold against her hands as his heavy chain clinked against her fingers, and his spindly hands trembled as he rested them on her shoulders, raising her face in his hands, stroking her tear-stained cheeks with his thumbs, as he had thousands of times before. His kind, lined face had been drawn in pain and anguish - at his parting from them - and he made her promise…protect her brothers… ”You’re the only one who can…”

Tears pooled hotly in her eyes, and stung her cheeks as they slipped down her wind-bitten skin, gazing at Winterfell, her memories an onslaught as devastating as any army cresting the invisible rise ahead.

Black Alys snorted and stamped impatiently, but Larra didn’t respond, blinded by tears, by ghosts, trying to catch her breath as she stared at her home. She never thought to see it again.

She shoved the tears from her eyes, sniffing, and focused on the horizon, on Winterfell. The moors were not unblemished, she realised, squinting in the snows that had returned, more gently than they had been most of their journey, delicate kisses whispering against her skin, as if nature itself was trying to soothe her, to say, “Welcome home. We’ve missed you.”

A haze of dark smoke lingered like a dense blanket over Winter’s Town, rising up to from the moors past the South Gate, busier even from a distance than Larra had ever known it: All of the North had gathered to Winterfell to endure the storm, and the town had been built for the occasion. Banners flew high over the grey stone buildings, whipping and snapping in the wind, colours whitewashed from ice and snow but still recognisable due to the rich dye pigments and designs. Many familiar Northern banners, but some unusual ones - unusual in that they flew over Winter’s Town at all: Corbray, Belmore, Melcolm, Hunter, Templton, Egen. Valemen. Lesser lords from the Riverlands: Blackwood, Darry, Pyper, Mooton, Strong and Vance. Even a Tully trout, black against the blue and red Tully colours. Brynden the Blackfish? she thought, slightly stunned. Lady Catelyn’s uncle - and a legendary warrior. One standard stood out, quartered with yellow suns emblazoned on rose and white crescents stark against azure blue. Tarth. How had the North secured support from the Evenstar?

Black Alys stamped her hooves and snorted, fidgeting: A smaller horse appeared in the corner of her eye - not a horse. Last Shadow. Hot breath pluming in the cold air, her night-black coat sparkling with melting snow, her inky eyes glittering with the warmth of embers as she raised her muzzle to nudge Larra’s leg. She looked Larra in the eye, and started padding away, toward Winterfell. Larra could do nothing but follow. She sniffed, wiped her face, sat up straighter in her saddle, and kept her pace slow as the rest of the column started to catch up. The sighs and chatter of exhausted people finally reaching safety was like music as it spread through the column like wildfire, relief and delight mingling with cries: They had made it.

You made it, she thought to herself, a mixture of grim acceptance and wonder. There and back again… She glanced over her shoulder, finding the familiar wagon where Bran was entertaining Little Jon and Ragnar with stories that would frighten even a Thenn, guarded by several direwolves and Night’s Watchmen: Edd rode ahead to meet Larra.

“You alright?” he asked, and Larra nodded mutely.

“Winter’s Town looks to be filling up,” she said. “Knights of the Vale and Tully bannermen.”

“How did that happen?” Edd frowned. He had been born and bred in the Vale: As one of Jon’s greatest friends and advisors and acting Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, Edd had a better picture of what had been happening throughout the rest of Westeros. The last he had been informed, the Lannisters had helped the Freys claim Riverrun, using Edmure Tully as hostage and leverage to surrender the castle without bloodshed. There were claims Ser Brynden Tully, the Blackfish, had died in the ensuing skirmish when he refused to meet Lannister terms. He had escaped the Red Wedding, they said; Larra marvelled that his standard flew above Winter’s Town. But then…she was returning to Winterfell, after being declared dead, after surviving the True North and all the horrors of legend and nightmare.

Stranger things had happened than seasoned old warriors surviving battles.

“We shall soon find out,” Larra murmured, and Edd nodded, his eyes on the horizon, squinting through the gentle snows.

“I’ll spread the word. Bannermen ride on ahead to the castle; everyone else settle in at Winter’s Town,” Edd said, and Larra nodded her agreement; he turned his horse around and trotted off, to pass orders along the column. She let Black Alys go, trotting gently along the path carved through the snow, snowbanks eight feet high and looming over them: The path had been created by foot-traffic and wagons - ahead, she could see several carts and a flock of black-faced fluffy Northern sheep being herded by clever Northern sheepdogs. Larra was reminded fleetingly of strict Septa Mordane trying to corral boisterous Arya, as Sansa preened by the hearth with her needlework, and the thought made her lips twitch as her eyes drifted to the castle, looming ever larger, ever closer. She glanced over her shoulder, seeking out Meera’s dark curls; she must have her head covered, as Larra did, against the bitter wind that had made her ears and back of her neck throb.

Winterfell.

It was full of ghosts - some of them exquisite, filled with delight and wonder, with warmth and love and friendship. It was the others that plagued her mind now, wheedling into the crack that had appeared in her heart long ago, weeping and screaming as Theon Greyjoy butchered Ser Rodrik in the courtyard, shaking with rage and grief as the Ironborn gave up Mikken to their Drowned God… She had been bullied and nearly raped in that castle. They had hidden in the crypts like common criminals - her, and Osha and Brandon, Rickon and sweet Hodor. She had turned away as Osha unsheathed her blade to gift Maester Luwin with mercy in the godswood. Smoke had billowed from the castle itself as they strode away across the moors, headed north to find Jon and some illusion of safety, long before they had ever met the Reed siblings. Winterfell was where her family had once been whole; and where she had experienced the first of the great horrors to define the woman she had become.

Her breath came in short, sharp bursts as she drew back to match pace with Brandon’s wagon, Meera resting beside him, tired and bleak-eyed. She met Larra’s gaze, and they communicated without speaking: Not all of them had made it back to Winterfell. Osha, Hodor, Jojen, Rickon, Shaggydog… Larra didn’t need to voice her trepidation about returning, about setting foot inside the courtyard still, in her memory, soaked with Ser Rodrik’s blood, about praying to the very same heart-tree under which Maester Luwin had been given the gift of mercy, the warm halls that had turned into her prison cell, hunted by Ironborn for sport.

They were digging a deep, wide trench. The poor sods who had to dig had broken through the frozen earth, and great mounds of it were piled outside the trench, forming a rise living infantry would find difficult to scale without being riddled with arrows - only to find a sudden drop and death beyond even if they survived the archers, an impassable boundary… Only a very narrow path, barely wide enough for a single wagon to pass through, had been left for access, a hundred yards to the right of the South Gate, which was being refortified with new gates made of ancient oak from the wolfswood, behind a new double-portcullis of tempered steel. Strong. Stronger than anything the Free Folk could ever craft.

She was gratified they were preparing: She also knew better than to think any of this would hold up against the Night King’s armies for long. A living army would be deterred by the trench and fortifications, and perhaps the trebuchets, launching fiery projectiles, might put a dent in the advancing hordes…but the Night King’s armies were not living. They did not tire; they felt no fear, or pain. They did not stop. They were fodder. And utterly, utterly in the control of their commanders. They would not break ranks, they would not flee. The dead would not stop for anything. Anything but fire or obsidian…

Still - they were preparing. And Jon had fought the dead at Hard Home - and lost. Edd had been at his side, fighting alongside the Free Folk to get as many of the wildlings onto Stannis Baratheon’s ships as possible: They’d talked about it, on their journey south. Edd had seen hardened wildlings weeping as the Night King raised the dead on the shores of Hard Home.

Winterfell was not Hard Home. And they were not going to be caught unawares, fractured, scattered - they had time, that precious commodity. They had weapons. And they had a fierce leader supported by equally fearsome advisors and chieftains and warriors, and allies experienced in many different kinds of warfare. That combined experience, combined resources, the strength from unity…

“Makes you wonder, doesn’t it,” she murmured to Edd, who glanced away from a trebuchet being pieced together by a team of rugged Northmen and Free Folk - recognisable by their furs.

“What’s that?”

“The difference it might have made, had Mance been allowed to lead the Free Folk south of the Wall,” Larra sighed. Edd nodded to himself.

“Even as I die I’ll still remember the shores of Hard Home,” he muttered, scowling in the snow. He sighed heavily. “Jon wondered the same thing, you know. We knew even as Mance Rayder marched his armies upon the Wall that the true enemy was the dead…but too few of us knew, or believed…”

“We built the Wall so we would never forget the threat,” Larra said, pulling the fur down from over her mouth so her voice wasn’t muffled. “The memories faded into myth and legend…we forgot. When we should have been afraid, and waiting.”

“Can’t help but think what we’d be doing now if Jon had never joined the Watch,” Edd said, raising his eyes to the great outer curtain wall of Winterfell.

“Strange how a single decision can alter the course of history,” Larra sighed glumly. She had always known, since they were children, that Jon would join the Watch. He was unwelcome at Winterfell, as Larra was, but he had opportunity due to his gender; and he was awed by Uncle Benjen’s stories of Ranging. These weren’t the lives either of them had imagined for themselves when they were small. Jon had joined the Watch, risen to Lord Commander, and defined the history of the Watch’s last war. The North would never forget his name.

If they survived the Long Night.

No-one stopped them as they made their way through the trench, across the narrow bridge of earth left untouched for easy access for the men working on the trebuchets; the few already constructed were launching projectiles, marking their range to improve their positioning. Carts laden with freshly-hewn tree-trunks rested beyond the trench, men working to sharpen some to savage points to embed in the trench, others to go toward more trebuchets; she grieved briefly for the wolfswood. The sacrifices they had to make if they wanted to survive.

Some of the men turned to watch, and Larra realised it was because of her - rather, because of Last Shadow, who padded silently beside Black Alys, hulking and gorgeous, bigger than any pony, lethal - and familiar…

A blur of something enormous and white streaked out of the gate: Last Shadow raised her muzzle to the skies and howled with relief as Larra’s heart swelled - Ghost!

Brother and sister pelted toward each other, tumbling together as they met, yipping and nuzzling, scenting each other, licking each other’s muzzles affectionately, playing together for the first time in years.

Men nearby backed away from the wolves, stunned and awed. Perhaps they were used to Ghost: But Lady had been killed years ago, Nymeria lost, Grey Wind butchered, and Shaggydog slaughtered. They wouldn’t know the rest of Ghost’s litter. They wouldn’t know the bond between Ghost, the albino runt of the litter, and Last Shadow, whose eyes had been open, howling adorably to Larra so they weren’t overlooked when Robb and Theon had gathered up the other pups mewling and whimpering and blindly seeking their dead mother’s milk. She still remembered Last Shadow, a tiny pup with soft down black as night and lustrous as velvet, a keen-eyed, brazen, cunning thing even as a pup as Larra taught her to hunt in the wolfswood. Larra had been so in love with watching Last Shadow grow, and learn, building on the instincts and resilience as a pup to one day survive the frozen wastes of the True North and, as a mature direwolf bitch when all her brothers and sisters were taken from her, form her own pack.

Larra handed Black Alys’ reins to Edd, and climbed out of the saddle, her legs aching, drawn to the two direwolves, as much her home as Winterfell was. Last Shadow howled her delight, and in the distance howls echoed back, each unique; the rest of the pack had stayed back from the castle, instinct warning them against coming too close. But Last Shadow knew this place…she had been drawn home…to her brother.

“Ghost,” she murmured, and the albino wolf, hulking and snow-white, fidgeted in the snow, ears twitching toward the sound of howls as Last Shadow licked his muzzle and nipped his ears. Glowing ruby eyes turned to Larra. She remembered Ghost slender and gangling and silent; before her, now, stood a beautiful strong, mature wolf, his face handsome and thoughtful and sorrowful, as if the emotion of every tragedy Jon had survived had pooled in his eyes, which were wise and sad even though they unnerved most. Some said Ghost’s eyes were the colour of blood: Larra knew they were the colour of weirwood amber, pure and vibrant.

If ever they needed confirmation that Larra and Jon were truly born of Northern stock, all anyone need do was look at Ghost, bonded so fiercely to Jon: With his weirwood-white fur and red-amber eyes, Ghost was the living embodiment of the North - of the Stark sigil and their First Men ancestry, linked so closely to the Children and the weirwoods that their devotion to heart-trees persisted in spite of invasion and conquest and beguiling new gods.

She fell to her knees in the muddy snow as Ghost approached; kneeling, he loomed over her. She didn’t see Edd ride on; or the wagon trundle past with Brandon and Meera watching from their furs. A subtle smile lifted Brandon’s sombre face as he watched Larra reunite with Ghost.

Tears slid down her face: Silent as she always remembered him, Ghost licked the tears from her face, so, so tenderly. His clever, sad eyes examined her face, remembering, recognising; he tucked his muzzle under her chin, chuffed gently, and licked her face, her ears. His thick fur warmed her exposed skin as tears slid down her face, tickling her chin; her body shuddering with sobs, her eyes burning from tears, she looped her arms around his neck and hugged him, hugged Ghost, as much a part of her brother as Last Shadow was a part of her. She buried her face in Ghost’s fur, his warmth seeping into her, his musty familiar scent soothing her, filling her with extraordinary memories to chase away the nightmares, memories of Shaggydog jumping out at them in the crypts; of Grey Wind and Summer tearing across the moors as Bran whooped and yelled in his new special saddle; of Last Shadow’s self-satisfied lick of Larra’s face after she brought down the stag Theon had been itching to successfully hunt for months; of Nymeria and Lady play-fighting and licking each other lovingly in the godswood as Last Shadow taught Shaggydog how to stalk their sisters; of Summer contentedly licking the cutthroat’s blood from his paws as Bran slept on; of Shaggydog and Summer cuddling with her brothers in the abandoned holdfast as they waited out a storm, warm and for the moment safe, the worst horrors behind them as far as they had known then, sleeping peacefully.

Ghost raised his paw, landing it heavily on her back, wriggling in her arms; his tail was wagging when she opened her eyes, raising her wet face from his fur. He snorted gently, his breath pluming in the air, gazed at her with those red-amber eyes, and gently licked the last of her tears away.

“You’ve been looking after him, haven’t you,” she moaned, her smile tremulous as Ghost’s tail started wagging again, and she raised her hand to stroke his face lovingly. He sniffed at her fingers, licked them, and gave them a brief, sharp, not unpleasant nip of affection. She gulped back more tears, wiping her face on her furs, and rose on weak knees, her fingers trembling as she grasped the hilt of her sword for something solid to hold onto; Last Shadow and Ghost prowled beside her, brother and sister on either side, as she approached the gate on foot. People moved out of the way for her - for her, and the direwolves.

Contentment, relief, swept through her for the first time in ages, Ghost and Last Shadow walking so close they bumped against her as they walked, matching pace, their heat radiating through her. She let her fingers trail through their thick fur as they walked. She knew Jon had gone south to meet with Daenerys Targaryen; but Ghost was here. Part of Jon was here. She followed the happy chatter and the sound of excited, contented people working hard, not pausing to reflect on the shiver that passed down her spine as high stone walls seemed to close in on her, unfamiliar shadows looming overhead - she had become unaccustomed to great stone structures, to castles and courtyards and looming towers. She had become used to the caves under the weirwood; to the open, endless grey skies; to the bare skeletons of trees whipping and cracking in brutal winds. For the briefest moment, she felt as if she was being crushed.

Then she saw the Stark banners hanging from the walls, grey direwolf against a pure snow-white landscape, and calm seemed to suffuse her body, her lungs cracking open to take in the cool air, the warmth of the direwolves at either side soothing her ragged nerves. She focused on the hum of activity, the anvils singing in Mikken’s great forge, the women clustered around open fires weaving baskets, old men fletching arrows and carving bowls and spoons, orphans helping wizened women prepare food in cauldrons hoisted over great fires.

The smallfolk of Winterfell were preparing for war. And yet they were happy.

They knew war was coming, but could not comprehend how devastating things would soon be: They were content to know that the Starks had returned to Winterfell, reclaiming the North - Starks were once again taking care of their people.

She heard the soft murmurings, the singing of women and the chatter of busy, contented people, the hacking of axes and chiming of hammers against anvils, heard the gasps as she relished the sight of her father’s sigil hanging from the walls once more, and her eyes flicked down to waist-height as she entered through a small gateway, where a new oak door banded with steel stood flanked by two freshly-hewn direwolf statues. She knew they were freshly-hewn: Generations of Starks had worn down the ears and noses of the direwolf statues guarding the entrance to the crypts as they passed their fingers over the fearsome effigies, each time they descended the age-worn steps into the ancient crypts, the burial-place of their ancestors…their brothers and sisters… Her mother.

Her mother rested beneath the courtyard flagstones. She had rested, in peace, with her brother and father, visited often by Ned, who held vigil over her, lighting her candles and bringing her flowers, bringing light and warmth and perfume to the dank crypts…

Larra glanced away from the entrance to the crypt and entered the courtyard, noticing a grim-faced man in a billowing yellow cape, Free Folk in their furs, and a shrewd-looking girl with the Mormont bear on its hind legs emblazoned on her leather breastplate, watching the people clustered around a wagon. Brandon’s sombre face turned to gaze at her, smile benign, and Edd’s sharp features creased in a contented smile as he leaned against the back of the wagon, watching Meera talk earnestly to a tall woman in a heavy, rich cloak. Meera’s eyes darted from the woman to Larra and back; Edd grinned over at Larra, his shrewd eyes alight with anticipation. A hush fell over the courtyard, people staring, parting to allow Larra and the direwolves through the throng of gathered nobles and smallfolk and knights and Free Folk.

The woman in the rich cloak had her lustrous red hair neatly plaited from her face and braided, coiled into a thick bun, the Northern hairstyle known as the “crown” adopted by every noblewoman north of the Neck, waves of copper shimmering over the thick wolf-pelt draped over her shoulders. Her profile was elegant as she turned; a long, slender nose, pretty rosebud lips and short, thick eyelashes. Blue eyes like the skies of the spring of Larra’s childhood, damp from shock and relief. Those blue eyes landed on Larra, and the Lady of Winterfell stumbled back, her lips parting, tears streaming down her face in shock, her face grief-stricken, heart-broken.

Larra stared at her sister. Gone was the delicate, petty young girl in softly-hued princess dresses, fussing over her embroidery and her braids; gone the courteous, sharp-tongued girl who cared more for poems and pageantry than appreciating her siblings. Gone the young lady who walked on air, her head full of songs and her heart full of dreams.

It had been the easiest thing in the world to forget, beneath the weirwood, that time was indeed still passing; until she looked at Sansa and felt the blow to her stomach as if kicked in the chest by a mule. Sansa was a woman now.

As a girl she had been pretty, promising great beauty: As a woman, with a steely glint in her blue eyes and her chin raised in defiance even as shock rendered her unsteady on her feet and gulping back tears, she was magnificent. Tall and stately, poised: She radiated strength and an unfamiliar confidence, a sternness that maintained the respect of those around her, even as she was reduced to tears. There was a cold, hewn sombreness to her face now, older and wiser and harsher.

For the first time in her life, Larra thought Sansa looked…Northern.

She was shrouded in a thick brocade cloak lined with fur, the fine wolf-pelt on her shoulders glistening in the pale light, her hands concealed by fine leather gloves, and beneath the folds of her cloak, Larra saw the familiar sheen of fine tooled leather and the shimmer of heavy skirts. Larra recognised the fabric, charcoal and onyx patterned with silvery steel-grey crosses. Beneath the clasps of her cloak, two silver direwolves pinned an exquisitely-embroidered high double-collar in place; a silver chain tinkled as Sansa moved, draped around her throat, dangling to her waist, ending with something small and dagger-like that glinted in the light.

Larra had the time to take in the details of her sister’s appearance as Sansa strode toward her, her eyes filled with tears, unblinking as she drank in Larra’s appearance. Hers was not as magnificent, she knew, but she raised her chin and met Sansa’s tear-filled eyes as her own burned, stunned by this stern beauty advancing on her, a smile breaking through as Sansa choked and threw herself at Larra, knocking her off-balance, embracing her.

Stunned. She was stunned. Too stunned to hug back immediately; but she blinked, and hot tears fell down her cheeks, and she found her arms wrapping themselves around Sansa tightly as Sansa shook against her.

She had never been embraced like this by Sansa…like a sister.

As an equal. As someone Sansa loved.

She hugged back fiercely, her eyes burning as tears streamed down her face, and Sansa shook in her arms, and Larra remembered that this was still her little sister, and that little girl in airy princess gowns was gone for a reason. Suffering had tempered her sister’s nature; and Sansa Stark was stronger for the pain, the resilience she had come upon through experience.

Her little sister. A grown woman, stern and unyielding as any she-wolf who had come before her. Beautiful.

Larra hugged her sister, as Sansa wept into her shoulder, shaking. Her little sister. Home. They were home. She panted, and sighed, and relaxed into her sister’s embrace as she held her sister upright, the fragrance in Sansa’s soft hair beguiling her nose, the softness of her cloak unfamiliar against Larra’s scarred palms. She gentled Larra, as she relaxed, stroking her long hair, rocking them both gently.

“Sansa?” she murmured.

“Yes, Larra?”

“Did you steal my dress?”

Startled, Sansa’s cries turned to a rippling laugh as they unfolded from each other; Sansa’s smile shone through her tears, her eyes glinting, and they parted, though they did not move away from each other.

“I did,” Sansa nodded unapologetically, glancing down at the rich folds of her gown. Larra noticed the leather wrapped around her sister’s torso in a complicated configuration, the laces hidden at her waist beneath a wide belt. Tears slipped silently down Sansa’s delicate pink cheeks as she smiled tremulously. She told Larra earnestly, “I wished to don a she-wolf’s pelt. I wanted you with me.”

Larra gazed at her sister: They were now the same height, gazing eye-to-eye. She was truly beautiful. Her fiery red hair shimmered as the snows drifted gently around them, clinging to her wet eyelashes, kissing her elegant nose.

“I always was…” Larra told her. How could she not think of her sisters constantly? “Look at you…” She stepped back, keeping a hold on her sister’s gloved hands, sweeping her eyes over the gown Sansa had fashioned for herself from Larra’s fabrics, the elegant cloak that brought to mind Father, the hairstyle that reclaimed her heritage as a Northwoman. She sniffed, wiping her tears away. She cupped her sister’s cheek in one hand, gazing into her face - a face so familiar, and yet so strange - and leaned in to kiss her cheek fiercely. “A warrior-queen stands before me.”

“A strategist, perhaps,” Sansa corrected, with a little irony. “I never did quite made it to queen.”

Larra smiled without delight. “But you made it home.”

Sansa gave her a tight, sad smile, a lot left unspoken. “And so have you… The Ironborn claimed they’d kill you.”

“It will take more than a few krakens to squeeze the life from me,” Larra sniffed disdainfully. “I’ve a dreadfully nasty bite.”

Sansa smiled, more warmly this time. “Me too.”

She fed him to his hounds. “So I’ve heard,” Larra grinned, pride warming her. She glanced around the courtyard, ignoring everyone watching them, focusing only on the Stark sigil draped against the wall. She turned toward the direwolf statues.

“They’re new.”

“The others were beheaded,” Sansa said, with the cold bite of an unexpected frost. Sansa sighed heavily, staring grimly at the new oak door. Her blue eyes slid to Larra. “He’s down there, with Father and Robb.”

Larra knew who she meant. She didn’t need to ask. She gave a tiny nod of acknowledgement as Sansa took her hand, both of them gazing at the door where their father and brothers lay beyond.

Where Larra’s mother had been all along.

Chapter 17: Dragonglass

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

17

Dragonglass


It disappointed him, truth be told, how little effort it took to nurture dissention in the ranks. The natives huddled in dread, starving, while the invading hordes of wild-men roved, starving, shuddering with dread every time they found themselves penned in by the ocean. The Prince’s paramour and her Sand Snakes were spitting with disappointment; the Tyrells shared disdainful glances; the Greyjoys muttered amongst themselves. They gave sound advice; and the benefit of their recent experiences; gave detailed accounts of Westeros as things lay with the surviving lords and ladies of the Six Kingdoms - Six, as the other Westerosi had immediately and irrevocably respected Jon Snow’s declaration of independence.

They were too bloodthirsty, too reliant on the Queen’s forces for their own ends to risk echoing the declaration. If Jon Snow spoke the truth, he had the most to lose of all of them by not winning alliance with Queen Daenerys: And yet he refused to kneel or placate her to win her. He refused to even try to win her. And that infuriated and intrigued her, to the point that it was Jon Snow’s opinion alone that Daenerys Stormborn sought, and listened to.

The old crone Olenna could tell the bright young Queen words of hard-earned wisdom until she was blue in the face, Ellaria Sand could purr seductively of strategy and patience, and yet they were ignored: If Jon Snow repeated what they said, it was he the Queen would likely praise for his intuition and brilliance.

Queen Daenerys ignored her advisors, her council. She ignored everyone but the one man who had sworn independent sovereignty from her family’s ancestral, now-defunct dynasty.

Of course, Jon Snow did not contribute at Council meetings. He did not repeat what Lady Olenna or Ellaria Sand advised. But they all knew if he had, the Queen would listen.

They respected Jon Snow; and it rankled that the Queen did not respect their experience, their wisdom, or their allegiance - all because one man had refused her. He had her sole focus. Except to dine with the court, Jon Snow did not show his face: He had his own concerns, and advising Daenerys on her conquest was not a priority. The first man not to fall in thrall to her pretty face or her dragons, he was a man among one million to defy her: And that was deeply attractive to a woman who had become accustomed to being worshipped.

She wanted him to worship her.

And she spent more time trying to figure out how to make that come about, than actually do anything that would remotely impress or earn Jon Snow’s respect.

Jon Snow filled his days with his own tasks, and in fulfilling them, he inadvertently - at first - started to settle things on the island, sowing the seeds of admiration and respect, unknowingly nurturing loyalty. Then he realised what he was doing: And went about it blatantly.

It began with something largely unseen, inconsequential to most: A fish.

Insignificant, to those accustomed to full bellies and the abundance of summertime.

Later, maesters might venture that the fate of Queen Daenerys’ conquest rested with a single fish.

It began with a fish, and with the King in the North’s ship, the one ship moored off the shore that had not been forcibly requisitioned into the Queen’s armada. Jon Snow did not ask permission to leave the island: He just did it. And because he did not cede that appearance of the Queen’s control over him, everyone acted accordingly. They treated him as the King he was, his orders carried out without hesitation or second-guessing - or approval from the Queen or her counsellors: Jon Snow’s men were not denied access to their little dinghy, laden with nets knotted by the islanders, nor were they denied the freedom to row to the King’s ship.

When the King’s ship sailed past the horizon, it had orders to take Arbour wine to the Saltpans to trade: And to return with barrels of salt. The King did not leave with his ship: His men found lodging in the tiny port, with the understanding that if Jon Snow caught wind that his men had laid so much as a hand on their wives and daughters, his men would lose that hand.

The King in the North would tolerate no violation of guest-right - either as host or as guest.

The islanders came out of their cottages, emboldened by a direwolf’s protection, to work alongside the Northmen and fish the choicest waters around the island, snaring the migrating shoals, each haul of the nets groaning with thousands of fish. They were not too late.

First it was one small dinghy. Then a handful more were reclaimed from the armada with the King’s help, flagrantly, in broad daylight. By the seventh sunrise, a sizeable fleet of liberated boats was hauling fish from the seas. No-one had asked the Queen’s permission. They did not seek her forgiveness.

A direwolf had emboldened them, reminded them that they were proud, and fiercely devoted to their own survival - and that they alone knew this island and its secrets. They held the power among the smallfolk gathered, Dothraki and Meereenese and Unsullied and Westerosi, liberated slaves from every known part of the world.

The tiny quay started to bustle as natives taught Dothraki how to prepare saltwater fish; and Meereenese taught the islanders their own peculiar way to preserve fish in vinegar; the Northmen brought their own knowledge, smoking the fish - smoked Northern salmon was a delicacy that had made Lord Manderly rich, exporting shiploads to King’s Landing, Highgarden and Lys. Through food, many different cultures came together and communicated, sharing their skills: Little language was necessary - everything was communicated through scent and taste and touch.

Jon Snow solved the problem of immediate starvation. He soothed rattled nerves and helped invaders form lasting bonds with natives, for one very special reason: Survival.

People remembered.

Though the Northmen had been housed by the waterfront, Jon Snow remained a guest at the castle: His presence was felt, and though he was not invited into the Council meetings nor did he ask to be present during them, his comings and goings were discussed at length.

Instead of discussing his efforts to feed the masses gathered on Dragonstone - Queen Daenerys’ masses - the Queen focused on his refusal to kneel to her. Instead of questioning what Jon Snow found so intriguing among the dusty shelves of Dragonstone’s extensive library, that he spent hours in there, poring over crackling scrolls, undisturbed for hours, she vacillated over the fact he had shown absolutely no interest in either asking for or accepting a seat on her Council.

Jon Snow had not pressed the issue of an alliance to defeat a mythical threat. Queen Daenerys did not question why: She obsessed over the fact the King in the North would rather stride the shorelines of the island, and share his meals with the smallfolk, than dine on foreign delicacies as her guest…

It was a curious thing that the Queen, so vicious and condescending - arrogant - toward Jon Snow upon his arrival, now seemed to consider the King in the North her guest, and consider him a guest in poor taste for not flattering her. More than that, she seemed to be doing her utmost to try and impress the King in the North. He refused to dine with her every night, preferring the smallfolk’s simple, wholesome fare, and sat polite but visibly uncomfortable at the Queen’s table, dining on exotic delicacies, listening to queer, unsettling music and watching foreign beauties dance and coil their bodies into intricate knots to entertain them.

And while the Queen nurtured her growing resentment toward her advisers, tempering her impatience with their wisdom, she ignored the people she had brought across the world: She did not see that Jon Snow had arrived at Dragonstone - and shown her up.

First it was the fish: Then it was the glasshouses.

“You once told me your father made you head of all the drains and cisterns at Casterly Rock,” Jon said to Lord Tyrion, as they wandered the pine-scented godswood. There was no weirwood here, the residents of the island long since turned to the Light of the Seven: More recently, Stannis Baratheon had burned the statues of the Seven from the castle’s sept, offering them up to the Lord of Light. The last autumn roses clung to vines that strangled their way around ancient apple trees, their perfume incongruous against the pervasive odour of sulphur and salt that permeated the air.

“All the shit found its way to the sea,” the Imp sighed.

“At Winterfell we have glasshouses. Dozens of them. My father used to warn us as boys that the glasshouses kept the North fed during the worst winters,” Jon Snow sighed, frowning. “Even in the deepest snows the glasshouses remained untouched; the hot-springs piped through the walls kept the glasshouses warm. Smallfolk from Winter’s Town kept the glasshouses of Winterfell tended, even when they had no lord and master to guide them…they rely on the glasshouses too. Why are yours barren, my lord?”

Lord Tyrion sighed, gazing up at the ancient, dark trees. “An experienced leader trains his inferiors to the point where his absence does not affect how the army performs. Something my father taught me. The North is used to strong, wise leadership - the Starks value their smallfolk as much as their bannermen, and the smallfolk trust the Starks. Such loyalty was not easily broken, as men found to their own destruction.”

“Aye,” Jon Snow agreed.

“Stannis Baratheon was an effective military leader, but he was not a great lord,” Lord Tyrion said, shaking his head. “He did not engender loyalty such as your father did… Every person at Winterfell knew their place, and their value; they took pride in living under Stark rule and in their small way could show their support of the Starks by maintaining Winterfell.”

“Do you intend to maintain Dragonstone as your stronghold throughout winter, my lord?” Jon asked, giving him a look that reminded Tyrion so vividly of Ned Stark, who could have had no idea that two of his sons would be named King in the North.

“You can forgive me, Your Grace, if I do not share the Queen’s plans for conquest with a foreign ruler,” Lord Tyrion smirked, his eyes twinkling.

“Your conquest won’t last long, or end the way you want, if you don’t respect the winter,” Jon said softly. He sighed, shaking his head. “Your glasshouses are empty.”

“The Dothraki and Unsullied are many things, Your Grace; sadly farmers is not one of those things,” Lord Tyrion smirked.

“They’re not all blood-riders and Unsullied,” Jon Snow said, giving Tyrion a look. “You visited Winterfell; you explored the castle, I remember you trying to trace the source of the hot-springs that feed the aqueducts, the watercourses that maintain the glasshouses even in the heart of winter.”

“A fruitless endeavour,” Lord Tyrion sighed, “and hell on my legs. I feel you are driving at something, Your Grace.”

“You were at Castle Black when you designed the saddle for my brother Bran,” Jon said. “You designed the drains and cisterns of Casterly Rock. Is it possible to design some sort of irrigation system to bring in thermal waters to the glasshouses here at Dragonstone?”

Lord Tyrion smiled at Jon Snow. Even removed from his own castle and lands, the King in the North cared for the safety and survival of people - whether or not they were ‘his’ - one of the reasons he had been named King in the North in the first place.

Within a week, the Hand of the Queen had provided technical drawings, schematics for a system of irrigation to bring thermal water from hot-springs into the castle, to the glasshouses.

And the King in the North was found, not with a sword in his hands but with a spade, one among a team of smallfolk - Dothraki, Meereenese and Dragonstone natives alike - turning over the earth in the neglected raised beds spreading across the glasshouses. Nomadic peoples and city-dwelling slaves had joined the King in the North to learn through his example, as they had when he provided the tools and experience they needed to learn how to fish and preserve their catch, and the natives of Dragonstone found themselves in a position of strength: They were farmers. Their fighting men had long gone off to war, and never returned - those who remained had grown up to fill the voids in the fields, in the fishing-boats. They shared their knowledge, and in doing so assumed positions of authority over the rest. The Dothraki and Meereenese freed-men were invaders, yes; but they were at the mercy of the natives of Dragonstone to survive the winter - winter, a foreign concept to Essos, reserved for tales of the barbaric Westerosi with their furs and wild beards.

The King in the North wore no furs as he tended the earth; his leathers were removed, the sleeves of his coarse linen undershirt rolled up, sweating profusely as he swung a pick-axe to loose stubborn earth.

“I have served a great many Kings in my time,” said an elegant voice, “and yet never one such as would toil in the fields beside his people to help provide for them. Where did the King in the North learn to farm?” The King glanced up, squinting as sweat dripped into his eyes. He accepted a ladle of water from a young girl whose task was to run between the diggers and offer a drink. The King wiped his mouth on the shoulder of his undershirt, and glanced at Lord Varys - trying to work him out. So far, the Master of Whisperers had been a polite, soft-spoken man with a neutral expression and only vaguely interested in what went on around him - the great ruse, Jon knew. He was not the terrifying Spider Jon had always heard whispers about when he was a boy.

Lord Varys was…curious. A curious character in himself, and a man full of curiosity. As far as Jon could tell, he was patient, benign and charming - he had as yet to see the Spider as anything but content to observe the juicy flies caught up in his web, twitching this or that strand of silver webbing to suit him.

Jon couldn’t say he liked the Master of Whisperers - he was too Southern, even if he was a foreigner: He played court politics too well, and Jon, though he understood the gist of it, could play the game but chaffed against being forced to, especially when time was of the essence.

More and more, the Master of Whisperers had made his presence felt near Jon: Sansa had warned that the Master of Whisperers had a network of spies, even probably Northmen whose swords were sworn to them - they would all be feeding him information. And yet there was little necessity for that, when the Spider himself was content to observe Jon Snow personally. At first, he had never approached, only watched; then he had started conversing with the smallfolk; then Jon’s men. Finally, Ser Davos - and Jon, who’d had enough of the lurking, and sat the Spider down with a cup of Northern mulled wine around a campfire.

The Spider seemed as comfortable in silks as in boiled leathers and roughspun; less cautious with the smallfolk, and disdainful of the nobles he manipulated with such ease. He was clever, and patient, and wise.

He had served many kings for a reason. He had weathered every storm, maintaining his position of influence. There was a lesson in that.

Jon couldn’t help wonder if Sansa hadn’t watched the Spider performing at court, and emulated some of what she saw: His courtesy, his benevolence, his unassuming charisma.

He knew the Master of Whispers was more curious for his own sake about Jon, than for the sake of the Queen - Jon had had to learn how to read people, or he would never have made it this far, never made it out of Mance Rayder’s tent: He knew enough about listening to his own instincts to know that the Queen’s court was rumbling with discontent.

They weren’t impressed that it was Jon Snow, a bastard named King in the North, who had brought together native islanders with Dothraki, Unsullied and Meereenese freed-slaves to fish; to overturn the barren glasshouses and plant winter crops; and to build sturdy accommodations for the thousands who would be left behind when the Unsullied and Dothraki blood-riders sailed to the mainland on conquest. They were disgruntled that Jon Snow had taken initiative in preparing for the winter, and at the same time ensuring a continued supply of food - untouchable by Cersei’s forces due to the fierce winter sea-storms - and rather than try and convince the Queen that it was in her interests to do it, had already organised the manpower to get the work done before the worst of the winter storms came south.

They were impressed with Jon: Not with their new Queen.

The Master of Whisperers sought Jon out at least once a day to check on his progress. He asked Jon questions, seemingly benign - about his family, his education, his memories of childhood… Anything to gently coax a conversation from Jon, notoriously quiet whenever he graced the Queen’s court.

“My sister wasn’t born patient. Father used to joke, she came first - too eager to explore the world around her,” the King said, his smile pained, something shuttering his dark grey eyes. “We had an excellent Maester at Winterfell - Luwin. When she’d irritated the septa to distraction, Larra was sent to join me and my brothers in the schoolroom. She was the most voracious student - all Robb and Theon and I wanted to do was fight… Maester Luwin taught Larra patience through gardening. She had her own allotments in the gardens and the glasshouses…she loved them; she became meticulous in caring for her plants, and she adored flowers… Maester Luwin taught her to appreciate the details, to give things time, to nurture…to have hope… When things were bad with Lady Catelyn, Larra would go to her gardens…they soothed her… I’d be the one to go and find her and bring her back when she was ready… She used to put me to work. I learned, because she had. We’d tend the allotments, and Larra would tell me of her plans for the autumn harvest, how she’d prepare for winter… She knew she’d be left behind, to look after Winterfell for Robb…”

Lord Varys smiled enigmatically, something dark and pained in his eyes.

“I never met the King in the North, of course, your brother, Robb,” Lord Varys amended, his eyes turning thoughtful, almost sad, “But your father… He abhorred the game, but he understood better than any the true nature of power. When he was Lord of Winterfell there was not a day that went by that he did not invite a stranger to dine beside him. To hear of their life, their profession, to hear their stories, and their wants, their grief and their hopes.” The Spider glanced around the glasshouses, watching people turn over the earth in the raised beds, more working with the guidance of the architects to make Lord Tyrion’s plans a reality.

“My father said never ask a stranger to fight for you,” Jon said, and the Master of Whisperers nodded.

“You took your father’s words to heart, Your Grace.”

“They’ve never failed me yet,” Jon Snow said grimly, his face shuttering of all emotion. One thing could be said of Ned Stark: His children had loved and respected him. That was a rare combination.

“I can say, honestly, Your Grace, having worked closely with Lord Eddard as Hand of the King, and having heard his reputation for many years before that…he would be very proud of your contributions to Dragonstone.” He bowed his head respectfully. “It would appear that you are incapable of not improving the lot of all those you meet. Most would enjoy the time in idleness; Queen Daenerys did bring some wonderful entertainers with her from the exotic East.”

“Aye, she did,” Jon Snow said grimly: The beauties from far away could not turn Jon Snow’s eye. He shook his head. “I can’t be idle, Lord Varys… I feel like I’m failing if I’m standing still… I know there’s work to be done at Winterfell - Dragonstone may well be one of the last outposts of Westeros…” He broke off, shaking his head; he had not repeated his request for an alliance, for the Queen to send her hordes North to aid Winterfell in a war no-one believed was real.

Lord Varys asked knowingly, “Has the Queen provided anything toward this undertaking?”

“After a fashion,” Jon Snow smirked, nodding toward the wheelbarrows waiting, some being emptied into the raised beds. “Shit. According to Lord Tyrion the ancient Valyrians used dragon dung to fertilise their crops. Let’s just say the Queen’s children have provided amply toward the regeneration of the glasshouses.” Lord Varys raised his eyebrows, not in the least surprised that the Queen had had only indirect involvement in a venture that would benefit those who followed her.

After the fish came the glasshouses; after the glasshouses came Winter’s Town.

There were simply too many people: The island was not equipped, nor were the nomads who had accompanied the armada. The Dothraki were not used to cold: They had no experience of vicious sea-storms, or of ice. They had no comprehension of snow. They were not even used to bitterly cold winds gusting off the choppy black waters. Their tents of hide would not suffice: There was not sufficient grass to build mud-huts as the Dothraki would in their sacred city of Vaes Dothrak.

Once again it was Jon Snow who went among the people, using a translator among the Unsullied, and then Missandei, and sought out builders, carpenters and architects - and there were several, among the Dothraki freed-slaves and those from Meereen who had followed Daenerys Targaryen to a better life.

On the advice of Ser Davos, the bluntly-spoken, wise Onion Knight, Jon Snow designed a town: The first buildings rose in the shadow of the castle, protected by it, blocking the bitterest of winter winds coming down from the north and taking full advantage of the meagre winter sunlight. Drawing on his knowledge of Winterfell and Winter’s Town, and Lord Varys’ intimate knowledge of the best and worst of King’s Landing’s neighbourhoods, the town was planned, and rose quickly with the available workforce idle and becoming agitated. People were put to work: And because they were working on somewhere they would live, protected from the elements they were unused to, in preparation for a winter they had never experienced, they were happy to keep working.

They were happy to help the King in the North.

“You’ve done much, Your Grace, in only a very short time,” Lord Varys said in a congratulatory tone, bowing his head respectfully. “I must commend you. Yet you have asked for nothing in return. No mention of an alliance with Queen Daenerys.”

The King stared long and hard at the Spider, and simply said, “No.” Jon chose his words very carefully.

He had gone in strong with a request for full alliance and unified military strength to defeat a common enemy the Queen did not believe existed.

Anything he might glean from her - or her advisers - would be more than he had hoped for, though less than they thought he wanted.

They were all fucked if he couldn’t get dragonglass.

So, on one of the finer afternoons when Jon took himself off for a long walk along the coast, gazing northwards, and he was met by Lord Tyrion who mentioned the Spider and Jon’s lack of persistence, Jon asked.

“Obsidian. Dragonstone sits atop a mountain of it,” Jon told Tyrion, as the Master of Whisperers observed silently, his hands hidden in the rich folds of his heavy, exotic robes, now fur-trimmed as the Westerosi weather had started to bring on near-daily storms - the days of fishing had passed, the shoals snared just in time. “Obsidian’s the only thing that can kill a White Walker, and with them all wights they turned perish. My brother Sam stabbed one with a dagger of obsidian; it shattered into a thousand pieces of ice and melted away… I would ask a guest-gift of the Queen; to mine the caves of dragonglass and ship it back to Winterfell.”

“That’s all?” Lord Tyrion asked dubiously, as if Jon was being absurd with his modest request.

“I don’t suppose I could request the Queen allow me to commandeer one of her dragons for the war-effort?” Jon quipped; Lord Tyrion’s lips twitched.

“I’d imagine the answer would be a firm no,” he smirked. “Why a dragon?”

“Fire kills wights.”

“I thought you said obsidian kills wights.”

“Obsidian kills White Walkers, renders whatever magic created them null,” Jon explained calmly. “A wight is a reanimated corpse, raised and controlled by a White Walker. Fire kills wights; but only obsidian and Valyrian steel kills White Walkers.”

“How many White Walkers are there?” Lord Varys asked curiously.

“There is the Night King, and at least a dozen commanders,” Jon said, glancing at Lord Tyrion. “They put your father to shame. And they command legions. After the losses at Hard Home…to say a hundred thousand of the dead march upon the Wall would be a safe estimate.”

“And you intend to equip Northmen with obsidian to fight an army of a hundred-thousand?” Lord Tyrion asked.

“We’ll fight; and we’ll die. But what else should we do?” the King in the North asked. Neither of the Queen’s advisers could answer him.

But they did grant his request.

Rather, they coaxed and bullied and wheedled and charmed the Queen into granting the request - obsidian as a guest-gift, the parting-gift a host gave someone as token that they were no longer under the protection of guest-right.

It was a subtle hint from Jon that his time at Dragonstone was nearing its end: That he would expect no favours from the Queen, or alliance, or protection. He would expect her acknowledgement that the North was an independent kingdom - and because it was expected, and because he had shown himself every inch a king, a leader the people of Dragonstone needed - Dothraki, native islanders, Meereenese freed-slaves and Unsullied alike - there were only two options open to the Queen: Accept that the North would never kneel to her.

Or execute the King in the North she lusted after, and ensure the North would never kneel to her.

The Queen was sufficiently enthralled by the King in the North that she graciously granted the use of four of her own ships to increase the volume of mined obsidian being shipped to Winterfell - and increase the chances that at least one ship would make it to White Harbour with its cargo intact: The seas were getting rougher.

Theon Greyjoy offered Ironborn to sail the ships North, through the treacherous waters.

Only the Ironborn enjoyed vicious storms! They were the only men stupid - and mad - enough to take a thrill from the brutality of the elements.

And they were the only men in the known world unafraid to sail them: The only men who could get the precious cargo of obsidian to Winterfell, through any dangers.

“Jon!” the voice echoed off the dank walls. He still couldn’t get used to the cold, to the idea that Princess Shireen had grown up in this miserable place, to the sound of Theon Greyjoy’s voice. They had lingered in a state of polite distance for weeks, ever since Jon’s arrival; whenever he appeared at court, Theon did his best to make himself invisible - not wishing to provoke confrontation with Jon. It was the first time he had approached Jon: Perhaps because there were only the eyes of Ser Davos on him. He raised his pale eyes to Jon’s face hesitantly. “Could I speak with you?”

Jon turned, paused…watched Theon Greyjoy teetering at the top of the steps, beside Queen Daenerys’ jagged throne. Ser Davos caught his eye: Jon made his decision, then and there.

“Aye,” he murmured to the smuggler, who nodded and departed. Jon waited for Theon to descend the steps; he walked hunched, cowering, a reminder of all Sansa had told Jon he had endured…afraid of himself, of his memories, his own shadow - and now afraid of Jon. Perhaps he always had been, since the moment he betrayed Robb. Sansa had told Jon that Theon refused to take the black, to see Sansa to the end of her journey to Castle Black, that Jon would kill him as soon as look at him.

“What you said…when you arrived at Dragonstone… You could’ve lied to the Queen, promised to bend the knee if she joined you… You didn’t have to warn her about the White Walkers… You risked everything to tell an enemy the truth,” Theon said thoughtfully.

“I came here to make peace before the North could be drawn into yet another conflict we will not survive,” Jon said earnestly. “And it seems to me, we need to be honest with each other if we’re ever going to fight beside each other.”

“You’ve always known what was right,” Theon said gloomily, though with that hint of respect utterly foreign in Jon’s memory of him. Theon gazed at Jon, gazed through Jon, as if seeing their younger selves, sparring in the courtyard. “Even when we were all young and stupid, you always knew. Every step you take…it’s always the right step.”

“It’s not,” Jon said grimly. “It may seem that way from the outside, but I promise you - it’s not true. I’ve done plenty of things that I regret.”

Theon Greyjoy looked him in the eye and cringed in shame. “Not compared to me, you haven’t.”

Jon went still, his face leeched of all emotion, his eyes hard shards of obsidian in the gloomy hall. “No,” he agreed, a dangerous undercurrent making his words heavy, “not compared to you.”

Theon’s lips parted, his eyes gazing into a distance, horror flickering across his face, and grief. Then he set his jaw in resolve, and Jon heard his gasp before he plunged ahead, stepping down to Jon’s level and admitting, “I always wanted to do the right thing… Be the right kind of person. But I never knew what that meant. It always seemed like there…there was an impossible choice I had to make… Stark or Greyjoy.”

Jon clenched his jaw, and strode forward - didn’t touch Theon; and Theon did not flinch. He knew his brother too well: Jon would have killed him that first day he arrived, if he’d truly wanted to.

Breathlessly, grief-stricken, heart-broken, Jon rushed out, “Our father was more of a father to you than yours ever was!”

“He was.”

“-and you betrayed him. Betrayed his memory.”

“I did,” Theon said softly, raising his tired eyes to Jon’s stern face. He didn’t look like Robb - he looked like Ned. Like Benjen, honour-bound to the Watch; and like Bran…who Theon had driven from his home…

And Larra…

Jon sighed, nodding to himself. “But you never lost him…” He raised his eyes to Theon’s. “He’s a part of you. Just like he’s a part of me.”

“The things I’ve done,” Theon said shakily.

Jon sighed. “It’s not my place to forgive you for all of it,” he said gently, “but what I can forgive…I do.” Theon raised his eyes to Jon’s face, visibly stunned. “You don’t need to choose. You’re a Greyjoy…and you’re a Stark… Thank you, for what you did for Sansa.”

“When I was Ramsay’s prisoner…Yara…tried to save me. She’s the only one…who tried to save me,” Theon said shakily. He looked at Jon. “I should’ve protected her. Protected Larra…our sister… The first time I ever arrived at Winterfell, she wore her hair in two plaits, and she had bloody knees, and the biggest smile you’ve ever seen… She thought I was another of Ned Stark’s bastards. The first thing she ever said to me was ‘Welcome home, brother’…she embraced me, kissed my cheek… I was vile to her. Insulted she thought I was a bastard.”

“You were wounded, stripped from what remained of your family,” Jon said compassionately.

“She offered me unconditional love,” Theon said softly, his voice thick, “And I betrayed her.”

“And she got the better of you,” Jon reminded him, and a faint smile teased at the corner of Theon’s mouth.

“Aye… Didn’t she always?” he said sadly. His shoulders slumped, and he sighed. “I’d give anything to go back to our schoolroom.”

“Aye,” Jon agreed grimly, too exhausted to allow himself to linger in those memories. He sighed, squinting at Theon. “Do you remember Old Nan’s stories?” Theon nodded tentatively. “Let me show you something…”

“When Maester Luwin was teaching us Geography did you ever imagine we’d both end up here? And after such journeys?” Theon asked quietly, following Jon and the flickering torchlight further into the caves that glistened deep onyx striated with multi-coloured hues when the firelight struck at odd angles.

They had found the cave early into their stay on Dragonstone, the entrance to the caves vast, unspoiled: There was only one place in the entire network of caverns that Jon had declared off-limits to the pick-axes now hacking at the walls at all hours - volunteer miners worked in shifts to ensure a constant stream of obsidian being passed out, crated up and shipped north.

“I don’t think anybody could’ve ever predicted our lives,” Jon said grimly, striding on ahead, sure-footed in territory he had familiarised himself with over weeks. As in the glasshouses, the King in the North had taken up an axe to join the men working: Mutual respect radiated from the men labouring as Jon wove past them, and the flickering torches nestled strategically around the caves, to one particular alcove half-hidden by what Maester Luwin would have called a natural optical illusion - a trick of the eyes, two rock-faces concealing a narrow passage into a small, sheltered cave. Jon had found it purely by accident, following the trail of smoke from one of his torches as the air sucked the smoke toward the entrance: The cave had once, eons ago, been a hiding-spot, perhaps even a home.

Jon slid into the cave sideways, and for a breathless, heart-sinking moment, he entered a different cave… He blinked, and took a breath, and eased into the chamber. Small, but the ceiling of the cave rose out of sight. Theon slipped into the cave beside him, and as Jon raised his torch, Theon Greyjoy’s lips parted.

“White Walkers.”

“Aye. And the Children,” Jon said, pointing out the etchings in the obsidian, ancient markings made beyond the Age of Heroes.

“Nan’s stories…they were here…they were real,” Theon breathed.

“Yes,” Jon smiled, raising the torch higher to show the markings. “Thousands upon thousands of years ago, the First Men came here… I think they mined for obsidian themselves…” He shone the light closer to some of the etchings - the White Walkers…the curious spirals all White Walkers and wights now left their prey, dismembered bodies, limbs… Ever the artists… He wondered why they mimicked the spirals…one of the etchings showed weirwoods growing in a similar pattern - the grove above the Wall had grown in a similar pattern, Jon remembered.

“You think Men made these drawings?”

“Aye,” Jon said, showing Theon more of the etchings. White Walkers…and Children…and Men - Men riding direwolves, holding spears of obsidian…

“Starks!” Theon blurted a laugh of astonishment, and Jon’s eyes glinted in the torchlight as they both smiled up at the etchings.

“Brandon the Builder,” Jon said warmly, smiling.

“Brandon the Builder, riding a direwolf into battle…and here you are, all those thousands of years later…they used to say Robb rode Grey Wind into battle… The way they tell it, you rode Ghost into battle at the head of a wildling army,” Theon said, his smile easy for the first time, a grin that reminded Jon of their childhood. Even the mention of Robb did not dim their smiles, for this one moment.

“Strange how history rhymes,” Jon said, gazing up at the etchings. Whether it had been an etching of Brandon the Builder was anyone’s guess; Jon liked to believe it was. Maester Luwin used to say that history did not repeat; but sometimes the rhyme appeared later, similar but non-identical circumstances creating unique events that echoed throughout history.

That night, gathered around a campfire on the shore, they listened to one of Jon’s men - a veteran of Hard Home and a fierce warrior who refused to leave the King’s side, representative of his people and warning to any who dared cross the King in the North - sing songs of the Free Folk in the common tongue, telling the stories of Brandon Stark and the Night King.

Theon sat beside one of his sisters, and one of his brothers, sharing fish stew and ale and listening to familiar but altered stories he and Jon had grown up on. They both thought of their brothers and sisters - the dead, and the living.

And Theon couldn’t help compare one King in the North to the other, to their dead brother he had betrayed… And Jon, the brother who had forgiven him for it.

Since leaving Winterfell, they had both become men. Their journeys had been different, but no less difficult.

They finished their meals, finished their ale, and both went to their beds to live with their regret. And wake up the next morning, nurturing hope for a better future than the years they had endured.

Chapter 18: But

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

18

But


She was mesmerising to watch.

Not because she strode through the halls of Winterfell in fine leathers and new velvet gowns, her hair free and curling, her violet eyes flashing - because she didn’t.

The girl who might once have been overwhelmed with pride at her brother’s kingship, and simultaneously delighted and chagrined by her new status as a King’s eldest, twin-sister, had gone dormant in the godswood with Maester Luwin: The woman she had had to become, to keep her brother alive, was a quiet, shrewd, dangerous woman honed to kill when startled, whose experiences had made her brutal, efficient and watchful.

Larra was cunning.

Some of the hardest lessons she had ever learned had been taught to her not in Maester Luwin’s schoolroom, nor in Mikken’s forge, or Ser Rodrik’s training yard, or even at her father’s knee. Sansa had learned the same lessons, in the sweltering, duplicitous court of King’s Landing: Larra had learned them in the endless, glittering ice-meadows, the majestic fjords and the snow-capped mountains, frozen lakes and beguiling caves of the True North.

How to watch.

How to listen.

How to trust implicitly in her own senses, the feeling in the pit of her stomach warning her, always warning her…

She had been stripped of everything superfluous, her education and fine upbringing, her manners and compassion, stripped of everything but those skills inherent to survival.

Larra relied on her senses, her instincts, just as much as Last Shadow did. She was a wild thing born of the North; and only a direwolf could survive the winter.

She did not saunter around Winterfell as the King’s sister - was she a lady? A princess? - in fine gowns and jewels, and, in the beginning, at least, she did not spend the majority of her days cloistered with Lady Stark in the solar combing through papers.

Because Larra…was now rather feral.

She was not the sister Sansa remembered, with her magnetic charisma and deeply maternal warmth and soft curves, calloused hands, sharp wit, sternness balanced by her playfulness - and her boundless love and affection for her siblings. Sansa remembered Larra striding around Winterfell with her head held high and shoulders thrown back, self-assuredness born of her own tenacity, her education and her decisiveness in forging her own role in the world where none had been made available to her because of the circumstances her birth - which Sansa’s mother had done nothing to aid.

Larra had been the confidante of and compassionate, sensible dispenser of advice to Robb; had knocked Theon down a few pegs, slapping him when he was foul and his arrogance was overwhelming; a playmate and tutor to curious, sharp little Bran; idol to rambunctious young Arya. Larra was the only one who appreciated that wild things like the youngest Stark sister were made to be free, could be gentled but never truly tamed, and had learned how to gentle Arya. To Rickon, Larra had been a second, then surrogate mother, his playmate and the one who kissed his injuries, cuddled him, knew how to gentle him as she did Arya, to sit in her lap and learn his letters, paying him attention, showering him with love and kisses and listening to his stories and getting to the source of his wrathful tantrums - especially in those dark days before their family splintered and divided irrevocably, and the worst thing to happen to them all was Bran’s fall.

With Jon, she had had a deep, impenetrable bond, his equal in everything, his partner and playmate, his guiding light and the tenacious warmth and unconditional love of family he had always craved, of belonging - she was his sister, his home.

To Sansa, Larra had always been a strange figure. Simultaneously she had admired and disdained her older sister, the eldest of them all: She was charming, witty, elegant and flirtatious, earthy, sensible, hard-working, decisive and shrewd, a creative thinker insatiable for knowledge and new skills. Sansa had been raised by her mother to look at her bastard half-sister, and strive to be more.

More elegant and refined. More charming, more amenable, gentler, sweeter. Daintier. Soft. The wildness of Larra’s personality, the interests Sansa had disapproved of - riding, hunting, gardening, her education, working with her hands on anything but embroidery - had been a model for Sansa of things not to do, if she wanted to be the refined lady she envisioned her older self as, who was sophisticated and dainty in everything she did. Sansa’s smiles were gentler; her voice softer; her movements more restrained, almost delicate. Even the way she had been raised to eat was dainty. Lady Catelyn had done all she could to ensure Sansa was raised to perfectly exemplify the traits of a well-bred daughter of a High Lord of Westeros. Even their accents were different, Sansa’s cut crystal, soft, lyrical; Larra’s the earthy, rich, almost guttural accent of the North, sometimes harsh and often boisterous. Sansa spoke like her mother: Larra spoke like their father.

Only during her captivity had Sansa realised that the things about her sister’s character that had chafed - her vibrant smile; her enthusiasm for everything; her flirtatiousness and love of rambunctious play and dancing; her cleverness and fierce dedication to pursuing a “man’s” education, sharing Maester Luwin’s schoolroom with their brothers, and applying everything she learned by creating games to teach their little brothers, songs and books and toys, finding cunning ways to educate Rickon when he refused to take lessons; her wildness and her free laughter; her expressiveness and physical playfulness - were the very things Sansa missed the most, and had made even fading memories of Larra outshine a sea of faceless sweet young ladies Sansa had suffered in her years at court.

She was ashamed to admit it had taken her far too long to realise that Larra had been wild, fierce, deeply loving, creative and unique. That the sister she had often maligned was truly exceptional.

Larra was mesmerising in her passion, her commitment, and her grit.

Larra was the kind of woman epic poetry was written about.

People forgot perfect little ladies - little doves like Sansa’s younger self - the moment they left the room.

But everyone remembered Larra’s fierce, flashing wolf-smile, her vivid violet-blue eyes, her rich laugh and passion, her sharp tongue and dry humour, her cleverness, her playfulness and creativity, and her earthy, rich warmth and deep love.

Among a thousand Sansas, there was only one Larra.

Rather, thousands of the girl Sansa had once been, and would have been content to remain, if she had lived another life.

Sansa had grown - fangs and claws and a glorious fur coat, and had remembered how to howl to the moon and stars and hunt for her prey - and Larra had changed.

Experience was the most brutal teacher: And they had both learned.

The warmth Sansa had always associated with Larra - even toward Sansa, who had always been disdainful and prickly toward her half-siblings as soon as she had learned what the word ‘bastard’ meant - had cooled. Because all Larra’s strength, all that she was and all that she had to give, all that she had been forced to become, was so honed on Bran’s survival that there had been no room for anything else. The Land of Always-Winter had stolen Larra’s warmth.

And Larra’s world had become smaller: Her world had become Bran - and Meera Reed, the wild-haired girl from the Neck whose brother had been lost beyond the Wall, whose face was tired and wan but creased with a small, powerful smile full of innocent, pure delight tinged with grief when a breakfast consisting a single egg fried in butter and rashers of smoked back-bacon were set before her.

She had been intrinsic to Bran’s survival, and to his and Larra’s return to Winterfell against all odds, when all the world believed them dead: Sansa would have given Lady Meera anything she asked for to show her gratitude. Sansa knew Meera had Larra’s love and loyalty forever.

One absurdly modest breakfast was all Meera had asked for.

And she had eaten it, wearing her wildling furs, strapped with weapons, her fingers scarred and chapped and bruised, her hair tangled in curls that reminded Sansa too vividly of Jon, as Larra looked on, fiddling with her spoon and a tiny portion of porridge, the ghost of her old warmth flickering with the first smile of contentment Sansa had yet seen on her sister’s rosebud lips since her arrival.

It had not taken Sansa long to realise that, in her world becoming so small, and her role in it so brutal by necessity, the very things she had once disdained Larra for were now the traits Sansa was most anxious to encourage in Larra’s recovery.

Lady Meera Reed sought Sansa out, one brittle afternoon with the fire crackling in the grate of the solar, to quietly and patiently explain that, “Larra puts everyone else first; she’s forgotten what it means to think of herself - if she ever knew to begin with.”

Sansa set down her papers, and sighed softly, reflecting on her own childhood - watching Larra carving out a place for herself in Winterfell, as her siblings’ carer, as their brother’s castellan in his absence. Both roles demanded sacrifice, unswerving duty - to the Stark family, whose name she was denied, and to their people, selflessly devoting herself to their wellbeing, unthinking of her own desires.

As little girls, Sansa had wanted to be a lady, about whom epic poems were written, songs sung of her beauty and all of that. Arya had wanted to be a warrior, to fight beside their brothers, ferocious and just.

Sansa could not remember what Larra had wanted for herself. Perhaps because she had never cared to know. All Sansa could remember was that Larra was going to remain at Winterfell, long after Sansa had married her honourable knight or shining prince and had babies of her own, to look after Robb’s heirs and lands.

It was not like Father, Sansa thought to herself, not to nurture his daughter’s desires and hopes for her future.

Especially Larra - Sansa had often considered Larra to be Father’s favourite. She could remember yearning for the kind of smile from him that Father always had for Larra.

Now, of course, Sansa understood that Father’s smile, his love, was all he could give Larra. Because of Sansa’s mother’s hatred for two motherless children.

Larra had fashioned herself for duty from a young age - bastards grew up sooner than true-born children, Jon had always said: Larra had understood her place not just in their family but in the world, and had made herself indispensable to her siblings - to ensure she had a place in their home long after Father was gone, and his protection with him.

It nettled Sansa, to realise she had no idea what her sister wanted from life, what secret desires warmed her heart and kept her going, even if she couldn’t acknowledge them, and never dared hope for them.

It upset Sansa to realise she had never had any true relationship with her sister - just as she hadn’t with Jon. Not like the sometimes absurdly intimate bond she and Jon had been nurturing these last months together, uniting the North to reclaim Winterfell, and ruling it justly and wisely together, as Father and Mother had.

Now was Sansa’s chance. The sister she had thought dead, skewered and burned by Ironborn…was very much alive. And Sansa was not the girl she had once been; she appreciated how unique her sister was. How rare her qualities.

Sansa invited Lady Meera - in her furs and tangled curls - to sit in the solar with her, sharing a cup of herb tea. Until the pot was emptied and the tea cold and bitter on their tongues, they spoke about Larra. Things Larra had not yet divulged - either because she could not, because they were observations Meera had made, or because she would not. And Sansa respected that some secrets were not meant to be shared, or coerced, or bullied and frightened out of a person; at the first sign of Meera’s unease, Sansa gracefully guided their conversation in another direction.

Sansa had yet to reveal - even to Lady Brienne or Jon - the darkest of her secrets, though she had alluded, and Lady Brienne and Jon had both inferred enough to know. But she could no more share her experience with Jon than he could share his experience of Hard Home with her. And she was not going to betray Larra by pressuring Meera into divulging secrets she had not earned. Even if she was eaten up by curiosity.

But what Meera had shared was enough: It painted a vivid picture of what Larra had done to protect their brother.

 “She’s…struggling,” Meera told her quietly, uncertain about discussing Larra without her knowledge - even to Sansa, her sister. Whether Meera knew their past, contentious relationship, Sansa did not know; but it was very clear that Larra had Meera’s loyalty and a deep bond founded on their shared experience. “I don’t mean, with what we have endured - in fact, most of the time, Larra was the strongest of us, in her body as well as in her mind, coaxing us ever onwards… She’s struggling, here in Winterfell…”

“I’m not sure I quite know where to start to help,” Sansa admitted. She had never understood wild creatures, the way Jon and Larra and Arya had.

“She has devoted the last six years utterly to Brandon,” Meera said quietly, something smouldering deep in her dark eyes. It might have been anger, but she blinked, and Sansa was uncertain whether she had seen the rage mingled with grief in Lady Meera’s dark, tired eyes. “And now Brandon is returned safely home and…the role she fashioned herself for is no longer needed.”

Meera winced slightly, and Sansa understood: Because Sansa had taken what should have been Larra’s place, as chatelaine of Winterfell, de facto ruler of the North in her brother’s name. Her only place in the world because of her birth.

Meera stared at her, saying, “I do not mean running this castle - Larra has told me how impressed she is with you… I meant that, she created herself as Brandon’s protector…now they’re home and there are so many other people who can share that responsibility, leaving her free to do other things, but...”

“But she’s at a loss what to do, because I have taken the position she was trained for,” Sansa finished, the great swooping feeling of shame mixed with pride and a little regret settling in her stomach as relief swept through her - Meera wasn’t criticising Sansa for stealing her sister’s place as castellan… Sansa didn’t need Meera to tell her that was what had happened: She knew she had taken what should have been Larra’s role…leaving Larra at a loose end, all the more because she had re-forged herself for something else, only to have that role taken from her too, simply by the fact they had returned to Winterfell, safe and for the most part, as whole as they had been when they left…

“You’ve spent all these years with my brother and sister,” Sansa said softly. “Living and fighting alongside Larra.”

“We were fighting…but we weren’t living,” Meera said softly, but her tone was ominous. Her eyes were dark and glinted in the firelight, emotion flickering across her face as she gulped, sniffing delicately. “We were surviving, for as long as the True North allowed us. And it chased our heels until the very moment we reached the Wall. And all that time, Larra never stopped - never stopped fighting; never stopped grieving for Rickon and Osha; never stopped worrying for Bran - never stopped supporting me. She is the sister I have never had; and the only one who could ever have guided me through my grief after the death of my brother. But she…”

“She what?” Sansa pressed gently.

“She never leaned on me the way I did her,” Meera said sadly. “I don’t know that it’s in her nature now to ever…be vulnerable, to let her guard down. Especially when she sees others in need. She puts everyone else first, always.”

“Larra trained herself from a young age that she would never be the most important thing,” Sansa said regretfully; her own mother had done everything in her power to ensure the twins knew they were unwelcome in their family’s ancestral home, that they were bastards, and that that meant being so far below the rest of their siblings, with no hope of ever becoming anything significant, or treasured, or even thought well of, respected or admired. Moreover, that there was no point hoping for anything different: Their roles had already been carved from stone the moment they first drew breath and whimpered at the breast of the mother they never knew.

Sansa sighed to herself. It was different, now, though; Larra was different. She had always been…happy, content, thrilled to find herself useful and needed… Now, Sansa was troubled by the impenetrable aura of aloneness that seemed to emanate from Larra. Strong, but taut - ferocious, cold and brutal as the True North. Sansa had stood atop the Wall, only once, and from there the view beyond it was not so very different than the terrain she had covered with Lady Brienne and Podrick. Jon’s stories of the great ranging had altered her perceptions of the True North; as had the few details Larra and Meera had given her of their time beyond the Wall in the Land of Always-Winter. They all said something similar, though: That it was beautiful, and brutal, and unknowable.

And that was Larra, now. Beautiful, and brutal - unknowable.

Even Sansa’s limited experiences of the wilds during her flight to Castle Black had left her with a deep respect for whoever had developed the skills to survive extended periods out in the elements. She had found herself thinking of Jon, and of Uncle Benjen, who had devoted his life to the Night’s Watch, Ranging far beyond the Wall for months and even years on end - a stranger to Sansa and, frankly, a figure that had always frightened her when she was a child…

Somehow, Larra had survived; and, beyond all hope and reason, she had kept Bran alive too.

Whatever lessons Larra had learned on survival were not easily forgotten, or even pushed to the back of her mind once she returned within the strong walls of Winterfell. It was as if she was still out in the wilderness of the True North, anticipating attack all around her, from the very earth beneath her feet to the skies and the misleading woods and the screams of the winds that tore at her furs.

Sansa had sent maids to air out Larra’s old chamber, and guards stationed outside the door had reported that Larra did sometimes retire to her old chamber in the evenings…but whether she rested at all was another matter. Maids told her that the bed, with its fresh feather mattress and clean linen sheets, quilts and furs, warmed by a bedpan every night, was rarely rumpled. As if it had not been slept in.

Once, a scullery maid sent in to relight the morning fires had reported back that Lady Alarra had been asleep in the rocking-chair beneath the window, which had been open, snow whirling gently over her as two little boys slept soundly, cuddled in her bed. The Umber boy, and the wildling child Larra had saved from a hanging cage at one of the holdfasts on her journey south from the Wall. The moment the door had cracked open, Larra had woken, shimmering black dagger in hand, eyes locked on the maid, lethal and assessing - assessing whether or not the maid posed a threat. The poor maid had been frightened out of her wits: Larra had risen from her armchair, the shadows beneath her eyes almost purple, and prowled the castle, restless and agitated, her new Valyrian steel sword loose in its sheath, an obsidian dagger curled in her scarred fingers. Always wary, always watching.

As intuitive and ferocious as a direwolf.

She could not ignore the restlessness in her bones, the need to keep moving that had become so ingrained in their journey to the Land of Always Winter - and back - that…Larra could not settle.

Larra was restless; but Bran did not share her struggles. Since their return, Sansa had had to reconcile the drastic differences in her older sister and their youngest surviving brother from the siblings of her memories.

Bran had become a man; his face had matured, and he was so still all the time. Vacant, distracted, and eerily quiet when he did speak, unnervingly accurate about things he should have no knowledge of. Larra had told Sansa early on that this Brandon was new. Until recently, their brother Bran had been a more belligerent, frustrated version of the boy they both remembered, who had been impish and kind, playful, stubborn and protective, fiercely good and conscientious. The few attempts Larra had made to illuminate the reasons for the change in Brandon left Sansa with a headache and a queer sense of dread in the pit of her stomach she most often associated with Jon during the rare moments he spoke of Hard Home and the Night King.

It didn’t make any sense to her - she knew Jon wouldn’t struggle, after what he had seen; Sansa knew he would accept it. Whatever it was that had altered Bran to this unrecognisable, eerie ancient boy, perhaps it did not need to be understood; only accepted.

Strange as he now was, it was Brandon who settled back into life at Winterfell with peculiar ease. As if he had never left - or as if he had been anticipating his return for so long, he could shed all other worries and sit smiling blandly in front of a roaring fire in the clever wheeled-chair Maester Wolkan had had the carpenters craft for him, furs tucked over his legs, pale hands clasped elegantly in his lap, eyes bright and flat as he gazed unseeingly into the flames. If he was not in his chamber, gazing placidly into nothingness, then Brandon was to be found under the weirwood, furs tucked around him, a guard keeping an eye on him at a distance. The first time Sansa saw his eyes milky white and unresponsive, her heart had flown into her mouth, calling for a guard - Larra had strode over, gave a quiet word to the guard, tucked Brandon’s furs tighter, and left him alone.

She had calmly explained to Sansa that Bran was now the Three-Eyed Raven, the last of the ancient greenseers from Old Nan’s stories. They had travelled North, to the Land of Always-Winter, seeking the previous Three-Eyed Raven, Bran’s guide and mentor, their guardian - and a Targaryen bastard, a figure from their history-books, the Bloodraven of legend, Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch lost to the frozen wastes of the North. As the mantle of king passed from father to son, and the title of High Septon was bequeathed on his successor, so too was there always a Three-Eyed Raven. A being of extraordinary power - Larra called the Three-Eyed Raven the keeper of the world’s memory.

He knew all that had come before, and all that still might be, everything happening now, and some things that might never be.

The transition from apprentice to master had been so recent, Brandon was still too overwhelmed to remember that he was Bran Stark, their impish, bright little brother. He was Brandon now. Brandon the Broken. The Three-Eyed Raven. As he was always meant to be.

Sansa knew that Jon had been resurrected by the Red Witch when mutineers had murdered him for decency. She knew it had pained him to talk about it, almost ashamed for her to know, bewildered about why he had been brought back, for what reason, why he was deserving of another chance at life, when his choices had led to his murder… She had heard it from Ser Davos, his blunt, earnest voice thick with emotion, and knew he spoke the truth: She believed it.

When Larra told her that Brandon was the Three-Eyed Raven and saw the past more clearly than the present, Sansa could do nothing but believe her. Take it with a pinch of salt, and get on with things; there was no point gawping and marvelling and trying to figure out the minutiae of details when all her instincts - her training - had taught her to focus on the tiny details that could unravel a lie or build an empire…

Lady Meera Reed confessing to Sansa that Larra was struggling was the easiest thing Sansa had to absorb, her sister’s transformation the easiest thing to adjust to. Though, perhaps transformation was not the right word: as with Sansa, the potential had always been there. This new Larra was one who had had everything but her purest instincts stripped away.

Sansa wanted to help her. Wanted to take the time, and coax and gentle Larra the way Larra had the dire-eagle she had once nursed back to health, slowly and surely calming, befriending and nurturing it back to health…

She recalled how she had felt, all those long years in King’s Landing, when she had been aching for closeness, for companionship and…and trust…to be able to relax, utterly, and be vulnerable without fear.

Until reuniting with Jon, Sansa had never experienced it.

Their experiences had been utterly opposite, Sansa in the glittering, malicious court, Larra in the barren, unforgiving True North, but they both shared the same thing: Isolation. Reliance on their own resources to survive impossible odds.

When one thought of things in such a way, Sansa felt far more confident in approaching her ferocious, eerie sister. She had been hesitant - because, truth be told, this stripped-back, brutal Larra unnerved her - frightened her, even. Those queer purple-blue eyes were sharp as daggers, brutal as direwolves, and saw everything in a way even Brandon could not: he was too distracted by the history of the world, by what had once been. Larra was focused on what was, now, in Winterfell, and nothing escaped her notice. It was a distinctively uncomfortable process, Larra levelling her violet gaze on a person. Because the warmth of Larra’s smile no longer softened that quelling gaze that stopped hard Northern lords in their tracks. The Lords who had already returned to Winterfell knew Larra was not to be trifled with. And sometimes, when Sansa approached too quickly and Larra pinned those violet eyes on her, Sansa stopped dead, her heart in her throat from fear. There was a predatory grace to Larra now, and an impenetrable wall of ice around her that would take a long time to thaw…

Sansa sat in the solar, the sound of the fire crackling in the grate soothing, its warmth lulling, watching as the firelight caught on the huge snowflakes idly whirling past in the dark beyond the diamond-paned windows dripping with condensation. Whenever Larra came to the solar, and stayed for any duration, she cracked a window open and sat beneath it - whether or not there was sleet or snow or a clear white sky; she could not abide the claustrophobic heat emanating from Winterfell’s heated walls, the water from the hot-springs sluicing through the walls…keeping the North alive through the harshest winters…

A soft smile came to Sansa’s eyes, and she pushed away from the worn oak desk, aching as she rose for the first time in hours. She remembered how tired Father used to look in the evenings, but he always made time to invite someone to the high table and listen to their lives… Tonight, though, she had asked for a simple supper to be brought to the solar later in the evening. The days were getting shorter and shorter. Her lessons reminded her that sometimes, in the very heart of winter this far North, the light of day could last as long as three hours together, before the world was plunged into darkness again.

They only had to look for the days growing longer again, to know that spring was on the way.

Until then, they endured.

But, Sansa thought, striding through the castle’s more private corridors and chambers - those devoted to the Stark family itself, affording them privacy when the entire North congregated at Winterfell for the winter - they could also thrive.

Jon had helped Sansa. Whatever magic had warmed his heart again had started to soothe hers. Now, she passed on the gentle, steady strength with which Jon loved, and protected… That was what he was, Sansa knew; a protector. The shield that guards the realms of Men…

She hoped, not for the first or even the hundredth time, that Jon would return home soon. She remembered his reaction when his eyes had rested on her at Castle Black for the first time, grubby and frozen in the courtyard amid the gentle snows…how he had stopped still as any statue in the crypt, his lips parting in quiet awe, and stepped back as if stunned by a physical blow, his long scarred fingers curling as if already holding her close to him… He had not even blinked as he stepped down into the courtyard, never even looked away from her for a single heartbeat, and Sansa had forgotten any physical discomfort - and distrust of being touched - and threw herself into his strong arms. Thrown herself at Jon, tall as an oak and resilient as any weirwood, fierce and bearded now, his hair freshly shorn, the wind flirting with his cropped curls, his face pale but his dark eyes glittering with wonder, grief and love as he gazed at her, sat before the hearth with soup to warm her hands…he had laughed when she had choked on the bad ale he drank so easily, crinkles appearing at the corners of his eyes, his white teeth flashing in his bearded face, and it looked strange, seeing him smile at her - because of her: His smiles had been for Larra.

Sansa couldn’t wait to see Jon’s reaction when he realised Larra was home.

She was still of two minds: Send a raven to Dragonstone, telling him - or let him find out upon his return.

On the one hand, she wanted him to know - to speed his return to Winterfell.

On the other, Sansa refused to distract Jon from doing what was necessary - for his survival, for their freedom; for the Long Night, and the wars to come.

Larra had not asked her to send a raven; nor had she expressively forbidden Sansa from doing so. And Sansa had not brought it up to her - a little in part due to her dread of what Larra’s choice would be. Because Sansa had to respect her choice, and her insight.

The fire crackled and Sansa tidied her working desk, before sending a maid ahead to prepare, and she shivered as she exited the solar - she had not realised just how hot the fire had been burning - and strode through the castle, appreciative of the fact that she had enjoyed the entire day without sight or sound from Lord Baelish. She had given instructions Littlefinger should be…kept occupied. Because Sansa did not want him too near her; but she could not afford to send him away - he was simply too dangerous to let out of her sight.

As long as he was at Winterfell, she could anticipate what he would get up to: Exactly what he always had, manipulate, murder and blackmail his way to getting what he wanted. Her. Control of the North through her. Northern armies combined with the might of the Vale to snatch the Iron Throne from Cersei. Litter Westeros with the bodies of anyone who stood in his way - and perhaps especially those who had helped him climb onto that unsightly chair.

But she was glad of the reprieve from his constant presence, from the shrewd, greedy gaze and the smirk she was desperate to slap off his face. Her lips burned whenever she thought of his presumptuous kiss, made her shudder with discomfort, more than memories of the King’s Landing bread riots - because Littlefinger was far more dangerous.

He didn’t like Larra, Sansa could tell by the way his sharp eyes lingered on her. Didn’t like her presence in Winterfell. Not her furs, not her handiness with weapons - or how she had taken the measure of him the first time she laid eyes on him.

Jon, Larra, Bran…her family had returned. There were now more and more people to strengthen the Stark hold over the North, to strengthen her; more people Littlefinger would have to find creative - or perhaps not subtle at all - ways to despatch in pursuit of his desires. Sansa, the Iron Throne.

At this time of afternoon, Sansa could usually find Larra in the training yard. She drilled with different groups of young people, with spears, bows and knives. And often, Sansa had watched from the gallery, Larra would issue drills, correcting posture and grip, encouraging people and setting high expectations people strove to meet, while her hands were busy with a hunting knife, whittling a basket of arrows to be delivered to the team of fletchers. Even stood still, Larra was never idle. It was a strange thing to watch Larra, and Sansa paused in the gallery once again, gazing down into the training yard illuminated by fires crackling here and there, and heard her sister’s voice before she saw her. Larra had picked up languages north of the Wall. Sansa had not yet asked about it, but Larra understood the dialects of several of the wildling clans - there were seven different languages spoken among the Free Folk - and Larra acted as interpreter for the Magnar of the Thenns, who spoke only in the Old Tongue of the First Men. Sansa heard Larra’s voice, but did not recognise her words: Peeking over the railing, Sansa finally found Larra, amid a cluster of wildlings, almost indistinguishable because of their furs - and they were…laughing. They were playing a game - one Sansa could remember her siblings being scolded for playing when they were little. Holding their fingers out, snatching out their hands to slap each other’s knuckles. Wildlings, and their children clinging to their furs, all laughed richly, chatting in their native dialects, as they watched Larra engaged in the game with a young Thenn, tall and pale as a weirwood with a shaved head, dazzling sapphire-blue eyes, wicked ceremonial scars and an insane grin. They were playing without gloves.

“Why?” Sansa asked with a mixture of curiosity and exasperation, eyeing her sister’s pale, scarred hands - skin reddened from the Thenn’s ruthless slaps - as the wildings dispersed, uneasy in the presence of someone who was so completely other, a southern Lady in her finery, the King’s sister… Not like Larra, who could pass as one of them, who had learned their secrets and their dialects, their culture and respected the cold war they had been fighting for years against the Night King, because she was also a warrior who fought for the living…

“Because it hurts more in the cold,” Larra said simply, as she trudged rather reluctantly inside, her eyes watchful as they entered the castle. Sansa had noticed that Larra was always rather unsettled by the idea of returning inside, as if she could not breathe freely within the ageless stone walls that had protected their family for thousands of years. The open window in the solar; resting in the rocking-chair rather than her feather bed - Larra was uncomfortable in their home, and Sansa knew it.

She rolled her eyes slightly at Larra’s answer, glancing at her sister, whose eyes glowed vividly violet as the torchlight caught them.

“Have they said anything?” Sansa asked curiously.

“About what?”

“The Northerners have me to bring complaints to; the Valemen have Lord Royce, who brings the few issues that he cannot settled to me…the wildlings had Jon,” Sansa said, frowning slightly. When it came to the wildlings, Sansa knew the respect they had for Jon would not pass on to her simply because she was his sister: His status as their leader was founded on his being a fellow survivor of the Night King’s hordes, as someone who had died to give them a chance at life… Sansa knew how to deal with the Valemen, who, as proud and honourable as they were, were well-behaved boys in comparison to the hard Northern lords… And compared to the wildlings, well… The Northern lords seemed like child’s play.

The wildlings were utterly foreign to her; they might as well have come from Asshai, for all Sansa knew of their languages and culture. They were utterly intimidating. But Larra…she had lived in the True North, and the wildings had appreciated that from the moment Larra, Bran and Meera had reached Winterfell. They could see it in Larra’s furs; in the way she held herself; in how swiftly she drew her short hunting knife - rather than her Valyrian steel sword - because it was cumbersome, not to mention unwise, to unsheathe a longsword and fight in snowdrifts. The True North was in Larra, in a way it never could be in Sansa: Larra appreciated their cultures, had adapted some of what she had learned to survive, and respected their strength and ferocity, their freedom.

Larra treated every person she met as her equal - because she had grown up being treated as inferior.

“Be assured, if the Free Folk have any issues, they’ll be dealt with swiftly and brutally,” Larra said, her pretty lips pursing in wry amusement. “The Thenns hate the Hornfoots; the Hornfoots hate the Ice River clans. Everyone hates the cave people… But they’re not so blinded by their hatred that they can’t see that they must work together if they want a future. Especially not after Hard Home… You don’t need to worry about the Free Folk, Sansa. They settle their own affairs…and as soon as they’re able, they’ll pack themselves off home to hack each other to bits over one perceived insult or another.”

“Yes, but until then…”

“Until then, they’ll work together, because it’s in their interests to do so,” Larra said softly. “Never underestimate what people are capable of if they feel it’s in their best interests… But they’ll never kneel. This is not their home, their lands… They’ll do what they must, fight with us…but they’ll always yearn for the boundless snow-meadows and clear glittering air of the True North, the freedom to live their own lives…”

“They won’t want to stay south of the Wall?” Sansa asked curiously. All her life, she had been warned by Old Nan’s stories of wildling raids, brutal wild-men carrying off livestock, castle-forged steel and innocent young girls.

“Some might,” Larra said thoughtfully. “There will be more than a few orphans before the Dawn comes…they’ll either adapt and kneel, or make their way home - and fight every day of their lives to survive.”

“Who would choose such a life?”

“There’s freedom in living that way,” Larra said, her voice faraway, almost dreamy. “It’s brutal and relentless, but you are beholden to no-one… You are stripped to your fiercest nature, left with nothing but what is so precious you would kill to protect it. It’s a simple way of life - and it is honest.”

“It sounds rather liberating,” Sansa said honestly, thinking of King’s Landing and the tangled nest of vipers, thorny blooms and mangy lions that was the Court. Everything had been cloaked in deception - even deceptions.

“In a way,” Larra said gloomily, keeping pace with Sansa even as she led the way through the bowels of the castle, the torch held by their guard guttering with every open window they passed, snow drifting past idly, the nip of the wind chasing away the worst of the suffocating heat of the walls steaming softly, vapour eddying at their feet. Winterfell had never been so atmospheric as when winter finally came, and the castle itself exhibited proof of why it had been built in such a way - and endured so long. The heated walls of the castle would keep the people of the North alive throughout the harshest winter: The difference between life and death in winter was often warmth, as Sansa could now attest to. She had almost died of the cold several times on her flight to Castle Black. Sharing what little warmth they had with Theon; marvelling as Podrick struck tinder so easily to coax a flame into life-giving ruby warmth.

But Sansa was a novice compared to Larra.

“You miss it,” Sansa said, glancing at Larra, who raised her violet eyes to Sansa’s face, her own expression rather grim.

“I knew what I had to do,” was all she said. Then her dark brows nudged toward each other, and she gazed around the corridor. “Where are we going?”

Sansa cleared her throat, as they entered a familiar corridor known only to those who knew where it was. A stretch of wall had been carved by Stark stonemasons centuries ago, possibly longer, a rather fanciful depiction of Brandon Stark’s settlement of the area that became Winterfell, with its godswood and its thermal pools and the irrigation system that kept their walls warm - kept the winter at bay… They had been raised on the story, and on this mural: They knew Brandon Stark by the direwolf hulking behind him, predatory and protective of the first Stark King in the North.

The torchlight threw queer shadows against the mural, and Sansa’s heartbeat quickened as she imagined the figures coming to life, Brandon turning his stern, unyielding gaze - so like Jon’s, so like Father’s - toward her, the enormous direwolf bristling and snarling as it sensed danger, bonded to Brandon as Lady had once been to Sansa... Brandon Stark had to have been a hard man, harder even than Jon - and as good as Jon, as gentle and brave and as strong - to unite the First Men, to ally with the Children of the Forest, to beat back the White Walkers, raise the Wall, initiate the Night’s Watch and lay the first foundations for Winterfell… Thousands of years later, here they were, Brandon’s direct descendants, preparing to finish what he had started so long ago…

Sansa turned to her sister, and said, rather bluntly - because she was home, and Larra did not appreciate minced words - “I appreciate that weeks cannot undo the work of years…”

“But?” Larra said, her lips twitching with irony, and Sansa was thrown back to Jon’s laughter interrupting their squabble - “anything before the word ‘but’ is horseshit.”

“But you are in dire need of a bath.”

Larra sighed heavily, her scowl heavy as she glared at the heavy oak door banded with steel hinges worked into the form of snarling direwolf heads. Her fingers twitched, as if itching to reach for her weapon - an instinct Sansa doubted would ever die - because she was in discomfort, anxious… Sansa couldn’t help but wonder why - and was clever enough not to dare ask, remembering some of the wisdom Meera had shared on her relentless, brave sister.

“I haven’t had a bath in years,” Larra murmured, almost to herself.

Chapter 19: Balm

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

19

Balm


The door was unbolted, and steam billowed out. It was the sultriest place in the entire castle, and made Sansa think of the capricious summer lightning storms that occasionally took hold of King’s Landing, when weeks of breathless humidity had threatened to choke the city - broken by fierce storms that drenched everything, scouring away the dust and muck, settling cool air across the city that made Sansa think of the tranquil chill of the godswood. She had anticipated every storm for that brief moment, the lungfuls of crisp, clean air that reminded her of home.

Now, she wandered into the baths, already stripping off her fur-trimmed gloves and heavy cloak, sweltering in the humid heat, as Larra reluctantly followed. The guard stayed beyond the strong door, and Larra bolted it from the inside. Sansa waited, watching, as Larra turned from the door, eyeing the vast chamber. There were several pools, of varying sizes and depths, with the smallest bubbling deliciously - clever stonework meant hot coals could be placed inside the walls of that particular pool, making the water even hotter than the regular pools, which steamed beguilingly, the water eddying delicately as it flowed from the careful irrigation system - pipes separated water-flow so that each pool had its own source and its own overflow spill, ensuring the warm water was always clean.

Sansa had weighed the expense, and had candles littered around the large chamber, making the steam glow and the carvings on the long walls flicker strangely.

“Do you remember what Old Nan used to say, whenever one of us was overwrought?” Sansa asked, and a sad smile lingered in the shadows at the corners of Larra’s beautiful lips.

“A long soak in warm water is the best balm for battered spirits and weary bones,” Larra said, and Sansa smiled softly.

“The first thing I did when we reclaimed Winterfell was to come down here, and soak it all away,” Sansa told her sister quietly. Her lips twitched, as she added, “All those years in King’s Landing, I had forgotten, you know…the cold. It was strange to get used to it again… Only when I immersed myself in the water did I realise how cold I had been for weeks… I thawed myself out, soaked everything away… When we were little, we used to come down here, all of us…we would play. And only you could gentle Arya long enough to comb the tangles from her hair. We’d wrap ourselves in terrycloth before the fire to dry off, playing games… You used to braid my hair.”

Larra gazed at the huge fireplace, where once their family had enjoyed playing as they dried off, Jon’s and Larra’s hair curling riotously, Sansa’s glowing as vibrantly as the flames, Arya always sitting too close and coming out in a rash from the heat, baby Rickon carried back to the nursery, fast asleep in Larra’s arms, his tawny hair soft and silky, his ferocious little face relaxed in sleep. “I didn’t think you remembered.”

“I do,” Sansa sighed softly. “I remember everything. The last words you said to me, do you remember? ‘You’re smarter than this, Sansa’… You don’t know how those words haunted me…”

“Good,” Larra said, her gaze unflinching as she stared at Sansa. “You were smart enough to survive King’s Landing. You’re the first Stark in generations to be able to boast that.”

“I was angry with Father, when they came for him,” Sansa confessed suddenly, staring at her fierce, clever sister. “Furious about Lady…about him trying to take me from the capital. He tried to get us out and I -“

“It doesn’t matter,” Larra said quietly, her voice gentle but unyielding. “You’re home. That’s what Father would care about. You’re home, at Winterfell; you’re safe… And you and Jon did what no-one else could. We can fight together for a future because of you. Your parents would be very proud of you. I am.”

Relief and pride swept through Sansa’s body, sparkling like beads of incandescent light through her blood, and she smiled sweetly, allowing Larra to see how honoured, how pleased she was to be thought well of by her.

“I…thought perhaps you were angry with me.”

Larra’s eyebrows rose, her violet eyes widening, and her lips parted in stunned incredulity. “What on earth do I have to be angry at you about? I was teasing you about the gowns.”

“I know that,” Sansa smiled softly, but it faded at Larra’s curious, guarded look - as if anticipating something horrific. “But I have taken the role you trained all your life to fill.”

Larra sighed, her gaze flitting over Sansa’s face. “I am glad that you have taken my place… When we returned to Winterfell, I could not have walked into the Great Hall and been what people needed me to be. But you are.”

Larra crouched down at the edge of the steaming pool, on the balls of her feet, perfectly balanced, with Dark Sister tucked out of the way and the hilt of her hunting-knife gleaming at her back amid her unkempt furs. Her face glowed pale as moonlight in the candlelight, her hair black as night in the shadows, and Sansa watched silently as Larra reached out, sighing heavily, and dipped the fingertips of one hand into the warm water. They sent delicate ripples across the surface of the water, sparkling in the candlelight, and the soft lapping noise was soothing as Larra idly flicked her fingers through the water.

When she spoke next, it was to the water, to the steam rising around her, obscuring her features, making her look eerie and out of place, her voice faraway and devastated: “I walk these halls, and…I know every stone, every passageway, every tapestry and tower, they have not changed. But the halls are filled with strangers, and I feel…” She turned to Sansa, and the candlelight caught her violet eyes, making them glow like amethysts, wet with tears that did not fall, her features solemn, heartbroken; her voice caught the longer she spoke, thick with feeling. “I feel as if I had died, after all. As if I am a ghost, haunting the halls of Winterfell, and everyone I knew and loved has gone ahead without me. I feel as if I have been left behind, and I know they are gone, and yet everywhere I go, I cannot help but look for them. I do not recognise our home.”

“Or me,” Sansa murmured, struck by the depth of her sister’s devastation.

“You are who you’ve always had it in you to be...” Larra said, her gaze steady as she held Sansa’s eye. She sniffed delicately, her lips twisting as she fought to control the emotion threatening to overwhelm her. “I haven’t…had the time to think about it, ever since Edd told me.”

Sansa blinked, startled, and devastation crept through her body, leaving nothing but raw anguish in its place. “Edd told you?”

Larra cleared her throat softly. “When we reached Castle Black. Edd spoke of the King in the North - I thought he meant Robb…” For a heartbeat, Larra smiled, and it was a harrowing sight, her eyes glittering. “He had to tell me. He had to tell me everything. The Red Wedding, Rickon…all of it. Here I am, home, safe and sound with Bran…” Her eyes glittered, but the tears did not fall; her lips twitched, and she sniffed delicately. She closed her eyes, and after a few seconds, she whispered in a dull voice filled with grief, “They’re gone but they’re everywhere.”

Sansa’s eyes burned. “You truly knew nothing, until weeks ago?”

“I lived with someone who was all-seeing…who parted with information like a miser with gold…” Larra said grimly. “The ink was already dry… He knew I could do nothing, so what would it do to tell me?”

After a few moments, Sansa said, “It was a backhanded kindness, not telling you.”

“Eventually the hammer had to fall… Hope is the only thing stronger than fear,” Larra said, sniffing delicately again, her voice stronger, clearer. She turned to Sansa, saying, “And I needed even the smallest glimmer of it, to get us back to the Wall and beyond it. If I’d known then…about Robb, and his poor wife, and their little baby…about Rickon…and you…about Jon… If I had known all of that…”

“You wouldn’t have stopped fighting,” Sansa said, with fierce certainty.

Larra’s lips twitched into a humourless smile. “You sound so sure.”

“You’ve never given up in your entire life, not at anything. You’ve had to fight for everything…” Sansa said, ashamed for her mother. The closer she had grown to Jon over these months, the more ashamed she was of her mother’s treatment of the best man she had known since Father’s death. “You weren’t about to stop fighting when Bran needed you most.” Sansa sighed, and murmured, “I wish Mother was here.” Larra gave her a look, her eyebrows raised, as if simultaneously compassionate of Sansa’s desire to see her mother, and relieved Lady Catelyn was not around to sneer down her nose at the bastard twins. Sansa smiled warmly, “The bastards she despised are the two people who did what she could not: Protected her children. I fought through seven Hells to get to Jon; and you kept Bran alive against all odds. She owes you both an apology.”

“She loved you fiercely, and if not for her I would not have you. To me, she was a harsh and ungodly woman…” Sansa did not look away, as she might once have; because this was Larra’s truth, and Sansa knew it to be true. Her mother had wished the twins dead since the moment she arrived at Winterfell with Robb to find the babies already ensconced in the nursery. Larra sighed, shaking her head slightly, her voice grim when she said, “She did not deserve her death.”

Sansa’s mother had never had a kind thought for or act towards the twins all their lives. To hear Larra speak well of her…

It was Larra who had raised Rickon, and protected Bran. She had abandoned their ancestral home to protect her half-brothers. And she had done it without question, because as fiercely as Lady Catelyn had hated Larra and Jon, Larra had loved her brothers and sisters.

“You didn’t deserve the way she treated you,” Sansa said quietly. “All those years in King’s Landing…I started to realise that Cersei treated me with the same viciousness and contempt that Mother threw at you every chance she could. All because Father loved your mother more.”

“It’s interesting to hear you say that,” Larra said, her eyes glittering. “You were once scandalised that Father could ever love anyone but your mother.”

“I’m not quite as naïve as I once was,” Sansa scoffed, smiling delicately, and Larra’s eyes shone as she smiled in response, amused but also saddened that Sansa’s innocence had been stripped away so brutally. “Your mother must have been magnificent, whoever she was, for Father to love her so fiercely.”

Larra’s face, already snow-white but for her constellation of dramatic freckles, turned greyish-green as she stared at Sansa, who frowned, bewildered by the visceral reaction. Sansa had thought it a compliment to Larra’s mother - if she had been anything like Larra, she had to have been truly extraordinary.

“Larra?” she asked uncertainly.

Larra faltered, staring at Sansa as her skin lost the sickly tinge just as quickly as it came, and hitched an uncomfortable smile on her lips. It did not reach her eyes, but her tone was gentle and coaxing as she said, “Let’s have that bath, before the candles burn themselves out.”

One by one, Larra unstrapped her weapons - a small pile of them accumulated at the edge of the pool, clacking and clanging, startling Sansa with every secret hiding-place as yet more weapons were withdrawn from the folds of thick furs.

And then Larra shed her furs. She shed a tunic that glittered black like thousands of tiny beetles, and stood in worn, knitted longjons, Old Nan’s stitching utterly familiar to Sansa even after all this time; they were made of fine musk-ox wool, the warmest yarn in the world, long-sleeved, reaching the ankles, buttoned down the front from belly to neck. Or they were usually buttoned; Larra’s appeared to be sewn together. The longjons were heavily darned, and they hung from her slender frame, where once they would have fit snugly. She had to reach for her hunting knife to slice through the stitches before she could shimmy and wriggle out of the longjons.

Sansa couldn’t help it. She gasped.

Jon was the shield that guarded the realms of men.

Larra was the shield that guarded Bran.

And like any effective shield, she was battered.

Even at first glance, Sansa knew there was not a single limb or part of Larra’s body that was not scarred.

Some were burns, hastily sealing a messy wound; some were neatly-stitched slashes. Some scars were white and old, some still pink, shining, angry and raised. One on her right outer-forearm slashed from elbow to wrist, an inch wide at its widest point, shining and jagged; an arrow-wound to her lower-abdomen had been neatly stitched to a tiny pucker. There was a slash below her collarbone, a triple slash to the base of her throat, and the firelight caught a milky-white scar beneath her ear toward the back of her neck. One thigh showed the damage of a knife-wound; her calf caused nausea to build in Sansa’s stomach, remembering Father’s wound and his limp as they dragged him up the steps of the Sept, stabbed in the back of the leg by a spear… Even her hip had been slashed; her arms were a criss-cross of healed scars, and one wicked scar jagged from hip to kneecap, a curving, slice that might have cost her life - it had been a clean wound, a sharp blade…

And her back…

When Sansa had left Winterfell, Larra’s back had still been healing from a flogging ordered by Cersei. Larra had struck Joffrey in the nursery, for tormenting Tommen and Rickon. Now, Sansa was filled with pride and smug elation that Larra had dealt Joffrey that sharp slap - the only time she had ever hit one of them in the face, rather than round the back of the head as a warning, and probably the only time in Joffrey’s life he had ever been struck for his foulness - but at the time, Sansa had been mortified.

Sansa knew now that Cersei had had Larra flogged as much for smacking Joffrey as for reminding King Robert so much of Lyanna Stark - of a time in his life he had fancied himself in love with Lyanna, and happy. Sansa remembered the way Robert’s jaw had hung agape at the sight of Larra in her feast gown, frost-bitten hellebores braided into her hair, her eyes sparkling, vibrant, her smile flirtatious and charming…

Cersei had never mentioned Larra again, and likely never even thought of her: But Myrcella had cried when they learned the Ironborn had taken Winterfell. Larra had painted her portrait, taken the Princess to collect a winter posy from the godswood, and gifted Tommen a kitten from her own Northern Longhaired cat Cinder’s litter. They had adored Sansa’s bastard half-sister. Most children did.

Sansa had not remembered that Larra had been flogged. Not really. They had left Winterfell before Larra was healed. Before Sansa had seen either the damage, or the scarring left behind. Now she saw it.

It looked like a weirwood had been scarred into Larra’s back, a tangle of shining white limbs across her shoulder-blades, a few deep slashes down her spine creating a sturdy trunk.

She was scarred, and so slender, but not deathly thin as some of the wildlings were, and Sansa knew it was Larra’s tiny but frequent meals that made all the difference - she looked healthy, not an ounce of extra fat on her, her musculature not overly pronounced but visibly strong; her breasts were high, unblemished and very pretty, not as heavy as Sansa’s because of her weight loss, her dainty, upturned nipples the colour of iced plums rather than the rosy apricot of Sansa’s. There was even a scar beneath Larra’s left breast, tucked down amid her ribs.

“Sansa…are you alright?” Larra asked, her voice gentle - absurdly kind, considering Sansa was gaping at her naked body in horror.

“There are…so many,” she breathed, her eyes flitting from one impossible scar to another. Larra’s side was still healing from a vicious bruise.

Larra stared back at her for a long time. Quietly, she told Sansa, “Every one of them tells a story of my strength in surviving.”

She said it in such a way, Sansa knew Larra felt no shame in any of her scars. They had been hard-won. They were proof of her strength - her survival. That strength emboldened Sansa to wriggle out of her own clothes - Larra’s lips twitched, and Sansa heard her soft chuckle as she approached, naked and unabashed, to help unlace Sansa out of her fortified gown, the many layers she wore beneath it - a silk chemise to protect her skin, a fleece-line tunic and musk-ox wool underdress for warmth, two pairs of wool stockings, quilted petticoats, fur-lined leather boots to keep her feet warm and dry, a silk neckerchief to protect her neck from irritation from the feathered collar with silver direwolves clasped nose-to-nose. Larra’s scarred fingers were nimble and as gentle as Sansa remembered as she unknotted ties, pinched clasps loose and unthreaded hidden buckles.

“You’ve armoured yourself well,” Larra murmured, her eyes flashing like dark amethyst embers, and Sansa took a breath that struggled to fill her lungs as Larra lifted the last, stone-grey silk chemise over Sansa’s head, revealing her naked body. She was not slender like Larra, she had been well-fed all her life - the journey to Castle Black had been one rare instance that had shown her what hunger and terror truly were - but her waist was still trim, her limbs supple and lean; there was a softness to her curves that brought to mind Larra’s old figure, when her embrace had been all warmth and bosom.

Like her sister, Sansa’s body was scarred. Not heavily, the way Larra’s body had evidently been used as a shield, but her body was no longer unblemished, the injuries not nearly as harrowing and jagged and life-threatening - they had been inflicted to elicit pain and fear, rather than to cause lasting damage or drain the life from her. The weeks she had been prisoner in her own home, Sansa had gained several scars, and compared to Larra’s they were almost laughable, so small and neat - but their size did not diminish the horror she had endured to earn them.

She was healing. One day, the angry pink scars would turn white, like Larra’s. They would always be there, a reminder - of her strength, of what she had it in her to survive.

They were still new, though, and sometimes, when she caught sight of one of them as she dressed, she was startled by their presence marring her skin. And she often thought, if her skin had reflected every emotional wound inflicted by Joffrey, people would stop looking at her with yearning and open lust, and realise just how much she had endured - they would recoil in horror at the sight of her, rather than attempting to undress her with their gaze, wondering what it would feel like to mount her. She looked untouched, pure… Beneath the skin, she was as scarred as Larra.

They had both endured the impossible, and survived it against the odds.

They were more alike now, through their own experiences, than they had ever been before. Two ferocious she-wolves of Winterfell.

Larra’s face went cold and hard as marble as her glowing violet eyes traced the delicate scars on Sansa’s body. She was the first person Sansa had shown; she bathed and dressed herself in privacy now, behind a folding screen, her maids merely bringing her clean garments and leaving them to warm draped by the fire in her chamber, waiting for Sansa to finish lacing herself up before tending to her hair and nails.

“I hope it was lingering,” Larra growled low, dangerous, her eyes wrathful violet flame.

“It was. And well-deserved,” Sansa told her gently. She forced a smile, and found herself brushing off the agony that temporarily squeezed her heart. She reached out to touch Larra’s arm, leading her to the smallest, shallowest pool where soft towels had been laid down over the stone lip of the bath to rest against, and earthenware pots and jars, delicate glass bottles and a woven basket full of combs, brushes, exquisite Qartheen snips and loofas had been arranged beside a cluster of fat beeswax candles, a delicate glazed candleholder melting solid perfumed oils to fragrance the entire chamber with warm vanilla, fig and camomile.

“What is all this?” Larra asked, more curious than suspicious, eyeing the arrangement of pots and bottles, brushes and the two simple chairs arranged beside the roaring fire beside the shallow pool, piles of clothing neatly folded in preparation for them, terrycloth towels draped over a rack to warm.

“Gifts, from Lord Manderly,” Sansa said, her smile brightening as she glanced at Larra, who was slowly lowering herself into the warm water, wincing ever so slightly at the unfamiliarity, the bite of the hot water against her abused skin. Sansa plaited her hair over her shoulder, then pinned it in place like a crown around her head to prevent it getting wet, and sank into the water with Larra, sighing as she ducked under the water to her neck. “He sent them after we had reclaimed Winterfell. Cosmetics, fabric and fine trinkets for me, barrels of citrus from Dorne and a high harp from Lys; for Jon, leather and furs, barrels of snow-crab, cod, Arbour wine, cheese from the Reach and word that the Stark fleet had been completed, ready to set sail… I wonder what he’ll send for you; you were always his favourite.”

“Well, he always had exquisite taste,” Larra teased, and Sansa smirked.

“You’re right. He knew your worth, even if nobody else cared to see past your birth,” Sansa said, knowing that she was guilty of it, too. “How long has it been since you unwound your hair?”

“You mean how long since I washed and combed it?” Larra smirked, her eyes glittering.

Larra wore her hair completely up, braided and threaded with knotted leather cords to keep everything in place. Some of the coils of the braids resembled the links of a chain. And because it was all braided up, there was no telling how long it was. Remembering how patient and gentle Larra had always been with Arya and Rickon, Sansa worked tirelessly with gentle fingers, unknotting the leather cords, using her fingers to comb out the braids.

It took a long time, and Sansa couldn’t help but laugh at the sight of Larra’s wild mane of kinky, bizarre hair, some of it finger-combed, sticking out at odd angles after being wound up so long. She went in with a large-toothed comb to gentle tease out the worst of any tangles; and then the first dunk of Larra’s head under water to soak through her hair. With a large bottle of vinegar infused with lavender, lemon verbena, rosemary and parsley to cleanse the dirt and build-up, and a finer-toothed comb, Sansa treated Larra’s scalp and hair, running the comb from root to tip until there was not a single tangle. Then, because Shae always had, Sansa picked up the tiny pair of Qartheen snips - delicate, horrifyingly sharp embroidery scissors - and trimmed an inch off the ends of Larra’s hair, no more and no less, so the ends were healthy.

Sansa had always enjoyed having her hair washed by Shae, the way she would massage Sansa’s scalp with her fingertips and use just the right amount of pressure, and once the vinegar rinse had cleaned the worst from Larra’s hair, it was Sansa’s turn to treat Larra. She opened one of the jars she hadn’t been able to bear the idea of using, the perfumed cream-coloured balm evoking memories that, until Larra’s reappearance, were too painful to bear. The same perfumer that shipped his wares to White Harbour had an aterlier in King’s Landing, highly favoured by the court: All the time Sansa had been at court, she had been provided with soaps, hair-balms, rinses, cosmetics, solid perfumes and scents from him. One word from Lord Manderly and the same orange-blossom scent Sansa always wore was shipped to White Harbour for her, along with others to tempt her - she was sister to the King in the North, the Lady of Winterfell, after all. She was an opportunity to expand his business.

The soft, buttery soap was heavily scented - and reminded Sansa of Larra: The scent of the winter sun melting snow and warming wild heather.

The soap was perfumed, according to the note handwritten by the perfumer himself that had come with the jar, with heather, hellebores - the hardy Northern rose that was Larra’s favourite - blackcurrant, oakmoss, patchouli, vanilla, camellia and the wild Northern meadow orchid. It was a scent made for Larra. It had broken Sansa’s heart, the first time she smelled it; and Jon’s face had turned grim when she had offered him the jar - he remembered, too, the way Larra had always smelled of melting snow and wildflowers glittering with frost, of tempting steamed puddings, hot drinks and dried herbs. She had smelled of warmth and wildness.

Sansa treated Larra’s hair with lashings of the balm, massaging her scalp until Larra was leaning back into Sansa in the warm water, the closest Sansa had yet seen her to being relaxed. She used a jug to rinse the balm from her hair, the suds and cloudy water carried away by the clever piping, and Sansa swept the fine-toothed comb through Larra’s wet hair one last time… Her hair fell to her bottom, now, longer than Sansa’s, dark as raven-wings, and springy, riotous curls were already starting to form as Sansa combed through it.

“How do you feel?” Sansa asked, smiling, as she dropped the comb in the basket, digging among the small flannels, loofahs and bars of soap.

“Deliciously clean,” Larra hummed. She already looked happier for her clean hair, soft from the hot water and perhaps from Sansa’s treatment. She was being taken care of - she was allowing Sansa to take care of her.

“When your hair has dried, there are some oils to help keep its shine,” Sansa said, smiling, pleased by the soft, warm look on Larra’s face. “But I suppose you’ll braid it up again.”

“Not tonight,” Larra said softly, smiling lazily.

“I…can tend your nails, if you’d like?” Sansa said dubiously, eyeing Larra’s scarred but elegant hands. Her sister chuckled low in her throat.

“Thank you, no,” she said softly, her eyes glittering. One of her fingernails was black with bruising; scars cobwebbed the backs of her palms, and Sansa remembered the time Larra had almost lost a finger, the scar from Maester Luwin’s stitches far older than any of the others. Larra had always used her hands - for gardening, carpentry, swordplay, archery, hunting… She had never been vain of her hands, which Sansa thought were beautiful, because she had never been praised for her beauty - or anything else. Praise was reserved for Ned Stark’s true-born daughters, not his bastard.

“Shall we go into another pool?”

“I think so; I haven’t swum in ages,” Larra smiled, and they stepped out of the small bath, the steam and sultriness embracing their bodies before they dipped into the largest, steaming pool where once they had all played and splashed and made a lot of noise and mess, the little siblings sitting on Robb’s and Jon’s shoulders to wrestle each other into the water, giggles echoing deliciously off the carved walls.

Larra was a stronger swimmer than Sansa, even after years without practise; Sansa paddled, while Larra sluiced through the water.

“Were there any hot-springs beyond the Wall?” Sansa asked curiously.

“A few, I imagine,” Larra said softly. “There were rivers even the Land of Always-Winter could not freeze…but we didn’t have the time or inclination to follow them to their source. Most of the hot-springs fed networks of rivers through subterranean caves… Perhaps that’s where Brandon the Builder got the idea for Winterfell’s walls in the first place… He and his people would have certainly known how to find the hot-spring caves…”

Sansa paddled over to the side of the pool to rest - she was sedentary by nature and design, not like the active and fiercely strong Larra, who swam lengths of the pool like a fish, her long hair a dark shadow behind her - and the glitter of black beetles caught her eye. She reached out of the pool for the tunic Larra had shed, and up close, Sansa realised it wasn’t beetles, but thousands of tiny discs made of a strange, shining black stone that refracted firelight eerily. She picked up the tunic, which was heavier than it looked, and examined it closely.

“How did you make this?” she asked, and Larra glanced over her shoulder, before swimming closer.

“It’s bearskin,” she sighed, gazing at the vest without affection. “The threads were Summer’s shed hairs… The Children taught me how to smelt obsidian to make the rings.”

Sansa blinked, her lips parting. “You made every single one?”

“I had a lot of time,” Larra said grimly.

“So…this is what Jon has risked his life for?” Sansa mused, passing her fingertips over the smooth, strange rings.

“Obsidian,” Larra sighed, nodding.

“Dragonglass. Is it true, does it kill White Walkers?”

“It does,” Larra said, her eyes like violet flames as she gazed unerringly at Sansa’s face. “And it blocks their weapons when they try to skewer you.”

Sansa didn’t like the implication. She asked anxiously, “Is it worth it?”

“You know Jon would be here if it wasn’t,” Larra said gloomily.

“I don’t like the way the bannermen are grumbling about him leaving.”

“Even though you agree.”

“They’re annoyed their king left: I’m terrified he won’t return,” Sansa confessed. “I want him home.”

“Let them grumble; it’s the ones who don’t air their grievances in the Great Hall that I’m keeping an eye on,” Larra said, showing her wisdom, the voices of both Ned Stark and Maester Luwin echoing in her words. “The worse the storms get, the fewer grain deliveries that arrive, the looming threat of an army they can’t possibly begin to comprehend…they’re frightened. Knights and lords…they’re like children, really… All children want to be reassured that they’re safe, loved - and valued.”

Sansa sighed, flinching internally - at the just accusation against her own mother’s mistreatment of Larra and Jon. “And how do I reassure them?”

“Keep them busy,” Larra said, her smile gentle. “During the day, they’re all focused on their tasks, fortifying the castle…it’s at night when they’re all cooped up that’s going to prove the problem, especially when the snowbanks rise so high we won’t be able to get out of doors for days on end…”

“You sound as if you’re used to it.”

“Gardening taught me the first lessons in patience when I was a girl; enduring beneath the tree with the Three-Eyed Raven made me a master of it,” Larra said heavily. “I watched countless sunrises and snowstorms from the cave entrance, waiting, learning how not to lash out in frustration, boredom, inertia and despair as the world passed me by…”

“How did you endure it?”

“I trained…and I sang.”

“You’ve been so quiet since your return,” Sansa said; Larra used to be the most vocal, the most vibrant of them all. “I’ve hardly heard you speak, let alone sing.”

“I know.”

“If I asked it of you, could you arrange something…an entertainment?” Sansa asked curiously. It wasn’t that Larra was keeping to herself, because she wasn’t; but it was evident she was more comfortable with the wildlings than the lords and ladies of the North. She wasn’t settled, yet. “You’re quite right; we can’t just allow our bannermen to fester in their malcontent when the day’s work is done.”

“We need to give them hope,” Larra advised her gentle. “Something to look forward to, even if it is only a dance at the end of the day.”

Sansa sighed, setting the heavy obsidian-encrusted tunic down on the age-worn stone floor, but before she turned back to the water, the firelight caught on something tucked among Larra’s discarded furs.

“What’s this?” Sansa blurted, her voice bright with curiosity, almost stunned. A small locket. Her tone teasing, she asked, “Another treasure from Lord Bloodraven?”

She glanced at Larra as she picked up the locket, and saw the way Larra could not conceal a sharp flinch, or the way her eyes locked onto the jewel in Sansa’s hand. To describe the look on Larra’s face, Sansa would say she was filled with dread.

It was very clear to Sansa that Larra had not intended for her to find the jewel.

One of those secrets even Meera Reed did not know about.

Cheeks pale and drawn, Larra finally raised her gaze to Sansa, brittle and grief-stricken, wide-eyed and panicky for the first time since her return.

Something about the jewel upset Larra.

That made Sansa even more curious, and it seemed to burn in her palm, larger than a gold dragon but heavier and much more exquisitely detailed. The candlelight made love to the intricate gold-work and the exquisite hues of enamel that made the lavender-grey hellebore rose on one side of the locket seem as if it had been encased in glass, rather than formed from platinum and enamel.

Larra’s voice was devoid of emotion as she said, “Uncle Benjen had it.”

Sansa started, staring at her sister, then glanced down at the locket in her hand. The sinuous chain was made of fine strands of platinum-silver and delicate pale-gold interwoven in an intricate love-knot. The locket itself was made of that same delicate pale-gold and shining platinum.

The hellebore rose - the Northern winter rose - rested in the centre of the round locket; around it circled a dainty silver-platinum dragon with its gold-chased wings tucked close, tiny rubies inlaid as its eyes, its jaws clamped around the heels of a silver direwolf, its eyes specks of obsidian, its jaws fastened onto the end of the dragon’s tail.

An ouroboros, without ending or beginning, sinuous and sensual.

The dragon and the direwolf were both raised from the surface of the locket, tactile and exquisitely detailed.

“It’s more exquisite than any jewel I ever saw at court,” Sansa breathed. More beautiful than any jewel Cersei had ever worn. Sansa stared at Larra, who looked ill, watching her with it. “Why would Uncle Benjen have it?”

A Ranger of the Night’s Watch, in possession of a priceless jewel?

Larra raised her eyes to Sansa, and something changed in her face. She calmed down, her eyes turning thoughtful, shrewd - resigned. She sighed softly, her breath cooling the water droplets lingering on Sansa’s skin.

“So it couldn’t fall into the wrong hands,” she said sadly. “So he always had Lyanna close to his heart.”

Sansa frowned, and was about to ask, when Larra reached forward and opened the locket.

Two exquisite miniatures were revealed, painted in the vibrant, hyper-realistic Myrish style onto ivory, glazed to protect the portraits forever. Sansa glanced down at the twin paintings, her jaw dropping, then at Larra, who was waiting for her reaction.

On the left was Rhaegar. It had to be him. His violet eyes, his long, wavy platinum-silver hair neatly pulled from his face highlighting his strong, masculine features, dressed in simple black leather armour.

The other portrait was of Larra. No - not Larra, Sansa realised. Not Larra, and not Arya, who so closely resembled Larra.

It was Lyanna.

The direwolf of silver-platinum, the hellebore rose… Lyanna’s winter roses…

Lyanna was beautiful, and so like Larra they appeared almost twins. Almost. Except for the eyes. Larra’s eyes…were the exact shape and hue of Rhaegar’s, Sansa realised, gaping at the portraits. Even in the candlelight, Sansa could tell that - because the candlelight illuminated Larra’s amethyst eyes - and though they did not look particularly alike, Rhaegar’s solemn expression reminded Sansa vividly of Jon. Lyanna’s smile poured from her eyes, beautiful and joyful - the same way Jon’s dark grey eyes betrayed his amusement, even if his face seemed carved from stone.

Around Lyanna’s dainty portrait were words, etched into the pale-gold frame. Sansa couldn’t understand them; they were High Valyrian, she recognised.

“What does it mean?” she asked, glancing up at Larra, whose expression was sorrowful as she gazed at the locket.

“It’s from an ancient High Valyrian ode…a poem from a dragon-rider to his lover…” she said softly. “‘The curves of your lips shall rewrite history’… In the epic saga, their love forged empires that lasted millennia.”

Sansa stared at Larra.

Uncle Benjen had been in possession of this locket, a locket containing portraits that showed just how vividly Larra resembled Lyanna…and how Jon bore similar features to Rhaegar.

“Your mother…” Sansa breathed, comprehension dawning, the mystery, the secret Father had kept all their lives. The twins’ mother. “The only woman in the world who could make Eddard Stark forfeit his honour.”

“Lyanna,” Larra acknowledged unhappily. She sighed, taking the locket from Sansa, delicately shutting the clasp, and enfolding it in her furs once again. She turned back to Sansa, saying softly, “We’ve never been bastards.”

Sansa stared at Larra. “You…and Jon…”

“Doesn’t matter now,” Larra said. “Except that Father was a greater man than even we knew him to be. He never once broke his promise to her… To protect us.” She let out a short sigh, a touch of anger between her eyebrows as they drew together in a frown that darkened her eyes. “Lyanna knew Robert would kill us for being Rhaegar’s children, no matter that we were hers, too…”

“But Rhaegar kidnapped and - “

“He didn’t,” Larra interrupted, her voice sad, resigned. Miserable. “They ran away together. Rhaegar wanted Rickard Stark’s support to enforce a regency over his father’s rule; ending his marriage to Elia Martell, retiring her to Dorne for her health, marrying Lyanna to ensure an alliance - and because they were in love with each another… It was foolish to do it in secret - probably Rhaegar’s only dishonourable act, not sitting down with our grandfather to ask for his alliance and his blessing, man to man, and a mortal error… Like Robb’s marriage… It doesn’t matter anyway. Not now.”

Sansa frowned, still grappling with the truth - and the look of pure misery on Larra’s face. All their lives, the twins had yearned to know their mother’s name. Father had kept it from them, the only two people in the world who deserved to know his secret. Their secret. “If it doesn’t matter, why are you telling me?”

“Because I can’t talk to Bran about it, when he remembers so much else. It’s not important to him. And when Jon returns…especially with Samwell at the Citadel - he’ll need someone to talk to,” Larra said quietly. She didn’t look up at Sansa as she said thickly, “She’s been dead the whole time. It’s almost worse than her being alive and exiled from our lives… And because he is King in the North now. It may be become important politically.”

Sansa stared at her sister, slowly analysing the implications. Larra and Jon had never been bastards. They were the legitimate children of Rhaegar and Lyanna…

“Aunt Lyanna was your mother…and Rhaegar was your father,” she murmured. Saying it out loud, it was almost absurd - and yet…and yet it wasn’t. Because it made so much more sense than Ned Stark fathering bastards.

The one woman in the world Ned would sacrifice his honour for - his own sister.

“Killed at the Trident before we were born, with her name on his dying breath,” Larra said dully. “And she died begging Father to promise her…that her children would be protected.”

“Father kept it secret ever since Dorne. He never even told Mother. Part of her always hated him on account of you and Jon…and you were Targaryens all along,” Sansa breathed, thunderstruck. An even greater implication struck her, then, and Sansa gaped. “You were - are - royalty, the only legitimate heirs to the Iron Throne.”

Larra scoffed, her tiny smile drenched in irony. “The Kingdoms rose in open rebellion against the Targaryen dynasty before we were even born, we’re not heirs to anything but a legacy of tragedy and horror.”

“Fire and blood,” Sansa said.

“Fire and Blood,” Larra agreed, her nose crinkling delicately to show her distaste.

“Jon is a Targaryen,” Sansa marvelled. And then her heart sank. “You are…niece and nephew to this Dragon Queen.”

Larra saw the change in her expression, and her eyes narrowed. “What is it?”

“When Jon left, I told him… I told him to do what he must, to get what he needed and to return home. I told him to ride the dragon if that’s what it took,” Sansa fretted, guilt suddenly consuming her, shame. The realisation that, “He’ll never forgive me.”

“How could you have known?” Larra tutted, shaking her head. Her drying curls the colour of treacle bounced delicately around her shoulders, tickling her bare breasts, whispering against her scarred arms. “And you’re assuming Jon cannot control his lust.”

“They say she’s very beautiful,” Sansa moaned desperately.

Again, Larra scoffed; she even rolled her eyes. “Women in positions of power usually are - even when they’re not.”

“‘A pretty face does not mean a pretty heart’,” Sansa recited, and Larra’s lips twitched, her eyes glowing with wry amusement.

“You do remember the things I told you,” she said fondly.

“Yes, your voice was always in my head - some days I just begged you to shut up,” Sansa said enthusiastically, smiling, and Larra chuckled softly. Sansa sighed, gazing warmly at Larra. “I know Jon still hears your voice, too. It’s why he didn’t strip the lands and castles from the Umbers and Karstarks.”

“You disapprove of his compassion,” Larra said, reading her face so easily.

“I worry it made him seem weak,” Sansa clarified.

“It doesn’t. It was the wisest choice he could ever make, not just the kindness. For generations to come, Umbers and Karstarks will be raised on stories of the King’s mercy. Jon’s not shown weakness; he’s assured his future strength. They will never forget…” Larra sighed, smiling fondly, proud of Jon’s wisdom and forethought. Wherever she had been, Sansa was sure Larra had always been proud of Jon. It made Sansa’s heart flutter to think that, perhaps, Larra thought as well of Sansa’s own survival. “And, practically speaking, it was wiser not to strip those lands and castles; we need every man here, focused on the war, not scrabbling to secure their new lands, squabbling amongst themselves over who deserves the lands more, the politics of it all.”

“When you put it that way…”

“Jon has powerful instincts,” Larra said quietly. There was subtle warning in her expression when she said, “Don’t underestimate him.”

“I don’t. But I do worry for him,” Sansa said honestly. “Stark men do not fare well when they go south.”

“True,” Larra said, her smile humourless. “But Jon’s not a Stark.”

“He is to me,” Sansa said earnestly. “So are you.” She cleared her throat as Larra smiled, gentle and fond, and raised her hands to her face. “My fingers have quite pruned. Are you ready to get out of the water?”

“Yes,” Larra smiled, and it finally reached her eyes. They waded to the stone steps and traipsed out of the water, dripping, enrobed by the sultry moisture in the air as Larra led the way to the hearth, and she handed Sansa a terrycloth towel before drying herself off with another. She sat naked on one of the stuffed floor-cushions laid out before the fire, and tucked her long hair over one shoulder, the better to dry it by the heat of the flames, squeezing the water from her long tresses, tenderly threading a comb through them before the curls could dry.

It was with a sense of déjà vu that Sansa sat beside her sister, and watched Larra’s shining treacle hair shrink in length from past her bottom to her lower-back as her hair dried and coiled into mutinous curls, thick and bouncy, lustrous and wild, flirtatious and unruly as Larra herself had once been. Sansa remembered her old envy of Larra’s beautiful curls, and smiled to herself. Larra had found a small basket on the hearth, with small seed-cakes folded inside a linen napkin, and a small skillet pot resting in the coals. Carefully lifting the lid, Larra’s eyes glowed as a smile turned up the corners of her lips.

“Cauliflower and chestnut soup,” she said warmly, and using a ladle tucked into the basket, doled out portions for them both into large, glazed earthenware cups. It was such a deceptively simple meal, yet it was thick, creamy and decadent, and Sansa knew the days of an indulgent soup served with dainty seed-cakes would be treasured memories when the winter had lingered too long.

For a little while, they sat before the fire, drinking their soup, enjoying the small, dainty seed-cakes, listening to the fire crackle and snap, lulled by the heat and the dancing flames, quiet, after such intimate talk… Sansa had a lot to think about. The implications… To distract herself, Sansa returned to the basket, carrying it over to the fire; she pulled out the dainty little bottles of fragrant oils and balms Shae had once used to keep Sansa’s hair shining, healthy and sweet-scented. Warming some balm in her fingers and palms, she finger-combed it through Larra’s already-tangled curls, helping them set, giving them a healthful shine; then she finished with a tiny bit of fragranced oil. It was strange, to be home, with Larra. They were adults now, grown women, and it was strange to think they should be here - two girls - when their brothers had been trained for war and violence since childhood. Their brothers were gone, but here they were… They had both survived the extraordinary.

If they survived this looming war, Sansa wondered whether they would not be remembered as two of the greatest She-Wolves in the history of the North.

Larra laughed grimly at the idea, her eyes sad and regretful. She sighed, shaking her head at something. She sighed, “There and back again… I had always imagined that my adventures would be worth writing down.”

“They are,” Sansa said coaxingly, her smile gentle. “They are.”

“No; they’d make for dull reading,” Larra disagreed. “Years trudging through the snow, idling beneath an ancient tree.”

“You lived among the Children of the Forest,” Sansa said, quietly awed. “You fought wights and killed White Walkers and learned the songs of the Children of the Forest, you immersed yourself in the cultures of the Free Folk and had tutelage from the last of the great Greenseers… Perhaps the day-to-day was interminable, but the knowledge and experiences you gained are worth documenting.”

“Much like yours,” Larra said.

“Nobody gives two shits what happens to a highborn hostage in her gilded cage,” Sansa said, and Larra’s lips twitched, her eyebrows rising at Sansa’s vulgar language, “but I do acknowledge they’d be rather curious how that hostage escaped from the Red Keep right under the Lannisters’ noses without so much as a whisper, only to reappear and liberate the North with an army of wildlings led by her brother, the Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, and her allies the Knights of the Vale.”

“Her allies?” Larra said shrewdly, giving Sansa a discerning look. “I’d wager Lord Baelish counts them as his.”

“Oh, he manipulated the Knights to do his bidding,” Sansa acknowledged, “but they are as distrustful of him as any men can be. He got them here; but they stayed for us. For me and Jon. Jon is…the kind of man the Knights of the Vale wish led them.”

“And you the Lady of the Vale they wish they’d had after Jon Arryn died, I’d wager,” Larra said, eyeing Sansa carefully, and Sansa nodded sombrely. “Lord Royce stays close to you.”

“As I said, he distrusts Lord Baelish.”

“It’s more than that; he dislikes the man.”

“Can you like someone if you don’t trust them?” Sansa asked, even as her mind went to Lord Tyrion. No, she had not trusted her first husband - should have, she knew, reflecting on her experiences with him - but she had grown to like him. His humour, his wit, his…compassion. She had not let him be kind to her when she had learned the horrifying truth of her family being butchered.

“What makes you smile?” Larra asked.

“You’ve…guessed much of what has happened to me… But there are some things I should have shared with you that I haven’t, yet… I haven’t told you about my protectors.”

“I truly did not think you had any.”

“I did… There were two. And they were exceptional.”

“How so?”

“One was Sandor Clegane,” Sansa said, something fluttering in her stomach at the memory of the coarse voice rumbling, “Little bird,” in her ear, the way he towered over her, intimidating - and how tenderly he had pressed a scrap of fabric to her bleeding lip after Ser Meryn had struck her. He was the only one to protect her modesty, draping his grubby white Kingsguard cloak over her when she had been stripped and beaten at court. She remembered how ruthlessly he had cut down the men intending to rape her, and had carried her through King’s Landing, bloodying anyone who attempted to harm her. How he had sought her out during the Battle of the Blackwater, drunk and upset by the fire that had consumed the bay, asking her, “Do you want to go home? I could take you with me. I’ll keep you safe…”

How bitterly she regretted not going with Sandor that night.

She could not remember when it was he had become Sandor in her mind, not the Hound.

“I was…utterly alone in King’s Landing. I couldn’t trust anyone, even - especially the people I thought were being kind to me,” Sansa said, sighing heavily. “The first was Sandor Clegane… Whenever he could, however he could…he protected me. When Stannis attacked King’s Landing, and he abandoned Joffrey, he came to me…he offered to bring me home…”

Perhaps it was because Larra had bared her scars without shame; or because she had shared the terrible truth about her parentage. But Sansa started to tell her about King’s Landing, her gilded imprisonment at court. Joffrey’s torment, Cersei’s passive-aggressive bullying and snide comments, being used as a pawn, dragged across the cyvasse board by her skirts, powerless, friendless, hopeless, beaten, belittled, preyed upon…

“The unlikeliest champion,” Larra smiled knowingly. Sansa had dreamed of perfect shining knights - who had Jaime Lannister’s looks and Father’s honour. Sandor Clegane certainly was not a perfect knight - but he was a good man, beneath it all. “You said he was the first. I’m surprised to hear there were others.”

“One other, who truly did his best by me… My husband,” Sansa said gently. It didn’t taste sour on her tongue to call Tyrion that. Looking back, piercing the murky veil of her grief and her veiled terror and anguish, she recognised the truth: that Tyrion Lannister was one man in a million.

“What husband?” Larra blinked.

“They wed me to the Imp.”

“What?” Genuine amusement lit up Larra’s face; Sansa remembered the King’s visit to Winterfell, how she had often, in the days before Bran’s fall, seen Larra and Tyrion deep in discussion - and their cups - playing games and exchanging books. “You were married to Tyrion?”

“On our wedding night, he pretended to be blistered from drink after he threatened Joffrey. He was insisting on a bedding ceremony; Tyrion threatened to castrate him,” Sansa said fondly. Larra stared, as she continued, “And when we retired to our chamber, Tyrion stopped me from undressing, and told me he would never share my bed unless I invited him... I think he was desperate to tell me about the Red Wedding, but - Joffrey found me first… After, Tyrion…worried about me, he…did his utmost to try to look after me… I didn’t trust him - how could I? - but I respected his kindness…though I never showed it. Sometimes he would talk about you, and Jon. It was clear he was fond of you. And that you liked him. He respected my mother, and felt shame for his family’s part in Robb’s murder… I didn’t hear about his arrest until later, and there was nothing I could do…”

“At least you know he’s safe,” Larra said, reading Sansa’s troubled expression.

“He’s serving a Targaryen,” Sansa said grimly, then realised who she was speaking to, after the revelation… Larra’s lips twitched with dark irony. “I suppose he’s survived far worse. Tyrion Lannister made an art-form of outwitting violent tyrants.”

“All while astonishingly drunk, no doubt.”

“You knew his worth from the beginning, didn’t you?”

“Do you know…he took the time, on his journey back from the Wall, to design a saddle for Bran,” Larra said warmly. “So he could ride.”

“He did?” Sansa asked; Tyrion had never mentioned that.

“The morning they finished his saddle, and we took Bran to the woods to ride…it was the first time I saw Bran light up with joy since his fall…” For a moment, Larra’s face lit up with warmth, joy. “I have that memory; and Tyrion Lannister gave it to me.” Her cunning eyes rested on Sansa’s face. “There’s much more I am grateful to the Imp for.”

“He hates that name.”

“I know. ‘Never forget what you are,’ he once told Jon. ‘Wear it like armour, and it can never be used against you’,” Larra sighed, her smile fond. “Tyrion Lannister is worth more than all the gold in Casterly Rock.”

“He’d be overwhelmed to hear anyone think so well of him,” Sansa said.

“Oh, I know,” Larra smiled sadly. “He’s like your imperfect knight. And your bastard half-sister. Few care to look beyond the surface to see the treasure beneath.”

“Well, I’ve learned to,” Sansa said softly, and Larra’s gentle smile was coaxing and proud.

When they were warm, and dry, and fed, and Larra’s curls shone like a frothy dark halo around her, Sansa knew it was time to go. Time to return to Winterfell, to face the castle and their responsibilities head on…at least, in a few hours, after they had indulged in a good night’s sleep. She turned to the chairs, on which clothing had been laid out, ready.

“I made Jon a cloak, like the one Father used to wear - as near as I could remember - with a direwolf embellished on the leather straps,” Sansa said, almost hesitantly, as she turned to the chair on which was draped a heavy silk gown of deep aubergine purple. The purple gown was deceptively plain, except for the cuffs, which were split and only slightly flared to accommodate for the black fur trim, and the hem of the skirt, which had been richly embroidered with hellebores in hues of amethyst, aubergine, tarnished gold and onyx in silk threads and the tiniest beads Lord Manderly could send from White Harbour. The hellebores rose almost to the knees, and among them danced direwolves in glittering black, tarnished gold, delicate amber, silver-white, soft brown and fawn - Last Shadow, Summer and Shaggydog, Grey Wind, Nymeria, Lady and Ghost.

Sansa had always worn her heart on her sleeve, sometimes dangerously so: She had sewn Larra’s heart onto her sleeves. Bran and Rickon. Shaggydog and Summer, chasing after Last Shadow, who snarled protectively at Larra’s wrists.

The hellebores were Larra’s favourite; the direwolves were each member of their family.

It was a gown fit for the sister of a King.

It was fit for her sister. Sansa had designed and sewn it herself, aided by the ladies of the North who had kept the secret, thrilled to be making something for their King’s sister who had been thought lost.

“You two have always been Starks; it was my mother’s wounded pride that kept Father from giving you his name. Our name,” Sansa said, staring at Larra. She gave Larra an ironic little smile. “Perhaps it is a little redundant now, given what you’ve learned.”

Larra had risen to her feet, her eyes flitting from the clothes Sansa had folded neatly on the other chair when she had climbed out of them earlier, to the gown draped beautifully over the other chair, the beading and embroidery shimmering in the firelight, the aubergine silk gleaming. She glanced up from the dress to Sansa.

“You made this for me?” she breathed.

“You should always have worn the direwolf; you do it proud,” Sansa said stoutly. Larra’s lips parted, her eyes wide as they drank in the details of the gown, from the three little direwolves running one after the other from elbow to wrist, to the intricate hellebores and direwolves at the hem.

“Thank you, Sansa,” Larra breathed wondrously. She had the same stunned look on her face that Jon had, when Sansa had given him the cloak, the first garment Jon had ever worn with Father’s sigil on it. His sigil. Their family’s sigil.

“You’re welcome,” Sansa smiled sweetly, pleased by the nonplussed look on Larra’s face, even by the way her eyes glittered as she bent to examine the intricate direwolves embroidered on the sleeves, on the skirt. Sansa pretended not to notice Larra swiping the heel of her palm over her eyes as she stood up, her curls concealing her face. “And don’t worry; I don’t intend to strip you of your protection. The head armourer has taken your measure; he’s already working on something for you. With your approval, I shall have the obsidian rings sent to him to complete your armour.”

“Please, no plate metal,” Larra grimaced, still holding onto the sleeve of the dress, rubbing her thumbs over the embroidered Shaggydog.

“Don’t worry; he’s seen you sparring in the training yard,” Sansa smiled brightly. “He told me he would never restrict your movements by putting you in plate armour.”

They helped each other dress, Larra’s fingers as nimble and gentle as Sansa remembered, and Larra smoothed the front of her new gown as Sansa laced it tight.

It was the finest gown Larra had ever worn.

Sansa stared, when Larra turned to her, giving her a full view of the gown, the silk gleaming in the firelight, the embroidery shimmering and sparkling with every tiny movement. She looked every inch a lady.

No, Sansa thought: “You look like royalty.”

Chapter 20: Dark Wings, Dark Words

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

20

Dark Wings, Dark Words


Winter had come. The sea surrounding Dragonstone was black, churning with rage, violent waves crashing over fifty feet high in places, abusing the cliff-sides and drowning the little quay. The smallfolk nestled in the shelter of the great, eerie castle were relieved, huddled behind their solid walls: any whoever could not be sheltered beyond its walls found room inside the halls of Dragonstone. It suddenly became very busy inside the dank, malignant castle: The rigid silence in which Daenerys Targaryen seemed to prefer to hold her court was disturbed, and no-one apologised for it.

The King’s men continued to labour in the obsidian mines. The first threat of men drowning, though, and the King forbade any men from digging. They would mine what they could in the finer weather, and wait out the storms in between, but their days of mining were becoming few and far between, and Jon knew that soon their opportunities to mine obsidian would run out. They would have to make do with what they had already mined from the earth - luckily, it was far more than he could ever have hoped. Enough to arm the entire North, at least with a spearhead or short knife each. That was all they needed. The real trouble was no longer just in mining the obsidian: it was in shipping it to White Harbour.

Only the Ironborn dared the sea during such storms as harassed the island, for which Jon was eternally grateful. They risked every storm to send the priceless, life-giving obsidian North. Sky and sea all but black, limned by lightning, thunder echoing through the carved halls that shimmered in places with the now-priceless obsidian, shadows flickering eerily as torches guttered and shadows seemed to become tangible, and every rumble of thunder made people anxious about Dragonmont. The volcano was still active, and whether it was the Queen’s children or the volcano itself, vapour from the volcano settled like a wreath around Dragonstone castle, shrouding everything but the tallest towers and the eeriest gargoyles, and Drogon, who often perched atop the Stone Drum inside which slept his mother, his mistress.

The Queen was unaccustomed to storms. It was curious for her council to observe that the young woman known all her life as Stormborn…was spooked by thunder and lightning.

She disliked it: She claimed she dreaded for her dragons, who could not fly in such weather.

Her Hand laughed: Dragons did not fear foul weather. The dragons were not seen for days on end, and perhaps they had disappeared into the heat of the active Dragonmont…or perhaps they had flown somewhere to hunt. Either way, Daenerys Stormborn fretted through the storms, and her council allowed her to think they believed her anxiousness was for her children…not for the harrowing sense that the castle would come down on top of them with every clap of thunder.

Tensions within the castle - within the Chamber of the Painted Table at the top of the Stone Drum in which the Queen’s council was arguing - were rising. The Queen’s council argued through the storm, their voices often drowned out by the thunder; and the longer they argued and the louder the thunder, the more volatile and irrational Queen Daenerys became.

The Queen’s council was in the midst of arguing over the wisest course of action when the first raven arrived, its feathers sticking at odd angles, half-drowned from the storm - but determined. It was fed raw steak and tended by a new maester who had arrived from Citadel just in time - before the first storm struck Dragonstone with a viciousness that was awing to behold. The Queen’s council only paused its arguments to dine in the evenings, and the exotic delicacies Queen Daenerys’ kitchens prepared did nothing to soothe the fractured nerves and splintering egos among her advisers as they sat quiet and agitated, and shrewd dark-grey eyes like the sea during the worst storms observed the tension between the Queen’s court and kept to himself, murmuring quiet thanks to the Queen’s cupbearers. They were the two pretty girls who had carried Queen Daenerys’ standard when Jon had arrived at Dragonstone, and until the first storm Jon had only known them by sight.

He had been talking with Theon when the first clash of thunder was heard, and lightning speared across the black clouds in violent forks that seemed almost to split the sky in two. The two girls had screamed and bolted, grabbing onto Jon and Theon fearfully, wide-eyed and shivering with terror. The one with rich amber-coloured skin, wide eyes heavily lashed and dark reddish hair was Zafiyah; the other, with pale skin, high cheekbones, a rosebud mouth and high, slanting dark eyes and silky black hair was Qezza. Both girls were natives of Meereen and by their wide eyes and the gooseflesh on their arms - they still wore their native tokar with no sturdier outer garments - regretted accompanying their Queen so far from their home, even as the only two of Her Radiance’s personally-chosen handmaids. They spoke a blend of bastard Valyrian and Ghiscari that Jon had never heard, and even Tyrion struggled with: Jon knew enough High Valyrian from Larra’s obsession with epic poetry that he could greet and thank the girls for the wine they poured, and praise Qezza’s singing as beautiful, though it made his stomach hurt, and he saw Theon’s grim, faraway expression, as they both thought of Larra singing through summer snowstorms to soothe their frightened little siblings.

Qezza sang sweetly, her voice soothing and calm, and Jon wondered if she had felt the tension in the air and chosen to sing to lighten the mood, or whether she had been asked; either way, the Queen’s court was just distracted enough by her sweet trilling that it was Jon who noticed the maester first.

He was a small man, always seeming to be flinching apologetically. He had been summoned to Dragonstone by Tyrion: the Citadel was obligated to send a maester to every great house in Westeros. Perhaps it was the fate of the previous maester at Dragonstone, or perhaps it was the Queen’s reputation that had Maester Mallor cringing every time he entered a room. Indeed, as he edged hesitantly into the candlelit dining chamber, his face was already pinched with a fretfulness that was agonising to witness. Jon had spoken with him several times, and knew it was more the Queen than the ghost of the previous maester that unnerved the maester; he was perfectly eloquent with Jon when they had discussed him helping Jon sift through the thousands of ancient Valyrian texts - a vast and priceless treasure-trove of rare and sometimes one-of-a-kind texts, books, scrolls, lithographs, papyri and exquisite codices, last relics of a lost culture.

Jon frowned softly at him; the Maester glanced fearfully across the chamber, where the Queen was sipping hibiscus wine, nibbling a variety of dainties made by Lady Olenna’s personal pastry chef and glaring coldly at Qezza in her dainty, shimmering rose-pink tokar and pearls.

Maester Mallor locked eyes with Jon, gulped, and glanced around the hall before shuffling toward Jon as if he wished for nothing more than to be allowed to remain blended in with the wall behind him, unnoticed. Jon noticed his robe was a little damp, his chain glistening with rainwater, and the chill of rain seemed to emanate from him as he approached. As Jon sat up straighter, setting down his finely-etched glass of mulled wine - still rather full; these southern heretics insisted on adding lemon - his gaze flitted across the chamber, to Ellaria Sand. Somehow, even during yet another violent thunderstorm, she oozed decadent warmth and sensuality, reclined idly on a chaise with her youngest daughters cuddled to her, tenderly stroking her fingers through their inky dark hair. Little Dorea and Loreza, who both sighed with admiration at Long Claw. Their sharp dark eyes twinkled in the candlelight, and even as Loreza sucked her thumb, tucked against her mother’s chest, she raised a dimpled hand to wave at Jon, whose stomach cramped with longing for the broad hearth in the nursery of Winterfell, all his brothers and sisters gathered around on a blustery dark afternoon, frightened and enthralled by Old Nan’s stories as her knitting-needles clicked and clacked and the logs popped and Arya burrowed into his chest the same way Loreza did her mother’s, and Larra rested her head on his shoulder, and he played with the ends of her long braid as he listened to the stories…

He shared a glance with Ellaria, who was curious, and beside her, the unbeautiful but powerful Obara Sand, eldest sister to Dorea and Loreza and as lethal, they said, as her father the Red Viper. She had arrived mere days ago with an elegant lady, Nymeria, another sister, with olive skin and impossibly sheer gowns that revealed spun-gold and jewels and the hilts of concealed daggers; a third Sand Snake, Tyene, blonde and blue-eyed, lounged with some Dothraki bloodriders, teasing and flirting as they played a game involving short knives. They ignored the maester, but Ellaria and Nymeria Sand both glanced from him to Jon as the anxious maester made his way to the King in the North, flinching every time his pale eyes darted fearfully to the end of the chamber and the haughty Queen simmering by the hearth carved to look like a dragon’s open maw.

Only a Targaryen would feel so comfortable sat quite so close to a dragon’s open mouth: Jon sat at the other end of the hall, away from the suffocating heat of the fire, too unused to warmth to enjoy it. The Sands, Jon knew, sat so far from the warmth of the flames only because they were so displeased with the Queen’s bloodthirsty plans for dominating Westeros. Ellaria was more cautious, far wiser. The younger Sands were militant, but guarded: They were here on behalf of their uncle, the Prince of Dorne, his representatives like Ellaria herself - Ellaria’s protection, and more eyes through which Prince Doran Martell could see. Each of the Sand Snakes focused on different details, Jon knew. Obara assessed the Dothraki horde and the Unsullied, including the uncut, training boys: Nymeria acted somewhat as an unofficial lady-in-waiting to Daenerys and had done since she sauntered into the throne room. Tyene…she walked on air, all false innocence, soft palms and sweetness - but as vicious, Jon guessed, as her eldest sister.

The Maester’s robes whispered against the worn stone floor, his heavy chain clinking and rattling, and he winced as he gave a courteous bow and proffered a raven-scroll, Jon’s heart heavy with dread. Was this the scroll he had been anticipating in his nightmares, Sansa’s elegant hand hasty as she scrawled her last message to Jon as the hordes overran Winterfell… The scroll glistened in the light from the oil-lamp on the little table beside Jon; the parchment had been treated with wax to protect it from the rain.

The wax sealing the scroll was reddish-gold, the seal itself…a lion rearing on its hind legs.

Jon frowned and glanced up at Maester Mallor, who cringed and seemed to shrink with fear. He did not anticipate any correspondence from Queen Cersei: He left it to Sansa’s wisdom and experience to deal with that particular threat, should it become more than just Sansa’s anticipation of an attack from Cersei. He sighed, and unfurled the miniature scroll, and realised immediately the scroll had not been for him. Just that the maester felt most comfortable approaching him…

So Jon could relay the bad news…

The roses have been uprooted from the garden, pretty flowers, gnarled roots and strong stems alike.

A tongue-in-cheek salutation, and following it, a few simple, brutal sentences. Jon’s heart sank, and he fought the instinct to glance up at Lady Olenna, and her eldest granddaughter Lady Alynore, who sat with an embroidery hoop, delicate, gentle and elegant in everything she did, with soft eyes that saw much more than people thought. Her young cousins, five of them, were with their septa in their chamber, according to Lady Alynore, frightened by the storm: They were convinced the castle was breaking apart, that they would be drowned - by the sea, or by molten magma from the exploding volcano.

“What is that?” The voice cut through the chamber like a whip-crack, and Qezza fell silent. The sudden absence of her lilting, gentle voice made the booms of thunder and the sharp explosions of lightning seem far louder; temporarily, Qezza had held the storm at bay.

The Queen had risen from her seat, the hibiscus-wine in her hand turned to liquid fire, illuminated by the flames behind her; her hair shimmered softly silver-gold around the edges, like the lightning briefly illuminated the ferocious clouds, and turned away from the firelight as she was, the Queen’s expression was shadowed from his view. He didn’t need to see her face to be able to read her body-language, or to hear the sharp snap of a trap in her voice. Demanding, unyielding… Jon sighed softly, and using the oil-lamp set the little scroll on fire.

He remembered two things: The care and grim concern with which Grenn and Maester Aemon had delivered the news to Jon about the Red Wedding while he recuperated from his time with Tormund’s raiding party, shot full of arrows as he left behind the woman he loved…

And the way in which Sansa had been informed that their brother had been murdered and decapitated, his dead direwolf’s head stitched to Robb’s body, and that her mother’s throat had been slit to the bone, her body thrown into the river. Joffrey had crowed, repeating Lord Walder Frey’s raven-scroll: ‘Roslin copped a fine fat trout. Her brothers gave her a pair of wolf pelts for her wedding.’ Joffrey had spared Sansa no detail, luxuriating in Sansa’s face slowly leaching of colour - disappointed and frustrated that Sansa had kept her composure long enough to withstand his torments, and finally break down and sob for days on end in the privacy of her new bridal chamber…

Jon stood, his movements heavy with anticipation, and made his way over to the Tyrells, Lady Olenna in a sturdy, engraved chair and Lady Alynore, fresh and delicate as any bloom in a rose-garden, reclined elegantly on richly embroidered woven floor-pillows nestled on furs and a rich Qartheen carpet at Lady Olenna’s feet. Lady Alynore noticed his approach as her grandmother’s rich clothing rustled, and lowered her embroidery-hoop: Lady Olenna’s eyes were shrewd and wary as he approached.

He remembered how Sansa had been told: He knew how he had felt, how much he had appreciated the gentle but straightforward way in which Maester Aemon had told him about the worst atrocity of their generation - of many generations, and one no-one was ever going to forget.

He took a knee before Lady Olenna, to put them on a level. Lady Alynore sat up straighter, and a whisper of her perfume of jasmine and delicate flowering mint tickled his nose, making him think of an afternoon he had spent in the solar with Sansa, who had enjoyed going through the gifts Lord Manderly had sent them from White Harbour, including fresh citrus from the Reach, Qartheen silk-velvet and perfumes from King’s Landing. For days the solar had stunk like a bouquet of flowers, so heady and pungent Jon’s eyes had watered every time he walked into the room. Sansa had teased him for being accustomed to the musk of ice, leather, sweat and fur. For a moment the firelight turned Lady Alynore’s soft golden-brown hair into fiery copper. Jon blinked, and his sister disappeared, replaced again by Lady Alynore.

Jon knew why he had been handed the raven-scroll; he was perhaps the only one in the chamber who could understand what Olenna and Alynore, and her little cousins, were about to endure. He alone could deliver the news with absolute empathy, born of his own experience.

“Lady Olenna… Lady Alynore… It is my regret to inform you that Highgarden has been sacked. Your larders have been plundered, your treasuries robbed…” Jon said, and paused for a heartbeat, before glancing from maiden to crone, telling them, “The Lannister armies were joined by the forces of House Tarly, and their allies… Every man, woman and child bearing the name Tyrell was put to the sword…”

He let his words sink in. How long would it take for the news to become a reality? How long before the two women could return to Highgarden, their pillaged home? Before the bodies decayed? Longer? Would their loved-ones be identifiable as their family? Had the Lannisters, at least, lit a funeral pyre? Or left noble ladies and children and old men to rot where they were cut down?

And what of the survivors?

An embittered crone; a dazed young woman; and five little girls.

“I am sorrier than I can say,” Jon said grimly, and because he was the son of the unjustly executed Ned Stark, and brother to the murdered Young Wolf, Robb Stark, everyone in that hall knew he was in earnest. He was the only one who had any right to try and console the Tyrells. He gazed at Lady Olenna, who stared blankly at him, as if mildly affronted by his approach, rather than the news he had delivered so sombrely, and at Lady Alynore, whose eyes gleamed, and her hands shook as she lowered her embroidery hoop to her lap, her cheeks hollowed as her skin turned ashen. “If there is anything I can do for you, you have but to ask.”

Jon was aware that he had taken a knee before Lady Olenna and her granddaughter. That he had offered his service to them. It was lost on no-one else, either, especially the Queen, who had spent days and long nights agonising over how to get him to do the same - to her.

Yet, Jon had not promised the Tyrells his kingdom; only his friendship.

The Tyrells were now, Jon knew, in the very same position Sansa had found herself when their father was arrested on false charges… Friendless prisoners of a vicious queen, utterly at her mercy - and her disposal, stripped from their home, the weight of tragedy thrust upon them…

Sansa had had no friends, no true protectors devoted to her.

She had fought like a vicious direwolf to reclaim their home. But she shouldn’t have had to. Her experiences had made her wiser, yes, and brought out earlier in her lifetime the sternness and resolve and cleverness that had always been there, beneath the surface, under the pretty silks and ribbons she had preferred…

The Queen of Thorns stared at Jon. For the briefest of heartbeats, Jon saw true frailty in her crumpled face as grief settled in, carving the last light from her shadowed eyes. A heartbeat, no more, and stoic resolve settled over her lined face. Her tone was crisp as night frost when she asked, “You burned the scroll. What did Cersei write?”

“Nothing clever…” Jon said grimly, and the Queen of Thorns nodded once. She rose from her chair, Lady Alynore’s wide pale-green eyes following her, damp and shocked, but her grandmother strode the length of the hall, her head held high, her black mourning veil and heavy black silk-brocade skirts whispering behind her. Jon watched her go, dignified and regal - until she reached the carved doors, where she paused, and Jon heard her laboured breathing over the crackle of the flames at the hearth and a brief pause in the deluge and thunder…she reached out a hand, steadying herself against the door, and Jon watched her composure falter, crumpling to the floor…not just with grief, he realised, and strode toward the elderly woman.

“Lady Olenna?” He reached the old lady first; her face was bone-white and beaded with sweat, and he managed to catch her before she hit the polished floor. She fell heavily in his arms, and Jon’s stomach felt leaden as he realised he could not hear her breathing. Over his shoulder, he called, “Maester Mallor!”

Lady Olenna’s age-paled eyes rolled, and Jon’s insides unclenched as she groaned, sweat slipping down her face, and a shaky hand reached to her bosom, her face a picture of agony.

“Fetch a litter,” Jon ordered some of the servants. A soft word from Missandei in bastard Valyrian, and the servants scampered away hurriedly. Lady Olenna groaned, grimacing, as she clutched at her chest. Shadows danced over them, obscuring her face, and Jon glanced up, scowling, to find half the court gathered around them, trying to see what was going on. Jon’s scowl was enough: They stepped back. The maester approached, and Jon asked Lady Olenna quietly, “Lady Olenna…may I loosen your belt, and your wimple?”

The old woman nodded weakly, wheezing. She could barely breathe.

“What is wrong with her?” asked Lady Alynore quietly, sinking to her knees beside her grandmother in a froth of delicate skirts, her face beautiful and concerned. Jon shook his head. If he had to guess, he would say Lady Olenna’s heart had broken.

“Move back…” Maester Mallor muttered impatiently, and for the first time, he took control of the room. His chain was heavy with healing links; his anxiousness melted away, replaced by quiet resolve and purpose.

“I have Grandmother’s smelling salts,” Lady Alynore said, her eyes still wide, and very damp now, her cheeks streaked with tears.

“I’m not sure they will help,” Maester Mallor said, his tone solemn but kind, as Jon unlatched the elaborate metal belt designed like tangled branches laden with thorns, and Alynore loosened her grandmother’s elaborate wimple. Four servants appeared, carrying a litter. “Lady Olenna’s heart appears to be failing.”

Lady Alynore turned to stare at the maester, as Jon and the servants helped settle the ill old lady onto the litter; she was carried out of the chamber, the maester muttering to himself. Jon offered his hand to Lady Alynore, in a pool of her diaphanous skirts on the polished floor. She gazed up at him, pale-green eyes glowing softly, glittering with tears, and her lower lip trembled as she exhaled shakily, reaching for his hand; Jon gently pulled her to her feet, where she stood faintly swaying, her expression bewildered, uncertain. Lady Olenna may have mastered the art of concealing her emotions, but her granddaughter had yet to discover the skill.

“Lady Tyrell?” Jon asked quietly. “Do you not wish to go with your grandmother?”

Lady Alynore seemed to struggle to focus on Jon, her eyes swimming, her lips pale. Eventually, she murmured distractedly, “Someone…must tell my cousins.”

Jon sighed heavily, staring at the young woman. She was beautiful. Her grief only served to highlight just how exquisite and delicate she was. But she was so much more than that, too. Jon understood at a glance that Alynore Tyrell was the kind of girl men simultaneously wanted to protect and ravish, whose smiles they wanted to claim, to make her laugh and earn her favour, and take her to bed and keep her there.

And she would become a woman men respected, and wish to gain approval from. She reminded him of Larra and Sansa in the way people often saw the beauty, but rarely the steel beneath.

“Let them have this one last night not choking on their nightmares,” Jon told Lady Alynore quietly. The little cousins had the rest of their lives to grieve, and regret: tonight, they should be allowed to dream peacefully.

“If I would ever have dreamed this is what I’d be left to…I would have died with my sisters in the Sept,” Lady Alynore whispered, her eyes shimmering. Jon stared at her.

“You’re stronger than such thoughts,” he said quietly, all too aware that the others were angling to hear. “It may not feel like it now, but you are. I don’t have to know you well to know that, Lady Tyrell.”

Lady Alynore stared up at him, her pale-green eyes beguiling and tragic. “Do you know how many members of my family had to die for me to become Lady Tyrell?”

Jon sighed grimly. “All of them.”

“Seventy-three,” she whispered hoarsely, tears glimmering like diamonds as they dripped down her pale cheeks.

“I don’t know what it means, to have a large family. I do know how it feels to find out my family has been butchered,” Jon told her softly, and she flinched, but did not break eye-contact. “It never gets easier to bear…but you do get stronger. Strong enough to carry your grief, and keep going. That’s all you can do, now. Keep going.”

Lady Alynore’s exquisite lips trembled, and she asked Jon thickly, “How?”

“You get out of bed every morning…and do what needs to be done, no matter what it costs you to keep going, how much pain you’re in,” Jon told her, and knew Lord Varys, Ellaria and Nymeria Sand and Theon had heard him. “And you’re not alone. You have your cousins, your grandmother…”

“Little girls…and a broken old woman,” Lady Alynore said hollowly.

A bolt of lightning illuminated the hall, casting eerie shadows; and for the briefest moment, Jon could have sworn he saw Larra in the vivid flicker of silver light, standing behind Lady Alynore’s shoulder. Her smile was tragic, but her eyes glowed with warmth as they rested on Jon’s face.

“The wisdom of the past, and a dream of a future you can build,” Jon told Lady Alynore, remembering something Larra had once said of Valyrian poetry and architecture, lessons to learn by to rebuild an even more vibrant future than what had already been lost. “Without even the smallest glimmer of hope for a future, we’re all fucked…” Lady Alynore’s expression did not change because he had sworn in front of her. She wavered on her feet, though, her eyes sliding past him subtly, uncertain as she gazed into the chamber. Jon understood. Etiquette dictated she remain with her queen: Loyalty called her to her grandmother’s sickbed. “It’s alright, you need no-one’s permission to go and grieve in private. I meant what I said…if you, or your cousins need anything, you have but to ask.”

Lady Alynore raised her eyes to his face, and held his gaze for a long moment. Solemnity had fallen like a delicate veil over her exquisite features, her gentle resolve elegant, almost transcendent. “Thank you, Your Grace.”

Jon watched her go, her skirts whispering over the polished floor as her hair glimmered in the candlelight, and the scent of jasmine lingered for a few moments as he frowned past the ancient, engraved doors, where the shadows had swallowed Lady Alynore.

Only the Queen’s voice distracted him, and only because it was so cold and sharp it might have sliced through the Wall without obstruction.

“The armies of the Reach have been routed…their larders have been emptied…” she said scathingly. “Cersei has stolen the food for the winter, and crippled the strongest of my allies.”

The Queen had turned to seethe at her Lord Hand. Whatever tensions they had briefly set aside for supper were now bubbling over with a ferocity that put the abating storm to shame.

Lord Tyrion’s look of disturbed shame at the Lannisters’ atrocities toward another great House disappeared in a blink as Jon turned to glance at him. Everyone did.

He lay reclined on a padded samite chaise piled with embroidered eiderdown pillows, his head nestled against his companion’s supple breasts. With her dark-hair, teardrop tattoo and no-nonsense accent, Jon liked her. She was refreshing, and almost Northern in her attitudes. And she seemed to live by the words Lord Tyrion had advised Jon the first time they ever met: “Never forget what you are.” She was Tyrion’s whore, and everyone knew it.

But it was more than that, Jon knew, for he had spent enough evenings in Lord Tyrion’s chambers with the Hand of the Queen and the young woman who looked after his every need. Her name was Tisseia, and she had been born and raised in slavery in Volantis. At thirteen, she had had the fortune to be sold to a popular whorehouse where the girls were protected against the worst kinds of abuse that often befell whores - especially bed-slaves.

Tisseia had survived because she had learned how to take care of a man’s every need, before he had to think of them himself. Before they knew they were hungry, she had food plated for them; their wine-cup never emptied; she listened to their grumbles with a sweet smile and kind words of gentle reassurance; massaged aching bones; and, if Tyrion was to be believed, knew how to make a grown man whimper like a newborn babe as she suckled his cock and drew out his release for hours on end, tormenting and teasing him. After, she would tuck him against her pretty breasts and hum lullabies to gentle him to a deep and dreamless sleep.

That she could do such a thing for Tyrion, he had told Jon, had been worth the cost of her freedom.

Somewhere in the last few weeks, Tyrion had stopped calling Tisseia his whore in favour of referring to her as his companion with a touch of respectfulness that made the girl glow with appreciation and pride.

According to both Tyrion and Tisseia, when the Queen’s fleet had made berth in the harbour of Volantis, the Triarchy that ruled the city had agreed between themselves to send the Dragon Queen on her way as soon as possible, without unleashing the sort of chaos that Astapor, Yunkai and Meereen were still recovering from. Thanks to the Queen’s single-minded focus on reaching Westeros as soon as possible to begin her invasion, and the tributes arranged by the Triarchy bequeathed on Queen Daenerys - which would have made any khal in the history of the Dothraki spontaneously combust with fury and envy - the first daughter of Valyria came out of Daenerys Stormborn’s brief visit unscathed. In fact, the Queen had remained on her flagship, her dragons wheeling and whirling over the city, terrorising everyone while her Hand interceded on her behalf with the Triarchy.

After diplomatic negotiations were over and done with, Tyrion had sought out the sceptical, pretty whore he had met in the bowels of the Long Bridge so long ago. Only then had he learned her name; but he had always remembered her dark eyes and pale, square face and his own astonishment that he no longer had it in him to take her to her small chamber and enjoy the hours with her.

“He walked into the brothel and told me he owed me gold dragons and a good fucking, and he always pays his debts,” Tisseia had told Jon, when they had told the story of their first - and second - meeting, dimpling with a sweet sort of irony. Jon liked her accent, and couldn’t help but wonder if her straightforward nature and gentle but direct way of speaking was a Volantene trait she may have shared with his brother’s Volantene wife. Jon knew only that her name had been Talisa Maegyr, and that she had bled to death, stabbed in the belly where Robb’s child had flourished in her womb…

When Jon had asked if she knew of the noble family, Tisseia had replied that everyone in Volantis knew of the Maegyr family, of the Old Blood. Had the Triarchy known that Tyrion belonged to a family that had conspired to murder a daughter of the Old Blood of Volantis, he would have had a harder time talking his way out of Volantis: The Maegyr family was known to be vengeful - and creative. Everyone in the city knew Talisa Maegyr had fled Volantis for Westeros, and never returned. Tyrion had not illuminated the Triarchy on her fate.

Tisseia was a former-slave: Tyrion had bought her freedom.

And she had offered her services - paid to be whatever Tyrion needed her to be. And Jon had seen how…domestic the two were - reminding him of himself and Sansa in the solar, working together: Tisseia kept Tyrion’s rooms in order, his desk uncluttered, ordered his correspondence and paperwork, arranged his daily schedule, somehow knew to massage his lower-back to soothe his aching legs, and coaxed him to bed before he could fall asleep at his desk. She was kind, patient and cheerful, with a clever mind and infallible intuition born of experience and survival as a bed-slave.

According to Tisseia, she had made the Queen bristle when she had asked why Tisseia would remain a whore by profession when her freedom had been bought.

Tisseia had asked what good freedom was without income.

One of the Queen’s flaws was her impracticality. She was a visionary - she paid little attention to the minutiae that made an idea take hold and flourish. How former slaves fed themselves; how an economy was not buried into a depression it would take generations to recover when slavery was ended overnight…

Tyrion had been right, of course, the first day he ever met Tisseia: She truly was a sceptic, one of the few besides Jon who questioned Daenerys Targaryen, even if only in private.

Shrewd Tisseia remained unmoved by the Queen, unimpressed by wealth and power as any who had been abused by it. She was not a zealot; she questioned why Daenerys had promised to create a new world for Slavers’ Bay…only to abandon it at the first sign of conflict.

Now, Tisseia’s dark eyes watched Daenerys carefully even as her fingers sifted gently through Tyrion’s dark golden curls, the picture of indolence. Jon had never known Tisseia before her freedom was bought: but he found it curious that she dressed more modestly than the Dornish, usually in a simple muslin slip with a heavy, flaring skirt - usually off-white or palest pink or sky-blue, embroidered with floral designs in the same colour - with colourful, richly embroidered shawls swathed around her body, belted with jewel-toned satin sashes, intricate gold filigree jewellery glinting at her throat and wrists. Her evening gown tonight had a plunging neckline, shimmering all over with intricate beadwork, and a diaphanous sash from her left shoulder to her right hip, belted with a narrow ribbon of velvet. She was dressed finely, but there was no removing the teardrop tattoo under her eye, or forgetting her nature. She assessed every situation as she assessed the men she took into her bed, weighing the dangers and the potential profit.

Jon watched Tisseia, watching the Queen: The former bed-slave’s body language as the Queen glowered at her Hand was protective, as if she might curl herself around Tyrion, shrouding him in one of her richly-embroidered shawls to shield him from the Queen’s wrath.

Tyrion seemed unperturbed, draining his finely-etched wine glass, and sighed, gazing up at Daenerys with eyes glazed from drink - but just as shrewd and dangerous as he had ever been.

Quietly, Tyrion retorted, “And you had us send the Unsullied to Casterly Rock to claim it. Forgive me, it may be the drink, but did I advise you to send the Dothraki and blockade the Rose Road and the Gold Road to prevent movement between King’s Landing and the Rock? To protect the Reach?” His tone was glib; Tisseia was already dutifully refilling his glass. He squeezed her knee appreciatively, lolling against her chest. His eyes remained fixed on the Queen, challenge in his expression. “‘No’, you insisted, ‘I shall take the Rock, as King’s Landing was taken from me. Cersei shall know how it feels to have her home and all that made her what she is and ever shall be stripped from her’.” He pulled a face at the Queen, letting his feelings be known. “Well. Now the Tyrells know exactly how it feels. Fascinating, really, when you think about it. Deliciously tragic irony.”

“Irony?” Daenerys bit out, her lip curling as her eyes blazed.

“The Targaryens granted House Tyrell the seat of Highgarden and Wardship over the South…and they paid the price of their alliance with you with all Aegon and his sisters granted them,” Tyrion mused. “Their home, their wealth, their status, their lands…their lives.” His eyes raised to Daenerys’ face, dark, grim and challenging. His tone, when he spoke again, was low, dangerous and chiding. “All because you would have your way.”

For a moment, Daenerys did not answer. Then she sneered, bristling, “I wonder that your loyalties are not divided between me and the Rock.”

“Even Aegon knew that attacking Casterly Rock was a strategic nightmare, and back then, the dragon truly had three heads,” Tyrion said derisively.

“I have three dragons.”

“And one rider between them with a fixation on vengeance rather than on military strategy,” Tyrion said, his voice withering. He sipped his wine. “I advised you to protect the Reach. An army marches on its stomach: My brother Jaime has been a soldier all his life and he is now commander of Cersei’s armies, you can be sure the attack on Highgarden was his idea. While the Unsullied dealt with a shadow force at the Rock, Jaime took his real army to where the Unsullied weren’t…as Robb Stark did to him at Whispering Wood.”

His smile was soft, ironic, and he glanced at Jon with a hint of respect in his eyes. Their brothers, on opposing sides of a war.

Daenerys’ voice was cold. “You sound impressed.”

“My brother always learned his lessons. In his own time - but he learned them, and he learned them well,” Tyrion said, sipping his wine. “And because you refused to listen, he has shown us both up.”

“I advise you to guard your words cautiously, Lord Hand.”

“Lest I say something to provoke your wrath?” Tyrion smirked. His eyes turned sharp. “Cut off a man’s tongue, you are not condemning him, only confirming that you are afraid to hear what he has to say. I’d wager I would be less than one of Lady Olenna’s little dainties to one of your children. Besides, they know it was I who freed them when their mama chained them up in the dark… They like me.” He grinned unabashedly.  “I do wonder…how long it would have been, before the Pit of the Great Pyramid became the next Dragonpit, tens of thousands of smallfolk dead in the fight to kill Targaryen dragons to break their rider’s power…” He finally set his wine-glass down, sitting up straighter and frowning solemnly at Daenerys. “You cannot win this war if you react to every setback with fire and blood, if you insist on seeking vengeance and punishing your enemies…because Cersei will use that to distract you to your own self-destruction, as she has a dozen times before with her enemies unwise enough to let emotion get in the way of tactic.”

“Your father arranged the Red Wedding; that was not your sister’s victory,” Daenerys said curtly.

“Oh, I’m not talking about the War of the Five Kings. Cersei has been playing this game for decades; she delights in toying with her adversaries before she destroys them utterly. It is only now that she is finally playing on the great stage on her own terms, for no-one but herself,” Tyrion said, waving a hand impatiently. He sighed, frowning darkly, “One way or another, Cersei always gets what she wants. If you believe nothing, believe her brother she has despised and abused since he had the misfortune to kill their mother during his birth. I am one of only two people in this world Cersei has not managed to murder when she set her mind on it - despite her best efforts.”

“Who is the other?” Daenerys asked, her tone cool and aloof. “Perhaps I would do better to have him advise me than the Queen’s abhorred little brother.”

“She is rather busy at present, ruling the North in preparation for war, and what is predicted to be the worst winter in generations,” Tyrion answered tartly. “She doesn’t have time for your conquest.” He turned to Jon, who lingered, watching cautiously - just as the others were. “Tell me, Your Grace…does Lady Stark sigh with relief behind the high walls of Winterfell, out of my sweet sister’s reach?”

Jon stared at Lord Tyrion, and remembered one of his last conversations with Sansa before he had left Winterfell. “No. Sansa knows exactly what Queen Cersei is capable of: She warned me that the Queen has found a way to murder anyone who’s ever stood against her,” Jon said grimly, and Tyrion nodded, his expression an odd mixture of smugness and grim acceptance. “She knows Cersei blames her for her son’s death; any break in the snowstorms will be Cersei’s first opportunity to assassinate Sansa.”

“But Lady Stark does not obsess over it?” Tyrion pressed.

“She’s too busy, preparing Winterfell, ruling the North in my stead,” Jon said honestly. “Cersei is in the back of her mind, always.”

“And the desire for vengeance?”

“Likely buried deep; but to live freely, in her own home once again, surrounded by her people - that is victory in itself over Cersei,” Jon said, and Tyrion smiled warmly. “Besides, there is too much else to worry about that is of more immediate concern.”

The Queen asked icily, “Such as?”

“Food. Warmth,” Jon answered bluntly, staring accusingly at the Queen, not forgetting the fishing, the glasshouses, the Winter’s Town he had led construction of in the shelter of the castle. “Consolidating the strength of the North by reuniting our bannermen.”

“How Robert used to rage about the Northmen,” Tyrion chuckled, clicking his tongue, his expression almost fond. “He couldn’t gentle them any more than he could a dragon, even with your father’s influence.”

“They’re stubborn as ironstone,” Jon smiled appreciatively.

“And you are premier among them,” Tyrion said richly, his smile wondrous and taunting at the same time, as if they were sharing a private joke. “A bastard sworn to the Night’s Watch. Why?”

“They chose me,” Jon said simply. “Some say I earned the crown, for all the mistakes I made.”

“And you made mistakes?”

“Aye,” Jon admitted. “Or they appear to others to be mistakes; or I believe they are, but others disagree.”

“Sparing little Lord Umber and Lady Karstark, for instance,” spoke up Lord Varys, for the first time since Lady Olenna had been carried out.

“You heard about that?”

“Other than the obvious, their being children innocent of their father’s crimes, why spare them the injustice of having their homes ripped from them, bequeathing their lands and titles on other bannermen loyal to you?” Tyrion asked.

“At the Wall, there was a maester, do you remember, Lord Tyrion? Maester Aemon. He was ancient, and kind, and wise… When I was voted Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch by a single vote - his vote - I asked why he had chosen to make me Lord Commander…” Jon sighed. He missed the ancient man, who reminded him of Maester Luwin - how Jon wished Larra could have known Maester Aemon. She had adored Luwin; she would have cherished Aemon. “He said I acted mercifully toward enemies I respected, made allies of them, fought for them… Maester Aemon voted me in as Lord Commander because he believed that a good leader should always choose mercy when faced with the inevitable.”

“And your first act as Lord Commander was to allow the wildlings south of the Wall, when the Wall has held them at bay for a thousand generations,” Lord Varys said, and Jon stared at him. He knew Varys had been working to get the measure of Jon for weeks.

“The Wall wasn’t built to keep Men out,” Jon told him sternly. “The Free Folk would have been condemned to join the Night King’s army if I hadn’t opened the gates to them, old men, children, fearsome warriors and young mothers alike.”

“So it was purely practical, not because you have an affinity for them?” Tyrion asked.

Jon sighed heavily, red hair and firelight flickering on steaming water whispering through his mind. “I’ll always have respect for the Free Folk. I spent too long among them…some of their ways of being have become mine. The True North is in me, now. I know what it is to be free…and I will defend that freedom with my life.” The Queen stiffened. Her council darted covert looks to her, even as they bowed their heads respectfully toward Jon, who cleared his throat, uncomfortable under their gazes after his admission, his memories of the cave… “I bid you all a good evening, my lords…my ladies…”

Whatever argument bubbled up between the Queen and her advisers, Jon didn’t hear it. He strode through the glimmering halls of Dragonstone until he came upon Sea Dragon Tower, and the chambers claimed by the Tyrells.

Their guardsmen, knights sworn to their protection, stood at attention in the antechamber, the torchlight shimmering off their rich velvet-covered armour. The armour was a clever deception - they looked unprotected, but were sworn to House Tyrell and deeply protective of their ladies.

He did not ask for admittance beyond the sturdy engraved door: Just asked after any news of Lady Olenna.

In turn, the guards asked Jon to confirm the rumours. Highgarden had been sacked.

And Daenerys Targaryen was blaming those who had advised her against her desired strategy.

Jon slipped into bed, exhausted, but hours later woke, finding it impossible to sleep with his mind turning over Robb’s fate, and his wife’s, and even Lady Catelyn’s, and that of all his father’s loyal bannermen… He wondered at the fate of those who served House Tyrell, and remembered what Lady Alynore had said…that seventy-three people had had to die for her to become the new Lady Tyrell, heiress of Highgarden and Lady of the Reach.

In a few hours, the little bouquet of Tyrell roses would wake…and their lives would be altered irrevocably.

Sam’s father had betrayed his liege lord and joined the Lannister forces. Jon wasn’t certain how he felt about that - or what Sam would have thought about it. Jon knew his father was a bully: but Sam’s mother had to be wonderful, to have raised such a son as Sam.

Jon dreaded the Queen’s retaliation.

For too long, her advisers had been arguing against unleashing her dragons upon Westeros.

He also couldn’t help but let the niggling anxiety creep in, that the raven-scroll hadn’t brought Sansa’s last words from the North… Every morning he woke, dreading its arrival. Every night, he went to sleep, filled with relief that it hadn’t. Over and over again, he went through the same process - the anguish, and the relief.

With the storms becoming more frequent and more violent, Jon knew their chances of mining more obsidian were dwindling by the day; the time would come far too soon for him to return to Winterfell, with all the dragonglass they had managed to mine.

They’d fight with what they had.

And when they fell to the Night King, he wondered whether the Queen would blame him for not warning her of the danger.

Chapter 21: LamFrey Pie

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

21

LamFrey Pie


“I find it absurd that I must stand before you and dispel a rumour.”

Brittle tension crackled from Larra as she frowned down the smoky hall. Night had come earlier due to a snowstorm, and on this rare occasion they had spared the candles for an important announcement to their bannermen that they had not realised they would be giving, not until the hour of the wolf last night, when a raven had arrived.

Behind Larra, an enormous log popped and snapped as the flames consumed it, the enormous hearth radiating heat and light to those sat behind the high table - Sansa, in her heavy fur-trimmed cloak and Brandon, in his clever chair, pale hands folded in his lap - and the light cast flickering shadows across their bannermen’s faces. The little bear sat at the front, near as she could get to the high table: Her young face was stern and unyielding as ever, dark little eyes shrewd, watchful and expectant. On the other side of the hall sprawled the Blackfish, who had watched Larra with undisguised distrust until he had watched her long enough to take his own measure of her - not rely on what he knew of his niece Catelyn’s hatred of her husband’s bastards…

Lady Brienne’s armour gleamed in the candlelight, and little Jon Umber sat with unusual patience beside Ragnar, who was eyeing the Magnar of the Thenns and Lord Cerwyn with equal scepticism. Clustered around the fearsome Mors Umber were his wildling grandsons - the enormous Bors and Umber - and his great-grandchildren, young warriors Larra’s age, Ivar, Hvitserk, Freydis and Gudrun - tall as oak trees, all muscle, they were ferocious, with wicked senses of humour, fierce loyalty to each other, and a deep appreciation that their great-grandfather still lived to fight beside them against the Night King’s hordes. If the Free Folk respected anything, it was a fierce old warrior. Spearwives Karsi, in her shellfish-armoured furs, and Morna, with her weirwood mask, leaned against the ancient walls, their children clustered around them whittling arrows, and Tormund rested with his elbows on his knees, staring unblinkingly at Larra as the Northern lords quieted, and Lord Royce scowled querulously at his own men to be silent.

For days, Larra had quietly endured being pestered.

One quiet, shy lord she had handled with dignity and kindness - for the both of them, as she sent him on his way, his shoulders drooping somewhat with disappointment and faint embarrassment.

The second, who caught her after supper in a busy corridor, insisted, taking her arm to confirm, eager to express his interest.

The third was a Valeman, chivalrous and kind, appreciative of her ferocity, her dedication to her family, and her cleverness - they had played cyvasse on occasion in the solar: He had been teaching Sansa, and admired the cyvasse sets Larra and her brothers had carved themselves. He had been keen to tell Larra of the wild beauty of his lands in the Vale, and to tell her how incomparably beautiful he found her.

The fourth had interrupted her sparring sessions. Along with the spearwives of the True North, Larra taught Northern girls how to wield a spear and a short knife with lethal precision. The fourth man to approach her had pestered her so much while she was trying to demonstrate accurate ways to hold a knife so as not to end up injuring oneself instead of the enemy, that the girls had become thoroughly confused - and Larra had lost her patience and scolded the man.

Each of them - and there had been more, three yesterday and four the day before that - seemed to be under the impression that the King in the North was going to marry Larra to one of his bannermen, or his allies - whichever impressed the King the most, whichever the King deemed worthy of his twin-sister.

Larra had wondered vaguely whether she would have to consider such a thing in the future - whether the change in Jon’s status meant a certain constricting of the freedoms she had enjoyed as a bastard with two true-born sisters who would be married off for political and dynastic purposes… But she hadn’t imagined she would have to address the issue quite so soon - in the midst of war preparations, no less.

“I have been approached by those who believe my brother is intent on marrying me off as reward for their part in the Battle of the Bastards,” Larra said grimly, frowning. Forget the fact that Jon had not returned, and no raven had been sent to Dragonstone to inform him of her return… “Let me assure you now, that I am no prize to be won. Nor shall I suffer to be given away by my brother, who as yet does not know I am alive… Nor do I want you to believe that I - or my sister Sansa - are rewards for loyalty, which we consider to be the every base standard we expect of each of our bannermen.”

Unflinching, she gazed around the hall, levelling her intimidating gaze on each and every face turned toward her. Her expression was not unkind, but it was stern and unyielding. And because she had addressed the issue bluntly, without calling out those individuals who had pestered her to distraction, they respected her for setting the score. She sighed grimly. “I believe I know where this rumour began, and I thank my lords for being direct in approaching me to confirm or deny the truth of the thing. If it comes to it, you can be sure I will choose the man I deem worthy to share my life with, for my own reasons.”

She sighed, gazing around the room; Lady Mormont gazed at her with a sort of curious admiration. Ser Brynden was smirking, chuckling softly to himself; Lord Royce nodded.

“I trust we can all get back to our work,” Larra said, sighing. She exchanged a glance with Sansa, who nodded. They had decided to do it this way - Larra dispelling the rumours, admonishing the lords, before delivering them news as a balm to wounded pride. “On to other news of greater importance. A raven-scroll arrived late last night from the Riverlands. Sansa, would you care to do the honours?”

Sansa gazed around the darkened hall, her eyes flitting for only a heartbeat on Lord Baelish, who stood by the wall with narrowed eyes fixed on Larra, dislike drifting from him. “No, I think you and Brandon can give a clearer telling of what’s happened.”

“The raven-scroll was sealed with a direwolf sigil,” Larra said, holding up a crinkled raven-scroll. It had arrived damp, and they had had to decipher the writing - luckily the hand that wrote it was not elegant, rather more like chicken-scratches, and the uneven lettering remained legible in spite of the bleeding of the ink. “It read simply, ‘The North remembers. Winter came for House Frey’.”

Low talk turned to louder conversation as the lords of the North and of the Vale debated what the raven-scroll referred to. Winter came… Stark words. The Freys - oathbreakers, violators of guest-right, murderers…

Brandon spoke, his voice gentle but eerie… For a moment, Larra looked at him and saw Old Nan, frightening them with terrifying stories of the Nightfort - the Seventy-Nine Sentinels; the thing that came in the night; Mad Axe; King Sherrit’s Curse; and Brave Danny Flint - his voice lulling and spine-tingling at the same time. The hall fell silent to listen, as it always did when Brandon spoke.

Very quickly, the Northmen and the Valemen had learned to respect Brandon’s voice. Brandon raised his dark eyes from his lap, and in his quiet, unnerving voice, he told a story: “A young serving-girl murdered Black Walder and Lothar and baked them into a pie, serving it to Lord Walder Frey… ‘Damn fine pie,’ he told her, asking for another slice… She called it ‘LamFrey pie’. It was then he found the first finger, the curl of an ear among the bacon… As he recoiled in horror, the serving-girl slit his throat to the bone. ‘The last thing you’re going to see is a Stark smiling down at you,’ she told him. The serving-girl took his face to wear for herself, and became the new Lord of the Riverlands. Every Frey was called to the Twins to feast their triumph… Arbour wine was poured, and gulped down greedily as the man they thought was Walder Frey toasted them… The wine was bittersweet with poison, they realised too late. ‘Leave one wolf alive and the sheep are never safe,’ said the serving-girl wearing Walder Frey’s face. Only one was spared, the Late Walder Frey’s new young bride. The serving girl who had become the Lord of the Riverlands removed Walder Frey’s face, finally revealing her own. She turned, and in a voice soft as falling snow, told Lady Frey, ‘When people ask you what happened here, tell them the North remembers. Tell them winter came for House Frey.’ Arya Stark walked out of the Twins, leaving no-one alive to stop her.”

Larra turned sharply to stare at Brandon. Sansa sat up even straighter, her blue eyes fixed on Brandon, whose smile was bland but oddly taunting.

“Arya?” Sansa blurted, sharing a shocked glance with Larra. Brandon had failed to mention that last night, when he recounted to them in detail what had happened at the Twins.

Instead of answering them directly, Brandon murmured, “Now she guides her horse from the Inn at the Crossroads, heading toward King’s Landing before a siege can choke the city.”

Larra stared at Brandon.

Sansa had told Larra that Lady Brienne herself had last seen Arya, in the Vale - headed away from the Bloody Gate after learning of Lady Arryn’s death. Sansa had wondered aloud by how many miles they had missed each other as she left the Eyrie with Lord Baelish to come north, following Littlefinger’s assassination of the deranged Lady Lysa.

So they knew that, at least until about two years ago, Arya had still been alive - against all reason.

Arya had been accompanied, of all the people in Westeros, by the Sandor Clegane, unexpected and begrudging protector of the younger Stark sister, after offering to be the elder’s sworn sword.

Perhaps the Hound had an affinity for direwolves.

Either way, that had been a long while ago: and Lady Brienne still seemed drenched in shame that she had defeated the Hound in single-combat yet lost Arya Stark, to whom she was pledged to protect by a blood-oath sworn to Lady Catelyn.

While all around the hall voices broke out, grumbles of confusion at Brandon’s story, cheers, even laughter, Larra frowned at Brandon.

He had not mentioned that it was Arya who had eradicated House Frey…

That she had murdered children.

Every man, woman and child bearing the name of Frey…even those denied it by the nature of their birth… Bastards and true-borns alike, the Freys met their end when winter came…

When Brandon had told them, last night in the solar, he had quoted the Freys’ killer word-for-word: “You didn't slaughter every one of the Starks…no, no. That was your mistake. You should have ripped them all out root and stem. Leave one wolf alive and the sheep are never safe.”

Had Arya killed the Freys?

Had she killed innocent children?

Wasn’t that the point of what she had told the Freys as they choked on their own blood and bile? Their mistake was in leaving Arya alive to come back and seek vengeance: She had returned, to eradicate every last trace, every last Frey... She had avenged the Red Wedding. Avenged the assassination of the King in the North; the murder of his Queen, and Robb’s baby growing in her belly; avenged the savaged Lady Catelyn; and the entire Northern army, butchered…

She had sent a message throughout Westeros, loud and clear for all to hear.

Winter is coming.

And nothing could stop it.

Was it Arya?

Larra knew Brandon did not lie; he saw through every disguise.

But Larra…dreaded to think that their Arya, as a child so fiercely devoted to justice, kind and charming, who made friends easily with deep bonds, had become so ruthless, so warped by all they had yet to learn had happened to her, that she would kill innocents.

Brutal efficacy over mercy.

It made her no better than the Freys and Lannisters she had sworn vengeance upon.

Slowly, realisation settled in among the Northmen. Shouts of jubilation and raucous cheers echoed off the stone walls as the relatives of those butchered at the Red Wedding started to celebrate.

Some of them turned to the high table, against which Larra was perched on her bottom, and behind which Sansa rested quietly in her high-backed, direwolf-engraved chair and Brandon gazed vacantly at his pale hands in his lap. They sought repetition of what they had all heard; that the Red Wedding had truly, finally, brutally, been avenged. “The Freys are dead?”

“Every man, woman and child bearing that name, and that of Rivers with the blood of Walder Frey flowing through their veins,” Larra clarified quietly, and the hall quietened as Brandon stirred in his long fur-trimmed robe, raising his pale solemn face, illuminated by candlelight to make his eyes glitter with ancient knowledge.

“The Late Walder Frey broke guest-right…and the gods paid him his due, as they did the Rat Cook of the Nightfort,” he murmured, and a shudder seemed to pass through the hall as the Northmen remembered the harrowing nursery tales. His smile faraway but fond, Bran raised his face to Larra and sighed, “Arya always was fond of that story.”

“The Freys are dead!”

“Winter came for them indeed!” A raucous laugh rippled through the hall, a few cheers echoed, but Larra reached for a piece of parchment on the table beside her, and a few men craned their necks to get a good look, anticipation written on their usually grim faces.

“There’s more we haven’t yet told you,” she said quietly, and the hall fell silent again. She gave a tiny smile, still troubled by the worry that their Arya had truly murdered babies. “After the Freys were killed, the dungeons were emptied… There were survivors of the Red Wedding, after all, and now they make their way north.” She cleared her throat, lifting the parchment, and cast her gaze across the hall. “I shall read out their names, provided by Brandon… I know some of you will be hoping to hear a name fall from my lips, and if my words could breathe life into the dead and return them to you…” She paused, frowning slightly: She knew the power to resurrect the dead existed in this world, but she would never dare wield it… She had experienced the very worst it was capable of. “We are only sorry that we cannot return all your loved ones to you…

“The names…” She cleared her throat, and her voice was clear as crystal over the breathless silence that seemed to grip the hall. There were over a dozen names, but they were too few. She read through them all carefully, and saw tears shimmering on ancient windswept faces, or young men turning pale with relief, and grim resilience as a hoped-for name never came. The last names, she smiled as she read, because she remembered those who belonged to them vividly, and had been glad to know they had survived: “Maege Mormont. Lyra Mormont. Jorelle Mormont, known as Jory. And lastly, the Greatjon.”

The little bear shot to her feet, though it made little difference when she sat beside the tallest of the Thenns and Ice River clansmen, and her own sworn warriors who were tall as oaks even sitting down. She looked Larra directly in the eye, forcefully repeating, “My mother is alive?”

“Aye…but she will be altered,” Larra said gently, maintaining eye-contact with Lyanna. She had a soft spot for the fierce young girl, who never failed to arrive early for her training sessions with the other youths. “They all will, after such long captivity. We have sent ravens to Greywater Watch and Moat Cailin, to redirect these men to Winterfell.”

“What does this mean for the Riverlands?” someone called from the back. “Could they send aid?”

“Lord Edmure Tully was one of those released from the dungeons; he has returned to claim Riverrun, with his wife Lady Roslin, and their daughter,” Larra said delicately, aware that Ser Brynden Tully sat staring grimly at her. “But he is in no position to call the banners and send men north… The men accompanying Ser Brynden are welcome, and much appreciated.”

“Edmure’s home, is he? Bloody useless, that boy is,” the Blackfish grunted. He sighed heavily, “I suppose if I survive this war, I’ll have to head back south and show him how the thing is done.”

“I am sure Lord Tully would appreciate your wisdom and experience, Uncle, as I have,” said Sansa with unhurried elegance; the Blackfish snorted, but his eyes glittered fondly as he gazed at his great-niece, far more beautiful than her mother ever had been, but every inch her mother’s daughter.

“Well, you have good sense,” Ser Brynden told Sansa. “Wish I could say the same for that puffed-up popinjay.”

“Uncle…”

“Alright, alright…” Ser Brynden capitulated, his lips still twitching in an ironic smile. “I’m off to give the young ones their shooting lessons. Milady, if you’d lead the way.”

“Thank you, Ser Brynden,” said the little bear, and she turned and strode the length of the hall, the candlelight turning her shadow into that of a giant.

“If you can shoot straight with all that’s going on in your head, you’ll be unshakeable on the battlefield,” Ser Brynden said, as he disappeared out of the great hall, reaching out to muss Lady Lyanna’s braids - the same way Uncle Benjen used to tousle Larra’s, the same way Jon used to muss Arya’s…

“Leave off!” the little bear grumbled, dodging away, for a heartbeat just a young girl being teased, and Ser Brynden’s amiable chuckle lingered richly on the smoky air. Larra couldn’t help think that little Lady Mormont was unstoppable anyway.

“Tormund,” said Brandon gently, and the redheaded wildling grunted expressively, pushing to his feet to stride up to the high table, leaning against it with curled fists.

The first time they had met, Tormund had stared at Larra, then laughed deeply and out of nowhere, startling people. He had laughed until the corners of his pale-blue eyes crinkled, flashing his fierce white teeth, and had clapped a hand on Larra’s shoulder. “Never thought I’d meet anyone prettier than Jon Snow,” he’d laughed, and Free Folk and Night’s Watchmen alike had laughed.

Because Jon was pretty: and Larra was more beautiful still.

She couldn’t help but think there would have been fewer men approaching her over the last few weeks, had she not shed her furs for the clothing Sansa had had the Northern ladies sew for her. Suddenly she seemed respectable again; ‘proper’ clothing and her hair combed and braided had made her desirable.

And Lord Baelish had used that to his advantage, his first move on the cyvasse board, a game he was now playing against her.

Larra ignored Littlefinger, still leaning with seeming disinterest, looking almost benign, against the wall: She focused on Tormund, who approached, his eyes fixed on Bran. The Free Folk held a certain wary reverence for him, more accustomed to greenseers and wargs than their counterparts who lived south of the Wall, more readily accepting of Brandon’s wisdom, and respectful of his awesome powers with an unyielding faith even Larra found troublesome to emulate. She yearned for her brother Bran to return; the Free Folk had never known him. They revered the Three-Eyed Raven of their ancient songs.

They loved nothing more than to hear Brandon’s stories of the Age of Heroes, before the Wall, when they had been one united clan… They loved nothing better than to hear Larra singing in the Old Tongue, songs taught her by the Children, which time had otherwise taken from the world…

“It’s time,” Brandon told Tormund softly. The wild man frowned. “Time for you to leave Winterfell. I shall choose men to accompany you; you must go to Eastwatch-by-the-Sea. Return to Castle Black, make your journey atop the wall as far east as the sea. There you shall wait. The Brotherhood Without Banners makes its way to the Wall, seeking to go beyond it, to a mountain in the shape of an arrowhead…”

Larra frowned, watching Brandon… The mountain shaped like an arrowhead. He had mentioned that mountain to Larra before, when they still resided beneath the tree, when the Three-Eyed Raven, Lord Bloodraven, had still lingered in this life to mentor him.

The mountain shaped like an arrowhead had once been home to a stone henge sacred to the Children on its heather-carpeted slopes…and a spiral grove of weirwoods, each of them carved with its own unique face ruby-red with sap… It was there, bound to the largest, most ancient weirwood with a truly harrowing face, that the Children had plunged a dagger of obsidian into the heart of a man, their captive, their enemy.

One of the First men. The first White Walker. The Night King.

Seeing what he had become, his brother…his brother had united the First Men…had allied with the Children to stop the genocide of Man and Children alike…had fathered Brandon the Builder, born during the Long Night. Brandon, who had finally beat back the winter…and built a great keep where he had finally subdued the Night King, every stone of the endless spiral crypts spreading beneath the castle steeped in ancient blood-magic to protect every generation of Starks that followed, to give them a safe place to wait, and from which to wage war again when the time came…

Until now, the Starks of Winterfell had forgotten… Now Brandon knew; and because he knew, and because Larra had the blood of the First Men and the blood of Valyria rushing through her veins, the magic alive and as strong as any Brandon the Builder had ever wielded to enchant the stones of the crypts of the Kings of Winter…they had the same chance Brandon the First had had. Because the Children had taught her the same song they had taught Brandon’s father, and Brandon, and Brandon’s children, the song lost over the millennia during which the White Walkers became legends, and then myths, and then nothing more than fairy-tales…

Larra turned to Brandon, frowning.

“How would they know to go to the arrowhead mountain?” she murmured darkly.

“Visions in the flame,” Brandon answered, his mouth twisting into a queer smile, and Larra frowned at him.

Brandon raised his dark, glittering eyes to Tormund. “Detain the men who seek the mountain, but do them no harm. You will need them. You must leave tonight, as soon as the storm lifts. You will meet a herd of elk three days’ ride from here; one will suffice to feed your men until you reach Eastwatch-by-the-Sea. The Night’s Watch left boats: A bob of Skagosi seals chases shoals of ice-cod, and they will fight a blessing of narwhals for them. Once you see the narwhals’ great horns breach the ice at the shore, take to the water to fish all you can; for a pod of weirwhales chase the narwhal, and will attack your boats as prey.”

“You want us to man to the Wall for you,” Tormund said, staring at Brandon, and nodded. Tormund grinned tauntingly at Mors Umber, who had approached the high table. “Looks like we’re the Night’s Watch now.”

“Hvitserk shall go with you, with Karsi and Hali. Asa and Sigurd of the Thenn. Yaskier also, Long Tom, Kenner and Greef of the Watch,” Brandon said quietly, and those Free Folk he had named exchanged a sombre look before nodding to themselves, while the Night’s Watchmen frowned in consternation that the wildlings so easily accepted orders from a southerner. But they did not understand: the Free Folk were raised with a fearful reverence of greenseers and an appreciation for wargs.

As Mors Umber leaned in to speak with Sansa about his nephew the Greatjon’s release from the Twins’ dungeons, Larra asked Brandon, “Why them?”

“I don’t know, yet,” Brandon said mildly.

“You didn’t mention that it was Arya who wiped out the Freys,” Larra murmured.

“You are unhappy,” Brandon said, his eyes glittering even as people dispersed, taking the news of the LamFrey Pie with them to spread throughout the castle and Winter’s Town, and the candles were snuffed out rather than left to burn themselves to stubs. Every inch of candlelight was precious.

“Was it Arya?”

“It was,” Brandon confirmed quietly. Something flickered in his eyes, and for a moment, the candles beside him threw his face into relief and a young man shone through those dark eyes, wincing with discomfort as he leaned toward Larra. “Arya has endured much… She is altered now, even more ferocious than she was as a girl, and her heart burns with a feral vengefulness that yours will never know.”

Larra frowned. “You think I do not know vengeance?”

Bran lifted his pale hand, to curl his long, slender, warm fingers against her scarred ones, and the little boy she remembered gazed beseechingly from his dark eyes. “Larra, you enduringly hope. Arya has learned to hate. It consumes her, has kept her warm, kept her sharp and swift all these years.” Bran eyes were agonised. “Our sister never needed a knight; she has become a sword. She eradicated our enemy…and made sure to remind every House in Westeros that House Stark endures for a reason, just as Sansa reminded them at the Battle of the Bastards. In Arya’s mind, it was necessary: In her mind, they did far worse to us. Instead of dealing the direwolf a swift and brutal death, they left it wounded and in agony to endure horror. In her mind she was merciful… Arya has forgotten warmth, and tenderness, and what it feels like to be all those things, and content. She will not be satisfied until every last name is struck from her list.”

Larra did not ask what list Bran meant.

It was a little too much to hear that their Arya had become a murderer without remorse. Little Arya Underfoot, Arya Horseface, who had come to the twins anguished that she, herself, was Ned Stark’s bastard, so closely resembling them, no hint of the Tully auburn hair or blue eyes in her… Their champion, their playmate, their dearest love, their little sister…

Murdering an entire House as vengeance for the pain they had caused her.

“These men…who seek the arrowhead mountain… Do they know why they seek it?” Larra asked Bran instead.

“The dead march upon it. They gather from all corners of the True North…”

“The King is ready to make his war.”

“Yes,” Brandon whispered, and his eyes glazed over, staring into the distance. Larra sighed, glancing past him, to one of the servants, who slowly wheeled Brandon around to face the hearth, close to the warmth.

The hall was still rumbling with noise as people mingled, ladies entering with their knitting and embroidery and their children, servants moving the enormous loom from beside the hearth in front of the fire for Sansa to see it: A group of noblewomen were working together on a grand tapestry to replace the one that used to hang in the Great Hall, burned by Ironborn.

Their first design had been unravelled the night Larra had returned with Brandon: Now, the lowest boughs of a weirwood were starting to show their vibrant scarlet leaves in the top-left corner of the tapestry, while a shimmering icy Wall carved diagonally from the lower-left corner to a third of the way along the top of the tapestry, slashing diagonally upwards, a blazing fire and an advancing army of Free Folk on one side with Baratheon cavalry in the distance, and on the other side of the Wall, Castle Black’s great switchback staircase intricately woven above the small stronghold under attack by wildlings. Winterfell dominated the lower-right corner of the tapestry, and Jon fought a battle on the misty moors that took up most of the tapestry. He was identifiable by the Stark sigil inverse on his leather brigandine - a white direwolf on grey, instead of the grey-on-white granted to true-born sons - and Ghost at his side, the Free Folk guarding him and a giant protecting him. At the top-right corner, the Knights of the Vale rode in, and Sansa’s horse had begun to be woven, the deep navy velvet of her gown draped elegantly, the ends of her vibrant braid just begun, mirroring the vibrant red of the other side of the tapestry. Amid the chaos of the great battle, the enemy had no features, no sigils, just like the carved settle in the solar. It was the Battle of the Bastards, but no-one would remember the name of the first House that had fallen to the winter Snows when they came down from the Wall.

The first time Larra picked up a sketching pencil since she had fled Winterfell was to draw the design for the tapestry. It was no good telling the ladies what they would never be able to imagine; she knew she had to show them. So she had sat down and sketched, one afternoon in the solar, as Sansa played cyvasse with her Knight of the Vale. She had been very specific with the detail and accuracy with which she wanted the Bloodraven woven into the tapestry, Leif and the last of the Children of the Forest, sweet Hodor, Summer, Meera, and even Larra herself. She had brought out her colours, providing intricate studies and sketches and small paintings to the dyers. They were a motley ensemble, beneath the tree, but that made their presence in the tapestry a point of curiosity for the viewer to remark upon.

She had sketched the day Lord Bloodraven had given her Dark Sister.

The day he had given her a name.

It was more important to her than she had realised until she set pencil to paper, for the North to accurately commemorate the legitimised bastard of King Aegon IV, Lord Brynden Targaryen - the Bloodraven, her great-great-great-great-great uncle - and Hodor, and Summer, and the last of the Children of the Forest.

Now the ladies of the North worked happily, most nights singing as they wove the great tapestry in front of the enormous hearth, tonight celebrating that winter had come for House Frey, the Red Wedding avenged. A weight off everyone’s lungs, it felt like. Delight seemed to surge around Larra wherever she went in the castle that night.

For a few moments, Sansa and Larra paused, quietly watching the women weave Sansa’s likeness into the tapestry, stern and beautiful, her hair vibrant - tonight, she wore her hair the same way she had worn it for the Battle of the Bastards, and the ladies immortalised it in the weft - even the intricate details of the direwolf embellishing the bosom of her velvet gown, the fine colouring of the furs draped around her shoulders… Larra’s eyes drifted to the left side of the tapestry, for some reason drawn to Hodor’s likeness. Brutally strong, with the smile of purest innocence, easily frightened, gentle and kind… Larra missed cuddling up to him to sleep, his unwavering patience and contentedness, even in the wastes of the frozen Land of Always Winter. It had hurt her stomach to see his likeness taking form in the weft, but now she was grateful for it. His gentle smile was how she would remember him, not…

She let out a sigh, turning to Sansa finally. “Well?”

The chatter of the ladies masked their voices, impossible to hear their quiet murmuring, as one of the Night’s Watchmen, Yaskier, lent his handsome voice in an attempt to woo the daughters of the North. He was composing again, Larra thought, her eyes on the lanky and perpetually-cheerful Yaskier, who had been forced to join the Watch after “hiding his sausage in the wrong pantry” once too often, or with the wrong lady, Larra wasn’t entirely sure which.

“He’s slinked off,” Sansa told her, sipping her herb tea as she watched the women weaving.

“For a first attempt, I must admit I am underwhelmed by the effort,” Larra admitted, frowning. “Well, I suppose, why should he use his best efforts on a bastard? What next, do you think?”

She eyed Sansa shrewdly. Larra often gave Sansa lessons in cyvasse in the solar - where Larra also privately tutored Sansa in how to wield the knife Jon insisted Sansa wore always on her person - and wanted to know her sister’s opinion. Larra had her own.

Littlefinger was angling to isolate Sansa. It didn’t take a greenseer to know it. According to Sansa, Littlefinger had always desired the Iron Throne: Now, he desired to make Sansa his queen and get his heirs on her. With her came the North - if he could get rid of Jon without being tied to the King’s demise.

Then Larra had shown up, dragging Brandon with her. Ned Stark’s only surviving trueborn son. The King’s ferocious twin-sister; and the legitimate heir to Winterfell.

Littlefinger was too clever, too forward-thinking to let their reappearance spoil his plans: He would simply adjust them.

Larra knew all too well that there were only two ways in which any obstacle could ever be approached: One could grit your teeth and force one’s way through, or one could assess the situation, move around the obstacle, and adjust.

Now Lord Baelish had to account for the removal not only of Jon, but of Larra and of Bran, too. And at every instance, appear to have had nothing to do with each tragedy that struck Lady Stark’s family as she was left with fewer family members but the enduring presence and kindness of Lord Baelish.

His first attempt: Using the Northern bannermen and Knights of the Vale to whisk Larra away, physically removing her from Winterfell. Then, in Jon’s absence, and without his great protector…what could a crippled young man do against trained assassins? One had already made an attempt on his life, before he had been forced from his home: Who was to say whoever had sent the first would not take opportunity to send others? What if they succeeded? Lady Sansa would be undisputed heiress of the Northern kingdom.

“He likes to remind me that you are my bastard half-sister,” Sansa sniffed delicately, watching the weavers work and sing, their children playing at their feet. “I may have begun to slip little details about how Mother and I treated you in the past into our conversations. Conversations about your place at Winterfell…if things had gone another way for our family.”

“We think alike. He’ll use childhood enmities against you, reminding you just how much you disdained me as the reminder to your mother of Father dishonouring his wedding vows…” Larra sighed, and Sansa frowned. She hadn’t yet brought up the subject of Larra’s true parentage since that day in the baths, but Larra knew she had been thinking on it, often. She always got the same look on her face. “And me, he’ll taunt about my loss of status as castellan of Winterfell, all I was raised to ever be. Now I am nothing, because you’ve taken it from me; and by right as the eldest and Jon’s twin, it should be mine.”

“Exactly,” Sansa sighed heavily, sipping her herb tea, her expression grim. She narrowed her eyes at a gaggle of young ladies clustered around a tall, attractive young man all in black, and exchanged a look with Larra, who smirked. She caught sight of one of the mothers, her fingers deftly weaving bobbins, her eyes shrewd on the young man, and she raised an eyebrow at the young man. He grinned widely, reassuring one of the girls who seemed particularly smitten with him, to stride over to them, his clear blue eyes sparkling.

“Yaskier - leave her alone,” Larra warned. The perpetually cheerful young man bounded over, gushing.

“I’m in love.”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake - again?”

“This time is entirely different.”

“It always is,” Larra chided. “Yaskier, if I get one more dirty look from the ladies, I shall string you up to the pillory and do unseemly things with you.” She sidled up to him, very close, her eyes alight and her lips twitching with delicious irony that made Yaskier’s eyes focus on her mouth, leaning into her, shuddering with suppressed desire.

“Don’t tempt him,” Sansa warned, rolling her eyes in faint amusement.

“Wicked woman,” Yaskier pouted at Larra, his eyes glittering with mirth. They enjoyed this game. “You know I’m vulnerable.”

“To what?” Larra scoffed.

“Fine eyes in the face of a pretty woman,” he purred. Larra rolled her eyes, levelling a grim smirk at him.

“A blade to the balls may yet cure you.”

“You are wise, fair one.”

“Shameless strumpet,” Larra smirked.

“Strumpet? Perhaps,” Yaskier grinned unabashedly. “Adoring supplicant? Eternally yours.”

“Go,” Larra laughed, smiling, and gently pushed Yaskier away, her hands on his stomach. “You should be sparring.”

“I thought we were,” Yaskier grinned easily. “Shall we sing tonight?”

“Ah, using me to impress one of your heart’s desires?”

“It is my last night at Winterfell,” Yaskier said, making his eyes large and tragic. “I go to the Wall, who knows what awaits me.”

“Death, most likely,” Sansa remarked.

“I shall need consolation - and the courage to meet my fate with my head held high,” Yaskier said.

“And practically skipping, I’d wager,” Larra smirked.

“Off you go,” Sansa chided, smiling. “Cease bothering my ladies.”

“My ladies…” Yaskier bowed to them each in turn, with a flourish.

“You enjoyed that,” Sansa murmured, leaning into Larra, her lips twitching, her expression slightly smug. “Flirting.”

“I blame you entirely. No-one looked twice at me,” Larra said defensively. “Then you bathed me, prettied me up and put me in fine clothes. You civilised me.”

“Well, not entirely,” Sansa smirked. “A direwolf can only be gentled and befriended, after all, never truly tamed.”

“Do you think he’s afraid of a nip?” Larra mused, as they watched Yaskier, already distracted by another pretty girl sashaying past him.

“No, and I think that’s why he ended up at the Wall in the first place,” Sansa said, and Larra grinned in agreement. “I should go, seek out Lord Baelish. He’ll be itching to pour poison in my ear about you addressing the rumour he started, and so boldly.”

“Bold?” Larra scoffed, raising her eyebrows. “Northwomen are often accused for being straightforward to the point of bluntness.”

“He has only to look at Lady Mormont to know that is true.”

“I like her,” Larra said warmly.

“She doesn’t much like me.”

“She doesn’t have to,” Larra said, shrugging. “She does respect you.”

“He’ll twist them against Jon.”

“Oh, of course he will.”

“He’ll want us at each other’s throats… He’ll want me fearful of you, paranoid - jealous,” Sansa said, turning sombre. “Try to turn us against each other.”

“This is going to be exhausting,” Larra sighed, already feeling tired at the prospect of what they had ahead of them. Politics. “I am no actress.”

“You put on plenty of puppet-plays for us when we were little.”

“That was writing…it was play…” Larra said, surprised. “I thought you’d forgotten those. You were so insistent, you were a lady; you had no need to spend time in the nursery with the little ones, playing with dolls.”

Sansa grew quiet, watching the women weaving, without really seeing them. She was far away. Softly, she said, “Father gave me a doll, after he killed Lady. I was so ungrateful, still angry at him… I told him I hadn’t played with dolls since I was eight… I slept with it every night in King’s Landing…every night… Father gave me the doll the day Arya and I argued at supper, and Arya dented the table she kept stabbing it with her knife. She said she was practicing to kill the prince… Father tried to warn us to be kind to each other. I didn’t listen.”

“You were little girls,” Larra said gently. She had been sixteen. It seemed absurd now, how young she had been, ruling the entire North for Robb as he rode to war, little more than a boy…

“I was older than Lady Mormont is now,” Sansa said quietly.

“You’ve had a different life than she has.”

“She’s had a different life than I had because of our family,” Sansa said. “Nothing we do happens on its own.”

“Hm.”

“What?”

“The Bloodraven… He told me that what I do in this life will echo through eternity,” Larra said softly. She had always admired those words. They had such gravitas. “It means the same thing: Our choices touch others. There’s no escaping that, only minimising the damage.”

“Minimum-loss strategy,” Sansa said, gazing at her, and Larra frowned. She knew that phrase, had coined it while planning her campaigns against their brothers in the old schoolroom. But Sansa had enjoyed dancing and embroidery with Septa Mordane, would never have cared to listen to her discussions with their brothers about war, strategy and economics. “Your progresses.”

“My what?” Sansa looked surprised.

“Maester Luwin. He wrote down every lesson; every observation regarding your education,” Sansa explained, and Larra stared at her. She looked almost apologetic, even abashed. “They’re fascinating to read. I’ll have them sent to your chamber, along with the other things Maester Wolkan unearthed in the Maester’s tower… Your lessons have taught me how to be a true warden of the North… Before that, I learned to become an actress. To pretend. To be what they wanted me to be, so I could survive.”

“It must have been exhausting.”

“It was.”

“And yet you’d happily endure it again, to snare a mockingbird,” Larra sighed.

“It shan’t take too long,” Sansa said, her tone sensible. “The strength of the Vale is behind us; I have had Lord Royce’s loyalty ever since I intimated Lord Baelish is responsible for Lord Arryn’s death… We just have to play the game long enough to spring the trap and let Littlefinger tumble in, without realising he’s been snared until it is quite too late.”

“And you trust that he will.”

“He’s too arrogant in his own cleverness,” Sansa said grimly. “The day you arrived, just before the guard came to call me to the gate…Littlefinger told me something I shan’t ever forget: ‘Don’t fight in the North, or the South. Fight every battle, everywhere, always, in your mind. Everyone is your enemy, everyone is your friend. Every possible series of events is happening all at once. Live that way, and nothing will surprise you. Everything that happens will be something that you’ve seen before’.”

“He doesn’t know everything.”

“No,” Sansa said curtly. “And he has underestimated an enemy before.”

“Everyone who’s ever underestimated you is dead now.”

“Most of them.”

“Well…do your worst, little sister,” Larra sighed, her smile twinkling and sad. Sisters had a unique viciousness when provoked. Only they had the weapons to truly torment each other. “And I will endeavour to do my very best to fill my role.”

“Believe me…Littlefinger will make it easy for you…” Sansa warned her, looking unhappy at the prospect of what they must dredge up to ensnare the mockingbird. “What Brandon said earlier…you are uncomfortable at the idea that it was perhaps Arya who murdered the Freys.”

“Can our sister have changed so much that she’d murder innocents?”

“To protect our family, what wouldn’t you do?” Sansa asked, after a moment’s thoughtful silence. She sighed, glancing sidelong at Larra. She asked hesitantly, “How must it be done? I know Father took you with our brothers, but I… I would do the thing properly, the Northern way. But Father never taught me…”

Father never taught his daughters how ugly the world was. He had protected their innocence - for perhaps too long, as it turned out.

Larra sighed heavily, remembering the scent of frost-bitten heather, wildflowers and fresh blood…

“The blood of the First Men flows through our veins, and for thousands of years we’ve upheld the belief that those who pass the sentence should swing the sword,” Larra said grimly. “The first time Father took us to witness a man being executed, he warned us not to look away… He told us that if we were to take a man’s life, we owed it to him to look into his eyes and hear his final words. That if we couldn’t bear to do that, then perhaps the man doesn’t deserve to die after all… He said those who hid behind paid executioners quickly forgot what death is.”

“I do not know how to hold a sword, let alone wield one,” Sansa said, her eyes widening slightly.

Larra’s smile was grim. “It needn’t be so literal. We’ve made this decision together. We both have condemned him. But as the Stark in Winterfell, it is you who must pass the sentence.”

Sansa frowned. After a long moment, she wondered aloud, “If I asked it of you, would you swing the sword?”

Larra stared back at her little sister, every inch a stern Northern ruler. An elegant lady; a perpetually troubled leader. She reached up to tenderly pinch Sansa’s chin, murmuring, “What wouldn’t I do for you?” What hadn’t she done, to protect their brothers? What wouldn’t she do, to protect her sister? To do what she could not, last time, and protect their people? Their home, their freedom. “You look uneasy. That’s good. Father was always troubled by it.”

Sansa gazed off into the distance, the same way Brandon did when he went somewhere else. To herself, she murmured, “It was his duty…”

“One of them,” Larra said. “To protect his people from those who would do them harm. It should never be easy. It should always give you troubled dreams.”

“In his progresses…Maester Luwin mentioned your dreams,” Sansa said, turning curious eyes on Larra. “He described them in detail.”

“I haven’t had them since I entered the caves beneath the great weirwood,” Larra admitted, and glad of it. “I think they were the Bloodraven’s way of reaching out…connecting me with Bran until I had brought us both North where we were always meant to be.”

Larra knew what she had to do. A task only she could perform. She was just afraid to do it. To go down there, where Father and Robb and Rickon all waited for her to remind her of her failure.

She leaned in to tenderly kiss Sansa’s forehead, and made her way out of the warmth and light of the hall, where the women sang and the tapestry continued to blossom before her eyes like a strange flower.

They were playing a little game, now. Just a little one, the cyvasse board small - but the dangers significant, if they did not do the thing with caution and sensitivity toward their allies - and their enemy.

The castle felt differently than it had before she and Brandon had shared the news of the Twins. As if the castle could breathe deeply into its lungs for the first time in an age. The Red Wedding was avenged, truly, finally. Almost all those involved in the Red Wedding were dead: The Freys, the Boltons, Tywin Lannister…

Things were changing. The old players were being wiped off the board.

It was interesting to wander the castle that night. They did not empty more barrels of ale or stout or cider; they did not feast in the hall and the courtyard. They did nothing out of the ordinary, except that the few musicians that had found their way this far north brought out their instruments, and anyone with a fine voice raised it to the skies as the snows gentled to nothingness, the clouds dissolving to reveal a flawless velvet sky studded with stars that seemed to glitter knowingly.

The music soared to the diamond-studded skies, and Yaskier sang, and Larra entertained a gaggle of children eager to hear of her adventures beyond the Wall, enthralled as she wove a tale - and had Last Shadow frighten the life out of them, appearing out of nowhere to growl in their ears and lick the backs of their necks.

She laughed, digging her fingers through Shadow’s thick pelt, and watched Yaskier disappearing with a pretty serving-girl - shortly before the horses were saddled, and those Brandon had called upon said their goodbyes, and headed out into the night, guided by a gentle moon. Larra raised her face to it, relishing the luminous silver light.

As children, Father used to say Sansa and Arya were as unlike each other as the sun and the moon - yet to Larra, they had both always radiated light.

How different were they, now, she wondered. Sansa wanted to do everything in her power to make a man’s execution just: Arya had allegedly wiped out a sprawling family, down to the last child, out of vengeance.

Larra still didn’t know what to make of it, Arya’s part in the eradication of House Frey. But she trusted that Brandon had no use for lies and deceptions. It had been Arya. And she had killed innocents.

And it broke Larra’s heart to think what Arya must have endured, to turn her into a cold-hearted killer.

It sat heavy on her heart both what Arya had become, and what Sansa had asked her to do.

No, not that Sansa had asked her: That she had agreed.

What wouldn’t she do for her family?

Chapter 22: Flowers in the Garden

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

22

Flowers in the Garden


“You look positively gleeful.”

“Not at your leaving this island, I assure you,” Jon smiled. “I’m just happy I don’t have to get back in that boat yet.”

“Ship,” Ser Davos corrected, his beard twitching, eyes twinkling. “Got to take advantage of the fine weather. Shipbreaker Bay earned its name, after all.”

“They’ll all be there?”

“All of the Stormlords,” Ser Davos sighed, grumbling slightly as he gazed out to sea. The sky was endless white today and the sea calm, pale grey, the water in the bay the clearest it had been in weeks: The day was bright - and brutally cold. There was a good breeze, coming down from the North, bringing with it the taste of ice - it was perfect weather for sailing, according to more experienced mariners than Jon. “Deciding what happens next. They have no leader; they’ll be arguing amongst themselves over who to pledge their swords to - Cersei, or Daenerys… If we get through it without broken bones, shattered teeth and wounded pride, I’ll eat my remaining fingers.”

“Well, it’s important you be there to represent your own interests,” Jon said quietly. “At the very least, you’ll be a voice of reason.”

“I still can’t change your mind?” Ser Davos prompted, and Jon sighed.

“As you said, the Stormlords have no leader,” Jon said. “And it doesn’t look like there’ll be a Baratheon miraculously returning to Storm’s End to unite them, if such a thing was possible after Stannis and Renly.” Ser Davos frowned at him. Jon knew him well, now, and could practically see his mind working. The intensity of his gaze was tempered by a quiet awe, as if he had just realised something very important.

“What is it?” Jon asked.

“What if there was?”

“Was what?”

“A Baratheon to unite the Stormlands,” Ser Davos said, with quiet urgency, and Jon just prevented himself from glancing to the left, where he knew Lord Varys lingered, hands tucked into the fur-trimmed folds of his robes, and who had just straightened almost imperceptibly - but just enough for a seasoned brother of the Night’s Watch to notice it. Varys was listening intently, as he seemed always to be when Jon was around.

“Sansa told me a rumour that King Robert’s bastards had all been butchered by Gold Cloaks in the early days after Father’s execution,” Jon said sombrely, wincing. Lady Catelyn had hated him from the moment she arrived at Winterfell with Robb, only to find Jon and Larra already installed in the nursery. But she had never harmed him, even if her thoughts had rarely been kind toward him. And Jon could never imagine Lady Catelyn vengefully murdering him or Larra, or sending cutthroats after them… “Either Joffrey or Cersei ordered it, she didn’t know which.”

“A few less than tasteful associates laughingly said at the time that the Stag’s Seed had been washed away into the Blackwater,” Ser Davos said grimly. “I remember the Red Woman regretting the waste; King’s blood has power, you see.” He bristled with suppressed rage, and Jon’s mind turned to a young, scarred face - a beautiful child full of true kindness and innocence. “But to Cersei, Robert’s bastards were a threat to her children - because they were his bastards; not hers.”

“They had a more legitimate claim to the Iron Throne than Cersei’s children - or Cersei herself,” Jon said, nodding. One of Lady Catelyn’s greatest lingering concerns had been that Jon may have become a threat to her sons’ inheritance. The tragic irony was not lost on Jon… “Disregarding those who still claim Robert was a usurper, of course.”

“Cersei and Daenerys can squabble over King’s Landing,” Ser Davos said offhandedly. Truth be told, neither of them had much faith in Daenerys Stormborn as being a ruler any better than the ones who had come before her. They needed only exchange a look to confirm each other’s feelings on the matter; they had never needed to discuss their opinions on how Daenerys Targaryen ruled Dragonstone. Or rather, didn’t. Ser Davos frowned thoughtfully at Jon, as if he was seeing someone else. “But Storm’s End…that’s the seat of House Baratheon. A Baratheon should claim it.”

“You wouldn’t bring this up if you thought such a thing could not be done,” Jon said: Ser Davos was nothing if not a practical man.

“There was one…” Ser Davos sighed, shaking his head. “One of Robert’s bastards, born in Flea Bottom; he managed to escape the Gold Cloaks.”

“How?” Jon asked, surprised.

“His master sold him to the Night’s Watch. According to him, he was on his way to the Wall with a wandering crow when they were attacked by Gold Cloaks…” Ser Davos glanced at Jon, who raised an eyebrow in surprise. Wandering crows were so named because they flew down from the Wall and drifted about the Seven Kingdoms, enlisting willing recruits and emptying castle dungeons. “And then captured by the Mountain and his men, during the early days of the War of the Five Kings. His trade saved him; an armourer’s apprentice… Somehow he and a few friends escaped Harrenhall - only to fall in with the Brotherhood without Banners…who then sold him to the Red Woman, for the King’s blood in his veins.”

“She wanted to burn him,” Jon said grimly.

“Among other things.”

“His own nephew… If I didn’t know what fate befell Princess Shireen, I might be shocked that King Stannis would ever have considered it…” Jon sighed, shaking his head. He may not have liked Stannis Baratheon, but Jon had respected him: He had set aside his plans to take the Iron Throne to lead his armies north. He had done his duty, to every man, woman and child in Westeros, though they would never know it.

And that was why it was so difficult to reconcile that the man who had set aside his claim for the crown and the man who had willingly burned his only daughter alive at the stake were one and the same.

Jon sighed, gazing at Ser Davos. “The boy lived?”

“Aye, he lived,” Ser Davos said heavily. “Because I betrayed my King and smuggled the boy off this very island.”

Jon smiled. “You forfeited your life to do what was right… That’s why Stannis named you his Hand.”

“I should have known…the moment he ordered me to Castle Black, I should have realised…”

Jon frowned at his adviser - his friend. “You may not have been able to stop her death, but you saved that boy’s life. Believe me, I know the weight of it,” he said softly, thinking of the Battle for Castle Black, and Hard Home after. The Watch had saved the North from an invasion of wildlings; but they had lost an army of those same wildlings to the Night King. Innocent children, old men, mothers. “Sometimes you can save one…rarely both. Sometimes neither… I didn’t know the Princess well, just that…she was sweet and gentle and impossibly kind…but I do know she’d rather you saved an innocent boy’s life than hers, if it came down to it.”

After a moment, Ser Davos’ beard twitched, and he sniffed roughly. “Aye, she would.” His voice was hoarse when he said, “She was a good girl.” Jon did not pretend not to see the way Ser Davos’ eyes glimmered. Jon knew he had loved the princess as his own.

“Do they know?” Jon asked quietly, meaning the Stormlords.

“Not that I know of.”

“What will you tell them, if it comes to it?”

“The royal family were killed by House Bolton. And if their bannermen hadn’t still been squabbling amongst themselves like spoiled children, they could have avenged them during the Battle of the Bastards,” Ser Davos said. He scoffed, “Never knew Stormlords to value velvet-covered armour and silks and Rainbow Guards over military strength and blood-right. The War of the Five Kings made a mockery of the Stormlords.”

“So you’re going to provoke them,” Jon said, smirking slightly, and Ser Davos’ eyes twinkled. “And what about Robert’s bastard? Will you tell them about him?”

“If I knew where to find him,” Ser Davos said, sensibly. “But we’d have so many pretenders, and we’ve far greater concerns. Besides, it’ll be a lot of hot-headed young men eager to fight and prove their mettle - and old sceptics who know better.”

“Don’t worry… I’m not hoping for much,” Jon said; they had discussed Ser Davos requesting men from the Stormlands to ally with them.

“I don’t like leavin’ you,” Ser Davos said, frowning.

“It’s important you be there,” Jon said fairly.

“I’ll see who’s left. Some with sense, hopefully. Others too tired to carry on, keen to die gloriously in battle…” Ser Davos shook his head. The War of the Five Kings may have gutted the Riverlands, but the War had started as a rift between two brothers who had divided the Stormlands. Most of the fighting men had died at the Battle of the Blackwater: any survivors had been conscripted into service under King Stannis, and had died on the moors of Winterfell. “I’ll do what I can to convince any who might listen…”

“Thank you, Ser Davos,” Jon said sincerely. “I wish you a fair journey.”

“I will return,” Ser Davos assured him. “Until I do, take care of yourself.”

“And you, Ser Davos.”

“Look after yourself with her,” Ser Davos said pointedly, and Jon nodded.

“I know what she’s about,” Jon said. The Queen was no Sansa: she couldn’t disguise her emotions. She couldn’t disguise her lust - her desire for Jon, his approval, his respect, his admiration. His presence in her bed, too, he did not doubt: Her gaze was always hungry.

He watched Ser Davos climb into the little dinghy. They rowed out to Jon’s flagship, and Jon sighed. Ser Davos was leaving, but Jon did not feel vulnerable without his presence: just tired. At least with Ser Davos - as with Theon - Jon did not have to be anything but exactly who he was. A grim, tired warrior who wanted nothing more than to go home - even if that meant finally facing down an enemy he had been evading for far too long, and had no real hope of defeating.

The sails unfurled, rippling in the strong breeze that would hurry Winter south. His flagship - his… Robb had commissioned the fleet but never seen a single one of the ships: Lord Manderly had continued building, in secret, as he had done most things. In his own time, for his own reasons. Winter’s direwolf figurehead was monstrous, but like most things in the North, the ship was strong, built to endure, with a focus on the practical rather than the pretty - certainly nothing to the grand and very beautiful ship Gallant that moored in the bay, gleaming like dark gold, its dark-green sails raised.

Movement flickered beside him, though Jon was used to Lord Varys’ near-soundless approach by now.

“Lord Varys,” he said quietly, turning to frown at the man as the brittle sun glowed above them.

“Your Grace,” the Master of Whisperers said cordially, dipping into a semi-formal bow.

“Couldn’t help but notice your interest in my conversation with Ser Davos,” Jon said. Lord Varys was far too…southern, for all he was a foreigner; Jon disliked politics, though he would engage in them when necessary. With Lord Varys, he had found that conversations could get utterly too flowery for his taste, and take far too long to get to the heart of the thing. He’d rather be straightforward about it. “Which part in particular struck your fancy? I can’t imagine it was Stormlords’ gathering - considering it was you who told Ser Davos about it.”

“Indeed, I did share pertinent information with your adviser,” Lord Varys said, unapologetically.

“I do hope it was not your ultimate goal to separate me from my adviser in the hopes I could be swayed to reconsider the status of the North as a free and independent sovereign nation.”

“I’ve been watching you for far too long, Your Grace, to believe Ser Davos has any true bearing on your decision-making. He may advise, but you know your own mind,” Lord Varys said, his tone amiable. “And if he were to convince you of another course of action, I am quite certain it would be because you already questioned the wisdom of such decisions. Besides, while you remain on Dragonstone without your adviser, the council will be without its queen.”

“She’s leaving,” Jon nodded: He’d seen the Dothraki preparing. He’d say it for them; they knew how to mobilise at a moment’s notice. No Westerosi army could ever compete. He frowned to himself, wondering what that implied for the future…if they all lived long enough to have one…

“Taking the hordes to the mainland,” Lord Varys said airily, nodding.

“Is that wise, to unleash them?” Jon asked: Part of his geography lessons with Maester Luwin had covered the migratory Dothraki with their single sacred city, their worship of horse-gods and their utterly brutal way of life, devastating city after city as they ravaged their way across Essos.

“Better them than dragons,” Lord Varys said, and his tone was almost tart.

“She’ll be taking them, too,” Jon pointed out heavily.

“Drogon, yes,” Lord Varys said. “What is a Great Khaleesi without her mount?”

“Most horses can’t breathe fire to melt castles,” Jon replied, holding Lord Varys’ gaze. He looked as sombre as Jon felt about the prospect of Queen Daenerys moving her cavalry to the mainland. Unsullied were one thing; Dothraki were an entirely different sort of beast - one it was next to impossible to control once it had been unleashed. Jon had been around them long enough on Dragonstone to know it, even if he hadn’t studied them as part of his history and military strategy lessons.

“Indeed not,” Lord Varys agreed with a murmur. “And while she is gone, the lot of us shall just have to muddle on.”

“You won’t go with her?”

“No. The Lord Hand and Queen’s trusted adviser and translator will accompany the armies,” Lord Varys said, telling Jon more than anyone had yet let slip about Daenerys’ campaign plans. “With bloodriders ready to kill each other for the honour of protecting their Queen and, indeed, the Lord Hand to guide military strategy, well…it would be laughable to even suggest I join the campaign. I am no soldier.”

“But you are a strategist.”

“I suppose I am,” said Lord Varys thoughtfully.

“Did you help devise the Queen’s strategy, or is she following her own advice?” Jon asked quietly. He knew the Queen had been advised until her councillors were blue in the face: She did not heed their warnings, hence her mobilising her armies to deal with what others had foreseen, and she had ignored in favour of her own petty vengeances, snatching Casterly Rock like a spoiled child who took toys off other children without ever wanting to play with them - just make sure no-one else did.

“In this matter, her first foray onto the mainland, which will surely set the tone for this war, the Queen has deigned to listen to the advice of her Council,” Lord Varys said carefully. “Whether she remembers it, when the time comes, is another matter entirely.”

“Unleashing Dothraki out in open field,” Jon murmured. “It’ll be over and done with before she can think too much on it.”

“That is my thought exactly,” said Lord Varys. “But what comes after the last sword falls to the ground in surrender?”

“If there are any left to drop them, you mean. You worry about her thirst for vengeance,” Jon surmised.

“I do. Innocents were slaughtered…but someone must end the cycle,” Lord Varys sighed, shaking his head subtly. “Her bloodthirstiness…concerns me. I had heard whispers…saw glimmers with my own eyes in Meereen; the Lord Hand and I did our utmost to curb those instincts then…guide the Queen toward a settlement both practical and merciful.”

“She doesn’t like diplomacy.”

“Nor do you.”

“I dislike politics. But I know they’re necessary. I’m a soldier, my lord…if I can avoid senseless violence and death, I will,” Jon said grimly and earnestly. Lord Varys nodded.

“I’ve heard many a song sung from the Wall. Their voices are chilled, but quite in awe,” he said almost fondly. “The bastard who became a steward. The steward who became a warrior. The warrior who became a traitor. The traitor who became a commander. The commander who became king.”

“Sounds simpler and far less gritty and gruesome than it truly was.”

“The songs always are,” Lord Varys smiled softly. “Lord Tyrion speaks of your time together at the Wall with high regard.”

“He’s too kind.”

“Usually, unless the wine-skin is out of reach,” Lord Varys quipped, and Jon’s lips twitched at the light shining from Varys’ eyes. He was fond of Lord Tyrion, too.

“My father taught me how to be a good man. Before he left the Wall, Lord Tyrion taught me my first lessons in how to be a good leader,” Jon said honestly. “He’d be flustered to know how much of an influence he had on my life in so short a time.”

“Our friend is not accustomed to genuine praise,” Lord Varys said, and his voice was soft and almost wistful. He smiled at Jon. “And now you pass on the teachings of your father and of Lord Tyrion… The Queen listens to you. I know she appears…hostile, at worst, and ambivalent at best, but you are perhaps the only person on this island - which means the world - whose opinion and approval Daenerys Targaryen desires above almost everything.”

“I’ve no time to teach her how to listen, if she wants to learn to lead,” Jon told Varys simply.

“Quite,” Lord Varys said. “And yet just your presence alone is enough: She emulates your behaviour…she is far more temperate in your presence.”

“I’m not a dragon-tamer,” Jon said, and Varys laughed.

“Perhaps as close to one as we shall ever find,” he chuckled. “The armies will be ready to sail to the mainland in two days’ time. I…humbly ask you to join us at court until the Queen’s departure.”

“You want her to go off to war in a pretty mood.”

“If I thought it may affect the outcome… Any conflict involving either the Dothraki or Drogon will not last long. Then she will face her first test,” Lord Varys said, looking unsettled. “How will she handle her enemies in their defeat? She wants to impress you.”

“She wants to imprison me.”

Lord Varys’ lips twitched, not denying it. “She desires your respect and admiration. If she goes into battle thinking how best to earn your regard…”

“So far I’ve seen nothing worthy of my respect or my admiration, except perhaps the small-folk who toil through all weathers and the Dothraki’s fine horses,” Jon said honestly. “And there must be something very wrong if she’s making decisions on the battlefield contrary to her nature in an attempt to try and win my favour…” He saw the Spider’s wince. “Don’t worry: I’ll keep that opinion to myself, if you do the same.”

Lord Varys sighed deeply, his long fur-trimmed sleeves rippling as he rocked on the balls of his feet. “Everywhere Daenerys Stormborn has gone, she has been wooed, admired, feared, beloved, yielded to, lusted after, adored… Until you. Northmen,” Lord Varys said, his eyes alight with amusement as his lips twitched. “A very different breed entirely to any other in the world, and I can say that, having mingled with most kinds of people from all over the known world. Stubborn, tireless, resilient, and just. And not impressed simply by a pretty face and a self-aggrandising name… You are the first person in years whom she can neither seduce nor intimidate into giving her exactly what she wants. To someone like her, the challenge is as exhilarating as it is infuriating.”

“I have a feeling she’d tell you there are no others like her.”

“Very true.”

“You want me there? And Lord Tyrion? Lady Ellaria? The Greyjoys?”

“Ironically, your presence at court goes a long way toward breaking the ice,” Lord Varys said, and Jon scoffed, shaking his head. “You have felt the tension among the Queen’s councillors.”

“Tension’s an interesting way of putting it,” Jon muttered.

“How would you describe the atmosphere at court?” Lord Varys asked, eyeing Jon shrewdly. He gazed back at the Master of Whisperers.

Fearful,” Jon said. He did not need to elaborate. “You agree. You just wanted to hear me say it aloud.”

“Once, I could explain away to youth and inexperience and a fierce, impatient heart. But when every Council session devolves into convincing Queen Daenerys not to unleash the dragons on the fields and holdfasts of Westeros to claim the Iron Throne all the quicker…”

“You can only advise; ultimately you won’t be able to make decisions for her. She’s not accountable to you. Or anyone else, for that matter - certainly not me,” Jon reminded the eunuch firmly. “You can only give advice; it’s up to her what she does with it.”

“That’s what I used to tell myself about her father… I’m not the one doing it,” Lord Varys murmured, his eyes faraway and haunted. “I found the traitors, but I wasn't the one burning them alive. I was only a purveyor of information. It's what I told myself when I watched them beg for mercy... I'm not the one doing it. When the pitch of their screams rose higher... I'm not the one doing it. When their hair caught fire and the smell of their burning flesh filled the throne room... I'm not the one doing it… I have a great many regrets in my life, Jon Snow. I have no wish to repeat my past, or for Daenerys to repeat her father’s. I have no wish for you to follow the fate of your uncle and your grandfather - nor your own excellent father. Too many Starks have died already for the sake of House Targaryen.”

“True. But I’m not a Stark,” Jon reminded him. Lord Varys looked so despondent; there was no way to ease the pain of remembered horror - Jon knew all too well. Something flickered in Lord Varys’ face, though, at the sound of Jon’s voice, or perhaps the words, and his eyes turned, for the briefest moment, shrewd. They flickered again, when Jon prompted, “You were there when my grandfather and uncle were killed.”

“I was.”

“Father rarely talked about them.”

“Lord Eddard was very like his father in looks, and indeed in temperament. Calm and grim, unfazed. And Brandon…handsome and fierce…and he died weeping as he watched his father’s eyes melt down his face, and his skin blacken and blister, strangling himself to try and free his father - the first he knew of his father’s presence in King’s Landing since his own arrest…” Lord Varys’ voice was soft, his eyes haunted. “He fought like a trapped direwolf to free himself - free his father…”

“They died for nothing,” Jon said quietly. Like Father. And it fell to Jon to preserve the freedom of the North, hard-won and bitterly bought. Lord Varys sighed, then frowned at Jon, his brow creasing, his eyes vibrant with intensity. “What is it?”

“A fragment of song from the distant past…”

Jon didn’t know what that meant; he raised an eyebrow, but shrugged it off. Winter had disappeared over the horizon, and Jon turned away from the quay. Lord Varys followed, somehow managing to look unruffled and unhurried as he kept pace with Jon, who slowed his strides. Lord Varys was quiet, and remained so as they started the long ascent. Jon was used to arduous climbs, but he couldn’t quite get used to Dragonstone, wreathed in strange vapour created by the sea-air mingling with the heat of the volcano that seemed to protect everything with warmth. The same way Winterfell was protected by thermal rivers, Dragonstone’s volcano radiated enough heat to stave off winter’s harshest elements.

And the castle itself looked superbly eerie, braceleted with wreaths of heavy fog strangely warm to walk through, though salty and sulphuric at the same time, with a hint of perfume from the ancient Valyrian plants growing in Aegon’s garden.

Jon and Lord Varys made their way toward the monstrous fortress, taking their time where the vapours had turned the stone walkways slick and precarious.

Jon saw her at the same time Lord Varys did.

A glimmer of shimmering rose-pink against the unbroken white sky. Silk skirts billowing in the wind that had picked up the higher they had climbed. She was bare-armed, wearing nothing but her pretty rose-pink dress of silk and jacquard, and the wind snatched at her hair, tangling the soft brown locks, as she stood in the shivering grass at the cliff’s rocky, speckled edge, winter wildflowers open at her feet.

It was Lady Alynore Tyrell.

“Will she jump?” Lord Varys asked, his voice hushed and grim, his eyes fixed on the girl. Lord Varys looked grim but expectant, even resigned. Jon watched her. She stared out to sea, and did not appear to notice them, or anything else.

“No,” Jon said, from experience with some of his brothers of the Watch. There was only one way out of a lifelong-oath: Flinging oneself from the top of the Wall often seemed like the only way out…until they reached the top of the Wall and saw just how high it was - and how long a fall it would be. Long enough to regret the decision… “If she’d wanted to jump, she would have done it by now.” Jon did not take his eyes off her, just in case, as he asked Lord Varys, “Has there been some change with Lady Olenna?”

“We would have been flocked by little birds if there had,” Lord Varys said softly. “What can she be thinking?”

“She’s thinking that her entire family has been butchered,” Jon said grimly, and Lord Varys winced. Jon sighed, watching the girl. She was perhaps Sansa’s age, just barely. Grief-stricken and overwhelmed, the future of her House and the fate of her family suddenly thrust upon her.

Calmly and quietly, Jon climbed over the side of the walkway, climbing up to the cliff’s edge, his heavy cloak - the one Sansa had made for him, and presented to him the day they left Castle Black - teased by the wind, too heavy to lift. Even he had worn his cloak to see Ser Davos off this morning; that said something about how brutally cold it was - and Lady Alynore stood with her bare arms and a low-cut neckline.

Her grief was horrifying.

Face pale, eyes haunting, a single tear fell as she turned her pale green gaze on him.

More followed, silent, and as painful to witness as a knife to the chest.

“Come away,” he murmured, reaching out, shocked by how cold she was as he reached for her hands and gently gripped her forearms, guiding her away from the cliff’s edge. She swayed, and blinked, dislodging more tears, blinding her - she broke, sobbing, and writhed, twisting away, likely having no idea why she resisted, or who it was she was resisting, but Jon held on, as she struggled and tried to fight, and he pulled her into his body, glad he had worn no gorget as she buried her face in his chest, butting her head against the leather of his brigandine, sobbing, and he released her, only to tug on his cloak and wrap it around them both.

It occurred to him, then…that no-one could had held her in her grief, since discovering her family had been slaughtered. He sighed heavily, and relaxed his hold on her, as she gentled and leaned into him, her sobs quieting to gasps and sniffles, exhausted and overwrought, cold and exhausted. He wrapped his arms around her, and held her for as long as she needed.

Only when she wrapped her arms loosely around his waist did he relinquish his hold - only so he could remove his cloak, and drape it around over her head. He wrapped the folds of it tightly around her: Alynore gazed up at him with damp eyelashes, her cheeks pink and lips shivering from the cold, looking exhausted.

Her lips moved, as if she was trying to speak, and then she whispered - more a moan of grief, of true heartache, “There’s no-one to call me Nora now. No-one who knows me…or c-cares… Everything I was died with them… I don’t know what t-to do. N-no-one taught m-me.”

Jon sighed heavily, staring back into those pale-green eyes, so clear, so gentle and innocent and mournful. “Experience is a brutal teacher.” She closed her eyes, tears trickling down her cheeks, and Jon sighed, tucking her close again. She didn’t want to be told she had the strength to carry on, that she would learn, that everything would be okay: She wanted to be held, and allowed to weep for her dead family, and for the future that had been stolen from her - replaced by one she could never have imagined, and was thoroughly unprepared to embrace.

But she had to.

One day, soon, she would have to.

“Come, let’s get you warmed up by the hearth,” Jon said softly. Lady Alynore leaned against him for a moment, her face entirely drained of vitality. Slowly, half-guiding, half-carrying her, Jon led the way up the pathway. Lord Varys had waited for them: He exchanged one solemn look with Jon, and stepped ahead, setting their pace to a slow but purposeful amble as Lady Alynore sniffled and gradually became more animated, tucking Jon’s heavy, almost suffocatingly-hot cloak around herself. All the way up to the spine-tingling entrance to the fortress, and inside: It always felt cool, walking into Dragonstone - unlike Winterfell, which became as hot as a glasshouse in summer, to Jon’s mind, so used to the brittle cold of the Wall.

But it was no longer silent inside the halls of Dragonstone: The smallfolk were occupying it. And everyone had work to do - Jon, and then the Queen’s Council, had made sure of that.

Most of the Queen’s guests had rooms in the Sea Dragon Tower, including Jon himself: There were fewer bloodriders and Meereenese and far more Ironborn, more Northmen, more indolent-looking Dornishmen in deceptively sensual ochre sandsilks and elaborate longaxes, more knights from the Reach in their velvet-covered armour, etched pauldrons and pikes with long, carved handles, still standing guard outside the doors to the Tyrell suite. Jon rarely saw women from the Reach outside of the Tyrell ladies, and they had all been cloistered away since news of Highgarden - and Lady Olenna’s collapse. Now, a lady’s maid met them in the vestibule of the Tyrell suite, bobbing a dainty curtsy to Jon and gazing anxiously over the state of Lady Alynore, but dared not approach too familiarly.

Alynore was Lady Tyrell, now. Things were different, not just for her: The household that had come to Dragonstone with Lady Olenna had had to adjust itself to the practicalities that among them was the new Lady of Highgarden.

A heavy ebony door carved with scales opened: A continuous scream rent the air, unbelievably loud and so high-pitched only dogs were in danger of being able to hear it.

Jon’s hand went to the hilt of his sword on instinct; he frowned, and strode past the maid, into a pretty drawing-room with a roaring hearth - and an irate septa bellowing and scolding, trying to physically overpower a little girl, who was screaming that piercing shriek and slashing her tiny hands, her face red, her eyes swollen, her cheeks sodden, tiny and overwrought. The other Tyrell cousins were upset by the sight of the septa trying to restrain the youngest of them, and Jon stopped short at the sound of a sharp slap.

The little one went silent, shocked, her cheek reddened from being struck.

“What is the meaning of this?” He didn’t shout: He didn’t need to. He was the only man in the chamber, and his deep voice cut through the noise of the Tyrell cousins’ weeping, begging the septa to stop hurting the little one, and the septa’s scolding. At the sound of his voice, the septa stood ramrod straight, seething, swelling with rage, one hand clenched at her side, the other clamped around the little Tyrell’s arm like a vice. As the shock started to wear off, the little girl started wriggling, and wept silently.

When children cry aloud they do it for attention; when they cry silently, it’s because they can’t help it, murmured Larra in his ear, as Jon took in the septa’s scarlet, fury-filled face, and the tear-streaked, miserable faces of the little Tyrell girls.

There were five of them, not one of them older than thirteen and the youngest just four years old. Their wan faces turned tearfully to Jon as he stood in the doorway, flanked on one side by the lady’s maid, a respectful distance behind, and by Lady Alynore, whose shoulders slumped visibly, a curtain of anguish and exhaustion falling across her face as her little cousins turned to her with entreating expressions.

Jon glared at the septa.

“Septa Veda hit Amna!” one of the younger ones - of middling age, neither the eldest nor the youngest - burst out, puffing up in indignation, and for a heartbeat, Arya stood in the drawing-room in her pretty but serviceable wool dress and perpetually unkempt braids, fiercely righteous. Jon blinked, and the narrow, solemn face and dark eyebrows hovering expressively over intense eyes disappeared, replaced by a gentle beauty. Still dark-haired, like Arya, but her eyes were deep, warm brown and ringed with fine black lashes, her lips small and pretty - already hinting at beauty.

Jon stared down the septa. She had the sense to let go of the child, and lowered her gaze to the fine Qartheen carpet.

The tension in the Queen’s court was nothing compared to the tension simmering in the drawing-room: Jon felt it. And he was reminded of fretful children and uncertainty, dread. He remembered Arya and Sansa squabbling over the prince, over Larra’s new ribbons from Queen Cersei: He remembered Rickon alternately crying and raging - and Larra, still healing, absorbing the role of mother when Lady Catelyn refused to leave Bran’s bedside, abandoning her other children, who were frightened, and anxious, and took it out on each other. Her back still healing from the flogging, and facing down their family’s imminent separation, Larra had somehow found the strength to settle the girls’ squabbles, to warmly and fairly discipline Rickon out of his wrathfulness, gentling him with cuddles and kisses, reaffirming that he was loved, and not abandoned, and support Robb, who knew rule of Winterfell was suddenly to be thrust upon him with Father’s departure, and not break her heart that Jon was leaving her forever.

In those first hours and days after Bran’s fall, and then weeks, Larra had held them all together. Had stopped them turning on each other - or been the balm to mend the wounds created when they did…

Let him wear himself out, Larra said, in his memory. Fresh air’s the best thing for him. Ahead of them, he could see Rickon’s soft blonde hair shining in the sunlight as he and Larra wandered hand-in-hand through the godswood, and their youngest, fraught little brother ran around, throwing stones into the pond by the weirwood, kicking patches of melting snow, fighting at tug-of-war with Shaggydog and a branch that had come down.

His wrath exhausted, Rickon had stumbled back an hour later, leaves in his unruly hair, hands grubby, scuffing the ground with his boot, and shyly and shamefully offered Larra a fistful of flowering heather in apology for hitting her, causing the back of her frock, with its triple-layered panel of linen sewn to protect it, to spot with blood from her still-healing whipping wounds.

Both of them holding his dimpled little hands, they had walked back to the castle, Larra carrying her little posy of flowering heather, sometimes lifting their little brother to swing him between them, laughing softly.

The sudden surge of memory, forgotten until now, caused Jon’s heart to stutter and squeeze painfully.

He turned to the lady’s maid wide-eyed behind him. “Could you fetch the girls’ cloaks?” The maid nodded, dipped courteously, and disappeared in a delicate swish of fine skirts. Emboldened by his presence, and that of their older cousin, the little girls turned to Lady Alynore, beseeching - Jon remembered that look: Sansa and Rickon - and even self-assured Arya and Robb - had looked at Larra that way. With absolute confidence that she knew exactly what to do.

Because, somehow, she always had.

When Lady Catelyn had withdrawn to Bran’s sickbed, Larra had understood better than anyone that Rickon, Arya, Sansa, even Robb, were desperately sore for a mother’s love. It was the first time in their lives that Lady Catelyn had abandoned them. Jon and Larra knew what it meant to go without a mother’s love: Larra had gone out of her way to ensure none of their brothers or sisters had ever felt anything less than loved and cherished.

Jon strode over to the septa, who was rigid, her face bleached of colour in shock and humiliation, but he merely leaned down and scooped up the youngest Tyrell. She was a little dumpling, with dimpled fingers, dove-grey eyes and long hair tangled around her face in bronze waves.

“Let’s go for a walk,” Jon said calmly, speaking to her as her lips quivered and tears welled, and he adjusted her in the crook of his elbow, clamped to his side, “and you can tell me all about it.”

If it wasn’t Larra, it was Jon their younger siblings had always run to - especially Arya, when the unfairness of the world had become too much for her to bear.

“And while we’re all gone, Septa Veda can have a cup of tea and some time to herself,” Jon suggested, glancing at the septa, remembering how hideous his siblings could be at times, and just how good Septa Mordane had always been about them. She had been sharp - but fair, always.

He caught Lady Alynore’s slightly stunned but grateful gaze, as the maid returned, her arms laden with cloaks of varying sizes, each trimmed with velvet and golden-brown fur, and soft suede mittens lined with wool.

“Are we going outside?”

“We all are,” Jon confirmed, as one of the older girls stepped forward, taking a small cloak and draping it over the head of the second-youngest - the one who had spoken up about Septa Veda - who squawked indignantly but was smiling when she resurfaced. The cloaks and mittens were divvied out amongst the girls, the older ones helping fasten elaborate clasps, and Jon tucked the dainty sky-blue cloak around the little girl still cradled in his arm, who was now gazing steadily at him as if uncertain whether she should start crying again or tuck herself against him for a cuddle. Jon glanced at the maid. “I’ll bring them back in an hour or so. Can you see that some soup is sent up for when we return?”

“Yes, Your Grace,” the maid smiled softly. It was always strange to be called that: Even stranger, by southerners. There was an innate sense of deference in southerners: Northerners were respectful, because they knew Jon had earned the title they had given him. Southerners…just knew he was a king and treated him how they thought kings expected to be treated. It was odd. Jon preferred the Northern way of doing things: It was more honest. When his bannermen were irritated by his decisions, he knew about it.

“Stay here,” Jon told Lady Alynore quietly. She was gazing at him as if it was the first time seeing him. “Get warm, and rest a while.” She just gazed at him, and nodded softly.

A little while later, Jon led the Tyrell cousins into Aegon’s Garden.

There were five of them - Tyrells. The eldest was Alyssa, twelve years old and already a lady - very much like Sansa, as she had once been, though there was a sensibleness and patience to Lady Alyssa that Sansa, at the same age, had lacked. Next in age came Poppy, who appeared before Jon in her cloak with a smile on her face still streaked with tear-stains, her blue eyes glittering, and she reached for Jon’s free hand, skipping along beside him as they made their way through the castle.

Poppy was a chatterbox, and reminded Jon so much of Arya in mere moments that it physically pained him. Not that he could show her that: He kept the grimace of grief and longing off his face, desperate to return to those days before their family had been divided. After Poppy came Cassia, who meandered outside, her arms cradling a book.

“What’s that, then?” Jon asked her.

“It’s The Dance of Dragons,” said Cassia, her eyes lighting up. “I’m reading about Baela Targaryen; this is where she bonded with her dragon - and where Moondancer died.”

“I know her,” Jon told Cassia, whose eyes shone with anticipation as she gazed delightedly at her book. “During the Hour of the Wolf, when Lord Cregan Stark wanted to execute her rescuers, she threatened him with a sword. He laughed, and the men lived.”

“Don’t spoil the ending!”

“Sorry,” Jon smiled softly.

“How do you know about Baela Targaryen?”

“My sisters. They liked to read about the Dance of Dragons, too. Baela was a favourite of my sister Arya. And Baela’s father the Rogue Prince was a favourite of my twin-sister, Larra. Him, and the Dragon Knight, who came later. Both wielded Queen Visenya’s sword Dark Sister,” Jon said, sighing.

“Ren wants to be like Baela; I think Ren probably already is like Baela,” Cassia mused, and the second-youngest Tyrell hummed as she ran past, her cloak fastened over her shoulder, dropping a mitten, eager to get outside. Jon smirked subtly at Cassia’s succinct observation.

“Aye, I think you’re right,” he agreed, chuckling softly, as Cassia paused to pick up the mitten. In the crook of his arm, the youngest rosebud, Amna, sucked her thumb, still gazing at him. But she’d at least tucked an arm around his shoulder to hold on as he carried her, and she hadn’t started screaming. Whatever had set her off, he didn’t particularly care: He cared only to remove her from the situation that had seemed like it could only escalate.

Aegon’s Garden was a strange place. There were no weirwoods, but everywhere Jon looked, the plants, trees and shrubs were queer shades of silver, pale-gold, blood-red and purplish-black among the greens, and there were hundreds of different hues and textures of green. Some plants were glossy spikes; wispy grasses glistened like molten gold; there were speckled purple-black bells; and vibrant scarlet dogwoods, the ground carpeted with blooming chickweed; spires of intricate and deceptively delicate orchids; great spears of decadently velvety, frilly blood-red flowers; black calla-lilies; the vivid scarlet ‘Valyrian Paintbrush’… Jon sighed, and set Amna on her feet, to give a wobbly smile, coaxed to join the older girls by Ren, who was already breathless from running around the many flowerbeds, tempted to climb an ancient tree with silver bark and black foliage like obsidian spears, strangled by a purple creeper with delicate flowers of palest lavender.

Cassia peered curiously at one of the flowerbeds. “Shouldn’t it all be dead?”

“It’s the Dragonmont,” Jon told her, sounding far more knowledgeable than he was about the subject. “The volcano heats the earth - and creates the warm fog. It keeps the winter at bay. These are likely the last of the autumn flowers.”

“Did King Stannis plant the garden?” Cassia asked curiously, as she delicately sniffed at a large and ornamental flower with waxy white petals and a crimson throat. Jon startled, staring at her. Stannis, plant a flower-garden? The thought was so absurd it almost made him laugh.

“I don’t think so,” Jon said, his lips twitching. And even Princess Shireen - his hesitant smile faded - would not have been encouraged to come out here to Aegon’s Garden. He frowned thoughtfully. “But this was Prince Rhaegar’s home, before the Rebellion. And he lived here with his wife and children… The Water Gardens of Dorne are famous.” He didn’t mention Highgarden: he didn’t need to.

“It’s prettier than Highgarden,” Cassia said softly, with a wistful sigh. She squinted up at Jon. “It’s more…more. Like it’s exactly as it should be, not pruned and forced to behave.”

“Things have been left to grow as they please,” Jon said. If it had been planted by Prince Rhaegar, the garden was nearly three decades old: It had been left to its own devices, and become established, and because of the microclimate of the volcanic island, and the sheltered garden itself, it had thrived. Aegon’s Garden was spectacular.

And it made Jon’s heart ache, thinking of those who would have adored to be here, to see it.

Here and there, Jon noticed splashes of soft, sunburned ochre - perhaps a nod from Prince Rhaegar to his wife, Elia Martell, taken from the desert-gardens of Dorne and left here on Dragonstone with her babies.

Speaking with Lord Varys earlier…it was easy to forget, because of the personal tragedies that had struck House Stark, that Rickard, Brandon and Lyanna Stark were not the only fatalities of the Rebellion. Prince Rhaegar, who had once lived on Dragonstone, and his wife Elia…their children - little more than babies. Princess Rhaenys had not even been as old as Amna when she was dragged out from under her father’s bed and stabbed half a hundred times…

Jon glanced at Cassia, who dimpled when he offered to carry her book, so she could go exploring among the flowerbeds: He wondered just what atrocities had been committed at Highgarden, whether details would trickle across Westeros to the girls’ ears, whether Lord Varys’ little birds would bring songs of mutilation and rape… Would the Uprooting of Highgarden match the Sack of King’s Landing?

The War of the Five Kings was over: He didn’t know what this war would be called, or whether anyone would be alive to remember it… But if they did survive the Long Night, how would history remember the two Queens as they quarrelled over the ragged, war-torn remains of Westeros in winter?

Laughter drew him from his turbulent thoughts: The girls were playing. They were running around, playing a game of chase: Ren was trying to climb the silver tree. And Jon grimaced and strode forward, but little Amna just pushed herself off the brittle silver-green grass where she had fallen face-first, blinked, startled for a moment, then grinned at the sound of her name being called, and giggled as Alyssa tickled her with a long stem of feathery golden grass she had broken off.

Jon remembered his brothers and sisters, his heart aching just as badly as Lady Olenna’s surely was in her chamber inside the Sea Dragon Tower.

He remembered their play. And, for an hour, maybe a little longer, Jon remembered what it was to be an older brother to younger sisters who loved to play.

Ren made flower-crowns for them all - including Jon, who taught curious Cassia the common Northern and ‘proper’ Valyrian names for some of the flowers, some of which were incredibly rare, a relic of Old Valyria and brought over before the Doom.

“How do you know about flowers?” Poppy asked, genuine curiosity on her face.

“My sister, Larra, she was…she was fond of flowers,” Jon said heavily, sighing, and Poppy exchanged a glance with Cassia.

“Is she dead?” Poppy asked, not unkindly.

“She is,” Jon confirmed, and the two girls exchanged a look.

“Our families are dead, too. That’s why Grandmamma’s heart broke,” Poppy sighed softly, and drifted off to root around under the plants for slugs and snails to torment Alyssa with.

Cassia forgot about her book, happy to chat with Jon as they explored the flowerbeds, and Jon suggested Cassia seek out the maester to ask for books on botany. Alyssa, the eldest, gentlest and steadiest of the five girls, picked armfuls of flowers which Jon had to help trim with his knife, and carried back to the Tyrell suites for her, so she could arrange them in jugs for Grandmamma’s delight, and so the girls could try and paint them - or embroider them, if the blooms lasted. And Amna tripped him up three times, giggling as she wound around his feet like an affectionate kitten, reaching up her little arms, the silent but utterly familiar signal of a little sibling begging to be lifted up and cuddled, as she started to yawn, and the girls’ smiles and pink cheeks and bright eyes signalled that Larra’s medicine was just as effective on dainty little southern ladies as wrathful Northern wolf-boys.

They returned to the Tyrell suite, laughing and happy, relaxed and eager for supper. It wasn’t that Jon was invited to stay for a bowl of soup; it was that he wasn’t actually allowed to leave. The girls had effectively taken him captive with their smiles and eagerness to enjoy their new friend. Forget that he was a king; he had taken them out to the garden and encouraged them to play.

He was surprised when Lady Alynore reappeared, dressed far more warmly, looking as calm and serene as she always had, and joined them at the dining-table. She gave Jon a soft look that was at once graceful and embarrassed, likely thinking back to the state in which Jon had found her. But her smile became indulgent as she listened to the girls telling her all about their playtime in Rhaegar’s Garden, as Cassia had renamed it: They were eager to show her every single flower they had picked for their painting and embroidery lesson, but were stopped by the arrival of their luncheon.

Delicate porcelain dishes had steam drifting from them as each was set in place by a liveried footman in front of the girls, a dozen or so tiny parcels of dough encasing a smooth filling, folded intricately, steaming in each shallow dish: A rich, clear broth was ladled over them, and Ren jigged with anticipation as the glazed tureen came round to her, licking her lips. It was a simple dish, despite being served with such ceremony, the flavours wonderful - the chicken broth, and the creamy four-cheese filling of the tiny parcels. For a moment, there was quiet, and contentedness. Jon watched Lady Alynore’s gentle gaze as she glanced from each of her cousins in turn, their pink cheeks and happy chatter, smiling.

Jon chose to make his goodbyes after the girls had been shuffled off by maids to bathe and dress for bed. “They always change into their nightclothes before their final lesson of the day; embroidery and singing. It’s so much cosier,” Lady Alynore told Jon, her smile soft and sad. “Grandmother started the tradition… Thank you for today. It’s meant the world to them.”

“It…reminded me…of when my family was whole,” Jon told her, and her eyes widened subtly. She nodded, lowering her gaze: hers was not the only family to suffer at the hands of Lannisters. Jon had just had longer to live with it.

Taking the Tyrells to the garden had eaten up several hours of Jon’s time; he found he didn’t mind it. It was a welcome reprieve from the arduous daily routine he forced himself through. At dawn he sparred with weapons; and usually he spent a few hours in the mines, allowing some of the miners to take a welcome break; and after breaking his fast, he dealt with any ravens that were now hand-delivered to him by Maester Mallor, and any other paperwork that accumulated. How he amassed paperwork when this was not his castle, Jon did not understand - until he had gone through the first scrolls and realised that his men were inventorying the obsidian they managed to mine and crate up, ready for shipping. Maester Mallor had been helpful in providing some basic sums to work out the quantity of weapons that could potentially be forged from what they had already mined - how many men they could arm against the Night King’s army.

After looking at the figures, it helped Jon to go into the mine and hit things with a pick-axe, until even his arms, so used to wielding Long Claw, started to ache.

Thinking of Lord Varys’ request, Jon grumbled, and staggered to Dragonstone’s baths. Some were sulphuric, which soothed his aching body; some were cold plunge baths, and others likely had a spring directly from the bowels of Dragonmont, the water bubbled so hot. He immersed himself in the hot water, washing the sweat from his hair, and grumbled that he should probably crop his hair short again - ever since Lady Melisandra had shorn him, he had come to realise just how long and distracting he had allowed his hair to grow out. A male Meereenese attendant bowed courteously when Jon caught his eye, and he came forward; cropped Jon’s hair and beard just a little shorter, neatening him up.

Getting pretty for the Queen, he thought, reminded only too vividly of being sheared and shaved before the King’s arrival at Winterfell. He felt the same sense of queer dread at the idea of attending court tonight: For the sake of potential allies in the Queen’s Council, if not the Queen, Jon would suffer it…and try to hold his tongue. Little annoyed him more than the Queen’s attitude. He was scowling at the prospect of attending court and having to pretend to enjoy the Queen’s entertainers - gymnasts and musicians who made unnerving, alien music, dancers and performing monkeys - as he made his way through the halls, back to the suite of rooms set aside for the Stark host, in a fresh linen shirt and clean breeches, overly hot from the sultry moisture of the baths, and feeling entirely too clean and vulnerable because of it.

“Your Grace,” one of his men stood to attention, his eyes flitting to Jon’s face before focusing on the wall directly opposite him. “You’ve a visitor waiting within.”

Jon groaned, rubbing his face with his hand, exhausted.

Please don’t let it be her, he thought. He wasn’t in the mood to be cornered by the Queen - not when he’d made up his mind to be civil for the sake of her courtiers. She had not yet sought him out, but he wasn’t stupid: She wanted to conquer Westeros, yes - but she wanted to conquer him.

And for all her beauty, and her terrifying dragons, Jon had little to no respect for her.

He did wonder what it might mean - what it might come to - that the Queen desired him.

The Queen was no fool, though: He could not just pretend to fall helplessly in love with her, besotted and amenable to her every whim and desire. She’d see through it: He had to play a very careful, very cautious - very patient game. As long as she was still flirting on that precarious line between lust and wrath, Jon could do as he liked, could challenge her - and withstand every attempt to force him to submit to her without repercussions.

And nor was Jon a fool to believe that her desire to have him as her lover could protect him for much longer. She had come to Westeros to reclaim the Iron Throne - and that meant conquering all seven of the kingdoms. Jon was a diversion; and he stood in the way of her ultimate goal, no matter what she said about freedom and shattering wheels.

It wasn’t the Queen, to Jon’s relief.

To his surprise, it was Lady Alynore.

She sat on the elegant dragon-shaped chaise in front of the hearth, the firelight lovingly caressing her profile as she started to rise from the chaise.

And Jon drew to a stop, staring. Because she…was beautiful. And something had altered in her, in the last few hours since Jon had seen her, Jon could see it. It had little to do with how shiny and soft her hair looked in the firelight, tumbling in waves over her shoulders in a pretty style with soft twists and a delicate bun, or even how understatedly sensual and elegant her gown was, billowing skirts of chiffon so pale a pink they were almost white, pearlescent in the firelight, with sleeves that billowed from shoulder to wrist and trailed on the floor, the shoulders exquisitely embroidered with pale-pink and delicate rose-gold, the entire bodice - loose, with no corseting, Jon couldn’t help but notice, and with a deep neckline that showed the mouth-watering swells of her little breasts - shimmering with the same intricate embroidery of open, evocative roses in palest-pink and rose-gold.

It wasn’t that the firelight made love to her impossibly soft skin, caressing the curves of her breasts. It wasn’t that she looked exquisite and untouchable, with her shimmering hair threaded with delicate white chickweed flowers instead of jewels.

It was that she seemed to radiate a tranquil strength.

There was a softness to her, still, a calmness - but the graceful resilience was utterly captivating.

She looked…absolutely delectable, and that wasn’t a word grim soldier Jon Snow had much call to use.

Beside her on the chaise, a cloak had been tucked into neat, heavy folds. Jon’s cloak. The one Sansa had made for him.

And he understood in that moment why he appreciated Lady Alynore so much more than he ever would Queen Daenerys: Lady Alynore reminded him of Sansa. The impossible elegance, the daintiness and seemingly infinite patience…the prettiness concealing a stern bite of strength and steel. And far cleverer than appearances suggested. Clever - with the wisdom to observe, and keep her own council, rather than blurt out the first thing that popped into her head, or let herself be swept up by emotion.

“Lady Alynore,” he said softly, not hiding his surprise. The door closed stoutly behind him, and he was aware of the crackle of the flames, the soft pattering of a gentle rain, and Lady Alynore’s chest rising and falling quickly - betraying her nerves, even as she stood so serenely.

“I…thought to return your cloak,” Lady Alynore said, glancing down at it, folded on the chaise. “The stitching is very fine.”

“My sister Sansa sewed it for me, when I left Castle Black,” Jon said quietly, not sure why he was telling her that. He watched the young lady, who seemed to be working herself up to something. He frowned gently. “You have not been waiting long?”

“I - Yes, but…I’m quite glad of the reprieve. My cousins are wonderful…but they do consume all my attention,” Lady Alynore said, with a soft wince of guilt. “I… I also wanted to ask you something, before I go to court. It…isn’t something I desire anyone else to learn of.”

“Oh?”

“When you told us about Highgarden…you said that if there was anything you could do for us, we had only to ask,” Lady Alynore said, and somehow, though she hadn’t moved, she stood before Jon, her eyes impossibly green, her gaze shy.

“I did,” Jon confirmed with a murmur.

Lady Alynore took a breath, and swallowed. “What I wish to ask is…is hard for me…and I ask that you not…not give your answer immediately. Because I would like you to think…about all of the implications… And please, do not laugh.”

“I promise,” Jon said solemnly, and Lady Alynore nodded, almost to herself - as if she was talking herself into asking whatever it was. He was curious, more than wary. Lady Alynore was such a serene, perceptive person, and he had noticed that from his earliest days at Dragonstone.

“Highgarden has been sacked; the Reach is in disarray because of our bannermen’s betrayal. And I am the future of my House,” Lady Alynore said, faint lines creasing at the corners of her eyes that hadn’t been there weeks ago, as she winced. “If House Tyrell can reclaim Highgarden…the lords of the Reach will be circling for the blood of my maidenhead…” Jon blinked, caught himself from gaping at her bluntness. “They will take my family’s home, our lands and our wealth as their own. They will erase the name of Tyrell. And I have no men in my family to protect me from the kinds of abuses young wives too often endure when they are friendless and powerless.” She raised her pale-green eyes to Jon’s stormy dark-grey ones. “I’m not like your sister. I have no-one to fight for me. For us. And the bannermen of the Reach will fight over the chance to breed on me, as the key to the Reach. My children will become the true power in the Reach; the lords of the Reach will fight for the right to father them.”

Jon frowned, completely thrown off. “What is it you would ask of me, Lady Alynore?”

Lady Alynore blushed hotly, but raised her eyes to his face, even as she gasped, “A child.” Her hands shook, and she flushed, embarrassed - humiliated, Jon realised, not just uncomfortable; she was absolutely humiliated standing here, asking him to… “I would ask you to father a child.”

He stared. Lady Alynore blushed.

She licked her lips delicately, rubbing her arms, obviously flustered.

“When we return to the Reach, I would return with a child, my heir… The only way to secure the future of my House without yielding it to one of our traitorous bannermen…is to return heavy with a child. My child - a Tyrell,” Lady Alynore said, still pink-cheeked, embarrassed, but determined to hold Jon’s gaze. “As a mother, I can secure the future of my House without surrendering anything.”

Jon bit his tongue. It had cost her to come and ask him this, he understood. A lady, asking him…to stud her.

“As a widow, and mother to an infant, I would be within my rights to refuse marriage - for decades, if I so chose,” Lady Alynore said, clearing her throat delicately. “It…it would provide me with time, to rebuild the Reach…”

“You wish me to father a bastard on you?” Jon clarified, his voice faint, still stunned.

Lady Alynore blushed again. “No…no, not a bastard. The child’s father would be Willas Tyrell…Lord of the Reach, after Lord Mace Tyrell’s death in the Sept of Baelor,” Lady Alynore said. 

“Your cousin,” Jon said quietly, and Lady Alynore nodded sadly. Jon heard her tiny sigh, saw the way her shoulders fell slightly. “But he wasn’t your husband, was he?”

Lady Alynore’s eyes shimmered as she glanced up, and Jon saw just how difficult it was for her to come to him, to ask him this. How much she had truly had to take on, and work through, and set aside to do what was necessary to protect the future of her family. He saw the grief… “No. But there’s no-one now to confirm or deny that our marriage took place…especially if it was in private, while our family was in mourning… My grandmother had decided that Willas and I would marry when we returned to Dragonstone… The intent never became a reality, but…the idea provides opportunity.”

Jon frowned at her, finding her request bizarre and terribly sad at the same time.

“My family has been slaughtered…our bannermen have betrayed us,” Lady Alynore said, her grief tangible as she gazed up at Jon, her eyes shimmering. She gasped softly, tearful, her voice choked as she said, “There’s no-one. I have to do it alone…and this is the only way I could think how… The only way I can… I will not reward oath-breakers with anything but their lives.” Her words became stronger, almost fierce; she drew herself up, elegant and resilient, and Jon would be lying if he said he was not, in that moment, in awe of Lady Tyrell.

Jon stared at her. His bannermen had called for House Karstark and House Umber to be wiped from the pages of history, their castles and holdfasts torn down, their children put to the sword: Jon had rewarded those men with death on the battlefield - and life for their families, in spite of their betrayal.

Did he respect Lady Alynore for her quiet determination, even as he was stunned by her request?

She cleared her throat delicately, glancing up into his eyes, bashful but softly defiant. “Please do not give me your answer tonight. I know…what it may mean to you, my asking you. You are a man of honour, and it goes against your nature to even consider such a thing. Know that I have thought long and hard about this, and do not make this request of you lightly.”

She being Lady Tyrell and Jon the King in the North, she dipped Jon a pretty curtsy and left Jon stunned, listening to the whisper of her skirts against the carpeted stone floor, the sound of the door opening and closing, and the silence broken by crackle of flames, the log spitting embers, and the pattering of rain.

“Seven hells!” he blurted to himself finally, gaping.

War, politics, Jon was fully prepared to do what he had to when it came to battles and court intrigue.

Since arriving at Dragonstone, Lady Alynore’s request was the first thing to unnerve him.

What in seven hells was he supposed to do? He thought of Ser Davos, of Sansa…of Sansa, who had endured everything Lady Alynore dreaded.

Would Jon do what he could to stop such atrocities being committed against the delicate, serene, strong Lady Alynore?

Could he…father a bastard?

It would be Lord Willas Tyrell’s child, he thought, frowning, remembering Lady Alynore’s words. Not a bastard; heir to the Reach. But still Jon’s bastard child.

He didn’t even want to consider the political implications, of the King in the North impregnating the young Lady of the Reach with a bastard - when she was so very young, and suffering such acute grief.

He remembered her quiet resolve as she had gazed up at him. She was no wilting flower, docile and submissive, wringing her hands - she had a steady strength and gentle charisma that was entrancing, and Jon couldn’t deny…he found her very attractive, for all those qualities. So like Sansa, without the sharp bite of a direwolf’s fangs; so like Sansa…before Ramsey, Jon imagined. Quiet, resolute and enduring - surviving the impossible through charm, political savviness and shrewd skills of observation and an unfailing intuition.

Jon drifted to the Queen’s court an hour later, still stunned.

Queen Daenerys looked especially resplendent, all in black, something gauzy, diaphanous and glittering. The sheer black fabric showed tempting glimpses of her nipples, her navel and the tempting shadow at the apex of her thighs. Her hair had been brushed until it gleamed like crushed pearls in the candlelight, twisted and braided away from her face, cascading down her back as she reclined on her favourite chaise mounded with down pillows, luxurious silver furs and soft Qartheen shawls.

Jon couldn’t focus on anything but the shit-storm stirred up inside his own mind. He was focused, not on the Dragon Queen, but on Lady Alynore, in her more modest but utterly sensual gown as she played cyvasse with Nymeria Sand - or rather, he was distracted by Lady Alynore’s request.

He was courteous as he had been taught by strenuous lessons with Septa Mordane on etiquette, letting his gut instincts guide him through fifty tiny courses, fine Essosi wines and entertainments after every tenth course.

Situated beside Lord Tyrion, Jon found himself asking the Hand of the Queen to confirm that he was, indeed, venturing out with the Queen’s armies.

“Indeed, I am,” Lord Tyrion sighed, eyeing the sinuous wine-decanter in front of him with a satisfied smile. On his other side sat his companion Tisseia, who always had a sweet, dimpling smile for Jon, cheerful and sensible as ever - her dark eyes flitted to the Queen, ever watchful, deeply protective of Lord Tyrion.

Jon muttered, “And if you happen to meet your brother on the battlefield?”

“He saved my life, more times than even I know,” Tyrion told Jon, taking a healthy gulp from his wine-glass. Lord Tryion’s shrewd eyes flitted to Daenerys. “I will do what I must to ensure his life. Mayhap the Queen could be convinced to exile her defeated enemies to the Wall and join your brothers.”

“My brothers at Winterfell? Sansa’s last raven told me the Watch has retreated to Winterfell to join with our forces there,” Jon told Lord Tyrion. “She’d send her enemies north to another kingdom she considers to be an aggressor against her claim to the Iron Throne?”

Throughout the interminable meal, which seemed far too much like a celebration of anticipated victory than a farewell, Jon sat grim and thoughtful, unless coaxed into conversation by one of the other ladies of the court. And every now and then, the firelight flickered and caught on Lady Alynore’s palest-pink gown…she was radiant, by all appearances recovered from her embarrassment in Jon’s chamber, charming but quiet and gentle as ever.

Perhaps Daenerys had grown impatient at being ignored: Perhaps she had noticed that Jon’s gaze kept returning to Lady Alynore. Either way, she was peeved. And, to snare Jon’s attention, she provoked an argument.

In the drawing-room, lounging on her favourite chaise, with a glass of clear sparkling wine in her hand and a Meereenese lute-player playing to her, Queen Daenerys spoke up. And when she spoke, the court tended to go silent to listen: She expected to be listened to.

“Since my earliest memories, I have known one thing: The fight to reclaim the Iron Throne. It is mine by blood-right, and I will not be diverted by clever words from men who are so small they cannot conceive of a world I desire to build,” the Queen said, and the comment was intended as a slap in the face, not just to those small men she had come across on her journey to becoming the woman she was, but to her Hand, who was trying his utmost to curb her worst, most volatile instincts. “My Council believes I should use patience and tactic in this war, and outmanoeuvre Cersei, rather than unleash my armies and my dragons. Thus far I have followed their advice. And they have proven only that their combined strategic brilliance amounts to defeated allies. I am losing this war before it has begun.”

She was looking steadily at Jon, though her accusations caused the court to bristle.

Jon sighed heavily. “Cersei drew first blood, is all,” he said, shrugging. “Did you expect your invasion to be a bloodless surrender? People unfurling secret banners, raising toasts to your triumphant return?”

He scolded himself for his flippant tone, taunting her. The Queen looked…startled, staring at Jon. Her lips parted, her eyes glowing purple in the candlelight, and for a moment, she looked horrified - and faraway, lost in memory.

Strangely, for the Queen, she relented, just enough to quietly ask Jon, “What do you think I should do?”

He was too tired for this. Too consumed by thoughts of obsidian, and of pale-green eyes shimmering with tears, and an absurd, tempting request. He rubbed his face, showing just how exhausted he felt; it was far too late in the evening, the Queen’s dinners always extending late into the Hour of the Wolf.

“I think that you helped make something impossible happen when those dragons were hatched. They were born into the world again for a reason… Personally, I don’t believe they were reborn into the world for something as trifling as a human war for a throne…” Jon said, honestly. He sighed, glancing around at the members of Queen Daenerys’ court - the Essosi who had come halfway across the world with her. “Maybe their impossible birth helps the people who follow you believe that you can make more impossibilities become real… You say you want to break the wheel, to destroy those who would oppose people without mercy… As long as you do as you please to get what you want - to sit on the Iron Throne your family built, which created the wheel you say you want to destroy… If you use those dragons to melt castles and burn cities, you’re no different, no better than Cersei or anyone else who came before you. Just more of the same.”

“And this is why you refuse to kneel,” Queen Daenerys prompted, her voice like iron.

“I’ve seen nothing here on Dragonstone to convince me why I should, Your Grace.”

The Queen’s expression turned cold, her posture brittle even as she remained reclined on her chaise. “You came here for your people. Isn’t their survival more important than your pride?”

“Fuck my pride,” Jon bit out, scowling, and he had to bite down on a smile as he thought of a grim ice-bitten cell, a man he respected in shackles, eyes wide at the prospect of being burned alive for refusing to kneel. He addressed Daenerys, finally understanding Mance’s words. “My pride’s the last reason why I will never yield the North. If you can’t understand why I won’t give up the safety and survival of my people to a foreign invader who would enlist them to a cause not their own…there’s no point me wasting my breath trying to explain.”

He sighed heavily, climbing out of his seat. Annoyed by the Queen’s arrogance, bewildered by Lady Alynore’s request, exhausted, Jon nodded courteously to the court. He finally turned to Daenerys, telling her grimly, “I wish you good fortune, Your Grace, in the wars to come.”

Chapter 23: Plucking Feathers

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

23

Plucking Feathers


Meera appeared.

Unlike Larra, she had not shed her furs - she hadn’t had her sister strip them from her and turn the furs over to be burned, the obsidian ring-mail vest turned into…something.

Pale-faced, Meera appeared in the courtyard, looking determined but upset. Larra frowned, lowering her hunting-knife - which she had been giving instruction on using, to a group of boys and girls determined to be legendary warriors like Lord Cregan and the Dragon Knight and Lady Brienne - to watch her approach.

She had been waiting for this for weeks. And she had been hoping it would not happen.

They had faced the Night King’s soldiers together for years. Their journey together had made them sisters. And Larra knew her sister well. They could try and coax Meera to stay; but Winterfell was not her home. She still had family in the Neck, her father… They had sent ravens on their return to Winterfell, but the storms may have taken the birds, or else they could not find the floating crannog-castle, Greywater Watch. Jojen had possessed the greensight, but Lord Howland did not: he would not know that his daughter still lived.

And Meera wanted to go home. She wanted to go home to her family.

“It’s time,” Larra said softly, and Meera paused, then nodded. Larra searched her face, which was pinched. Meera gusted out a breath, and looked stricken with guilt for a heartbeat.

“I don’t want to leave you -“

“You’re the last person who owes explanations, Meera,” Larra said softly. “You want to go home to your father. How could we ever deny you anything? Have you told Bran?”

Meera paused, and her gaze flitted to the entrance to the godswood, the heavy door ajar, soldiers guarding the walkway. Larra didn’t have to see the weirwood to know Brandon sat beneath it in his clever wheeled chair. Meera had come from there; Larra remembered the hurt look on her face as she had entered the courtyard.

“Meera?”

“I… He knew,” Meera said softly. “I - He… Jojen and Summer and Hodor all died…died for him and - “

Larra sighed heavily, frowning. Meera didn’t have to finish her sentence; Larra knew. Bran was not there: Brandon sat in his chair beneath the weirwood. The winged-wolf. The Three-Eyed Raven.

“He was not grateful.”

“I don’t expect anything,” Meera stammered, looking flushed and hot and upset. “All those years together… I just thought he would… I don’t know… I didn’t know whether I should tell you, perhaps you felt the same way.”

Larra pressed her lips together, frowning - annoyed and a little ashamed of her brother’s behaviour.

“I couldn’t bear it if you had just left,” Larra said softly. Bran had disappeared without warning, replaced by Brandon the Broken. For Meera to vanish…

Meera gave her a weak smile. “We had our adventures, didn’t we, you and I?”

“There, and back again,” Larra said softly, with a sad smile, an ember twinkling in the back of her mind, the spark of an idea, of a memory, Maester Luwin talking about titles for the stories she wrote for her siblings. “It sounds like the beginning of one of Old Nan’s fairy-tales.”

“Perhaps you could write it all down,” Meera said quietly, and Larra chuckled softly, shaking her head at the idea.

“I am sorry that Brandon could not give you what you deserve,” Larra said sombrely.

“I don’t know what to say to you. How…how do we possibly say goodbye? When I know what I am leaving you to,” Meera stammered softly, staring at Larra, whose chest ached. For years, they had been fighting side by side, and often back-to-back, to protect their brothers, had become as close as sisters, with a strange, unbreakable bond far stronger than blood…

Larra stared at Meera, with her wan face and tired, shrewd eyes.

After spending years together…how were they supposed to adjust to…to separation? To not having each other to fight back-to-back with, to bolster each other, to calm each other when the night-terrors were too much and make each other smile with memories of better times.

“Perhaps we don’t,” Larra said softly. “How about…one of us rides to the gate…and doesn’t turn back. Even if our heart screams out for just one more look, even if it goes against everything that we are to turn our backs and not know we’re safe… But I’ll know that you not looking back means…that I will love you, always. And it’s time for you to go home.”

Warm tears pooled in her eyes; Meera sniffed, and nodded, and they embraced like the sisters they were, and for a moment neither of them could let go.

And then they did.

And Meera turned, and walked away. She climbed onto her horse, and rode to the gate.

She did not look back.

And Larra stared after her, long after Meera had disappeared from her sight.

A spear-wife took over her instructions: Larra wiped her eyes, frowned, and made her way into the godswood.

There he was. Sat in the wheeled chair beneath the weirwood. The pond was frozen now, a good foot of flawless ice concealed by fresh snow. The only evidence of movement in the godswood were the tracks made by Brandon’s wheeled chair, to and fro, deep grooves compacting the snow from repeated journeys to the weirwood. Sentinels stood guard at the courtyard entrance to the godswood, and another stood with Brandon in his sight just in case.

Larra strode through the snow, frowning as she approached her brother. His eyes were not the milky-white she was so familiar with now: They were small and dark but still faraway, even as she reached out to grab the arms of Brandon’s wheeled chair to turn him sharply away from the weirwood.

Upset by Meera’s departure, knowing it was the last time they would ever see each other, Larra was even more annoyed by Meera’s poor treatment by Brandon, after all they had endured together. She scowled down at the stranger who looked so like her little brother as he raised his bland face to hers, utterly disinterested as she wheeled him around and bent over to meet his eye.

“Now, you listen to me, little brother,” she growled softly, warning, her fury building, ferocious and chilling. Because Meera’s mistreatment was the last straw. “You’re not so powerful now that I’ll tolerate you being foul to those who’ve earned far better from you. The Bran I know would be ashamed to treat his friends so poorly. Is he still there? Or is Bran lost? Because we need Bran. Not Brandon the Broken, some gormless stranger staring into the hearth or the heart-tree, useless and blind to the very real danger bearing down upon us. Bran. Who cared so fiercely about others. Our bright, impish little brother who understood far too much and laughed like a squirrel and would be horrified that he sits back and watches while his family and his people are under threat… We need Bran to help us in this fight. You’re no good to us if you don’t care…and Bran always cared. Even when he was foul, he cared. Is he gone forever, like Robb and Rickon? Because if there is even a whisper of my little brother still in there, he had better start fighting like a starving direwolf for us - as I did for him!”

“Larra,” said a soft, stern voice, and she realised how angry she was as she stepped back, her chest heaving. Sansa strode over to them, looking concerned, elegant as ever in her heavy gown, trapped inside her leather belts, fur-trimmed gloves and cloak, her hair vibrant as the weirwood. Sansa sighed, glancing at Larra. “Meera’s left.”

“Yes. And our brother couldn’t bother himself to give her the goodbye she’s earned,” Larra said, glaring down at Brandon. She frowned, then her eyes widened, her jaw dropping. Her voice was sharp as the blade itself as she blurted, “Where did you get that?!”

A dagger. Eerily exquisite, vicious and spine-tingling to look at - intricately beautiful and lethal. A dragon-bone hilt inlaid with obsidian, gilded steel and a fat ruby, with a wicked, curved blade of Valyrian steel.

The blade that had been intended to slit Bran’s throat so many years ago.

It had cut Lady Catelyn’s fingers to the bone as she fought off the cutthroat, slain by Summer.

That dagger had taken Lady Catelyn to King’s Landing, to enquire after its owner as proof the Lannisters had conspired to kill Bran, somehow linked to the alleged murder the former Hand of the King, Jon Arryn. Lady Catelyn meeting Lord Tyrion Lannister on the King’s Road back to Winterfell had triggered the War of the Five Kings. It all came down to that dagger.

Larra stared, raising wide eyes to meet Sansa’s, as she glided over to peer into Brandon’s lap, where the dagger rested.

“Your mother took that to King’s Landing,” Larra said quietly, filled with dread.

Sansa blinked, understanding blossoming on her face. “The catspaw. After your fall, the cutthroat who attacked you in your bed… This was his dagger?”

“It’s far too fine for a common cutthroat,” Larra said quietly, frowning. “Lady Catelyn suspected one of the Lannisters.”

“It was Joffrey,” Brandon murmured disinterestedly, his eyes following the edges of the blade as his gloved fingertip stroked the steel. “He hoped to impress the man he believed was his father…”

“Joffrey?” Larra blurted, but Sansa did not look surprised.

“He had overheard Robert saying that the life of a cripple was no life at all…that it would be a kindness for the broken boy to die before ever he could wake…” Brandon sighed. “Joffrey took the blade from the royal armoury, gave it to the cutthroat with a bag of silver stags… Littlefinger gave it to me.”

“Littlefinger gave it to you?”

“He is not a generous man; he wouldn’t give you anything if he didn’t think he was getting something in return,” Sansa warned, and Larra ignored the twitch of her fingers to wrap around the hilt of Dark Sister and run it through Lord Petyr Baelish. There was no-one in the North more dangerous to their family than him.

“It matters not why he offered it… It is Valyrian steel,” Brandon said softly, sheathing the blade. He offered it to Larra. “A relic of your family.”

“You’re my family.”

“Aegon I Targaryen commissioned it as a bride-gift for his favourite sister…his favourite wife. Aegon told her to give a sweet kiss of steel to anyone who ever tried to harm her. Rhaenys nicknamed it Sweet Sister… Dark and Sweet are reunited at long last,” Brandon said, his eyes twinkling as they rested briefly on Dark Sister, belted around Larra’s narrow waist. Larra flitted a glance at Sansa. Brandon raised his eyes to her face. “You know the truth…”

Sansa sighed heavily. “About Jon and Larra? Yes.”

“I am glad Larra told you,” Brandon murmured. He raised his fathomless dark eyes from Sansa to Larra. “While I fight my way back, you must trust your own instincts, embrace all you have learned…prepare… We must be ready… It will soon be time, Larra.”

“What does he mean?” Sansa murmured, as Larra frowned at Brandon. He did not mean the Wall, she knew it in her gut… He referenced what Larra had survived the True North to do - what she had learned, the skills taught her by the Children…why she had been called beneath the weirwood, though she had not known until she left it that her training and time with the Children had been just as crucial as Bran’s with Lord Bloodraven.

But she couldn’t. Not yet. She could not go down there, where Father and Robb and Rickon…where her mother waited for her.

Since her return, Larra could not bear to enter the crypt.

And yet, she knew she must.

Not today.

“Where are you going?” Sansa called.

“To pluck a mockingbird!”

Littlefinger wasn’t difficult to find: He was always skulking about wherever Sansa happened to be. Never overtly spying, but close enough to fall into place at the exact moment he saw her vulnerable - when she was flustered, or deep in thought. Anything to startle her into confiding in him, so he could worm his way in, twist Sansa around until she could not tell up from down.

He was dangerous because he was subtle. He kept to the shadows, seemingly benign and endlessly courteous in public, conniving and worm-tongued in private, whispering titbits and veiled threats, poisoning wherever he went.

Lord Petyr Baelish was more a venomous snake than a mockingbird.

She confronted him in the courtyard, talking herself up to being seen to be angry - she was already heightened from Meera’s departure and her shame and annoyance over Brandon’s behaviour - and to allow Littlefinger to verbally best her. He liked to find the words that would cut the deepest, to leave people unnerved and upset - all the better to guide them toward making a mistake.

“You mean to mock my brother by giving him this dagger?”

He looked startled, seeing her bear down upon him - as he should; she was lethal. Dark Sister heavy at her side, Sweet Sister buckled at her belt with Robb’s hunting-knife at her lower-back, she glowered viciously at the snake.

“A gift, my lady,” Littlefinger demurred. “The blade was meant to take his life.”

“I remember,” Larra snapped. “The cutthroat almost succeeded. He wounded Bran’s mother, cut her fingers to the bone as she fought him off.”

“Your brother couldn’t defend himself then… I gave him the blade intended to kill him, that he may now defend himself.”

“He doesn’t need to defend himself, he has me to protect him!” Larra said fiercely.

“As you protected his younger brother?”

Larra let the breath catch in her throat, clenching her jaw.

“A difficult choice, my lady, I know…” Littlefinger murmured, looking obsequious, though his eyes glimmered with subtle malice, enjoying her reaction. Because, though she had anticipated he had an arsenal of vicious words with which to cut her…she wasn’t fully prepared to hear them. To feel them slice through her heart. The first person to say aloud what she had known to be true since she learned Rickon’s fate: She had sent him to his death, and Osha too. Nobody ever mentioned Osha…but Larra could never forget her. The only mother-figure she had ever known… “Ultimately, you made the wrong one. You trusted your brother’s life to your bannermen.”

“They broke their oaths and murdered my brother,” Larra said softly, then shook her head, frowning. “They got what they deserved.”

“And you?” Littlefinger purred, knowing how much pain he was causing. “You chose the cripple over the boy that was whole…”

“I did,” Larra gulped.

“You won’t always be there to protect him. On that day, he will have to protect himself. He’ll be needing that dagger,” Littlefinger said, and Larra just stopped herself from narrowing her eyes. There it was. A subtle double entendre - wise and practical advice concealing a veiled threat. Littlefinger’s dark eyes glided past her, and his thin lips twitched to a deferential smile as he bobbed her a courteous bow - not nearly as low as it would be for Sansa, but then, Sansa was legitimate heiress of Winterfell and the North, and he coveted her: Larra would always be a bastard, and Littlefinger did not forget it. “I meant no offence, my lady, in giving Lord Stark that dagger. A gift. The pledge of House Baelish, to support him, as I did his mother… I see so much of her in your sister. She had no time for you, though, did she?”

“No, she didn’t.”

“It must have been difficult, to return to Winterfell, only to find your sister in your place. Were you not trained from a young age by the maester, joining your brothers at their lessons, that you could rule the North in the stead of Lord Robb?”

“For the King in the North,” Larra corrected him coldly.

“Of course… Lady Catelyn did her daughters no favours in denying them an education.”

“She raised her daughters as noblewomen raise their daughters all over the world. To dance and embroider, to sing and to please, to anticipate their wedding, and hope for strong sons and beautiful daughters,” Larra said stoutly. Defending Lady Catelyn now?!

“But you…the bastard daughter of her husband… She took no interest in your upbringing.”

“I was raised by Father and Maester Luwin,” Larra said, frowning at Littlefinger. If he hoped to provoke a reaction out of her by bringing up Lady Catelyn’s absolute hatred for her and Jon, he had chosen the thing least likely to get under her skin: she had lived with that all her life. Lady Catelyn was dead: The twins she despised and wished dead had protected her children and reclaimed their ancestral home and inheritance for them.

“You had an extraordinary education.”

“Only my gender made my education extraordinary.”

Littlefinger pursed his lips at her interruption. His eyes narrowed, “All those years, that devotion to your studies…all wasted, while your sister takes the only position ever afforded you.”

Larra narrowed her eyes, and gave the mockingbird a weapon for his arsenal to use against her - and Sansa. “If I thought Sansa unworthy of the task, I would take it from her.”

She didn’t: Larra wouldn’t.

Sansa honoured the she-wolves that had come before them, ruling Winterfell fairly and wisely in times of winter and of war.

“I know she will do her best…but when the snows melt, and the North must face the wrath of the Iron Throne… She was so conflicted, when her father was arrested. Loyalty to him; loyalty to the crown… Do you know…it was Lady Sansa who alerted the Queen to her father’s betrayal? Before he could take her from the city, from her betrothed…”

Larra stared coldly.

“Not at all what she had intended, of course, your father’s arrest - she was so young…so naïve… She could have had no idea that the King would take your father’s head… She begged so sweetly for mercy, realising what she had done,” Littlefinger sighed wistfully. “I still remember her on her knees before the Iron Throne…”

Larra stopped herself from shuddering. She felt unclean. As if she would have to scrape layers of slime from her body.

She’d bet he liked to remember Sansa on her knees.

“…how pleased she was, to earn the King’s forgiveness, and sit by his side, his future Queen…” Littlefinger’s gaze strayed to Sansa as she glided around the courtyard, never looking at them but definitely marking them. “It suited her. Lady Sansa was born to be a queen.” He gave Larra another small bow that somehow managed to be disrespectful, his lips twitching. “My lady…”

He turned and walked away, seeking Sansa. Always seeking Sansa.

Leaving Larra furious, her hand twitching for a blade.

A sweet kiss of steel indeed, Larra thought, the obsidian-and-dragonbone handle of the Valyrian steel dagger knocking against her forearm where it was belted at her waist.

She hated him. Hated that he so easily used people’s pain against them. And hated that he lusted after Sansa, thought himself entitled to her…

Hours later, she scowled as she entered the solar - just in case. To keep up the illusion. A clear voice said, “He’s not here,” as the door shut behind her, and she sighed, relaxing. She slumped onto the settle beside her sister; Sansa was sewing, an embroidery hoop in her lap, firelight glimmering off the pearlescent black silk thread, her needle winking silver with each pass through the fabric. Brandon sat in his wheeled chair before the hearth, tucked up in his furs, gazing into the fire. A new circular table had been brought in, set before the hearth, large and low, a replica of Winterfell taking shape as the carpenters finished each piece - every building, recreated as if for miniature dolls to live in. The better to plan fortifications for the war: They had to devise strategies to safeguard the castle if the walls and wards were breached…to manipulate the armies of the dead, instead of being overwhelmed by them… Larra’s weirwood cyvasse piece, with its exquisite scarlet silk leaves, already stood in the godswood.

It had been reclaimed from Sansa’s dressing-table, where she kept it safe, idols to pray to, alongside the personalised cyvasse pieces carved by their brothers.

The broken tower was missing: Larra spied it in Brandon’s pale hands.

“Where have you been?”

“Training, with Lady Brienne. I’m still getting used to the weight of Dark Sister… No-one has yet started fortifying the glasshouses, so I put together a team of apprentices to help the carpenters… I asked the stonemasons about rebuilding the Broken Tower for Bran, to accommodate for his wheelchair. We should rebuild it, even if it’s only a temporary structure - it was the highest watchtower, but it’s still the northernmost. It must be fortified,” Larra sighed heavily, resting her head back, her eyes closed. “And Maester Wolkan took off Ragnar’s arm-cast. He celebrated by teaming up with Little Jon, Karsi’s daughters and a couple of young Thenns to hunt down some of the Ice River children and try and scalp them.”

“Oh,” Sansa said, laughing softly. “You missed supper in the hall. Beef and barley stew. There’s some in the pot on the hearth for you.”

“Thank you,” Larra grumbled, exhausted. Dealing with people created a different kind of exhaustion than trudging through the snows of the True North. And she was starting to anticipate meals again, as a balm for the everyday strain of being a leader to tens of thousands of fraught, frightened people - none of whom liked or trusted each other very much.

There was a soft chuckle from Sansa, the scrape of cast-iron, and soft hands touched Larra’s where she had fallen into a doze on the settle: Sansa handed her a glazed earthenware bowl ladled full of rich, hearty stew, and a spoon. Only when she had finished the last mouthful, using her finger to wipe up the last of the rich gravy, did Sansa prompt her.

“Well?” she asked, as she dipped her slender fingers into another, smaller glazed earthenware bowl. The sound of dozens of tiny rings of obsidian sliding and clicking together was mesmerising, oddly calming.

“He made reference to you on your knees, at which point I just prevented myself from gutting him there and then,” Larra grumbled. Sansa wrinkled her nose.

“Tell me everything,” she said softly, so Larra did, from the moment she had sought out Littlefinger, to his threat.

“If Littlefinger gets his way, Bran won’t long outlive me,” Larra told Sansa. “He’s clever with his words, as if it was meant as a warning of Bran’s vulnerability…but it was a threat. Bran’s the last true-born son of Ned Stark. The only one who could contest you inheriting the North.”

“Jon’s already ensured that I am his legal heir, should anything happen to him. Littlefinger probably squealed with delight when he learned of it. One less thing he has to do,” Sansa said softly, sewing away. “The only reason Littlefinger could have to get rid of you and Bran is to leave me without family, to isolate me - as I was before. Friendless, grief-stricken - easier to dominate me that way, make himself the only one I can turn to for counsel…”

“How much longer must we endure him?” Larra asked darkly. “He lusts after you.”

“And I know it,” Sansa said, with a bite to her words. She sewed away. “Not very much longer. We must let him believe he is creating discord between us, that everything is going exactly as he has predicted it would.”

“He’ll make certain he’s prepared if it doesn’t,” Larra reminded Sansa, who nodded.

“I imagine when you’re hunting, you don’t allow your prey to realise they’re marked for death - if you want to be quick and efficient, not allow their instincts to warn them of the danger and flee,” Sansa mused, and Larra nodded. “That is exactly what we are doing with Littlefinger.”

“Snaring him in a direwolf-trap,” Larra mused, her lips twitching with irony. “What would you like me to do next?”

“What else did Littlefinger tell you?” Larra recounted exactly what Littlefinger had said, about Sansa’s conflicted loyalties, how she had begged for Father’s life when she had realised how naïve she had been…

Sansa was ashamed. It was true, all of it, from a certain perspective: Littlefinger had made Sansa sound a traitor, not a frightened girl.

“You were utterly at their mercy the moment Father learned the truth about Cersei’s bastards,” Larra sighed, and it turned into a yawn she had to stifle, her eyes smarting. It had been a long day. Scolding Little Jon and Ragnar - and the other children - had reminded her so vividly of scolding Rickon and Bran - before his fall - when they were still allowed to be little boys getting into mischief, trying to emulate their older-brothers, almost losing eyes and fingers as they played with one of Theon’s stolen hunting-knives, and given one of Larra’s Northern Long-Haired Snow-Cats a haircut.

“But the truth remains that I did tell Cersei that Father intended to return to Winterfell with us,” Sansa sighed.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Brandon softly, staring into the fire. “Many plans were in motion the moment Father arrived in King’s Landing, seeking the truth of Jon Arryn’s death. If they had not snatched Father then, Cersei would have invented any of a dozen other falsehoods to charge against him.”

“I know what we do next,” Larra said, sitting up a little straighter, frowning.

“What?”

“Littlefinger wants me to believe you’re a traitor,” Larra said, glancing at Sansa. In the firelight, her blue eyes glowed, her hands pale and elegant as she deftly sewed. “I must unearth evidence of your treachery.”

“You wish to fabricate something?” Sansa frowned.

“I don’t need to.”

Sansa looked unnerved, her eyes widening. Larra smiled softly, though her eyes were grim and sad. “Everything comes down to context, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Good. I want you worried, so your reaction is genuine when I attack you.”

“Larra.”

“He knows you too well. He’ll be able to tell if you’re putting it on,” Larra reminded Sansa.

“Very well,” Sansa relented, frowning at Larra, as if trying to figure out just what hideousness Larra could unearth that would incriminate her.

There was a soft knock on the door to the solar. “Maester Wolkan, my ladies, my lord.”

“Oh, am I a lady now?”

“Not sprawled like that, you’re not,” Sansa chided, and Larra smirked, sitting up straighter, though her leather-clad legs were still stretched out before her, ankles crossed. “Come in!” The tall and rather timid maester appeared, bowing his head so that his great chain of office clinked and shone in the firelight.

“A raven, my lady,” Maester Wolkan said, addressing Sansa but nodding respectfully to Larra, whose position was still ambiguous, and to Brandon. “Highgarden has been sacked. The only Tyrells to survive were those who had journeyed to Dragonstone, guests of Queen Daenerys Targaryen.”

“Lady Olenna?”

“One among the survivors. With the new Lady Tyrell, a young woman named Alynore…and, it is reported, five girls under the age of thirteen,” Maester Wolkan said grimly.

“Growing strong…” Larra said softly, shaking her head and sighing. “I’ll give it to Cersei; she is brutally efficient. First the Sept of Baelor…now the breadbasket of Westeros. She’s rid King’s Landing of the Faith Militant’s chokehold, and seized control of the Reach to feed the masses who suffered under the Sparrows. One wonders how she’ll use Daenerys’ invasion to solidify the people’s love for her.”

“She’s spent twenty years learning how best to play this game,” Sansa said grimly. “This Dragon Queen from Essos will not have faced anything like Cersei before.”

“No, she hasn’t,” Larra agreed, with a heavy sigh.

“Thank you, Maester Wolkan,” Sansa murmured.

Larra glanced up. “Maester Wolkan…might I accompany you back to the Maester’s Tower? I’m in need of your assistance,” Larra said.

“Of course, my lady,” Maester Wolkan bowed his head deferentially, though he sounded surprised. Groaning, Larra unfolded from the settle, her bones aching, and stretched luxuriously, rubbing her face. She dipped to kiss Sansa’s cheek, and rumple Brandon’s hair as she passed, and the maester bowed to Sansa before retreating after Larra. It was cooler, outside of the solar - which Sansa preferred to keep warm - much more comfortable for Larra, who found herself more animated away from the lulling fire.

She had not returned to the Maester’s Tower - Maester Luwin’s tower - since her return. It was less terrifying than heading into the crypt, but not by much: Maester Luwin haunted the tower, and she felt his presence as she climbed the staircase. Some of her earliest memories were struggling with the hems of her dresses as she climbed the spiral staircase, and the crinkled face of Maester Luwin, creased into a smile of warmth and indulgence as she managed to reach the topmost stair, spilling over the threshold in a tangle of limbs and long braids and hated hems. He always heard her climbing the stairs, even when she had been older. And he had always met her with a warm smile full of love and affection lighting up his lined face. Always.

A fissure appeared in her heart - what little remained of it that was still unblemished through all she had endured - as she paused on the threshold, then pushed the door open. At the hearth was a familiar chair, high-backed, engraved with direwolves…and beside it, a small rocking-chair with an embroidered cushion and a little padded footstool. Larra’s. Maester Luwin had had them made: Larra had spent so much time in the Tower, often she had curled up on the stones in front of the hearth and dozed, cuddling one of her snow-cats or dolls, soothed by the scratching of Maester Luwin’s quill. Sometimes she would feed the ravens for Maester Luwin; sometimes she would read through the raven-scrolls and sort them; other times, especially as a child, she had climbed into Maester Luwin’s lap, and he would let her read to him. He gave her the rarest of things - cuddles, and praise. Undiluted affection, love. He had cherished their time together, taken great pride in her every accomplishment, nurtured her curiosity, taught her the skills to indulge her interests, and sometimes…sometimes they had sat before a small fire, and he had held her hand and let her sniffle and cry over the unfairness of it all.

And there…there on the mantelpiece…a small, octagonal walnut box, the lid inlaid, the sides beautifully engraved. It had belonged to Maester Luwin’s mother: And in it, he had always kept biscuits. Some of them dimpled with jam; others iced; some sprinkled with spices; some studded with exotic nuts. His one indulgence, Father had always said: Maester Luwin had earned every morsel. As a little girl, the worst of Larra’s wounds could be healed by time spent in front of the hearth, with Maester Luwin listening to even the most trivial of her hurts, and he would hold her hand, give her a reassuring smile, brush her curls away from her face, and let her choose a little biscuit from the precious box. The biscuits were a treat: But it was the maester’s attention and love that Larra always came back for.

She could imagine the Maester’s heartbroken delight at her return, with Bran safe and sound…and that made it hurt all the more - because he should be here. Like Rickon, like Hodor, like Osha, and so many others…

Larra sniffed and cleared her throat, her fingers twitching to feel the engravings carved into the back of the rocking-chair, to reach for the biscuit-box, aching to hear the soft voice say, “Larra,” softly, sighing, and the gentle smile of encouragement to pour it all out to him, all her worries and woes.

“Will you be wanting the chests, my lady?” Maester Wolkan asked, and Larra glanced at him, startled.

“Chests?”

“Yes, my lady…in storage,” Maester Wolkan said. “When first I took up residence in the Tower I discovered one of the storage-rooms filled with chests…it was there I found the previous maester’s progresses, written to document your education.”

Larra blinked. Stared at the maester. He seemed unsettled by her unwavering focus - far too afraid to be noticed, after years at the Dreadfort.

“I… That’s not… Please show me,” she said softly. And the maester guided her to one of the storage-rooms high in the tower, furniture draped with dust-sheets, and great trunks neatly arranged on top of each other, neat stacks of them. There were other things, too, propped against the trunks and the walls, draped with a cloth. Just in front of her, the dust-cloth not quite in place over it, was another trunk, this one smaller than any of the others, and Larra fell to her knees in front of it, tearing away the dust-cloth, her heart seizing, feeling as if she may vomit as sudden dizziness washed over her, grief so thick she could taste it in her mouth. The trunk was of a rich, dark-gold wood, polished to a high shine, plain, except for the twin direwolves carved on each panel, and the hinged lid, which had been upholstered with silk, the dove-grey fabric embroidered prettily with her name, and her favourite flowers and animals - even a beautiful bronze-and-jade dragon from her dreams Larra now knew to be Rhaegal. It was intricate, and the incredibly beautiful fabric and the silk embroidery threads had come all the way from Qarth - a name-day gift from Lord Manderly.

She dove to her knees before her trunk, snatching the lid open. She lifted a heavy, soft, pale-grey blanket scattered with dried lavender from the top, and her eyes burned, and she sighed, “Oh, Maester Luwin…”

Inside were her passion-projects. The wooden toys and puzzle-mazes and spinning-tops she had carved and created; the dolls she had stuffed and stitched and made miniature frocks for, toy animals she had knitted; the toys she had created with Maester Luwin’s help to coax Rickon to learn his letters and numbers; envelopes full of seeds she had gathered at the end of summer; her favourite earthenware mug she had thrown on the potter’s wheel and glazed herself; a skein of yarn she had dyed herself and never had the time to knit with; and the intricate shawl she had knitted, fine and delicately patterned, slate-grey and white and dove-grey; her inkstone set, and her paint-box and the brushes Maester Luwin had taught her how to make; the crude dagger Mikken had tutored her to make, after much wheedling to let her into the forge; and a neat pile of books Maester Luwin had helped her bind together after she had completed each illustration and instalment of one of her stories or histories or biographies. A dozen of them, each book-cover bound in dyed leather that she had learned to emboss herself, each thick page preserving her vibrant watercolour illustrations, and the stories she had dreamed up to entertain her siblings. There were charcoal sketches, too…and, tucked into a neat pile and bound together by a length of deep purple silk-velvet ribbon…

Larra’s hand shook as she reached for them, picked them up, rested the small but heavy pile in her lap. Portraits. She had mixed the oil-paints herself, from pigments gifted her by Lord Manderly - and Father, when Maester Luwin had advised him that Larra be taught to paint to exorcise the subjects of her queer dreams. She had spent meticulous hours painting layer after layer, waiting for each to dry before adding and removing, altering… Portraits of those she loved…and even one of the woman who had loathed her…

All of them.

Her hand paused as she reached to pull on the ribbon. But she couldn’t do it. Instead, she tucked the pile back into the trunk, turning to the things propped against the other trunks, the walls… She removed the dust-clothes, and knew… Her paintings. All of them. Stored here by Maester Luwin. She couldn’t bear to look through them: It was enough to know they were here. That they had not been burned, protected by their presence in the Maester’s Tower - though they had lived in her chamber. She had thought all that remained of her presence in the castle was the mobile by her window, displaying odd trinkets she had accumulated, and which had kept Rickon absorbed as he sat in her lap, listening to her read.

She tucked everything back inside the trunk. She had made everything, including the trunk itself. Maester Luwin had preserved it - preserved everything she had ever made…as if it was precious.

“Thank you for showing me these, Maester Wolkan,” Larra said, and even to herself, her voice sounded hollow, exhausted - devoid of emotion. “In the morning, would you see to it that these trunks are removed to my chamber?”

“Of course, my lady,” Maester Wolkan nodded.

“As to the matter I wished to ask for your help with,” Larra said, sighing, her back burning as if the trunks glared at her, refusing to be ignored. “I seek a raven-scroll.”

“Maester Luwin kept meticulous files, my lady; everything organised by point of origin and date of receipt,” Maester Wolkan informed her.

“I seek a scroll written by my sister,” Larra told him, and Maester Wolkan faltered. “You shall know which scroll I mean, for if you are the man I believe you are, you will be anxious about what I intend to do with it. It was addressed to my brother Robb.”

It didn’t take the maester long to find the scroll, and he did look agitated when he returned to Larra, offering the scroll she remembered so well.

The next day, she was out-of-doors but for mealtimes: When she went to wash her face and hands before dinner in the great hall, she found the trunks from the Maester’s Tower neatly stacked inside her chamber, with the smallest - the one with the padded, upholstered lid with her name embroidered on it, tucked by her rocking-chair under the window. Perhaps Maester Wolkan was more observant than Larra realised: the biscuit-box rested on a small occasional table beside the rocking-chair, and across the hearth was the rocking-chair of her youth, with its embroidered cushion and tiny footstool.

She had kept the scroll on her all day, tucked safely away. Now she went to her trunk, and removed the pile of small portraits, unfastening the knotted ribbon. She did not look at the portraits themselves, her heart stuttering, but rather sought one in particular. The woman who had loathed her: Larra had not had the time to finish the painting before her sisters had left for King’s Landing. It was supposed to be a gift, to take with them…

Before heading down to the great hall, she entered the Lord’s chamber - set aside by Jon for Sansa: The candles were not lit, nor was the fire, though fresh wood rested, ready to be kindled for a fire should the lady desire it… There was a dressing-table, littered with fine porcelain pots and glass bottles, hair-pins and combs and a fine horsehair brush. Sansa’s nightgown was already laid out across the end of the large bed, newly made, the headboard engraved with direwolves, and laden with soft knitted blankets in grey and white, a patchwork quilt, linens trimmed with crochet, glistening silver furs.

Larra frowned at the portrait. It was small, but detailed. She had had to use her imagination, and think how it might have been to have Lady Catelyn smile at her with love pouring from her eyes, her hard, thin, sour mouth turned up at the corners in a gentle, coaxing smile full of encouragement and pride… She had painted Lady Catelyn for her daughters, as her daughters had known her. Otherwise, Larra would never have deigned to immortalise the malicious cunt who had wanted them dead since she arrived at Winterfell to find them in the nursery…

In her heart, Larra knew she would have slit Lady Catelyn’s throat herself if it meant saving Robb’s life, or Sansa’s, or Arya’s, or Bran or Rickon. But she had been their mother. No matter how she had treated Larra and Jon, she had loved her children with a ferocity that might have broken Larra to be deprived of, had Lady Catelyn’s malice not cured Larra of any yearning for her approval, had Larra grown up to have any respect for the woman. She hadn’t; Larra had no respect even for the memory of Lady Catelyn. But Larra loved her sisters. For Sansa, for Arya, she had painted their mother, to take with them to King’s Landing… Now, she nestled the small painting on Sansa’s dressing-table, propped against the looking-glass.

Sansa would find it, and no doubt be distraught by its presence, and her memories…but it was Larra’s apology, for picking this fight with her tonight. For saying horrendous things to provoke her, and let Littlefinger believe they were turning on each other.

Who, better than sisters, knew how to truly hurt each other?


The great hall was packed with people, the heat smothering, the scent of supper rich and heady, and Larra hated the heat as she took her seat beside Sansa at the high table, the hearth roaring with a great blaze at their backs.

She reached for an earthenware jug and poured herself a healthy mug of dark stout, as a maid set a woven basket full of small bread rolls still warm from the ovens and covered by a fine linen napkin in front of her; a tureen of stew already rested, steaming, in front of Sansa, the ladle propped inside to serve herself, while serving-girls made the rounds, doling portions of stew to everyone else. It was a symbol of their status, the tureen left with the ladle, to serve themselves more if they so chose. Larra reached and ladled herself some stew, and finished half of it before reaching out and setting the raven-scroll on the polished oak table between them. She was acutely aware that Littlefinger sat on Sansa’s other side, beyond Lord Royce, who had been invited to dine at the high table.

“What’s that?”

“You’re sitting exactly where Robb was when he first read that scroll…his traitorous sister, summoning him to King’s Landing - to his death.”

Sansa blinked, taken aback. Her eyes flitted to the scroll, and she frowned delicately before reaching for the scroll. Her face fell, her chest rising and falling quickly, as she read the scroll.

“I was forced to write - “

“Did they hold a sword over your neck? Threaten you with torture? No… The worst thing they ever did to you was marry you to the Imp… You knew what would happen when Robb received that scroll. Our fierce, honourable brother. He would come to King’s Landing and swear fealty to King Joffrey to protect you, to save Father,” Larra said coldly, and she saw Sansa gulp. It had to be real, they had decided. “Only he didn’t. He learned his lesson from our grandfather: Never go south on the summons of a king - not without an army.”

“He started a war,” Sansa said curtly. “Joffrey punished me for it; he could have killed me whenever he wished.”

“He didn’t… And now he is dead. And Cersei sits upon the Iron Throne… A curious thing. All those years with Cersei, her little pet, her little dove…” Larra emulated every look Lady Catelyn had ever given her as she sneered at Sansa. “Her children are dead, she sits upon the Iron Throne…and you sit beside the King in the North. A bastard who took your blood-right, your legitimate inheritance, your place as heir to the North.”

“Jon earned his crown.”

“Did he? He abandoned his post at the Wall; that makes him an oath-breaker… He won a battle. Does that make him a king? And you let him go south to be snared in the clutches of the Dragon Queen’s talons… What better way to get Jon out of the way than allow someone else to do it for you?” Larra said, hostile, her eyes narrowed. “The same way you were spirited away when Joffrey was assassinated. I wonder…whether you and Cersei conspired together to kill him, to place her on the Iron Throne…whether she has chosen her successor, her protégé, her little dove, the only one capable of bringing the North back under the control of the Iron Throne. Take the North…and one day, take the Iron Throne.”

“That’s absurd.”

“Cersei ordered her Master of Coin to spirit you away from King’s Landing… And here he remains, advising you…the Queen’s ambassador, your mentor… It all began with this letter, I suppose… It determined the fate of our House, tore the ragged remains of our family asunder…left us vulnerable, an open wound… All so you would be queen.”

“You’re…you’re confused, paranoid. Jealous,” Sansa said, looking flustered. “That I reclaimed Winterfell, and united the North with Jon. Not you. Me.”

“After you betrayed it. Betrayed your House, betrayed the North. You betrayed your family, led them to their deaths,” Larra said harshly, and Sansa blanched.

“I did what I had to do to survive.”

“Worked well, didn’t it,” Larra said tartly. “Everyone else is dead, and yet here you are, sitting pretty ruling the North, sowing dissent among Jon’s bannermen while he risks his life to secure weapons and allies.”

“You’re ridiculous.”

“Am I? All you’ve ever wanted was to be a queen. Perhaps you did murder Joffrey after all. Convenient they pinned it on your husband, Queen Cersei’s own despised brother. She turned on him…” Larra said softly, dangerous. “You tried to lure Robb south to his death. What a grand conspiracy. Both of you walked away with your hands clean… How long before you convince the Northmen that you are the only legitimate choice as Northern sovereign.”

“I will do my duty to the North. To Winterfell.”

“To House Stark. And we both know Jon’s not a Stark.”

She finished her stew. Did not make her apologies or excuses as she pushed away from the table, and strode away. Didn’t have to look back to feel Littlefinger’s smug little smile as Sansa stared, and Lord Royce lowered his eyes to his stew, delicately ignoring the vicious argument between sisters.

It wasn’t his place to make judgements…from what he had seen of Lady Sansa, she was a capable and devoted leader. The bastard sister was ferocious, but playful, wise and kind too, inspiring smiles and loyalty - and lust - wherever she went, unafraid to talk to anyone, or give her time freely to those who desired it. Lord Royce wondered whether Littlefinger wasn’t behind this spat: The sisters had been seen together, and though Lady Stark was elegant and aloof, and the bastard was wild, vibrant and chilling, they seemed to warm each other.

In that moment, Lord Royce was the more discerning of the two men: He had grown up with Ned Stark, after all, at the Eyrie, fostered with Jon Arryn. He had warred bedside Ned Stark, who had fought like a direwolf possessed to avenge his father and brother, to rescue his younger sister… Lord Royce knew that nothing came between Stark siblings. Even if one was denied the name.


“Where on earth did she find it?”

“You’re asking the wrong question,” Littlefinger murmured, sliding a cunning glance at Sansa. “Not where…why? She’s your sister. Half-sister. You know her far better than I ever could.” He was silent for a moment, as Sansa frowned, pressing her fingers to her brow. “What do you think she wants?”

Sansa stared at him, as if uncertain, confused. He gave her a soft look, as if he sympathised with her struggle to understand the finer points of political intrigue. Softly, he told her the secret that had made him Littlefinger: “Sometimes, when I try to understand a person’s motives, I play a little game. I assume the worst. What’s the worst reason they could possibly have for saying what they say and doing what they do? Then I ask myself, how well does that reason explain what they say, and what they do? So, tell me…what’s the worst thing she could want?”

“She could want me dead…because she thinks I betrayed my family, and caused their deaths, conspired with our enemies, because she thinks…I’m a threat to Jon…”

“Could she murder her own sister?”

“Half-sister. If it came down to it, me or Jon… She would not hesitate to protect Jon.”

“Why did she unearth the letter Cersei made you write?”

“To provide proof of my betrayals… To provide justification after she murders me.”

“And…after she murders you…what does she become?”

“Lady of Winterfell. Jon’s heir… Heir to Winterfell… Queen in the North. Everything my mother always feared… And she was right to!” Sansa gasped, her eyes widening.

“She said something interesting to me, that day in the courtyard, when I gifted Lord Stark that priceless Valyrian steel dagger…that if she thought for a moment you were unequal to the task of ruling the North…she would take it from you.”

Sansa’s lips parted, seemingly stunned.

“She would not be so bold.”

“She has been beyond the Wall for years. Those savages live by no laws made by men,” Littlefinger muttered. “She has forgotten her true place in the world. Her brother may have been named King…but he can be unnamed…and regardless, she remains what she has always been. A bastard girl from the North with ideas beyond her station, too foolish not to accept offers of marriage to provide herself with comfort and wealth that would otherwise be denied her. She has her sights set on a greater prize.”

She slumped slightly in her carved chair.

“Winterfell. Ruling the North, with Jon,” Sansa murmured, her eyelashes fluttering as her gaze darted about the hall, long shadows stretching to the high, hammer-beam ceiling. “She would…would take Winterfell as the home my mother always denied them, cast me out or murder me as my mother wished to do to them… This is her revenge, for my mother’s mistreatment…for my disdain toward them… Larra never forgot anything.”

“What you next have to ask yourself…what must I do, to anticipate their treachery, and evade blame while they sabotage themselves in their desperation to ruin me?” Littlefinger murmured, and Sansa stared at him, her lips parted.

“I…I must act quickly - before…before Jon returns. Before she can gain a hold over the bannermen,” Sansa stammered, licking her lips daintily. “She always held them captivated. They adored her.”

“They lust after her,” Littlefinger corrected. “She is a very beautiful woman. And she has denied them.” His eyes glowed, as he murmured, “There is nothing so exquisite, so attractive, as what has been denied you. And to finally claim it…that is excruciating ecstasy.”

Sansa shivered, glancing at the man. His eyes were dark, glittering in the firelight, and she knew what he was inferring. That claiming her would be an exquisite agony.

“What do you think I should do?” she breathed, leaning toward him, her expression conflicted.

“Make it public,” he advised silkily. “Make it irrefutable. You are the daughter of Ned Stark. Call upon your honour as a daughter of the North, the eldest, only surviving true-born daughter of their beloved liege-lord… Make it just…and inescapable.”

“What about Jon?”

“The King has had to make many hard decisions on his journey back to Winterfell, which he only fought to reclaim because of you… I imagine there is little he would not do for you,” Littlefinger said. “He loves you. To see his twin maddened by all that happened to her beyond the Wall, threatening you, a danger to all the North is rebuilding… He would not blame you, for protecting yourself in his absence…”

“Then…I know what I must do,” Sansa breathed, her hands shaking.

“Good,” Littlefinger said, and he smiled softly. “But you needn’t do it tonight. Rest. You must make arrangements. But your half-sister is dangerous; if I were you, I would take precaution not to be alone in her presence. It may be wise to confine her, for your protection.”

“She would know…she would know I distrust her,” Sansa said, her eyes widening. “She escaped Winterfell once, and none knows how... She survived the True North with a cripple, when it would seem to be impossible…”

“That’s interesting…”

“What is?”

“The twin-sister of the bastard who has claimed the North as his own survived, beyond the Wall, with a cripple and a simpleton, while even the fiercest wildlings have fled?” Littlefinger mused, sliding her a calculating look. “More likely, Jon was indeed protecting them…and now that he has claimed the North for himself, there are only two who could take it from him…”

“Brandon…and me,” Sansa breathed.

“If I were you, I would probe a little deeper into where your brother was, beyond the Wall,” Littlefinger suggested. “Is he as you remember?”

“No, he is…he is altered.”

“As you were altered during your captivity…”

“You think Larra kept Bran captive?”

“The last true-born son of Ned Stark - and a cripple, least likely to grow to wield a sword against them,” Littlefinger said, shrugging slightly. “Being utterly vulnerable to her for so many years, his fear of her would explain his silence…his yearning to sit beneath the weirwood, in the open space and fresh air…a welcome reprieve from captivity.”

“But why would Jon leave me at Winterfell…? Because he knew Larra was on her journey home,” Sansa murmured, and Littlefinger nodded slightly.

“And if you and your brother were to die tragically, for example…during a siege…”

“You think Jon has been conspiring with Larra this whole time?”

“I think the timing is suspect. And I think Jon Snow is taking his time on Dragonstone, not for obsidian… They say the Dragon Queen is very beautiful.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Daenerys Targaryen is young and unmarried. Jon Snow is young and unmarried. A political alliance between them would make them a formidable pair…would grant Jon certain protections…”

“Jon would not surrender the Northern crown to a Targaryen invader!” Sansa breathed, eyes widening.

“There are many different ways to yield, without surrendering anything,” Littlefinger said. “One thing at a time. For now…the sister is a danger to you.”

“I cannot let her know that I have discovered her intentions,” Sansa said softly.

“Then…I would not prolong the inevitable,” Littlefinger sighed, as if saddened by the whole thing. “The risk you pose yourself by letting her roam unfettered around this castle…”

“I will be clever about it,” Sansa said determinedly, “so that she does not know she is in a trap until it is too late.”

“You’re learning.”


The Tyrell rooms were warm, and cosy, as if they had brought the warmth and elegance of Highgarden with them. Jon couldn’t imagine Queen Selyse paying much attention to soft furnishings intended to give comfort; she had lacked taste. But the Tyrell rooms had been decorated, fit for Ladies of the Reach, and Lady Olenna’s chamber was elegant, definitely expensive, but far simpler than Jon would have expected. A dressing-table, a chaise, and the great four-poster bed in which Lady Olenna rested, propped up by pillows and cushions.

She wore a nightgown and a heavy jacquard robe, and Jon was startled to see her without her crespine or wimple, her iron-grey hair braided over her shoulder. Her small, pale eyes lanced to Jon as he entered the chamber, and a maid bobbed a curtsy, setting an exquisite Qartheen tea-service on a little table by the bed, while a servant carried a chair to her bedside.

“Do forgive me, Your Grace… You must allow for age and infirmity, or I should curtsy before you,” said the Queen of Thorns.

“I would not expect it of you, my lady,” Jon said, sighing softly, and he strode over to the old lady’s bedside. As he sat, he frowned, eyeing the Queen of Thorns shrewdly; she winced, as she adjusted her position against the mound of cushions. She looked pale, but healthier than the last time he had seen her - certainly more animated. There was an ironic glint in her eyes that spoke of her continued recovery: Only when the Queen of Thorns ran out of barbs would they truly be worried. “I hope you’re not putting yourself in discomfort on my account.”

“Hmph,” Lady Olenna scoffed, smirking. “I’m an old woman, Your Grace. Discomfort comes with the territory.”

“The maester is doing all he can to ease your symptoms?”

“Oh, he pressed milk-of-the-poppy. If I could get through multiple childbirths and the massacre of my House without resorting to its numbing effects, a slight heart-ache will not do it,” Lady Olenna said brusquely. “I feel much better.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” Jon said earnestly. “The girls have been telling me that you’re getting stronger, terrorising the servants with renewed vigour.”

“’Terrorising servants with renewed vigour’ - that was Cassia, wasn’t it?” Lady Olenna guessed, her lips twitching with amusement, and Jon smiled.

“She’s fond of words,” he said; every morning, he saw the little girls walking - unchaperoned - to Rhaegar’s Garden, as they had renamed it. He could hear their squeals of delight, their laughter, and was glad of it.

“There is nothing quite as cutting - and amusing - as a child’s candour,” Lady Olenna smiled. “You’ll always get an honest answer from them, no matter how terrible it is.”

“I remember,” Jon nodded, thinking of Arya. “My little sister had to be taught to soften absolute honesty with kindness. She was a fierce advocate of truth.”

“No matter how terrible,” Lady Olenna said, chuckling softly, but the smile faded as she gazed at Jon. “Lady Sansa once mentioned to Margaery her wild little sister. Arya. That was her name. Lady Sansa said she had always wished to have sisters and cousins like Margaery’s - little ladies who loved dancing and embroidery… How she must have ached for her fierce sister, surrounded by my dainty little granddaughters… One never truly appreciates the value of a thing, until it is ripped away.”

Jon didn’t know what to say: He remained silent. His father had never said much, and yet people had somehow always been eager to confide in him. They had trusted him.

“Will you have some tea, Your Grace?” Lady Olenna asked. “If you would be so kind, I dislike a strong brew; pour mine first.”

“Of course, my lady,” Jon said softly, thinking back to preparing the Lord Commander’s hot spiced wine at the Wall. Quiet and amenable, but watchful, learning. He had learned how to be a leader through Lord Commander Mormont’s example - exactly as the Lord Commander had intended. He reached for a delicate, painted porcelain teapot and a rose-filigree-handled tea-strainer, pouring a cup of amber liquid for Lady Olenna. The earthy scent of black tea mingled with a delicate hint of citrus teased Jon’s nose, invigorating and bright. He passed the lady her teacup and painted saucer, and poured himself a cup.

“That’s very delicate,” he said thoughtfully, his stomach aching, feeling decidedly morose, as he thought of Sansa, and of Larra - who had hated southern teas because they were so heavy with bergamot. He sipped the tea; it was delicate, and comforting. “Sansa would adore that.”

“She was fond of citrus, I recall,” Lady Olenna said. “Not many citrus trees at Winterfell.”

“Not many.”

“But a very grand godswood, allegedly. Ten-thousand years untouched by Man,” Lady Olenna said, and Jon glanced at her, nodding. “My granddaughters have spoken of nothing but their time in the garden with the King. You’ve quite ensnared their darling little hearts.”

“They’re sweet girls,” Jon said fondly.

“You are a grim warrior, and even more introverted king. It is easy to forget, given your nature, that you were once a young boy in the schoolroom with your siblings,” Lady Olenna said thoughtfully, eyeing Jon shrewdly. “That you are an older-brother to sisters. I was reminded of it in your kindness toward my granddaughters. It is easy to be cruel; but to be gentle, and patient, and compassionate…that takes some doing. I imagine your sisters found you the gentlest and most thoughtful of their brothers.”

“They remind me of my sisters, as they were…”

“Not many like the girls in the North.”

“No. The girls of the North are made of a tougher stuff,” Jon said carefully, and Lady Olenna smirked.

“They’re hard bitches,” she said, and Jon grinned.

“You should’ve married a Northman,” he said, and Lady Olenna chuckled. “You would have been well-suited. And the lords would have been well-matched… You remind me of one of my bannermen.”

“Do I?”

“Aye. Lady Mormont. She’s not yet a woman, but after we reclaimed Winterfell and the banners had been called, she stood in front of my lords and shamed them,” Jon said fondly, and Lady Olenna chuckled again. “She named me King in the North… You’d like the little bear.”

“One day, when I am stronger, perhaps I shall journey to the Northern court to meet this Kingmaker.”

“You would be very welcome, my lady,” Jon said earnestly.

“And the Lady Tyrell?” Lady Olenna prompted, and Jon looked up sharply over the rim of his teacup, which he lowered slowly. The Queen of Thorns was smirking knowingly.

He frowned. “Lady Tyrell’s request is why you invited me here.”

“Of course,” Lady Olenna said, smiling serenely. She knew? “You didn’t think my granddaughter would be emboldened to make such a request of you without knowing she had my support?”

“And she does?”

“I must admit, I did not expect it from her,” Lady Olenna said softly. “It is rather startling to be taken by surprise by one’s own kin. I suppose that is my own fault; I never paid enough attention to her, or the others… I underestimated my granddaughter. She is proving herself more than worthy a successor.”

“And…you would want such a life for your granddaughter?”

“This is the life she is choosing for herself; how many of us have such a luxury?” Lady Olenna sighed.

“Even if it’s the wrong path?” Jon prompted.

“And why should it be wrong?”

“She’s choosing a life of solitude,” Jon said. “She doesn’t deserve that.”

“She’s buying herself time, that she make the wiser choices to benefit all,” Lady Olenna said, her eyes shrewd as she gazed at Jon. Her gaze turned almost fond. “You care for her.”

“I don’t know how anyone couldn’t,” Jon said, clearing his throat. “She’s calm and graceful and clever.”

“Not to mention a beauty.”

“Aye, not to mention that,” Jon said wryly.

“When my granddaughter proposed the idea, I laughed, I’ll admit. She startled me. But it is cunning, and expedient. And to ask you…”

“Why did she ask me?”

“Because you are a man of honour. Least likely to jump into her bed purely because she asked you to,” Lady Olenna smirked. “Who would ever suspect you of fathering a child by her? As inconceivable - if you’ll pardon the pun - as Ned Stark returning from war with bastards of his own. Unaccountable of him, to go off to war, and return from Dorne with twin babies. When all he sought was his dear sister. Strange…” Her smile was almost mocking. “The honourable Ned Stark goes in search of Lyanna…and returns to Winterfell with twin babes, and a pile of bones that were his sister’s.”

Dread curdled the tea in his stomach. He stared at Lady Olenna, who smiled sadly, almost apologetic.

“He never told you her name, did he? Your mother’s,” Lady Olenna said.

“He never even told his wife who she was,” Jon said, swallowing the dread that always churned in his stomach whenever he thought of Lady Catelyn.

“I imagine that must have made your childhood rather traumatic,” Lady Olenna mused. “Still…safer for you, for Lord Stark to remain silent…allow the world to think the worst of him…so they never guessed at the truth.”

Jon sat, reeling.

It couldn’t be. The Queen of Thorns was just trying to wound him…but why would she, he thought, when her granddaughter has asked this favour of me?

“You imply I was never my father’s son,” he said, aware his voice had the cold bite of steel he often used when speaking with Queen Daenerys.

“Oh, you are his, absolutely,” Lady Olenna chuckled, unperturbed by his tone - possibly, she enjoyed it. There were few strong men in Lady Olenna’s life - even fewer, now. “You are Ned Stark’s son…though if he laid with your mother, I will eat my corset.” Jon blinked, and the old lady chuckled. She sighed, shaking her head. “Lyanna Stark disappeared with Rhaegar Targaryen…she died, they say in Ned Stark’s arms…and he returned to Winterfell with infant twins.”

Jon stared at her.

She winced. “If I were an honourable man, who loved his sister fiercely, and would do whatever it took to protect her…protect her virtue, protect her children…”

In his mind, he was stood in the ravenry, feeding the birds for a blind, kind and shrewd old maester. A Targaryen, hidden in the snows of the far North, safe from the sharp blades of Robert Baratheon and his famous wrath. “What is honour compared to a woman's love? What is duty against the feel of a newborn son in your arms . . . or the memory of a brother's smile?”

Lady Olenna gave him a strange look. “I would not have taken you for a philosopher, Your Grace.”

“I’m not. Something Maester Aemon told me at Castle Black, when I learned Robb had called the banners and marched to war to free Father…” Jon sighed, gazing at Lady Olenna. “You believe Lady Lyanna was my mother?”

“What wouldn’t he have sacrificed, for his family?” Lady Olenna said softly. “Lord Varys tells me that Lord Stark was prepared to die, until they threatened your sister’s life… He confessed to treason to protect her. His daughter. What would you do for your sister?”

Cold rage gripped Jon, shooting ice through his veins; the thought of Littlefinger, sniffing around Sansa, obsequious and foul and avaricious, lusting after her…his fingers twitched, aching to wrap themselves around his sword, or Littlefinger’s throat once more… The thought of leaving her there, with him…was intolerable. The idea that he might hurt her…that he had hurt her, selling her to their enemies, that he was a cause of Sansa’s torture…

Lady Olenna nodded understandingly. “It is my belief that Lord Stark sacrificed his honour for his sister’s virtue. To protect you.”

If Lyanna Stark is my mother…then…Rhaegar Targaryen was my father…

“To protect the child forced on his sister?”

Lady Olenna’s smile was sad and almost pitying. “Jon… Until direwolves learn to write, the hunter will always be victorious… Rhaegar died; Robert took the crown. Do you imagine, had Rhaegar and Lyanna lived, that the tales would have had Rhaegar kidnapping and raping the girl? I knew the Last Dragon: It would have gone against everything that he stood for, to abuse and dishonour Lyanna Stark. After what he witnessed his mother endure all those years… Rhaegar…was a romantic. A grim warrior with the heart of a poet - he believed…in love. When the histories are written by the winning side, it is always best to take them with a handful of salt.”

Jon gulped, stared at the old lady. “I do not know what you think you could get out of sharing this…this theory with me. To make me question my father’s honour?”

“No, no… Certainly not,” Lady Olenna said, her tone gentle, appeasing. She gave him another sorrowful, compassionate look. “Merely to prove that…sometimes it is not so clear, what the honourable thing is.”

“From a young age I have always dreaded that I may father a bastard,” Jon said, frowning. “I know what its life would be. I promised myself I never would inflict that life on an innocent.”

“Your child by Alynore would not be a bastard; they would be heir to Highgarden,” Lady Olenna said stoutly. “More to the point, the child would be passed off as my grandson Willas’. Or would you risk the child’s life by blabbing the truth?”

“I would not. But who’s to say Lord Varys won’t get wind of the truth and tell anyone who’d love to rip the rose-garden from the Reach for good?” Jon asked, frowning.

“Oh, the Spider. Do you really think he would tell? Under House Tyrell, the Reach has become peaceful and prosperous, a hub of culture and arts, theatre and music unknown to the rest of the continent,” Lady Olenna said, waving a hand. “To preserve that prosperity…do you think the Spider would risk such information getting abroad?”

“He could still tell the Queen.” Lady Olenna narrowed her eyes, her expression almost dismissive. “I’m not deaf to rumour, or blind to what I see before my eyes: I know the Queen desires me as a lover. How do you think she would react, to know that I reject her, and yet bed one of her ladies?”

“Lord Varys possesses that unique quality…of tact,” Lady Olenna mused. “What benefit could there be in telling the Queen, when the inevitable backlash would have lasting consequences on any potential alliances… I know that the Spider often seeks you out. In the weeks since you have been on Dragonstone, how would you describe the changes in his attitudes toward the Queen?”

“I’d describe him as disillusioned,” Jon said honestly, and Lady Olenna nodded.

“Very astute. Never meet one’s heroes, Your Grace,” Lady Olenna advised, and Jon thought inexplicably of the Halfhand. “From half a world away, pretty songs reached the Spider…and he was lulled by them, to be sure, drawn out of his web… Only to be met with the reality of a spoiled, arrogant girl with no traces of diplomatic agility, an overzealous opportunist who became little more than a warlord who has convinced herself she is a liberator, a creature who thinks herself closer to a god than a girl, and beholden to now laws but those of her own making… She fancies herself rightful sovereign of Westeros, based on her name, the power of her dragons, and a failed experiment in a city-state she overturned in an afternoon, and which she abandoned in economic crisis and civil war when she lost interest in the arduous everyday of ruling…”

“It’s dangerous for you to speak so candidly. Why tell me this?”

“I thought an alliance worth it to see Cersei dragged from the Throne Room to be butchered,” Lady Olenna said sharply. She sighed, settling back against her pillows. “For being so unwise as to pursue vengeance, I paid the price with what remained of my family… I will not deny, I need allies still to reclaim Highgarden. House Redwyne itself will not suffice, and I have made offers of friendship with Dornish lords bordering the Reach - the lands owned by the bannermen who betrayed us… But, like dear Lord Varys, I worry for the future of Westeros. The Queen is rigid in her belief that everything she thinks and feels and does is right, and good…even as she commits acts reminiscent of her father’s unyielding sadism… Her messianic belief in her own mythology is perhaps even stronger than the fanaticism exhibited by her followers. To believe that she alone is right…to be so unwise that she will not compromise… To deny you aid without payment, all while claiming that she has come to Westeros to save its people... It speaks to her true intent, no matter how many pretty speeches she gives about freedom…”

“She’s always gotten exactly what she’s wished,” Jon said quietly. “I’m afraid that Westeros will be no different. The moment she realises she’s neither wanted nor adored…when someone intimates that she is wrong to invade Westeros…that there was just cause for overthrowing her father… With her dragons, and her temper…”

“Yes,” Lady Olenna agreed, not needing Jon to spell it out for her.

“She’ll burn what does not bend to her will,” Jon muttered, and Lady Olenna nodded.

Hadn’t she done so, in the past, all throughout Slavers’ Bay? Her followers delighted in telling the stories of how she had overthrown their cities, and crucified and burned the nobles, liberating the slaves. Crucified and burned…because they would not yield to her.

To Jon, she did not sound a liberator.

She was a warlord, leaving unthinking destruction in her wake, as terrible as any highborn of Westeros leading their men to battle for their own vanity.

And the arrogant way she had told her Council that she would use Meereen as experience of ruling, before she turned her gaze westward to conquer the Seven Kingdoms…

The more Jon learned of Daenerys Targaryen, the less respect he had for her.

“Until then… I will do what I must to protect the few rosebuds that remain,” Lady Olenna sighed, looking suddenly tired.

Jon smiled sadly, thinking of home. “There are some hardy roses that bloom even in the heart of winter,” he said softly, and Lady Olenna smiled almost wistfully. “Maester Luwin used to say that ‘the flower that blooms in adversity is the most rare and beautiful of all’. He used to say it of my sister Larra…now I know it describes Sansa, too… Lady Alynore has it in her to flourish in spite of everything.”

“I am glad that you were so quick to appreciate her worth,” Lady Olenna sighed. “I let her down.”

“You didn’t.”

“I did. And I will continue to do so, while I lie here slowly dying, frail and useless.”

“You’re not useless, and you certainly do not seem frail,” Jon said, and Lady Olenna’s lips twitch. “I know I’m not your king, Lady Olenna…but I forbid you to die.”

“Give me a great-grandchild to look forward to, and I just may yet obey you, Your Grace.”

Chapter 24: He Never Liked It

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

24

He Never Liked It


The courtyard was eerily quiet. Since her return, she had not known the castle to be still, even during the Hour of the Wolf. And yet, today, as fat snowdrops whirled idly on a gentle breeze, the ominous silence chilled her to the bone.

Two guards led her, holding flickering torches aloft. It was not yet near sundown, and yet it was necessary to light the torches, especially within the halls of the castle; angry black clouds threatened to consume the fluffy white expanse that brought the snows, foretelling a worse storm. Light from torches held by more soldiers, and braziers in the courtyard and the gallery high above, gilded everything, from the soldiers’ helmets to the ancestral rune-engraved armour of Yohn Royce, the ragged furs of a few curious smallfolk, and the banners of the Northmen. Lady Mormont’s black sharp new leather armour gleamed; her scowl was heavy, and a few of the other bannermen shifted uneasily as Larra was led into the centre of the courtyard.

Before her, Sansa’s red hair glowed a deep and vibrant copper in the firelight, which picked out the blue of her eyes and cast shadows across her beautiful face. The red direwolf that had toyed with Larra’s boot in the makeshift hut beyond the Wall so many weeks ago rested beside Sansa, ears pricked, panting, and yawned widely, exposing her terrible white fangs. Beside her, Brandon sat in his chair, looking complacent and calm, his gloved hands folded in his lap.

The guards stopped. Larra tucked her chin down, glancing around, feeling the hostility emanating in waves from the Northmen and Valemen gathered in a U-shape around the courtyard, all facing Sansa and Brandon - penning her in. All of them - the Northmen who had already arrived at Winterfell to fight through the storm with them; the Valeman who had remained after the Battle of the Bastards out of dread of Littlefinger more than loyalty to Sansa, and a sense of honour to defeat the enemy Jon warned them of. A few of Jon’s commanders among the Free Folk lingered, curious. They were all gathered - all silent, and solemn.

Another guard stepped forward. Careful of where he put his hands, he unbuckled the belts strapping her new dagger and the hunting-knife Robb had given her around her narrow waist. The Valyrian steel dagger, he gave to Sansa, the hunting-knife to Lady Brienne, who stood guard just behind Sansa, armoured and armed and grim.

Larra did not resist as she was relieved of Dark Sister, watching grimly as the ancient Valyrian sword was handed to Lord Royce.

She turned and sighed, gazing mournfully at Sansa. “You’ve made your choice, then.”

“There was no choice,” Sansa said, her voice crisp. She lowered her eyes demurely, but seemed to steel herself, and gazed at Larra. You owe it to them to look them in the eye… “Honour demands I must act to defend my family from those who would harm us. I must protect my people from those who would betray us.”

“Nasty business,” Larra said offhandedly, seemingly unconcerned that she was penned in, defenceless, friendless. She fixed Sansa with a sharp look. “Shall we get it over with?”

“Yes, I think so…” Sansa nodded, her breath pluming before her as she sighed, and cleared her throat uncomfortably. Her voice was clear, and cut through the silence like a Valyrian steel blade. “You stand accused of treason. You stand accused of murder. How do you answer these charges…Lord Baelish?”

The dark little man stood leaning indolently against a direwolf statue by one of the gates - which was closed, and guarded. And he looked utterly taken-aback to be addressed by Sansa, her hair shimmering like a long copper curtain as she turned to stare at him.

Larra followed her gaze, to find the man looking momentarily startled, confused.

The men and women gathered in the courtyard seemed to harden in that moment, as Littlefinger blinked in confusion, thinking quickly. Their gazes lingered on him, steel and venom. Lord Royce’s scowl deepened; Lady Mormont’s eyes narrowed. Lord Manderly and Crowsfood Umber both glowered, their hands twitching for the weapons strapped to them. Lady Karstark glanced from Littlefinger to Sansa, a faint frown on her face, before exchanging a look with Little Jon Umber, who stood scowling with his arms folded over his chest, muttering under his breath to Ragnar, who looked for a second murderous - and then relieved, his gaze flitting to Larra: He sagged with relief, and smiled softly at her.

A shadow moved, and the tremendous direwolf Last Shadow padded through the crowds, taller than any pony, enormous, vicious, and bumped gently against Larra, radiating heat, before licking her bare palm, exposing her fangs at Littlefinger in silent warning as her eyes glittered in the firelight.

“My sister has addressed you, my lord,” Larra said softly, absently running her fingers through Shadow’s thick pelt.

Littlefinger frowned, his eyes turning shrewd, calculating - but he looked off-kilter, as if he had suddenly found himself on uncertain footing, and had no idea how it had happened.

“Lady Sansa, forgive me…” he lisped. He never called her Lady Stark, never acknowledged that she, and not Brandon in his wheeled chair, was the only true heir to Winterfell. “I’m a bit confused.”

“It is rather a lot to contemplate, I know. So many plots and betrayals, it must be a constant struggle to keep track of them all,” Sansa said, her voice cool. “I’ll make it simple for you. You murdered my aunt, Lysa Arryn. You pushed her through the Moon-Door at the Eyrie and watched her fall to her death, do you deny it?”

Littlefinger gazed at Sansa, thinking quickly. His voice was soft, as he said, “I did it to protect you.”

“You did it to take power in the Vale from my cousin and his true protectors,” Sansa said sharply, and the Valemen stirred. “Before that, you conspired to assassinate King Joffrey, using the Strangler, smuggled into the royal wedding on a necklace you planted on me. Years ago, you conspired with Lysa to poison her husband, the Hand of the King Jon Arryn, when he had discovered the truth about Cersei Lannister’s children, bastards conceived of incest with her twin-brother Ser Jaime Lannister. You gave Lysa Tears of Lys to poison Jon Arryn, do you deny it?”

Another hesitation, thinking. “Whatever your aunt might have told you, she was a troubled woman.”

“She was utterly in thrall to you, as you well knew. She poisoned Jon Arryn for you, because you told her to, tempting her with the promise of marriage if she were free of him. Something she had wanted since she was a girl, and of which you had long taken advantage of,” Sansa said coldly. “You had her write a letter to my mother, telling her it was the Lannisters who had conspired to kill her husband, when really it was you. The conflict between the Starks and Lannisters, it was you who started it as part of your ambitious plan to claim the Iron Throne for yourself, do you deny it?”

“I know of no such letter.”

“Convenient that Lysa wrote to her sister to burn it, lest it fall into the wrong hands and her head - and that of her child - end up on spikes before the Red Keep,” Sansa said, glaring at Littlefinger. “But it was my father’s head that ended up there, after you helped him discover Robert Baratheon’s bastards as evidence against the Queen’s treason. You let the Lord Hand learn just enough to be dangerous - and you conspired with Cersei Lannister and her bastard son Joffrey to betray Lord Stark before the truth could come to light. Thanks to your treachery, Lord Eddard Stark was imprisoned and later executed on false charges of treason, do you deny it?”

“I deny it!” Littlefinger called, striding into the centre of the courtyard, the wings of his coat flaring as he turned, attempting to find a friendly face, an ally to vouch for him. None presented themselves. He was met by a wall of ice. “None of you were there to see what happened! None of you knows the truth.”

“You held a knife to his throat,” said a soft voice, silky and ancient with a hint of vulnerability. Bran’s eyes glittered in the torchlight like the eyes of a raven. “You said…‘I did warn you not to trust me’.”

Littlefinger stared back at Bran, unable to show just how unnerved he was.

It was not the first time the Three-Eyed Raven had frightened the mockingbird.

Last Shadow started to growl, low and soft and spine-tingling in the silence. Larra stroked her ears, and they twitched; Shadow fidgeted, then chuffed indignantly, glancing up at her. She settled, and the red wolf by Sansa cocked her head, emulating her leader.

“When my mother journeyed to King’s Landing, following the attack on her son’s life with this blade, you told her it belonged to Tyrion Lannister,” Sansa said, holding aloft the Valyrian steel blade so that the dragonbone hilt was clearly visible, the cruel smoke-over-silver blade gleaming. “Another lie. It is a Targaryen relic, one among many in the royal armoury… It was the Queen’s bastard Joffrey who paid a cutthroat to kill Bran… But you knew exactly what my mother wanted to hear, after having Lysa send that letter, to plant doubt and suspicion about the Lannisters…”

Littlefinger surged toward Sansa: The red direwolf growled, low and lethal, exposing her fangs. She was smaller and younger than Shadow but no less dangerous. Lady Brienne stepped forward, hand on the hilt of Oathkeeper, her expression cold and dangerous. Littlefinger stopped, eyeing her warily. He beseeched Sansa, “Lady Sansa, I’ve known you since you were a girl. I’ve protected you -“

“Protected me? By selling me to the Boltons?” Sansa snapped, and the red wolf snapped her jaws, causing Littlefinger to jump back.

He flinched. “If we could speak alone… I can explain everything…”

Sansa’s face became cold and perfect as carved marble. Her dainty lips flicked up in the corners, her smile lethal, ironic, and did nothing to soften the ice in her hard blue eyes. She stepped forward, around Lady Brienne, the folds of her heavy cloak whispering against the snow on the ground, the firelight gleaming against the leather she used to strap herself into her gowns and protect herself from any kind of contact. Littlefinger closed his eyes as she started to speak, as he realised…he had overplayed his hand - underestimated his apprentice: “Sometimes, when I’m trying to understand a person’s motives, I play a little game… I assume the worst… What’s the worst reason you have for turning me against my sister? That’s what you do, isn’t it? What you’ve always done. Turn family against family, turn sister against sister. That’s what you did to my mother and Aunt Lysa, that’s what you tried to do us.”

Sansa finally looked at Larra, who fell into place, close enough to Lord Baelish to see the growing panic bubbling up behind his intelligent eyes.

Had he been less exultant that the pieces were falling into place exactly as he had planned, again, and paid more attention to the details, he might have noticed. Might have been forewarned.

Larra wore new clothing.

A split-skirt of thick dark wool, the hems falling neatly above her ankles, fine leather boots and a long undershirt of brownish-black linen beneath a fine leather tunic to her elbows. Over the leather tunic, a thick, high-necked garnet-red tunic of silk over wool with wide sleeves to just above the elbows, the sleeves embroidered intricately with snow-bitten weirwood leaves, the high neck sewn with two direwolf heads meeting nose-to-nose, worn beneath an armoured leather bodice fitted almost like a corset, the leather dyed closer to a warm black than brown in colour, sewn like a brigandine with small panels of steel concealed beneath the intricately embossed leather, the centre panel, with a V neckline to accommodate for dressing, shimmered curiously in the torchlight as the fire reflected off thousands of tiny obsidian rings, embroidered with steel-wire and leather cord into the shape of two rearing direwolves, nose to nose, not snarling aggressively but rather nuzzling each other lovingly, protectively. The firelight turned the direwolves onyx, or gleaming copper, or bright, hot white by turns. The shoulders shimmered, too, like liquid obsidian dripping over the garnet-red sleeves of the tunic, hundreds more rings of obsidian stitched together, protecting her shoulders and upper-arms. Steel-reinforced leather gauntlets finely embossed with weirwood trees protected her lower-arms, and her belts had been studded with small direwolf-heads.

Some might look at Larra’s new armoured bodice and obsidian ring-mail, and assume the black was for her brother, sworn to the Night’s Watch, or for her direwolf, night-black and swift as shadows, that the garnet-red was a nod to the weirwood under which she had dwelled in safety for so long, and with which her brother was inextricably linked, or for the blood that had been spilled in her dedication to protecting her family. All would be true.

Sansa had chosen the deep, earthy jewel-red, and a rich treacle brown so dark it was near-black, to honour all of those things: But she had also chosen the colours to honour Rhaegar.

The sigil of her mother’s House, the House of the man who had raised and protected her, and the colours of her father’s House. Allowing Larra to embrace both facets of her true identity, the daughter of Stark and Targaryen, of ice and fire.

Sansa had created every piece with meticulous attention to even the smallest detail.

She had embroidered the tunic herself, adding a snarling direwolf head over the breast, only visible when the armoured bodice was removed. Obsidian rings, to protect her sister’s heart from a White Walker’s blade of ice.

Sansa had poured her love for her sister into every stitch.

Had sent Lady Brienne to Larra with the clothing mere hours ago, stitched by her own sister’s hands, bequeathing her the sigil so long denied her. Declaring Larra’s heritage, and Sansa’s love, for all to see, if they but looked.

Littlefinger hadn’t paid attention. Should have recognised the stitching on the sleeves of Larra’s tunic, should have thought long and hard about why Sansa would have spent so many hours meticulously stitching clothing for the sister she was about to betray.

He should have realised, the moment Larra stepped into the courtyard, that Sansa, with her direwolf-clasped shadowcat-fur cloak and the two snarling direwolves - one snow-white and one of obsidian - racing across the black velvet over her breasts, and Larra, with two direwolves nuzzling lovingly on her armoured bodice, and Brandon, the clasps of his fur-trimmed gown each a direwolf-head, were a family united.

He should have realised the trap had been baited, not for Larra…but for him.

Wolves surrounding their prey, ready for the kill.

Larra tilted her head to observe the mockingbird panicking in the snow.

“We are not gaping trout to be hooked on a line, Lord Baelish,” she said calmly, and the slender man winced, glancing quickly away from her, as if suddenly frightened of her gentleness. “We are she-wolves of Winterfell. To return home, we have defeated far worse than you.”

“Sansa, please…”

“I’m a slow learner, it’s true,” Sansa sighed. “But I learn.”

“Give me a chance to defend myself,” Littlefinger begged. “I deserve that.”

Sansa said nothing, only gazed unerringly at the trapped bird unable to take wing, his long sleeves billowed as he whirled toward Lord Royce, still propping Dark Sister up in the snow, resting his clasped hands on the ruby-inlaid hilt. He glowered at Littlefinger, who was puffing up, fluffing his feathers, aware he was under threat, doing his utmost to appear bigger, more powerful.

“I am Lord Protector of the Vale and I command you to escort me safely back to the Eyrie.”

“I think not.”

Littlefinger deflated, blinking dazedly. He turned to Sansa, beseeching.

“Sansa, please - I loved your mother since the time I was a boy,” he implored.

“And yet you betrayed her.”

“I loved you…more than anyone,” he whimpered.

“And yet, you betrayed me…” Sansa said sadly, her gaze steady as she stared down Littlefinger. Her breath plumed in front of her, catching in the firelight, as she sighed. “When you brought me back to Winterfell to sell me to the Boltons to be brutalised, you told me there is no justice in the world, not unless we make it,” she said, and again, Littlefinger flinched; others murmured, a soft hiss carried on the winds, and, from somewhere beyond the castle walls…direwolves started howling to the moon. Their howls were blood-curdling, to those who did not know the beauty of wolves singing to one another. Littlefinger jumped, and others gazed warily around them, eyeing the gates, as if unnerved, thinking that perhaps the wolves of winter would snarl and snap and leap into the courtyard to join their sisters at a summons from the she-wolves of Winterfell.

“I thank you for your tutelage, Lord Baelish. I shall never forget your lessons.”

Littlefinger gaped, his eyes widening, as Sansa drew herself up. The firelight gleamed off her hair, off the twin wolves glimmering across her breasts, off the dragonbone hilt of the silver-and-smoke Valyrian steel dagger that had created such tragedy for their family.

“In the name of Jon Snow, King in the North, I, Sansa Stark, Castellan of Winterfell and Lady Regent of the North, find you guilty of conspiracy, of treason, of murder and regicide,” Sansa said, her voice clear and strong. “In the name of House Stark and of my King, I sentence you to die.”

Littlefinger’s eyes popped, his lips parted, and he stood gaping, like the trout he had tickled and manipulated and battered against the rocks so easily.

Larra’s glare was ice-cold and fierce: Littlefinger blinked quickly, wincing and shrinking away from her, though she stood quite still. Power, menace radiated from her, but when she spoke, Larra was deceptively calm, polite. He closed his eyes, realising his mistake, when she said, “When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies but the pack survives.”

She strode to Lord Royce, who bowed solemnly, and offered the sheath of Dark Sister: Larra gripped the hilt, and unsheathed the lethal blade. The rippled silver-and-smoke blade gleamed in the torchlight, eerily entrancing, and she turned back to Littlefinger, who eyed the blade with true panic settling in.

“You should have realised, Petyr,” she said softly, and he cringed regretfully as she said, “we would rather die than betray one another…” She nodded to two guards, who strode forward, taking hold of his arms, guiding him to his knees. A block was placed before him, to lean over. His breath plumed before him, thick and fast as he started to hyperventilate in his fear.

Larra paused, and took a knee before him, to look into his face. “Do you have any last words?”

Littlefinger sniffed, his eyes glittering, as he glanced across the courtyard, where Sansa stared stonily back at him, unmoved by his terror.

“I played well,” Lord Petyr Baelish muttered, and Larra nodded, almost to herself.

She gave him a sharp and dangerous look, her tone quiet but deeply threatening, as she warned him, “Now die well.”

For her sake, Larra thought, casting one last glance at her sister, before she sighed deeply, eyed Littlefinger’s exposed neck…and swung Dark Sister through the darkness.

A swish that was delicate, almost imperceptible. A gruesome squelch and a decisive thud.

A sudden silence, as the direwolves fell silent.

Blood oozed sluggishly from her blade, already starting to freeze in the cold, as the snow stopped falling, and the sky darkened near-black, the clouds threatening thunder, heavy with hail.

“Burn his body,” she said quietly, and everyone in the courtyard heard her, though she spoke barely above a murmur. “Scatter his ashes beyond the sept.”

She did not wait to see the orders carried out, or the body parts gathered up and carried away. Larra turned and carried Dark Sister to one of the wooden gates into the godswood, trudged through the snow, and sank down beneath the weirwood, as she had seen Father do so many times.

Feeding the tree, she thought, as Littlefinger’s blood dripped onto the snow, a jarring contrast. She used handfuls of snow to wash the blood away, then pulled out an oiled suede cloth to polish the blade to a high shine. The moon had already risen, a half-crescent, but shy tonight, hiding behind the sea of sinister clouds. The soft crunch of snow compacting underfoot alerted her to Sansa’s approach: no-one else would dare disturb her under the heart-tree.

“How many times did we find Father sitting there, cleansing Ice?” Sansa said sadly, tucking her heavy cloak around her as she sat down beside Larra on one of the ancient, gnarled roots. “I found Jon here, after the Battle of the Bastards… I came here, after the hounds… I never truly knew what it meant, why Father came here…”

Larra finished polishing the blade, and carefully sheathed it, propping it beside her. “How do you feel?”

“It’s a strange thing, to take a man’s life,” Sansa murmured, hugging her knees. “You gave him a clean death.”

“For your sake, I’m glad he died well,” Larra said quietly. She leaned over, and kissed Sansa’s cheek, stroking a hand over her long, soft hair. “You did well.”

“I did my duty…but I hated it,” Sansa confessed on a whisper, her eyes shining as she glanced at Larra.

“Good.”

“Father never liked it… Hm.”

“What?”

“You remember I told you about Sandor Clegane, the night of the Blackwater? He was covered in gore, and I was frightened of him. He knew it. ‘Your father was a killer’, he told me ‘Your brother is a killer. Your sons will be killers someday. The world is built by killers. So you’d better get used to looking at them’… He was right, of course…but how could he have known about my sisters then? About me? Two men have died directly at my word, if not my sword.”

“Two men who did far worse to you,” Larra reminded her gently, not that Sansa would ever need reminding. She may wear Ghost upon her breast, but Sansa was still strapped in her leather gear, protecting herself from the slightest touch, even affectionate. She was warming to Larra, in the privacy of the solar, but it would take years before she would be comfortably being physically affectionate again. She had simply endured too much hurt. “I have killed countless wights, and one White Walker… I have killed twelve men, including the three Ironborn who would have raped and mutilated me… I remember every single kill. I also know that if I hadn’t, I would not be alive now. Bran would not be alive… There was some truth in what Littlefinger intimated about Rickon. That my choice led to his death.”

“You cannot listen to anything Littlefinger said.”

“He was right, Sansa, that’s why it made such a dangerous weapon against me,” Larra murmured, sniffing. “I chose Bran. And that fills me with shame. I chose one brother over the other.”

“You chose one to save both,” Sansa said, her voice gentle, reasonable. “Rickon would never have survived the True North - not the little boy I remember. You would have failed, trying to gentle his nature, and it would have cost you your lives. You couldn’t have saved both. Just like you could never have reclaimed this castle from the Ironborn, not without risking the lives of the smallfolk - and you would never have allowed them to die for nothing. I’ve read your cyvasse campaign strategies.”

“It’s one thing to play at cyvasse and another to implement strategy in real life…” Larra said dazedly. “There’s no accounting for how emotion outweighs pragmatism.”

“If you could go back…and you knew what was going to happen…what would you do?” Sansa asked curiously.

“What would you do?” Larra asked.

“Tell Robb not to raise the banners; Father was as good as dead the moment that boar gored King Robert. I would risk everything to tell Robb to declare independence - and fiercely guard it from anyone who tried to take it from the North again, and to never think of his sisters,” Sansa said, fierce and wise. “To be as ruthless and cold as our ancestors had to be.”

Larra sighed, and watched Last Shadow and the red wolf approaching quietly, curling up together at the base of a tree.

“If I could go back…and knew what was to happen… I wouldn’t change a single thing,” Larra said, holding Sansa’s eye sombrely. “That’s the horrifying truth. Father…Robb…Rickon… I know what came after. I know what’s still to come. And where we are is where we were always meant to be.” She sighed, gazing up; in the dwindling twilight, the blood-red weirwood leaves were eerily vibrant. She thought of Lord Bloodraven, of the Children… “There’s a reason…we were always meant to be here. To fight. Perhaps to live. And that is an encouraging thought.”

More footsteps; the direwolves glanced up, but lolled back against the snow, yawning carelessly.

Lord Royce’s armour gleamed in the light of torches held by knights of the Vale. He bowed low to Larra, and Sansa, and told them, “The thing was done well, my ladies.”

“It was a thing we took no pleasure in,” Sansa said.

“No indeed, but your Father would have been proud nonetheless,” Lord Royce said. “The Northmen live by the old ways, as he always said. You got the better of a dangerous man who would have done his utmost to harm you, as he already has…” His gaze lingered briefly on Sansa, who remained on weirwood root even as Larra stood, too accustomed to rising in the presence of her betters. “I speak for all the Lords of the Vale, and the Lord Protectors of House Arryn and the Eyrie, when I say the Vale owes House Stark a great debt. You have avenged Lord Arryn, a man we respected and followed through wartime and together enjoyed peace. You avenged his wife. For that, we are utterly grateful.”

“You will tell my cousin the truth of things?” Sansa asked hesitantly. “He had great love for Lord Baelish.”

“The boy will come to learn the truth, my lady, but not for a while yet,” Lord Royce said. “We have discussed it amongst ourselves: In light of everything, the Lords Protector of the Vale hope to forge a lasting alliance between the Eyrie and House Stark. It began with the Battle of the Bastards; it shall not end before the battle through the Long Night.”

“You will stay and fight?” Larra asked breathlessly, something fluttering in her chest. It had always been one of the risks they had calculated, her and Sansa, that without Littlefinger pulling strings, the Valemen would return to their mountain-halls.

“I grew up with your father,” Lord Royce said stoutly. “I know full well, observing him these months, that Ned Stark’s quality has passed to his son. I have known too many soldiers to believe your brother is either a liar or a madman. The Vale will stand beside the Northmen against the White Walkers, as our ancestors the First Men did so many ages ago. We should be ashamed to turn tail and flee back to the mountains and still call ourselves knights of the realm.”

“Thank you, Lord Royce,” Larra said earnestly, and Sansa gave him a serene, beautiful smile.

He gave them a deep bow: Both women responded with an elegant curtsy.

“There is one last thing, my ladies… The first shipment of obsidian has arrived from Dragonstone. The blacksmiths are rather at a loss what to do with it.”

Belting her sword around her waist, Larra’s solemn face melted into a smile, her eyes vibrant in the torchlight.

“Finally!” she smiled. “You can finally put me to good use.”

“Pardon?” Sansa blurted, her eyelashes fluttering.

“Dancing wasn’t the only lesson the Children gave me.”


“You’re certain this is what you want?” he asked, his voice sounding too loud in the empty chamber. A fire crackled in the hearth, shedding warm golden light over everything. “I don’t want you to regret it.”

“There are many things I know I’ll regret for the rest of my life,” Alynore said softly, her smile desperately sad. It gentled, became soft, and her eyes seemed to radiate their own inner-light as she gazed up at Jon. “You will not be one of them… Every fibre of my being tells me that I can trust you. Not just…to treat me with kindness and respect… You’re a man of honour: You could never be forced or coerced into doing anything that might risk your child’s life, even if no-one knows the chid is yours… And you’re too cautious, and have no political ambition beyond protecting your people; you would not use the child - our child - as leverage… You’re grim, and honourable, and unselfish. And for all those reasons, I wanted it to be you.”

He was humbled by what she had said.

“Why ask me, to give you a child?” Jon asked, something that had been on his mind ever since she had proposed the idea to him. “Why not just climb into my bed?”

“And have you find out after the fact that that is why I slept with you, for your seed alone? I couldn’t do that to you,” Alynore said, and warmth coloured her cheeks delicate pink, her eyelashes fluttering, her expression turning bashful. “And I… I never have before.” In her nightgown and robe, she looked ethereally lovely, and Jon admitted it, he was entranced by her loveliness. There was a strength and a vulnerability to her that was as heartening as it was refreshing.

There was nothing shy about her going up on her tiptoes, pressing her lips against his. He moaned softly, surprised, but found himself relaxing into the kiss as Alynore teased and dominated… He panted as they broke apart, gently squeezing her waist, surprised. She dimpled sweetly, shyly asking, “Did you think I’d never been kissed?”

“I’d hoped not, for your sake.”

She smiled, and Jon cradled her slender throat in his hand, leaning down to snare her lips, kissing her slowly, fiercely, consuming her, until she was panting in his arms, her knees weak, her hands tugging at his undershirt. Hand tangled in her hair, she gasped softly as he first delicately kissed and then teased his tongue against her lower-lip, and held her close against him, consuming each other, embers sparking to an inferno in his blood, desire warring with desperation for contact, for intimacy…

She broke away, tugging his undershirt over his head, leaving him in his boots and breeches.

She gasped, her eyes widening in horror, hand fluttering to her mouth, one to his chest, just barely catching herself from tracing the deep, wicked scars slashing his flesh.

Jon froze.

He had forgotten them. They gave him no pain.

But he clenched his jaw and felt a flush of something…something like humiliation - because there they were, irrefutable signs that he had been utterly betrayed by those he led. The reminder that those he had trusted to do what was right, no matter their personal feelings, had used his few weaknesses - Benjen’s fate - against him in a conspiracy to assassinate him.

He gulped down a breath, forced a grim smile onto his face. “You see…there’s nothing you can show me that you should ever feel embarrassed about.”

She had been so shy when he arrived, her hands shaking, breaths coming quick, even though he could tell by looking at her that she had spent a long time preparing for his visit, her nightgown and robe simple, her hair brushed out and gleaming. She had never had a man before, he had already guessed that much; she had just confirmed it.

And she had been embarrassed about taking her clothes off in front of him, the first man to ever see her naked.

“There are so many,” she whispered, her eyes still wide. Finally she reached out, her eyelashes flickering gold in the candlelight, as she traced the curved scar… “They twisted the blade…”

“Aye,” Jon murmured, and Alynore leaned forward, pressing her lips to the tough, puckered skin. One by one, each scar was caressed by the lightest of kisses from her soft lips, down his chest. He inhaled sharply, finding himself swaying, and gripped the bed-post, as she pressed a gentle kiss over his hip, where the skin was unblemished but incredibly sensitive…

He curled a finger under her chin, drawing her back up, and claimed her lips with an intense kiss that left them both breathless and lightheaded.

She gazed up at him, lightly panting, lips swollen, cheeks flushed delicately, her eyes heated with desire. Her eyes dipped to his breeches. Jon smiled, and leaned in to kiss her gently, sensing her nervousness; her palms were soft, warm, as they rested on his waist, and shook only slightly as they went for the laces of his breeches. She only got as far as loosening the laces, before her nerve failed her; Jon just hugged her closer, deepening the kiss, until she was all but collapsed against him, her hand tangled in his hair, her fingertips biting into his bare shoulder, and he reached for the delicate clasp closing her robe, pushing the silk from her shoulders, so that it fell heavily to the floor at their feet.

“Climb onto the bed,” he told her hoarsely, and Alynore nodded, swallowing, and climbed onto the bed, the quilts and furs already turned down. She knelt on the mattress, watching him, the firelight glowing through the thin muslin and highlighting every tempting curve, as he tugged off his boots with a groan, and climbed onto the bed, kneeling before her. She was still nervous; he wouldn’t take off his breeches until she was ready. Her breath feathered across his face as she gazed up at him, eyes wide, lips swollen, and he cradled her face in his hands, mesmerised by her strength and daintiness, by the desire glowing in her eyes and the faint tremor in her fingers as she reached out to trace her fingertips over his arms, his shoulders, over his chest.

He ran his hands heavily, from her shoulders to her knees, the first caress through the muslin; then reached for the hem of the nightgown, and lifted it over her head, leaving her naked. The room was hot; but her dainty apricot-pink nipples hardened under his gaze, begging to be sucked. He groaned softly, unable to stop himself, and leaned in to capture Alynore with a deep, probing kiss as he raised his hands to cup and gently knead her pretty little breasts. She gasped against his lips, shivering, and gripped the waist of his breeches, meeting his fierce kiss.

Not yet, he thought, as she tugged insistently, leaning away to gaze fiercely into his eyes, telling him without words what she wanted. He guided her to her back, relaxing against the pillows, and moaned softly as he nestled between her thighs, to trace kisses on the tip of her nose, along her jaw, down her throat, to suck on her collarbones, and finally, to lick and suckle her breasts, until she was gasping and grinning and moaning as she writhed, holding his head captive to her chest, her fingers tangled in his hair, and he tenderly touched the tiny rosebud between her thighs.

Shocked, she gasped; her first touch from a man, perhaps at all. Slow, and soft, Jon continued to suckle and tease her nipples with his tongue and his teeth, cupping her breasts with his free hand, leaning up to give her long, slow kisses in time with each pass of his fingertip.

“Jon!” she gasped, blinking dazedly, and he grinned, and placed a delicate line of kisses from nose to navel, and, lowering himself until he rested between her thighs, she gasped and flushed hotly and writhed away, trying to clamp her thighs together - he arched an eyebrow, spreading his calloused palms on her soft thighs, and lowered his mouth to her.

“Oh!” she gasped in surprise, moaning, and she sighed, her legs sprawled wantonly, her body relaxing utterly. And Jon was relentless, using his tongue and his teeth and his fingers, coaxing her to an inferno, until her thighs were shaking and her back was arched and Alynore had forgotten her shyness, lost to everything but the sensation of Jon between her thighs - and then, not even him: Just the onslaught of feeling he created in her, seizing her, overwhelming her, freeing her of everything but an exquisite agony that brought utter peace and contentment, even if only for a few unending moments as she lay, flushed with pleasure, a slow smile curling her lips.

She was utterly lovely to behold.

He wiped his mouth on his arm, and sighed, satisfied, disentangling himself from her legs, to stretch out beside her. She radiated heat, her skin silky soft and delicately fragrant, tiny beads of sweat shimmering in the firelight, her hair glowing… Lovely, he thought, startled that for a moment her hair seemed almost red.

After a moment, Alynore smiled richly, coming back to herself, and sighed, turning her head to him, her smile deeply affectionate, and he chuckled softly to himself, glad.

“I didn’t know men did that.”

“It’s my favourite thing to do,” Jon told her, and Alynore giggled softly, biting her lip.

“Then I shall let you treat yourself whenever you choose,” she said, and Jon laughed in surprise at her brazenness. He reached out, to cup her face, and tenderly draw his thumb over her nose, her lips. He leaned in, giving her a gentle kiss, and she rolled onto her side, pressing close against him, her hand going to his breeches, and he groaned as she slipped her hand inside, hesitant at first, then seeking, and finally, her eyes alight with curiosity and anticipation, started to stroke him, hard and hot and insistent against her soft palm.

“Wait…” Jon murmured, and Alynore stilled. He gave her a coaxing smile, to show she hadn’t done something wrong. “Careful,” he warned her, giving her a gentle kiss, and guided them back to the pillows, reaching down to tug his breeches off, flinging them off the bed, as Alynore rolled to her back, and he stretched out above her, pressing their hips flush together, gently rocking for a moment, and he leaned down to kiss her as her thighs tensed, and uncertainty flickered across her face at the heat and hardness of him, so unfamiliarly close to her. Panting lightly, he gazed down into her eyes, and told her, “We don’t have to… Say the word, and I’ll leave…”

Alynore gazed up at him. She licked her lips, and subtly shook her head, her eyes locked on his. “I don’t want you to leave,” she breathed, arching up to kiss him, sucking on his lower-lip, as she reached to stroke him again. He inhaled sharply, and buried his head against her neck; and she stroked him, until they were both rocking their hips, her heels digging into the mattress, and Jon reached to grasp her wrist, and pull her hand away. Levering himself over her, she wrapped her hands around his strong arms, her chest heaving as he leaned down to kiss her tenderly, catching the sharp moan and her wince as he settled himself between her thighs and thrust into her with agonising slowness. Slick though she was, he felt her tense, and gentled every movement. He reached between them, using his fingertip, and she moaned in surprise, startled, and sighed… He gentled her pain with pleasure she had never known before.

They were both panting heavily when finally, Jon pressed his forehead against her neck, and spilled deep inside of her, relief sweeping through him. He kissed her gently, and withdrew, rolling onto his side, curling her against him, his heart thundering in his ears, her pale-green gaze wide and a little bewildered, and curled an arm around her, tucking her against his side. He kissed the top of her head, stroking her long hair, and sighed, the day’s exhaustion, utterly relaxed, sweeping over him, and he sighed, his eyes heavy, Alynore soft and sweet beside him.

They dozed, Alynore’s head resting on his chest, and Jon started, a little while later, suddenly forgetting where he was, and who he was with, and why. He sighed, remembering, and relaxed against the soft mattress, stroking Alynore’s arm, her back. She turned her face to him, propping her chin against his chest.

“How do you feel?” he asked softly. The fire had burned itself out; the only source of light was the moon, its rays silvering everything they landed on.

“Sore, and strange,” Alynore answered honestly.

“Can you not sleep?”

“Thinking too much.”

“Mm,” he grunted softly.

“You sleep lightly.”

“You learn to,” Jon told her, exhausted but too engaged by the soft heat and delicate perfume of Alynore’s skin to sleep. He sighed, stretching luxuriously, and Alynore smiled softly when he asked, “What can I do, to help you gentle your mind?”

“I don’t now… Talk to me,” Alynore said, and Jon found it such a strange request, given everything, that he smiled in the darkness.

“About what?”

A soft sigh. “Have you ever been in love?” Jon’s eyes opened, staring at the canopy above them.

“Yes,” he said, and sighed grimly.

“What was she like?”

“She was fierce, and kissed by fire…and I betrayed her,” Jon said quietly. He glanced at Alynore; her face was faintly silvered by the moonlight, soft and gentle. And because they were here, and because he had never spoken of her, not to anyone, not since he had burned her body in the grove of weirwoods beyond he Wall, and because Alynore had trusted him…he told her.

He told her about Ygritte. About the Watch, the Great Ranging, Qhorin Halfhand and Mance, and climbing the Wall, his ultimate betrayal. Reaching the garrison shot through with arrows she had aimed at him - yet never struck true, in spite of her awing aim. The Battle for Castle Black. Her dying in his arms, her heart pierced by an arrow. You remember that cave…

Tenderly, Alynore leaned forward and kissed Jon’s chest. It was such an intimate gesture, not romantic but something deeper. “If she truly loved you for all that you are, she would have known, deep down in her heart, that you could never truly lose yourself, not even for her.”

“I was hers, and she was mine…and we lived…” Jon said, his voice agonised and unfamiliar to his own ears. “I’d never felt so alive as when I was with her. She fought by my side…teased and taunted me…she made me laugh. She was ferocious and sharp and flirtatious… And she died for nothing.”

“You saved her people.”

“Not nearly enough of them,” Jon said, with quiet ferocity. Not nearly enough of them. Alynore sighed, propping herself up on her elbow. She traced her fingertips down his chest, pausing at every scar.

“You wondered why it was you I asked to father a child…” she said quietly. “One of the reasons…if my child inherits even half your grit and goodness, I know I shall truly have reason to be proud of them…” Jon sighed grimly, and captured her face tenderly in his hands. He flitted his gaze over her face, sleepy and relaxed, and leaned in to kiss her; he rolled them over, and tasted Alynore’s gasp on his lips as she felt him. “Again?”

“My lady, I’ve a job to do,” he said, and Alynore laughed, biting her lip.

“And you always do your duty,” she said, with mock sombreness, and Jon leaned down to nip at her lower-lip.

“If you’re too sore…”

“I’m not,” she murmured against his lips. It was gentle and slow and savouring, with ardent gazes broken by tender kisses. After, Alynore curled up against Jon again, tracing his scars with her fingertip, and she asked sleepily, “All the horror you have seen...would you do it all again?”

“There was a time I thought not… When I learned Robb had called the banners… After I betrayed the wildlings, I heard what happened at the Red Wedding,” Jon told her, his eyes closed, heavy, his body relaxed. Strange that he could talk about Ygritte, and Robb, without his body locking with tension, without simmering, icy rage or utter despondence consuming him. “I knew if I’d gone after him…deserted the Night’s Watch…I never would have been there when the wight attacked, when Lord Commander Mormont led the Great Ranging… I never would have seen… I hate it with every fibre of who I am…but I’m still here. And there’s a reason. There has to be.”

“You’re grim and sensible… I don’t think you’d have the imagination to create White Walkers and wights just to play a political game to distract everyone from a southern war, when the North has already declared independence,” Alynore murmured.

“You believe me?”

“I do.”

“We’re all going to die because of this invasion.”

“We all die. Why do you keep fighting?”

“Because otherwise…it’s the end of all things.”

“Perhaps you need to show people why they should be frightened,” Alynore murmured, yawning, and curled against Jon, her body becoming heavier, her breaths deeper, as she fell into a deep and restful sleep.

Jon’s eyes popped open, and he stared long and hard at the canopy.

Show, don’t tell, Maester Luwin reminded them, as they planned their campaigns. He had always meant, ensure your words match your actions. Never let anyone question the honour of your intentions. Set the precedent: Show your word is your bond.

But maybe… Show them, stop trying to tell them, Jon thought. Show the two Queens why their war was petty, and ultimately irrelevant. Why they needed to stop fighting, and commit their armies to fighting the Night King’s hordes.


“There is news, my lady,” Maester Wolkan said, glancing from Sansa to Larra, who had collapsed, groaning, into the settle moments earlier, hands aching, in desperate need of a bath to rinse the sweat from her body - the forge was horrifically hot to her now, though she remembered it as warm and inviting. She was too used to the cold now, to linger by the fire without feeling the heat like a trap. “Two thousand Unsullied soldiers took Casterly Rock, unchallenged. The Lannisters have been summoned to the capital by Queen Cersei. The larders and treasuries had been emptied. When the Ironborn returned to their ships…they were set upon by Ironborn.”

“Ironborn?” Sansa murmured breathlessly.

“Led by Euron Greyjoy, who has styled himself King of the Iron Islands and allied with Queen Cersei,” Maester Wolkan said apologetically. “The Ironborn destroyed the ships flying Daenerys Targaryen’s colours; for days, mutilated and drowned Unsullied have been washed ashore at Lannisport.”

“Oh, dear,” Larra sighed heavily, glancing at Brandon, whose face turned sad and grim, his eyes gleaming but fading out of focus as he remembered… “Maester Wolkan…may I request that in future, when you deliver any bad news, you also give a hint of hope. Doesn’t matter how small.”

“The winter crops are flourishing, my lady.”

Larra winked at the maester, her smile sardonic, teasing. “That’ll do.”

“Any word from Dragonstone?” Sansa asked. “From Jon?”

“None, my lady, since confirmation that the King has been granted access to mine obsidian from the Dragonmont,” Maester Wolkan said apologetically. They had just received the first shipment; that raven had been weeks ago.

“Euron Greyjoy would be a fool indeed if he didn’t turn the Iron Fleet toward Dragonstone soon,” Larra murmured. “Daenerys Targaryen cannot conquer the mainland with her armies if her armies cannot reach the mainland…though that does pose the greater threat, will she unleash her dragons so soon, to take Westeros?”

“I suppose the benefit of the Targaryen invasion is that Cersei cannot unleash the Greyjoys on our fleet,” Sansa said.

“At least as long as we all overwinter at Winterfell, our people will be safe from Ironborn attacks,” Larra said. “If we have to reclaim coastal castles when the snows melt, the krakens shall learn how sharp a direwolf’s bite is.”

“I’d rather not lose the ships, all the same,” Sansa said.

“Nor I. I know what they cost the Northern treasury… The Ironborn fleet is made of wood, I imagine.”

“Yes.”

“The Targaryen queen is an arrogant, impulsive girl with three dragons. I think we can safely surmise that Daenerys Targaryen will target the Ironborn fleet in retaliation for her humiliation at the Rock, as vengeance for her butchered soldiers,” Larra said. “In this quarrel between queens, Cersei has drawn first blood using the Ironborn fleet. The Queen’s dragons may yet deal with the Ironborn for us… If Tywin Lannister taught Westeros anything during the War of the Five Kings, it’s that it is someties expedient to allow others to slaughter your enemies on your behalf.”

Sansa cast a sharp look at Larra, frowning slightly; it was true, though. Tywin Lannister had redefined warfare by conspiring with the Freys to arrange the Red Wedding - everyone knew Lord Tywin had made assurances to the cowardly Lord Frey. Nobody dared accuse the Lannisters outright, because the Freys had been seen to take all the risk. They had taken all of the credit. And the blame.

“How do you know the Targaryen queen is arrogant and impulsive?” Sansa asked, when Maester Wolkan had bowed himself out of the solar. Larra yawned, nodding her chin toward Brandon. He turned his pale face to hers, holding her gaze, and Larra woke up a little, sitting up straighter. She frowned at the question in Brandon’s eyes.

Slowly, she nodded.

Sansa knew Cersei. It was important she know Daenerys, too, the other side of the same coin.

“Show her.”

She helped wheel Brandon’s chair next to the settle, close to Sansa. Larra arranged the cushions, knowing all too well the stiffness Sansa would return to after Brandon had showed her everything she needed to see. Sansa was wide-eyed, and eyed Bran’s hand sceptically as he offered it.

“It’s alright,” Larra told her gently. “You’re safe.”

Sansa swallowed and eyed Brandon’s hand before resting her palm in his.

It was strange to watch Brandon whisk Sansa away with him into his memories, the way her eyes turned milky-white and her body relaxed against the settle. Larra sighed, and tucked a blanket and a fur over Sansa to keep her warm. Then she realised she sat alone in the solar, and cast about for something to do; she still did not sleep well. Her bed was far too soft.

She found some knitting, and eyed the ledgers and letters on the great desk, and settled herself in the carved chair, peering down at Sansa’s work. While Sansa learned, Larra would work, sharing the load. Alternating between writing - she had spent weeks acclimatising her fingers to holding a stylus and scribing, practising her handwriting - and knitting, Larra went through the pile of paperwork, answered scrolls, read the most recent accounts, and annotated several documents, making notes for their preparations for the castle - repairing the Broken Tower; fortifying the glasshouses; preparing as much pitch as could be made; the cost of cheap, plentiful grains from Essos to cover the poor wheat yield, or finding alternative ways to prepare what they had.

While Larra worked, Brandon took Sansa on a journey, watching a timid girl in Pentos become a conqueror and a killer.

“Larra…” The voice was soft; she glanced up, letters swimming in her vision. She saw Brandon staring back at her; beside him, Sansa’s eyes were still milky, her hand loosely draped in his. “Something has happened in the West. You must see…”

Larra set down the stylus, and tucked herself on the flagstones in front of Brandon’s wheeled chair, reaching her hand up. He took it, and Larra blinked.

The sun was shining hotly down upon them, great monuments of ancient red stone jutting up from wide open plains toward the sky, lazy rivers winding around them, lined by dense shrubs with prickly boughs and dying flowers.

Everything else was burning.

Chapter 25: Fire & Blood

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

25

Fire and Blood


The air was thick with smoke and the screams of Dothraki bloodriders flinging themselves from their mounts to slash at Lannister soldiers struggling to raise their spears, shuddering with dread, as a great black dragon circled and banked over the river, his sheer proximity causing the water to hiss and bubble, as fire sparked in the back of his gullet, the only warning for a group of soldiers who saw him - and fled, screaming as Drogon belched fire upon them, setting alight wagons and the horses that pulled them, soldiers roasted inside their gilded-steel armour as their screams grew high and tinny, desperate to reach the river, now black with soot and the blood of soldiers slain by the Dothraki, the riverbanks littered with the still-burning dead turning to ash carried on the winds, carried in the water, as Dothraki bloodriders leapt through great curtains of flame, fearless, their horses charging through, biting and kicking, heedless of fear or injury, as the Westerosi soldiers buckled, and fell back, and were slain in their droves.

The Lannister line was buckling: Officers on horseback galloped behind their men, and Larra watched Ser Jaime Lannister, his gilded-steel hand gleaming, riding with no helmet, astride a beautiful white horse, encouraging his men to “Hold the line!”

For every spear that struck its target, felling a Dothraki horse and its bloodrider, a dozen Lannister soldiers were trampled underfoot as the horde advanced.

And Larra watched grimly, her eyes wide, and Robert Baratheon’s voice inexplicably resounded in her head: “If the Targaryen girl convinces her horse-lord husband to invade, and the Dothraki horde crosses the Narrow Sea, we won't be able to stop them… We hole up in our castles, a wise move. Only a fool would meet the Dothraki in an open field… They leave us in our castles. They go from town to town, looting and burning, killing every man who can't hide behind a stone wall, stealing all our crops and livestock, enslaving all our women and children…”

Robert was right.

In matters of war, there was no-one with better instincts than Robert Baratheon, who had only lost a single battle… Possibly one better, Larra thought, Robb’s face flickering in her mind. Robb had died undefeated. But even he could not have fought off the hordes, not in open field, and everyone knew it.

The Dothraki could not be defeated in open field. An irrefutable truth. They had never crossed the Narrow Sea. Now they had.

The screaming hordes of the Dothraki.

They were magnificent, Larra admitted it, bold, exultant in combat, utterly unafraid, in their leather vests and oiled braids, their arakhs gleaming in the firelight as they flung themselves from the saddle, their horses struck down by archers - and behind them, even more, an endless river of bloodriders, bellowing, pushing themselves up to stand on their saddles, aiming their wicked, curved bows. To watch a horde descend on its enemy…breath-taking.

Larra frowned.

There was no need to unleash the dragon. No need to belch fire upon the armies: The Dothraki were making quick work of the most well-trained army in Westeros.

She spied a glimmer of silver amid the shadows and smoke.

Daenerys Targaryen looked little more than a tick, dug in on Drogon’s back.

Larra’s lips parted, following the direction of the dragon - who vomited fire and caused a line of wagons and carts to explode in a fury, scattering debris.

“Was that food?” Larra muttered, glancing darkly at Brandon, who was watching, tall and shrewd beside her. On his other side was Sansa, wide-eyed, bewildered, and utterly horrified - she had been removed from the Battle of the Bastards, seen everything only from a distance, and the aftermath, the survivors covered in gore.

They were fully immersed, and Sansa flinched every time a bloodrider slashed their arakh, and jumped as Drogon set alight more men, her lips parting on gasps as her cheeks went ashen, hollowed, and the dragon wheeled and banked in the air, goring the earth with deep burns.

Ser Jaime Lannister, sat astride his fine white horse, organised archers, as Drogon flew high above, wheeling and circling back around.

The archers loosed their arrows: High above, Drogon shrieked and exposed his armoured belly, sweeping down dangerously fast, to incinerate more of the archers.

Fire burned everywhere, men screamed as they blistered and turned to ash, bloodriders bellowed as they revelled in the slaughter - and that was what it was.

It was no battle: It was a massacre.

And the Dothraki adored it. They hollered as they rode through the Lannister infantrymen, some swinging twin arakhs, some wielding barbed whips, some had wicked spears or blade-tipped bows. And every time Drogon vomited fire, the Dothraki screams grew louder, more aggressive, more triumphant - they followed the greatest khal, riding the most horrifying mount in their history.

She gave them glorious death: And they loved her for it.

It was chaos. Pure chaos, everything on fire: The smoke obscured the sky, turning day to night, and ash drifted through the air like snow. Everywhere, the clang of metal as arakh met broadsword and spears clashed, and shields shattered - or turned to dust as Drogon breathed great waves of fire across the plains, along with the men that hid behind them.

A slim man in plain leathers galloped on a dark horse, clashing with a bloodrider - and he ran, toward a canvas-covered wagon, pausing only to change direction, avoiding more bloodriders, and free the sword from a burning soldier’s chest as he screamed, pinioned to a carriage, and killed a bloodrider, ducking as Drogon screamed overhead, the sky obscured by smoke and ash, everything burning, heat rippling in the air, and the strange screams of the dragon sent chills down the spines of all those who were still fighting.

He dived inside of the wagon, and a moment later, the sides of it fell away, unfolding to the ground like ramps, revealing the man - and the biggest crossbow Larra had ever seen. Not a crossbow, she remembered, thinking back to her cyvasse games with the boys. A scorpion. Robb used to use them against cavalry of armoured elephants - they had often argued over the practicality of any Essosi armies transporting the elephants across the Narrow Sea.

“The Dornish scorpion,” Bran sighed softly. His eyes glimmered as he gazed at the weapon, and Larra focused on the man and the scorpion, as he primed the weapon with great spoked wheels, winching the bowstring back, and armed it with a steel spear six feet long, barbed and evil, heavy - and perfect for piercing tough flesh.

Anyone who knew their histories knew that a single, lucky bolt from a scorpion had pierced the dragon Meraxes’ eye, striking the dragon dead in mid-flight, and causing Queen Rhaenys Targaryen to plummet to her death.

One lucky shot was all that slim man and his scorpion needed.

But the sky was choked with smoke. Day was night, and though Larra felt merely as if they were stood in some balmy meadow, to the soldiers, it would be blisteringly hot - smoke stinging their eyes, sweat drenching their bodies.

As the little man in the leathers primed the weapon that was going ignored by Daenerys Targaryen while she burned soldiers alive, Ser Jaime shouted, “Take cover!”

They were close enough to Ser Jaime to see the look on his face as the men in front of him turned from flesh to fire to ash in a heartbeat, brushed away by the wind. He closed his eyes, shock and agony flitted across his face. Devastation quickly turned to grim determination as he opened his eyes, and set his jaw.

Men stood a chance of surviving against the hordes: There was no way to war against fire.

And Ser Jaime had watched Daenerys’ father burn men alive. Had stood guard over the monster he was sworn to protect while he burned Rickard Stark alive, his son Brandon asphyxiating himself trying to get free to save his father…

Aerys had wildfire.

Daenerys had dragons.

The bolt went wide.

The man in leathers primed the weapon - it was a job for a team, but he worked alone, feverishly arming the scorpion.

The second bolt struck true. They heard it - not the impact, but its aftermath: Drogon shrieked, the sound unholy, making even the marrow in Larra’s bones shrivel in dread, and blood rained down on the bloodriders below the beast, great fat droplets.

Drogon fell.

Larra raised her hand to shield her eyes as the wind swept billows of smoke away, briefly revealing the sun, and watched as Drogon careened through the air toward the unforgiving earth, his wings flapping uselessly, tail lashing in pain, and her lips parted as she lowered her gaze, squinting…

“Sansa…” she said, and her sister followed her gaze. On the horizon, watching the massacre, a tiny man was surrounded by bloodriders, their horses finer than any of the bloodriders’, silver circles gleaming on their furred vests - a three-headed dragon ouroboros worn by the Queen’s favoured few. “Lord Tyrion.”

“Ser Jaime is the only one who ever showed him kindness,” Sansa said urgently. “If he dies -“

“The Queen may find herself short a Hand,” Larra muttered, as Drogon appeared to recover from his shock at being injured. Fifty feet above the ground, his great wings flapped, stirring the fires, disturbing the ash, and Lannisters and Dothraki alike dived out of the way as he screamed so loudly Sansa clamped her hands over her ears, grimacing.

The man in leathers dived from the scorpion, just as Drogon vomited fire, destroying it in an explosion that rocked the ground beneath their feet. He belched so much fire upon the thing that had stung him, Drogon created a crater fifteen feet deep, scarred and smouldering and black with soot.

Up close - the only ones immune to death by dragonfire on this godsforsaken plain - Larra could see the injury that had stunned Drogon mid-air.

The bolt had hit its mark, but not accurately. The bolt intended for his eyes, the only vulnerable part of the beast, had struck the side of his head, piercing through, the barbs of the bolt tearing through the skin and sinew: the bolt had passed through the side of his armoured head, shattered one of his great horns, and slashed along his neck, before embedding itself in Drogon’s back, two feet from where Daenerys clung on, wild-eyed terror at her fall replaced quickly by fury that she had nearly been killed.

The dragon shrieked and screamed, and did more harm to the hordes as their horses - trained to be fearless in battle - whickered and snorted and screamed, and bolted, heedless of their riders, who fled the area as Drogon screamed and thrashed and vomited fire, blood splashing from his face, pooling along his neck.

Drogon thrashed too much for Daenerys to cling on; she tumbled off his back, and glanced around, wide-eyed, barking orders in Dothraki to bloodriders who bellowed and charged to her, arakhs raised - to protect her.

She had no weapon but her dragon, and he was beyond her control, a wild beast in tremendous pain.

And across the water, a knight on a white steed watched the white-haired girl, grimacing and attempting to climb back onto Drogon’s back - to pull free the bolt causing him such pain.

Ser Jaime saw Daenerys, vulnerable.

He saw Lannister spears littering the ground. Watched the bloodriders holler as they surged toward their khaleesi. And winced against the pain of the sound as Drogon screamed, the barb twisted and tugged by Daenerys, embedded deep into his flesh - they did not know it, but embedded into his bone - and Ser Jaime acted.

He spurred on his horse.

Plucked an upright spear from the chest of a Dothraki bloodrider.

And charged.

A lifetime of jousting, a lifetime of battles and war and inexplicable bravery mingled with stupidity, Ser Jaime charged.

Daenerys yanked the bolt free. Drogon screamed. Turned his head. Vicious eyes lanced on Ser Jaime as he advanced with a lance of his own - Drogon opened his mouth.

The slim man in leathers barrelled out of nowhere, jumping off his horse to shove Ser Jaime out of the way as Drogon bathed their horses in fire.

With a tremendous splash, Ser Jaime Lannister landed in the water, weighted down by his gilded armour.

The common sell-sword in plain leathers, who had wounded Drogon the Dread, hit the water, already dead of shock as half his body burned.


When the fighting was done, they watched Lord Tyrion softly pad through the ash-meadow. Searching… He was searching for his brother…

“Ser Jaime resurfaced just beyond the river-bend,” Bran said gently. “He is alive, though he nearly drowned. He is on his way to King’s Landing, to tell Cersei.”

“He’ll wish the dragon devoured him,” Sansa said curtly.

Larra followed Lord Tyrion, as he came upon Daenerys. She rested on a rocky outcrop, Drogon resting behind her, smoke billowing, embers hissing, the Dothraki shoving the prisoners-of-war toward their Khaleesi for judgement. She strode closer, the better to hear Daenerys and her advisor; Sansa appeared at her side, the wool of her gown immaculate, untouched by the scorched earth, by the blood of the slain, by the ash and smoke lingering in the air. She was paler than usual, but watching Lord Tyrion and Daenerys shrewdly.

“Our strategy was to unleash the hordes,” Lord Tyrion said sharply. “Not to spew dragonfire across the Westerlands.”

“My enemy is defeated.”

“And Drogon is injured. Your child…is injured,” Lord Tyrion frowned. “How often must he take the weapons aimed at you before you realise he is still vulnerable?”

“Drogon grows bigger with every moon-turn,” Daenerys said dismissively. “He will heal.”

“And possibly come to associate you with pain,” Tyrion warned.

“I am his mother.”

“It is mothers who should protect their children,” Tyrion said, with soft accusation, “not the other way round. Do not give Westeros even more reason to endanger these rare creatures you brought forth into this world. They are far too precious to risk with your foolhardiness.”

Daenerys glowered, but had no reply.

Her bloodriders shoved their prisoners forward. Daenerys turned her expression almost neutral, but her coaxing came off as condescending when she started to speak. “I know what Cersei has told you. That I’ve come to destroy your cities, burn down your homes, murder you and orphan your children… That’s Cersei Lannister, not me.” Larra scoffed incredulously; Sansa raised her eyebrows. “I’m not here to murder, and all I want to destroy is the wheel that has rolled over rich and poor, to the benefit of no-one but the Cersei Lannisters of the world.”

“She wants the Iron Throne,” Sansa said succinctly. “If she truly wanted to eradicate the wheel, she would melt the hideous thing down and go back to Essos where she’s wanted.”

“I offer you a choice,” Daenerys said. “Bend the knee and join me. Together, we will leave the world a better place than we found it… Or refuse, and die.”

“I’d rather she be plain stupid than delusional,” Larra sighed, shaking her head. “Submit or die? She will unite the entirety of Westeros against her to fight for their freedom!”

Some men knelt, without thinking. Others stood taller, shoulders back, levelling glares at the white-haired girl. Drogon shrieked, flaring his wings, blood splattering from his still-seeping wound. More men knelt, quickly. But there were some - nearly a dozen - who stood with their backs ramrod straight, even in the face of a dragon’s fury. Most of them were surprisingly young, despite the soot and blood smearing their faces.

“Step forward, my lord.” Daenerys did not speak above a murmur.

An older, dour-looking man in armour emblazoned with the sigil of a striding huntsman stepped forward.

“House Tarly,” Larra murmured. She remembered Samwell. Had learned all the sigils of Westeros as a girl; knew this must be Samwell’s father, and stood beside him, tall and strapping, with a handsome face and bloodshot eyes pinched with dread, must be Sam’s younger brother. They were as alike as chalk and cheese, though the earnestness shining from his face reminded her of Sam.

“You will not kneel?”

“I already have a queen.”

“My sister. She wasn’t your queen until quite recently, though, was she? Before she murdered your rightful queen, and destroyed House Tyrell for all time,” Lord Tyrion said glacially. “Your allegiances appear to be somewhat flexible.”

“Less so than yours, my lord Hand,” Lord Tarly retorted accusingly, his eyes flickering to the symbol of office pinned to Lord Tyrion’s leather jerkin, and Tyrion had the grace to shift uncomfortably under Lord Tarly’s quelling gaze. “Say what you will of your sister, she was born and raised in Westeros with all our histories and customs, she has spent over twenty years ruling the Seven Kingdoms - all but the last few years those of peace and plenty. Two short wars - one started by Balon Greyjoy - the other…by your father when Lady Catelyn arrested you upon the Kingsroad; and you repaid him with murder. And now you have threatened the freedoms of Westeros by inviting fire-worms and savages and foreign warlords to our shores to destroy all that we are - out of spite for your family.”

“You will not trade your honour for your life,” Daenerys said coolly. “I respect that.”

“Perhaps he could take the black, Your Grace,” Lord Tyrion interjected quickly, barely concealing his anxiousness as Drogon furled and unfurled his wings behind them, assessing the damage. “Whatever else he is, he is a true soldier. He will be invaluable at the Wall.”

“This man, you tell me, is Lord Randyll Tarly - the only man to defeat Robert Baratheon in battle during the Rebellion,” Daenerys said. “Send one of the greatest living military leaders to my northern enemies, give him to Jon Snow to lead his armies?”

“Jon Snow is not your enemy, he is King in the North and a potential ally,” Lord Tyrion said, sounding long-suffering. “Lord Tarly is indeed a most seasoned commander; if you will not lend Jon Snow troops to defeat the Night King, then send the Night’s Watch your prisoners of war to do with as they so choose, as sovereigns have for thousands of years - including your ancestors.”

“You cannot send me to the Wall,” growled Lord Tarly. “Only my true Queen, Cersei Lannister, has the power to exile me. You are nothing but a foreign invader clinging to the legacy of a cruel people dethroned decades ago.”

Daenerys’ eyes narrowed. She nodded at her commanders. The bloodriders strode forward, removing Lord Tarly from the rest.

“You will have to kill me, too.”

“Step back and shut your mouth!” Lord Tarly barked, whirling to knock the hands of the Dothraki from his shoulders, glaring at the boy.

“Who are you?” Daenerys asked.

“A stupid boy!”

“I am Dickon Tarly, son of Randyll Tarly.”

“You are the future of your House. This war has already wiped one great House from the world,” Lord Tyrion warned, and he sounded rather hectic. “Don’t let it happen again, bend the knee!”

“If it shows Westeros her true quality, then I shall die,” said Lord Dickon Tarly of Horn Hill, every bit as honourable and brave - and perhaps as clever - as his older-brother. “I will not kneel.”

Lord Tyrion grimaced, turned to Daenerys, said hastily, “Your Grace, nothing scrubs bold notions from a man’s head than a few weeks in a dark cell.”

“I meant what I said,” Daenerys said silkily, her voice heavy with threat. “I’m not here to put men in chains.”

“No, you would rather burn them,” Lord Tyrion said scathingly, his voice sneering, and Larra’s lips twitched toward a smile in spite of the circumstances. There he is… “Murder them, you are no better than Cersei was when she blew up the Sept of Baelor. You will show the world only that you take no prisoners; and your enemies will respond accordingly.”

“If imprisonment becomes an option, many will take it,” Daenerys said sharply. ”I gave them a choice…they made it.”

“You offered them a lifetime in bondage to you or death. Is that not what the slavers of Essos offer?” Lord Tyrion insisted vehemently, and Daenerys looked as if she had been struck. “The ashes of your enemies are not a firm foundation on which you can build the world you wish to create. It is your choice. Do not make the wrong one.”

The Queen stared long and hard at her Hand, her expression yielding nothing. She turned, and stared out at the men gathered beyond. There was no love, no respect in their gazes, as the sooty men in heat-warped armour glared up at her on their knees. Only cold fear, and a slow, burning hatred kindled by the murder of their friends and brothers, slain by savages. No-one cheered; there were no smiles, or hands reaching toward her, whispering in awe. Only hostility. The reminder of her lost family, of everything they had taken from her.

Drogon called out, and Daenerys glanced up at him; the dragon’s great head, shining with blood, was turned northwest, toward a cluster of bloodriders galloping toward them at high speed. A khalasaar was easy to find; one led by a dragon, even easier, and Drogon dominated the horizon, flapping his monstrous wings, the ground shuddering with every harrowing scream.

Daenerys stared as the bloodriders hurtled closer, the men on the ground and the Tarlys stood in Drogon’s shadow shifting uneasily, their warped armour clanking, sweat dripping down their faces, leaving streaks through the soot and grime clinging to their skin, and the Dothraki commanders, those men who had remained behind with Lord Tyrion during the carnage - their braids were long and glossy and tinkled with silver bells that sang of prowess in battle, showing their status - muttering amongst themselves, as the small group of bloodriders approached. Their bare arms were smeared with black and blood-red slashes, as Khal Drogo’s khalasaar had once worn vibrant blue: They wore her colours. Targaryen colours.

The bloodrider at the head of the cluster leapt from his saddle, muttered to some of his commanders, and approached respectfully Daenerys, “Khaleesi…”

“What’s he telling her?” Sansa murmured, frowning.

“Nothing good,” Larra muttered, watching the Queen’s face. Whatever news he brought, she had been waiting for it: triumph made her face burn with a cruel arrogance, exultant.

“Something has happened,” Brandon said sharply, and Larra glanced at him. And she realised it was not Brandon, but Bran: because his eyes were wide with alarm, his cheeks pale, and he was gazing beseechingly at Larra, horror-struck. Her brother’s face shone through the mask of the Three-Eyed Raven, and dread, something like heartbreak, despair, flickered across his face. Tall Brandon was replaced by the courageous, impish little brother she remembered, curious and innocent. “Something worse.”

“How could things get worse?” Sansa asked, her face still pale, eyes flickering from the charred, smoking plains to the Dothraki laughing callously as they looted dead bodies, and Daenerys, rigid and cold above them, framed by Drogon’s bulk as the sun started to dip lower toward the horizon.

“Never ask that,” Larra warned grimly.

The vision changed.

They were no longer in open plains jutting with great natural stone monuments, but in a picturesque canyon. Either side, red stone walls rose, jagged and vibrant, turning the vivid blue sky into a winding ribbon of sapphire above them; a shallow river wound lazily along a faint, little-used trail, bubbling playfully. The riverbanks were lined with trees and shrubs, hardy flowers growing unexpectedly from crevices halfway up the walls. Some trees were tall and striving, amber leaves flickering in the breeze, among sycamore and elder, ash and chokecherry trees, redwoods, while some were short and shrubby, with dainty yellow flowers, velvet mesquite and juniper, mulberry and white oak, ancient olive trees, walnut and desert willow, the ground littered with agaves and prickly cacti, crimson penstemons, sprawling cliffroses, dainty gaura, bladderpod, spiderwort and catclaws heavy with seedpods, four-wing saltbush, desert broom and the golden chrysanthemum coveted as an emblem of the Westerlands.

It was a beautiful place.

“Wait - what about the Tarlys?” Sansa blurted, blinking around, shielding her eyes from the sun that suddenly seemed much harsher without the smoke blocking its rays.

Larra was already staring grimly.

It was a beautiful place: It was also a perfect place for an ambush.

And an ambush there had been.

“The Tarlys are alive,” Bran said softly, his expression despondent as he winced, and they watched.

A caravan of incredibly fine carriage-houses had been ambushed. One wheelhouse lay on its side, one of the horses screaming, its leg broken: a bloodrider put it out of its misery, making the people clustered by the side of the wheelhouse whimper. They were richly dressed, jewels glinting gold and silver, the fabric of their clothing shimmering, furs gleaming, but some of them were bleeding superficially from being thrown about in the wheelhouse. The carriage-houses themselves were outfitted for royalty, golden lions inlaid into the sides of the polished carriage walls.

A dozen wheelhouses, wagons trailing out of sight behind them, guarded by Dothraki.

Lannister guards were heaped in piles - or had been left where they were slain, their blood colouring the dusty earth a rich ruby red, quickly cooling to black, attracting flies and curious lizards. It had been quick, the ambush - the bloodriders had caught the Lannisters before they even realised they were under attack. Their men lay butchered.

Now, the bloodriders threw open the doors of the wheelhouses, barking orders that no-one understood - some, who knew a few words of the common tongue, spoke harshly, poking their heads inside the wheelhouses - and a few bellowed and fell back, dragging older men out, snatching the daggers from their hands. They were killed on the spot, and the sound of feminine screams echoed off the eternal red-stone walls.

“There’s smoke to the south,” Sansa murmured, her eyes raised to the skies, as one carriage-house was emptied of people, who were herded together at the point of an arakh, wielded almost lazily by a smirking bloodrider.

“That’s south-east,” Larra said gently, judging the skies.

“The fires burn that high?”

“We’re just that close,” Larra said.

Small children started crying. Every wheelhouse was emptied, sometimes roughly, sometimes at the point of an arakh, with dread gripping the faces of the girls manhandled toward their mothers, who held their beautiful daughters close, and young boys and old men knew they were soon to die, unarmed and useless. They were golden, all of them. Golden, and green-eyed; some had the stern silver hair of age, faces lined with wisdom. But they were all handsome, and all of them dressed richly in the manner of the West, in the asymmetric style favoured in the court of Queen Rhaella. And every one of them showed their colours - and their loyalties - with golden lions stitched somewhere, or draped around their throats, or studding belts or embossing lapels.

Then they heard it. The crash of thunder, and a scream…a shriek that curdled marrow and liquefied the insides of brave men. Drogon. It was not the sound of thunder; it was Drogon’s great wings, and a heartbeat later, plumes of dust rose as those great leathery wings flapped, and the beast gained footing. He shook his head, snarling, and Larra shivered, watching Drogon peer down at them from above the canyon, looming, his tail swishing - he reminded her of a shadowcat, she thought, stalking its prey, hungry for the kill…

A speck of silver and shadow dripped off Drogon’s back, climbing down, met by bloodriders to guide her on a sure-footed path, descending into the creek.

Larra watched the smoke off in the distance, now white - the fires were burning themselves out - and it seemed as if Daenerys had brought winter with her: Snow seemed to be falling in the creek, dusting the vibrant flowers and the bodies of the fallen. It wasn’t snow, though; snow did not look like that. It was ash.

The wind had brought the ashes of the dead Lannister army to the last of House Lannister.

Penned in by gleaming arakhs and wicked smiles, frightened children whimpered and cried as brittle old men tried to shield pregnant women and frail ladies and young mothers with small children clutching their skirts and clamped to their hips tucked their babies even closer, bright eyes darting, terrified, between the Dothraki and the dragon.

Daenerys walked toward her captives, dozens of them - all of Casterly Rock emptied, the Lannisters summoned to King’s Landing to support their Queen at court.

She walked past the Lannisters, bloodriders falling into place behind her, arakhs swinging loosely at their sides, bows idle, whips whispering like snakes across the dusty earth as the bloodriders grinned viciously at their captives, their dark eyes lingering on the prettiest women among them.

The bloodriders guided Daenerys to the wagons and carts behind the wheelhouses, removing tarpaulins and canvas to reveal trunks full of clothes, furniture, exotic animals in cages, musical instruments, a fortune in tapestries and bolts of Qartheen silks, velvets, heavier fabrics for winter, golden furs. Several armoured wagons hauled bars of gold; another, precious jewels. Finery all fit for a queen - and that was who it was intended for: Cersei. Gifts for their kinswoman and Queen. Further away, the bloodriders told Daenerys, the wagons were full of grain and other footstuffs.

“Very good,” she told the bloodriders. “Guide the wagons to join the rest of the khalasaar; the spoils we took from the battlefield will feed our armies. I want the khalasaar to protect the food. Escort it back to the poisoned water. When we have reached Dragonstone, I shall have my pick of the treasures, and make gifts of the rest.”

“Yes, Khaleesi,” the bloodrider nodded, and barked orders; bloodriders leapt onto their steeds, hollering and snapping their whips at liveried Lannister servants driving the wagons and carts.

“Your army has been defeated,” Daenerys said, walking forward with her hands clasped loosely before her. Her voice was calm, her face benign: Some of the Lannisters whimpered. “My Lord Hand, your kinsman Tyrion Lannister, bade me spare the life of those bannermen so unwise as to pledge their swords to your House.”

She paused for effect, and when no-one spoke up, she went on, “It occurred to me in that moment that, wise though he undoubtedly is, my Lord Hand is, by the nature of his familial loyalty to his House, conflicted in his interests. I cannot have that. Nor can I allow my servants to question my decrees.”

She let the words fall heavy in the air, and a soft gasp issued from the pride of trapped lions.

“I look at you, and see in you the very same fear I once felt, facing down a Dothraki horde,” Daenerys mused, “facing down my wedding-night with my new horse-lord husband, little more than a girl, sold to be mounted. Do not fear. I shall not give your daughters to my bloodriders for their entertainment, nor as their khaleen. They deserve neither such brutality, nor such an honour.”

Mothers gripped their daughters even tighter. Old men glowered at the Queen, suddenly feeling sixteen again, strong enough to fight the savages to protect their nieces and granddaughters.

“I maintain an iron hold upon my bloodriders,” Daenerys said, her voice cold and clear. “They will not rape. They will not butcher innocents. They will sate their bloodlust only upon the battlefield, defeating my enemies. The same could not be said of the Lannister armies that marched upon Highgarden. Infants and the heads of young children were mounted on spikes beside those of their fathers, their mothers and sisters mutilated and left to bleed out where they were shoved to the ground to be raped… Who shall pay for this atrocity? Genna Lannister.”

A querulous-looking woman stepped forward, square of figure, her long shining golden hair curling past her waist, but for thick braids coiled into buns over her ears, held fast by ruby-studded gold nets, gold ribbons crossing her brow like a circlet. Larra watched her, and Sansa seemed to recognise a little of Tywin Lannister in her hard eyes, for her lips parted, and she glanced uncertainly at Larra, at Bran. Lady Genna did not look in the least bit perturbed by the appearance of Daenerys, her bloodriders, or her dragon. She looked imperious and almost smug, as if she knew exactly what was going to happen, and what the far-reaching consequences would be. She looked at Daenerys Targaryen, and her lip curled.

Daenerys saw it, and bristled. “I vowed before I ever left my queendom of Meereen that I would answer injustice with justice. My Lord Hand reminded me of it. He reminded me of the danger of allowing injustice to go unanswered,” she said, her eyes widening, that fierce expression of self-righteousness consuming her face, turning her unnerving, half-wild. That unshakeable belief in herself above all things… “To allow disloyalty to fester. I intend to burn away the disease, before it may take hold…”

Larra frowned, watching the Queen. Burn away the disease, before it may take hold…? The disease…is loyalty?

“Seven Tyrells were spared the atrocities committed at Highgarden,” Daenerys continued lightly, seeming to calm herself down. Her purple eyes drifted over the gathered Lannisters. There were strapping young men considered too old to squire but too young to command, old men with steel in their trimmed beards, little boys with dimpled cheeks and perfect golden curls rioting all over their heads. There were pretty young mothers with swaddled infants in their arms, and little girls with ribbons in their hair, young ladies still in the schoolroom with their septas, and old women with the bloom out of their cheeks and a firm grip on their precious grandchildren. Generations of Lannisters, from the very elderly - a white-haired woman leaned heavily on her cane, rheumy-eyed and gummy but dressed in finery, small children clustered around her for the feeling of safety she emanated - to the unborn, the belly of a young woman with tumbles of golden curls gloriously fat, heavy with a child. She was not the only one expecting; jewelled fingers rested on the rounded bellies of at least two other women.

“When Cersei Lannister blew up the Sept of Baelor, which was built by my ancestors, she showed the world the value she placed on not only her enemies, but her kinsmen as well. I do not believe in wholesale slaughter, nor in vengeance for the sake of it. However, someone must be held to account for the atrocities committed at Highgarden,” Daenerys told them sternly, her eyes resting on Lady Genna. “Seven Tyrells were spared the Uprooting of Highgarden, all of them female. I shall spare seven Lannisters - a kindness to my Hand, though you do not deserve it. And you, Lady Genna, shall choose. Choose amongst yourselves. Choose from among the innocent, and choose wisely. Choose who lives.”

Stunned silence met her proclamation. Lady Genna seemed to swell with rage, but it was a quiet rage, her green eyes glowing like wildfire, fixed on Daenerys’ face. There was no false promise in her words, or her eyes; nothing but cruel, unyielding intent.

“Choose…or I shall.”

“Surely, she won’t - “ Sansa breathed, gazing at Larra and Bran, startled. Watching the field of fire had been harrowing enough, to someone unaccustomed to unbridled carnage, but this… Larra frowned, something coiling unpleasantly in her stomach, knotting and twisting, tight… She winced, and glanced at Bran.

“Bran, tell me she doesn’t slaughter them?”

Bran said nothing, but sighed, and watched - and that was his role; to watch. Never to intervene, or alter things. He was a passive observer. Bran murmured miserably, “Yes, now the rains weep o'er his halls, and not a soul to hear…”

Lady Genna stared at Daenerys long and hard. Finally, she glanced over her shoulder, and her kinsmen gasped, and it began. Begging. Pleading. Threats. Women weeping on their knees. Screaming, as their daughters were prised from their arms. The sharp slap of Lady Genna’s hand, and the low warning that their daughters would remember… Lady Genna chose.

Seven girls. The eldest little older than thirteen, already elegant, regal and poised, an exquisite beauty with gleaming green eyes, her golden hair shining to her bottom, dainty twists coiled like a circlet around her head, glimmering lions stitched onto the shoulders of her asymmetric ruby silk gown; the youngest, a tiny dumpling of four, had the most perfect golden curls coiled at her temples and bobbing over her neck, and sucked her thumb as her mother yielded her to Lady Genna, looking only slightly perturbed by the disruption. Seven, between the ages of thirteen and four.

Each of the girls was separated from their families - who wept, and screamed, and raged, attacking Lady Genna, who stood still and unyielding as a steel monument, every inch her brother’s sister. Her eyes remained fixed on Daenerys, who watched with an expression of mild interest, as the girls were penned by bloodriders. The eldest two stood rigid, their eyes wary of the savage men eyeing them with a cruel hunger - the eldest showed subtle evidence of budding breasts, a woman’s figure starting to blossom. Old enough for the Dothraki. One of the youngest girls started to cry, confused, calling out to her Mama, her tiny hands reaching for her, as her mother clawed and fought to get to her, her face shining with tears. Another gazed up at the older girls uncertainly. And one took the hand of the youngest, her unaccountably pretty face hardening as she glared at Daenerys with such scathing hatred, such viciousness, that Larra was surprised the Queen’s skin did not blister.

“Great beauties,” Daenerys said, and her tone was condescending as she cast her eyes over the seven girls. Whether it was a trick, a manipulation to show her power over the Lannisters, by forcing Lady Genna to choose…it was effective. The Lannisters were clawing at each other, screaming, arguing - showing their disunity: When it came to their survival, their children, what parent would not fight to the death so that their child might live?

“I don’t choose them for their beauty,” Lady Genna snapped, her expression of utmost disdain as she sneered at Daenerys. “I chose them for their natures - the better to survive you…” She drew herself up, her neck bleeding where one of her kinswomen had scratched her. She eyed Daenerys from the top of her head - her intricate white braids - to her toes, still caked with mud and ash and blood from the site of the massacre. “Tywin was right: It would have been better had King Aerys died at Duskendale. Rhaegar would still sit upon the Iron Throne…and you, girl…you would never have been born to replace your father in cruelty - and firelust.” She gave Daenerys a look that would have broken braver men. Her lip curled. “It’ll be the end of you. Your father was King of Corpses by the end…and you…you shall be Queen of naught but ashes.” Daenerys blanched. Then her face twisted, her expression wrathful. Teasingly, Lady Genna warned her, “Targaryens have always been their own undoing.”

Daenerys snarled, and spat, “Dracarys.”

Sansa gasped. Larra’s jaw dropped. Bran lowered his eyes sadly: he had seen this before.

Drogon craned his bleeding neck into the canyon and bathed the Lannisters in dragonfire.

Larra’s hands shook, and she felt dizzy, nauseous, needing to rest her hands on her knees and take great gulps of air deep into her lungs, retching. Sansa whimpered, her eyes glinting, and Bran sighed, reaching out to hug his arm around her shoulders, as she watched the people - old men, pregnant women, grand old ladies and little boys with perfect golden curls - burn alive. One mother had tried to break away from the rest, pelting for her daughter - her hair caught alight, her gown, and her brittle, hideous scream was harrowing - she burned before their eyes, tumbling to the ground.

The Lannisters died as their soldiers did - flesh turned to fire turned to ash in a matter of heartbeats quickly stopped. The dusty earth was scorched. Nothing remained of House Lannister but fragile statues of ash, and seven beautiful girls.

The eldest, in her fabulous silk gown, went white as a sheet, her eyes widening - but she did not look away. Did not react. Not until the next in age, with billows of frothing silver-gold curls, fell into a dead faint, knocking against her; she caught her cousin, and gently lowered her to the ground, tenderly stroking her face to wake her, as tears dripped down her cheeks, and the girl with eyes of the most vivid sapphire and paler, straight blonde hair to her waist screamed and screamed and screamed. The baby blinked confusedly, watching the fires subside, and ash appear in place of her family. The two younger girls sobbed, and the older visibly wet herself at the sight of such horror, while the younger collapsed in a heap on the ground, crying. The seventh, of middling age, with hair almost as pale as the Queen’s, stood with her eyes swimming, her face fierce, her body shuddering with suppressed rage and grief, her fists clenched.

The fires subsided. The Lannisters had become statues of ash; the breeze undid Daenerys’ work, teasing the piles of ash.

The youngest girl got free, running toward the ash, for the woman that had run for them. She looked confused, gazing this way and that, seeking - she frowned, tilting her head so that her bright golden curls bounced. “Mummy?”

She reached out to the pile of ash: The statue crumbled into the breeze at her touch. The breeze embraced the statues, carrying them away in its arms, dispersing the ash here and there like snow, brushing delicately against the girls’ skin like the ghosts of the kisses of their loved ones, lingering in their long golden hair. Several of the girls looked frightened to breathe; another swatted at her hair and clothes as if she had been set alight, swatting the flames, and Larra thought she might wake up from such nightmares the rest of her life.

The eldest watched the baby, her eyes widening in horror: She pushed off from the ground, and was allowed to descend on her cousin, scooping her up, carrying her back to the rest.

Daenerys approached the girls, and Larra was made more uneasy by the benign smile on her face than by any of the gruesome bloodshed she had witnessed on the battlefield. She approached them slowly, looking serene, and her smile shone from her eyes, her body-language relaxed and unassuming - as if to coax and reassure them, as if she was not the executioner of their families but their benevolent saviour. She stood before them, giving the girl who had wet herself a compassionate look, her eyes wandering to the girl in a dead faint on the ground.

The little girl who stood with clenched fists and rippling pale silver-blonde hair tilted her head at Daenerys. And projectile-vomited.

All over Daenerys’ fine boots, the fur-trimmed hem of her flying leathers.

The little girl - her name was Calanthe - straightened, spat, drew her sleeve across her mouth, and glared, never taking her eyes off Daenerys’, as the Queen started, and gaped down at her ruined boots, disgusted - and annoyed. She raised her eyes to glare at Calanthe.

On the ground, the eldest, Narcisa, finally roused her cousin, Crisantha, named for the famed beauty of the golden chrysanthemums of the West. Blue-eyed Delphine’s screams had subsided to a ragged whimper, and then to silence, but her lips were still parted, as if she could no longer give voice to the grief screaming in her heart; she stood like a statue frozen, her mouth open, eyes glazed.

Larra’s heart had made the same sound when she learned Father had been killed.

She had heard it again, when she learned of Robb’s fate, of Rickon’s. As if the grief throbbing through her heart would never gentle, always paining her. It was silent, but it was strong.

The vomiting girl, Calanthe, gave Daenerys another withering glower, and tucked her arms stoutly around the shoulders of her two younger cousins, delicate Altheda in her shimmering golden gown damp with her own urine, and little Rosamund, uncertainly clutching her doll, her eyes damp. The baby, Leona, sat on the ground by Crisantha, sucking her thumb complacently, ash collecting in her curls.

It was the little lioness, Calanthe, whose glare caused Daenerys’ smile to falter. Hostile, tear-streaked little faces, pale and afraid, gazed back at her: The younger girls continued to cry silently. Crisantha roused, confused, and turned green as she glanced around and saw the blackened earth, collapsing into her cousin Narcisa’s lap with a moan.

Larra watched Daenerys. She looked…confused…that the girls were not breathless with wonder, awe and gratitude that their lives had been spared, even as the wind continued to churn their family’s remains around them, flecks of ash caressing their skin.

The sound of hooves made the girls startle, and Daenerys’ face was imperious and unyielding once more as her bloodriders appeared - with Lord Tyrion, in his clever, modified saddle. His cunning eyes swept over the creek, the Lannister lions on the wheelhouses, the dead soldiers sprawled where they had been slain, the blackened earth and swirling ash, the crying girls.

Assessing, weighing… Lord Tyrion turned a dark look on Daenerys as Narcisa recognised Lord Tyrion and let out a shuddering gasp, a soft sob. “What have you done?”

“Let the last of the Lannisters be an example to all of the Houses of Westeros,” Daenerys said coolly. “Now that House Lannister is extinct but for this handful of small girls and my Lord Hand, I trust I have his undivided attention…and loyalty.”


“You think it’s a good idea?”

“I think it’s one of the few chances I might have. I think I could drag a wight into Daenerys’ court and she’d sooner blind herself to the truth,” Jon grunted. “You heard her the other night, she will not be distracted by small men… People have to be shocked out of apathy, and Daenerys…”

“What about Cersei?” Theon prompted, and Jon pulled a face, shrugging.

“As for her, I doubt I’d manage to arrange an audience with her - not without finding myself in a Black Cell,” Jon sighed. “She’d likely accuse me of conspiring with Daenerys to depose her - out of vengeance for Father.”

“You’re King in the North,” Theon reminded him. “You could call an armistice… If you truly want the North to remain neutral, it’s an opportunity for you - get the queens to meet on neutral terms, so you can show the both of them what’s truly at stake.”

“I’d have to guarantee I’d have something worth showing,” Jon said, glancing at Theon. Without the presence of Ser Davos on the island the last few weeks, Jon had found himself more and more seeking counsel with Theon, of all people. But he had been Jon’s brother once. And he had learned from his past.

“And how d’you do that?” Theon muttered, gazing out to sea. They sat on the clifftop, the frostbitten grass shivering; Jon wore no cloak, enjoying the sun shining down on them. The days had been fine, and he raised his face to the sun, resting; his nights had been exhausting.

After their first few nights together, Jon now returned to his chamber every night to find Nora already waiting for him, a smile on her face. No matter how exhausted he was, that delicate smile, the excitement glowing in her green eyes, was enough to set his blood afire, thrilled and excited. They had been learning each other - and they were emboldened; they were unabashed, confident in each other’s company, each other’s embrace. Nora was gentle and voracious; Jon gave her what she wanted, and relished every time.

If others had caught wind that Lady Tyrell had been slipping into the chambers of the King in the North for weeks, and did not reappear until past dawn, her lips swollen, skin delicately flushed from a dawn tumble in the sheets - or beside the hearth, or over the chaise - then nobody mentioned it. Not even the Sandsnake Nymeria, who revelled in intrigue and gossip.

If Theon guessed the truth about Nora, he didn’t mention it, but he had seen her wandering down the corridor the other morning, when he had come to meet Jon to discuss news from White Harbour carried by the Ironborn who had shipped obsidian north.

“There’s only one way,” Jon said grimly, glancing at Theon, who frowned. Jon tugged at the long grasses and spent wildflowers. The last few weeks had brought harsh winds and unforgiving sleet-rain: Theon warned they would not have favourable weather to sail for much longer. “Go beyond the Wall and snatch a wight, and drag it to King’s Landing if I have to.”

Theon gaped. “Do you wish to die?” Jon scowled. “Jon, you cannot go beyond the Wall, not after what you’ve told me about Hard Home. Sansa will be furious that you’d put your life at risk - again.”

“Then I shan’t tell her ‘til the thing is done!” Jon blurted, the mention of Sansa’s name rubbing him the wrong way - because he knew exactly how Sansa would feel about it.

“And if you fail?” Theon said sternly. “Sansa will think Daenerys is to blame; you went beyond the Wall to snatch a wight because she would not believe… Sansa will go to war on Queen Daenerys over you. And Daenerys will destroy Winterfell.”

“Interesting, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“Everyone on this island seems to understand that Daenerys’ first instinct is the very worst instinct.”

Theon sighed, shaking his head. He muttered, “You remember what Maester Luwin used to tell us, as we planned our cyvasse campaigns?”

“Which part?”

“That if our words don’t match our actions, very quickly people will come to realise that our word means nothing,” Theon said, his voice heavy with guilt and grief. Theon eyed Jon thoughtfully, and asked, his tone careful, “What d’you think of her?”

“She claims to want to break the wheel of oppression…but she’s invaded Westeros to take the Iron Throne.”

“And everything before the word ‘but’ is horseshit.”

“Father…” Jon sighed. He stared out over the choppy bright-grey sea, admitting miserably, “I miss him.”

“Me too. I miss them all…” Theon grunted. “I wish none of us had ever left Winterfell. I wish none of this had happened.”

“When it comes down to it, I suppose all we can do is decide what to do with what life flings at us,” Jon said. “It’s our choices that matter, how we react.”

After a little while, Theon asked, “Think Daenerys will win?”

“She’ll take the Iron Throne, I’ve no doubt about that…it’s just a matter of what she’ll lose in the process…and if it really matters to her, after all.”

“I wonder what Sansa would think of her.”

Jon exchanged an arch look with Theon.

“I believe we both know what Sansa would think of her. Sansa’s far too used to sweet courtesies concealing true cruelty not to see through Daenerys,” Jon said, and Theon smirked. They both admired Sansa. “And for all her fine clothes and prettier words about breaking chains, at her heart Daenerys Targaryen is a warlord, a conqueror. By its very definition, that makes the Queen an oppressor.”

“I think you should be careful of what you say around her,” Theon said softly.

“Lest I end up kindling?” Jon quipped, his smile grim. It had always been a possibility - and for the obsidian now being shipped to White Harbour, it was a risk Jon had always had to take.

“I mean it, Jon. She’s come to respect you and your opinion has weight - but the things she respects you for are the same reasons you’re a threat to her,” Theon said, uncharacteristically wise. “She’s too busy lusting after you at the moment to realise it, but the moment you say the wrong thing and her lust turns to hate…”

“I know,” Jon sighed, shaking his head. “You think I’m afraid to die?”

“No,” Theon said honestly, eyeing him shrewdly. “It might even be a blessed relief, to rest. We’re soldiers… We’ve both been soldiers since we left Winterfell.”

Jon sighed heavily, and they stared out to sea. With the sea so bright, he could almost imagine it was the snow-covered moors outside Winterfell. “We learned how to die a long time ago.”


The solar was silent, but for the crackle of the flames, and Sansa’s delicate sniffles, her fingers trembling as she raised her hand to wipe her eyes. Shock; that was what it was. Larra slumped in the settle, hugging one of Sansa’s embroidered cushions. Bran sat gazing sadly at them.

“Bran…tell me that was a version of a possible future,” Larra said hollowly.

“It was always a possibility,” he said softly.

“She spared the soldiers but slaughtered the innocents,” Sansa sniffed, wiping her eyes. She shook out her hands, frustrated with herself for crying, but Larra understood: she just felt numb. All she could think of was those seven little girls. “People need to know about this. What she’s done.”

“You don’t think Daenerys will crow about this?” Larra said grimly. “The entirety of Westeros will hear of it. Jon definitely will.”

“What if Jon is imprisoned on Dragonstone?” Sansa asked, her voice bright with fear. “We’ve had no word from him in weeks.”

“You heard Daenerys - she will not put a man in chains,” Larra said, her tone mocking.

“Then he is dead!”

“Sansa, calm down,” Larra told her gently.

“Jon is safe,” Bran said softly.

“What’s he doing? What is he doing, right this moment? I want to know,” Sansa said, her tone fierce. “I need to know he is safe.”

“He’s…engaged in a delicate diplomatic task,” Bran said, his lips twitching.

“You aren’t half ominous, Bran,” Larra told him, rolling her eyes.

“Don’t worry; he’s enjoying it.”

“You won’t get a straight answer out of him,” Larra warned Sansa, who looked like she wanted to press the issue. “Let it suffice we know he’s alive.”

“Very much so,” Bran quipped. His amusement faded, and he sighed, “He will learn soon enough what Daenerys Targaryen has done. And he will not linger long on Dragonstone.”

“How do you know?” Sansa asked breathlessly. Bran smiled warmly at them.

“I know our brother.” One of the guards arrived, and Bran nodded silently to him.

“Off to bed? Goodnight,” Larra said, and leaned in to kiss Bran’s cheek. He smiled softly, and the guard wheeled him around, pushing him out of the solar. Sansa groaned and slumped back, folding a washcloth soaked with hot water and camomile over her eyes. She handed one to Larra, and for a little while, they rested. They were too rattled from the ash meadow…

“You haven’t said much about Bran’s visions.”

“I’m still wrapping my mind around it. He has such power… Has he shown you…her?” Sansa asked, and Larra heard her sit up; she did the same, letting the cloth fall from her eyes, already cooling. It had felt delicious, soothing the phantom sting of smoke in her eyes.

“Yes. On our journey from Last Hearth. The last vision he shared was Jon’s arrival at Dragonstone…” Larra said, and Sansa nodded thoughtfully. “It’s important he showed you. I know it’s…absurd, and terrifying, that Bran has this…this power. Even more spectacular that he has the gift to share it with us… It’s important that you saw for yourself, without embellishment or others’ bias…to get your own measure of her. You need to be prepared.”

“She thinks of the North as her property…her enemy… She has two more dragons. If she decides to use them, to really use them…”

“We stop her,” Larra said coldly. Sansa stared at her. And then she nodded, seeing the unyielding look in Larra’s eyes.

“We stop her,” she agreed. Sansa’s voice was very young, and scared, when she asked, “What about Jon?”

“Jon’s intuitive,” Larra said. “He’ll have very quickly made up his mind about her.”

“She is beautiful,” Sansa said mournfully, and Larra pulled a face.

“Less and less with every massacre,” she grunted, and Sansa raised an eyebrow, agreeing. “Sansa…how did you feel when she smiled at the girls?”

“For a heartbeat I thought of Joffrey…then I wondered whether she was even aware of the horror of what she had done,” Sansa said, thoughtful. “It wasn’t…malicious and joyful, the way Joffrey always was when he indulged in cruelty…it wasn’t entertaining…to her, it…it seemed like…”

“Like she felt righteous in the act. You remember what I said about our way? We pass the sentence, we swing the sword…” Larra said, and Sansa nodded. “She’s already forgotten what death is… Those girls…the eldest could not be older than you were when Father was executed. And the youngest… Sansa, do you think it possible Tyrion condoned such a thing, perhaps…was it planned between them?”

“No,” Sansa said slowly. “No, I do not believe Tyrion would ever have a hand in that. Daenerys said it was a kindness to her Hand, but…”

“But what?”

“She had already won the battle. The bannermen had bent the knee to Drogon. What reason could she possibly have for going after the Lannisters? They were unarmed, women and children and old men. She killed them all to punish Tyrion - because Jaime Lannister outsmarted her. She was humiliated, in front of people who had warned her,” Sansa said, working it through slowly. “She killed them as punishment for her wounded pride, and she kept the girls alive to remind Tyrion of it. Now their fates rest with Tyrion. Whatever disappointment she suffers, she will be sure to threaten to take it out on the last Lannisters. Whipping-girls to ensure Tyrion’s best efforts against Cersei… What?”

Larra was smiling softly at her, proud. “You’re thinking like a true strategist now… What will Tyrion do?” Sansa sighed, and thought long and hard before she answered.

“When he came to King’s Landing, Lord Tyrion treated me with courtesy and respect. The first thing he did, in front of the court, in front of Joffrey, was to offer his condolences over Father’s execution. He didn’t rub my nose in it; he was in earnest…” Sansa said, clearing her throat awkwardly, still shedding the conditioning that saw her apologising for their father’s treason. “He was the only one who ever frightened Joffrey…the only one who stopped Joffrey’s torments. Before the Blackwater, he outwitted everyone in order to implement his own plans to defend the city. The city, and everyone who lived there, including Cersei… He will do what he must to ensure those girls are safe. Ultimately he’s too decent a person to let them be hurt because of him - or because of her whims… He’s too clever not to realise why Daenerys spared them.”

“What she did was an atrocity,” Larra said coldly. “Why did she go after them, after the fact?”

“The bannermen. Everywhere she’s gone, people have worshipped her… That scorpion did more than injure Drogon; it gave her ego a sharp sting,” Sansa said tartly. “She’s not wanted here, or desired, or admired…she’s reviled and distrusted. In Essos, she was deified. In Westeros, people would rather die than follow her.”

“Strange, isn’t it? That someone who claims to want to bring an end to tyranny forces those she defeats to choose between utter subservience and death.”

“You don’t think much to her.”

“Not of the person she has become. I think she started with a wonderful dream that’s become confused by conflicting desires. I think what she’s done, and become, is in conflict with what she was conditioned to want since she was old enough to remember wanting anything,” Larra said, considering. “She can bring an end to slavery; that should have been her life’s work. Or she can claim the Iron Throne. There is no world in which she can have both. Becoming the Breaker of Chains was a happy by-product of her journey to amassing the armies and wealth to launch her campaign on Westeros.”

“She stayed in Meereen to practise at ruling…and she left because the reality of ruling became too much of a headache,” Sansa said disdainfully, her eyes sliding to the great working desk. The hour was late, but their day was far from over. “She was more interested in planning her invasion.”

“Ultimately her actions have proven her words as worth very little,” Larra said, shaking her head. “You must make sure to match your actions to your words, or people will learn your word means nothing.”

“Did Father tell you that?”

“Maester Luwin.”

“Did he give you lessons like this, too?”

“Is this a lesson?” Larra asked, her smile cunning; Sansa gave her a look, and she grinned. “Yes, he did. After Jon had left and Robb was busy ruling the North for Father and I was exhausted with Rickon…we’d sit in the Maester’s Tower, and I had my own chair by the fire. We would sit, and Maester Luwin would pick a topic, and we would just talk about it…sometimes I’d fall asleep. I’d always wake up with a blanket tucked over me… He always took care of me…” She sighed wistfully, miserably. She missed Maester Luwin like a constant toothache. She smiled sadly: “Taking care. That’s what it comes down to, ruling. Taking care of as many people as you can.”

“How does arming the entire living North to fight the Night King tie up with your policy of minimal-loss?” Sansa asked.

“It doesn’t,” Larra said grimly. “But it is necessary. If we can’t stop the Night King…well, we won’t be around to wring our hands about it… All Septa Mordane’s talk of souls and heavens…sometimes I wonder if we’ll leave our bodies behind, our corpses trudging along, and Father will be waiting for us.”

“I’m no longer certain about religion…but I do believe they’re waiting for us,” Sansa said softly, gazing into the dying fire. She raised her blue eyes to Larra’s violet ones, and her smile could have made the sun rise. “All of them. We will see them again…but not yet.”

Larra smiled softly, agreeing, “Not yet.”


The court echoed with silence. Only a few stubborn candles flickered, the rest burned low.

Lord Varys sat still holding the raven-scroll in his hand.

Theon kept catching Jon’s eye, and they communicated silently, as only brothers could.

The news was…irrefutable, written in Lord Tyrion’s own hand. Telling them of atrocities, war-crimes committed on the Gold Road.

They sat for a very long time, in silence, in darkness. Finally, as the last candle wavered, and Jon sighed, pushing himself to his feet, Lord Varys seemed to shake himself from his stupor.

“Your Grace,” he said softly, and Jon paused, glanced back at the eunuch. “I will do everything in my power to help you. I hear talk of a Northern expedition. You will need help. And I am particularly situated to make arrangements that will see our queens behaving themselves for your sake.”

“I thank you, Lord Varys,” Jon said sincerely, glancing at Theon, who shrugged.

Nora was fast asleep in his bed when he arrived, the fire built up. Jon stripped, and climbed into bed, relishing the softness and warmth of her skin as he gathered her up close. She sighed, stretching luxuriously against him, and relaxed, nuzzling against him.

He woke her at dawn, making her toes curl, watching her blush and writhe, swallowing her dainty gasps, hissing as she raked her fingernails down his back and brushed delicate kisses over his chest and shoulders. The crisp dawn light spilled across the bed, turning her skin to silver and her hair to spun bronze, and they cried out as they came, Jon spending deep inside her with a decadent groan that made her smile, humming softly as she nuzzled his neck.

He rolled to his back, gathering her up close, and sighed as he gazed out of the window, into the bay.

Jon spied a ship on the horizon, his lips quirking into a smile.

Winter had come.

Chapter 26: Glorious Victory

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

26

Glorious Victory


“Your Grace…”

“Ser Davos!” Jon grinned, and embraced the older man like any one of his brothers. “Well, you look no worse for wear. How was Storm’s End?”

“The Stormlords could not agree between them that the ocean is wet,” Ser Davos said, his beard twitching, but something glinted darkly in his eyes. “They bicker over who should take possession of Storm’s End. The castellan holds it, and will not yield it. Ah, none of the Stormlords has the men to take the castle anyway.”

“Taking a castle’s simple enough, even without numbers,” Theon muttered, looking shame-faced. “It’s holding it.”

“Who’s that?” Jon asked, frowning. Winter was not alone in the bay; another ship, its sails emblazoned with the sigil of a shield-maiden wearing a winged helmet and wielding a sword, was new to the bay. “Er…House Barahir of…Val Hall?”

“I told you I’d do what I could, convince any who’d listen,” Ser Davos said, looking disappointed nonetheless, even as Jon stared in surprise.

“He’s pledged to fight?”

“Well, he didn’t come all this way to propose marriage t’you, for all you’re so pretty,” Ser Davos quipped, and Jon smiled. “Shall we wait for him? And while we do, you can tell me all about this alleged ranging beyond the Wall seeking to kidnap dead men.”

“How did you - ?!” Jon blurted, and then realised, frowning at Theon, who shrugged.

“Aye, Theon was here as Winter weighed anchor,” Ser Davos nodded. “No greetings, just ‘You’ve got to talk some sense into him’. Hopefully I’ll have better luck than I did with the Stormlords.”

Jon sighed heavily, and told Ser Davos everything. He listened, without interrupting, let Jon explain his reasoning, his plans.

“I told Jon it doesn’t count as a plan if it takes you longer to say it than it does to think it up,” Theon said, shaking his head.

“I agree, it’s a reckless venture,” Ser Davos frowned, staring at Jon, who remained grim and determined. Ser Davos sighed heavily, “But if all Jon says is true…it may be our only chance. We need armies. Real armies, if Queen Daenerys won’t offer hers.” Jon and Theon shared a look, and Ser Davos frowned. “What is it?”

“You’ve not heard?” Theon prompted, wincing.

Jon sighed heavily, talking himself up to telling Ser Davos, “Daenerys unleashed the Dothraki hordes upon the Lannister armies. She unleashed Drogon. She sent her Dothraki to ambush the Lannisters headed to the capital on the Gold Road… She burned every man, woman and child bearing the name Lannister.”

Ser Davos blinked quickly. His beard twitched. He stared at Jon, and he knew in Ser Davos’ mind, those children all had Princess Shireen’s face. “All of them?”

“All but seven young girls. For the seven Tyrells safe on Dragonstone when Highgarden was sacked,” Jon said, grimacing, glacial rage searing through him. “She called it justice.”

“We received word of it last night,” Theon said quietly. “And Daenerys is on her way back, with all the food from the Reach, and gold from Casterly Rock.”

“And the little girls?” Ser Davos asked, looking aghast.

“They’ll likely be her wards,” Jon said coldly, and Ser Davos’ beard twitched as his eyes narrowed. Sansa had been the ward of a Queen; Jon knew exactly what kindnesses lay in store for those girls. Ser Davos eyed Jon shrewdly, understood the quiet rage in Jon’s voice.

“Your Grace, it sis my learned opinion that it’s best we make our graceful departure from the Queen’s court as soon as possible,” Ser Davos said brusquely, and Jon nodded.

“I couldn’t agree with you more, Ser Davos,” Jon said grimly.

“If I may caution you,” Ser Davos said, wincing, and he seemed to set aside his anger, or push it deep down. “If we do not wish the Queen to misconstrue your departure as you using the first opportunity to escape…it would be prudent to prolong our voyage back to White Harbour just long enough to see her return triumphant from her slaughter.”

“Aye… I was thinking the same,” Jon said, though he would love nothing more than to leave this wretched island and never return, never think of Daenerys Targaryen and her warped principles ever again. He wanted to bury his head in the snow, he’d freely admit it: And he’d rather go North to capture a wight than have to endure his presence in the Dragon Queen’s court much longer. “I have to stay, anyway, if I have a chance of convincing Daenerys to agree to an armistice. Or at the very least, convince the Lord Hand to intercede on my behalf. Lord Varys has already offered his help in arranging things with Queen Cersei.”

“You want the both of them there?”

“I need to show them what they should truly be fighting,” Jon sighed, rubbing his face.

“You look tired,” Ser Davos frowned, and Jon saw Theon’s tiny smirk.

“He’s been having a lot of late nights,” Theon said, managing to keep a straight face as Jon shot him a warning glare. Oh, Theon knew about Nora alright. Ser Davos glanced between the two brothers, and gave Jon a look that said he could guess; he had been a young man once.

“Well, I’m glad at least you didn’t spend your time pining in my absence, sick with worry that one of the Stormlords would clobber me to death with his drinking-horn,” Ser Davos said, and Jon smiled.

“Were you in any real danger?”

“No, not really,” Ser Davos chuckled. “Hot-tempered young men and old warriors who know better, just as I thought. I brought back the only one with good sense and a sizeable force at his command.”

A small boat had just brought a group of men to the quay, the guards wearing the shield-maiden sigil proudly, a dark-haired, grim-faced man in leather-covered black armour and a heavy fur-trimmed cloak leading them as he strode toward Ser Davos.

“Jon Snow, this is Lord Marton Barahir,” Ser Davos said, and the older man bowed humbly to Jon. “Lord Barahir, this is Jon Snow, King in the North.”

“You have the look of the Starks,” said Lord Barahir, “and from what Ser Davos tells me, you inherited your father’s nature. I knew Ned; we became men together, fighting side-by-side in the Rebellion. He saved my life half a dozen times. It is right that I start to settle a debt that can never be repaid.”

“Lord Barahir inherited Val Hall from his nephew, Your Grace,” Ser Davos explained, “after King Stannis was defeated on the moors beyond Winterfell.”

“I have only recently returned from Essos, Your Grace, where I fought with the Second Sons,” Lord Barahir said regretfully. “I returned to find my lands in chaos, Val Hall in disarray. I have one hundred men with me; six hundred more I have instructed to sail directly to White Harbour, and make their way to Winterfell. I pledge my sword to you, and will be honoured to fight and die by your side.”

Jon stood, stunned. He stared at the man. He had a not-unhandsome, earnest face, cropped dark hair and a few noticeable scars. His men stood tall and proud. “Ser Davos…told you what you’re to face at Winterfell?”

“It matters not to me whether your enemies are creatures from myth or merely wildlings masquerading. I owe my life to Ned Stark,” Lord Barahir said solidly. He unsheathed his sword, and placed the tip down in front of him, holding the hilt with both hands - as Ned Umber and Alys Karstark had, in the Great Hall at Winterfell so long ago. “If by my life or death I can protect you, I will.”

Jon had never needed to learn how a king addressed a knight or lord who pledged his sword; he needed Sansa here for that sort of thing.

“Thank you, Lord Barahir,” he said, and his simplicity and his earnestness shone through, and it was enough for Lord Barahir, who was a simple, earnest man himself, and remembered Ned Stark as a quiet man who chose his words carefully.

“Tell me…has the walkway up to the castle shortened in my absence?” Ser Davos asked, and Jon smiled.

“It’s gotten longer, if anything,” Jon said, turning to grimace up at the eerie castle. “But there will be stew and ale at the top.”

“That’s good enough for me,” said Lord Barahir, sheathing his sword. His grim face broke into a smile, and they started the climb. Lord Barahir was quiet, but interested to hear news from other parts of Westeros: He was newly-returned to the Seven Kingdoms, uncertain about the invasion of Daenerys Targaryen, but curious about Jon’s journey from the Wall to kingship. Jon wondered if everyone he ever met henceforth would be curious to hear that story. It was long and bloody, as he had told Lord Tyrion when he first arrived at Dragonstone - and he didn’t much like telling it.

And in his turn, Lord Barahir told them about his time with the Second Sons. His perspective on the sacking of Astapor, Yunkai and Meereen. Some of his men had journeyed to Westeros with him, born in Essos but desiring a home, and a strong commander they could respect: Some of those men had fled from Meereen, leaving great pyramids smoking behind them, a civil war raging.

Jon didn’t know how long ago that was: Daenerys had allegedly left Meereen in a state of détente with its neighbours, no more masked ambushes in the streets or the Fighting Pits. Lord Barahir’s men had escaped a city tearing itself apart.

As they climbed, and talked, Jon added Lord Barahir’s seven-hundred men to the Northmen, Valemen and Free Folk who could fight. It would not be enough to break the Night King’s armies…but it was more men than he had woken up with this morning.

If Sam killing the first White Walker in millennia had taught Jon anything, it was that every man counted. It had taught people not to underestimate appearances.

Their army would be small, patchwork, and deathly afraid - but the Night King would underestimate them - how could he not? His army was unbeatable, his commanders implacable. But they would fight, regardless.

Jon was startled from his grim thoughts by the presence of Lady Olenna in the great dining-hall, ready to break her fast. It was the first time she had appeared outside her chambers in the Sea Dragon Tower, and she looked pale, but there was a steely glint in her eyes as she glanced away from Ellaria Sand at the sound of Jon’s approach.

Jon couldn’t help note the lack of Essosi in the hall: The servants were liveried with the Tyrell rose and the sun and spear of Dorne. There were no Dothraki present. The only person from Essos present in the hall was Lady Tisseia, Lord Tyrion’s freed-slave companion and head of his household. Even Daenerys’ young cupbearers Qezza and Zafiyah were absent, though they usually enjoyed dining with the Sandsnakes and the Tyrell girls.

“Lady Olenna… I’m glad to see you back at court,” Jon said earnestly. Close by, Nora smiled and filled a plate for Amna, who stuck her tongue between her teeth in concentration as she carried the plate to the polished table.

“It must have been ponderously dull without my presence,” Lady Olenna said mockingly, her lips twitching. “Hmph. The Onion Knight returns. How were the Stormlords?”

“Squabbling children in need of a firm hand,” Ser Davos said, bowing to the majestic old lady. “I’m glad to see you, my lady.”

“And who is this?” Lady Olenna asked, gazing shrewdly at Lord Barahir, who bowed low to Lay Olenna, and to the other ladies present.

“Tell me, Lord Barahir, you have a shield-maiden for your sigil…” This was Nymeria Sand, purring and sensual even before breaking her fast. “Are there women fighting in your army?”

“None, my lady,” Lord Barahir said. “My ancestors, the First Men, had many shield-maidens and spear-wives who fought side-by-side with their fathers and brothers and sons. We honour them.”

“You would honour them by training your women, no?” Obara Sand grunted.

“Please forgive these young girls their barbed tongues,” Ellaria Sand smiled graciously, standing to curtsy to Lord Barahir. “They find it hard to reconcile their own privileged upbringing with the standards imposed on the rest of Westerosi women.”

“The King has allowed women to fight for him,” said Obara stoutly, her dark eyes - identical to each of her sisters’ - flickering to Jon with a hint of respect. It was difficult to tell with Obara, who always seemed angry.

“I’m not brave enough to forbid those women from fighting,” Jon said, and Ser Davos chuckled.

“Northwomen…are forces of Nature,” he said, with his beard twitching in amusement. “They frighten me more than the men.”

“With good reason,” Jon grinned, and Ser Davos chuckled. They both adored Lady Mormont - but she was a terror.

“You have come a long way, Lord Barahir,” Lady Olenna said, frowning. “I’m afraid Queen Daenerys is still on the mainland, roasting pregnant women and young boys alive.”

Jon glanced sharply at Lady Olenna.

“I did not come for the Dragon Lady,” said Lord Barahir solemnly.

“You call her lady,” Nymeria Sand murmured. “She is a queen.”

“No longer. Meereen has rejected her sovereignty. I returned from Essos when I learned that I had inherited Val Hall from my nephew. I fought with the Second Sons; some of my men had chosen to follow Daenerys Targaryen after Astapor…” Lord Barahir said, and everyone turned to stare at him, wary of the words that next poured from his lips. “When she set sail with the Dothraki and her Unsullied, she left vulnerable those she had sworn to protect… Some of my men were her lieutenants. They were given a choice: Surrender the city and flee, or die.”

“So they abandoned it.”

“A free Meereen was her vision, but she left others to see it born into a reality. Sell-swords who fight for gold in their purse, not ideas of a better world, and old men who did not wish to die so far from their home…” Lord Barahir said grimly. He shook his head, sighing, “Meereen is gripped by another civil war: But both sides agree, Daenerys Targaryen abandoned them. She is no longer their queen.”

“I think it wise we keep such news between us for the present time,” Lady Olenna said carefully, sliding her shrewd eyes over everyone.

“Jon mentioned something…in the West,” Ser Davos hedged.

“A Lion Culling,” Lady Olenna said, and Ellaria Sand sipped her tea, concealing her expression.

“Tell me,” Ser Davos said, glancing at Jon.

“After we’ve broken our fast,” Jon said heavily, clapping a hand on Ser Davos’ shoulder. “You won’t feel so hungry after I’ve told you.”

Lady Olenna was grim, disappointed but unsurprised that Daenerys had resorted to unleashing Drogon, inflicting cruelty and vengeance - “and she did so in the name of avenging Highgarden! To have House Tyrell associated with such an act… To eradicate House Lannister is one thing; to make a show of sparing a chosen handful as the Queen’s justice… It sits ill with me, I do not deny it. It feels absolutely wretched. She has besmirched our name.”

“She has dishonoured her own,” Jon muttered, and Lady Olenna gave him a dark, calculating look. “She’s done more harm to her own cause than Cersei’s.”

“Agreed,” Lord Varys sniffed, as Lord Barahir nodded solemnly, mopping up the gravy in his bowl with crusty bread, and Ellaria Sand muttered low with Nymeria, lolling sensuously on a chaise eyeing up Lord Barahir like choice steak, and Obara, who was glaring at Jon. He didn’t mind that: She was always glaring.

“Impetuous youth…foolhardy,” Lady Olenna sniffed, shaking her head. She was becoming more animated the more agitated she was over the Lion Culling - and its association with House Tyrell. Ser Davos was quiet in thought, and it was the quiet that worried Jon, knowing all too well his advisor’s thoughts had turned to Princess Shireen. “I doubt she will live long enough to learn her lesson.”

There was a shocked silence, more for the almost-treasonous talk than who had spoken: Lady Olenna was nothing if not punishingly honest and astute in her observations.

“You don’t think she will win this war?” Ellaria Sand prompted.

“I think Cersei Lannister is an expert at waging emotional war on her enemies. She’s just as short-sighted as our young queen, but she knows how to play people. And Daenerys Targaryen, whatever she thinks, is a slave to her emotions,” Lady Olenna said, sighing. She shook her head. “As a young woman I knew I had to appear to indulge in my emotions but remain above them, if I wanted to survive, if I wanted my family to thrive… I was good…I was very good. Margaery was even better… And Cersei destroyed all that she was, all that I had taught her to be, in the work of a single morning… I am alive because Margaery risked everything to warn me to flee the city before that wretch came for me too… What for? To witness the destruction of my House, the last of them frightened little girls clinging to the skirts of a woman whose body is failing her?”

“You survived so those girls would have a future,” Jon reminded her gently, and Lady Olenna gave him a fond smile that reminded him suddenly of Old Nan. “They need you. You’re the Queen of Thorns and you’re ferocious as any direwolf. They need you to protect them, and guide them. Endure for them, if you can’t bear to keep going for yourself.”

Lady Olenna eyed Jon shrewdly. “Who is it you endure for, Jon Snow? Not the North, no…you’re too tired to be a true hero like the tales. You’re here because you love someone so fiercely even Death cannot claim you.”

A flicker of vibrant red hair, a hesitant smile, gentle hands - Jon swallowed, and frowned at Lady Olenna. The scars on his chest seemed to burn, as a reminder. “Death tried.”

“Mm. With me also,” Lady Olenna sighed.

“I don’t imagine the Seven are quite ready for the Queen of Thorns,” Jon said, and several people chuckled indulgently. “Not nearly enough time to prepare for that.”

“Hm. I enjoy you,” Lady Olenna declared, smiling fondly. “It’s rare to find someone unabashedly kind, even when their tongue is sharp.”

“You’d have liked my twin-sister Larra. She was stern…but she was lovely. Children adored her; they knew where they stood with her…” Jon said, and whatever humour had bubbled up inside him died. He sighed softly, and told Lady Olenna, “It’s the same with you.”

“Your grandfather was the same,” Lady Olenna told him. People rarely spoke about Lord Rickard, even at Winterfell, where he was still in living memory. “I imagine Ned Stark was, too. You have more guile, though I can tell you detest the game.”

“You can’t just kill everyone you disagree with,” Jon grumbled, and there was a touch of disappointment in his voice that made Lady Olenna smirk.

“No matter how tempting. She’s made it that much harder for herself, now,” Lady Olenna mused, and her eyes were sharp, ironic, when she muttered, “The Dragon Queen burns women and babies and brittle old men… People will obey her…they will endure her; but they will wait with baited breath for her demise. And plot to bring it about all the sooner.”

“Do you remember her father?” asked Nymeria Sand, her eyes lowered almost coyly.

“I do. His reign started off promisingly enough. But there were always glimmers,” Lady Olenna said after a moment, her face thoughtful, as if she was peering into the past. “And after Duskendale… He set the precedent at Duskendale, for how he would treat his enemies the rest of his reign… The Ash Meadow, the Lion Culling… I have seen it before. I did not desire the death of children: I desired Cersei’s execution… It won’t work, of course.”

“What?”

“Burning all those Lannisters. Cersei proved the morning of the Sept that she did not care one whit about her kinfolk. Cersei cares about Cersei. Her sons are dead. Prince Doran wisely keeps the little lioness cloistered in the Water Gardens, and refuses to yield her to Daenerys for anything,” Lady Olenna said, nodding respectfully toward the Sands, Prince Doran’s emissaries. “What could Daenerys possibly do to Cersei that would ever hurt her, when Daenerys’ own allies are both wise and cautious, and morally opposed to allowing the butchery of innocent princesses be the consequence of war.” She eyed Jon sharply. “And what is this I hear of an expedition to hunt dead men?”

The Sands exchanged a look; Lord Barahir frowned softly. Ser Davos glanced up, and Theon sighed heavily.

“The only way to convince everyone is to show them. I intend to show Queen Daenerys and Queen Cersei the truth of the thing,” Jon said. “This war of theirs is petty. The real war is in the North. And if we cannot fight, and are defeated…this quarrel between them will cause the world’s ending.”

“To risk being contrary - you have yet to convince the majority of us,” Lady Olenna reminded him. “Lord Varys speaks of an armistice. I do believe I shall focus all my energies on shoring up the strength to attend. I’ve still a few thorns left in me with which to pierce Queen Cersei and make her bleed.”

“Any armistice cannot be about wounding each other,” Jon warned, and Lady Olenna glanced at him shrewdly, the iron tone in his voice making her eyes widen subtly.

“Young man…that is exactly what such an opportunity presents. It’s what they were created for,” Lady Olenna sighed, her smile ironic and tired. “Wounds inflicted with words, not weapons. You can be certain Queen Cersei will find a way to hook her claws under your skin.”

“I’ve a tough pelt, my lady,” Jon said, and Lady Olenna chuckled. “I’m a bastard of the North. I do not forget what I am.” Lady Olenna stared back at him, thinly-veiled insinuation in her gaze: he remembered their conversation regarding the curious timing of Ned’s return to Winterfell - with babies, and a pile of bones belonging to his sister.

“This…venture you speak of,” Ellaria said, gazing at Jon, her dark eyes shrewd. “You will journey beyond the Wall? To snatch one of these…wights of the old legends…”

“Yes, my lady…”

Ellaria glanced over her shoulder at her lover’s older daughters, sensual and elegant as ever. Ellaria was a nobleman’s illegitimate daughter, had been Prince Oberyn’s beloved paramour…had the ear of the Prince of Dorne, and his trust… She was one of his advisors, and agents. Jon was under no illusions that Ellaria and Nymeria weren’t every bit as dangerous - if not more so - than the Red Viper had ever been. Obara was different: She was a warrior, angry and militant.

“Then Dorne will see it done.”

Obara gave a sharp half-bow that managed to appear brutal, telling Jon stoutly, “My spear is yours, Your Grace.”

Hours later, Jon climbed one of the great cliffs, the grey-green grass shivering and brittle underfoot, a tell-tale sign that winter was truly setting in on the island, no matter the warm mists of the Dragonmont. The volcano would best the gentlest frosts and the island’s geography would protect it from the harsh snows of the mainland…but winter had come. One morning, all of Westeros would wake to a blanket of snow, a gleaming grey sky and a forgotten quiet that accompanied the very beginning of winter, when everything became restful, almost tranquil, when it was still new, and wondrous…

Today, there were few clouds, the sky pale blue, and when the wind died down, the sun was surprisingly hot. Instead of heading inside to dress for court, Jon had chosen to hike up the cliff-side for some air, and some much-needed light after so many hours in the mines. He was determined that when he left for Eastwatch-by-the-Sea, his ships would set sail for White Harbour, taking with them the last of the obsidian they had managed to mine. All he could do was hope it was enough. Time was running out, and some was better than none; but he could not stay away too much longer.

Daenerys’ return would mark Jon’s departure.

He groaned and climbed up to the topmost part of the cliff, and stopped short, not wanting to startle anything…

A dragon rested, sunning its great wings.

It was the green dragon, smaller than Drogon the Dread but not by much. Its great wings, its armoured reptilian body and its terrifying horned head, were all shades of jade green; its wing-joints, horns and the great spikes that studded its back gleamed like dark-bronze in the sun, and in the light even its wings seemed veined with it.

Jon had never been this close, to any of the great winged beasts. Up close, it was even more monstrous than it appeared in the skies. And yet there was something…mesmerising about it, something deep in the pit of his stomach…a fondness, almost. He found himself close to smiling, awed. What Larra and Arya wouldn’t have given to see this, he thought, not for the first time. Dragons…

What had the Queen named them? Drogon was the black one. She spoke rarely of the white-and-gold one, but Jon thought she had named him for her brother Viserys…Viserion. And the green-and-bronze…’I named him for my valiant brother, who died on the green banks of the Trident…”

Rhaegal opened his jaws, yawning, and shook his great head, sending a shiver down the spikes lining his spine - protecting his spine. Jon had never been close enough to hear the dragons, and was far too used to Ghost’s silence: but Rhaegal made curious noises, cooing and snapping and purring - neither birdsong nor insects chirping, something reptilian and shrieking and entrancing. It was not a sound Jon had ever heard in nature. Because dragons had been thought lost from the world. Like giants. Like White Walkers.

He jumped, when suddenly Rhaegal turned his great head, and fixed molten gold eyes on him. Jaws still open, Jon saw Rhaegal’s many layers of obsidian-black, dagger-sharp teeth…

Rhaegal stared at him, eyes dancing like embers, and Jon gazed back, shocked and utterly entranced.

Rhaegal flapped his wings, tucking them against his body, and made a soft, thoughtful, purring hum that gurgled almost playfully in the back of his throat. His neck extended, tucking his body in close - like a cat ready to pounce, he thought, his tail even lashing lazily - Jon heard Rhaegal sniff the air around him. Rhaegal purred, the sound so strangely gentle…a lullaby, almost, and he blinked its golden eyes lazily, before bumping his great leathery nose against Jon’s chest.

Jon stumbled back, but caught his footing. Rhaegal nudged him again, making that strange, beautiful sound, and Jon realised he was smiling as he reached his hand out, slowly, to stroke down between Rhaegal’s eyes, as he might give a horse affection. More of those soft, curious purrs, and Rhaegal seemed to sigh, his enormous armoured body relaxing, closing his eyes as if lulled by the barest of contact from Jon.

Lord Tyrion had told Jon the story of releasing Rhaegal and Viserion from the makeshift dragon-pit beneath the Great Pyramid in Meereen…how he believed, from extensive reading on the subject, that dragons were more intelligent than men… Lord Tyrion had talked to the terrifyingly beautiful beasts, gently telling them the story of his childhood heartbreak over discovering that the last dragons had died a century ago, and thus he would not likely be receiving a dragon for his name-day gift. Affection for their friends; fury for their enemies… The dragons had offered him the collars bolted around their necks, and he had freed them. Lord Tyrion believed they had understood every word.

“Hello, Rhaegal,” Jon said softly, stroking his knuckles over the tough hide between his molten eyes. “What my sisters wouldn’t give to meet you… They spent all their childhoods, dreaming they were soaring through the clouds on the back of a dragon, pretending they were Daemon the Rogue Prince and Baela Targaryen… They’re gone now…and here you are… There’s something excruciatingly ironic about that…”

Rhaegal purred, rustling his enormous wings. A screech shattered the air, and Rhaegal snapped his head around, watchful and tense, and Jon followed the dragon’s gaze. The shriek had come from the white-and-gold Viserion, wheeling overhead; he shrieked and called, as Rhaegal cooed and grumbled and bumped his long neck against Jon, and the dragon snorted, flapping its great wings, and Jon ducked as he shot into the sky, buffeting Jon about.

Rhaegal took to the skies, soaring after his brother…

Because their mother had returned home.

Jon saw the ships nearing the bay; Rhaegal and Viserion soared through the air, to circle and bank and wheel overhead, falling into formation with the third, the largest of them, Drogon. And on his back he undoubtedly carried Daenerys.

She had returned.

Jon frowned, and watched the dragons swoop and soar through the air.

Her return meant several things. His departure, yes. But also, the end of his nights spent with Nora: They had both agreed. Jon did not like the risk to Alynore to let it continue under the Queen’s nose, when she was…when the Queen was who she was, and would not react well to finding out Jon favoured another.

It meant Daenerys was now at Dragonstone, to coerce into an armistice with Queen Cersei. With Daenerys’ return meant Lord Tyrion’s, too. Jon was never quite sure whether he should trust Lord Varys, but Jon respected Lord Tyrion. Jon wondered very much how the Lord Hand felt about his queen burning his family alive, and if his feelings would hold any sway over Jon’s proposal.

Was Daenerys any better than Cersei, after what Lady Olenna had dubbed the ‘Lion Culling’?

Jon strode into his chambers, intending to strip and bathe, and prolong the inevitable - he could not avoid the Queen; she would be expecting everyone there…to congratulate her on her victory. He dreaded the Queen’s outlook on it. Because how could she think it was anything but an atrocity? A barbarous war-crime.

“I saw the ships,” Nora said gently. She was reclined on his bed, looking sad, but she gave him a soft smile that spoke of acceptance. He sighed, striding over to her, and she helped him out of his shirt. She trailed her fingers over his scars, pressed her lips to his skin, and sighed, leaning her brow against his chest. “I thought we’d have longer.”

“So did I,” Jon said softly, leaning down to kiss the top of her head. He reached up, to cup her face. She gazed up at him, miserable. The last few weeks had been…wonderful, Jon couldn’t deny it: His time with Nora…intimate, gentle and companionable… He had relaxed with her, enjoyed her, and more importantly, he had allowed himself to be relaxed, to enjoy her, to embrace the strange, gentle intimacy that had cocooned them… He had relished…having someone. Not just someone with whom to share his bed: To greet him with a smile at the end of the day, to sift her hands through his hair when he was tired, who hummed gently as she sewed between bouts of their bed-play…who gently coaxed him to confide in her, without doing anything at all but listen… He had enjoyed being no-one but himself - flawed and tired. It was almost a strange relief to learn that someone could enjoy him when everything was stripped bare; when they were together, he wasn’t the King in the North. He was Jon. Just Jon, and Nora didn’t need him to be anyone else. When he was grumpy, she was patient; when she was upset, he quietly held her and let her cry, the only person in the world she could break down in front of, for whom she did not have to be strong, and composed and elegant.

Their time together, limited though it had been…it had been different than his time with Ygritte, but no less extraordinary, for different reasons. He had loved Ygritte. He adored Nora, knew he would care for her the rest of his life.

Nora reached up, cradling his cheek in her hand, gently stroking with her thumb, sorrowful but accepting. She leaned in, and kissed him, slow and torturous, and Jon tucked her close, savouring it. His tunic fell to the floor; Nora made quick work of his breeches, and they joined together one last time, slow and agonising, deeply passionate, not telling but showing just what they meant to each other, Nora’s legs locked around his waist, her fingers tangled in his hair, as he cupped her breasts - she winced softly - and kissed her throat, capturing her mouth as she moaned deeply and arched her back, digging in her heels as he thrust into her, and gurgled a soft laugh of ecstasy as she came down from her orgasm, her thighs quivering, sweat shimmering delicately on her brow, her lips swollen, and Jon groaned, burying his head in her neck, the scent of her soft hair pushing him further as he came inside her.

For a few moments, they lingered, tangled and intimate, savouring the last time they would trail their fingers over warm skin, preening against each other, drawing each other close as they drifted off to sleep, warm and relaxed.

Jon sighed, as Nora slowly sat up. Her long hair tumbled down her back; he reached out to brush his fingers over it, sweeping it away from her face, over her shoulder. Her pale-green eyes were soft and sad as she gazed down at him, her lips still swollen from his kiss. She propped herself up on a taut arm, leaning down to give him a tender, most heart-breaking kiss. He reached out, wanting to hold her close, but ended up only trailing his fingers along her jaw, and she pushed back, climbing off the bed.

He followed, and helped her dress. They didn’t speak: She left, pausing at the door only long enough to give Jon a look that emphasised her wish - that they had more time; that neither of them would be quite as lonely as they had been before… But they would, Jon knew it. He thought of the nights to come, alone in the interminable quiet, forever on his guard - even with Sansa…especially with Sansa. Her red her glimmered in his memory, the sweet smile on her lips as they stood gazing out over the godswood, and she had told him that a white raven had arrived from the Citadel, “Winter has come.” “Father always promised, didn’t he?”

Father. Their father.

Before she had appeared at Castle Black, grubby and cold, Jon hadn’t truly thought about Sansa in years. And ever since she had appeared…he couldn’t stop thinking about her. Every night, he went to bed sick with worry for her; and every morning, he woke hoping the day would be better than the last for her sake. They had never been close as children: and to go from famine to an oasis of Sansa, her vibrant hair, her delicate scent, her ferocity gentled by elegance…

Father.

Lady Olenna’s words had wheedled their way into Jon’s mind, and in quiet moments like this, Jon had found himself turning them over and over. He insinuation that Ned Stark…was possibly not his father by blood, but his uncle…that Jon was the child of Lyanna Stark by Rhaegar Targaryen…in which case, Robb and Sansa and Arya and Bran and Rickon had never been his brothers and sisters… They were his cousins. And that…was devastating, even as something in the back of his mind, and the pit of his hurt heart, sparked into an ember of warmth and something - not delight…eagerness.

To be, not Ned Stark’s child…but the son of Rhaegar and Lyanna… It sounded impossible. Fanciful, even… And yet…and yet Jon had spent many nights - with Nora curled up against him, her warmth soothing and giving him a sense of protection from his own thoughts…and yet…it added up.

He hated that Lady Olenna had whispered that poison in his ear. That it was the only thing he could think about sometimes, especially when he was hacking away at the obsidian caves. Because if she was right, then Ned Stark was not his father by blood, and he had lied to Jon his entire life…had put Jon through torment - no. Ned Stark’s wife had been sure to torment him all his life, punishing him for ever having the audacity to be born… And worse…Ned had known that Jon’s mother, whom he and Larra had yearned to know since they were old enough to understand that Lady Catelyn was not their mother and considered it a stain on her honour that they had once wanted her to be…was dead. Had been dead all their lives.

Next time we see each other, I’ll tell you about your mother…

You may not have my name, but you have my blood…

Jon scowled, and put thoughts of Lyanna Stark and Rhaegar and Sansa and Nora out of his mind…he really tried…

But when he strode into the court a few hours later, he was in a dark mood.

It was not made better by what he found. The court was quiet, and Ser Davos caught Jon’s eye with a scowl.

Before the jagged throne stood a line of Unsullied soldiers. Dothraki paced around the court, as they always did, but their eyes - as did everyone else’s - constantly flicked back to the Unsullied… He strode over to Ser Davos, who stood near the chaise on which Lord Tyrion was drinking profusely, propped up against Lady Tisseia, his head resting against her breasts. Lord Tyrion raised his eyes to Jon over the rim of his wine-glass, and it was all Jon needed to know of Lord Tyrion’s thoughts on all that had occurred since he left this castle.

The Unsullied guarded little girls, one for each.

They ranged from very young ladies to older toddlers. All of them were exceptionally beautiful, even at their young ages: Some had green eyes, some blue. Some had froths of natural curls that billowed like clouds around their shoulders, others had shimmering cascades of straight blonde locks. Some had soft baby-blonde hair, and others had hair nearly as pale as the Queen’s. One, the youngest, had tightly coiled curls that bounced as she glanced around the hall, her eyes bright, curious, but not red-rimmed with tears like the others’ were. She sucked her thumb, and swung gently where she stood, the hem of her dress whispering against the stone floor. Beside her, one of the middling girls had a stain on her golden dress; and each of them seemed cold, and grubby, their hair rather unkempt, their faces wan, smeared with ash and tear-stained. One of the older girls, the one with froths of pale-gold curls surrounding her slender face and clear amber eyes, was weeping silently. They all appeared to be shivering - with cold or dread, Jon could not say. Only one of them wore a cloak; one of them kept glancing at the platters of food laid out for the court to pick over, her lower-lip trembling, and she couldn’t help a moan of hunger pass her lips.

How many days since the Lion Culling?

Lord Tyrion finished his glass; Tisseia was ready with the decanter to refill it, her dark eyes scanning the girls, her expression wary but discerning. She flicked her gaze up at Jon for a heartbeat, and he frowned, falling into place beside Ser Davos.

A musician plucked at his lute, filling the chamber with strange foreign music, and the soft whisper of silk and leather against stone made them alert to the new arrival.

Queen Daenerys had spent the hours since her return languishing in a bath, washing and brushing her hair until it shone like polished silver in the candlelight. She sat on her jagged throne, in a Qartheen gown of translucent sunset-orange silk glimmering with gold. The gown bared one of her breasts, as all her Qartheen gowns did; she wore her hair shimmering over her shoulders, tickling her bare nipple, and an extra braid had been added to her hairstyle, wrapped from ear to ear like a circlet and entwined with golden threads. Her arms glinted with gold; around her throat she wore a jewelled collar. Her smile was radiant, as she climbed the steps and settled on the jagged throne.

It happened in the space of a heartbeat.

One moment, the Queen was smiling down at the little Lannister lionesses…the next, one of the middle girls had flung herself away from her cousins and the Unsullied who guarded them, raced up the steps and launched herself at Daenerys, spitting and scratching, her screams becoming higher and more shrill, repeating, “THAT IS NOT YOURS! THAT IS MY MOTHER’S. MY MOTHER’S NECKLACE! GIVE IT BACK GIVE IT BACK GIVE. IT. BACK NOOOOOOW NOW noooooOOOOOOOOWWW!!!”

As one, the Unsullied engaged their weapons to protect their Queen.

No sooner had they aimed their spears at the girl than Jon had already climbed the steps toward the Queen - and turned, unsheathing Long Claw in a flash, to level at the throat of the nearest Unsullied commander that had dived forward, spear raised, expression horrifyingly neutral.

A few of the Lannister cousins whimpered, their eyes on their cousin. The baby glanced up uncertainly at the one in the red gown, the eldest of them. The amber-eyed girl continued to weep silently, as if she had no idea what was happening around her, numbed by her grief.

“You will not harm her,” Jon warned, his men glaring, weapons in their hands - and those of Theon, and Lord Barahir, even elegant Nymeria Sand, a flash of silver in her palm, her sister’s twin-bladed spear poised at the throat of a bloodrider who had raised his wicked barbed whip. Ellaria Sand shielded her young daughters, Nora stood rigid beside her grandmother, a hand on her cousin’s shoulders, warning them to remain silent. The tension in the court was palpable, everyone waiting with baited breath to see what happened next - as the screams of the little girl and the grunts and cries of the Queen crumpling on her throne echoed off the unnerving black walls, throwing back eerie red-black light and echoing spine-tingling screams. “Lower your spears.”

As Daenerys whimpered under the onslaught of a child’s vicious punches and the slashes of her tiny, sharp fingernails, her ears nearly bleeding from the girl’s shrieks - becoming more and more upset, more high-pitched, unintelligible, her voice brittle and heartbroken - the Unsullied cast black looks among themselves behind the shadows of their helmets, but did lower their spears.

Long Claw scratching at the throat of the Unsullied - Jon thought his name was Grey Worm - Jon slid his glance past the commander, to the line of Lannisters groaning with dread and grief. He caught the eye of the eldest, and asked gently, “What is your cousin’s name?”

“Calanthe, Your Grace,” the girl said hoarsely.

“Step back,” Jon told Grey Worm, who glowered, and made a show of it, but took three steps back, until he was no longer on the steps. His hand twitched for the spear on the floor. Theon kicked it out of reach, and Jon sheathed Long Claw.

“Calanthe,” he said, his voice low and gentle. He approached the throne, wrapping his hand around the little girl’s tight fist. She had the other wrapped around the intricate gold collar Daenerys wore; there was evidence of her fingernails, scratching at Daenerys’ neck to prise the collar away. “That’s enough now. Let go.” He reached out, and gently clasped her wrist, stroking the back of her hand. He leaned over them both, levelling his gaze on Calanthe. Her eyes were streaming, her face grimy with ash - the ash of her burned family - but her expression was warped with a seething, white-hot rage, and she sobbed as she let go of the necklace. Jon took her by the waist and lifted her off the queen, clamping her to his hip.

Daenerys slumped on her throne, utterly bewildered - bleeding, from Calanthe’s claws, her sharp fangs puncturing Daenerys’ arm where she had thrown it up to defend herself from the little girl’s slaps and hits and gouges. Daenerys was shaking, staring at the girl in utter horror. She raised her purple eyes to Jon, relief oozing from them - and appreciation, that it was him who had come to her defence. Her expression faltered, as she saw the pitiless glare on Jon’s face, his gentle but immovable hold on Calanthe’s waist, hugging her to him…and behind him, the Unsullied commander frozen, his spear useless on the ground where he had dropped it, Greyjoys and Northmen and Sandsnakes baring their weapons against her commanders and kos.

“The collar,” Jon said, his voice commanding. Daenerys blinked. She stared at him. After a few moments, she raised trembling white hands, unfastening the jewelled collar, and handed it to Jon.

It was exquisite, and heavy, made of bright gold, figured into a dozen intricate chrysanthemum flowers set with vibrant citrines, with delicate filigree and a fringe of small pale-gold pearls that gleamed in the candlelight, swaying with every movement. He weighed it in his hand, watched the candlelight gleam off the gold, the pearls, made the citrines glow like Rhaegal’s eyes…

He handed it to Calanthe, and she tucked the jewel against her chest, her head dropping heavily against his shoulder as her entire body shook with silent sobs.

“Sshhh,” Jon murmured, rubbing the little girl’s back. He caught sight of the Queen’s interpreter. “Lady Missandei…I trust the belongings of the girls’ families will be returned to them?”

Missandei flicked a glance at the Queen, swallowed, and nodded. “At once, Your Grace.”

“Lady Tisseia…would you be so good as to lead the ladies to Lord Tyrion’s chambers?” Jon asked sombrely, aware of Lord Tyrion’s eyes glinting in the candlelight, watching everything from behind his wine-glass. Lady Tisseia smiled at Jon, perhaps with relief, eyeing Calanthe in his arms. She disentangled herself from Lord Tyrion, and approached Jon; her smile was gentle and earnest as Jon transferred the sobbing girl into her arms. “I believe they’re in need of a bath, some good hot soup and sleep.” Jon sighed, and walked over to the other girls. The Unsullied saw the look on his face, and took two steps back. “My ladies, this is your uncle’s companion, Lady Tisseia.”

Calanthe crying in her arms, Tisseia pressed a soft kiss against her head, and offered one of the little girls her hand. “Come along, little ones,” she said, her voice coaxing and soft. “Let’s get you settled.”

The eldest, holding the hand of the baby, fell into step behind Lady Tisseia, who started to sing softly in bastard Valyrian, gently rocking Calanthe in her arms, and the sound of her voice lingered on the air as the golden-haired girls disappeared into the shadowy corridors beyond.

Daenerys swiped her fingertips over her throat; she stared at the blood smeared on them. Barely more than a drop, but her lips parted, her eyes wide. “That child should be whipped.”

Jon started, turned. Stared at the Queen, torn between incredulity and anger.

“You murder her mother and parade around in her jewels, and the child should be whipped?” he growled dangerously. “You mock their grief… What were you thinking?”

“What was I thinking?” Daenerys blinked, sitting up straighter, as maids fussed over her. “I have fewer enemies than I did a moon-turn ago.”

Jon stared, his lips parting. And his tone was as blunt, humourless and accusatory as he meant it to be: “Which gave Drogon the most trouble? The young women heavy with child, the brittle old men or the infants?! This was not an act of war. This was an act of murder. You BURNED little children.”

Everyone in the hall jumped at the sudden bellow. Jon’s voice echoed off the black stone, fractured and amplified. People exchanged uneasy looks, glad they were not the one to have given voice to their thoughts, though relieved someone had. They were not alone in thinking it.

Daenerys looked taken aback for a moment, staring at Jon as if seeing him for the first time, curious, unsettled and intrigued by what she saw. And flustered, almost…abashed, as her purple eyes drifted around the room, found faces downturned, eyes avoiding hers. Grim faces. Hostility that reminded her of the Ash Meadow, her enemies on their knees glowering at her…

She raised her chin, but her voice wavered ever so slightly, as she repeated, “They were enemies.”

Jon scoffed, his sneer a terrible blow to Daenerys as she gazed at him, horror settling into her face. Missandei lingered uncertainly, her face pinched and conflicted, glancing back at her Queen, flinching, and turning her gaze away to the floor…the way she always had when waiting for her Master’s orders, eyes down, shoulders low, utterly submissive - dehumanised.

Missandei had never looked at her like that, with anything but admiration and respect in her dark eyes, warmth radiating from her smile. Appreciative, adoring.

“You burned them because your pride was wounded that brave men would rather die than bend to your will… You burned them because they were vulnerable…and because you could,” Jon snarled. “Because you wanted to. And now you’ve given Cersei all the weapons she needs to defeat you. The Mad King’s Daughter will burn Westeros - down to the last child - to become Queen of the ashes!”

His voice had risen: It was not normal for Jon Snow to raise his voice, especially in anger.

And it was for that reason it resonated with everyone, especially the Queen. “You’ve just become the single most reviled and feared person in Westeros,” Jon told her coldly. He levelled his gaze on her, unflinching, cold and accusing. “And there’s nothing like a common enemy to unite people.”

Hours later, Jon groaned, pausing in the torch-lit corridor to knead the heels of his palms into his eyes.

“She won’t forget you shaming her before her entire court,” said a voice, and Jon glanced around. Lord Tyrion, drinking from a wine-skin, leaned against the wall, just inside the warm glow of the torchlight.

“Do you really think such a person as her could ever be shamed by what she thinks is the right course of action?” Jon asked grimly. They had spent hours going back and forth, arguing over Jon’s intentions to go North and fetch a wight - and his expectations that Queen Daenerys would attend an armistice that her Lord Hand would take part in arranging on Jon’s behalf.

He expected it.

Jon did not ask.

He was beyond that, now. He set expectations; and left it to Daenerys to meet them.

He was too angry with her remorselessness over the Lion Culling, her tasteless behaviour earlier, draped in the jewels of the dead girls’ mothers...that she believed the child deserved a whipping - Jon flinched, and thought of Larra with her ‘ruby ribbons’ from Queen Cersei… The thought that Calanthe Lannister would likely have been skewered by the Unsullied commander, had Jon not stepped in.

That troubled him the most.

Could the Unsullied - could Daenerys - not distinguish between a grief-stricken, wrathful, hurting child, and a full-grown, adult, armed enemy?

Would Daenerys have even blinked if the Unsullied had skewered Calanthe before her very eyes?

Jon glared down at Lord Tyrion, who had chosen to support her, to not just follow but guide her way back to Westeros. “No, she won’t forget it, but she will ignore everything I said.”

Tyrion sighed heavily, shaking his head dolefully. “Those little girls are strangers to me…and I frighten them. The Imp. The monster who murdered the Old Lion, their great protector, Tywin Lannister, the dread of Westeros.”

“Let them know you,” Jon advised him gently. “You’re all they have now.”

“Poor dears.”

“Privileged,” Jon corrected, eyeing Tyrion sombrely. Even in the time Jon had been on Dragonstone, he had observed Lord Tyrion drinking more and more. That said a lot about Lord Tyrion’s state of mind, that he would rather numb himself than go through his day sober. “Larra appreciated your quality within days of your arrival at Winterfell; I learned it at Castle Black; and Sansa grew to respect and admire you. You’re so much better than what your family tried to convince the world you are.”

“It’s a good thing it’s dark,” Lord Tyrion said, his beard twitching. “I haven’t blushed so much since my first brothel.”

“I mean it,” Jon said earnestly, and that probably made Lord Tyrion even more uncomfortable. “It’s a crass thing to say but you’re worth more than all those Lannisters combined.”

“Especially as they’re dead.”

“Lord Tyrion…take the compliment for what it is.”

“I’m not used to receiving them.”

“I know. But I mean it. You’re a clever man - but you also have empathy. You’re not going to let those girls suffer. The same way you guarded Sansa,” Jon reminded him, and Lord Tyrion’s eyes glinted as he gazed up at Jon. “Because they’re innocent, and it is in your power to protect them.” Jon sighed, rubbing his face, exhausted. He could not wait to leave…even facing down wights and White Walkers was better than this. He gazed down at Lord Tyrion, and asked quietly, “How are you going to protect them from her?

Lord Tyrion sighed softly, shaking his head. He looked utterly despondent…lost.

As if he was in completely over his head, and had no idea how he had come to be. As if things had completely overtaken him, and he wasn’t sure what was up or down anymore. He grimaced, and took a long draw from his wine-skin.

“They can’t stay here.”

Chapter 27: Heart and Henge

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

27

Heart and Henge


Obsidian was finicky. Don’t give it enough heat, it turned brittle: Forge it too hot, it was the hardest material in the world, nigh on impossible to reshape.

It was all in the heat. Heat had created it, melting stone over thousands of years, so said learned maesters. And an ingenious maester who had discovered how to record temperature using mercury would say that the key to forging obsidian lay in the temperature of the fire into which the obsidian was placed to be melted down and forged.

The Children knew of no such thing. There was no temperature, only the fire, and their crude stone implements. No true tools as blacksmiths and craftsmen would understand them. Just a rock to bash the hunk of obsidian into smaller pieces; a blackened ironstone saucer in which to place the obsidian; the fire; and whatever spear or dagger-hilt they wished to bond with the obsidian. Any wood worked, but obsidian bonded best, for a reason completely unknown, with ironwood or weirwood. As weirwood was no longer in abundance, they would have to suffice with what they had on hand - and the felling of parts of the wolfswood, though it made Larra’s heart ache to see it done, was instrumental in forging weapons fit to fight the Night King’s armies.

The castle was never still, and today it was especially manic: As many arrows as could be fletched were stacked in woven baskets as groups of small boys, elderly men and women chatted and sang and laughed, their fingers working with remarkable dexterity. If they were not engaged in fletching, other groups were crafting spears, taught by the women of the Free Folk who led lessons in wielding the finished weapon itself.

Arrows, spears…for those more adept at fighting, it fell to the forges to craft weapons people could actually use, swords and cudgels, maces and axes, halberds, falchions, flails and morningstars, tridents - Meera had hers a ‘frog spear’. The smiths had no problem whatsoever with forging any such weapons: And they were at an advantage, all the North emptied to Winterfell, which meant every castle and holdfast’s blacksmiths and armourers had converged on the forges of Winterfell. There were more than enough men to complete the work, and they all had the skill to forge the weapons.

They had never worked with obsidian before.

Only one person in the entirety of the North knew how to forge it. Because she had been taught. The Children had passed on all their learning, their songs and their skills.

It was quite something to see, and it attracted quite a bit of attention - first from Lady Sansa, who was curious, and then the Knights and Northmen and Free Folk who came to ask for specific weapons - as Larra held the forges enraptured.

There was only one way to ensure the tempered obsidian was strong enough to endure. And that was to pay close attention to the fire.

With her hair bound up in braids, and her gauntlets gleaming, Larra’s long, pale fingers flashed in the firelight as the smiths and armourers snickered. She had produced a large chunk of stone, and began smashing the obsidian to pieces.

“Doesn’t have to be stone,” she said softly, not looking up; the fire before her made love to her fine features, made her eyes glow like purple stones. “But this is how I was taught. The obsidian must be crushed to pebbles, and then…a single layer of the stuff, spread out over the dish, so that all of the obsidian is heated evenly…” She gathered up the obisidan in her palms, sprinkling it over the ironstone dish resting in the fire, the heat shimmering in the air. Casting a glance at the obsidian, she readied her mould - not made of steel, but of ironwood, neatly carved with ten arrowheads.

The obsidian started to hiss, and then to melt.

“It should start to look like treacle,” Larra murmured. Despite the noise of the courtyard beyond, she did not have to raise her voice: She was surrounded by men, ranging from young apprentices to grizzled white-beards, and they were all enraptured, watching her work. Her unhurried calm, the purposeful movements of her long, pale fingers, her ease around the great forge, her sensibleness, the simple clarity with which she explained everything, and her subtle confidence made her mesmerising to watch - they had started laughing as she bashed the obsidian with a rock, but quickly fell silent, watching. She did not stir the obsidian; she used a poker to nudge the sides of the stone dish so that the melting obsidian - which did indeed look temptingly like treacle - swirled idly around, a viscous material that had an entrancing sheen to it, every colour of the firelight reflected seemingly from within the liquid itself, a hint of its origins.

“You don’t want to stir it,” Larra warned. “Poke anything in there, it’ll be bonded fast. You don’t want to use it yet, especially at this heat. See the tiny white sparks rising from the edges of the dish? That’s tiny bubbles releasing from the still-melting rocks… You’ll have chunks of obsidian spoiling your weapon, and the obsidian itself will set brittle. Give it a cross look and it’ll shatter.”

“You know this?” one of the old men asked, his white hair glowing like a septa’s wimple around his shoulders. “How?”

“Practise,” Larra said, pointing to her armoured vest, the direwolves stitched in thousands of tiny obsidian rings, her shoulders dripping with the stuff.

“You forged those?”

“Fiddly and time-consuming - but worth it,” Larra said, glancing around the men. “This stuff’s worth far more than gold. Not only does it kill wights and White Walkers, but it stops the Others’ ice-weapons from penetrating through. I wore these stitched to a bearskin vest under my furs - I should’ve been skewered, but the obsidian stopped the blade. I was bruised, not gutted.”

“And…you did this, every time you made that ring-mail?” another man asked, frowning.

“I did,” Larra said. “These are the work of thousands of hours. I can tell you, all I know about forging obsidian I’ve learned through experience. See how the obsidian’s starting to smoke?”

They looked, and some peered closer, while the apprentices jerked their heads back, as the glimmering opalescent surface of the liquid smoked - and caught alight. First orange, then warm yellow flames…bright hot white…pale blue, and then…

“When it reaches purple, that is when it is at the perfect time to start working with,” Larra said. “You can pour it immediately, into arrowheads or dagger moulds… But if you want to create something truly remarkable out of it, you can. You can pour it, shape it, take hammer and tongs to it. As long as you give it time to melt properly, you’ve the time to work with it, before it starts to cool and set. If you’re working on something like a Morningstar or a mace or a trident, you can return the obsidian to the flames as you would steel - make sure the flame burns purple before you start to work with it again, or it’ll all be for naught. But don’t dunk it into a barrel of water - the obsidian will explode on contact with the cold water, and you and the barrel with it.”

“It can cause that much damage?”

“Oh, yes,” Larra nodded. “People call this stuff dragonglass, after all. Forged by fire, volatile…but enduring. Temper it the right way, these weapons will last as long as any Valyrian steel sword… Any questions?”

She organised the forges. Apprentices emptied the crates and started the process of crushing the obsidian: the smiths took turns preparing the obsidian, with men who had the specific role of checking the obsidian was being heated to the correct temperature - the ‘purple-phase’, they called it. The smiths took charge of making arrowheads, spearheads and daggers; and the more experienced armourers were charged with forging weapons fit for the nobility trained to wield them. At Winterfell, obsidian would replace good castle-forged steel - at least for this one battle.

And alongside those men, some of the smiths had to be set aside to continue working with steel. There were still things around Winterfell - things for the siege preparations, and the everyday running of the castle - that required steelwork.

And in that forge, Larra had quietly placed her designated survivors. Skilled armourers, apprentices, seasoned blacksmiths, and a few who had started to forge obsidian and done so with meticulous attention to detail, making her take note: They worked the regular forge, and in the back of her mind, Larra had a thought to keep those men back from the fighting. If the Night King was defeated, and some of them had managed to survive, then a complete team able to take over the forge in a moment’s notice would be beneficial.

They had to think about what came after the Night King.

He could only kill them.

Daenerys Targaryen intended to enslave them all to her will.

Larra sighed, her eyes smarting as she left the overwhelming heat of the forge, glad of the cold and the light of the brittle winter sun. It was a relatively fine day, after almost six days of continuous ice-sleet and rain and cold that had seen the courtyard frozen solid. Men had gone about with axes and tridents to break the ice and make it safe underfoot, scattering salt sent by Lord Manderly from the Saltpans, crushing gravel to give them purchase on the slick, ancient stones: Livestock had been moved inside, and two unfortunate people had been found frozen solid.

“Larra…”

Bran, wheeled across the courtyard by one of two dedicated guards, smiled softly to Larra.

“Are you headed to the godswood?”

“Yes.”

“Where’s Sansa?”

“Inside with the ladies,” Bran said, his eyes twinkling. “Sewing and singing…they need a new song… Larra, it’s time. You’ve put it off for far too long.” Larra watched him carefully, and gave him a warning look. And Bran gazed at her, mournful and almost desperate, “I can’t go down there. Can’t see them.” He glanced down at his wheeled chair, looking so like the frustrated little boy who had woken from his long sleep, broken, and aching to go about and run and play with his brother, and spar with swords in the courtyard and tumble about in the autumn leaves in the godswood, and climb the stairs, and push himself out of bed… “Light their candles for me?”

Larra sighed, dread settling in the pit of her stomach. She eyed the guard. “Go, fetch yourself something to eat. I’ll take Bran to the heart-tree. Come and find him later.”

“Yes, my lady,” said the guard, bowing courteously, and left, leaving Larra rather unsettled. My lady… People had started calling her that, though she wasn’t one. Whatever Jon was, Larra was still a bastard born of the North…or so people had always been led to believe by Ned Stark. And yet, they addressed her as my lady and curtsied or bowed at her approach. It had a little less to do with who Jon was than it did what Larra got up to around the castle. She was a leader; she organised everything; she always had an answer or solution - or knew who to ask for an answer or solution. People came to her, sometimes for reassurance, sometimes for guidance, but always…they listened patiently for her advice, and took it. That was the strangest thing. Larra had had to fight her entire life for all she had - her education, her place in the family with her brothers and sisters - and no matter how much she did, how high she had raised Robb with her actions…she would always only ever have been his bastard half-sister, despised and distrusted by his mother, disdained by the bannermen who could never forgive her birth.

To be not only accepted but respected…that was a heady thing, for someone like her. And she had earned it.

Larra pushed Bran into the godswood. The ice-sleet had not done much damage - the godswood had withstood thousands of years of winters, after all, unchanged, enduring… It was tranquil, and fine; the sun shone, making the snow shimmer, and the ice frozen on the trees glittered like hundreds of thousands of diamonds strung on silver. There was nothing quite as beautiful as the North in winter, Larra thought - something Father used to say. But Benjen had once told Larra that in spring, all of the moors surrounding Winterfell were carpeted with wildflowers beyond imagining.

“You want me to go down there?” Larra prompted grimly, as she settled Bran beneath the heart-tree. The scarlet leaves gleamed, as if they had been trapped inside the purest crystal; instead of rustling together, they clinked and tinkled in the gentle wind, and here and there Larra heard a patter - the ice slowly melting in the sunshine.

“Yes,” Bran said softly. “You cannot delay it any longer, though I know you would rather go the rest of your life without having to go down there again…” Bran squinted up at her. “They’re all down there, Larra. Just waiting for you.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

“You do not fear the dead,” Bran said softly, his face understanding.

“You’re wrong,” Larra told him quietly. “My fear kept us both alive.”

“Fear of the Night King’s soldiers…” Bran stared up at her. “Why should you fear your family?”

“Rickon’s down there. He’s down there…because of me,” Larra said, clenching her jaw.

“The Ironborn would have skewered him long before, had it not been for you,” Bran said softly. “They would have gutted him at Craster’s Keep, had it not been for you… In the Land of Always-Winter, he would have died…and he would have killed you - it would have been the death of us all.”

Larra stared at Bran, uncertain…was he fabricating some possible future, diverted by her actions…to soften the sting of guilt and shame that pervaded her entire body, and snapped in the back of her mind every time she relaxed toward deep, untroubled sleep?

“I’m not lying to you,” Bran said softly, gazing up at her. “It would be easier to fabricate some untruth to put you at ease… You made a choice. The possible outcomes were whittled down. Without Rickon, we stood a chance. And you knew that from the very beginning. You did the right thing in sending Rickon away: Smalljon Umber made the wrong choice in betraying him. Now both are dead; and we are alive, because Rickon did not die lost in the Land of Always-Winter, separated from us, to turn…to find us and slaughter us in the storms… Larra…you’re the only one who can do it, you know that. You need to go down there. The Children taught you for a reason.”

“I know,” Larra said heavily. There was something comforting in the fact that she had been…necessary, that her time in beneath the weirwood had not been wasted, that she had not been merely a vessel, a carrier - the one who carried Brandon the Broken. The Children had been preparing her, for this very day.

“Go, now,” Bran said softly. “Don’t think on it. I have a skin of stout, some oatcakes and a truckle of mature Cerwyn cheese. Take them and go.”

Larra sighed, eyeing the provisions Bran had hidden, tucked in his furs, and took them. She turned and walked away. By an ancient oak, she spied a flicker of colour. A weirbird, tugging at the tufted grasses and moss beneath the tree, protected from the worst of the ice-sleet by the tree’s massive canopy. And beyond the weirbird…nodding hellebores, some of them still dusted with snow, others gleaming with ice. They were hardy flowers, the winter rose. Through sleet and snow and ice, they endured, with their simple, broad petals and frilly throats, and gorgeous variations of colour - from pure snow-white to delicate pink or green to the deepest, velvety purple-black, and every hue in between. Diverted, Larra wandered over; the weirbird paused, hopped, turned to stare at her with beady black eyes. It chirped, fluffed its wings, and went about foraging for worms and slugs. Not too many to be found now, but in the shelter of the godswood’s great canopy, the birds stood a greater chance of finding food.

She stooped, trailing her fingers over the pristine winter roses. The finest, she left where it was, that it could go to seed and bring forth more flowers later. She picked the second-best, a many-layered hybrid with pure white petals soft as silk and a throat of delicate lavender.

White and purple… Silver-white hair and violet eyes, Larra’s eyes… Rhaegar.

She plucked the flower at the stem, and focused on the many immaculate petals as she trudged through the godswood. Distracting herself with thoughts of Rhaegar, and the locket heavy against her breast under her clothing, she barely noticed when she approached the entrance to the crypt. The direwolf statues had been replaced with new ones, uncannily accurate representations of Ghost. Workmen were grunting as they installed a new door - the brief one-time occupants of the castle before it had been reclaimed had installed a door engraved with the flayed man. Sansa had had it ripped off its hinges, and the bones of the Leech Lord burned and scattered in the wolfswood. The new door was made of ironwood, plain, but banded with obsidian. The workmen were being especially careful; the obsidian bands were decorated with obsidian spikes. To keep the dead out.

Every external door was going to be outfitted with the same, every gate, every window and murder-hole, and the battlements were going to be similarly armoured.

Larra was of the opinion, and those Sansa had consulted agreed, that given all they knew of the enemy, the best chance they had was to fortify, and defend - not attack. They did not have the men.

But they could be clever, and cunning, and use the one thing they had: Winterfell.

So use it they would, concerting all their efforts into turning Winterfell from a fortress into a weapon in and of itself.

Whenever Larra had sat in counsel with Sansa and the Northmen, and the Knights of the Vale, planning their defences and some of their strategy when the enemy finally showed itself, they went over the fact that the Night King had no archers, no siege towers, no scaling ladders or catapults or battering-rams. It was the one thing they went back to, when it all seemed too overwhelming: It was the one advantage they had.

They had long accepted that the Night King’s army would contain the ragged corpses of giants - apparently, the last of the giants, Wun Wun, had fought beside Jon and Tormund Giantsbane during the Battle of the Bastards: The Valemen had seen his body. They believed… And there would be mammoths, shadowcats, bears - every manner of creature lethal in life would now be horrifying in death. Giants, mammoths, all the beasts of the True North…but no siege weapons. No true cavalry - Larra had never seen a wight astride a dead horse or a giant upon a decaying mammoth, and nor had any of the Free Folk, who would know best. No archers, no cavalry, no siege weapons: The Night King did not need them. His siege weapons were his infantrymen.

And for every one of the living who died, they were at risk of allowing another soldier to join the Night King’s army. Those who died within the walls of Winterfell were a risk to those who could keep fighting.

There was only one way to stop the Night King’s influence take hold. Larra knew it: She had lived within its protection for ages. She had been taught the spells…

She slipped down the worn stone steps, the topmost ones still slick from the ice-sleet that had seeped under the door, and she stepped carefully down into the dark. Embers seemed to flicker into life out of the chill darkness, and as she walked along the passage full of gaping vaults unsealed - ready for the future generations of Kings in the North - the embers grew to a warm, inviting glow. Hundreds of candles flickered in the dank vaults, scattered here and there among statues.

Something pierced her heart as Larra stopped at the first statue.

The long, narrow face, the stubborn chin, even Rickon’s wild curls had been immortalised…his face clean-shaven, if he had ever grown in his first whiskers, his expression stern but far gentler than Larra ever remembered her little brother being. His face had been carved, not from memory, but from observing his dead body. His bones were interred, and a likeness of Shaggydog was curled at Rickon’s feet; an iron sword rested on upturned palms, the same as every other statue. There was a reason every statue was given an iron sword - to keep the vengeful spirits at bay…

Every King in the North had pledged an oath - and given it was the Starks, allegedly, who had founded the Night’s Watch, it was perhaps less remarkable that the vows of the Kings of Winter were very similar to the vows of the Night’s Watch - the greatest difference being the vow of celibacy, and holding no lands or titles.

Winter is coming, and so begins my reign. I shall defend my realm and all those who live within it. I shall fight for their freedom, never for mine own glory. I shall live and die for the good of the North. At Winterfell the fire burns against the cold, and the light brings the dawn. It is my blood that wakes the sleepers. Mine shall be the sword in the darkness. I am the shield that guards this Realm of Men. I pledge my loyalty to the North. In my life and death I pledge to fight for Winterfell and the North, for winter is coming. Winter is coming.

They were the words, handed down through the generations - from the very first Brandon, who had built these crypts and the First Keep, and had raised the Wall and manned it with the Night’s Watch. Curious words…full of double-entendre, though no-one knew it.

At Winterfell the fire burns against the cold, and the light brings the dawn. It is my blood that wakes the sleepers… In my life and death I pledge to fight for Winterfell and the North, for winter is coming…

Vows so that the Kings in the North would never forget their duty. And yet, they had forgotten their true meaning - the power of those vows, those words, the magic in their veins. The magic of the First Men, the oaths they had taken…

It is my blood that wakes the sleepers… A shiver crept down her spine. Larra paused before the statue next to Rickon’s.

It looked like him. Whoever had carved Father’s likeness had known his face. Grave and gentle but unyielding. His bones were there, Larra knew, sealed away. He rested beside his family, beside Lyanna - beyond her, Lord Rickard her father and her brother Brandon held iron swords, direwolves curled at their feet. Rickard and Brandon’s tombs were empty.

Larra glanced back. Rickon, Father, Lyanna, Rickard, Brandon…

Robb was missing. The first King in the North in three centuries. Robb had neither tomb nor statue, and nor did his foreign Queen. A devastating oversight.

Someone had come down to light the candles, and only the Starks ever came down here. They were the only ones who did not dread the crypts, the shadows of the dead Kings of Winter. Some of them had done terrible things, and Larra had grown up learning every one of them, every story. She knew the stories as well as she knew those of the Targaryen dynasty. They may not all have been good men, the Starks of old, but they had been great kings and leaders of men. They were a family of hard people, raised to rule even harder lands in the harshest of times.

Finally, she stood before Lyanna. Every Stark had a place in the crypts; but only the Kings in the North and the Lords of Winterfell had statues, iron swords in their hands and direwolves at their feet. The statues of Brandon and Lyanna were an exception. Brandon, killed gruesomely, and Lyanna…

She carried no blade, but one of her hands was elegantly upturned. Her serene face…looked punishingly like Lyanna’s - gentler, but with the same solemn oval face… Candles flickered all around her, and if Larra squinted, she could almost convince herself that the carved stone eyes were alive… She stared at the statue. Her mother. Her bones had turned to dust long ago, sealed in their crypt. She had been here, all this time.

How many times had Larra come down here, to vent her frustrations - scorning Lyanna for her stupidity in…well, in running off with Rhaegar Targaryen. As a child, Larra had thought, if Lyanna had never done that, then Rickard and Brandon might still be alive, and so would Lyanna, and Father wouldn’t be so unhappy at the sight of Larra’s smiles; he would never have had to marry Lady Catelyn, and he and Larra and Jon could have been happy in a holdfast, with Uncle Benjen. The Seven Kingdoms would not have been plunged into the most destructive war since the Dance of Dragons.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, and placed the winter rose in Lyanna’s accepting palm. She sighed, and gazed up at the statue. It wasn’t her mother, but it was the closest Larra had to her. “I’m sorry you’re dead. I’m sorry it all went wrong.”

“Lyanna would be so proud of the woman you’ve become - of the man Jon has become,” Uncle Benjen murmured, the wind stealing the sound of his voice.

“Was it really worth it?” she had asked. “All the horror, the death…”

“Were you worth it? Always. Absolutely.”

She stepped away from the statue, leaving the flower in Lyanna’s hand, and her eyes glanced from Brandon to Rickard...she took a fortifying gulp from her skin of stout, stoppered it, tied the laces to her belt, and set her shoulders, determined.

The candlelight was soon consumed by the gloom. She went deeper into the crypts, walking past each and every sealed tomb. She descended lower, and for a moment, absolute terror gripped her.

Old Nan’s voice echoed off the dank vaulted ceilings of the crypts sealing in ancient kings, telling them the story of the Seventy-Nine Sentinels.

“T’was the Nightfort they were bound to, sworn brothers all in black, seventy-nine of them… In the dark of night, they fled the Nightfort, stealing down from the Wall as outlaws, dangerous men with naught to lose…naught but their lives, which were given over to the Night’s Watch before Old Gods and new… One being the youngest son of Lord Ryswell, they thought to secret themselves away in safety to his lands… But Lord Ryswell was a man of honour, and dreaded the wrath of the Kings of Winter should they discover he harboured deserters and oathbreakers… Lord Ryswell had the outlaws rounded up and bound in chains - yes…his son, too, for bringing dishonour upon the Night’s Watch and the name of Ryswell too… They were dragged back to the Wall, and the crows enacted their punishment… Holes were cut into the Wall, seventy-nine in all, one for each of the deserters, who were sealed up inside with horn and spear…in life they had abandoned their posts and brought dishonour upon themselves; in death they endure, sentinels of the coming storm…”

She had always both anticipated and dreaded every retelling of that story. Every time Old Nan told it, the details were slightly different - more gruesome, depending on how much she wanted to frighten the little boys into obedience.

But it made her shudder, to be here, now…where the dead Kings of Winter were interred, bound by their oaths for eternity, their swords of iron all that bound them to the crypts…

She put the Seventy-Nine Sentinels to the back of her mind, focusing not on the ancient kings before her but Lyanna behind her…and Ned, whose love had protected her all her life.

On and on, sprawling far further than the entirety of Winterfell, Larra plunged deeper into the darkness of the ancient crypts, pausing at every sealed tomb…thoughts of the Seventy-Nine Sentinels lingered, though, and she sometimes thought she heard murmurs of the long-dead, their sighs and groans after so long in idleness, a slow and patient anger, a wariness and anticipation emanating from the chill stone…as if the stone itself - or the spirits of those who lay beyond - was alive, and aware…

The only things that startled her in the dark were the cobwebs, and the rustling of rats, but even they grew fewer as she went deeper.

Down, down into the dark, no torchlight to guide her, her sword sheathed at her side, Larra journeyed through the crypts. If she was thirsty, she sipped the rich, savoury stout. If she was hungry - and she thought to herself how soft she was becoming, here at Winterfell, that she gave in to hunger so easily now - she nibbled on an oatcake or a chunk of mature cheese.

And eventually…eventually…she tasted it in the air. Warm water on stone. She tasted it before she heard it, the soft bubble and gurgling of running water. A tiny stream, little more than a trickle, passing from a tiny crevice, into a gentle depression in the earth…and the ground beneath her was earthen, now, no longer foundations of stone.

Her eyes were accustomed to the dark, and she could see…

She squatted down, to kneel and observe the delicate ribbon of clear water trickling from the natural stone - the eldest of the crypts were crude, reminding her too vividly of the Children’s caves beneath the weirwood, the floor beneath her feet of packed ancient earth, the walls carved from ancient ironstone.

Down into the depression she slipped, and then she saw it. In the stillness, the sound of the water brought life to the henge.

It was not as big as the ones she had seen in Bran’s visions, or her own childhood dreams. The sacred henges of the Children, curious spirals of stone made to honour the weirwood groves, which, left to themselves, grew the very same way - the boughs of the weirwood into which the Children fled from the predators, the roots beneath which they created their cave-communities, their homes, secret and safe, feeding the trees with their dead, as the Starks fed their own dead to the crypts, to the weirwood heart-tree that grew above them. To the Children, the great weirwoods were as eternal as stone.

The first White Walker, the dreadful Night King, had been created at a stone henge overlooked by a mountain shaped like an arrowhead, a shard of obsidian plunged into his heart. A weapon for the Children, to defeat the First Men who were their enemies, massacring them…their creation had turned on them, destroying not just Men but…everything…

A henge beneath Winterfell, made by the First Men, the allies of the Children in the War for the Dawn. The stones were smaller, shorter than she was but heavy, and arranged in the strange spiral, sprawling outward.

The henges were places steeped in magic.

The henge below; the heart-tree above.

The Kings of Winter, waiting between.

It is my blood that wakes the sleepers.


They gasped and writhed against each other, her golden hair spilling over the crumpled linens as he hooked her knee over his elbow, adjusting his hips to thrust deeper, making her cry out, and he groaned, giving a few last brutal thrusts that made her moan shakily, and finally he pulled out of her, rolling to his side, grinning and panting as she preened, smiling and relaxed.

He smoothed a hand over her breasts, which were high, plump and very sensitive, and he tenderly cupped her belly, sweetly rounded… Myrcella had felt the first true flutterings of movement weeks ago; now Trystane felt them.

“I can feel it...like the kiss of butterfly wings against my skin,” he murmured in wonder. He shot her a grin.

“I’ve felt it for weeks, I am glad that you now can…our child straining to meet you…” Myrcella smiled warmly, draped with a kind of rumpled, sensual elegance against the embroidered pillows. She reached a hand down to caress her belly.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you quite so beautiful as you are now.”

“I’m getting plump,” Myrcella blushed.

“Plump with our child growing in your belly…” Trystane grinned, and his eyes dipped. “And these magnificent breasts…” They were much bigger now, Myrcella thought; Trystane was becoming obsessed with them, though they ached, and had been sensitive to the touch, even to the feel of Qartheen silk against them… There were things no-one had warned her about carrying a child. The vomiting. The bad dreams and sleeplessness, a strange aversion to some of her favourite foods, nausea every hour of the day, feeling tired all the time, and the bloating…the bloating was possibly the worst. She felt uncomfortable in her own skin.

No-one had prepared her for it, not even her mother. But then, her mother had not prepared her for much. Not for life in the Dornish court, certainly; it had been an education of its own, and Myrcella had learned a great deal. About her own body; about men. Princess Arianne had been her confidante and her tutor, guiding her in all things…things that had made her blush…and things that had excited her curiosity. Things the Dornish revelled in…finally, she understood why…

“I am glad your father has finally agreed that we shall marry… I was terrified when I first came to Dorne…now the idea of returning to King’s Landing… I could not bear it,” Myrcella said. They both knew Prince Doran had finally only capitulated because of the child growing in her womb. It had been Princess Arianne to suggest Myrcella hurry things along, if she was so terrified that she would be flung back to King’s Landing… “To leave here…to leave you… But I am glad he has agreed. I would not have wanted word to reach my mother that I had been…anything but virtuous.”

“We shall keep it a secret from her, then, that it was I who was in constant danger of being corrupted,” Trystane teased, and Myrcella blushed, smiling fondly at him. “You are tenacious.”

“You like strong women in Dorne.”

“Yes, we do.”

“I was worried your father would…would perhaps cast me aside, or…” She sighed, framing her belly with her hands. Her golden rings glittered in teh fierce sunlight. Winter may have come, but here in Dorne it would mean something very different to Winterfell. She still remembered Winterfell; Prince Doran had told her that Lady Sansa had returned to the North, and reclaimed her home. Myrcella was glad. But Myrcella no longer wanted any home but this one, no family but the Martells who had welcomed and embraced her. “I hear things, what’s happening in the rest of the kingdom. I know diplomatic relationships between Dorne and the Iron Throne are strained…I do not want your father to think less of me for seducing you.”

“Why would he?” Trystane asked, his eyes wide. Prince Doran could have no issue with Myrcella rumpling the sheets with Trystane - not with the way his own daughter carried on. The rumours were she lay with her cousins the Sandsnakes - Myrcella didn’t believe it one bit; but she knew those women adored each other with a ferocity that was often quite alarming.

“Perhaps he thinks…with your cousins on Dragonstone at the Dragon Queen’s court…” Myrcella winced, as her baby kicked. “I’m a complication.”

“Did you think he would allow his first grandchild to be born a bastard?” Trystane asked, trailing his fingers over her rounded belly. He leaned in to kiss it, sighing.

“Trystane…does it bother you?” Myrcella asked. She had never asked before. Better to know now, though, today, before… “The rumours…that I am not Robert Baratheon’s trueborn daughter.”

“Myrcella…” Trystane frowned, but did not immediately deny that he had heard the same rumours - that he and his family likely believed them. As Myrcella did.

“None of us ever looked a hint like him,” Myrcella said, almost desperately, her beautiful face anguished at the realisation, the unsettling truth. “My mother’s twin-brother…they were always together. Even in my dreams they are together, smiling and intimate… What if it is true? Not a princess…a bastard.”

Trystane knelt before her, cupping his face in his hands, his dark features solemn. “Whatever you were born, you shall be Myrcella Martell. I give you my name; it shall always be yours, from this day on. And you will be a Princess of Dorne.” He leaned in, and gave her a deep, savouring kiss that lit a fire in her again. He cupped her belly, gazing with fondness and pride at it. “This child…will be a prince or princess of Dorne, and no-one will ever dare question it.” He smiled, kissed her fiercely, and started to climb off the bed. “Now…we should get ready. I shall see you in a few hours, and finally make you my wife.”

“Not yet,” Myrcella said softly, tugging gently on his hand; Trystane didn’t resist. He grinned, and dived for her, already hard, and they groaned in exquisite agony as her legs parted eagerly, and he shoved inside her. Sometimes it was slow and savouring, spending all night just touching and kissing, tormenting each other by denying themselves…sometimes, though, it was hard and fast and desperate. It was like that now, feverish for each other.

“The more I give you, the hungrier you seem to get,” Trystane groaned, and Myrcella grinned, gasping, as he arched his back and spent inside her.

If Myrcella was truly a bastard, she thought, this was why: Because the feeling of someone she loved filling and enflaming her was worth everything in the world.

Hours later, the entire court of Dorne was gathered in the Water Gardens, the scent of citrus heavy in the air, the setting sun gilding everything a deep, rich gold, the perfumed air heavy with moisture and the strains of exotic, hypnotic Dornish music, the sound of laughter and murmured conversations, gasps and stifled grunts from the dainty follies and shivering bushes, and servants everywhere poured vibrant sparkling drinks, offering stuffed olives and figs and pastries drenched in pomegranate syrup. Prince Doran was dressed handsomely, his aching feet concealed by shimmering silk, as he was wheeled through the gardens, greeting his court, to take his place in the most honoured position, observing the proceedings as the septon prepared.

The laughter and conversation bubbled brightly, delighted, and cheers issued from a few of the nobles present, alerting everyone to the presence of Princess Arianne for the first time in months. No-one but Doran and his man Areo Hotah knew that a coup had been stopped before it could put Princess Myrcella at risk: Doran had had his own daughter and heir imprisoned for her recklessness. Now, she knew all.

Now, things had altered. News had reached them of a Lion Culling.

Demands had been sent from Dragonstone - ordering the Prince of Dorne and all his lords to bend the knee to Daenerys Targaryen, or die.

And specifically to Prince Doran, to yield the Princess Myrcella.

The years she had been a guest at his court, Doran knew the girl had come to view the Water Gardens as her home. He had come to have a deep and abiding affection for her - and had understood her value far sooner than his eldest son, who was enamoured of her beauty. She was naturally a joyous, gentle girl, underestimated because of her shining golden beauty. But she was cunning, Doran knew it: He had spent too many hours playing cyvasse with her - she had been a quick study. It was…delightful, to spend time with her. She radiated light and an innate joy wherever she went - her mother’s opposite in every way. And Doran had invested much, to make up for her lack of education: She had enjoyed her lessons, and continued to show incredible promise. She had innocence, a genuine sweetness, and shining beauty that stood out among the salty Dornishmen. Arianne had been teaching her guile; but Myrcella could teach Arianne much about patience and objectivity.

Yes, Princess Myrcella would be an asset to the royal court of Dorne. She was not just an exquisite beauty: She was cleverer than Trystane, gentler and more patient than Arianne, with her own unique charm and tact. She complemented his children beautifully, and Doran foresaw the future: a wise, calm, stunning woman who charmed with ease and guided her husband and sister-by-law with patience and insight.

He regretted that she had been so frightened that he would brush her aside, send her back to her disgraced mother, do worse. But he could not help but smile in anticipation - she was with child. His first grandchild. The future of House Martell, a future for Dorne.

Doran flicked his gaze to Trystane, already ready, waiting, dressed in Martell colours, a silk cloak falling from his shoulders; and he greeted his older sister with a bright grin, clasping her in his arms to kiss her.

“Sister!”

“Did you think I would miss such an occasion?” Arianne purred, smirking. Trystane glanced knowingly at his father, who winked subtly. Arianne sighed, smiled, and gathered up her glittering skirts to lean down and kiss her father’s cheek. “Father.”

“Dear child,” he sighed, smiling. He reached out a hand to cup his daughter’s cheek. Beautiful. Wilful, like her mother…passionate, like Oberyn, with a hint of Doran’s own shrewdness that time and experience would nurture.

The music swelled, and a sigh whispered through the crowds. Myrcella had appeared.

In the dying sunlight, Princess Myrcella glowed as radiant as the sun. Her golden hair had been curled and brushed down her back, and wreathing her head was an intricate coronet of gold orange-blossoms and pearls, Doran’s personal bride-gift to her. Her gown was of fine pale-gold lace, falling from intricate strings of golden pearls gleaming over her shoulders, the lace shimmering with thousands of tiny gold beads, outlining golden lions and tangled antlers and sunspears over the lace, which showed off her breasts, growing more succulent and plump as the child in her belly grew bigger, and the golden embroidery trickled over her hips, the swell of her belly noticeable under the pale-gold lace, the future of House Martell for all to see.

There was no hiding it, though clever sewing might have, a different style of gown, if they had chosen to conceal what all knew. In the last month, she had started to show. Myrcella was proud of that child, excited for its birth, already in love with its every flutter and kick. The other day, she had reported that the baby kept hiccupping.

Every tiny detail about the child reminded Doran of his own anticipation of Arianne’s birth, when he was young and in love... Only an hour ago, Trystane had told Doran that he had felt the baby moving in her belly for the first time. Doran hoped it would not be the only child to bring joy to their family. He wanted to hear innocent laughter echoing through the Water Gardens again before he died.

Trystane draped his cloak over Myrcella’s shoulders, giving her their protection. She was officially their princess now. And no-one would take her from them. Not Daenerys Targaryen…not even Myrcella’s mother.

She carried the future of House Martell…she was the future of House Martell, along with Princess Arianne, and her new husband Prince Trystane, who spirited his new wife away to their bedchamber before they could even start the wedding feast. They reappeared, flushed and wearing a change of dress less formal, more comfortable for a feast - for dancing and celebration. Myrcella was radiant, her golden curls shining in the candlelight as she beamed, dancing giddily and laughing, her new husband stealing kisses, noblewomen congratulating her on her child, the future prince or princess, offering advice, asking about names…

No-one told Myrcella about the Lion Culling that night.

He let the newlyweds bask in their love, in their lust…

They had time for grief and dread later.

They had time to prepare Princess Myrcella Martell as envoy at a summit between warring queens, both of whom wanted to snatch her from the other’s grip.

Doran wondered, sipping his wine, his lips curling with anticipation, how Cersei would react, to see her daughter so recently wed and noticeably with child already.


She stood buffeted by the wind, by the snap and thunder-clap of her children’s wings as they soared and danced in the air about her. From the top of the cliff, she looked over Dragonstone, the island and its ancient fortress forged with fire and forgotten magic, and the new settlement that had sprung up at the base of the Dragonmont, protected by the castle and inhabited by Dothraki and Unsullied and Meereenese freed-slaves. The Dragonstone natives, those whose families had lived on the island for centuries, some long before the Conquest, kept to themselves, at the quays and in little hamlets. Watchful and wary, waiting for the moment Daenerys would leave their island, their home, and take the Seven Kingdoms - and leave them in the peace they had become accustomed to.

This was her ancestral home, though it did not feel like it.

Her home was Khal Drogo, making love under the moonlight in the great grass seas, their son growing healthy and strong… In her dreams, her home was the sons and daughters she bore Khal Drogo, plenty of both, all copper-skinned, violet-eyed, strapping and strong like Drogo with her gentle, fierce heart… That home had been taken from her, as had every other.

She had not known home since the red door in balmy Braavos, with the lemon-tree outside her window.

Ser Jorah had once told her that Braavos was a dank stone city concealed by mists in the marshes. Lord Tyrion agreed: Whatever trees there were in the stone city were not citrus.

Citrus grew in the south, in Dorne. They were famous for their orange-blossoms and lemon-cakes.

Daenerys frowned, swatting away the thoughts.

She would not have her advisors convincing her that her own memories were false.

Not only were they questioning her decisions…

She winced. The little girl had left claw-marks on Daenerys’ skin, something no armed man had yet managed, in all their many attempts.

“Which gave Drogon the most trouble? The young women heavy with child, the brittle old men or the infants?! This was not an act of war. This was an act of murder. You BURNED little children.”

No matter what she had been engaged in the last few days, always, her thoughts seemed shattered by the King’s words. They shot through her when she dozed toward sleep, spoiled the food in her mouth as she dined with her sullen court, and filled her with a hotness not unlike Drogon’s fire burning beneath her skin, blistering and painful.

She felt as if she was back in the Great Pyramid again, forced to deal with the freed-slave who had killed the Son of the Harpy imprisoned in her custody for questioning. She felt the subtle but irrefutable sting of shame and uncertainty as Hizdahr zo Loraq told her that his father, a man of learning who had honoured Meereen’s past by preserving its great monuments for posterity, for the future, had been crucified on her orders.

For every action, she was coming to realise, there were going to be untold, unforeseen reactions.

She had ended House Lannister, as they had ended House Tyrell. She had spared seven, as seven were spared. She had done no more than House Lannister when they had sacked Highgarden, and yet…and yet she they turned their noses up at in disdain, disrespectful. It was she they refused to look in the eye. She they scorned.

Daenerys closed her eyes.

Had you not promised yourself that you were above them all? That you were better than those you intend to rid the world of? That you had not come to Westeros to murder people and orphan their children? a little voice inside her head said. It sounded suspiciously like Ser Barristan, the calm old man with soft white hair and stories about her valiant, gentle brother, who had never liked killing, as Viserys had claimed, but had adored singing. Had been a man himself as their Father descended into cruelty, turned mad by the tortures he endured at Duskendale, where Ser Barristan had been the only man to dare scale the walls and rescue his king.

What had the broad, shrewd-eyed Lannister woman, Lady Genna, said? “Tywin was right: It would have been better had King Aerys died at Duskendale. Rhaegar would still sit upon the Iron Throne…and you, girl…you would never have been born to replace your father in cruelty - and firelust…”

She had warned Daenerys that she would become Queen of naught but ashes…

What had Jon Snow called her, the night she held court, after the wild brat had assaulted her? The Unsullied should have been able to stop her; why had they been so slow? How had the King come between them?

Why had her own men turned on her Unsullied? The Greyjoys and the Sandsnakes had each held weapons to her Unsullied, her kos.

Over a child.

Daenerys winced.

Had she not often wished, as a frightened child no older than the violent little lioness, that someone…someone like the King would come and rescue her? Fierce and gentle and brave. To stand between her…and Viserys, all Daenerys knew in the world, and her first, prolonged exposure to cruelty. How often had she ached, in those first few torturous days and weeks of her marriage to Khal Drogo, before she had learned the ways of love to gentle and coax him…as he had taken her brutally on her belly, on her knees…before she had taught them both that he could be tender… How often had she bitten down on her whimpers of pain and imagined herself somewhere else, perhaps with a man who was gentle and considerate, with hands calloused from fighting but whose eyes lit up with warmth as he shushed and cuddled a frightened child.

Khal Drogo had become that man, whose calloused hands turned gentle when he held her, who had killed Viserys to protect her, and their unborn son.

In that moment, slumped on her throne, smarting and bleeding, Daenerys had realised one horrifying thing.

To that small child, cuddled in the King’s arms…she was more vicious than Viserys had ever been.

He had sold their mother’s crown to feed and shelter them.

She…had taken the jewels of that child’s mother and…as Jon Snow said…had paraded them about, unthinking of the effects… The reactions.

She had made a mistake.

Possibly more than one. And yet she was uncertain… The Lannisters were not abhorred, had not lost the respect of Westeros when they had taken Highgarden, and yet…and yet Daenerys saw it in their eyes. A shrewd caution, a disappointment…

They expected more from her.

She had let them down.

She had let herself down, she realised.

What had the King said?

“You’ve given Cersei all the weapons she needs to defeat you. The Mad King’s Daughter will burn Westeros - down to the last child - to become Queen of the ashes!”

She had vowed that she was not her father, that she understood that he had been an evil man inflicting untold horrors on innocents, and that that same malice had sparked the destruction of a dynasty, had robbed Daenerys of her family, her home…

The day he had arrived, the King in the North had told her that any oath his ancestors had made had been destroyed in fire and blood when her father murdered his grandfather and uncle, when her brother had stolen off into the night with the only daughter of the North…

The Targaryen dynasty had ended in fire and blood. And she had begun her conquest with the very same.

Daenerys winced, and sighed, shaking her head. Her long hair, intricately arranged by a noticeably quiet Missandei, featured a new braid, but it seemed to sit heavily on her head, the way none of the others did. She tucked a loose curl over her shoulder, catching sight of movement.

She had chosen no kos, but claimed the entire united khalasaar of Dothraki as her bloodriders. And yet, among them, they had their leaders - the strongest, fiercest, most ruthless of them. They had the finest horses, and in the castle, kept the most beautiful wives, some of the young girls freshly mounted for the first time, but others had already given them fierce sons of their own, who trailed behind their fathers, loosely swinging their arakhs and whips, some plucking the strings of their bows. With them walked the young dosh khaleen Zharanni, the beautiful Lhazareen widow with remarkably fine eyes: She was one of Daenerys’ ladies-in-waiting now, the rest of her young life no longer given to isolation in Vaes Dothrak. Daenerys was already considering possible marriages for her: She was a beauty, and her lessons with Missandei on the common tongue were coming along very well. Naturally shy from her husband’s abuse, and the sharp tongues of the hags of the dosh khaleen, she was becoming vibrant once more, curious and engaged, and in awe of Daenerys. The Dothraki still respected Zharanni - and the other women - as dosh khaleen, but they did not question that they sat in Daenerys’ court in finery, rather than secluded away in shadows, as they had been in Vaes Dothrak.

What good was their wisdom, if Daenerys had no access to it?

Some of the other dosh khaleen had not made the journey with Daenerys; they had remained in Vaes Dothrak, as the merchants and slaves had. Daenerys needed only the mounted warriors. But of the dosh khaleen, Zharanni now led them; Jassi was still young, and had given her khal five sons before his death - she had taken Daenerys’ ko Zireyo as her husband, when Daenerys had declared that the dosh khaleen could remarry - and in fact, should. She was already pregnant: Zireyo expected a son as fine as any of the five she had born her khal.

Zharanni was accompanied by Oqetti, the daughter of Kovo, bloodrider to one of the burned khals - the one who had whipped Daenerys and taunted her on their long trek to Vaes Dothrak, and one of the first to kneel before her as the great temple had burned around her. Daenerys had chosen Oqetti as a handmaiden, and where Zharanni went, Oqetti was likely to be. Oqetti remained in awe of Daenerys; Zharanni smiled beautifully at Daenerys as she approached, with Kovo and Zireyo, Qago and Rozzo, her ko. She had no bloodriders, but she had men who kept a firm control over her khalasaar. It was the greatest since the Century of Blood: Her warriors needed a firm hand to guide them.

“Khaleesi,” Zharanni began, then flushed and smiled bashfully, switching to the common tongue, “My Queen… Ser Jorah here.”

“Ser Jorah is here?” Daenerys breathed, light filling her, relief. Whatever their tumultuous bond was, he had been with her since the very beginning, since her wedding-day, and if he had had his way, every day since. He loved her, she knew: She loved him, in her way, as a niece might love her uncle. He had guided and protected her… And whatever else he had done, he had always done his utmost to make it right with her. Was deeply loyal to her. And he always gave her wise advice.

And there he was. Wrapped in a fur-trimmed cloak billowing in the winds, his weather-beaten face earnest and smiling as he stepped forward, taking a knee respectfully.

“Khaleesi,” he rumbled. She would always be his khaleesi, she knew, no matter how many lands she conquered or thrones she claimed. She would always be the shy, dainty girl in the pale pink silk dress, silver-blonde in a sea of copper-skinned Dothraki, delicate and untouchable, and strong. He had watched her turn from frightened girl to the Mother of Dragons, to a conqueror, confident and radiant… “Your Grace.”

“You look strong,” Daenerys gasped, unable to contain just how pleased she was, how relieved. She had banished him to cure himself and return to her - as he always had. “You found a cure?”

“I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t,” Ser Jorah promised. “I return to your service, my Queen… If you’ll have me.”

“It would be my honour,” Daenerys beamed. She reached her hands out for him, and the knight stood, his Westerosi armour gleaming, the rearing bear over his heart seeming to roar, and smiled as he took her hands in his. “I admit I am quite in need of your counsel, Ser Jorah.”


Hissing at the brightness of the light, Larra stumbled out of the stairwell, hand clamped over her eyes, and took up a vigil beside one of the carved direwolves as the sound of carts rattled far too close and the clamour of the courtyard stung her deprived ears. Too bright, too loud. She had grown accustomed to the dark, to the restless silence of the crypt.

“Where have you been?”

She jumped, and squinted in the sunlight.

A fire burned, growing larger the closer it got, consuming everything… Oh. Not fire. Sansa. Larra winced, and opened her eyes, which smarted in the brightness of a pristine white sky. Snow was drifting down in idle flurries.

Sansa advanced hurriedly, her pale, beautiful face pinched anxiously.

“I’ve been…in there,” Larra said, raising her hand to jab her thumb over her shoulder.

“For three days?!” Sansa blurted exasperatedly. Larra blinked.

“Three days?”

“Yes! What were you doing?!”

“Didn’t Bran tell you?” Larra asked, tilting her head to one side.

“Bran - he’s gone off - who knows where…or when!” Sansa said. “What on earth were you doing down there?”

“Making preparations,” Larra said, almost defensively. It had not felt like three days…

“What kinds of preparations?” Sansa frowned. She glanced at the obsidian-banded door. “Doing something for Bran?”

“Yes,” Larra said quietly. Sansa actually looked quite upset. You’ve been gone three days, with no word, Larra thought guiltily.

“Couldn’t he do it himself?” Sansa asked. Larra raised her eyebrows, and Sansa realised what she had said. She blushed. “Oh.”

“He used to forget, too,” Larra said sadly.

“What was it you were doing down there?” Sansa asked quietly, eyeing the door to the crypt warily.

“Waking the sleepers.”

Chapter 28: His Father's House

Notes:

So my face-claim for Gendry will always be Henry Cavill. Take a peek at 'Night Hunter' which shows him with full beard and wild curls, wearing snuggly jumpers; and his accent and clothing will be inspired by Geralt of Rivia!

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

28

His Father’s House


She stared into the fire, the soft click-clack of her needles soothing as Old Nan’s used to be, as she reacquainted her fingers again with the feel of polished oak needles and soft yarn coiled around her finger to guide it. Like Old Nan, she could knit without even looking at the yarn: Her hands remembered every stitch, every pattern. It was embedded in her muscle-memory, as much as her knife-training and fletching skills.

“What are you thinking about?” asked a soft voice. More and more often over the last few days and weeks since Larra had told him off, Bran had been making an effort. To engage.

Perhaps it was the easiest and best way he had of remaining in the present, focused on them, rather than on the thousands of years’ worth of memories fighting for dominance inside his own head. Asking them questions perhaps allowed him to sift through the memories, and realise where and when he wask.

Larra sighed, glancing over at Bran. “Arya.”

“You still worry about her,” Bran said softly.

“I worry about what she did,” Larra admitted quietly.

Bran sighed, and reached over, his pale hand glowing in the firelight. Larra eyed it, knowing what that simple gesture meant. She lowered her knitting, transferred the needles to one hand so she would not drop stitches…and she took his hand, uncertain whether she was prepared to see what he had to show her.

Blistering sunlight blinded her, and she was deafened from the throng pressing around them. Bran stood at ease, but there was no relaxed, dry humour in his face, or wonder; only grief.

They stood among the mob outside the Sept of Baelor.

“No!” Larra blurted, whirling away, her eyes clamped shut: She would not look.

You owe it to him to look him in the eye…if you cannot bear to do that, then perhaps he does not deserve to die…

Bran appeared before her, smiling sadly, his dark eyes pinched in pain. He pointed in the direction of the one man in the crowd not staring at the steps, jeering and screaming, and Ned Stark lowered his head to the executioner’s block. The grubby man with the lined, weather-beaten face was dressed all in black, his clothing patched, threadbare in places and dusty: He had a small child snared in his arms, their head pressed tight against his chest, as they wriggled and thrashed to get free.

Not a child.

Arya.

She was in boys’ clothes, and the Braavosi sword Jon had had Mikken forge for her as a parting-gift was tucked into its sheath at her belt.

As Larra stared at her little sister, grubby and hungry-looking, she heard the tell-tale swish…and her heart stuttered as a flock of pigeons took to the air; Arya’s eyes were focused on them. Her breath caught in her lungs, her body thrumming with heat and despair, and she pushed back tears, focused on Arya. On the man who had her face tucked against him, to make sure she didn’t see…

Larra sniffed, and focused on the grubby man in black. “I know his face,” she said hollowly, hating Bran in that moment for bringing her here. Father… “Yoren. That was his name. The wandering crow… He shared the road with Lord Tyrion on his return from the Wall…”

She remembered him in the Great Hall at Winterfell, grateful for room at their hearth and table, given a good bed for the night. She remembered Robb trading barbs with Lord Tyrion, and herself, sheathing the blade Robb had laid bare before him as threat to Lord Tyrion…who had returned from the Wall with a wonderful design for a saddle that had allowed Bran to ride… Lion and crow had left Winterfell together, sharing the road.

“Look at me! Look at me!” Yoren forced Arya to look up; her eyes were damp, but she looked more shocked than anything, numb. His voice aggressive, forceful, Yoren shook Arya out of her daze. Sharp-minded and grim, Yoren eyed the crowd warily, his face pinched, and in that moment Larra knew, he understood exactly who Arya was, and exactly the danger she was in. Her respect for the wandering crow, Jon’s black brother, grew a hundredfold. “You remember me now, boy? Hey, remember me?” Arya blinked, and seemed to come out of her daze; she focused on his face, adn appeared to nod. “That’s a good boy. You’ll be coming with me, boy - and you’ll be keeping your mouth shut.”

He lifted her roughly, shouldering his way through the crowd, her head tucked against his shoulder - she still could not see the steps of the Sept, and Larra did not look back. She followed Yoren, shoving his way through the crowd, the sound of King Joffrey’s voice smug and arrogant as he addressed the crowd - who roared their approval.

In a dusty side-alley, Yoren stopped, shoving Arya against the wall. “Keep your mouth shut, boy.”

“I’m not a boy!” Arya cried in protest, blinking up at Yoren with her huge expressive eyes, and jumped as he unsheathed a dagger at his belt. He was strapped with weapons, not just a brother of the Night’s Watch but a wandering crow - and their job was more dangerous than the Rangers. Rangers only had to deal with wildlings and White Walkers: Wandering crows had to deal with every kind of scum, filth and other nobility there was in the Seven Kingdoms.

“You’re not a smart boy, is that what you’re trying to say?! D’you want to live, boy?” Yoren growled dangerously, and he starts to slash Arya’s long brown hair off. “North, boy, we’re going North…” He finished slashing Arya’s long hair; it fell to the floor, dirty and tangled. How often had Arya threatened to cut her own hair, furious about having the knots combed out? Gripping her tightly by the upper-arm, Yoren led her away from the Sept, away from the crowds, to a dusty marketplace choked with the stench of the city’s poorest and shimmering with heat. He released her arm, shoving her toward a group of young boys. “You, stay here with this lot, boy, and - stay - or I’ll lock you in the back of the wagon with these three.”

Arya stared at a prison wagon, inside which three men were locked. One had a cowl over his head, and sat complacently; the other two snarled and grumbled and howled. Arya stared so long, she didn’t see the large boy until she collided with him. He pushed her down into the dirt.

“Watch yourself, midget!”

“He’s got a sword, this one.” A ratty-looking boy appeared beside the large one, watery eyes peering down at Arya.

“What’s a gutter-rat like you doing with a sword?”

“Maybe he’s a little squire,” rat-boy jeered.

“He ain’t no squire, look at him. Looks like a girl!” exclaimed the fat boy. “I’ll bet he stole that sword.”

“Let’s have a look.”

“I could use me a sword like that,” said the fat boy thoughtfully.

“Well, take it off him.”

“Give it here, midget.”

“Look at him,” rat-boy snickered. “You better give Hot Pie the sword. I’ve seen him kick a boy to death.”

“I knocked him down, and I kicked him in the balls, and I kept kickin’ him, until he was dead. I kicked him all to pieces,” the fat boy, Hot Pie, boasted. “You better give me that sword!”

“You want it?” Arya snatched his hand, Needle already pointed at his belly. She used his weight to lever herself off the floor, the boy barely breathing as Needle threatened to pierce him full of holes “I’ll give it to you. I already killed one fat boy. I bet you’ve never killed anyone. I bet you’re a liar. But I’m not. I’m good at killing fat boys. I like killing fat boys.” She advanced, tiny and terrifying, and Hot Pie stumbled back, into a taller boy stood behind him with his well-muscled arms folded across his chest, vivid blue eyes narrowed as he scowled.

“Oh!” Hot Pie gasped, stumbling away from the taller boy. He was older than the rest, sixteen or seventeen, tall and well-built - well-fed - and likely to get taller and bigger. His black hair was shorn for ease, his jaw was already strong, and his chin was dimpled. He had high cheekbones and an imperfect nose Larra thought perfectly fit his rugged, deeply masculine face.

He was already handsome, in a brutal sort of way - because of the harsh haircut. Those eyes - dark and mesmerising as the finest sapphires, finely lashed - were startling, set into his grubby and tanned face.

“You like picking on the little ones, do you?” he asked, and his voice…was attractive, not too deep yet but laced with menace, and he seemed to grow bigger as he crowded Hot Pie, dominant and threatening. He was all shoulders and arms and flashing yes. And he knew it: The other boys cowered. “You know, I’ve been hammering an anvil these past ten years. When I hit that steel, it sings. Are you gonna sing when I hit you?” Hot Pie fled, glancing over his shoulder warily, the rat-boy looking frightened. The sapphire-eyed boy sighed softly, his posture relaxing. All for show, Larra thought, finding herself smiling. He knows bullies are frightened of him. She eyed his arms, corded with muscles already, bigger than they should be for a boy his age. What had he said - he’d been hammering an anvil the last ten year? A blacksmith’s apprentice. He turned to Arya, eyeing her shrewdly. He frowned at Needle, still gleaming in her hand. He wasn’t afraid of the blade, the way Hot Pie had been, and he handled the steel with confidence as he reached for it. Not to steal it from her, and Arya seemed to understand that, for she did nothing to stop him as he took the Braavosi sword from her, examining it carefully. He noticed the maker’s mark claiming it as Mikken’s work. “This is castle-forged steel!” he said, surprised. He gave Arya an assessing look. “Where’d you steal it?”

“It was a gift.” From Jon, Larra thought, frowning. ‘I already killed one fat boy…’

“Did she kill a boy?” Larra asked Bran, remembering what Arya had told Hot Pie. She was no liar, after all.

“Oh, yes,” Bran said softly.

“Don’t matter now,” the tall, blue-eyed boy told Arya. “Where we’re going, they don’t care what you’ve done. We’ve got rapers, pickpockets, highwaymen. Murderers.”

“Which are you?” Arya asked, and for a second, sadness and disappointment flickered across his face, regretful.

“Armourer’s apprentice,” he said. He shrugged off his sadness, but Larra had seen it - and Arya did, too. “But my master got sick of me, so, here I am.”

“Come on, you sorry sons of whores!” Yoren bellowed across the marketplace, climbing onto a wagon. “It’s a thousand leagues from here to the Wall. And winter is coming!”

Arya sheathed Needle at her side, and marched off behind the boy with the blue eyes. He carried a pack and a helmet fashioned after the head of a bull, horns and all, and Larra noted it; it was fine work. A testament to his skill and his patience. Arya looked back, just once, past the wagon cage, to the dusty market square, but the steps of the Sept, still splattered with the blood of Ned Stark, were out of sight, and Sansa had been carried into the Red Keep by the Hound, the pretty she-wolf locked away in a cage.

They watched Arya. Her friendship with the brave, gentle and strong young man Gendry, with his blazing blue eyes and infallible sense of decency, his corded muscles, handsome laugh, cheerful charisma and his grit, his bravery and loyalty.

They watched the crows’ journey North, and the death of Yoren, protecting not only Arya but also Gendry, hunted by the Gold Cloaks for a secret even he didn’t seem to know.

They watched Arya sleeping in the rain at the feet of the ruined Harrenhall, as the screams of smallfolk being mutilated punctured the air, all the way to Arya, sleeping in the rain, on the steps of the House of Black and White. Everything in between. The playful protectiveness of Gendry; the extraordinary vulnerability of Tywin Lannister before his disguised cupbearer; the eerily entrancing Jaqen H'ghar. The Brotherhood - Gendry pinning Arya to the ground as she writhed and fought and spat at the Hound to “Burn in hell!” for the murder of the butcher’s boy, judged by the Brotherhood’s Lord of Light in a trial by combat against Lord Beric Dondarrion, resurrected half a dozen times.

“I can be your family,” Arya had told Gendry, her heart breaking. The simmering hatred in her gaze as Arya glowered at the Red Woman, Lady Melisandre, who had bought Gendry from the Brotherhood determined to ransom Arya to her Tully relatives.

Sandor Clegane, riding through a burning army camp carrying an unconscious Arya and a Frey banner to conceal their escape as the Northern army was butchered. Teaching her where the heart was. A brawl in a tiny tavern…striking the Hound’s name off her list as he lay broken, goading her to kill him…bartering for passage with the curious coin Jaqen H'ghar had given her, and the ancient Valyrian words, “Valar Morghulis,” spoken to a Braavosi ship’s captain.

They watched her lessons. Her blindness.

Larra watched her charismatic, fiercely just sister become consumed with vengeance. She watched the animated, vibrant and passionate Arya become still. Quiet, watchful. Wrathful. Burning with a hate that kept her blood warm as she lay in the mud listening to torture, or begged blindly in the damp, cobbled streets of Braavos, or calmly kneaded dough in a darkened kitchen, her mother’s and brother’s killers dismembered in a barrel, ready to be baked into a pie for their father.

And her prayer… “Joffrey, Cersei. Ser Ilyn Payne. The Hound. Meryn Trant. Amory Lorch. The Mountain. The Tickler. Raff the Sweetling. Polliver. Chiswyck. Weese. Dunsen. The Red Woman. Thoros of Myr. Beric Dondarrion. Walder Frey. Valar morghulis…” Names she had offered up to the god of Death before she even understood what Valar morghulis truly meant. Names that, one by one, Arya was striking off her list, the names committed to memory, committed to the god of Death. The prayer was becoming shorter.

As Arya donned a new face, fastening a crimson cloak to elaborate, gilded-steel armour, her lips moved silently: Cersei, the Mountain. The Red Woman. Thoros of Myr. Beric Dondarrion. Valar morghulis.

Bran sighed, and released Larra from the memory.

The ruddy walls of the Red Keep, glowing in the lingering sunset bathing King’s Landing in blood-red light, faded to ancient grey stone and a log crackling orange-white in the hearth.

Larra sat quietly, her hand still clasped loosely around her knitting. Dazedly, she picked up her needles… Needle.

Arya had cried as she hid the little sword Jon had gifted her.

She had been unable to bear giving up that little sword, to shed all that she was, her identity, her past…her family. To abandon the love of her brother, her hope…to see him again. To return home, to her family…

Arya had knocked the poisoned rum from Lady Crane’s hand, knowing that her death was undeserved - that her name had been offered up out of spite and jealousy, not a desire for justice. And when she was hurt, Arya had sought refuge in Lady Crane’s home. Larra had thought there was a slight resemblance between Lady Crane and Lady Catelyn - their colouring, their cheekbones, the sensible maternal warmth radiating from the actress as she tenderly administered to Arya’s wounds, the first motherly touch Arya had known since she left Winterfell…

Arya had killed the Waif not just in self-defence, but as justice for the actress who had healed and sheltered her - and been mutilated for her kindness.

No matter what Arya had done, Larra knew…her sister was not gone. She was lost. Drowning in grief, pain and a desire for vengeance to drown out the screaming inside her own mind that had not stopped since they took Father’s head.

The butcher’s boy had been Arya’s first taste of true powerlessness, of injustice: Since then, she had witnessed almost every evil of Man’s devising. Arya understood just how ugly the world truly was.

Now Arya had the skills to answer injustice with swift and brutal violence.

Arya’s journey had been more gruesome, more brutal, more unforgiving than Larra could ever have believed if she had not witnessed it. It was no wonder that Arya was…altered.

There was no shame in Arya having been so brutally changed by all she had survived, all she had endured.

Weren’t they all?

But when the last name was struck from her list, what then? Larra couldn’t help wonder. When she had avenged their family, and anyone who had ever crossed her, would her wrathful sister ever be able to find peace?

Needle, Lady Crane…Larra had seen Arya’s truest nature shining through in those rare moments - crying in heartbreak for missing Jon; seeking the safety of a mother’s warmth.

Arya’s tears, her rare vulnerability, had reminded Larra how young Arya still was; how young she had been when Father was executed. Arya was now only as old as Larra had been when she had fled Winterfell, and the Ironborn, with Bran and Rickon.

From the moment Ned Stark had been executed, Arya had been fashioned by the men she had met along her journey - every single one of them - but she was still, deep in her heart, that delightful, ferocious little girl who believed in justice, in loyalty and truth.

Larra hoped that, one day, Arya would be able to return home. Not just to Winterfell…to herself. To find peace, and shed the wrath she wore as both blanket and shield.

She raised her eyes to the mantel over the hearth, where Sansa had agreed they should place the small portraits Larra had long ago painted of their family. There she was, Arya, twelve years old, still with the light of innocence in her eyes and her thin lips curved into a breathless smile of anticipation, her long braids unkempt. To look at that painting…it bore no resemblance to the cunning, dangerous young woman Arya had become. Because of all Arya had endured…the torture, the training - Hot Pie and Yoren and Jaqen H'ghar and Tywin Lannister and the Brotherhood and Gendry.

“What happened to the boy?” Larra asked, glancing at Bran. It was easier than asking about Arya. But the boy, who had been charming and clever, even-tempered, shrewd, with an easy laugh and a spine of tempered steel - even as he faced down torture… His face lingered in her mind, those incredible blue eyes, the strong, dimpled chin, stronger arms, even the shadow of a beard he had grown by the time he and Arya were separated. How fiercely he had reminded Larra of Jon, just watching the way he treated Arya - with delighted incredulity mingled with fondness, deep love and fierce protectiveness. “The Red Witch bought him. Did he live?”

Bran smiled softly. “He lived.”

“Where is he now?”

“About to meet an old friend.”


“You know where you’re headed?”

“I made this journey before, in the dark, drenched in the blood of my father and lover. I know the way,” Lord Tyrion muttered, eyeing the red castle towering over the city. It was a tiny inlet, ideal for smugglers who wished to avoid detection - though most smugglers utilised the blanket of darkness that was night, with only the moonlight to guide them; so said Ser Davos, who was the expert in such things, as evidenced by his knuckle-bones draped around his neck in a leather pouch. Not them: Lord Tyrion had asserted that if he were to appear in the Hour of the Wolf, every Lannister soldier in the Red Keep would be called upon to skewer him, if the Mountain did not crush him like a grape before that. No, it was broad daylight for him, so to allay at least one of Cersei’s fears. Even if Cersei was not the one he was here to see.

He just hoped Jaime had not armoured his detachable hand with a hook to disembowel him on sight.

Tyrion was under no illusions that…he had murdered their father, after Jaime had conspired to free him from his prison, and certain death by royal executioner…

Tyrion had murdered their father, after Jaime had spent a lifetime defending him.

“And where are you going?” Lord Tyrion frowned at the Spider, who had climbed out of the boat with surprising agility, and now stood assessing the cliff-face. He did not wear his fur-trimmed robes made of fine Qartheen samite. No; he dressed humbly, now, as Tyrion knew he was prone to when he did not wish to be noticed. Lord Varys was still a mummer, playing a part.

“I have things to attend to. My little birds find it difficult to fly through the storms,” Lord Varys said softly. “And I do so miss their songs.”

“Well, good luck. Does Cersei know you’ve been to Meereen and back?”

“What my little birds have told me, the Queen’s new Hand believes he guides them,” Lord Varys sniffed. “They give him titbits, little more - of course, your sister has never been anything less than petty and vengeful; she focuses on the little things, far too close to home. She has no care for news from abroad; she cares to know who still laughs at the Queen who walked naked through the streets, sheared and shamed, covered in shit.”

Lord Tyrion’s lips twitched into a leer. “Do you know, the people of King’s Landing suddenly seem far more attractive to me than they were a moment ago.”

“As for the news of my whereabouts, I took great care to conceal my movements - especially in connection with you…” Lord Varys shrugged. “And it takes a little more than candied plums to turn my little birds’ feathers… If you’ll pardon me, my lords.” He bowed to them, moving with surprising speed and ease across the sand, and disappeared, heading for the city.

Ser Davos kicked a long stake into the sand, wedging it deep, securing the boat from drifting away into the tides of the Blackwater, their only escape.

“There’s a path to the left that hugs the cliff,” Ser Davos told Tyrion, gesturing. “City Watch hardly ever patrols it; too many steps.”

“You’re not staying here?” Lord Tyrion blurted, as Ser Davos strode past him, following in Lord Varys’ wake.

“I’ve got my own business in Flea Bottom,” Ser Davos told him.

“What if someone takes the boat?”

“Then we’re fucked!” Ser Davos exclaimed, glancing over his shoulder as he strode off. “Best hurry.”

The city stank. It always had. Like sour wine, rotting fish, baking bread, sweat, horse-piss, nightsoil and smoke. The cantankerous old captain of Cobblecat had claimed that King’s Landing reeked like an unwashed whore. As a boy Ser Davos remembered his eyes watering at the stench in high-summer: The autumn past gone and winter officially here, the stench was not quite so bad, but it still stuck to the back of his throat, and he had to dodge pails of nightsoil being emptied from high windows that leaned over the winding, cobbled streets.

And yet, in spite of the stench and the nightsoil, Ser Davos felt the city around him, his onetime home with her three high hills…it was happy. Winter had come, but it had not yet truly touched King’s Landing, except for the lingering chill in the morning air, the fog drifting off the Blackwater to curl around their feet as he avoided rivers of horse-piss and blood from butcher’s stalls, the ground scattered with sawdust that gripped his boots as he trudged along, listening to the singing of washerwomen and the scream of seagulls as they dived about the Fish Market, fighting over discarded innards, and here and there he caught scents that took him back violently to his youth, fruit tarts baking, the stench of unwashed bodies, saltwater and sour ale and lavender growing in pots marking whorehouses, the nimble girls draped in the doorways reeking of the flower, coaxing and smiling.

Here and there, though, he saw evidence of the fear that had so recently gripped the city. The High Sparrow and all his little hateful followers; a few of the old brothels had been burned down, taverns had been hastily rebuilt, and in the markets, he noticed fewer stalls, less produce, and higher prices being bellowed about. And the Sept…or what had once been the Sept of Baelor. A tremendous crater, gouged out in the heart of the city. Children played among the ruins, as workmen struggled to clear the rubble, loading up carts. Ser Davos watched, realising…that amount of debris would be useful, come a siege. Projectiles to load the trebuchets with and shatter siege-towers, render soldiers to jelly.

The bite of smoke and steel tickled his nose, and Ser Davos followed it. He took his time, idling and observing everything. Flea Bottom was eternal, he thought; time would not change it. It felt the same as it had when he was a boy. The people looked the same, sounded the same, the children eyed his belt just the same as they had when he was young - he smiled at them, eyes twinkling: His coin-purse was tucked nowhere they were brave enough to venture.

The Street of Steel… He wandered between the forges, from smithies to armourers, seeking. He never asked, just observed.

A great hulking man with great arms muscled like basilisks hammered away at an anvil, steady and fierce, and Ser Davos almost moved on - until the man glanced to the side at the sound of a boy’s voice, and Ser Davos saw…the strong nose, fierce jaw swathed in a trimmed beard, and vivid blue eyes…

He paused in the doorway, heat already beading sweat on his brow. The man at the anvil wore breeches and a decent pair of boots, and under his leather apron, his shirt was drenched through with sweat, sleeves peeled back, brawny forearms protected by leather gauntlets.

“Thought you might’ve have rowed all the way to the Summer Isles by now,” he quipped, and the man at the anvil froze, stood up straighter, his head lifting at the sound of Davos’ voice. The man set down the sword he was working on, letting the metal glow bright hot orange-white in the embers, and slowly set down his hammer. He turned, and Ser Davos stared.

As a young lad, Gendry had been tall, well-built and good-looking. Ser Davos remembered him slim, suspicious, stubborn, brave, earnest, clever and succinct.

As a man, Gendry had grown a foot taller, his shoulders wide enough to wreck stone doorways, back heavily muscled, his strong arms scarred and shining, thighs thick. His sweat-soaked shirt showed more muscles still, and dark hair on his chest. His black hair was longer than Davos had ever seen it, curling everywhere as he sweated, the shadow of the short beard swathing his deeply masculine jaw did not quite conceal the dimple in his chin.

Gendry grinned. He still had Renly’s easy smile, Ser Davos thought, the Baratheon looks. Fierce and handsome and strong. He had grown into his strong features, very handsome, and fine lines crinkled the corners of his deep sapphire-blue eyes as he grinned, hinting at the time that had passed.

Ser Davos had saved a boy; he had become a man.

And he greeted Ser Davos as he would a brother, enveloping him in a tight embrace that startled a laugh from the older man as he was overwhelmed by Gendry’s size - he was huge. Larger than his father had ever been, even.

“Ser Davos!” Gendry said warmly, and even his voice had changed - deeper, still with that innate humour and earnestness, but rich and handsome. “I was certain Stannis had killed you.”

“Almost,” Ser Davos said, his beard twitching. “Step back, let me take a look at you! They must be adding something new to the bowl o’ brown, you’re enormous.”

Gendry laughed richly. “I’m an excellent armourer and charge a fair price,” he told Ser Davos, shrugging modestly. “I’ve the money to buy meat now.”

“I can see that!” Ser Davos chuckled. Movement in the corner, and Gendry glanced around, still grinning. “Cadeon, come and say hello. This is Ser Davos Seaworth. Ser Davos, this is my son Cadeon.”

Ser Davos blinked, staring at the boy. Son? He was tall, in that lanky phase between childhood and manhood, as if someone had taken hold of his boots and his ears and stretched him - growing too quickly, with nothing to feed him. Not nothing, Ser Davos understood, because the lad wasn’t skinny as most Flea Bottom urchins were skinny; he was just growing that quickly. He had dark hair, violently streaked by the sun, his face faintly tanned, the skin beneath his eyes red from the sun reflecting off the water. Ser Davos knew the look of sea-burned skin. The boy had vivid blue eyes like Gendry’s, though they were a different shape, and pale rather than deep sapphire, his left eyebrow was sliced through, scarred…but that was nothing to the scars fracturing from the right corner of his mouth, some of them tickling his jaw, some stretching toward his ear. He saw Ser Davos looking at the scar, and scowled.

“Your…?”

“Not actual son,” Cadeon said, rolling his harsh bright-blue eyes. “He never fucked my mother - or maybe he did - ow!” In a slow and practised move, Gendry clipped him round the ear, raising an eyebrow warningly. “What I mean is, I’m too old to be his son, obviously.”

“Cadeon has the unique talent of being insolently truthful,” Gendry said, with wry humour, eyeing the boy. He could be no older than thirteen or fourteen, tall for his age and older because of his scarring and scowl.

“He took me in,” said Cadeon simply, and Ser Davos nodded. Despite his harsh tongue and scowls, when Cadeon looked at Gendry, there was nothing but respect and fondness in his eyes. Whatever their bond, it was strong.

“Cadeon, you’d know Ser Davos as the Onion Knight…” Gendry said, and Cadeon turned those vivid pale-blue eyes on Ser Davos, reassessing. “He saved my life. You’re here because of him.”

“You were a smuggler?” Cadeon said, disbelief dripping from him; Ser Davos’ beard twitched as Gendry rolled his eyes.

“A lifetime ago,” Ser Davos sighed. “I’ve been a lot else since then.”

“Cade, go and get Neva,” Gendry told the boy quietly. “Take a few coppers and got to the fish market. Get some white fish. We’ll have our meal. Have you eaten? Get enough for all of us, Cade.” The boy nodded, and strode off, shouting for Neva, whoever that was. Gendry grinned. “Thirsty? There’s ale, and Neva’s fish stew is…you’ll see.”

“The boy?” Ser Davos prompted, and Gendry glanced at him, halfway through a doorway into a back room, his living quarters or the passage to them.

“He was a rigging boy on a Myrish pirate-ship,” Gendry said, his lips twitching. “I wouldn’t believe it, but for the brand on his arm. ‘P’ seared into the skin; even I know what that means.”

“He keeps that covered, I hope?”

“Always,” Gendry nodded. “Anyway…somehow he made it to King’s Landing. I found him by the docks, face split open… He’s been with me ever since.” He stared at Ser Davos. “I thought you’d been executed for helping me… When I came back to King’s Landing…my Father’s house…his people…my people… I knew I had to pay it on kind, what you did for me. I can’t hold lands or titles, but when you saved my life, you showed me what it means to be a man. So, I…take care of as many of my father’s people as I can. Orphans and tired whores and blind fishermen… Especially when the Sparrows came…”

Ser Davos had not known King Robert near so well as he knew Stannis: But he knew enough to think that Gendry was already a greater man than his father ever had been.

“I heard about the Squabble of Sparrows,” Ser Davos said brusquely. “Saw the Sept.”

“What’s left of it, anyway,” Gendry shrugged, and he carried two simple clay cups and a jug out of the back-room - holding them all in one enormous hand. He poured them out a healthy measure of good ale each, and Ser Davos accepted a cup gratefully, smiling. Gendry’s expression was scornful and angry for a moment, and he blurted, “They called themselves pious. Claimed to be godly men. They spread nothing but hate and fear. The city was choking on it.”

“Feels as if the city’s recovered,” Ser Davos mused.

“I’ll tell you something, Cersei’s a callous bitch but she did in a morning what Maegor couldn’t do in a decade,” Gendry said. “I may wish her dead for what she did to my father - what she tried to do to me - but the city can breathe again. Young whores aren’t being whipped through the streets, bastards aren’t being drowned in the Blackwater as the product of sin, the ale-houses aren’t being burned, merchants’ shops torn apart for their spreading the sin of excess…”

“You seem as if you got through it unscathed.”

“I did. I’m a skilled worker,” Gendry shrugged. “I know my value. So I armed the Faith…now I arm Lannister soldiers. Never get a second look. No-one knows me, except Tobho Mott, and he knows enough to be wary of the strength in my arms. The hardest thing was keeping Cadeon and Neva out of sight. The Faith liked things in proper order, and those two…” Gendry sighed, swallowed his ale, and glanced at Ser Davos. “I was surprised to hear Stannis died fighting in the North. He abandoned his claim on the Iron Throne?”

“He never abandoned it; just approached it from a different angle,” Ser Davos sighed. He shook his head, and sipped his ale. It was good, and flavourful. Gendry frowned at him.

“You’ve had a strange journey since we parted,” he said quietly. “Are you going to tell me some of it?”

“Aye. I believe I shall,” Ser Davos said. Gendry eyed him shrewdly.

“You didn’t come back to this city to re-establish trade, did you?” he said, and Ser Davos shook his head.

“No. I’m here on urgent business for Jon Snow,” Ser Davos said.

“Jon Snow - the Stark bastard?” Gendry blurted, his handsome face the picture of surprise.

“Aye. You’ve heard of him?”

“Bits and pieces. For months all anyone talked about in the taverns was the Battle of the Bastards. The White Wolf and his wildlings. Now he’s King in the North,” Gendry said, then frowned softly, shaking his head. “They talk about him like they used to talk about the Young Wolf, Robb Stark.”

“Perhaps he is like his brother, I don’t know - never met the last King in the North,” Ser Davos said.

“Well, hopefully the North won’t go through kings like King’s Landing does,” Gendry said.

“Indeed not,” Ser Davos said grimly, thinking back, to the sound of a direwolf’s mournful howling, a fire crackling in a small room chill with death, a snivelling man’s false promises.

“They say he and his sister reclaimed Winterfell,” Gendry said cautiously.

“Aye. Sansa Stark,” Ser Davos said, and noticed the disappointment flicker across Gendry’s sapphire eyes. “Good lass. Survived Cersei for years; she’s wily as a direwolf herself.”

He told Gendry everything, from saving himself from certain execution with a raven-scroll he had read, the details corroborating with a vision Stannis had in the flames. Their journey North, and the battle in the snows beyond the Wall. He told Gendry about Jon Snow, and Jon Snow giving the gift of mercy to Mance Rayder, a man he respected despite the fact they were enemies, as he burned. King Stannis’ hard push to Winterfell to claim it from the Boltons, to protect the North and unite it against the coming storm… Gendry had never met his cousin, and swallowed a mouthful of ale trying to dislodge the lump in his throat as he tried to tell him about Shireen. Stannis had died on the moors outside Winterfell, before he had the chance to lay siege to the castle. Knowing his plans for his only child, who Ser Davos had loved as his own, King Stannis had sent Ser Davos back to Castle Black, back to Lord Commander Jon Snow… He had become advisor to the Lord Commander.

He slipped up: He told Gendry, “He did what was right, and they murdered him for it.”

Gendry blinked at him.

“The Night’s Watchmen murdered their Lord Commander? But…”

“T’was the Red Witch,” Ser Davos growled.

“She brought him back,” Gendry said easily, and Ser Davos blinked at him. Gendry explained, “With the Brotherhood, I saw…Lord Beric Dondarrion, cut down by the Hound. His friend Thoros of Myr brought him back, praying to the Lord of Light. That’s the Red Woman’s god, wasn’t it?”

“Aye, that’d be the one.”

“She brought him back,” Gendry said wonderingly, and Ser Davos nodded.

“His watch ended; he was determined to leave the Wall and everything else behind, after executing the mutineers…then his sister arrived at Castle Black,” Ser Davos sighed. “We spent months travelling the North, trying to scrounge up men to fight against the Boltons. And then it came. The Battle of the Bastards. Jon slew the bastard in single-combat, with naught but a shield against bow-and-arrows - but only after we’d almost lost the battle, and the Knights of the Vale rode in. They’d come for her - for his sister, Lady Sansa. Her cousin presides over the Vale as Lord of the Eyrie, you see.”

“Now they’ve taken their home back,” Gendry said, and Ser Davos nodded. “Ser Davos, did you ever hear anything about the Red Wedding?”

“I think we all heard enough about the Red Wedding.”

“That’s not what I meant. I never said a word before, but the Brotherhood who sold me to the Red Witch had Arya Stark; they wanted to ransom her to Lord Tully at Riverrun - her grandfather. Said they needed the gold to keep fighting. Same reason they sold me,” Gendry said, and he could talk about it now without bitterness: He never would have learned his identity, never would have met Ser Davos, whom he respected and admired, one of the two men to show him what it meant to be a man. Yoren was the other. Gendry had realised that Yoren had known Arya’s secret the moment he shoved Arya among them in the dusty marketplace, her hair hacked off, calling her a boy. He had protected Arya, and Gendry. He had lost his life for his decency, but that only made Gendry believe more strongly in honour and loyalty and protecting those who could not protect themselves. Not that Arya had ever really needed protecting - except maybe from herself; she had always been far too brave than was wise. He sighed, and shook his head.

Ser Davos sighed, shaking his head. “How is it you came to be captive of the Brotherhood with Arya Stark?” Ser Davos could not hide his disbelief.

“I suppose it started with her father…maybe even with Stannis, before him, and Lord Arryn. They all came to Tobho Mott’s armoury in the weeks before they died, seeking me out, asking me about my mother. They knew what I didn’t, you see. They saw it in my face the moment they looked at me; I was Robert Baratheon’s bastard… Lord Arryn seemed shocked, he said, ‘The seed is strong!’ when he looked at me. He said, ‘They’re nothing alike’… Suppose he meant the Queen’s bastards… They’d learned the truth in my face…” Gendry sighed, shaking his head. Those men - good men, who led well and ruled justly - had died for the truth of Gendry’s birth. They had died for his looks. “When Ned Stark came to the capital, he visited the shop, too… He told Tobho Mott, ‘If the day ever comes when that boy would rather wield a sword than forge one, you send him to me’… Ned Stark was arrested, not long after, and I was sold to the Watch. We were set to leave the capital the day they executed Lord Stark, and Arry appears with the rest of the recruits, hair freshly shorn and carrying castle-forged steel in the style of the Braavosi water-dancers’ blades. ‘Course, none of us knew who she truly was, and I think I was the one of the few who paid enough attention to realise she was a girl… But she told me who she was, eventually - when the Gold Cloaks came for us; she thought they had tracked her down, were going to drag her back to the city, to Cersei… They wanted me. The Gold Cloaks left, but they came back with the Mountain’s men. They killed Yoren. They took us prisoner at Harrenhall…we escaped, but the Brotherhood found us. Would’ve gotten away, if they hadn’t grabbed the Hound, too, and he recognised Arya. When the Red Witch bought me, that was the last time I saw Arya.”

Ser Davos stared at him. Until now he’d never breathed a word of Arya to anyone. But it was Arya who Cadeon reminded him of so violently - his stubborn refusal to die, his viciousness when provoked and his hilarious, insolent truthfulness. And he was loyal, like Arya. She may be a High Lord’s daughter, and Cadeon born the lowest of the low, likely a bed-slave’s son or worse, and they had had very different lives, but they were so alike in nature it was uncanny. Gendry loved Cadeon as his own: He also frustrated him near to tears sometimes. Arya had been the same.

“But the Freys took Riverrun after the Red Wedding…”

“If they had snatched Arya Stark, all of Westeros would’ve learned of it,” Ser Davos said vehemently, and he saw the disappointment and grief flicker in Gendry’s eyes.

“But if they had her… House Frey is a dead House now,” Gendry said grimly. “They’re saying that winter came for House Frey, if she was there…”

“We’d have known it,” Ser Davos sighed, shaking his head. “It does no good to dwell on her fate, Gendry…believe me. There’s worse than winter coming.”

Gendry frowned at him. “What d’you mean?”

Ser Davos faltered for a heartbeat, then told him - everything. The White Walkers, Hard Home, Jon Snow letting the wildlings through the Wall, and the army of the dead, Jon’s search for obsidian that had led him to Dragonstone. Gendry listened, never interrupting, but Ser Davos could see his mind working behind those clever blue eyes.

Gendry listened, and became more and more impressed, and more homesick for Arya, the only family - the only sister - he had ever had. He listened to Ser Davos’ stories of Jon Snow, and thought, He sounds just like Arya always described him. He told Ser Davos as much.

“It’d break his heart to hear what his sister endured,” Ser Davos said quietly.

“Have you seen it?” Gendry asked him quietly. “The army of the dead?”

“No, but -“

“But Jon Snow says he has, and you believe him?” Gendry prompted.

“I do.”

“Then I believe you,” Gendry said simply, shrugging. He refilled their cups. “I know Arya would believe her brother. The world’s ending. Thought it’d be by dragonfire the way they’re talking about what happened in the Westerlands.”

“It may yet,” Ser Davos said darkly.

“You’ve seen her?” Gendry asked. “The Dragon Queen?”

“Aye.”

“And?”

“Short in stature, but every inch a conqueror, and you’d best not forget it,” Ser Davos said, frowning. “Prideful. Arrogant.”

“You don’t like her,” Gendry noted.

“I don’t trust her. I saw what wildfire did to Stannis’s fleet at the Blackwater. She has infinite supply of it in those three dragons of hers…” Ser Davos said uncomfortably, and he scowled, his cup shaking as he raised it to his mouth, glaring into the distance as he thought of the girls… “You heard about the Lion Culling?”

Gendry’s eyes were intense as he raised them to meet Ser Davos’, and he nodded slowly. “She hunted down Lannister women and children and burned them to ashes.”

“I smuggled food to Stannis during the War her father started when he burned Rickard and Brandon Stark alive. Her father had wildfire, and it’s said he lusted for death by fire…” Ser Davos said, grimacing. “I worry about what she’d feel herself entitled to if Jon manages to convince her to ally against the Night King’s army.”

“Isn’t life enough?” Gendry blinked.

Ser Davos chuckled softly, raising his cup. “To simple folk like us.”

“To simple folk,” Gendry smiled softly, gently clinking their cups together. “What about Jon Snow? What does he think of this Dragon Queen?”

“She is a beautiful young woman, but he has no respect for her, especially not now. She’s used to getting what she wants, and she finds him infuriating and attractive,” Ser Davos said astutely. “Knows her way around a man, I’d guess - how could she get so far without learning?”

“Like the Red Woman.” Gendry’s eyes narrowed, and he seemed to suppress a shudder.

Ser Davos’ expression was murderous, he knew. He would never forgive or forget Shireen’s murder, and hoped for nothing more than the Red Witch’s return to the North - so he could execute her. Ser Davos reflected on the Red Witch, on Daenerys Targaryen. They were so similar, he realised - they were as unlike each other in looks as blood and chalk, but in their utter belief in their gods - Lady Melisandre in the Lord of Light, the Targaryen in herself…their faith was infallible, they believed every act they committed was blessed by the gods, was necessary, no matter how evil…because they did not believe it was evil… “And just like her, you’d meet your death by fire…”

“Jon Snow can’t have made it this far without keeping his wits about him - if he’s anything like his sister, he’s a lot cleverer than he lets on, even if his fierce heart is likely to get him killed,” Gendry said, his eyes widening subtly as he caught Ser Davos’ gaze, remembering what Ser Davos had said about the mutiny.

“You’ve no idea how right you are.” It was goodness that caused Jon’s death. Goodness.

“You’re going back to Winterfell?” Gendry asked.

“I’ll stay with Jon; we need to keep sending shipments of dragonglass back to White Harbour but it’s a delicate situation, and only becoming more so,” Ser Davos said, wincing and glancing at the door to the armoury: He could not see the Red Keep from here, the streets choked with people and overhanging buildings…but he hoped all was going well with the Imp and his brother the Kingslayer.

He supposed, as with Arya Stark, if Cersei had managed to get her hands on Tyrion Lannister, the entire city would have heard of it by now.

“Because the Dragon Queen is burning her way through Westeros,” Gendry said succinctly, and Ser Davos nodded.

“One of the many reasons,” he sighed.

“We bought bread!” Cadeon reappeared, his scarred mouth rippling as he grinned, his eyes alight, and he held up four small bread rolls scattered with seeds, and Ser Davos’ eyebrows rose in delight as a little girl entered the forge beside him, carrying two silver fish from strings. “It’s from yesterday, but it’s the good stuff!”

“Put it next to the coals,” Gendry told him, as the little girl wavered uncertainly in the entrance.

“Bless my knucklebones!” Ser Davos chuckled, as Gendry smiled warmly at the girl, and she glanced uncertainly at Ser Davos, to hurry to Gendry, behind whom she hid. “If I’d known I was to be meeting such a lovely young lady, I would’ve brushed my beard! Who might you be?”

The little girl was about six, slender as a reed and daintily made, her skin pale and without flaw, her hair glimmering like crushed pearls, and she had huge eyes pale lavender in colour. She was also exquisitely beautiful, even at such a young age.

It was a shock to see her pale hair and purple eyes, but not really. Here in King’s Landing, where there was a great deal of trade and movement between Essos, the Summer Isles and the islands of Lys and Myr, the blood of Old Valyria showed itself here and there. She was not the first child Ser Davos had ever seen with the Valyrian looks; it was only a shock, because he was so accustomed to the harsh, demanding nature of Daenerys Targaryen’s beauty.

This little girl had all the same features of Old Valyrian blood - pale skin, pale beautiful hair and even finer eyes - without any of the Queen’s severity. Softness and delicacy seemed to radiate from her, even in her plain-spun frock. Even in her bashfulness, light seemed to shine from her face, gentle and steady like the stars, not fierce like the sun or beguiling and changeable like the moon. She was barefoot, and she rubbed one foot behind her ankle as she leaned shyly into Gendry’s arm, tucking herself out of sight, nothing but a pair of light-purple eyes gazing back at him.

“This is Neva…she’s very shy around strangers,” Gendry said softly, his voice tender, as Cadeon took the two fish from the little girl. Gendry tenderly stroked her hair from her face. “My little girl’s shy,” he said affectionately, kissing her temple. “But you’d never know it, hearing her chatter away in bastard Valyrian with her brother… And this is no stranger…Neva, this is Ser Davos. You remember me telling you about him?”

“You said he died,” Cadeon said bluntly, and Ser Davos chuckled, watching Cadeon hack the tails off the little fish on a board near the fire, where a small pot was starting to steam.

“I thought he had,” Gendry said, shrugging.

“I came all this way, from the far North,” Ser Davos said coaxingly, “because I heard that a little lady named Neva makes the best fish stew in the Seven Kingdoms. Would that be right?” Pride radiated from her smile, even as she tucked her face into Gendry’s neck; he chuckled richly, winking at Ser Davos.

“I’m sure we could spare a bowl for Ser Davos, couldn’t we?” Gendry asked, and the little girl nodded. She gave him a gentle kiss on the lips, untangling herself, and went to the fireside; in a few moments, Ser Davos heard the two children rapidly speaking bastard Valyrian between them.

“D’you speak bastard Valyrian?”

“Enough to put a stop to any rebellions before they happen,” Gendry said, with a wry smile as he watched the children, and Ser Davos laughed.

“Where’s the little one from? She has the look of the Lyseni.”

“That’s exactly where she’s from,” Gendry sighed, shaking his head. “Her mother was a courtesan, a bed-slave; Neva was bred for her beauty. If you think Neva’s beautiful now, her mother was… Well, I’m not a poet, but she was stunningly beautiful, even with the scars that came later. She earned enough money to buy her freedom, and her daughter’s, and came to King’s Landing to open a pillow-house… She did well, until the Sparrows descended on the city. They burned the brothel, whipped her girls through the street, slashed her face for her vanity… Cadeon found Violanthe being hassled in an alley, with Neva naked and hungry and crying to watch her mother whimpering in pain… Cade stabbed the worm and left him - he brought them home to me, and we tucked them away safe from the Sparrows…Violanthe died a few days later, but not before asking me to look after Neva. She’s been with us ever since.”

Ser Davos sighed heavily, shaking his head.

“How long, Ser Davos?” Gendry asked, and Ser Davos glanced at him.

“How long?”

“Until…?”

“The army of the dead,” Gendry said grimly. “If Winterfell can’t stop them, how long until they reach King’s Landing?”

“If the Wall falls, and the combined might of the North can’t stop the Night King’s hordes…months,” Ser Davos said, shrugging. Jon said it wasn’t a matter of if as much as when. The Others had not been gathering their armies for no reason. “A year at most, Jon hazards. If they breach the Wall, and Jon’s certain the Night King will find a way.”

“And what if the living win?”

“If we can stop the Night King, then, well, all we have to worry about is a Dragon Queen setting Westeros aflame to claim the ashes from Cersei Lannister,” Ser Davos said archly. Gendry frowned, watching the two children. Cadeon was wiping his hands on a cloth; Neva was humming to herself as she gently dropped chunks of white fish into the little cooking pot. On the cutting board, there was a pile of skin and scales, the fish-heads and bones, the smallest of which Neva had felt out with her tiny fingertips and removed with a small needle, tongue between her teeth in concentration.

“If you were in my position, Ser Davos…between waiting for the storm, hoping the people who trust you to protect them will survive, and facing it head-on, knowing you joining the fight could make all the difference…what would you do?” Gendry asked quietly, his voice soft and thoughtful. He glanced at Ser Davos, and for a heartbeat, he was with Stannis again.

“I can’t make that decision for you. But it sounds like you’ve already made up your mind. You don’t know what it is we’re truly facing,” Ser Davos warned. “The end of all things. You don’t know that we’ll survive the Night, at all.”

“No. But I know the Starks,” Gendry said, and there was pride and a lot of respect in his voice. “If we fight, and I fall, but they live, I want them to live under Stark rule.” He nodded at the two children.

“You might die,” Ser Davos said.

“We all die,” Gendry said grimly. He shrugged, glancing away from the children. “But I’m going to choose what I die fighting for.”

The stew took moments, the fish cooking through, and turned wooden spoons were brought out, the ale shared around - it was safer for the children to drink ale than water, Ser Davos remembered. The wells in Flea Bottom were notoriously rancid. The small, seeded rolls were plucked off the embers, the ash dusted off their bottoms, and they sat in companionable silence as they ate, the lid of the pot removed, each of them helping themselves to the pot, dunking their bread, the same way Ser Davos remembered eating with his family as a boy. Large lavender eyes rested on Ser Davos, and he made a show of enjoying every mouthful - though it really was very good, and he didn’t have to put it on, creamy and spicy.

“One of the neighbours taught her how to make it,” Gendry said fondly. “She takes such care with it, that’s why it’s so good. The fish is never chewy.”

“You’ve a treasure here,” Ser Davos smiled, and Neva leaned in to Gendry’s chest, gazing coyly at Ser Davos through her lashes, a smile on her plump lips.

Content, stomach full, Ser Davos folded his hands over his belly, crossing his ankles near the fire, as the children tidied the things away, Neva humming to herself prettily, Cadeon keen to take over the forge while Gendry spoke with Ser Davos.

 “So…you want to come North,” he muttered. He eyed the walls and racks of weapons Gendry had forged. Dozens of swords gleamed, freshly sharpened, ready to be sold. Their craftsmanship was second-to-none - but then, Tobho Mott was the best in the city, and Gendry had apprenticed under him for years. “You’ll be needing one of those.”

“I’ve been practising,” Gendry admitted, shaking his head, and he reached for something hooked on one of the beams. He lifted down…a great war-hammer, spiked and lethal. Just from the way Gendry held it, Ser Davos - who was not a natural warrior - could tell that it was perfectly weighted, and lethal, one side wide and heavy with nine shallow spikes meant to demolish anything that got in its way, the other side boasting two long, wicked curved spikes. On the top, there was another long, gruesome spike. The steel haft was dark, near-black, and banded with bronze and wrapped with a leather grip; the head was intricately, almost lovingly detailed with dark bronze horns. “But I’m far better with this.”

“Horns,” Ser Davos observed, his beard twitching. “Not antlers?”

“Bastards can’t use their father’s arms. Besides, everyone always called me the Bull,” Gendry shrugged, and Ser Davos laughed, eyeing his great size. Even as a boy he’d been tall and strong for his age; now, he truly lived up to the nickname. “Want a look?”

“I doubt I could even lift it,” Ser Davos chuckled, and Gendry smiled. He sighed, glancing from the children to his great war-hammer. “Neva, Cadeon…get your things. We’re leaving.”

Cadeon turned, wide-eyed, then scowled. “But I haven’t finished my helm!”

“You’ll have plenty opportunity to forge armour at Winterfell.”

“Why the fuck do we want to go to Winterfell - ow! I mean, why in seven hells would we want to go to Winterfell? - Stop!” Cadeon said, brandishing his fists at Gendry, who had clipped his ear for every curse. He gave Gendry a stubborn look, rolled his eyes, and turned to Ser Davos. “I apologise, Ser.” He turned back to Gendry, exasperated. “It’s winter. They say the Citadel has sent out white ravens. That means winter has come. D’you know what happens in the North when it’s winter?”

“Yes. The Starks look after their people,” Gendry said stoutly, already moving around the forge collecting things to tuck into a leather pack, an enormous sword he strapped to his back, a dagger and a throwing-axe tucked into his belt, a sling for his hammer crossed over his front. “Think Cersei Lannister’s going to feed us all through the winter, when the Dragon Queen has just burned half the food from the Reach? We’ll be fighting another war just to survive if we stay in this city.”

“What about my girls?” asked Cadeon indignantly.

“By the gods, Cadeon - you’re too young to be chasing after girls,” Gendry said, and Ser Davos chuckled.

“They chase after me!” Cadeon protested. “I bear their advances as best I can!”

“My arse!” Gendry laughed, and Ser Davos smirked. “Get your things, and help Neva. Where’s your cloak?”

“What? Never ‘ad no cloak,” Cadeon grunted. An arched eyebrow from Gendry, the threat of another clip round the ear for his poor manner of speaking. “I meant, ‘Pardon? I do not own a cloak’.”

“I believe I can help with that,” said Ser Davos, his beard twitching as his eyes glinted with amusement. Cadeon raised his dark, scarred eyebrow at the old man, who smirked. “As it is I am of a mind to lighten the burden of my coin-purse. And I need a lady’s opinion on ribbons.” He twinkled down at Neva, who was tucking a rough doll into a small bundle of clothes, a few spare dresses and nothing more. “Do you think you could help me?”

“For yourself or the King?” Gendry teased.

Ser Davos chuckled, but his eyes dimmed. “Rosebuds and lion-cubs.”

Gendry stilled, tucking his great war-hammer into a leather sling across his front, the sword strung opposite across his back. “The survivors. They’re all on Dragonstone?!”

“Every one of them,” Ser Davos said grimly. “The only Lannisters on the mainland sit within that red castle.”

“The Queen and her brother,” Gendry said. “Or is he her lover?” Ser Davos stared at Gendry, frowning in confusion. “The Kingslayer, Ser Jaime Lannister. They took his white cloak and gave him the Lannister armies. He led the sack of Highgarden.”

“He survived the ash meadow?”

“So they say. Hard not to spot a handless man in gilded armour damn near killing his horse to reach the Red Keep. They’ve been locked up in the Keep since then, up to only the gods know what,” Gendry grunted, tucking things into his pack. “Probably trying to make more bastards, from what they say. Better to get out soon: the city’s about ready to tear itself inside-out over fear and rumour, again…”

“Aye, I feel it. The city’s holding its breath waiting for the storm. I’m of a mind not to linger,” Ser Davos said. “Come, we’ve ribbons to purchase. What’s a fine colour for little girls, do you think?”

Neva glanced at Gendry, who gave her an encouraging smile. Quietly, her voice soft as silk, Neva said, “Purple.”

“Purple. The lady has spoken,” Ser Davos said, smiling fondly. He offered his hand, and Neva shyly took it as Gendry climbed up into the eaves, and Ser Davos heard the stifled sound of coins slinking and sliding against leather. “Best tuck that somewhere none’ll be tempted to root about for it…though you’re in danger from every woman in this city!” Gendry smiled, tucking his coin-purse around his neck, out of sight. Beside him, Cadeon was arming himself with several wicked knives. Ser Davos murmured to Gendry, “Does he know how to use one of them?”

“Better than I can,” Gendry muttered back, giving Ser Davos a telling look. “When I found him at the docks, he was bloodied and dying…I took him to the armoury, patched him up, tucked him into bed - when he woke he tried to knife me. Vicious little beast - said he’d been rigging-boy on a Myrish pirate-ship. Wasn’t used to kindness, except from a whore the captain kept on-board - though I’m not sure it was kind what she did to him. He’s very comfortable with concealed blades.”

“And this is the gentled version?” Ser Davos asked, as Cadeon strode out of the armoury.

“He’s vicious when provoked, but he’s a good lad,” Gendry said fondly, and they cast their eyes upward, ever watchful for nightsoil being dumped out of windows. “He just…wanted someone to love him. And he’d murder anyone who tried to hurt Neva…”

“Or you, I’d imagine,” Ser Davos observed.

“He reminds me of Arya Stark,” Gendry said warmly. “It’s those fierce eyes. Spine strong as steel.”

“Jon never talks of her.”

“Arya?”

“Or the elder, his twin. Larra. According to Lady Stark, they were his favourites, though she said it without bitterness…just grief,” Ser Davos sighed heavily. “They were her sisters, too. Jon’s twin, lost beyond the Wall. Their youngest sister, lost the day Ned Stark lost his head.”

“She wasn’t lost; Yoren hid her in plain sight,” Gendry said thoughtfully. “I’m surprised she’s not made her way home.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because Arya Stark never needed protecting: People needed protecting from her,” Gendry said, his face alight with amusement. “She was fearless. A fearless she-wolf.”

“You loved her.”

“She was the first family I ever had. She asked me to go with her to Winterfell…I thought I’d join the Brotherhood, be part of something great… I didn’t understand… I should’ve gone with her,” Gendry said regretfully, shaking his head, and they dodged a car loaded with turnips. “Still…here we are all the same. Heading North.”

“Hopefully a fairer journey than your last,” Ser Davos said.

“Thank you, Ser Davos,” Gendry said earnestly. “It should be me repaying you. Though I don’t know how such a debt is ever repaid.”

“It was never a debt,” Ser Davos told him.

“I fully expected Stannis to execute you - over me.”

“One innocent life is worth everything,” Ser Davos said stoutly. “You agree, or those children would be dead.”

“When I learned who I was - who my father was - and you helped me escape… I’ve never forgotten that I’m alive because you did what was right, no matter the price you had to pay,” Gendry said solemnly.

“Save one person, save the world,” Ser Davos said simply.

They found a fine tailor’s emporium, with a milliner’s attached, and little Neva’s eyes widened with awe as walls of colour spread out of sight, rich fabrics from all over the world, heavy furs and the most delicate of Qartheen lace, shimmering velvets, silks light as air, and ribbons… Fat ribbons, skinny ribbons, silver ribbons, embroidered ribbons, woven ribbons, beaded ribbons, velvet and gossamer and samite and silk. Ser Davos knew the girl had never seen so many colours before in her life, from the daintiest pearl-pink to cloth-of-gold to the most vibrant ruby-red - very popular, they were told. Undoubtedly; the Queen’s colours.

Gendry gave Ser Davos an uncomfortable but grateful look as he ordered new winter clothes - for Gendry, and the children, including thick warm wool cloaks, a fur for their shoulders, and good strong boots.

“Ser Davos -“

“Don’t. I know what you’re about to say,” Ser Davos said, his beard twitching. “It’s my pleasure. I’m bringing you North to gods-know-what, the least I can do is properly clothe you and your little ones. Now - tunics for the lad and dresses for the little lady. Wool for both, if you please, and the finest Northern wool you have to hand, none of that rough-spun shite from Essos. And plenty of room for them to grow. And a leather jerkin for the young man. For the Bull, good strong leather, cotton and wool.” He chuckled at Gendry’s small smile.

“Any colour preferences, Ser?” the attendant asked Gendry.

“Black would be more practical,” Ser Davos spoke up when Gendry looked uncomfortable, and Gendry smiled.

“My father’s colours,” he said softly.

While they were outfitted, Gendry’s clothing tailored to his enormous size, and Cadeon was fitted with strong boots of fine leather - protesting against having to wear them at all, too used to the freedom and movement afforded his bare feet on-board ship - Ser Davos coaxed Neva to the wall of ribbons, and let her take her pick. She picked out the prettiest, some plain, some intricate - some were vibrant dark sapphire, like Gendry’s eyes, and some were delicate, pale mauve, perhaps like her dead mother’s eyes. She fancied the rose and sky-blue silks, cloth-of-gold ribbon woven in intricate love-knots, violet silk, fresh pale spring-green silk, a wide velvet-trimmed ribbon embroidered with tiny colourful beads like a posy of flowers, sunset-orange taffeta that shimmered fuchsia in the light, pale-yellow that glowed like candlelight, and crimson velvet.

He had told her they were for several sad little girls, and he needed her help to pick them out so they’d smile again. She was to pick the loveliest ribbons she could find.

“The last one, then,” he said coaxingly, and Neva drifted along the coils, not daring to reach out and touch the fabrics - intuitive about the suspicious glances of the attendants, their eyes on her and Cadeon like hawks ever since entering the grand shop, too grubby, too common, too bluntly-spoken - too poor. Neva stopped, and smiled, pointing a tiny finger. “Oh, now, that’s a lovely colour. Reminds me of the chicory flowers that grow by my home in Cape Wrath.”

“Just the one more,” Ser Davos told the attendant in a low voice, giving them a subtle wink. “Neva, why don’t you go see to your brother, he sounds as if he is being murdered. I’m sure he’s just making a fuss.” Neva nodded, cast one subtle, longing look back at the ribbons, and skipped away to find Rhysand, who did sound as if he was engaging in a skirmish for his life - he was being fitted for new shirts. Ser Davos wasn’t forcing true finery onto the boy, just strong cotton shirts and a thick wool tunic, but it certainly sounded as if he was being tortured. There was a wildness to Cadeon, no doubt, as if he had been made of wind, earth, fire and sea - and there was no trapping him inside such mortal coils as clothing. Ser Davos was reminded of the wild rigging-boys of his own smuggling days - brave lads up for anything. As soon as Neva had disappeared, Ser Davos nodded to the attendant. “Which is the one she kept looking at so admiringly?”

“The plum velvet, Ser,” said the attendant, at once.

“A length of that, if you please, long enough to bind the girl’s hair however she should wear it,” Ser Davos said, thinking how he had never made a gift of ribbons to Princess Shireen, and never had a daughter of his own to treat to such things.

“Certainly, Ser. Anything else you require?”

“Aye. D’you happen to have embroidery threads? I’ve a mind to make a gift to a young lady who has considerable skill with a needle,” Ser Davos said. To his recollection, Lady Sansa had sewn every night, even travelling through the North to rally their bannermen. She sewed her own gowns, and shirts for Jon, the direwolf-embossed great-cloak he always wore.

Sometimes, Ser Davos wondered if the cloak meant far more to the young man than the crown. The lady’s needlework, his father’s sigil.

“Certainly, Ser,” the attendant said, and disappeared with a bow after snipping a healthy length of the plum velvet ribbon from its bobbin. Ser Davos sighed, and thought of Shireen as he gazed at the neat little knots of ribbon ready to go. She had never seen such vibrant colours, such fine fabrics. All her life, except for the last, brutal chapter of it, had been spent in a dismal chamber at Dragonstone. When the attendant returned, he held two handfuls of vibrantly-coloured skeins of cotton embroidery threads. His wife Marya bought such, always separating out the threads to adjust the thickness of her embroidery.

“That’ll do very well,” Ser Davos nodded, examining the array of colours. “It won’t get the lady through the winter entirely, but she’ll have it to hand to make herself something pretty when the snows block out all the colour in the world.”

“Would you care to have everything boxed, Ser?”

“No, thank you. A canvas sack would be better - we shall be travelling light, no room for bulky packages,” Ser Davos informed the attendant. “And I would settle the bill before the young man finishes his fitting.”

“Of course, Ser.”

“Ser Davos…” They tumbled out of the emporium, Cadeon vibrating with dismay at the softness and tailored snugness of his new clothes, clutching at several parcels while Gendry and Ser Davos carried the rest between them - Gendry now dressed in fine new leather trousers buttoned to the waist and a black shirt of treated, double-thickness cotton with buttons down the right shoulder, with a heavy wool cloak folded under one arm - while Neva hummed and clasped Ser Davos’ hand and he led the way out of the city.

At the tiny little beach, and the small smugglers’ boat nestled in the sand, Gendry levelled a black look at Ser Davos. “Not more rowing?”

“It’d be a shame to waste all that training,” Ser Davos smirked, his beard twitching, and Gendry scoffed, grinning easily.

“So is there a reason you’re not docked in the wharf?” Gendry asked, while they waited; their purchases were safely nestled in the boat, and Cadeon was currently tormenting Neva with long ropes of seaweed. They watched him chase her across the sand, her giggles echoing off the cliff-face. “Or is it just that old habits die hard.”

“Needs must, I’m sorry to say,” Ser Davos said, glancing a Gendry.

“How’s that?”

“I had some important cargo that needed to reach the Red Keep unencumbered by our friends the Gold Cloaks,” Ser Davos said, sighing, as he noticed someone staggering down the hewn staircase. He squinted at the figure, who looked more than halfway into his cups. “Ah. Looks like he’s returned. Best get the children into the boat, don’t want to linger in case he was followed.”

Lord Tyrion staggered down the last few hewn steps, wine-skin in hand. He stumbled, and fell, landing heavily in the sand with a groan delayed by his drunkenness.

“Mind grabbing him?” Ser Davos asked, wincing. “You’re the stronger. And he’s heavier than he looks.”

“Is that the Imp?” Gendry asked him, his face sombre and shrewd. He frowned at Ser Davos, then sighed, shaking his head, and strode across the beach to the foot of the stone staircase. While Ser Davos situated the children - Neva was quiet and watchful, while Cadeon lolled easily - Gendry managed to get Lord Tyrion on his feet, and guided the drunkard to their little boat as if herding sheep. Lord Tyrion hummed to himself and drank and staggered the entire way. He tumbled into the boat rather inelegantly, and Ser Davos left him there, with the two children peering down at him, a wealthy man in considerably finer clothing than their own, hugging a wine-skin, belching freely and murmuring to himself. Gendry pushed the boat out into the water, as Cadeon engaged the paddles - a laughable thing, to row their weight, but he got them past the gentle waves, and was dextrous enough to clamber about the boat without upsetting it when Gendry indicated for him to move from the bench, so that he could take over the rowing. He was by far the strongest of them all.

Lord Tyrion hiccupped, and rolled in the damp bottom of the boat, turning to frown first at Cadeon, who was leering down at him as if he had already sliced Lord Tyrion’s purse-strings and pocketed the contents - then Neva, blinking rather stupidly, until finally he turned and his gaze rested on Gendry. It was at that point, the drunk fool tried to stand up, and ended up half in the young Bull’s lap. He reached up, grabbing Gendry’s strong jaw, and Gendry looked amused and a little affronted as Lord Tyrion stared him dead in the face, swaying as much from the drink as the water.

“Robert?” he blurted disbelievingly. He released Gendry’s jaw, sighed, and dropped his wine-skin. “Too much strong-wine.” He was slurring rather a lot.

“How did it go?” Ser Davos prompted.

“Let me sleep this off and I’ll share all I can recall,” Lord Tyrion said, settling himself down against Gendry’s folded cloak. He sat with his eyes closed, yawning widely. “If I am speaking, I imagine my head remains safely lodged upon my shoulders and my sweet sister failed to detain and eviscerate me.”

“Lord Tyrion Lannister, Hand of the Queen,” Ser Davos said, his beard twitching, though his eyes were grim. Lord Tyrion raised a hand, gasped, and almost fell overboard with the enthusiasm of his hurling.

“Oh, dear…” Cadeon grinned.

“Better out than in,” Ser Davos tutted.

“Can’t you handle your drink?” Cadeon snickered.

“Cadeon.”

“Oi!” Cadeon started as Gendry smacked him round the back of the head; Cadeon tucked the wine-skin out of the way, stoppering it. “What, I was only - fine.”

“This is Gendry,” Ser Davos told Lord Tyrion, when he had recovered enough to stare gloomily around at them. “Cadeon, stealing your strong-wine, and this little lady is Neva.”

“The ghost of Old Valyria,” Lord Tyrion slurred, his eyes on Neva. He rolled his head to the side, to peer up at Gendry. “And of dead stags.”

“Can you keep your thoughts to yourself before your liege, or shall Gendry leave you floating in the Blackwater?” Ser Davos asked severely.

“Had I been in King’s Landing to stop Cersei sending Gold Cloaks after Robert’s bastards the first time, I would have - I won’t start handing innocent men over to unstable sovereigns now,” Lord Tyrion said. That he could string together a complete sentence was miraculous, Ser Davos thought; that he could sound so condescending and elegant at the same time, truly a gift. He frowned and gazed around the boat “Where’s Varys?”

“Told me not to wait for him to return; he has business on the mainland.”

Lord Tyrion dropped his head back, sighing heavily, and his fingers flicked expressively as he murmured, “‘The storms come and go, the waves crash overhead, the big fish eat the little fish, and I keep on paddling’… Wonderful. He dragged me halfway across the world, only to abandon me with her…” He groaned, and sat up a little straighter, eyeing the packages in the bottom of the boat. “What’s all this? Treasures for the Queen? I don’t think ribbons will distract her from desiring the North - or your King in her bed.”

“They’re for the girls. Tell me your journey was not wasted,” Ser Davos said. “Did you manage to speak to your brother, at least?”

“I did. He hates me.” Lord Tyrion reached for his wine-skin, his expression despondent.

“You killed your father with a crossbow while he was in the privy…not that anyone really blames you,” Gendry said, and Lord Tyrion glanced at him as he drank deeply of the wine-skin. “Accusing you of killing the King, when it was likely the Old Lion himself who did it to get the vicious boy off the Iron Throne before he could do any more damage - and wanted you dead to wed Sansa Stark himself.”

Lord Tyrion choked. He lowered the wine-skin, grinning. “Is that what they’re saying?”

“People say she’s very beautiful,” Gendry shrugged. “That your father coveted her. They said that’s why she disappeared when King Joffrey was poisoned - your father had her spirited away to the Rock…”

Lord Tyrion threw back his head and roared with laughter.

“Oh, that’s tickled me!”

“Now people say she’s a skin-changer like her brothers, takes the form of a monstrous red direwolf; that’s how she made her way north and fought beside her brother the White Wolf to reclaim Winterfell during the Battle of the Bastards.” He howled with laughter, hugging his skin of strong-wine as he wheezed, wiping the tears from his scarred face.

He was still gleeful as a ship appeared, its sails plain but the figurehead very clearly a monstrous direwolf. Ser Davos caught Gendry’s eye.

“At least you don’t have to row all the way back to Dragonstone.”

Neva turns to Gendry with wide eyes as a rope ladder descended nearby; Cadeon yawned, clearly bored, and clambered up, nimble and quick, hopping over the side.

“You go first, I’ll catch you if you fall,” Gendry told Neva gently. As Cadeon appeared overhead, he coaxed and cooed to her, spurring her on. Lord Tyrion ascended next, and Gendry and Ser Davos brought up the rear, hooking the little dinghy up to lowered ropes to be hauled up by the sailors as soon as they were on-board.

“How long will the journey take?” Gendry asked, gazing around the ship.

“With this good, strong wind?” Ser Davos said, checking the sails. “We’ll reach Dragonstone in about two days’ time.”

“So soon?”

“How long did it take you to row back to King’s Landing?”

Gendry glanced at Ser Davos, his expression wry. “Longer.”

Chapter 29: Look After One Another

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

29

Look After One Another


The ship glided into the bay, the sails filled by a helpful wind. As they swept past, Cadeon stood with Neva carefully balanced in his arms, leaning over the side, speaking in bastard Valyrian as he pointed out various unique features of the different kinds of ships gathered in the bay. And it was full of ships - battered Greyjoy longships; newly-built cogs and carracks, and the great war-galley Winter, all belonging to the fledgling Northern fleet; Queen Daenerys’ beautiful flagship, a swan-ship from the Summer Isles, modified with one hundred oars and a figurehead of a three-headed dragon; and the gorgeous Tyrell fleet. Gendry watched them, with a contented smile on his face, passing a wine-skin back to Tyrion.

With nothing else to do, and no-one else to talk to but the ship’s rather recalcitrant Northern crew, Tyrion had decided on making a study of Gendry and his children, to entertain himself through the brief journey. He had spent quite some time with Gendry, enough to understand that Gendry was once prisoner of Lord Tywin at Harrenhall, saved from torture to work in the forges, and that Gendry was indeed Robert Baratheon’s bastard son. Tyrion needed little confirmation - it was there in Gendry’s fierce, handsome face for all to see, and Tyrion couldn’t help smirking to himself at Cersei’s audacity, thinking to pass off her own bastards as Robert’s offspring - one glimpse of Gendry and Robert’s Hands had known the truth of the thing. And here they all were.

Tyrion had also discerned that Gendry, despite being uneducated, was a shrewd, clever man with integrity, wit and charisma, gentle and strong and loyal with good instincts, a natural way with people and adaptable. He also did not seem to possess Robert’s notorious wrath, or his infamous lusts. Tyrion thought the son was much more thoughtful than the father ever was, considerate and showing great empathy, but with a heaping of good sense. Gendry wasn’t a natural sailor, and neither was Tyrion, and they got along well, while Gendry’s adopted son Rhysand scampered around like a monkey, flinging himself up masts, hanging out of the crow’s nest, his laughter echoing on the wind, his face alight with joy - “Freedom,” he sighed lustily, “that’s what a ship is. It’s not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that’s what a ship needs. What a ship is…is freedom.”

The boy seemed to come alive on the ship, and Tyrion noticed the slightly pained way Gendry watched the boy. He was apprenticed to Gendry in the armoury, but Tyrion believed Gendry was shrewd enough to understand that this was where Cadeon truly felt alive. If Cadeon finished his apprenticeship, he would not long labour in a forge: It was the sea, for him. That beguiling, treacherous mistress.

Tyrion was just glad he had not had to make the journey in a crate. They had been discussing Gendry’s journey from Dragonstone as they swept into the harbour, and his handsome face pinched with something close to anger, or more accurately, distrust, as the great eerie fortress loomed into view, shrouded by mist, the great dragon-shaped towers coiled ready to pounce.

“Never saw it in the light,” Gendry said, frowning. “It has the feel of Harrenhall.”

A curious observation, Tyrion felt. One had been forged and crafted by dragonfire; the other had been destroyed by it.

Dragonstone and Harrenhall. Two sides of the same coin.

“Er… Dragon?!” Cadeon blurted, gaping up at the skies, and a heartbeat later, a piercing shriek and rumbling, gurgling call shattered the tranquil air, and a great green-and-bronze dragon swooped down out of the air not fifty feet from the starboard side, created a tremendous splash, and screamed again, his great wings beating swiftly and threatening to knock them over, as they stood, and gaped, and watched the dragon pluck a dolphin from the water with ease, each beat of its wings like thunderclaps as it rose higher into the air, tossed the dolphin from its claws, to roast it with a swift blast of fire, and in another heartbeat, opened its gullet to swallow the charred creature whole.

“Ah… Feeding-time,” Tyrion said drily, as Gendry suddenly found himself at the starboard side, gaping in awe. A dragon. A real, live dragon… “We’ve interrupted the hunt. The green is Rhaegal. His brothers will be along swiftly, they do quarrel over dinner…”

Sure enough, Viserion the white-and-gold dragon, and Drogon the Dread, black glowing with blood-red veined through his wings, appeared moments later, and as the ship sailed through the bay toward the harbour, they watched the dragons fishing for their supper. Every time they made a catch, they soared into the air, and repeated the same process Rhaegal had - catch, fling, roast, consume.

“Dragons and men are the only creatures in the world to cook their meat,” Tyrion mused, glancing up at Gendry, but his eyes were still on Rhaegal, awe and terror warring on his fiercely handsome face. For a heartbeat, Tyrion wondered what Robert might have looked like, had he met Rhaegar on the Trident - riding a dragon! Without even seeming to see her, Gendry picked up little Neva, who had her arms raised to be carried: She climbed up, and settled on his shoulders, the better to gaze up at the dragons as they soared above them, circling for their prey.

It was quite something, Tyrion thought, to watch the exquisite beauty of a Lyseni child, the last blood of Old Valyria, gazing in rapture at the dragons, dragons that had once filled the skies, dragons that her ancestors had once ridden.

Cadeon was the bolder, no doubt, he was a force of nature, irrepressible: He scowled up at the dragons in suspicion and dread. Not so the gentlest creature Tyrion might ever have met, sweet Neva who hummed when she was content - and she seemed to be always content, whether it was skipping to and fro along the deck, playing hopscotch, or cuddled up in her adopted-father’s arms, tucked warm and safe against his enormous chest, his scarred, skilled hands tender as he held her close and she dozed. Neva, delicate, gentle and easily content, gazed up into the skies as if in thrall to the great beasts, her exquisite lavender eyes, pale, radiant and gentle, wide with reverence, not fear.

The dragons called to her, or so it seemed. They ignited in her the memories of a lost race, the memories of a people forgotten to the Doom. Tyrion smiled fondly at her, understanding her completely.

“The first time I ever saw a dragon,” Tyrion said softly, “we were sailing a little boat through the Doom of Valyria…I thought, for a moment, it was my mind’s trick - the memories of a thousand years, the ghosts of dragons long dead… Not a ghost. Not a memory… Flesh and fire, reborn into the world… Magnificent beautiful creatures, are they not?” He smiled fondly, for though they were harrowing when they were enraged, they were entrancingly beautiful.

“They are,” Gendry said, his voice faraway, disbelieving - but he was frowning softly, bemused. He blinked several times, then turned to Tyrion. “I saw what they’re capable of with my own eyes, at Harrenhall. Stone melted like candles. We all heard about the ash meadow and the Lion Culling… They would be more beautiful if they were less deadly.”

“Some would disagree,” Tyrion said, gazing thoughtfully at Gendry, whose eyes had returned to Rhaegal, the great green-and-bronze, named for the man his father had killed in single-combat. A flicker of unease whispered through Tyrion at the thought of what awaited them at the castle - who awaited them. Were she to find out the truth of Gendry’s paternity… “To some…the more power they display, the more deadly they are, the more attractive they become.”

“Sounds familiar,” grunted Ser Davos, and Tyrion glanced at him. The tone in his voice, the grim distrust and thinly veiled repugnance emanating from the Onion Knight as he watched the dragons, his eyes flicking to the eerie castle, Tyrion knew he had inadvertently described…well…Daenerys. He sighed.

“That’s what their fire is for,” Gendry remarked, as Drogon dived, a dolphin in each clawed foot. “To feed themselves. Not to burn little children.” Tyrion winced at Gendry, who was watching shrewdly as Drogon tossed the dolphins into the air, and gave a spurt of flame that roasted both, consuming them before Viserion could screech and circle and dive upon him from above. The two brothers fought, and Tyrion noted that Viserion went for the tender skin of Drogon’s neck, still healing. Strange…Rhaegal and Viserion, fractionally smaller than Drogon, had never attacked their vicious brother before. Rhaegal was the more vicious of the two, anyway. It was strange to see Viserion attacking.

They are still animals, he thought. They sense weakness and attack. And Drogon, no matter how monstrous, was still a creature that bled like any other when he was wounded. Viserion slashed out at Drogon’s neck with his talons: Rhaegal swooped in out of nowhere, butting all his considerable weight against Viserion, sending the white-and-gold dragon hurtling into the water with a wrathful bellow. Rhaegal shrieked, and Drogon purred, both rising away from the water, soaring over the shivering green swells of the island with its jagged cliffs and small, treacherous beaches and coves.

They sailed into the shelter of the harbour, and Tyrion almost groaned with ecstasy at the thought of disembarking the ship…until he remembered the walk that awaited him, and the fact that he would have to consider very carefully how to present Lord Varys’ disappearance to the Queen, even as he confirmed that his brother Jaime had agreed to peace-talks on his Queen’s behalf.

Did he tell Daenerys the reason why Jaime had agreed? Because he had been one of the few survivors of Ash Meadow, and Jaime dreaded Daenerys’ use of all three of her dragons to burn Westeros to claim the ashes.

How Tyrion had coaxed, wheeled, threatened, begged and entreated Jaime to do all in his power to convince Cersei it was in her interests to meet, because Tyrion dreaded Daenerys’ use of all three of her dragons to burn Westeros and claim the ashes.

Neva beside him as they descended the ramp onto the quay, Tyrion was reminded of the seven little Lannisters locked up in the castle. He had left them in the care of Tisseia, who had a wonderful sort of practical motherliness to her. Truth be told, she seemed far more intuitive about the girls’ needs than Tyrion had expected. She was unfazed by anything that came her way - a good thing, for a whore. Former whore, he thought. She was his companion now, sworn to him alone and paid well for the privilege. But he had learned from prior mistakes: and Tisseia was not…her…she was practical and cheerful, not purring with sensuality, somewhat startled as much as she was delighted by the finery he lavished upon her, as his companion, as his advisor and she who massaged his lower-back to soothe his aching legs, who listened if he needed her to, and offered her solid wisdom when asked.

Tyrion had to admit, he had unknowingly unearthed a treasure when he sought her out in that brothel on the Long Bridge on their return journey. She was adaptable and clever, and he had spent many pleasurable evenings on their voyage from Volantis, teaching her how to read. She was clever, astute and a quick study - and she had somehow managed to take over the organisation of his household and his work as Hand, so that everything ran smoothly, though he had never asked her, and had no idea how she knew exactly what he needed before he knew what he needed.

Plus, she had the most magnificent breasts he loved to bury his face in as she rode him, writhing and doing the most glorious thing with her hips that made him regret not fucking her that first day he had seen her. He had thought her pretty then, in her way, dark-eyed and cautious. She was all those things; but she was also far more beautiful than he had realised, radiating softness and warmth, steadiness and empathy. And she suckled his cock as if the gods had crafted it for her alone to enjoy, bringing him to come with his eyes rolling so hard he feared temporary blindness. The more time they spent together, the more he saw of the true Tisseia, who was emboldened to ask for what she liked, so that they both reached their pleasure, and it was a wondrous thing to watch blossom, in a girl whose face still bore the mark of her enslavement. She had never known what it was to be treated as a person, much less an equal in their bed-sport: She had endured what men paid her master for, with a smile on her face - or a whimper, if that’s what they wanted most. But to be asked what she liked, and to devote his time to helping her discover what it was that made her writhe in ecstasy, and ache for his touch…that was a heady thing to observe, this slave-girl becoming her own woman unafraid to first ask for and then take what she wanted.

Best of all, he thought, trying to ignore the flicker of anticipation at the thought of her warm, dimpled smile and glittering dark eyes, when he had asked her to forsake all other men while she was his, she had claimed she would rather have none at all, if it were up to her. She could happily do without being pestered, she had told him: Tisseia was just so blunt and earnest, it was truly refreshing. She was…almost Northern in her outlook, and at times, she seemed unimpressed by his status or wealth or whatever - she just liked that he was kind, and enjoyed cuddling up to her under their furs at night, enjoying the rarest and simplest of intimacies.

Tisseia fucked him because he was a considerate lover, and the gods had given him one blessing - two, if one counted his enormous, throbbing intellect - and he made certain she enjoyed every moment of their time together. Yet, she had told him, she would be happy to take no other man, even when he tired of her. She did not luxuriate in her whoredom, as others had: It was a thing necessary for her survival. And yet she had found something else that made her…almost irreplaceable to him, Tyrion thought. She was kind and affectionate, but he was under no illusions that she had fallen madly in love with the idea of him; they were…friends, Tyrion thought, marvelling. They were companions, who fucked when he wanted to, and talked when she didn’t. And she took care of him. Not just in bed, but in all aspects of his life. She was earnest, shrewd and attentive.

Tyrion was not in love with her: But he did adore her. He did love her, and it was a calm and steady sort of love rooted in their companionship, in a mutual respect and appreciation. No, they were not lovers in the traditional sense; they were companions.

If that was the best he could hope for, Tyrion thought, then he realised he was a very privileged man.

Perhaps that was where it had all gone wrong before.

He had tried to take care of too many people who did not appreciate it, who had betrayed him in spite of it: Tisseia…took care of him, without him ever having asked her. Not because of the gold - she was utterly unfamiliar with payment - but because it was her nature, to be gentle and restrained and considerate.

He was in a high mood, in spite of the winding stone stair, as they approached Dragonstone, anticipating climbing under the furs and drifting off to sleep with his head nestled against her glorious breasts with his hand tucked between her thighs.

Tyrion practically skipped up the stone steps, for the first time not envious of Gendry’s long strides, and his ease as he carried Neva on his shoulders, so that she could better watch the three dragons circling and wheeling overhead.

Jon met them in the monstrous entrance hall, with Rhysand shrinking into Gendry, his eyes suspicious and filled with dread, the cavernous black walls glistening and shimmering with eerie iridescence, the entire hall crafted by ancient magic and dragonfire to resemble the inside of a dragon’s mouth, the walls jagged high above and along the floor to mimic dragon’s teeth long and sharp as swords…

The King in the North saw his advisor back safe and sound, grinned briefly, and embraced him like a brother.

“Saw the harbour,” Ser Davos said, in greeting. “It’s looking busy. You’re prepared?”

“A few more days, we should be ready for the return voyage,” Jon said, nodding, and he heaved a sigh, kneading his eyes. The young man did look tired, and Tyrion wondered how court had been - wondered how the Queen had been.

“Days?” Tyrion blurted, staring up at Jon, almost aghast. Lord Varys disappeared, the arrival of Robert Baratheon’s bastard, the King’s departure, anticipating a summit in King’s Landing - Tyrion stifled a groan.

“I’m anxious to see the thing done,” Jon said grimly, and eyed the giant hulking behind Ser Davos, his two children, dark and fair, tucked against him, one spooked by the massive, menacing hall, the other shy by nature.

“Ah, Your Grace, this is Gendry Waters,” Ser Davos said, and Tyrion shot him a shrewd look. Gendry was staring at Jon, who was staring right back with a shrewd expression. His eyes drifted to Ser Davos for a heartbeat, a question in his dark grey eyes.

“You don’t much look like him, but you’re exactly as she described,” Gendry said, and Jon raised his eyebrows, staring at Gendry, who, Tyrion realised, was taller even than the King. They were both very tall, but Gendry more so, and where Gendry was broad and rippled with muscle, sturdy and immovable, Jon was lean and graceful. They were both handsome, Tyrion noted miserably, as well as monstrously tall…

If he didn’t know the men, and the lives they had led, Tyrion might have thought the gods had blessed them. He knew better.

“Excuse me?” Jon blinked, bemused.

“Your father, Lord Stark. I met him, once, in King’s Landing, when he was Hand of the King,” Gendry explained. “He came to my shop.”

“Your shop?”

“Gendry is an armourer, Your Grace,” Ser Davos smiled.

“But you won’t be needing one, with a sword like that,” Gendry said, his eyes dipping to Jon’s waist, where Long Claw was belted. “It’s an old blade, but sharp as the day it was forged - a new pommel?”

“Aye. The original was shaped as a bear, when it was held by House Mormont,” Jon said. “But it was damaged by fire. The pommel was remade before the blade was given to me.” Jon frowned, and a flicker of something close to guilt crossed his face, as he glanced over his shoulder; the Queen’s men approached.

“She didn’t say you had a Valryian steel sword,” Gendry said, his eyes on the blade that was becoming almost as famous as the man who wielded it.

“Who?”

“Arya.”

For a moment, Tyrion truly believed Jon’s heart had stopped. Even he turned to gape at the young armourer.

“Arya Stark? No word has been heard of her since they arrested her father,” Tyrion said, startled. Even Varys’ little birds could sing no songs of her - and Tyrion had ensured every effort went into finding the younger Stark girl.

“Who’s Arya?” the boy Cadeon frowned. He stared at Jon. “Who are you?”

“Caeon, this is Jon Snow, the King in the North,” Ser Davos said, his beard twitching. Cadeon stared at Ser Davos. Stared at Jon Snow. Stared at Tyrion.

Ser Davos chuckled. Jon Snow was still staring at Gendry.

“You’ve seen Arya?” he breathed.

“It was a few years ago now, Your Grace, but, yes, I did. I travelled the Riverlands with her,” Gendry told him.

“How?!”

“Another time,” Ser Davos said cautiously, eyes shrewd as he watched the Queen’s men approaching. He nodded at Jon. “Let’s get Gendry and the children settled, and we can share a bowl of soup and a few good stories.”

Jon glanced from Ser Davos to Gendry, and nodded. Tyrion stifled a sigh; as the Queen’s Hand, he knew he would not be privy to those stories, the information that they granted. And information…was currency, he thought, reminded of Lord Varys. Influence… He had to break the news that Lord Varys had not returned to Dragonstone, though Tyrion had the wit to inspire Daenerys’ confidence in her Master of Whisperers; Lord Varys was better served on the mainland than on this godsforsaken island surrounded by Daenerys’ supporters - he needed to be out there, gathering information on her enemies by any means necessary.

Cadeon was muttering quietly to Neva in bastard Valyrian, his bright, sharp eyes dancing from Jon Snow to Ser Davos and Tyrion himself: Finally, as the Stark men led the way through the gaping entrance hall, Rhysand turned to his young, adopted-father, as if he had never seen Gendry before, and blurted, “Who are you?”

How many bastard armourers rubbed elbows with Kings, notorious smuggler-knights and dead girls?

Who, indeed? Tyrion thought, as the Stark party disappeared up one of the grand obsidian staircases, and Missandei appeared, escorted by two Unsullied guards. She was smiling benignly.

“Her Radiance the Queen welcomes you back to Dragonstone, my Lord Hand,” Missandei said formally. “After you have dined and rested, she bids you join her in the Chamber of the Painted Table. She would know the triumphs of your journey to King’s Landing.”

“Triumphs?” Tyrion scoffed. “I made it out with my head on my shoulders, at least. But I shall dine and rest, and thank the Queen for the opportunity.”

“You still dislike the water, my lord?” Missandei smiled knowingly.

“The water dislikes me, my dear Missandei,” Tyrion grunted, his legs aching at the prospect of climbing more stairs. He had a mind to outfit the steep ascent with a funicular as they had at the Rock. It would be armoured, he thought, of course, with steel plate between varnished wood for durability - and inside, oh, decadence! Leather upholstery and polished wood. Furs, hot bricks and mulled wine for the winter; and a lithe, bare-breasted girl to fan him in the summer and feed him iced cream and blueberries. He glanced at Missandei. “How has court been in my absence?”

“We have missed you, my lord,” Missandei said. “The Queen most of all.”

“Miss me, did she? No,” Tyrion smiled shrewdly. “With Ser Jorah so attentive to her?”

“It is the Queen’s hope, my lord, that you will be able to dissuade Ser Jorah the Andal from joining the King in the North on his expedition beyond the Wall,” Missandei said, and Tyrion blinked. “For he is quite resistant to her pleas to stay by her side.”

“Ser Jorah wants to go North?” Tyrion blurted, then pulled a face. For all his knighthood and fluency in Dothraki and bastard Valyrian, Ser Jorah was no Andal: He was of the North, born to an ancient family descended from the First Men. He wants to go home, Tyrion thought. Winter had come; he wondered when Ser Jorah had last seen snow, for there was certainly none in Vaes Dothrak, nor settling on the Great Pyramids of Meereen.

“As the Queen’s representative during this expedition, my lord,” Missandei nodded. “Obara Sand shall accompany the King as representative of Dorne.”

“And when shall this expedition be under way?” Tyrion asked.

“As soon as the King’s ships are outfitted, my lord,” said Missandei.

“I would speak with the King before he departs on his great expedition, on a matter of some urgency,” Tyrion said. Little Neva had reminded him - watching Gendry with his adopted daughter had reminded him. It was easy to forget them, the little lion-cubs, somewhere in the bowels of this monstrous fortress. They were out of sight, and therefore, sadly, out of his mind. Until sweet Neva, Tyrion had scarcely spared a thought for the little Lannisters, and that filled him with a sense of shame - and reminded him of their precarious position, and his duty to them. Yes, things had gone wrong in King’s Landing for him, when he tried to take care of too many who did not deserve or appreciate it - but it was not wrong that he had; only foolish for him to become so emotionally invested in earning their appreciation, their love, their respect.

“Might I ask, Lord Lannister,” said Missandei, and it shocked Tyrion to hear her address him that way. Lord Lannister was his lord father Tywin, and let no-one forget it. “Where is Lord Varys?”

“Doing what he does best,” said Tyrion with gusto, as he waddled down the hall. The big fish eat the little fish, and I keep on paddling…

Yes, Varys was doing what he did best, and Tyrion only had to keep up with him - and ensure the little fishes weren’t roasted alive by a dragon.

 


“Why don’t we settle the children in the nursery with the others?” Jon said, glancing at little Neva and Cadeon, who was eyeing the White Wolf, the King in the North, with wariness and a quiet sort of respect. “They’ll be more comfortable there, while we talk.”

“How are the girls?” Ser Davos asked. He winked at Neva. “The little lady Neva helped me pick out a little treat for each of them, didn’t you?”

“They’re settling in,” Jon said heavily, shaking his head. “Though they’ll carry that horror for the rest of their lives.”

“Which children…er, Your Grace?”

“You don’t have to call me that,” said Jon, looking uncomfortable. He sighed. “The Lannister girls. They’ve had their innocence burned away. Some of them weep; some of them rage and run feral. The others are quiet, and just seem to be getting on with things. They squabble, like any family.”

They reached the nursery, which had become prettier since the Queen’s people had decorated it, outfitting it with chirping exotic birds, fine cushions and toys from far away. Ser Davos had told Lady Tisseia where the Princess Shireen’s chamber had been located, and within it her collection of books and carved animals and her miniature castle where tiny dolls lived cheerfully drinking tea and reading before the hearth most days. The castle featured a carved stag and a fine doe and several little fawns on the approach; Ser Davos had carved the great stag for the Princess while in the North, to replace the one she had left here on Dragonstone, and his mind was on that blackened, broken stag as he entered the nursery with Jon, Gendry and his two adopted children.

A fire crackled merrily in the hearth, and though there were handsome carved chairs and large, stuffed cushions on the floor with fine carpets and rugs and furs to lounge upon, none of the children went near it. Crisantha sat beneath a window, an embroidery hoop in her lap, her hands limp as she raised her face unseeingly at the sound of their entry; her amber eyes dripped with silent tears, as they had since they arrived. Tiny Leona was humming and sucking her thumb, somehow managing to chatter happily around it, her eyes vibrant with delight as she and Rosamund with her sweet rounded cheeks and plump lips played with the doll-castle.

There was music playing, and shards of light danced over the golden curls of quiet Altheda, whose dainty fingers danced lovingly across the polished black keys of a pianoforte, a new invention all the way from Lys, made of a beautiful golden wood polished to a high shine, with curlicues and stylised lions engraved and painted in gold among bouquets of flowers in vibrant Myrish colours on the lid, which was propped up and open to show the strings and dozens of tiny hammers, jigging away happily to create a beautiful melody.

Altheda played very prettily, but not nearly loudly enough to conceal the sound of quarrelling voices. The eldest, Narcisa, her long hair gleaming and magnificent, and the bold girl Calanthe, were almost nose-to-nose and snarling at each other, and for a moment, eight-year-old Calanthe seemed the taller and more terrifying of the two. She had her little fist curled around the hilt of a gilded dagger, and Lady Tisseia stood with her around a pink-cheeked Delphine’s shoulders as she sniffled, the lady with her tattooed face trying valiantly to settle whatever dispute had cropped up.

There was nowhere in the Seven Kingdoms more fractious or prone to civil wars than the nursery. Jon could remember the squabbles amongst his own siblings - and yet they would be forgotten within the hour, playing together fiercely, every hurt forgotten, as they made up a new game, or clustered around Old Nan eagerly for another story.

“What’s all this?” Jon asked, sighing, and the girls glanced up. Calanthe tried to hide the dagger behind her skirts, but her delicate face was a mask of guilt. Lord Tyrion waddled up beside Jon, still holding a wine-skin, likely seeking his companion, and he glanced around the room and grimaced up at Jon as they lingered. Jon raised an eyebrow at Calanthe, who relented; Narcisa seemed to deflate, flustered and abashed by the arrival of Jon, her eyes lingering with curious appreciation on Gendry before drifting to Lord Tyrion, and she stood a little straighter, pushing her shoulders back and her chin level to the floor - a superbly elegant posture, mature. In front of the adults she respected, she wished to be seen as a young lady, and Jon knew it: She was very like the girl he remembered Sansa being at the same age. Eager to please and devoted to the idea of being a lady. Jon sighed, and glanced down at Lord Tyrion.

“My father used to say war was easier than daughters,” he said grimly, and Tyrion’s beard twitch.

“What’s going on here?” Lord Tyrion asked, peering around at the little faces.

“They’ve been squabbling again. Calanthe trying to trim Delphine’s hair - without asking,” Lady Tisseia said patiently, giving the younger girl a chiding look as Jon strode over, and reached for the stiletto blade held by Calanthe. The little lioness’ gaze was unyielding, as Jon sighed and sat down on one of the nearby chairs.

“Where did you get this?” Jon asked curiously. It was a Braavosi stiletto blade, the handle of golden wood inlaid with gold and mother-of-pearl, the small pommel a lion’s head with a great mane. Calanthe raised her dainty little chin. She was the middle girl, and more delicate than Narcisa’s magnificent beauty, yet she was stubborn, and her personality was fierce. That was why they clashed, Tisseia had mused often, and Jon couldn’t help but agree. Calanthe was a force of nature; and haughty, shy, sweet Narcisa thought herself leader of their little family as the eldest. She led Crisantha and Delphine, a trio of incomparable beauties; while Calanthe dominated the babies, ferocious about protecting them. In the absence of Lords Tyrion and Varys and Ser Davos, Jon had spent a good bit of time with Lady Tisseia at court, and she spent most of her time with the girls: Tisseia was sensible and approachable, and Jon found that he liked her company.

“It was my father’s,” Calanthe said, a challenge in her gaze as she raised her emerald-green eyes to Jon’s. Jon realised she must have taken it from the trunks full of their families’ belongings, which had been returned to them.

“Do you know the first thing about wielding a weapon?” Jon asked, and Calanthe drifted nearer. She raised her chin, her delicately beautiful features stubborn.

“Of course I do! You use the pointy end!” she responded with great asperity, and for a second, Jon stared, and then he grinned. The others saw it; they heard his gruff laugh.

“Aye, that’s the essence of it,” he agreed with a sigh, turning the blade over in his hand. “And who were you planning to pierce full of holes with this? Narcisa?”

“No.” Calanthe scowled, and Jon exchanged a quick glance with Lord Tyrion when Calanthe declared, “The Queen.”

Jon sighed, and held out his hand to her; she took it, and gently, he drew her closer, until she was curled up at his side, his arm loosely around her waist holding her close. The King’s expression was open and earnest, and anxious.

“I understand how you feel…but you’re smarter than to let anger and vengeance consume you,” Jon said softly. “Those Unsullied were ready to skewer you when you attacked the Queen, and for what?”

“It was my mother’s necklace,” Calanthe said, wildfire burning in her eyes.

“And I’ll bet she couldn’t care less about a necklace - but the thought of you at the end of an Unsullied spear?” Jon said, a muscle in his jaw ticking. He exhaled heavily, shaking his head. “I’m not going to lie to you…and I know there’s no frightening you more than you already are - “

“I am not frightened.”

“Yes, you are. You’re terrified, and that makes you furious,” Jon said succinctly, and Calanthe scowled at him. Jon nodded, for the little girl could not deny it. It was her fear that fuelled her rage. She was a seething ball of vengeful wrath wrapped inside a little girl’s vulnerable body. “Fear makes you quick - but anger, that makes you stupid. Stupid gets you killed.” Calanthe’s eyelashes fluttered, and he knew his words had struck home with the girl, for her shoulders loosened and her expression became softer. Jon sighed. “You and your cousins are in a dangerous position. You cannot fight amongst yourselves.” He reached up to stroke the hair out of her face, which had fallen out of its dainty twists, and for a moment, it was Arya with her sloppy braids and tough linen dress and dirt on her chin from wrestling with Brandon in the training yard for telling her to go back to her needlework. “Do you know the Stark words?”

Calanthe nodded, and said fiercely, “Winter is coming.”

“Well, winter has finally come,” Jon said grimly. “In winter, we must protect ourselves, look after one another…that means no more trying to cut your cousins’ hair - or they’ll make ribbons of you.”

“I wouldn’t really have done it,” Calanthe sighed, glancing across the chamber at her cousin, who was stood beside Ser Davos, with the little silver-haired girl beside him, divvying out hair-ribbons. “I’m not jealous of Delphine’s hair like they said. But my hair is my one beauty…Delphine has lots.”

“You think your hair and your looks make you beautiful?” Jon shook his head slowly, holding Calanthe’s gaze. “You could be the most radiant beauty in the world, and have the sourest, ugliest heart. Yours is fierce and righteous and good. That goodness will shine from your face all your life, and you will always be beautiful.”

“Oh, then…” Calanthe said, mollified and secretly pleased. She searched Jon’s face, and sighed, her shoulders falling a little. “I should apologise to Delphine.”

“I think so… Calanthe…” Jon said softly, handing back the stiletto blade. In a quiet murmur, he told her, “Never let anyone know you want them dead, not ‘til your blade’s tucked safe between their ribs.” He took her hand, and curled it around the hilt of the dagger. “This is how you hold it, so you don’t end up hurting yourself.”

Little Neva approached them, at some encouragement from Ser Davos, a length of crimson velvet ribbon coiled in her palm. She offered it shyly to Calanthe, who blinked, smiled in delighted surprise, and accepted the gift. Neva gave Jon a bashful smile, and darted back to her new friend Ser Davos, who was sat before the hearth with each of the girls fiddling with their new ribbons, fussing over which girl should have their hair braided first.

“What are you doing?” Calanthe asked, as Jon took the crimson velvet ribbon from Calanthe. He adjusted her grip on the stiletto blade, now sheathed, and wound the ribbon around and around her hand so that the blade was tied to her hand.

“Carry it until it feels unnatural to be without it,” Jon said, and Calanthe frowned, shaking her hand as if trying to loosen her grip on the dagger; the ribbons held firm, and Calanthe gave Jon a curious look.

“You’re letting me keep it?”

“If you’re determined to carry it, you should know how to use it properly so you don’t hurt yourself,” Jon said, thinking of Sansa, who had balked when he had presented her with the dagger she now wore concealed beneath her skirts, but had taken it because it reassured him that she had some last, desperate defence.

“That should reduce the trouble she can make by half,” Lord Tyrion remarked, appearing at Jon’s side as the little girl wandered off, almost shyly approaching lovely Delphine.

“Don’t you believe it!” Jon scoffed. “I could tell you stories about Arya and Larra and the mischief they got up to…”

His eyes flicked to Gendry, who was sat before the hearth, frowning in consternation as he tried to follow Narcisa, beautifully braiding Delphine’s long hair. Neva sat, her face absolutely radiant with the purest delight, cradling a plum velvet ribbon in her hands as if it was the most precious jewel in the world. To her, it was: She had never owned anything so dainty.

Lord Tyrion settled on a chair beside Jon.

“Arya Stark,” Tyrion muttered, and Jon glanced away from Gendry, who was brushing Neva’s hair to section it into a simple braid, some of the Lannister girls clustering around to lend their support. It did not escape Jon that Gendry was incredibly handsome. Neva sat before him on a little footstool, sucking her thumb and smiling shyly as tiny Leona toddled over to share her dollies, which she thrust at Ser Davos for kisses. He took them and cradled them and asked them if they had missed him. “When I was Hand of the King, I had Varys’ little birds seeking out even the faintest whisper of her whereabouts. Nothing…”

“I’d be very interested to hear what he has to say about her,” Jon said, watching the concentration on Gendry’s face as he tenderly braided Neva’s long shimmering hair.

“You’ve spent some time with these girls?” Jon asked.

“A little. The Tyrell girls are usually in here, too, with their septas and maids,” Jon said. “They like to invite me to have tea with them. I enjoy talking with Lady Tisseia.”

“Wonderful, isn’t she?” Lord Tyrion observed fondly, gazing at the tattooed girl with her glittering Volantene robes and sensible dark eyes. “Jon… I would ask you to foster the girls at Winterfell.”

It took a second to register; then Jon Snow turned to Tyrion, his eyebrows raised in quiet alarm.

“You know why I came here? Why I’m mining obsidian? Why I’ve united Free Folk with Northmen for the first time since the Wall went up? Winterfell’s about to become the least-safe place in the world, and you want to send innocent girls there?” Jon blurted, his tone exasperated but no longer surprised by Tyrion’s disbelief. “Why?!”

Tyrion frowned at him, as if willing him to understand through the look alone. “Jon. Just how safe do you imagine the girls are here? As long as they are young, unmarried, with no friends and no armies, they are utterly vulnerable. If they survive Daenerys, you can bet Cersei will find a way to get to them, if only to prove that Daenerys is incapable of protecting the innocents she has deigned to spare,” Lord Tyrion said, his voice shrewd and stern, unyielding. “They are worthless to Cersei, except as a tool against Daenerys. Jon…” He repeated, gazing urgently at the King in the North. “They cannot stay here. Even if Daenerys refuses to allow them to be mistreated, to be imprisoned, or given to her bloodriders…they have no family, no mothers, they have no place. They are little girls. What use are they beyond ornaments in the Queen’s court - a reminder of her people’s loss of faith in her decisions? As they grow older and more beautiful and more beloved, sought after by those who wish to marry them for their lands and loyalties, she will come to resent them… I have seen it before. With your sister.”

Jon sighed heavily. “I know.”

Tyrion sniffed, and told him, “I will pay the Northern kingdom for the privilege of taking the girls on as wards of Winterfell.”

“Lord Tyrion, that’s not -“

“Jon. Gold from the Rock, and food from the Reach,” Tyrion said firmly. “You will need both to survive the winter, even after you survive this battle you prepare for with such single-minded purpose. It is foretold to be the worst winter in a century.”

“Aye, and I know what it brings. Lord Tyrion -”

“Please,” Tyrion begged. “They are the last of my family…and innocent… And they will have no lives worth living if they stay here. They will be lost. I would send the girls to Sansa. I trust Sansa, and you, to raise the girls, to educate them, and embrace them, not just endure them, punish them for their very presence… I trust Sansa to be far kinder to them than my sister ever was to her…”

“That’s not saying much…” said Jon darkly. He sighed, gazing across the room at the girls, now clustered around Ser Davos and Gendry as he knotted the plum velvet ribbon at the end of Neva’s simple braid. Cadeon was stretched out along the hearth, hands clasped loosely over his belly as he dozed, his head resting on an embroidered cushion. He seemed to be asleep, but the glow of the fire betrayed him in the glitter of his narrowed eyes, as he gazed through his lashes at Narcisa with a furious, annoyed sort of longing. “They’re already frightened, you think sending them to Winterfell is going to help?”

“Yes, I do. I’ve seen the way you are with them,” Tyrion said. Even before he had left for King’s Landing, Tyrion had seen it with his own eyes, the concern Jon had for the girls, the time he devoted to them, the thought that he put toward their happiness and their protection. “They’re frightened of me, but they respect and admire you. And you are gentle with them, and stern. With you…they know exactly where they stand. That fills me with confidence about how they will be treated at Winterfell, and the kind of people they may yet have the chance to grow up to be… Please, Jon…I would not have them lost, as your sister Arya was lost…”

But she wasn’t, Jon learned later. Arya hadn’t been lost. She had been hiding in plain sight.

But his heart broke, listening to Gendry’s stories, the truth of Arya’s fate when they had arrested Father and executed him. He was grateful beyond belief to the wandering crow Yoren, who had recognised and protected her, out of fierce loyalty undoubtedly to his black brother, Benjen. He was horrified, and grief-stricken, that Arya had witnessed torture and worse as captive at Harrenhall. Devastated, that the last time Gendry had seen her was several years ago; there was no accounting for what had happened to her since.

“I know two things for certain. The only person who needs protecting is the one who gets in Arya’s way,” said Gendry firmly, as he refilled Jon’s cup with strong beer. “And if Arya thought I knew you were about to do something as brave and stupid as heading beyond the Wall to capture a dead man, and didn’t go with you to protect you, she’d murder me. Ser Davos told me where you’re going, and why: I’m coming with you.”

“Er…”

“I’m not a trained soldier, I know,” Gendry said, brushing aside Jon’s misgivings. “But I’m good in a fight and strong. When your father came to my shop all those years ago, he said if I ever wanted to learn to wield a sword instead of making them, I should go to him. If I come with you, I want Cadeon and Neva to go to Winterfell. Rhys has been my apprentice in the armoury, he’ll work hard in the forge; and Neva’s quiet and gentle and would make a good lady’s maid with some training. I’m not asking for a future for myself; Ser Davos gave me that years ago. I’m asking you to give them a future.”

“Most people I tell don’t believe what’s coming,” Jon said, sighing.

“Ser Davos believes you; Arya would believe you - so I believe you,” Gendry said simply.

“And you’d risk your children by sending them where it’s the most dangerous?”

Gendry frowned heavily, saying, “Winter has come; it’ll be a fight for our survival anywhere.”

Jon sighed heavily, and at length, he nodded. He agreed. “The Lannister girls are going North too. They’re to be wards of Winterfell, until the war in the south is over.”

“The Queens’ war?” Gendry frowned, and Jon nodded.

“The North is staying out of it,” Jon said. “Lord Tyrion wants the girls at Winterfell for their protection. It’s the most dangerous place in the world…”

“Maybe he thinks, the closer they are to danger, the farther they are from true harm,” Gendry suggested thoughtfully, and Jon shrugged. “Ser Davos says the two Queens will tear Westeros apart to snatch whatever’s left from each other’s claws. I’ve no love for Lannisters but those girls are innocent; it’s good they’ll be tucked safe out of the reach of either of the queens.”

“I wish I could make people understand…” He sighed, shaking his head.

“That’s why we’re going beyond the Wall, isn’t it?” Gendry prompted. “To show people what they should actually be afraid of, so they stop acting like spoiled children?”

“Aye,” Jon nodded.

He thought of Cersei. Jon thought of Daenerys.

After what he had done, allowing wildlings beyond the Wall for the first time since the black brothers began their long vigil, could Jon just sit back and watch as innocent children were left vulnerable to cruelty when he could ensure it did not happen?

Were the girls truly any safer at Winterfell, with an invasion imminent, than they would be at Dragonstone, with an invasion imminent?

The armies of the dead could only kill them.

The armies of the living historically did far worse to beautiful, defenceless little girls like them.

It was in Jon’s power to ensure that was not the fate of the last Lannisters.

It was because of his sisters that Jon had agreed, not because of Lord Tyrion’s offers of gold and food to pay for the privilege of taking the girls on as wards of Winterfell.

He sat at his desk, his gaze flicking mournfully to his empty bed where once Nora had coaxed him so sweetly to join her, and started writing a letter to Sansa. It had to be done: She needed to be informed one way or another about the truth of the armistice being organised. He regretted she would learn about this expedition by letter, but, as he explained, he could not waste the time. He had to be North beyond the Wall and back south again as quickly as possible.

In the meantime, Lord Tyrion prepared his kin for their journey. Jon did not concern himself with the politics of whether or not the Queen would allow Jon to take the Lannisters, her hostages, as his wards, or if Lord Tyrion had even asked her permission. He just organised things as if it was already set in stone that the girls were going North.

Kneading his tired eyes, he heard a soft knock on the door, a guard telling him, “Lady Missandei, Your Grace.”

“Show her in,” Jon called, setting down his quill and standing from his desk. The pretty Summer Islander, the Queen’s most trusted advisor but for Ser Jorah, entered the room, but she was not alone; several servants carried crates of books and scrolls.

“Lady Missandei,” he said, aware how exhausted his voice sounded. “How can I help you?”

“Your Grace, I have spent many weeks exploring the texts and scrolls in the library,” Missandei said softly. “There are some of the rarest manuscripts in the world here, and most are written in High Valyrian. At my Queen’s behest, I have been searching the ancient writings for mention of obsidian and of White Walkers.”

Jon glanced at the small crates, five of them, filled with books and scrolls and parchment manuscripts, clasped and illuminated. “You found something?”

“Quite a lot, I am delighted to say,” Missandei said softly. “The writings on the White Walkers are…ancient and…obscure, even for High Valyrian odes, and had I not heard of your experiences beyond the Wall I would have discounted them as fanciful myth, embellished by the authors. The Valyrians of old were renowned for aggrandising their sagas. My Queen would bequeath these ancient writings to you; I supervised a team of scholars who have translated them into the common tongue for ease - though the beauty of the prose is somewhat damaged in the change.”

“This…this is more than I could have asked for,” Jon said, gazing at her and rushing out an earnest, “Thank you.”

“It was my pleasure, Your Grace, truly… There is one particular manuscript which I believe may be of particular importance to you,” Lady Missandei said, and she gestured to a servant, who carried forward a large, old wooden box. He set it on Jon’s desk, opened the creaking lid, and unfolded swathes of velvet, samite, sealskin and thick waxed parchment. The manuscript he lifted out - wearing gloves of softest kid - was bound with weirwood, banded by bronze, the cover carved…with a White Walker…and one of the First Men, a spear in his hand, a direwolf snarling at his side. “It is not written in High Valyrian, Your Grace, though a translation was found with it, a sister, made in likeness of the first. The original, to the best of my knowledge, is written in the runes of the First Men. It lays out the legend of the Long Night, and the war for the dawn fought between two brothers.”

“Two brothers?” Jon breathed, stunned, as the servant carefully unclasped the manuscript.

“One, taken captive by the Children of the Forest and created as a weapon by them with harrowing magics, and his brother, who united the First Men to stop him when the Children’s hold over him failed,” Missandei said softly, her gaze uncertain as she glanced at Jon. “This manuscript…is thousands of years older than the Valyrian Freehold, even. Generations have maintained its integrity - there is a record of it. The manuscript belonged at Winterfell, Your Grace, for many thousands of years. There is a note written in it, preserved with wax, from a Lady Alarra Stark, daughter of Lord Alaric Stark, Warden of the North, who gifted the manuscript to Queen Alysanne. She was very well-read, and had enjoyed the rich culture of stories and legends of the North during her progress through the Northern kingdom.”

Jon’s heart seized at the name. Alarra. Larra, his heart moaned sorrowfully.

His breath gusted out. It was a point of pride that Good Queen Alysanne had journeyed throughout the North, hosting her women’s courts and strengthening support for the Night’s Watch. She had been coldly received at Winterfell, the stories claimed, but even Lord Alaric had not been strong enough to withstand the Queen’s charms.

“I have also had a translation written,” Lady Missandei said softly, her smile gentle. “Though we have not had the time to turn it into a manuscript of such superior quality as these.”

“Thank you,” Jon wheezed, disbelieving, as Lady Missandei produced a stack of gatherings - Jon knew the word because Maester Luwin had taught Larra how to make manuscripts from treating the skins to make parchment to painting illuminations and decorating the covers and bindings - a collection of parchment pages sewn together with thick linen thread. The handwriting was clear and elegant, written in the common tongue.

“Your Grace…when you became King in the North…did you swear an oath?”

“Aye,” Jon said, nodding. He had exchanged one vow for another, the Night’s Watch for the entirety of the North and all who lived there.

“Might I ask, what was it?” Missandei asked curiously.

“‘Winter is coming, and so begins my reign. I shall defend my realm and all those who live within it. I shall fight for their freedom, never for mine own glory. I shall live and die for the good of the North. At Winterfell the fire burns against the cold, and the light brings the dawn. It is my blood that wakes the sleepers. Mine shall be the sword in the darkness. I am the shield that guards this Realm of Men. I pledge my loyalty to the North. In my life and death I pledge to fight for Winterfell and the North, for winter is coming. Winter is coming’,” he recited grimly. Missandei’s dark eyes glimmered, and she gazed at him.

“The first Oath,” she said softly.

“Pardon?”

“That oath, Your Grace…it is recorded in the manuscript as the First Oath. The oath sworn by Bracken the Stark…his son Brandon became the Builder who united the First Men with the Children and drove the Others away… The oath every King of Winter has sworn for thousands of generations…and you,” Missandei said softly. “The oath Bracken swore…to defend the North even in death, to stop his brother whom he had lost, even if it meant plunging a knife through his heart by his own hand.”

Jon stared at the translator. Her face - which seemed tired, to Jon - was alight with the fascination of legends recorded in a dying language.

“Show me,” he breathed, and for a little while, Jon and Missandei pored over the translated text. Jon had never heard the story; it had never been one that Old Nan had ever told them.

The Night King…was a Stark. The war for the dawn was a battle between brothers, one twisted and warped into an unrecognisable thing devoted to one cause - the destruction of every living creature. He had been mis-created by the Children, so said the ancient manuscript, their captive, and their weapon. But he had turned on them, too, until the Children and the First Men had had no choice but to unite, if they had any chance of surviving.

The manuscript said that ancient magic wielded by the Children and the First Men, combined, had been enough to beat the Others back, long enough to raise the Wall, beyond which the Others had slumbered for thousands of years, waiting…

Jon read the First Oath, a chill going down his spine, but he didn’t focus on that. What drew him back were the words Bracken had sworn: To stop the Others, even if it meant plunging a knife through his brother’s heart…

“Thank you for this, Missandei,” Jon said softly. “Truly. It…is a priceless relic.”

“It belongs at Winterfell,” Missandei said softly. She hesitated. “You spent many years away from your home, Your Grace?”

“I did.”

“And…did you think of it often?”

“Always,” Jon said, with a soft, gruff, tired laugh. He glanced at Missandei, who looked drawn and suddenly pale. “Missandei? Are you ill? Sit down.” He pulled his chair out for her, settling her down. “Shall I get you something to eat, or hot tea?”

“I… I am quite well, thank you, Your Grace,” Missandei said shakily.

“You’re not,” Jon frowned. Missandei glanced around the chamber almost desperately. Her dark eyes settled on Jon.

“I…have not been sleeping well, Your Grace. It is how I found the manuscript; I have been…retreating to the library at all hours, because I can find no rest…the words drown it out,” Missandei said hoarsely.

Jon frowned, and gently asked, “Drown what out, my lady?”

“Screaming… I remember… I remember, screaming for my mother, as they carried me away,” Missandei said shakily, her eyes gleaming and faraway.

Missandei stared at the King in the North, whose dark eyes flickered with concern, his grim, bearded face full of empathy. He sighed heavily, and nodded. “When they took you from Naath.”

“Everything was burning,” Missandei whispered, staring in remembered horror at Jon, though in her mind she was far away, white shores growing smaller, great palm-trees catching alight as the island choked on black smoke, the screams of the dying carrying on the gentle air with the smell of flowers, great flocks of colourful birds exploding into the skies, the waves frothing with the blood of the dead cast overboard, and the hand that clamped on her shoulder, nails biting into her skin, and the vicious smile leering down at her as a collar was clamped around her throat.

The Lion Culling was the first time Missandei had thought about that day in a very long time: What came after was truly more horrifying.

She had watched the pale girls with their golden hair sobbing and crying for their mothers as they were manhandled into a wheelhouse, locked away, heard their whimpers and saw the fear in their eyes as they watched the bloodriders, and the flames, and Missandei…could not forget her own enslavement.

She could not shake the unsettling feeling…that what Queen Daenerys had done…was wrong, that it put her on the same level as those who had stolen Missandei from the glittering white beaches of Naath, stripping her of her freedoms and her innocence, all that she was and all that she ever could be.

Missandei sniffed, wiping her eyes, as the King in the North looked on grimly. He did not ask her to explain, and Missandei offered nothing else: He didn’t seem to need to ask, he read it in her face, in her tears.

She had not cried about her enslavement since that first sea-voyage: She was almost shocked to be weeping now, for seven little golden girls whose names she barely knew.

“The Lord Hand has made arrangements for the Ladies of Lannister to live as wards at Winterfell,” Missandei sniffed delicately, and the King nodded solemnly, though a tiny line appeared between his brows as his eyes seemed to pinch in distrust - or at least, wariness. “I am glad they will be safe under your care, Your Grace.”


The hard part was not in getting the Lannister girls onto a Northern ship.

It was Gendry’s adopted children. Specifically, getting Neva to stop clinging to Gendry’s leg long enough for Lady Tisseia or Zharanni, both of whom were accompanying them North, to coax her onto the ship, and Cadeon, who was stubborn as an aurochs and seemed to grow as large as his adopted father in his anger at the threat of their separation.

“We’re a family!” Cadeon raged. “A family. We’re supposed to stay together.”

“We are a family. We will always be a family,” Gendry asserted, his voice deep and solemn and fierce. His blue eyes glowed; he looked ferocious, and those who watched pretended not to see the tears glinting in Cadeon’s eyes as he glared at his father. “It’s my job to keep you safe; and safe is where the Starks will keep you. At Winterfell.”

“We need good men like you,” Jon said, and Ser Davos smiled warmly in approval, as Jon said, “to look after the girls. They’re deathly frightened and have no menfolk to protect them but the Queen’s men.” In her beneficence, the Queen had granted each of the seven Lannister girls a bloodrider sworn to their protection, to ride down any who tried to harm them, and an Unsullied soldier - to cut down any of the bloodriders who might be tempted to abuse their positions.

Cadeon sighed heavily, glaring at the Lannister girls - specifically Narcisa, though his eyes lingered a second too long, and he rolled his eyes, scoffing, when she caught him staring and blushed, frowning - then turned his vivid pale-blue eyes on Jon. “What about Gendry? Who’s going to look after him?”

“I will,” Jon promised him. “The two of us, we’ll return to Winterfell. I’ve my sister to return to; Gendry has you two to fight for. You’ll not be parted long. I give you my word.”

Cadeon scowled. “You can’t promise that. Your family was ripped apart, everyone in the Seven Kingdoms knows it - and in Essos too!”

“Aye. It was. If you trust nothing else, believe that I will do all I can, with all the strength I have in my body, to make sure Gendry survives this expedition,” Jon said quietly, leaning down to meet Cadeon’s eyes. “I have no desire to lose any more brothers.”

Cadeon sighed heavily, still scowling.

“I’ve another task for you, not just looking after the girls…I’ve a letter that must reach my sister, Lady Stark. She won’t be happy to read it, but it must reach her,” Jon said, and he produced the thick letter he had spent hours wording and rewording in his head before he could write a single sentence, too anxious about what Sansa would read, and how she, specifically, would read between the lines, interpreting what he left unsaid.

All he wanted was to go home and just talk with her, relaxing in the carved settle while she sewed, and he rested his tired eyes. Sometimes she’d accidentally rouse him from his doze, spreading a fur over him; he was a light sleeper, but he always appreciated the thoughtfulness of the gesture, and they’d usually cuddle up under the furs when that happened, luxuriating in their time together, in their home.

That was all he wanted. He didn’t want to be going beyond the Wall, for the sake of two spoiled queens who needed to be shocked out of their conceit.

He was so tired of fighting.

Jon just wanted to rest.

“How will I know who she is to give it to her?” Cadeon frowned. “Never seen no Sansa Stark.”

“You’ll know her. She’s tall and beautiful, with hair kissed by fire,” Jon said. “And she’ll probably terrify you.”

“I’m not scared of girls,” Cadeon scoffed.

“Well, she scares me,” Jon said, and Ser Davos chuckled, his beard twitching, at the look on Cadeon’s face. As if it was incomprehensible that a hard Northern warrior who was becoming a legend even as far south as King’s Landing was afraid of his sister.

“She’s not going to throw me in a dungeon for what’s written in the letter, is she?” Cadeon asked shrewdly.

Jon chuckled. “No. She may put you in the forge, and you’ll spar daily in the training-yard with all the other boys.”

“Learn to fight?”

“Spears, shields, bows, knives -“

“I know how to use a knife,” Cadeon said dismissively, and though Jon could not see one on the boy did not mean he was not armed.

“I hope you reach Winterfell without having to use one,” Jon said earnestly.

It was Cadeon who peeled Neva off Gendry, kissing and cooing to her as she silently wept, her eyes utterly accusing, devastated - she believed Gendry was giving her away. Gendry kissed her and murmured reassurances, but it was Lady Tisseia who took the little girl into her arms with a cheerful smile, coaxing Neva to wave to Gendry, and speaking bastard Valyrian to her.

As Winter navigated its way out of the harbour, Gendry sighed heavily, his face tortured, his shoulders slumping. He ran his hands through his curly black hair in evident frustration, as guilt warred across his face.

An hour later, they followed Winter’s course aboard Storm Crow, the last of the three vessels bound to the Night’s Watch, and the hardiest. They were headed north, finally, and Jon felt freedom as the island of Dragonstone disappeared on the horizon, as if he could breathe again.

They headed ever northward, until the choppy waves gave way to angry black seas and skies heavy with sleet-rain that punished anyone unfortunate enough to be stuck above-deck. It was miserable: It was also the most relieved Jon had felt in months - his time spent with Nora the exception to the rule, his general agitation and barely-leashed frustration and anger toward the Dragon Queen.

They spent the journey discussing the Night King’s armies, the threat to all of Westeros - and the danger they were headed into, a last, desperate move.

Gendry said it simplest, and said it best: “All this for two spoiled queens.”

Chapter 30: The True North

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

30

The True North

“


On the morning of my eighteenth name-day, my father came to me. ‘You're almost a man now,’ he said, ‘but you are not worthy of my land and title. Tomorrow you're going to take the black, forsake all claim to your inheritance, and start north… If you do not,’ he said, ‘then we'll have a hunt, and somewhere in these woods your horse will stumble, and you'll be thrown from your saddle to die… Or so I'll tell your mother… Nothing would please me more’…"

It gave Jon some great pleasure to outfit the great Lord Randyll Tarly in wildling furs, to take away his fine sword - not the Valyrian-steel Heart’s Bane passed down through his family, but a plain steel sword, new-forged - and replace it with a rudimentary dagger and a spear both tipped with obsidian. Jon could feel the hate emanating from Lord Tarly…but not so his younger son, Dickon, who stood as tall as Jon, grateful to still be alive, almost relieved to see the ramshackle Eastwatch-by-the-Sea, buried in snow and frozen solid against the very end of the Wall.

After their journey, brief though it had been - they had been blessed with fierce winds to fill their sails, and the worst of the storms had chased behind them - Jon was very relieved to disembark at Eastwatch. He had never been to the eastern-most fortress held by the Watch: He knew they had as much trouble, if not more, from slavers from Essos than wildlings, with whom they traded, along with Ibbenese whaling vessels and Skagosi. Anything to survive, Jon thought, sighing with relief as his boots hit the pebbly beach. Snow fell, but it was gentle, almost as if welcoming him back, and the snow did not stick to the shoreline as angry waves crashed in.

“There’s a light up ahead,” said Gendry thoughtfully, as he strapped his two great war-hammers to him, and Jon frowned, turning toward the fortress, where indeed, a rich orange glow was emanating from one of the windows that had, seconds ago, been shuttered against the elements.

“Someone has a fire going,” Jon said gratefully. He cast an eye over his companions, those men - and women - who had volunteered to join him. Ser Jorah wore his bear-adorned armour beneath a heavy fur-trimmed cloak, tucking a shield over his back. Obara Sand permanently had her double-ended spear in her hands; the blades had been removed, crafted into twin daggers with obsidian spikes set into the pommels, by Gendry, who had tempered new obisidian blades for her spear: After Lord Tyrion had managed to analyse and write out in plain speech the flowery High Valyrian instructions on tempering obsidian, which Missandei had found in the archives, Gendry had taken to the forge in Dragonstone, and spent days in there, working with obsidian. Gendry had left his sword on-board the ship, the weapon he was least-skilled with: He carried his enormous war-hammer, which even Dickon Tarly could not lift, and the second he had forged at Dragonstone, its dark brother, made of steel and bronze and obsidian. He carried both strapped in a leather harness.

It was one thing to know Gendry was a trained blacksmith and armourer: It was another thing to see him adapt and improvise his training to an unfamiliar material, crafting weapons of superior quality in mere days.

His craftsmanship had earned Gendry a good deal of respect from the likes of Obara, wrapped up in leathers beneath her furs, and Lord Barahir and two of his men: Lord Barahir wielded twin gladius swords, and his men each carried an obsidian falchion and a brutal scythe-like blade attached to a steel chain. Gendry had even managed to forge brass knuckles - with spikes made entirely of obsidian. One of Lord Barahir’s men was notorious for being hands-on, lusting for a good brawl.

Ser Davos and the Tarlys made up the rest of their party, and the spiteful look on Lord Randyll Tarly’s face was enough to put a spring in Jon’s step as he pushed off along the rocky shoreline, approaching the fortress, wondering who he would find within. Cotter Pyke, the intimidating Ironborn commander of Eastwatch, had been with him at Hard Home: Cotter Pyke’s attitude toward the wildlings, and Jon’s leadership, had done an abrupt about-face since then.

“No-one to greet us?” Lord Tarly said querulously. He was a brutal, unpleasant man without humour, and a somewhat warped sense of his own honour. He was the only one to ever defeat Robert Baratheon in battle, and supported the Targaryens during the Rebellion.

He had his own reasons for not kneeling to Daenerys Targaryen, and Jon respected them. Just as Lord Tarly respected Jon for refusing to yield the North to her.

Not that Lord Tarly had wanted to join Jon on his expedition: He had no choice. Lord Tarly had refused to kneel to Daenerys, and he refused to accept that Daenerys had the power to force him to take the black. No-one could force a free man to swear his vows, Jon had told him; and they were all in a unique position.

“If you were tucked up in the warm and dry, my lord, would you leave the hearthside?” Jon asked, striding ahead. The others sounded happy to be off the ship; Jon certainly was. As they had weighed anchor, he had watched in gruesome fascination as a pod of weirwhales hunted narwhal, the sea churned red with their blood. He had never seen either, but knew what they were from the books at Winterfell. Weirwhales were monstrous, pure-white whales that feasted on other great beasts of the sea; and the narwhal was alleged to be a sea-cousin of the unicorn, on account of its single great horn. Weirwhales were sought after by Ibbenese whalers for their blubber which, when treated into oil, gave off brilliant light and was odourless when burned, a great benefit that afforded it a high price. Jon only hoped there were no Ibbenese whalers about foolish enough to try out the blubber on shore beyond the Wall, as was their habit if they were close enough to land when they hunted successfully - this, according to Cotter Pyke, who traded with the Ibbenese whalers, who brought him news from beyond the Wall.

Eastwatch wasn’t like Castle Black, Jon thought, and it gave a false impression of the Watch to those who had never visited the Wall to know that the great stone fortress was an exception, not the rule. Castle Black was falling down: Eastwatch had been built to endure. And yet it was just as poorly-manned as Castle Black - even more so, Jon thought, frowning, as they approached the castle. At Castle Black there was always the sound of men working and training, in all weathers. Eastwatch was eerily still, but for that flickering golden light up ahead.

Jon unsheathed his sword.

“Your Grace?” Dickon Tarly frowned, as Jon edged toward the front gate, which stood open. He eyed the tracks on the ground, though the snows had settled and softened the markings. The fact that the snow lay undisturbed made him suspicious.

“There should be men training,” Jon murmured. “The snow is undisturbed…” His mind went to the worst possible scenario. Then he heard a soft neigh, and slipped into the yard, peering into the stables; horses bedded down with hay and oats and blankets.

Had the Wall been breached and the fortress attacked, there would have been nothing left alive. Yet the horses were content, cared for. Where were all the men?

“Fine beasts,” someone grunted, and Jon raised his eyes - to find an arrowhead aimed between them.

Then someone laughed, and Jon knew the sound. Long Claw slipped from his grip as someone collided with him, with enough force to knock him clean off his feet. Matted furs and fiery red hair, a wild grin.

“Tormund!”

“Jon Snow!” he laughed, embracing Jon like a brother. Jon grinned and hugged back, then frowned at him. “We didn’t think to see you here.”

“Who’s we - and what’re you doing here?” Jon asked, slightly dazed. Tormund grinned his mad grin.

“We’re the Night’s Watch now,” he growled tauntingly, his eyes scanning the others behind Jon, Gendry scowling deeply, ready to take Tormund’s head clean off with his great war-hammer. Tormund saw him, saw Dickon Tarly with his falchion raised threateningly, looking uncertain, and grinned like the madman Jon knew him to be. Tormund laughed. “These boys have giant’s blood or I’m a maid.”

“Tormund, what’re you doing here? Where’s everyone else?” Jon asked.

“All the crows have flown down from the Wall, all your brothers, called to Winterfell,” Tormund said gruffly. “Best place to put up a real fight.”

“They’ve left the Wall unmanned?” Jon blurted, horror settling in. Edd, you idiot! “And when the Night King’s army breaches the Wall?”

“The Three-Eyed Raven will know,” Tormund said solemnly. Jon stared at him. The ways of the wildlings were still foreign to Jon. A few months with them, years ago, spending most of his time trekking through the snow and wrestling inside Ygritte’s furs was one thing; he was not Mance Rayder, immersed in their culture for twenty years. Whatever the Three-Eyed Raven was, Jon had no idea; but it was obvious that Tormund respected it.

“Come, little crow, I’m freezing my balls off out here. Warmer by the fire. We’ve good stew, and songs. One of your brothers never shuts up. But he does sing so prettily,” Tormund said, his usual wry humour in full force. “Who are these people?”

“Tormund Giantsbane, this is Gendry, Obara Sand, Lord Barahir and his men Bors and Dagonet,” Jon said, introducing everyone, and Tormund embraced Ser Davos. “And Lord Dickon and Lord Randyll Tarly.”

“Tarly? Like your brother?” Tormund grunted, frowning, and Jon nodded.

“Aye, they’re Sam’s kin,” Jon said.

“This one looks like he’s trying to shit an anvil,” said Tormund, brandishing his short, brutal sword at Lord Tarly, and Jon’s mouth twitched. Tormund leered, striding toward Lord Tarly with that predatory swagger Jon knew so well. “Not for nothing, but the last time someone looked at me like that, we ended up married for three moons.” Jon scoffed, smirking, and he shook his head. “Come. Inside, where it’s warm. You can tell me why you’re here.” He grinned, gestured to Jon, and led the way to a rickety staircase. The wildling with the bow had already disappeared inside, and by the time they entered the small chamber, which was glowing from the fire filling the great hearth that spread warmth over them in waves, Tormund’s companions were roused and grinning.

Night’s Watchmen in their faded blacks and wildlings in their ragged furs, Jon saw; they shared the hearth, and the contents of the castle larders. He recognised a few faces - Karsi smiled at him, the firelight gleaming off the muscle-shells armouring her furs, and Long Tom from Castle Black. There were two tall, terrifying Thenn, Asa and Sigurd, who had survived Hard Home, and two other wildlings, Hvitserk and Hali. From the Watch, there was also Kenner, Greef and a tall, slender young man with a cheerful face named Yaskier.

“I see, so you’ve been feasting,” Jon said, his lips twitching toward a smile as he noted the foot being shared out - the barrel of mead that Tormund seemed to be sitting on.

“Just enjoying some well-earned comforts,” said Yaskier, handing bowls of stew to Lord Barahir and Obara. “We had the worst journey atop the Wall.”

“Got here six days ago,” Tormund said gruffly, filling his drinking-horn, and grinning tauntingly at Lord Tarly, who accepted a bowl from Yaskier only grudgingly - and only because the young man wore the black. Obara sat beside Karsi, who openly admired her double-ended obsidian spear.

“Why are you here?”

“The Three-Eyed Raven sent us,” Tormund said, unhelpfully. “And you?”

Jon sighed heavily, accepted a bowl gratefully from Yaskier, whose face was alight with excitement, as if he was about to burst if he could not say something - he bit his lip, grinned, and ducked back to his own seat. Jon told them.

“Isn’t it your job to talk him out of stupid fucking ideas like this?” Tormund accused Ser Davos, who sighed grimly.

“Is it a mad idea? Aye. Is it the only chance we’ve got?” Ser Davos said, nodding fiercely. “I don’t like it, and I wish to the gods it could be done any other way, but it’s necessary.”

“How many queens are there in the south?” Tormund asked, scowling.

“Two,” Jon said.

“And you need to snatch a wight and show it to the Queen of the dragons, or the one who fucks her brother?” asked Karsi, making Dickon Tarly start, staring at her coarse language; Lord Tarly frowned, perhaps surprised to hear the scorn in her voice. Even beyond the Wall, where there were few laws, incest was taboo. Gendry scoffed, grinning, as he accepted a horn of mead from Tormund, who was shaking his head.

“Both,” Jon said.

“How many men did you bring?” Tormund asked.

“Those you see here,” Jon said. “It’s my hope we can do the thing quickly, without alerting the White Walkers that we’re there…though I’m not sure how. If they were at Hard Home months ago…”

“They could be waiting beyond the gate,” Yaskier murmured, cheek pouched with fish stew, his eyes widening in sudden horror.

“We looked; they’re not,” Hvitserk said, with a roll of his eyes.

“No word reached me at Dragonstone that the Wall had been forsaken,” Jon said quietly, glancing at Long Tom, Greef, Yaskier and Kenner. “We were hoping some of the brothers could help.”

“Jon…you saved us at Hard Home,” said Karsi, and she shook her head, “and for that I owe you my life, and those of my daughters. Let me save yours, now; do not go beyond the Wall. You know what waits for you there.”

“I do. That’s why I must go,” Jon sighed. “We need more men; we can’t get them, without southern support. And they’re stubborn and stupid and spoiled, and I need to shock the hell out of them if we’re to get what we need to defeat the Night King’s armies.”

“You really want to go out there, again?” Tormund clarified, his voice low, concerned. They had both survived Hard Home, though barely. He glanced at Greef, at Hali. He sighed heavily, shaking his head. “Southern fools. You’re not the only ones trying to get beyond the Wall.”

“What do you mean?”

“Finish your stew, first,” said Karsi, sensibly, as Tormund rose. They finished their meals, grateful for them, and Tormund led Jon - with Gendry as his hulking shadow - to the ice-cells.

“Asa scouted them a mile south of the Wall,” Tormund said, stopping by one large cell, inside which several bedraggled-looking men seemed to be resting. As they neared the cell, Gendry started to laugh softly. He leaned against the cell door, grinning.

“Well, this is a twist of fate,” he said, his voice rich with irony. Several of the men looked up. “Remember me?”

“Gendry,” said one of the men, who wore an eye-patch, his hair thinning. “I remember you. I remember all of them.”

“You know these men?” Jon asked. Gendry nodded, his eyes narrowed.

“They’re the Brotherhood without Banners. During the War of the Five Kings, they claimed to protect the smallfolk from the horrors of war…they sold me to a Red Witch to be murdered,” Gendry said fiercely, scowling at the men.

“You’re still alive?” said a soft, silky voice in the shadows. He sat forward, pale eyes glowing in the brittle light. He stared at Gendry. “How? The Lady Melisandre took you for a purpose.”

“She did.”

“How are you still alive?”

“Because in spite of how you treated me, there are still men out there who do what is right,” Gendry said fiercely. “He freed me, when the Red Woman wanted to burn me alive, offer me up as sacrifice so her god would put Stannis Baratheon on the Iron Throne.”

The man with the pale eyes peered at Gendry through the gloom.

“And how would your death have helped put Stannis on the throne?”

“King’s blood,” Gendry said softly. “The King’s blood, flowing through my veins… King Robert was my father.”

Jon turned to stare at Gendry. That was why he seemed so familiar. He definitely looked like Robert Baratheon, with his fierce, flashing blue eyes and black hair - though he was a lot leaner. He resembled Stannis, somewhat. That’s why Gendry’s looks felt so familiar to Jon, yet he had not been able to place them. There was a hint of Stannis in Gendry’s occasional sternness, but the two men were very different in personality, Gendry open and charismatic, fierce-hearted, humorous.

“You were one of Robert Baratheon’s bastards,” said another man, wrapped in a tattered cloak. “Thought Joffrey and Cersei had you all hunted down like vermin.”

“They tried,” said Gendry stubbornly. Jon recognised the man by his burned face.

“You’re the Hound. Sandor Clegane,” Jon said, staring. From what Sansa had said, he had rescued her during the bread-riots in King’s Landing, and offered to take Sansa to freedom during the Battle of the Blackwater. The huge, scarred man barely turned his head to stare back at Jon; he was lying on his back on a bench, wrapped in a tattered cloak. At Jon’s words, he sat up.

“And you’re the White Wolf,” he growled back softly, the nastiness in his tone softened by the thoughtfulness in his face as he stared at Jon. “Ned Stark’s bastard.”

“I am.”

“You and her, you look alike,” he growled, scowling. Jon frowned.

“Who?”

“That cold little bitch, Arya,” the Hound grunted.

A soft voice in the shadows said, “Not still sore about that trial, are you, Clegane?”

“No, not about that,” said the Hound ominously.

“They want to go beyond the Wall too,” Tormund told Jon.

“We don’t want to go beyond the Wall, we have to,” said the man with the eye-patch, his voice deep and rich. “Our Lord told us that the Great War is coming.”

“The last thing your Lord told you was to sell me to the Red Witch to be murdered,” Gendry rumbled. “I’m alive, and you’re locked in a cell. Tells you something about your Lord, doesn’t it?”

“Aye,” said the man with the eye-patch. “Perhaps it does… Here we all are…at the edge of the world, at the same moment, heading in the same direction, for the same reason.”

“You don’t know what our reasons are,” said Gendry coldly.

“It doesn’t matter what we think our reasons are,” said the man. “There’s a greater purpose at work. And we serve it together, whether we know it or not. We may take the steps, but the Lord of Light -“

“For fuck’s sake, will you shut your hole?” interrupted the Hound impatiently. He raised his dark eyes to Jon. “Are we coming with you or not?”

“Don’t you want to know what we’re doing?” Jon asked, frowning.

“Is it worse than sitting in a freezing cell waiting to die?” asked the pale-eyed man.

Jon sighed heavily. “Let them out.”

“You’re sure?” Tormund asked.

“We’re all still breathing. That puts us on the same side,” Jon said grimly, and Tormund shrugged, unlocking the cell door.

The Brotherhood were given the last of the stew, while Yaskier and Karsi outfitted the newcomers with furs; Jon contributed obsidian daggers. They weren’t much, but the idea wasn’t that they were waging a full-scale war against the Night King; they were only there to sneak in and lead a raid on his soldiers to carry one off.

A wall of snow three-feet high collapsed as the gate rose, and the wind howled through the icy tunnel. Jon sighed, as they stood at the gate. Ser Davos, who was staying behind, had opened the gate; he would let them back through the Wall later. He turned to the others, swaddled in rough furs, carrying their obsidian weapons, each of them strapped with coils of rope, a skin of strong drink and enough dried meat to keep them going, the means to make fire and shovels to carve dig from the snow - these, brought on the advice of the Free Folk, who had survived more winters above the Wall than any Ranger of the Night’s Watch had ever dared.

Before they set off, Jon glanced at the others - at perpetually-angry Obara, at grim but determined Karsi; at Asa and Sigurd, two Thenns who had battled at Hard Home, evidence of it in Asa’s lost eye, Sigurd’s mutilated face; at Lord Tarly, bristling in his wildling furs, and by his side, his favoured son, handsome and nervous; at Ser Jorah, following in his father’s footsteps; and Lord Barahir, new to Jon’s cause, but adaptable and determined, and the rest, men he had never met but appreciated their presence, remembering the notorious strength and skill of the Hound. “I hope we can get this over and done with as quickly as possible.”

“Oh,” Yaskier winced, looking wounded, and he held a gloved hand over his heard. “I’ve heard that far too many times before.”

Gendry laughed, and the tension faded. Whatever they were to face, it did not jump out at them as they stepped out of the tunnel, leaving the safety of the Wall at their backs.

In fact, they met nothing. No life, but for the trees and the howling of the wind as it snatched at their furs, and even that died down as they left the Wall behind them, and started their long march. As night fell away, a pale white light guided their way, and soon the sky was bright and blue overhead, the snow beneath their feet glittering, and they were tugging at their furs uncomfortably.

“Sam…ventured beyond the Wall with you, Your Grace?” It was Dickon Tarly, and Jon glanced at Sam’s younger brother.

“He did… I thought Sam would have stopped at Horn Hill on his way to the Citadel,” Jon frowned softly. “Did he not mention the Great Ranging?”

“He…wasn’t much encouraged to speak of his time at the Wall,” said Dickon fairly, with a wince. “But his lady, Gilly…she… She stood up to my father. I’d never seen anyone do that.”

“Gilly’s endured worse than your father,” Jon said grimly.

“My mother liked her,” Dickon said. “She was kind and she…she has faith in Sam. Mother said…she saw Sam’s true worth, which my father never could.”

“Sam’s a lot braver than he thinks he is,” Jon said, “and a far better man than he knows. He is one of the best men I have ever known.”

“I never spent much time with Sam,” Dickon admitted, almost mournfully. “Father would not allow it; I was in the training yard most of my childhood…but I do remember Sam reading to me. He’d sit me on his knee - when I was still small enough! - and he’d tell me stories. They were wonderful… I always enjoyed it when Sam opened a book; all the things he could tell me… Would you tell me more stories of my brother’s adventures, Your Grace?”

They were as different in looks, Jon thought, as a sword and a scroll, and yet, as they walked through the ice-meadows, and Jon told of the Great Ranging and Sam’s stewardship, naming Jon as candidate for Lord Commander, Sam’s bravery during the Battle for Castle Black, his wisdom and guidance to Jon, his bravery in defending Gilly, Jon knew that deep down, despite appearances, Dickon Tarly shared the same profound sense of integrity that Jon had always respected in Sam.

“You still angry at us, then?” wheeled Thoros of Myr, as he tottered beside Gendry, stoppering his skin of black-strap molasses rum. Gendry glanced at the drunk.

“I spend all my days hitting things; my anger’s long since spent. Besides, anger makes you stupid,” he replied, glancing up ahead at the King, remembering what he had told the girl at Dragonstone. “Stupid gets you killed.” Gendry frowned, and glanced at the Hound. “You defeated Lord Beric in the trial-by-combat. The Brotherhood set you free. Why are you still sore about Arya naming you a murderer?”

“I’m not sore about that,” said the Hound, his tone aggressive. He scowled at Gendry. “That little bitch left me to die.”

“When?” Gendry asked.

“After she’d scarpered from us,” said Thoros. “After we sold you to the Lady Melisandre. Ran off into the woods - this one snatched her out of the shadows. Had her wandering all over the Riverlands, from what we’ve wheedled out of him, trying to find anyone who’d pay for her.”

“Don’t tell me tiny Arya got the better of you?” Gendry smirked at the Hound, who scowled.

“Not her.”

“Who, then?”

“It was a woman.”

“A woman?” Thoros said, his eyebrows raised, and he gave a smoky laugh. “A woman bested you, Clegane? Did she get you deep into your cups same as Anguy, and bludgeon you?”

“No. Single-combat,” the Hound growled irritably. “It was Brienne of fucking Tarth. She’s no ordinary woman.”

“Why’s that?”

“She’s a trained warrior,” said Beric Dondarrion. “Her father Lord Selwyn, the Evenstar, had no surviving sons; she would have been the stronger of any of them. She was a more fearsome fighter than any of the Stormlords’ sons, even when I knew of her - they nicknamed her Brienne the Beauty out of spite… I should have liked to see that fight, Clegane.”

“Why were you fighting?” Gendry asked curiously.

The Hound scowled. “She thought Arya Stark needed protecting from me.”

“Arya never needed protecting,” Gendry said fondly. He frowned. “But…how did you and the lady-warrior end up fighting over her?”

“The Tarth bitch had sworn an oath to Catelyn Stark, to protect her daughters and bring them home,” the Hound shrugged.

“So…you were with Arya?” Gendry said, frowning at the Hound.

“That’s what I said, wasn’t it?”

“But - until when? When did she leave you?” Gendry asked, glancing ahead at the King again. He was talking to the tall young Tarly.

The Hound shrugged. “Two years ago, maybe,” he said.

“Where?”

“The Saltpans,” the Hound grunted. “After the Red Wedding. A few days after Lady Arryn took fall from the Eyrie. She took my coin-purse and left me broken.”

The Hound shifted his pack higher on his back, scowled, and shoulder his way past Gendry, the conversation brought abruptly to an end. To Gendry, the Hound didn’t sound so much sore over his defeat as almost hurt at Arya’s abandonment. He marvelled. Arya had still been alive two years ago?! In the Saltpans - away from the fighting that had ravaged the rest of the Riverlands. There was a chance, then…wasn’t there?

Gendry’s last memory of Arya was her telling him, “I could be your family.”

He had been with her for years: Jon had known nothing about her fate until Gendry had arrived at Dragonstone, and told him. And Gendry had seen the young King’s heart break with the news of all Arya had endured. Gendry thought of Arya…the thought of Neva suffering the same fate filled his mouth with the taste of bile, filled his belly with a seething rage that made his hands shake, almost frightening him.

And to learn such things had happened to her, after the fact - powerless to have done anything, because he thought her dead…

He didn’t know how the King could stand it.

But then, Gendry supposed…he had more worries on his mind than just one of the sisters he had lost. There were others, he knew. Arya had called them the Red and the Black: Sansa and the King’s twin-sister, Larra. One kissed by fire, one caressed by moonlight and shadows. That was how she described them. Fire and night. And Larra’s direwolf, Last Shadow - so named, because her shadow was the last thing you were ever likely to see.

Gendry raised his eyes to the brutal, beautiful landscape, the craggy hills and snow-capped peaks, the fissures and gorges filled with ice. This was the direwolves’ natural home, he knew, from all Arya had told him of her own direwolf pup Nymeria.

This was where they had come from. Where the direwolves had come from…and where the Starks had come from, also, years before the Wall, when the First Men had carried bronze spears and rode direwolves into battle against the Others, all through the Long Night…

He shivered, and shook himself. They had a job to do. And he had vowed to himself that he would protect Arya’s brother. He found the King, striding ahead, and kept a close eye on him.

It wasn’t that he distrusted everyone: It was that, well…he was smart enough to realise the two Queens fighting over the Iron Throne would likely both consider the North declaring its independence, with its own King to rule them, as treason.

And one of the Queen’s men was among them, Ser Jorah, a known traitor and slaver.

It would be handy if the King in the North disappeared in the True North.


The sun beat down on her face, warmer than it had been in days - ever since the King had departed. Days of ice-rain had kept people indoors, and kept Daenerys away from her dragons, who had been spotted, only once, diving into the depths of the Dragonmont, where there were, according to Lord Tyrion, great caves where the dragons of old had nested among the fires and vapours of the volcano.

In their last two conversations alone, Lord Tyrion’s knowledge of ancient Valryian dragon-wisdom had far eclipsed anything Viserys had ever told Daenerys about dragons. Lord Tyrion dropped the little titbits into conversation, taking for granted his great wealth of knowledge, his voice always soft with wonder and respect, as if the mere presence of the dragons had reminded him of his lifelong admiration for the creatures he had, with an abiding sense of grief, bitterly accepted were extinct.

Now, though, Daenerys could see the Lord Hand stood on the cliff-side, wrapped in a great fur cloak, his gaze upturned to watch the dragons as they wheeled and soared and circled high above him. And she beamed, feeing the wind in her hair and watching the water churn beneath her, the air shimmering with the heat radiating from Drogon so that it looked like he was almost smoking as he soared through the gentle rain. Her hair was freshly braided, and she wore a new coat with broad sharp shoulders, deep charcoal-grey wool tufted with narrow vertical stripes of tufted ermine, and down her back, the dainty strips of fur were sewn into an intricate spine that resembled the spikes extending down Drogon’s tail. It was a winter coat, fitting for the coming storms. It had been finished with an elaborate silver chain, looping from her shoulder to her hip, clasped with a three-headed dragon. She was the Mother of Dragons. In this coat, she looked half a dragon herself. She looked a true Winter Queen. And she felt strong, powerful and content, with Drogon’s heat beneath her, radiating deliciously even through her furs and her leather gloves, the wind tugging insistently at her braids, the sun caressing her face every time they swooped around and she felt it fierce on her face.

Drogon swooped, his wings snapping like the clap of thunder as he changed direction in a heartbeat, and Daenerys smiled breathlessly: He was healing. He swooped again, diving, hurtling headlong toward the sea - then at breakneck speed, snapped his wings out; Daenerys gasped, jolting on his back, but clung on as he soared high into the air.

They passed Viserion, who screeched and dropped back to tumble through the air and catch himself, billowing through the mist, and Daenerys smiled, for her children were playing.

She glanced around for Rhaegal, frowning, watching her bronze-eyed child swooping on Viserion, butting all his strength against his brother, snapping his great jaws and shrieking. Viserion hissed, and Rhaegal tumbled away, flapping his bronze-veined jade wings mightily, soaring into the air, high, high above them, and Daenerys shuddered, frowning, as Rhaegal dived toward them from above, shrieking and hissing and calling to Drogon, who grumbled and let out a half-hearted roar, as Rhaegal swooped, darting before them, and began circling Drogon, pestering him. Daenerys had never seen Rhaegal act so strangely before - usually her two smaller children never bothered Drogon. But Rhaegal was shrieking and snarling and, Daenerys thought, frowning in consternation, crying. Rhaegal snapped delicately at Drogon once, made that beautiful rumbling, purring coo Daenerys knew so well, as if heartbroken and disappointed to be ignored, and fell away.

Drogon roared, and Daenerys’ stomach dropped away as they plunged; Daenerys clung on, and managed to peek about her when Drogon levelled off. Far ahead was a glimmering speck of green; Rhaegal. And chasing after him was a swift bead of bright golden-white light, Viserion. Drogon roared again, and flapped harder, until he had overtaken Viserion, and descended to fly at a level with Rhaegal.

The choppy sea passed beneath them, and Daenerys chanced to twist around, and gazed behind her. Her insides seemed to disappear, as Dragonstone became little more than a dark seam on the horizon.

“Drogon, where are we going?” she asked, striving for calm. He had carried her off once before, and she had ended up at Vaes Dothrak. She had been untouched, but the bloodriders of Khal Moro’s khalasaar could have raped her half a hundred times and left her to die; all because Drogon had abandoned her in the Dothraki sea. “Drogon?”

He ignored her.

Drogon was growling and screeching and cooing to Rhaegal, who kept flying, determinedly beating his great veined wings.

They were communicating, Daenerys understood, as terror settled in, watching the clouds tumble above and the sea thrash below, and her dragons seemed to smoke as they flew through rain, faster and faster, until the sea beneath was nothing but a blur, and Daenerys tucked herself tight against Drogon.

No matter what she said, what she did - slapping her palm against Drogon’s back, pulling on his great spikes - he ignored her. He was implacable. And her dragons kept flying.

She had never felt so vulnerable, not even when the khalasaar had descended, not when the Sons of the Harpy revealed themselves, not when Khal Drogo led the way through the night to claim her beneath the stars.

Within an hour, she was panting with dread. By the second hour, she saw a rocky shoreline beneath them, to her left side. They were headed north.

The dragons did not stop.

Not even when the weather became stormier, more unforgiving as day turned into night… Her eyes widened, and Daenerys tucked herself against Drogon’s back, though he was heedless of her as her three dragons flew headfirst into billowing, angry storm-clouds. Over the course of hours, she was pelted by ice and hail, alternating soft snows, hellacious winds and brutal thunderstorms that petrified her to her marrow, sobbing as she clung on to Drogon and forks of lightning speared the sky, illuminating everything with a clash and a clamour, as if giants were at war among the clouds, her children uncaring of her suffering.

Day had long turned into night, as she cried and clung on. Night fractured into day, with a hailstorm that had her bones aching and her teeth threatening to shatter as she shivered, Drogon’s warmth the only thing that saved her from freezing to death, utterly exposed to the elements.

She had never known true fear like this, as her eyelashes turning brittle, delicately kissed by ice as they flew through moonlight.

Utterly exhausted, Daenerys knew she would die upon Drogon’s back.

She had always convinced herself of the illusion of having control over the dragons’ actions, her children - especially Drogon, with whom she was bonded so intimately, her husband reincarnated as her fiercest mount…and she wept, her tears stinging her wind-burned cheeks, realising that she had lied to herself, she may have given the dragons life by feeding them to the funeral pyre of her sun and stars…but they were so much more than she would ever be. Strange magic had birthed them; stranger magic still had bonded them. And that bond was mercurial and unknowable, and had lulled her into the belief that she had power over them…the mother of dragons… She had wielded them as weapons, as others would trained hounds or tigers, unshakeable in her belief that they would never turn on her. And yet they were unknowable creatures, fire made flesh, power incarnate, and they were free…

What was the will of one little girl compared to three dragons?

She found herself lulled by the cold above her, the cold within her, Drogon’s heat beneath her. The heat kept her alive, but not conscious; Daenerys drifted into an exhausted sleep, dreaming of her stickily hot tent in the great grass sea, riding her sun and stars to their pleasure…in her dreams, his burnished bronze skin grew pale as moonlight, his oiled braid cut short, his black hair curling all over his head…as it had every time she had this dream. Drogo became Jon Snow, and yet the lust, yearning and admiration in his eyes was the same. She ached for it, as much as she ached for the feel of a man - that man - between her thighs.

She dreamed of Jon Snow, as the fire of her sun and stars reincarnated kept her from death.


“The first time I went North of the Wall was with your father,” Jon said, glancing at the older knight, as up ahead Yaskier hummed the tune to a song he was composing, called Dark Sister. Ser Jorah was as fit and healthy as any of them, and only the unfamiliar terrain made for slow going. But Ser Jorah was of the North; he knew snow, even if he did not know the True North.

“He was a good man,” Ser Jorah sighed regretfully. “He deserved a better son… Were you with him at the end?”

“I was a prisoner of the Free Folk,” Jon admitted sadly. “But we avenged him, I want you to know that. Every one of the mutineers found justice, by my sword or those of my brothers.”

“I can’t think of a worse way for him to go,” Ser Jorah said grimly. “The Night’s Watch was his life. He would have died to protect every one of those men, and they butchered him.”

“I hate that he died that way,” Jon said fiercely, and there was a sad smile on Ser Jorah’s face as he looked at Jon; perhaps he could see the fierce love Jon had had for the Lord Commander, a surrogate father to so many boys like Jon, abandoned at the Wall. Jon sighed heavily, his breath billowing around them like a great cloud that disappeared in the breeze that was today almost gentle. The snows had cleared; they had made good progress. “My father was the most honourable man I ever met. He was good, all the way through. And he died on the executioner’s block.”

“Your father wanted to execute me, you know?” Ser Jorah said.

“I heard.”

“He was in the right, of course. Didn’t make me hate him any less,” Ser Jorah said.

“I’m glad he didn’t catch you,” Jon said. He had heard the stories on Dragonstone, after Ser Jorah’s return. What would the world look like, he wondered, if Ser Jorah had never become young, newly-married Daenerys Targaryen’s protector? He had witnessed the death of her first husband, and the birth of her dragons. He had been with her throughout all of it. Daenerys had a fierce love for him, even if she did not love him the way Ser Jorah would have wanted her to. Time and again, that love provoked Ser Jorah to do extraordinary things for her, things that put his life at great risk. Ser Jorah was adamant that Daenerys Stormborn was worth the fight.

He knew a very different Daenerys to the one Jon had met.

“Me too,” Ser Jorah smiled, and Jon knew he was thinking of his Queen.

Jon sighed, and reached for his belt. He unfastened it, the supple leather giving way, and he offered Long Claw to the older knight. “Your father gave me this sword,” he said softly. “He changed the pommel from a bear to a wolf, but it’s still Long Claw.”

Ser Jorah took the blade, gazing mournfully at it.

“Lord Commander Mormont thought you’d never come back to Westeros. But here you are. And Long Claw’s been in your family for centuries,” Jon said solemnly. “It’s not right for me to keep it.”

“He gave it to you,” Ser Jorah said meaningfully.

“I’m not his son,” Jon said, meeting the knight’s eye. Ser Jorah unsheathed the blade by a few inches, to examine the dark smoky ripples of the folded steel.

“I brought shame unto my House,” Ser Jorah said grimly. “I broke my father’s heart…” He sheathed the blade with a gentle shnick. “I forfeited the right to carry this sword.” He passed the blade back. “It’s yours… May it serve you well, and your children after you.”

Children, Jon thought, with a jolt, as Ser Jorah walked on. Yaskier was still singing softly, and Tormund was talking to Gendry about experiencing his first snow.

“- never seen snow before.”

“And how do you like the True North, hm?” Gendry grunted.

“It’s brutal,” Gendry said, gazing around him. It truly was awe-inspiring; he had never seen anything like it in his life, could never have imagined anything like it. “But beautiful.”

“Brutal and beautiful,” Tormund nodded, with a gruff noise in the back of his throat. Gendry had never met anyone like Tormund, fierce and untamed - but good-humoured. He told tall tales without arrogance, laughed quickly, and according to Jon, was a fierce ally to have, a chilling warrior to have by your side. “It is. I can finally breathe again!” He seemed to come alive the further they roamed, unperturbed by any shifts in the weather, even as it worsened.

This was home to him. And he and the other Free Folk knew how to withstand the storms. They tied ropes to each other, lest they lose each other in an ice-storm with a brutal wind that battered even the Hound.

“You don’t look much like him,” said a voice, and Jon glanced at Lord Beric.

“Who’s that?”

“Your father. I suppose you favour your mother,” he said, and something niggled in the back of Jon’s mind - Lady Olenna. Her suspicions. He frowned at Lord Beric.

“You knew him?”

“Of course I did. Fought beside him during the Rebellion,” Lord Beric said. “When he was Hand, he sent me off hunting for the Mountain. Your wildling friend told me the Red Woman brought you back… Thoros has brought me back six times. We both serve the same Lord.”

“I serve the North,” Jon said stoutly. He knew nothing of the Lord of Light - and after Princess Shireen, had absolutely no interest in joining his cult of followers.

“The North didn’t raise you from the dead,” Lord Beric said.

“The Lord of Light never spoke to me. I don’t know anything about him, I don’t know what he wants from me,” Jon said, with a bite of impatience.

“He wants you alive.”

“Why?” Jon asked, glancing at Lord Beric. Why Jon? Why not one of the thousands of other innocents who had lost their lives at Hard Home? Why not one of his brothers, devoted to the Night’s Watch? Why not Father, or Robb? Why not Larra?

“I don’t know.”

“That’s all anyone can tell me,” Jon sighed. “’I don’t know’. So what’s the point in serving a God if none of us knows what he wants?”

“I think about that all the time,” said Lord Beric. “I don’t think it’s our purpose to understand. Except one thing. We’re soldiers. We have to know what we’re fighting for.” He stopped, turning to Jon. “I’m not fighting so some man or woman I barely know can sit on a throne made of swords.” Jon grunted his agreement.

“So what are you fighting for?” he asked curiously.

“Life,” said Lord Beric simply. “Death is the enemy. The first enemy and the last.”

“But we all die,” Jon said softly. Lord Beric smiled.

“The enemy always wins,” he said, still smiling, “and we still need to fight him. That’s all I know. You and I won’t find much joy while we’re here. But we can keep others alive. We can defend those who can’t defend themselves.”

“I’m the shield that guards the realms of men,” Jon murmured, and smiled. Perhaps it was as simple as that.

“Maybe we don’t need to understand any more than that,” Lord Beric agreed, smiling. “Maybe that’s enough.”

“Aye,” Jon agreed. If that was why he had been brought back…then that was more than enough. To keep doing what he had been doing. To keep fighting, no matter how exhausted he was. “Maybe that’s enough.”

In the corner of his eye, there was a flicker of fire. Not true fire; just Tormund’s wild hair. But Jon’s mind went to the solar, to the firelight glimmering off Sansa’s long hair, as she sewed complacently, tucked against him on the settle.

What wouldn’t he endure, to sit by the fireside with her?

Did it matter why he had been brought back, just that he had?

He trudged on, and quickly realised that the others had stopped hiking through the snow. Clegane was stood, watching the snow-capped mountains. The fog and cloud had lifted slightly, and Clegane was pointing.

“That’s what I saw in the fire. A mountain like an arrowhead,” he said.

“The Gods’ Arrow,” Tormund said gruffly. The Thenns said something in an ancient tongue that Jon would have no clue how to write down on parchment; the name of the mountain in the Old Tongue.

“Are you sure?” Thoros asked, and the Hound nodded.

“We’re getting close,” he said softly.

The snowstorm hit them as they descended into a valley, and they bunched together, ropes tied between them to stop them wandering away from each other. One of Tormund’s men went on ahead, staggering against the wind, spear at the ready. Tormund, whose eyes were sharper in the snow, brought them to a halt, as they squinted.

“A bear,” Tormund growled, pointing. “Big fucker.”

Gendry, scowling from inside his fur hood, asked, his deep voice clear through the howling wind, “Do bears have blue eyes?”

They heard the tremendous noise of the bear lumbering toward them - lost him, in the snows, and a startled yell was cut off, Tormund’s man disappearing in a glimpse of lethal fangs, a decomposing maw and vivid, glowing ice-blue eyes. They rushed headlong, and found a bloody smears and a broken spear in the snow.

They stood back to back, weapons at the ready.

The bear attacked out of the storm.

Beric and Thoros lit their flaming swords, and as the bear bit down on one of the Thenns, flinging the warrior with horrifying ease, Beric caught the beast’s fur alight.

Snarling and growling, the burning bear with its vivid blue eyes advanced on the Hound, lumbering in the snow, being consumed by the fire. The Hound did nothing, stood frozen in terror - not at the beast, but at the flames.

Thoros knocked him aside, threw up his sword - was knocked down, shoved the flaming blade of his sword between the beast’s jaws, struggling. Tormund bellowed, attacked the beast. The Hound watched helplessly on the ground, as the beast snarled and bit at the sword, wrenching it from Thoros’ grip, flinging it aside with a vicious snarl - and bit the priest. It bit, embedding its rotting teeth into Thoros’ flesh, snarling and thrashing.

Gendry watched the beast, as he un-looped his new obsidian war-hammer from its leather harness. As the others advanced, with flaming swords and short daggers, he approached.

With a roar, he swung his hammer.

A skull was far softer than an anvil.

All his life, he had been training - maybe not for this, but it certainly made this easier. The beast collapsed, its head caved in, brain and matter splattered, bone crushed, body already being consumed by the fire. Waves of warmth drifted off it, and Gendry stood back, as Yaskier and Lord Beric dragged Thoros away from the flaming carcass.

Gendry panted, exhilaration flooding him, and he stepped away from the bear. Lord Beric’s flaming sword drew his eye, as Yaskier’s nimble fingers deftly tugged Thoros’ clothes away from his chest, the better to see the damage.

“We have to get him back to Eastwatch,” said Ser Jorah grimly, but the Red Priest just shook his head.

“Flask,” he said hoarsely, and Lord Beric offered him the rum. Gendry still remembered the potent, sweet taste of it when the Red Priest had shared the drink, all those years ago. Too sweet for him; he preferred ale. But the Red Priest liked it, was never without it, had once joked that his friends had endured the tedium of his sobriety before: Thoros needed that rum. Especially in that moment, with Lord Beric’s sword blazing above him, his chest carved up like a hot rake had been dragged through butter. He gazed up at his friend, after a healthy dose. “Go on.”

Lord Beric sealed the wounds. Thoros stifled his screams, but the sound of his flesh searing in the heat of the flaming sword was almost too much. The Hound turned away, the light of the burning bear flickering over his scarred face.

Thoros panted, gasping, and his friend covered him up again, Yaskier quick to secure his buttons and fastenings. They could not get cold in a place like this.

“You alright?”

“I just got bit by a dead bear!” Thoros declared indignantly.

“Aye. You did,” Lord Beric chuckled softly.

“Funny old life,” said the Red Priest softly.

“Right then…” They pulled him to his feet.

They had bodies to burn, two of them, and Lord Beric set to it quickly with his flaming sword. It was not honourable, to light them and leave - they had no choice. They could not linger, and if they stayed still too long in this storm… The bear’s bloody footprints had frozen in the snow.

Climbing out of the valley, the worst of the snowstorm abated, and a clear, cold day broke, still grim because of the low clouds, but there was no snow, and the wind had died. In the hours that had passed since the bear, it had occurred to more than one of their party that…Thoros of Myr was dying. He staggered on, struggling to stopper his flask, but he did it, he kept marching alongside them, talking cheerfully with Ser Jorah about charging through the breach on Pyke during the Greyjoy Rebellion.

“I thought you were the bravest man I ever saw.”

“Just the drunkest,” Thoros joked, climbing after the rest as they made their ascent.

Tormund held up a closed fist. Crept up to a boulder to spy below them… Jon crept up beside him, and peered down into a narrow gorge.

There. A line of the King’s soldiers, ambling along.

“Where’s the rest of them?” Jon breathed, his expression dark.

“If we wait long enough, we’ll find out,” Tormund warned. The pushed away from the boulder, and slipped down soundlessly to the others. Quietly, they made their plans. They staged their ambush.

They lit a fire by the trickling creek, little more than a small thermal stream winding through the crevasses of the mountains.

There was only one of the Night King’s commanders leading them, his pace slow, as if enjoying a walk through a flowering meadow. Snarling and jerking around him were his soldiers, a dozen of them.

They needed only one.

Long Claw unsheathed, Jon advanced; the others followed, bellowing their war-cries, attacking the wights.

The commander narrowed his eyes slowly as Jon approached, swinging his razor-thin blade of ice. As Gendry roared and bludgeoned one wight with his great war-hammer, and a second which was overpowering Yaskier on uneven ground, taking its head clean off so that it crumpled at Yaskier’s feet, another wight choked Ser Jorah, and two bore down upon Lord Tarly, who stood shocked, for a moment, at the sight of corpses with blue eyes snarling and raising their weapons against him - until his son appeared out of nowhere, and slew them with a practised swing of his falchion.

They heard the strange, sonorous ringing of Valyrian steel against the razor-sharp ice-sword of the commander, and those without a wight to fight watched as Jon Snow swung his sword - if the commander had been made of flesh and bone, Jon would have cloven him in two through his midsection.

The Other was not made of flesh and blood: He shattered into a thousand pieces of ice, scattering down around Jon’s boots.

With hissing, snarling screams, the wights exploded all around the gorge, startling those who were mid-swing, defending themselves. Piles of bones and decomposing tissue collapsed to the ground. Jon gasped, turned to cast an eye over his men. He saw the wide eyes of Gendry, of the Tarlys, of Ser Jorah and Lord Barahir’s men, Obara Sand blinked dazedly as she poked a pile of bones with the tip of her obsidian spear.

A single wight remained, and as it snarled and thrashed, they surrounded it.

“No obsidian,” Jon said in a low tone, and the others nodded. They needed this one as it was. Their whole reason for being here.

Tormund, being Tormund, punched the creature.

The Hound threw himself over the writhing corpse to pin it to the ground when it staggered back.

It screamed.

A high, animalistic scream, echoing off the walls of the gorge, a call… The Hound tried to cover its mouth; its flesh peeled away, to the horror and disgust of the men who did not know…

Staring in horror at the wight, Dickon Tarly turned to Jon, and panted, “Sam killed one of them?”

“No,” Jon corrected, and he pointed Long Claw at the remnants of what had been one of the Night King’s commanders, glittering in the snow. “He killed one of them.” Jon raised his eyes to Dickon, who gaped, and turned to stare at his father. Jon stared at Lord Tarly, as the older man stood, looking utterly harrowed; he raised his eyes to Jon’s face. Jon told him fiercely, “Sam was the one to find dragonglass weapons at the Fist of the First Men. He was the first to kill a White Walker in thousands of years. We know that dragonglass kills White Walkers because of him. We were able to mine it from Dragonstone because of him. Sam’s the wisest and bravest of all my brothers.”

Lord Tarly was visibly stunned, speechless.

It was an uncomfortable process for him, Jon imagined, being educated on the true character of Samwell Tarly.

Thunder started rumbling. Jon turned his gaze to the skies. The clouds were wrong…only they weren’t, he realised, because they were changing as he watched. It wasn’t thunder…it was the clamour of thousands of the Night King’s soldiers. The same sound they had heard at Hard Home.

Hastily, Ser Jorah shoved a canvas bag over the wight’s head, as the others bound it with rope.

“Yaskier!” Jon called, and the young man glanced up. “Run back to Eastwatch. Send a raven to Daenerys Targaryen, tell her what’s happened. She’s the only one who can get here fast enough.” Yaskier nodded hastily, climbing off the ground, his eyes wide, and he turned - and ran, as fast as he could the way they had come. Jon watched him go, as the Hound hauled the wight off the ground. Jon only hoped Yaskier made it back to the Wall at all, let alone in time to save them.

The rest of them ran, out of the gorge, into a wider, open meadow of ice…

Not a meadow.

A lake.

A frozen lake.

The ice fractured as they ran out onto it.

“Stop!” They froze; the ice continued to fracture.

The hordes descended.

Ice before them; death behind them. They ran, for the rocky outcrop jutting up at the heart of the lake.

“Go!” Gendry shouted, falling back, and he eyed the ice, fractured under their weight. The hordes…were harrowing, he thought, but paid them no mind as he choked up his grip on his war-hammer, and swung it with all his might.

The ice fractured, and the wights disappeared in a heartbeat as ice-water churned up, claiming the corpses. On the uneven ground, Gendry staggered; someone grabbed him from behind as he slipped, and they stumbled back - away from the fractured ice.

“Come on!” Jon gasped, and Gendry regained his footing, and ran. Behind them, the wights thrashed and flung themselves toward the living - they disappeared under the ice - but more ran around the great fissure… They made it to the rock, climbed on top of it, glad of solid footing beneath them.

Gendry turned, and watched. Gripped his hammer, as the others adjusted the grip on their weapons, ready.

The dead surged in like the pounding waves on the shores of Dragonstone, relentless and even more dangerous.

The rumble of thunder had warned them of the horde’s approach. Great ominous cracks echoed off the mountains rising up around them, over the snarls of the writhing masses - and the ice, compromised by their weight, shattered by Gendry’s war-hammer, fractured.

Some reached the rock, but met their obsidian blades.

They watched in quiet awe as the ice collapsed, and the wights dropped out of sight, the water churning. Not for long: They could not swim.

“That was some hit,” Tormund said, as Gendry stared. He was strong, he knew it; but he had never done anything like that. Never had a need to.

“A lucky hit,” Gendry said. What had he done?! He had fallen back - to give the others time, to compromise their enemy’s advance - Rhysand’s flashing eyes, Neva’s smile flickered in his mind’s eye, and his heart ached. What had he done? He had risked…never seeing them again.

The wights snarled and thrashed, and sank beneath the water. But more had stopped, eerily still, waiting at the very edges, where solid land had frozen over, not water. They formed a ring around the lake. And at the heart of it, surrounded by icy water and impenetrable walls of the dead…they were stuck.

The captive wight snarled and thrashed, almost mockingly.


Yaskier ran.

As night drew in, he ran on, faster than he knew he could move, ignoring his discomfort as his lungs screamed and his legs ached. He was spurred on by the very real terror of having to explain to Lady Larra that she had been within weeks of reuniting with her twin-brother…and it was Yaskier’s fault he had died before that could happen, because Yaskier hadn’t been fast enough.

What were the White Walkers compared to Lady Larra’s wrath?

She’d carve him up with her shining sword and feed him piece by piece to her direwolf while he watched. And she would weep as she did it, for the brother she had been so close to reuniting with, and lost because of him. And that would kill him, Yaskier knew. Her tears. He never could stand for women to cry in front of him. One glimmer of tears and he was theirs, utterly. That was how he had ended up at the Wall in the first place.

A beauty had sent him to the Wall: A beauty had commanded him to abandon it.

Yaskier was nothing if not a slave to the whims of beautiful women. He fell in love far too easily, and far too often.

But he also respected Lady Larra, from their time journeying together from the Wall to Winterfell: She was tough and fierce and had a sharp wit and a profound sense of loyalty, and loved so deeply, it hurt Yaskier to witness it.

All he had ever wanted was to be loved by someone, the way Larra loved so ferociously.

He knew it hurt her to love so fiercely. He knew it hurt her to be separated from her brother.

They would not be parted by death, because of him.

So he ran, and ran, and ran…and finally, blessed Mother above! The Wall. Never, in his all his time as a sworn brother of the Night’s Watch, had Yaskier ever truly been glad to see it. Taking the black had not been his choice. And yet it had become his life.

Approaching the gate, waving his aching arms to and fro like a madman, he hollered and shouted, hoping the wind would not snatch his voice from the ears of those he needed to hear it.

He stumbled, finally defeated, as he slipped on a patch of ice and collapsed in a heap. He was vaguely aware of the rattle of enormous chains, and then the glow of firelight smarting his eyes, and someone shook him.

“Yaskier!” The accented voice of Karsi, chieftainess of the people of the Frozen Shore.

“Raven!” he gasped, shivering. “Ravens! Daenerys Targaryen! They’re trapped. Have to send a raven!”

“Help me get him inside…”

The flames guttered out, and he was hefted off the ground, carried between two people.

Ser Davos’ voice was urgent as he asked Yaskier for details. He was so tired; all he could do was repeat what Jon had said. “Daenerys Targaryen. Daenerys. They’re trapped…”


“Thoros?!” The snarls of their captive wight had woken them from their doze; they hadn’t dared to truly sleep, taking it in turns to stand watch and huddle against each other for warmth, all through the night. Now, the light was brighter, and Lord Beric was leaning over his friend.

Thoros of Myr gazed up at the sky, as snow drifted gently from the soft pale-grey clouds. His face was chalky, now. The light had left his eyes. Lord Beric whispered a devastated, “Thoros.”

But they all knew.

Lord Beric draped his friend’s cowl over his face, and the Hound knelt beside him.

“They say it’s one of the better ways to go,” he said, with an uncharacteristic gentleness. Then he stole the priest’s flask of rum.

“Lord of Light…show us the way,” said Beric softly, folding his friend’s arms over his chest. “Come to us in our darkness and lead your servant into the Light.”

With a scowl, Jon snatched the flask from Clegane. The other men did not know how wights came into being; but the Free Folk and the Watch had learned how to stop the strange magic from taking hold. “Lord Beric…we have to burn his body.”

“He would have wished it so,” said Lord Beric gravely, gazing down at his friend.

“We’ll all be close behind him,” Tormund said gently, as Jon splashed rum over the dead man’s body. “Unless the Lord of Light is kind enough to send us a bit of fire.”

Lord Beric unsheathed his sword, and in a dramatic gesture, he lit it, flames dancing along the steel. The Hound turned away, as the blade lowered.

“Lord of Light,” said Lord Beric sombrely, “come to us in our darkness….”

“For the night is dark, and full of terrors,” Gendry sighed, watching the flames take hold, and Lord Beric’s eyes met his across his friend’s burning body. Gendry remembered the prayer; he had sometimes found himself thinking it, as he lit a candle in the night to chase away his children’s terror - Cadeon suffered nightmares he never spoke about, even with Gendry, and Neva woke herself crying for her mother. By the light of the candle, they could always find Gendry, to cuddle up beside him as he slept by the hearth. He watched the flames catch on Thoros’ furs, his hair, and closed his eyes, turning away, thinking not of the burning man but of his children, of Neva’s gentle smile and Cadeon’s sharp wit and rare affection. Dark and fair, they were - and his.

“Who are you thinking of?” Jon asked him quietly.

“My children,” Gendry said hollowly. He raised his brilliant blue eyes to Jon. “And you?”

“Sansa,” he said mournfully. By now, the Lannister girls might have reached Winterfell, and with them, Neva and Cadeon, and the letter he carried for Sansa.

In one paragraph, he had told Sansa what to do to prepare if Jon succeeded in this mission.

Another detailed what she must do if he failed.

They would know, soon enough. That he had failed. That he had taken the risk…and lost everything. In the fires of Thoros’ burning body, Jon saw her vibrant red hair, her stern eyes and the exquisite sweetness of her rare smiles. His battered heart moaned and ached, sobbing, for just one more evening in the solar, cuddled up with her under the warmth of the fur, the fire crackling lazily, lulling him to sleep - the most relaxed he had been in years.

He wanted to go home.

He wanted to go home to Sansa.

“We’ll all freeze soon.” The querulous voice of Lord Tarly. His face was still dour, but there was a strange sort of respect shining in his eyes, and he stood beside Jon, sighing heavily. “And so will the water. It’s only a matter of time, which kills us. The cold or the dead…”

“Not what I’d hoped for,” Jon said quietly.

“When you slayed the White Walker, almost all the dead that followed it were destroyed,” Lord Tarly muttered. “Why?”

“Maybe he was the one who turned them?” Jon muttered.

“Has such a thing happened before?”

“Not in my experience,” Jon said. “Hard Home…was a massacre. I killed a White Walker there, but there were…so many. So many wights, and more commanders who did not engage in the battle… Ancient magic created the wights; if the ones who wield that power are destroyed, it makes sense that what they control is also destroyed.”

“Take out the commanders, take out the legions,” Lord Tarly said, and Jon remembered that he had been the only one to defeat Robert Baratheon in battle.

“The one time in history where killing the commanders really would put an end to the war,” Jon said grimly, and Lord Tarly nodded.

“How many are there?”

“I’ve never seen their full strength,” Jon admitted. “At Hard Home, the Night King was there…maybe twenty commanders…but if they’re his generals…”

“There will be more,” Lord Tarly said grimly. “Far more. They have a King?”

“The oldest and strongest of them,” Jon said, and he nodded, across the lake, where five Walkers sat upon dead horses, carrying great spears of ice, watching stoically, as they had for hours, their blue eyes glowing through the night. Even from here, Jon could see the horned ice crown of the King glinting in the brittle light. “The very first White Walker.”

“The very first? Then he created the rest,” said Lord Tarly, glaring across the ice. “He created them. His death will destroy them.”

“We’ll never get close enough,” Jon said firmly, giving Lord Tarly a warning glare. “Our best chance is Daenerys Targaryen, even if we freeze to death before she can get here… If she comes beyond the Wall, she’ll see…she’ll understand…and if she is the woman Ser Jorah believes in, then she will do what is right. We may not live, but others will…”

“If that’s the case,” Lord Beric said, appearing at Jon’s other side, “then we might as well fight, give everything we have. The Lord brought you back, he brought me back. No-one else, just us. Did he do it to watch us freeze to death?”

“Careful, Beric,” the Hound warned, his voice dripping with irony. “You’ve lost your priest. This is your last life.”

“I’ve been waiting for the end for a long time,” Lord Beric said carelessly. “Maybe the Lord brought me here to find it.”

“Every Lord I’ve ever met’s been a cunt,” the Hound said bluntly. “I don’t see why the Lord of Light should be any different.”

They waited. They waited, clinging to the tiniest flicker of hope - that Yaskier had not been killed, waylaid by more wights on his journey back to the Wall; that the ravens were not caught in storms on their way to Dragonstone; that Daenerys Targaryen would heed their call for help…

Jon glanced at Ser Jorah, frowning thoughtfully. Her oldest friend… She would come for him, no matter her personal and political feelings about Jon or any of the others. Yes, she would come for him…but in time?

Jon had said it so easily, that if they died while waiting for her arrival, then at least Daenerys would see the truth with her own eyes.

But it was one thing to say it, and quite another to sit, for hours, with nothing to do but think about the realities - if they did not make it out of this frozen lake alive… Who would take over the war preparations? It would be left…to Sansa.

Sansa, and Daenerys, and whoever else they could convince.

And how would that work? With Jon’s death, Sansa would become Queen in the North, and Jon knew her stance on Northern independence - she would fiercely defend it, with her life…and Daenerys would take it, when Sansa stood in her way, and refused to yield the North.

If Sansa refused…and Daenerys had fought side-by-side with the North…what rights would Daenerys feel entitled to, over dominion over the North that she had saved, as she had saved Astapor, and Yunkai, and Meereen?

What would happen to Sansa, without Jon to be her shield, her sword?

How could he protect her if he was dead?

“It’s stopped snowing.” Dickon was frowning at the sky, his palm outstretched.

“It’s getting colder,” said Tormund grimly, and Jon’s eyes lowered. Every Northman knew that if it got too cold, it would not snow: Ice would settle instead.

And ice was forming, before their very eyes…the Night King on his dead horse had raised his hand. The wights snarled in unison, shuddering awake, after waiting, still and ominous all night, and for every inch the ice grew…they advanced…

They palmed their weapons, said their silent prayers, and fought.

Obara Sand was a marvel with her double-ended spear; and Gendry, an untrained soldier, was truly gifted with his war-hammer. Jon carved through the wights with Long Claw, and fought back-to-back with Ser Jorah, as Tormund fought back-to-back with Dagonet. Lord Beric slashed out with his flaming sword, and burning corpses soon glowed in the miserable light, snarling and hissing and thrashing about, knocking into other wights, the ice beneath their feet glistening wetly. The heat melted the ice again; more wights crashed through the unstable ice, and they fought on.

“Fall back!” Jon bellowed, and they did, and the Hound grabbed Tormund, pinned to the ground by more wights, some using him to lever themselves out of the ice-water, and Obara covered their retreat, aweing to watch as she spun and stabbed and moved like a sand-snake, quick and lethal.

And yet…

Sigurd stumbled, fighting a wight; he fell, and the horde tore him apart. Jon stared at where the great Thenn had disappeared beneath the sea of wights, and their horrifying, decaying faces turned to his. His breath gusted before him, too cold now to snow; ice-crystals started to sparkle on the air, as the cold bit at is face, and across the lake, the Night King was faintly smiling. The ice hardened beneath the wights, and Jon could hear it, the strange noise of ice settling and groaning. The wights climbed on top of each other as he watched, clawing to get at him; they climbed the rock. He raised Long Claw, dreaded his end, a flicker of vibrant red hair in his mind’s eye as he accepted it, and heard the clap of thunderclouds signalling more hordes descending…

An explosion of fire, ripping through the sky; Jon saw the glow on the wights’ faces and ducked on instinct, and understood in that heartbeat: The thunderclaps were wings. The light was fire. Dragonfire.

The fire shocked him; he shuddered and straightened, hands still gripping Long Claw, and he gasped, relief sweeping through him, as Rhaegal swooped and bathed an entire legion of wights in fire. Even from here, Jon could feel its heat.

And Rhaegal was not alone. Viserion the white-and-gold screamed and bathed another legion in fire as the wights ran mindlessly toward the attack.

Stunned, Jon glanced at the others, their faces masks of shock and relief and exultation as they watched the three dragons dance above them, destroying entire legions with a single burst of wildfire. Clearing the way.

Clegane grabbed the wight, through it over his shoulder, as Drogon roared and landed nearby, his scarred neck extended as he breathed a great swathe of fire across the advancing legions, turning them to ash, melting the ice, making the water bubble… Jon glanced down, at Drogon’s feet, where his enormous heat was turning the ice beneath him slick…it was melting.

A pale face caught his attention: Daenerys. Her eyes were barely open, glinting in the light of Drogon’s fire: She raised her head, though barely, and her gaze rested on Jon. Her lips parted on his name, but he did not hear her voice.

“QUICK!” he bellowed. Drogon climbed onto the rock, as if he understood the danger, and they ducked as he opened his great jaws, bathing more of the wights in flames. Vserion swooped and wheeled and circled overhead, bathing the lake in more fire. “EVERYONE CLIMB ON!”

He saw more wights advancing, saw bursts of fire from Viserion, frowned as he noticed Rhaegal had disappeared - he slashed out with Long Claw, determined to give everyone precious time to climb on Drogon’s back.

Ser Jorah climbed, his first time ever daring approach Drogon so closely; as the others hastily climbed on, holding on where they could - the Hound literally lodged the wight on Drogon’s great spiky spine - Jorah reached for Daenerys. Her lips were dark as blueberries, her face pale and wind-chapped. And she was cold, so icy cold, Jorah knew…she would die, if she did not get warm soon. Hypothermia, the maesters called it.

He covered her with his body, chilled though he was he was still warmer than her, and he lent her what little warmth he had, shielding her body - from the cold, yes, but from the wights, too, still advancing, even as Drogon bathed them in dragonfire.

“Ser Jorah,” Daenerys sighed, barely a whisper, but his heart seized at the sound of it, relief sweeping through him, as much as it had when Rhaegal had descended from the clouds, bathing them in the protection of his fire. Now Rhaegal had disappeared into the clouds again, as Viserion circled and wheeled and screamed as he bathed the wights in fire.

“Jon!” Gendry bellowed; he was still fighting. Fighting to give them time. Ser Jorah shouted for the young man, but Gendry had turned back, rather than climb onto Drogon’s back, and went after Jon.

“Go!” Jon shouted, slashing, and Gendry scowled, bellowing as he took the heads off three walkers with a single swing, as he watched movement across the lake. The commanders had climbed down off their horses. He struck out again, covering Jon; and when he saw one of the generals hand the Night King a great spear of ice, Gendry knew.

What was the white one’s name? He struck out, bludgeoning a wight attempting to ambush Jon from behind as he dealt with another two. He remembered Lord Tyrion telling Neva about them.

“VISERION!”

If anyone had any doubt that Gendry was the son of Robert Baratheon, even Lord Randyll Tarly glanced over from Drogon’s back, thrown back twenty-odd years to the Battle of Ashford, Robert’s bellows echoing across a battlefield as he led his men. Gendry had inherited his father’s battlefield voice, the deep bellow that cut through even the clamour of battle.

And the dragon heard him.

In the second it took for Viserion to turn in mid-air, the Night King’s aim was thrown off.

His spear did not strike true.

It did not hit Viserion’s neck; it glanced off his armoured spine, shattering. A piece lodged itself in his wing-joint.

Viserion’s scream was terrible, and he hurtled toward the mountainside - but he was alive, and his clawed feet found purchase on the ragged rocks.

A general handed over another spear.

“GO NOW! GO! LEAVE!”

Drogon rose, bathing the lake in fire once more, and he screamed at his brother, whose blood splattered the mountainside, but who rose, his wings beating furiously against the pain.

Jon glanced at Gendry, who breathed deep, and accepted it. He choked up his grip on his obsidian hammer, glaring at the Night King and his commanders, daring them to come closer, to face them, not send their creatures.

They ran, back toward Drogon - they had enough time to climb on his back, as he unfurled his great wings. Ice cracked behind him, and Gendry glanced back - Jon had fallen through the ice. Long Claw landed with a clatter beside a gaping hole where Jon had stood a heartbeat before.

Without thinking, Gendry skidded and turned back. He threw himself onto the ice, as Jon splashed and struggled, and disappeared. Heedless of the danger at his back, Gendry thrust the haft of his hammer out into the water. Grunted, as something jerked at it.

He pulled.

Jon resurfaced, spluttering, shocked from the ice-cold water, his hair already starting to freeze.

Gendry jumped, as great wings beat overhead, and the green-and-bronze dragon descended, screaming and breathing fire; he landed behind them. Ahead, Gendry saw fire. Where the Night King and his commanders had been was now only fire, and, perhaps, movement flickering within the flames.

“DON’T LET GO!” Gendry bellowed, using his hammer to drag Jon to the edge of the hole, and lever him out of the water. He grabbed Jon’s hand, and pulled him out of the water, twice his weight for the water clinging to his furs, already starting to freeze - but he got Jon out. Rhaegal screamed, and Gendry threw aside his obsidian hammer; he picked up Long Claw in one hand, and threw Jon over his shoulder. He ran to the dragon, who had dipped its wing for them to climb on.

He not-quite-so-gently shoved Jon onto the dragon’s back, climbing up beside him, instantly feeling the intense heat of the dragon. The dragon gave itself a shake, shrieked, spread its wings, and in two great flaps like thunder, he had risen from the rock. The other two dragons were nowhere to be seen, and Rhaegal rose in the air, away from the clamour of the hordes.

They did not fly south: By Gendry’s estimation, it was north-east they flew, over the mountains… Rhaegal grumbled, low and dangerous, his body seemingly smoking as his heat reacted with the brutal cold around them, and Gendry kept a stunned Jon pinned to Rhaegal’s back, an arm banded over him, tucking the slenderer man close, keeping them both pinned against the dragon’s back, heat searing through so that Gendry finally understood just how cold he had been, relaxing in shuddering, painful waves as the heat lulled him. Not for long: the reason for Rhaegal’s detour became apparent, as they skirted another mountain-range, and Gendry heard it.

More dead.

Rhaegal descended from a bank of clouds, and Gendry saw…seas of the dead. Rhaegal flew low, and Gendry watched in horror, Jon stirring beside him at the sight of entire hosts of giants and woolly mammoths waiting patiently with tens of thousands of more soldiers tucked safely out of sight of the frozen lake.

The rest of the Night King’s army.

The lake had been but a glimpse of the army, little more than the vanguard.

Rhaegal targeted the giants. The mammoths. He bathed them in fire, setting them alight. Bathed legions in fire. And before the White Walkers could react, he banked and rose, higher than the mountaintops, until Gendry was lightheaded, and they were out of range, and he thought they might be flying south.

Ice-sleet started to lash down, and Rhaegal rose, higher than the clouds, above the storm.

Gendry shook Jon, whose eyes had closed…

“Jon… Jon, stay awake!” Gendry told him. What had Arya once said, of the brother who was going to take the black - she had worried that he would die of cold in his sleep, the way so many Rangers did, caught beyond the Wall in winter.

The worst thing you could ever do in true cold, Arya had said, was give in and sleep.

You would never wake up.

Chapter 31: Wolf Girl, Dragon Boy, Wolf Boy, Dragon Girl

Notes:

So there have been some glitches on FanFiction.net, which prompted me to upload this entire story to AO3 tonight!

I'll be posting to both FF.net and AO3 from now on.

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

31

Wolf Girl, Dragon Boy, Wolf Boy, Dragon Girl


In the mountains of west Dorne, a gleaming white castle with a pale tower guarded the mouth of great frothing river as it rushed heedlessly to the Summer Sea, a pale tower glimmering like a sword thrust toward the skies in the dying sunshine that stained the skies blood-orange, fuchsia and purple, and the mountains surrounding them a rich, burning red. Starfall.

Legend told that the castle had been built where a magic stone struck the earth after hurtling across the heavens. From that stone was forged not just a legendary sword, and warriors who wielded it, but the castle, to commemorate its landing-place.

The Daynes had been the power in western Dorne long before Nymeria ever sailed across the seas.

Recent history had documented that Lord Eddard Stark, after discovering his sister dying in a modest tower in the Dornish mountains, had returned Dawn to House Dayne, here at Starfall… He had slain Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning, and brought the sword home in place of he who had wielded it.

A noble act. Lord Varys could not help but think of Lord Eddard Stark’s greatsword, Ice, melted down for two obscenely gilded blades claimed by House Lannister.

Ashara Dayne had plummeted to her death after flinging herself from Palestone Sword into the sea, and rumour had it that she had taken her own life after the birth of a stillborn daughter…or having her children taken from her…or because she had been dishonoured at the Tourney of Harrenhall…or out of grief over her brother’s death.

None of those things had ever been proven, and there were none now to ask the truth of the thing.

One thing was irrefutable. A wet-nurse from Starfall had accompanied Ned Stark north to Winterfell, nursing the twin babes he had fathered during the Rebellion. She had nursed the twins, and accompanied a simple casket containing the bones of Lady Lyanna, draped with a Stark banner and a wreath of winter roses. That wet-nurse had later returned to the south, when the babes had been settled in the nursery of Winterfell, with a Northern wet-nurse, and Lord Stark awaited the arrival of his lady-wife and their newborn son and heir, Robb Stark, who had become the Young Wolf, the first King in the North in three centuries.

Until now, it had never been in Varys’ interests to pull on that particular thread.

In the balmy warmth and delicate sea-foam of the Torintine, Lord Varys drifted among the hibiscus, finally following the thread, from the bowels of Starfall’s kitchens to a modest dwelling of white stone with a kitchen-garden overflowing with herbs and a small harvest of early-winter crops, to a small hearth, at which a grandmother sat, contentedly sewing.

He had had it confirmed by those who had once been young during the Rebellion: Ashara Dayne had given birth to no bastards, living or otherwise.

Lord Eddard Stark had arrived at Starfall with the twins, the casket, and the sword of House Dayne. The wet-nurse had already been with him; but she had been a servant of Starfall, as generations of her family had been before her.

He saw it in her face, as he was shown to the hearth by a woman with a toddler in her hip, children tugging at her apron-strings and gazing with unabashed curiosity at him. The daughter chided her children, sent them out of the small parlour, so that Lord Varys and her mother might have privacy. The older woman squinted at him in the firelight, lowering her embroidery.

“So… You found me.”

“Oh, I never lost you,” Lord Varys assured her, folding his hands in his sleeves. “My little birds trilled their songs to me over the years, keeping me informed, and yet until recently, I had no reason whatsoever to wound you by digging into your past. I am sorry it will not be a more pleasant conversation.”

“It’s never pleasant, telling ghost-stories,” sighed the woman. She gave him a shrewd look. “Those babes nursed at my breast…I swaddled them, cared for them…what d’you intend to do with them?”

“There is now nothing more that can be done to the daughter,” said Varys quietly, and the woman winced. “The True North claimed her years ago. She is safe now in the memories of those who had loved her… But the son. The son lives. He thrives.”

“We’ve heard the stories. The White Wolf, who protected his sister’s inheritance - and defended her honour - and laid waste to their family’s enemies upon the moors of Winterfell,” said the woman, with quiet awe.

“Yes,” Varys said softly. “The babe you cared for is a tired warrior, and a fine young man. A great leader, intimidating to nobles and queens alike, and he inspires great trust and admiration and love in the smallfolk.”

“And what are you going to do to him?” It was a seething glare, hostile - the glare of a mother-bear sensing danger to her cubs.

“It is my hope to put his father’s crown upon his head,” Lord Varys said softly.

“His father never wore the crown,” the woman said, sighing, and something broke, Lord Varys saw it. She shook her head, and set her needlework in her lap. “The Stag gored the Last Dragon at the Trident…” She shook her head, and fixed her pale eyes on Lord Varys.

“Please tell me everything.”

She sighed heavily, but sat up a little straighter, and nodded. “It was Lord Dayne himself who summoned me up to Starfall one evening. It was past the hour of the wolf… And there he was, the Sword of the Morning. I had grown up at Starfall, I knew his face, though he did not wear his white cloak, only simple clothes, a brigandine and gorget - not the full armour of the Kingsguard that he wore later… His broher was in need of a midwife and wet-nurse, milord said, someone who could be trusted: I had helped deliver and nursed Lord Dayne’s son, you see… We left Starfall within the hour, on horseback, with a small company of Dayne guards; they left us as we reached the tower. Joy, the Prince had called it, and I could feel it, as I entered the tower. It was a happy place; it was in the very stones and the air… It was a place of joy and great love… The Princess met me in the little parlour.”

Varys waited, and the woman gave him a sad, shrewd smile.

“Princess Lyanna,” she said softly. “Lord Commander Gerold Hightower of the Kingsguard introduced her himself. I still remember her to this day. Tall and slim and queenly. Oh, she was a beauty. Not in the way of the songs and tales with their golden heroines…she had a solemn beauty, like moonlight and shadows. But it was her eyes…they were kind, and warm, in spite of her stern face. Grey eyes, dark hair to her waist, simply braided, and her gown was of fine wool, nothing spectacular, nothing a princess would have worn… Her belly was big when I arrived, bigger than she should have been - she had counted the moons since she last bled, but she was carrying low, and the maester thought her time was near; they sent for a wet-nurse in preparation. It was Lord Dayne who thought of me, being a midwife as well as wet-nurse… The Princess was relieved at my arrival. Her maids were one thing, as company; I had experience as a mother… I was brought to Starfall as much to give the Princess advice, for when her time came, and what to do after, as to nurse her babies if she needed me to. She was determined to nurse them herself…”

The woman sighed, shaking her head. “It was my privilege to stay at the tower of Joy in those weeks before the babies came. Prince Rhaegar had gone off to fight the Rebels, but in that little tower… It was a family. A family. Princess Lyanna, and her brothers, the three of them - though she was most deeply bonded with Ser Arthur Dayne. She told me once, he reminded her of her younger-brother, though they were nowhere near in age. Benjen, his name was, I still recall his face, he looked so like her… She said he wanted to be Kingsguard himself… They love each other deeply, I believe, as brother and sister, Ser Arthur and Princess Lyanna…

“A raven came, from the Trident: Ser Arthur delivered the news himself, though I could see that he had died upon hearing of his best-friend’s death… The sound of her scream will haunt me ‘til my last breath. She asked only whether her brother had dealt the killing blow; Ser Arthur confirmed it had been Robert Baratheon… Her grief started her pains… Ser Arthur never left her side, as she laboured. He stayed with her, and held her hand, and brushed her hair from her face as she silently wept and struggled… She gave birth to her daughter. Any midwife or maester will tell you, babies are not born pretty. But I cleaned up the babe, and she was a beauty; soft dark hair like her mother’s, and eyes so big and so blue they were like violets… They were already open, as if eager to explore everything around her, she was so animated… I placed her at her mother’s breast…when the Princess’s pains began again, we knew there to be another…the boy had not turned. Ser Arthur took the child from her mother and cradled her himself, gently rocking her as she fussed and whimpered, and she gentled and curled up against him as he kissed her soft hair. He held her mother’s hand, as I attempted to turn the other child… If the son’s birth had been like the daughter’s, the Princess might have lived… But she laboured too long…she bled, as we finally freed him. He was perfect, as his sister was, born frowning as if he wasn’t ready to face the world… I still remember the way he smiled, when his sister cooed. The way she whimpered, until they were swaddled together, and they cuddled up to each other, as they had in their mother’s womb. Ser Arthur held them both, as I tended to the princess. He cried, I remember. His best-friend was dead, but he had given them joy even after he was gone, in those two little babies. The Princess was bleeding… The Prince’s death, her children’s birth…it took the strength from her. She drifted, for weeks; in and out, sleeping… But the babies - they were strong. The little girl had bonded with Ser Arthur, perfectly content to be cuddled by him; the boy was only content when he was with his sister, else he frowned and fussed.

“When the Princess was situated in the bed, cleaned up, the babies swaddled in their cradle, the other men appeared. They witnessed the babies themselves, examined the sex of boy and girl, confirmed with Ser Arthur which had come first… Prince Rhaegar had already had the official royal documents already drawn up in preparation. The documents confirming the birth of Prince Rhaegar’s true-born children. Princess Lyanna woke long enough to sign her name on the grand, illuminated parchment, beside that of her husband… Each of the Kingsguard lent their signatures, and their seals, witnessing the children’s birth, and recording their names…

“The Princess had told me what she and Prince Rhaegar had decided to name their child. They had the names ready, for boy or girl; both were used, as it turned out. Her daughter she named Princess Aella Alarra, to honour her grandmother, and the Stark who served as lady-in-waiting to Good Queen Alysanne, her friend…and her son… Prince Aegon Torrhen, after Prince Rhaegar’s great-grandfather who died the same day he was born at the Tragedy of Summerhall, and the King-Who-Knelt, Torrhen Stark, who sacrificed his crown for his people.”

The woman sniffled, and dabbed at her eyes with her needle work.

“What happened to the document?” Lord Varys asked, and the woman smiled wryly.

“They didn’t only lose their prince at the Trident,” she said. “They lost brothers, cut down in their white cloaks… A rider was despatched, with guards. Guards wearing the sunspear sigil of House Martell.”

“Prince Doran,” Varys said softly, and the letter he had secreted from a hidden place in the bowels of the Red Keep seemed to burn in his sleeve. Grand plans gone so tragically awry.

“I imagine the documents reached Prince Doran at near enough the same time news reached him of King’s Landing,” said the woman grimly. “We heard about the Lannisters sacking the city…what happened to Prince Rhaegar’s former wife, their little babies… The Kingsguard knew that soldiers would be on their way, seeking the Princess,” she sighed, looking overwrought. Twenty-odd years was a long time to keep such secrets to herself.

“And seek her they did,” Lord Varys sighed, and the woman nodded.

“The Prince’s death, the strain of her children’s birth…I believe it was watching her brother cut down her friend who had loved and protected her that finally broke the princess,” said the woman hoarsely. “We watched the skirmish from the tower window… There were only two survivors, Lord Stark and the little crannogman… When Ser Arthur was cut down, the Princess howled…I settled her into the bed, and that was where they found her, the last of her strength gone, clutching the dead petals of the roses Rhaegar had picked for her before he went off to war… She was fierce, though, fierce in her last moments - she had his promise, his oath - to protect them. She gave him the children’s names - Aegon and Aella Targaryen… I’ve never seen anyone so shocked. The Lord Stark knew, in that instant…it had been a lie, everything he had been fighting for… His sister had never been snatched and dishonoured; the Prince had wed her, and given her children his name…

“Lord Stark gathered us in the parlour. There were none left who could fight, but it seemed to me the fight had gone out of Lord Stark. He simply told us that if we breathed a word of the children’s true parentage, Robert Baratheon would not stop until he had hunted down and slaughtered them. We had heard of Princess Rhaenys and little Prince Aegon, and we had loved Princess Lyanna… Lord Stark knew he needed no threats to keep us silent. We kept the lady’s secret; we kept her babies safe. Lord Stark claimed them as his own. He kept the daughter’s name, Alarra, but changed the boy’s, for his own safety. He tore down the tower, built cairns as grave-markers for those who had died defending his sister…he carried Dawn back to Starfall, and we made our way North.

“We sailed to White Harbour, to quicken the journey to Winterfell; it took us three weeks, and I was set up in the nursery with the babies. Lord Stark’s younger brother - Benjen, the one who wanted to be Kingsguard - came and visited often, cuddling the babies, just talking to them, telling them stories about his sister… The babies were five months old when Lord Stark’s wife arrived from the Riverlands, her own newborn son at her breast. He was six weeks old, but nearly as big as the twins. They had been small, of course, sharing the womb. She took one look at them, and I swear, I knew in that moment I’d have died for it, but I would never have let her lay a hand on them…

“When she pestered me for the truth of the baby’s birth, I went to Lord Stark. He filled my coin-purse, and sent two guards to escort me home. Here, to Starfall. I’ve been here ever since, and never breathed a word of it. ‘Til you.”

She sniffed, wiped her eyes, and glared stubbornly at him.

“I hope whatever mess you’re about to drag that boy into is worth it.”

“It may yet…for all of us.”

He bowed to the woman, and made his leave of the modest home with a token of his gratitude to the daughter in the form of coin, and stepped out among the hibiscus, their scent tantalising, and a warm breeze caressed his face, which was drawn into a thoughtful frown.

With surprising grace, Lord Varys mounted his horse. He draped a scarf around his head, concealing his face, and to any observer he looked like just other Dornish merchant. He was nothing if not a master of disguises and theatrics. They had served him well, for many years.

He glanced up at the stars, and gently spurred his horse into a neat trot, heading for the famous Water Gardens.

There was much he would discuss with the Prince of Dorne.


Viserion raged. He screamed, confused and wrathful, screaming and vomiting fire into the air, causing the waves crashing into the stony shore to hiss and bubble.

He had flown as if in great pain. The shard of the Night King’s ice spear had been dislodged, or melted by Viserion’s own heat, but it had hurt him, and it was evident with every flap of his wings - he screamed, and whimpered, and he struggled to flap his wings together, one of them not quite unfurling properly. And yet he had been determined to keep up with Drogon. The dragon knew, to stay North was to invite his own death. Dragons were not stupid.

It was absurd, really, how quickly the dragons had flown back to the Wall. The great black one’s ease carrying them all - all but Gendry, and Jon, who he had to lift off the green dragon’s back, unconscious but still breathing, his furs frozen solid.

In the time it had taken the dragons to appear, and save them, and return them to the Wall, Yaskier had only just arrived, having run flat out through the day and most of the night, and was still shuddering in the Commander’s bed, piled with furs and quilts, with good strong broth to warm him as Ser Davos tried his hardest to write a legible scroll to Daenerys Targaryen. The scroll was abandoned, and Yaskier’s soup slopped over his hand, as the three dragons landed beyond the walls of the great fortress, screaming and bellowing, Viserion belching fumes and fire.

For a heartbeat, nothing happened - then Ser Davos upset his ink-bottle in his haste to leave the room, and Yaskier suddenly found himself following, the furs and quilts abandoned - his soup bowl still cradled in his hands - and they met Karsi at the external door, her spear raised, her eyes wide in awe.

Dragons.

As the great, monstrous Drogon landed on the battlements, lowering his wing so they could descend directly into the training-yard, a third dragon landed just beyond the gate, carrying two large men.

People clambered down off Drogon’s back, until finally, Ser Jorah peeled a pale, limp figure off the great beast’s steaming back. Ser Jorah carried the girl - for she had long, pale-blonde hair that looked white in the snows that drifted gently around them - hastily to the rickety stairs, pushing past them to get her to the roaring hearth as Karsi and Yaskier gaped at the dragons. Drogon shook himself, snarled, and took off.

Dickon stood with his hands on his knees, his legs trembling; Obara Sand leaned heavily against her obsidian spear. Lord Tarly still looked thunderstruck, his eyes wide and horrified. Tormund looked grim, and helped the Hound carry a snarling, twitching thing away from the startled horses, to throw it in a deep ice-cell. A bellow came from beyond the gate, and Lord Barahir and his men reacted swiftly, unbolting the gate and prising the frozen doors apart to admit Gendry, who carried Jon over his shoulder.

“He fell through the ice!” Gendry called, carrying Long Claw in his other hand. Between them, he and Lord Barahir carried Jon inside as the white-and-gold dragon thrashed and screamed, swinging his long tail, and demolishing an outbuilding.

“We’ve got to get them warm!” Karsi declared, raising her hand to Daenerys’ brow, examining her dark-blue lips, the ice on Jon’s eyelashes, touching Jon’s frozen furs, Daenerys’ soaked coat.

“Carry them to the Commander’s chamber,” Ser Davos said. “We’ve kept the fire going in there; it’s a smaller room, it’ll heat up faster. Karsi, you tend to the Queen; Gendry, help Jon. Tormund, tell me what’s happened…”

Jon and the pale-haired girl were carried to the Commander’s chamber, where a great box bed had just been vacated by Yaskier. Another straw mattress had been dragged inside by the hearth, piled with furs and quilts; the men had taken this room, while Karsi had been adamant about staying beside the hearth with her dagger in her hand, unused to such luxuries as straw mattresses.

The girl was laid tenderly on the bed by Ser Jorah, who looked torn, even as Karsi ordered him away so she could strip the girl. He put bricks among the embers to heat, so they could be wrapped in towels and tucked between the linens and quilts and warm them, and turned to help Gendry, who was tearing Jon’s frozen furs from his body, and Yaskier appeared, to claim the clothes and hang them up before the great hearth to dry.

“There’s hot food,” Yaskier said. “The elk we hunted when we arrived; Karsi made a rich stew.”

“You go,” Gendry said, nodding to the door. “Get some soup to warm you. I’ll stay with Jon. Tell Ser Davos what’s happened.”

“You must strip and climb in beside him also,” said Karsi, and Gendry turned, startled at the sight of her nakedness; she merely climbed into the bed beside the unconscious Queen, gathering the smaller girl to her, and tucked the furs and quilts over them both, rubbing the girl’s back. “Rub his chest to warm his heart. It will warm the rest of him.”

Gendry did as he was told by the one who knew better than he ever could how to treat intense cold; he stripped off, after gathering blankets and furs and quilts, and tucked himself under their weight, inhaling sharply at the icy cold that emanated from Jon’s skin. Slowly, he warmed, and some of the others appeared, to bring firewood - parts of the outbuilding Viserion had destroyed with his tail - and mead for Gendry, who was quickly sweating and overheating under the furs and quilts.

“How’s she doing?” he asked, glancing over at Karsi.

“The cold has its claws in her, deep,” Karsi murmured, sighing, as she cuddled the queen closer, as she would any of her own children. “And Jon?”

“He’s probably just relieved to sleep,” Gendry grunted, sighing heavily, wiping the sweat from his brow, uncomfortable in the intense heat. He didn’t know Jon Snow well, but he thought he understood the King. And he was exhausted. And yet…and yet he kept fighting. Even as they knew they would be left behind, to give the others a chance, hopeless and exhausted, Jon had still fought, slaying every wight that attacked them… The cold had caught Daenerys worse - foolish girl, she was not dressed for true winter weather, only her fanciful dreams of what she thought winter was, not what it truly meant. Winter meant death, as it always had, and Jon knew that. Every Stark and Northman knew that.

The Starks had been warning them for thousands of years. Winter is coming…

What they meant was, Death is coming. Death. The Night King and his hordes.

When Jon was hot to the touch, and relaxed under the furs, Gendry gently touched his hand to his brow, felt him sweating, and told Karsi; she said this was a good sign, and told Gendry to go and get some cool air and some stew.

Gendry dressed, and met some of the others by the great hearth, relieved to be out of the suffocating heat of the room.

“How are they?” Dickon Tarly asked.

“Jon’s sleeping,” Gendry said, accepting a bowl of thick venison stew with a grateful smile. He had never had venison before, and couldn’t help but think of Hot Pie, and all his various recipes for venison suet-puddings and pies. Arya had talked of Winterfell, and her family: Hot Pie had talked of food, and it had taken all Gendry’s patience not to bludgeon him as they trudged through the Riverlands, starving, while he talked about baking, his true passion. “I think the Queen will be alright.”

Ser Jorah sighed heavily, relieved, and he nodded.

“What’s going on out here, where is everyone?”

“Organising provisions. There were barrels of pitch left behind,” Lord Tarly said. “Food in the larders, good steel in the forge, likely recently traded for. The Watch travelled light when they abandoned the fortress. We’ve the means to transport what’s of use to Winterfell.” Gendry nodded.

“And the wight?”

“Thrown in an ice-cell, gagged and chained,” Obara said, polishing her double-ended obsidian spear. It had been tricky to make, not because obsidian was an unfamiliar material, but because it was so finicky to get the obsidian to the right temperature - he had to look for the violet flame, Lord Tyrion had told him, translating a flowery High Valyrian text.

“Yaskier’s searching the storage vaults for a suitable crate to transport it,” Lord Tarly said, finishing his stew. “Can’t have the wretched beast getting loose aboard the ship.”

“That’s the last thing we need,” Gendry agreed, rubbing his face tiredly. Karsi joined them, not long after, declaring the Queen warm and resting peacefully, her colour returned.

They sat quietly before the hearth. What was there to say? They all knew what they had seen with their own eyes. They knew what they had narrowly escaped. They realised what Jon Snow had been fighting, for years.

It was an uncomfortable thing for Lord Tarly, who scowled into the flames, second-guessing everything he had ever thought about his firstborn son, with a sinking, hot feeling that anyone else might recognise as shame…


He jumped, the delicate kiss of snow startling against his sweat-slick skin, which seemed to be on fire. Through his lashes, a curtain of palest silver-gold shimmered in the fire firelight. Disoriented, he squirmed and fought against the furs and quilts burying him, his eyes bleary from exhaustion and sweat dripping into them, and the gentle kiss of cool, soft skin drifted from his brow to his throat to his chest.

“Shhh,” someone cooed gently, and his body tensed as the delicate touch lingered on his chest…traced the curve of his wickedest scar, the one that had plunged a dagger through his heart. Breath caught in someone’s lungs, and he frowned, still half-asleep and disoriented, as the furs were pulled lower. Cooler air sighed over his sweat-slicked chest, and he felt he could breathe properly - but he clenched his jaw and shuddered, reaching out to swat at the hand, catching slender fingers tightly, as whoever it was traced their fingers over his scars. Those scars. Scars they had no right to see.

He scowled up through his lashes, his eyes pained by the light, and slowly, blinking the sweat and sleep from his eyes, Jon realised… Daenerys. He blinked. Where had she come from?

And why was she naked?

She sat curled beside his hip, her legs tucked elegantly beneath her, her long hair tumbling in a thick braid over her shoulder, swaying temptingly in front of her succulent breasts as she leaned over him on one stiff arm. She had been caressing him with her other hand, now snatched in his. Unabashedly naked, she sat beside him, her skin cool against his hip where she leaned so delicately, and as Jon scowled up at her, bemused, her eyes glowed in the firelight, warm and tearful.

He woke up a little at that, frowning up, ignoring her nakedness in favour of the curious vulnerability in her eyes - a deep sense of sorrow and regret. “I didn’t believe you,” she whispered hoarsely, looking deeply upset. “You had to see it… Now I know…”

“Aye, now you now,” Jon agreed grimly, and he blinked…and his eyelids grew too heavy to lift again, and he sighed, drifting off to a sleep that was rich and deep and restful.

Hours later, Jon sighed, and woke, fully conscious all at once, his exhaustion shed like a blanket. He frowned, attempting to stretch - only to realise…there was a soft, supple body tangled beside his. Daenerys lay alongside him, her back to him, with her head on his shoulder, her hand curled delicately over his bicep, and she sighed softly as he stilled. He could see the dimples of her lower-back, the curve of her tiny waist, and her bottom, her unblemished skin glowing…her long curls whispered against his skin, glittering softly silver in the intense firelight.

How to free himself, without waking her? Carefully as he could, Jon tried to disentangle himself from her.

But she was not asleep. She sighed, and rolled over to face him, leaving her body utterly exposed to his gaze. Her eyes glowed in the firelight, and she smiled softly, reaching out to rest her hand over the scarred skin above his heart. All he could see was her eyes, her soft, earnest smile, her vicious determination as she told him, “We are going to destroy the Night King.”

We. Not ‘you’. The two of them. Jon closed his eyes, not wanting to show the true depths of his relief to hear it…

He jolted, as her delicate hand dipped beneath the furs, and exhaled sharply as she reached for him. She bit her lip, her gaze intense on his lips as she stroked him.

“Daenerys,” he warned, clenching his jaw.

She rose over him, still gazing at his lips, still stroking, and whispered, “And we shall do it together.”

She leaned in, and Jon winced, her hand increasing pressure as she stroked, and inhaled sharply, moving his head to the side - her kiss landed delicately at the corner of his mouth, not full on his lips.

Daenerys gazed into his eyes, her hand stilling. “Your vows…” she realised, her eyes widening. Then they softened, and she leaned in again, attempting another kiss, as she smiled, “You’ve never broken them.”

He dodged her kiss, and told her bluntly, “I’ve broken them. It did not end well.”

Daenerys stared down at him. He reached for her wrist, and she glanced down between them, turned her gaze back to him, read his face. Seemed to understand.

“She died… You loved her,” she said softly. Jon gave one brutal nod. He had loved Ygritte. Daenerys’ soft smile faltered, and she gave Jon a sad, almost accepting look. “And you do not love me.”

“No, I don’t,” Jon said honestly, and to her credit, the Queen did not balk or weep. Just gazed mournfully, yearningly, at him. “I can’t give you what you want.”

“I disappointed you. I lost your respect…I never had it, did I?” Daenerys asked, with a faint bitter edge to her soft laugh of realisation, her eyes glimmering with tears of understanding. “I ruined it, the day you arrived at Dragonstone.”

“You didn’t ruin it,” Jon told her softly, but his tone was grim, heavy - exhausted. She had ruined it that day, with her appalling arrogance - but he didn’t want her to know she had ever had a chance at impressing him. His father had simply set the standard far too high for anyone to ever measure up.

Daenerys sniffed delicately. “Not that day, then, but…the ‘Lion Culling’. I heard people, my people, on Dragonstone, that’s what they’re calling it. In the ash meadows…a lion culling… The Dragon hunted lions and snow fell in the meadows…not snow…ash…” Daenerys blinked unseeingly, her eyes glimmering with tears in the firelight, her expression lax - the most open and vulnerable Jon had ever seen her. She gazed into Jon’s eyes, horror slowly swelling, “I…murdered families. Mothers and…little children with perfect golden curls… I see them in my dreams. That isn’t…” She sniffed, reached up to wipe the tears from her cheeks. “I promised to be better. I burned them. I came to Westeros…to free people. To fight…to save people…” She closed her eyes, and fresh tears tracked down her cheeks. Jon’s hand twitched to reach and wipe them away. Daenerys opened her eyes before he could, and she gave him a mournful, tremulous smile. “Now I know. All my armies…they are yours.”

Jon sighed heavily. It was all he could have ever hoped for… But… “Daenerys…”

“I pledge you my armies, Your Grace,” Daenerys repeated, her tone unyielding as he knew her to be.

“You send your people North, they will die,” Jon said, propping himself up on his elbows, meeting her gaze intensely. “If not all, then most. It would mean sacrificing your war. Could you bear that?”

“How can I claim to fight for the freedom of the people of Westeros if I refuse to sacrifice my armies to protect them?” Daenerys retorted fiercely. “I came to Westeros to save its people, not to…burn children…”

“Daenerys…” She leaned over him, nipples brushing against his chest, and took his face in her hands. And Jon…could not turn his head away as she kissed him, full on the lips, slowly and sensuously. She took his hand, and cupped her breast, moaning softly as she slipped her tongue between his lips, dominating and seeking. Jon shuddered, and fought the instinct to cup and squeeze her breast, her soft skin, her hard little nipple insistent against his palm. He broke away from her kiss, from her breast. She was panting softly, her eyes heavy-lidded as if drunk from her kiss. He looked grimly into her eyes, annoyed and flustered that he was in this position, that she had invited herself into his bed, knowing exactly what she wanted - and all too well the full implications of what it would mean after. “It won’t be enough for you.”

Her armies…for one night with him? Because he knew, he would never give her what she desired. How could he? And yet, here she was, in his bed, naked and insistent, and…how did he say no? How did he say no, without risking her ire?

Without her going back on her word, taking back her oath to help him?

And if he gave in tonight, what did that mean after?

Daenerys faltered, wincing for a heartbeat, understanding with great reluctance the truth - even if she ignored or forgot it later… He did not desire her in his bed as his lover, nor did he admire her as a woman he respected, a queen he would yield to.

Daenerys dipped her head, and gave him a long, plundering kiss. Her eyes were dazed when they broke apart, and she gazed at Jon, overwhelmed with desire, “If tonight is all I shall ever have from you…then lie to me…for I cannot bear the truth… Let me pretend I have not made the greatest mistake of my life in losing your respect and your trust…” Shame and regret poured from her eyes, and Jon saw it; the great illusion was shattered, the true Daenerys revealed - but far too late. Tears trickled down hr cheeks. “That I have not dishonoured all that I strive to be, that I am no better than those I would wage war on. That I am my father’s daughter.” She grimaced, squeezing her eyes together on a soft sob, and leaned forward, stealing another kiss, cradling his face in her hands, trailing her fingers down his neck. She gasped, and gazed at him tearfully. “Tonight, let me be Daenerys…who cared when people were hurt…she did not inflict it…”

“Shhh…” Jon sighed, and tucked her against him. The agonising truth was finally starting to sink in - far too late, he thought; but it wounded her - as well it should - but he was no heartless sadist, to enjoy watching her fracture and weep. He sighed heavily, tucking her head under his chin, and gently stroked her arm. She turned her face against his chest, cuddling close.

“How have you done it for so long?” she asked hollowly, tracing her fingertip over his scars, those scars he hated so much. The last person to touch them had been Nora, and with her he knew, he had been utterly relaxed, able to trust her. He did not trust Daenerys. He did not like her tracing his scars, or inviting herself into his bed, putting him in this position.

His honour, or her armies.

Could he save his people, without having to fuck her?

Would she remember his rejection, after the battle, when her people were decimated, and he still refused to yield the North? She was the last of a long list of people committed to fighting the dead; what right did she have more than them to claim any part of the North, to demand their fealty?

Daenerys sniffled delicately. “This life? All you have endured, the fighting, the wars, the…the choices…the loss?” She gazed up at him, her eyes damp and glittering, and genuinely seeking. She was struggling, he could see it. And she genuinely appreciated his wisdom, in a way she rarely did her own advisors’. “How have…how have you not lost yourself?”

Jon frowned softly, “You’re not lost.”

She gave him a tremulous smile, finally sitting up, to lean over him, gentle and unaccountably sweet. “You reminded me who I am.” She gave him a tender kiss on his lips. “I wish…the girl I was before is the one you met on Dragonstone. You would have liked her…respected her, even… Perhaps you would have desired her, even loved her. I was proud of her.” She gazed at Jon, as if awed. “She would not have believed a person like you even existed…couldn’t possibly be real…” Her hands gentle on his shoulders, she straddled him.

“Daenerys -“ he warned, as she reached between them, and guided him into her body.

“Jon,” she sighed, and he inhaled sharply as she rolled her hips, taking him deeper. He shuddered at the feel of her, slick and hot and silky soft, and she placed his calloused palms over her breasts as she had before, dipping her head to snare a deep, savouring kiss. He groaned, and squeezed her breasts tenderly, shoving down his uncertainty, his dread, to play with her nipples, breaking their kiss - too intimate, he thought, far too intimate - to nip and suckle her nipples, as she rode him.

She draped her arms over his shoulders, tangling her fingers in his hair, tugging, to force his face to hers and kiss him. He clapped his hands down on her hips, grasping her backside, and Daenerys gasped as Jon grabbed her and thrust up, hard, as she rolled her hips down. She threw back her head and moaned.

She rode Jon, hard, demanding everything from him, and he met her fiercely. She raked her fingernails down his chest as she rode him, catching on his scars; Jon growled, and slapped his hands on her backside in warning, thrusting hard into her, and snatched her hands, pinning her arms behind her back, clasping both wrists in his hand. She writhed, and whipped her hips back and forth, and thrust her breasts out, whimpering softly. He kissed and sucked her nipples as he pounded into her, and with his free hand he sought between her quivering thighs.

“Are you going to behave?” he growled breathlessly, nipping her shoulder, her throat, and Daenerys gasped, nodding eagerly, her eyes alight with ecstasy. She slowed the pace of her hips, and Jon sighed, giving in, just for this moment, releasing her hands, to trail his own from her breasts to her waist - and flipped her off him, onto her back.

Arms stiff above her, he thrust into her with a deep groan, making her gasp and shudder with delight, and Daenerys wriggled and writhed beneath him, and spread her thighs wide for him, moaning with every deep thrust, her lower-lip trembling as she clutched at him, his muscles bulging, and he rode her, until she was breathless and shaking, and he pushed up, to kneel before her, and took her hips in his broad, calloused hands, and thrust up into her, his thumb delicately teasing her, and she cupped her aching breasts and moaned with abandon, thrusting her hips to meet his, the firelight swimming in her eyes as he pushed her body, taking her ruthlessly, until she knew nothing but him inside of her, and the intense pleasure burning through her. She panted, and moaned deliciously, smiling breathlessly as he continued to thrust inside her, gentler now, almost as if soothing her descent.

His face drawn, his gleaming muscles rippling, Daenerys knew - and he…pulled out - tried to - she locked her legs around his waist, shoving her hands above her to brace against the headboard, grinding her hips hard against his, locking her thighs on him.

He warned, scowling, even as he thrust and clenched his jaw, “Daenerys, I’m going to -“

“Don’t pull out! I want all of you!” she cried out, fingernails digging into his skin as she gripped his backside, thighs locked around him, and for a moment, he looked agonised, still thrusting, as if he knew he should stop himself, and could not bear to. She thrust to meet him, and moaned, and shook her head. “You can’t get me pregnant - I’m - “

She gasped as he gave one last, brutal thrust, his head thrown back, his chiselled chest gleaming, every muscle tensed, rippling, and he grunted, panting, gentling his weight on her, stilling inside her.

For a second, he looked stunned - then utterly relaxed, and then…shocked, guilty… And so much younger than she had imagined he was. He was always so grim and serious; but he was a young man.

He pulled out of her with a shaky, stifled groan, and Daenerys lolled, luxuriating in her pleasure, her body throbbing deliciously, aching from him, as he slumped against the furs, panting. She saw his hand shake as he reached up to push his dark curls out of his face. His slender, muscled body was heaving as he panted, a thin film of sweat coaxing her to lick him from his head to his toes, if she could but find the energy to lavish on him as he deserved. She could still feel him inside her - she would feel him for days, she knew. She was slick between her thighs, from her pleasure, and his seed, and she preened, delighting in the feel of it, the ache, the delicious slick heat burning through her.

“I shouldn’t have spent inside you,” he said hollowly. She managed to push herself up onto her elbows, and smiled as she lifted a foot to gently poke his thigh. She smiled warmly at him, though she felt the cut deep in her heart the same this time as she had every other, admitting the truth.

“I can’t have children,” she said softly. Her son had been pulled from her, monstrous and deformed, and dead.

‘When the sun rises in the west and sets in the east. When the seas go dry and mountains blow in the wind like leaves. When your womb quickens again, and you bear a living child… Then he will return, and not before.’ Hateful words, from the woman who had taken her sun and stars from her, and murdered their child growing in her belly… A cunning, vengeful woman - Daenerys was glad she was dead. With her sun and stars, the witch was the first she had burned…

And now Daenerys burned small children.

She raised a hand to her head, suddenly overwhelmed, bristling with shock at her own thoughts.

“How do you know that?” he asked quietly.

“It was…prophesied, by the witch who murdered my husband and our unborn son… You don’t look convinced.”

Jon scowled, spitting the words, “I don’t put any stock in prophecies.”

“You are not my first lover since my sun and stars was taken from me,” Daenerys admitted, almost bashfully. She had never been ashamed of her appetites, the gods knew Drogo had ruined her for other men, but… Jon was so different. His opinion of her mattered. And she was struggling to show him the true Daenerys, the one she wanted him to know, not the one the world was coming to dread. “And in all the years since… I am barren. My dragons are the only children I shall ever have.” Silence descended on the room as Jon frowned at her, but for the flickering fire; and beyond the sweating stone walls, they could hear them. One of the dragons, screaming. “One of my sons is out there, crying…”

“Viserion was hurt,” Jon told her. Daenerys blinked, and her hands shook as she raised them to her head, caressing her long braids as if for strength.

“Lord Tyrion warned me, I keep…they keep getting hurt because of me,” she whispered hoarsely, staring at Jon in horror.

Jon frowned. “Why did you come North?”

Daenerys gulped, dread coursing through her at the memories, true fear gripping her tight. “Rhaegal flew off… Drogon and Viserion followed. I was on Drogon’s back, I - I convinced myself that I can control them,” she said wonderingly, staring at Jon in growing realisation. “I commanded the destruction at the ash meadow…but that day, flying above Dragonstone…our flight here through the storms… It was like they had forgotten I was there…or didn’t care. They are my children, and yet they are their own masters.” She frowned thoughtfully at Jon. “They…followed some intuition, perhaps. They knew you needed them.”

“I’m glad they came,” Jon said earnestly. He gave Daenerys a chiding look. “But you need proper furs if you’re going to be flying about in all weathers.”

“You’re always so sensible,” Daenerys said, her tone gentle, fond. “Tell me you were successful, at least. Did you capture a wight? I can’t quite recall what truly happened, only…the sea…” She frowned at him. “The sea of the dead.”

“We captured one. Last time I woke, Gendry said they’d loaded the wight onto the ship,” Jon said, frowning to himself. He sighed, glancing around the chamber. Their clothes had been brought in, folded onto chairs at the end of the great bed. “We had better hasten to King’s Landing. I don’t know how long it’ll last…whether the magic of the Wall will somehow affect the Night King’s influence over it…”

“Surely you don’t intend to leave now?” Daenerys blurted, startled.

“We need to leave here as soon as possible,” Jon said, climbing out of the nest of furs and quilts, reaching for his small-clothes and leather trousers, climbing into them, as Daenerys gaped. “I dislike that the Night King…seemed to be waiting for us. I just hope that bringing the wight beyond the Wall has not…has not compromised the spells that keep the Wall standing.”

“You think the Wall may be corrupted?”

“I think that it’s corruptible,” Jon said darkly, frowning, after a moment’s thought. “It was made; it can be unmade. And the Others have had thousands of years to work out how to bring it down. I need to get to King’s Landing as soon as possible; I need to get home as soon as possible.”

Daenerys stared at him from the furs, bare-breasted, hair tousled from their tumble, and stunned - that he did not wish to luxuriate in the furs with her, most likely. That he was so…sensible, so unaffected by what had just happened.

Jon wasn’t; he was shivering with shame, as he tugged on his shirts, the ones Sansa had sewn for him.

He had fucked Daenerys, knowing she had wanted it more than anything: He had fucked her, in spite of his own dread, the warnings inside his own mind that…he had no choice.

He could not give her what she wanted in the long-term, which was everything: Nor could he deny her that which she had wanted from him just now.

He could not give her what she wanted: And yet he had to give her what she had needed from him in that moment.

Or…or she would have become the brittle woman he already knew, who burned women and children and destroyed entire armies without a second thought… But it wouldn’t be the army of the dead she warred against; it would be him. His people. Winterfell. The North.

So he’d fucked her, knowing she’d wanted it for ages, knowing that it didn’t matter what he wanted; it was for the good of the North. He couldn’t say no, when denying her might mean their deaths.

He dressed, quickly, his back to her, clenching his jaw and trying not to show that he was shuddering with shame. He did not want her: He knew no way out.

He couldn’t save the North and deny her this one small thing.

What was a quick tumble in the furs, even if shame had consumed him in the act, compared to the lives of hundreds of thousands of his people?

She’d taken what she wanted. He’d given it to her, because the alternative - denying her - was so much more dangerous.

He was still dressing as he left the Commander’s chamber, his hands shaking, and stopped short at the sight of Gendry, who had been reaching for the door-handle.

“Jon, you’re - ” He broke off, frowning at Jon, and his eyes slid beyond Jon, over his shoulder, into the room, to Daenerys, flushed and bare-breasted in the furs laid out for Jon.

He reached past Jon, grabbing the door-handle, and tugged it closed tight behind Jon - who was shocked to see a dark scowl on Gendry’s usually cheerful face, a dangerous look the Queen undoubtedly had seen.

Gendry eyed Jon shrewdly. “Thousands of the dead descending on us, your hand never shook once,” he observed, as Jon pushed his curls out of his face, feeling…haggard, exhausted. Jon raised his eyes to the other man’s face, and Gendry let out a deep sigh, frowning at the closed door.

“She’s committed her armies to fighting the dead.”

“Mm,” Gendry grunted thoughtfully, his vivid eyes narrowing. There was no accusation or humour in Gendry’s face, or his voice, when he said, “And was fucking her part of that arrangement?”

Jon grimaced, rubbing his hands over his face. “If I didn’t -“

He broke off, flushing hotly. But Gendry just stared back at him, his expression even. Almost knowing.

“If you didn’t, what?” he prompted gently.

“We need her armies,” Jon said, almost pleadingly, and Gendry nodded. He sighed heavily, giving the door a scornful look that might have blistered any varnish off it.

“She didn’t get where she is by thinking about other people,” Gendry frowned. “She’s here because she took what she wanted, everyone else be damned.”

“Or burned,” Jon corrected.

“Jon…she doesn’t get to just have whatever she wants,” Gendry said quietly.

“If I don’t -“

“If you don’t, and she goes back on her word, that’s entirely her doing,” Gendry said, his voice sombre but gentle. There was a wisdom in his voice, which was deep and rumbling - yet he was young. Younger than Jon. There was a grit to him that Jon recognised: He had not had an easy life, at all. “What is it you’re truly afraid of?”

Jon stared at him.

“I’m afraid that if we win this war against the Night King, she’ll feel entitled to the North. And when I refuse to yield it, she’ll set loose those beasts of hers,” Jon said. “She’ll slaughter my people. She’ll murder my family.”

“Fucking her won’t change that,” Gendry said bluntly. “You already know deep down what she’s capable of… No matter what you do, what you give her, she’ll do whatever she wants.” He sighed, shaking his head. “I saw how she was with people at Dragonstone. She’s a bully. She likes picking on people she thinks are less than she is. I’ve seen it my whole life.”

“So what do I do?”

“Two things I know. It’s not you who should be feeling ashamed. And the only way to stop a bully is to stand up to them.”

Notes:

Hm... Did Jon consent?
There’s a difference between a dominant partner and a sexual predator.
Precarious situation our boy’s in there. And I purposely wrote it that way: Jon’s very conscious of the repercussions his actions may have, either way, if he rejects her outright or sleeps with her only once. But they’re in no way in love - or at least, Jon is not in love with Daenerys.
I enjoy developing this bromance between Jon and Gendry. And I can’t not hear Henry Cavill’s Geralt-voice while he’s speaking these lines in my head! When I was writing that snuggle scene, I had two thoughts: That would make one delicious sandwich to be in the middle of… And, Damn, Jon and Gendry together would be unnnnhhh! Hot.

Chapter 32: Lion Cubs in the Snow

Notes:

It’s a small thing, but I’m getting rid of Larra’s freckles.

Also, I was watching The Princess Bride and was overwhelmed by the story of Inigo Montoya, and how the actor’s portrayal of that famous scene with the man with six fingers, “I want my father back, you son of a bitch” was Mandy Patinkin getting revenge on the cancer that killed his own father. And I thought…a skilled swordsman fuelled by vengeance, desperate to avenge their father’s death…an elegant, stoic princess…a hero who is tormented and returns from being ‘mostly’ dead…the Strong Man…the tiny mastermind… The Princess Bride is so good it even transcends into other worlds…

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

32

Lion Cubs in the Snow


“We should prepare the nursery.”

Larra choked on her tea.

She turned wide eyes on Sansa, cold fear gripping her marrow.

Sansa merely raised an eyebrow at her, only mildly affronted.

“Don’t look at me. I cherish every moon-flower that reminds me nothing festers in my womb,” Sansa said, almost tartly, turning back to her sewing, and Larra slumped back against the settle, her heart pounding painfully inside her chest, for a second gripped with sheer terror.

“Well, it’s not likely to be me,” Larra said, frowning. Her last tumble had been far too long ago, though she remembered every lingering touch and deep thrust… She glanced at Bran. “Is there something you need to confess, little brother?”

“We shall have visitors,” Bran said softly, his eyes sparkling as he gazed at Larra.

“And you just thought you’d try and frighten the life out of me,” Larra frowned.

“Your reaction was wonderful.”

“Smart-arse. That was cruel.”

“It was. I am sorry,” Bran said, his eyes drifting from Larra to Sansa.

They had approached the vicinity of the subject only once, Sansa’s…marriage…when Larra had confessed she had not bled in years first due to the stress she had been under, then due to her skinniness. Her body could barely sustain her own life, let alone another. In the last few months, because the gods were cruel, she had started to bleed again, though irregularly, as she continued to put on weight.

As if she wasn’t riddled with enough pain, anger and discomfort already.

Larra knew that if that…monster had left Sansa with a child, she would have given birth to it a long while ago - during her time with Jon reuniting the Northmen under the Stark banner.

But, like Larra, the stress of Sansa’s circumstances - her near-nightly torture at her husband’s hands - had given her the smallest of blessings: Sansa’s moon-blood had stopped coming. She had not become pregnant. He who exalted in and cherished violence, mutilation and death could not force life on Sansa, no matter what else he did to her. No life; no child. His seed had not quickened in her womb, forcing her to bring forth his offspring into the world.

Sansa had told Larra quietly that she could not imagine anything worse than being a mother to a child forced upon her by that creature - to never be able to love it, to dread its embrace as she dreaded its father, to taste the nausea and grow cold, gripped by terror, at its smile. To be a prisoner in her own home, abused…to be locked away from herself inside of her own mind, forever…to spend her entire life enslaved by her hate toward and fear of her own child…

“When I have children, I shall have them by a man who is brave and gentle and strong,” Sansa had told her, that quiet evening by the fireside. When, Sansa had said. Not if. That gave Larra hope that her sister was not broken by what had been done to her; it gave her hope that Sansa had not been so brutalised that there was no hope for her recovery, for her to live a life of her choosing, one that brought her contentment and joy - a life that was not dictated by the horrors she had survived, but one she designed for herself.

That Sansa could even think of such an occurrence - having children by a man who was worthy of her - was a tremendous milestone in her healing. Sansa had blushed demurely, lowering her eyes to her sewing.

No, Sansa was the farthest thing from broken. She kept herself guarded, though - not just physically, with her intricate leather belts and her standoffish nature - but emotionally: it was Larra herself who had coaxed Sansa into being intimate with another person - because Sansa had recognised the need in Larra for emotional intimacy. For compassion.

Larra, well…she wondered whether there was anyone in the world worthy of Sansa.

She did not think that just as a sister, but as someone who marvelled at Sansa’s strength of character, her grit and her sophistication.

“Why must we make ready the nursery?” Larra asked, frowning over at Bran, who was sifting idly through raven-scrolls in his lap, dark eyes glittering as he read some and crumpled others in his fist. “The castle is filling to the rafters with little children, why are these so special?”

“They are the first wards of the King in the North in three centuries,” Bran said softly. “The entirety of Westeros will be watching them.”

“Jon has taken on wards?” Larra blinked at him, glancing over at Sansa, who looked flummoxed. “We prepare for war and he takes on wards - why?!”

“For the girls,” Bran said softly, and Larra frowned, wondering which girls he meant. There were so many vulnerable little girls, after all. The last of the Lannisters; the little rosebuds that were missed during the Uprooting of Highgarden; even Ladies Karstark and Mormont. “None of this is their fault… We should prepare the schoolroom, too.” He glanced at Larra, with a ghost of a smile glittering in his eyes. “You will be far more suited to teaching them than anyone else. Maester Luwin crafted the most extraordinary, comprehensive curriculum for inspiring young children to become excited in their learning. And they will love your games and toys and your stories as much as Rickon and I did…maybe even more; they will truly appreciate them, after comparing their time with you to their education under their septas.”

“Septas should confine themselves to elocution, dancing and embroidery - and their gods, of course,” Larra sniffed scornfully; she had never had any patience for the Seven and all their ridiculous rules, and even less patience for Septa Mordane prattling on about her gods, filling her sister’s head (Arya was as resistant as Larra) with nonsense about songs and prayer and seven-sided crystals and incense and books written by men having anything to do with living in a way that honoured the gods.

To live well by oneself and others was a simple thing, needing no such embellishments.

At least, in Larra’s opinion: Maester Luwin had raised her with a healthy scepticism for all forms of worship, even the worship of the written word, which could never be taken out of context or relied on utterly, but with that scepticism, he had instilled in her a respect for others’ beliefs. Larra’s disgust of the Faith did not come from the religion itself, but from her disdain for the only person she knew to follow the Faith and call herself a godly woman - Lady Catelyn. And yet her treatment of Larra and Jon was far from the teachings of the Book of the Mother, who taught compassion, love, tenderness and guided all who would live by her example to protect the innocent as if each was their own child.

“Otherwise they’ve no place in the schoolroom. Let the maesters teach arithmetic, history, geography, philosophy, agriculture or strategy; it’s what they have devoted their lives to studying,” Larra added.

“Septa Mordane was very good to us,” Sansa said softly.

“To you,” Larra corrected, with a smirk. “You, she adored. You were ideal, the image of what a lovely young lady should be. Arya and I - we were the terrors of what she had the nerve to call a schoolroom.”

“Do you know how often Septa Mordane used to tell me, ‘your sister Larra always persevered’, ‘your sister Larra had her own struggles’,” Sansa said, smiling.

“And you replied, ‘my half-sister Larra’,” Larra smirked, and Sansa rolled her eyes, though she blushed, because they both know it was true. Sansa had always made sure to make the distinction - to correct others on their mistake. “Alright, well, how many of these wards are we to expect?”

Bran thought for a moment. “Eleven. Seven in one chamber, five in another, and one shall stay with his parents.”

“That’s thirteen, Bran,” Larra said gently, her lips twitching toward a smile. His arithmetic lessons had been cut brutally short.

“Three shall join Little Jon and Ragnar.”

“Seven,” Larra mused, glancing at Sansa, understanding that Bran wasn’t going to mention the thirteenth child he had counted. “Those will be the last of the Lannisters.”

“Why on earth is Jon bringing them here?” Sansa asked, wide-eyed, pausing in her writing.

“The closer they are to danger, the farther they are from harm,” Larra said, shrugging. “The dead can only kill them. What would the two Queens do, fighting over them?” She sighed, gazing at Sansa. “They will give the North political leverage - provided we live, of course.”

Sansa frowned thoughtfully. “That will be Lord Tyrion’s doing.”

“You think so?”

“Jon would never take little girls as hostages,” Sansa said firmly. “He’s far too honourable to even think of the advantages they could give us.”

“They’re only useful as leverage if they have value,” Larra said, with a delicate wince. It was a horrible thing to say, but it was true; and the Dragon Queen had burned anyone who had ever thought them precious.

“Then we know Lord Tyrion places value in them - or at least, he recognises his duty to them as one of their last remaining relatives,” Sansa said softly. She sighed, frowning. “But why send them to Winterfell, knowing they would be leverage later on… Unless…”

“Unless what?”

“Lord Tyrion never did anything for no reason,” Sansa said. “He knows exactly what he is doing, he will have thought through every permutation of how this plays out, assuming we win this war against the dead… He has weighed his options, and has chosen to send the last of the Lannisters away to the North. Where neither his sister nor his Queen can get to them.”

“Tyrion was never an idiot,” Larra said. “And it says a lot that he does not trust his Queen with his kin. After the Ash Meadow and the Lion Culling, what do you imagine he is thinking about her?”

“Nothing very flattering,” Sansa said. “He’s seen far too many poor rulers not to recognise Daenerys Targaryen as one.”

“She’s just murdered his entire House to ensure his loyalty and undivided attention,” Larra said, crinkling her nose as she mimicked the Queen. Auntie, she thought, with a foul scowl and a shudder of suppressed anger. She was everything her father had been; she disgraced Rhaegar’s true legacy. “What does he do next?”

“What he’s best at,” Sansa said, with a smile that bordered on adoring. “Undermine her at every turn - without making her aware of what he’s doing, if he wants to survive; but if he gets too caught up in the game, he may take pleasure in it.”

“Do you think he’ll get caught up in the game?” Larra asked.

Sansa sighed, frowning thoughtfully. “If she was more like Joffrey, relishing cruelty and indulging in her every whim for it gleefully, then, yes. But Joffrey was stupid; Queen Daenerys is self-righteous, and that is far more dangerous. She believes in herself absolutely, to the detriment of everything around her because she refuses to listen… I think Lord Tyrion has been shocked out of his wrathful grief at being betrayed by his family, by the Dragon Queen burning his entire House, down to almost the last child. The desire to annihilate his family and the reality of the wholesale slaughter of his House are two very different things - not least because the ones he had truly wished to punish are the only ones left alive… And Lord Tyrion is, in his heart, a good man. He will carry his family’s deaths with him for the rest of his life, knowing they died because she wanted to make an example of them to him, of her power over him.”

“And so he sends the last of the Lannisters to the North. To the one kingdom in Westeros that has declared its independence and consolidated its strength,” Larra mused. “The ones preparing for war against an undefeatable enemy. Giant wights and Night Kings or dragons, it makes little difference.”

Sansa frowned at her. “What do you mean?”

“Say we do, somehow, by the grace of whatever gods there may be, and by our own efforts, manage to defeat the Night King and his hordes… What next? What if Daenerys Targaryen takes King’s Landing, kills Cersei, subdues the other Lords, and continues to burn her way through Westeros, only to end up here, in the far North…and here’s a castle that has undergone intense fortification, and a people hardened by a fight for their lives the like of which can never be imagined - and who will fight again to preserve their freedom,” Larra said, and Bran turned his face to hers, glowing in the firelight, his dark eyes twinkling thoughtfully. “After what we shall face, three dragons will seem like child’s play.”

“Only a Targaryen would link dragons in the same sentence as child’s play,” Sansa said, her lips twitching, the closest she had come to teasing Larra about the horrible truth since Larra revealed it.

Larra crinkled her nose. “And there’s another point…what happens when Daenerys Targaryen discovers her brother’s children live - with a far greater claim to the Iron Throne. Do you think she will content herself to let Jon live, sitting on the Northern throne?”

“No,” Sansa said, sniffing delicately. “I don’t. I don’t believe for a moment she would let anyone stand in the way of her getting what she wants. And she wants the Seven Kingdoms. Jon has already earned one, where she has been wholly rejected by Westeros so far. That wounds her pride now, let alone discovering that Jon has the only legitimate claim to the Iron Throne - and always has.” Sansa blinked dazedly at the last comment. Jon has always had the only true claim to the Iron Throne. Sansa stared at Larra.

“He was born a king,” Bran said softly. Larra gazed at him.

“Was he?”

“First Rhaegar was killed at the Trident…Aerys and your half-brother Aegon were killed in King’s Landing days later,” Bran said softly, his face a little pinched - as if remembering the horror; because he could see it. “Aerys, Rhaegar, Aegon, all dead…and then you were born. Aella Alarra first, with Aegon Torrhen coming later. Our Larra. Our Jon. The line of succession had been wiped out, but for Prince Viserys on Dragonstone, Rhaegar’s seven-year-old younger-brother. With Jon’s birth he was Aerys’ direct successor through Rhaegar. He was King the moment he was born.”

Larra gazed gloomily at Bran. She hated the reminder that discovering her true parentage had given her nothing; only taken what she had never even had. Mother, father, brother, sister, grandmother, uncle, aunt… That same aunt had now invaded Westeros, intending on claiming it for herself and subduing any who dared oppose her conquest.

“Torrhen,” Sansa murmured. “Jon’s name…it was Torrhen?”

“Aegon Torrhen. Uniting two ancient Kings,” Bran said, his smile soft and dreamy. He sighed, gazing into the fire. “The Conqueror always respected Torrhen. He did what Aegon could not and kept the Northmen in line. And though he was named the King-Who-Knelt, Torrhen never lost the respect of his bannermen. Torrhen was a hard man who understood that a man who kneels may yet rise again, blade in hand.”

“Well, it only took three centuries, but here we are,” Larra said, feeling suddenly exhausted, as if she had lived every moment of those three centuries.

“Torrhen,” Sansa murmured again, frowning. “I don’t think I could ever call Jon that.”

“Don’t; it’s not his name,” Larra said softly. “He’s Jon.”

“Until he’s not,” Sansa said, with a sigh. “We have to think carefully about the inevitability of people discovering your true parentage.”

“Who’s going to tell anyone?” Larra frowned. She sighed. “There are only five people who know the truth - three of them are in this room; the fourth will be hidden among the marshes of the Neck by now; and the fifth ranges beyond the Wall and kept the secret as long as Father did.”

“No,” Bran said softly, and Larra’s heart seized. Meera…Uncle Benjen… “We are not alone in knowing the truth. Not all who witnessed your birth died at the tower Rhaegar named Joy… A spider has been twitching threads on his sticky-web, long ignored…but not forgotten.”

“Spider… Lord Varys, you mean,” Sansa said, with a slightly scornful frown. “The Master of Whisperers.”

“And the most effective since Lord Bloodraven,” Bran murmured, and Larra sighed, staring into her earthenware mug of steaming, fragrant tea. Lord Bloodraven… She had far too many ghosts, Larra realised. Lyanna, Rhaegar, Rhaenys, Aegon, Rhaella, Brandon, Rickard, Father, Robb, Rickon and Osha, Maester Luwin, Brynden Rivers the Bloodraven, Leif and the Children, Jojen and Hodor and Mikken and Ser Rodrik and all the rest… People she had known and loved, and people she had never met, whose lost love she grieved for…

“He knows, then,” Sansa was saying to Bran, who nodded slowly.

“He does not yet know that Larra lives,” Bran answered softly. “Only that Jon thrives in the North. He has learned the truth of their birth from Wylla, their first wet-nurse. Soon he shall discover documents declaring their birth official…that they are legitimate…soon, all of Westeros shall know that Rhaegar and Lyanna wed on the Isle of Faces…that Rhaegar and Elia were officially separated, intending for Elia to retire to the Water Gardens for her health, while the Dornish gave their strength to Rhaegar in a coup to enforce a regency on his father’s rule, along with Northern support through his marriage to Lyanna… Soon, Westeros shall know that the only true heirs to the Iron Throne are Rhaegar’s surviving children by Lyanna Stark, secreted away by her brother Lord Eddard, who was every bit as honourable as people believed.”

“So the Spider has his eyes on Jon,” Sansa frowned.

“He is disillusioned with Daenerys Targaryen; this is how he would supplant her,” Larra said, with a heavy sigh. “Using Jon.”

“He has seen Jon’s true quality,” Bran said softly. “He has observed Jon long enough to be able to compare his leadership with that of Daenerys Targaryen’s…and to find her wanting.”

“But he still supports her?” Sansa frowned.

“He is adaptable,” Bran said thoughtfully, watching the flames flicker. “Lord Varys will use who he must and act in whatever way he must to secure the safety and prosperity of the Seven Kingdoms and all its peoples. He supports no single person, but uses them for his endgame.”

“And he’s decided he can just use Jon to get whatever it is he wants? Without Jon’s knowledge or consent?” Larra scowled.

“No-one Lord Varys uses ever gives their consent,” Sansa sighed softly. “They never know they’re being used to give their consent.”

Larra winced. “People cannot discover the truth before Jon learns it.”

Bran sighed softly. “Someone has made allusions to the circumstances of your birth,” he said softly, glancing at Larra.

“Who?!”

“The Queen of Thorns,” Bran murmured, and Sansa pulled a face, almost smirking.

“And what did she have to say about it?”

“Just that the timing of everything was highly suspect. They discussed it long enough - and bluntly enough - that Jon is left wondering… When the time comes, he will be ready to accept the truth - however horrifying the ramifications may be,” Bran sighed, gazing into the distance, a soft frown drawing his features. Larra watched, as he reached down to grip the polished rims of the wheels of his chair, guiding himself around, and, with some effort, pushed himself forward to the great working-desk. He glanced up, and saw Larra, who was smiling radiantly. “What?”

“That’s the first time you’ve ever done that,” she said softly. “Wheeled yourself around.”

The first time he had taken agency over his own movement since his fall. Hodor and Larra had carried him past the Wall and back: Now, he had that clever wheeled chair. For the first few months, he had been content to let others wheel him about. Now…

He did it himself. No longer just allowed others to push him around, but actively engaging in his surroundings and how to navigate them - as if he was truly here, not just a shell that resembled Bran, filled with memory out of context. This was Bran, her stubborn, impish, curious little brother.

And he was learning how to be independent once more, for the first time since his fall.

The Three-Eyed Raven teaching him to fly had not freed him; Maester Wolkan’s wonderful chair had. It had given him independence.

The fact that Bran was choosing to move about the solar, and going about it himself, was an extraordinary thing to witness - for the girl who had been with him since he had woken, frail and broken and frustrated and deeply wounded, upset, the life he had imagined for himself stripped from him with one stumble…

Bran gazed at her, and for a second, as the firelight flickered, Larra imagined it was ten-year-old Bran gazing through the mask of his older face, dimpled and sweet, his dark eyes dancing - modest pride radiating from him, as it had when they finally buckled him into Lord Tyrion’s marvellous saddle.

He still needed help moving Sansa’s chair from behind the desk; Larra rose to carry it out of the way, so that Bran could adjust his wheeled chair behind the desk, tucked close, and his dark eyes scanned the papers and parchment and books stacked on the great table. Moved by his sweet little smile, the glimpse of Bran beneath the mask, Larra reached out to trail her fingers through his inky dark hair, and leaned in to give his brow a tender kiss. She heard him sigh softly, and he had his eyes closed, his expression almost wistful, when she withdrew from him. He blinked, and rustled some papers; then he lifted a neat scrap - a raven-scroll - pinned it down with weights, and eyed Sansa’s ink-well and the earthenware pot of new quills waiting to be used.

“And what are you doing?” Sansa asked, gazing at Bran with a slight frown, as he reached for a quill.

“It is one thing to know that there is evidence; it is another thing entirely to navigate a snake-pit to find it,” Bran murmured. “And Prince Doran, though less notorious than Lord Varys, is no less cunning. He has his own endgame… I intend to help them see that they may serve each other’s purposes well.”

“What are you going to do?” Larra asked darkly.

“What should have been done decades ago,” Bran sighed, dipping the quill into the ink-well. “Rhaegar failed because he cared too much what others thought of his actions, however necessary they were. Nor did he wish for others to be punished and blamed for what he was about to do, should his father learn of it prematurely… The coup to install a regent never occurred because Rhaegar kept everything too covert. He did not trust the Spider to want the same things he did…”

“And if he had trusted the Spider?”

“The last twenty-five years would have been rewritten,” Bran said simply. He sighed, frowned, and gazed down at the raven-scroll, quill hovering inches above it. Unsure what to write, perhaps - or unfamiliar with the feel of a quill in his hand, after so many years. He raised his gaze to Larra. “I think you and Sansa should go and make ready the chambers for the children - and their carers. They will be here in three days’ time.”

“Carers?”

“Escorting them are Lord Tyrion’s companion, Tisseia, a Lhazareen khaleen of the Dothraki named Zharanni, and Nymeria Sand, ostensibly as an envoy of Daenerys Targaryen,” Bran said.

“But not in fact,” Sansa said.

“’Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken’,” Larra said, with a delicate smirk. “The Dornish serve the Dornish… I hear tell the Sandsnakes are more dangerous even than their father was… Still, we shall have an envoy from the Water Gardens at Winterfell. That will be beneficial later.”

“Anyone else?” Sansa asked, glancing at Bran.

“Two septas and three maids accompany the Lannisters. Each of the Lannisters has been assigned their own bloodrider to protect them - and an Unsullied soldier, to keep the bloodrider in check lest they are tempted to give in to their culture,” Bran said, and Sansa scowled.

“Strange the Queen felt the need to protect the girls from their assigned protectors,” Larra sniffed, frowning.

“Where are they coming from? The Kingsroad?” Sansa asked.

“They sailed from Dragonstone to White Harbour,” Bran said softly.

“And before that, they journeyed from Casterly Rock toward King’s Landing, and were diverted to Dragonstone,” Larra sighed, shaking her head. “All that within, what, two months? They’ll be exhausted.”

“Did Lord Manderly host them?” Sansa asked Bran, who nodded.

“Yes. Lord Manderly increased their escort, and sends more provisions, including another shipment of obsidian, and half his men. But the smallfolk remain at the harbour city, to lessen the strain on Winterfell’s resources and to man the Northern fleet. They may yet be called upon to ferry the last of the Northmen from the mainland,” Bran said gently.

“And where would they sail to?” Larra asked, frowning. “Skagos? The Free Cities? Wherever they flee, the Night King will follow.”

“Unless he falls.”

Larra smiled sadly, “Winterfell may yet be the place where winter fell?”

“Perhaps…”

Larra and Sansa spent the next day preparing chambers for another influx of guests. Wards of Winterfell, seven of them would be, and southerners who had never experienced snow, let alone true winter. Like Bran, they had all been born in the Long Summer; they had never known anything else. Larra insisted that the seven Lannisters share a chamber - and she chose Brandon’s old chamber, wood-panelled for extra warmth, with a good sized hearth, little windows and easy access to the nursery and their former schoolroom - and Larra’s chamber down the corridor. They tucked a second large bed in beside Brandon’s old one - the girls could fit three to a bed easily - and a small cot for the youngest child.

Rickon’s bedroom had already been rearranged for Little Jon and Ragnar, who were thick as thieves and did not seem to appreciate that their little haven away from the hustle and bustle of the rest of the castle - and Larra’s eagle eyes - was being violated by the addition of new children. A second bed was tucked into Rickon’s room, beside the larger one Rickon used to somehow go missing in - as she helped the maids tuck fresh linens over the bed, Larra couldn’t help but remember how she spent several hours one morning desperately searching the castle for Rickon - who had managed to tuck himself along the bottom edge of the bed beneath the sheets and quilts and furs where he went unnoticed, sleeping away peacefully.

She squashed the memory trying to poke at her mind, the one of Rickon’s statue in the crypt - the statue of an adolescent young man, no longer the little boy of her memory.

In Larra’s chamber, where Maester Wolkan had had the trunks filled with Larra’s progresses sent, as she had requested, Sansa sat on Larra’s bed, while Larra rocked gently in her chair beneath the window, and they went through the contents of Larra’s trunks, deciding what to decorate the schoolroom with that would ignite curiosity and inspire delight in the children confined to it for several hours a day.

Sansa alternated between playing with the wooden games and hand-painted jigsaw puzzles and combing through Larra’s paintings, her progresses, and Larra’s stories.

“‘She-Wolves and Winter Kings: The Starks of Winterfell’,” Sansa sighed, smiling, as she opened a fat tome Larra had created with her brothers’ and Maester Luwin’s help. It was the first manuscript Larra had ever learned to bind, and only after Maester Luwin had worked with them for months on writing biographies - seeking facts, inferring from text, understanding context and perspective, and paying close attention to the long-term ramifications of particular choices made by their heroes. She, Jon and Robb had each worked on writing biographies of the legendary Stark kings and she-wolves they had researched, even some of Old Nan’s stories preserved on the parchment. Maester Luwin had settled the argument over who got to write about Lord Cregan Stark, their mutual hero, by determining that they should work together on his biography. Larra had illustrated every single entry - their faces had appeared in her dreams, as had so many others.

The last entry…was Robb, as Larra remembered him in the courtyard, armed and armoured and riding to war in the last of the late-summer snows, surrounded by his bannermen.

The two-dozen parchment pages that followed his likeness were pristine.

Larra had left room for more. For Robb’s children, and his grandchildren. They hadn’t known it, then, that those children would never be born.

Larra had never dared to dream that it would be Jon who was crowned the next King of Winter.

Sansa sat cross-legged on Larra’s bed, surrounded by puzzles and toys and dolls, her face shining as she tenderly caressed her fingertips over their brother’s portrait.

Larra tenderly shuffled the colourful, illustrated cards she had made of the alphabet, and the phonics sounds to enable Rickon with his reading…every morning, she had been woken by Rickon climbing into bed with her for a cuddle. Before they broke their fast, before they even climbed out of bed, Larra would go through the deck of cards with Rickon, quick and easy, holding up one card and waiting for him to make the sound. She would shuffle the cards, introduce them in new ways - after their breakfast, they would sit in the godswood with a basket Larra had filled the previous afternoon with things that had the same letters as the sounds they were focusing on in Rickon’s reading - feather, fern, fish, fan, frog, flower. She used to walk with Maester Luwin in the afternoons as she collected items for Rickon’s treasure-basket, as he had called it. And they would sit by the pond in the godswood, practicing their letter-formations, dragging a stick through the mud. It was the only way to get Rickon to learn: He would not sit in the schoolroom at a table. Maester Luwin had educated Bran: And he had let Larra implement creative strategies to coax Rickon into engaging with his own learning, understanding that the two boys were vastly different. Bran had always been very bright and curious, eager to learn: Rickon had to be coaxed and almost hoodwinked into being educated. As long as he was playing a game, and as long as he had Larra’s attention, he was happy - and happy to learn.

The cards were rippled in places, where Rickon had spilled his tea on them, or muddy, where they had been dropped in the godswood, and some of them were bent; one of them even had a hole punctured through the parchment - where Shaggydog had attempted to help pick up the dropped cards. These cards were precious; they were her mornings with Rickon, their special time together. They were his cuddles as they went through the cards, his tawny curls tickling her chin, his giggles, and his smiles when he went through all the cards without a single error, and they moved on to the simple stories Larra and Maester Luwin had written together to introduce simple sentences and more complex words.

She tucked the cards in a neat pile and tied the sapphire velvet ribbon around them, as she had every other time before, and tucked them in Rickon’s treasure-basket full of trinkets and toys and artefacts Larra had unearthed to reinforce his lessons… She stood up, bones aching, and went to sit with Sansa on the bed, which was utterly too soft for her, but she sat with her sister, and gazed down at Robb’s handsome face.

“I never imagined it would be Jon,” she said softly.

“Who could have?” Sansa sniffed, finally turning the page, to the last Larra had written about Robb.

Beneath She-Wolves and Winter Kings: The Starks of Winterfell open before Sansa, another leather-bound manuscript caught Larra’s notice. The leather was dyed red, and a three-headed dragon ouroboros was embossed on the cover, a title embellished in silver-leaf beneath it. She lifted the book into her own lap, tracing her fingers over the lettering that had taken her weeks to emboss, so particular was she about it.

“‘An Abbreviated History of the Dragon-Riders, Notorious Princesses and Terrible Kings of House Targaryen’,” she sighed. “Otherwise known as my family-history. Gods…”

Her heart squeezing, Larra grimaced and turned to the last page.

A portrait of Prince Rhaegar with Princess Elia Martell, their daughter Princess Rhaenys standing in her father’s lap, her tiny fingers wrapped around his forefingers for balance as she smiled, infant Aegon still in his swaddling, cradled in his mother’s arms…

And another portrait, this one of Rhaegar alone, grim-faced and exhausted, silver-gold hair pulled back from his face by a neat leather cord, a swathe of dark-gold across his jaw, a battle-beard that he had not worn at Harrenhall, slogging through the carnage of battle, dressed in serviceable black armour, battered and battle-scarred, the only concession to ornament the rubies embellishing the three-headed dragon on his gorget.

Larra stared at the painting.

Not because Rhaegar was handsome and exhausted and hated war.

But because, entering the throne-room of Dragonstone that first day he had arrived, grim, exhausted and unimpressed…Jon had never looked more like him.

“It is uncanny…” she murmured, frowning down at the portrait. She trailed her fingertips over Rhaegar’s face, as Sansa had Robb’s.

“What is?” Sansa asked, her voice rather thick, as she wiped her face.

“In my dreams…I saw their faces,” Larra said distractedly, still gazing at Rhaegar. She had his eyes. Exactly, his eyes. She had seen it, in the memories Bran had shown her during their journey home…but she hadn’t even realised it as she painted this picture, all those years ago… She was painting her father. Their father. And Jon…though Lyanna’s solemn beauty dominated their looks, Jon did resemble Rhaegar.

In their childhood, their resemblance to Lyanna was almost horrifying… As a man, and a seasoned warrior, Jon looked more like Rhaegar than he ever had before. She sighed, shaking her head, wincing, and her eyes stung. “My terrible family. This is Rhaegar, exactly as he was during the Rebellion.”

“He looks like Jon,” Sansa said quietly, and Larra nodded. Sansa saw it too - but then, she knew Jon the Lord Commander, Jon the King. Larra remembered Jon her twin-brother, Jon who had left Winterfell for the Wall, not even yet really a man…her first glimpse of him had been in the throne-room at Dragonstone, and even then…he could not see her.

Her eyes scanned the paintings. Elegant Elia, and her little babies… Larra’s older sister, her older brother…

She gasped, feeling as if someone had just punched through her gut with a burning lance.

Rhaenys had their father’s eyes. She had Larra’s eyes.

Larra turned the page, tracing her fingers over the gold-and-silver lettering pronouncing Rhaegar’s name, his unofficial title - The Last Dragon. The name by which the songs would always remember the tragic prince… Larra read what she had written, wincing. As with Lyanna, she had never been particularly forgiving of what she considered to be Rhaegar’s utter lapse of judgement in sneaking off with Lyanna when he should have been securing a regency to end his father’s tyranny - whether or not Lyanna had consented to it (and Larra being a fierce Northern she-wolf herself, never believed for a moment that Lyanna would have allowed herself to be carried off; she had believed Lyanna to be a selfish idiot who mucked it all up for everyone else). Larra read her entry on Rhaegar, from his birth during the Tragedy of Summerhall, to Duskendale, to the Tourney at Harrenhall…to his death at the Ruby Ford, his chest caved in by Robert Baratheon’s great war-hammer, his heart crushed, dying with Lyanna’s name on his lips.

She swallowed a lump in her throat, grimacing, and kneaded her chest with the heel of her palm at the sudden ache, uncovering the third painting connected to Rhaegar’s section… Lyanna.

Moonlight and shadows. Obsidian and snow. Lyanna’s serene, haunting beauty was captivating.

And, except for Lyanna’s grey eyes and her cascade of straight treacle-dark hair, Larra was Lyanna.

Larra had her father’s violet eyes, and her paternal grandmother’s curls.

Otherwise, it was uncanny. It was…horrifying.

It was the reason Father’s joy had always died at the sight of Larra’s smiles.

At her back, Larra reached for her hunting-knife, unsheathing it, gripped with horror and grief and an unaccountable sense of guilt, her own handwriting burning her skin like a brand of shame as she gazed down at the page, and she started to cut through the leather thongs binding the gathers inside the leather covers.

“What are you doing?” Sansa yelped, swatting at Larra’s hand, looking horrified. “Don’t ruin it!”

“It’s not right,” Larra said, stunned to hear her voice so hoarse, strained, her eyes burning. It wasn’t right. Sansa laid her hand gently on Larra’s, forcing her to still.

“Don’t ruin it,” she repeated gently.

“How could I think so horribly of him?” she asked hoarsely, sniffing.

“We all did.”

“Why did Father let us grow up believing the absolute worst of Rhaegar?”

“It was safer that way. You had no illusions,” Sansa said gently. The grip of sudden grief and madness and guilt eased, and Larra gentled, the grip on her knife loosening; Sansa took it from her, placing it gently on Larra’s bedside cabinet. She was a little more comfortable with holding one now, after her near-nightly lessons with Larra in the privacy of Sansa’s chamber.

“Do you know something…in all my life, I cannot remember Father ever saying a bad word about Rhaegar,” Larra said, squeezing her eyes. “Rhaegar, who…was indirectly responsible for the deaths of his father, brother and his sister…”

“I imagine it was a terrible sort of privilege,” Sansa said, her voice soft but thick, and Larra frowned curiously at her. “To raise Rhaegar and Lyanna’s children, who were born out of love - out of a desire for them to be born. To know that all that death, the War…was built upon a lie… That it was an unjust war. And the ones who truly suffered were the innocent - you, and Jon. You were left orphaned because of him, because of Robert.”

“He didn’t start the War…though it became his when people believed his love had been snatched by Prince Rhaegar,” Larra said gloomily. “Lyanna saw through Robert… She chose another, and Robert could not forgive Rhaegar for it… But it was Jon Arryn who called his banners, protecting Robert and Father from the King. He would not yield the boys he loved as his own sons… The real reason for the War became lost over time. It was Jon’s love for his surrogate sons that started the War. Robert never loved Lyanna; he lusted after her…he imagined he loved her ‘til the day she died, for she was the one woman in the world he could not have. She was a paragon to him, of all he thought he deserved… She was so much more…and Rhaegar knew it. He understood her true quality. That’s why she chose him… Because he was worthy of her. That’s why Father never said a word against him…because Rhaegar was a good man… It’s worse to know that he was good.”

“It’s a bloody mess,” Sansa said, giving Larra a glum look.

“It is indeed that,” Larra agreed, with a tremulous smile, feeling no humour. It was worse to know that Rhaegar had been good all along.

She gazed down at the book in her hands.

She had not left empty pages: She had not even included the two Targaryen exiles flung across the world, Viserys and Daenerys. In her mind, the Last Dragon was Rhaegar.

Larra still believed that.

She was a Northerner. She was a Stark, even if Father had denied her the name to protect her life. The wolf-blood flowed through her veins. She was as much a part of the North as it was a part of her.

And yet… Rhaegar was not the last Targaryen.

She wondered how he would have felt - how they would have felt, him and Lyanna - to know that Jon would rise from bastardy to become Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch and King in the North, uniting men against the Night King…

Rhaegar had loved songs. Lyanna had been raised on Northern legends. Larra wondered whether they would both have been simultaneously proud and horror-struck that Jon had endured a life out of legend.

We both have, she added, somewhat offhandedly.

Everything she had written about Rhaegar was wrong.

It was a disservice not just to him, but to Lyanna and Ned and Larra herself and Jon, not to correct things.

Larra sighed, and set aside the manuscript with its mangled cover, feeling guilty over her hastiness. She had nothing to replace Rhaegar’s chapter… But should she replace it? Everything she had written, she had believed - as the majority of Westeros did - to be accurate. Over twenty years after the fact, the truth had been revealed. Her previous writings now filled her with shame, because she could see the scorn with which she had written about Rhaegar: A scorn he did not deserve - not from her.

“Perhaps you can amend it,” Sansa said, tenderly smoothing out the parchment featuring Rhaegar’s war portrait, the one that showed his marrow-deep weariness and hatred of war, far more punishing and accurate than anything Larra had written about him. That portrait showed his true nature - and so did the family portrait, with his daughter on his knee, smiling and deeply affectionate, proud… Larra wondered what it would have been like, to know the deep and abiding love of a father unbridled by anything…

Now, Larra knew Father’s love for her had begun with his love for Lyanna, and yet it had always been strained and tarnished by that same love - and the presence of his wife.

Not for the first time, Larra wondered what it would have been like to grow up with a mother, her mother. She wondered now what their lives would have been like had Lyanna lived…had Rhaegar lived…

The last twenty years would not have happened, Bran had said.

There would certainly be no Dragon Queen turning her greedy gaze to the Seven Kingdoms, threatening to annihilate them all so she could nestle herself comfortably on a throne of fire and blood…

The Dragon Queen.

She bore the name of Targaryen yet Larra could not reconcile Daenerys with the dynasty carved out by their forefathers - because she had been separated from the culture of that extraordinary family just as effectively as Jon and Larra had. Daenerys had risen on her own, yet had only risen because of her dragons - and Larra did not believe Daenerys was anything without them.

And Daenerys did not plan a restoration so much as a total conquest of sovereign nations that had effectively and irrevocably cast off three centuries of her family’s oppression.

Rickard and Brandon Stark had been the last spark to ignite the wildfire that saw House Targaryen destroyed with fire and blood.

“I shall make it up anew,” Larra declared tiredly. Rhaegar deserved better. And Daenerys Targaryen’s conquest needed to be recorded.

She would start with Daenerys Stormborn’s birth, nine moons after the Sack of King’s Landing, at Dragonstone; her marriage to Khal Drogo; her collusion with her horse-lord husband to murder her brother the Beggar King…the birth of the dragons in the Dothraki Sea, and everything that had happened since - everything Larra had witnessed in Bran’s memories, saving the people of Slavers’ Bay from their savage ways, an imperialist, the pride of her Valyrian forefathers…

Perhaps Larra would compose a unique manuscript purely to record the rise of the Mother of Dragons…and her descent…

That was the thing about flying, she knew, from nursing the dire-eagle all those years ago and watching it test its healing wings and take to the air. There came a point where the creature could fly no higher…when it inevitably had to fall - either back to safety, or to its death. Sometimes they were snatched by unexpected air-currents, flinging them off-course.

Dragons were no different. Even they had their limits.

“Larra… Look what I’ve found!” Sansa beamed fondly, and she showed Larra a very slim volume that Larra had created on her own, without Maester Luwin overseeing the process. It was a very slim manuscript, with a Braavosi sword burned on the plain wooden cover. “Do you remember this? I’d forgotten… It was our favourite…”

Larra found herself smiling, taking the book from Sansa. “The Princess Bride…”

“I remember Arya was so disappointed when you asked me for the title; then you asked her for the hero… A pirate,” Sansa said, beaming, clicking her tongue fondly at the memory - and their sister’s tomboyish nature - and Larra smiled. “Truest love and sword-fights.”

“The makings of every good story,” Larra said softly. She took the slim book, opening the dainty clasp, and flicked through the pages. It was a very simple story, not highly detailed - but it was theirs. Hers, Sansa’s, Arya’s - and the boys’ too, even the older ones. It was a story Larra had created, first for her sisters, and then her brothers had fallen in love with it. But it was clear it had been written by a novice, more time spent on the illustrations; the story itself had always varied in the retelling, Larra remembered. “Hmm…”

“What?”

“It could be improved,” Larra said fondly, gazing at the painting of the Dread Pirate, and another of the Princess Bride in her exquisite golden gown.

“Well, we loved it,” Sansa said, smiling fondly, and Larra chuckled.

“I know. Even Rickon adored it. The Dread Pirate duelling with the Braavosi swordsman,” Larra sighed. “He asked if Hodor was the Strong Man - and if I was the Princess, going to be taken away to marry a prince in a foreign land… I said yes: Prince Oberyn the Red Viper. He raged and bawled for days, thinking I was going to be taken from him. He would not forgive me for teasing him.” Larra’s smile turned tremulous, her eyes smarting. She sniffed, her smile brightening. “Until I brought him a treacle sponge pudding in secret, and between us we ate every single crumb…” She pinched her eyes, sniffling, her nose and throat burning, overwhelmed. “I never used to cry at all.”

“You haven’t had years to reconcile their deaths…as I have,” Sansa said with a gentleness that was surreal to hear from her now. “And I wept…”

“You wept…but you weren’t allowed to grieve,” Larra said succinctly, eyeing Sansa’s black mourning clothes. Now, she had the freedom to mourn, to grieve their loved ones - and themselves. What they had survived was nothing to scoff at.

“Read it to me, like you used to?” Sansa said gently, eyeing the book.

“You want me to?” Larra asked, and Sansa settled back against the embroidered bolster-pillow, cradling an old doll Larra had made years ago. Larra sat cross-legged at the end of the bed, glanced over at her sister and smiled. And she began, as she had begun every telling: “’The Princess Bride. Chapter One: The Most Beautiful Woman in the World’…”

She read the story, in its simplest form. And as she did so, the adventure she had imagined came to life in her mind for the first time in years. Long after Sansa had retired to change for an evening with the nobility in the great hall, Larra sat in her chamber, embellishing and improving the story of the Princess Bride in her mind, her fingers itching for a stylus and her paint-set. The little story she had created for her siblings - one of so many - was expanded and embellished, improved and revised, and she started to imagine the motivations and backstories of the characters - her soft-spoken Braavosi, in particular, who thirsted for vengeance, the most masterful swordsman in the world; the sweet giant; the calm tenacity of the elegant princess; the devotion of her hero; the sheer repugnance of the handsome prince.

The characters were all people she had loved in her own life: The humour and wit she gave them was her own.

It made her happy to think of her story, and her characters, and to write the notes down, and to anticipate telling the story to other little children. It gave her something to focus on, rather than drift through the shadowed corridors of Winterfell at all hours when she did not sleep for dread of never waking.

Her mind came alive with the story of the Princess Bride and her pirate-hero, a sweet giant and a chivalrous, vengeful swordsman, a story of miracles and intrigues and the deepest and most abiding love. Of grit, and of hope.


By the time the caravan of wagons and wheelhouses was sighted over the moors two days later, the first chapter of the original version of The Princess Bride was stuffed with inserts and notes on scraps of paper, all documenting the flurry of ideas and improvements Larra had thought up for her characters and her story.

She was excited to share them.

They saw the Manderly colours flying, but no Lannister lions - except those inlaid into the polished sides of the two wheelhouses that trundled laboriously over the moors. Larra could never understand wheelhouses - with so many jolts and lurches, surely it would be more comfortable to ride? More wagons trailed behind, lots of them, and Manderly soldiers marched behind them with spears and shields.

As the Lannister wheelhouses drew to a stop, Larra and Sansa met in the courtyard, which was bustling with people all devoted to their daily chores - the everyday running of the castle, alongside siege-preparations for the war. The days were very much shorter than they were all used to, night falling barely the fifth hour after midday now, and the torches and braziers had all been lit so the work could continue. The moon was bright tonight, though, which also helped, and limned everything with silver, making the fresh snow glimmer and glisten, and made their faces glow. There was just enough light, with the torches and braziers and moonlight, to keep working, at least for a couple of hours until supper - at which time the torches and braziers were doused, heedful that their wood supply was not unlimited. They did not insist that people worked through the night: Exhausted soldiers did not make an effective army. And they had to go on under the assumption that battle could commence at any moment. They all needed the strength to endure the storm.

Several people glanced up, gaping at the lions emblazoned on the sides of the wheelhouse as they flashed in the torchlight - and at the copper-skinned riders who guarded the wheelhouses, each of them carrying cruel arakhs and curved bows, their long braids oiled, tinkling with tiny silver bells, wearing shaggy furs that left their arms mostly bare, revealing rippling muscles. Their horses were very fine, and the natural riders among them took note of the patterned blankets beneath the Dothraki-style saddles, which were smaller by far than the designs favoured in Westeros. Marching on the outside of each rider was a soldier in gleaming black leather and black linen, wearing a spiked helmet that made them resemble beetles, each carrying two swords, a shield and spear. They were not dressed for the winter, but Unsullied had been trained to ignore discomfort. They were not uniform in their appearance beneath their helmets, the way the Dothraki were all copper-skinned with dark almond-shaped eyes and coarse black hair - some of the Unsullied were silver-haired Lyseni, some Ghiscari, some Summer Islanders, some had a Westerosi look to them, and some had the look of Dothraki. What made them uniform was their training. It had brutalised the individuality out of them: They had been trained to understand that to act alone was dangerous.

They had orders from their mistress.

Even over the noise of the courtyard, they could hear squabbling - a child crying, and the voice of a boy on the cusp of manhood, a woman speaking in a foreign tongue in frustration, high-pitched squabbling.

 “Well…here they are,” Sansa sighed, standing a little straighter.

“Easy,” Larra warned gently, as Sansa’s features turned near-glacial. She looked queenly and imposing. “They’re frightened, tired little girls. Don’t punish them for their relatives.” Sansa sighed, glancing at Larra.

“It reminds me of her arrival,” Sansa admitted, looking uncomfortable, as two Unsullied snapped to attention and unfolded the steps below the door of each wheelhouse.

“It may look similar…but it is far from the same situation,” Larra said quietly, as others gathered at the edges of the courtyard - as much to witness the legitimate Dothraki screamers and Unsullied soldiers as the expensive wheelhouses emblazoned with lions. “This time, the North is strong.”

A woman with a dimpled, cheerful face sighed with relief as she climbed down the steps, her embroidered skirts shimmering beneath a heavy woollen shawl trimmed with fur, draped elegantly around her shoulders. She tucked a curtain out of the way, and held her hand out; a little paw appeared, covered in a woollen mitten, and a tired, wan little face followed. A little girl clambered down the steps, one of the middling girls, Larra recognised. She was followed by another, this one very tiny, who was passed out of the door by a woman with lustrous dark eyes, dressed elegantly but not particularly warmly, with a silk shawl patterned with sunspears draped around her head like a cowl. The little girl - the youngest of the Lannisters - was red-faced and screaming, great fat tears dripping down her sodden cheeks, hiccoughing and choking on her sobs, and she looked absolutely exhausted.

“Oh, dear,” Larra tutted softly, flinching as Rickon’s wrathful tantrums flickered through her memory, loosening something she had tucked into her belt in anticipation, as another little girl - this one unfamiliar to her, with shimmering hair that glowed silver in the moonlight, her clothing far less rich than the other girls - slipped down the steps. There was a scuffle, and a boy on the cusp of manhood briefly tussled at the doorway with the eldest of the Lannisters.

“Oi! Cissa!” the boy grunted, as she slipped back into the wheelhouse, freeing the doorway - only to shove the boy down the steps. He fell haphazardly, hitting the wooden steps, and with a growl, he picked up a handful of muddy slush, flinging it backwards at the girl, who squealed and ducked away as she slipped down the steps.

“Cadeon!” she squealed irritably, her face drawn in annoyance, swiping the sludge off her skirts, and she reached out to shove his shoulder as he blocked the foot of the steps, and her path. Eventually, she shoved her way past in a flurry of heavy skirts and shimmering blonde hair, while the boy - Cadeon - smirked insolently, sprawled at the foot of the steps in the sludge, an elbow resting against a step, eyeing the girl up as she shook her long braid back and gazed imperiously at him.

The other wheelhouse emptied, a copper-skinned woman stepping down first, her vibrant eyes wide with apprehension as she gazed around the courtyard.

“I recognise her,” Sansa murmured, and Larra looked closer.

“The Lhazareen khaleen from Vaes Dothrak,” Larra said softly, glancing at her sister. The young widow whose khal had broken her ribs after delivering him a daughter at the age of thirteen. She had been the youngest in the dosh khaleen - and was now one of Daenerys Targaryen’s ladies-in-waiting. Larra exchanged a glance with her sister, as the other little girls slipped out of the wheelhouse, looking sore and exhausted.

The three women looked highly relieved to be out of the confinement of the wheelhouses, especially as the youngest girl continued to scream.

Larra walked forward, as the two groups converged uncertainly. Brandon had prepared them only insomuch as he had told them where the women had come from - one from Dorne, one from Volantis, one from Vaes Dothrak. The elegant one was Nymeria Sand, the Red Viper’s dangerous daughter born of a noblewoman from one of the most ancient families of Old Volantis; the one with the pretty eyes was the khaleen; and the dimpled one with sharp glittering eyes and a cheerful disposition was the former bed-slave from Volantis. Her freedom had been bought: She still wore the mark of her enslavement in the form of the teardrop tattoo beneath her eye. Lest she ever forget. Her long earrings glittered as they swung about her face, glancing around and adjusting her fur-trimmed shawl as she bent to try and coax and coo at the little girl, as two of the Lannisters converged on her to try and do the same.

Sansa approached Nymeria Sand, the most elegant and most dangerous of the women. Larra turned to the khaleen, attempting in Dothraki, “I greet you, khaleesi.” There was no way to say ‘welcome’ in the Dothraki language. But it was a respectful acknowledgement, at least, and the woman’s face - she was older than Larra, by several years, though she was still young, with extraordinary beauty because of her deep copper skin and vivid pale-blue eyes - lit up with appreciation that Larra had made an attempt.

“My lady,” she said, just as uncertainly, and cast a sidelong look at Nymeria Sand before attempting a curtsy. Larra smiled, and sank down onto the ground, heedless of the sludge, to gently draw the tiniest of the girls to her - the one still hiccoughing and sobbing.

“Leona,” she said tenderly, and the two girls clustered around her froze, startled that she knew the baby’s name. She reached out to a pile of fresh snow, melting some in her palms, and wiped the tiny girl’s flushed red face. The cold shocked her, but it also cleansed her face, cooling her flushed skin and wiped away the evidence of her despair. Larra gently stroked her rounded little cheeks, and her tiny chin, wiping the last of her perfect tears as they dripped from her long curling lashes, cradling her tiny face in her hands, and leaned forward slowly, to give the little girl a tender kiss on the lips, before gathering her up in her arms and tucking her against her chest, holding her close, allowing her calm and her heat to wash over her, to let her melt into the warmth of an embrace that was deeply maternal, a protective cocoon.

Larra had held herself together for many days after they learned of Father’s execution. She had to, for Bran, and for Rickon, who had wept and raged and run away.

Larra’s first memory of being held, as if by a mother, was when Osha had found her, days later, on the verge of utter collapse, so deeply wounded by the news of Father’s death. Osha had given her the safe space and support to shatter. She had wrapped herself around Larra, holding her together for as long as it had taken Larra to put the shattered pieces back into place.

Osha had been Larra’s only experience of a fierce and abiding maternal love toward her - a wildling woman from the True North had become everything Larra had always bitterly wished the godly Lady Catelyn should have been.

Osha was the only mother’s love Larra had ever known - and treasured it still.

Larra had been nearly an adult by then: this tiny girl still had the look of a toddler, she was so tiny, just turned four, barely over a foot tall with perfect doll-like curls and wide green eyes damp with tears, and no-one had held her since her mother was burned before her eyes. All this little girl knew was that she was surrounded by strangers, her mother was gone, and no-one had taken responsibility for her care.

No-one cared.

She sighed, holding the tiny girl close, and kissed her gorgeous curls, and tiny fingers gripped at her leather armour, sighing heavily as she rested her head against Larra’s shoulder, her long eyelashes tickling Larra’s neck.

“Leona, there’s someone who’s been waiting for you,” she said gently, and the tiny girl whimpered. Larra loosened the cloth doll she had tucked into her belt, and Leona wriggled, sniffling, raising her head curiously. “This is Vaidence. She’s all on her own and she’s very frightened…she desperately wants someone to love her.”

Tiny Leona gazed at Larra, her vibrant eyes fringed with long, curling lashes damp with unshed tears, and a calmness seemed to replace her uncertainty, as yearning warmed her face. Larra raised the doll, smiling, and Leona showed her perfect pearly teeth as she smiled, reaching out fingers still deliciously dimpled, to stroke the doll’s yarn hair. Larra whispered conspiratorially to her, “Do you think you could take care of her for me?”

It wasn’t a big doll, barely longer than her hand; Larra had sewn it years ago out of scraps, stuffed with wool, to re-enact some of her stories for Rickon. She had even sewn a wardrobe of costumes for her to match the stories.

Leona nodded, her enviable curls bouncing at the nape of her neck and at her ears, and she clasped the doll tenderly to her chest, as if it was the most precious thing in the world. She popped her thumb into her mouth, rested her head against Larra’s shoulder, and sighed, relaxing utterly into Larra’s embrace.

The other girls had been watching her, some with eyes narrowed, assessing, others with a yearning that was utterly familiar to Larra; one stared blatantly at the weapons belted at her waist, her lips parted and eyes wide with intrigue and delight. Larra recognised her as the one who had vomited on Daenerys Targaryen’s boots at the Lion Culling.

She stood, tiny Leona clamped to her chest, and approached the cluster of girls, who looked simultaneously filled with dread and yearning.

“Look at all these tired little faces,” she sighed, clicking her tongue gently. “You’ve had a very long journey.”

“Altheda vomited all the way from Dragonstone,” said one, the middle girl.

“Which is Altheda?” Larra asked, and a shy little thing sighed heavily, gazing at the tips of her boots just visible under the hem of her skirts, which were indeed stained with vomit.

“She managed to get everyone,” said the boy with the vivid pale-blue eyes and a few wicked scars. He was in that in-between place, no longer a boy but not yet a man either, stretched out and awkward, starting to grow into a man’s body - and he would be a handsome man, Larra could tell, with fierce features and a wicked, ironic glint in his cutting blue eyes.

“Did you?” Larra asked her coaxingly, and the little girl’s eyes filled with tears of humiliation. Larra smiled warmly at her, cupping her chin to tenderly tilt her face upwards, so they could meet each other’s gaze. Larra twinkled at her. “Then you won the game, Altheda. Did your cousins squeal?”

The little girl’s lips twitched, as the boy grinned.

“They did,” he snickered, his vivid pale-blue eyes searching her face with almost indecent intensity.

“Well, you can give it a rest now, Altheda,” Larra told her gently. “No more voyages or agonising long journeys to upset your tummy. So…I’m enjoying my delicious cuddle with Leona…but who else do we have here, Altheda? Would you introduce me to your cousins?”

Shyly, Altheda glanced at the girl beside her who had enormous blue eyes. Altheda had the daintiest lisp, and gazed demurely up at Larra through her golden lashes, telling her, “This is Lady Delphine.”

Delicate Delphine dipped an elegant curtsy. With a tender smile, Larra reached out and tucked a rope-twist behind Delphine’s ear; it had come loose from her hairstyle. In fact, all the girls’ hair looked worse for wear after their long journey. Only tiny Leona, whose curls bobbed about her neck, and the eldest, regal Narcisa, who had tucked her long hair into a simple braid, seemed unrumpled. Larra leaned in and gave Delphine a gentle kiss on the cheek.

“I am Lady Calanthe Lannister,” said the next girl, speaking for herself, raising her chin just a little, her pale gold hair loose about her shoulders and shimmering. “But the King called me the Lioness.”

“Did he then?” Larra smiled.

“And this is Lady Crisantha Lannister, but she doesn’t talk anymore,” Calanthe declared, gazing up at her cousin. Larra turned her gaze to Crisantha. She had never seen a more exhausted, more despondent creature in her life; it was as if all the life had been drained from her, leaving an exquisite shell behind. She stood with her shoulders drooping, her unseeing gaze on the ground, and the billows of golden curls Larra had seen that day of the Lion Culling now fell limp around her shoulders.

“Crisantha… Crisantha, look at me, dearest,” Larra coaxed tenderly, and she reached out to cup Crisantha’s chin, lifting her head. Crisantha’s eyes glowed like molten gold in the torchlight, but they seemed hollow, devoid of any expression - a stark contrast to the glittering emerald eyes of her bold cousin Calanthe. Larra stroked her cheek and sighed heavily, and leaned in, looping an arm around her tiny waist to tuck the unresponsive Crisantha close.

Murmuring in her ear, Larra promised her, “I’m going to do my utmost to make you feel safe enough that you’ll return to us, Crisantha.” She brushed a kiss against Crisantha’s cheek, gave her a tender squeeze, and released her.

Next was a little girl Larra did not recognise from the Lion Culling, and doing some quick counting, Larra knew she was not one of the Seven.

“This is Neva,” said the boy, standing behind the little girl with hair that glowed like crushed pearls in the moonlight, her dreamy lavender eyes glowing in the torchlight. Her hair was drawn back into a simple braid, a purple velvet ribbon tying the ends, and she reached up with her thumb and forefinger, delicately rubbing the expensive fabric.

“Hello, Neva. You’ve such a lovely name,” Larra said, smiling warmly, as little Neva tucked herself against Cadeon's legs.

“Neva is my sister,” said the boy. “And I’m Cadeon.”

“They have no other name,” said a quiet voice, belonging to the eldest of the Lannister girls. Her pale green eyes flicked over Cadeon’s handsome face, his scarred mouth.

“Yes, we do. It’s Waters.”

“That’s the name given to bastards born in the Crownlands.”

“It’s our father’s name,” snapped Cadeon, scowling at the girl.

“He’s not old enough to be your father,” said the eldest girl, frowning bemusedly.

“He is our father if we say he is our father. We are a family,” Cadeon said heatedly. “He is my father, and Neva is my sister. And nothing a spoiled, stuck-up bitch like you can say will change that.”

“That’s enough,” Larra said, with a stern look - at both of them. Cadeon flicked his gaze to her, wary; the girl looked faintly embarrassed. “I’ll not have that language, thank you. We’ve enough to be dealing with, without flinging nastiness at each other.” She gave Cadeon a quelling look, and the boy frowned at her, though relented. She turned her gaze to the last of the Lannisters - a little dumpling tucked behind the skirts of the eldest.

She squatted down, Leona still cuddled against her chest, to smile coaxingly at the little girl tucked behind her cousin’s skirts. Huge eyes gazed back at her.

“Leona, who’s this?” Larra whispered, and Leona gazed up at her, sucking her thumb complacently. Those huge eyes glanced from Larra to Leona in her arms.

“It’s Rosamund,” said Calanthe with a gentle sigh.

“Hello, Rosamund,” Larra coaxed. She smiled warmly, holding her arm open to her, as the little girl’s lip started quivering. “Would you like a cuddle?”

Eyes damp, the little girl let out a whimper and tucked herself into Larra’s embrace with a sob of relief.

“Dear me!” Larra tutted, rubbing Rosamund’s back as she burrowed close, and gave her soft blonde hair a kiss. “You’re shivering so hard, you’re making my teeth rattle!” She gave her gentle kisses, on her hair, her neck, her cheek, anywhere she could get to as she squeezed Rosamund close, and Rosamund whimpered softly and clung on, her fingernails biting the leather of Larra’s armour. For a little while, she squatted in the sludge cuddling two orphaned little lion-cubs. She gave Rosamund a lingering squeeze, and straightened up; Rosamund tucked herself against Larra’s skirts, as Larra stroked her hair gently.

She approached the eldest, who was truly an exquisite beauty, with pale-green eyes and shimmering golden hair falling to her bottom, dressed in the Westerlands styles adopted from Targaryen court dress, her heavy velvet gown trimmed with fur. She was tall and incredibly regal already, exquisite, tiny breasts budding against her heavy gown, just beginning to blossom into her beauty.

Narcisa glanced at Larra, bashful and proud at once, her eyes darting to Cadeon as she blushed delicately - embarrassed to have been squabbling like brats in front of her - and Larra sighed, approaching her. Narcisa’s pale-green gaze flitted uncertainly to Larra’s face and away, as if she could not bear to meet Larra’s eye, either from fear or embarrassment. She reached out, tucking an arm around the girl’s incredibly slender waist and drew her into a gentle embrace.

“When there are not so many eyes on us,” Larra murmured, “and you don’t feel you have to act the lady in front of everyone, we shall have a proper talk, you and I.” She released Narcisa, who looked uncertain but less alarmed, and Larra reached up to tuck a loose strand of hair behind her ear. She sighed, leaning her forehead gently against Narcisa’s, leaving her no choice but to hold her gaze. It was a quiet and gentle moment, intimate; they did not know each other. And yet, Larra knew this girl. “It is no easy thing, to be the one left behind to look after all the rest.”

Narcisa’s eyes shimmered, and Larra cupped her cheek tenderly. Larra gave her a tremulous smile, the sorrow in Narcisa’s eyes calling to her own.

She noticed Narcisa’s gaze flit to the side, just once, but her body-language changed, going rigid, her high cheekbones hollowing with dread as she gazed past Cadeon. Larra followed her gaze, watching two of the Dothraki who had dismounted, lazily swinging their arakhs as they stared with a predatory greed at Narcisa, Crisantha and Delphine. True fear gripped Narcisa, her breathing turned shallow, pupils blown wide, and Larra recognised it.

Larra met the Dothraki’s gaze - and held it, ferocious and implacable.

“Cadeon?” Larra said softly, beckoning him to her with a curl of her finger, and the boy nodded, frowning hesitantly, but walked up to her. She murmured in his ear, still watching the Dothraki, “Were those Dothraki men ever alone with the girls?”

“No,” Cadeon said, and gave Larra a filthy look that spoke volumes. “I made sure of it, and so did Lady Nym.” He rolled his eyes with faint amusement, “Lady Nym’s been teaching Calanthe knife-skills. As if her bare teeth aren’t enough to do real damage. None of the others’ll dare look at a blade let alone use it.”

Cadeon watched her carefully as she maintained her stoic glare at the Dothraki, implacable, unblinking - unimpressed. Until they looked away, unnerved by a woman who was fearless in the face of them.

“Aren’t you afraid of them?” Cadeon asked quietly. “They’re killers and rapers.”

“I’ve faced and killed worse than Dothraki,” Larra said coldly.

Cadeon frowned at her.

“You’re not kissed-by-fire,” he said softly, frowning at her, making her blink in bemusement. “The King said his sister is tall and beautiful and terrifying.”

“And I am all those things?” asked Larra, raising an eyebrow.

“Yes,” Cadeon answered sincerely, frowning up at Larra in quiet awe, and Larra wondered how she looked, through the children’s eyes. She knew the Northmen and Knights of the Vale and even the Free Folk were wary of her - that a single look could silence the hall and make people mindful. “You’re not kissed-by-fire. But you look just like him.”

“I should think I do…” Larra smiled softly. “Jon is my twin-brother.” Cadeon’s eyebrows rose. There came a soft gasp from Calanthe, who was pointing across the courtyard at one of the wagons. Not the wagon, Larra realised, but Ghost, who had appeared, glowing in the moonlight, his long tail wagging happily as he nuzzled and bumped against a plump man climbing down from the bench.

“The White Wolf,” Calanthe whispered, her eyes widening. “It is true, the King did ride into battle on the back of his giant white direwolf!”

“I thought the King could change into a white wolf,” Cadeon frowned.

“Who says he can’t,” Larra said, glancing at Cadeon, smirking delicately at the look on his face.

“Dragons and men turning into fucking direwolves…” he muttered under his breath, and Larra reached out to gently clip him round the ear, raising an eyebrow in warning. He gave her a slightly rueful smile, rubbing his ear. Ghost’s shadow abandoned him, to prowl closer, and as one the little girls - and even Cadeon - collectively withdrew as Last Shadow scented the air, and Narcisa’s skirts, before nuzzling Rosamund tucked against Larra’s legs, tenderly licking her face, before bumping against Calanthe and licking the palms of Delphine and Altheda, before pausing before Crisantha, gazing up at her sorrowful face, and snorted softly, before rubbing up against Crisantha, whining softly, and padded over to Larra.

The children stared at her in awe, as the horses whickered and whinnied in fright at Shadow’s nearness.

Larra smiled. “Now, I know all of your names. My name is Alarra Snow. You may call me Larra.”

“Are you the King’s sister?”

“I am indeed,” Larra smiled. “I know that you were at Dragonstone together with him; I should like to hear all about it, for I have not seen Jon in years.”

“Why not?”

“He went to join the Night’s Watch when we were sixteen,” Larra said regretfully.

“You’ve not seen him since then?”

“I caught glimpses - two of them - in the years since,” Larra said. “Perhaps I can tell you that story, after you tell me about Dragonstone… In a moment, shall we go up to your chamber? There is good rich stew and we’ve tucked warming-pans in the beds so they’ll be deliciously cosy and warm. In the morning, after you’ve all had a good long sleep, I shall take you to the baths. How does that sound?”

“We…” Narcisa gazed at Larra, her eyes sliding to Sansa, conversing with Nymeria Sand and Lady Tisseia while an Unsullied soldier translated for the khaleen and the Dothraki. “Cadeon and I have letters for Lady Stark. For her and no-one else. They are from the King. He entrusted them to us.”

“Well, then,” Larra smiled. “We’d best get them delivered, and then we can go inside into the warm.”

“Ghost!” a voice laughed, and Larra glanced over at Shadow’s brother, who was silent as ever but fussing over the man by the wagon as he lifted a small boy from the bench. Ghost’s tail was wagging madly, and he reared up to lick the little boy’s face; the child giggled, reaching to grab Ghost’s ears. A dark-haired woman in a fine woollen dress and fur-trimmed, richly-line cloak climbed down from the wagon, and Larra stared, her eyes honing in on the man.

“SAM!”

A laugh rippled from her, as the man jolted and turned, setting the child down in the sludge so that Ghost could lick his face excitedly.

For a second, Samwell Tarly stared across the courtyard, his gaze flitting over everyone. Then his eyes landed on Larra. And he gaped. He jolted as if struck by lightning, and a smile spread across his kind face - a tremulous smile of sheer disbelief.

“Larra!” he cried, as Ghost nuzzled against a young woman who was dressed prettily with braids in her hair; her son reached for her hand, grinning and giggling as Ghost licked his ears, tickling him.

Larra hurried over to them, Leona still cuddled against her, Rosamund and Shadow trailing after her, and Larra beamed delightedly as Sam offered her a tight hug, blinking dazedly as if suffering from a blow to the head.

“Sam. You look well,” Larra said, beaming.

“You look - alive!” Sam gaped, stunned, and Larra laughed. He stared at her, horrified but awed, his gaze roving over her face. “We thought…I desperately didn’t want you to go beyond the Wall… But here you are…and…and the others?”

“Bran is inside, by the hearth,” Larra said softly, her smile fading, “and Meera has returned to Greywater Watch.” Sam’s smile faltered, his face pinched with understanding.

“I’m dreadfully sorry,” he said earnestly.

“So am I…” Larra’s gaze rested on the girl, who was a woman now. “Hello, Gilly.”

“I didn’t… We thought…”

Larra’s eyes burned as she gazed down at the child clutching his mother’s hand, and Larra raised her fingers to her lips. Her voice was hoarse, when she said, “This is your son.”

Only seeing Sansa for the first time had struck her as fiercely with the sense of time truly passing. The last time Larra had seen Gilly, her son had been days old; they had fled the True North and its horrors, the White Walkers - Sam had killed the first, with the obsidian dagger. He had given them obsidian weapons, too, before letting them through the magic door through the Wall - though it had killed him to let them go, knowing what they were to face.

But here was Gilly’s baby, the infant Larra had once sung a lullaby to - as much to gentle the fussy newborn as to soothe Hodor, who had been upset by Bran’s ghost-stories about the Nightfort they had sheltered in.

Gilly’s son was a happy little boy with curling dark hair and a cheerful smile, chattering away as Ghost fussed over him, his tail wagging.

“This is Little Sam,” Gilly said, her smile proud, and Sam nodded, his eyes twinkling. Larra sank into a squat in front of the little boy.

“Hello, Sam,” she said softly. “You won’t remember me… I knew you when you had just been born... I’m very pleased to meet you again. I never thought I would.”

“However did you survive beyond the Wall?” Gilly asked, looking awestruck. Sam gazed at Larra, too.

Larra said softly, “I shall tell you my story, if you tell me yours. Where have you been?”

“In Oldtown.”

“Sam stole books from the Citadel.”

“I - “ Sam grimaced guiltily, as Larra raised her eyebrows.

“You were at the Citadel?” she breathed, awed. “What was it like?”

Sam beamed wistfully. “It was wonderful.”

“You hated it! All you ever did was moan!” Gilly declared.

“I disliked the maesters’ nasty attitudes,” Sam said, his tone fair, and Gilly smiled indulgently at him. “The archives themselves were magnificent.” Sam smiled at Larra. “I know I asked Jon to send me south, but I was useless to him there, I realised. So I’m here to help, in whatever way I can. Where is Jon?”

“He left for Dragonstone before we returned to Winterfell,” Larra sighed, and Sam faltered. He gazed at her.

“Does… He doesn’t know you’re alive. Oh, I’m so glad I shall be here to witness it when Jon sees you again. I hated telling Jon that I’d let you through the Wall… I felt like I’d let him down - I know I let you down, letting you go beyond… But you’re alive.”

Notes:

Reunions! I just love Sam. He’s just so earnest and gentle and brave and good and wise…

Also wanted to show the beginnings of a bond forming between Larra and each of the Lannister girls - and that Sansa will be a bit standoffish with them, her own trauma in King’s Landing still too fresh, but Larra is going to become something of a surrogate-mother to them that is founded on Larra never having had a mother herself. Also the continuity that she clips Rhysand round the ear for swearing, the same as Gendry does! I’m looking forward to writing more scenes with the children.

Chapter 33: Rhaegar's Revenge

Notes:

Hold onto your butts, you’re going to love this one.

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

33

Rhaegar’s Revenge

“How many people live here?”

“A million, or nearabouts,” Ser Davos said, and Jon exhaled a stunned breath, grimacing.

“More than the entire population of the North, crammed into a place smaller than Winterfell,” he said with a grim look. “When I was a boy, Maester Luwin taught us architecture and economics. Winter’s Town has been successful for millennia because it was planned, and expansions were carried out during the spring and summer years to prepare for the next winter when the North converged on Winterfell… Maester Luwin had visited King’s Landing; he said the city saw an explosion of population-growth as the Red Keep was completed, but no-one had thought to plan for where people would live outside of the castle.”

Jon frowned up at the Red Keep, thinking. It sounded very like Daenerys’ occupation of Dragonstone - she had claimed the castle and planted herself firmly on the jagged throne, and no-one thought of her followers until Jon had tasked Lord Tyrion with designing a Winter Town for the Dothraki, Meereenese and other freed-slaves who had followed Daenerys to Westeros - and been left to fend for themselves, the Queen having forgotten all her promises of a better world she intended to create for them.

The sails rippled in the wind, and Jon glanced up at them. The Stark sigil was bared proudly today, and they sailed into the harbour of Blackwater Bay, the direwolf figurehead of Winter snarling dangerously as they swept through the choppy dark-grey waters.

It was perhaps only the appearance of safety in numbers, but Jon was glad of even this fraction of the Northern fleet accompanying him, with the Greyjoys and the Tyrells, and several choice ships from the Targaryen fleet bringing Lord Tyrion to the mainland. Lord Tyrion was still in rather a state of agitation: Daenerys had, after all, gone inexplicably missing on the back of her dragons, and returned a week later on a ship with the King in the North, a wight, and one of her dragons injured.

Things on Dragonstone had been…tense upon their return.

Ironically, in their lady’s absence, the Queen’s Council had been able to work with efficiency and focus: They had gotten along far better without her, not that they would say so to her face. They didn’t need to, though: Jon saw it.

And he did his utmost to stay away from the Queen, remembering Gendry’s simple words that continued to bolster him: “It’s not you who should be feeling ashamed. And the only way to stop a bully is to stand up to them.”

Well, he could start standing up to the bully - after this summit.

On the return journey to Dragonstone, Daenerys had been given the captain’s cabin. And Jon had slept - tried to sleep - in one of the hammocks with the other men.

He had given the Queen no further opportunities to climb into bed and take what she wanted from him, and even though the air was cool, Jon flushed - with shame… It was one thing for Gendry to say it was not they who should be ashamed, because Jon felt ashamed.

That he did not have the freedom to deny her. Jon understood exactly what the dynamics were between them. He was in a precarious position: He needed Daenerys’ armies.

But he did not want her. Nor did he want her to believe this tentative alliance meant he would be in any way moved to bend the knee to her out of gratitude or obligation because she had committed her troops to a cause that served to protect not just his people but all people - including those she intended to conquer.

He frowned up at the Red Keep. This was where her family’s legacy had begun. King’s Landing - Aegon’s city. The throne he had created with dragonfire and the swords of those he conquered, thousands of them. Sansa had told Jon it was an ugly, unwieldy thing, the Iron Throne. Impractical, she had sneered, and Jon teased her, reminding her that she had once desired to perch beside it with little golden-haired babies cooing in her lap, the beloved Queen of the Seven Kingdoms. Queen Sansa. It even sounded right.

She would hate that Jon was here. He knew, sending the letter with Rhysand, that Sansa would be furious. That she would…would be afraid - for him.

Uncle Brandon and their grandfather had tortured and tormented and mutilated before death had blessedly claimed them. Summoned south by the Dragon Queen’s mad father.

The last man in their family to come south had died with his head on the executioner’s block - in front of Sansa.

Sansa had spent years navigating the treacherous political mire that was the royal court, and now that she had escaped it, Sansa was adamant about keeping the Northmen away from it by any means necessary.

To say relations between the Iron Throne and the North were hostile was underselling it.

But Jon was not Ned: And he had had to do his fair share of political manoeuvring. He was glad, though, that he did not arrive at King’s Landing alone. He was even more gratified that among the ships already moored were several from the Stormlands, the Arbour and the Westerlands. The ravens that had been sent out had gained traction, it seemed; there was even a ship from Oldtown, he thought, the figurehead of the ship nothing more or less than a maester’s chain, coiled and knotted, made of many dozens of different materials that glinted or shimmered in the light reflecting off the water as they passed. One gorgeous ship bore a figurehead of a beautiful woman with a long spear in one hand and a sun cradled in her other palm, both gilded. The Dornish. Their flagship was named Nymeria, and the name painted in gold sent a pang through Jon’s heart worse than any knife.

Arya, he thought, with a sigh, gazing up at the Red Keep. Sansa’s prison, for so many years. Not Arya’s, though: She had endured a very different fate - she had become a wanderer, just like her hero Nymeria. The last Gendry had seen of Arya, they had been in the Riverlands: But they had met here in King’s Landing, the day they took Father’s head.

Jon had one of his black brothers to thank for her escape from this city, though Jon had barely any recollection of the man Yoren, beyond him having a hearty laugh and a sensible if rough demeanour. He had been a good friend of Uncle Benjen’s, Jon remembered. What Gendry could recall of Yoren fit Jon’s limited memories of the man: He had been tough as old boots and dangerous enough to survive wandering the Seven Kingdoms the last twenty years recruiting for the Watch.

“Where’s the summit being held?” Jon asked quietly. He was acutely aware that the ravens sent out had named Jon, the King in the North, as the one who had called an armistice and invited the lords of Westeros to King’s Landing for a meeting of dire significance.

“According to Lord Tyrion, in the Dragonpit,” Ser Davos said, and his beard twitched as he added, his tone dripping with irony, “Fitting.”

“Cersei will have chosen the Pit as a perfect place to jibe Daenerys,” Jon said heavily, and Ser Davos nodded.

“Undoubtedly. You know this isn’t going to be about the wight so much as everyone airing their grievances and blaming each other for every wrong committed the last fifty years,” Ser Davos grunted, sounding tired already. Jon nodded.

“I know it,” he said quietly. “I’m just glad so many have responded to the ravens.”

“A chance to see the White Wolf and the Dragon Queen?” Ser Davos chuckled, and Jon gave him a look. Ser Davos gave him a measuring frown. “Are you alright?”

“Better, now that there’s some distance,” Jon admitted, sighing heavily, reaching up to rub his face in exhaustion. It was just past dawn, and he could hear the noise of the city drifting over the water as they approached the harbour. Ser Davos frowned steadily at him; Jon shrugged it off. “She got what she wanted; we have her armies.”

Ser Davos said nothing, just frowned steadily at him.

“What you gave her is not nearly all she wants, though, is it?” he said quietly. “Nor was it hers to just take.”

“You’ve been speaking with Gendry,” Jon said darkly.

“He thought it was something I might need to know about, as your advisor - and your friend,” Ser Davos said, and a look passed over his face that startled Jon - for a moment, Ned Stark was staring at him, his face full of anguish and concern. “Jon…you don’t have to do this.”

“That’s what Gendry said… But I do,” Jon said grimly, gazing back at Ser Davos. “Maester Aemon once asked me, if the day ever came when my father had to choose between honour and those he loved, what would he do.”

“And how did you answer?”

“I said my father would do what was right… Maester Aemon told me that love is the death of duty,” Jon said, Ygritte’s face flashing in his mind - but she looked more like Sansa than ever, and he winced. “I don’t quite agree. My duty is to those I love - it’s because I love them that I’ll do my duty by them. By everyone.”

Jon never forgot that he had ripped off the Lord Commander’s heavy cloak and was set to leave the Wall and the North forever, the day that Sansa had appeared at Castle Black. Regardless of all he knew, all he had done, everything he knew was coming, Jon had…had had enough. He was tired…so tired…

Jon’s love for Sansa had bolstered him - had strengthened his commitment to his duty.

His love had not been the death-knell for his duty. It had been a lightning-bolt striking him to remind him of what that duty was - and to whom.

Sansa had burned through his exhaustion, his…his despair. She had relit the embers; the Battle of the Bastards had seen the spark catch into a fury, burning through him - he had fought. He had not merely woken to endure every day: He had realised…no matter how often he questioned that he did, Jon lived. He was alive. He should be dead. He was going to fight for every stolen dawn.

He had been ready to give up. To give in.

Sansa hadn’t let him.

Her love - his love for her - had only strengthened his devotion to his duty.

Maester Aemon had been partially right. Ygritte had died because he had chosen his duty as a brother of the Night’s Watch over her: But it was because of his love for Sansa that Jon had not abandoned his duty to the North, to everyone.

She was the reason he was here today.

And she would be the reason he left this city alive. He had her guiding him; he had her to return home to.

Jon sighed. “How many Ironborn ships do you count?”

“Too many,” Ser Davos said grimly, his clever eyes flitting across the bay. The Iron Fleet - led by Euron Greyjoy, self-proclaimed King of the Iron Islands - littered the bay, and Jon felt the tension building between his shoulder-blades. “I’ve known this city under siege before. Their presence gives me the same feeling.”

“I do not understand Cersei allying with Euron Greyjoy,” Jon admitted. “Why ally for his ships if she’s not going to utilise their strength properly?”

“How so?”

“If I was Cersei, and had the Iron Fleet at my disposal,” Jon thought - and a warg to be my spy - “I would have found a way to provoke Daenerys to dispatching her armies to the mainland - and had the Iron Fleet waiting, to stop them. The Dothraki are out of their elements on the sea. As fierce as they are, the Ironborn are second-to-none when it comes to sea-warfare. I would have ensure the majority of Daenerys’ forces never made it to shore.”

“And her dragon?”

“Cersei is ruthless,” Jon mused. “She proved that with the Sept of Baelor. Her own kin were acceptable collateral when it came to destroying her enemies… She would sacrifice the Iron Fleet in a heartbeat if it split open a wound Daenerys could not easily heal.”

“She’d still have those dragons,” Ser Davos said, and Jon grunted. He felt that Daenerys would be more dangerous without her two armies - without the Unsullied and Dothraki to unleash, leaving nothing but her three dragons, all Aegon and his sisters had when they brought Westeros to its knees.

And yet…and yet Viserion was still healing. The Night King’s spear of ice had wounded Viserion - and though the ice had melted…Viserion was not healing. Not as he would from a normal spear-wound - not nearly as quickly as Drogon was healing from the wounds inflicted at the Ash Meadow. Viserion, the smallest and least vicious of the dragons - though that did not say much - was still suffering from lingering pain.

They could hurt: They could be killed.

And Jon imagined Cersei already planned to exploit that fact.

He glanced behind him. In the distance, some of the Targaryen fleet was just sailing into the Blackwater Bay. The Queen had decided she would arrive by air rather than by sea.

In spite of the injuries to two of her dragons, Daenerys had declared all three would accompany her to King’s Landing. As would her Dothraki screamers, and her Unsullied.

Larra used to love playing cards with Jon: She would spend hours painting them, filling each miniature picture with exquisite details, clues and hints at jokes only they understood. She invented games. And through their cyvasse campaigns with Maester Luwin’s guidance, they had both learned - never to show all their cards.

Her Dothraki, her remaining Unsullied, her three dragons - two of them injured, one visibly struggling to fly great distances, or at speed. All Daenerys had, put on display as a show of her strength.

And yet Jon knew the very great vulnerability of her armies. Her Unsullied were depleted; her Dothraki were undisciplined; and her dragons were wounded.

They could bleed.

It was…a relief, to Jon. Horrifying as the image was at the time, now, Jon could look back at Viserion’s injury by the Night King’s spear and know…the dragons were not invulnerable.

Therefore the Queen was not invincible. She was not a god. Not a horrifying figure from legend, implacable and immortal.

Just a girl, with two armies she had no idea how to truly command, and three dragons that were living creatures just as any other - and like every other creature in the world, could be killed.

She had wagered her entire conquest on them.

Take them away…what was Daenerys Stormborn of House Targaryen, the First of Her Name, 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 left with?

A self-aggrandising name.

Strip it all away…Jon could breathe a little more easily. He appreciated that her armies could be destroyed, that her dragons could bleed - and that without them, she was nothing but a name.

She was just a person.

Jon felt lighter than he had in days, as they trudged toward the Dragonpit, turning over the details of his epiphany about Daenerys’ power. The illusion of her power over him.

She only had power over him if he yielded it to her.

He hated that she had crawled into his bed, and put him in that position of utter vulnerability - to have no choice. Jon found it extraordinary that a person who named herself the Breaker of Chains so easily exerted her own power over another who was in a position seemingly more vulnerable than her own…

Of everything he had heard of Daenerys Targaryen’s exploits in Essos, what he had witnessed at Dragonstone, and how she had conducted herself in the Ash Meadow the day of the Lion Culling, her climbing into his bed to force him to bed her - knowing full well the underlying political tensions, asserting herself over him while he was powerless to deny her - had cemented Jon’s understanding of her true nature. Even though she lied to herself about who she was, Jon saw it with punishing clarity.


He sighed grimly, frowning up at the Dragonpit looming above them, casting shadows across the city as the pale, hot sun beat down, whipping a cold wind off the Blackwater that brought noisome odours from the slums when the breeze blew the wrong way - the city’s foul stench was so thick, Jon could almost chew it, and he didn’t wonder about the wealth of heavily-scented plants and shrubs lining the gravel walkways through the gardens that led up the hill on which the Dragonpit stood like a broken crown, and he wandered between unfamiliar olive trees, their leaves glimmering silver-green in the sunlight, noticing more and more of the city’s higher-ranking nobility and merchant lords lingering among the terraced gardens full of white lavender, purple sage, myrtle trees and nodding penstemons. The sun-baked red roofs of the city grew smaller as he strode up Rhaenys’ Hill, and the air became cooler, crisper and free of the stench of the city below. 

It certainly smelled like a million people were crammed into the tiny space, and when Jon paused to turn and take in the view, he could see the great manses with their cultivated gardens giving way to winding streets choked with buildings piling on top of each other, and the slums tumbling toward the gates, and stretching beyond them. A million people, forced to live on top of each other… He cast a scornful look at the Red Keep. Aegon may not have planned for the city to erupt around his castle, but his successors had certainly had the time to invest in designing a city worthy of its people.

He glanced ahead up the gravel path, and back behind him - toward Obara Sand, whose angry eyes had focused on the rich ochre silks and glimmering golden sunspears emblazoned on the banners and cloaks of the guards marching ahead. Four of them carried a fine litter, also emblazoned with the sunspear of Dorne.

The Dragonpit had been largely left untouched since the Dance of Dragons: The sandy floor, the fire-blasted walls, the broken domed ceiling. A decrepit ruin, all that was left of a legacy of fearsome power.

Cersei had chosen well for the summit’s location, Jon thought. She had chosen the place that at once represented the might of the Targaryen dynasty - and its ultimate downfall. The same reason for both: Dragons.

The Dragonpit had been prepared for a summit, with the sandy floor cleared of debris and swept, with raised pavilions newly-built, decorated fit for royalty, draped in House colours and clustered with potted plants, all to disguise the lingering scent of the city. His own pavilion was draped not with a banner of white with the grey Stark direwolf emblazoned on it, but rather the other way around - pale-grey silk on which a snow-white direwolf was stitched, a nod both to Jon’s nickname and a snide reminder that he was forbidden his father’s sigil due to his birth as a bastard - and Cersei remembered. There were several chairs set aside, all high-backed and unadorned.

He could not help notice, however, that the pavilion draped in his colours was somewhat larger than the one dedicated to Daenerys’ court, which was draped in black silk emblazoned with a ruby-red three-headed dragon. There were also no chairs beneath the Targaryen awning.

There was also no pavilion for House Tyrell, nor any of the Lords of the Reach, the Stormlands, the Vale or the Riverlands. Only House Lannister, House Stark, House Martell and House Targaryen.

The grandest pavilion was drenched with Lannister gold - though the traditional red of their sigil was now a deep, blood-red closer to black, perhaps as a show of the Queen’s continued mourning, and as for the lion…it seemed abstract, now, its mane twisted into a representation of the Iron Throne on which Cersei now sat. It was interesting, Jon thought, frowning at the strange design, that the Queen would have had her new sigil embroidered in silver, with only a few wisps of gold chased through it. Beneath the awning were several comfortable, leather-upholstered chairs, spindly tables overflowing with exotic fruits and glinting carafes of expensive wine and pastries and carved joints of meat, liveried servants already standing attendance. A great chaise rested in the centre of the pavilion on a dais that raised the sitter above everyone else, richly upholstered with shimmering gold fabric, cushions and furs arranged neatly. Braziers either side of the chaise made cleverly into the shape of roaring lions were already lit, and would shed further warmth over the person who reclined there.

It was not cold - not by Jon’s standards - but for King’s Landing, there was a distinctive chill in the air that, to Jon’s well-trained nose, smelled like the threat of snow. He glanced up, past the crooked remains of the Dragonpit’s domed ceiling - which looked like jagged broken teeth - to the skies, which were mostly clear, allowing the sun to shine down, but beyond the hills heavy white clouds lumbered past on a sluggish wind.

Before the people of King’s Landing would realise it, winter would be upon them.

The small litter ahead of them stopped at the Martell pavilion, where several high-backed, leather-upholstered chairs were arranged beneath an awning of shimmering ochre velvet embroidered with sunspears, and a young woman was assisted out of it.

Jon had to hand it to Cersei, she knew how to make her feelings known, without having to say a word. Hard, unforgiving wooden chairs for Jon; leather-upholstered ones for the Dornish; and none at all for Daenerys and her court.

The reason for the leather-upholstered chairs in the Dornish pavilion was apparent; the envoy from the Water Gardens was a glorious blonde young-woman Jon vaguely recognised.

Vaguely - because he had seen her many years ago, when she had been but a young girl.

Jon glanced over his shoulder at his own company, and they exchanged a look, heading for the pavilion set aside for the King in the North.

Lady Ellaria had given Jon prior warning that the envoy from Dorne would be the Princess Myrcella, freshly wed to Prince Doran’s son Prince Trystane.

The Princess looked very heavily pregnant for a girl freshly married, and she sighed as she climbed out of the litter, her jewelled hands lingering on her huge belly, her lower-back. She glimmered in gold, an elaborately embroidered dress of gold lace and silk trimmed with velvet, with a long filigree belt and matching necklace, and a heavy cloak of ivory-and-gold velvet brocade trimmed with sleek, shimmering pale-gold furs, with a gold chain and jewelled clasp. Her golden hair, more vibrant even than her dress, glimmered in tumbling waves to her waist, and on her head she wore a simple circlet of gold set with citrines, each of them carved with a sunspear motif.

Ellaria Sand, and her two youngest daughters, had seen the princess, and with the exception of Obara Sand, who gave him a terse but respectful bow, the ladies all curtsied to Jon before making their way to their new princess and kinswoman-by-marriage, who greeted them with beauteous smiles and a glimmer in her eyes as she was enveloped in a fierce embrace by Lady Ellaria, whose gaze dipped down to the Princess’s swollen belly, and started to croon her delight, tenderly and familiarly stroking the Princess’s chin before kissing her on the lips. The little girls both curtsied to their princess, who took their hands and walked with them to the pavilion, the youngest chatting happily about her adventures terrorising the servants of Dragonstone.

Jon glanced over his shoulder at the rest of his company - Ser Davos, Lord Randyll and Dickon Tarly, Lord Barahir and his men, Lord Beric Dondarrion, and Jon’s guards - and they made their way to the pavilion marked for the King in the North. Sandor Clegane remained behind, gently stroking the neck of the donkey harnessed to the wagon in which they had transported the crated and chained wight from the ship. Reaching into the wagon, Jon withdrew one of the small parcels he had brought ashore. A small box, safely wrapped inside a pocket of velvet.

Remembering that certain things were expected of him as a sovereign engaging in politics, Jon had visited Daenerys’ jeweller before they had disembarked from Dragonstone.

The gift was not what it should have been, but it was all Jon could offer. The North was not a wealthy country - recently beleaguered by war and disunity - and never had been. Its strength had never come from its wealth, but from its people. Let the Lannisters have their gold, Jon thought: He had the respect of his people.

Lady Ellaria smiled as he approached the Martell pavilion. The Princess sat on the upholstered chair in the centre of the pavilion, stroking the hair of Ellaria’s older daughter, and she started and smiled as Jon approached, giving her a respectful half-bow.

“Princess Myrcella. May I offer my best wishes on your marriage,” Jon said formally, remembering what Septa Mordane had drilled into him. He was to extend best wishes to the bride, and congratulate the groom on coaxing his bride to accept his offer of marriage. In the back of his memory, Larra scoffed: As if the girl had any choice in the matter!

Princess Myrcella was radiant with joy, however. If she was unhappy in her arranged marriage, she was an expert actress to conceal her true feelings.

The Princess stood, and somehow, despite her bulging belly, managed to sweep an elegant curtsy. “Your Grace,” she smiled, glowing more brightly than the sun above. It startled Jon - not just to be recognised as a King, but without hesitation, by someone born and raised a princess…even if the circumstances of her birth were questionable at best. She had been born and raised what she was; a princess. And yet she had not hesitated to address Jon as someone who now outranked her.

For Jon, banished to the farthest part of the hall during feasts, it was a strange feeling.

“It is not what it should be, Princess,” he said softly, solemnly offering Princess Myrcella the box. “But a small token from the Northern kingdom on your marriage.”

The Princess looked surprised and a little flattered, her eyes taking in Jon’s freshly-cropped curls, his neatly trimmed beard, his brigandine and his polished gorget and boots. It was too hot for the cloak Sansa had given him; he had already slung it over the wagon. And it felt hotter still under the Princess’s gaze, for he never had been at ease when women took notice of him.

She drew the small box from the velvet sleeve. It was made of weirwood, polished until it glowed like pearl, and had been inlaid with obsidian and gold, combining two sigils - the Lannister roaring lion’s head and the Martell sunspear. The box had cost more than the obsidian it contained: Queen Daenerys’ jeweller, formerly of Qarth, had inlaid the weirwood box himself, purchased in White Harbour on their return journey from Eastwatch-by-the-Sea, and had cut and polished a chunk of obsidian into small, multi-faceted gems. Princess Myrcella ran her jewelled fingers over the surface of the box, her beautiful lips tilting at the corners into an appreciative smile, and she opened the box, the sound of the obsidian gems slinking and clicking against each other as she sifted her fingers through them strange and oddly pretty.

“It’s obsidian, or dragonglass. Had I more time, I would have had them set in silver, but… I don’t know the fashions,” Jon admitted, and the princess smiled sweetly, her eyes crinkling. He glanced into the princess’s beautiful face, and said, wincing slightly, “The colour may be too harsh for you.”

“My child shall be a salty Dornishmen, like their father,” she said softly, her voice gentle and kind. “Dark hair and dark eyes, I’ve no doubt. If it is a girl, I shall have the stones set into a circlet; and if I give birth to a son, I shall have the armourers craft a sword for him, and embed the obsidian into the hilt. A gift from the King in the North. Thank you for the gift, Your Grace…you are as thoughtful as your sister.”

“Lady Sansa has always adored fine things,” Jon admitted, with a slightly rueful smile, happy that Sansa had at least outgrown that passion. The Northern coffers could not afford to sustain the passion for Qartheen silk she had developed in her time at court.

Princess Myrcella dimpled. “Your Grace, I meant your twin-sister. Alarra.”

Jon blinked, and stared. Larra?!

The Princess smiled again, and it was so beautiful other men would have fallen on their swords for her favour. Jon felt as if he had been kicked in the stomach by the mule pulling the wagon. “I remember you, Your Grace. From my time as a guest of your family at Winterfell. We danced together, at the welcome feast - though you blushed and mumbled; your sister had shoved you in my way so you had to. Alarra, with the violet eyes…” Jon stared at her, and perhaps it was the withdrawn, harrowed look in Jon’s eyes, his sudden paleness, that made the princess glance uncertainly at him, and dip her chin, gazing sadly through her lashes at him. “Sometimes…when I am wandering the Water Gardens, I am reminded of picking flowers in the godswood. I still have the book of Northern wildflowers Lady Larra taught me to press - and the portrait she painted of me…. I cried when we learned she had been killed.”

Mouth dry, Jon all but croaked, “I had forgotten about the painting.”

Princess Myrcella’s smile was tremulous as she caressed her swollen belly. Her voice was hoarse as she admitted, “I keep it on my dressing-table. I think about her all the time…”

Jon gulped. “I do remember the port, and the heavy cake, though,” he told her, and Princess Myrcella gasped, a pretty blush colouring her cheeks.

“No! You mustn’t tell - Uncle promised it was our secret!” she laughed giddily, her eyes dancing.

“Who d’you think carried you to your chamber? Lord Tyrion?” Jon smirked playfully, remembering the day when Lord Tyrion and Larra had polished off a heavy fruitcake topped with plum jam and a bottle of rich Arbour port, and accidentally got Princess Myrcella and Prince Tommen drunk on the stuff while they played games with their uncle, and their new favourite playmate Larra, who had indeed coaxed the royal children on walks through the godswood - to Sansa’s benefit and delight, befriending the princess - and flattered the queen (before the dreadfulness with the flogging) by requesting to paint the royal children’s portraits. That afternoon, Larra had carried a sleeping Prince Tommen to the royal nursery via the servants’ passages to ensure they were not caught by the Queen; Jon had carried Princess Myrcella, and Lord Tyrion had giggled as he had smoothed the children’s golden curls after Jon and Larra had tucked them into bed, tenderly kissed them on the brow, and proceeded to lose the contents of his coin-purse to Larra in a game of cyvasse.

“Oh dear,” Princess Myrcella gasped, one hand over her smiling lips. “What must you have thought of me?”

“Port and heavy cake’s the ruin of many strong Northmen,” Jon smiled. “A dainty little waif from the South stood no chance.”

“Do you know, I’ve never since tasted port so velvety rich - or cake so moist and good… We walked through the godswood for hours, and sat about the fire warming our toes, cuddling with Tommen,” Princess Myrcella said, and her smile slowly faded. She blinked several times, and Jon saw her glance across the city…to the crater that had once been the Sept of Baelor…to the Red Keep, from where her younger-brother had thrown himself to his death. Jon vaguely remembered the little prince - swaddled in so many pillows in the training-yard that a blow would never land on him.

“I am sorry for his death,” Jon said earnestly.

“So am I,” Princess Myrcella said throatily. She blinked several times, her eyes no longer shimmering. “I was glad to hear that Lady Sansa has returned home. Your Grace… Would it be impertinent of me to ask a favour?”

“Of course not,” Jon said, frowning softly.

“I…had anticipated that perhaps Lady Sansa would be attending this summit,” she said, with a slight wince of disappointment: Sansa would never set foot in King’s Landing again. “And…then I realised she would likely never leave her home again, after all she endured… My own experiences as guest in a strange court have illuminated some of the unkindnesses Lady Sansa endured. I was not the sister or friend she deserved.”

“You were both children,” Jon said gently. And he was stunned to realise that Princess Myrcella was in every way the opposite of what Sansa knew Cersei to be - and by extension, what Jon also believed her to be.

“I have no such excuse now,” Princess Myrcella said, and she reached into a deep pocket inside her cloak, withdrawing an envelope sealed with ochre wax shimmering with gold. She used the Martell sunspear sigil, rather than her mother’s Lannister lion. “I wrote this letter. I would be honoured if you would deliver it to Lady Sansa. It shall be some time before I ever see her again, I know…it is my small way of apologising. And perhaps…perhaps building on what should have been a loyal friendship where I protected Lady Sansa… Your sister is Regent to the Northern crown while you are abroad; I shall also be sister to a sovereign, when the day comes that Princess Arianne takes up her father’s position as ruler of Dorne… I should…like us to be friends.”

“I should like that very much,” Jon said solemnly, giving her a small bow, and understanding absolutely the implications. He took the envelope from Princess Myrcella. “I’ll deliver your letter. Sansa said you were always very kind.”

“Not as kind as she deserved,” Princess Myrcella said; she seemed set to punish herself for the abuse Sansa had endured at her mother’s and brother’s hands - because she was now highly aware of what had truly transpired at court while she was still a girl.

She was excellent, Jon thought. Gracefully navigating political waters. She was very like Sansa - elegant, dignified, eloquent - and yet she lacked the bite of steel that Sansa had acquired. Sansa had always had a sharper tongue, though, less genuine sweetness than Princess Myrcella radiated: Sansa could never have walked on air the way Princess Myrcella did. Because despite her childish obsession with songs and knights and her naĂŻvetĂŠ, Sansa had always had it in her to be a fierce, strong Northern she-wolf.

He gave Myrcella a respectful half-bow, kissed Lady Ellaria’s hand, rumpled her daughters’ hair playfully - they squawked protests but grinned - nodded to Obara Sand, and made her way over to the pavilion under which his men were resting, waiting.

Jon sat down, arms folded over his chest, legs spread out, and didn’t realise he was scowling until Ser Davos murmured, “Are you alright?”

“Hm?” Jon blinked, startled, staring at Ser Davos. He nodded hastily and cleared his throat.

“Yes. Yes, I’m fine. Princess Myrcella just…reminded me of her family’s visit to Winterfell…my sister Larra taught her the names of all the Northern wildflowers, and painted her portrait,” Jon said, and Ser Davos gave him a pinched look of understanding.

He did a very good job of not remembering Larra, until something like this happened - until one of the Lannister or Tyrell girls reminded him vividly of something his twin used to do, or Princess Myrcella shared her own memories of his sister…the things that had made her extraordinary, and very much missed. He was jarred that Larra’s name had been mentioned - and by Princess Myrcella, the least-likely person imaginable. And for a moment, Jon’s grief was agonising - overwhelming.

Then Sandor Clegane set the crate down, far enough from the pavilions that the wight could not reach them without them all having fair warning if it escaped.

And then a second, larger litter arrived, one Jon recognised. It was gilded with lattices heavy with roses, and behind the gold overlay, the wooden panelling concealing the reinforced steel walls had been painted teal-green. Tyrell guards in their velvet-covered armour stood sentry as servants carried the litter, and Jon heard the snappish tone of the Queen of Thorns before she appeared, ill-tempered and exhausted from her journey, but absolutely determined. Thinner than Jon’s memory of her, Lady Olenna still wore her mourning clothes, though still with her brilliant gold belt of thorny vines and an elaborate rose. Her weight loss was not the most remarkable thing about the old lady; she now walked with a polished rosewood cane - and Jon could not help but feel that, in spite of her ongoing recovery, the old lady was more dangerous now because of that walking-stick.

She grumbled and scowled as she climbed awkwardly out of the litter, snapping at one of the servants, who jumped to help her. Behind her, her granddaughter appeared, her hand outstretched to rest on Lady Olenna’s arm, her tone soothing and soft. Nora looked beautiful in a deep emerald-green velvet brocade gown, her belt a more delicate and intricate interpretation of her grandmother’s, a wide criss-crossing of delicate thorny vines bedecked with dainty golden blossoms, some of them set with tiny pearls, climbing up toward her breasts and down over her hips like the caresses of a lover, and over her shoulders she wore a stole of glossy black fur. She looked vibrant and powerful, in a way she never had before. It was her gown, Jon thought, the rich colour bold and eye-catching, mature - and the way she held herself, no longer the fragile wallflower in the jagged throne-room of Dragonstone, nor the fractured girl broken by grief on the clifftop. This was the Lady of Highgarden, in all her glory, straight-backed, clever and proud. Jon noticed her glance across to the Martell pavilion, where Princess Myrcella sat, her belly proudly on display.

The two Tyrells - Nora’s cousins had been loaded onto their flagship, and Jon, if no-one else, knew that the Tyrells were already planning to head south to their Redwyne cousins in the Arbour - made their way to the Martell pavilion, and Jon watched introductions being made by Lady Ellaria. Of course, Jon had heard from Lady Olenna herself that certain tracts of land in the south-eastern parts of the Reach may be used to entice Dornish lords to aid in the Tyrell recovery of Highgarden - and simultaneously punish those bannermen who had betrayed House Tyrell.

After a few moments’ quiet conversation with the Princess, Alynore dipped a polite curtsy, her eyes on Myrcella’s bulging belly as she turned away. Nora’s gaze landed on Jon, who had been watching with mild interest: Her face radiated pure delight for a moment, unguarded - and Lady Olenna, using her cane to aid her to her granddaughter’s side, saw Jon watching and gave a blatant, conspiratorial wink before she said, in a voice loud enough to hear if one wanted to listen, “We must sit you down my dear…all this lurching about is no good - I must take care of you, in your delicate state.”

Another kick to the gut.

Jon watched Nora closely; she did not look his way, but she was still smiling - even if a blush had blossomed high in her cheeks… Delicate state… Nora was expecting a baby.

It was a good thing Jon was seated, as his head grew light. He gazed mournfully at Nora: He had given her what she asked, though he knew he would miss her cruelly. Her companionship had been…wonderful…

Then he remembered what Lady Olenna sharply observed: there was no pavilion for House Tyrell.

“Hmph,” Lady Olenna grunted, then her thin lips twitched to a smirk, and she made a very good show of ambling over to the main pavilion, leaning heavily on her cane, and on her granddaughter. To the comfortable chaise laden with cushions and furs.

“We had heard you suffered an illness at Dragonstone, Lady Olenna,” said the Princess gently, watching the old woman mount the steps up the dais to the chaise. It was quiet enough in the Dragonpit, above the noise of the city, that her voice was clearly audible. “You are not still recovering?”

“I shall endure yet, Princess,” Lady Olenna promised, as she groaned and sank down onto the chaise with her granddaughter’s help. Nora perched at the end of the chaise, looking wonderfully elegant, still blushing delicately. Lady Olenna propped her cane against the chaise. “Still, best not to tempt the gods. I must rest. Such a thoughtful gesture of your mother, to provide for an ailing old woman.”

Princess Myrcella smiled graciously, but no-one believed Lady Olenna to be ignorant that the chaise had been set aside for anyone but Cersei. Lady Olenna’s illness had weakened her heart, not her wits. She knew exactly what she was doing.

It was some time before the next party arrived, Zafiyah and Qezza leading the way bearing the standards of House Targaryen, Daenerys’ three-headed silver dragon ouroboros emblazoned on black silk. Both girls were beautifully dressed for cooler weather, emulating the sharp-shouldered fashions set by the Queen, adapted to their shimmering, jewel-fringed tokars over the top of sharp-shouldered long-sleeved gowns of thick wool-lined silk trimmed with fur. Behind them marched Unsullied, escorting Daenerys’ court: Ser Jorah, in new Westerosi clothing, his armour covered in leather and emblazoned with the standing bear sigil of House Mormont that Jon knew so well; Missandei; several of the dosh khaleen who had followed Daenerys from Vaes Dothrak; her fiercest Dothraki bloodriders; Theon and Yara Greyjoy and several of their men; and Lord Tyrion Lannister, who wore his golden Hand of the Queen pin proudly on his handsome black leather jerkin, his expression rather anxious.

Then he realised that each pavilion had been claimed, and a wicked grin spread across his scarred face. His eyes glinted as he beheld Lady Olenna, smirking upon Cersei’s chaise. Then his gaze slid to the Martell pavilion - to his niece, resplendent there, and Jon saw it, Lord Tyrion’s stunned disbelief and joy. True, genuine love poured from his face, as he hastened over to the pavilion, the princess rising from her seat to awkwardly try and embrace her smaller uncle, manoeuvring around her giant belly.

Lord Tyrion cooed at his niece, “My dearest one, get any larger and I shall not be able to see your lovely face. Come, sit, so that I may kiss you.” Princess Myrcella beamed, and reclaimed her seat; Lord Tyrion did indeed lean in to kiss her cheeks, his smile almost tremulous as his eyes glinted. “You’ve become a woman… And more radiant than ever! Dorne agrees with you.”

“I have you to thank for my happiness, Uncle, for I know that it was you who sent me to Dorne,” Myrcella smiled, her hand cradled over her belly. “How I wept the day I left… Such joy awaiting me there, I could have had no idea.”

“I am glad you are happy, dearest,” Lord Tyrion said earnestly, and Princess Myrcella’s smile faded slightly.

“I never believed it, Uncle,” she said softly. “I know you loved us, more than anyone. I know you never would have hurt us.”

“You’re a good girl,” Lord Tyrion sighed, gazing at her with a sad smile tugging at his lips. “If you are the last of your siblings left… I am glad. Truth be told, you were always my favourite.”

“I know,” Princess Myrcella dimpled, and Lord Tyrion chuckled. He reached out to playfully flick her nose, and the princess giggled softly. Perched on one of the chairs, Lord Tyrion remained by his niece’s side as she told him of her life in Dorne, and they waited. While they did so, Daenerys’ courtiers grew impatient, and the Dothraki laughed as they dragged the empty chairs from under Cersei’s pavilion to Daenerys’, sprawling on them - one of the prettier dosh khaleen sitting in one of the bloodrider’s laps, playing fondly with his braid, while Qezza Galare and Zafiyah played a game of hopscotch in the sand, chasing each other around the chairs occupied by Missandei and Ser Jorah.

Cersei’s court was far larger, of course, and the first they heard of the Queen’s arrival was her courtiers assembling: They circled the pavilions, and Jon watched on grimly as they vied for the best view. There were not only Westerosi lords but emissaries from foreign courts: Qartheen and Pentoshi merchants; exquisite Lyseni who reminded Jon of little Neva; princes and princesses from the Summer Isles, wearing vivid colours Jon had never seen outside of Larra’s paintings, bedecked in fierce jewels and vibrant feathers and gold; small Braavosi in strange velvet robes; Volantene nobles; and of course, lesser nobles and the merchant princes of King’s Landing who had managed to sneak into the Dragonpit thanks to its sheer size, and the relative few guards in attendance - they were dotted around the Dragonpit at intervals, though Lord Tyrion had informed them that most of the exits had been blocked a century ago. The only way out was the way they had come.

The level of noise rose as Cersei’s courtiers gossiped amongst themselves - pointing out Princess Myrcella, the Queen’s daughter, heavy with child; the grim-faced King in the North, unimpressed; the kinslayer the Imp; the Queen of Thorns and her new champion, the new Lady of Highgarden - an unknown who was attracting a lot of attention with her beautiful gown and her even more exquisite looks.

Daenerys Targaryen’s absence was noted, and Jon knew the great crowd had little to do with the summit as it did the rumours of the attendance of the Dragon Queen. They wanted to get a look at her, the Mad King’s daughter - and her alleged dragons.

The chatter died, and Jon heard the tell-tale rattle of armour moments before Lannister soldiers appeared, protecting their Queen from all sides, while a dedicated Queensguard in simpler steel armour without a trace of gold flanked Cersei Lannister.

She wasn’t how Jon remembered her, in her shimmering silks and billowing sleeves and long, flowing golden hair.

Cersei was severe, now. Her long hair, shorn for her Walk of Shame, was growing out, reaching to her chin in simple, slightly tousled waves, and as Jon frowned and looked around, he noticed several other ladies wearing a similar cut - following the Queen’s example, they had trimmed their long locks of hair off too. A physical display of their loyalty. On her glimmering golden hair - darker than her daughter’s - was set a simple circlet that glinted silver in the light, as did the pauldrons on her shoulders, connected by a sinuous silver chain. Her gown was of leather with thousands of tiny cutouts revealing glimmers of silver fabric beneath.

There was no pretence, Jon understood. Sansa had known Cersei as the wife of a king, and then the mother of another king. She was Queen in her own right now, and on her own terms.

Following behind her was a monstrous man. If Jon had never met and fought beside giants, he might have thought the man shadowing Cersei Lannister was a giant himself. The Mountain, he thought, remembering Lord Tyrion’s trial, and Gendry’s stories of Harrenhall, and glancing at Lord Beric, with his new leather eyepatch, his remaining eye fixed on the monstrous man. Behind the Mountain trailed a squirrely-looking man in a cowl but no maester’s chain; he wore a small golden hand pinned to his robes. More courtiers, armoured commanders of her armies - what was left of them - and Gold Cloaks of the City Watch escorted her, and a man in battered Ironborn armour grinned, a mad glint in his eyes, as he swaggered behind Cersei - to the blatant irritation of Ser Jaime Lannister, who looked as different now than Jon remembered him as Cersei did.

Cersei stopped dead before the Martell pavilion, as Princess Myrcella rose with a breathless gasp and a delighted cry, “Mother!”

The Queen stared at the Princess. Her daughter. Resplendent in gold, radiant as the sun, heavy with child, the most beautiful woman anyone had ever seen.

The most beautiful woman anyone had ever seen.

No longer a girl.

A woman. And an unforgiven reminder that Cersei…was ageing.

They all saw it. Something fractured between the Queen and her daughter as the Queen swept her sneering expression up and down Myrcella’s body - Myrcella, who still had her arms open to embrace, or be embraced by her mother. They had not seen each other in years. Slowly, Myrcella lowered her arms, as Queen Cersei made no move to embrace her; the smile faded from Myrcella’s beautiful face.

“Mother?” she said softly, her tone uncertain. “Will you not embrace me? Do I not still have your love?”

“You will address me as Your Grace,” Queen Cersei said coldly, her lip curling as she sneered at Myrcella’s growing belly. “I see no daughter of mine before me; only the whore of the Water Gardens as rumour named you.”

Gasps echoed around the Dragonpit: Ellaria laid her hand on Obara Sand’s arm as she jerked forward, fury written on her face. Lord Tyrion’s face was dark with fury as Princess Myrcella gasped, her eyes glimmering with tears. Genuine hurt and confusion coloured her features, and she glanced uncertainly at her uncle.

“Sweet sister, those who live in glass whorehouses would be wiser not to throw stones,” he growled, for a moment a vicious smirk illuminating his face as he looked pointedly at his handsome, scarred brother. “Come, sweetling, sit down. Your mother cannot forgive your beauty - and she has suffered deliciously for her shame.” He gave Cersei a vicious smile, tenderly and pointedly stroking Myrcella’s long golden hair as she sat herself down. “Nor can she forgive the reminder that she is in fact old. And nothing has yet reinforced that fact more vividly than the child thriving in your womb. Hm…the Queen is to be a grandmother.”

They watched Myrcella accept her mother’s rejection with a natural poise that was breath-taking to behold - and as Cersei turned away from her daughter, the courtiers gossiped even more furiously, sympathetic looks cast to Princess Myrcella as Lady Ellaria rested her hand gently on Princess Myrcella’s clasped ones, her dark eyes on Cersei Lannister.

Ser Jaime, in his polished but battle-dented armour, his gilded-steel hand glinting in the sunlight, approached his niece - his daughter - to give her a chivalrous bow, take her hand in his, kiss it, and lean in to murmur something in her ear that made Myrcella’s lips twitch toward a tremulous smile. Ser Jaime Lannister kissed the girl’s brow and withdrew from the shade of the ochre pavilion.

The Queen strode on, chin raised, expression cold and twisting with a strange fury, her focus turning to the grandest pavilion…and Lady Olenna smirking as she rested comfortably on the chaise. Cersei’s chaise.

Lady Olenna just smiled blithely down at her.

The Mountain rested his hand on the hilt of his sword; the squirrelly man muttered something to him, his shrewd eyes scanning the crowds.

For several long, tense moments, Lady Olenna stared down Queen Cersei, who stood in the dust, her crown glinting…powerless.

Jon sighed, stood, stifled his smile, and lifted his own chair easily, carrying it over to the great pavilion. There were now no chairs there; Daenerys’ people had taken them all, sprawling about their pavilion with great ease. He carried the heavy, straight-backed chair over to the Lannister pavilion, and tucked it under the shade of the awning. Lady Olenna smirked at him, her eyes glinting, and Nora gave him a private expression he knew so well - at once amused and apologetic. He settled the chair down, reached down to dust the seat, and approached Cersei, nodding courteously, “Your Grace.”

Her lip curled, taking in the direwolves on his gorget.

“The King in the North, is it?” Cersei said coolly, sweeping her eyes over him. Jon stared back at her, bracing himself for whatever comment she could fling at him. He’d had a lifetime of this. Cersei narrowed her eyes, recognition sparking in her malevolent green eyes. “You… T’was your twin-sister that Robert was so enamoured of, at Winterfell… I remember, now. The two of you, dark-haired…those violet eyes of hers…I’d wager Robert died regretting he did not mount her when he had the chance - he regretted that he could not claim Lyanna Stark.”

“Yes, King Robert was struck by my sister’s resemblance to Father’s sister,” Jon said politely, his tone glacial, ignoring the not-so-veiled insinuation. “She had the look.”

“Had?” Cersei blinked, and a nasty smirk curled her lips. Her voice was silken as she said, “Yes…that’s right. The krakens rose up and killed the wolf-girl.” Her eyes slid over to the Greyjoys sitting beneath Daenerys’ banner.

“No. The wolf-girl killed the krakens, defending her brothers. She fled into the wilds,” Jon said quietly.

“From what I remember of that girl, the wilds was where she belonged,” Cersei said softly. “Half a beast herself - like that young wild creature, what was her name…Ariana?”

“Arya,” Jon corrected, and he gave her a nasty smile. “Aye, they were wild girls…and every man who ever met them preferred them to any other, no matter how beautiful, just as they did my aunt.”

The Queen gave him a scathing sneer that showed his barb had struck true.

“I did wonder the King did not set you aside to wed her and make her his queen, sister,” Lord Tyrion mused, wandering over from the Martell pavilion, heading back to the Targaryen court, and his smile was cutting as he paused to gaze at Cersei. “She would have been magnificent. Could you imagine their children - fierce purple eyes and violent black curls!”

Jon stifled a shudder at the very thought.

“I do wonder that Robert did not try to father a bastard on her,” Cersei said caustically, glaring at her brother. She said, silkily, “Perhaps he tried.”

Jon stared long and hard at the Queen, until her smirk faded and she swallowed, averting her eyes, regretting her tartness and insinuation. Jon said merely, “Whether by a King or by krakens, Larra was never to be made sport of.”

The shrieking of dragons pierced the air, and Ser Jaime Lannister noticeably jolted, his armour rattling, hand going to his sword. His expression was stricken, wary as he gazed at the skies.

Screams and gasps erupted as Viserion and Rhaegal swooped and dipped low, soaring past the jagged teeth of the broken crown that was the Dragonpit’s ancient crumbling domed ceiling. Cersei squinted, throwing up a hand to protect her eyes as the sand eddied around them, and Jon braced himself against the force of the wind created by the dragons’ wings. Swooping and shrieking, the dragons…seemed to be toying with the courtiers, some of whom pelted toward the only exit as guards gaped in horror. Jon watched Viserion, gleaming cream-and-gold in the sunlight, circle overhead, screech, and disappear; a tell-tale thud echoed from the gardens, screams echoing off the still air, and the sound…it was almost like…laughter. A reptilian chortle. Rhaegal answered with a cooing song, wheeling and circling overhead, elegant as any dancer.

A roar shattered the air, and Drogon soared overhead, disturbing everything - whipping at the awnings, tearing at the elaborate hairstyles of the courtiers, whirling dust everywhere, making the braziers either side of Lady Olenna splutter and choke, and the dragon screamed as he landed high on the broken domed roof, his enormous clawed feet finding purchase on the benches that descended toward the sandy floor of the pit, and he flapped his great wings once for balance and to settle, knocking people off their feet, roaring again, so loudly Jon’s ears ached, and people whimpered and cried in the silence that followed, watching with mingled awe and a deathly terror as Drogon slowly, almost gently, lowered one of his wings. A tiny figure in black descended, standing complacently on his wing, unruffled.

Daenerys was stunning, in a caped black gown trimmed with vivid blood-red scaled embroidery and a fringe dripping with rubies. Her silver-blonde hair was braided and coiled and arranged artfully in tumbling curls over her breasts and down her back, held in place by the weight of a magnificent crown Jon had seen her wear several times at court in Dragonstone. Wrought into the shape of a three-headed dragon, the coils were made of a deep red-gold, the wings of silver and pale yellow-gold, and three heads were intricately carved from jade, ivory and onyx, inlaid with gold and silver filigree, and citrine, ruby and gold beads for glimmering, curiously sentient eyes. The crown had been a gift from the Tourmaline Brotherhood of Qarth, the only gift Daenerys received in that great city that she had not sold to fund her campaign - and several of the Qartheen ambassadors to Queen Cersei’s court knew it.

They had seen the Dragon Queen when her children were mere hatchlings. They resented her destruction of the House of Undying when she had wielded her hatchlings as weapons for the very first time… So far, she had evaded every assassination attempt the Qartheen could send her way: And there had been many.

Next to Drogon, Daenerys looked diminutive: As she walked to the pavilions, she looked regal and composed, almost dainty except for her expression. To Jon, she appeared…brutally neutral, even as people whimpered and children cried in shock and terror at the appearance of the dragons. Others eyed the Dragon Queen, her unruffled black caped gown, her magnificent crown, her gleaming pale-silver braids. She was young, and looked very beautiful.

Cersei by comparison looked like a bitter shrew.

“I see that it is true; the Dothraki have no concept of punctuality - or of politeness,” Cersei said coldly. “You have done well in terrifying half my court.”

“I thank you for the preparations,” Daenerys said, not pausing to acknowledge Cersei as she elegantly gathered her skirt, and Missandei dusted a chair for her queen. Daenerys arranged herself on her seat as if it was a throne, straight-backed, expression bland, her purple eyes glimmering with veiled hostility and contempt as she eyed Cersei. “I hope you were not put into discomfort.”

“More comfortable than the last Targaryen who came here, I’d wager,” Cersei said, her expression snide. Her eyes glinted evilly as she glared at her younger brother. “You know the story well, brother. It is a relic, now, of when the Targaryens tore the Seven Kingdoms apart. I say when…one of so many times people had sought to overthrow their tyranny… Which of Queen Rhaenyra’s sons was it who fell to his death over the Dragonpit?”

Lord Tyrion sighed heavily, drinking from a wine-skin. He stoppered it before answering, “It was Joffrey Velaryon.”

“That’s right. Joffrey… A brave boy, who gave his life to further her claim to the Iron Throne,” Cersei said, reflectively - her tone almost wistful. She raised her emerald eyes to Daenerys, smirking horribly. “In fact…he died defending her dragons, the source of her power. How many were there? You always knew your dragon-tales far better, brother. None of the rest of us cared.” She smirked at Lord Tyrion, a scoffing little laugh twisting her lips.

“There were four dragons chained in the Dragonpit when it was stormed by tens of thousands of smallfolk,” Lord Tyrion said, picking at a thread on his sleeve. “Shrykos, Morghul, Tyraxes and Dreamfyre.”

“And how many of them died?”

“All of them, as well as Rhaenyra’s dragon Syrax,” Lord Tyrion sniffed, “with her son Joffrey Velaryon, and thousands of the smallfolk.”

“It speaks volumes of the people’s love for the Targaryens - centuries before my husband’s righteous rebellion,” Cersei mused, her face soft and thoughtful.

“Your son plummeted to his death, too, did he not?” said Daenerys, and Jon glanced sharply at her, frowning. Daenerys’ expression was bland, though her tone had been cool. “I was spared a great fall not so long ago, when one of my children suffered an attack…” Her eyes drifted to Ser Jaime Lannister, standing behind Cersei. “Dragons are far more durable than little boys. Drogon recovered quickly… But I remember my fear as I fell…” There was something unpleasant about her mouth as she said it, Jon frowned, something glimmering in her eyes - not hostility… He could not think of the word to describe it, only that he was disgusted she was alluding to what Cersei’s son would have thought and felt as he plunged to his death, to deliver Cersei yet more pain. Daenerys’ looks seemed to gentle. “I also lost a son, the child of my first husband. I offer my condolences, on the death of your son Tommen.”

For a heartbeat, Lord Tyrion’s hand faltered as he raised his wine-skin to his lips. He seemed to bolster himself, and took a swig from the wine-skin. Cersei barely acknowledged Daenerys’ words, just a brusque nod of the head.

“He was a sweet boy,” said Lady Olenna, and Jon tensed, his eyes on the old woman. He enjoyed her, liked her bluntness and flavourful delivery of shrewd observations - but what had she warned him, before this summit had even been arranged? ‘Wounds inflicted with words, not weapons.’ Cersei’s subtle allusions to the people being tired of Targaryens and their dragons centuries before Deanerys’ return to Westerosi shores, and their willingness to fight to the death to destroy them; hinting at the suicide of Cersei’s younger son; insinuations against Larra’s virtue… “He would have made a wonderful king...and with Margaery as his queen…Jaehaerys and Alysanne, come again… He was utterly entranced by his beautiful, kind bride…utterly captivated…to take his own life, out of grief at her death… A tragedy no-one could have accounted for.”

Lady Olenna’s eyes slid to Cersei, cunning and sharp as a blade, glittering with a snide smile.

Tommen’s suicide was not a fatality Cersei had anticipated when she hatched her plan to blow up the Sept of Baelor with wildfire.

“Yes…many died needlessly that day,” Queen Cersei said softly. “Who could have known there were caches of wildfire beneath the Sept - except, of course…the man who had them planted there? There were rumours, of course, the Mad King…” She blinked, demurring to Daenerys with a twisted smirk. “Pardon me, King Aerys II…he littered the city with the stuff. They say, in the last days of the Rebellion, the King threatened that Robert Baratheon should have naught from him but ash.” Cersei’s malicious green eyes rested on Daenerys, a soft smirk on her lips. “Incredibly volatile, wildfire; I remember my brother Tyrion speaking of it as he planned the defence of this city so many years ago. Tragic, that something sparked it ablaze that dreadful day… I sometimes wake from nightmares, thinking about it…their deaths. My uncle Kevan, my kinsmen… How long did it take them to burn? My brother Jaime used to tell me stories, about people being burned alive, when he was Kingsguard to King Aerys. Great lords…and their sons and heirs…” Her eyes lingered on Jon, who leaned against one of the columns of his pavilion, arms folded across his chest, and frowned back at her grimly. Everyone knew who Cersei was alluding to: Rickard and Brandon Stark, and a soft hiss of whispers swept through the courtiers. “They died gruesomely…and slowly, their skin blistering and charring, their eyes dripping down their faces, as their hair caught alight and started to smoke… At least the wildfire…the explosion was quick. It took no longer than a heartbeat.”

“Yes… It would have been quick,” Lady Olenna sniffed brusquely, smoothing her skirts. “Far quicker than the butchery at Highgarden.” She adjusted herself on the chaise, turning to face Cersei fully, Lady Alynore perched elegantly between them, and for a brief moment, Nora raised her eyes to Jon’s face, sharing a look of dread and anticipation. Lady Olenna’s smile was soft and lethal as she said quietly, “Still, I would not have liked any of my family to die…the way that monstrous boy of yours did, clawing at their necks, foam and bile spilling from their mouths, eyes blood-red, skin purple…” Her lips were twitching into a deliciously nasty smirk. “Must have been horrible for you, as a mother…it was horrible enough for me. A shocking scene… Not at all what I had intended.”

Nora glanced sharply at her grandmother, who was smiling down at Cersei from the Queen’s chaise. “You see…I’d never seen the poison work before…” Lady Olenna took great pains, while the impact of what she had said sank in, to hobble down the steps of the dais, leaning heavily on her granddaughter and her cane, so that when she stood beside Cersei, neither Ser Jaime nor the Mountain hulking behind her reached for their swords. A decrepit old woman - wielding words that cut sharper than Valyrian steel. “I wanted you to know it was me.”

Lady Olenna smiled, adjusted Cersei’s circlet as a doting grandmamma might her favourite, and walked out of the Dragonpit arm-in-arm with a shocked Lady Alynore, guarded by their men. They disappeared into their litter, and descended from the Dragonpit, all the way to the harbour unencumbered, to join their cousins in the Tyrell flagship - and sailed away, south, to join the forces of the Arbour already sailing to Oldtown, to march upon Highgarden and reclaim it.

Cersei looked ready to burst into flame, and her twin-brother beside her looked stunned and despondent, but not at all upset. Ser Jaime glanced across the pavilion to Lord Tyrion, who had been staring at Lady Olenna in awe and sudden realisation, and his twitching lips now hid behind his wine-skin.

Cersei inhales sharply, glaring at Lord Tyrion and Daenerys. “And this is how you would begin peace-talks? Encouraging that old cunt to spread vicious lies meant to cut me open - when your guilt was pronounced before all by the will of the gods when the Mountain shattered the Red Viper’s head like a melon.”

Ellaria Sand hold a firm hand on Obara’s spear as she bristled, her expression lethal. The armoured giant near Cersei rests his hand on the hilt of his sword, which is almost as tall as Obara herself.

“I am beyond trying to convince you of my innocence, sister,” Lord Tyrion said, shrugging. “Since I had the foul luck to kill Mother as she pushed me out between her legs, you have been convinced I was sent by the gods to ruin our House.”

“The death of my sons and the murder of our father would suggest you have had the utmost success in that regard,” Cersei hissed. “Not to mention the Lion Culling in the Ash Meadow.”

“That was not my Lord Hand’s doing,” Daenerys said coolly, her eyes level on Cersei. “It was my decision and mine alone. I alone have the power to command my dragons, and I commanded them to destroy your armies and eradicate your House, as so many others have been destroyed at your family’s command… I do not know the truth of Lady Olenna’s being complicit in your older son’s death, but I do know this meeting provided the perfect place for her to injure you… On her behalf, I apologise for her conduct. Please believe I came to King’s Landing in good faith.”

Cersei’s bristling anger turned to incredulity, laughing.

“Good faith? You burn babies in their mothers’ wombs, char brittle old men with dragonfire, steal away orphaned daughters for your savages to rape and breed upon, good faith?” Cersei sneered, and Daenerys’ jaw flickered, Jon noticed, as she tried not to show her reaction, how those words had wounded her. The courtiers bristled and muttered, hateful glares cast Daenerys’ way - and she saw them. She saw their hate, their dread - and their sneers of disrespect, and the warning of the King in the North resounded in her head…’single most reviled person in Westeros…’

“We did not come here to burn cities and murder innocents,” Lord Tyrion asserted. He tucked the stopper in his wine-skin and slipped off his seat. “We are all facing a unique - “

“I see you’ve found new friends, Theon!” One of the men amid Cersei’s courtiers swaggered to the front of the group clustered around Cersei’s pavilion, shouldering knights and ladies out of his way. He crowed over Theon, grinning like a madman. “Did your sister decide you were no more use to her, and sell you to the Unsullied? You fit the criteria, ever since they took your favourite toy… I heard you cried when it was taken from you.”

Lord Tyrion cast a questioning look at his brother, who answered him with another look: No words were exchanged, but they did not need to speak. They understood each other.

“We have larger concerns than the fate of Theon Greyjoy,” Lord Tyrion said, with a respectful nod toward Theon.

“Then why are you talking?” the man asked. “You’re the smallest concern here.”

“Do you remember, when last we saw each other at Winterfell, we discussed dwarf jokes?” Lord Tyrion said, turning to exchange a look with Theon Greyjoy.

“His wasn’t even good,” Theon said bluntly, his expression utterly familiar to Jon.

“He explained it at the end,” Tyrion chided, tutting. “Never explain it; it ruins it.”

“We don’t even let your kind live in the Iron Islands, you know,” said the man. “We kill you at birth. A mercy for the parents.”

“No wonder you’ve befriended my sweet sister,” Lord Tyrion quipped, giving Cersei a snarling, vicious little smile. “She would have done the same, though certainly not as a mercy.”

Jon glanced at Ser Davos. This is going to go on forever, Jon thought. All of them, trying to wound and one-up each other. He strode forward, as Ser Jaime and Cersei snarled at the man in black, and he was vaguely aware of Daenerys’ voice and that of Lord Tarly, as he unbolted the lid of the crate, and slid it off, heaving a great kick at the side of the crate, upturning it.

The wight screamed, tumbling out, and hurtled at full speed toward the great pavilion. Screaming and snarling, scratching its decomposing fingers through the air, it hissed and shrieked and fought against the chain wrapped around it, mere feet from Lord Tyrion and Euron Greyjoy and Queen Cersei - on her feet, snarling at Tyrion again - at Daenerys, who was flanked by two bloodriders, and Ser Jaime, who jolted, stunned, his gleaming hand moving in reflex to his sword-hilt - his golden hand was useless, and he struggled to unsheathe the sword belted at his right, true shock and horror mingling on his face as he attempted to comprehend what thrashed and screamed before him.

Jon perched on the edge of the upturned crate, long legs spread before him, arms folded across his chest, and watched patiently. They scattered and shrank back, horrified. The chain held, but Jon could feel the crate vibrate with the force of the wight’s tugs and straining against its bonds. They were regular steel, not dragonglass, and he was taken back to his first ever wight, in the Lord Commander’s chambers - how silent Ghost had howled, and snarled at the Lord Commander’s door until Jon broke it down… His hand smarted, at the memory of the burn he had received, flinging a flaming torch-bracket at the wight when no weapon could deter it.

He watched the Lannister soldiers react - the Mountain lurching forward - all their weapons unsheathed, on the attack.

Yet nothing they could do to the wight stopped it in its tracks. Nothing. Not even the Mountain.

From his spot perched on the crate, Jon watched, ignoring the pain in his ears from the noise of the wight’s screaming. He stood, finally, as the soldiers retreated, appalled, the wight still hissing and screaming on the ground in writhing pieces. Stifled screams echoed around the Dragonpit as courtiers looked on in horror. Jon approached, slowly, as Ser Davos joined him, carrying a torch and tinder; Jon unsheathed his obsidian dagger. “They can be destroyed by fire…” He lit the lower torso still kicking and writhing on the ground, and the dismembered limbs, “Or with weapons of obsidian.”

Staring baldly at Ser Jaime Lannister, e stabbed the wight through the crumbling, rotting skull. The creature collapsed. For good measure, Ser Davos lit the remains.

“You were right, Ser Jaime, it has been thrilling to serve in the Night’s Watch, guarding you from wildlings and White Walkers and all the perils beyond the Wall,” Jon said tartly. “Don’t worry…they’re nothing more than sacks of meat, blood…a little bone to keep it all standing… That was a soldier of the Night King’s army. Just one of thousands. That is the fate of every person in the world if we do not stop him… Winter has come, Your Grace. And with it, the White Walkers.”

“I didn’t believe it until I saw them,” Daenerys said calmly, though her eyes were wide. She had been severely ill, clinging to Drogon’s back, with only vague impressions of the frozen lake. Seeking a wight up close… “I saw them all.”

Lord Tarly stood, stifling a sneer in Daenerys’ direction as he joined Jon, addressing Ser Jaime. “I was with His Grace beyond the Wall when we captured the foul creature. They have fifteen legions, no fewer. And that is only their infantry. Giants and mammoths, shadow-cats and bears. And their commanders…” He clenched his jaw, his eyes searing Ser Jaime’s face. “Their commanders would make your father cower, and that is not a thing I say lightly of the Old Lion.”

“You’ve seen them?” Ser Jaime breathed.

“I have.”

“This is why I am asking you both to set aside your war,” Jon said, glancing from Cersei to Daenerys, giving them both the same stern, implacable look, “just long enough to defeat the Night King’s armies. Because if you do not…then that will be the fate of every person in this world. There is only one war that matters, Your Grace.” He glanced at Queen Cersei. “The Great War. And it is here.”

For a moment, Cersei said nothing. She was still staring at the burning wight, her eyes wide, a hand clamped over her stomach, shock plain on her face.

But as Jon roused her attention by speaking directly to her, she slowly raised her face, and as she did so her expression twisted nastily. “You have overplayed your hand,” she seethed at Daenerys, at her younger brother. “You conspire with this treasonous bastard who calls himself King in the North, and use black magic to assassinate me! KILL THEM.”

“Cersei - !” Ser Jaime blurted.

“Stay your blades!” Jon bellowed, as everyone reached for the swords, glaring at the Queen. “Do not engage!”

A bone-chilling scream shattered the air, a shriek so loud and so high, it pained their ears, and sand blinded them as monstrous wings flapped like the clap of thunder. They were buffeted off their feet, knocked backwards into the sand, weapons falling from their grip as they shielded their stinging eyes. All but one, and he thundered towards Jon, his sword raised.

The great green-and-bronze dragon shrieked, and vomited fire.

A Mountain crumbled to ash, drifting in the breeze like dead leaves.

The dragon rumbled softly, flapping its wings delicately, cooing softly over the flames to Jon, who staggered to his feet, Long Claw gripped tightly in his hand, the rippling smoky blade coming to life in the firelight, as the dust settled. Over the flames, Rhaegal poked his nose at Jon, who felt something twinge in the pit of his stomach, his heart leaping with a strange and unfamiliar joy, and he reached out his hand, a soft and uncertain smile on his face, to press his palm against the dragon’s snout. His heat seared Jon’s hand, but it did not hurt; it felt heartening, like a dose of hard liquor after a shock. Rhaegal snorted softly, blinking his great bronze eyes, and flapped his wings, churning the embers that had once been a Mountain.

In the quiet, a Hound barked.

Sandor Clegane’s laughter echoed off the dilapidated, soot-blackened walls of the ancient Dragonpit, loud and clear and hearty, as if he had never laughed before, and had no idea how to stop - or any desire to. He sat in the sand, watching the ashes of the Mountain swirl in the air as Rhaegal raised his head and screamed once, as if in warning, before taking to careen around the Dragonpit, and Sandor Clegane laughed.

Lord Tyrion was grinning, “Rhaegar’s revenge…”

“What?” Queen Cersei snapped, her twin-brother helping her off the floor, covered in dust. They all were. Jon dusted the ash off his brigandine, wrinkling his nose in distaste to realise they were the ashes of the dead…and Rhaegal had burned the Mountain to protect him.

Daenerys had not commanded him to: Rhaegal had acted on his own.

“That dragon, the green-and-bronze…he was named for Rhaegar. Fascinating that it should be him that finally killed the one who mutilated Rhaegar’s children, and brutalised Rhaegar’s wife,” Lord Tyrion said, grinning, as he raised his wine-skin in salute to House Martell: Lady Ellaria’s dark eyes were gleaming with triumph, Obara’s face finally split into a satisfied grin. Rhaegal had given them the justice that had been stolen from them. “Yes…curious indeed… The Mountain is naught but ash…” Lord Tyrion giggled softly, and shook the dust from his dark gold curls. He sighed, and fixed Cersei with a sharp and implacable look that reminded Cersei absurdly of her father. Ser Jaime looked at his little brother, and acknowledged what no-one ever had: That Tyrion was far more Tywin than any of his children. “We are not here to assassinate you, Cersei, and the only reason Rhaegal attacked was because you commanded your men to murder us, as he was ready to do the moment you stepped foot inside this pit.”

“That wight was not a trick, or black magic wielded by Daenerys - it is a soldier of the Night King,” Jon said gravely, sheathing Long Claw after eyeing the guards, who stood trembling. “If we do not work together, we are all dead… Queen Daenerys graciously allowed me to mine obsidian on Dragonstone, to arm my men for the coming war. And she did so, in spite of the fact that I would not kneel. I shall never yield the North to the Iron Throne, no matter who sits upon it: We shall remain a free and independent kingdom. Moreover, the North shall remain neutral in the conflict between Dragonstone and the Iron Throne…”

“And why should I believe that?”

“Because Winterfell is now a safe haven to the last of your family. Queen Daenerys…spared seven daughters of Casterly Rock,” Jon said, and beneath her black awning, Daenerys shifted ever so slightly in her seat. “The closest of their kin at her court, Lord Tyrion, has asked me to take the girls as wards of Winterfell, for the duration of the winter and your war.”

“Seven little girls?” Cersei scoffed, smirking and shaking her head.

“Which little girls?” Ser Jaime frowned, his eyes widening slightly, even as Queen Cersei continued to smirk. Jon held a glare long enough that she grew uncomfortable under his quelling gaze, then turned to Ser Jaime.

“Lady Narcisa Lannister, eldest daughter of Lord Tytan and Lady Lovisa Lannister. Lady Crisantha, only daughter of Lord Jason and Lady Merinda,” Jon said, recounting all the details, the names, the little golden faces tearstained and exhausted. “Lady Delphine, youngest daughter of Lord Teobald and Lady Leila. Calanthe the Lioness, daughter of Lord Loreon and Lady Louella. Lady Altheda, daughter of Lord Hagon and Lady Lyra. Lady Rosamund, daughter of Lord Lyman and Lady Jacquetta. And Lady Leona, daughter of Lord Leovar and Lady Rohanne.”

“Aunt Genna chose them herself,” Lord Tyrion said quietly, glancing at his siblings. Ser Jaime’s lips parted, but the Queen’s eyes narrowed.

“They will remain at Winterfell, educated and protected,” Jon said earnestly.

“And why should we trust you to keep them safe?” the Queen sneered. Jon levelled his stare on her again: It was more effective than shouting.

“Trust my sister Sansa to do better than the example shown her,” Jon said harshly, and Queen Cersei glanced back at him, shrinking under the strength of the quiet rage in Jon’s face. Her eyelashes fluttered as she glanced away from his unyielding gaze. Jon sighed, and shook off his anger, the reminder of Sansa’s mistreatment. “Your armies have suffered a defeat, I know, and with things as they are, the likelihood of calling your banners to aid the North is slim…but long have the dungeons of King’s Landing been emptied to man the Wall. I would ask that you do so now, Your Grace, and send north your criminals to defend the Seven Kingdoms.”

“That’s all you want?” The Queen seemed surprised.

“That’s the best I can hope for from you,” Jon said, subtle accusation lacing his tone.

“It seems a strange joke…dungeons full of the worst kinds of criminals…in exchange for the safety of seven little orphans,” Cersei said, with a tittering laugh.

“The girls’ safety is not conditional, Your Grace,” Jon glowered. “Those girls are daughters of the North for all intents and purposes, and shall be treated as such.”

“Why?” Ser Jaime asked, staring at Jon.

“Why not?” Jon said grimly, scowling at the handsome knight. He looked very different to the man Jon remembered being so snide to him in the courtyard at Winterfell. He seemed…more tangible now, more real - as if this was the man he had always been, beneath the gilded front he put on. Jon was aware that there was…something between Ser Jaime and Lady Brienne, that a bond had formed during their journey together after he had been quested by Lady Catelyn to bring her daughters home…

“How long?” the little man, Queen Cersei’s Hand, turned to Jon. “Your Grace, how long until the dead march south?”

“If they breach the Wall…months,” Jon said grimly. “And it’s only a matter of time, now, until they do.”

“If I may, Your Grace…a quiet word…”

The Queen turned to her Hand, giving him a cool look; she turned, walking away, regal and unfazed by the violence, by the ash, by the dragons circling overhead. Jon frowned as they went, hoping against hope that the Queen’s Hand was shrewd and cunning and clever enough to realise the advantages this presented them. And help Cersei realise them.

A little voice inside Jon’s head, one that sounded suspiciously like Larra, told him that an armistice, however temporary, could only be to Cersei’s benefit. The little voice mused that while Daenerys’ forces were committed in the North, Cersei would have time to recover from her losses in the south, to consolidate her power over the kingdoms…to weaponise her cities and motivate and mobilise her population to fight for her.

Jon was relieved Daenerys had committed her armies to fighting the Night King.

He still did not believe that Daenerys would be a better ruler on the Iron Throne than any who had come before her, even if she managed to claim it.

Perhaps, in time, she could learn how to be a ruler, to lead…but all her thoughts - all her experience - were turned toward conquest, not what came after. He had seen it on Dragonstone.

He had seen it in the rare vulnerability she had shown him at Eastwatch, her uncertainty, her confusion. He wondered if she actually knew how to remain still…how to live, without something in the back of her mind spurring her ever onwards, striving and straining… What would she do, when she finally got what she wanted?

What would she do, if she didn’t get it?

Jon was happy for the North to remain neutral. He was not convinced, and for all her promises and self-reflection that night she had forced herself upon him, that Daenerys had truly thought it through, the idea versus the reality of committing her armies. Of sacrificing them to defeat the Night King.

Cersei returned. Her Hand dusted her chair for her, and the Queen sat. “If my brother Jaime informs me correctly, you’re asking for a truce.”

“Yes,” said Daenerys simply. “That’s all.”

“That’s all?” Cersei blinked, her expression dangerously benign. “Pull back my armies and stand down while you go on your monster-hunt. Or while you solidify and expand your position, hard for me to know which it is…with my armies pulled back.”

“Which armies would those be?” Lord Tyrion quipped: Cersei ignored him.

“Then you would return and march on my capital with four times the men,” Cersei snarled.

“I could take King’s Landing in a fraction of an hour,” Daenerys said coldly, her eyes alight with a self-righteous fury. “And yet my children circle this…ruin, protecting me from harm, so that we may discuss terms. King’s Landing will remain safe until the Northern threat has been dealt with. You have my word.”

“The word of the Mad King’s daughter?” Cersei sneered.

“When your father summoned Lord Rickard Stark to King’s Landing, the King gave his word that until Lord Stark arrived at the capital, no harm would come to his son and heir… Lord Stark came south,” said Ser Jaime Lannister, directly addressing Daenerys for the first time. He looked like he was supremely aware that before him sat the daughter of the man whose throat he had opened, whose back he had shoved a sword through. “The King had his Warden of the North burned alive while his son watched, strapped in a torture device that strangled him as he struggled to free himself and put an end to his father’s gruesome, slow death…”

“You like to burn people, too, don’t you,” said Cersei silkily. “Wise Masters, Dothraki khals, pregnant women and children…”

“You informed my commanders who surrendered at the Ash Meadow that you did not come to Westeros to destroy our cities, burn down our homes, murder us and orphan our children… You told them that, after you had burned their armies - before you went on, to burn women and babies… Your word accounts for nothing.”

“Mine, then?” Lord Tyrion said, ending a brittle silence that had Daenerys fuming where she sat, glaring with wide eyes at Ser Jaime Lannister. At the sound of her Hand’s voice, Daenerys lowered her gaze, her expression gentling, as if she was tucking away her rage, the story of her father’s maliciousness, the value of his word… “Did I not do everything in my power to defend this city, and all those who live within it, did I not give mine own blood defending it, when Stannis Baratheon laid siege to King’s Landing? I did not suffer any harm to come to any of its peoples then, no matter who they were - no matter what they deserved,” he glanced meaningfully at Cersei “- and I will not suffer to let it happen now.”

After a few moments, Cersei sighed softly, and her expression relented. “The Crown accepts your truce, until the dead are defeated. They are the true enemy.”

“Thank you, Your Grace,” Jon said, giving her a respectful, formal half-bow.

“My Lord Hand shall see to it that the dungeons of the Red Keep are emptied, the able-bodied men sent north…”

“We’ll ferry them north,” said Yara Greyjoy, the first time she had spoken, and beside her, Theon nodded.

The Queen glanced at her Hand, who nodded, bowing slightly to Lady Greyjoy. Cersei gazed at Jon. “May they be more honourable in their deaths than they ever were in life.”


“Well…that could have been far worse.”

“I anticipated it would be.”

“One death, and one confession of regicide,” Ser Davos said rather cheerfully. “Can’t say I’m sorry to see the Mountain reduced to cinders - or surprised, that Lady Olenna had the nerve to claim she’d poisoned the boy-king.”

“Nor I,” Jon agreed. They strode through the harbour, Jon itching to get on-board his ship. Unless Cersei launched flaming debris from trebuchets, his fleet was safe - he was safe to depart King’s Landing and never look back.

He could already see chained men being herded onto Yara Greyjoy’s ships: Queen Cersei had been true to her word about that, at least. She had given him exactly what Daenerys had: Nothing. They had both given him something without yielding anything. Obsidian and criminals, it made no matter; they were both the same.

And yet, even a thousand more men helped.

And Princess Myrcella had brought one thousand spearmen with her: They were to accompany Obara Sand to Winterfell, where her sister Nymeria already waited as Dornish emissary at the Northern court. The spearmen were Prince Doran’s contribution to Jon’s war-effort.

A thousand Dornish spearmen; the bowels of the Red Keep emptied onto Greyjoy ships.

More soldiers than he’d had when he woke up this morning.

“Your Grace?” Crimson glimmered, and Lannister soldiers marched forward, escorting Ser Jaime Lannister, who looked sombre and somewhat shaken. He stopped, the soldiers froze, and he bowed low to Jon.

“Ser Jaime,” Jon said quietly.

“I had hoped to catch you. You are leaving now?”

“As soon as the last of the supplies are loaded,” Jon nodded. “I am anxious to return to the North. Please pass on my thanks to Her Grace for the men.”

“I made certain those who showed symptoms of sickness were prevented from boarding the ships,” Ser Jaime said, his eyes dancing, his smile rather rueful. “My sister has a way of giving poisoned gifts.”

“I appreciate that,” Jon said, startled by the knight’s candour. “What can I do for you, Ser?”

“It’s…what I can do for you,” Ser Jaime said, with a slight wince, glancing around the bustling quay as if abashed. He glanced over his shoulder, summoning someone with a gesture. A cluster of wizened old men in robes shuffled forward, squinting as if the sunlight pained them. “You said obsidian and fire can destroy the wights?”

“They do,” Jon confirmed.

“These men are what remains of King Aerys’ Guild of Pyromancers. These men are the only men in Westeros who can create wildfire,” Ser Jaime said, and Jon stared, his gaze falling quickly to the small nervous-looking men. “During the siege of King’s Landing, my brother put them to use to safeguard Blackwater Bay against Stannis Baratheon’s fleet - to great effect.”

“I well remember,” Ser Davos said grimly, glancing at Jon.

“With Queen Daenerys allying with you to fight against the Night King, I am sure my brother will be present at Winterfell to aid the siege preparations,” Ser Jaime said. “Tyrion has a mind for strategy, and wielded wildfire in such a way that it was the advancing army, and not the innocents living within the city walls, who were caught up in the explosions… The Pyromancers’ Guild has endured this long for a reason - I know it is for something far less petty than setting alight the Sept of Baelor.” He condemned his sister’s actions as well as giving his damning opinion of the Pyromancers’ Guild in one sentence.

Jon’s mind was racing. Pyromancers - wildfire. With that… Sansa had told Jon what she had glimpsed from the castle windows as Stannis Baratheon’s fleet advanced…and was obliterated into nothing more than splinters and embers, the entire Bay glowing emerald-green… With wildfire…

“Thank you, Ser Jaime,” Jon said, his voice rich with earnestness. The knight nodded.

“You will know, of course, that the Lannister armies are severely depleted,” Ser Jaime said, frowning. “There were many witnesses today to what lies in store for us through the winter. And there are still brave, honourable men in the south, though it is understandable that you would not believe it…” Jon said nothing: Many of his black brothers were from the south. He couldn’t blame the brothers he had loved and lost because they came from the same places as Janos Slynt and Alliser Thorne. Ser Jaime raised his emerald-green eyes to Jon’s: They looked sombre and haunted, a far cry from the arrogant man with dancing eyes glittering with irony who had taunted Jon that day at Winterfell. “I will do my utmost to assemble as many men as I can.”

Jon understood what Ser Jaime was implying: He was willing to commit treason and usurp his sister’s command of her armies to take men north to fight against the Night King.

Just the act of putting the Pyromancers’ Guild at Jon’s disposal - when Cersei was undoubtedly already planning her next moves while Daenerys headed north, and would likely desire to wield wildfire against Daenerys’ armies - was treasonous in itself.

Strange, to see the Kingslayer in such a way. Willing to defy his queen to do what was right.

Jon remembered what Tyrion had said, so long ago, in the throne room at Dragonstone. That the Mad King had littered King’s Landing with secret caches of wildfire to burn the city to the ground, rather than yield it to Robert Baratheon’s advancing forces… That Ser Jaime had plunged the sword into Aerys’ back and slit his throat for good measure - so the Mad King could not give the order to burn hundreds of thousands of people alive.

The King in the North stared at the Kingslayer, and wondered why he had never made the truth widely known.

People would have believed him: After all, it was Aerys’ cruelty the Seven Kingdoms had rebelled against. Lord Rickard and Brandon’s gruesome executions, and Lord Arryn raising his banners when King Aerys demanded both Ned Stark and the Lord Paramount of the Stormlands Robert Baratheon, had ignited the rebellion.

“Thank you, Ser Jaime,” Jon said sombrely.

The knight nodded, and the little pyromancers scuttled up the gangway to board Winter, wringing their hands and muttering amongst themselves in agitation. Ser Davos caught Jon’s eye, raising his eyebrows, but Jon…was overwhelmed by the brief sensation of…relief. It was utterly foreign to him - and very welcome, no matter how fragile and temporary it was.

“Now we’ll have other options if the Queen decides to throw a tantrum,” Ser Davos muttered low, his beard twitching, and Jon nodded, some sharp pain in his chest easing. Yes…he hadn’t even thought of that, just of the practical applications of wildfire for warfare - but, yes, that did mean that if Daenerys threatened to withdraw support, at least they now had the means to make fire of their own without having to cut down the wolfswood in its entirety to burn it.

“This is much more than I dared hope for,” Jon murmured, and Ser Davos nodded his agreement: Truth be told, both of them had anticipated the summit to end with exactly what Cersei had done - thrown a fit and set her guards upon them after screaming about conspiracies and assassinations. Thankfully - thanks to Rhaegal - the destruction of the Mountain had afforded them precious moments in which Jon had taken advantage of the Queen’s shock…

One thousand Dornish spears. The black cells emptied to fight in the North. And pyromancers to create wildfire…

More than he had had when he woke up this morning.

“I wish you good fortune,” Ser Jaime said earnestly, “in the wars to come.”

“And you, Ser,” Jon said quietly. Ser Jaime stepped back with his guards, watching Ser Davos and Jon approaching the gangway, cleared now of the last of the supplies and equipment Jon had had the foresight to send people to purchase while they were in the capital.

He turned toward the ship, and Jon’s eyes glanced over a diminutive figure in grubby clothing, who sat perched on a barrel beside the gangway, dark hair twisted into a neat plaited knot, heavy eyebrows hovering over strange eyes, a small Braavosi sword at their belt.

Jon froze. Stared straight ahead, feeling as if the wind had been knocked from him.

He turned sharply, eyes wide, not daring to believe it - he gaped, stunned and winded.

The young woman on the barrel gazed back at him, her unusual eyes glimmering. Her gloved hand was wrapped around the hilt of Needle.

Jon stumbled down the gangway, his arms wide.

And, as she had the last time he saw her, Arya leapt into them. She clung on as if for dear life.

Jon’s eyes burned; Arya whimpered a soft sob, and he squeezed her tighter, gasping and shocked.

Arya!

Eventually, she wriggled - as she always had - and Jon reluctantly set her down on her feet, realising he had been holding her dangling two feet off the ground. She was still just as little.

“I worried you wouldn’t recognise me,” she said, her voice softer than Jon ever remembered it. She had always been vibrant, irrepressible - she had been so like Larra that way, wild and free, and good.

His breath was stolen from his lungs as he gazed down at her, grief and disbelief warring on his face as he swiped at his burning eyes. She wasn’t a little girl anymore. She had grown up. And her unusual eyes were drenched in sorrow and far too much understanding for someone so young. There was a calm to her now, a stillness, but when she gazed up at Jon, her eyes glinted with tears, her voice shook, and she dived in for another, briefer hug that knocked the breath from Jon’s lungs again.

“Arya!” he breathed, leaning down to kiss her head, his eyes burning with tears. As she straightened, he blinked furiously, shaking his head, uncomprehending, “Arya.”

“Do I have to call you King Jon now?”

“And curtsey.”

Notes:

Anyone bawling? Anyone screaming? Both?! Told you, you’d love it!

So…I’ve just started reading Throne of Glass - without realising there are eight books in the series. And I’m undecided whether I’m annoyed enough about the characterisation to rewrite the whole thing with my own OC as main character replacing Celaena/Aelin, or if I care to invest in all those eight books when I really dislike the characterisation of the heroine (I keep getting whiplash, and think maybe Maas was writing two characters and accidentally mushed them together)… Same issue I have with Feyre in ACoTaR - loved the world, loved the men, hated every female character except Amren! A rewrite may be required for that, too (for a more mature readership!) - but I just…let me know, anyone who’s read the books and was dissatisfied with the portrayal of a teenage ‘assassin’ who took every opportunity to act more like Serena van der Woodsen: Arya Stark and the flirtatious but lethal Natasha Romanov have ruined me for portrayals of female assassins of any age. Also, my OC would not be a blue-eyed blonde: I’m tired of blondes being the standard for ethereal, otherworldly beauty! (cough, *Daenerys* cough)

Chapter 34: Under Watchful Gazes

Notes:

You thought you’d heard the last of me! I started my first teaching job in January - hasn’t gone exactly what you’d call ‘to plan’, what with the lockdown! So I don’t have as much time to write - meaning: I don’t have any time to write! So, that’s why I haven’t updated.

I’ve also changed Rhysand’s name. On repeated re-reads of ACOTAR, I’m getting some dangerous Daenerys vibes from him - the narcissism, hypocrisy and entitlement. So he’s been renamed to Cadeon. Cadeon Baratheon has a lovely ring to it, doesn’t it?

I’ve also realised who I want Larra to become like - Tywin. In the best way possible. There’s a great analysis of Tywin by King McKay on YouTube, detailing what made Tywin the man he became, and one line stuck out to me: That Tywin the man was created because he had to rebuild his family and their status after his father ruined them. That’s basically Larra: She was left to repair the damage created by her family’s mistakes - not just Ned’s and Robb’s but Rhaegar and Lyanna’s, though that’ll come later.

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

34

Under Watchful Gazes

Fat snowflakes whirled idly around her, gentle and deceptive. As a girl, she had always thought of snow as peaceful. The way everything seemed to slow down, to calm and become still.

All those years beyond the Wall had taught her the dangers of snow. Pelting through it at breakneck speed, clinging to the sledge as Shadow dragged them through the worst snowstorms she had ever endured… Larra sighed, and her breath plumed around her, illuminated by the flickering torchlight that made the stars so high above wink and twinkle dully. So many torches, so many lit windows, the muted hum of thousands of labourers in and around the castle… She stifled a laugh, startled to realise she missed the silent solitude of the great weirwood… Perched on the threshold of the cave, she used to sit and stare up at the endless velvet night-sky for hours, counting the stars…until the dawn traced a delicate silver-pink blush along those eternal snow-capped mountains that had tried for eons to pierce the sky, to reach those stars.

Strange how much she missed them. Those stars, those snow-capped mountains. The space.

The freedom.

The Free Folk said she had the True North in her now. For her, there was no going back - she’d never be a kneeler. She knew that to be the truth, at least. But she had never lived a life without responsibility, lawless as she had become beyond the Wall.

She had had Bran to think about, and still, even though he was independently mobile and taking a more active role in the running of Winterfell, Larra didn’t believe she would ever lose the sense of accountability she felt for Bran. Too many of her thoughts and choices for far too many years had been devoted to him. The near-obsession over his health and wellbeing was now the weakest it had ever been since his fall, but it was still there. Even as she watched the stars, and blocked out the sounds of the people working, to enjoy just this brief moment of calm, Larra felt the tug to scan the godswood for his wheeled chair, for those glinting dark stranger’s eyes in an ancient young-man’s face, to search the castle for him and ensure he was fed and warm. Always warm.

Always, she worried that Bran was warm enough.

It did her good to step away.

It had done her good, these last few days, to ignore him completely. Yesterday, she had sat to supper with the children, prising apart Rosamund and Altheda as they squabbled over the ribbons Ser Davos had gifted them while Neva winced at the noise and carefully guided Leona as she haphazardly used a spoon and Cadeon nettled Narcisa - all of them overwrought from their journey, anxious in their new surroundings and desperate for the familiar - realising she hadn’t thought about Bran for three days together. It was an odd, horrifically liberating realisation that had filled her with shame, then anger at her guilt over not prioritising Bran.

Larra had devoted her days - and many of her nights - to the lion cubs, to Little Jon and Ragnar, to Neva the Lyseni, and the reckless, riotous, charming and larger-than-life character that was Cadeon - who held the boys of Winterfell in awe with his ‘war wounds’ and knife skills. The children had commandeered her time and all of her focus, and Larra was glad of it, though it made her heart ache. There was no going back, no replacing Bran or Rickon with the children, no slipping seamlessly back into the old routines she had cultivated with her brothers when they were under her care. To do so would be to break her own heart over again.

And yet…

She could not help but be drawn to the children, so particular in their differences from her siblings yet so similar in many ways.

Just like Bran and Rickon, the seven Lannister girls were fraught from the loss of their families and all that they knew, everything that they recognised. Even the warmth of a plain woollen overdress was unfamiliar to them. They were summer girls, Southern girls; they had no notion of austerity, of cold…of winter.

Experience was a brutal teacher; they were learning. It fell to Larra to guide them: no-one else cared to take on the responsibility. Sansa looked at the girls and was reminded all too vividly of Cersei, and Larra wondered whether the Queen haunted Sansa worse than the horrors she had experienced for even so brief a time as captive in their own home. Cersei had had Sansa for longer; the wounds inflicted on Sansa’s mind went far deeper than those inflicted on her body.

Larra had taken on the girls as her responsibility: with Sansa excelling in her role as castellan of Winterfell, Larra had needed to find her place in the castle. No-one else in the world cared about the little lion-cubs: Larra knew how that felt. They had no true home anymore, no-one to champion them. Jon had named them wards of the King in the North, yet Sansa was in many ways a girl still, and had no experience. Not like Larra. So she had become what the Lannister lionesses needed, just as she had for Bran and Rickon all those years ago.

The girls did not know her as her brothers had, to trust her as they did; but they were learning who she was. They were starting to understand that when they woke whimpering from dreams drenched in terror - in memory - she would be there, sat in the rocking-chair under the window cracked open against the stifling warmth of the heated walls.

They knew she would coax them to climb into her lap, and her gentle singing would soothe them as she wiped their tears and rocked them. When they were calm, she would tuck them up with their cousins under mounds of blankets, eiderdowns and furs to keep them warm. They knew that by the time Larra woke them - long before the idle winter sun had risen - their youngest cousin would already be cuddled up in Larra’s rocking-chair, enfolded in thick knitted blankets, chatting contentedly around her thumb while Larra used a spurtle to stir a cauldron of porridge that coaxed the girls out of the warmth of their beds, wrapping robes around themselves and blankets around their shoulders, to enjoy a large bowl of porridge to and fill their bellies for the morning’s learning with a quiet, gentle maester who had earned the position of their teacher through his gentle voice, kind nature, boundless enthusiasm for learning and deep compassion for all living creatures. Larra was impressed with him; even more so because he was so in awe of the progresses Maester Luwin had curated for Larra’s education. The girls’ first lessons had been very simple, more to introduce them to the maester and the schoolroom than anything else, based on discussions of ideas to glean what the girls already knew and what they would like to learn. Larra collected them at midday, the only time it was guaranteed to be quite bright outside, and took them for a long walk in the godswood. She had noticed some of the girls shuddering with dread at the sight of the great weirwood: it was an ancient, eerie place - a Northern place. What did these little Southerners know of the Old Gods, of the wolfswood and the rich, ancient cultures of the endless whispering moors and mountains embraced lovingly by blankets of snow?

They were starting to trust Larra: She made them feel reassured, settled - safe. Enough to be coaxed out into the brightness of the brittle winter sunlight a few days after their arrival, wearing knitted mittens and bonnets over their bright gold hair, to explore the godswood while the daylight lasted.

“You’re preparing for a battle.”

Snow crunched underfoot and the idyllic picture of children playing innocently in the snow fractured: Calanthe’s stubborn little face, nipped pink by the chill, frowned up at her.

Larra had no favourites among the children, of course.

But Calanthe was her favourite.

While they had been adjusting to the castle, the fierce little lioness spent most of her time eluding her septa, spying on drills in the training-yard.

She was too like Arya. And Larra found herself sympathising with how Father must have felt, watching his girls who were so like fierce Lyanna - filled with depthless love intertwined forever with sorrow and heartsickness. She could not long watch Calanthe without thinking of Arya, and it hurt. Watching Calanthe hurt. Though she was as like Arya as the sun and moon in looks, vibrant and fiercely just Calanthe was so like Arya in her passion and tenacity that it gave Larra stomach-ache.

Larra was determined to give Calanthe and her cousins an arsenal with which to face the world. To be better-equipped to handle the grim realities of the world, without ruining what little innocence the Lion Culling had left them with. To give them the chance neither Sansa nor Arya ever had. A chance Larra barely had, only because she had fought tooth and nail for it. In crafting a curriculum by which to educate the lionesses, based on Maester Luwin’s excellently curated curriculum created for Larra herself, Larra had determined that none of the girls would ever have to fight her tooth and nail to learn to protect themselves. That was what it came down to: Giving the girls every opportunity, not just to survive. To thrive in spite of all odds.

On her better days, Larra thought she and Sansa had done miraculously well, all things considered. Thus far, they had certainly beaten all odds stacked against them - not always with aplomb, but they had done it. They had conquered horrific odds to come back home, to come back to each other, without ever realising the other still lived. They had endured - often without hope.

A better opportunity to thrive was all Larra would have wanted for her sisters, looking back. But she would not trade Sansa, as the young woman she now was, for anything. Though it would have saved Sansa a lot of grief and heartbreak to learn some things sooner rather than later. And Arya…

As Sansa said with more than a touch of bitterness, “Father never wanted his daughters to know how ugly the world truly was.” Neither Sansa nor Arya had been prepared for it. Sansa’s new view of the world was harsh, but how could it not be? Larra knew there was still beauty in the world, no matter how rare in some circumstances.

But there was beauty, goodness, loyalty, bravery. All of the qualities Father had held sacred, qualities he had passed on to them: nobility of action rather than birth, loyalty and justice, humility and devotion, wisdom and generosity.

Larra did not blame Sansa for having trouble seeing them: She was still healing from the brutal lessons life had dealt her.

So was Larra, in her own way.

Her sigh plumed in front of her as she lifted her gaze to the boundless sky, dreaming of touching those twinkling lights so high above, away from the noise and clatter, the heavy responsibilities she had placed on herself, the dread of the coming storm, all of it. She breathed out, slowly, and let the cold nip at her lungs and fat snowflakes caress her eyelashes and her nose as they drifted by idly.

The girls’ rare giggles were muted in the godswood, the ageless trees sheltering them from the fiercest of the flurries, and a ghost of a smile whispered at the corners of her lips. Children lived in the moment in a way adults could never understand, and most had forgotten: The girls experienced their first snow with the same innocence and awe that Larra had once also viewed it. It was refreshing, to see the world through their eyes. To recapture, even if for only a few heartbeats, the pure wonder at nature’s most beguiling trick. To experience their delight and their rapture, and try to absorb some of it as her own. To see the snows as the girls saw them, without the shadows of wights and White Walkers lurking beyond the fragile, vicious snowflakes.

“We are indeed,” Larra acknowledged.

“When it comes to it, I want to be the one to kill the Queen,” Calanthe said stoutly, and Larra glanced down at the girl. She was learning the girls’ natures very quickly. Narcisa was aloof, elegant and prideful but also very emotional and easily nettled by Cadeon, with whom Larra suspected she was rather infatuated despite herself. She was at that age, her attention ensnared by a pair of pretty eyes. Rosamund was tearful, confused - she woke each morning expecting her mother to greet her with a kiss, and was heartbroken all over again when she did not, fretful and anxious, but drawn to Larra for comfort. Altheda was wide-eyed and remained quiet, easily startled and seemed to have to concentrate to focus on anything, unsettled to find herself in unfamiliar surroundings; she handled this disorientation by lashing out - usually at little Neva, who always gazed at Larra with moon-eyes, shy but consistent, delicate in nature but caring, and who was most often to be found amusing tiny Leona or sitting contentedly with fragile Crisantha, who drifted about as if guided by invisible strings, utterly compliant, completely non-vocal, her eyes perpetually glazed as if locked inside her own memories. Larra knew that look from Brandon far too well.

It was Crisantha’s complete disengagement from the world around her that Larra was most concerned about. Sansa had murmured over supper one evening that she remembered feeling the way Crisantha looked after Father had been executed - her body had moved as if of its own volition while her mind remained foggy, brittle and silent but for her occasional screams of despair, the sound of her heart breaking reverberating through her mind.

Larra approached each of the girls differently. Narcisa responded to unyielding sternness: she had, after all, grown up at Casterly Rock with Lord Tywin Lannister. Narcisa responded best to strictness: Larra gave Narcisa no room to sneer at her over her bastard status. Narcisa had been raised the eldest daughter of a powerful, wealthy man, was haughty and rather spoiled - in an instant, the tragedy of her family’s fate had undone the worst of the damage to her truest nature, which was fair, stern, courageous and hopeful. Rosamund and Leona, Larra only had to offer her arms and they climbed up for cuddles, desperate for the comfort and safety of a deeply maternal embrace.

There were many ways to communicate, and while Crisantha remained silent, locked inside her own mind, Larra communicated through touch. Frequent, tiny touches full of tenderness. They told Crisantha without Larra having to say anything that here, she would know only gentleness. Larra had spent hours washing and then combing out Crisantha’s thick hair so that it dried into voluminous, bright-gold curls, untangling the knots and smoothing balm through the curls the same way Larra had always treated her own riotous curls. Always gentle, always patient and tender.

Rosamund and Leona were always the first to approach Larra when she entered the room; but Crisantha remained nearest to her for the longest. Even now, as Neva and Rosamund played with Leona beneath the weirwood, Crisantha stood beside Larra, close enough to share their warmth, silent and eyes downcast, her mitten-covered hand held loosely in Larra’s bare one. Crisantha often reached for Larra’s hand as if completely unaware she was doing it; perhaps Crisantha was terrified of being snatched away by the wind like fallen weirwood leaves.

If Crisantha had a perfect opposite, it was Calanthe.

She was fierceness, tenacity, obstinate righteousness, unguarded honesty and a charming sense of earnest decency mingled with flashes of haughtiness, impish mischief and deep loyalty. She was also unexpectedly emotional; she was nine years old.

Larra found Calanthe utterly delightful - and horrifying in her similarity to both Arya and Rickon.

“I’m afraid over a hundred-thousand Dothraki screamers stand between you and their khaleesi,” Larra said, glancing down at Calanthe, keeping a close eye on little Leona gathering weirwood leaves at the base of the ancient tree, close to the pond where Father used to cleanse Ice after every execution. The pond remained unfrozen, like the river where the dire-eagles gathered to fish throughout the winter: In the half-light of dusk, they could be forgiven for believing that the ground was smoking as vapour drifted up eerily from the black water.

Calanthe sighed, her beautiful features drawn into a scowl of deep annoyance. Though they were all blonde with pale eyes, it was clear that the girls were cousins rather than siblings; they shared similar traits, but were unique in their looks. They were all, however, very pretty girls, and if they were lucky, may grow to be stunningly beautiful women. It had occurred to Larra many times that she had taken responsibility for who those women would be. Calanthe glared at the smoking pond. “The smallfolk say there’s a dragon under there. They say it lives in the crypts beneath Winterfell.”

“There’s no dragon beneath Winterfell,” Larra assured her gently, for though Calanthe never said it, Larra could sense the girl’s fear. For all her ferocity, Calanthe was still a little girl fresh from her family’s massacre. And none of them sat near to the fire in their chamber, no matter how cold they were.

Calanthe went very still, not looking at Larra. She was easy to read. “How do you know?”

“Because I’ve been down to the very first foundation stones,” Larra said quietly, suppressing a shudder. Three days and nights she had been gone, to invoke ancient spells and call upon older vows, and all the while she had fought to keep the story of the Seventy-Nine Sentinels out of her mind. She had always felt that was the most horrifying of Old Nan’s stories. “There is nothing down there but dust and decay, and the ghosts of the Kings of Winter.”

“The King in the North,” Calanthe breathed, with a quiet awe. Her intense face softened with a wistful smile as her hand drifted to the knife belted at her waist, a knife she had proudly told Larra that Jon had allowed her to keep, even showing her how to correctly hold it so that she would not do herself an injury. Larra’s lips twitched with a smile, answering Calanthe’s. “King Jon said I should learn how to use my knife.”

“I’m certain he did,” Larra said softly, her lips twitching as Calanthe gave her a sly look. King Jon…

“When shall I begin my training?” Calanthe asked, and Larra gazed down at the girl.

“Are you to begin training?”

“All the other girls are,” Calanthe said. “I’ve been watching them in the yard. The King has commanded that all boys and girls from the age of ten must train.”

“You’re a ward of the King in the North,” Larra reminded Calanthe gently. “You’re here under Jon’s protection; you’re exempt from his command.”

Calanthe went still, frowning. After a moment, she said quietly, “I must learn to fight.”

“Learning to fight is a very different thing to killing,” Larra muttered, glancing down at Calanthe with a wince. “The children sparring in the yard will likely die in battle within a few months. If you pick up a sword now, you will never live to be the pride of your family.”

Calanthe sniffed. “My family is dead. What does it matter if they’re proud of me? I’d rather train to fight so I can protect people from her… All she has, all she has taken - she doesn’t deserve it. She deserves to be dead.”

Larra sighed heavily, glancing down at Calanthe, and perhaps it was the very real sorrow heavy in her voice that made Calanthe take notice, and remember Larra’s words all her life.

“Some who live deserve death…and far too many who have died deserved life. Can you give it to them?” she asked gently, and Calanthe’s shoulders drooped, sighing as she reluctantly - regretfully - shook her head. “Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement.”

Calanthe sighed heavily, then frowned up at Larra. “Aren’t you angry?”

“About what?”

“The Red Wedding,” Calanthe said, wincing, and Larra went still. “Everyone knows about it. The North remembers… “And we are Lannisters. Why are you taking care of us, not tormenting us?”

“I shan’t punish children for the mistakes made by their elders,” Larra said grimly. “They’ve enough to contend with.”

“What do you mean?”

“All you see around you is the work of my brother and sister; they had to rebuild Winterfell, when it was taken from our family, when the North was snatched from us through treason and bribery and backstabbing,” Larra said. “They had to unite their bannermen after their trust was broken, after their faith was shattered. My father was loved by his men as much as he was respected as a fair ruler. It is in part due to their abiding love and respect for him that Jon and Sansa could call on their oaths of fealty. No-one loved Tywin Lannister; they dreaded him. And without the threat of his ruthlessness if they dare go against Lord Lannister, there is little now to inspire loyalty among Lannister bannermen. You and your cousins will have a hard enough fight when you’re older; I am determined to give you the skills you’ll need to fight. And I do not mean on the battlefield.” Calanthe’s lips had parted eagerly; her mouth closed as she frowned thoughtfully.

“What kind of fighting can we do if we’re not on a battlefield?” Calanthe asked, and Larra smiled sadly.

“Oh, even more dangerous games,” she said. She shook her head. “The War of the Five Kings did not end because of a decisive victory in the battlefield; my brother Robb died undefeated in battle. The North lost the war because of politics, Calanthe. The duplicitous arts of diplomacy, tact, backstabbing, cunning, blackmail and bribery, ruthlessness and single-minded purpose. Playing cyvasse with queens and armies across continents rather than carved icons on a board.”

“Grandpapa plays cyvasse,” Calanthe said, her eyes brightening for a heartbeat - only for her vivid emerald eyes to darken. “He played cyvasse. He would sit me on his knee and tried to teach me the rules.”

“Tried to?”

“I wanted him to tell me stories about the Dance of Dragons,” Calanthe said, with a wince that seemed almost guilty. Larra smiled softly to herself, feeling a pang as Arya’s soft voice coaxed her for one more retelling of the Battle Above the Gods’ Eye before bed, and how often she would undo her freshly combed braids so that Larra had to stay and sit and neatly braid her hair, allowing for that last thrilling retelling.

Larra glanced at Calanthe. “Are you a Green or a Black?”

“A Black, obviously. Rhaenyra was much older, and was her father’s chosen heir,” Calanthe said passionately. “Aegon was only chosen because he was a boy.” Larra’s lips twitched as Calanthe scowled. “Why are you smiling?”

“You remind me of my sister Arya. She was a fierce advocate of Princess Rhaenyra, too. She loved to listen to the stories of the Dance of Dragons. Blood and Cheese was her favourite. She had a bloodlust for justice, too. Before she ever learned what death and war truly are.”

“It all seems like rather a lot of waste,” Calanthe said softly. “All those dragons, all those children. Dead.”

“Yes,” Larra agreed.

“Twice they passed over women, first Rhaenys and then Rhaenyra. And doing so led to the Dance of Dragons,” Calanthe frowned. “Why are men so delicate about their pride? Are they so threatened that a woman would upstage them?”

“Usually,” Larra said, and chuckled, though it was a grim, tired sound. “How much grief might the Seven Kingdoms have been spared, had the lords of Westeros respected primogeniture? My brother Robb and I always argued over it; he was the eldest trueborn son, after all - but I was the eldest child, and more devoted to my studies and my duties because I knew it was a privilege to sit in the schoolroom alongside my brothers. Which of us do you think was better prepared to rule?”

“They say King Robb was a commander such as is seen only once in a generation,” Calanthe mused, frowning. “But to be good at war is a different thing than ruling over people. And you wouldn’t have been distracted by a foreigner, no matter how fair she was.”

“Would I not?”

“No. You’re too stern.”

“Robb was stern, too.”

“Yes, but he was a man,” Calanthe sniffed. “They are so easily led.”

Larra laughed. “Where did you learn that?”

“Aunt Genna,” Calanthe said, her eyes glittering, her smile rather cheeky. “She said it all the time… When Lord Tywin went to King’s Landing, it was Aunt Genna he left to rule the Westerlands. Most people were more afraid of Aunt Genna than Lord Tywin. Why are girls taught embroidery because they’re deemed unfit to rule, yet are left to rule when the men go off to kill each other? What are needles to dragonfire?”

“Far more useful,” Larra said, and Calanthe gave her a surprised look, confused by Larra’s response. Larra smiled. “Needles can repair anything - ever since the Doom, dragonfire has only ever destroyed. The Conqueror sparked a dynasty of relentless destruction that lasted three centuries - and just like fire, it consumed itself to the last ember. Only the Ancient Valyrians knew how to wield magic and dragonfire to create things; their skills have been lost. Anyone can pick up a needle and mend or create something with it. But most people would rather have dragons.”

“Most people are idiots,” Calanthe said tartly. Larra barked a laugh, startling Crisantha. Even Calanthe looked surprised; as she had said earlier, Larra was stern. She didn’t laugh much anymore.

But Calanthe reminded her so much of Arya.

“In the North, we learn how to mend things, rather than just decorate them. And we acknowledge that those without swords still die upon them,” Larra said. “It’s a hard land, and we rule over a stern people, with even more ruthless people constantly aggressing our borders. We must learn when to be tender, and when to be hard.”

“Like Lady Mormont,” Calanthe said, her eyes lighting up again, delight blossoming on her beautiful face. “She told me she has learned to sew only to mend her clothing and stitch up battle wounds. She doesn’t like us at all. Her mother was at the Red Wedding. As if we had anything to do with it! Why doesn’t Lady Stark wear a sword?”

“Because she has no skill to wield one,” Larra said softly. “Her mother was Southern: she wanted to raise her daughters as Southern ladies to prepare them for their future marriages, where they’d have no need to learn about warfare and suffering. My sisters have not lived the lives their mother imagined for them.”

“Lots of things happen that we don’t ever imagine,” Calanthe murmured softly, almost to herself, and Larra glanced down at the little girl. Larra often wondered whether Calanthe was an only-child, surrounded most of the time by adults, for she was rather an old head on young shoulders; sometimes she said things that seemed far too mature for her age. She was echoing what she had heard elsewhere. And she was utterly delighted to find herself amongst her cousins; they were a novelty, after such tragedy. Calanthe gave her a sly, sidelong look. “I heard that Lady Stark fed her captor to his own hunting-hounds. Is that true?”

“Aye. Our way is the old way,” Larra sighed. The new kennel-master - the younger son of the Karstark kennel-master, who liked dogs far more than he did men - was training a few litters of fine dogs from the Umber, Karstark and Manderly kennels. They were gorgeous breeds - the Great Northern boarhound, the famed Umber deerhound as well as the usual sheepdogs as well as pit-bulls usually used in the North to protect noble nurseries - they were more ruthless than any guard when attacked, yet gentle as a lamb with those they were loyal to. Larra enjoyed visiting the kennels, cooing over the pups. So did Sansa. Larra could always find her in the kennels when Sansa was unsettled; the pups soothed her, bolstered her when she was feeling vulnerable or overwhelmed.

“What does that mean?” Calanthe frowned, her expression curious. Surrounded by Northmen all her life, Larra took it for granted that other cultures in the continent knew what she meant. The old ways; the ways of the First Men, of the North.

“Here in the North, those who pass the sentence must swing the sword,” Larra told Calanthe grimly, sighing heavily; her breath plumed before them, glowing in the moonlight. It was not late; but the nights were long, and beautiful. She gazed up at the endless stars, missing the silence and the freedom of the cave yet drawn to the little lionesses, charmed and grief-stricken by them all at once. “We believe that if you would take a person’s life, you owe it to them to look into their eyes and hear their final words. If you cannot bear to do that, perhaps that person does not deserve to die.”

“Don’t you have a headsman?”

“No. We don’t hide behind paid executioners,” Larra said grimly. “It is all too easy to forget what death is… You’ve seen it yourself. One word and an entire family was wiped out, without Daenerys Targaryen ever getting her pretty braids mussed.”

“The Lion Culling,” Calanthe whispered, and Larra nodded. Crisantha’s hand twitched in hers, and Larra stroked her thumb against the back of her hand. The Lion Culling…the Red Wedding… People were so tongue-in-cheek about tragedy - as long as it did not touch their own families. Calanthe frowned, then glanced up at Larra. “Winter has come. I don’t want people to think I’m a spoiled Southerner because I won’t fight when everyone else must, and eat people’s rations.”

Larra frowned. “No-one having met you thinks you’re spoiled. You’re from a very different place; a wealthier place. It’s a different way of living, is all,” she sighed. “Who’s mentioned food rations?”

“One of the old maids. I heard her say that Winterfell shouldn’t have to fuss over Lannister whelps when thousands of Northerners will go hungry before spring,” Calanthe said, looking slightly uncomfortable. Larra sighed heavily.

“Which maid?” she asked, wondering if Father had felt this heavy sense of foreboding as he had headed off to silence the rumours about Lady Ashara Dayne being his bastards’ mother. One battle she could do without having to fight, not within the walls of Winterfell, not with the looming threat of the Night King. General discontent over the presence of Lannisters.

The North remembers.

It did put things in perspective, though. Even with the Night King’s imminent invasion, Larra still had to deal with the mundane everyday; the grudges and long-held prejudices. Northmen and wildlings, Valemen and Dothraki, Unsullied… Winterfell was filling to the rafters with people from vastly different cultures, none of whom tolerated each other very much: They were bound to clash. It was inevitable.

Larra knew it was a matter of managing the disputes.

But sometimes she’d rather go back to slaying wights and evading White Walkers.

The discontent amongst the Northmen surrounding the Lannisters’ presence at Winterfell reminded Larra, even more so than the girls themselves, of the all she had missed while stuck beneath the weirwood tree. The Stark-Lannister war that had torn apart the Riverlands; the Red Wedding orchestrated by Lord Frey on Tywin Lannister’s behalf when the Old Lion realised he would not easily outmanoeuvre the Young Wolf in the field of battle.

Dirty tricks, bribery and backstabbing had won Tywin his last war: but everyone would remember that it was his dwarf son who murdered him while he took a shit.

Everyone would remember Robb Stark, the Young Wolf. King in the North - the first in three centuries, who had been murdered, undefeated in battle, beside his pregnant wife, in front of his mother, during a wedding he had been invited to as a guest. People would remember that guest-right had been violated. And they would remember what happened when winter came for House Frey. Their names would not be erased, as House Bolton’s would: The North remembered. And the rest of Westeros would forever wonder just how House Stark had managed it - the total eradication of House Frey in retribution for that violation.

Many would imagine the gods themselves had a hand in it.

Leave one wolf alive, the sheep are never safe, Larra thought. She glanced down at Calanthe, suppressing a shiver as she thought of the Frey children. Arya had annihilated every man, woman and child bearing the name of Frey - and those with Lord Walder’s blood, if not his name. She had murdered innocent children.

Wolves hunted in a pack for their survival; in prides, it was the lionesses who hunted and killed. The largest and strongest male spent most of his time slumbering - unless harassed to protect his pride of females and their cubs, and his position within their pride.

Like the Old Lion himself, Larra thought. Tywin Lannister, as Hand of the King to Aerys II, had effectively ruled Westeros for twenty years, providing the continent with peace and plenty. He had only reared his head and proven himself brutally effective in conflict when challenged - by Robb.

Robb was dead; so was Tywin.

Sansa and Arya lived; the Lion Cubs lived.

Her sisters had learned how to fight their own battles - Sansa with her etiquette and her wits and feminine wiles and being perpetually underestimated because of her prettiness; Arya with her Needle, her tenacity and grit and that ferocious bloodlust that had kept her warm through the miserable nights and worse days.

Larra glanced at Calanthe. She must learn to use her cleverness as well as her claws if she’s to survive, Larra thought grimly. They all must.

Yet she worried what Calanthe would do with it if she put a sword in her hands.

Larra let the girls play a little longer, anxious thoughts gnawing at her regarding the girls. Regarding Jon’s plans for the children he had ordered be trained in combat, who trained now in the yard with spears and bows.

She couldn’t do it. She could not rally for siege and battle with children stood beside her.

She would not allow it.

Many things might have been different, had Larra fled south with her younger brothers, rather than North. Had she grabbed Robb by his auburn curls the moment his gaze lingered on the Volantene healer and dragged him away to do his duty; for that is exactly what she would have done. No pandering to her brother because their bannermen had been so impressed with his tactics in battle that they named him their king.

Larra would have reminded her brother of his duty.

She would have dragged the Volantene healer by her braids to a ship bound for Essos. She had healed their soldiers, yes; and irrevocably fractured their commanders’ trust in Robb. He had forgotten his duty. Larra had never been one to hold her tongue, especially with her brothers. She had never been one to forget the privilege of duty and service that was Robb’s by right of his parents’ marriage.

Jon had always sulked and slinked away into the shadows; Larra had always snapped back, her bite as vicious as her howl. She had never backed down in a fight with Robb in her life, and would never have started because their bannermen thought he was good at organising slaughter. Larra could not remember arguing with any of her siblings more fiercely than she had with Robb: They had not always seen eye-to-eye, much as they had loved each other. Robb had always been wary of three things: Losing his father’s respect, being denied his mother’s love, and igniting the fire in Larra’s wolf-blood.

Because she was the eldest of them all, and sometimes he needed a smack to be put in his place - to be reminded of his extraordinary privilege.

How she missed him.

“Come along, girls,” she said softly, and the girls turned pink-cheeked faces breathless with delight to her.

“Is it supper-time?” Altheda asked, clambering through the snowbanks, and Larra nodded. Her face thawed as she smiled at the little girls toddling towards her through the snow, stumbling and smiling, and Leona clutched fallen weirwood leaves in her hands, gazing shyly up through her long, curling lashes as she offered them to Larra. She crouched to the little girl’s level, smiling gently as she examined the treasures Leona had gathered up in offering.

“You’ve chosen the finest leaves,” Larra smiled warmly, and Leona beamed. Neva stood a few paces behind, her fingers, encased in mittens, clasped around something she was examining closely. “We shall have to arrange them in a vase. They’ll bring some colour to your chamber.”

“What have you got there, Neva?” Larra asked. Neva was unused to being around nobility: Given the choice, she would happily have melted into the snows rather than be singled out. She was shy by nature, gentle and compassionate, but too easily dominated by larger personalities like Cadeon and Altheda, who Larra kept an eye on for bullying the Lyseni girl. Larra had to coax Neva to speak, but she was happy enough to play with Leona and Rosamund, taking care of the younger girls.

“I don’t know what it’s called,” Neva said, in her hushed, accented voice, like a breathless sigh on a rich summer breeze. If Neva was breathless, exotic warmth, then Cadeon was the lightning crackling across a stormy summer sky.

“It’s an acorn,” Altheda said, with more than a touch of asperity. Larra gave her a quelling look, offering her hand out to Neva, who passed her the acorn. It was far larger than a regular oaknut or even a horse-chestnut, fitting into the palm of Larra’s hand, weighty, the tender seed buried within a shell of pure white: it looked like a snowball. Maester Luwin had once shown her a dissected weirnut; inside the tough, protective shell was a seed of vivid red more brilliant than any Qartheen ruby. And, to Larra, far more precious.

“We call it mast,” Larra said gently, smiling at Neva. “It is the fruit of the forests, nuts and such from trees and shrubs. Through winter most birds and small animals will survive on the nuts shed by trees in the autumn and frozen in the first snows of winter. Weirbirds and ermines and Northern shrews and such are very clever about sniffing them out. Even deer and elk will survive off them. This is the first time in my lifetime the weirwood has given fruit. I was Leona’s age when the ravens arrived declaring winter was finally over; this weirnut has been forming ever since, dropped as Robb rode off to war. My father’s bannermen said they had never seen the weirwoods so heavy with weirnuts. They called it a good omen that the North would rise, stronger than ever before, that Robb’s war would be victorious and return the old ways.”

“What do you think?”

“I think there are far too few weirwoods left in this world; I believe we should do all we can to plant more,” Larra sighed, examining the weirnut. She wondered which of the great weirwoods had pollinated the tree in Winterfell’s godswood, for she had read of no saplings growing in the North in centuries; Maester Luwin could not tell her which was the youngest weirwood in Westeros. They were all ancient beyond the count of years.

Leaf would have known, a little voice whispered sorrowfully in the back of her mind. The Children could have told her about every single weirwood - the ones that were left. Below the Neck, there was only the famed Isle of Faces, last haven of the weirwoods in the South. Last home of the Children, legend told. Leaf had never mentioned such a place to Larra; nor had the Bloodraven.

But Bran did… The place where Rhaegar and Lyanna wed. In front of a heart-tree on the Isle of Faces, Larra thought, her mood dropping like a stone. Rhaegar hadn’t just married Lyanna; he had married her in possibly the most sacred place in Westeros - a forest-island of weirwoods each carved with a face, so that the gods could bear witness to the peace pact between the First Men and those who sang the song of the earth.

Rhaegar had wanted Lyanna’s gods as witnesses, not just his friends and Kingsguards.

“What is spring like?” Delphine asked, almost wistfully.

“I can’t speak for everywhere. But here in the North… I remember great oceans of green, and new rivers and waterfalls rushing everywhere as the snows melted,” Larra said sadly. One of her earliest, most vivid memories was of riding across the moors, great carpets of lush new grass and jewel-bright wildflowers, Uncle Benjen’s rich laugh echoing off the air filled with the scent of pollen and rain and new life as they chased each other on horseback. She remembered her legs aching after her first true ride out in the open moors so much that Uncle Benjen had had to carry her from the stables, slung over his shoulder and laughing all the way; it had been his first visit since the snows melted, since taking the black.

She had forgotten how young he had been. That he had laughed…

Another pang, another drop in her mood. Larra felt it like a stone settling in her stomach, pulling everything else down with it.

“Do the gods really look out from the faces?” Calanthe asked curiously, glancing over her shoulder at the weirwood tree, her expression dubious.

“Gods, and ravens,” Larra said cryptically. “You should ask Bran what he sees through the trees.”

“How can a person see through trees?”

“’Tis a rare skill, it is true,” Larra acknowledged, a twinkle in her eyes. “Now, come along inside before Leona falls asleep in the snow. Before bed, perhaps we shall ask Bran to recount the true story of how it was Lann managed to swindle the Rock from the Casterlys.”

“Through cunning,” Calanthe said, her eyes vibrant.

Altheda frowned. “What exactly is cunning?”

Larra chuckled, promising to explain. Without letting go of Crisantha’s hand, she scooped up Leona in her other arm, tucking the little girl against her waist; Leona immediately nestled against Larra’s chest, the soft yarn of her woollen bonnet tickling Larra’s bare skin, Vaidence the doll tucked between them, the hem of her little skirt already fraying from constant twiddling from Leona’s fingers. Narcisa and Delphine walked arm-in-arm before her; Rosamund latched onto Larra’s belt, staying close.

“You must go behind,” Altheda said imperiously, and Larra glanced over her shoulder to see Neva’s slim shoulders droop beneath her neat woollen cloak, the dip of her chin, the gleam of her silver eyelashes as the moonlight gleamed off her pearly head.

“Stop being such a shit, Altheda,” Calanthe snarled, shoving her cousin; there was a wail as Altheda toppled into a snowbank.

“Stop your thrashing, Altheda,” Larra said grimly. “You shan’t drown. Calanthe, pull her to her feet. Both of you apologise to each other, and Altheda, you owe Neva an apology.”

“I do not. She’s a whore’s get, I heard Cadeon say her mother was a brothel-keeper,” Altheda sneered as she clambered to her feet, slapping Calanthe’s hand away and dusting snow off her skirts. Her cheeks were aflame with humiliation at being pushed, and being caught out in front of Larra.

Larra levelled her gaze on the girl, unimpressed.

“I don’t care where you are from or how wealthy the family you were born into, how important you were raised to believe yourself,” Larra said coldly. “You will learn to treat everyone with consideration and respect, or very quickly learn that you are not respected.” Altheda scowled at her. “Wipe that look off your face,” she ordered, and Altheda’s face turned mutinous.

“Altheda’s mother spoiled her,” Narcisa said, giving her younger cousin an imperious look. “Everyone in the family knew it.”

“I’m not spoiled!”

“Yes you are!” Calanthe snapped. “You’re spoiled and sour.”

“Neva’s been nothing but lovely since we met,” Delphine said, in her calm, gentle voice. “She does not deserve your nastiness.”

“Girls, go on ahead,” Larra said quietly, watching Altheda as the other lionesses circled, ready to pounce. It was not kind for Altheda to bully Neva; nor was it kind to allow the other Lannisters to gang up on Altheda. Narcisa gestured for the other girls as Larra handed Crisantha to Delphine, and Calanthe marched through the snow with her spine straight, following her three elder cousins. Larra sighed and turned to Altheda, who was pointedly dusting invisible snow from her skirts to avoid eye-contact with Larra, and Neva, whose gaze was downturned, still and lovely as any statue. “Altheda, I want you to consider how Neva feels to have you say such unkind things to her. She is your playmate and companion, not someone to hurl abuse at to make yourself feel better.”

“I don’t - “

“Yes, you do. I’ve seen it with my own eyes,” Larra said sadly. “And I know it makes you feel better to do so. When we are hurt, we lash out, it doesn’t matter whether we are Men or direwolves or lions. But now you are causing hurt. You are not malicious by nature, of that much I am certain. I do not know that you were spoiled; your mother had your past. I am privileged to have your future. You’re mine, now, and I am yours. I will teach you how to harness your grief and your pain into something of ecstatic beauty, if you let me. Will you let me?”

Altheda’s eyes were glazed, her expression mutinous - attempting to conceal her emotions, the way Larra doing so often at the same age, hiding how Maester Luwin’s gentle words cut right to the heart of her anguish and rage. Because he knew her. He knew the source of that wrath, that pain - could do nothing to cure it, as Larra could do nothing to soothe Altheda’s grief and pain - but acknowledged it and guided her through her vicious emotions, helped her master them and herself, and in turn, how to master any situation that pitted her against Lady Catelyn. Her father’s wife had always been a slave to her hatred and distrust of Larra and Jon; Maester Luwin had taught Larra to place herself above it and win every battle of wills by taking the emotion out of it.

“I want to go home!” Altheda whimpered, and burst into tears. Neva jumped, startled, and Leona blinked owlishly from Larra’s waist, gazing at her cousin as Larra tucked Altheda against her.

“I know,” Larra said hoarsely, her throat burning. She wanted to go home, too. To Winterfell, with Father and Bran scampering up the walls and Rickon playing tug-o-war with Shaggydog and Osha smiling at her and her sisters braiding each other’s hair and teasing Theon as they shot arrows in the yard and Robb’s sapphire eyes sparkling as he grinned across the cyvasse board, Jon’s soft husky laugh echoing in her chamber as she finished another chapter of The Princess Bride and Uncle Benjen flying down from the Wall to dance with her at feasts and listen to her sing and the stable-boys giving her fistfuls of wildflowers behind blushes, cuddling with Hodor as Old Nan told stories and Larra knitted to the crackle of a small fire and he gossiped in the kitchens with the young scullery maids, her friends, the scent of porridge and roasting meat and fresh herbs and stout and cooking apples heady, and playing kiss-chase with the serving boys thrilled her as they darted through the laundry. That was home to her. Where they were all safe, and whole. “I know.”

Many moments later, a hiccoughing Altheda detached herself from Larra, trying to catch her breath and wiping her face with her knitted mittens, her face streaming, nose red.

“I should not have been unkind to you,” Altheda mumbled to Neva, looking her in the face. She did not see the flicker of uncertainty on Neva’s face as she turned and trudged through the snow after her cousins.

“Neva?” Larra said gently, and the exquisite Lyseni turned her gaze to Larra. The moonlight turned her lavender eyes to the palest purple quartz, her pale pearly hair hauntingly lovely. She looked half a ghost, shimmering with iridescence in the snow about her. Larra reached out, to cup the girl’s chin tenderly, offering her a sad smile. “I am sorry I did not tell Altheda off for her nastiness sooner.”

“Lady Altheda was picking on the little ones. She kept pinching Lady Rosamund when the septa wasn’t looking,” Neva said softly, looking almost guilty. It was the most Larra had ever heard her say. “I didn’t mind her saying nasty things to me; I didn’t like her bullying the babies.”

“Altheda was pinching Rosamund? Why didn’t you tell Lady Tisseia or Lady Nymeria? Or me?” Larra asked curiously.

Neva’s eyes glowed enormous and pale, glittering quartz. “She’s a lady.”

“Oh,” Larra nodded, remembering. Who would take the word of a whore’s bastard over a highborn lady’s? Hadn’t the Wall been manned by those who had no power to speak against their liege lords? “You can always come to me. I was raised to be a good listener.”

Larra reached out to stroke Neva’s shimmering hair. “Come, let’s go inside before your eyes turn blue.”

“You say many strange things,” Neva said softly, gazing up at her. “Cadeon likes you.”

“Does he, then?”

“He likes the way you tell stories,” Neva said, smiling up at Larra.

“And what do you like about the North?” Larra asked.

“I like the smell of snow,” Neva said uncertainly, with a delicate smile. “It is clean. I like hot baths and my woollen dress and cuddling with Lady Rosamund and Lady Leona and knitting and porridge.”

“I’m glad,” Larra said.

“My father would like it, too,” Neva said softly. “He said when he was in the Riverlands, he had never seen so many different kinds of green. I like white; white is quiet.”

“Yes,” Larra agreed, with a sad smile. Hadn’t she always thought the same when she was Neva’s age? “It is quiet.”

Quiet and brutal and magnificent.

She took Neva’s hand, and they wandered through the godswood. Larra’s lips quirked toward a smile as she saw a cluster of little lionesses huddled beneath an ancient oak, their pale faces little more than glowing orbs in the incessant gloom of the godswood, ancient boughs catching the moon’s light.

“It’s too dark to see the path,” Narcisa’s voice said, rather haughtily, and Larra chuckled.

“Come along, my little lionesses,” she cooed, and each girl took their cousin’s hand. She led them through the ancient godswood, to the lonely gate and the ruckus of the yards that had been muted by the high walls and even more ancient trees. Torchlights flickered, small fires crackled here and there as the smallfolk went about their chores - it was barely the fourth hour after noon, yet dark had descended. Smoke from the fires obscured the stars, the shouts of labouring peoples shattered the timeless quiet of the godswood, and Larra’s fine boots sank into sludge churned up by mud and grit and salt as wagons were wheeled in and out of the yard, cattle and geese were herded to the barns and young lads trained with wooden daggers, girls practising their archery.

A brief respite from the rest of the castle, and Larra winced at the noise. Sometimes it startled her, just how loud the castle was. Sometimes it was entirely too much. Sometimes the walls closed in and she could not breathe, desperate to flee, to find quiet and calm.

“Neva!” Larra shouted, heart in her mouth as Neva darted in front of a loaded cart heavy with obsidian. The enormous draft-horses whinnied as Neva darted across the courtyard, quick as a minnow, running headlong for the gate. “Neva!”

She asked Narcisa to take the other girls inside to the great hall and hoisted Leona on her hip, striding after Neva, her heart thundering with dread. Careful as people were, mindful of each other as they laboured, accidents still happened, and it would not have taken much for Neva to be trampled beneath the great draft-horses’ hooves. What had caught Neva’s attention? What was so important she had thrown all caution to the winds and flung herself headlong across the yard?

A cluster of snow-blown people wrapped in furs were climbing off exhausted horses just inside the gate, accompanied by a party of direwolves led by Last Shadow, who yawned widely, shaking herself, as stable-boys avoided her and ran to care for the horses, while wildlings converged on a fiery redhead.

Tormund Giantsbane, Larra thought, her breath leaving her in a soft rush. They have returned. And Shadow’s pack had guided them home.

She hitched Leona up on her waist and pushed through the yard, tracking Neva, who wound her way through the wildlings and men in black to reach the tallest and broadest of the wildlings, who carried an enormous war-hammer strapped to his back, nearly as tall as Larra and probably far heavier, lethally spiked in several places. Curved bronze horns gleamed wickedly in the firelight, and Larra slowed as she noticed the man helping Yaskier off their horse.

Above all other voices, she heard Neva’s high, young voice - and the enormous man did, too. He froze, turning sharply, to let Yaskier grimace and hunch over his aching legs, blue-lipped and in agony after a ride that had nearly killed their horse. Neva threw herself at the enormous man, who dived to catch Neva as she slipped in the sludge and careened ungracefully into his waiting arms.

He hoisted the little girl into the air, smothering her in his embrace, and Larra slowed, stunned, as his furred hood was knocked back. He had his eyes tight shut, face drawn into a fierce grimace of relief and something close to pain, hugging Neva, but Larra knew his face. She recognised those fierce good looks, though the years had turned him from a charming, adaptable youth to a confident, capable, fierce man.

High cheekbones, an attractive and imperfect nose, firm lips and a fierce jawline swathed behind a short black beard, the dimple in his strong chin just barely visible. Frozen curls tangled around his head like a dark halo, the wind snagging and snaring them, flirting with his ears, coiling over his forehead. He was fiercely masculine and intensely handsome. The ferocity of his expression made Larra’s heart stutter - not with fear, but with longing.

Watching him hug Neva tight to him, as if he had never thought to see her again and would never again let her go, the little girl seemed even tinier in his arms, made her yearn for such an embrace.

To feel safe.

Watching Neva, Larra was certain there was nowhere in the entire world Neva felt safer than in that young man’s arms, brutally strong as they were, fierce and intimidating as he seemed, well over six and a half feet tall and built like a bull, with massive hands that Larra couldn’t help notice as he clutched Neva to him with surprising tenderness, enormous, long-fingered, scarred and clever. Gentle.

He was fierce and rugged, raw and intimidating - yet tender and gentle with the child in his arms, vulnerable in front of others in a way few men dared ever be. He was utterly attractive to her.

He peeled Neva away, just enough to give her a kiss, tickling under her chin to make her smile as she silently wept with relief, her lower lip trembling as she attempted a smile. He raised his gaze, and even in the flickering firelight, his eyes blazed like sapphires as they landed on a tall, pale beauty who reminded him so vividly of Arya, he did a double-take, startled.

Not Arya.

He blinked, dazed. Dark-haired, with a long, solemn face and vivid eyes the colour of violets Arya had once picked as they trudged through the Riverlands, the colour of the deep, velvety petals reminding her all too painfully of her eldest sister.

And she was staring at him, with an intense, unguarded expression that seemed to cut right through him, utterly familiar to him though they had never met. He had seen it before; he now knew where Arya had learned it, though she had been a novice in comparison to this implacable gaze. A few loose curls had escaped her braids; they tangled into coils and brushed lovingly against her moon-pale skin and her neat dark eyebrows settled over those vivid eyes. She was far taller than Arya, slender as a whip and dressed in fine leather armour adapted to her figure, twin obsidian direwolves shimmering across her chest, a priceless sword and dagger belted to her waist. She bore many weapons, he noted, all of them incredibly fine, and not merely for decoration; she carried a small golden child on her hip - one of the Lannister girls - but he could see her hands, her long slender white fingers webbed with scars that came from constant handling of weapons.

Tall and slender, pale-skinned and dark-haired, she was moonlight and shadows.

She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

Arya had had a rough, impish sort of charm, could make friends with anyone and hide in plain sight as whoever she chose to be in that moment. This woman was serene and still in a way Arya could never be - predatory in a way he had watched the direwolves be, ever since the pack had joined their party, leading them to shelter, and then to Winterfell, rather than attacking them for the horseflesh they rode on. This woman was still and cunning the way the biggest of the direwolves was: Quiet, watchful and gentle unless provoked.

Forgetting himself, he stared at her, and was reminded of the True North, of the great snow-meadows and ageless, unforgiving mountains, of the depthless sky littered with more stars than he could ever count, of the cold in his lungs that had seemed to draw all his notice to the fact that he was alive, exhilarated - and liberated. The True North: Brutal and beautiful. Deceptive in its beauty and unforgiving of the unwary.

The flickering firelight lovingly caressed the high planes of her face, throwing her cheekbones into relief and illuminating those intense violet eyes - he stared dazedly. Arya had always compared her sister’s eye to violets. But he gazed at her and saw the precarious moment when molten obsidian was tempered to its strongest, its most unbreakable - the entrancing violet flames that whispered of enduring strength.

He knew who this woman was. If he ever second-guessed his instincts, the enormous black direwolf, large as his own horse, padded silently to the woman’s side. The monstrous direwolf had led a great pack and corralled their party south to Winterfell. Without looking away from him, she reached her hand to the enormous wolf, which dwarfed her, yet she did not cower or tremble or look even the slightest bit uncomfortable or wary about being crowded by the giant beast; she offered her fingertips, which the direwolf nipped lovingly, licking, before raising its muzzle to sniff and lick at her neck, her ears, tucking her nose under the woman’s chin in an affectionate gesture that awed him.

The woman stared at him, and a smile blossomed on her face, startling him. Unsmiling, she was perfect and pale; with a delicate tilt to the corners of her lips, she was radiant, gentle and almost sweet. Arya seemed to shine from her smile - or perhaps because he knew Arya’s face so well, and ached to see it again, he saw Arya in her sister.

“Hello, Gendry,” she said, her voice rich, warm, filled with humour. Her eyes, violet fire, flickered and glowed in the firelight, warm and mesmerising.

“Larra,” Gendry said, feeling a grin tickle his lips. He didn’t know why he was smiling. He was exhausted, but something about that violet fire set his blood alight, made him forget his aches and the dizziness in his head from hunger, the pressure in his temples from the relentless storm that had been chasing them, the ache in his head and his raw thighs from riding without pause, outstripping the storm.

Her smile widened, as if pleased: Her delight shone from her eyes. It softened her entire face, from harsh perfection to something even more beautiful - tender and surprisingly sweet, her eyes larger and her pretty rosebud mouth softer. His eyes were drawn to her beautiful lips.

The smile disappeared in a heartbeat, replaced by something troubled, almost upset. Emotions flickered across her face, too quickly to read, before she darted to him, slipping her free arm around his thick waist and squeezing him tight. Startled, Gendry jumped, but on instinct he clamped an arm around her, tucking his head low.

“What’s this for?” he murmured against her the clean sweetness of her hair, quiet enough so no-one else could hear, enjoying the close embrace. The little lioness, Leona, gazed up at him with wide eyes, thumb in her mouth. Larra Snow released him, stepping back; there was a flush in her cheeks, making her look…delicious, he thought - but she was clearly flustered.

“For doing what we could not, what my brothers could not - for stopping Arya from getting herself killed,” she said softly, gazing up at him from under her lashes. He could rest his chin on the top of her head with ease if he liked, he realised. The corners of her lips were turned down in misery, and he saw the weight that seem to settle on her shoulders as she adjusted Leona on her hip, hiding a subtle grimace of pain and grief. Her eyes landed on Neva. “Neva is yours?”

“Aye, and Cadeon,” Gendry said, smoothing Neva’s glimmering hair from her face as snow whirled around them, clinging to her eyelashes. Larra gave him a long, assessing look and seemed to nod her approval.

“You are raising wonderful young people,” she said, and Gendry felt his spine straighten, his shoulders just a little wider. To be praised for his weapons was one thing; to have his childrearing skills praised was quite another. He had been taught how to smith weapons; he was fumbling in the dark when it came to Cadeon and Neva. To be acknowledged as doing a fine job by them…

Gendry stared at Larra Snow. Arya looked like her, with their long, solemn faces and dark hair, but the more he looked, the more he recognised the differences between the two. The more he saw Jon. The curly hair, the shape of their mouths. Jon’s twin-sister. Jon.

“Jon - he thinks you’re dead,” Gendry said, dazed.

“He has every reason to,” Larra murmured, her sigh heavy.

“I didn’t breathe a word!” Yaskier appeared, teeth chattering, lips blue, hunched and in pain, but more animated than Gendry had seen him in days, gaze greedily drinking Larra in. They had had to double up on the horses, and Yaskier had taken ill about a week ago. Gendry had had to learn quickly how to manage his horse and keep Yaskier toppling out of the saddle at the same time; their journey had not been an easy one. The sight of Larra, it seemed, was enough to revive Yaskier. “He was right there before me, and it was on the tip of my tongue to tell him! But I didn’t dare ruin the surprise.”

“Yaskier,” Larra murmured, in that rich voice of hers, her tone drenched in irony. A flirtatious glitter flickered in those violet eyes, kisses winking in the corners of her succulent mouth. “How did you find the True North?”

“A frigid mistress,” Yaskier muttered miserably, and Larra flashed a wolflike grin that startled Gendry.

“You were successful, I assume?” Larra prompted. “You secured a wight to transport south.”

“Jon and the Lords sailed back to King’s Landing with it; Lord Tyrion Lannister arranged a summit,” Gendry shrugged. Whether the ships had reached King’s Landing, he didn’t know; if the summit had already occurred, they would have had no way to know.

“How many were lost?”

“Not nearly as many as we feared,” a grizzled voice rumbled, and Tormund appeared. It was strange to see the terrifying wildling look small beside Gendry. He jabbed Gendry with his elbow; Gendry grunted, grimacing, and rubbed his ribs through his furs and leathers. He had learned that Tormund was a very physical person, displaying affection and displeasure with varying strength behind his blows. “Never known a man to have this one’s strength before. Nor seen them swing a hammer the way he does. Bastard saved our lives more than once - and Jon’s.”

“What happened?” Larra asked urgently, frowning.

“Rhaegal saved our lives,” Gendry corrected quickly, not liking the harsh intensity that clouded Larra’s face, the same terrifying focus that he recognised from Arya. A vicious, unforgiving focus that meant danger. “I just got us onto the dragon before the wights could tear us to shreds.”

“You broke the ice, boy, kept those armies from tearing us to shreds,” Tormund growled. “You gave us days. And then you pulled Jon out of the water when he fell. Kept him warm after.”

“Is Jon alright?”

“He is whole and healthy,” Karsi said gently, and Gendry pulled a face, remembering all that had happened when they had reached Eastwatch. Jon might be whole, and healthy, but he was not unhurt, was not invulnerable. Was not untouched by all that had happened to him, all of which had been beyond his control.

Larra noticed.

Gendry glanced back at her, gulping, and lifted Neva back into his arms, eager to be away from her cunning gaze. Larra did not ask him to explain what thoughts had caused the look on his face.

“Rhaegal is one of Daenerys Targaryen’s dragons,” Larra said quietly, and Gendry wondered how she knew that. He frowned, realising too late…how did she know him? Only Arya knew him, and Arya… “What was a dragon doing north of the Wall?”

“The dragons flew North,” Gendry said quietly. “We’d seen them on Dragonstone; they appeared at the ice-lake just as the wights attacked. Burned great swathes of the Night King’s army to ash.”

“But not nearly enough,” Tormund grunted, and everyone exchanged troubled glances. “And but for this boy’s bellowing, we would have lost one of those dragons to the Night King.” Larra glanced at Gendry, who felt flushed under her scrutiny.

“The Night King hurled a spear of ice and caught Viserion in the wing-joint,” Gendry explained.

“Would’ve struck the beast clean through the heart if you hadn’t made him swerve in the air,” Karsi said. “And the Night King, riding a dragon for his mount…”

Gendry was not the only one to shudder. A muscle fluttered in Larra’s jaw, the same way it did in her brother’s when he was under great pressure.

“Why would the dragons fly North?”

“Daenerys Targaryen rode the largest, but she confessed to Jon they acted on their own instincts,” Gendry said, scowling as he remembered everything that had happened after they returned to Eastwatch. “She almost died on the journey north, as they paid no heed to her. They just kept flying north, and attacked the army of the dead.”

Larra frowned, worrying her lower lip with strong white teeth. “You said you had met the dragons on Dragonstone?”

“Aye,” Gendry said. “Lord Tyrion says dragons are smarter than men. Rhaegal seemed to like Jon; I think they knew Jon was in trouble. They came for us - for him.”

Larra looked startled, the colour in her cheeks disappearing, her vivid violet eyes turning stark, as if he had said something awful.

Notes:

It’s difficult to show just how intimate I wanted Gendry and Larra’s first meeting to be. I wish I could show rather than tell, with visuals and actors and all of that. They would have been struck dumb by each other. The world would have gone quiet, the snow blocking out all sight and sound. Music would’ve swelled. We would’ve wept.

Definitely check out stills from Night Hunter for Henry Cavill’s cosy wintertime beard-and-curls combo. Absolutely scrumptious.

Chapter 35: No Progress Without Chaos

Notes:

I know it’s been far too long, but thank you for sticking with me. I adore these characters, and writing this story - sadly, adulting takes precedent.

On to other news: who’s watched the teaser? I’m cautiously optimistic. A little wary of the costumes (well, the headpieces worn by the women), as they seem too ‘Tudor historical’ rather than fantasy-with-various-cultural-historical-influences like the GoT costumes… But damn, Daemon! Matt Smith’s performance will absolutely make him a fan favourite. Interesting that they didn’t reveal any new musical themes, just lured us in with the ‘Winter is Here’ theme to play on our heartstrings and ensure an emotional connection… Very savvy. I’m super-excited to hear Djawadi’s new score. And I’m desperate for Cregan Stark to appear. I always imagine him as Ray Stevenson’s Dagonet in the 2004 King Arthur film (well worth a watch, as it’s always inspired me and a lot of the character dynamics will appear in some of the Stormlords I’ll be introducing later).

Also, it’s hilarious that I’ve never looked this up before, but the name Larra literally means ‘protection’. Chose that well, didn’t I!

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

35

No Progress Without Chaos


“You’ve been sleeping for two days,” a young voice grunted, and someone kicked the bed frame. It didn’t budge, but the young lad cursed colourfully. Gendry chuckled groggily, even as he burrowed deeper under the thick knitted blanket and quilt draped over him. The soft linen sheets smelled of soap and flowers, and now that Cadeon had dragged him to consciousness, Gendry realised how soft the bed was. Unused to such softness, he started to fidget with discomfort.

He felt as if he had slept for years. Rested, yet exhausted at the same time, as if he had had to fight to wake. His body ached in a different way than it had before; as if he had not moved in days. And likely he hadn’t, tucked on the neat bed arranged in a chamber high in the private rooms belonging to the Stark family, where his adopted children had been given beds beside noble sons and wildlings and little lionesses.

“Were you sent to wake me?” he groaned, raising a hand to his face to rub it; disoriented, he got a knuckle in the eye instead.

“No; you stopped snoring and Neva was worried you’d died,” Cade remarked, and Gendry smiled to himself, groaning as he stretched luxuriously, relishing the ache.

“Where is she?” he yawned.

“In the nursery; she likes Larra to braid her hair before her lessons,” Cade sighed. Gendry yawned again, widely, and smiled as he opened his eyes, seeing the yawn catch and Cade shudder as an enormous yawn took hold of him.

“Lady Larra,” Gendry corrected on a sigh. Larra… Oh, he’d dreamed of her.

“She doesn’t like being called that,” Cade muttered.

“Why not?”

“’Cause she’s not one,” Cade shrugged. “She says, call a thing what it is.”

Gendry grunted softly, closing his eyes. A moment later - or was it much longer? - Cadeon punted the bed-frame again. Gendry jerked awake, squinting up at Cadeon. He fidgeted on the bed, moving over as he normally did.

Gendry didn’t know everything that had happened to Cadeon; he could only guess, from what little Cade had offered up, the scars on his face and certain behaviours Gendry had noticed. So it always surprised Gendry, assuming what he did about what Cadeon had endured, that Cadeon was the first to seek close physical touch. He liked the feeling of being tucked away, too, which Gendry always found odd; Cadeon was a creature meant to be free. But he liked the confinement when he slept; he had grown up sleeping in a hammock. He had told Gendry he felt safe to be wrapped up, unable to move. He had told Gendry that no-one could get to him when he was swinging in a hammock, and that comment alone had told Gendry a lot. Cade slipped into the bed, cuddling up to share Gendry’s warmth.

“What’s happened to your eye?” A bruise flourished, making his scarred son seem even more wicked than usual.

“Oh. Ragnar caught me with an elbow,” Cadeon grumbled.

“You’ve been fighting again,” Gendry said, giving him a disapproving look the boy did not see - his eyes were shut. Cadeon liked to fight. The only thing he perhaps liked more was chasing girls; he had more success fighting.

“I’ve been training,” Cade sighed.

“Does that involve thrashing other boys?”

“Girls, too,” Cade smirked. “By the King’s decree.”

“You’ve been thrashing girls?”

“Felt wrong, ‘til Lady Mormont winded me with one hit from her shield,” Cadeon grunted. “Wonder what she’ll be like with a sharp edge.” His eyes opened, and a look of delight illuminated his pale eyes.

“That’s what you’ve been doing since you arrived? Fighting highborn ladies and young boys?” Gendry sighed, his eyes drifting shut again.

“Not just that; Larra’s had me keeping the young apprentices in the forge in line, and giving lessons on how to use a knife,” Cade murmured, subtly wriggling beside him to get more comfortable. To get more warmth, Gendry realised, as Cade muttered, “Fucking cold though.” Gendry did not have the awareness to clip him round the ear, lulled toward sleep by the warmth of the chamber.

“This isn’t cold,” he muttered, his mind going to endless ice meadows and treacherous crevasses near invisible until you were upon them. His mind was on the white emptiness, the clearest air he had ever breathed, sharp and clean and pure.

Images of the Night King’s soldiers slashed through his mind; suddenly, he was wide-awake, his body tense and alert, suddenly cold.

“You went beyond the Wall,” Cadeon muttered.

“Aye.”

“You returned.”

“I promised I would.”

“Most people are killed before they can keep their promises,” Cadeon sighed. Gendry gazed down at his son’s hellishly scarred face. He thought of Ned Stark, of the offer he had made Gendry - to teach him to wield a sword when he tired of forging them.

“Well, I’m one of the lucky few,” Gendry acknowledged, sighing heavily.

“You know you’ve saved us from starvation,” Cade muttered, his piercing pale-blue eyes opening, “although our balls’ll probably freeze.”

“Good thing we’ll be staying in the forge, then,” Gendry grunted, and Cade flashed a grin.

“Aye. Good thing,” he said. “How do the Northerners not freeze to death?”

Gendry grinned lazily to himself. “Walking’s good. Fighting’s better. Fucking’s best,” he repeated. Tormund flickered in his memory, and Gendry groaned. The thought of the great terrifying ginger wild-man, and how he likely hadn’t rested at all after their journey, let alone sleeping for two days and nights together, made him sit up, untangling himself from Cade. Gendry had endured worse, truly. Harrenhall. That fucking boat, rowing for days on end, terrified of stopping and resting lest the boat drift into open water.

But he had been moving for so long that when he had finally allowed himself to stop, he had realised just how exhausted he was. He had been on edge for years, firstly hiding his true identity from the Gold Cloaks and Queen Cersei’s spies, then avoiding the Sparrows’ scrutiny.

And now he found himself exactly where Arya Stark had always wanted him. Winterfell.

What would their lives have been like, he wondered for the millionth time, if he had stayed with her? Stayed true to one another and the loyalty and friendship they had built, rather than looking for it elsewhere - among men who had betrayed him at the first opportunity. Thoros was dead, yes, and everything had put him on the path to where he was now, yet Gendry could not forgive the Brotherhood’s betrayal - they had betrayed everything they had claimed to fight for when they had sold him to the red witch. Their actions had proven the value of their word.

He groaned as he sat up, his muscles protesting - from lack of use. It wasn’t in his nature to sit idle. He smiled down at Cadeon, who was snuffling gently, dozing, and reached out to smooth his rumpled hair. It was the same way he woke Cade every morning. “Up you get. They’ll be missing you in the forge.”

“Food first,” Cadeon yawned widely. “Come on.” Stiff, Gendry followed Cadeon out of the chamber - which was guarded by two men in Stark leathers and mail - and down a startlingly warm stone passage. Hot water runs through the walls of Winterfell, he remembered Arya telling him. Even in the heart of winter, the castle remained warm - it gave the entire North life-giving warmth to survive the winter. One of the many reasons that House Stark had endured for thousands of years.

Gendry had only ever known the youngest Stark daughter. He could only imagine how hard those ancient Starks had been, if Arya, twelve years old and raised as a lady, was stronger and fiercer than any grown man Gendry had ever met - except perhaps her bastard half-brother.

It had never occurred to Gendry to put a sword in Neva’s hand; but Jon had given Arya her Needle. Jon had given Arya what she needed to protect herself when thousands of leagues had separated her from his protection.

They piled on whatever clothing they had and Cadeon led Gendry confidently through the maze of passages and hallways busy with people in the midst of their daily chores. He had seen little of the castle on his arrival. Hail had followed the fat snowflakes that had whirled around as he first laid eyes on Larra Snow. The vicious storm they had barely outraced to Winterfell descended on them within hours of arriving at the castle; their arrival had given everyone precious hours to prepare for the storm. Man and beasts alike had been tucked inside the warm walls of Winterfell to wait out the storm. Thunder and lightning made the ancient keep tremble, while hail thrashed at diamond-paned windows soon buried beneath snow and hail that froze together.

Winterfell was itself like an enclosed city, bustling with life and noise - animals and children darted everywhere, getting underfoot, people squabbled and flirted and worked. Cade led them to a smaller hall where great cauldrons of hearty stew were hung over a hearth that spread the length of the room, doled out by maids in simple wool dresses with padded collars to keep their necks warm, mimicking the styles of the highborn ladies.

The rich, savoury scent of the stew made Gendry’s stomach clench as he gratefully accepted an earthenware bowl from one of the serving-girls. He glanced back when she gave him a flirtatious smile, uncomfortable with her attention as her eyes wandered. He felt heat flush his cheeks and down his neck, his shoulders tensing. He spent so much time in the forge that he rarely had to reconcile looks like that from comely girls; and he did his best to ignore signs of any sort of interest in him if he had to leave the safety of the armoury. Always, he was haunted by memories of the Red Woman and her leeches. The niggling suspicion that her blood-magic had killed the three kings - Joffrey, Renly and Arya’s own brother Robb, the Young Wolf.

Cade saw his shame and mistook it for embarrassment, and snickered, giving him a small shove against his lower-back to move. There were no tables in here, but many long benches where people could sit while they ate their stew, and Gendry dropped onto one of the benches as far away from the serving-girls as possible - but he could hear their giggling even over the noise of other people eating, and it made him uncomfortable. He focused on his bowl of stew as rich, savoury steam wafted up. Just by looking at it, Gendry knew this meal was likely the finest he had ever eaten in his life - and this was what the smallfolk were provided by House Stark. A rich, thick broth that was almost gravy, in which had been cooked celery, carrots, onions, even some mushrooms as well as barley and bits of beef - the offcuts, whatever was unfit to be served to the high-borns but was more than Gendry had ever had. It was the richest, most flavourful thing he had ever eaten, and he grunted his appreciation as he cleaned his bowl. A heel of sourdough bread was passed along the line, people tearing off chunks, and Gendry marvelled, taking it from a dimpled older woman with gnarled fingers permanently stained with vegetable dye. He took a chunk of bread and passed the loaf to Cade, who was eating his stew with almost indecent enthusiasm.

“They serve this every day?”

“There’s not always meat,” Cade grunted, licking gravy off his chin with a swipe of his tongue, rather than waste it on his shirtsleeve. “Only if they’ve slaughtered animals for the high-borns. And they don’t do that near as often as I would’ve thought. The Starks mostly eat as we do. Or there’s been a break in the snows and some of the Free Folk head to one of the thermal rivers - we have salmon chowder those days. The soup’s always thick, and rich. Yesterday it was this creamy bean stew with ham. The day before, it was a chunky soup stuffed full of vegetables. That was Neva’s favourite - she liked all the colours. I liked the pumpkin soup - they added roasted seeds to the top to make you feel special.” Cadeon sighed contentedly; Gendry’s lips twitched, understanding that if Cade was enthusiastic about his meals, he was happy. “But the roasted garlic and parsnip soup’s the one to watch for - you’ll be sucking on snow for hours after! No-one will want to kiss you then.” He shot Gendry a sly look; Gendry rolled his eyes, using the heel of crusty bread to mop up the last of the gravy.

Warmed and invigorated by the stew, Gendry stood, and Cade showed him where to deposit his used bowl and spoon - in one of the large woven baskets set at the end of a trestle table, where a scullery-maid was waiting to carry it back to the kitchens - and Cade led them through more corridors and halls. Gendry slowly became aware of the chill creeping in, the meagre silver light from high windows - a weak sun glowing off fresh snow. The pale light and subtle chill warned him that they were approaching the castle walls, and soon enough they were passing a wide entryway into a smaller courtyard buried beneath two feet of fresh snow, which smallfolk were doing their best to clear with wide shovels, so that a new arrival of Northern cows could be directed into one of the great barns within Winterfell itself.

“Lucky we don’t have to go through that,” Cade said, wrinkling his nose in sympathy for the smallfolk hastily shovelling snow.

“We don’t?”

“The entire castle’s built with the snow in mind,” Cadeon shrugged. “That’s what one of the blacksmiths told me. He grew up here, then went to another holdfast when his apprenticeship was finished. There are tunnels and passages and barns and all sorts within the castle proper, so that even in the worst snowstorms, people can still get about.” Thousands of years ago, tunnels and covered passages had been dug, neatly bricked with grey stone smoothed by the footsteps of generations. The hothouses, the granaries, the barns, the maester’s tower, the libraries and armouries, even the eerie, forbidden crypt and the tiny sept were all easily accessible - underground. Candles and torches were used sparingly; they were preparing for siege as well as settling in for the winter. “The courtyards are only used when the weather’s fine, as the walkways have to be kept salted and gritted or they’re a death-trap - too slick underfoot. I hate these fucking boots.”

“You’ll keep your toes,” Gendry grunted, and Cadeon grimaced. They soon reached the forges - and Gendry stood stunned. He had grown up on the Street of Steel, used to the sound of hammers on anvils and the stench of molten ore, the blazing heat of the fires. But the Street of Steel could have nestled comfortably within the Winterfell forges several times over. There weren’t dozens of armourers and blacksmiths; there were hundreds.

The Smith would have wept to work in Winterfell’s forges.

They were what Gendry imagined one of the seven heavens looked like. And they were absolutely teeming with workmen, apprentices and smallfolk tasked with aiding them, bringing barrels of fresh snow to melt, crushing shards of obsidian to fine pebbles, tending to the fires.

It was blisteringly hot, but Gendry noticed that bright silvery light glowing from a far corner; a courtyard entrance to the forges. It gave a welcome breath of sharp cold air, and Gendry saw men drift in and out of the open entryway, bleary-eyed from exhaustion beside the forges or refreshed from the cold and the bright clear air and weak sunlight.

A fierce man with a flat nose, bristling black beard and only the one arm noticed Gendry and swore under his breath, “Fuck my old boots!” He gaped at Gendry as if he had seen a ghost.

“This is Donal Noye,” said Cadeon offhandedly, his eyes scanning the forges, and narrowing as he noticed a pair of boys snickering, his entire body going still, predatory. “He’s armourer for the Watch.”

“What’s left of it,” Donal grunted, his shrewd gaze sweeping up and down Gendry. He pinned Gendry with a fierce look. “Before that, I was a Baratheon man. Forged that great war-hammer that caved in Rhaegar’s chest on the Trident. They say Robert littered Westeros with stag-seed wherever he went… I’ll eat my anvil if you’re not one of them.”

“What’s left of them,” Gendry acknowledged, feeling a searing hatred lash through him at the thought of the half-brothers and sisters he had never known, murdered by the Lannisters purely for being born - for being born of Robert’s seed, a threat to Cersei’s own bastards she had seen perched on the Iron Throne, even if for only a little while. Donal Noye grunted as he squinted at Gendry, his expression shrewd.

“You went North with Lord Commander Snow,” he said, and Gendry nodded.

“Now I’m here. Put me to work,” Gendry said.

“You’re a smith?”

“Armourer,” Gendry said, and they had a brief discussion about Gendry’s apprenticeship in King’s Landing, and his experience in the forges. Soon, Gendry realised that a place had already been made for him in the forges. A whitebeard led him to his own station, closer to the open entryway but not so close that he felt the chill of the bright white light. He wasn’t used to the cold, as others were, and he realised the Northmen had forges closer to the entryway, closer to the cold sharp air. With a nod from Donal Noye that promised a conversation later on, Gendry set to work. One forge was very much like any other, and though he was surrounded by hundreds of blacksmiths and armourers from every holdfast and castle in the North, he started to work, unfazed. Gendry knew his worth; he knew how talented he was - he had been honing his skills for fifteen years. And he had apprenticed under the best armourer in the Seven Kingdoms. One thing was different though: he had several apprentices, not just Cadeon, who scampered about the forges, keeping the younger apprentices in line, running errands and trying his hand at the anvil. Whenever Gendry glanced up from his work, he sought out his son, proud to see him working so diligently. Cade was a wild creature meant to be free - meant to be out on the open seas… No matter how he itched to return to that seductive mistress, when Cade was given a task he gave it all his strength and talent.

As the hours and then the days trickled past, Gendry was introduced to more and more of the blacksmiths and armourers, and was surprised when he was told by a fierce older woman to go and have a rest. Cade snickered that Aislin had been placed in charge of the men in the forges, enforcing Lady Larra’s decision that all men should stop their work and rest for a while after every fourth hour of labour. They were given a mug of stout and chivvied out of the forges into the daylight. And none dared refuse the querulous woman: Cade enjoyed watching her scold whitebeards and boys alike, though was wary of never crossing her himself.

Another thing that surprised Gendry about the forges was the unity, the camaraderie. He was used to being in rivalry with his fellow armourers on the Street of Steel. Here in the Winterfell forges, they were all committed to one single purpose. And, with the exception of some armourers and blacksmiths from the Vale and some of the Free Folk learning how to forge steel for the very first time, the forges were filled to the brim with Northmen. They had their own ways and culture - they had their histories, and their songs, and in the Winterfell forges, Gendry was becoming accustomed to the sound of deep voices raised in chorus, ancient songs rich with history and meaning drowning the sounds of hammering, the hiss of steam and the crunch of obsidian. They were songs as old as the North itself, passed down through the generations, from the First Men who learned to temper steel. They were ancient songs in the Old Tongue - no-one but the unnerving Thenns knew what the words meant, but every man in the forges who knew the songs sang passionately. The words weren’t important; the meaning to them was.

He was learning about the people of the North, of Winterfell. The fine weather he had woken to lingered for barely an afternoon, and lightning started to lash the sky as if the gods themselves were at war, whipping each other across the heavens, and though children whimpered and hounds howled at every lash of lightning, the atmosphere in Winterfell was persistently cheerful.

It was one thing he could say for the Northerners; though they were known for their grim severity and austere, hostile natures, Northerners in their strongest, safest place, together, were content, helpful and cheerful. They were used to the cold, and embraced it with a rich culture of story-telling by great roaring hearths. They knitted to keep their hands warm as they shared ancient stories; sang to raise their moods, until the echoing din of the thunder was lost to the chorus of choirs hundreds strong; and dancing lively jigs to keep the blood flowing fiercely through their veins, every musician in the North gathered to share their skills and inspire new songs and dances and teach what they knew. Gendry learned that every winter saw a surge in Northern culture.

It was a side of the Northerners few outsiders were privileged to witness.

Even he contributed to the explosion of culture that Winterfell was enjoying: He had been raised and apprenticed in the finest armoury in the Seven Kingdoms, after all. The grizzled whitebeards watched him work, and saw his skill. He shared his knowledge with others, taking the time to teach new techniques, help refine skills, alternative methods of doing things. He built bonds in the forges with the other armourers and smiths, even the Free Folk who were learning to smith for the first time.

At Winterfell, they were under siege - from the winter, and the Others who lurked in the fog and the snows - yet they were happy. Even the labourers prevented from preparing for siege due to the weather were content; Larra Snow gave them new jobs to complete until the storm wore itself out.

Gendry had never been part of the household of a castle - he did not count those few, harrowing weeks at Harrenhall - so he could only compare Winterfell to King’s Landing. There were far fewer people, but that wasn’t the greatest difference. Everyone knew their place, how they fit in the castle and what their role was, their duties and the privileges that came with sheltering under their liege lord’s roof - under their King’s own roof.

The Red Keep was for royalty and favoured nobility: Winterfell was for all the living North, if they had any hope of surviving.

That was the difference between the Starks and every other Great House in Westeros, and likely one of the most enduring reasons why outsiders were so distrusted: They did not understand the North, or respect the Northern way of doing things - other Houses outside of the North did not understand or appreciate that the Starks respected their people, believed wholeheartedly that it was their duty and responsibility to protect and provide for them. Gendry could not remember a single time Arya had ever spoken of her rights as the daughter of the High Lord; she spoke most fiercely about her father’s duties and the exhaustion he suffered due to the care he had for and of so many.

It was strange to settle into the castle, as if he had not mere days ago fled an Army of the Dead intent on ending the race of Men, had not flown on a dragon’s back and fought side by side with a King.

To the people of Winterfell, it made no difference that they were hounded by the Others of legend: Life went on. Elderly died, and a half-dozen babies were born between one storm and the next. Regular, rich meals were provided, and everyone continued their work, ignoring the storms. During the daytime, they worked; in the evenings, the musicians played, choirs sang and the young people went courting, dancing merry jigs and seeking private spots about the castle. There were very few of those to be had, which was just as well; there was no-one fiercer than a Northern mother protecting her daughters, as many a young lad discovered.

The highlights of Gendry’s days were always glimpses of her. Larra Snow.

And he saw her more often than he would ever have imagined, her being sister to the King after all. And part of that was down to Neva and Cadeon. Neva was a welcome guest in the nursery, a companion to the younger Lannister girls. She shared a chamber with Cade, a wildling boy named Ragnar and the Umber heir, Little Jon, both of whom seemed in awe of Cade and even more so of Gendry once they had witnessed him at work in the forges, trailing after Cade like little pups, and each tried to lift Gendry’s war-hammer.

Dawn seemed to come later and later every morning; the castle was bustling long before the sun peeked demurely over the horizon, and one of the earliest to rise, beating even the scullery maids who lit the fires, was Larra Snow. Every morning, she came to the nursery and prepared a skillet pot of porridge for the children - for the Lannisters, Little Jon Umber, for Neva and Cade and Ragnar and Little Sam Tarly, who joined all the other children for a walk in the godswood if it was fine before breaking their fast. Larra would sit and carefully comb and braid the girls’ hair with her scarred, nimble, gentle fingers, then dole out the porridge for each of the children while she asked questions about their learning with the maesters. Gendry knew all this, as he had taken to visiting Neva in the nursery every morning before he headed to the forge. He timed it just right: Larra Snow was always tenderly combing the tangles out of tiny Leona Lannister’s golden corkscrew curls as Gendry entered the nursery, the children sitting at table to eat their porridge. He always got a smile from the children, and a kiss from Neva…but it was the way Larra Snow’s violet eyes lit up like obsidian embers when she saw him, the subtle winks at the corners of her rosebud lips, that gave him a secret thrill. It was the only time she ever gave him such a warm look.

She would set down the comb, help Leona into her high chair, give kisses, and walk out of the nursery with him. She did not always speak; she was unlike Arya that way, though Gendry didn’t think it was Larra’s truest nature to be this quiet. He had seen her light up, teasing and flirting with Valemen and the Free Folk warriors, vibrant and charismatic and delightful. She was warm, gentle and stern with the children. With Gendry, she was quiet, for whatever reason. He told himself it didn’t matter; he just liked seeing her, looked forward to waking every morning knowing her purple eyes would glow with something at the mere sight of him entering the nursery.

But it was a shock to see her in the forge for the very first time.

There were three different languages spoken in the forges - nine different dialects. And not everyone knew the Common Tongue. There were many voices in the forges - but few of them female. So it was exceptional when they heard her. They heard her sing.

One morning, a storm thrashing the castle - lightning threatening to tear the sky asunder, icy rain so thick and harsh no-one dared step outside to get pummelled - the usual raucous noise of the forges and the singing of the men was accompanied by a breath-taking female voice.

“I love it when she’s here,” Cadeon sighed, resting near the fire and gazing wistfully across the forge, to the courtyard entrance where rain pelted through the wide opening and lightning sporadically illuminated the figure of a slender woman working. The storm did not faze her, even as whitebeards were spooked by the lightning and the boys glanced above their heads as if expecting the castle to tumble down upon their heads.

Gendry was stunned to see Larra Snow tempering obsidian.

He had not yet been asked to work with obsidian, though knew he was being assessed by the older armourers for his skills first. Not every smith and armourer was working on obsidian; there were still things that required steel. The Broken Tower was being rebuilt, in between storms, and the workmen required the usual building materials from the forges. He did not mind; but he knew he could work with obsidian, and create some quite extraordinary things with it.

He had not thought anyone in the North would know how to use obsidian. Missandei and Lord Tyrion had discovered and translated Ancient Valyrian writings on using dragonglass, and they had informed Gendry when he started working with the stuff. It had not occurred to him that someone else might know how to work the strange material.

“Strange how the work slows when she sings,” said a gruff voice, and Donal Noye chuckled under his breath, his eyes alight with amusement as he watched Larra Snow with something like fondness and sorrow in his gaze.

“But look how much calmer people are because she’s singing,” Gendry said, gazing around. The incomparable sounds her voice made as she sang felt like a dose of hard liquor deep in the belly, fortifying and, Gendry admitted, entrancing. He had never heard a person sing the way she could, never heard a voice so beautiful, swelling and soaring and echoing around the forges, clear and strong. He imagined none of the others had ever heard the like, either. But he knew he was also right when he said Larra Snow’s singing eased the worst of the men’s dread. And if she could sing so beautifully as she calmly worked, paying the storm no mind, then what was stopping them from doing the same?

“Go watch her work,” Donal grunted, jerking his stubbled chin toward Larra Snow. “She taught everyone here how to smelt obsidian.” Gendry raised his eyebrows, surprised.

“I’ve worked with obsidian before,” he said quietly.

“In King’s Landing?”

“Dragonstone,” Gendry said, still watching Larra Snow, her singing high and strong over the noise of the anvils and the storm - quite a feat in itself. “But I will go and watch her work.” He wasn’t the only one. The smiths who were having a rest had gathered near to Larra Snow’s forge, and Gendry sidled up to them, leaning against a stone pillar. Cade settled at his feet, leaning against Gendry’s legs, closing his eyes with a soft smile on his scarred lips as he listened to Larra Snow’s voice swell and rise and sweep over them like waves. Gendry listened - but he also watched.

Larra Snow always had her hair pinned up. Gendry had yet to see Larra Snow with her hair unbound, and found himself wanting to see that more than anything. As she always did, she had parted her hair down the middle, and two raised braids worked from the centre of her forehead back to the nape of her neck, where she entwined the braids and pinned them in place in a bun that gave her a very pretty profile. In the mornings, Gendry oft saw her with those two shining treacle braids draped over her shoulders past her waist while she combed Leona Lannister’s curls; she twisted and coiled and pinned them as they left the nursery, sometimes wrapping them over her ears in a coronet if she was heading out-of-doors into the cold brisk air. Today, she wore her braids pinned at the nape of her neck in a bun, and Gendry could tell how hot she was, working at the forge; sweat shimmered on her brow like tiny jewels, and loose curls twisted like Leona’s corkscrews around her face, wayward and uncontrollable, annoying her. Her hair was curly, then, like Jon’s. She was slim and tall like Jon, too, and Gendry knew he could rest his chin on the top of her head if she stood close enough.

Sometimes he imagined her standing close enough for him to wrap his arms around her - for her to tuck herself against him, and let him rest his chin on her head and smell that sweet flowery scent that sometimes drifted from her hair. He imagined a lot about Larra Snow.

Gendry had seen Larra in her armour, and on a rare evening he had seen her in an expensive silk dress she had worn to dine with the nobles, the deep purple of the silk making her eyes glow like purple embers. In armour or silk, she wore her hair pinned up, and looked beautiful and lethal in either. Cade mused that Larra concealed weapons beneath the silk, whereas she draped her slender body with weapons over her fitted leather armour. Gendry imagined he was right. But today, she wore a battered leather apron over a simple dove-grey wool dress with a high neck and fitted sleeves, leather gauntlets buckled over her forearms to protect them - but her hands were bare, and Gendry noticed the firelight gleaming off the ancient white scars that cobwebbed her fingers and the backs of her hands, as if her hands were draped with silver chains instead of jewels. In the firelight, her skin glowed snow-white, but he noticed the three narrow scars at the base of her long, slender throat, and the scar beneath her ear.

His body seemed to come alive at the fleeting idea of kissing those silvered scars - particularly the ones on her throat. He wondered what sound she’d make if he kissed that silver scar beneath her ear. He remembered, before he had been sold to the Watch, that some girls liked to be kissed there. He remembered the soft, whimpering, breathy sounds they had made in his embrace - and scowled as the fire before Larra made him see red. The Red Woman. He exhaled angrily, folding his arms across his chest, and tried not to appear to be scowling at the lady as he watched Larra Snow work.

Gendry often found that his body came alive around Larra; and that the thought of her alone was enough to gentle the rage and shame that consumed his mind whenever the Red Woman whispered in the back of his mind - which was often.

He loved to watch her work. The calm, precise way she moved, her meticulousness and patience…she would have made a fine blacksmith, something which made some of the Winterfell smiths laugh - according to them, she had grown up in these forges, pestering the master armourer Mikken until he had conceded and tutored her, spending hours teaching her the craft: She had forged her own hunting-knife as a girl. Gendry wondered if she still wielded it. He knew she had a fine Valyrian steel dagger, as well as the sword she always had within reach - it was propped up mere feet from her, ready to snatch up at a moment’s notice - and a second dagger she wore belted at her lower-back, but if she still had it, she wore it concealed.

Thinking about where she concealed her blade made Gendry flush with the possibilities, and his gaze lingered on her plain woollen dress and the leather apron. The idea of what remained hidden by them made his body tense. His body threatening to betray him, Gendry focused not on her almost painfully tiny waist, or her breasts lovingly caressed by the wool, but on her hands.

He had seen seasoned blacksmiths more unnerved by the fire than Larra. She was comfortable around the forge, around the fire - if not the heat - and the tools, just as the sword and dagger and hunting-knife were an extension of her. She wasn’t afraid of them, cautious and hesitant and uncertain. It was a quiet confidence. She was not in the forge to show off; she was here to work, just as any of the others were. The only difference was, she was the King’s sister - and a beauty. And she did gentle their dread of the storms.

“Come here,” she said gently, pausing her singing, and she raised her uncanny purple eyes, lancing them straight on Gendry, whose entire body tensed with awareness. He swallowed, raising an eyebrow. She set her tongs down and tidied some other tools, curling a finger toward him as she did so. Cadeon raised his eyebrows at Gendry as he shifted off Gendry’s legs; Gendry glanced at the other men, who gave half-hearted shrugs. He cleared his throat and approached the lady, nervously brushing his hands on his own apron. The directness of her gaze reminded Gendry inexplicably of the moment Lord Tywin Lannister had arrived at Harrenhall. There was power in her gaze, unyielding.

Those vivid purple eyes glowed like gems in the firelight as Gendry approached, and her succulent lips twitched with a teasing sort of irony.

He was used to being the tallest person around. He certainly wasn’t used to tall, slender women who somehow seemed to look him in the eye, despite being a head shorter. She raised her chin, that quiet confidence radiating from her, and Gendry eyed her warily as she stepped aside from the anvil.

“Spearheads,” he said, eyeing what she had been working on. She had tidied up her station, leaving the tools meticulously organised, a bushel of crushed obsidian within reach and the fire stoked. He liked a tidy workspace.

Her voice seemed to rub him all over as she said huskily, “It’s my turn to watch.”

He glanced at her. “What would you like me to do?”

“Whatever you’d like,” she murmured, and he shivered as her eyes swept over him. “You have used dragonglass before.” It wasn’t a question. “I wish to watch you temper it.”

And she watched. At first, it was unnerving: She had never remained so close to him for so long, but just like their morning walks from the nursery, she was still quiet. Watchful. Occasionally, her sharp eyes would widen and she would step forward, and his entire body would tense as she laid a hand gently on his forearm to stop him. He noticed the finer scars on her fingers, and that one of her nails was purple-black with bruising. She was unafraid of getting her hands dirty - of working with them. She would ask him to either repeat a movement or explain the process - how he had learned to temper dragonglass was subtly different from the way she had been taught, mostly in the materials and tools he used in comparison to what she had had available. Larra did not tell him about where or from whom she had learned to smelt obsidian - Gendry couldn’t help wonder where it had been mined so far in the North, if that was indeed where Larra had been all the years since the Ironborn took Winterfell - but Gendry learned enough just from her questions about how she had been taught. Crude tools used with patience and exquisite attention to detail. Larra was clever and quick to pick up new skills; she started working beside him, sometimes glancing his way to check what he was doing, and using the techniques she had seen him use with precision and great care.

She compared the first spearhead to the one she had created using his techniques, holding them both before the fire, her eyes sharp and assessing, critical. Larra’s lips parted with a thoughtful, “Huh!”

“What is it?” Gendry asked, pausing in his hammering.

“You can see its heart,” she breathed, seemingly mesmerised by the obsidian. Gendry set down the obsidian blade he was forging, nestling the glowing purple-black obsidian in the fire, and stepped closer to Larra. He was close enough to smell the perfume in her hair, and the sweat shimmering delicately on her brow, which she often swiped away with an annoyed jerk of her upper-arm across her face. As she held the spearheads up in the firelight, Gendry saw it, as she had said. The heart. Deep within the spearhead, a violet-blue flame seemed to throb. The first spearhead, held up beside it, was dark and cold. It was serviceable, but not beautiful.

“I’ll give it to them,” Gendry sighed, “the Valyrians’ craftsmanship was unsurpassed.”

“Steel and sorcery,” Larra murmured sadly. “For thousands of years, they were unparalleled… And then they were gone.” She set down the spearheads. “And all that made them extraordinary was lost with them.”

“Not all,” Gendry said quietly, remembering the sound of the wind whipping in his ears, the tremendous, awing power - of wings and of fire. Larra flicked her purple eyes to Gendry, and she seemed to discern his thoughts from the look on his face.

“Not all,” she agreed softly.

Gendry sighed heavily, glancing at Larra.

“This is the most you’ve spoken to me since I arrived at Winterfell,” he said quietly, moving closer to Larra, glancing around to ensure they weren’t overheard. “I see you, cuddling with the children, talking with the Free Folk and flirting with the men. With them, you’re warm and playful.” He moved closer still, and frowned softly. “With me, you are quiet. Do I offend you?”

Larra glanced sharply at him, her expression showing subtle horror, as if she could not believe what she was hearing, melting into something soft and sad, which was worse to witness - tragic, almost. Her eyes warmed the way they did every morning in the nursery when she saw him; her lips twitched, and Gendry stilled, watching, as the tip of her tongue dabbed delicately at her lower-lip. She cleared her throat softly.

“I enjoy you,” she admitted, her voice rich. Gendry felt himself blushing at the intensity in her eyes. She didn’t need to giggle and simper and make suggestions; the ferocity of her gaze alone felt as if she was stroking him, enjoying him as she said. He wondered if she felt the same way when he snuck long looks at her - if she had noticed? Her expression turned sad again, cautious. “When you arrived at Winterfell, Karsi told me that Jon was whole and healthy… The expression on your face said something quite different.” Gendry suddenly regretted mentioning it. Something like a shadow of Jon’s shame flushed through his body, chased by chills that made him suppress shudders of rage mingled with dread. “Something happened to Jon.” Her face was solemn, her eyes so dreadfully understanding as she turned to gaze up at him. “Whatever it was, you haven’t betrayed Jon’s confidence - not even to his own family. So how can I possibly ask you to?”

It unnerved him that she could read him so well, without ever having met him before that day in the courtyard. But he stood a little taller as he realised she respected his loyalty to Jon, protecting the secret of whatever had happened to him. How was Gendry supposed to tell Jon’s sisters what had happened to him?

Larra gazed up at him, earnest worry drawing her pretty eyebrows together, casting her deep purple eyes into shadow. Her voice was heartbroken as she asked, “Is there something we need to know about Jon?”

Gendry thought about his answer for a long time, watching her face, the way her eyes glimmered and glowed and sparked like violet embers in the firelight, the shadows and light lovingly caressing her face. It was love, Gendry realised. Love radiated from her eyes - love for her twin-brother, concern for him. Real dread. Gendry remembered why the castle was preparing for war - and the murmurs of the Northmen that the “real” war would begin once the Night King was dead. Their real enemy was the foreign invader, the Dragon Queen who incinerated pregnant women, young boys and ancient men to prove a point of her ruthlessness and absolute power to her councillors.

He thought of Jon, and how it was Daenerys Targaryen had managed to climb into Jon’s lap. Not by Jon’s choice - but through his utter lack of one.

They needed to know what Queen Daenerys had done to their brother.

He sighed heavily, reaching up a hand to brush over his chin, still somewhat surprised to find a short beard swathing his jaw. He glanced at Larra, and eventually nodded. “Aye, there is.”

“You’re used to highborns doing as they please with you,” Larra said quietly. “Sold to the Watch, tortured and put to work at Harrenhall, betrayed by the Brotherhood…” Gendry’s lips parted. How did she…? “I wouldn’t blame you, for being wary of me, or of Sansa. Perhaps you might think we wouldn’t believe you, or say something horrendous and brush aside your worries - and punish you for them later.”

“You sound as if you’re used to high-borns doing as they please with you,” Gendry said, and remembered what Arya had told him about her bastard siblings - and how they were treated at Winterfell by Arya’s mother. Larra made a soft noise of agreement.

“I’ve no power to command you to tell me what happened,” Larra said softly, and Gendry raised an eyebrow. She was still Lord Stark’s daughter, after all, and ruled this castle and the people of the North. And you are the son of a King, Gendry reminded himself. Larra cleared her throat gently. “I want you to know that you can. I’ll listen.”

“What if you don’t like what you hear?” Gendry asked grimly.

Larra’s smile was sad and accepting, and that made it worse. “I’m already certain I won’t. But I’ll hear it all the same, if you’ll tell me.”

Gendry gazed at her, and for a heartbeat he considered it. Then he remembered who he was speaking to. It wasn’t a matter of being believed… He felt flushed as he cleared his throat, muttering, “It’s…not a thing ladies speak of.”

Shrewd understanding darkened Larra’s eyes, and Gendry saw the danger in them - a wicked danger that showed just how Larra Snow had kept her crippled brother alive in the True North. She had made hard choices, and done things no lady ever had to.

“I’m not a lady,” she said heavily, and it sounded very different from when Arya had shoved him, that day at the brook, teasing her about calling her m’lady. She was deeply in earnest. She wasn’t just a lady. She was a she-wolf. And her eyes were cunning and dangerous as any dire-wolf’s as she watched Gendry carefully. Even if she didn’t say it, she suspected something.

A clap of thunder rumbled so loudly, it felt as if the forge was moving underfoot; lightning bombarded the castle, and Gendry shuddered with dread…until he noticed Larra’s lips moving silently, her vivid purple eyes on the open entryway, counting. When the thunder finally grumbled and quietened, and the courtyard entrance slowly faded to shadows, Gendry shivered, and realised that the hammers had stilled, the men were quiet.

“We’re at the heart of it, now,” Larra said softly, and Gendry was surprised to see a flicker of warmth and amusement in her eyes, her pretty lips lifting up at the corners. “The worst of the storm is above us; she’ll wear herself out soon enough.”

“Are storms female in the North?” Gendry asked, to distract himself from the feeling of his bones shaking because of the strength of the thunder.

Larra’s lips quirked, her eyes glinting with humour. “Extraordinary beauty coupled with unfathomable destruction? Of course… Not all storms are a bad thing.”

“How can they be a good thing?” Gendry asked, curious about her perspective on things.

“There is no progress without chaos,” Larra sighed. She held up the two spearheads she had forged using skills learned from two different cultures thousands of years apart in terms of craftsmanship. “And as destructive as storms are…ancient trees will be felled during this storm, timber we need…and they’ll give way to new growth. On and on it goes. A never-ending circle of life and death. Death pays for life… It is eternal.” She gazed at the tip of the spearhead in her hand, thoughtful and faraway. “Nothing in this world can break it. All things end but endings also mean new beginnings.”

“For some,” Gendry said quietly, a flicker of shame dancing through him as he glanced at Larra, and wondered just how closely she resembled the Young Wolf, whose name had been uttered over a fire, Gendry’s life-blood hissing as it fuelled a black curse.

Larra nodded, and sighed. “For some,” she agreed. She set her spearheads down and tidied her workspace.

“Is that you finished for the day?”

“I’ve a standing appointment with the maesters,” Larra said, undoing the knots of her apron, revealing her simple wool dress as she hung the apron on a nail embedded into one of the wooden pillars on which copious shelves and ledges had been built for storing tools and projects. “I would ask you to demonstrate your methods of tempering obsidian to some of the other smiths and armourers.”

“Your way yields serviceable obsidian,” Gendry said. “Both those spearheads will kill a White Walker.”

“Dragonglass is fussy,” Larra said, shrugging delicately. He noticed the way the wool stretched and shifted over her breasts with the movement, and wished he hadn’t. Wished he didn’t wonder how heavy they were, how he could cup them in his hands. “Your method yields more reliable results.”

Gendry nodded. “As you wish.” Larra glanced up at him, her eyes glowing.

“I do,” she said softly, and her lips twitched into a rare, sweet smile that made Gendry shove his shoulders back and bite back on a grin when she strode away, through the forges, rumpling Cade’s hair as she passed him, pausing to speak to Aislin and some of the whitebeards and the Chief Armourer who organised the forges at her behest.

For the rest of the day, Gendry demonstrated his method - the Valyrian method - of smelting obsidian, crafting spearheads, dirks and arrowheads and simple, brutal gladius swords. His obsidian war-hammer, with a tempered steel haft and bronze embellishments, was much admired by the armourers. It was no small thing to be asked by the lady to share his knowledge: Gendry was instructing men with decades more experience than himself at their own craft. But he stood even taller when he was praised by the oldest, most experienced of the whitebeards for his passion and skill.

When Larra returned, she took up her station, looped her apron over her head, and Gendry watched out of the corner of his eye. Her frown was intense, and she picked up her hammer, focused on the rhythmic pounding on the anvil.

“Your meeting with the maesters that frustrating?” Gendry asked, and a soft grunt was her response as she hammered away, until she picked up a stick to poke and swill a dish containing crushed obsidian.

“Grains,” was all she said, but with great feeling, her eyes glowing as she gave him a disgruntled look. She stepped away from the fire to knead her eyes, looking very tired; purple bruises smudged beneath her eyes, and Gendry saw the way her shoulders drooped slightly under the weight of her responsibilities to the people of Winterfell. She glanced at Gendry, tilting her head thoughtfully. “How do they feed the smallfolk in King’s Landing?”

“Not well,” Gendry said grimly, and Larra raised an eyebrow. Gendry told her about bowls of brown, and they had a quiet conversation about the markets in the capital, the foreign foods imported from Essos and even the Summer Isles, the spices and foreign wines and odd stalls set up by immigrants from the Free Cities - Larra, who had lived all her life in the North, made him smile when she said the most exotic thing she had ever eaten was a bear’s balls.

“How were they?” he grimaced, teasing.

“Chewy,” Larra said, a grim look on her face, but her eyes danced, and her nose crinkled sweetly.

“When we ate our bowl o’ brown, we used to pretend it was chicken,” Gendry said fondly, thinking of the children he had grown up with, other orphans. He knew he alone had made it to adulthood. Someone had been taking care of him, he suspected. He had not found his way to Tobho Mott’s forge by accident. “We knew it wasn’t, but it made it go down easier.”

“I used to pretend the blood stew was venison and mushroom pie with flaky butter pastry, washed down with good strong, tangy cider,” Larra said wistfully. “If I never taste acorn paste again, it’ll be too soon.”

They spoke of the King’s Landing markets - it was a strange thing to think that Gendry, an armourer’s apprentice and a bastard with no name, took for granted something Larra, a High Lord’s daughter, had never experienced. His exposure to foreign cultures, languages and the foods people from exotic lands brought to King’s Landing, the largest port-city in Westeros, overflowing with people from all over Westeros - all over the known world. He was used to the smell of spices in the air, to foreign voices shouting over each other in the markets, different coloured skins and unusual ways of dressing, unusual flavours and ways of cooking things, Westerosi stews cooked up beside honeyed mice and sweets from Qarth and curries from Volantis, oysters Braavos-style, spicy broths with noodles, goat curries with firepods, sweetgrass, and honey, olive loaf, spicy fish served with succulent exotic fruits from the Summer Isles, hundreds of different kinds of cheeses from all over Westeros sold in special bazaars, lobster and winkles and cod, dates and melons from Dorne and peppers that made the unwary sweat from head to toe, lamb with salad of raisins and carrots, with hot flaky bread, shrimp and persimmon soup and plum wine, firewine and milk tea.

It was strange to think how much more of the world Gendry knew about, simply from living in King’s Landing, and Larra commented on it. Her own experiences were much more limited. But, Gendry pointed out, “I’ve seen you hold a conversation with ten people in five different dialects without even blinking an eyelash.” He chuckled. “You could probably write a book on all you know about the clans of the Free Folk and their cultures. More than any maester can ever learn.” He shrugged.

“Your experiences sound so much more exciting…more exotic,” Larra sighed, almost regretfully.

“No. They were just a lot warmer,” Gendry said, and Larra laughed. It was the first time he had ever heard her laugh, and startled him. It was an attractive sound. She smiled, turning back to the fire, picking up her hammer, and Gendry refocused on his work. He knew Larra was thinking about their conversation - about grains, and ways in which she could feed Winterfell if the winter lingered too long. She had told Gendry she wanted to extend what they had, though, without having to resort to expensive foreign imports. What was standard trade in King’s Landing would be eye-wateringly expensive to the North, which was the largest and poorest of the Seven Kingdoms.

“Will you join us in the nursery for supper?” Larra asked, as she hung up her apron for the night. Gendry glanced at her as he rolled his shoulders, stretching his neck, and stopped.

“With you?” he asked, unsettled.

“Well, and the children,” Larra said, looking almost disappointed at his reaction.

“Only if I’m welcome,” he hedged.

“I wouldn’t ask if you weren’t,” Larra said earnestly, and he nodded. In his mind, he had always imagined that high-borns always ate numerous courses of exotic dishes - the sorts of things he had seen sold in the markets in King’s Landing but never had the coin to try for himself, elusive and decadent. He imagined they were in their finery, draped in jewels and eating off enamelled plates. If the children in the nursery had been used to such things, in the Winterfell nursery they had a very different sort of experience. Simple, hearty meals - similar to what Gendry ate downstairs, except for the cuts of the meat - were set out on the large round table, the babies were draped with wide linen bibs to protect their clothing - or their frocks were removed entirely, in Leona’s case - and they served each other, eating with simple carved spoons. He noticed each child had their own, their names engraved into the handles.

Gendry didn’t wonder why Larra had decided to dine in the nursery: the storm was still abusing the castle, and they appeared in the nursery to more than a few teary faces. Neva darted to him, and Leona’s lip quivered as she reached for Larra, who scooped her up. The sound of her singing coaxed and gentled the children, who looked relieved by her mere presence - as if Larra herself would fight back the storm single-handedly.

The storm raged, but it was cosy in the nursery. The hearth crackled with a lively fire, and the children were kept busy with knitting and crochet projects, dolls or books, or braided each other’s hair into new styles, practised their embroidery or dancing to the pianoforte or learned ancient Valyrian arias from Larra as she sang and cuddled Leona, gently rocking in the rocking-chair beside the fire, bundled under blankets.

Gendry sat in one of the other chairs, Neva cuddling in his lap, and his heart sank further and further as Neva delicately lisped over her words with meticulous focus and patience.

She was reading.

Gendry had never learned.

And his mouth went dry as she turned, her delicate silver brows drawn together, and asked whether she had said the word correctly.

“You did. Well done, Neva,” said Larra gently, her nimble fingers untangling a knot in Rosamund’s attempts at crochet. Leona sat cuddled in her lap, enormous emerald eyes gazing from within the folds of a soft dove-grey blanket with extraordinary patterns, sucking her thumb. Larra handed Rosamund her crochet back, adjusted Leona in her lap, and leaned her head back, her eyes glinting like embers as she observed Neva reading. Her gaze drifted slowly upwards, those entrancing purple eyes resting on Gendry’s face, intense yet oddly gentle at the same time.

Just as Altheda and Calanthe started squabbling over a game of cards - Larra’s creation - serving-girls arrived with their meal. It was perfect to combat the lingering storm: Potatoes mashed until they were creamy and smooth, ladled with a rich stew groaning with gravy-soaked carrots and pearl onions and beef short-ribs. The meat was so tender it was falling off the bone.

He and Larra were not alone in joining the children to eat in the nursery: They were joined by Sam Tarly and pretty Gilly, Zharanni, Lady Tisseia, the Dothraki kos who guarded the Lannister girls, two of the maesters tasked with educating the children, and the septa who gave instruction in dancing, embroidery and etiquette. Gendry savoured every mouthful of this meal. Beef short-ribs! He exchanged a glance across the table with Cade, whose grin outrivalled any cat who got the cream. Neva, always a contrast to her brother, looked awed and unsettled at being given such a rich, expensive meal, and picked delicately at it until Calanthe told her to “wolf it down like Larra!”

And there was something incredibly wolfish about Larra as her eyes turned watchful and cunning, whipping away any of the bones that had not been stripped of every sliver of meat. She sucked them clean. Their discussion about how a bear’s balls tasted echoed through Gendry’s mind, and he grinned to himself as Cade crowed and teased Larra, and fought her for the last of Narcisa’s bones. Gendry listened more than he spoke during that meal, unsettled by the richness of the meal and savouring it. And he was quite aware how much he watched Larra. She had not joined the children in the nursery - or invited the other adults - for the sake of dining with them. Gendry noticed how cunning and observant Larra was: She was watching the girls, particularly. She wanted to know how they were settling in, whether there had been any squabbles, and she gauged their emotions just with a few quiet word, especially Narcisa and Delphine. Crisantha remained mute, but was more engaged than Gendry had ever seen her on Dragonstone. The shock was wearing off: And she felt safe near Larra, he could tell just by the way she moved to be near to wherever Larra was. If Larra sat in the rocking-chair, Crisantha settled on an embroidered floor-cushion with her embroidery, close enough to lean her cheek against Larra’s thigh, close enough for Larra to rest her hand on top of Crisantha’s head and stroke her billowing curls.

Larra spoke to the maesters about the girls’ progress in their lessons, asked the septa to introduce new stitches and dances for the girls to learn - after their demonstrations earlier - confirmed with Tisseia how their Valyrian was coming along, and asked Zharanni, whose Common was coming along very well, to translate for the kos.

“As soon as the weather clears, the girls must learn to ride,” she said, and Zharanni spoke to the kos in harsh, guttural tones. The copper-skinned men - now wearing woollen tunics beneath their leathers, provided by Larra and her sister - exchanged looks. One of them said something; Zharanni spoke sharply, raising her chin, and the man eyed Larra’s stern, unyielding expression, and seemed to relent.

“We’re to learn to ride?” Calanthe asked eagerly.

“Like a man?” Narcisa said, aghast.

“Like a Dothraki,” Larra said. “There are no finer horsemen in the world. You must learn to ride, as if you are one with your mount.”

“Why?” Altheda asked curiously.

“Many reasons. For the joy of it,” Larra said, shrugging and somehow managing to make it look elegant. “And one day your lives may depend upon it. If you can mount a horse, you have the option of fleeing.”

“A horse cannot outrun a dragon,” said Narcisa coldly, her eyes glints of emerald fire as her features turned to stone. Gendry glanced at Larra, who was watching Narcisa carefully. Narcisa’s wrathful hatred toward and dread of the dragons was the first thing Gendry had learned about her.

“No, that’s true,” Larra said, watching Narcisa carefully. “There are only three dragons in the world. There’s far worse out there than them, and far more of them.”

“Like what?”

“Like men.” Narcisa’s eyes fell to the three identical scars scratched at the base of Larra’s throat, and a few of the adults flicked their gazes there, too. If rumour was to be believed, and Gendry thought there was some truth to it, those scars had come from the Ironborn who had taken and then yielded Winterfell. Those scars had come from an Ironborn who had attacked Larra - and received a meat-hook to the jaw in return.

“Are you intent on turning us into she-wolves?” Narcisa asked, her voice brittle.

“I am intent on teaching you the skills to survive,” Larra said sharply. “I shall not shave your head and shove a spear in your hand, do not fear. You shall continue your lessons on etiquette; the gods know they saved Sansa’s life more times than she could count. But you will not leave this castle unable to defend yourself.”

“And that is why we must learn cyvasse and economics and geography and all of that?” sniffed Narcisa disdainfully.

“Yes.”

Narcisa sat up straighter, and said, “Very well then. We shall learn to ride the Dothraki way.”

“Good. I’ll have the maids bring up your breeches in the morn,” Larra said, and her eyes twinkled merrily at Narcisa’s mortified gasp. Gendry hid his grin behind his cup of ale, glad the tension had lifted. Narcisa didn’t seem to realise Larra was teasing; not when Calanthe was giddy at the idea of wearing breeches and tunics.

As the others turned to their own conversations, Larra leaned closer to Gendry, murmuring, “I think it best we send them to bed - before Cadeon earns a few more scars.” She inclined her head toward Cadeon, who was needling Narcisa about dressing like a man - to the mounting fury and embarrassment of Narcisa, who clenched her hand around her knife. Gendry laughed.

“Cade,” he said warmly, shaking his head when his son glanced over. “Relent.” Larra reached over and took the knife from Narcisa, and Calanthe piped up, “Shall we learn to hunt, Larra?”

“If you’d like. I’m in need of a new bearskin. Sansa whisked mine away, I know not where,” Larra said mildly. “Now, it is time for bed.” A chorus of pleas erupted, but Larra was implacable. The children were guided to their chambers, with the promise of kisses from Larra - and Gendry - when they were settled, their teeth and hair brushed and clothes folded neatly in trunks.

“She’s pushing back,” Tisseia said softly, glancing at Larra. “Narcisa.”

“I know,” Larra said thoughtfully. “She’s getting her confidence back. I’m glad she is showing some spine.”

“Goodnight, Larra,” said Sam, and Larra smiled warmly, leaning in to embrace Sam, and kiss Gilly’s cheek, as they walked past with Little Sam, who was carrying a heavy book. Gendry felt unsettled by the sight of it, reminded of Neva reading in his lap and the embarrassment of being unable to guide her as she improved her skills.

The nursery emptied, and the fire was doused by a scullery-maid. Nothing was wasted in Winterfell. As they had promised, Larra and Gendry said goodnight to the children: Larra went alone into the Lannister girls’ chamber, and in the one beside it Gendry found the boys, and Neva, yawning and quietly talking amongst themselves. He observed Neva; she was chatting in an unfamiliar language to Ragnar, the wildling boy. She laughed her musical laugh and nestled down further under her blankets, her smile content as she saw Gendry in the doorway, her eyes lighting up. Larra arrived a few moments later, pausing at the door to sweep her eyes over the room. They rested on Gendry, sat at the edge of the bed Neva and Cadeon shared, Neva cuddled up to him and quietly talking about her day, and her hopes for tomorrow. Larra, in her plain wool dress, looked elegant in the firelight as she walked over to the bed shared by Little Jon and Ragnar, tall and lean, and she settled at the edge of the bed as Gendry had done. Listening to Neva, Gendry could not hear Larra’s words, but knew he wouldn’t be able to understand them - she was speaking to Ragnar in his own tongue, while she stroked Little Jon’s hair; he was already snoring softly, as Ragnar chuckled softly under his breath and gesticulated with his hands.

Snuffing out the few candles and dousing the fire, Larra’s soft laugh rubbed over him as Gendry made a noise of disquiet; he jumped as a hand reached for his in the dark, but it was Larra, and she led him out of the pitch-black chamber. She was used to the dark.

“Can you see in the dark, as dire-wolves can?” he teased, as he drew the heavy door shut behind him, glad of the torchlight in the corridor.

“Only when the moon is bright,” Larra said, her low laugh husky and seductive. The torchlight made her eyes glow like melting obsidian, her teeth shining straight and white. His eyes went to the three scars at the base of her throat, the scars he had wondered about kissing - the scars that told of brutality.

They remained in the corridor, the warm atmosphere of the nursery fading, and Gendry was at once uncomfortable about lingering but aching to remain by her side. “It’s good that you’re teaching them to defend themselves… They’re not likely to meet any monsters worse than men.”

Larra’s smile was sad, tragic even, and Gendry shivered deliciously as she murmured, “The men they meet won’t measure up to you… I don’t want them growing up fearful that every man they ever meet will abuse them…but they will know how to defend themselves against the very worst this world has created.” His eyes went to her scars, and he cleared his throat awkwardly. If the rumours were true, he knew what those scars meant. Knew what she had faced. And it made it easier, somehow, to think of speaking to her about such things.

He cleared his throat awkwardly, feeling a flush creep up his neck. Glad of the darkness in the corridor, hiding most of her face as he looked at her, he said, “Larra…may we go somewhere? Somewhere quiet?”

Larra watched him silently for a long moment. Then she sighed, and nodded. She led him through the Starks’ private corridors. “This is the solar. If I’m not in the forge or the courtyard, I’ll likely be here, should you ever need me.” The fire had been stoked, the candles lit, and Gendry watched her check something on the huge working desk beneath the diamond-paned windows - heavily shuttered - before nodding to herself, ladling water from a barrel in a shadowed corner into a kettle and suspend it over the fire, crumbling dried herbs from an earthen pot on the mantel into a small clay teapot.

Gendry stood just taking in the details of the solar. This was where High Lords worked, where Larra and her sister Lady Sansa worked, where they ruled. This was a private room, away from the nagging and demands of their people. There were high chairs piled with embroidered cushions, and an upholstered settle with a handsomely-carved back depicting a battle - the Battle of the Bastards, he thought, noticing a dire-wolf among the Stark infantrymen, wildlings in their rough furs fighting alongside the figure he assumed was Jon by the Stark sigil on his gorget. A low round table featured a miniature of Winterfell - every building, hall, silo and granary, courtyard and the tiny sept, the godswood and even the broken tower. Trinkets and keepsakes were arranged on the mantelpiece over the fire, and he was vaguely aware of Larra’s eyes on him, even as he was drawn to the portraits leaning on the mantel, unable to stop his feet from moving. He forgot his wariness; he was drawn to the small, uncannily accurate painting of Arya - of Arya as the painter had known her, long before Yoren had saved her and sheared her and hidden her among the lads intended for the Watch. Bright eyes and a delighted smile - her braids were as rumpled as Gendry imagined they would have been. Arya had always been so lively - she had never been vain about her appearance. She hadn’t cared about anything for herself, just Needle - and standing up for her friends.

Larra watched him silently as he examined the different paintings. They were all small, no bigger than his hand, but there was a much younger Lady Sansa, and an almost unrecognisable Jon - clean-shaven, his hair wildly curly and almost to his shoulders. The others - a little blonde boy with a stubborn mouth and a handsome young man with vivid blue eyes and a reddish tint to his hair - had to be the other brothers. The ones who had been lost. He swallowed, hard, at the sight of the Young Wolf, bearded and armoured - a young king off to war.

He thought of Stannis muttering Robb Stark’s name over a brazier, and bristled with shame and rage at what the Red Woman had done. Done to him. How she had used him. The damage she had done through him.

He clenched his jaw and stepped back as the kettle started to sing; Larra’s eyes were solemn and watchful as she gazed at him, almost as if she could see into his soul. She poured boiling water into the teapot and let the brew steep for a few moments, before pouring the herb tea into two glazed earthenware cups, passing one to him. She sat down in the one chair furthest from the fire, and indicated with a nod of her head that he could sit at the settle. He had never sat on anything so fine or so comfortable, and dreaded that his great weight - he knew he was an immense bastard, muscled as any bull - would do some damage. He cradled the cup of herb-tea in his hands, and in his agitation, his leg started jigging.

Larra leaned forward, her eyes glowing in the firelight, and her expression was deeply kind and understanding, as she said softly, “What is it you dread telling me, Gendry?”

“You don’t mind if I’m coarse? I don’t know how to say it delicate,” he asked, and she shook her head. She didn’t smile, or tease; her expression was solemn. He cleared his throat, took a long drink from his cup, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. The tea scalded as it went down, burning and invigorating.

He told her. Tried to explain what had happened - but also why it made his skin crawl that it had happened at all. The fact that Daenerys Targaryen had just promised to put her armies at Jon’s disposal before she abused him. That there was no way for Jon to shove her off him without risking everything…

He glanced at Larra. Her face was as still and cold as any statue he had ever seen. Perfect - eerie, and chilling. He had heard that the Northmen had the “wolf-blood” which made them fierce and volatile, but Larra’s rage was ice-cold and lethal, radiating from her as cold had emanated from the Wall itself. It was utterly terrifying to behold.

And then two, perfect tears dripped onto her cheeks, glittering in the firelight.

She wasn’t just enraged; she was heartbroken. Her eyes flitted to the portraits on the mantelpiece, and her voice was hoarse, as she said, sniffing delicately, “Is it not enough that he had to suffer being murdered?” She swiped the tears away angrily, her eyes hardening. She seemed to calm herself down, and gazed at him.

“Daenerys Targaryen is a beautiful and powerful woman. Most men would congratulate Jon on riding the dragon,” she said softly, thoughtfully. Her frown was delicate. “But not you.”

“She knew what she was doing. She took what she wanted. She took away his choice,” Gendry said, stifling a shudder as a memory threatened to overwhelm him. His choice taken; the damage that had been caused because of it. Robb Stark gazed at him from the mantel, his piercing dark-blue eyes accusing - but sorrowful too, as if he understood.

“You see her for what she is,” Larra said softly, her eyes drifting over his face, almost tender. Her pale hand rose, her thumb barely touching the lowermost of her triple scars. Her lips parted, as she breathed, “Oh.” Her eyes sharpened, terrible understanding in them, and Gendry fought the flush of shame that crept up his neck. “Someone hooked their claws into you. She did some damage.”

Gendry glanced sharply at her, but her gaze was faraway, lost. Her thumb pressed against her scar, her expression miserable. He gazed at those triple scars, and shifted on the settle, leaning closer to her - so close he could smell the fresh scent of her hair, the mint tea on her breath, feel the heat of her - and reached up, slowly and carefully, to touch his fingertips to those scars peeking above the neck of her modest dress. Their faces barely inches from each other, Larra’s eyes were impossibly purple as she gazed at him; he traced her scars with her fingertips, and she sighed, relaxing under his touch as he cradled the base of her throat in his hand, stroking his thumb tenderly up and down. She reached up, placing her own hand over his - smaller, pale, incredibly elegant and comparison to his oversized paw, yet just as scarred - and her gaze softened, her eyes misted, and her lower lip quivered.

“I’m glad you got your hook into them,” he growled low, and Larra’s smile was tragic, her eyes shuttering for a heartbeat. She leaned forward, and he remembered that she was a she-wolf when she nuzzled her dainty, pretty nose against his, rubbing her cheek against his. It was exquisitely intimate, and when she lifted her head, he held her gaze, his thumb tracing the curve of her jaw.

“I’ll have her head for this alone,” she whispered hoarsely, and Gendry slowly nodded, seeing the blistering intent and ice-cold rage warring in those purple eyes, hardening like tempered obsidian.

“I believe you,” he said, and jumped out of his skin as the door to the solar burst open.

Lady Sansa appeared, swathed in cloaks, the firelight turning her hair to molten copper. Her pretty eyebrows rose sharply as she saw the two of them, and Gendry jumped up from the settle, bowing uncertainly.

“What’s going on here?” Lady Sansa asked, something like irony glinting in her vivid eyes - so similar to Robb Stark’s, Gendry had to stop himself from looking over his shoulder at the portrait. Larra had not stirred from her chair, though Gendry watched her body relax at the sound of her sister’s voice, her grip on her earthen cup gentling. Her expression hard, Larra glanced over her shoulder.

Bluntly, every word laced with cold fury, Larra told her sister, “She raped him, Sansa.”

Notes:

I was desperate to get this chapter out. I was going to extend how long it took Larra and Gendry to get to the talk about Jon, but it worked out this way, so…

I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube videos about Tywin Lannister - The Order of the Green Hand does a wonderful ‘Machiavelli of Westeros’ series about him, which is making me question a lot of things! Including Tywin’s involvement in the Tourney of Harrenhall (funding it) and where Rhaegar was when he disappeared from Dragonstone, since he was gone for about two years (they hypothesise that he went to the Wall to seek counsel from his Uncle Maester, and met Lyanna along the way at Winterfell, and they stayed at Winterfell throughout the entire war; Ned’s ‘fever dreams’ mingled two events - the duel with the Kingsguard, then finding Lyanna - into one). Fascinating idea.

Also, what if Aegon wasn’t the only royal baby (allegedly) switched out of the nursery? What if Daenerys is actually Rhaegar’s daughter by Elia, Rhaenys? Daenerys claims she grew up in Braavos with a lemon-tree outside her window - there are no lemon-trees in Braavos, because its climate is too cold/wet. But there are citrus groves aplenty in Dorne. And it would make sense that Doran supports Daenerys’ claim to the Iron Throne later on, as she’s actually Elia’s daughter and his niece, which would put a Martell on the Iron Throne…

Chapter 36: The Ghosts of Grief

Notes:

I know I say it every chapter, but thank you for bearing with me! It’s been an insane few months, so I haven’t even had time to sit down and do any writing. Half-term has just ended, and I spent it decorating my house and writing +40 Word pages of notes for the future of this story!

I know there are two established Velaryon characters in the books by the time of the War of the Five Kings, but they’re boring. After the HotD teaser, I was inspired, and decided to overwrite Monford and Monterys Velaryon and Aurane Waters in favour of my own characters, who will appear a little later on, inspired by Black Panther’s M'Baku and Nakia, as well as Tia Pepa’s family in Encanto, of all things!

I’ve also been delving into tinfoil theories about (f)Aegon, and one of them links with a character called Gerold Dayne, “Darkstar”. Never heard of him before; I haven’t read far enough in the books, apparently. Apart from having a very cool nickname, I am fascinated by the idea that he may in fact be the son of Rhaegar and Elia, smuggled out of KL by Ashara Dayne. Most people will say, No, he’s way too old to be Aegon. To that I say: I do what I want! Gerold Dayne has silver hair with one black streak and violet eyes, and shares the name of two of the Kingsguard? I almost like the idea of (f)Aegon and Darkstar being part of a complicated switch that no-one knew about – Elia sent her son Aegon with Ashara to Dorne, and Varys switched the baby who had taken Aegon’s place with another child without ever knowing about Elia and Ashara’s switch. Darkstar could potentially be the true Aegon, while Varys believes Young Griff is the heir to the Iron Throne. Prince Doran calls the Darkstar the most dangerous man in Westeros (or Dorne, can’t remember which) and all I can imagine is Darkstar fighting like Henry Cavill’s Geralt in the Butcher of Blaviken scene in The Witcher. I even have the most perfect face-claim for Darkstar: Ton Heukels.

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

36

The Ghosts of Grief


Lady Sansa blanched, caught off-guard. “I beg your pardon?”

Larra’s expression did not change. Grim and unyielding. “She raped Jon.”

“The Dragon Queen - ?” Larra’s sister flicked her dark blue eyes to Gendry, suddenly flushing red, even though her spine straightened and her expression smoothed to stone - just like Larra. It was eerie, how similar they were, despite looking so different. Her sister flushed even more hotly than Gendry, who was suddenly very curious about the bottom of his cup. He flicked a glance at Larra as she cleared her throat delicately, and was…oddly charmed to see that even Larra’s cheeks bloomed a delicate pink as she caught his eye.

“Is this conversation appropriate - ?”

“No, but it is necessary,” Larra said, a stubborn bite to her tone. “Sansa. She promised Jon her armies then fucked him in spite of any protests - how could he protest, when he’d risk her withdrawing her support out of spite for wounding her pride?”

Lady Sansa sank down onto one of the chairs, meticulously removing her gloves as she gazed at the miniature Winterfell between them.

“Jon will be ashamed to think we know about this,” Lady Sansa said hoarsely, a desperate sort of yearning on her face as she gazed at her sister.

“I told him it’s not his place to feel shame,” Gendry said quietly. “It’s hers.” Something warmed in Lady Sansa’s eyes as she stared at him. He had travelled the Riverlands with Arya, and now spent a lot of time with Larra, but their elegant sister was a stranger - and she was every inch the highborn lady her sister Arya had once protested against being herself.

“Fuck this tea,” Larra grumbled, setting her cup down, and disappeared for a moment behind Gendry. Larra returned with three small silver tankards full of foaming stout, which she passed first to her sister then to Gendry before sitting down beside him on the settle, so close their arms and thighs touched. Gendry glanced at her, and she held his gaze, sombre and expressive. She lifted her tankard to her lips and drank. He did the same, becoming more and more used to the full-bodied, almost sour tang of the malty dark drink. It was a strong and heady drink, a meal in itself and popular amongst the Northern smallfolk - and their lords - for that reason. It sustained them.

Lady Sansa did not seem to know what to do, how to react. Gendry frowned softly at her. “You seem surprised a man could suffer rape, m’lady.”

“I know men can suffer the same abuse and humiliations as any woman,” Lady Sansa said, her tone cold, but her eyes were brittle. “He was hurt and vulnerable. She abused her position over him.”

“For the first and only time,” Larra promised, her tone scathing. Lady Sansa sipped her stout, unable to hide a grimace at the taste, gazing cautiously at Larra.

After a long moment, she said tentativel, “We still need her armies.”

Larra sighed heavily and grimaced. “Aye, I know… In times of hardship, our ancestors have always made decisions that leave a bitter taste in the mouth. We’re no different… But I shan’t let Jon suffer for the sake of a few spears.”

As her voice became a soft, dangerous snarl, Gendry reached out, gently touching her knee; he could feel how wound-up and agitated she was, her body practically bristling. That searing intimacy, that calm that they had shared together, had disappeared with Lady Sansa’s arrival. The Lady Regent of the North glanced briefly at Gendry’s hand on her sister’s knee, a curious glint in her eye. He did not remove his hand: Larra gentled.

“Of course not,” Lady Sansa said, and Gendry caught the covert glance she gave him. “Larra…we must be cautious and think. How do get what we want without having to sacrifice something for it?”

“You don’t,” Larra said tiredly, staring into the fire. She groaned and scrubbed her hand over her face, looking absolutely exhausted. “She should’ve learned that a long time ago, when she burned her khal…but she didn’t. She continues to act as though there will be no repercussions to her choices…” She scoffed angrily, her tone tart as she said, “When one has three dragons at one’s disposal, I think it highly unlikely one ever has to suffer any.”

“Highly unlikely,” Lady Sansa agreed. “So what shall we do about this? This changes things. How do we keep Jon safe?”

“You mean, keep her from digging her claws in too deep?” Larra said, her tone ironic, but she exchanged a solemn glance with Gendry. He could see how upset she was, and he gently squeezed her knee. She gave him a sad smile, glancing at her sister. “Until Jon reaches us, we can do nothing.”

“And once he is home?” Larra hid her face behind her tankard, but her eyes glinted viciously.

“When he returns, Jon will be accompanied by a strategic ally,” Larra said pointedly.

“Not a welcome guest,” Lady Sansa said, sighing softly. “I shall ensure her rooms are far removed from our own.”

“And we shall limit her access about the castle,” Larra said quietly, thoughtful, and she gradually softened against Gendry, relaxing the more she thought of how to handle the Dragon Queen’s imminent arrival, and how best to protect her brother.

“I spent enough time with her to know she’s used to getting her way in all things,” Gendry warned.

“One way or another,” Larra muttered, her eyes snapping like amethyst embers as she gazed into the fire. “I’ll not indulge her.”

Lady Sansa sighed, leaning back in her high-back chair, propped up by embroidered cushions. She looked superbly elegant - and highly disturbed. For a little while, they sat in silence. The crackling of the fire was lulling, especially when combined with the gentle pattering of fat snowflakes against the diamond-paned windows. The scent of Larra’s hair whispered under his nose, her heat radiating from her body so close beside his, and the stout seemed to have an effect: his eyelids grew heavy, his muscles relaxing even though Larra sat so close they were touching.

Without realising it, Larra had rested her head against his shoulder, gazing at the fire and the miniature of Winterfell. He started when she spoke, and blinked dazedly. Had he fallen asleep? He glanced at Lady Sansa, who had her face hidden behind her tankard of stout, her eyes glinting in the low firelight. If she had been watching them, Gendry could not say - though he suspected she had.

“You have been working on binding obsidian to steel,” Larra mused sleepily, peering up at him with owl-eyes shadowed with exhaustion. Gendry rubbed his face, his short beard, and nodded slowly. He had. It was one of the skills the Valyrians had mastered, and which Gendry had been curious to try since learning of it from Lord Tyrion on Dragonstone. He hadn’t had the time or the resources to try it then, but Larra was all for letting him play about with it. If they could repurpose weapons already forged, it would cut their workload significantly - and put far less strain on Winterfell’s resources. Almost everyone had access to steel, whether it was a simple dagger or a castle-forged sword, a hog-splitter, scythe, a Thenn’s axe or a harpoon belonging to the whalers of the Frozen Shore.

“I have,” he said, clearing his throat and trying to sit up properly without jostling Larra, who seemed to have curled into him while they dozed. He was far too comfortable with her curled up against him. Those vivid purple eyes searched his face, intense and awing.

“And how do you find it?” Larra asked. “Trickier than smelting pure obsidian or easier?”

Gendry cleared his throat. “In some ways it’s much easier,” he admitted, “but it depends on the quality of the steel that was originally used in the forging of the weapon. Something forged here in Winterfell’s forges will always bond instantly to the obsidian.”

“Purely for the quality of the steel?” Lady Sansa asked.

“Not only that; it’s how the steel was tempered and forged. A smith in a hamlet far in the North won’t have the knowledge or experience that an armourer in Winterfell has,” Gendry said. “What they create will always be serviceable, but not of great quality. The time and attention that goes into things will never be the same as what an armourer from Qarth will give their creations. And that’s the difference - the more intimately you work with something, the higher the quality, the more beautiful something will be. And especially if you are working with steel, the more you temper it, the stronger and purer it becomes. I think it all comes down to the fire.”

“The fire?” Lady Sansa frowned.

“With obsidian, it’s all about finding the right temperature. With steel it’s how many times you temper it,” Gendry said. “That’s what makes binding obsidian to steel so tricky; the fire, and how hot it has to be so you don’t ruin the steel but don’t risk the obsidian setting brittle.”

“The Valyrians did it,” Lady Sansa said thoughtfully. Gendry shrugged.

“They had the benefit of thousands of years of knowledge and experience,” he sighed. “All that has been lost. I’ve been experimenting with techniques Lord Tyrion Lannister read about in the library of Dragonstone.”

Larra frowned, her expression shrewd. “Maybe not lost,” she said softly.

“What do you mean?” Gendry asked. Larra glanced up at him, then frowned, shaking her head.

“Just a thought I had,” she said, shrugging it off. “I wonder what Brandon might know about it…” Gendry frowned. Her younger-brother was bound to a wheeled chair and as far as Gendry knew, had been a boy when Larra dragged him beyond the Wall. He certainly had spent no time in any forge. “I would like you to continue to work with obsidian and steel. When the Unsullied army arrives, they will surrender their spears and blades to have them bound with obsidian.” Lady Sansa sat up a little straighter, her eyes sharp on her sister. “We will move everyone else into the castle: the Unsullied shall have Winter’s Town as their barracks until the Night King comes.”

“What of the Dothraki?” Sansa asked, her eyes wide - eager.

Larra frowned. “The same. They shall stay in Winter’s Town. Their horses we shall find room for in the barns.”

Gendry glanced at Larra, smiling softly. “You’re going to separate the Queen’s armies from their weapons.”

“And the Queen from her armies,” Sansa said.

“The castle pushing capacity should stop her complaints, and will provide an excuse if she does,” Larra said, her eyes glinting dangerously.

“And when she argues that her people are here to fight and deserve Winterfell’s roof over their heads?”

“The Free Folk and the Valemen have fought with us and for us, demanding nothing in return,” Larra said quietly. “They are our honoured allies and guests.”

“You know this could be seen as making her a prisoner in our home,” Lady Sansa said delicately, glancing at Gendry. Larra sighed, running her finger around and around the rim of her tankard, gazing in to the fire.

“People will see what they wish to see. What they need to believe to sleep through the night,” Larra said, her tone sad rather than grim. “But all will see that she is a threat - to the North, yes, but the Vale will not withstand dragonfire. The Eyrie was designed to defend against mudbound armies. And after the Lion Culling and the Ash Meadow, she is known across the Seven Kingdoms as a threat to the entirety of Westeros. She will find no supporters here. And this is our home.”

“She can’t frighten us,” Lady Sansa murmured, almost dreamily, and Larra nodded.

“She will be treated just as any other lord or lady under our roof who has brought fighting men - but she is not the only one,” Larra said firmly. She sighed and frowned at a small cyvasse board on a polished table. “Daenerys Targaryen is an ally with sizeable armies - but nothing more. No other friends, no true wealth or resources, no lands but a distant island she is using as a step-stone to the Iron Throne, no actual power or influence, just what she believes she has.” Her eyes went to a cyvasse set on a polished table. “The belief more than any of her armies is what makes her dangerous.”

“And her three dragons,” Gendry reminded them, and Larra grunted softly. “She’ll want to keep them near, especially since Viserion was injured.” Larra sat up sharply, her eyes lancing to Gendry. He felt as if he had been struck by arrows, so fierce was her gaze.

“I’d forgotten that. How severely was he hurt?”

“When we were trapped on the ice-lake, the Night King threw a great spear of ice. He had others, I could see them even across the lake, as tall as a man. He had them ready…almost as if he was waiting to use them… If I hadn’t bellowed his name, Viserion would’ve been struck down over the mountain,” Gendry said, and Larra stared at him. She went deathly pale; even the shadows under her eyes lost all their colour.

“And would have risen as a wight,” she breathed, looking as if she might be sick. Her eyes flicked over his face, searching. “But Viserion lived?”

“The spear lodged in his wing-joint,” Gendry confirmed, indicating his own elbow, and this made Larra go paler still. He could see Larra’s mind working behind those depthless purple eyes. “He was roaring something terrible, destroying outbuildings at Eastwatch, but we got the spear out…”

 “Larra…you’re dreadfully pale - what’s wrong?” Lady Sansa asked concernedly.

“We can’t risk her bringing Viserion north,” she whispered, her eyes widening in sudden horror, and her Northern accent became much thicker as her voice became hoarse: “T’wasn’t just a spear of ice hurled at Viserion. There’s ancient magics bound to the Others’ weapons. Dark magic that warps and twists… It’s how the Others came into being in the first place.”

“Magic?” Lady Sansa prompted. “Maester Luwin said it was embellishment.”

“Only because magic has been fading from the world,” Larra sighed heavily. “Maesters rely upon evidence: what they can see, smell, taste, touch with their own hands. They can see no evidence of magic, so it’s easier to stop believing it ever existed. But millennia ago, during the war between the Children and the First Men, a man was taken captive by those who sing the songs of the earth… They intended to forge a weapon to protect themselves from Man. They plunged a dagger of pure obsidian into the man’s heart. He became the Night King: the obsidian mutilated everything he had once been…he created the first White Walkers and commanded the legions of the dead… Their weapons don’t just maim and kill: there is dark magic in them and it spreads through a wound like rot.”

Larra licked her lips, her eyes shadowed - harrowed by something from her own past, Gendry thought. Her own experiences beyond the Wall, secret horrors she kept tucked away.

“How do you know?” Lady Sansa breathed.

“Uncle Benjen went beyond the Wall, scouting for the Watch. White Walkers found him; they stabbed him in the gut with their ice-weapons and left him to die and turn.”

“Jon said Uncle Benjen was lost beyond the Wall years ago.”

“Aye, he was… The Children found him, dying; to stop the Others’ magic taking hold, they plunged a dagger of obsidian in his heart,” Larra said glumly, and Gendry frowned. The Night King had been made with a dagger of obsidian to the heart: his magic was rendered neutral by the very thing that had created him. “But the magic that saved his life stops him from crossing the Wall. As long as it stands, no creature bound to the Night King may cross it.”

“And if the Wall falls?” Lady Sansa prompted.

“When it falls…we’d best be ready. We must weigh our advantages and use them wisely; and no matter how powerful dragons are, Viserion especially is vulnerable. The Night King will use every advantage, and that is definitely an advantage.”

 “We cannot risk Viserion, then,” Sansa said quietly. “But what of the others?”

“Dragons are intelligent - more intelligent than men…but they won’t understand strategy,” Larra sighed, wincing as she kneaded her brow. Her gaze flicked intently over the miniature of Winterfell before them. “In this war, we must use everything we have with deliberate purpose.”

“Our plans have always been to defend,” Lady Sansa said thoughtfully, glancing at Gendry. “We do not have the men to attack. So we use the dragons in the same way?”

“Yes. Defensive strategy only,” Larra said softly, wincing subtly as she shifted on the settle. “If we use them at all.”

“Larra - “

“She has no skill with strategy, and refuses to listen,” Larra said firmly, glancing at her sister, and Gendry realised the two sisters had had this conversation before. “She must be made to listen if we’re to use the dragons. This isn’t about showing off, destroying armadas and frightening nobles; this war is not about her. We have to think very carefully about our advantages - and everything that can be turned into a weakness. Viserion’s injury, and her inability to listen to anyone’s advice…those are weaknesses that can have catastrophic consequences.”

“Strange to think dragons haven’t been used in war since the Dance of Dragons,” Gendry sighed, and Larra sat back, leaning into his arm. “I think Jon’s right…they were reborn into the world for more than the Queen’s war. They were reborn to help in this war, but it’s too much of a risk to wield them as weapons.”

 “The double-edged blade,” Larra muttered miserably. He reached out and squeezed her knee gently. After that searing, intimate moment they had shared, touching her felt natural - it felt right, as if he had been born to do so.

Her eyes glowed vividly as they searched his face, and Gendry stared back, captivated. He could see her mind working beyond those fathomless purple eyes, see the cunning, even as her face was still - a perfect mask, seemingly emotionless. But her body relaxed, and Gendry felt it; the tension between her shoulders loosened beneath his palm, and as she sat up, his hand slid down to her waist. It occurred to him, as she leaned back, that his arm was draped around her, and she subtly leaned her body into his.

“The Dance of Dragons…tens of thousands of smallfolk stormed the Dragonpit and managed to kill all of the Targaryen dragons penned there,” Larra said softly, her tone almost sorrowful. Her features hardened with something close to true terror. “An army of the undead would make short work even of a dragon if it was downed on the moors. Any precautions we have in place will be for nought.”

“So we must devise new strategy,” Lady Sansa sighed, sounding exhausted. She winced as she gazed at the miniature of Winterfell.

“Oh, many of them,” Larra said grimly, and Lady Sansa frowned. “Nothing ever goes to plan - especially war. Too many variables. They’re the unknowable pieces on the cyvasse board… Things that cannot be accounted for… And when it comes to it, what we plan amongst ourselves must change in the moment. We must rely on experienced commanders to assess and advise and lead.”

“Experienced commanders?” Lady Sansa said softly, her eyes glittering. Her pretty lips pursed tartly. “We’d have better luck finding dragon-eggs in the crypts.”

Larra’s smile was grim. Gendry frowned. He asked the lady, “What do you mean?”

“There’s a myth amongst the smallfolk that the hot-springs that keep Winterfell warm are heated by the breath of subterranean dragons,” Larra chuckled softly. “They say that dragons have long lived beneath the castle, and is perhaps why Bran the Builder chose this location to raise his castle. Some say that when Queen Alysanne came North, her dragon laid a clutch of eggs here. Others say it was Prince Jacaerys Velaryon’s dragon, Vermax, who laid the eggs when he came North to gain support from Lord Cregan Stark during the Dance of Dragons. Either way, they believe dragonfire keeps us warm through the winter.”

“What do you believe?” Gendry asked. Larra’s lips twitched with faint amusement.

“I believe that there must be life-giving heat beneath the earth,” she said softly, her eyes turning thoughtful. “The Fourteen Flames brought forth flame from deep into the earth and destroyed the Freehold with it. They say the sea boiled with the heat of it. There must be some source of heat beneath the earth – in the True North, there are hot-springs as there are here at Winterfell.”

“You don’t believe there are dragon-eggs beneath Winterfell?”

“She spent enough of our childhood searching for them to know there are none,” Lady Sansa said, her eyes glittering with amusement as she gazed at her sister. Larra’s smile slowly faded.

“Aye, I did,” she sighed heavily. She did not say more. Lady Sansa bit her lip, wincing slightly, almost guiltily, as she gazed at her sister.

“When we were children, Larra used to play tricks on us. She liked to try to frighten us,” Lady Sansa said, glancing at Gendry. “Old Nan would tell us stories of ice-spiders and dragons beneath Winterfell, and Larra would lie in wait in the crypts with a flaming torch, screeching something terrible.”

“I got Robb a half-dozen times once,” Larra said, her eyes briefly lighting up. She chuckled softly, sadly. “’Til the last time, when he caught me with an elbow by chance and gave me a bloody nose.”

“We all thought he’d slain the dragon.”

“I remember… Arya and Bran wept. They would not forgive him,” Larra said, her eyes glittering, and her smile faltered, trembling.

“They forgave you even less, for making them believe,” Lady Sansa said warmly. Larra did not smile, her gaze lingering on the fire crackling in the hearth. Thinking perhaps of her brother, the Young Wolf? Gendry glanced at the mantel, where Robb Stark gazed back, sombre and far too young. How many months before he marched off to war had the King in the North been playing tricks on his siblings in the crypts? Since he had been playing with his brothers and sisters, all of them still children?

Gazing at Robb Stark’s picture, Gendry tensed; and Larra noticed it, draped against him, her warmth searing him. Clearing his throat, he set the tankard down and made to stand; Larra straightened and let him, and he was suddenly filled with regret. He gave his best attempts at a bow to Lady Sansa and nodded awkwardly at Larra before telling them, “Excuse me, my ladies… I’m to be in the forge early tomorrow morn.”

“We shall not keep you,” Lady Sansa said, her voice rich, polite and generous. Her eyes – Robb Stark’s vivid blue eyes – seemed far warmer now than they had been when she first entered the solar and found him in an embrace with her sister.

Gendry left the chamber, and Larra exhaled slowly, already missing his intense warmth and gentleness and the sense of calm, of safety, that seemed to envelop her whenever she was near him.

“Do you think speaking of the dragons unnerved him?” Sansa asked, glancing at Larra, who stared hard into the flames crackling in the hearth. She was at once annoyed at Sansa’s interruption and ashamed to think such a thing of her sister. And she was deeply aware of the fact that she already yearned for Gendry’s presence. To spend all day working beside him, but for her meetings with the maesters, had been a rare and coveted treat. Watching him work was aweing. Her mouth watered with every strike of his hammer as his muscles rippled across his arms and his enormous back. The firelight made his eyes smoulder like burning sapphires. And she had found every excuse to touch where she might otherwise have spoken, just to feel his intense heat thawing her chilled hands. His heat never felt overwhelming, the way that fire did. She could let it envelop her without ever burning, without ever losing herself. It was all too tempting. And those enormous scarred hands of his, so sure and powerful, so capable and creative, had been so utterly gentle with her.

They had been intimate in a way Larra had never been – not with anyone. But something about Gendry…it was the gentle, respectful way he handled everything, meticulous and thoughtful – made her unafraid for him to see beyond the icy, implacable façade she put up.

With him, she felt…

She felt safe.

But their conversations in the solar had ripped open some old wounds.

Larra did not sleep that night. She awoke, breathless with terror, thrashing and clawing the air, whimpering with dread, shocked and shuddering and slick with cold sweat as she fought to catch her breath, the dead pouring over each other, slashing and snarling, to tear her to shreds as the gentlest of giants held the door…

Gendry was stunned, firstly, by the presence of Larra in the forges long before dawn the next morning. Then he noticed some of the whitebeards and apprentices glancing over their shoulders at her as she hammered with a tireless intensity, her expression brittle and faraway, her gaze unseeing but her eyes bright with something Gendry explicitly remembered experiencing himself at Harrenhall. Sheer terror had transformed itself into remembered horror that was harrowing to experience. She looked deathly pale, the bruises beneath her eyes dark. She was hollow-eyed, cheeks wan, almost deathly pale.

“How long’s she been here?” Gendry asked one of the others. They shrugged.

“Since before I got here,” they grunted in response, and Gendry watched, frowning concernedly. Larra did not stop. He could see she wore her grey woollen dress again, but it was darker now – made darker by her sweat, as she tirelessly beat her hammer against the anvil. Sweat beaded on her brow but she did not blink as it dripped into her eyes; Gendry knew how much that stung.

From the moment he had left her in the solar last night, he regretted it. The loss of her warmth, the intimacy he had shared with her, the softness of her skin – even the silkiness of her raised scars against his palm as he caressed her throat – the scent of her and the feel of her body pressed against his, the contradiction of her voice – soft, rich wisdom mingled with the bite of ice and sting of sharp steel.

Now, as he watched her hammering away seemingly without thought to her own actions, he was concerned. What had happened since he left the solar last night? What had she and Lady Sansa spoken of that had left Larra in such a state?

“She’s been at the anvil for hours,” one of the whitebeards croaked, his wizened face creasing with concern.

“Has no-one stopped her?” Gendry frowned. The men exchanged looks. None dared, he realised. She may be one of them within the forge, but outside of it she was still the King’s sister, castellan of Winterfell in all but name.

Gendry sighed heavily and frowned, striding across the forge to Larra. The closer he got, the more concerned he was by the expression on her face. She wasn’t just harrowed; she was utterly lost.

“Larra,” he murmured, approaching her as he might a wounded wolf. Slowly, cautiously, and always in her eyesight. She kept hammering. Her eyes were unseeing; her arms were shaking – but her knuckles were white where she held on so tightly. As if she daren’t let go for anything. She looked…haggard, Gendry thought. Something was tearing her apart. He sidled up close beside her and instead of trying to take the hammer and tongs from her, he rested a hand on her shoulder. He could feel her whole body trembling beneath his palm, felt her shallow pants as she struggled for breath, the exhaustion racking her entire body as she pushed herself to continue hammering. His hand on her shoulder, she did not shrug it away, did not freeze or react in any way: he reached out and placed the other between her shoulder-blades. The wool beneath his fingers was damp with her sweat; he gently rubbed his palm in soothing circles as he stood close behind her, until he could feel her warmth and smell the perfume of her hair mingling with her sweat, see the hair at the nape of her neck, loose from her braided circlet around her head, coiling tightly, watch the droplets of sweat trickle down her neck enticingly. His body stirred but he ignored it, letting his hands gently rub circles up and down her back, stroking her arm, until she was enveloped in his arms, his hands smoothing the way down her arms, until he had his chin perched on her shoulder, his hands wrapped around hers as she continued to clench the hammer and tongs. He could feel the muscles in her arms spasming, heard the short, painful, sharp pants of her breath like a wounded, trapped animal, felt her heart thundering against his chest, felt the tension and despair coiling her body like a trap ready to break from the pressure.

His entire body wrapped around hers, he realised just how slender she was. Little more than a wraith. Pure muscle – power driven by purpose. And he feared whatever had driven her for so long had caught up to her.

He rubbed his cheek against hers, nuzzling and communicating with touch, and stroked his thumbs against the backs of her hands, soothing and gentling her.

“Larra, it’s time to let them go,” he murmured, nuzzling her ear, and Larra finally blinked. Sucked in a shuddering breath. Her lashes fluttered as she glanced at him, and he felt her weight shift, leaning against him – letting him support her. She blinked several times, the confused haze slowly disappearing from her eyes, tears dripping down her cheeks unnoticed.

“Time to let them go?” she repeated hoarsely, and Gendry nodded, continuing to stroke her hands with his thumbs until she gradually started to relax against him.

“Yes,” he muttered, nuzzling his jaw against her neck, giving her body a gentle squeeze as he tenderly freed her hands from the tools. “It’s time to let them go.”

He carefully released the obsidian into the fire then set the hammer and tongs down on the workbench in front of them, never moving from her. He took her hands in his, carefully unfurling her fingers, and hissed as he grimaced at the sight of her palms; blistering and smeared with blood from four deep crescent-shaped gouges. Her heart still hammered against his chest; her breath came in frantic pants. He sighed heavily, wincing at the pain she was enduring.

He felt it when something changed, when she let herself lean on him, be supported by him. When whatever harrowing dread that had been choking her released its hold and she stumbled back, into his waiting embrace. None saw her stumble; he was there, his entire body waiting for her. But he felt her weight shift against him, and she slowly looked over her shoulder.

Her grief was horrifying.

“I had a bad night,” she whispered hoarsely, and he sighed grimly as he watched her lower-lip tremble violently, her eyes stark, obsidian consuming vivid violet fire. She looked bereft. Bewildered.

And utterly young, in a way he had never seen her. She looked…young. She looked, startlingly, her age. He was startled to realise that Larra was in fact a young woman. She was barely a year or two older than Gendry himself, yet she always radiated such command, such authority and sureness, her beauty and her youth were forgotten.

“Come with me,” he murmured coaxingly, and Larra let him guide her outside into the bright white light that had dawned after the storm thrashed itself out. The courtyard was still and quiet this time of the morning, but already there were signs that the castle was waking, and enthusiastic to get outside after being castle-bound for so long. By the time they reached the gate to the godswood, Larra walked beside him, but her hand was safely wrapped in his. They entered the quiet and calm of the godswood, Larra’s shuddering having little to do with the cold and everything to do with her “bad night.”

Fat snowflakes whirled idly around them as they walked; Gendry didn’t know where to lead her but Larra didn’t need to be led in this place. This was a sacred place, where thousands of generations of Starks – and Snows – had come to seek the quiet, enduring wisdom of their strange gods. Larra walked through the fresh snow unerringly toward the heart of the godswood, to the most ancient and enduring of all of the trees. The heart-tree. A towering weirwood with a canopy of blood-red leaves that would have enveloped the entirety of the Street of Steel in King’s Landing; the leaves were frozen solid, glittering and shimmering like the finest rubies in the bright, surprisingly hot sunlight that pierced billowing silver-white clouds.

They stopped by the enormous trunk of the tree, its strange bone-white roots tangling everywhere, a ruby face weeping frozen sap.

He released her hand, to tenderly cradle Larra’s face, and brushed away the tears drying on her cheeks, clinging to her eyelashes. She looked wan, exhausted. Whatever had held her in the forges seemed to be loosening its grasp. She softened, miserably staring up at him as he carefully attended to each tear, almost reluctant to stop touching her.

“Have you ever betrayed someone you loved?” she asked hoarsely, and Gendry stared down at her.

“Yes,” he answered honestly. “Your sister. I never should have left her.”

“Why did you?” she asked, tears welling in her eyes. He didn’t think they were for Arya, though: her gaze went faraway again, ever so briefly he might have imagined it.

“I wanted to join the Brotherhood,” Gendry admitted. And how he regretted it. Yet, if not for that choice, he would never have met Cade, nor Neva; he would never have joined Jon Snow at Dragonstone for their venture beyond the Wall.

“You wanted to serve a purpose greater than your own,” Larra said, warmth slowly trickling back into her hollow voice.

Gendry nodded, glancing up into the boughs of the great weirwood as several birds started to sing, trilling prettily. Here and there, he thought he caught flickers of movement, but he saw no birds. “And what they did to me betrayed everything they claimed to stand for…”

“People make awful choices when they’re desperate,” Larra said hollowly, her eyes going faraway, misty. “Things they never thought themselves capable of.”

Gendry watched her carefully, remembering all he knew about Larra Snow, the She-Wolf of Winterfell. The woman who had yielded Winterfell to protect her brother; who had carried her brother beyond the Wall to the True North and back again. He had seen her training in the yard, and had a faint idea of what she may have done to protect her brother, but he couldn’t know everything. Who could? Only Larra herself; and she was being punished by her memories. He sighed heavily, his breath pluming in front of him despite the warmth of the sun above them. “And sometimes the choice is taken from them…” Larra stared despondently at the pond steaming beside them, its waters unfrozen despite the cold. “I don’t know how you did it but you kept your brother alive in the harshest place known to man, against all odds, through every danger. You couldn’t have done such a thing without making hard choices. It’s a good thing you’re haunted by them.”

Larra raised those purple eyes to his. “How’s that?”

“You care,” Gendry said quietly. “Life hasn’t ruined you.”

A long while later, Larra asked hoarsely, “How do you know?”

“Because it still hurts,” Gendry said, watching her carefully. “You’re not afraid to let it hurt.”

“Am I not?” Her lips twitched toward a miserable smile.

“If you were, you’d never set foot in the nursery,” Gendry said. “You’ve bonded with those children – you’ve opened yourself up to joy but you’ve also left yourself vulnerable to more pain.”

Larra gave a great shuddering sigh, as if she was letting loose everything that had been punishing her, releasing it. She wiped her face with the cuffs of her dress, and stifled a yawn. She had to be exhausted. Her eyes lowered, resting on clumps of lush green plants clustered here and there amongst the roots of the weirwood. Gendry had noticed them as they walked through the godswood, and had been startled to see them flowering. Lush leaves, tall slender stalks and heavy, nodding flowers in a range of hues from snow-white to lavender and lilac and velvety violet to indigo and blackish-purple.

“What are they?” Gendry asked curiously. The plants seemed to shiver in the cold but they held their heads up, withstanding the winter.

“The winter rose,” Larra said softly, glancing at him. Gendry glanced from her to the flowers. He knew a story about winter-roses; everyone knew a story about winter-roses. He had always thought they looked just like the rambling roses that flowered all over the gardens of the manses in King’s Landing, embroidered all over Tyrell gowns and velvet armour. He should have realised the Northern winter-rose would be far more unassuming, and far more beautiful because of its strength.

“No rain, no flowers,” Larra murmured, and Gendry knew she was referring to leaving herself open to pain by embracing love. Flowers could not survive without rain: it was as simple as that. “You cannot experience tremendous love without also suffering unfathomable grief…” She sighed and glanced at Gendry, her lips twitching; she looked far calmer now. “You’re far too observant.”

“I can’t seem to keep my eyes off you,” Gendry admitted, then realised what he had said. Flushing, knowing he could not take his words back, he admitted, “I wouldn’t even if I could… When people show me who they are, I believe them.” Somehow, the gap between them had closed. Larra gazed up at him with those eyes of violet fire, and he caressed her face. “I see you, She-Wolf of Winterfell.”

“Gendry…” she sighed gently, softening. “It is our honour and privilege to have you here at Winterfell. For Jon’s life…I’m not sure how I can ever repay you.”

Gendry examined her face, stroking her cheekbone with his thumb, memorising every detail – the curve of her eyebrows, the fineness of her eyelashes, the dainty constellation of birth-marks across her face, the kisses tucked at the corners of her succulent lips. “Perhaps there’s a way.”

Those immaculate lips twitched. She bit down on her lower-lip as her eyes sparked. Almost breathlessly – or perhaps he hoped she was breathless – she asked, “And what might that be?”

He cleared his throat gently, “Teach me how to read?”

Larra’s smile was slow to come, but like a cinder it blossomed into something rich and warm, full of light. He had never seen her smile like this, open and delighted and free, flashing those pretty teeth, her eyes crinkling at the corners, her dainty nose crinkling slightly, her cheeks blossoming with warmth, and she gazed up at him, her expression filled with affection, fondness, amusement and something else, something he didn’t dare name.

“I can do that,” she promised. She didn’t laugh at his request, didn’t sneer or turn him down. She did, however, turn to the steaming pond and crouched beside it, lowering her hands – blood, blistering and sore – into the water. Carefully, she scrubbed the dried blood and sweat and oozing blisters clean. She gave his hands a covert glance and Gendry examined them; they were smeared with her blood, so he stooped beside her to splash surprisingly warm water over his hands, flicking the water away and drying them on his tunic before straightening up. He heard the birdsong again, and frowned up at the boughs of the weirwood, wondering if the Northern gods had sent the birds to taunt him.

“Weirbirds,” Larra said, a touch of amusement colouring her voice. She glanced over her shoulder at the weirwood. “They’re camouflaged against the leaves; you’ll never see them. But their songs are beautiful. Birds always sing after a storm, no matter how bad it was.”

“Perhaps Men should learn to do the same,” Gendry mused, and they gazed up at the ruby-red leaves that clinked and chimed against each other, slowly starting to drip and patter against the snowy ground as the sun melted the ice.

“We could learn a lot from nature, if we’d but see,” Larra sighed, shaking her head gently. “Everything is in perfect balance.”

Gendry frowned, the snow on the ground around them reminding him only too clearly of snow-white hair. “We’ve been so long without them, makes you wonder how things will be upset, now that dragons have returned…”

“I dreamed of dragons as a girl,” Larra said, gazing up at the weirwood leaves. She seemed brighter already, lighter somehow, and her face lit up with faint amusement as they caught a flicker of movement amongst the leaves, a short, sharp burst of beautiful birdsong piercing the air. “I used to gallop across the moors around Winterfell as fast as my horse could carry me, the closest I could ever come to flying… It is a great tragedy that dragons have been reborn into the world.”

“A tragedy? Most believe it is a miracle,” Gendry said.

“They were born already yoked to someone, enslaved to their whims… Instead of being protected as the wonders they are, they are used as weapons,” Larra said, her expression turning thoughtful and sad.

“If they were yours, how would you use them?” Gendry asked curiously.

“I wouldn’t,” Larra blinked, looking aghast. “Wild creatures are meant to be free.”

“Like you,” Gendry said, and Larra frowned softly. “You miss it. Being up there.”

“As I said – you’re too observant,” Larra said, and Gendry smiled.

“If you had to keep them close to protect them, what would you do with them?” Gendry pushed. He was very curious to know what Larra, highly educated and experienced with ruling over people, would do with a dragon.

She sighed heavily. “You live by your hammer. Its power has no equal: it can be used as a weapon to destroy and as a tool to build. No other tool or weapon in the world can do the same – except for dragons. The Valyrians built tremendous cities with dragons, the finest civilisation that fostered the most brilliant minds; but they also drowned whole civilisations in fire and blood trying to conquer the world… If I was bonded to a dragon, and they allowed it…I would use my education and experience and its strength to build something worthy of it.”

“I think any who have ever known you know you need no dragons to do such things,” Gendry said, and Larra’s smile was tinged with sadness. He thought of Lommy, and all his brothers of the Watch. He thought of Yoren, and was filled with a sense of bewilderment that a stranger had defended him, grief at the way the man had been slain, and worry that he had not lived up to Yoren’s sacrifice. “But if you don’t…I think I’d be angry at the waste.”

Larra glanced sharply at him, and Gendry gazed back at her. He sighed, and shook his head, reflecting on his own life, his own secrets and hardships and regrets. “It’s okay that you survived, Larra.”

“It’s not that I survived,” Larra said softly, a frown pulling her dark eyebrows together. “It’s that I turned my back on them, knowing they wouldn’t.”

“You could never have saved everyone,” Gendry said quietly, and Larra turned her gaze to the base of the weirwood trunk, where winter-roses nodded amongst gnarled bone-white roots.

“I know. That doesn’t mean I’ll ever stop wishing I could have,” she said, almost desperately. Her lips twitched, and she sniffed sharply as she glanced away from the weirwood tree.

“You’ve an awful lot of ghosts, Larra,” Gendry said quietly, and he was startled by her sudden laugh, ringing around the godswood. It seemed to chime off the frozen weirwood leaves, echoing off the steaming pond, dancing among the fat snowflakes drifting lazily about them.

“Yes,” she agreed. She sighed, the sound almost content. “I do.”

He wondered what was funny. Larra didn’t explain and he didn’t ask. Instead, they reached for each other’s hands and slowly made their way back to the castle, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to walk hand-in-hand through the snow, content and calm in each other’s presence.

“If…you were to dine in the nursery again tonight, we can start your lessons this evening,” Larra said softly, and Gendry blinked dazedly.

“Tonight?”

“Aye.”

“You’ve so many demands on your time–“ Gendry blurted, suddenly feeling anxious. Larra glanced up at him, and her smile was gentle but knowing.

“There’s no use trying to get out of it now,” she warned him, a delicate smile starting to brighten her eyes once more.

“Tonight, then,” Gendry agreed, and Larra beamed at him.

After the children were tucked into bed, Gendry returned to the nursery to find Larra lifting things out of a trunk. An enormous tome rested on the polished table, clasps glinting dully; its black leather cover was decorated with a silver tree without leaves or blossom, seven stars above it, all gleaming in the firelight. Larra glanced over her shoulder, smiling, and a kettle started to sing. She rose to her feet, carrying a large, polished wooden box, which she set on the table, then went to the hearth, pouring the hot water into a pot to make herb tea.

“Are you ready?” she asked, smiling, her eyes like live violet flames as she sat beside him on the settle, rather than the rocking-chair. She heaved the enormous book into her lap and unclasped it. At the sight of the writing, Gendry’s heart plummeted. She saw the look on his face and gave him a gentle smile.

“I’d like to read you something before we begin,” she explained softly, and he cleared his throat, nodding, and relaxed. She showed him the intricate lettering, black ink on ancient parchment. “It reads I Túrin i Cormaron. It is High Valyrian: it translates to ‘The Lord of the Rings’.”

“Who wrote it?”

“A Valyrian scholar of exceptional creativity. This copy was translated from High Valyrian to the Common Tongue centuries before the Doom,” Larra said, gazing wistfully at the enormous tome.

“Why do you want to read it to me?”

“Because it’s beautiful. Because one day you’ll be able to read it for yourself but it will take work. I want to give you something to work for. And you appreciate working for something even more than you appreciate its beauty,” Larra said softly, glancing at him out of the corner of her eye. “You don’t labour in the forges because it’s your living; you enjoy every part of being an armourer. The creativity, the craftsmanship, the attention to detail, the devotion and patience and focus, the strain and effort and frustration. You are passionate about the work… It is easier to destroy things than create them; you are consumed by the joy of creation. I see it every day in the forge. No task is ever beneath you; or too ambitious for you… I see you too, Gendry.”

Gendry flushed hotly, glancing at Larra, and asked hoarsely, “How does it begin?”

“It starts in High Valyrian… ‘I amar prestart aen… Han Matho ne nen. Han mathon ned cae. A han noston ned gwilith… The world has changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air… Much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember it’… What a devastating beginning,” Larra sighed dreamily, her eyes alight. She cleared her throat and lowered her eyes to the page once more. “’It began with the forging of the Great Rings’…”

Gendry listened as Larra read, and as she read, she seemed to weave a tapestry in his mind, pictures unfolding in his head, places he had never been, faces he had never set eyes upon. She read with passion and true enjoyment, mimicking different voices, her timing and delivery impeccable for jokes, bringing the characters to life, and her eyes danced as she explored the story she cherished. She read just enough to ensnare him, thrilled by what had already occurred and eager to know what happened next, before slipping a marker between the pages and shutting the book.

“You should read it to the children,” he said, almost breathlessly, itching to open the pages – eager to start his lessons to know how to decipher the marks himself, which he knew was the point.

“I don’t think so,” Larra smiled warmly. “It’s not all second breakfasts and party-trees. It becomes far too violent. And Calanthe would become entirely too inspired by one of the female characters. We’d never hear the end of it.” Gendry grinned, and Larra reached for a neat, polished box in which were kept thick parchment cards the size of his palm, exquisitely painted and decorated. Each card showed a single letter, or a couple of them, joined together to create sounds. To help him – or anyone who had previously used them to learn how to read – there were images of familiar things painted around the letters, clues to associate the letter with the sound.

Larra went through every single card, laying them out on the table before them, explaining the letter and the sound it made. Gendry frowned and reached forward, picking up a handful of cards, and went through them carefully.

“So all letters are just sounds,” he said, frowning. “Someone’s just made a picture of what they think the sound looks like.”

“Yes,” Larra said, and Gendry frowned.

“Oh. I always thought it was more complicated than that.”

“There’s a reason for that,” Larra said, her tone rather dark, and Gendry frowned at her, then realised what she meant.

“It sets those who can read apart from the rest,” he said, and Larra nodded.

“My brothers never gave their education a second thought,” Larra said. “But I had to fight tenaciously for mine. I worked harder for it, was hungrier for it, more curious, more focused. I could fight for it, because I’m a bastard; my sisters were raised by their mother to be what the South thinks ladies ought to be. Their heads were filled with songs and prayers and other nonsense… A fine education is one of the greatest advantages anyone can have, no matter what they were born. Let’s begin.”

Gendry glanced at the enormous tome Larra had set beside her, and then at Larra herself.

Never once had she scoffed at the idea that he wanted to learn to read, never inferred that he couldn’t because he was an armourer, or shouldn’t, because as an armourer he had no need.

Instead, and without question, she had committed her time and effort to teaching him.

If he thought she was meticulous, calm and painstaking in her attention to detail in the forge, in the schoolroom she was warm, coaxing, gentle and encouraging.

He understood, during that first lesson, why it was the children had all fallen in love with her.

She made them feel as if they had it in them to do anything, become anyone they wished – so long as they worked for it. And she would always be there to support them to do so.

Unlike the children, however, Gendry flew through his letters.

“You’ll outstrip Neva soon,” Larra said, with a coy look, and Gendry breathed a sigh of relief, nodding. As long as he could stay one step ahead of Neva, to help her in her own lessons, that would be enough.

Realising that learning to read quickly meant fewer lessons with Larra, and less time with her in the cosy warmth of the nursery, had Gendry considering feigning a struggle.

No, he thought, smiling back at Larra as she beamed at him, tucking away the painted cards. She’d see right through it.

Not that it wasn’t tempting to see if she’d play along.

Chapter 37: Brontide

Notes:

Oh, it’s about to get smutty!

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

37

Brontide


The peaceful snows Larra and Gendry had wandered through were the only respite they had between savage storms threatening to rip the castle apart. A few days after Gendry’s first reading lesson, they were woken, not by birdsong, but by the clamouring of distant thunder. The sun did not seem to rise that day; the entire sky was a roiling, mutinous black, as if the gods had upturned an inkwell. Whips of lightning lashed through the sky, volleys of light that seemed to go on endlessly, dazzling and horrifyingly beautiful. Instead of snow or sleet or even rain, a ferocious wind screamed across the moors, bending ancient oaks, sending young saplings hurtling through the air, tearing at the great stone walls and screaming in the diamond-paned windows.

The howling winds were nothing to the screams in the schoolroom, however, as Narcisa and Calanthe went to battle.

A panicked Crisantha hurtled into the solar, her billowing curls flying about her head like a mane, and for one of only a handful of times in Larra’s memory, she met Larra’s eye: She reached out, grasping Larra’s hand, and pulled her to the schoolroom.

They heard the shrieking as Larra stalked along the corridor, following Crisantha.

They burst into the schoolroom, and Larra’s jaw dropped.

Altheda and Rosamund huddled beneath the great oak table covered in books and artefacts and exotic potted plants from the hothouses; Delphine trembled by the hearth, her back flat against the wall as if trying to press herself into it; and in the arms of a wide-eyed, pale Neva, Leona was convulsing with soundless screams, her beautiful face bright red and tearstained. Maester Atten, kind and incomparably gentle man that he was, looked absolutely stricken, misty-eyed and bewildered, as Narcisa and Calanthe fought tooth and nail, hissing and biting, scratching and tearing at each other’s hair.

Blood blossomed as Calanthe struck a practised blow to Narcisa’s nose, and the older girl shrieked; Calanthe hissed and writhed as Narcisa dug her fingernails into her neck.

“Enough.”

The one word, spoken with absolute authority, rang through the schoolroom. Leona, diamond-like tears dripping down her face, reached hopelessly for Larra, nearly toppling out of Neva’s arms; Rosamund whimpered under the table, and Maester Atten gave Larra a look so aghast, so bewildered that Larra knew he was deeply upset to see the children he adored being so cruel to one another.

Calanthe got one last, ringing slap in, Narcisa’s cheek flaming scarlet, and Larra stepped between the girls as Narcisa surged toward her cousin, bristling with rage. Her hair was dishevelled, her fingernails bloody from gouging at Calanthe’s neck, nose gushing blood from Calanthe’s hit: her cousin’s braids were unkempt, her neck bleeding, and seemed to be twice her normal size, snarling with fury.

“Sit down,” Larra ordered them in a tone that brooked no opposition. The two girls glowered at each other but Calanthe was the first to lower herself to one of the high-backed oak chairs, her emerald eyes glinting mutinously as she glared at Narcisa. The eldest Lannister pushed back: she glared at the flagstone floor, shaking with emotion, backing toward a chair, but refused to sit. Refused to bend to anyone’s will but her own. Instead of shouting, Larra merely watched her, daring Narcisa to defy her. She had all the time in the world to win this battle of wills.

 Calanthe sighed, shoving her sleeve under her nose, and slouched in her chair, arms crossed over her chest, taunting her cousin. Her emerald eyes – so like Narcisa’s – flicked from Larra to her cousin, triumph and glee mingled there, eager to see Narcisa knocked down.

“That’s alright, Narcisa; I can wait,” Larra said softly, casting an eye over the table before them, the work spread out, maps and Far-Eyes and books of exotic animals and plants. A Geography lesson; once, one of Larra’s favourite. She glanced at the maester. “Maester Atten, please could you be so good as to escort the girls back to the nursery and instruct their septa that they shall have hot spiced blackcurrant. They can sit before the fire and knit or play with puzzles.” She gentled her voice even further, coaxing the two girls out from under the table. “Rosie, Al – it’s alright, now; you can come on out.” A soft whimper and Rosamund emerged, tearful; Altheda followed, looking stricken. Maester Atten rose from the table, shaken, and coaxed Delphine away from the wall. She looped her arm through his, and Crisantha took her little cousin’s hands. Larra beckoned Neva, still struggling with a fraught, writhing Leona in her arms.

Larra lifted Leona into her arms, enveloping her the same way Gendry had embraced her in the forge. Her scent, her warmth, soothed and gentled Leona more effectively than any remedy. The little girl clung to Larra, her tiny fingernails biting through the wool of Larra’s dress. Larra reached out, stroking Neva’s hair, and bent to gently kiss the top of her head, murmuring gentle words in her ear before sending her off after the maester and the rest of the Lannisters.

As Leona sobbed soundlessly, choking and hiccoughing, overwrought and frightened, Larra gently rocked her in her arms, rubbing her back and stroking her hair, giving her gentle kisses and softly humming the lullaby that always soothed her. It did not elude Larra that Leona had reached for her, struggling to get closer to her, the moment she entered the chamber – that at her most upset, her most frightened, Leona wanted her.

Slowly, and while the others had left the chamber, Narcisa had deigned to lower herself to a chair, as if Larra would not notice.

For a long while, as Larra tried to work out how to proceed, there was silence in the chamber, but for the crackle of the fire and Leona’s soft whimpers. Eventually, Leona grew heavy in her arms; she sucked her thumb, clutching her doll, and snuggled deeper into Larra’s embrace, her tiny nose nuzzling Larra’s neck, snuffling and sighing with contentment, safe in Larra’s arms.

Calanthe sprawled in her chair – wearing the tunic and breeches she had first donned for her riding-lessons and had yet to be coaxed out of – smirking triumphantly at Narcisa. At one look from Larra, however, the smugness faded, replaced by contrition mingled with righteousness.

“I am disgusted by what I have just witnessed,” Larra said softly. She rarely raised her voice; it rarely yielded the desired result. But keeping her voice low and calm was just as effective on little girls as it was lords. Authority radiated from her. “I hope you two are just as ashamed of yourselves by this exhibition as I am.” Calanthe’s shoulders drooped just a fraction. By contrast, Narcisa’s chin rose, though her eyes never left the flagstones. “I would like to know what provoked such appalling behaviour. Narcisa? You are beyond old enough to know better.”

Narcisa exploded. Leona jolted awake in Leona’s arms, whimpering, and Larra glared at Narcisa. Coldly, she cut through her tirade, and said, “I will listen when your tone of voice matches my own. Calanthe?”

“I only asked if she wanted my help reading the passage Maester Atten was talking about,” Calanthe said, and it clicked into place. Maester Atten had spent days carefully watching and assessing Narcisa in the schoolroom. They had just days ago had a long discussion about how to proceed with the eldest, proudest Lannister. “Then she said something horrid about Mother, and about you.”

Larra gave Narcisa a very cool look. “Were you listening to Calanthe, Narcisa? Is that true?”

“Yes, it’s true,” Narcisa snarled. “What I said about her cunt mother and about you.”

“I am sure you believe it to be so,” Larra said coldly. “Calanthe, you may go. Go to the Maesters’ tower and have your neck seen to, but tell the maesters Larra Snow said to avoid giving you stitches if at all avoidable.”

“Will it scar?”

“Hopefully not,” Larra said, but Calanthe snorted.

“I hope they do; I’ll look like just like the bastard wolf’s-whore of Winterfell,” Calanthe said, pausing at the door only long enough to spit venom at her cousin, her eyes glinting maliciously. She shut the door with a bang before Narcisa could throw herself out of her chair.

Larra clicked her tongue. “The bastard wolf’s-whore of Winterfell,” she repeated softly, patting Leona’s back as she swayed gently, soothing the little girl. She refused to be insulted or hurt by the words; she had heard far worse. Never forget what you are… “Did you hear that elsewhere or is it of your own invention? For I know you certainly have not read it somewhere.”

Narcisa flinched, her face colouring with fury – and perhaps a little humiliation, too.

Larra reached across the table for one of the books Maester Luwin had painstakingly created for Larra when she was a little girl, and which Rosamund and Altheda were now working their way through together. She turned to a page about vibrant flowers from the Summer Isles and set the book before Narcisa. “I’d like you to read this page to me.”

“I have no desire to read it.”

“No, but I have asked you to.”

“Why should I?” Larra gave her a cold, unyielding look usually reserved for the most reticent of the lords.

“I have asked you to. Prove to me that you can, and that what your maesters and septas believe is false. That you are lazy and arrogant rather than uneducated. Prove that you did not raise your hand to harm your cousin because she noticed you were struggling, and offered you help,” Larra said icily, and Narcisa gave her a mutinous glare that made Larra’s hand twitch, thinking of all the times a younger Sansa had given her the same look – one full of disdain, an utter lack of respect. That was not Narcisa, Larra knew, not a truly accurate reflection of what she felt for Larra: humiliation made her vicious and cruel.

Shoulders back, Narcisa turned to the book, resting her fingertips against the edges of the pages, and her emerald eyes focused on the first word. Larra could see it: the mounting frustration, anger and humiliation as she struggled. Unable to decipher even the simplest of phrases. Larra sighed heavily and reached out, gently closing the book and setting it back at the places where Altheda and Rosamund had been working.

Gently, she asked Narcisa, “Are we the first to notice you are illiterate?”

Hoarsely, her eyes glinting with tears of humiliation and fury, Narcisa said, “Mama never cared that I should read. She insisted that I learn etiquette and courtly manners, High Valyrian and dancing and embroidery and the high harp. My septa said I need only know how to count my children.”

“You were taught to embroider and dance and please,” Larra said delicately. “You have been failed by the people responsible for preparing you for the world.”

“My mother loved me,” Narcisa said fiercely, flinching, and Larra thought it an interesting thing for her to say. It had never been a question of whether Narcisa was loved. But in her mind, perhaps Narcisa linked the two – that if she had truly been loved, why had she not been taught properly all the things she would need in her adult life?

“Yes,” Larra said gently.

Narcisa’s eyes filled with tears. “Why didn’t they teach me?”

Larra sighed heavily. “Because your septa was not alone in her views. As women, we must fight for everything we have, and that includes an education. If you did not fight for yours, it is because you did not know it was a thing you could fight for.” She gazed at Narcisa, whose shoulders drooped – the first time Larra had ever seen her with poor posture – and who looked utterly dejected. “If you care to learn, I shall teach you. None of your cousins need ever know.”

“Or Cadeon?” Narcisa asked quickly.

Larra laughed under her breath. “Or Cadeon,” she assured the girl. Funny how Narcisa’s thoughts sprang instantly to the scarred boy. Thinking of him made Larra think of Gendry, and her heart sped up at the thought of their next reading lesson. Night after night, they had spent hours in the nursery, becoming more and more at ease with each other, casual and intimate, teasing and flirtatious…thrilling…

She yearned to be in that fire-lit nursery, entangled with Gendry on the settle beneath heavy blankets, drinking herb tea and thrilling over every stolen touch, fire racing through her veins at every covetous look, aching for more.

A spear of lightning slashed blinding white light through the schoolroom and Narcisa jumped, her breath catching. Larra watched the diamond-paned windows shrewdly. Today was not the day for lessons, she decided. Today was a day the girls could cuddle together under blankets and distract themselves from the storm with their favourite things.

“I want you to go to your chamber and tidy yourself up,” Larra said quietly. “When you are calm, and ready to be among them, come and join your cousins in the nursery.”

Narcisa stood up, making her way to the door. When she reached it, she stopped, and looked shamefacedly over her shoulder at Larra. “I didn’t mean what I said. About Calanthe’s mother. Or about you.”

“I know,” Larra replied gently. “We all say things we regret when we are upset.”

“You never speak much when you’re upset,” Narcisa said softly.

“One hard look and people will tell you everything,” Larra said. “My father taught me to listen when that happens.”

“And he taught you the look.”

“He did,” Larra confirmed.

“Your father taught you a lot?” Narcisa prompted.

“He did,” Larra said, her voice turning hoarse as her eyes burned. “And yet there was still so much I had yet to learn from him.”

“So you know how it feels,” Narcisa said softly. Larra stared at her, sighing heavily.

“I know it is no easy thing to be the last one left behind to look after the rest,” she said grimly, and Narcisa nodded. “My little brothers lashed out because they were confused and frightened but most of all angry. I had to try and gentle the rage in Rickon at being abandoned, and support Bran without deciding for him as he ruled the North in our brother’s stead. I had to remind them that they were still loved and cherished and important. Even when they forgot to remind me. My brothers and I were all we had left in the world; and I had to fight every urge to take it out on them, the way they did on me.”

Silently, Narcisa left the chamber, and Larra sank into a chair, Leona asleep against her chest. “What am I going to do with them?” she murmured, gently kissing Leona’s tightly-coiled curls.

Everything she had planned for the day had to be thrown out of the window: the other girls were too fraught, too upset. She sent a message to Sansa to tell her what had happened, and that she would have to miss their scheduled engagements for the afternoon – today involving sitting with the Northern ladies to gossip and hear complaints and keep up to date with proposed marriages and requests made on behalf of their husbands or their sons or grandsons. She was glad to take that hour back. While Sansa entertained the ladies, Larra tamed some lion cubs.

She carried Leona back to the nursery, gently waking her so that she could play dolls with Altheda and Rosamund. She noticed the sad, wistful look Neva tried to conceal as she watched the Lannister girls playing with their exquisite porcelain-faced Qartheen dolls. Larra crooked her finger toward her, and Neva came to sit beside her on the settle, smiling delicately; Larra had been teaching Neva how to crochet, something that Neva had taken to naturally, making large squares with different patterns each created to resemble a Northern wildflower. It was the same way Larra had learned, and Old Nan before her: the knowledge of the stitches and patterns was passed down from generation to generation, added onto and embellished with new designs shared beside the hearth during long winters tucked safely inside Winterfell.

The return of a bandaged Calanthe and a wan but quiet and calm Narcisa made for an interesting afternoon: Altheda went to the pianoforte, letting Neva play with her doll, while Crisantha sat on a small footstool beside Larra, her head in Larra’s lap, silently embroidering something shimmery silver-grey. Narcisa practised new hairstyles on Delphine’s long, glimmering hair; and Calanthe sat before the fire fiddling with cyvasse pieces.

“Where did you find those?” Larra asked. She had never seen the pieces before; and cyvasse was a rare enough game in the North. To her knowledge, only Lord Manderly had any affection for the game: he used to play with her whenever he came to Winterfell, and sometimes he had gifted her with unusual and beautiful cyvasse pieces from Volantis, where people were mad for the game.

Calanthe sighed, glancing at Larra. “They’re from Grandfather’s cyvasse set,” she said miserably. It wasn’t the first time Calanthe had mentioned her grandfather.

“Did he teach you how to play?” Larra asked, and Calanthe nodded glumly.

“I’m not very good.”

“Then you’d best practise,” Larra said.

“Do you know how to play?” Calanthe asked, her eyes widening.

“I love to play,” Larra admitted. She very often played with a Knight of the Vale, but so far her most thrilling adversary in the game was Lady Nym – Nymeria Sand, who oozed sensuality and danger with equal measure, and who seemed just as delighted with Larra as an opponent as Larra was with her, likely surprised that anyone in the North could play cyvasse – or provide such a frustrating challenge. Calanthe retrieved her grandfather’s cyvasse tiles and figures, and Larra sat cross-legged on the fur before the hearth with Leona cuddled in her lap, teaching Calanthe how to play.

Larra spent the day in the nursery with the girls, playing games, braiding hair, untangling knitting and cuddling dolls. They enjoyed hot spiced blackcurrant and fresh toast with jam as a treat to sooth rattled nerves. The boys joined them for their evening meal, and finally, the children were sent to bed. The storm still raged outside, but in their chamber it was warm and cosy. Larra tucked the girls in, doling kisses out generously, and with a great groan of relief mingled with exhaustion, she pulled the nursery door to behind her, glad of the quiet and the calm. She raised her hands to knead her eyes, exhausted. Spending all day with the girls was always exhausting, though they had done nothing but play. It was a rare day that Larra just played, but they all needed it. The girls had needed her presence, needed her there to have a cuddle with and a chat as they played with dolls, or hear her praise as they played the pianoforte or paraded a new hairstyle. It was important they see her as more than a disciplinarian. Seeing her in the nursery, strengthening bonds with them, meant she would have to very little disciplining in the future. On Maester Luwin’s advice, she had done the same with Rickon. Play, but set firm boundaries, her expectations of his behaviour.

The fire crackled softly in the grate, and she yawned widely, kneading at her eyes. Her entire body felt stiff and heavy – she had not been able to train for days, cooped up either in the nursery, the solar or the library.

She opened her eyes at a soft noise, and smiled gently to herself.

Gendry was already sat on the settle, his handsome face drawn into a frown of concentration as he went through the cards they had been working on. His lips move soundlessly as his fingertip traced each letter. At the sound of the door closing, he glanced up and went still, watching her. His frown deepened and he neatened the stack of cards.

“I heard about the battle,” he said softly, and Larra nodded. He set the cards aside and held out his enormous hand to her. She smiled softly, drawn to him, and placed her hand in his, letting him coax her closer, until she was stood between his powerful thighs and gazed down at him. She reached out a hand, sifting her fingers through his riotous curls, trailing her fingers along his strong jaw swathed in a short, well-kept beard, smiling as she felt the dimple in his chin. She raised her hands to cradle his face, tenderly stroking her thumbs against his cheeks.

“C’me ‘ere,” he murmured, taking her waist, and she smiled, linking an arm around his massive shoulders, perching on his powerful thigh. He readjusted her in his lap, until her toes barely touched the flagstones and she was safely tucked in his arm. His heat and his scent enveloped her, the same way they had that awful day in the forge, and she sighed, nestling her head in the crook of his shoulder, tempted to close her eyes and just stay there, his enormous hand hot against her hip, his other arm draped around her, cuddling her close. He rested his cheek against her head, sighing deeply, contentedly, and she smiled, ready to melt into him, so comfortable was she, so relaxed. Perhaps she did. Perhaps, for a few moments, she dozed off; him readjusting his embrace so she didn’t topple out of his lap seemed to rouse her.

“I was trying not to wake you,” he said softly, but she smiled, fidgeting until they were both more comfortable, her arms loosely draped around his neck, his arm tucked close around her waist, his other hand on her thigh, and she rested her hand on his chest, flicking her gaze over his face. Those intense eyes, imperfect nose, handsome beard and firm lips. Her gaze flicked from those intense sapphire eyes to his firm lips, and she couldn’t help it – didn’t want to: She leaned in, nuzzling his nose, and Gendry made a soft, deep, masculine noise, raising his hand to cradle her neck, rubbing his thumb along her jaw, and she leaned in, pressing a tender kiss to his lips.

She leaned away: his eyes were fixed on her lips. Breathless, they gazed at each other, and his eyes glimmered in the firelight, warm and full of yearning; he saw the desire smouldering deep in those violet flames and was filled with relief as he leaned in for another taste, another kiss that this time was not sweet or hesitant but slow and fierce and consuming. With a soft moan, she shifted in his lap, his fingertips trailing over three silky scars at the base of her throat, and he froze. Broke away from her. She made a soft noise of confusion, her brow puckering as her eyelashes fluttered, and gazed down at him. Suddenly, she flushed, looking…appalled.

She’s kissed a bastard armourer, he thought.

“I am sorry,” she whispered, looking horrified, and started to climb out of his lap. “I thought perhaps – but I mistook – I am sorry to have kissed you when you did not wish–“

“I did!” he blurted, only then realising he was breathless from kissing her. “I have – I mean… I do wish to kiss you. I have since the moment I first saw you. But I thought…”

“What?” Larra asked gently, looking as confused and embarrassed as he felt. His eyes dipped to her throat, and he noticed her fingers trembling as she raised them to the scars there. “My scars?”

Gendry grimaced softly, “People talk about how you got them…”

“I’ve dozens more, and far worse. I killed the ones who gave me these scratches,” Larra said, her voice taking on that stern bite he was becoming so used to. She didn’t like to talk about her experiences in the True North but she didn’t shy away from acknowledging she had had them. He gently pulled on her hand, coaxing her back into his embrace, and she nuzzled his jaw, making him groan when she kissed his neck, and murmured breathlessly in his ear, “Are you going to let dead men stop you kissing me?”

A deep chuckle rumbled from his chest, and Gendry grinned, pulling her closer. Soft, tender kisses deepened to something wild, demanding and fierce, greedy for the taste of each other, igniting embers racing beneath their skin, becoming more and more aware that their bodies were tangled together. She explored his broad shoulders, squeezing and stroking his muscles over his tunic, kissing fiercely as he adjusted her in his lap to squeeze her hip, her backside, and she moaned and broke away, breathless, her lips red and plump from kissing, to take his hand and cup it over her breast, diving in for another fierce kiss as she tangled her fingers in his hair, pulling him closer, and he groaned at the heaviness of her breasts in his palm, cupping and squeezing, gently kneading them until he could taste her tiny whimpers and feel her squirming in his lap, and the throbbing ache of his cock, hard and straining for her as she nibbled his earlobe and gentled stinging nips of his throat with gentle sucking and sweet kisses, her tongue darting between his lips, gasping against his lips as he cupped and massaged her breasts, pressing her body against his, her entire body alight with awareness of him, of the hardness pressing against her thigh, and as he trailed kisses up her throat, making her whimper and groan as he sucked at one sensitive spot beneath her ear, she panted, reaching down between them, desperate to know the feel of him. Her palm seemed to burn as she brushed it against the hardness beneath his leather breeches.

He froze.

Gendry went cold.

And she noticed. Her entire body trembling with desire, yet she noticed, and removed her hand. Shaking with need, she sat up straighter. Put distance between them. Her eyes read his face, and Gendry swallowed, hard.

Now? he thought, bewildered, frustrated – and angry. Now he thought of the Red Woman? When Larra seemed desperate to melt into his body, ached for his touch and was desperate to touch him?

“You went somewhere else,” Larra said softly, and his cock throbbed at the throatiness of her voice, at the sight of her kiss-plumped lips, of her vivid eyes smouldering with intensity, her entire body thrumming with pent-up desire and aching need. She desired him, ached for his touch. She shivered in his lap, and for all the Red Woman’s hold over him, he could not let Larra go. His hands, clamped on her waist, were shaking, and his breath came in frantic pants. “With someone else.”

Tenderly, she combed his curls away from his face, stroking his hair until he visibly calmed. Frustration, confusion and embarrassment flickered in those intense blue eyes, but he did not lash out at her. He leaned in to her touch as she stroked his curls.

“Would you like me to leave?” she murmured gently, her fingertip trailing along the curve of his ear, the length of his jaw. Tender. The touch that had excited him now soothed him.

“No,” Gendry gasped out, his hand squeezing her hip as if he was afraid she would climb out of his lap.

Larra stroked a hand through his hair, asking softly, “What would you like me to do?”

Gendry gulped, his eyelashes flickering as he glanced around the chamber, overwhelmed. “I don’t know.”

She nodded, as if she understood, and Gendry relaxed, relieved, when she whispered, “I promise not to touch you until you ask.”

He knew about her scars; she knew about his.

Shakily, he took her hand, tenderly kissing her palm, then looped her arms around his neck, pulling her closer. He leaned in, kissing her neck at the point where he knew made her whimper and squirm in his lap, and she nipped his ear as punishment when he chuckled deeply. Grasping her backside, he cupped and massaged her breasts, and she squeezed and kneaded his muscles, tangling her fingers in her hair, as they sank lower on the settle, almost reclined, Larra draped over him, and if the castle crumbled around them, neither of them would have any idea, they were consumed by the taste and smell and feel of each other, sharing ferocious kisses that left them breathless, left Larra moaning and aching with need and Gendry panting and desperate and frustrated, his own aches ignored as they kept kissing.

They writhed, tangled up in each other, until the screams of the wind were replaced by the weeping of small children.

Blinking dazedly, they parted, panting and shivering with need, and Larra glanced over her shoulder toward the door. “Is that someone weeping?”

“It sounds like it,” Gendry panted, startled to find his hands shaking as he reached up to push his hair out of his face, once again ignoring the throbbing, unbearable ache in his breeches. Larra’s lips were plump, her eyes bright, and her braids had become unpinned, draped heavily down her back, and her heavy wool dress looked rumpled. She gave him a reluctant look, almost pouting, and they both moaned softly – from the ache and the sudden loss – as she pushed herself off him, rising to a shaky stand. She plucked at the cuffs of her dress and her waist, straightening her bodice where his groping had rumpled the fabric, and exhaled shakily as she shook out her trembling fingers. She was halfway to the door before she turned back, swooping in for a fierce, lingering kiss that made him growl and grasp her backside in his hands, pulling her closer.

Laughing breathlessly, Larra wriggled out of his arms and out of the nursery. Gendry grinned, watching her long braids whip after her, and realised the fire had burned itself out, leaving the chamber in darkness. His body was still alight with awareness, though, of her, and of his desire for her; it took a long time for him to calm down, and by the time he rose to leave the nursery, Larra was closing the door to the Lannister girls’ chamber behind her.

Her eyes glowed in the firelight from the torch beside the girls’ door, and he noticed her lips, still plump from kissing him.

“You know,” he said softly, “it won’t work.”

“What won’t?”

“Trying to seduce me to get out of giving me my lesson,” he said, his lips twitching, and Larra grinned.

“I can only try,” she said, and he grinned back at her. He liked teasing her; he liked that he could tease her. And he liked it when she flirted back. She hummed softly to herself, gazing up at him through her lashes. “We can go back to the nursery if you wish.”

“The fire’s burned itself out,” Gendry said.

“What to do?” she said softly, her tone teasing, clicking her tongue. Her eyes glinted and the naughty glint in her eyes made his blood simmer. She took his hand and led him down the corridor to another chamber. Her chamber. He knew it was hers the moment he saw it, just by the paintings and the books on the table, the crochet in a basket by the rocking-chair strewn with embroidered pillows, a mobile dangling by the diamond-paned window, things glittering in the volleys of lightning that bombarded the castle. There was a small settle on the other side of the hearth, and the other half of the chamber was dominated by a large bed made up with fine linen, quilts, crocheted blankets and furs. He tried to ignore it, and Larra certainly looked like she was, too; she went to her rocking-chair and sat down, inviting him to take the settle.

That was the last night he had his lessons in the nursery.

Every night after, he joined Larra in her chamber.

He looked forward to cuddling on the settle together, buried beneath blankets, drinking herb tea or mulled wine as Larra read to him from The Lord of the Rings. Sometimes, though, Larra would sit in her rocking-chair, crocheting or embroidering while he painstakingly sounded out his letters.

Every time he mastered a letter or sound, he earned one of her fierce kisses.

He mastered them very quickly.

He learned his letters; and when the lessons were over, they learned each other.

Tangled up in blankets on the settle, sitting in his lap, she explored under his tunics, her clever fingers dancing across his skin, sifting through his chest hair, squeezing his muscles and delicately scraping as she panted and writhed and he learned his way under her skirts. He knew the shape and strength of her legs, knew how her thighs quivered when he kissed her beneath her ear, and his favourite sound in the world became Larra’s whimpers and mewls in his ear as she bit her lip and writhed her hips under his touch, stroking and teasing between her thighs. He loved the sting of her fingernails as she scraped them across his chest while he stroked her, the startled look on her face as intense pleasure overwhelmed her – pleasure she had taught him how to give her. He was awed by the slick, intense heat of her as she gasped and writhed and took his fingers into her, writhing and eager, clutching his wrist to guide him the way she wanted, harder and deeper, stroking herself until he learned how to do both at the same time. He loved how she shuddered and writhed and yielded everything to him, emotionally stripped bare and utterly vulnerable in his arms. He loved when she went limp, utterly lost to the world, drunk on her pleasure – and trusting him to bring her back with gentle strokes and soft kisses, and the way she would kiss him, breathless, panting, utterly boneless, and glance at his breeches, biting her lip, pure yearning in every line of her face, yet never touched him.

The first time they had tumbled to the bed, locked in fierce embrace, they were interrupted by a soft knock on the door. Rosamund and Leona, upset by nightmares, tiptoed into the chamber, teary-eyed and shivering, and climbed into Larra’s bed. She tucked them in, and gave him a deep, lingering kiss he could feel all over his body, smiling regretfully as she closed the door on him.

The next night, Gendry joined Larra in her chamber and she asked him, breathlessly, “Would you mind if there was no lesson tonight?”

“No,” Gendry growled softly, grabbing her for a kiss, and Larra wrapped herself around him, pressing her body against his with a sigh of relief. They tumbled to the bed, losing themselves to each other. He had been thinking of this all day, and Larra panted the same thing in his ear before nipping it, sucking and kissing her way down his neck as he groaned, grasping her hip, and stole fierce kisses from her, smoothing his hand from her neck to her hip, caressing and squeezing, cupping and massaging the way she liked. Their boots fell with loud clunks to the flagstone floor, with the soft hiss of Larra’s laces coming undone in his hands, letting him prise her bodice open and shove aside her chemises to kiss and suck and nip at her breasts, his hand cupping the other, the rough callouses on his palm delicious against her aching nipples. Larra rolled to her back, pulling him on top of her. He groaned at the pressure between them, and she nipped his chin, kissing and sucking his throat, pulling one of his hands free from her bodice as she shivered at his kiss, guiding him to the hem of her dress.

“I missed you all day,” she breathed, and moaned loudly as Gendry sucked on the tender skin below her ear.

“Where were we?” he panted, trailing his fingertips up her leg, caressing her thighs, and she stretched and writhed, a breathless smile flashing across her face before sighing and moaning and melting into his touch as he stroked and caressed her. Tongues tangling in a fierce kiss, her breath caught in her throat as he pressed his finger inside her; her toes curled, breaking away from his kiss to whisper, “Two, please! Two!”

She moaned loudly, rocking her hips to meet him as he worked two fingers inside her, a delicious rhythm that made her thighs tremble as delicious pressure sparked through her body. She gripped his curls in her fingers, pulling him down for a fierce kiss, gripping his hip with her other hand, squeezing his backside, panting and writhing and aching for his weight over her, and he did roll over her, bracing his weight above her, dipping his head to kiss from her ear to her nipples, sucking and nipping the way that made her moan, growling softly as he thrust his fingers and her hips rolled to meet them, and she tugged and freed his tunics, letting her hands roam, exploring his muscles and panting, nipping at his collarbone as he buried his head against her neck, kissing her as she shuddered and gasped and gave in to the ecstasy rippling through her body under his touch.

His gentle kisses brought her back, as they always did, and she smiled lazily, utterly sated, as he removed his fingers, tenderly stroking her thighs until they stopped shaking, giving her neck and face tiny kisses.

“Come here,” she panted, smiling, and he smiled lazily, sinking into the cradle of her thighs, kissing her from her neck to her breasts and back while she squeezed and kneaded his backside, his hand cupping her breasts, massaging and playing with her nipples, and she sighed, moaning at the delicious pressure already building again as he rocked his hips against hers. His impossible hardness poked at her and she whimpered, writhing her hips to change the angle, shuddering as he stroked against her, hot and insistent. Her palms itched to feel him; instead, she squeezed his backside, spurring him on as he slowly rocked against her, sucking on her nipples until they throbbed, kissing his way up her throat, giving her a fierce, deep kiss that made her toes curl again. Her fingers trailed to his chest, wrapping her legs around him, and he levered himself over her, kissing her deeply as he thrust his hips, grunting softly with each thrust, his entire body shuddering.

As she kissed his neck and sucked his earlobe, her fingers trailing across his chest, enjoying the feel of his chest-hair against her palms, the pressure rising between her legs again, he froze.

His massive body shuddered above her. She panted, startled, and stared up at the expression on his face – bewildered, furious.

“Gendry?” she gasped, suddenly concerned, and she felt him, felt the absence of his hardness and heat against her. He shook his head sharply, his dark curls dancing, and squinted his eyes shut. Took a few deep breaths and opened them. He stared into Larra’s eyes, and she saw it – the aching desire and his fear.

He gulped and pushed himself off her, stumbling off the bed. Larra sat up, her body alight and trembling with desire and thwarted pleasure, and reached for him.

“Gendry,” she said softly. He shook his head sharply.

“I’m sorry,” he panted.

“Gendry, it’s alright,” she said gently. They had been going at his pace – and within the limits Larra had set by promising never to touch him without his asking, he was voracious. Curious, fierce, passionate, tender, patient and proud. He was a proud lover, she saw it every time his eyes lit up at watching her come. At watching her tumble through ecstasy because of him.

“No – no, it’s not,” Gendry blurted, wide-eyed. His massive body thrummed with frustrated pleasure but also with fear. She remained still, watching him carefully. He panted, his entire body shuddering, and his hands shook as he shoved his tunics into his breeches. “It’s my fault Robb Stark is dead.”

Larra sat, stunned, staring at the place where he had stood long after Gendry left the room.


Days later, Larra was still uncomfortable in her own skin: Gendry’s touch had left her excited and unable to satisfy herself.

She was grumpy. Wisely, Sansa did not ask why Larra was particularly impatient, but Larra knew her sister was no fool. She likely knew Larra and Gendry spent hours together every night, and Gendry always left her chamber with his curling hair wild and his lips swollen.

Instead of chasing after him, Larra let Gendry be. She did not know what to say or how to approach him, not after what he had said. It’s my fault Robb Stark is dead.

What on earth did that mean?

How could he think he had anything to do with Robb’s murder?

Not until a few days later, when she saw him in the forges, did Larra approach him. His massive body rippling with muscle made her mouth water, but the look on his face… Intensity. Pure ferocity, taking out his anger and frustration on the anvil. She wished she could do that; but the throbbing ache he had created refused to be gentled.

It’s my fault Robb Stark is dead…

She sighed, frowned, and carefully approached the hulking armourer. She loved everything about how big he was, from his arms like basilisks to the shoulders that could wreck stone doorways to those powerful thighs she ached to feel between her own, his enormous chest carved with muscle and dusted with dark hair. Those fierce eyes, his handsome beard. His enormous, calloused hands that were so talented.

She cleared her throat gently, and his body tensed as he approached.

Softly, she said, “I think I’m owed an explanation for what you said to me.” He shot her an intense look, then nodded.

“If you still wish to continue your lessons, I can find someone else to teach you,” she said softly. Gendry glanced sharply at her, his eyes intense.

“I want to keep learning,” Gendry said quietly. “I don’t want anyone else teaching me.”

Hours later, there was a soft knock on Larra’s door. She set her box of cards down on the small table before the hearth and smoothed her braids before opening the door. Gendry stood in the doorway, his arms crossed over his chest, and he slowly raised his eyes to her face.

“Come in,” she said softly, and he nodded, entering the room silently. He took his place on the settle, and she leaned back in the rocking-chair as he reached for the box of cards. They started as they did every lesson, reviewing all the letters and sounds Gendry knew, then reading short stories Larra had written for her brothers which matched the sounds. Small steps, Maester Luwin used to say. Small steps.

They went through the cards one by one, Gendry giving examples of different words he knew from memory that contained the sound; she would write them on a thin sheet of slate mounted in a wooden frame using a stick of chalk, and sometimes they discussed why certain letters made different sounds, or why the same sound was written differently.

When he reached L, Gendry said softly, “Larra.” He glanced up at her, and Larra smiled softly. She wrote her name down, and watched him reading it, working out the sounds of the different letters and how they merged together to create her name. “Anvil. Longbow. Ballista. Cudgel. Battle. Valyria. Lys. Love…” He cleared his throat softly. “Elbow. Elephant. Sigil. Jonquil. Lace. Lady. Lobelia… Leeches…”

He fell silent after that last word, leaning on his elbows and staring hard at the card in his hands. Larra waited patiently. Neither of them had mentioned what he had said to her the other night.

He cleared his throat softly, flinching, and focused on the card as he started to speak, “During the War, the Brotherhood without Banners sold me to a red witch from Asshai… She followed the Lord of Light. Her men took me from the Riverlands all the way to Dragonstone…” His voice became brusque, his face colouring with shame, when he told her, “She – seduced me. In a grand bed, she had me bound, stripped off my breeches and put leeches on my cock. Then she called Stannis Baratheon into the chamber. When the leeches were fat from my blood, she plucked them off. Each time Stannis threw one of the leeches into a brazier, he said a name.” His jaw flickered, and Larra waited. She watched his chest heaving. Though his voice was gentle, he was far from calm. “Joffrey Baratheon, Balon Greyjoy and…Robb Stark.” She closed her eyes. Robb Stark. “It was blood magic. She used my blood to sacrifice to her god.”

Quietly, Larra asked, “Why would this priestess believe your blood holds power?”

“It’s my father’s blood she wanted,” Gendry murmured, staring into the fire suspiciously, as if the red witch’s Lord of Light lurked in the embers. “King’s blood.” He blinked suddenly, glancing at Larra, and grimaced guiltily as he said, “I’m Robert Baratheon’s bastard…”

Larra’s lips parted, and she leaned forward in the rocking-chair, staring into his face.

She had only ever seen Robert fat, drunk and deeply unhappy – no: She had seen him, once, in his prime. At the Tourney of Harrenhall, when he had danced with Lyanna Stark. Her lips parted as she stared, for there he was – Gendry looked incredibly like that young man. Robert had given Gendry his eyes, his dark hair and his strength – but the rest was all Gendry. The intensity in his eyes, the gentleness of his strong hands, the purpose behind those muscles, the thoughtfulness and care. Gendry was far more handsome than Robert had ever been. And a far better man than Robert could ever have hoped to be.

“She used my blood to murder them,” Gendry said quietly, finally setting the card down on the table. He leaned back in the settle but clasped his hands tightly, glaring down at them, chest silently heaving.

Larra watched Gendry silently, thinking over what he had just revealed to her. Blood magic had had a part in Robb’s death? She knew that there was great power in blood-magic. She also knew that gods took little interest in the wars of men. At least, no war beyond the Wall.

“I want you to listen to me very carefully. Their deaths are not your fault,” Larra said, her voice gentle but stern. Gendry glanced at her and held her gaze. “Joffrey was a vicious cunt and deserved a more lingering death even than the one he earned. Balon Greyjoy’s brother coveted rule of the Iron Islands; the motive for his murder was as simple as that. And Robb…” She sighed, shaking her head. “Your blood had nought to do with his death. He crossed a very dangerous, conniving, evil, cowardly little man. It would be easy to ignore Robb’s mistakes because of how brutal and devastating his murder was… He sealed his fate the moment he wed his Volantene.” Larra sighed, slumping in her seat, and shook her head. She loved Robb, she missed him and she had respected the man he was, but could not excuse the mistakes he had made. “Robb’s love for her was the death of his duty to the North and it cost thousands their lives, including his.” Robb had been the architect of his own demise. “How did the Red Witch convince you she had the power to murder through your blood?”

“She didn’t. But I’d seen the power of R’hllor with my own eyes before she took me to Dragonstone,” Gendry admitted. “When I was with the Brotherhood, the Hound killed Beric Dondarrion in a trial-by-combat. Thoros of Myr prayed to R’hllor and Lord Dondarrion rose from the dead. If the Lord of Light can give life then surely he can take it.”

“And there’s no better time to do so than during a war,” Larra said grimly. “Gendry… You are the last person responsible for Robb’s death.”

“When I reached King’s Landing…when I heard what they’d done to him, and…to his wife and to their little baby…” Larra flinched, and he fell silent. She could see the pain and grief and guilt in his eyes. “My blood did that.”

“No. Robb did that,” Larra said fiercely. “He broke his oath. I am saying this as his sister, who loves him and misses him still. Robb was fierce and brilliant and honourable – until he wasn’t. He broke his word and he died for it. I won’t let you hold yourself to blame for Robb’s mistake… I miss him. I miss arguing with him. I miss loving my brother. I miss them all. You’re the last person to blame for his death. As for those leeches… Belief is a powerful thing. Their deaths weren’t inevitable but they were all involved in open war. The red witch took advantage of that; she took advantage of Stannis Baratheon’s belief to secure her own position.”

For a while, they were both silent. The fire crackled in the hearth and Gendry watched it warily. He frowned, glancing at Larra; his eyes were impossibly blue in the firelight. “How did you know I was with Arya, before?”

She smiled without humour. “Well…since you’ve been brave enough to be honest about the Red Witch, perhaps you’ll believe me…”

She started from the beginning, or what she believed the beginning to be: her dragon-dreams, the dreams she now believed had been planted by the Bloodraven to ensure she believed Bran when he started to have dreams of his own. She told Gendry about the King’s visit, and Bran’s fall. She told him about their journey north beyond the Wall to the great weirwood. She told him about Jojen and Meera and Hodor and all the others they had met and lost along the way. She told him about the Children and about Lord Brynden Rivers.

She didn’t tell him about Rhaegar and Lyanna, though. That was still Jon’s secret, and he didn’t even know it yet.

Larra gave Dark Star to Gendry to examine, the closest he had ever come to true Valyrian steel.

“I know about this sword,” he said in quiet awe, watching the way the firelight seemed to caress the rippling blade, making it seem to come alive like a blade of living smoke rippling and whirling and lethal. “Everyone knows about this blade. It was thought lost.”

“Just kept safe,” Larra said quietly.

She let Gendry examine the sword in minute detail, until he sheathed the fine weapon, examining the jewelled hilt one last time before propping it against the hearth. Then she told him about Bran and his visions, being a greenseer. That she – all of them, actually – were wargs through their Stark blood, which allowed them to see through the eyes of animals. Bran was different; he could see through the great weirwood trees, and through them could see the past and the future, as well as the present.

“That’s why he’s so quiet,” Gendry guessed. “He’s overwhelmed with memory.”

“Yes,” Larra said. “And possibility… He showed me Arya’s journey from King’s Landing, the day Father…”

“The day he was murdered,” Gendry finished for her, and she nodded.

“I watched her being picked on by some boys…and there you were. You frightened away the bullies. The two of you were inseparable ever since. You kept her secret.” She glanced up sharply at Gendry. “That’s why the Goldcloaks were after you.”

“My blood. King’s blood,” Gendry grated, looking fierce - angry. “Lots of men died because of it – they did,” he said stubbornly when she made a noise of protest, and Larra knew it was true. “There’s no use denying it. Yoren protected me; the Goldcloaks came back with Clegane’s men and killed a lot of us, including Yoren.”

Larra sighed sadly. “I liked him. So did Uncle Benjen.”

“You knew him?”

“He was a wandering crow; he would always pass through Winterfell,” Larra said. Tyrion Lannister had once said that everyone was connected in some way to everyone else in the world. It was strange to think that the thread binding Larra and Gendry was Yoren. He had been not only Arya’s protector, but Gendry’s too. He had been their brother. “He was gruff and good-humoured and dangerous.”

“He was a good man,” Gendry said sorrowfully. “He was the first person to ever protect me for no reason other than because it was right.”

“There must have been others,” Larra said softly. “You couldn’t have survived otherwise.”

“Someone paid for my apprenticeship, but after I found out who my father was, I know whoever it was didn’t do it for my own good,” Gendry said, shrugging. “They knew who I was. Maybe I could be useful to them… But maybe that same person knew my life was in danger, and had me sold to the Watch to get me away from King’s Landing. Life was simpler when I didn’t know.”

“Much,” Larra agreed, thinking of Rhaegar and Lyanna and the locket Benjen had kept for decades now burning a hole in the enamelled box on her dressing-table. The fire burned low and Larra gazed at Gendry. She murmured, “I’m glad you told me.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t before now,” he said gruffly, and she could hear the shame in his voice.

“It was no small thing,” she said softly. “What you went through – why people forced you to endure it. It is not an easy thing. Especially not to share it.”

“I… Every time I…” Gendry struggled, and shook his head, sighing. “I am afraid…”

“Of her,” Larra said quietly, and he nodded, staring at his hands. “You’re afraid of being used to hurt people.”

“I hate that she still has this power over me.”

“Only if you let her,” Larra said quietly. “When I was a girl, I was desperate to be loved by Lady Catelyn. She pretended we did not exist, Jon and me. If her gaze ever landed on us, I remember feeling such shame that I dared be there. Jon used to quake and hide, afraid of every word she uttered, even of her entering the same room… I was different. I started to see her for what she was; a hateful, ungodly woman who punished innocent children out of jealousy and spite for their mother. She made me feel ashamed to be loved by my family; she made me feel afraid in my own home. She made me small. I stopped letting her; I took that power from her. I decided that no-one in the world has the power to make me feel small.”

“Is it that simple? Just deciding?” Gendry asked, and Larra gave him a wan smile.

“No. The thing is, you have to keep reminding yourself. Whenever you hear their voice in your head, you obliterate it. Replace it with other things; memories of you at your fiercest, your most capable,” Larra said. “Sometimes, I just picture my brothers and sisters laughing. Knowing I loved them with all that I am, and they loved me the same, is the greatest power I have over that nasty little voice. It’s been a long time since I heard it last. I know who I am and what I’m worth, what I’m capable of. I know what I’ve earned. That’s a powerful thing.”

Gendry rose to his feet, offering his hand, and Larra smiled, letting him pull her gently to her feet. He cupped her face in his hands and leaned in to give her a slow, savouring kiss.

“Will you stay?” she whispered, and Gendry nodded. They went to the bed, tugging off their boots, and Gendry groaned as he lay back; she tugged on the bedding, pulling quilts, blankets and furs over them, and lay beside him. He gathered her up, her head in the crook of his shoulder, and she sighed as he gave her a kiss.

“You left me hurting,” she said quietly.

“I’m sorry about that,” Gendry said, reaching up to caress her cheek, and gave her another slow, savouring kiss.

“You should be; I’ve been an absolute terror,” she murmured against his lips. She sighed and lay back, gazing up at him. She reached up to push his curls out of his face so that the firelight caught in his sapphire-blue eyes. She sighed, admitting sadly, “I used to have no need for anyone else; I could take care of myself. Now, nothing else will do… No-one else will do.”

Gendry growled softly, nuzzling her nose, and gave her short, sweet kisses, murmuring against her throat, “Let me take care of you.”

As his hand slid up her skirts, she sighed and murmured against his lips, “Please do.”

Notes:

I think we’ll all agree we want/need/deserve a Gendry in our lives.

Chapter 38: Forging Anew

Notes:

Okay, I lied: here is where the smut truly begins. No apologies: Let’s not pretend we’ve not been waiting for it! And it must be about 12 chapters since the last smut, so we were due!

If you don’t want to read the smut, there is some important dialogue about halfway through the chapter.

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

38

Forging Anew


She shivered. Not from the cold; from the soft, almost tentative brush of Gendry’s fingertips against her bare skin as the last of her clothing dropped heavily to the floor. Fingers tangled with the little buttons of his tunic, she tugged on it, pulling his undershirts free from his breeches and over his head, and he panted softly, tugging her into his body, stealing a slow, deep kiss that had her melting. His arms banded around her, holding her tightly to him, bare-chested for the first time, his heat searing her skin, the coarse dark hair on his chest tickling her nipples – the feel of her nipples hard against his chest making him groan in surprise – and her hands drifted to his waist, to the buttons of his soft leather breeches. Gently, he broke from their kiss, only to nod his head, and Larra smiled breathlessly as he dived in for another kiss.

Gendry’s kisses deepened, consuming and fierce, his enormous hands tentatively caressing her back and hips, and they both groaned, Larra shivering with suppressed yearning, as she nimbly unfastened the flat metal buttons of his breeches, her palms itching to cup and caress the impossible hardness straining against the leather. He groaned loudly, dropping his lips to her neck as she slipped her hands down his breeches to shove the soft leather off his hips, gripping his backside and pressing her hips against his, panting as she felt his erection hot and unyielding between them. She felt…almost drunk just from the merest hint of him. And she ached to strip him of his smallclothes and explore, to learn and adore him…but she didn’t. She shoved his breeches over his muscular thighs, her mouth watering at the muscles clenching and shifting under her gaze, his enormous chest and abdomen cut with muscle and softened with coarse black hair, his thighs…oh, his thighs… So thick she ached to give them a nip and see whether he shuddered. She shoved his breeches down and he kicked them off. Then she took his hand and guided them to the bed.

His expression was bashful – he had never seen a woman naked before, not like this, not his – and curious… His gaze was almost tentative, and Larra realised she was holding her breath, waiting for his reaction. Waiting for him to notice. She flushed hotly and wished…

She wished her body was beautiful.

And she forced herself to focus, not on the wicked burns, jagged scars, angry pink puckered skin and icy slashes of healed wounds that marred her body, but on Gendry. On the immense muscles of his shoulders and chest lovingly caressed by the firelight, the few, faded burns on his arms. On the dark hair dusting his upper-chest, his abdomen, his groin and thighs, always drawing her attention back to his smallclothes. She tried to focus on what lay waiting for her there, rather than the embarrassment she felt at not being…beautiful.

She knew her body was not beautiful; it was too battered.

But she didn’t want him to think that.

It was the first time she had ever felt bashful about her scars.

Slowly, she raised her gaze to his face, to those deep sapphire-blue eyes, and studied his expression. There was no grimace, no wince of pity or disgusted curl of his lip. No: everything about Gendry’s expression radiated pure awe.

Something caught in her throat, and she watched his eyes, his expression, as he learned her body, every soft curve and hollow, every angry pucker and jagged scar, the tempting frosted-plum colour of her nipples that drew his gaze more than the scars.

It was awe she saw in his eyes. Pure wonder.

And the tiniest flicker of horror, of realisation.

“There are so many,” he murmured, his deep voice rumbling in the quiet of the darkened chamber. The only other sounds were the gentle pitter-patter of heavy snowflakes against the window and the joyous crackle of the fire in the hearth, sending waves of warmth drifting idly over them, the dark golden light caressing their bare skin.

There were so many scars. Far too many, and most of them far too ugly. The firelight and the shadows could only soften and blur them so much.

If he had imagined her, as she had found herself imagining what waited beneath his clothing for her to explore…this was not it.

“Not what you imagined?” she said softly, barely catching his eye, and she sighed softly to herself, gazing regretfully at her body. It wasn’t ruined – but it wasn’t beautiful either.

Gendry nuzzled her nose, stealing a deep kiss, and when he withdrew, his eyes were impossibly sad. He said, his voice deep and earnest, “I could never imagine you hurt.”

Larra watched Gendry’s eyes as he tenderly caressed his fingertips over her bare skin. It was an effort, when he traced the scar on her right forearm from elbow to wrist, shining, jagged and still angry, not to remember how she received it, to remain in the moment with him.

Then he kissed her. She sighed against his lips, pressing her body against his, relishing the feel of his heat and his strength, the faintest tickle of his chest-hair against her nipples, the delicious pressure of his calloused palms against her skin. She sighed, moaning, and writhed against him as those enormous hands drifted down from her back to her waist, to her hips. He squeezed gently and she moaned, wriggling against him, trying to get closer, but froze, breathless, when his fingertips trailed over the one sickening scar that trounced all the others: a wicked scar jagging from her hip all the way to her kneecap, a deep, curving slice that had almost claimed her life. It was the fiercest of her scars and the only one that had ever truly frightened her.

It was the closest she had ever come to failure. To abandoning Bran. To giving in. She was lucky not to have shattered bone. Lucky not to have succumbed to rot. Lucky not to have bled to death. She shuddered against Gendry, suddenly chilled to the bone, and he noticed. Eyes widening in sudden alarm, he froze and lifted his hand off her leg.

Panting, she shook her head, willing herself to explain, “They never bothered me before.”

He frowned, bemused, gazing up and down her body with such intensity, she shivered, heat pooling between her thighs, her nipples aching. “They’re beautiful.”

She shook her head, giving him a rueful smile. “They’re not.”

“I think they are,” Gendry said, his voice rich and earnest still. His eyes – oh, those eyes! Vivid, intense and honest – held her gaze and he seemed to be willing her to believe him. “They’re powerful.” His long, clever fingers trailed idly over her skin, the old callouses making her shiver, her toes curling. He trailed his fingertip from her knee back up her thigh, making her muscles quiver, and she panted, reaching out to clutch at his shoulder, to grip those muscles. “I had no idea you could be so strong. Larra…you survived. That strength is beautiful.” His gaze swept up and down her body. Every time it did, he seemed more confident, emboldened. Passionate and full of desire. He leaned in and stole a fierce kiss full of tongue and teeth and wandering hands that squeezed and cupped and kneaded deliciously.

He kissed down her throat, delicately licking the slash beneath her collarbone, and her stomach dipped, muscles clenching, as he went lower, to the small pucker of skin from an arrow-wound, kissing it. He trailed his fingertips over that awful scar from thigh to knee, down and up again, his touch feather-light and wicked, until she started to shiver. Not from dread but from longing.

She watched, holding her breath, gripped with anticipation as she watched him trace her scar with his eyes, up, up…he raised his eyes to her face, and he gave her the wickedest smile she had ever seen on his face.

“Show me.” He didn’t ask. She bit her lip, what felt like starlight sparkling across her skin under the intensity of his gaze, those sapphires fierce and compelling. Panting softly, writhing back on the pillows, shivering with need just from the intensity of his eyes alone, she sighed and relaxed, bending her knees, and spread her thighs wide.

She shuddered at the pure, animalistic groan that rumbled from deep inside his chest. The deeply masculine sound that rubbed over her entire body, filling her with pride that she had brought forth that reaction from him. His vivid eyes were heavy-lidded, his body hulking, but as she preened and shivered with anticipation, she noticed his hands shaking as he reached to gently press them against the inside of her thighs, his thumbs gently stroking her skin. Shaking, but huge and hot, and she knew the talent of those fingers, knew the joy, the ecstasy he could coax from her.

With another soft growl, Gendry leaned in, kissing and licking his way up that vicious scar. The soft heat of his lips, their firmness, and the delicious tickle of his trimmed beard – she imagined how it would feel and quivered, moaning softly. She was panting, shivering, by the time he raised his head, a quiet confidence radiating from him as he said, “Tell me what you need.”

“Come here,” she breathed, curling a hand around the back of his neck, drawing him closer, and she groaned as he rose over her, settling his weight on her, pulling him in for a kiss. She nipped his lower lip, and he let out a soft growl before diving in to kiss her, taking control, dominating, and she took his hand, cupping it over her breast to gently massage and play with her nipples while he swirled his tongue with hers, fierce and dominating, and she writhed beneath him, toes starting to curl. He grunted, blinking dazedly, when she broke away, panting. “N-now do that…here…”

She rolled her hips against his, gasping – he hissed and his eyes widened – at his erection straining fiercely against her. He panted, staring at her, and searched her face. Then, he gave her a sweet, almost delicate kiss on the lips, before sliding down between her thighs. He glanced up at her through his lashes, and she nodded, giving him a tiny, coaxing smile. Still gazing at her, he turned his head and kissed her thighs, first. The wicked smile he gave her made her grin, and she moaned with shock and relief as he set in.

His first kiss was tentative. One taste of her heat and her softness and he shuddered. The feeling of her body relaxing under his tongue was powerful – she moaned, and he growled softly, wanting nothing more than to feast on the taste of her. He wanted to feast on the taste of her. He clamped an arm around her thigh, pinning her hips in place, as she wriggled and sighed and threaded her fingers through his hair. She bit down on a whimper, already writhing under the onslaught of sensation as he feasted. Any shyness was gone.

Guided by her, he massaged and squeezed one breast, squeezing and tweaking her nipple until it throbbed, and when he abandoned it for the other, and she let go of his hand and let out a cry as he pinned her hips to the mattress and feasted, and she was left with nothing but to accept the ecstasy starting to sparkle beneath her skin like liquid embers catching alight. Squirming under his steely grip, she whimpered and clutched at his free hand, the arm clamped over her hip, his long hot fingers splayed across her belly.

“I n-need you to t-touch me!” she shuddered, biting her lip, and trembled against the pillows, gripping his curls in her fingers and trying to thrust her hips to meet his tongue. He hummed softly and she cried out, loudly, at the sensation that fractured through her body like bolts of lightning. “And do that again!”

A soft laugh vibrated against her and her toes curled. He used his thumb, stroking her the way he knew she liked best and she groaned loudly, squeezing her fingers, her muscles clenching, her thighs quivering, and she lost herself to everything but his tongue and his hands – his scent, his heat, his fierce, insistent tongue and patient fingers, stoking the embers of a fire that slowly and surely swept through her body like waves of molten fire, searing and burning as they went. Relief, after, lingering joy as she was enveloped into a world of embers twinkling in endless soft shadows.

He panted and knelt between her spread thighs, chest heaving, and wiped his mouth as he gazed down at her, awed. Scarred and imperfect as she was, he thought she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. In the firelight, her pale skin seemed as radiant as snow in the moonlight, flushed delicately pink in a way he only ever saw her when they were intimate this way, when it was just the two of them and their bodies, their hands and lips and a deep, throbbing ache only they could soothe. His hands shook, his thighs clenched and his cock throbbed but he ignored it – he tried – and watched her. She was collapsed against the pillows, her cheeks flushed, her eyes closed, her lips plump from kissing him, her nipples hard, her slender thighs slick from the wet heat that had coated his tongue. The taste of her lingered on his tongue and did nothing to help the nearly painful ache in his smallclothes. His hand itched to soothe it but he didn’t. He flushed at the thought, I want her to finish me.

Just the sight of her like this put him in danger of finishing in his smallclothes.

He smiled to himself. He had done this. She was sprawled out, flushed and utterly boneless from pleasure, and he had given it to her. His first time, his first taste, and this was her body’s response. He reached out, smoothing his palms over the insides of her thighs – she shuddered, almost lazily, and her lips curled into a smile as she preened. He chuckled softly, awed, and leaned in, tenderly kissing her thighs, trailing up, to her belly, and sighed as he settled his weight between her thighs, hugging her waist, to rub his chin over her nipples, his beard making her shiver, before lavishing kisses on her breasts, worshipping them. He adored her high, full breasts and her dainty nipples the colour of frosted plums – but even now, as he laved kisses and sucked on her nipples, he wanted to dip back between her thighs, to kiss her there again, to hear her moans and whimpers and watch her body go boneless under his tongue.

He had intended to gentle her from her pleasure with his kiss, as he had many times before – his kisses seemed to gentle her as much as they inflamed her – but at the thought of kissing between her thighs again, he groaned, scowling at himself for thrusting his hips against the mattress, and reached a hand between them.

Pinpricks of light seemed to spark behind her eyelashes and Larra gazed at him, her cheeks flushed, and she moaned with abandon as he stroked her with his thumb, then thrust a finger deep inside her. He stroked and thrust and she writhed, her hips rocking to meet him, and she gripped his shoulders as he leaned up to snare a kiss. She cried out, her thighs quivering against his sides, as he stole another kiss and thrust a second finger deep inside her.

Watching her fall boneless under his touch was one thing. But it was exciting to watch her whimper and try to fight it, to feel her shudder and know she was digging her heels into the mattress, her fingernails biting into his shoulders, her teeth tugging on his lower-lip in a way that threatened to have him spill in his smallclothes, but there it was – that shudder of ecstasy ripping through her body even as she fought to prolong it, startled and overwhelmed, her eyes widening as she gazed up at him, his fingers thrusting deep inside, and he nuzzled for a tender kiss, finishing her with a twist of his wrist that made her thighs shake as her muscles gripped him tight. He stroked her until she gentled, swallowing her whimper as he withdrew his fingers with a deep kiss, and groaned as he collapsed on his back beside her. In one movement, he flipped her body against his, draping her over him, stroking his fingers over her back, her arms, draping her thigh over his to tenderly trace the scar that had started it all. He sighed and kissed the top of her head as the aftershocks that made her tremble gentled.

He gazed down at her, and smiled softly at the hazy look of absolute rapture on her face. “You know, one taste of you will never be enough,” he remarked softly, and she gave him a lazy smile. Her eyes flickered open and she preened against him, writhing; her smile widened, almost sweet.

“I’m looking forward to my turn,” she said huskily, reaching up to gently stroke his jaw, tracing the dimple in his chin, his lips. Gendry gazed at her. Her smile was soft, and Gendry leaned in for a kiss that was soft, slow and savouring. He caressed her arm and reached for her hand, tangling their fingers together, and as the kiss deepened, he guided her hand lower. He inhaled sharply at the feel of her hand as he cupped it over his erection, and she gently broke away from the kiss, her eyes darkening with concern. He nudged her nose with his and pulled her closer to steal another kiss, a soft rumble growing from deep inside his chest as he shakily guided her hand inside his smallclothes.

Her gently calloused palms, her slender fingers radiating heat; he groaned and let his head fall back at the feel of her touching him for the first time. Larra was touching him. He raised his head and caught her eye; she remained still, watching him carefully. She didn’t cup him but she didn’t remove her hand either. Waiting cautiously for his reaction.

“I’m alright,” he said, surprised by how gruff he sounded. Her eyes glittered, her entire face seeming to soften and warm, pleased or relieved that he wanted this. Gods, he wanted this. Though he knew she had more experience in the bedchamber, her touch was tentative – she had never touched him after that first time in the nursery, not even when he’d noticed her fingers twitching and her gaze dipping to his groin as she bit her lip. When she bit her lip… He shivered. She withdrew her hand, and he frowned, only to shiver as she went to her knees bedside him and slowly unbuttoned his smallclothes.

Larra bit her lip as she slowly peeled Gendry’s smallclothes from him, as if unwrapping a precious gift. She had only once felt the barest impression of him, that night in the nursery, and since then only felt him press against her hip or thigh or belly as they learned each other – always in smallclothes, usually still with his breeches on. Always out of reach. Always intriguing. As the linen was peeled away, she couldn’t help the moan that escaped her lips, or the way slick heat flooded between her thighs, making her squirm and rub her thighs together, aching again. She tugged his smallclothes down his legs and cast them aside, sitting back to gaze at him, stunned. If there was a god of virility, of true masculinity, they were made in Gendry’s image. His enormous body, cut with rippling muscle, his immense shoulders, arms she loved to nip and cling to, those thick powerful thighs she ached to have between hers, all dusted with dark hair that seemed to trail to his groin.

They nicknamed him the Bull, she thought dazedly, licking her lips as she gazed at him. He was the biggest she had ever seen, ever imagined. Long and deliciously thick, jutting proudly from that dark patch of hair, impossibly hard. She ached at the sight of him, yearning…

Already panting, her heart thundering, Larra leaned in, murmuring in his ear, “You are magnificent.” She gave him a tender kiss but did not touch him. Didn’t dare. She didn’t want to spook him. He cradled her face with one enormous hand and kissed her deeply. She stroked his shoulders and chest, his abdomen, feeling the muscles contract under her fingertips. She broke away and gasped softly, “What would you like me to do?”

He shook his head, giving a desperate sort of shrug as if he had no idea what he wanted – or rather there were too many things he wanted! He gazed at her lips, and Larra smiled softly. She leaned in, gently kissing him. She reached out, cupping his jaw as she kissed him, and when she broke away, she gave him a soft, earnest look. “Stay with me.” She stroked his cheek with her thumb and he nodded, knowing what she meant.

Larra moved to kneel between his legs, gently shoving his thighs apart, drawing up a knee so she could get closer, and he watched her body move as she lowered herself to her belly between his legs. Her violet eyes were heavy-lidded, dark and glinting as she gazed at his cock as if she had never seen anything so magnificent in her life, had never been hungrier in her life. She looked as if she was starving.

And he groaned and shuddered as she started to feast.

She lovingly caressed him with her palm first, gently, then with more pressure, and he choked when she glanced up, giving him a wicked smile, before her tongue darted out and gave the tip of his cock a tiny lick. Then another, and another, tiny and teasing, until they weren’t, until she was lavishing his entire length with her tongue. He watched, stunned, as she kissed him, and his thighs jerked when she gave him the gentlest of nips, easing the sting with a kiss and a savouring lick.

“Larra!” he grunted, and she glanced up at him, eyebrows raised almost tauntingly. The only way he could describe the look she gave him was wolfish as she curled one hand over him, her eyes snaring his, and took him into her mouth in one stroke. The heat of her mouth, her tongue on him, licking, her hand gently pumping him as she swirled her tongue around him. Then she moaned, her eyelashes fluttering closed, and she started to suck.

Gendry’s head fell back, his eyes rolling, and he groaned from deep inside his chest.

He snatched her hand, gripping it tight, her only warning before he came violently, shuddering and panting, pleasure searing through his body. Her tender licks and kisses gentled him the same way he always gentled her; blearily, he watched her cleaning him with her tongue, as if she was savouring every lick.

“I’m sorry!” he grunted, flushing out of embarrassment as much as pleasure. He hadn’t lasted. But then, he’d never experienced an onslaught such as that. She had a wicked, clever tongue.

“Why?” Larra purred, slowly climbing into his lap, straddling him. She looked…pleased. Could she have liked bringing him to pleasure as much as he adored watching her climax? She reached out, tenderly tracing his features with her fingertips. She leaned in and kissed his brow, his eyelashes, the tip of his nose, his chin, all the while rubbing her hands delicately over his shoulders, up and down his arms, across his back. Soothing him. This was a she-wolf praising her mate, he thought dazedly. She gazed into his eyes, watching his face, his reactions. When he had calmed, feeling utterly sated and relaxed, he gave her a soft smile, his hands gently rubbing her thighs.

“I’m here,” he murmured, reassuring her, leaning in to give her a tender kiss. “I’m here with you.”

The sombre, almost cautious look on her face softened completely when she gave him a tender smile. She reached out and brushed his tangled curls out of his face. He gathered her up, and they kissed lazily, until Larra was draped over him and he had an arm clamped heavily over her waist, keeping her there, the feel of her tiny kisses on his chest making him smile sleepily even as his eyes grew so heavy he couldn’t keep them open. He was only vaguely aware of Larra tugging up the linens and quilts to drape them heavily over them and the tickle of furs against his bare arms. He only cared to have her weight on top of him, her scent all around him. She tucked her head into the crook of his neck and he felt her soft sigh against his skin as he nuzzled her hair, cuddling close, exhausted but elated.


Sleep drifted from him slowly, a delicate nip of chill teasing his cheek. Someone murmured softly to themselves, and he squirmed and stretched under the heavy quilts, sated and content, drifting peacefully in that place between sleep and awake, where dreams were tangible and the real world was softer and more hopeful. He frowned as sparse silver light played with the shadows cast by a small fire crackling merrily in the hearth. A soft sigh close by and he peeked through his eyelashes, gazing blearily past linens, embroidered patchwork quilts, silver furs and a tangle of yarn to the tail of a long, thick braid, curling riotously below the neat suede cord binding it.

He reached out, touching the springy corkscrew curls, and closed his fist around the end of the thick braid, following it with his eyes. The sight of Larra with her hair unpinned was special; he sighed and rolled over, watching her. Her hair was still drawn away from her face by two thick, raised braids, meeting at the nape where they became one thick, multi-stranded braid plaited and twisted together, and it fell heavily over one shoulder, coiling by her hip. He had never seen her with her hair unbound; it was always neatly braided away from her face. He adored her face but yearned to see her with her hair free and curling.

Gendry smiled softly to himself, rubbing his thumb over the coils of her braid, and hummed contentedly. “I half-expected you’d be gone. It’s not like you to laze about in bed ‘til the late hours.”

Larra glanced down at him, her hands busy. She smiled softly and leaned down to give him a tender kiss. “I’ve only just woken.”

“You’re lying,” he accused knowingly.

“I didn’t wish to wake you,” Larra murmured. No, that wasn’t it. She could slip out of this chamber without waking him.

“You never have,” he said softly. It wouldn’t have been the first time he’d woken to an empty bed. Larra was incapable of sitting still. He wondered for the hundredth time whether Larra actually required sleep. He admired how hard she worked but it had made for an uncomfortable morning, finding himself alone in her chamber, in her bed.

“I didn’t wish to leave you,” Larra admitted, blushing delicately, and Gendry smiled up at her. He reached up and caressed her cheek.

“M’lady, I think you’ve taken a fancy to me,” he said softly, and Larra gave him a sidelong look. He chuckled richly, grinning, and sat up, tugging the blankets up and resting against the pillows, leaning closer to her.

“I don’t know what gave it away,” she said, leaning down to give him a kiss, and he caressed her face, deepening the kiss lazily, savouring the taste of her. He stroked his thumb against her cheek when they parted. She gave him a soft look and he sighed, gazing into her eyes. He had taken a fancy to her, too.

She had left the bed without him noticing, he realised. Firstly, she was dressed in one of her thick woollen dresses – this one dark charcoal grey and embroidered at her wrists and shoulders with shimmering black winter roses, some of them intricately outlined, some of them cut from black velvet stitched onto the wool – and he was oddly charmed to see her stocking-clad toes wriggling under the furs. Fully dressed, but no boots. This was Larra at her most relaxed. And even then, her sword lay within arm’s reach, leaning against the bedside cabinet. And he watched her fingers working; yarn tucked around her finger, a carved wooden hook looping in and out without her even watching. All about her feet, he saw strips of vibrant fabric – silk, he thought, the colour of precious gemstones – and knitting. Not knitting – crochet: Neva adored learning from Larra.

“What are you making?” he asked quietly, leaning his cheek against her arm.

“Ear-warmers,” she replied. She picked up one of the lengths of silk fabric and draped it over her head so that it covered her ears. Then she lowered it and showed him the other side: the richly-embroidered silk gave way to crocheted yarn that looked dreamily soft. “Muskox wool for warmth and silk for beauty.”

He peered closer, always appreciative of exquisite craftsmanship, whether it was tailoring, painting, armoury or embroidery. The embroidery on the strips of silk was staggeringly beautiful, intricate and lifelike, shimmering with tiny beads and metallic threads.

“You never wear such things,” he noted. She wore her furs the same way the Free Folk did – with the fur turned in for warmth. She braided her hair and pinned it over her ears if she needed to – she hadn’t had access, he realised, to muskox wool and silk.

“They’re for the girls,” she said softly, and lifted each embroidered headband in turn as she said, “Peacock feathers and clematis for Narcisa; chrysanthemums and hummingbirds for Crisantha; for Delphine, luna moths and ferns.”

“The lioness for Calanthe,” he murmured thoughtfully, picking up a strip of glowing silk as red as rubies richly embroidered with golden lionesses.

“What else?” Larra smiled fondly. “Altheda gets the swan; violets for Rosamund; and sweet-as-honey Leona gets honeysuckle and honeybees. This one is for Neva.”

A strip of midnight blue silk delicately embroidered with shimmering silver starbursts. “Stars. Where’s the moon?”

“No moon; she’s too changeable. Neva is constant,” Larra said warmly. “She is as gentle and as radiant as starlight.” Gendry gazed at Larra. He knew she was a talented woman. He was always filled with pleasure and pride to know she saw him but that she understood Neva… She paid the girl just as much attention as she did the other, high-born girls.

“Did you sew all these?” he asked, marvelling at the beauty of the embroidery. Lifelike, minuscule hummingbirds, delicate violets that could have been plucked from the Riverlands, proud lionesses, honeybees he could practically hear humming as they drifted past him, twinkling stars in a midnight sky.

“No; Sansa helped, and some of the ladies,” Larra said, with a slightly rueful smile. He supposed she hadn’t had much time to perfect her stitches. “We’re still working on collars. They take ever so much time.”

“Collars?” he frowned. She raised her chin slightly, showing off the double standing collar she herself wore, the lower band of sleek black fur and the upper one of dark wool richly embroidered with grey direwolves, twisting silver roots, tiny snowflakes among shimmering winter-roses, heavy buds of silk dangling in places, twinkling with tiny beads and silvered thread. The long, embroidered cords were neatly pinned with a silver direwolf brooch set with obsidian eyes. He had only ever seen Larra and Lady Sansa wearing the collars.

“We don’t wear jewels in the North. Instead, we wear raised collars to show off our embroidery. They’re a symbol of status, but also provide warmth. Here in the North, we bind up our hair in braids and crowns to keep our heads warm but it doesn’t always work, so we must find other means to keep our ears and necks warm. We took something necessary and made it beautiful.”

“The details make them beautiful,” Gendry said softly, examining the beautiful thing Larra had made for Neva. “Time and care goes into them, and you can see it.”

“Just as with everything you make in the forge…” Larra kept working, frowning slightly, and he glanced up at her.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, as she sighed and untangled something.

“My – my fingers work too quickly. There’s too much friction between the hook and the yarn and it snags,” she grumbled. He watched her work, and when she grumbled a second time he took her crochet hook from her, examining it closely – not daring to drop the loop from it lest her work unravel. It was a simple tool but he knew how much Larra was capable of creating from it: he was buried beneath the hours of her labour, the beautifully stitched panels of a heavy muskox blanket, every one of them a unique pattern inspired by a Northern wildflower. After a little while watching him examine the crochet hook, thoughtful and inspired, Larra said, “Gendry…how ambitious are you?”

“Fairly, I suppose,” Gendry said, glancing up at her. “In the armoury, at least. I want to create the best.” He itched to create armour, all his time now devoted to simple obsidian weapons. Necessary, but not challenging. And he enjoyed the challenge.

“I…had a thought,” she said cautiously, and Gendry gazed at her patiently. “I don’t even know if it’s feasible. But if it’s even only remotely possible, it would be worth it to try.”

“What?” he asked, curious.

“Your, um…your blood. You are ashamed that it may have been used to murder, to destroy,” she said, and Gendry remembered their conversations, his years of shame. He knew she didn’t believe it; he was working on convincing himself. It helped to hear her remind him that it was not his fault that Robb Stark’s family had been butchered. “But what if it has the power to create something?”

He sat up a little straighter, frowning. “What do you mean?”

“What do you know about Robert Baratheon?” Larra asked, and Gendry blinked, startled by the mention of the man. “His family, I mean – the Baratheons of Storms End?”

“Not much,” Gendry shrugged nonchalantly. He knew Robert’s brother Stannis would willingly have murdered him. “Orys Baratheon was the Conqueror’s half-brother, some say. He married the last Storm King’s daughter. I know that Robert was good at killing. He was a decent king – we had peace, at least. Though that was probably because his Hand worked himself to death ruling for Robert.”

“Robert’s grandmother was Princess Rhaelle – the daughter of Aegon the Unlikely,” Larra said, and Gendry’s eyebrows rose, staring at her.

Gendry blinked, then frowned. “Robert was a Targaryen?”

“Through his grandmother, yes,” Larra nodded. “Through her, you have the blood of Valyria flowing through your veins.”

Gendry was silent for a while. Larra could always see him thinking. He had a clever and cunning mind, and she always knew he was deep in thought when he frowned. “He and Prince Rhaegar were related?”

“Second-cousins, I believe. Robert’s grandmother and Rhaegar’s grandfather were siblings,” Larra sighed. She shook her head delicately. The tiny rosebuds on her raised collar swayed and glinted in the firelight. “It’s why they gave Robert the crown; he had claim to the Iron Throne through Rhaelle.”

“Robert killed his own cousin,” Gendry realised, appalled. He had never known that before. “He was a kinslayer. For what?”

“Because Rhaegar was the better man, and Lyanna Stark knew it. She chose the better man – and Robert could never forgive them for the wound to his pride,” Larra murmured miserably.

“I thought Rhaegar kidnapped Lyanna Stark?”

For a long moment, Larra did not reply. Then she sighed heavily, and her gaze was strangely grief-stricken as she winced, “Until the direwolf learns to write, history will favour the hunter. Robert won the war; no-one was going to praise the Last Dragon within earshot of him, or claim the wrong man lost his life at the Trident… It doesn’t matter. They’re both gone now. And if Rhaegar had lived, you would not have been born.” She gave him a smile then that made him feel as if all that bloodshed had been worth it, that he was a worthy trade for the Last Dragon’s life.

“The gods struck a poor bargain at the Trident when they gave Robert the strength to deal Rhaegar that death-blow,” he said, because that same feeling did not linger long.

“I don’t think so. Look where we are. If things had gone differently, none of us would be here,” Larra said, her tone light, fair, thoughtful. “The Night King would be marching to war and we would be utterly ignorant of it. Things are as they were always meant to be. That is comforting.” She gave him a gentle, coaxing smile.

“What were you going to ask me?” he prompted. “You asked how ambitious I am… What do you think my blood has the power to do?”

“You have the blood of Old Valyria. The blood of dragonlords – magic,” Larra said thoughtfully, glancing at the headbands she was stitching. She raised her eyes to his, vivid violet and intense in the firelight, intense with her enthusiasm and passion. “With your blood and your skill, I wonder whether you could possibly forge Valyrian steel.”

Gendry watched her for a long moment, frowning and thinking it over. “Tobho Mott taught me the theory of reforging old Valyrian steel into something new…but the method to create Valyrian steel was lost in the Doom.”

“Not lost – forgotten,” Larra said, her tone bright, almost breathless, her eyes sparkling with delight. “But there is one who could remember. And if we could learn the method…isn’t it worth it, to try and forge fresh Valyrian steel?”

“To wield against White Walkers?”

“To be the first to create Valyrian steel since the Doom,” Larra said breathlessly. “Valyria burned to ash but from the ashes a fire can be woken…”

Gendry gazed at her. To forge fresh Valyrian steel? To be the only person in the world to have attempted it – or mastered the lost art? His eyes slid past Larra, to the sword resting beside the bed. “Pass me your sword.”

Larra smiled and handed him Dark Sister. As she did a loose running-stitch to pin the embroidered silk to strips of thick wool as a lining, in preparation for stitching the crochet to the other side, she watched Gendry out of the corner of her eye. He examined the elegant sword for a long time, watching how the blade seemed to drink in the firelight, making it dance and writhe like liquid shadows. It was enthralling to watch him think, assessing the sword, turning it over in his mind. His size and his birth would always make people underestimate him, his shrewdness and cunning, his focus and skill. But Larra saw it and respected it – admired him for it. She adored how clever he was. This was Gendry the armourer, a master despite his youth – because of his passion.

That passion would be what determined their success, Larra knew instinctively.

To create Valyrian steel, to be the only one able to do so? What master armourer hadn’t wished to be that man? But did she mean…she had mentioned her brother Bran and his visions, his dreams. Did she mean he was the one who could remember? Could he help them learn the secrets to creating Valyrian steel?

When he finally passed Dark Sister back, Larra glanced at him and said, “It’s high time you trained with the weapons you’ve made.”

“I prefer my hammer,” he shrugged. Truth be told, he wondered whether he could learn – whether he wasn’t too old to start to learn.

“Take it from someone who knows; you need to know how to use whichever weapon you can lay your hands on,” Larra said grimly. “Even if it’s a meat-hook. Come…enough lazing about in my bed.”

“We could laze together,” Gendry suggested, the cunning in his eyes taking on a different feel, playful and suggestive.

“Come on,” Larra coaxed, grinning. “Off to the forge with you.”

“Will you walk with me?” he asked quietly.

“I can’t,” Larra groaned, her shoulders slumping. “I’m due with the maesters; Maester Atten wishes to discuss Narcisa. Then Sansa insists I show my face in the hall with the ladies.”

“Hence your finery,” Gendry noted, watching her as she unfolded from the bed, smoothing her skirts and tucking her heavy braid over her shoulder. It fell down her back, swaying heavily to her bottom, and for a moment Gendry thought it looked like a wolf’s tail. He glanced at the diamond-paned window, where relentless silver light speared through the iced glass. “It looks like a fine day.”

“I know,” Larra said gloomily. Her eyes sparkled, however, when he shoved back the blankets and climbed out of bed, naked and unabashed before her. She had already enjoyed every inch of him; there was no use for false modesty now. And he got a thrill when she bit her lip longingly as her gaze swept over him; he could practically feel her gaze caressing his skin, and shuddered, reaching for his smallclothes – all his clothing had been neatly folded on the trunk at the foot of the bed.

“Make sure you get outside,” he said, and smiled softly as Larra wandered over to do up the little buttons on his tunic. It was such a simple thing, but it felt intimate, the way she helped him dress for the day. “You’re impossible when you’ve been penned in too long.”

“Impossible, am I?” Larra repeated, raising her eyebrows.

“Less so, now that I know how to manage you,” he rumbled softly in her ear, leaning in to give her a sweet kiss, and Larra was smiling when he leaned away.

“Well, I may need managing later…” She gazed up at him and said earnestly, “Think about what I said. There’s no point attempting it if your heart’s not in it; I want you to think about it.”

“I won’t be able to think of anything else,” he admitted. She had filled his head with possibility.

With a sly look, she rose to his tiptoes to kiss his cheek and suck on his earlobe, making him groan, a shudder rippling through him. “Are you sure?”

“Now that was mean,” he growled softly, and Larra’s eyes glinted wickedly as she paused at the door, her long thick braid swaying heavily as she glanced over her shoulder.

“Just wait.”

He growled and darted after her – Larra laughed and dashed off. He chased her into the corridor and caught her, gathering her up into his arms, and stole several deep kisses before she leaned away, breathless and bright-eyed, a promise in her smile as she strode away, her long braid swaying behind her.


Soft purring greeted her and she smiled softly, pushing the door gently shut behind her. The firelight crackled softly and shed golden light over the bed, where Gendry lay, his chin touching his chest, his dark curls tumbling into his eyes, and her painted cards tumbled in his lap. He looked relaxed but faint lines of exhaustion radiated from his eyes. She felt how tired he was just by looking at him yet felt no guilt at keeping him awake in the hour of the wolf. Not when her body was still sensitive with the feel of his fingers and his tongue adoring her.

She crept through the chamber, tidying the cards away, pulling off her boots and dress, and climbed into bed beside him, tenderly tucking the quilts and blankets over him. Seeing him so relaxed, she settled in beside him, tucked against him and dozed, rich sleep coaxing at her, lulling and heavy and decadent.

A gentle kiss tickling her lips woke her, and her eyelashes fluttered as she stirred. She gave Gendry a lazy smile, stretching luxuriously against him, and sighed contentedly.

“I kept you waiting,” she murmured, and he leaned in to kiss her. He caressed her face and gazed down at her, then leaned in to kiss her brow, her eyelashes, the tip of her nose and finally her lips, his hands smoothing over her body, stroking and cupping gently. She nuzzled her nose against his and sighed into a kiss that was slow and deep and built into something fierce and necessary, and they moaned and grunted softly as they unknotted laces and twisted buttons free, gasping as they parted ever so briefly to pull her chemises over her head, tugging at his tunics and shoving his breeches over his thighs so she could wrap her hand lovingly around his cock, stroking and gently tugging until he grunted, scowling, and tugged her hand away for fear he’d spend on her belly. He grinned wickedly, clasping her wrists together with one hand, bending his head to kiss and suckle her breasts, teasing her nipples with his teeth, flicking with his tongue, sucking voraciously, and his free hand went between them as she writhed.

His breath gusted out as he found her wet, and she whimpered softly as he stroked her, delicately at first, then gave her nipple one last, lingering suck and a nip that made her shudder and writhe, kissing his way down her navel, licking and kissing her thighs before he set in ravenously. All he had thought about all day was the taste of her, her heat and the silky softness of her, how responsive her body was to his touch, how he ached to explore and adore her again. He took her with his mouth, his kiss relentless, until her thighs shook and she moaned and writhed and tugged on his wrist, and he smiled wickedly up at her, delicately teasing her with his fingertips before rising up over her, wiping his mouth on his shoulder before leaning over her to catch her in a kiss as he thrust his fingers inside her. Her hips rolled sensuously to meet his hand, her heels digging into the mattress, and he groaned as he watched her move beneath him. Propped over her on one taut arm, he growled softly and gave her a deep, possessive kiss, working his wrist to meet her, his thumb delicately caressing her where she needed him, and marvelled at the way she moved beneath him, her hips rolling sensuously and powerfully to meet him, her hand clamped like a steel band around his wrist as he thrust inside her slick heat, and she mewled softly, offering her breast to him with her free hand, her fingers shaking. He growled softly and dipped his head, feeling the pulsing rush of need as he wrapped his lips around her nipple, sucking and nipping and licking until she was shuddering and mewling with abandon. He worshiped that sound, his body shuddering, his cock throbbing with the need to spill his seed – he raised his head, withdrew his hand, and Larra cried out, her entire body shuddering, on the edge, her eyes wide as she gazed up at him, bewildered.

He gave her a soft, tender kiss and she cradled his face in her shaking hands, letting out a delicate gasp as he lowered himself between her thighs. His weight settled deliciously between her thighs and she gasped and moaned, rolling her hips gently, as he propped himself over her on arms rippling with muscles turned to bronze by the firelight, sheened with sweat and flickering with strain. She leaned up, licking a droplet of sweat from his chest, turning her face to nip his bicep and she cried out, seizing his face to pull him in for a frantic kiss as he rocked his hips between her thighs, the tip of his cock – mouth-wateringly thick, blistering hot and relentless – sliding deliciously against the tender bud between her legs. Again and again, he rocked his hips, slowly and relentlessly, the tip of his cock sliding against her slick heat, against her bud, stroking, until she was shaking with need, her trembling thighs wet from him – for him – and she stroked her hands up and down his chest, gasping softly as he lowered himself over her, kissing her fiercely, sucking on her neck where she liked it best, burying his head in her neck as he moved his hips with agonising purpose, and she whimpered, digging in her heels, then lifting her knees to coax him closer, lightly scratching her fingernails against his waist as he shuddered and nipped at her collarbone, tenderly licking her scar there. He rocked over her, his cock stroking her, his chest-hair tickling her throbbing nipples, until her entire body shuddered, a flush spreading from her cheeks to her chest as she panted, her eyelashes fluttering, her thighs falling limp, still trembling as aftershocks rippled through her. She whimpered softly, hips writhing, her lip trembling as she panted and gasped and moaned at the ache throbbing with painful emptiness between her thighs.

Breathless, Gendry panted, “Larra.” He caressed her face and kissed her fiercely, and her breath caught at the gleam in those sapphire eyes as he gazed down at her. He rocked his hips and they both moaned loudly, his eyes widening as hers fluttered shut, writhing beneath him, desperate for that fierce, relentless heat prodding her belly.

“Gendry…?” she whispered, and he gazed back at her, his expression intense, almost as desperate as she felt. He nodded and she smiled, giving him an open-mouthed kiss as she reached between them. He moaned and she gasped as she caressed his length, and she kissed the side of his face, his jaw and his neck, his shoulder, as he adjusted his weight over her. She guided him with her hand on his hip, gently stroking him with the other, and manoeuvred him between her thighs, and they both cried out, Gendry dropping his head to her neck as her eyes widened, at the feel of the tip of his cock nudging insistently against her slick heat. Her entire body shuddering with need, aching with emptiness, she panted at the delicious pressure of his cock pressing teasingly against her. Gendry raised his head, his entire body shuddering, and gazed at her. He looked stunned; she gave him a breathless grin and cried out, “Now.”

She felt his muscles flexing, her hands clasped over his backside, and cried out as he entered her in one fierce, relentless thrust. Burning pain seared through her, an exquisite pain of absolute fullness – he was so large, so thick, her thighs quivered and she gasped at the fullness of his heat and relentless strength deep inside her. It had been so long, and he was so thick and stretched her deliciously, pleasure bordering on pain, she could feel everything, aware of her own body in a way she never had been before, how he was able to glide over a secret part of her only she knew about, thought only she could find.

Larra felt his body, thrumming with tension, and cracked her eyes open to find his body hulking around hers, his eyes on her face, looking…almost frightened. She panted, her face splitting into a smile, and reached up to grip his cheeks and pull him in for a kiss.

“You’re not hurt?” he whispered shakily, still looking alarmed. She shook her head wildly.

“In the most delicious way,” she whispered in his ear, and he gave a shocked grunt, his eyes wide. She nuzzled his nose and stole a kiss. Shivering, her voice shook as she said, “Roll your hips, as you did before, and I shall meet you…”

She moaned loudly, throwing her head back, whimpering as he withdrew slowly, her emptiness agonising after knowing the fullness of him inside her; she drew up her thighs and dropped her knees to the mattress to give him more access, crying out in exquisite anguish as he thrust inside her, slow and deep. Her fingernails bit into his hips as she guided him, her hips rolling to meet his, and he swallowed his soft, stunned grunts and gasps with tiny, delicate kisses. Her toes curled as he thrust inside her, and she panted, writhing, needing more of him.

“I n-need more,” she whimpered, and he nodded, his expression fierce, focused, as he propped himself up over her on taut arms, biting his lip as he rolled his hips, slowly withdrawing, and she cried out, startled and delighted, when he slammed his hips, entering her in a powerful, unforgiving thrust, burying himself deep inside her. A slow rock of his hips as he pulled out, and she whimpered, leaning up to lick and bite his chest, his nipples, and he grunted, thrusting deeper, harder, and she clutched at his chest, his waist, her fingernails digging in as she shook, his cock filling her, stroking and relentless, teasing that secret spot deep inside her, until molten flames replaced the blood rushing through her body and stars burst under her skin. Rapture replaced everything that she was.

He watched her climax, awed, and gentled his thrusts as she smiled and writhed beneath him, her body responding so sweetly, yielding and coaxing. Her face flushed, her eyes glittered when her lashes finally parted, and she panted breathlessly, her face radiating pure joy. His body responded; he gasped as pleasure ripped through him, sparkling behind his eyes and skittering across his skin, making his thighs shake. He couldn’t stop thrusting, didn’t want to, knew he would spend his entire life aching to fill and enflame her the way he had just now. He would spend his life aching to bring her to such joy again and again.

She sighed and lazily wrapped her arms around his neck, drawing him closer, and he thrust deep inside her, making her chuckle almost drunkenly, licking her lips as if savouring the feel of him so deep inside her. He never knew it could be like this. He hissed as his balls ached, tightening, and she drew him in for a deep kiss, her hand caressing down his back as he thrust, his spine starting to tingle as it did when he was close, and he gasped, giving one last powerful thrust, grunting in anguish as he came deep inside her. She sighed, the sound almost content, and he shuddered as her muscles clamped around him, seeming to milk him of every drop he had to give her.

He didn’t mean to; he collapsed on top of her, dazed. Dimly, he became aware that she was kissing him. His neck, his shoulder; she stroked his hair and her clever fingers trailed delicately across his shoulders, his back, stroking his arms and his waist, even his backside. Her touch soothed him, the same way his kisses always gentled her after fuelling the fire that made her burn. Slowly, gently, she brought him back, with her gentle touches and her sweet kisses. When he raised his head and stared down at her in awe, she gazed back at him, her smile rich and warmer than he had ever seen. She leaned up to kiss the dimple in his chin, the tip of his nose, then his lips, and she caressed her fingertips over his chest, tangled in his chest-hair, her thumb tenderly circling a nipple as she gave him tiny kisses along his jaw and neck, then nuzzled his nose and drew him in for a deep, tender kiss.

The delicate whimper of her disappointment as he withdrew from her made him smile against her lips. As he rolled to his back, he gathered her up in his arms, wrapping her around him. As she had for him, he stroked his fingers down her back, over her arms, her hips and thighs, her backside, gentling her. She sighed softly, resting her head against his shoulder, her fingertips sifting through his chest-hair, and tenderly kissed his shoulder and chest.

He had seen the playful, mischievous wolf, and the fierce warrioress. He adored the tender she-wolf. He had thought so before, but now he knew he was witnessing a she-wolf praising her mate for worshipping her as thoroughly as she deserved.

Larra shivered, missing the heat of him above her as his weight settled over her – she loved the weight of him pressing against her, had never felt…never felt safer than when he dominated her utterly with his enormous, gentle body. She reached for the furs, draping them over their legs, and sighed as she curled against him. He wrapped an arm around her shoulders, hugging her close, and she bit down a moan as he splayed his other hand on her thigh draped over him, his thumb tenderly stroking her hip. She felt raw, aching deliciously, throbbing with the burn of his lovemaking, and had never been worshipped so fiercely before in her life.

Utterly boneless, she found herself falling into a doze, curled against his enormous chest, his chest hair tickling her skin, his hands spreading warmth as he stroked her skin, and she was vaguely aware that he was playing absently with the curling end of her braid. His heartbeat thundered against her ear, fierce and strong, and she writhed against him, sated, content and safe. She couldn’t remember the last time she had felt this way, this safe, felt treasured and loved and protected.

She felt his delicate kisses against her hair and sighed, propping her chin on his chest and gazing up at him through her lashes.

“I feel absolutely wonderful,” she murmured sleepily, and felt the soft chuckle reverberate through his enormous chest. She also felt something else, and sleep was suddenly chased away, excitement sparkling through her body, her breath catching in her throat, grinning as Gendry blushed at her, his new erection straining impressively against her thigh. She laughed delightedly, aware that her voice was slightly hoarse. She cooed, “A bull indeed.”

He chuffed out a breath and groaned, wincing as she glanced down, reaching for his cock, jutting fiercely toward her. She caught his eye and his cheeks flushed, but he reached out and cradled her face, giving her the tiniest, most tender kisses, shuddering as her breasts – nipples hardening at just the sight of him ready for her – brushed against his chest, heavy and aching for his touch. It was no effort at all to shift her hips and straddle his lap, and she felt his deep pants teasing against her bare skin as she straightened up. He growled softly, splaying his hands wide on her thighs, and she sighed, smiling adoringly, as his thumb went first to stroke her between her thighs. She mewled delicately as he stroked and rocked her hips subtly, then tangled her fingers in his curling hair, cupping his head to give him slow, deep kisses. She untangled one hand, to cup her breast, and offered it to him; he groaned and set in, kissing and suckling, tugging and teasing her nipple, flicking it with his tongue, nipping with his teeth, sucking until she throbbed between her thighs, and she reached between them, cupping and massaging his balls.

“Larra!” he gritted out.

“Yes, dear?” she panted, and, bracing her arms around his shoulders, she positioned herself over him. He laughed breathlessly, his hands tight on her thighs, and she nodded, giving him an open-mouthed kiss. She rolled her hips downwards and cried out as he thrust his hips up to meet her, his hands shoving her thighs down at the same moment, filling her with one brutal thrust. She gasped and shivered with delight at the fullness throbbing deep inside her again, teasing at the rawness from their first time. He drew her in for a deep kiss, groaning and settling back into the pillows, his fingers trembling on her hips as she whipped her hips back and forth, slowly at first, groaning and aching as she savoured the exquisite pain of being filled and stretched by him, then faster. Her face turned fierce, a red blushing flushing her body as she whipped her hips back and forth, moaning sharply each time she took him deeper, the thrusts of her hips fierce, whimpering as she tried to spread her thighs wider, needing more of him, head thrown back and shuddering with pleasure as he suckled and nipped her breasts.

As he raised his face to kiss her neck, and that tender spot where her shoulder joined her throat, the spot that made her shiver, he saw the tension in her face, the quiver of her lip, heard the whimper of need – and in one swift movement, had her on her back. Her eyes burst open, and she whimpered, “Yes,” frantically kissing his chest and throat as he shoved her thighs wider, propping himself above her on taut arms, and gave her what she needed – fierce, unforgiving thrusts. She wrapped her hands over his muscles, panting as she met every thrust of his hips, her fingernails digging into his skin, and her hands travelled down, over his arms, his chest, digging her fingernails down his back as he sucked and nipped her neck, her breasts, and grabbed his backside, laughing breathlessly at the feel of his muscles flexing beneath her palms, the sweet sting of his teeth as he worshipped her breasts, kissing and sucking them until they throbbed, the power of his thrusts, his fierce fullness inside her bordering on pain, pushing her towards the greatest ecstasy she had ever known.

It threatened to consume her, and as his blue eyes glowed fiercely above her, she let it. He kept thrusting inside her, even as she panted and writhed with pleasure, her entire body tensing. He felt her tighten around him, fierce and demanding, and he cried out, shocked by the ferocity of her orgasm as she writhed and her muscles clamped down on him, and he was powerless to yield everything to her. A noise halfway between a groan of ecstasy and a gasp of shock escaped him as he finished inside her, relief and pleasure sparking embers all over his body, and he shuddered, blinking dazedly. Larra’s eyelashes flickered, guarding the amethyst embers glowing like molten obsidian, glittering in the firelight. She raised a shaking hand, drawing him to her for a tender, savouring kiss.

He pulled out of her gently and was surprised by the shiver of pride that swept over him as she made a tiny whimper as if of loss. He kissed her neck tenderly.

“You’re pouting,” he panted, glancing at her swollen lips, and she gave him a look from under her eyelashes. Indeed, it was a pout. He grinned, confidence filling his veins with fire. He nuzzled her nose playfully and grinned, sucking on her lower-lip. He promised her, “You shall have it back soon enough.”

“Well, then…” Larra purred, and stretched luxuriously against him, the movement utterly sensuous and suggestive. Her cheeks were flushed pink, her eyes were brighter than he had ever seen them and her lips were plump from kisses. “I feel absolutely delicious.”

He shivered, and she noticed, her laugh soft and sultry, and he nuzzled her neck, tucking her close, drifting off to sleep surrounded by the feel and warmth and scent of her.

Chapter 39: Ash and Memory

Notes:

I’m on a roll at the moment. It was about four months since I’d last updated, due to my teaching schedule etc. but I got over the block where I knew where I wanted to get Larra but didn’t know how to get her there! So here we are. Enjoy!

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

39

Ash and Memory


She winced as her skull pounded. Pressure squeezed her temples and she flinched at the raised voices that scraped like nails across slate, shooting spears of lightning through her head. The pounding in her head told her they had been at it too long. She had not been outside all day, had not felt the breeze caressing her face or filled her lungs with sharp cold air. The heat of the chamber, packed with so many bodies, so many candles lit and the fire roaring in the hearth to keep them all comfortable – their Southern guests unused to the biting cold of true winter, clutching at steaming cups of mulled wine and mead or herb tea to keep the chill from their fingers – had her head thundering with pain, stifled and hot and uncomfortable.

Gendry watched her carefully, concern in his dark blue eyes. She stood close beside him, and if anyone noted the hand he rested heavily on her small waist, no-one mentioned it. They never mentioned any hint of intimacy shared between Gendry and Larra, though she knew they had become less and less bothered about veiling their feelings toward each other, the intimate nature of their relationship – not just being lovers, but their partnership. They spent many hours together, and it had been noted even if no-one said anything.

He handed her a cup filled with ice-water from a pitcher, one of many scattered across the long table, and she sipped slowly, willing the thudding in her head to cease.

She knew she was scowling, impatient and uncomfortable, and glanced around the hall. Night’s Watchmen, Northern lords, Free Folk, Knights of the Vale had all gathered, once again, to discuss plans, as they did every other week. Not just to update each other on any progresses being made – the glasshouses had been suitably fortified against siege and battle – but to discuss any new strategies they could implement for the defence of the castle. The more time went on and they were not under attack, the more time they had to think of other options. And options were the key, Larra knew. The more options they had, the less likely it was that everything went to shit when Winterfell was laid siege to by the Night King’s army. No matter what happened, they would have a plan to handle it. To adjust. Perhaps, to survive.

They had been discussing siege weapons for the last three hours.

Some of the Southern lords championed scorpions, insisting the armourers, smiths and engineers should build them in preparation. Lord Royce turned to glance at Larra, eager to hear her opinion on the matter – she being one of the few present to have ever witnessed the White Walkers or the armies of the dead.

“Scorpions are useful for more than shooting dragons out of the sky,” she sighed, after taking a long drink from her cup. “The Others command giants and mammoths. Should they breach the wall, any one of them could decimate our forces in moments.”

“Rhaegal burned a good few of them,” Gendry muttered.

“Did he?”

“After I pulled Jon out of the water, Rhaegal picked us up and circled over the Night King’s army,” Gendry said, and she felt his slight shudder. “There were no spears being hurled at us; the army was just waiting. Rhaegal burned a few good holes in the Night King’s army.”

“But not enough.”

“No, not nearly enough,” Gendry agreed, sighing heavily as he folded his arms over his chest, his sapphire eyes shrewdly scanning the model of Winterfell – this one far larger and even more detailed than the one in the solar – outfitted with siege weapons for one of any potential battle strategies.

“There should be scorpions all the way around the curtain-wall,” one of the Knights of the Vale insisted. “Do we not have steel enough to make them?”

“Getting hold of the steel’s not the problem; we’ve plenty,” Gendry shrugged, frowning softly at the accusation in the Knight’s expression as he scowled at Lady Sansa. “It’s the cold. And the storms. We could build dozens of scorpions and station them all the way around the castle, but they’re so big, they’d have to be assembled in place and remain there. A few good storms like we’ve had, they’d be dashed to pieces. The steel would become too brittle; if someone tried to use them, they’d more likely kill themselves trying to loose a bolt.”

“What do you do at the Wall?” Sansa asked gently, peering at Dolorous Edd, but it was the great one-armed blacksmith Donal Noye who spoke up.

“We had mounted, small-scale ballistae and scorpions, but they were only outfitted with skeins during an attack – or, as the lad said, they’d freeze and snap and kill whoever was loading them,” Noye said, nodding at Gendry.

“What about that great thing you cut us off the wall with?” grunted Tormund Giantsbane.

“The scythe? You’d need speed and power to make it work – and enough men to crank it back into place for another drop,” Donal Noye said, shaking his head. “For the number of wights you’d kill, it’s not worth the effort to make it.”

Larra sighed and emptied her cup, reaching to refill it. The ring-mail she wore tinkled prettily with the movement, and she frowned, slowly lowering her cup. “What about obsidian?” she asked. She glanced from Donal Noye to Gendry. “It doesn’t become brittle in the cold, the way steel does. It can last for millennia.”

“If you forge it correctly,” Gendry said.

“You can.”

“I can – but that’s a lot of obsidian,” Gendry said fairly. “Obsidian we need for other weapons – even binding obsidian to existing steel rather than forging weapons entirely of dragonglass.”

“It is still better to have one working scorpion than none at all,” Larra said, and the others murmured. “But it must be kept protected. Not just from storms but from the very creatures we hope to kill with it. We keep banking on the Night King’s army having no projectiles – can a giant hurl the weight of a mammoth?” She glanced at Tormund and the Magnar of the Thenns, who muttered to each other. Tormund spoke for them.

“A live one? No more than I could a bull,” he grunted, leaning back against the edge of a table, arms folded idly across his chest, his hair wild, his furs wilder still. The Knights of the Vale still did not know what to do with him; the Northmen had accepted him as one of the hardest men they had ever met, a man who could outdrink them, lusted after women yet was gentle and fussed over children and diligent when training them. “The giants used mammoths as mounts. But one that has been dead for months, years…”

“Even a fraction of a mammoth’s weight is enough to demolish buildings with enough power behind it,” Larra said.

“You’re thinking overly much about this,” Lord Royce warned, eyeing her shrewdly.

“Should I not?” Larra replied gently.

“I’m glad someone is,” Lord Royce said, with a respectful nod, a twinkle in his eye. Larra rather thought he liked her, at least a little.

“What about the Broken Tower?” Sansa mused, her gaze on the model of Winterfell before them. “The builders have not yet reached the uppermost level. We aimed to reconfigure the tower for Bran’s personal use – “

“That can wait,” Larra interrupted grimly. “He can have use of the tower after we’ve survived the war. We could construct the topmost chamber to give at least one hundred and eighty degrees of visibility.”

“Degrees?” Tormund grunted, looking lost.

“Half a circle,” Larra said, indicating what she meant on the model of Winterfell, drawing a line with her finger from one side of the Broken Tower to the other. She glanced up at Gendry. “Which is next to useless if the scorpion is static.”

“Static?”

“Has no movement,” Larra murmured, frowning, as Gendry leaned his closed fists against the table, hulking over it as he frowned deeply at the model, assessing.

“Cersei’s engineers have been experimenting with a new design of scorpion.” Bran’s voice was softer than the crackle of the fire beside him, into which he gazed thoughtfully. They all turned to stare at him; most had forgotten he was in the room with them. He rarely spoke. “It is fully pivotal, with a seat and a viewfinder for the soldier firing the bolts.”

“Well, I’m sure Cersei Lannister will put it to good use,” Sansa said waspishly, with an impatient sigh.

“If you could pass me a pencil, so shall we,” Bran said patiently, with a tiny smile in his dark eyes. Larra found a pencil and a piece of paper, handing both to Bran after he had wheeled his chair around to the table. He beckoned Gendry and Donal Noye to him and Larra watched, disconcerted, as he started to sketch. Peering over his shoulder, she saw Bran’s sketching technique, and her heart dropped to her stomach as she realised the annotations marking the sketch were written in an elegant hand – handwriting Bran had never had chance to master in the schoolroom before they had fled Winterfell.

Bran’s voice was soft and low, explaining to Gendry and Donal Noye how the new scorpion was fashioned, all its component parts and measurements. Larra watched Bran’s pale fingers, deftly moving the graphite across a scroll of paper as if he had done so a thousand times before; she listened to him explaining the finer details of the scorpion as if he was the most knowledgeable engineer of projectile weapons in the world. If Gendry or Donal Noye were startled by Bran’s knowledge, neither of them showed it. They listened attentively, and asked shrewd questions that made Bran’s eyes glitter.

“I think it time we take refreshment,” Sansa said lightly, smiling to the lords and Free Folk gathered. “We have made much progress in our preparations. I thank you for your time, my lords.”

The meeting disbanded, everyone departing to take a meal or return to their training, or, in Samwell’s case, return to the library to continue researching the White Walkers. With him went the maesters, including a new one, Maester Arys, a burly man with an enviable golden-brown beard swathing half his face and soft blue eyes that seemed to permanently twinkle. He had a rich voice and paid utmost attention, serious about his new duties within the walls of Winterfell, no matter how absurd or outlandish they seemed to him. He gave Larra and Sansa a courteous bow before following the other maesters out of the chamber, all of them muttering about necessary ratios of obsidian to steel to bind dragonglass to existing weapons of the armies predicted to join Daenerys Targaryen at Winterfell.

“Go, get some rest,” Larra told Sansa, as she shuddered, trying to suppress a yawn. “I know you were up well past the hour of the wolf.”

“As were you,” Sansa said, arching an eyebrow knowingly, but Larra ignored the subtle smirk winking playfully at the corner of her sister’s lips.

“Go,” she said gently, and Sansa sighed, rubbing her face, then nodded and rose to her feet, striding out of the chamber with one last lingering frown at the model of Winterfell. With each meeting, they adjusted the model to reflect new plans and strategies the other lords had thought up, so they could all consider the benefits and potential hazards of each.

“Larra, Gendry…come and sit with me a moment,” Bran said, and for a heartbeat Larra could have sworn Bran was ten years old again, his voice full of life, delight. His eyes glittered as Larra turned to him. Gendry shot Larra a curious look. Bran smiled at them, his eyes twinkling. “We’ve discussed obsidian.” He smiled at Larra. “You want to know about steel.”

Larra’s eyes narrowed, her lips parting; Gendry blushed delicately and cleared his throat as they both realised the same thing. Bran knew about their conversation, which meant… Bran smirked playfully. “Valyrian steel, yes? You wish to know if it’s possible to start forging it once more.”

“Yes.”

“For Gendry, of course it is!” Bran beamed, a child’s delight gleaming from his deep dark eyes, his excitement palpable. “He already has everything he needs.”

“Almost everything,” Larra corrected.

“Almost,” Bran conceded, his smile gentling. He gazed at Gendry with something close to pride. “Spells aside, you already have what you need to forge Valyrian steel. Patience, the utmost attention to detail, fierce nobility of action, passion and care. These things are what have always separated you from all the rest, Gendry. There is no-one in the world but you who could do this…” His gaze was deeply earnest, respectful and…and admiring, Larra thought. Bran gazed with fondness at Gendry. Bran sighed softly, his eyes twinkling, a hint of her little brother in his smile as he said, “When I was a boy, I yearned to be a Kingsguard, wielding a great Valyrian sword into battle to defend what is right and good. Do you remember, Larra?”

“I do,” Larra nodded, her voice very small. Her lips twitched miserably, her voice hoarse when she added, “You fashioned yourself Bran the Bright – for your wit, and the gleam of your sword.”

For a long moment, Bran was silent. Then he raised his long, sombre face and he looked almost a boy again. He looked the same way he had when Larra had told him about Father. Eyes shining with unshed tears, youthful and devastated – yet in that moment, Bran had become a man, mature, seeking wisdom, setting aside his own wants for the needs of others. “I shall live thousands of lives and yet none. I shall never leave this chair.” He sighed heavily, glancing from Gendry to Larra. “None of us shall live the lives we thought we would…” He stared at them long and hard, until Gendry frowned, growing concerned, and Larra shivered.

Bran blinked, his eyes twinkling once more. He asked breathlessly, almost giddily, “Shall we go?”

“Go where?”

“If you wish to learn, you must take lessons from the greatest armourer to ever live,” Bran beamed, fidgeting in his chair. He held out his hand to Gendry. “We must journey to Valyria.” He glanced at Larra, his eyes gleaming. “Shall you come with us, Larra? You always wished to see the city of a thousand years. Let it be an inspiration to you.”

Gendry gave Larra a bewildered look but gentled at the look on Larra’s face. She was not afraid or amused by what sounded like madness coming from her strange little brother. She sighed, downed the last of the ice-water from her cup, set it aside and drew up a stool beside Bran’s chair. Gendry did the same, frowning. Bran turned a gentle, encouraging smile on Gendry and offered his hand.

Larra took Bran’s hand and he smiled.

She blinked, and they were worlds away.

Her breath caught in her throat, staggering where she stood, breathless at the onslaught of incredible beauty and majesty overwhelming her senses. Lilting, exotic music quavered on the air, eerie and seductive; spices tickled her nose, enticing and foreign, spicy and sweet, a heady bouquet of floral perfume dancing with anise and cinnamon and sugar, mingling with the scent of saltwater and smoke rising in vapours from rivers of liquid fire oozing idly like ruby rivers amid great sprawling neighbourhoods of magnificent palaces and towers twisting and spiralling high into the air, precarious bridges hung with great orbs of blown glass arced high above, joining wide open balconies and rooftop gardens where people sprawled on cushioned chaises and sipped apricot wine, enjoying each other or converging in secrecy to enact plots, their silver-gold hair shining brightly in the sunlight, piled high with precious jewels, their bodies draped with sheer fabrics that revealed more than they hid. She was struck by the diversity of the Valyrians – every one among them had the silver-gold hair made famous in Westeros by the Targaryens, and she could see eyes of violet, lilac, icy-lavender, loveliest indigo and vivid amethyst – yet not all of them were pale-skinned. There were men and women with deep olive complexions like the Dornish; children with skin like midnight velvet splashed and played in rooftop fountains with little children with almond-shaped eyes and delicate ivory skin, and chandeliers of orchids trembled as, among them, a woman with gorgeous slanting eyes and full lips writhed in the arms of a golden-haired man with skin the colour of cinnamon.

Everywhere she looked, there were Valyrians. She heard their music, watched their children play, listened to the sound of their voices, and gazed on in awe as they loved and lusted and schemed as if their great empire would last an eternity, never knowing that this tremendous city, with its precarious sky-palaces and twisting towers, all interconnected by sinuous death-defying bridges perilously high in the air, would be consumed. The city spread as far as the eye could see, reaching for the clouds, for the sun and the stars above them, always reaching, always ambitious, striving, yearning for more, for better, spreading toward the Summer Sea. Great monuments of twisted black stone – of obsidian – pierced the air, forged by magic and by dragonfire into the monstrous form of dragons, a great avenue of them guarding the banks of the greatest of the rivers of molten fire, great tiered gardens descending to reach the rich, fertile black earth either side of the river, each tier of the gardens overflowing with giant trees, staggering lush greenery and flowers of unimaginable beauty. Sinuous bridges of twisted obsidian spread out as dainty as Sansa’s embroidery, connecting either side of the river, and halfway between were more balconies, urns of greenery and flowers, slaves waiting with downturned gazes and trays laden with refreshments, barely flinching as dragons swooped past. Tangles of tiny hatchlings screeched and cooed and snapped their jaws at each other as they flapped their delicate wings in sheltered hatcheries close to the lava-river, while great monsters soared idly high above the city, casting enormous shadows bathing them in eerie light refracted through colourful wings.

Her breath caught as a slender silver dragon banked and weaved through spindly towers, its movements liquid, elegant, and came to settle at the edge of a balcony, poised and patient, perfectly balanced, while its rider descended, taking a drink of chilled liqueur from a collared slave without a glance of acknowledgement. The dragon seemed to tumble backwards for a heartbeat before its great wings snapped open and expertly caught a breeze, rising swiftly, flapping its tremendous wings once before shooting higher, toward the billowing clouds gilded by a dying sun. The slave melted away, unnoticed, and the Valyrians continued their merrymaking.

This was Valyria in its golden hour. The scent of spices and perfume on the air, their lyrical voices raised in song, their buildings staggering in their beauty and architecture, their gardens mesmerising – to Larra, who had always been fond of flowers and growing things – self-assured in their strength, their power untested. It was magnificent.

It was flawed, too, but its splendour was undeniable.

High in the air dwelled the Valyrians, where they schemed and lusted, and a cluster of Valyrian children laughed and played and ran after a tangle of hatchlings, their eyes bright with delight as the tiny dragons gleamed in the dying sunlight, their vivid scales burning bright, streaking past as the children laid bets on which hatchling would win the race. Soaring past them, bold adolescents did acrobatic tricks on the backs of their dragons, showing off, waving at their friends as they passed, an exquisite beauty with cinnamon skin and pearls and golden chains woven through her shining silver-gold curls walking from the wing of one dragon across a second one’s as if she was strolling to her bed, her hips rolling sensuously, at least a hundred feet in the air, to climb into the lap of a lover.

This was the Valyria that Valyrians would have wanted the world to remember.

Down below, where the earth was black and fertile yet hot to the touch in places and pockets of vapour burst and burned alive those unfortunate enough to be near, collared slaves laboured in their thousands, ensuring the ease of the lives enjoyed by those far above.

In between – between the scalding earth and the precarious sky-gardens – were manses, guildhalls and palaces and covered markets, workshops, ateliers, theatres and religious sites, pillowhouses and schools, galleries and wine-sinks, each of them built solidly of melted obsidian twisted by magic and dragonfire with rows of high, arched windows open to the city’s great airways and great covered bridges teeming with life, with shops and gardens, with slave-markets and stables and inns. Greenery thrived here, though fewer flowers gave their colour; the high arches were draped with sheer curtains to ward off whatever sunlight not snatched away by the balconies high above, great orbs of coloured glass lit as the sun dipped, casting beautiful soft light across tiled mosaic floors. Dragonlords cavorting high above, slaves labouring far below, and between them, those Valyrians who were freeborn and yet worked for their living.

Larra ached to wander to a theatre, a terraced building raised specifically around a large stage just for the purpose of plays or musical concerts. Audiences rocked, clutching their bellies, laughing raucously, or wept and sniffled and wiped their eyes on delicate scraps of lace, music drifting coaxingly on a breeze that tasted of sulphur, salt and jasmine flowers, and she yearned to stand among the groundlings, treating herself to a pomegranate or some chilled honey-wine as she watched the actors. As Larra watched two lovers casually strolling through a garden groaning with flowers, Bran’s voice sounded softly, sorrowfully beside her:

“They held each other close, and turned their backs upon the end,

The hills that split asunder, and the black that ate the skies,

The flames that shot so high and hot that even dragons burned,

Would never be the final sights that fell upon their eyes.

The waves the sea-wind whipped and churned,

The city of a thousand years, and all that men had learned,

The Doom consumed them all alike, and neither of them turned.”

She let out a shuddering breath and broke her gaze, glancing at Brandon. It was all ash, now. Ash and memory. Sorrow gripped her: Bran smiled sadly. The knot loosened. She could feel sorrow for the Doom and all those who perished but they had been gone for centuries. And with them, the best of their culture. The worst of it lingered in places where the Empire had once spread its wings – Slavers’ Bay, in the Old Blood of Volantis, Lys the Lovely. Everywhere dragon wings once cast a shadow upon the earth, slavery still held its grip.

They were not here for the worst that Valyrians had given the world: They were trying to rejuvenate the best of its artistry. Valyrian steel. Nothing in the world compared to its strength and endurance, its sharpness and beauty. As a stern, sensible Northerner Larra despised the ornamentation of weaponry and armour, taking something harrowing and hiding the horror behind false beauty, spectacle and pageantry. There should be nothing appealing about brutality. Yet the South made an art of it. She scorned tourneys and always had; violence should be relegated to the battlefield, if it had to be endured at all. She acknowledged that without chaos there would never be any progress made, no change, no way to better what had been done before.

She refused to celebrate bloodshed.

“Are you alright?” Gendry asked, and Larra glanced at him. He was wide-eyed but otherwise seemingly unaffected by a stroll through the past in Bran’s head.

“I was just thinking, that is all.”

“About what?” Gendry asked gently, reaching out to take her hand.

“When the Doom struck, we lost the best of the Valyrians but retained the worst,” she said, sighing softly. “Slavery lingers but artistry is lost. Instead of seeking philosophers and artists, we search for a weaponsmith.” She clicked her tongue, slightly ashamed. Everything Bran now had to offer, and she sought knowledge to forge weapons.

“I’m sure the weaponsmith we seek would claim they’re as much an artist as anyone,” Gendry said, giving her a gentle smile full of understanding.

“We don’t seek knowledge of how to forge Valyrian steel for the sake of brutality,” Bran said gently. His eyes were dark and lustrous in the dying sun as he gazed at her with a strange, heartbroken longing. “You’ve always sought to better protect those who cannot defend themselves.”

Her throat tightened at the look on her little brother’s face and nodded sharply, wiping her eyes, and said, “I do not love the sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only what they defend.”

“What’s that from?” Gendry asked, and she smiled sadly.

“I Túrin i Cormaron,” she sighed.

“Words to live by,” Gendry muttered, and she nodded.

“Too few people have ever heard them,” she said sadly, gazing around them. The wisdom of the Valyrian philosophers was lost. Everything, from their textiles to their jewels and playwrights, dragon-trainers and artists, sculptors and mages, musicians and architects, was lost.

When Bran steered them to an armourer’s workshop, Gendry sighed with envy, his eyes widening as he gazed around. His gaze was drawn to the weapons neatly arranged on the walls of the wide, airy chamber, every one of them immaculate and glimmering like liquid smoke, thousands upon thousands of tiny folds exquisitely hammered until the metal shimmered like silk, sharpened to a lethal edge. His eyes drank in the sight of hundreds – perhaps thousands – of Valyrian steel blades, each of them utterly unique, from the length or curve of the blade to the decoration of the hilt and pommel, some set with precious stones, others worked with manipulated obsidian, yet more with gilded steel.

Larra’s gaze was snared by the armourer himself. She was taken by how similar he was to Gendry – his shoulders were broad, his arms enormously muscled, yet his skin was a deep burnished bronze, glistening in the firelight, his muscles rippling as he laboured. He wore metal rings around his biceps, a mark of status she had noticed flaunted by some of the adolescent dragon-riders – or perhaps they were the fashion. Unlike Gendry’s dark riotous curls, his platinum-silver hair was shorn close to his scalp, shimmering in the firelight, and his eyes were a deep, fiery violet. What made them utterly similar, Larra realised, was the determination in his face, the fiery passion in his eyes, softened only by the lingering smile that seemed utterly unconscious as the armourer hammered and created things of beauty designed to end life. It was the same look of fierce determination, pride and enjoyment that consumed Gendry when he was working. They both adored their craft, were excited by it and proud of their skill.

“He is one of the best Valyrian armourers?” Larra prompted, glancing at Bran.

“If not the best,” Bran said, watching the man with an enthusiastic gleam in his eye. “Just watch…”

They watched. Sometimes, though, Larra’s gaze drifted to Gendry, a small smile on her lips as she noticed him edging closer and closer, eager to watch, and several times she saw him, about to ask the man a question, only to catch himself. His shoulders would droop a little then, but he kept watching. Kept absorbing everything he could learn from watching, the same way Gendry had learned all his life. Watching, and having a go himself. The armourer, burnished bronze and glimmering like quicksilver, was an artist, they learned, his skills exquisitely honed, and they watched him working on as many as a dozen different projects at once, switching between different weapons.

Larra stepped closer, mesmerised, as he began a new project – Gendry murmured the process to her as he watched, fascinated, his eyes never leaving the armourer, whose movements were so fluid, so sure, that he looked like he was engaged in a dance. The very first step in creating Valyrian steel, and the armourer…started to sing.

It was not a song of the earth, as Larra had learned from the Children, but even she could feel its power, the way her heart tripped and her breath came shallow in her lungs. Valyrians were infamous for their blood magic rituals, but it wasn’t all dark. Magic, as with everything, was in perfect balance in the world. Where there was dark, there was also light. Where there was destruction, there was also rebirth and creation. She had heard rumours that Valyrian steel was imbued with magic – that the ancient armourers had imbued every fold of the steel with magic. The spell woven by the armourer was beautiful, sombre, powerful and majestic and made her shiver as she listened. His voice is not as fine as Rhaegar’s by far, she found herself thinking, startling herself.

“How long will it take him to forge that sword?” Larra asked quietly, glancing at her brother: Gendry was consumed by the armourer.

“He will forge and fold the steel thousands of times before he is content – you remember the ripples along Ice’s blade?” Bran asked, and Larra nodded. “Chicken-scratches compared to the lacework this master creates with his folds. He is the image of the splendour of Valyrian artistry…before the breaking of their world.” Bran’s eyes lingered on Gendry’s broad back, then mused, “Gendry has it in him to surpass him.”

Larra gazed at Bran, who turned his gaze from Gendry to Larra. There was deep understanding there, a soft warmth radiating from his smile. He took Larra’s hand tenderly in his own – she was startled by how large it was, how long and clever his fingers were – and again almost jumped when he leaned in, taller than she was, and tenderly kissed her brow. In her ear, he murmured, “You have both chosen well.” Larra glanced at Bran, and he gave her a soft smile, his eyes warm and encouraging. He squeezed her hand and turned to watch Gendry.

They watched for months, or what felt like it. The sun rose and set over Valyria and the armourer continued his work. They watched a lump of molten ore become something wondrous – and familiar.

Bran smiled richly as Larra’s breath caught in her throat and she stepped forward, watching the master armourer carefully set a fat ruby engraved with a three-headed dragon into the cross-guard of a familiar longsword. A woman had provided the ruby, straight-backed and proud, with high cheekbones and shining silver-blonde hair with one large streak of gold at the front that she drew back from her face with leather ties, and violet eyes full of fire: she had arrived on the back of a sleek silver dragon glimmering with palest lilac, and when she returned to claim her longsword, her beautiful haughty face split into a breathless smile of wonder. She sparred with the armourer, testing the weight of the blade in her hand. Larra knew the feel of it intimately. She knew how Dark Sister moved, how perfectly balanced blade and hilt were, how sharp the blade was to this day.

“Who is she?” Larra asked softly, watching the absolute certainty with which the woman moved, her elegance and lethal precision mesmerising.

Bran laughed softly to himself, his eyes twinkling. “She is Aella Targaryen.”

Larra choked on a scoff, laughing. “Aella?”

“Yes,” Bran smiled, his eyes twinkling. “She is a force of nature. It is through Aella that dragons came to House Targaryen.”

Larra stared at the woman. Her ancestress. First wielder of Dark Sister. She remembered all her dreams of Targaryens yet never had she dreamt of this woman, with her sun-streaked silver hair and fierce violet eyes, her lean body, quick feet and impish smile as she tempted and teased the armourer.

“How old is Larra’s sword?” Gendry asked, tearing his eyes away from the sparring match.

Bran smiled again. “Oh, just over a thousand years.”

Larra’s jaw dropped.

“Has it ever been sharpened?” Gendry asked Bran, who smiled and shook his head.

“Not since she was first forged,” he said. “The last man to work on her was Aeris the Armourer… And that is why we have been watching him. His craftsmanship has witnessed empires rise and fall. That is true immortality.”

For a moment, Gendry looked daunted. Then his eyes seemed to burn, his hands clenching, and those sapphire eyes burned with purpose, with excitement. They had watched Aeris the Armourer for what seemed like months, perhaps years, and his labour had birthed a sword that was as perfect now, wielded by Larra, as it had been a millennium ago when Aella Targaryen first claimed her.

Gendry turned to Bran, his eyes gleaming. He grinned breathlessly at Larra.

“When can we get started?” he asked.

Bran chuckled softly, and the dream melted away.

Larra sighed, blinking slowly, her eyes adjusting to the gloom, startled to find herself in a stone chamber, the scent of snow and herbs in the air as a fire crackled in the hearth, meagre silver light beaming half-heartedly through diamond-paned windows. The scents and sounds of Valyria were a long way off. Gendry sighed softly and relaxed on Bran’s other side; he blinked around the chamber, looking bemused. He frowned at the model of Winterfell before them, the fire in the hearth, Bran in his wheeled chair, tucked up in his furs. Bran smiled serenely back at him. Larra remembered what Bran had said, “You have both chosen well.” He knew, then. So did Sansa, though she had the tact enough not to say anything. Yet. Larra was waiting for it; she wondered how many she’d offended by bedding the blacksmith.

She didn’t care. He has it in him to surpass him, Bran had said of Gendry’s skill.

Gendry worked harder than anyone she knew – he worked almost as hard as she did, and that said a lot. He was impassioned by his craft, considered it an art-form, was dedicated, ambitious yet paid close attention to the details, took care of every aspect of his craft. He possessed enormous strength yet was incredibly gentle with everyone he met, especially the children. He was shrewd and curious and cautious and eager to learn, to improve himself. And he understood her.

“Larra,” Bran said softly, smiling at her. She blinked and turned her gaze on him. “Please pass me some paper. I shall write down the spell Aeris the Armourer used…it is High Valyrian. You must teach it to Gendry exactly. And I shall write down instruction for when the spell must be sung in conjunction with the steps in the forging process. This is important.”

His eyes glowed with excitement and he grinned, watching Bran carefully as he picked up the pencil and began to write. Gendry’s lips moved as he carefully decoded the words letter by letter, frowning at the unfamiliar blending of sounds. Larra gently tutored him in the pronunciation of the High Valyrian words and Bran offered inside into their translation and the specificity of the spell.


Hours later, sprawled in bed, Gendry’s head against her breast as he traced lazy swirls on her belly, she sighed and picked the scroll up from her bedside cabinet, the firelight illuminating Bran’s unfamiliar elegant handwriting, and read the spell once more. She stroked his curls and smiled when he lifted his head, his eyes alight with excitement.

“How long until I shall be able to start?” he asked, for she was ultimately in charge of the forges. Aislin organised the men for her, but she did Larra’s bidding. Any alterations to their orders came from Larra. Gendry worked to her orders. She bit the inside of her cheek, thinking. They had engineers and blacksmiths enough to be getting on with the siege weapons and bonding obsidian to steel weapons. But they hadn’t the time to waste when it came to forging fresh Valyrian steel. And one Valyrian steel blade was still one more than they had access to now.

“Tomorrow,” she said softly, and Gendry grinned. He curled an arm around her waist, and she laughed, the scroll tumbling to the flagstones, as he flipped to his back, pulling her into his lap. She moaned at the feel of his erection already prodding her thigh and shifted her hips. They both cried out as he thrust his hips, entering her in one fierce thrust the way she adored. She gripped his shoulders and laughed softly as he kissed her neck, her collarbones, kneading her breasts and sucking her nipples as she writhed in his lap, slowly sliding her hips back and forth, taking the length of him, building speed, and he met each glide of her hips with a thrust of his own, until there was nothing but their tangled tongues, the soft slap of her thighs against his skin, her whimpers and his deep groans as she rode him, her breasts swaying, heavy and aching, and he reached up to cup and knead them, flicking and pinching her nipples until she pulled his hair, making him chuckle as he sucked on her neck, his other hand free to delve between them and stroke her. She came in a wet rush, gripping him with agonising tightness, and he grasped her hips, thrusting his to meet her as she writhed and whimpered over him, shoving his length deeper as she cried out and whimpered, biting her lip, her head thrown back, the curling end of her braid tickling his thighs as she threw her head back and moaned, her entire body going boneless. He thrust deep inside her once, twice more and leaned in to lick and suck her breast before spilling inside her, pleasure shuddering through his body.

Each time they were together, he lasted longer. They teased and petted each other until they orgasmed – that was the word for the pleasure ripping through his body under her fingers, her tongue, when her body writhed around him and her heat overwhelmed him. Each time they were together, they were bolder, more comfortable, more intimate with each other. More demanding – and more worshipful of each other. Every night – and every morning – they lavished pleasure upon each other, aching to bring each other to ecstasy and desperate to be filled and enflamed. He was learning what she liked, and what she needed; she was doing the same but she was far more intricate, far more intriguing, and he adored every moment he got to spend exploring her.

As she had promised, the next morning Gendry did not smelt obsidian. Donal Noye took point over construction of the obsidian scorpion. And Gendry’s hands shook with the magnitude of what he was about to undertake. To be the first to temper Valyrian steel since the Doom…

Then pride at his skill, and ambition – the desire to push himself, to be a worthy successor to Aeris the Armourer – filled him, stoked a fire in his belly, and he stretched his muscles and set to work.

The problem with masters was, of course, that they made everything look easy. Gendry’s gift, however, was his ability to observe, to watch and assess. He had learned all he knew by watching the best armourer in Westeros. He had spent what felt like months, possibly years, watching Aeris the Armourer – yet it had only been a few hours in reality – and his memory was sharp. Better than his memory, though, were Lord Brandon’s detailed instructions. Larra had taken to singing Aeris’ song, humming the tune to herself as she worked at the table in her chamber, writing her letters or updating logs or working on the next chapter of her book. Every opportunity he had, Gendry would unsheathe Dark Sister and examine her. The intricate lacework of the thousands of tiny folds of the steel rippled and shimmered like liquid smoke, dancing and shivering and swirling in the firelight. To think they had witnessed Dark Sister being forged! All knew Dark Sister was a Targaryen sword, but to see its original wielder serenely descend from the silvered-lilac wing of a dragon to claim her was a thing Gendry knew he would never, in all his life, forget. Aeris’ song would remain locked in his mind forever.

Larra had once told him he appreciated a thing not just for its beauty but for the work that went into it. And it was true; he was filled with a burning desire to work, to witness each fold appear in the steel as he worked lost magic into it. But, at the end of a day, when he had made little visible progress, it did hearten him to take Dark Sister and see the potential, to know this was what he was working for. One day, he may forge a longsword such as Dark Sister; for now, and in agreement with Larra, he was testing his skills on a hunting knife. Better to start small and discover how he worked with Valyrian steel. He could watch and mimic, but ultimately he was not Aeris the Armourer: Gendry’s skill and technique was his own. He could adopt techniques but had to adapt what he was learning to his own skills and experience.

“The wiser course is the hunting-knife,” he sighed, almost grumbling, as he curled around Larra, aching and sore from a long day in the forge, where very little progress had been made, yet sate from Larra’s urgent lovemaking. She had missed him all day, she’d told him, as she tore his clothes from him.

“Even a Valyrian steel hunting knife is the first of its kind to be forged in nearly half a millennium,” Larra sighed gently. “And one Valyrian steel hunting knife is one more blade than we have now.” She stroked her fingers across his chest, burrowing deeper into his arms. He had noticed she did that more and more now; tucked herself close to him, almost draped over him in sleep, as if she was more comfortable draped over his hardness than she was the feather mattress, as if she was used to it. He knew better than to ask, yet, whom she had become accustomed to sleeping against.

“Still…a longsword looks more impressive.”

Notes:

Valyria transformed as I was trying to describe it. Lava rivers, floating gardens, palaces in the sky, hatchling-racing and mid-air acrobatics? I imagine it as a mixture of Qarth, tropical islands like Fiji and Hawaii, Ancient Egypt and Greece, with hints of the Renaissance in terms of art, philosophy and medicine, and a hint of Shakespeare, but I’ll get to him later.

Chapter 40: A Winter Rose

Notes:

This one’s a rollercoaster.

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

40

A Winter Rose


Pink-cheeked and breathless, Larra smiled as she strode through the castle, the chill of snow clinging to her, the girls racing ahead, blonde hair rippling behind them, the sound of their giggles and chatter echoing off the walls. The day had dawned bright and unusually hot, the sun pale gold and fierce, and had made everything seem to come alive. Larra had insisted they take opportunity to go for a ride while it was still fine – the kos who guarded their little lionesses had whooped and hollered with delight as they galloped across the moors, exercising their horses. Their boldness was aweing. Larra had lifted Leona into her lap, and had been surprised when Qhaero returned to them, the tiny silver bells in his braid chiming and singing, his severe, handsome face split into a grin revealing straight white teeth, and offered Calanthe his hand. Effortlessly, he had lifted her up and into his lap. Larra had thought that Dothraki never shared their mounts, and the other kos had looked surprised to see him lift Calanthe into the saddle. Calanthe had grinned, and Qhaero dug in his heels, spurring his stallion on. Larra had watched, laughing softly, as Calanthe’s shouts and hollers of delight echoed across the snowy moors.

The other girls had had a gentler lesson, learning to sit confidently in the saddle and becoming accustomed to their mounts. Without a bond with their horse, they would always struggle to ride. The little ones – Rosamund, Neva and Altheda – all rode gentle ponies, while Narcisa, Crisantha and Delphine, all fair riders in side-saddles, had to relearn how to sit astride their horses. They were soothed somewhat by the appearance of Larra as well as Zharanni in their riding leathers, sitting boldly in their saddles. Larra kept Leona in her lap, the little girl tucked inside the folds of a heavy new wool cloak trimmed with fur, and her tiny pearly teeth flashed as she smiled, her eyes bright, as Larra galloped with her across the moors, joining the Dothraki kos and Calanthe, who was pink-cheeked and bright-eyed, laughing and chatting to Qhaero, wearing her new breeches and very much enjoying herself.

The girls had all been outfitted with breeches and tunics for their riding lessons, but Calanthe would have to be cut free from hers soon enough: She refused to wear anything else now, to Narcisa’s enduring horror. Calanthe looked smaller, somehow, without the billowing skirts about her legs; she was skinny and quick, and much younger than Larra often remembered she was. She bounded about like a gazelle, unencumbered by her skirts, boisterous and excited, filled with joy. She was delighted…to be free.

For the entirety of the morning, Larra remained outside, in the saddle, exercising Black Alys. After they had enjoyed some time in the saddle, the kos returned to their charges and started giving surprisingly gentle instruction to the girls. Larra and Zharanni remained close, observing the lessons and encouraging the girls; Aqo, Leona’s guardian, was lean and quick and young, and spoke more Common Tongue than the rest, and Larra spent a good deal of time discussing with him and Zharanni, and through them the other kos, the progress of the girls’ riding lessons. Qhaero insisted Zharanni tell Larra that she rode almost as well as any kos, which made her smile. He also asked whether she would stud her fierce mare – Black Alys snorted, as if she could hear them discussing her, and gave one of the kos’ stallions a fierce nip when he wandered too close. Considering the wisdom of breeding on Black Alys now, Larra examined the kos’ mounts – they were all powerful stallions bred for strength, endurance and ferocity in battle, incredibly handsome creatures full of fire. Alys’ offspring by any one of them would be incredibly strong, full of fire and powerful and gorgeous to look upon.

They discussed horse-breeding, and Larra explained the Westerosi term cavalry to the kos, who were curious about the Knights of the Vale and admiring of their fierce, armoured coursers, destriers and chargers. The Dothraki measured a person’s social standing by either the pure breeding of their mount or the number of horses they owned. Black Alys was an incredibly fine mare and Larra a gifted rider. The kos didn’t need to know she was sister to the King or castellan in all but name of Winterfell: they saw her astride Black Alys and knew she was as close to a khaleesi by their standards.

As they trotted back to the castle, she heard Qhaero praising Calanthe, his rich voice warm with pride as he murmured to her, and she caught the word, “Khalakki.”

“I know khaleesi,” Larra said to Zharanni. “What is a khalakki?”

“It is…the daughter of a khal,” Zharanni said, her beautiful face pinching slightly. Larra watched Qhaero and Calanthe, smiling softly to herself. Zharanni watched them too, and murmured, “He takes pride in her. He thinks…he tells her thinks she shall be a bloodrider.”

“I didn’t know girls were allowed to be bloodriders,” Larra said.

“In the Great Grass Sea, no,” Zharanni said. “But in Rhaesh Andahli, perhaps she is allowed.”

“Rhaesh Andahli?”

“The Land of the Andals,” Zharanni said uncertainly. Larra scoffed.

“You’ll find few of those here,” she muttered, and Zharanni frowned bemusedly at her. “The North is home to the First Men. Andals came to Westeros thousands of years after, but here in the North we fought them and defeated them. Their descendants live in the south.”

“You are not an Andal?”

“Certainly not,” Larra said crisply, her spine straightening. She had always been very proud to be of stern Northern stock, a descendant of the First Men. The only Andal she had ever met was Lady Catelyn, and that hadn’t put the rest in good stead with her. “My ancestors were the First Men.”

And Valyrians, she thought offhandedly. A child of ice and fire…

She brushed Alys down and was satisfied to see the kos teaching the girls how to do the same. When she had given Alys some oats as a treat, she guided the girls back inside, all of them pink-cheeked and chilled but happy. She watched them dart down the corridor and smiled to herself. It had been a lovely morning.

Larra eyed the maid shrewdly as she approached, giving Larra an apologetic glance as she dipped a curtsy. “Beggin’ your pardon, m’lady. Lord Brandon wishes to see you in the solar.”

“Does he, indeed?” Larra replied, nodding, and the maid curtsied again before bustling off. Larra’s thighs ached as she strode upstairs, both from riding this morning, and from riding Gendry last night until they were both hoarse. She smiled softly to herself as she strode through the castle, the delicious ache between her thighs teasing her memories, and she blushed when the guard opened the door to the solar, to find Gendry stood there.

“I was just thinking of you,” she said warmly, and Gendry’s fierce look faded, replaced by something softer, warmer. He held out a hand to her and she went into his arms; he sighed and kissed her temple, his enormous arms banding heavily about her, keeping her close for a lingering embrace that said much about how tired he was. “Did Brandon summon you here?”

“Yes. I thought perhaps he’d like to discuss the steel,” Gendry said, his frown thoughtful. “You?”

“Brandon asked me here,” Larra said, glancing around the solar. The fire was lit in the hearth, candles flickering on the great working desk, but there was no Brandon in sight, and no Sansa. “Where can he be?”

“I am here,” Brandon said, and a guard wheeled him into the chamber. Beside him, holding his hand, walked a little girl buried in layers of rough-spun clothing, a knitted bonnet of undyed yarn neatly tied under her stubborn little chin. Bran glanced over his shoulder, politely telling his guard, “This will do, thank you. You may go and take some rest.”

Larra glanced at the girl, her lips parting with sudden recognition. Beside her, Gendry tensed, a soft gasp escaping him.

Despite her grubbiness and poor clothing, the girl was undeniably a beauty. She was fair-skinned and freckled, with a pretty button nose and rosy-pink lips so plump and full they looked bee-stung. Raven-black braids fell from under her bonnet. When she glanced up, her fierce eyes were a scalding blue.

They were Gendry’s eyes. Robert’s eyes.

Larra knew instantly who she was, though she had never met the child, didn’t even know the name her mother had given her, had never thought about either of them since Maisie was married off to a widowed farmer all those years ago. Another of her ghosts returned to haunt her. Maisie had left little of herself in her child, though Larra could see her childhood friend in the girl’s pretty nose and her freckles. Her hair, though, those fierce eyes glaring from her pale face, those were the King’s. Ours is the fury, she thought, gazing at the King’s youngest surviving bastard.

“Briar, this is my older sister, Larra, who made the little lamb,” Bran said, his voice ever so gentle. He gave the girl a coaxing smile, perhaps remembering how it felt to be small and terrified by strangers much bigger than you. Larra noticed that she clutched one of the little knitted animals she had been making for the children – a lamb, as Bran had said, with a sweet face and a little blue dress, hose and a hooded cape – and her fingertips were white. “And beside her is the man I told you about.”

The little girl gave Bran a sidelong look, obviously remembering the name. She flicked a glance at Gendry, a tiny frown on her face, and she pursed her lips thoughtfully, scowling at Gendry warily. Shrewd and careful, just like her brother, Larra thought.

“Gendry,” the little girl said, a bite in her tone, but Larra focused on her tiny fingers as she clutched the toy lamb. Sceptically, her voice fierce, she asked, “Are you my brother?”

So accustomed to Gendry’s southern way of speaking was Larra that she blinked, fighting back a smile at the thick Northern accent that came tumbling out of the girl’s mouth, rough and pretty all at once, lively and stern.

“Am I her brother?” Gendry asked Bran dazedly, his eyes wide. Bran nodded silently, fiddling with something in his lap – a small suede pouch Larra recognised with a sinking feeling in her stomach. She remembered Maisie’s lips – so like her daughter’s – quivering as she wept and handed Larra the treasures she had been gifted by the King.

“Aye, he’s your brother, lass,” Larra said gently, watching the girl grimly. She sighed and smiled coaxingly, sitting down on the settle. Gendry sank down, weak-kneed, staring at the girl. She held out her hand and smiled coaxingly, and Briar glanced at Bran. He smiled warmly at her, and she stepped closer. “I made lots of other animals. Did you choose the lamb yourself?”

“Aye,” Briar nodded, and Larra noticed her wide blue eyes darting to Gendry and back to her, her fingers trembling as she clutched the toy.

“Daddy’s a shepherd, isn’t he?” she prompted, for it was she who had arranged Maisie’s marriage. All the others had gone – Father south to King’s Landing, Lady Catelyn following him, Robb busy ruling the North in their stead. It had fallen to her to protect her friend and provide for her and the babe the King had left her with when he forgot about the fancy he’d taken to her. Larra had married Maisie off to a hard-working, kind older widow with a farm just miles from Winterfell, and had forgotten all about her the moment responsibility of her brothers had fallen to her.

Briar’s eyes gleamed and her lips became tiny, her freckles stark against her pale skin, and she looked away, her face fierce, almost hard. But her fingers clutched at the lamb and Larra sighed heavily. “Oh, I see.” She glanced at Bran, who gave her a sombre look; he didn’t need to say anything to confirm that the winter had already taken Briar’s father, as it had so many other older people. “Did he teach you all about lambing?” A nod. “You know, I should doubt Gendry’s ever seen a lamb before in his life. He’s from King’s Landing, you know.”

“Perhaps you could tell me all about it,” Gendry suggested, his voice softer than Larra was used to, trying not to frighten the girl. She shot him a fierce look, twisting the arm of the toy. She glanced again at Bran, who gave her a coaxing smile.

“I believe there are ewes in the barn ready for lambing,” he said softly. “Perhaps, Briar, you could show Gendry and Larra. You’re so good at it.” Briar scowled fiercely at Bran, still clutching the toy lamb, but Larra could see her mind working behind those stern blue eyes.

“Alright,” she finally agreed, flicking Gendry a look out of the corner of her eye.

As they passed, Bran handed Larra the small suede pouch he had been fiddling with. Silently, she opened it and sighed, frowning. She pulled the strings tight and tied them to her belt.

Briar didn’t reach for their hands, as the Lannisters or Neva would have; she watched them carefully as Larra led the way through the corridors and halls and covered passages, until they reached one of the barns. The smell greeted them first, fierce and nauseating, like a wall. During the winter, they had to keep their livestock indoors overnight and during storms, or else all but the hardiest – muskox, highland cows, Northern bearded pigs, Northern Blacknose sheep – would freeze to death. But life still went on despite the storms and the turn in the weather. Husbandry was an important part of the duties of the Castellan of Winterfell: too many lives depended on fresh meat when the summer’s grain supplies dwindled. They would have fresh lamb, pork and veal throughout the winter but only if they kept up a rigid breeding cycle.

Animal husbandry, like the forges, was one of the areas that fell to Larra to manage; it was alien to Sansa, whose meat was presented to her on a plate, roasted and covered with herbs and rich gravy. She had never thought where the meat came from and had blushed the first time one of the farmers asked to discuss his prized bulls ready to breed. Larra, who had always adored flowers and growing things, spent time in the forges and soaked up as much education as Maester Luwin could give her, had always been fond of animals, not just horses and orphaned direwolves.

“Which is your favourite animal, Briar?” Larra asked, as they watched her, up to her knees in hay, diligently examining a ewe. Around the animals, she relaxed, her eyes brighter, the tightness of her mouth softening.

“Branda was our sow,” Briar said, glancing at Larra. “She always talked to me.”

“Pigs are very clever,” Larra said. “Cleverer than dogs, some say.”

“Wolves are cleverer than them all,” Briar said, with a sly look at Larra.

“Aye, that’s true,” Larra agreed. “People often speak ill of wolves. But wolves are gentle creatures. They’re great nurturers – they take care of one another. If they’re not hungry or threatened, they’re the gentlest creatures. They’re very loving.”

Briar gave Larra another of her shrewd looks. “You have a direwolf.”

“Oh, no. Last Shadow comes to visit now and then, but she’s a wild creature,” Larra smiled. “She roams the Wolfswood with her pack…when she was a pup, though, she lived in my garden, with my other animals.”

That caught the little girl’s interest. “What animals?” she asked curiously.

“Well, Father gifted me a garden to grow crops and flowers,” Larra said, smiling sadly. Maester Luwin had taught her patience through gardening. “I hatched quail and chickens to keep the crops free from slugs and insects. The quail were all named after wildflowers and the chickens were named after she-wolves of Winterfell. One of Father’s bannermen gifted me a goat on my tenth name-day. I named her Visenya, owing to her feisty nature. I even had honeybees, though they’ll be hibernating in their hive through the winter.”

“Didn’t your direwolf eat any of the other animals?” Briar asked.

“No. Wolves only hunt when they’re hungry,” Larra said. “I used to take Shadow hunting for deer in the Wolfswood.”

Gendry watched Briar carefully as she went about the chores assigned to her by one of the older farmers. They could always use an extra pair of eyes during lambing season, and an extra pair of hands, and Briar had been taught spectacularly by her father. As she went about her work, confident and focused, Gendry glanced at Larra.

“Feel like explaining?” he asked quietly.

“Her mother and I grew up together in this castle,” Larra said, sighing heavily. “She was the same age as me; we were playmates, then she worked as a scullery-maid… She was always very pretty, with strawberry-blonde hair and those lips.” She nodded at Briar, who had inherited her mother’s freckles and lips, if nothing else. “All the boys loved her. I loved her. She was always smiling. When the King and all his court came to Winterfell, he noticed her.”

“She was your age,” Gendry said, frowning deeply, and Larra nodded.

“Aye, sixteen, when the King arrived at Winterfell,” Larra sighed. She glanced at Gendry. “Father went to King’s Landing, Lady Catelyn followed him and…and Maisie came to me and told me the King had got her pregnant. The number of times he had her, I’m not surprised… I arranged her marriage to a widowed farmer. Then Father was killed and Robb went to war and…that was the last I thought of her – of them.”

And she was ashamed. She had forgotten one of the people she had promised to protect. She had forfeited them for Bran, as she had ever other person living in the North. She had abandoned her duties to them so that she could protect Bran. A small part of her still insisted that protected Bran meant they could one day return to protect the rest, but it was a very small voice, and she knew in her heart she hadn’t thought about the hundreds of thousands of people in the North who relied on House Stark for protection. She had failed them.

“What was in the pouch your brother gave you?” Gendry asked quietly.

Larra frowned, watching Briar work. She sighed, shaking her head, “The King gave her jewels, gold and silver rings set with cut stones. Over a dozen of them. They’re Briar’s inheritance.”

“A dozen jewelled rings,” Gendry said, his voice simmering with anger. He scowled fiercely as he watched his sister, looking so like her with that ferocious glint in his sapphire eyes that Larra’s lips twitched in spite of their discussion. “A trinket for every tumble.”

She reached out and stroked his back gently. His trimmed beard twitched as he clenched his jaw, and his voice sounded angry and incredibly vulnerable when he said, “How could he do this? Fuck a young girl and get a babe on her, only to abandon her and never think of her again. How could he do it, over and over again?” They watched Briar coaxing and cooing to one of the ewes.

Quietly, Larra told Gendry, “Robert was not an evil man. He wasn’t even a bad one, not really.”

“What was he, then?” Gendry grunted softly, looking despondent.

“I remember him at Winterfell. Fat and drunk,” Larra said, pulling a face that coaxed a smile from Gendry. King Robert had been…a disappointment, after all Father’s stories about him. “He put so much effort into being the one to drink the most, bed the prettiest maids, laugh the loudest… I remember thinking that I’d never seen anyone so unhappy in my life. He was. He was unhappy.”

“He was the king.”

“Robert was forged for war. Father always told us, Robert loved nothing so much as battle. It was where he was truly alive…” Larra clicked her tongue, shaking her head. She sighed heavily, “After the Rebellion ended, all the Targaryens were dead, and they gave Robert the crown. They might as well have just had his head then and been done with it. They denied him who he was.”

“What do you mean?” Gendry frowned softly.

“If I was to say to you that you could have all you’ve ever desired, even in secret, lands and wealth beyond imagining, influence and the respect of everyone around you, women desiring you and men desiring to be you…but you could never set foot in a forge again or lift a hammer…what would you choose?”

Gendry’s answer was instant: “The hammer.”

She chuckled softly. “Robert would have chosen the hammer, too. He would have chosen to be a warrior,” she said. Thoughtfully, she said, “I wonder if he could have done it all over again, knowing what would happen, whether he would have let Rhaegar deal a killing blow instead… Robert was made for war; peace killed him, slowly but surely. Time wore bits and pieces of him away.”

“A rusting weapon,” Gendry muttered, and Larra nodded.

“Your father wasn’t an evil man. A careless one, perhaps, and unhappy – and he was careless because he was unhappy…but certainly not the worst,” Larra said.

“All those women, all those babies,” Gendry gasped softly, grief flickering across his face, darkening his eyes. “We’re the only ones left – me, and Briar. Cersei had all the others murdered. He couldn’t bother himself to protect us…” He turned and looked Larra straight in the eye, and she could see real vulnerability, desperation and anger simmering there. “I’m ashamed of him.”

She nodded gently, reaching up to cup his cheek. “I’d be more concerned if you weren’t.”

He tucked her into his arms, watching Briar praise a ewe as she licked her newborn lamb clean. “What do I do with her now?”

“She doesn’t need to know she’s the King’s bastard. We don’t know what her father told her. All she needs to know is you’re her brother. Let her know she’s safe and wanted,” she said, thinking of her own childhood, desperate to be accepted, aching for love, dreading Lady Catelyn’s approach and infuriated whenever Jon shrank away from her. “The rest will follow. She’ll warm to you. How could she not? You’re wonderful.”

Gendry gave her a subdued smile but sighed into her kiss when she leaned up to press her lips against his. She caressed his cheek and sucked sweetly on his tongue until he groaned. A loud baaaa close by startled them, and Gendry’s cheeks flushed as they broke apart, smiling at each other as Briar clambered past in the hay, cheering on a wobbly lamb as it tottered about. Briar, her face alight, beaming, scooped up the lamb and carried it to its mother, ordering it to suckle. She turned and caught their gaze and smiled at them.

The next ewe she tended to, Briar had Gendry in the paddock with her, squatted down beside her as she explained what to do and what to look for and how to help if the ewe needed it. When Larra told them it was nearly time to wash for their evening meal, Briar washed her hands in a barrel of water and flicked them dry, then reached for the knitted lamb Gendry had kept safe and clean in his hand the entire afternoon. She replaced with her hand without ceremony, and brother and sister walked through the castle together.

Wistfully, Larra watched the two of them. She wished it was so easy for one of her own long-lost siblings to reappear into her life. The mutinous glint in Briar’s eye had reminded her of Rickon all afternoon, though Briar gentled considerably around the animals.

Larra was there when Gendry introduced Briar to Neva and Cade, who rumpled Briar’s hair affectionately, shrugging and instantly accepting of the new member of their family. Neva’s eyes sparkled but her natural shyness held her back. All the while the children interacted, Gendry watched them; he coaxed Neva to say hello, and Cade, who had had a growth spurt and seemed as wobbly on his long legs as the lamb in the barn, turned to Gendry with a bewildered look.

“You said you’d never been North before,” he accused.

“I hadn’t.”

“So how’ve you got a daughter at Winterfell?”

“Briar’s not my daughter,” Gendry said, as Larra smirked, realising that indeed, Gendry was actually old enough to have fathered Briar. “She’s my sister.”

“And you, born in King’s Landing?” Cade frowned. “Your father spread his seed far.”

“You’ve no idea,” Gendry said darkly, and Cade heard enough in his voice not to press the issue.

Larra watched the two little girls, complete opposites in their natures – one bold, the other gentle – comparing the knitted animals they had chosen as companions. Briar’s was a lamb, and Neva always now slept with a snow-white bunny with black splotches, wearing a pale lavender dress and hooded cape. The bunny was named Elbereth – a High Valyrian word meaning Star Queen. The two girls settled down in front of the hearth and discussed what Briar could name her lamb, Briar’s eyes sparkling with delight as Neva shyly suggested beautiful High Valyria names for wildflowers. Larra was reminded, strangely, of Princess Myrcella, gathering wildflowers in the godswood; Larra had pressed them for her and taught her the High Valyrian names as well as the colloquial Northern names for them. She had made the princess a little book modelled after one Larra had compiled throughout her own childhood, and made a note to dig it out later.

The Lannisters entered the nursery in that moment, Calanthe leading the charge, and she bounded over to the hearth, still proudly flaunting her new breeches.

“Who’s this then?” she asked giddily, and Larra watched the other girls.

“I need to find her a new frock,” Gendry muttered to Larra, wincing slightly, as the Lannisters clustered around Neva and Briar. Though Larra had replaced the girls’ expensive silks with thick, warm woollen dresses, and had taken pains to ensure there was little difference between Neva’s clothing and the other girls’, the quality of their clothing was noticeably fine. Beside them, Briar looked out of place. Desperately drab and very grubby. Larra reached out, rubbing Gendry’s arm.

“Leave it to me,” she said, leaning up to kiss his cheek. She clapped her hands and the girls glanced over their shoulders, bright-eyed and happy from a lovely day. When she told them, “We shall have baths tonight,” they beamed, delighted. They all adored going to the baths. Every seventh night, Larra would take the girls down to the baths so that they could have a splash and she could wash their hair properly; in between, they helped each other wash.

Bath-night was a treat for everyone, as much for Narcisa as it was for Neva. They carried their thick nightdresses and quilted robes and fleece-lined leggings downstairs with combs and perfumed soaps and for a few hours, they luxuriated in the sultry, humid heat of the baths. Tonight, they were accompanied in the baths by Lady Nym and Zharanni, who luxuriated in the smaller, hotter pools and talked, sipping fine wines brought by Lady Nym, while Lady Tisseia helped corral and care for the girls, massaging soap into their long golden hair and patiently unknotting tangles with large-toothed combs. Neva always made Larra smile, and she teased the little girl.

“Are you a water-nymph?” she asked. “Or a dolphin?” Neva and Cadeon were both water-babies: Neva had grown up swimming the waters around her mother’s pillow-house in Lys, while Cade had been raised on-board pirate ships. He was a fiercely strong swimmer and loved to be in the water as much as his sister.

Briar took one look at the steaming pools and stopped dead in her tracks. Her cheeks flushed in the heat, wrapped up in her layers of rough-spun, and it took Larra a long time to coax her out of her clothing, and even longer to get her to splash in the shallowest part of the smallest pool. She watched Neva, her silver hair glimmering in the firelight as she swam underwater, holding her breath, from end to end of the largest pool, doing somersaults, twisting and turning and having a lovely time.

Eventually, and with much coaxing from bold Calanthe, Briar entered into the pool and played with Rosamund and Altheda. Watching Lady Tisseia wash the other girls’ hair with a suspicious frown, Briar eventually turned to Larra and let her empty a jug of warm water over her head, massaging soap into her hair.

When all the girls had had their hair washed and combed free of tangles, they were wrapped up in great sheets of terrycloth and set before the roaring hearth with their dolls, chatting to each other while they dried their hair and warmed themselves. Larra sighed and relaxed into the smallest, hottest pool, her own hair heavy and nourished by thick balm she had rinsed out, and Lady Nymeria lolled sensuously beside her, her arms spread either side of her along the lip of the pool, dark nipples proudly bared, and she sighed contentedly, her lustrous eyes glinting in the firelight as she watched Larra dip into the water.

“How pleasant it is to be warm,” she sighed, giving Larra a warm smile, her full lips curving seductively, stained with wine. Larra wasn’t used to blatant sexuality; Nym was exceedingly confident in her own body, her beauty – she used it as a weapon as much as the blades she concealed beneath her silks. “I thank you for the invitation, cousin.”

Cousin. She had given Larra an ironic smile, her eyes laughing, when she had first greeted Larra. She was a Sand: Larra was a Snow. In Lady Nym’s mind, she had thousands of brothers and sisters – other Sands – and Flowers, Stones, Waters, Hills, Rivers and Snows were all her cousins. They were all bound by the same circumstances, though she had given Larra a queer look and laughed sultrily, “Most bastards have no father. You, Larra Snow, are unique in having no mother.”

“I’m glad to extend it,” Larra said honestly. She had never met a Dornishwoman before, knew of them only by reputation alone, and had been honestly surprised by how much she enjoyed Nym. Where Northerners were stern, the Dornish were sensuous. At opposite ends of Westeros, one kingdom icy, the other fiery, their cultures were surprisingly alike in many ways – they both revered loyalty, justice and honour, and acknowledged that those without swords died upon them. Like Larra, Nym had been raised with a weapon in her hand, both their fathers determined that they should know how to defend themselves, haunted by the ghosts of their tragic sisters.

It had occurred to Larra on more than one occasion that their families were very alike, in that they had suffered similarly. Prince Oberyn and Ned had both lost brothers and sisters because of the Rebellion. At their cores, House Martell and House Stark were not so very different.

Nym was graceful, dressing elegantly, and highly educated, and she admitted she found herself as delighted by Larra’s intelligence as Larra was with hers. It was unexpected; neither of them knew enough about the other’s culture to truly appreciate it, but they were learning. Larra had spent many long hours with Lady Nym, leaning over a cyvasse board. Nym drank mulled wine; Larra, strong cider. Nym wore silks and heavy velvets to chase away the cold; Larra sat in her wool dresses, uncomfortable too near the fire. They both wore their long dark hair in a simple braid, though Nym’s was wrapped with red-gold wire and Larra kept hers pinned out of the way. They shared many interests, not least of which was cyvasse. It was almost obsessional in Nym, who had learned it from her Volantene mother, where the game had been given birth, and Larra had finally found a worthy opponent who appreciated the game as much as she did. They were either the eldest or one of the oldest siblings with younger brothers or sisters who adored them. They were both highly educated, and spent many long hours discussing philosophy, economics, High Valyrian poetry, debating politics and religion, inheritance and weaponry. On occasion, they trained together with knives and daggers. Learning that Nym’s mother was a noblewoman of the oldest blood of Volantis, Larra had once, tentatively, asked whether Nymeria knew the name Maegyr. Nym’s lustrous black eyes – eyes she claimed she and all her sisters had inherited from their father – had watched her carefully before answering that she had heard the name Maegyr, that it belonged to the old blood and that one of the triarchs, a tiger, bore the name Maegyr. Larra hadn’t pressed for more; she had never met her brother’s wife, after all, and knowing what she did of Talisa’s fate, Larra didn’t wish to hurt herself by learning more about the woman who should have been her sister. Nym had told her instead of the city of Volantis, of the politics and elephants and sugar-beet soups and tiger-skins worn with silk soft as butterfly wings.

Nym had had someone set up their cyvasse boards, and when they climbed out of the pool, they wrapped themselves in blankets and let their hair dry a they played. Larra smiled, turning happily to the game while the girls warmed themselves by the fire. While she and Nym played, Larra talked with Zharanni – in Dothraki, so that Larra could practise – while keeping an ear out for the conversation between Nymeria and Tisseia. The bastard daughter of one of the oldest blood of Volantis and a freed slave, her face still marked with her profession, discussed the growing discontent in Volantis. Larra knew enough about Volantene politics to know that the elephants were those who favoured peace while the tigers thirsted for war: the tigers had snatched control in the last election, yet Tisseia warned that the breaking of chains and the roar of dragons had been heard in Volantis, and the slaves outnumbered free men five to one.

“Does your mother still live inside the Black Walls?” Larra asked.

“She does, though Uncle extended an invitation to join us at the Water Gardens,” Nymeria admitted, her accented voice rich as velvet, dripping from her lips like honey. “I think she will not come.”

“The city’s about to turn on itself,” Tisseia said, giving Larra a look. “The Red Priests warn that the city will burn if the triarchs take up arms against Daenerys Targaryen; yet all the talk is of the gold and slaves that will flood Volantis once she is dead.”

“People will always act in their own self-interests,” Larra said, and Nymeria let out an indignant gasp, her lustrous eyes narrowing on the cyvasse board, as Larra claimed her king. It said a lot that Daenerys Targaryen, who had made a name for herself by freeing the slaves of Slavers’ Bay, had ignored the plight of Volantene slaves on her journey to claim the Iron Throne.

“I wonder why Daenerys Targaryen docked in Volantis yet allowed slavery to endure in the city,” Larra said, glancing at Nymeria, who was always careful, her words dripping with double-entendre whenever they flirted with delicate topics.

“Surely the Dragon Queen could have made short work of Valyria’s daughter,” Nymeria sighed, emptying her wine-glass and giving Larra a sidelong look that spoke volumes. They had debated Daenerys’ goodness, both too intrigued by cyvasse to see Daenerys’ actions as anything but, at worst, completely self-serving or, at best, a happy by-product of her ultimate goal. Nymeria tilted her head thoughtfully at Tisseia, her gaze lingering on the teardrop tattoo beneath her eye. “How is it you became free, my lady?”

“Lord Tyrion Lannister paid for my freedom,” Tisseia said stoutly, her chin rising.

“But you stayed with him?” Nym prompted delicately.

“What am I to do with freedom if I cannot feed myself?” Tisseia asked. “Lord Tyrion and I look after each other.”

“Everyone I meet seems to come to adore this Tyrion Lannister,” Nymeria said, glancing at Larra.

“Don’t look to me for contraction. When Bran broke his back, Tyrion designed him a saddle so that he might still ride,” Larra smiled fondly.

“I do not understand this fondness for Lannisters,” Nymeria frowned.

“For one Lannister,” Larra assured her.

“My father died for him.”

“Your father died trying to avenge his sister,” Larra corrected delicately, and Nymeria glanced sharply at her. Larra raised an eyebrow and said sternly to her, “Look me in the eye and tell me you would not do the same to avenge yours.”

Nymeria sighed heavily, her long eyelashes casting her dark eyes into shadow. She rolled her neck and gave Larra a rueful smile. “I cannot.” Her eyes dipped to the scars clearly visible on Larra’s body. “Nor can you.”

“I’ve almost died nearly a dozen times protecting my brother – that is the difference. My sisters would rage at the idea of me dying for their sake,” Larra said. Sansa would, at least; she would weep furious, bitter tears at the idea of Larra wasting her life, this second chance the gods had somehow granted them.

“Lady Sansa does not wish you to avenge her?”

“She revenged herself,” Larra said quietly. “Against all odds, we’re still here. I should be ashamed to be wasteful of it.”

“My father wishes me to avenge him, I know this,” Nymeria said firmly.

“There are many ways to get revenge. The best I’ve found is to live in spite of the one who’s wronged you,” Larra said, shrugging delicately. And that went for Lady Catelyn who despised her as much as it did the White Walkers who had hunted her.

“And what of the Twins?” Nymeria asked, her eyes narrowing. “Winter came for House Frey, they say.”

“House Frey violated guest-right. The gods punish,” Larra said, aware that she was smiling. A many-faced god named Death, she thought. Death, who wears my sister’s face. Nymeria chuckled and leaned closer, her eyes sultry as she settled close beside Larra.

“I enjoy our time together,” Nymeria admitted, her voice sounding candid, as if she was surprised. Larra smiled.

“So do I. It’s rare up here to find someone who shares my passion for cyvasse and philosophy and economics,” she said, and Nym smiled.

“Another pup has found its way to the wolf’s den,” she murmured, her eyes on Briar, whose hair had dried into a sheet of shimmering obsidian, sucking her thumb as she played with Neva and Altheda in front of the heart with their dolls and toys. “Not a Lannister.”

“No,” Larra agreed.

“She looks as if your lover fathered her,” Nymeria observed, and Larra glanced at her. It hadn’t been acknowledged that she and Gendry were – well, lovers. That he slept in her bed and that they were intimate in the way they acted and spoke to each other.

“She’s his sister,” Larra said, giving Nymeria a sidelong look. Nymeria raised her eyebrows, watching the children.

“You remind me of my father,” she said softly, her smile turning sad.

“How so?” Larra laughed; she had heard of the Red Viper and didn’t quite think their reputations matched up. Though, they were both known as incredibly dangerous…

“Father collected his bastards and raised us together,” Nymeria said softly. “Obara, Tyene, Sarella, my sisters by my father’s paramour Ellaria… We are a family, though we were strangers. I get the same feeling when I watch those children together. You have brought them together, have crafted for them a family.”

“It’s what every child deserves,” Larra shrugged. “A place they’re safe and loved.”

“The way you were not.”

“My father loved me,” Larra replied.

“But not your father’s wife,” Nymeria sighed. “I am lucky, I know. I had two mothers. The one who gave me life, and the one who raised me as her own blood.” She sighed heavily, for the first time looking almost glum. “Father should have married her.”

“Ellaria Sand?”

“Mm… One day, you shall meet her. You have the same…maternal nature. My uncle, he will delight to play cyvasse with you,” Nymeria smiled.

“Am I to come to Dorne, then?” Larra asked, smiling.

“After the war,” Nymeria nodded, and Larra laughed softly. “You will like the Water Gardens; it is cooler there, and the air is heavy with the perfume of flowers. We shall find you a sand-steed worthy of you, and silks that show off your eyes.”

“And what excuse shall bring me to Dorne?” Larra asked, smiling. She had no intention of leaving Winterfell – if indeed they survived the coming war, but it was fun to play with Nymeria.

“The King will need an emissary in the southern court, yes?” Nymeria smiled playfully. “One who is cunning as a wolf and can appreciate our ways. You will love the Dornish court; the women fight as fiercely as they fuck. And the men worship them for it. You can bring your blacksmith – my sisters would adore his weapons.”

“And other things, I’m sure.”

“As sure as I am that you will fight them all to keep them away from him,” Nymeria said, teasing. “You can bring your babies, too. My Princess will enjoy her cousins at court.”

Larra sighed heavily, gazing over at the girls. “They’re not my babies.”

Nymeria laughed softly, and told her, “They are yours. Just as I know that I am Ellaria’s, I know that those are Larra’s girls.”


Nymeria’s words echoed in Larra’s mind for a good long while. The girls were wards of the North, of Jon, who had tasked Sansa with raising and protecting them – yet Sansa was self-aware enough to know she was too close to it. Too close to the suffering she had endured under Cersei. She could not separate herself from it, to treat the girls as they deserved to be treated, as Cersei should have treated her. It fell to Larra, who often worried she was overstepping.

Larra’s girls…

More and more, they became her girls, though, in spite of her concerns. They turned to her for comfort, for praise – and to celebrate things.

They raced to Larra the moment they learned a Northern Longhaired cat owned by one of the Northern ladies had given birth to a litter of kittens. Altheda ran to fetch Larra, excitement making her beam as she tugged Larra through the halls. The lady gave Larra an apologetic grimace, sliding out of the way of the girls who were all clustered about the Longhaired cat and her kittens, cooing and gasping excitedly.

“Please may we keep one?!” Altheda asked, her eyes wide.

“Please, Mummy - ” Rosamund blinked as Calanthe nudged her, and Larra swallowed. She glanced at Narcisa, who had been pale and wan for days, listless and distracted during their reading lessons: she sat contentedly with a kitten. Beside her was Crisantha, who was still mute, yet who was sat on the floor with a kitten in her lap. The kitten had silver-gold fur and its amber eyes were almost exactly the same colour as Crisantha’s. She stroked the kitten and Larra could hear its deep purrs.

She watched Crisantha’s face as she stroked the kitten, her amber eyes more focused and aware than Larra had ever seen them. She thought of Shadow, and the simple joy and calm that spread through her body whenever the direwolf was near, the companionship she had enjoyed with the wolf for years.

Larra remembered that snowy summer’s day when the rider had arrived at Winterfell, and Bran had accompanied them for the first time to witness the execution of a Night’s Watch deserter. Little had they known, then… She wondered about the direwolf, as she had a thousand times, dead with a stag’s antlers deep in its throat and pups born of its dead body whimpering for milk. Six pups, for six Stark children.

She frowned at the litter of kittens, counting swiftly. If they were short, none of the girls would have one, for the sake of fairness. Twelve, she counted. One for each of the girls, and then some.

“Is she ready to part with them?” Larra asked the lady, who nodded.

“Yes, my lady,” she said softly. “If it please you, you may have your pick of the litter.”

The girls turned beseeching eyes on her – celery-green, amber, vivid sapphire, palest lavender – and she had renewed respect for Father’s limitless patience and goodness.

Sternly, and bewildered by how similar she sounded to Father, she told the girls, “You'll train them yourselves, you'll feed them yourselves and if they die, you'll build their pyre yourselves.”

“You mean it? We may keep one?” Calanthe grinned, her eyes glowing as she lifted the kitten in her hands, its fur golden and glowing. It swiped its tiny claws at her, and she laughed delightedly. Each of the girls claimed their new pet, Neva’s pearly silver one peeking a grey eye open before curling up against her chest, sleeping soundly, while Briar’s attempted to climb her sleeve, tiny claws digging into the wool of one of Larra’s childhood dresses now proudly worn by Briar. Narcisa had claimed the green-eyed kitten daintily washing its paws and Delphine smiled as she took a blue-eyed kitten with gold dappled markings on its pale-golden back. Ensuring each of the girls had their pick – surprised there was absolutely no squabbling as they fought over which got to have any particular kitten – Larra thanked the lady. She let out a soft noise and rocked on her toes, just catching herself from tripping over a kitten that had dashed away from its brothers and sisters and was now rubbing itself against her ankle, purring loudly. Beside it, uncertain on its tiny feet, was a second kitten, mewling softly, its tail flicking.

She remembered Cinder, her beloved childhood cat – a querulous old woman, grumpy and scornful if disturbed – and squatted down, lifting the two tiny kittens. One had dark grey fur and a sooty face from which vivid blue eyes glowed – she was unaccountably reminded of Grey Wind and of Robb’s blue eyes. The second kitten was a beauty, with pale grey fur, white socks and delicate white markings around its teal-green eyes. The pale kitten mewled and the dark one swiped a tiny claw, but both settled as she lifted them onto her chest, where they perched, supported by her hands, and started to purr, mewling delicately at each other.

It had been a long time since she’d had a pet. Looking at the kittens, she experienced a sudden, deep longing for the companionship she’d enjoyed with Cinder, the fearsome old lady.

She glanced at the lady. “May I?”

“Of course, my lady,” the lady smiled. “You’re doing me a favour, taking them off my hands.” Larra smiled, lifting one of the kittens, and gave it a kiss.

The girls were in raptures as they rushed back to the nursery with their new treasures. Calanthe wondered aloud, “Shall we ask Maester Atten how to care for them? He knows ever such a lot about animals!”

“I think that would be wise,” Larra agreed.

“What are you going to name yours, Dells?” Calanthe asked her cousin. They chatted happily, and brought out little toys for the kittens to explore in the nursery. Larra gave instruction to the maids to seek out a basket-weaver, asking them to create enough little beds for the kittens to share, while Larra remained in the nursery with the girls, teaching Leona how to gently stroke her own kitten and hold it so that she didn’t hurt it, the other little girls watching carefully. Calanthe was delighted, her kitten – named Tigress for the stripes on its back – already perched on her shoulder, claws dug in to the leather gorget Calanthe wore over her tunics, and she chatted away, telling them all about the pet cat she’d had at Casterly Rock. She became quiet, wondering how it fared on its own, for she had been forbidden from taking the cat with her to King’s Landing.

When the girls were settled, and their kittens also, Larra sighed and retreated to her chamber. She set her kittens down on the flagstones to explore their new home, smiling contentedly, and sat down at her table. She had worked hard all morning and now she ached to do something for herself. New kittens, the girls happy, Briar settling in, loved fiercely by Gendry morning and night, everyone content in the castle, siege preparations well under way…she felt the best she had in ages. Every night, Gendry told her about his day; every day, he managed to increase the number of folds he created with Valrian steel. His confidence with the steel was growing, as quickly as his confidence in bed, and she smiled to herself, already anticipating the night to come.

Every night as she drifted to sleep tucked tight against Gendry’s hard body, she thought of Aella Targaryen and Aeris the Armourer, and she ached to know more about their lives, to add Aella to the History she had compiled.

She was still musing over the updated entry for Rhaegar, uncertain about committing certain things to paper lest anyone read it who oughtn’t. But Aella? Her image was seared into Larra’s mind, the first wielder of Dark Sister, who had given the blade its name and brought dragons to House Targaryen. Straight-backed, unflappable and sensual – with Larra’s violet eyes.

Larra glanced at her great working table and reached for her art supplies, including a box about ten inches squared, made of reinforced paper covered with delicate Qartheen silk. She removed the lid and smiled at the five smaller boxes nestled neatly within, each of them fashioned from pale balsa wood, the lids decorated with intricate pyrogravure, as the Qartheen called it, patterns of exotic birds and flowers burned into the wood – and reveaing vibrant watercolour paints. For parchment or canvas, she would never use them; but with thick Myrish cotton paper or even more delicate yet durable Lyseni mulberry paper, they were perfect. She still had sheets of it, a gift from Lord Manderly for the last nameday she had celebrated at Winterfell. She had always been too precious about using them, afraid to do them a disservice with her burgeoning techniques.

Now, she reached for her art supplies and smiled as she got stuck in. One of the kittens – the paler one with delightful white marking around its eyes – mewled softly at her foot. She leaned down, picked it up, and nestled it in her lap. One hand stroking the kitten, the other busy with pencils, she didn’t notice the door opening hours later, engrossed in her artistry. She lifted her paintbrush and someone leaned in, murmuring low, “That’s very beautiful.”

She smiled and sighed as Gendry kissed her neck. “Thank you. You’re finished already?”

“You missed supper,” he said, and Larra’s mouth watered, her stomach grumbling, as he produced a steaming earthenware bowl of stew, a spoon ladled in it. In his other hand, he held a seeded roll.

“You’re an exceptionally handsome and talented man, did I ever tell you that?” Larra asked, raising her hands to take the bowl, and he chuckled softly, relinquishing it. He peered at her lap, where her two kittens were snuggled up, purring deeply.

“You haven’t, but it’s good to know you think so,” he smiled easily. “I see you’ve had a busy day.”

“They beseeched me,” Larra grimaced, and Gendry chuckled sat down on the bed, tugging at his boots. “All their darling little faces gazing up at me… I felt so sorry for Father. Direwolf pups…everyone thought him mad. At least they’re kittens, not lion-cubs.”

“They’ve been telling me all about it,” Gendry smiled.

“Even Briar?”

“She was the first to show me her kitten,” Gendry said, his eyes glittering warmly, and Larra smiled, relieved. “She was beaming with pride. She climbed into my lap and introduced me.”

“That’s wonderful,” Larra smiled softly, and Gendry nodded. It was slow going with Briar, a stubborn, suspicious, prickly little thing, but day by day she and Gendry were building a bond. Larra ate her stew and watched Gendry relax; he unfastened the buttons of his breeches and tugged his tunics free, stretching his toes, and laid back against the mattress, groaning as he stretched out his back. She loved watching him do this – relaxing after a long day. It was no longer just her chamber. She wasn’t sure when, but it had become theirs. She set the kittens down in their new basket and tidied her things away, then slipped off her boots.

“Take off your clothes and roll onto your front,” she told him gently, and he did so, relaxing once again as she straddled his backside. He hummed gently, sighing, as she reached out and started to knead his muscles, loosening the knots. In no time at all, he was fast asleep, and she smiled, slipping off her clothing, checked on the kittens sleeping in their basket, and climbed into bed beside Gendry. His gentle snores were soothing to her, after so long in the cave with Hodor’s thunderous rumblings. She cuddled up close and smiled. It had been a lovely day, and she felt lovely as she drifted of beside Gendry.


The door banged open and Larra jerked upright, hand fisted around the hilt of Sweet Sister, her heart in her throat, eyes wide, snarling lethally. A torch flickered wildly and she caught a glimmer of gold.

“Narcisa’s dying!” screamed a panicked Calanthe, and Larra gaped as Gendry grunted, jerking awake. Larra climbed from the bed, taking the torch from Calanthe’s shaking hand, and lit the sconces on the walls. Dark golden light brought Calanthe into relief, and beside her, a very pale Narcisa, visibly distraught.

“What’s going on?” Gendry rumbled softly, blinking owlishly in the light.

“Look! Someone’s stabbed her!” wailed Calanthe, as Narcisa’s lip quivered. Calanthe jerked at the hem of Narcisa’s nightdress. Her eyes adjusting to the dark and the flickering amber light, Larra relaxed as she realised what had happened. Blood was smeared on Narcisa’s thighs. Her paleness and despondency, her irritability, all made sense, and Larra realised she had not noticed the signs of what was to come.

She had to fight the urge to laugh, at the ferocity mingled with terror on Calanthe’s face. Always the first to start an argument with Narcisa, it was heartening to see how much Calanthe truly cared about her cousin. Larra told her gently, “Calanthe, your cousin is not dying. No-one has stabbed her.”

“How do you know?” Calanthe breathed.

“Firstly, they would have to get past your bloodriders,” Larra said. She said kindly, “Narcisa has had her first blood.” Calanthe frowned bemusedly at Narcisa, whose watery gaze lifted from the floor to Larra’s face, her lips parting.

“Blood?” Calanthe frowned.

“Yes. It means her body is beginning to prepare to bear children.”

“Now?” Calanthe yelped indignantly.

“No, not now,” Larra reassured her.

“Do you mean…she’s flowered?” Calanthe asked, frowning deeply, thinking hard.

Larra stopped herself from rolling her eyes. That was the term the septas had used to prepare Sansa. “Yes.”

Calanthe exploded, her indignation palpable. “There’s not a single flower involved! Who thought up such a stupid name?! Call it what it is – a bloody mess! A red terror!” Sudden realisation seemed to dawn on Calanthe, demanding, “Will this happen to me, too?”

Larra couldn’t help it; the horror-struck look on Calanthe’s face was too much. “Not for a little while yet,” she chuckled softly. “But yes, one day, the red terror will come to you.” Calanthe looked absolutely disgusted.

“Mother didn’t tell me everything,” Narcisa whispered, her green eyes wide. Larra had never seen her so…young, so vulnerable.

“Sometimes it is better not to know too much,” Larra said. She glanced over her shoulder and sighed, watching Gendry tuck his legs into his breeches and carefully pull them up under cover of the shadows. “Gendry, could you please take Calanthe back to her chamber? Narcisa and I need to have a little talk.”

Calanthe’s eyes snapped to the bed. Her fair eyebrows rose. “Why is Gendry in your bed?”

“He’s keeping it warm,” Larra quipped. “To bed, Lady Lioness.”

Calanthe protested, as Gendry approached her, rubbing a hand through his curls and yawning widely, “I want to know more – can you tell me more?”

Gendry grunted softly, steering her gently out of the chamber, “I’m afraid not.”

Larra heard Calanthe muse, “Perhaps we should go to the library.” The door shut behind them, and Larra turned to Narcisa.

“How do you feel?” she asked gently. Narcisa’s lips quivered, tears trickling silently down her cheeks. The shock was the worst thing, Larra realised. Narcisa had not been prepared – and Larra hadn’t thought she needed to be the one to prepare her. “Do you have pain? What about – do you feel thick, bloated?”

Narcisa’s lip quivered and her hands shook as she grasped her sleeves. “I can’t sleep and my head aches. My…my breasts are sore. And I feel sick.”

“Herbal teas help with the nausea, and with sleep. And sleep will help those headaches,” Larra said softly. “And the pain…the pain can be helped with a warming-brick to relax the muscles. I shall teach you how to protect your clothes and keep yourself clean.”

“How long does it last?” Narcisa asked hoarsely.

“It depends on the lady, I’m afraid. If your mother bled heavily for longer, you may also; before…I had three heavy days where it felt my insides were at war with each other, and a gentler day either side,” Larra said. That was before. Before she had lost half her body-weight; she was only just returning to a healthy size – at least, she was no longer flirting with death if she missed a meal.

“I don’t know how my mother bled – she never told me,” Narcisa said tremulously, her eyes shining. “She never talked about such things.”

“Well, we’re talking now,” Larra said gently, guiding her to the settle. She prepared a pot of hot water and rummaged around for the root Osha had taught her how to find, to create a tea to melt away pain. Until she could boil it and make a tea, herbs would have to suffice.

“Did Lady Stark teach you?” Narcisa asked quietly, when Larra had handed her a small cup of stewed tea.

Larra’s answer was blunt. “No.”

“Then who did?”

“A maid.”

“Are you going to marry me off?” Narcisa asked, and Larra turned to stare at her.

“Why would you ask that?” she asked, thrown.

Narcisa’s lip quivered. “Because I can bear children.”

Larra frowned at her, asking gently, “Why do you sound so frightened at the very thought of them?”

“Why – why would I ever have children when she’s just going to burn them?” Narcisa burst into tears. Larra stared, stunned. She gathered Narcisa up into her arms, holding her and stroking her hair until she calmed down. She helped clean Narcisa up, taught her how to protect her clothing, and escorted her back to the girls’ chamber with a hot stone wrapped in flannel to hug to her belly.

The next day, Larra let Narcisa stay in bed, clutching a hot stone wrapped in flannel to her belly as she tried to sleep through her pains. The other girls wondered why Narcisa was allowed to stay in bed – and why she had been moved to the cot in which Leona slept alone. Larra was surprised that Calanthe had not told her cousins. Instead, she pestered Larra for information.

“Do I have to go back to wearing dresses?” she complained. “I only just started wearing breeches!”

“Of course you don’t. If you’d like to wear a dress, wear one; if you’d prefer to wear breeches, by all means put them on,” Larra said, glancing at the younger girl, who should have been in the schoolroom with her cousins. Yet Larra knew it was important – she had failed to prepare Narcisa and knew she couldn’t fail the other girls.

Calanthe frowned at her. “You wear both.”

“Yes.”

“But Lady Sansa only wears gowns,” she said, and Larra nodded.

“Because that is the sort of woman Sansa wishes to be,” Larra said. “Look at Lady Brienne – a warrior in armour is the woman she wishes to be. Just like Lady Mormont.”

“Narcisa would never wear breeches,” Calanthe mused.

“No,” Larra agreed. “But that is the sort of girl Narcisa is.”

“It seems like a nuisance,” Calanthe scowled.

“It is.”

“What good could possibly come from it all? ‘Cisa told me – I kept bothering her, too – and she said I’d have pains and headaches and nausea and awful shits and my mood would change in a heartbeat and I’ll be crying all over the place,” Calanthe said, wrinkling her nose in disgust. “Name one good thing that could possibly come from this?”

Larra glanced at Calanthe, and the gentleness in her voice seemed to startle the girl when she said, “I’ll name seven. Let’s see, there is…Leona and Crisantha, Rosamund and Altheda, our glorious Narcisa, of course, Delphine…and the other one, you know, the brave, righteous, clever one who loves her family fiercely and will fight to defend them. What’s her name?”

The little lioness gazed back at her. “Calanthe.”

“Calanthe,” Larra nodded, with a sad smile, marvelling for the hundredth time that she was lucky enough to be raising these girls, and devastated by the thought. “It is a bloody mess. But sometimes wondrous things are born out of chaos.”

“Grandfather always said I am chaos,” Calanthe said, her face brightening.

“He wasn’t wrong.”

“He said I was worth the trouble,” Calanthe sighed contentedly. “My uncles said that women are weak because we bleed. That’s why we can’t fight.”

“Why do you think men are afraid of us bearing arms?” Larra clicked her tongue, and Calanthe grinned. “Shedding our own blood, enduring pain and discomfort, and wielding a weapon? We’d be far too dangerous. We’d have them on their knees within a fortnight and none would dare take for granted the life we give by declaring wars and murdering each other. Men are particularly messy.”

“Aunt Genna would have liked you,” Calanthe said, grinning.

“Would she?”

“She didn’t suffer fools either.”

“And what would she have said about all this with Narcisa?”

“Like any war: What’s coming will come and we’ll meet it when it does,” Calanthe said stoutly, and Larra laughed. Calanthe sighed, wincing uncomfortably. “Will it really happen to me, too?”

“Yes, dearest,” Larra smiled softly. “But it is so worth it.”

“How? Besides the babies, I mean.”

“Well, the rage helps with your training,” Larra said, reflecting. “Come on. I’ve got to go and find Delphine and Crisantha – gods…Crisantha…” Crisantha was barely present. What would happen if she started to bleed, and had no idea what was happening? How could Larra be sure Crisantha heard her, to be prepared?

“She’s doing better, I think,” Calanthe said thoughtfully, her eyes bright. She blinked and jumped when Larra leaned down, wrapping her arms around her. “What’s this – are you attacking me – oh…oh, it’s a hug. What’s this for?”

Larra sighed, squeezing the lioness. She murmured, “I am glad to know you, Calanthe Lannister.”

“Oh, then…” Calanthe sighed, and leaned into the embrace. After a moment, she murmured against Larra’s shoulder, “Do you want to know a secret, Larra?”

“If you’d care to share it,” Larra said, leaning back, and Calanthe stared up at her, her beautiful face deeply earnest.

“I miss my family…but I love being here with you.”

Deeply affected by Calanthe’s words, Larra drifted into the forge. She sought out Gendry, aching to be near him as her emotions overwhelmed her.

“You look upset,” he said softly when he spied her drifting closer, frowning fiercely at the idea of her being upset. She gave a shaky sigh and shook her head. “What’s got you so quiet?”

“It’s a secret.”

Gendry sighed heavily. “You look tired.”

“I’m exhausted,” Larra said honestly. She had had some lovely days but she was also more tired than she had been in ages. “Someone’s keeping me up all night.”

Gendry pulled a face and suggested, “Perhaps he should leave you be.”

“Well, I didn’t say that,” Larra said quickly, and he flashed a grin.

“Go and get some fresh air,” he told her. “You’ve not been outside for days, I know.”

“Come with me for a walk in the godswood?” Larra asked, and Gendry gave her a sidelong look, setting down his hammer and tongs.

“Why not? The steel must temper for a while,” he said, and Larra grinned.

It was true, she hadn’t been outside in a few days, and the tension was building in the base of her skull where headaches started to blossom if she hadn’t breathed fresh air. To keep themselves warm, Gendry lifted her up against a tree, taking her slowly as gentle snowflakes drifted around them.

Pink-cheeked, relaxed and grinning, they wandered back to the castle hand-in-hand.

The lingering ecstasy shattered as they heard screaming. Not just a single voice – hundreds. Larra gave Gendry a stricken look, and they ran. Not away – toward the screams.

They burst through the gate, into the courtyard, as people screamed and scrambled away, shoving each other to get inside, fleeing.

Larra’s breath escaped her in a gust.

Perched idly on the ramparts was an enormous green-and-bronze dragon.

Rhaegal rustled their tremendous wings and snapped their jaws, rows of lethal teeth glistening in the meagre sunlight shining stubbornly despite the snow, but did nothing except watch people running for safety. No screaming, no roars; Rhaegal calmly observed everything.

Larra sheathed Dark Sister, belted as always around her waist. Never breaking her gaze, Larra drifted forward, compelled by some strange instinct, staring in absolute awe. She had seen Rhaegal before, yes, in Bran’s visions.

She gasped, and wondered if it was the sound that drew Rhaegal’s attention to her. The great green-and-bronze dragon rustled its neck and…and cooed, singing, as it lowered its enormous head, craning its neck lower, until the dragon was balanced precariously on the battlements, leaning in to come face-to-face with her.

Rhaegal was now so large that Larra could walk into their open mouth; they sang and crooned and exhaled a breath of hot air that dried the snow melting in her hair.

“Rhaegal,” she breathed, stunned. A dragon. A real, live dragon – fire made flesh. Here. Stood before her – real. Not a dream from Lord Bloodraven but a real dragon, massive and sinuous and divine, their tough leathery hide shimmering like emerald velvet – like the moors outside Winterfell shivering in a summer breeze, gilded by sunlight. Rhaegal’s movements were slow, careful, and Larra smiled, her eyes stinging, as she held out her palm. She felt something soaring within her, swelling, as Rhaegal delicately poked their immense muzzle against her palm. She gasped softly at the unfamiliar heat stinging her skin as much as the feeling of something deep and ancient and exhilarating, pure and natural, unfurling itself rapturously around her, a sinuous strand of something binding them together, ancient and unknowable and right. Rhaegal blinked their enormous bronze eyes and cooed. Larra stroked her hand along their face, telling them, “I dreamed of you…for years – green and bronze. Like the eyes of those who sing the songs of the earth.”

Rhaegal purred deeply and nuzzled her entire body, as Last Shadow would, and Larra smiled. “Perhaps you dreamed of me, too?” she whispered.

Rhaegal purred and cooed, serenading her with their song, and Larra smiled, gazing up at them as they straightened their neck, flapping their enormous wings with a sound like thunder. The courtyard was silent around them; people had fled in fear at the sight of Rhaegal, yet now stood enraptured, watching Larra murmur to the dragon. Rhaegal shook their great head, flapped their wings for balance, then dipped one of them low. Larra glanced from the dipped wing to Rhaegal’s face, and Gendry watching carefully, saw it, ever so briefly: emotion warred across her face as she gazed at the dragon.

Then her inner dispute seemed to settle, her smile became breathless, her eyes sparkling, and Gendry noticed her hands shaking as she climbed.

Larra mounted the dragon, who let her settle along their spine before flapping their great wings, and Gendry could have sworn Rhaegal was speaking to him when he purred and snapped his rows of vicious fangs, his eyes on Gendry as he cooed and warbled a sound that could only be described as beautiful. Almost proud.

Gendry could just see Larra, in her plain grey wool dress and heavy cloak, strapped with weapons, her braids bound like an obsidian crown around her head.

Gendry saw Larra bend low, saw her lips move, but could not hear – and Rhaegal shot into

the air.

Chapter 41: Across the Stars

Notes:

Thank you so much for the reviews! This week, I had my final observation to be signed off as a fully qualified teacher, otherwise I would have been updating more. But I have been signed off and can now party – and by party, that means sit at home alone drinking a mini bottle of prosecco and writing fanfiction!

So, remember when Gendry was clever and cunning and observant and can keep his mouth shut? That comes into play in this chapter.

So I was always adored Toothless and Hiccup’s first flight in How to Train Your Dragon – the music is so joyous and majestic – and in Avatar when Jake Sully claims his Ikran.

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

41

Across the Stars


His heart thundered in his chest, a grin spreading across his face as Larra’s shout of sheer joy ripped through the air, as fierce and as warming as a dose of fiery Northern whisky. The sound echoed around the still courtyard long after Rhaegal’s tremendous wings had carved through the billowing clouds dusting snow everywhere, soaring higher, his great spiked tail finally whipping out of sight.

Gendry knew Larra loved dragons: Arya used to tell them stories as they trudged through the Riverlands, stories about dragons that her sister Larra had told her by the hearth while they knitted. Even last night, he had seen the painting Larra had done of the beautiful, proud Aella Targaryen and her sleek lavender-silver dragon. He also knew Larra had had dreams of dragons since she was a girl – the beasts themselves, and the people who rode them. She had dreamed of Targaryens. She had dreamed of dragons: she had dreamed of flying. Larra had once told Gendry that galloping across the snowy moors was the closest she knew she would ever come to flying.

During the flight from the True North to Eastwatch-by-the-Sea, Gendry had been so focused on keeping himself and Jon on Rhaegal’s back – and keeping Jon alive – that he hadn’t truly thought about the fact that he had flown on the back of a dragon. He remembered the heat and the indescribable power of Rhaegal’s wings.

He smiled to himself; what he wouldn’t give to be on Rhaegal’s back with Larra now, to see her face and experience her joy with her.

It was something, he knew instinctively, that she had to do alone. That she and Rhaegal had to do alone.

He lowered his gaze to the courtyard, surprised to see so many people gathered. Not everyone had fled, it seemed; but those who had had spread the news. A dragon had come to Winterfell.

Shivering in her training gear was Calanthe, her jaw agape. Her wooden sparring sword drooped uselessly at her side. Beyond her, stood on one of the raised, covered walkways, was Lady Sansa. She looked ill, pale as the snow drifting lazily around them, her cheeks hollow. Behind her, some of the lords muttered amongst themselves. One of the maesters newly arrived at Winterfell, Maester Arys, a burly, good-humoured man who taught the children languages, stared with open-mouthed disbelief. He seemed to pull himself together, then gave Lady Sansa’s stricken face a shrewd look, rubbing his beard thoughtfully. Samwell Tarly was blinking rapidly and seemed to be thinking very hard as he watched the skies. His dark eyes dropped to Lady Sansa and his lips parted as something sparked in his expression, a sudden realisation, and Gendry frowned, watching him, wondering what had him bustling away before anyone could say a word.

“He’s going to eat Larra!” Calanthe burst into tears, her wooden sparring-sword clattering to the ground. So quiet was the courtyard that everyone heard her; Lady Sansa turned enormous deep-blue eyes on the girl, her lips pale.

Gendry strode across the yard to Calanthe, who was shaking like a leaf. Her long eyelashes were spiked together by the tears streaming silently down her face, and as he approached he noticed the wet patch on her breeches. She had lost control of her waters – and after what she had endured in the Westerlands, he wasn’t surprised. In fact, seeing Calanthe put things in a new light. He had only ever witnessed the dragons unleashing their power upon the Night King’s army, Rhaegal swooping in to rescue him and Jon both. He had seen Viserion’s wrath at being injured, demolishing outbuildings at Eastwatch – but even then, they’d used the timber to keep the fires lit.

Calanthe had witnessed the very worst atrocities that a dragon-rider could commit: she was one of seven to have been chosen specifically to survive that atrocity.

In Calanthe’s experience, dragons did not save: they destroyed.

He saw the dread in Calanthe’s eyes, her cheeks pale, her pupils dilated, black swallowing the emerald-green. Her breath came in shallow pants, and her cheeks were stained with pink as she fidgeted, becoming more aware of her own body as the shock and terror of Rhaegal’s appearance – and sudden disappearance with Larra – wore away.

“Larra will be alright,” Gendry said gently, squatting down in front of her. He reached out and took her tiny hands in his, searching her face. “Calanthe…look at me… Larra will be perfectly alright.”

“You don’t know that!” Calanthe cried, her little face scrunching up.

“I do.”

“How?” she sobbed, and for a rare moment, young Calanthe looked and sounded her age.

“Because if I was a dragon seeking a rider, I’d be looking for someone as brilliant and splendid and ferocious as I was,” Gendry said softly, not smiling, because Calanthe was deathly afraid. He believed what he said but he wondered whether Calanthe could ever learn to see Rhaegal as anything but a monster. She sucked in a shuddering breath, her gaze fixated on him with a desperate sort of fury. He reached for the wooden sparring-sword and stood up, gently scooping Calanthe against his side, carrying her as she shuddered and sobbed silently into his chest. “Come, let’s get you cleaned up and warmed.”

As he carried Calanthe toward the great doors, Lady Sansa caught his eye, striding toward him: She had heard every word he had said to Calanthe. She stopped Gendry and laid a hand gently on his free arm, demanding, breathless with terror, “Why didn’t you stop her?”

Even as he frowned at her, Gendry knew Lady Sansa’s was a very different kind of fear than Calanthe’s. Calanthe dreaded that Larra had been doomed to a gruesome fate: Lady Sansa, for whatever reason, seemed more afraid of the mutterings of her men.

Why didn’t you stop her? How could he, was the better question. How could he have stopped Larra climbing onto Rhaegal’s back – when the beast itself had cooed and coaxed her with a gentle lullaby and offered its wing, when Rhaegal had relaxed at the very sight of her and cooed, purring and clicking. When Larra had dreamed of dragons and yearned to fly from her earliest memories.

“How could I?” he asked heavily. He could no more have stopped Larra mounting Rhaegal than he could harness the moon. He frowned deeply at Lady Sansa, wondering…what had her so petrified. It wasn’t like her to lose her composure, to let others see her emotions, or to give in to them, especially in front of an audience. He knew little enough of her yet Gendry knew that about Lady Sansa. She was composed, elegant and untouchable – not like stern, ferocious, deeply loving and charismatic Larra.

He doubted Lady Sansa had the same fears as Calanthe, but something about Larra flying off on Rhaegal’s back had spooked her sister. And something about their men talking about it frightened Lady Sansa even more.

He’d always been told only Targaryens could ride dragons.

Only Targaryens…

Frowning intensely at Lady Sansa, reading the worry in her eyes, Gendry’s eyes widened with a sudden thought. But it couldn’t be! Yet…no-one knew who the Snows’ mother was. Everyone in Westeros knew that Ned Stark had kept the name of his bastards’ mother secret.

Yet she had to have had Targaryen blood, somehow. They were the only Dragonlords to survive the Doom of Valyria, whose blood held that unique ability to bond with dragons. Only dragonseed could claim a mount, like in the Dance of Dragons, the smallfolk with Targaryen blood had claimed feral dragons to help the Blacks. Gendry had a drop of it, they knew, to be able to forge Valyrian steel. Larra had realised that. But had she realised his potential because she, too, had that same potential? She had always dreamed of dragons. Was that her mind’s way of telling her, all this time, that she had Targaryen blood?

Gendry frowned. Yet how could she? The only Targaryens alive around the time of her birth were King Aerys, Queen Rhaella and Prince Rhaegar…

Rhaegar who had kidnapped Lyanna Stark.

Lyanna Stark, whom the whitebeards – smallfolk and Northern lords alike – claimed Larra was the spitting image of, but for her eyes and her curls.

Everyone knew the story.

Ned Stark had gone to war against the Mad King and returned to Winterfell with his sister’s bones: she had not survived the war. And Ned had brought two bastard children home with him, a boy and a girl with the Stark look… The daughter who had vivid Valyrian purple eyes and had mounted a dragon…

Gendry stared at Lady Sansa. Her dread seemed to seep into him, making his skin itch and his hands shake. Was Larra a Targaryen? The child of Rhaegar and Lyanna Stark, born during the Rebellion?

The Last Dragon’s only surviving children, hidden safely in the snow with the only person who could ever have protected them from Robert Baratheon’s infamous hatred of dragonspawn.

“Lady Sansa?” someone called, and she turned her gaze away, dropping her hand and smoothing her features. Nothing betrayed the dread Gendry had seen: her expression was mild and considerate as one of the maesters approached her. Unsettled, Gendry glanced down at Calanthe, who was frowning deeply at Lady Sansa, sharing his confusion. Her breathing was under control now; she started to hiccough as he led the way back to the Starks’ private chambers. His mind raced and he itched for Larra to return, for a different reason than Calanthe did. Calanthe wished her surrogate mother to return, safe and whole. Gendry knew no harm would befall Larra while she was with Rhaegal: he wanted her to return so that he could ask her…

Could ask whether she was indeed the child of Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark.

Only…did it matter? He asked himself the same question over and over. What did it matter if Larra was the child of Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark? If Jon was the son of Rhaegar? It mattered in the same way it mattered that Gendry had been sired by Robert Baratheon: not at all, really, except for the potential in their blood. King’s blood, he thought, scowling, as he hammered away, folding and folding and folding…

Calming as the hours passed, cleaned and clothed in a fresh, warm woollen dress, Calanthe stopped watching the courtyard entrance to the forges; her attention turned instead to Gendry. He knew she was supposed to return to her cousins in the schoolroom for their afternoon lessons, but he also knew the girls well enough to know they’d get nothing out of Calanthe except mayhem until she was assured of Larra’s safe return. So he had set her on a perch on a workbench in the forge, near enough to him that he could keep an eye on her, and she on the courtyard. Calanthe had her crochet with her, and an encyclopaedia of Essosi mammals, which she distractedly read aloud to him as he worked. Slowly the crochet, the book and the courtyard were forgotten as Calanthe inched closer to him, watching him work, eventually asking him questions about what he was doing.

“What are you making?”

“A hunting knife,” Gendry grunted, hammering away.

“Does it usually take this long?” Calanthe asked candidly. Gendry smiled.

“No,” he admitted. “See these ripples? How many are there?”

“Hundreds?” Calanthe said, glancing from the small blade to Gendry’s face, biting her cheek thoughtfully. “They look like Qartheen lace.”

“Each ripple is a fold in the steel,” Gendry said, demonstrating with his hammer. “Each time I fold the steel, I must let it temper before I can forge another. That’s what takes the time.”

“Is the knife for Larra?” Calanthe asked, her emerald eyes clear and appreciative as she gazed at the hundreds of tiny folds in the rippling smoke-black steel. “It looks like Dark Shadow’s fur in the firelight.”

Gendry stared at the weapon. He had been so focused on the intricate folds of steel that he hadn’t noticed but Calanthe was right: as dark and smoky as it was, the blade did seem to resemble the way the firelight shone on Last Shadow’s impenetrable black fur – silver rapturously caressing obsidian.

“Does it have a handle?” Calanthe asked, and Gendry chuckled softly. He taught her the true names for the different parts of a weapon. She mused, “The hilt should be made of weirwood.”

“Should it?”

“If it’s for Larra, then yes,” Calanthe said stoutly. “The weirwood is sacred to Larra. And she treasures Last Shadow. Larra lets Shadow be wild and free because she loves her so much.”

“I’m not sure Larra would take kindly to us hacking bits off the great heart tree,” Gendry said, smiling softly.

“Probably not,” Calanthe sighed, then perked up. “I know! Maybe it dropped branches during the storms!”

“You could go and check,” Gendry said thoughtfully, glancing at the entrance to the courtyard. The light had taken on a curious, fiery tone, and when they paused at the entrance Gendry saw a glorious sunset blazing fire everywhere, gilding the heavy blanket of black clouds that had settled across the sky. The courtyard seemed to glow with that strange orangey-pink glow of a deep sunset – a colour Gendry was so used to in the south, where the sun was harsh and the sunsets fiercely beautiful. In the North, it turned dripping icicles to rubies and seemed to soften the harshness everywhere around them, the icy, jagged stone walls and the sludge beneath their boots.


A sea of snow drifted beyond her, as far as the eye could see, great fluffy white meadows glinting and glimmering with silver, wisps of mist drifting idly like gentle waves, a dreamlike city of spires and gentle hills ever-changing and mesmerising. An endless sea of snow-clouds below her, and above her…eternity. Endless dark-blue, velvety and rich, beguiling in its calmness and its serenity. The boundless sky yielded its secrets, thousands upon thousands of stars glittering brilliantly like diamonds just out of reach.

Thighs clamped on Rhaegal’s enormous back, Larra had long since ceased clinging to him; she sat straight-backed and proud, beguiled and tempted to stand and reach for those stars glinting so tauntingly. She sat up straight and gazed at the world around her – their world. Hers and Rhaegal’s; this was theirs alone.

A gentle wind caressed her face and teasing her braids, and she felt it for the first time since…since perching precariously outside the cave: Freedom.

She could breathe.

They had left the day behind them; beneath the clouds, the sun hung low and stubborn, shining through the snows. But above the clouds…in the heart of winter, the moon had already risen, gliding higher in the sky, huge and heavy, enormous and aweing and turning everything to silver light. Above the clouds were snow-meadows and an endless velvety night scattered with stars winking flirtatiously. The cold sharp air filled her lungs and caressed her bare skin. She tasted the snow in the air and heard the windsong in her ears. If she closed her eyes, she knew she would have trouble discerning between the skies and the True North.

Flying, she had learned the moment she climbed on Rhaegal’s back, was freedom.

Rhaegal’s tremendous body, blistering hot and chasing away the worst of her discomfort at the cold – she was, after all, in a woollen dress and cloak, not her furs – was incredibly gentle as they glided through the air.

The moment she had seen Rhaegal, she had felt it, a whisper, as beguiling to her heart and mind as dragonsong was to her ears. A delicate ribbon of smoke and golden firelight sensuously intertwined, reaching for her, unfurling rapturously and embracing her. Embers sparked beneath her skin, simmering low, not painful but delicious, the embers growing to sparks and catching alight, searing and necessary, a throbbing ribbon of molten gold, smoke and flickering firelight, a blinding, breathless golden light that drenched everything, saturating her with unbridled ecstasy. She had felt it, tenuously at first, yet now that tether between them – a smoky, sensuous seam of shadow and firelight – seemed to sear through her, branding her, forever entwining them together, an aweing rope of lightning and molten gold, starlight and shadows, solid and fierce, unbreakable. Their bond. And at the other end of it, Rhaegal.

Smiling breathlessly, Larra closed her eyes and opened herself up to the bond. She felt Rhaegal inside her mind, knew Rhaegal was nestled deep in her heart now forever. She felt Rhaegal’s frustrations tempered by a natural gentleness and compassion, the ferociousness buried deep just waiting to be brought forth to protect those they loved. She delved deeper into the bond and sighed, smiling, feeling Rhaegal’s mind, as familiar to her as her own. She understood their intelligence, their boundless love and unfettered joy as they glided above the clouds, their wings caressed by the wind and by starlight, their fierce independence – and their frustration born of a fruitless desire to guard and protect and love, yearning to be free yet embrace something they could fiercely protect with all their strength and cunning.

Larra felt Rhaegal’s cunning, clear and sharp. Shrewd, assessing and creative.

Rhaegal was fierce, cunning and, Larra believed, humorous.

She wondered what Rhaegal thought of her – didn’t have to wonder; Rhaegal cooed and sighed and sent great waves of delight through the bond, pride and fierce joy, adoration, appreciation.

They were exquisitely well-matched.

Stern, ferocious and creative, vicious and compassionate, humorous and gentle unless provoked, with a latent potential for indescribable violence simmering deep beneath the surface. Sheer joy at their freedom, a deep appreciation and wonder for the world around them. Intuitive, frustrated and yearning. Deeply nurturing, protective to a fault and ferociously loyal.

She was Rhaegal’s, and Rhaegal was hers.

All those times she had watched the dragons, from hatchlings to Drogon burning the khals… She had watched Rhaegal, frustrated and furious, independent and cunning, aching to be loved yet spurning the one who obviously favoured another. Aching for connection.

Now, Rhaegal had it. Rhaegal had found her. And Larra felt Rhaegal’s unfettered rapture at finding her: tears blinded her as Rhaegal’s fierce emotions swept over her, pure and consuming. She felt the rumble through Rhaegal’s enormous body as they cooed and sang and clicked melodiously, talking to her.

Grinning, she sniffed and wiped her face, stroking her hand against Rhaegal’s neck.

“You found me,” she said hoarsely, smiling, and Rhaegal cooed, relief and joy sparkling through the bond. She felt calm sweep through Rhaegal, and a quiver of uncertainty; Rhaegal had lived so long in a state of frustration that calm was alien. Rhaegal luxuriated in it, in the calm and in the connection, their bond. Larra let it drift through her, consuming and good. She watched moonlight glimmering off Rhaegal’s leathery wings, more like a bat’s than a bird’s, and smiled to herself, delight and excitement, curiosity, filling her body.

She had reared a wounded dire-eagle; and bats used to roost in the high chambers above the Library. On calm summer nights when the light lingered, she used to see the bats darting in and out, spiralling through the air, twisting and tumbling, their leathery wings carving through the air. Rhaegal’s wings were designed for more than gentle gliding above the clouds. She was curious to learn how Rhaegal flew; and how she could fly with them. How, together, they could enjoy and explore the bond, and the freedom of the air.

“Shall we fly?” she murmured, and Rhaegal cooed, a ripple of delight shuddering through the bond. Larra grinned, adjusting her position, raising her backside up, planting her feet, balancing, keeping a hold of the spikes in front of her – the way she would rise from the saddle, preparing to gallop. Everything she knew about horses – even about guiding Bran’s sledge – came rushing to the forefront of her mind, and Rhaegal chirped and trilled once, before angling their wings to catch an air-current, and Larra let out a great scream of delight as they rose, higher and higher in a great spiral.

Rhaegal flapped their wings with a sound light thunder, rumbling deep in their chest, amusement rippling through the bond, and dived, wingtips skimming the sea of clouds, scattering starlight. They broke through the clouds, diving into a world awash with red-gold light from the dying sun, and Rhaegal tucked their wings in tight, shooting faster than any arrow. Larra screamed with delight, excitement skittering across her skin and bubbling through her blood, as they plummeted. Rhaegal’s wings snapped open, the veins of bronze glowing vividly, and caught another air-current, snatching them higher into the air, making Larra giggle raucously as exhilaration flooded her. With a roar of delight, Rhaegal flapped their wings and dived again, sweeping through enormous snowy valleys, darting between crags and towers of ancient stone, soaring over pristine snow-meadows and startling herds of wild buffalo and muskox, instantly melting frozen waterfalls with their nearness, the wind chilling Larra as they glided over frozen lakes. She grinned breathlessly, eyes blinded by tears – the wind snatched at her, and joy consumed her – and wiped them hastily, snatching her rebellious cloak around herself as the wool snapped and slashed in the wind with every movement. They soared over holdfasts and abandoned villages, frosted fields and copses, great valleys and winding idle rivers, frozen waterfalls and hot-springs busy with all manner of wildlife. Far off, barely bigger than the glinting stars, she saw flickers of firelight, torches lit in great number, a large cluster of them. The only signs of people she had seen since leaving Winterfell on Rhaegal’s back, and before Rhaegal could bank and flap their wings and soar back among the clouds, she noted the landmarks, the direction of the sun. South-east, then; another party approaching Winterfell from White Harbour. She tucked the cloak tight around herself and grinned as Rhaegal plummeted, fog snatching long fingers toward them, enveloping them like a blanket as snow-capped evergreens tipped with gold in the dying sunlight rose up to meet them like thousands of glinting spears, the great unknowable Wolfswood shrouded by ancient mists, and Larra could have sworn she heard wolfsong echoing on the wind as they hurtled past. Rhaegal shrieked and roared and snapped their wings, darting effortlessly around ancient mountains and ageless towers of rock thrusting up among the trees, swathed in mists, and they broke out onto an endless plane of pure glass, an ice-lake frozen and gleaming beneath them.

Screaming with delight, Larra laughed and punched the air with both hands, thighs protesting as they gripped Rhaegal tight, her face stinging from tears and from the wind, the dying light blinding her, the wind tugging at her braids and her cloak, and beneath her, Rhaegal roared and cooed, rumbling and chortling.

They danced through the air for hours, playing. They learned how to fly together. Larra learned how Rhaegal’s wings interacted with air-currents and how swiftly Rhaegal could change direction, darting and twirling and dancing in the air, astonishing for a creature of their size, elegant and powerful. Rhaegal was showing off, playful and delighted to have a companion to share their joy with. They learned each other.

That first flight was forever seared into their minds. Rapture and connection. Playful and free.

As darkness consumed the world below, Rhaegal flapped their great wings and climbed above the clouds. Endless seas of stars and silver greeted them, and Larra sighed, awed, brought to tears of awe as the lights flickered all about them – the Northern lights, a flickering, eerie, mesmerising display of colour, ever-changing. Exquisitely beautiful and unexplainable. One of the great natural wonders of the North. The Children sang of the lights; the Free Folk told tales of giants and gods. In the True North, they were visible in all seasons; below the Wall, it was only during winter that the lights were visible, and rarely at Winterfell. The Umbers told myths and legends of warrior-queens bearing the lights and summoning great warriors to their rest.

Stuck under the great weirwood, Larra had waited for the lights to flicker into life every night, had ached to hear the Children singing to them. The Children sang the songs of the earth but had their own special lullabies for the lights, and she sang them now as she watched the lights, almost as if in tribute to them, to her and Rhaegal and their first flight, flickering bronze and silver, violet and emerald, ever-changing, sensuous and mesmerising, eerie yet calming.

Soaring above the silver sea, Larra sighed and smiled, settling into Rhaegal and letting their warmth settle through her body. She missed riding across the moors around Winterfell; but she knew she would always ache for this. For flight – for freedom. She knew she would always be wondering when she could next mount Rhaegal and fly and play together.

Cooing and chortling, Rhaegal snapped their wings and Larra felt the question through the bond, almost asking her, was it time for her to return? She patted Rhaegal gently.

“I think so, Rhaegal,” she sighed dreamily. “I wish we could stay. You must return me.” Rhaegal cooed and clicked. She smiled at the brief dip of sorrow that trembled through the bond. She caressed Rhaegal’s tough leathery hide. “Sssh, don’t fret. We shall fly again.” Rhaegal cooed warmly. Larra smiled. “Tomorrow. And the next day, and the next, for as long as you return to me.”

That was the important thing, Larra thought. That Rhaegal returned to her, out of choice, out of delight at their time spent together. Like Last Shadow, Rhaegal was a wild creature; they were meant to be free. Larra could enjoy her bond with both creatures but she understood one crucial thing: they were wild. Bonded though they were, they belonged out there, embracing their natures, their instincts. Not shackled to her.

They were bonded – not bound.

Rhaegal cooed and chirped and sang, gliding above the clouds, seeming to understand that though Larra knew she had to return to Winterfell, she longed to remain where they were, where the world was silver and starlight and the Lights danced in celebration at them finding each other.

They had found each other.

It was a staggering thought.

One of three dragons in the world had found its rider.

She was a dragon-rider: Rhaegal had chosen her as their rider.

She knew the implications: during that first flight, Larra focused only on the pure joy and exhilaration of flight, of their connection, their freedom, the playfulness and rapture of Rhaegal as they twirled and danced through the air, showing off, learning each other. Pride in being chosen by Rhaegal swept through her, fiery and gentling and good.

They had found each other.

As miraculous as Rhaegal’s birth was, it was more extraordinary still that Rhaegal had found her. Dragon-riders were just as rare as dragons themselves.

A dragon only ever had one rider.

Daenerys Targaryen could only ever have claimed one of the beasts for herself, and she had favoured Drogon from the beginning. Knowing that truth – that she could only ever truly control one – and appreciating the reality of it were two different things: they were her dragons in her mind, her children… Rhaegal claiming Larra as a rider went against everything Daenerys thought about herself as the Mother of Dragons.

Rhaegal would never again answer to Daenerys, if they ever had; they were bonded now to Larra. And that bond was everything.

Reluctantly, Rhaegal dipped back beneath the clouds, the world plunged into darkness, and Larra sighed, leaning down to stretch along Rhaegal’s spine, feeling their warmth coaxing her and soothing her like a blanket. She closed her eyes, listened to the windsong and to Rhaegal’s soft cooing and clicking of contentment, and trusted the dragon to fly her safely through the pitch-black night to Winterfell.

She knew they were near when Rhaegal started to slow, gently flapping their wings, soaring lower and lower, the wind louder as it tangled with the Wolfswood, washing across the unbroken moors, and she felt Rhaegal’s sadness through the bond as they banked and soared in a gentle spiral, lower and slower with each turn above the great sprawling castle, torchlight flickering delicately in the courtyards, the unbroken snows of the godswood gleaming intermittently as the clouds drifted sluggishly past, moonlight spearing through and shining down upon the castle, illuminating plumes of smoke from Winter’s Town and people the size of ants scurrying across the yards. Lower and slower, until Rhaegal clicked and cooed and their talons scraped delicately against the stone of the battlements, wings spread for balance, and finally stopped.

“Thank you, Rhaegal,” Larra whispered, leaning along their long neck, and the dragon chirped and cooed as they lowered a wing, letting her elegantly descend the way she had once watched Aella Targaryen dismount. Larra sighed, her legs wobbling as her booted feet found themselves firmly planted on solid stone freshly gritted, and gazed up at Rhaegal’s enormous head. Bronze eyes glimmered and snapped like firelight even in the dark and Larra smiled, leaning into the embrace as Rhaegal tucked their entire head against her body, gently chuffing out a breath of hot air, rustling their enormous wings. She smiled and returned the embrace, laughing softly to herself.

Throughout their exploration of Brandon’s memories of Daenerys Targaryen’s journey, Larra had seen Rhaegal agitated, vengeful, cunning, wrathful, joyous, grumpy, exhausted, hurt and despondent, furious and beguiling. She had never once seen them affectionate.

With Larra, they were. She felt it. She felt love flow through the bond, tremendous and unbreakable. Love, loyalty and trust – a shared understanding of each other, an appreciation and fondness. A ferocious desire to protect each other and to enjoy each other.

Smiling, she stroked her hand down Rhaegal’s muzzle, felt the heat of their fire, and her heart soared and stuttered as Rhaegal cooed and crooned to her, serenading her with a lullaby.

“Goodnight,” she sighed, smiling. “Until our next flight.” Rhaegal cooed, rustled their wings and took off, gentler than they had when she rode them. Larra knew instinctively that Rhaegal did not wish to startle the people of Winterfell as they had earlier – that Larra had been concerned by the fear of her people, and Rhaegal understood it.

Even in the dark, the fire that burned within Rhaegal still flickered, the bronze of their eyes and wings shimmering and glowing softly. Larra stood and watched Rhaegal gain altitude, until the glowing ribbons of bronze shimmering in the onyx sky became little more than a whisper of memory.

She massaged her thighs, entered the castle and made her way through the torch-lit passages and halls to the Stark chambers. Exhilaration flowed through her veins, bright and fierce and good, and her face ached: she knew she was smiling because everyone who saw her seemed startled. It was a rare thing to see Larra Snow smiling, her vivid amethyst eyes shining and bright with delight. Larra strode to the solar, knowing her family would be there, and beamed breathlessly at Bran the moment she threw open the door and saw him sat by the hearth. He raised his dark eyes to her and little Bran’s face shone through the wise, ancient greenseer’s – the little boy she remembered grinned eagerly, excitement shining from his eyes, breathless with delight, eagerness in every line of his face.

“Where have you been?” a brittle voice snapped, and Larra glanced around. Sansa rose from the working desk.

“Sansa… I’ve been flying,” Larra said breathlessly, smiling. Her eyes were brighter than Sansa had ever seen them – not just brighter, more full of life, radiant with joy, but the colour of them, more vivid than any amethyst jewels, deep and wondrous.

“How could you do it?” Sansa asked, and the smile drifted from Larra’s exhilarated face. Her hair was windswept and tangled free from her braids and she didn’t seem to care. She looked…unharmed, Sansa thought, her eyes narrowing on her older sister. Unharmed, yet utterly different somehow. The eyes, the joy…she had never seen her sister so rapturous before, and Sansa’s heart stuttered, fear gripping it tight.

Larra blinked but did not answer. Her expression gentled and Sansa realised her mistake the moment Larra’s smile faded, the usual expression of grim determination settling into the familiar lines of Larra’s pale face. She realised it but did nothing to stop herself from picking the fight. Terror had clutched at her all day; this was the first time she had drawn breath. And in her relief, she attacked.

“They know, Larra!” Sansa blurted furiously, her eyes stinging.

“Know what?” Larra asked, lifting her chin delicately – stubbornly. Her vivid amethyst-violet eyes levelled on Sansa, simmering with emotion Sansa refused to name, lest shame consume her. Why are you picking this fight now? When have you ever seen her so joyous?

“They know that the only dragon-riders left in the world were Targaryens and you rode a dragon!” Sansa shrieked, emotion getting the better of her, her voice breaking. Her fear choked her and she glared at Larra for making her feel it. She dreaded what the lords would think and how they would use what they thought they knew to manipulate Jon and Larra.

“I did. I rode a dragon,” Larra said calmly. Sansa glared at her, breathless with anger. She had noticed Larra did this – whenever anyone became enraged, Larra simply became calmer. She refused to engage. She was treating Sansa’s anger the way she would have dealt with one of their lords. Her!

“You were smiling,” Sansa hissed. “I’ve not seen you like that since…”

“Since I was a girl, learning to gallop over the moors as fast as I was able – because I could almost believe I was flying,” Larra murmured. Bran remained silent in his wheeled chair beside the hearth, watching the two of them.

Sansa stared at her sister. Not your sister, she thought, for the first time. Not her sister by blood. Something else. Someone else. “You’re a Targaryen,” she breathed, stunned, staring at those strange, intense violet eyes. “Rhaegar Targaryen was your father.”

Almost coldly, Larra reminded her, “You knew this.”

“But to believe it, to truly believe everything…that everything we were ever told about the Rebellion was a lie,” Sansa said shakily, her hands clenched in fury. “A lie Father told to protect you. No-one will be able to deny the truth of it. She won’t be able to deny it. You’ve bonded with one of her dragons. What does that mean?”

At Sansa’s voice rising, filled with fury – with fear – Larra remained infuriatingly calm. Gently, she said, “I don’t know.”

Sansa knew she did; Larra was the cleverest person Sansa had ever met. She was cunning. And the fact that she would not entertain the conversation infuriated Sansa further.

“You don’t know?” Sansa repeated, hissing viciously.

“Stop it,” Bran said gently. His gaze was gentle as he glanced at Sansa. “You have exhausted yourself. Larra has returned, unharmed. Go now and rest.”

Sansa became aware that her hands were shaking, that she was panting for breath, her anger and her fear bubbling over. She had lashed out at Larra, she knew, out of fear. Fear that the truth would come out, that Jon and Larra would be endangered…that the situation with the Dragon Queen, already warped by her mistreatment of Jon, was now so much more complicated because Larra had claimed one of her dragons – her children, Sansa thought with a sneer.

Rippling with anger, cold dread making her tremble, Sansa stalked from the solar. She knew she had allowed her emotions to get the better of her in a way she never allowed them to. She never lost control.

She heard Bran’s soft voice saying, “This is the first time Sansa has tasted true fear at the thought of losing you.”

Her eyes stung, and she stalked to her chamber, bolting the door, allowing relief and shame to sweep over her – relief that Larra had returned safely, and shame that she had caused that rapturous smile, that joy, to disappear from her eyes. She had ruined what should have been a moment of tremendous joy and awe – their sister had become a dragon-rider!

Gasping and shuddering with sobs, Sansa choked and wiped her face and glanced at the small portrait on her dressing-table. She ached for Jon’s return, now more than ever. He had always understood Larra in a way none of the rest of them ever had, ever could. She wanted him… She wanted him to tuck her into his embrace, calm and grim and tired as always, and gently kiss her brow as he stroked her hair, the way he had hundreds of times before. She wanted his heat and his scent and the feeling he always gave her – of absolute safety. She missed him; she needed him. She wanted him home, now. She wanted him home with her, cuddling on the settle, gentle and intimate and fierce, safe.

She cried herself out, then prepared for bed, undressing herself and cleansing her eyes with little cotton pads doused with lavender water to take away the sting and the swelling. She knew she shouldn’t have lashed out; she knew she needed to apologise.

She had let her fear ruin something extraordinary.

Larra gazed at Bran, her eyes burning. He watched her lower-lip quiver violently, the fierce look on her face carved from marble. War is easier than sisters, he thought, and held his hand out to Larra. Not to coax her into memories: to hold his sister’s hand because she was upset. Her euphoria had been brought crashing down, hurt and misery searing through her chest.

“I shouldn’t have mounted Rhaegal,” she said hoarsely.

“You were always meant to,” Bran said, and Larra watched his gaze go out of focus, slowly drifting back. Ominously, he murmured, “Better now than later…” He smiled at her, a mixture of Bran’s childlike innocence and Brandon’s taunting wisdom. “Things have been set in motion now that cannot be undone.” He reached up and brushed away the tears that had slipped from Larra’s vivid eyes. It was strange, to be the one comforting, when all his life, it had been Larra comforting and caring for him. And he knew it. He stroked her chin delicately and gazed back at his beautiful, stern sister with her ferocious heart and unquenchable passion, her yearning for freedom and a breath-taking desire to build and to improve, to help everyone she met. Fiercely loyal, just and compassionate, her grit was mesmerising. Incredibly discerning, she was a fascinating blend of toughness, tenderness and gravitas coupled with a profound emotional intelligence born of a childhood where she had been made to feel less than she was. She responded to cruelty with incredible compassion.

Bran sighed, “My beautiful sister.”

“I miss you, Bran,” she said hoarsely, her eyes fierce.

“I’m here,” he whispered back to her, his eyes burning. “I’m still here.” She leaned in and gave him a kiss on the cheek, her lips trembling. Her eyes were bright, shining with tears, the only hint that Sansa had truly upset her. He smiled regretfully at her. “Gendry is waiting for you.”

“Is he?” she asked softly, wiping her face and standing. She had always been tall to him; as a boy, she had seemed like a giant, untouchable, fierce and strong, a warrior-queen. He still knew that to be true now; but Sansa’s words had made her buckle. He knew only Gendry could reignite that passion, that delight that Larra had been consumed by when she returned from her flight with Rhaegal – the first of many, Bran knew.

Bran sighed and watched Larra go, her unruly braids tangled down her back, and turned to stare into the hearth. He saw it all before them – Larra and Rhaegal, bonded forever, just as she and Gendry were forever intertwined. He knew what was to come, and smiled as he unfurled the raven-scroll he had received between the last storms, the golden sunspear seal glinting in the firelight as he read it again and again. Things are in motion, he thought, smiling. He called gently for a guard and asked them to invite Nymeria Sand to the solar.


Larra entered her chamber and found Gendry sprawled on the bed, scowling intensely, his lips moving as he formed the words on the page of the book before him. He glanced up, sapphire eyes glowing, and the sudden smile on his face disappeared, replaced instantly with a look of concern.

“You’re upset,” Gendry said softly.

Larra’s hands shook. She muttered, “I rode a dragon.”

Gendry smiled, laughing softly. “I saw.”

“Sansa was so angry. So afraid,” she said, her lip quivering, and Gendry gently set his book aside, sitting up straighter and opening his arms for her. Larra went into them without thinking, cuddling up against him, his enormous chest, his muscular arms, his thick thighs feeling like home to her as his scent swept over her, his heat teasing her. His short beard tickled her cheek as he kissed her, settling them both back against the pillows. He stroked her tangled curls, the closest he had ever come to seeing her hair unbound. “I frightened her.”

“Yes,” Gendry acknowledged. Larra’s lip trembled and she burrowed her head against his shoulder. He unfastened her cloak and smoothed his hands down her back, soothing her. Curiously, Gendry asked, “What were you thinking?”

“I wasn’t,” Larra admitted. “There was no room for anything except how I felt.”

Gendry smiled softly and asked, “How did you feel?”

Larra raised her face and stared at him. Her eyelashes fluttered closed and she breathed, “Free. I could breathe. I felt like I was born to do it. To fly. The wind in my ears and the cold, the quiet… I was free.” Tears leaked down her face.

“Like the True North,” Gendry said thoughtfully. “Seas of snow and stars as far as the eye can see.” Larra sniffed, wiping her face, gazing at him as if enraptured. She nodded, and knew he understood. The rapture. The freedom.

“I dreamed of them, for years. When I was a girl,” she admitted. She rose from his lap to rummage around in one of her trunks, extracting some of her art books where she had practised sketching and painting. She climbed back into Gendry’s lap and flipped the pages open, showing him studies she had made of dragons. She pointed at some of the bronze-and-green watercolours. “It is Rhaegal exactly, down to the scars on their legs where she chained them beneath the Great Pyramid.” She gulped and glanced from the paintings to Gendry. “I was dreaming of Rhaegal before they even existed in the world. Rhaegal is mine; and I am Rhaegal’s… I should never have climbed on Rhaegal’s back.”

“Why not?” Gendry asked gently.

“Because we are bonded. Rhaegal won’t answer to anyone else – not even her,” Larra breathed, horror spreading through her. She had not allowed herself to do anything but embrace the bond, the first flight she and Rhaegal had shared. It was theirs and theirs alone. No-one else was going to ruin it. Not Daenerys Targaryen…not Sansa. “I’ve made myself her enemy.”

“You already were,” Gendry reminded her, his voice dark, and she nodded.

“It’s more than that,” she murmured. “She believes she is the Mother of Dragons. She believes that she alone in the world is special and unique because she has the power to command them. The moment she realises she is not alone in that gift, that there are others who can challenge her, it threatens everything she has convinced herself of. It threatens everything she believes. That makes her incredibly dangerous.”

“Another Dance of Dragons,” Gendry said softly, clicking his tongue. “If it comes to that, at least you do have Rhaegal.”

Larra shook her head, sighing. “Wild creatures should be free. Rhaegal is so much more than a weapon.”

Gendry sighed heavily, nodding. He knew little of wild creatures, just that Arya and Larra were wild and untameable – they could be gentled but never broken or controlled. He was learning how to gentle Larra but she was still a wild creature – she still yearned to be free despite her joy at being home with her family. She would always ache to be free, he knew, yet she would always put her duty first. Always.

“You frightened the life out of Calanthe today,” he told her, and Larra went still, her expression sorrowful, almost regretful. He didn’t say it to punish her for flying Rhaegal, just to prepare her for Calanthe’s reaction when she realised Larra was returned safely. “She feared Rhaegal had carried you off to eat you.”

Larra sighed heavily, rubbing her face, and gave Gendry a careful, assessing look. “How did you settle her?”

“I told her that if she were a dragon, wouldn’t she want a rider just as fierce and wily and extraordinary as she was?” Gendry said, and Larra’s eyes widened as they rested on his. He reached up and caressed her face. He leaned in, placing a tender kiss against her lips. “There’s nothing you couldn’t do, even before Rhaegal bonded to you.”

Gently, they stripped each other of their clothing, and Larra sighed as Gendry’s immense weight settled over her; she cradled him between her thighs and his kiss snatched away her gasp as he entered her. She scraped her fingernails against his massive thighs as he thrust into her, slowly at first, then harder, fiercer, and she shuddered and writhed as he pinned her down and took her relentlessly, the ferocious thrusts of his hips tempered by the sweetest and most tender kisses on her face, her neck, her breasts, until she came, pleasure ripping through her body. Her toes curled and she clung on, grinning breathlessly, as he pounded deep inside her. He grunted, hooking a hand under her knee to lift her leg, adjusting the angle of his thrusts, until she whimpered and clawed at his back. As pleasure shuddered through her a second time, he gasped, startled, and came inside her. Cradling her face, he gave her long, deep kisses – savouring and sweet.

Panting and exhilarated from his lovemaking yet calmed in his embrace, Larra shivered and settled in his arms as he wrapped the quilts and furs over them. As she dozed, Gendry trailed his fingertips up and down her spine. The scars on her back were the oldest, now the faintest, and he gave them no mind, too preoccupied.

“Larra…”

“Mm?” she sighed, half-asleep against his chest. He absolutely adored the way she tucked herself into him, how she only ever seemed to sleep comfortably was draped across his enormous, muscular, hard body. He loved how dainty she was compared to his immense size. He hated to ruin it, considering how calm she was, but he wanted to ask... Yet she knew the truth about him, after all.

“They say only Targaryens can claim dragons,” he said quietly, his voice rumbling gently around the quiet, fire-lit room. He felt Larra’s sigh tickling his chest-hair and she leaned her chin on his chest. Her vivid amethyst eyes glowed at him.

Instead of deflecting the suggestion in his voice, or ignoring him, she said softly, “That’s true.” His lips parted, but she said, “I can’t talk to you. Not yet.”

He frowned, then realised, his eyes widening, “Jon.”

She nodded. “I shall tell you all about it, but not yet.”

Gendry realised, “He doesn’t know.”

Larra shook her head, her voice hoarse and her eyes bright as she repeated, “He doesn’t know.”

Notes:

We love a clever boy.

Chapter 42: Voices from the Past

Notes:

So I’ve been thinking about the dragon has three heads. In this story, it will, but not the three people will expect. And it’ll have two different meanings.

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

42

Voices from the Past


Groaning, Gendry emptied deep inside her as she whipped her hips one last time, and she laughed breathlessly, pleasure rippling through her body, as he kissed her throat and jaw, his short beard tickling her sensitive skin. An attempt to climb out of bed early and dress had resulted in this; tangled in Gendry’s lap, her hands exploring under his tunic, one of his hands clamped down on her thigh while the other teased between her legs. The sun sent shards of silver light through the frozen diamond-paned window and glinted off the embroidery on her dress, which was pooled around her waist, her chemises tugged low so Gendry could lavish her breasts with kisses. They throbbed, and she knew she would feel him all day – he was becoming an expert at making her body ache because of him, and for him. Their appetites were becoming voracious and Larra was never going to be caught complaining. She shivered and sighed, gasping softly as she twisted her hips and he pulled free from her.

“Now that’s a way to start the day,” he murmured teasingly against her throat, kissing her tenderly, and tucked himself into his breeches. He smiled and leaned up to kiss her lips as she sighed, gentling in his arms. She nodded in agreement.

Rhaegal had not yet returned, thanks to tremendous storms that had swept in from the coast, bringing with them ice-sleet and lightning that had felled three ageless trees in the godswood. Their destruction had made Larra weep. They had been stuck inside for days yet Larra was still happy. She and Gendry had been enjoying each other at every opportunity they could snatch in their busy days, between working on Valyrian steel, obsidian scorpions, reading lessons, writing The Princess Bride, raising the children, gentling fierce Briar, settling an anxious Calanthe, mediating between the maesters and the lords.

Legs trembling, Larra climbed off the bed and hissed as she pulled her chemises over her throbbing breasts, her nipples tender. Gendry grinned at her, his eyes filled with fire. He climbed off the bed, tucking his tunics into his breeches, and tugged his boots on before striding over to her, taking hold of her laces as her fingers trembled. He stole a kiss and smiled, utterly sated, as he tugged gently on the laces down the side of her bodice.

A soft knock echoed on the door, making Larra look over in surprise. The children burst in at all hours, unhindered by the guards – indeed, Larra had dismissed them as unnecessary, better off diverted to guarding Bran’s chamber rather than her own. The only ones who came to their chamber were the children, and only the older ones knew to knock. Gendry abandoned her laces and strode across the room, tugging the door open. A soft sigh, and Gendry glanced over his shoulder. The look he gave her was at once mischievous and apologetic. He tugged the door open wider and ducked through it, smiling, leaving Larra to stare at Sansa, who lingered tentatively at the threshold.

“You can come in,” she said drily, watching her sister. Sansa was dressed impeccably, as always, her hair rippling to her waist in a shining sheet of copper. Sansa entered the chamber – the last time she had been here, they had explored the trunks full of Larra’s belongings which Maester Luwin had hidden away – and glanced around. There seemed to be more life in the chamber now. Larra’s and Gendry’s clothes tumbled from the trunk at the foot of the bed; books were piled beside the settle, which was draped with blankets and furs, and the great bed was still rumpled.

“Do you need help with your laces?” Sansa asked, and though she didn’t, Larra nodded. Her sister approached almost timorously and neatly tied Larra’s laces for her. Clearing her throat delicately, Sansa said softly, “I’m sorry I upset you. You rode a dragon. You flew. And my reaction ruined it.”

Larra sighed heavily, shaking her head. Nothing could ever ruin the experience she had shared with Rhaegal. “It didn’t ruin it.”

Shame-faced, Sansa said, “I’m ashamed of how I reacted.”

“I frightened everyone by taking off on Rhaegal. I frightened you,” Larra said, acknowledging that she understood why Sansa had lashed out. “I should have been more frightened than I was. I know how dangerous it was for me to climb onto Rhaegal’s back… Are people talking?”

“Yes,” Sansa said simply. “They’re grasping in the dark.”

“Let them wonder. Until Jon…” She sighed, shaking her head. Gendry hadn’t asked since that first time but she knew he was curious. “It doesn’t matter if people learn the truth, but Jon should know first.”

Sansa agreed, of course. She gazed at Larra. Curiously, softly, she asked, “What was it like?”

A smile split Larra’s face, radiant. She breathed, “It was magnificent.”

“How do you feel?”

“I felt…bonded. Not just to Rhaegal…to all of them,” Larra said, glancing at her working table, where new paintings were drying. “Even though they’ve been dead for centuries, I feel…bound to them. I belong with them.”

“Your family,” Sansa said sadly.

“All the stories…the moment I climbed onto Rhaegal’s back, I knew I was part of something, that I belonged,” Larra said hoarsely. “They are a part of me, and I am…”

“You are the best of what remains of them,” Sansa said gently, her eyes blazing. “You show them all up. You do them proud.”

Larra smiled sadly. “Thank you, Sansa.”

She set about straightening the linens and tucked in the quilts, tossing the furs over the end of the bed and straightening the pillows. Sansa, watching her tidy up the evidence of her lover, asked her quietly, “Do you love Gendry?”

The question didn’t take her by surprise: it was the first open acknowledgement from Sansa that she had taken Gendry as a lover, that they lived together in this chamber.

“Ah. That…” She sighed thoughtfully, frowning. She shook her head, “Love would never be enough for me, it is too small, too limiting. I respect Gendry; I admire him; I enjoy him; I desire him.”

Wistfully, as if she was somewhere else, Sansa said, “He’s brave and gentle and strong.”

“He is,” Larra agreed.

“I heard what he said to Calanthe Lannister about you,” Sansa said. “He respects and adores you too.”

“I know.”

“You are well-matched.”

“Are we?”

“You both work harder than anyone I have ever met,” Sansa said, almost rolling her eyes. “The impossible excites you. You know when to be stern and when to be gentle. You’re decisive and shrewd. You’re both charismatic. People respect and adore you.”

“You almost sound as if you’re giving your approval.”

Sansa smiled almost mischievously, a twinkle of Arya, of the wolf-blood, of the North, glittering in her eyes. “You’d never need it. The True North is in you now.”

“That’s true.”

Sansa gazed at her, tilting her head thoughtfully. “Does he know?”

“He suspects,” Larra admitted. “The moment I mounted Rhaegal.”

“Then he’s cleverer than most in this castle.”

“Oh, easily,” Larra said.

“But you’ve not confirmed anything?”

“No. Not yet,” Larra said, and Sansa nodded.

“You should. He should know what he’s getting himself into,” she said.

“As much as I should know what I’m getting myself into,” Larra said, and realised Sansa didn’t know. “He’s Robert Baratheon’s bastard.”

Sansa’s eyes widened, then she seemed to think back, and her lips parted. “His eyes.”

“Some of the older lords say Gendry’s the image of Robert when he was still young and strong,” Larra said, shrugging. “I can believe it.” Sansa started laughing softly. “What is it?”

“It’s just – Robert’s son and Rhaegar’s daughter,” Sansa said, her eyes glinting with amusement. “Out of all the people in the world, and all the two of you have lived through, you found each other.”

The same way she and Rhaegal had found each other.

“Isn’t that something?” Larra mused.

“Like it was meant to be.”

Meant to be, Larra’s mind repeated softly. She mused on that simple phrase as she followed Sansa out of her chamber and they went about their day’s tasks.

Scowling at the ledgers, Larra sighed, set down her pen and kneaded her eyes. It was never a good sign when the number started swimming. She eyed the hourglass and realised the sand had run out; she had spent too long on the ledgers. She and Sansa had come up with a system to ensure they took breaks from their work, ensuring a day did not go by with them focused on only one thing without gaining progress. So they broke up their days with spurts of activity for the running of Winterfell and siege preparations for war with activities they found pleasure in. Sansa focused on her sewing. Larra turned to her crochet, her stories or her painting – or she went to the nursery and played with the children, the best way to bond with them and assess their learning.

Now, though, she stood and stretched and prepared a pot of liquorice and blackcurrant tea, smiling to herself as she brought out her Qartheen box of watercolours. She had finished her paintings of Aella Targaryen and Aeris the Armourer and was making progress rewriting The Princess Bride: Lady Nym had heard Larra telling the girls the story as they warmed themselves before the hearth in the baths. She had sighed wistfully that her youngest sisters would adore the story – especially Ozias Vollanar, the Braavosi water-dancer fuelled by vengeance, aching to avenge his murdered father, and the Dread Pirate Aeros, who had so brutally ripped apart the saccharine romance of Anemone and her sweet Wyman.

After discussing it with Sansa, Larra had decided to create various different versions of her story, each with unique illustrations she would paint herself. One where Anemone, the most beautiful woman in the world, was golden-haired and emerald-eyed and wore a crimson gown: one where she had soft brown hair and gentle blue eyes and wore a floaty blue gown: one where she was deeply tanned with lustrous dark eyes and wore silks the colour of the sun: and one last one, where she had a long pale face, curling dark hair and vivid violet eyes and wore a simple storm-grey dress and silver furs over her shoulders. One for the Lannisters: one for the Martells: one for the child of Princess Myrcella: and the last, to remain at Winterfell, the heroine radiant and beautiful with her pale solemn face. They were overtures, Sansa called them – gifts to the futures of the Great Houses from the King in the North’s family, made personally by his own twin-sister, and made in likeness of the standards of beauty held by each House. Larra had to recreate each painting five times in total – the first for her own copy, and one for each of the books they would send out. She had been filling old cotton-paper sketchbooks with her drawings, taking likenesses of Lady Nym and of the Lannister girls; Bran had given her glimpses of Lady Alynore Tyrell and of her cousin, the deceased but beguiling-in-life Lady Margaery to model Anemone after.

She was stalling, however, on sketching her own likeness. Gendry laughed at her reluctance to turn herself into the heroine of the story.

Setting her sketching pencils aside, Larra smiled and prepared her paints, sitting up straighter and smiling at the prepared sheets of strong cotton paper from Qarth, measured and cut to size, each of them intricately sketched and ready to be painted, laid out in sequence to assess which scenes she should add.

A soft knock on the door made her glance up, pausing as she reached for her Qartheen watercolour paints.

“Come in,” she called gently, and Samwell Tarly’s round face appeared. He was smiling, but his eyes were pinched apprehensively. She glanced at her brother’s most trusted advisor – his best friend, his brother – and tilted her head thoughtfully.

“Samwell,” she said gently, noticing the lines of tension around his dark eyes. “Come in, come in.”

“I hope I’m not disturbing you,” Samwell fretted, but Larra smiled and coaxed him into the room with a wave. He carried with him a rather large wooden box – it was noteworthy because of how fine it was, polished to a high shine and inlaid with something she couldn’t quite make out while Sam carried it.

“Never,” she said warmly. She enjoyed Sam. She knew how much Jon loved him: he was not what he appeared to be. “Are you well, Sam? You look worried.”

“Oh… I’m very well, Larra, thank you,” Sam stammered, glancing at Larra with his small dark eyes.

“But?”

“You sound like Jon,” Sam said, sighing heavily. He smiled. “He says everything before the word ‘but’ is –“

“Horseshit,” Larra supplied, when Sam broke off, flushing. He laughed nervously. “Sam, whatever is the matter?”

“The maesters have been combing through the documents Edd brought down from Castle Black,” Samwell said, eyeing the large box. “I…found this amongst them.”

“What is it?” Larra asked curiously, and she noticed the pinch of his eyes as Samwell turned the box so that she could see what was inlaid on the front, beneath a glinting silver lock. Nestled seamlessly in the polished wood was a sigil: an ouroboros. A winged dragon with no beginning and no end, self-devouring, eternal. Not the Targaryen sigil. Larra knew whose it was, though: a locket burned in her mind, decorated with an ouroboros of a dragon and a direwolf sensuously intertwined for eternity. Rhaegar and Lyanna’s sigil. The dragon ouroboros: Rhaegar’s sigil. Her heart seized in her chest. She stared at the box, all too aware of Samwell hesitantly watching her reaction. Her voice calm, she asked, “You’ve opened it?”

“I have,” Samwell said gently, almost apologetically. Larra glanced at him, unable to speak. Samwell nodded, understanding her silence. He explained: “There are letters…hundreds of them. Rhaegar Targaryen wrote to Maester Aemon since he was a young adolescent, from my calculations he was about thirteen years old when he sent the first letter by rider to Castle Black… Prince Rhaegar wrote to Maester Aemon for years, he called him Uncle Maester… The last letter he sent…was despatched from the Riverlands the night before the Battle of the Trident.”

Larra’s heart thundered in her chest. It was a large box, and her hands burned, aching to open it. She was surprised by that, by the instinct to seize the box, snatch the lid open and devour the contents. To know… Her father. Did he write about Lyanna? He had to, she thought.

“You’ve read them,” Larra said, her voice now hoarse as she stared at the box.

Falteringly, Samwell admitted, “I have – some. I… I read one of the last ones, but… It felt such an intrusion.”

Larra nodded, her eyes stinging. She inhaled sharply and glanced at Samwell, her eyes clearing. “Why did you bring me this?”

Sam’s round face shone with earnestness. The love he had for Jon, the faith he had in Jon, shone through, the same way it had that night in the Nightfort, desperately trying to convince Larra to take her brother to Castle Black, not go beyond the Wall where Samwell knew best what lurked waiting for them there. “When I was in the Citadel, the Grand Maester gave me a punishment for treating Ser Jorah Mormont of his greyscale without permission, at great risk to myself and everyone else’s safety… He had be transcribe ancient texts and scrolls… One of them was the personal diary of High Septon Maynard, who led the Faith of the Seven during the end of King Aerys’ reign and into the Rebellion.” Larra stared at Samwell waiting. Hesitantly, he proceeded. “Prince Rhaegar had petitioned the High Septon for a separation from Elia Martell and he granted it. Prince Rhaegar and Princess Elia Martell’s marriage was ended: they were no longer married in the eyes of the gods or by the laws of men.” He faltered, almost flinching as Larra continue to stare. As gently as he could, Samwell said softly, “He travelled to the Isle of Faces…and married Prince Rhaegar to Lady Lyanna Stark in a ceremony at the centre of a grove of weirwood trees.”

“Did he, then?” she said quietly.

“There were… Maynard wrote that there were witnesses. Brothers of the Kingsguard –”

“All of them dead,” Larra interrupted delicately.

“- and two squires: Ser Myles Mooton and Ser Richard Lonmouth,” Samwell said.

“Likely dead as well,” Larra said softly. Samwell gazed at her, his dark eyes filled with sadness – and unbearable kindness.

“Larra…in his letters to Maester Aemon, Prince Rhaegar spoke of her, of Lyanna… He wrote about her pregnancy,” he said apologetically. With utmost gentleness, Samwell said, “Your father – Ned Stark – returned from the Rebellion not with his bastards…but – ”

He faltered, and she smiled sadly. “It’s alright, Sam. You don’t need to say it.”

Samwell blinked quickly at her. Then he realised, “You…you know this already.”

“I learned it months ago,” she said softly, reaching out to caress her fingertips across the silky polished wood of the box. The keyhole glinted softly. She raised her eyes to Sam’s face. “Jon doesn’t know.”

“It’s true,” Sam breathed, and Larra nodded.

“Thank you for bringing me these,” she said quietly, her stomach doing strange things as she thought about what she would find, what she would read.

“Larra…”

“I’ll tell him, Sam,” Larra told him gently, and his entire body seemed to relax. Sam stared at her. She sighed heavily. “When I do… When he hears it from me, he won’t want to listen to anything else. Jon loved and respected Father fiercely. He’ll – he’ll be upset. He’ll need someone he trusts and respects to help him make sense of it.”

“He trusts and respects you,” Sam pointed out gently. “You’re his sister.”

Larra smiled sadly. “We’ve been parted too long, Sam. I don’t know the man he’s become…but you do. He trusts you; he values your insight. He’ll need you.”

“You remind me so much of him,” Sam said gently, giving her a hesitant smile. “He always sells himself short, too.”

“A good thing he has always had you by his side, championing him,” Larra smiled.

Samwell flushed, delighted and embarrassed. “I’m the unlikeliest champion you’ll ever see,” he laughed softly. Larra smiled.

“You should read I Túrin i Cormaron,” she said softly. “I think you’d appreciate it.”

“You’ve read The Lord of the Rings?” Samwell said, his tone awed. Larra glanced up at him.

“Of course I have,” Larra said, smiling softly as he goggled at her. “I take it by your expression that you have, and are surprised to learn that I too have read it.”

“Jon said you liked Valyrian poetry but he never mentioned you’d read I Túrin i Cormaron,” Samwell said, his eyes lighting up. “T’was the only story my Father ever allowed me to read to my younger brother Dickon.”

“Because of the battles?” Larra asked, and Samwell nodded fervently.

“Mother used to sing the songs. She had ever such a pretty voice,” Samwell beamed. He glanced at the box and his smile faltered. His face deeply earnest, he said, “I’m dreadfully sorry, Larra.”

“Whatever for?” she asked.

“I know it weighs on Jon, not knowing who your mother was… But to find out, and to find out she’s been gone all this time… I’m very sorry,” Samwell said tenderly. Larra nodded.

“Thank you, Sam,” she said softly.

“And I will be there, when Jon needs me,” Sam assured her kindly. She smiled and nodded, and Samwell handed her a tiny silver key, making a gracious exit and leaving her with the box of letters.

She tucked the key into her pocket and turned away from the box, focusing on her paintings. She was…almost afraid to open the box and read those letters. Sam had said they began when Rhaegar was about thirteen years old, ending the night before he was killed in combat. Nearly twenty years’ worth of correspondence. She wondered why he had written to Maester Aemon, yet instantly knew why: Maester Aemon was the only other living Targaryen…and he had taken the black. He was sworn to the Night’s Watch and could not engage in the politics of the Seven Kingdoms. And, as a brother of the Night’s Watch, it was easy to get correspondence to him: everywhere in Westeros, the black brothers were respected, feared, and left well enough alone. No letters addressed to the maester at Castle Black were ever going to go missing. She imagined black brothers like Yoren – perhaps even Yoren himself – had delivered the letters, or perhaps a loyal squire or even one of the Kingsguard themselves, or trusted knights escorting seventh sons to the Wall, as Lord Royce had his own younger son months before Father had executed the deserter who had claimed to have seen White Walkers.

Larra turned to her paintings, doing her utmost to ignore the box.

Huffing irritably, she tidied her paints away and shot the polished box a scathing look before stomping out of the solar, threw on the new furs Sansa had procured for her and slipped through the castle. It was snowing gently again, and the delicate flakes drifted against her skin like the sweetest of Gendry’s kisses. She could hear the chorus of weirbirds even from the yard and cast her eyes over the people training, catching a glimmer of fiery gold – Calanthe, sparring with her wooden sword, her expression fierce and determined. So as not to distract her and throw off her lessons, Larra slipped through the yard and out of the North gate. Her breath plumed around her and she trudged through the snow, watching men digging and maesters muttering and wringing their hands as they measured and calculated.

She heard their startled cries and strangled yells as a shadow cast the entire meadow into gloom. She glanced up and grinned at the sight of green, of bronze ribbons glimmering in the sunlight they swallowed, casting them in shadow. A laugh rippled from her and Larra clutched Dark Sister at her side, the better to run. Her braid swung heavy behind her as she ran toward the dragon as they elegantly alighted on the frozen moor, their wings spread, sunning themselves. Rhaegal clicked and cooed and chuffed a breath of hot air over her as she darted to greet them.

Rhaegal played, bumping their head against her body, knocking her into the snow and nuzzling her, the same way the girls played with their new kittens, making a low, rich cooing and clicking noise.

“I’ve missed you, too,” Larra laughed richly, stroking Rhaegal’s muzzle, and the great dragon cooed, rubbing the side of their face against her. She smiled and sat up, stroking Rhaegal’s face, pulling herself up by the great bronze horns spiked around the back of their head like a collar – like a crown, she thought – protecting their neck. Their eyes glowed like molten gold and Larra smiled as Rhaegal dipped their wing; she climbed onto their back without a second thought, settling along their back, glittering with bronze-tipped spines. The sun shimmered off their wings, making them sparkle and snap like seas of emerald grass golden-tipped by a rich summer sun. Those great wings unfurled, flapped once, and Larra was grinning from ear to ear as they shot into the air. The shouts of the maesters made her laugh aloud and she waved violently from Rhaegal’s back as they scattered, fleeing for the castle.

The hours passed in a blur. Rhaegal took her over frozen seas of ice and soaring mountains snow-capped and teeming with snowcats and bearded goats, over the mist-shrouded wolfswood, past gushing waterfalls, frightening herds of moose. Tucked up snugly in her furs, Larra was deliciously warm and comfortable, her entire body alive with joy as she relaxed on Rhaegal’s back and embraced the bond between them, learned through it. They learned each other, how Rhaegal worked, how Larra could adjust to the way Rhaegal moved, how they could play and learn and enjoy themselves, and as time wore on they became…daring. Remembering the tricks and displays of the adolescent dragonlords, Larra learned how to fly with Rhaegal, not just cling to their back. She learned the most comfortable, most secure way to mount Rhaegal and how to not only sit up easily for the best view but also how to stand on their back and balance as the wind snapped at her and the world danced below her, dizzyingly far away, a blur of whiteness speckled with occasional green but mostly stone-grey and frozen palest blue.

This time, she noticed, they were never far from Winterfell; Rhaegal kept them close. Perhaps because Rhaegal sensed Larra knew she had to remain close by: she had her duties, after all, and an evening with the ladies planned out. They were to design a wardrobe for Narcisa now that she had had her first blood, a time-honoured tradition among Northwomen.

Joy rippling through her, Larra sighed and settled comfortably on Rhaegal’s back as they glided gently through the air, soaring over the Wolfswood. Flocks of dire-eagles rose from their barren perches at Rhaegal’s approach but didn’t dare attack; they settled back down as soon as Rhaegal had passed, instinctively knowing they were not being hunted. She smiled and knew it was their bond, perhaps, that had drawn Rhaegal to a particular spot in the Wolfswood, a wide open area where the thermal river was especially wide and a jutting rock provided a perfect outcrop for Rhaegal to alight. Spreading their wings to sun them, Larra climbed down off Rhaegal’s back and smiled, stretching her legs and gazing at the view, down the rushing thermal waterfall where strange vibrant plants grew even in the heart of winter and salmon teemed and brown bears snuffled and feasted and disappeared to hibernate and deer gathered to strip the bark off of young trees. All around them, life teemed, as it always had…and hopefully always would. She remembered her journey south from the Wall, surrounded by the smallfolk and Jon’s black brothers, accompanied by Little Jon and the injured Ragnar. It had not been so very long ago, yet she felt a different person entirely. A different person than the Larra who had dragged Bran to Castle Black, yet a different person again to the one who had turned her back on Maester Luwin in the godswood and led her weeping brothers away as Osha gave the gift of mercy. The girl who had laughed and danced and teased her brothers…she was still there, somewhere…she ached to tease and laugh and dance with her brothers again. That girl was gone, not because she did not wish to dance and tease…but because there were too few now to tease, even fewer to dance with. She was altered because her family was altered.

Rhaegal rumbled softly behind her, sighing, their breath pluming around them, warm and comforting. She reached out and patted the side of their great head. “You know this place?” she said softly, and Rhaegal clicked. “Aye, it’s special… D’you like salmon?”

Perched precariously on the jutting outcrop of rock, head tilted with curiosity, Rhaegal watched her fish. She literally plucked the gaping salmon out of the warm water with her bare hands, there were so many of them, swimming so furiously, anxious to spawn. She plucked them out of the water and flung them high into the air: a short burst of flame and Rhaegal gulped them down in one, to the sound of Larra’s laughter. She plucked out more and more, and went still, breathless, when she heard it. The sound of dozens of wolves. Direwolves. Her direwolf.

She grinned and watched Last Shadow emerge from the trees, surrounded by her pack.

A sound rumbled from Rhaegal, deep and dangerous, their wings flared in warning.

Last Shadow snorted, giving Rhaegal a look so disdainful it would make Sansa blush, and sauntered toward Larra, licking her ears and neck.

“Shadow,” Larra hummed, and behind her, watching carefully, Rhaegal slowly relaxed. The direwolves joined her in the water, fishing. Unlike Rhaegal, the wolves feasted on their salmon raw. Larra fished one out for herself then frowned, realising it would take her an age to strike a fire. She stilled and turned to stare at Rhaegal, who rustled their wings importantly and let out a soft clicking, chortling noise. She smiled, gutted the salmon with ease and skewered it on a long stick she sharpened with her knife. As the direwolves feasted and fished, ignoring Rhaegal completely, Larra held the salmon out at arm’s length. Carefully, Rhaegal opened their jaws and emitted a low, constant flame. Larra laughed as she roasted her salmon by dragonfire.

It was delicious. She settled down on one of the rocks, Shadow lolling beside her, sated and content, her heavy head resting in Larra’s lap, and ate her dragonfire-roasted salmon. As she ate, she talked to Shadow, the way she always had when they hunted – when they came here, to this thermal waterfall, where the water was fine and Larra had taught Shadow to swim… All the time she talked, she was aware of Rhaegal…watching. Watching and listening. Their great golden eyes, their cunning mind, Larra knew it instinctively that Rhaegal was listening. Larra sighed, her belly full of roasted salmon, and nudged Shadow’s head out of her lap so she could go and wash her hands and face in the water. She turned to see Shadow sauntering up to Rhaegal…and the great dragon clicking and cooing to her as she sniffed them and settled down, curling up beside them. Sharing the dragon’s warmth, Larra realised, watching in quiet awe as the rest of the pack approached, some cautiously, the pups pouncing on Rhaegal’s long tail as they swished it idly.

Larra settled herself amongst them, beside Shadow, propped up against Rhaegal’s neck, sheltered by their wing as the snows started to swirl more heavily around them. As sunset approached, the wolves rose and melted into the shadows of the Wolfswood once again, only the sound of their song echoing on the wind.

In the lingering dark, Larra fished several more salmon from the river. “I found Shadow, you know… Years ago, my father was called to execute a deserter from the Night’s Watch. Men who guard the Wall; you’ve been there. You’ve seen them for yourself…you’ve seen what’s beyond. We didn’t know, then… We thought he was a madman. But he had deserted his station and the punishment for desertion is death. Father had to execute him… On our way back to Winterfell, my brothers and I rode ahead of the party and we came to the woods… We found a she-wolf dead in the snow, a stag’s antlers buried in her throat and her pups mewling and whimpering for milk. They’d been born after she died… We found five pups – one for each of my siblings. Robb, Sansa, Arya – she’d adore you – Bran and Rickon…” She sighed, shaking her head. “Direwolves have always been special to Starks… We convinced Father to let us keep the pups, else they’d have died on their own with no mother to nurse them…but there were no pups for me or Jon. We were about to leave when I heard it – the tiniest, most pathetic howl you’ll ever hear! But it was Shadow. The only one of the pups on her feet – black as night and fierce already, standing over her brother, an albino with red eyes who’d been rejected by the rest and taken himself off. Jon claimed Ghost; they were so alike! But Shadow butted her head against my ankle and nipped at the hem of my dress and pulled me toward her brother and I knew…she was mine, and I was hers… She’s been my friend, my sister, ever since.”

Rhaegal purred deeply.

“She has her own pack now, her own family,” Larra sighed. “She’s where she’s meant to be, with her own kind – free. She comes and goes as she chooses but she always comes when I need her the most.”

Realising Rhaegal was listening, Larra talked. Just talked, about everything and anything. Her siblings, the War of the Five Kings, her father, Rhaegar: “You were named for him; people called him the Last Dragon. He was a great man. He was never a dragonrider, though…in fact, he was born the night most of his family were killed; his grandfather was trying to hatch petrified dragon-eggs… That’s what you were. Petrified. The centuries had turned you to stone.” She gazed at Rhaegal in awe, smiling. “Now look at you…flame and flesh. I wonder if you realise just how precious you are. Everyone believed dragons were gone from the world forever…like the giants, and the Children…” She sighed, shaking her head, sorrow filling her. “The Giants are gone, I’ve seen their rotting corpses marching among the Night King’s army… If there are any Children of the Forest left, they keep themselves safe in utter secrecy… But you…” She bit her lip. “No-one could keep you secret if they tried. You’re too…rare and too powerful. Everyone who ever learns of you will either wish to dominate you or destroy you.” She stroked a hand down their muzzle. “So how do I keep you safe? You could live centuries…you could witness the birth of great dynasties that shape the world.” She grunted, stringing several salmon together. “We have to survive the winter first…and the more that I think on it, the less wise it seems to unleash you on the Night King’s army. You’re too precious to lose, and too dangerous to lose to the Others. If we lose you, we are all lost. You are power…but you can be hurt. What happened to Viserion proved that.”

Rhaegal snapped their head toward her, golden eyes pinned to hers, their entire body rigid. A soft, dangerous growl rumbled persistently inside their enormous chest. Yes, you’re listening, she thought. Larra stared back at the dragon, their cunning, ever-changing eyes – liquid gold, forged fire – fixed on her, radiating tension, and she could feel it. Her lips parted, reaching out a gentle hand to press it against Rhaegal’s enormous muzzle, still stunned by the intense heat radiating from his tough, leathery hide.

“Ssshh,” she coaxed, gently running her palm over Rhaegal’s muzzle. The great dragon moaned softly, the noise guttural and almost piteous. She knew that sound. And through the bond, the bond that had sparked something fierce and glorious in her heart, consuming and life-giving, she felt Rhaegal’s uncertainty, their pain and their sorrow. She could feel the ferocity of the dragon’s emotions. Just that one word, Viserion – they knew the name. Knew what it meant – and felt strongly because of it. Why did my ancestors never write about the bond this way, she wondered. That she could understand Rhaegal’s emotions as her own, that Rhaegal understood her – her speech, even her relationships with other creatures.

“Viserion is hurt. I know what wounded him,” Larra said quietly, and Rhaegal purred deeply, staring at her. “I too have a brother who will never truly heal.” Beneath her palm, Rhaegal’s body seemed to shiver. Black claws scraped against the wet ground, and Rhaegal shook their tremendous wings, making that low, piteous growling noise again. She could taste it through their bond, Rhaegal’s concern. The great dragon…was worried. Larra stroked Rhaegal’s long nose, marvelling at the heat that had stopped even the worst of the cold from nipping at her fingertips as they flew.

Rhaegal dipped a wing and Larra climbed onto their back. They soared above the Wolfswood and glided across the snowy moors as the clouds drifted away, revealing an endless velvet sky sprinkled with vibrant stars, the moon just a shade less full than it had been during their first flight, but no less bright.

Seeing the flickers of firelight from Winter’s Town, she remembered the pinpricks of light she had seen during their first flight.

Later, when she found Sansa in the solar, frowning at the polished box and Larra’s abandoned paintings, Larra told her, “During my first flight with Rhaegal, I saw a great party in the snows, coming from the south-east.”

“South-east? From White Harbour,” Sansa said, and Larra nodded.

“If the weather holds, they’ll arrive in two days’ time.”

“But the weather hasn’t held,” Sansa said, glancing at the dark diamond-paned windows now reflecting the light of the fire roaring in the hearth. The last few days they’d had atrocious weather; she didn’t envy those stuck outside in it – remembered it all too well. Sansa glanced at the polished box. “What’s that?”

“Voices from the past,” Larra said softly, and Sansa frowned.

“You and Bran are far too alike, you know,” she chided.

“How so?”

“You’re…ominous. I rather think you enjoy it,” Sansa accused delicately, and Larra smiled.

“You’re the one who says not to give everything away,” she reminded her sister, who smiled.

“True,” she acquiesced graciously. Her sapphire eyes glinted. “Whose voice is it, Larra?”

Larra sighed, glancing at the box. “The Last Dragon’s.”

Sansa’s eyes widened as they fell on the box, her lips parting. She sat up slowly, turning her gaze on Larra. “Where did they come from?”

“Samwell found them among the papers brought from Castle Black,” Larra said. “Maester Aemon was…he was a Targaryen. Aegon the Unlikely’s older brother, who took the black to secure his brother’s throne.”

“Why would Rhaegar have written to him?”

“For the same reason Jon went to him for advice,” Larra smiled. Father and son…and Maester Aemon had to know, she thought. “He was a very wise man. And he was the only Targaryen left outside of Rhaegar’s immediate family. All the others had died the night Rhaegar was born.”

“At the Tragedy of Summerhall,” murmured Sansa, who remembered her songs far better than her histories. Jenny’s song was one of her favourites – tragic and beautiful: Duncan Targaryen had cast aside his crown for one of the smallfolk, the lovely and strange Jenny of Oldstones. Larra remembered painting Duncan and Jenny, entitling it A kingdom for her kiss. Sansa had taken the painting and propped it on her dressing-table, praying to the Mother for a prince as romantic and gallant as the Prince of Dragonflies. Sansa glanced at the polished box. “The box is locked.”

“Samwell gave me the key,” Larra said quietly.

“Are you going to read them?” Sansa asked.

“I’m not sure,” Larra said, though in her mind she knew the answer already. Yes. Her bond with Rhaegal had done something – as she had told Sansa earlier, she had felt connected, felt a part of something in a way Lady Catelyn had always forbidden her in this castle, within her own family. Of course, the members of her father’s family were all dead (but one) and in no position to deny her place amongst them… She acknowledged that…

And she was genuinely curious about the nature of Rhaegar and Lyanna’s relationship. It was easy to think of things in extremes – either he was a rapist, or she was a thoughtless romantic – but life was never truly so simple, so black and white. The world Larra knew existed in ever-changing shades of grey. She wanted to know… She had seen Rhaegar entranced by the sight of Lyanna at Harrenhall, but that was it. What had he truly felt about her? Had he truly set Elia aside as they had discussed at Harrenhall, watching Lyanna Stark dancing with Robert Baratheon and Jaime Lannister? Had Rickard Stark been privy to Rhaegar’s plans to impose a regency on his father’s rule? Had the Warden of the North been arranging to call the banners for his liege while the Dornish armed themselves, all to support Rhaegar’s claim?

They all knew that whatever plans had been rumbling unseen, they had been thwarted when Brandon Stark flew down to King’s Landing in a rage, demanding Rhaegar’s head.

She scrubbed a hand down her face. “Oh,” she remembered. “Rhaegal’s worried about Viserion.”

“I heard you’d been out again,” Sansa said, giving Larra a curious look. She frowned. “How can you know that?”

“Because Rhaegal is cunning and clever, and I felt it when I mentioned Viserion’s name,” Larra sighed. “They’re worried. Viserion was struck by a weapon forged by the Others… Rhaegal has every reason to be worried…as do we. When the time comes, I don’t care how hard the other lords argue for it, we cannot allow the dragons to join the fray.”

“You’ll be hard-pressed to convince them it’s a bad idea,” Sansa said. “Dragons are an inextinguishable source of fire, and we need fire to defeat the armies of the dead.”

“They’re not inextinguishable,” Larra said grimly, shaking her head. “And if they die, they can be commanded by the Night King.”

“It’s moot anyway. How shall the Targaryen girl command three dragons? She can only ride one,” Sansa said. She was remembering everything Arya used to jabber on about, how no dragon ever had more than one rider at a time. No one person could control more than one dragon. She glanced at Larra. “Will you keep Rhaegal away?”

“Absolutely. If I can,” Larra said firmly. She dreaded what the Night King could do with a dragon at his disposal. She thought of Rhaegal, daintily roasting her salmon for her, allowing the direwolves to cuddle against them and share their warmth, burbling and cooing as Larra told the story of finding the direwolves, the sorrowful sound they made when Larra faltered, her voice growing thick and hoarse as she talked about Robb and about Rickon. She had felt tendrils of grief and sorrow whisper through the bond they shared, just as she felt the anxiety rippling from Rhaegal at the mention of their brother who had been injured by the Night King’s weapon.

Shivering, she put the image of the Night King out of her mind as best she could, but she was still haunted by the glacial blue eyes and utterly emotionless face she had seen morph into something predatory and harrowing as he lowered his palms and the Children’s flames were extinguished…the utter calm and purpose as he strolled idly to the entrance of the cave as they fled, leaving everything behind – Summer and Hodor and Lord Bloodraven and Leif and all the rest. Hold the door…

She shuddered and staggered against her door, panting for breath, forcing the memory from her mind, focusing instead on naming as many wildflowers as she could – a strategy Maester Atten had suggested for Narcisa when she became irate, instead of lashing out. She named a flower for every letter of the alphabet before she opened her eyes and lugged the large polished box to her working table. There was no sign of Gendry yet; she was due to join Sansa downstairs with the ladies, planning Narcisa’s new wardrobe – repurposing the gowns which had belonged to her mother and sisters, with Narcisa’s especial permission, and fashioning new ones from thicker Northern textiles.

The box niggled at her all night, and when she finally staggered into her chamber, eyes smarting from the ladies’ perfume and head aching from the noise of their chatter and singing and musical instruments and the exuberance of Narcisa planning her first adult wardrobe, she fumbled with the tiny silver key, unlocking the box, and slowly lifted the lid. Stripping down, she climbed into bed and unfurled the oldest letter – dated 274 A.C. She frowned and checked the dates of her own Targaryen history – Rhaegar had been born in 259 A.C. He would have been fifteen years old, writing this letter – she folded it and dug through the contents of the box until she found it, the oldest letter, dated 272 A.C.

Prince Rhaegar, thirteen years old, had thanked his Uncle Maester and the valiant men of the Night’s Watch for the engraved horn they had sent for his nameday gift along with a collection of myths and legends about the Night’s Watch compiled by Maester Aemon himself. Rhaegar wrote that he had wept bitterly for brave Danny Flint and had not slept for a week thinking of the Seventy-Nine Sentinels – the story that still made the hair on the back of Larra’s neck stand on end. The letter had been delivered with a large shipment of steel, men to wield it and gold to repair Castle Black and feed their men. Prince Rhaegar, his handwriting neat and his tone young and almost innocent, had asked Uncle Maester whether there had ever been any news as to the fate of their distant uncle Lord Bryndn Rivers. Larra felt a pang in her chest and winced, folding the letter, and tucked it neatly aside, reaching for another.

She sighed and settled in, organising the letters by date before reading them. Rhaegar’s life…was not a happy one, not an easy one. He had been young but had learned to see the world as it was from an early age, the same way Larra and her siblings had had the worst realities of their world thrust so brutally upon them at a young age. Rhaegar had written to Maester Aemon about his father’s unpredictable behaviour and growing cruelty, his unbridled joy at the birth of two of Rhaegar’s younger brothers – Aemon and Jaehaerys – and Rhaegar’s growing fear and dread as his father’s behaviour worsened, becoming cruel and vicious and controlling, torturing entire families to death after blaming them for Jaehaerys’ death. He wrote of sitting with his mother, unable to stop her weeping.

The only joy in Rhaegar’s life, besides his books, was his mother – and the Sword of the Morning. His best friend, whom he called his brother in his letters. Everyone knew of the bond between Rhaegar and Arthur – but to read how Rhaegar spoke of Arthur… It was heart-breaking. As devastating as how deeply Rhaegar loved his mother and desired nothing more than to see her happy, as tragic as how much he loved his father in spite of his growing cruelty, and his powerlessness to do anything to help either of his parents.

Rhaegar’s letters became more numerous, more detailed as he approached sixteen, then seventeen; Larra wondered what advice Maester Aemon had sent to his great-nephew.

Larra knew what was coming, as Rhaegar reached his eighteenth name-day. The Defiance of Duskendale had occurred that year.

Gendry slumped into the chamber, groaning heavily as he sank onto the bed and tugged off his boots. Larra, eyes bleary from reading too long in the dim light, gathered up the letters, folded them neatly and locked them back inside the box. She wasn’t ready to share them, not yet. Not until…Jon has to know first, she reminded herself, aching to share with Gendry the truth of it.

If Jon needed Samwell to help him make sense of things, Larra knew there was one person she trusted and respected above any others. That man was so exhausted, she realised, that he had fallen asleep in the act of unbuttoning his breeches. She smiled and reached over to help him; Gendry startled and blinked blearily up at her.

“You’re exhausted,” she said, and he grunted softly, sighing heavily. He just managed to pull his breeches and tunic off, tucking her against his body, before his gentle snores filled the chamber. Larra smiled against his chest. Sometimes she didn’t need to talk; Gendry’s mere presence was enough.

But she drifted off into an uneasy sleep, her heart aching and her mind in turmoil, overthinking everything Rhaegar had detailed in his letters, of life at court under his father’s increasingly more volatile and violent rule, his mother’s depression, the dead baby brothers he couldn’t stop weeping over, his loneliness and isolation and desperate desire to help, having no idea how and no power to do so.

His life had not been happy, and as Larra finally drifted off, she imagined that Lyanna, a she-wolf with fierce brothers she loved dearly, must have appealed to the part of Rhaegar that still remembered the devastating loneliness of his childhood and the grief of losing his brothers before they even outgrew their cradles. A passionate she-wolf with rambunctious brothers, all of them fierce and healthy and strong, close-knit and fiercely loving… Lyanna had enjoyed the childhood Rhaegar had always yearned for.

Larra’s had been somewhere in between.

She thought of Jon, who more than her had felt the sting of their bastard status and let it define his relationships with their brothers and sisters. More sensitive, more reclusive, more prone to taking himself off – not like Larra, who had always refused to be pushed out, who guarded her bonds with her siblings fiercely.

As much as they could be, raised by another, after all they had experienced in their lives to alter them, Jon was like Rhaegar, while Larra was like Lyanna.

She knew one thing for certain, and the thought gentled her agitated mind, allowing her to drift off: Rhaegar and Lyanna would both have been proud of how Ned Stark had raised their children, embraced and beloved by their siblings and fiercely loyal to them in turn.

She tucked herself against Gendry and fell into a deep sleep.

Notes:

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Chapter 43: The Return of the King

Notes:

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(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

43

The Return of the King


A collective groan of relief escaped them as they wended along a lazy thermal river and crested another hill. To outsiders, the snow made everything seem endless yet Jon recognised the fine winter’s day for what it was. He was heartened by the taste of the snow on his tongue, the song of the wind and the sun shimmering behind the billowing clouds. He was home. And he clicked his tongue and guided his horse confidently ahead, leaving behind the others – all but Arya, who cantered beside him, her eyes bright, colour high in her cheeks.

She knew Sansa waited for them at Winterfell: Jon had never seen Arya look so excited, so delighted, to see their sister.

He couldn’t wait to see Sansa’s face when he returned home, not only alive and well and leading armies, but with Arya!

The journey home had been insightful, he thought, in many ways. The Westerosi had come prepared, swathed in heavy woollen cloaks and new furs purchased in White Harbour, their armour leather-covered and their weapons freshly sharpened. They rode confidently through the snows, following Jon’s party, laughing and singing through the storms, sharing stories to warm themselves with their laughter. At Jon’s order they had tents raised before the storms hit, were well-rationed and sparred morning and night before continuing their journey or retiring to try and find some rest as the winds howled.

Used to the cold, accustomed to moving as the Free Folk did, Jon slept in short bursts. Always wary of someone crawling into his bed-roll. He slept poorly, agitated more by the knowledge of her nearness than the howling winds tearing at their tents. He had taken pains to strategically place the criminals of King’s Landing between their parties – the Northmen, who knew the country, led the caravan, with Ser Jaime Lannister’s contribution on foot or in wagons behind, some chained but most free. After them came Daenerys’ honour-guard of one hundred Unsullied soldiers, who served the dual purpose of protecting her while also ensuring none of the criminals attempted to flee – none so far had proven themselves stupid enough to risk it in this weather – and behind the Unsullied rode Daenerys Targaryen with her court. At the back of the caravan rode two hundred kos, Daenerys’ favoured bloodriders.

They had arrived at White Harbour and Jon had sat with Lord Manderly, discussing how to transport so many men north in winter. That was the first argument Jon had had with Daenerys: she insisted they wait at White Harbour for the rest of the Unsullied armies to arrive on her ships, and the Dothraki to join them on the King’s Road. Jon refused to waste the time. And despite Lord Manderly’s fine hospitality – he was hosting his King, after all – Jon had been anxious to leave the only Northern city.

He knew Daenerys had attempted to seek him out in his chambers.

Attempted… A she-wolf had guarded his door.

A silky soft voice broke the silence of the darkened corridor, and her heart fluttered in her chest. “Are you lost, my lady?”

The fine hairs on the back of Daenerys’ neck stood on end as shadows took the form of a young woman. She was taller than Daenerys and very slim, sharing the King’s long, solemn face. The way she looked at Daenerys with her eerie grey eyes always unsettled her: she felt as if her skin was being flayed, leaving her utterly vulnerable.

The girl looked so like the King, so like Jon – with her long face that seemed never to have known a smile and her mesmerising, unsettling grey eyes – yet when Daenerys looked at her, she shuddered. Pretty as the girl was, something went cold in Daenerys at the sight of her. She knew, instinctively, that there was no-one she had ever met more dangerous than this young woman, with her simple dark braid brushing her shoulder-blades and a delicate Braavosi-style sword glinting at her belt. It wasn’t the sword that frightened Daenerys.

She narrowed her eyes at the girl, determined not to be afraid of those chilling grey eyes.

You don’t want to wake the dragon, she thought, assessing the girl – for that was what she was. A slip of a girl with a little sword. How long had her ancestors’ swords held up against the wrath of dragons, Daenerys mused, the thought bolstering her: she was determined to put the girl her in her place.

“I would see Jon Snow.”

“The King is resting,” the girl said softly, her voice barely more than a whisper. “We have a hard ride ahead of us.”

“He would wish to see me.”

“No-one is to disturb him.”

“He will see me. I am a queen,” she said impatiently, lifting her chin. She thought she saw a smile glittering in the girl’s grey eyes, but the torchlight flickered and she must have imagined it.

Her voice as gentle as a caress, the girl tilted her head, gazing unblinkingly at Daenerys, and murmured, “In Essos.”

Daenerys bristled and flushed with anger. The strange girl’s eerie eyes glinted with triumph, seeing that her barb had struck true. And that made Daenerys angrier still: no-one dared speak to her thus.

The girl’s unyielding grey eyes swept downward from Daenerys’ face, slowly taking in the details of the most sensuous Lyseni lace nightgown Daenerys had in her wardrobe, iridescent silver-gold and fashioned in as a Meereenese tokar, the lace revealing more than it concealed. Her voice was exquisitely gentle yet Daenerys had never felt more threatened when the girl told her, “You’re likely to catch your death if you saunter about like this.”

Goose-flesh appeared on Daenerys’ silky soft, lavishly moisturised and perfumed skin. Her heart stuttered in her chest and her mouth went dry. Arya Stark smiled blandly at her.

“Shall I call a guard to guide you back to your chambers, my lady?” she asked, her voice a delicate sigh like the breeze on a gentle summer’s morning. My lady… I am a Queen…in Essos…

Arya watched with some satisfaction as her words started to spread their poison. Daenerys Targaryen’s lip curled and she stifled a snarl with great effort. Bristling, she threw back her tumbling platinum waves and sneered, “So be it. If the King does not desire to meet with me I shall not force him.”

Arya Stark gave her a seething, icy look more dangerous than any Daenerys had yet seen on her chilling, emotionless face.

With a wave of her hand, a Manderly guard appeared. Arya told them gently, “Please escort Lady Targaryen to her chamber. She has become quite lost. I can only imagine what she was thinking, wandering about Lord Manderly’s castle dressed…like that.”

Daenerys Targaryen simmered, her eyes narrowing on Arya, who gave her the blandest look in response, utterly unfazed. The guard goggled at Daenerys Targaryen’s small, exposed breasts and tripped over his own feet, guiding the way through the corridors.

Arya melted into the shadows, touching the hilt of Needle, reassured of its presence at her waist, and she traced her fingertips over the tiny obsidian wolf-heads embellishing the sword-belt Jon had gifted her, replacing the one she had lost the day Father was arrested and Syrio Forel was killed. She tapped her knuckles delicately against the heavy Northern oak door and listened for Jon’s muffled response before entering his chamber.

He glanced up from a working table overflowing with papers, the lines at the corners of his eyes exaggerated by the flickering candlelight, and blinked, kneading his eyes as he groaned.

“Arya,” he said, sounding exhausted yet relieved to see her. “I thought you were in bed.”

“Perhaps you’d have preferred I was. You almost had an uninvited bed-mate,” Arya said gently, watching her brother. His body went still. His reaction told her everything she needed to know. She hadn’t even had to say the name. He cleared his throat gently.

“You frightened her off?” he asked quietly, barely glancing at her.

Arya smiled. “Now, why do you assume I frightened her?”

Jon gave her the kind of look he used to give her all those years ago, when they had barely needed words to communicate. His eyes glittered with irony: she smiled in response. Her heart soared, joy sparkling through her veins, bright and good. They had spent every moment together: Jon seemed unwilling to let her out of his sight, and Arya was just as protective of him. Throughout their journey from King’s Landing to Duskendale, then north to White Harbour, they had spent every waking moment together, talking – they had shared their stories. He knew some of hers: Gendry had shared it with him! Gendry! He was alive – and headed to Winterfell, of all places! Jon had told her all about Sansa…and Rickon…

All Jon could share of Larra and Bran’s fate was a brief glimpse one of his black brothers had had of them at the Nightfort years ago.

Larra had taken their broken brother beyond the Wall… Of all the places Arya had been, all she had endured, the idea of going beyond the Wall still gave her chills: Arya remembered Old Nan’s stories and shuddered. Men were one thing: monsters were quite another.

Sighing, Arya pulled up a chair at the end of the table, gazing concernedly at her brother. He never stopped working – never stopped worrying. He reminded her so bitterly of Father she wanted to weep. But she didn’t. She watched. He had become guarded and sterner than she ever remembered Jon being when Daenerys Targaryen appeared at White Harbour, barely two days after they had docked in the harbour. Ever since, Jon had been tense. Ever since, Arya had been watching Daenerys Targaryen.

And what she had noticed disturbed her.

Tonight was the first night Daenerys had attempted to approach Jon but she had spent days watching his every move, pining for him – and becoming more and more bewildered and infuriated as he actively ignored her. Unseen, Arya watched her reactions – and more importantly, the reactions of those around her, who knew her best, worshipped the ground she walked upon…and dreaded her disappointment. Arya wasn’t the only one watching, waiting for Daenerys Targaryen’s reactions whenever Jon ignored her. It was very telling that the tension within Daenerys Targaryen’s court rose the longer Jon denied her what she wanted.

“Jon… We have shared our stories…the very worst we have endured,” she said gently. Of all her siblings, she had been closest with Jon and Larra, but especially Jon. Arya knew her mother had hated that they loved their bastard siblings so fiercely: she had never wanted to get Larra into trouble by spending too much time with her. Whatever Arya did would be blamed on her and Arya was always afraid that Father would give in and send the twins away. She gazed into Jon’s face, yearning for those days again, in the nursery with Bran and Rickon, squabbling with Sansa, cuddling with Larra and watching Robb and Theon and Jon play and fight. “You’ve told me everything…everything but her.”

“There’s nothing to tell,” Jon said shortly, his jaw tightening as he averted his eyes to his scrolls.

“Then why did you tense with dread when I mentioned that someone wished to climb into bed with you?” she asked gently. She frowned. “I didn’t even give a name. But you knew. Jon… What’s going on?”

“She committed her armies to our cause,” Jon said, trying to shrug it off. Arya gazed at him.

“And?” she prompted gently.

“And then she used me for her pleasure,” Jon said, his gaze challenging as he levelled it on her. Arya did not look away. She sighed heavily, understanding what he meant. He hadn’t dared refuse her when she had climbed into his bed, for she had committed her armies. Arya knew enough of Daenerys Targaryen’s arrogance to know that denying her would have risked her continued alliance – she would have gone back on her word to spite him for rejecting her, her pride wounded.

“She desires you…because you’re the only one she has ever met strong enough to resist her,” Arya said, pride shining from her face. She rested a hand on Jon’s arm and became very serious, intense. Her grey eyes – their grey eyes – seemed to glow, mesmerising and eerie in the candlelight. “You have to but say her name and she shall die by my hand.”

Jon didn’t laugh. He took her seriously, as he always had, even when she was a little girl and she had burst into tears because she was desperate to learn to shoot. Instead of laughing at her frustration and fury, he had wiped her face and taken her to the godswood. He had let her practise with Bran’s little bow until her fingers ached. He sighed and shook his head, looking absolutely exhausted. “I’m not sure what good that would do.”

He hadn’t said no. Arya stared at her brother. The Jon she remembered would have balked at a cold-blooded assassination – where was the honour in such a thing? But he hadn’t said no, hadn’t even chided her.

I’m not sure what good that would do, he had said. Arya realised her brother had given the matter serious thought. The fact that he hadn’t outright forbidden her, chastised her, been horrified at the suggestion…it said a lot about what Jon had been through, what he would tolerate, what he would do to uphold the oath he had sworn to guard the realms of men.

“Jon,” Arya said softly. She realised, suddenly and completely, that Jon her brother had become a man. A man who had been forced by circumstance to make the harshest choices anyone could make – and had to live with them. The scars on his face attested to that. “How can I help you?”

Jon sighed heavily, set his pen down and gathered her up in his arms, embracing her fiercely. He stroked her short braid and Arya rested her cheek against his shoulder. “You’re doing it,” he murmured, and Arya smiled sadly to herself.

Arya’s presence had bolstered Jon. Had brought joy to his life once more. He had thought never to see her again. When Gendry had told him of their adventures… Jon had thought her lost in the Riverlands, or dead. He knew why Arya had not tried to return to Winterfell – the last she had heard, it was a smoking ruin, their family scattered or murdered. What was left for her in the North? She had chosen to go east, to Braavos, where she had trained. She had learned how to become a Faceless Man. The deadliest of assassins. She had told him about some of the skills she had learned – not the art of death itself, but of learning: of gathering information and observing patterns, how to use them to her advantage, to spot the flaws in people’s nature or tease out their deepest desires.

She had become a spy without equal.

She watched everyone, never letting it be known by anyone but Jon just what she was, or what her particular skills were, or how she could use them. What she was learning just by watching.

Just as her nightgown did, Daenerys Targaryen revealed more than she could hide. It was almost too easy to take her measure, boring. Entitled, arrogant, believing herself more god than girl, untouchable, self-righteous and vicious, wilfully ignorant – not just uneducated, but actively ignoring what was before her eyes when it contradicted what she had convinced herself was the truth…

Arya had knocked her down several pegs that night in the corridor, guarding Jon’s door.

A thoughtful and decisive ruler, Jon had been undermining Daenerys at every turn since his arrival at Dragonstone. In Essos, she had been worshipped as a god: in Westeros, she was nothing. And everyone knew it. Daenerys was starting to realise it. Arya watched how Daenerys reacted, and how everyone else reacted to her. They were more fascinating than their mistress. Daenerys wasn’t used to taking orders – or having the orders of others followed by her own people, yet that was exactly what happened – to Daenerys’ mounting fury.

The first time Daenerys learned how it felt to be put in her place was at White Harbour. Her wishes were ignored in favour of the King’s orders. No-one listened to her – not even her own council. Jon Snow refused to wait. They would make do with the men they had or would be marching upon Winterfell as the Night King levelled it. They would face the mightiest army the world had ever known – and be powerless to stop it, caught in the snowdrifts, exhausted and without weapons.

The journey itself had not improved the Dragon Queen’s mood. She knew nothing of cold, how it sapped your strength and gnawed at your resolve. She did things as she had always done them – which was exactly the way she wanted, in spite of the realities she refused to face head-on. She refused to listen to Jon’s advice on travelling through the winter storms. She proved herself inept during their journey to Winterfell once – and only once. That was the second, and most severe blow to Daenerys’ ego as they travelled north.

After the two Unsullied she had ordered to guard her tent overnight were found frozen to death the next morning, still clutching their spears, the King intervened. He directly took control of the Unsullied and Dothraki. Forever after, her men turned to him for leadership. Daenerys sulked, sour-faced, looking like she was chewing a hornet.

They had all seen Daenerys’ horror at the men’s needless deaths, rightly blaming herself for them. Yet it had not lasted long, and it was Jon who had lit their funeral pyre himself, tossing the torch into the conflagration that sent waves of delicious, welcome heat over them all – horrifying though it was, they all leaned toward the burning bodies, groaning at that life-giving heat. Daenerys had remained inside her tent as the camp was dismantled, buried in furs and complaining about the temperature of the stew and the quality of the meat.

“You’re thoughtless,” Jon told Daenerys, his tone dark, his solemn face sterner than they had ever seen it. “Thoughtless to anything but your own desires… You will heed me.”

Daenerys Targaryen had become accustomed to having men heed her. She had learned to use her body to pleasure her husband until he worshipped her, murdered for her, razed cities at her word. Because of Drogo, Daenerys had learned that she could use herself – her body – to get whatever she desired. As long as she made men happy by giving them her body, they would give her the world and believe it was their idea to do so.

Jon Snow was not happy – not with her. He actively avoided her. He spent every night with that chilling sister despite knowing how much she frightened Daenerys. He had to know that, surely. Every night, Daenerys tucked herself up in her feather duvets and furs and wondered why he had rebuffed her so coldly – through his sister, no less – and she thought back to their time at the Wall, the hazy firelight, drenched with warmth, the ferocity of his lovemaking… Surely he wanted her again?

This Jon Snow, this King in the North, was the man who had arrived at Dragonstone and bluntly refused to kneel. Had snatched away one of her kingdoms with a soft scoff and a grim, unyielding voice of tempered steel. Denying her family had ever had any right to the North at all. Protecting his own interests – and those of his sister, who had been married to her Hand so briefly. Daenerys knew Lord Tyrion had a fondness for Sansa Stark and a deepening respect for Jon Snow. And she was coming to despise both for it, itching with irritation every time her people turned to the King for leadership. Lord Tyrion continued to serve her yet Daenerys knew he had lost all admiration for her, all respect, all love – if he had ever loved her to begin with.

He always watched her carefully when Jon Snow refused to engage with her.

And he had watched her, unsettled, when Lord Manderly gifted her a beautiful whip upon her departure from White Harbour.

It was about time, she had thought, and her due as Queen of the Seven Kingdoms, to receive gifts. Jon Snow had been lavished with gifts upon his arrival at White Harbour, feasted with fresh seafood prepared every which way. With Jon Snow, Lord Manderly had been open, warm, delightful and charismatic, jolly. To Daenerys, Lord Manderly had been courteous. He had given Jon and his sister gifts, and more to take to their sister at Winterfell, fine velvets and hair-combs and silver furs, perfumes and glistening jewel-bright embroidery threads.

Daenerys, he had given a whip.

It was a fine whip…but a single whip. Not worthy of a queen, or even a lady. He had given it to her as she departed White Harbour, and she thought she saw a look pass between Ser Jorah and Lord Tyrion as she accepted it from Lord Manderly. Paltry though it was, Daenerys had thanked Lord Manderly for the gift with as much queenly magnanimity as she could muster.

She tightened her grip on the handle of the whip now, glaring as yet another flurry of snow and wind tore at her hair and bit her lips, stinging her eyes. Irritated, she jerked on the reins of her mare and hissed as the beast neighed, jerking its head in protest. The mare was nothing like the silver Drogo had gifted to her: Jon Snow had asked Lord Manderly to make no special arrangements for her. And the mare was wilful.

She gritted her teeth and slapped the whip against her mount’s hind-quarters, making her buck and kick out, furiously throwing back her head.

“Gently, Khaleesi,” Ser Jorah said.

“She is a wilful beast,” Daenery scowled.

“You have been punishing her for miles,” Ser Jorah chided softly. “Loosen the reins or she’ll toss you from the saddle.”

“Do these Northerners not know how to break their horses?”

“A broken horse is useless, like anything else,” Ser Jorah said kindly. “You’re taking your anger out on her and she won’t stand for it.”

“Must we continue to ride at the back of the caravan like the lowest of the slaves?” Daenerys hissed. His face was swathed with cowls and a furred hood but Daenerys could see his eyes narrow in a frown.

“There are hundreds of criminals who must be escorted North and only the Unsullied have the skill and discipline to do so,” he said. She had heard this before. And it grated more and more each time she heard it. She knew it made sense strategically to put the criminals between the Northmen and her forces, lest any make an attempt at escape…yet she could not help but think of Arya Stark lurking in the corridor, guarding Jon Snow’s door – denying Daenerys entry to the King. Denying her – a Queen! Who did the Stark bitch think she was?

Daenerys glared ahead of her as if her gaze could span the miles between herself and Arya Stark, who clicked her tongue and nudged her young stallion ahead, her heart in her mouth, breathless with terror and delight. Awe.

There it was. They crested the hill and her eyes burned with tears.

Winterfell.

For a heartbeat, she glanced over her shoulder. Swathed in a thick woollen cloak lined with heavy bear-fur, dressed in new wool tunics and leathers, a heavy brigandine and gorget, Sandor Clegane caught her eye. His sad brown eyes stared back, and his voice murmured in her memory: You’re almost there and you’re afraid you won’t make it. The closer you get, the worse the fear gets…

He had said that to her barely days – had it been only hours? – before they had reached the Twins. They had been too late then. And he had saved her life when it would have benefited him to surrender her to her family’s enemies: scooped her up onto a horse and carried her away from the carnage as the Northern army was butchered.

You’re almost there… I made it. I made it home, Arya thought, and Sandor Clegane gave her a sad, gentle smile, his gaze sliding past her to the great castle sprawling across the moors. She let herself grin and turned back, sitting higher in the saddle to catch the first peek of crimson, searching for the weirwood tree. Even from this distance, through the snow, they would be able to see the blood-red leaves of the heart-tree. Her eyes stung, her heart soared, and her lip quivered as she saw it. Red. The heart-tree. Home.

Beside her, Jon reached out and touched her cheek as she sniffled.

She clicked her tongue, and, for perhaps the first time, people heard the King in the North laugh as he spurred on his own proud stallion and cantered beside his sister, riding headlong for Winterfell.

Behind them, their self-appointed honour guard exchanged glances and urged their horses on, retaining a respectful distance – everyone seemed to appreciate just how extraordinary this moment was, that Jon Snow was returning to Winterfell with the sister everyone had presumed dead. But they were saddle-sore and exhausted and those high walls promised shelter, food and warmth and the King would not begrudge them urging their horses onwards.

Sandor Clegane watched Arya ride on ahead, something unfamiliar swelling in the pit of his stomach. He had become…accustomed to the girl’s presence, infuriating though she was… He hated people but he had murdered anyone who tried to take her from him. She had lodged herself deep inside him like an arrow through the ribs, and he could not free himself of her. Didn’t wish to. The furious, wrathful, brave Stark bitch who had left him to die…after promising to murder him every time she had drawn breath. She had not gifted him with mercy, though he’d taught her himself where to strike the heart… She had left him. Left him to die, perhaps…or left him to live. She couldn’t do it. Hard bitch that she was, Clegane thought to himself…she had taken his name off her list.

He’d seen her laugh only once: when they had learned her Aunt Lysa had taken flight from the Eyrie. This was different. She had smiled and her mutinous grey eyes had been soft, warm and glistening with tears. She had smiled at him.

You made it, girl, he thought, pride swelling in his chest. Whatever she had been up to – and he had heard rumours throughout their journey north, believing only the worst of them to possibly be true – she had made it home.

He had kept her alive. Her sister had been too frightened of him: Arya had never been frightened enough. But they were both home.

Spurring on his horse, he followed the King and his sister with a large party who had kept pace with the King since White Harbour: Ser Davos Seaworth, the Northmen who’d travelled south with the King, Lord Manderly’s own guards, Lord Barahir, the Tarlys and several Dornishmen, including the fierce Sand who’d come beyond the Wall with them and a young Dornish knight who had all the beauty Obara lacked. As they neared the great sprawling castle – so much bigger than the Red Keep, with plumes of smoke rising from Winter’s Town – they noticed the siege preparations.

The King’s Regent had not been idle.

Good girl, Sandor thought, a vision of red flickering through his mind, sapphire eyes and a flawless ivory face that never revealed her thoughts. He remembered the girl over whom he had draped his dirty white cloak as she was abused before an audience; the girl he had offered to return to this place; the girl who could barely stand to look him in the face yet who had sought him out to thank him for returning for her during the riots, who knew he would never – could never hurt her.

The little bird had discovered that she had fangs and a fur coat and knew how to hunt.

He remembered her in ill-fitting silks fashioned to flatter the Queen: he remembered her that last night, in a sombre purple dress with her hair down, more Northern than she had ever allowed herself to look. She had not yet been a woman the last time he saw her, the night of the Blackwater… He wondered whether the Red Wolf was now brave enough to meet his eye.

How was it that the Stark girls had become so important to him? Proud of Arya’s smile; delighted by Sansa’s survival.

He watched the two fine horses cantering towards the castle, losing them to the gentle snows drifting idly around them, and cantered on ahead as the rest of his party spurred their horses onwards, desperate to reach their destination at last.

 

Snow twirled delicately in the air, which tasted of frost and smoke, but did not stick. It was too fine a day for the snow to settle, especially after yesterday’s rains, which had frozen solid overnight, making the castle’s battlements and yards treacherous. Men had been busy since dawn spreading grit on steps and pathways, the great yards turned to a quagmire of melting ice, frozen mud and salt-grit. Despite the weather, the yards and battlements teemed with life: a break in the storms had the skilled workmen labouring intensely on the Broken Tower. It was beginning to take shape, now, the tallest and northernmost tower of Winterfell, shooting proudly into the air like a spear. The men worked in spite of the snow drifting in dainty, unhurried flurries about their heads, melting in their hair and on their eyelashes before it could touch the ground. The sun blazed through the snow-clouds, bright, white and hot.

After so long indoors, the people of Winterfell – and Winter’s Town – enjoyed the brief respite, and many faces turned to bask in the rare heat of a strong winter sun. Larra smiled, watching the seven Lannister girls, with Neva and Briar, basking in the sun. They were wrapped up in fur-trimmed cloaks and each of them wore thick woollen dresses, their ears kept warm with their prized, embroidered headbands or, in Briar’s and little Leona’s case, a delicately crocheted bonnet tied beneath their chins. Their hands were encased in crochet-lined, felted mittens embroidered to match their headbands, keeping away the sting of the cold. They were the girls’ pride and joy, now that they were denied silks and fine jewels. The Lannisters, so used to the blazing warmth of the sun in the Westerlands, and Neva, who had been raised in the tropical paradise that was Lys the Lovely and was used to the sweltering heat of King’s Landing, were drinking up the winter sun for as long as they could enjoy it, perhaps imagining, Larra thought, that they were…home.

Under Lady Tisseia’s care, Larra left them basking: the former slave turned her tattooed face to the sun and sighed contentedly, her heavy skirts sparkling blindingly as the intricate beading and embroidery caught the light and refracted it. It had been a while since Larra had taken a shift in the forges, and though she had received regular reports – both from Aislin and Gendry – she liked to be there, amongst the men, to watch and to listen. She wanted to assess the apprentices and check on the progress of the obsidian scorpion.

The Broken Tower would be completed before the blacksmiths had finished the scorpion, Larra realised with some regret, as Donal Noye gave her a tour of the forges designated for building the scorpion. Turning something of wood and steel into a machine of entirely dragonglass was a feat in and of itself. Under pressure to complete it quickly, the armourers were floundering.

“Oh dear,” Gendry sighed, his lips twitching as Larra approached her usual anvil, knotting a leather apron over her woollen dress. “It’s going that well?”

“What do you mean?”

“You only return to the anvil when you need to think carefully about something,” Gendry smiled warmly. “If you stay in the solar, you’ll be interrupted; no-one dares distract you here.”

“You mean when I’m within arm’s reach of a hammer?” Larra sighed, the humour in her voice falling flat. He had left her in their bed hours ago and had been working diligently at his anvil ever since. His tunic stuck to him, stained with sweat and his muscles rippled with every movement – and she watched him move, licking her lip. “Are you having better progress than the scorpion, at least?”

“Miles better,” Gendry grinned. “Come and have a look: it’ll cheer you up.”

Larra set down her hammer and drifted over to Gendry’s anvil. The heat of him, the scent of him, made her mouth water and she gave him a gentle, appreciative smile as she sidled up beside him. He caught her eye and his lips twitched, his sapphire gaze flicking to her mouth, and he cleared his throat, tucking her closer with a hand heavy on her waist. He lifted his tongs closer for her to see – she breathed out a sigh of delight and wonder at the intricate ripples and folds Gendry had created, molten silver and shadows dancing and writhing sensuously like forbidden lovers.

“You’ve done it,” she breathed, peering closer. The blade…seemed to be alive, moving in a way she had never seen Ice or Dark Sister do – perhaps because Gendry was still actively forging the steel. Or it was her imagination. Either way, Gendry’s craftsmanship was exquisite – worthy of an apprentice of Aeris the Armourer.

“Well, I’m trying,” Gendry said, flushing delicately, and he turned his gaze to the blade, likely assessing it for imperfections. His humility made Larra smile, and she reached up to cup his cheek, drawing him in for a sweet, lingering kiss.

“You’ve done it,” she said softly, gazing up at him, her eyes glowing with pride.

“Valyrian steel,” he said softly, shaking his head as if in wonder. He turned his gaze from the steel to Larra, searching her face, adoring it, and he sighed. “Surely I am dreaming.”

Larra smiled. “Then it is a good dream.”

He hugged her waist, drawing her in for a gentle, savouring kiss that took her breath away. She smiled, teetering back, and blushed.

“Go get yourself some stout,” she said, watching his face. “You’re exhausted.” He nodded, hugged her waist and strode toward the courtyard entrance. She called after him, “And bring me some back too, please!” She heard Gendry chuckle and he raised a hand in acknowledgement as he strode away.

Tasting him on her lips, she smiled as she took up her hammer and tongs and set to work, planning out the armourers’ next steps forward as she hammered and manipulated obsidian. She glanced at the Valryian steel Gendry was forging…the Valyrian steel Gendry was forging, she thought, awed. Such a phrase no-one ever believed would be possible after the Doom. It was…momentous. Gendry was forging Valyrian steel. She shook her head, delighted and awed, yet bit her lip. He was the most talented armourer in the North – possibly, by forging Valyrian steel, the world. He had a cunning mind and a way of assessing things, picking them apart and rebuilding them in his mind to see how they worked…

Regretfully, she eyed the Valyrian steel. She knew what had to be done. The progress Gendry had made with Valyrian steel, monumental though it was, for many different reasons, would have to halt. At least temporarily. Until Gendry had figured out how to alter the scorpion to accommodate for it being forged entirely from obsidian. She hated to stop him when he was filled with such passion for their project, when he was making such staggering progress already, his confidence growing with every strike of his hammer...but they needed the scorpion.

Always so agreeable, Larra knew Gendry would do it – would sacrifice his time with the Valryian steel to do what was necessary, though his heart would ache and scream to return to the challenge and artistry of Valyrian steel.

She hated the idea of disappointing him.

Gendry strode back into the forge, empty-handed but smiling.

“Gendry – ” she began, but he wasn’t listening. Instead, he took her hand, gently pulling her away from the anvils and through the forges. “Are you alright?” she asked curiously. She bit her lip, thinking of how thoroughly he’d had her this morning, with her on her belly, first, then on their knees, her gripping the headboard as he pounded into her, a new favourite position for them both. No, he didn’t need her, the way they so often took themselves off to the godswood or her chamber during a hard day – whichever was nearer. His eyes were glinting with something close to mischief, and she winced in the bright light of the strong winter sun beaming down on the yard, turning banks of snow to blinding beacons. The tumult of the yard never carried into the forges, where the songs of the anvils and hammers drowned everything but the deepest of male voices or Larra’s soaring voice when she sang.

The yard was bustling with activity: Jon had not announced his return with banners or horns – he and Arya had spurred on their horses, anxious to reach the castle. Behind them, though, his personal guard followed, and he heard their groans of relief as they slowed and stopped, lads from the stables rushing out to aid them. A ripple spread through the courtyard as people recognised him – Jon smiled, his breath pluming around him, as Ghost skidded toward him, leaping high and planting his front paws heavily on Jon’s shoulders, licking his face.

“Ghost,” he grunted, reaching up to pat the direwolf, who dropped back onto all fours and tilted his great head at Arya. He went still, delicately sniffing the air, scenting Arya, glanced at Jon as if in question, then leaned in to gently lick Arya’s face, neck and ears. Jon watched, awed at the direwolf’s memory: Ghost meant home, no matter where Jon was. And he had never seen Ghost so deeply affectionate with anyone. He was gentle with Gilly and Little Sam but never adoring like this.

“It looks the same,” said Arya quietly, as Ghost padded away, to wend through the horses as men – and women – clambered off them, groaning and massaging their aching legs, glad to relieve the reins to stable-boys. Arya gazed around the courtyard with misty eyes and Jon smiled sadly as he looked around, seeing what Arya did: a bustling yard full of happy people all diligently working away, weaving baskets, carving or fletching arrows, spreading grit on the walkways and steps, doling out stout and ale, skinning animals for their furs and sending the carcasses to the butchers, building siege weapons, giving livestock some sunlight in the fine weather, talking and laughing, singing and flirting and kissing and scolding. They were living.

“The snows are heavier…but the castle’s the same as it ever was,” Jon said, and fondly watched his sister dawdle about the yard, her eyes wide with wonder as she drank in her first sight of home and the Stark banners flying from the walls – the colours inverted now, a white direwolf on a grey banner. To mark Jon’s bastard status – though most now associated the white direwolf with Ghost, with Jon. It was only Jon who lingered on his bastard nature, and now only rarely.

Jon gazed around the yard as Arya did, glad that they had given no warning and even more glad that Sansa had not ordered the work to cease just because of his return. The castle did not stop still, the way Father and Lady Catelyn had ordered Winterfell to turn out for King Robert’s arrival all those years ago. There were no garlands of flowers: instead, swathes of icicles glittered in the sunlight as delicate flurries of snow drifted past like thousands of tiny dancers. A murmur of King in the North spread throughout the yard, until it was a shout, and those in the yard turned to cheer.

His people celebrated his return in their own ways, waving and smiling from their work or dipping curtseys or short bows. He acknowledged them with a nod or a wave but cared only to see one face.

Flickering like flame, the sheet of copper hair caught his attention and he prowled closer, smiling, as Sansa hurried down the steps from one of the covered walkways. She was swathed in a heavy cloak, a grey wolf-pelt about her shoulders. Rippling behind her was her sheet of copper hair, brushed until it shone. She was the brightest thing in the yard and all eyes were drawn to her red hair – to their Lady, the Regent of the North. Jon strode across the yard to meet her, feeling his heart seize in his chest as Sansa launched herself at him, throwing herself into his arms, gasping with relief. He lifted her off the ground, squeezing her, and felt as if he could breathe for the first time in months. Her familiar scent teased his nose and he groaned, hugging her tighter, lifting her off her feet. He stroked her hair and sighed, closing his eyes, relishing the closeness, her warmth, her scent, how fiercely she embraced him.

“You returned,” she panted breathlessly, giving him a squeeze.

“I promised to always return to you,” Jon murmured in her ear, pressing a kiss to her cheek, finding himself wishing that they could have reunited in private, without eyes on them, enjoying the intimacy of the solar and the firelight and the two of them together. Sansa’s deep sapphire eyes were sparkling with tears as they released each other; her lower lip trembled slightly.

“Jon,” she sighed, her eyes shimmering.

“I…brought you a gift from King’s Landing,” Jon said, as movement flickered in the corner of his eye. He smiled, and Sansa’s eyes widened.

“A present?” she asked, sniffling delicately. “Your safe return is all I care about.”

“I should like to share it with you nonetheless,” Jon said, his grey eyes glittering with rare humour. Sansa followed his gaze and froze, gaping: she burst into tears. The two sisters, as alike as copper and acorns, darted toward each other, eyes shimmering and lips quivering, to throw their arms around each other. Sansa silently wept: Arya hugged her fiercely, shuddering with a devastating mixture of grief and relief.

All around them, the men and women who’d ridden with him climbed off their horses, groaning with relief and giving orders to the stable-boys who rushed around. Jon noticed the quiet before anything else: the way the courtyard had fallen still, watching the Stark sisters reunite. No-one looking at Arya could mistake who she was, not with the King stood lean and dark and solemn beside her, sharing her grim eyes and her dark hair and her long face. Lean and supple as a sapling, Arya released Sansa, who wept freely and sniffled, giving a tremulous smile as she wiped her eyes. Arya reached for her sister’s hand and held it, smiling gently as Sansa caught her breath.

Ghost licked Jon’s palm and he glanced down. The direwolf gazed up at him then turned his enormous head to stare behind Jon, who followed his gaze and flinched, his breath catching painfully in his lungs.

He had not seen her in a long time. The castle was full of ghosts yet Jon had worked himself so hard his exhaustion had kept her away. Yet now he saw her, out of the corner of his eye, a glimmer of shadows and moonlight. He hated thinking of her here, knowing what fate had befallen her in the place she should always have been safe. It was Arya, he knew: seeing her had reminded him too vividly of Larra. They had always looked so alike, except for Larra’s eyes. Her uncanny violet eyes had always been uniquely her own. He missed their warmth and their mischief, the depth of her compassion and understanding, her wiliness and charisma and creativity. He missed his sister: and watching Arya and Sansa, he could finally admit it. He missed his twin-sister. He had not allowed himself to miss her, not when he had gained so many brothers. Not when he had so many demands on him. Not when thinking of her fate beyond the Wall might be the thing to break him.

He met Sansa’s gaze: her eyes blazed, smiling so brilliantly he was stunned, blinking at her in a daze. Confused, he stared at her.

“I have a gift for you, too,” Sansa said, her voice husky from her tears. Her eyes blazed like sapphires and Jon stared at her, his heart stuttering in his chest, seizing painfully. He stared at her, the colour draining from his cheeks as a tantalising pain spread through his body, an awareness that prickled his skin. His lungs cramped as he fought to breathe and Ghost bumped against him, butting his head against Jon’s hip, forcing him to step back for balance.

He glanced at Sansa, beseeching her with wide eyes, his features taut. Beside Sansa, Arya gazed past Jon and gasped softly. Jon stared between his sisters, his breaths little more than pants, his body tense, and he willed himself not to turn, not to look. It could not be. It was not her. To look, thinking it was her, and be disappointed so bitterly… Arya had filled him with hope. The ghosts of Winterfell threatened to destroy it.

Jon stared at her, a war going on behind those impenetrable grey eyes, and Sansa knew it. She saw the conflict. She saw the panic mingled with desperation in his gaze, the yearning and sorrow and heartbreak, the anger and bitterness and furious love. He was desperate to see her yet desperately afraid of being broken by her absence. Sansa glanced past Jon to the entrance to the forges and smiled.

It was the smile that did it. Sansa’s smile as she gazed past Jon to the forges.

Hope flickered through him. If Sansa saw her too…

Slowly, he turned, holding his breath, steeling himself against disappointment.

Jon’s breath gusted from him, pluming around them as snowflakes twirled idly in the air, the sunlight making them sparkle. The shock rendered him speechless, unable to think, to do anything but stare, slack-jawed, across the yard.

An immaculate oval face surrounded by riotous curls sprung free from simple, raised braids, pale as moonlight with a pretty nose and an exquisite rosebud mouth. Vivid violet eyes that glowed like amethysts amidst the grim grey yard.

Onlookers watched the expression on his face and many yearned to be looked at the way he looked at the woman across the yard. Utter reverence. He gazed at the slender, beautiful young woman as if she was the beginning and end of all things. She was dressed simply, wearing a leather apron over a plain woollen dress, her dark hair gathered into thick braids, tight corkscrew curls tumbling about her face rebelliously, brushing kisses against her cheeks and brow. The wind teased her curls but her face remained immovable as a glacier.

Behind her loomed Gendry, muscled arms crossed over his chest, an easy grin on his face as he watched Jon. The King in the North stared across the yard for a long moment. Then his brows drew together and he blinked rapidly, glancing back at Sansa for a heartbeat: the redheaded woman’s eyes glowed as she smiled, giving him the tiniest of nods.

Heart hammering in his chest, Jon glanced across the yard. Larra stood there, tall and slender, her purple eyes vivid and glowing in her pale face. She looked older, more beautiful than even he remembered her, he who loved her the most and saw all of her beauty. His eyes burned and Jon groaned as if wounded, kneading the heel of his hand against his chest, useless because of his brigandine. His muscles aching as he stalked across the yard, drawn to her.

He slid on a patch of ice and Larra caught him as he skidded toward her, heedless of anything but her. She caught him. He stumbled and she steadied him, wrapping her arms around him and squeezing him fiercely. He heard her short gasps and smelled the perfume in her hair, felt her warmth and her strength, her arms like steel as she embraced him. He clung to her, shuddering with disbelief, bewildered and off-kilter, eyes darting as he tried to rationalise what he was seeing and feeling. He clamped his eyes shut and focused only on the ferocity of her embrace, her heat, the scent of white flowers touched by snow clinging to her hair.

“Larra,” he moaned, and it was a broken sound, a boy’s voice – the boy who had left this yard years ago to join the Watch, leaving behind the person he loved most in the world, and for whom he would sacrifice his own life to defend. Thinking of protecting her through his dedication at the Wall had kept him going when he had forgotten what warmth felt like, when every hard decision had weighed on him so heavily he could barely walk let alone fight, let alone lead. He reached up and gripped tight the long braid falling heavily past her waist. His hands shook: his face stung. Tears dripped down his wind-chapped cheeks and he shuddered, lifting Larra off her feet to squeeze her tightly. She clung on and he heard her delicate sniffles as she wept freely into the furs draped across his broad shoulders.

He set her down, reluctantly releasing her, to cradle her face in his hands, stunned and disbelieving. A feminine, far more beautiful version of himself, with her expressive brows and pretty lips. Skin pale as the snow, treacle-dark curls and those splendid purple eyes, deep and lustrous. He had forgotten what colour was, spending so much time in the ice and snow and grim tumbledown Castle Black. But there they were, Larra’s eyes, vibrant and mesmerising as they had always been – yet he had forgotten just how deeply purple they were, how they glowed with humour, irreverence, ferocity and cunning – and love. Larra was love, fierce and unyielding. Half-blinded by tears, he sniffled and his lips trembled as he smiled at her, breathless with shock.

“Larra,” he said again, this time soft and yearning. She reached up, wiping his tears away with her thumbs and cradling his cheeks.

“Jon,” she murmured, smiling beautifully. Her eyes glittered in the sunlight sparkling all around them; her cheeks were flushed with delight and she sniffed delicately, wiping her cheeks and her chin where tears dripped freely. “You’re home.”

“I’m finally home,” Jon breathed, staring at Larra, afraid to blink lest the vision disappear. He sucked in a shaky breath and Larra smiled warmly at him, reaching to hold his hand. They gazed across the courtyard and Larra gasped softly, her fingertips fluttering to her lips as her gaze landed on Arya. Their youngest sister stared across the yard at them, at Larra, as if struck senseless. Beside her, Sansa was beaming, wiping her cheeks. The men and women who had ridden with Jon watched on, every one of them unable to deny that they were not touched by the scene as brother and sisters reunited for the first time in years, despite every hardship.

Arya ran across the yard. She launched herself at Larra, who caught her easily, lifting her off her feet with the strength of her embrace. Hugging Arya fiercely, Larra opened an arm to Jon, inviting him to join their embrace. He wrapped his arms tightly around his sisters, kissing their heads. The three of them looked so staggeringly alike, with their dark hair and long solemn faces. Jon opened his eyes and caught Sansa’s gaze across the yard; she strode elegantly toward them, her lip quivering, and Arya squawked indignantly as she was enveloped by her three older siblings, Sansa joining their embrace, kissing Jon’s cheek and resting her cheek against Arya’s head, Larra gripping the back of her cloak to hold her close.

After an age, they broke apart: tall, but still the smallest of them all, Arya started wriggling with discomfort. They reluctantly let each other go, smiling and wiping their eyes.

Larra gazed at Arya, stunned. “We thought you were in King’s Landing… Bran will be happy to know you’ve returned home.”

“Bran?!” Jon blurted, startled, and Larra and Sansa exchanged a tiny smile.

“He’s in the solar.”

Jon looked as if he had been struck dumb. Arya’s mesmerising grey eyes popped. They glanced at each other.

Then all four rushed for the nearest door, racing to get inside, to reach their brother. Jon tore ahead, his long legs eating up the distance; Sansa’s copper hair shimmered as she followed, pausing only to beam at Lord Yohn Royce, who smiled warmly, bowing his head respectfully, and took on the duties of greeting the King’s men, who watched with no small sense of yearning as they watched the ferocity of the Starks’ love for each other.

They burst into the solar, tumbling over each other, and Jon rushed to Bran. He looked more like himself than Larra had seen him in years, his face youthful and open, alight with sheer joy as he reached up to embrace Arya and kissed her cheeks, breathless with excitement as they talked over each other, eager to share their adventures as if they were once again children in the nursery eager to share the most gruesome of Old Nan’s stories.

Jon sank down to Bran’s level, his eyes swimming with tears, as he leaned in to embrace their brother. Bran’s face became more sombre, wiser, more knowing, and he rested a hand gently on Jon’s shoulder, saying, “Jon,” with terrible feeling.

Jon turned his gaze to Larra, shocked.

“How?” he croaked, his eyes wide as he took in Bran’s wheeled chair – evidence of his broken body – and Larra smiled. “Sam said you went beyond the Wall. However did you survive?”

“Because I’m stronger and smarter than you,” she teased.

Jon laughed richly, the sound echoing around the solar. “Aye,” he agreed, breathless and grinning, his eyes alight.

“That’s true.”

Sansa watched him, aware that he seemed more alive now than he ever had. It was joy that radiated from him rather than the exhaustion she was so accustomed to. It was joy that had been missing in Jon all those years at the Wall. Larra was his joy, they had always known that. Jon was Larra’s pride; Larra was Jon’s joy.

As he sank onto the settle beside her, he reached for her hand, weaving his fingers through hers, and Sansa’s heart soared, smiling and settling in beside him as they always had for those months when it had been the two of them alone against the world.

They were no longer alone: Arya and Bran and Larra were home.

Their family was home.

Winterfell was home again because their family was with them.

Against all odds, in spite of all they had endured, they had found each other again. The direwolves had returned to Winterfell.

When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies but the pack survives…

Notes:

My heart!

Chapter 44: Many Meetings

Notes:

Ton Heukels is my face-claim for Darkstar. Talk about beautiful!

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

44

Many Meetings


The men groaned, stretching their legs and sighing with relief as they kicked out cramps and massaged aching thighs. The snow continued to drift idly around them but within the walls of Winterfell it took on a dreamier nature: they were sheltered from the worst of its effects and could now enjoy the best as it sparkled around them in the sunlight that insisted on shining hotly. The Dornish squinted up at the sun, surprised that it shone: they had heard tales of the land of snow and endless night and had expected to travel in darkness. The sun shone bright and hot and the people working diligently around the yard smiled as they raised their faces to it. Everywhere they looked, smallfolk and lords alike were watching the Starks: pride, respect and admiration shone from their faces. They shared in the joy of the Stark siblings’ reunion: they had been ripped asunder yet somehow found each other again.

They gave their people hope without even doing anything.

The King pelted across the yard, his sisters – all but Lady Stark, who lingered to speak with one of her vassal lords – keeping pace with his long-legged stride with ease, hurtling through the nearest doors.

“My lady Stark bids you welcome to Winterfell,” said a booming voice, and a very tall man strode forward, giving them all a courteous half-bow. He wore a fur-trimmed cloak with open, billowing sleeves and a sigil of black iron studs on a bronze field, bordered with strange runes, stitched over the breast. Towering over most of them – except Sandor Clegane and the beautiful Dornishman, only half a head shorter – Bronze Yohn cast his eyes over them and found a familiar face. “Ser Davos. There is good food and strong stout to be shared over a story, if you’d but tell it. The King returns with a lost sister?”

“And the Lady Regent procured one of her own in Jon’s absence!” Ser Davos said, his eyebrows bristling as he raised them over wide eyes. He had become so accustomed to the beautiful pale face of Arya Stark during their journey north that he knew exactly who the other young woman was without having to ask. But for the eyes, the other woman was an exquisitely feminine, more beautiful version of Jon – yet just as grim.

“The She-Wolf of Winterfell fought her way home,” Bronze Yohn said stoutly, his booming voice filled with pride and awe, “with a broken brother in tow. Come, my lords. Warm yourselves by the hearth.”

“My lord, we are but the first to arrive,” spoke Lord Barahir, tugging his cowls down from over his face. “The rest of our party struggles through the snows.”

“How many?” Bronze Yohn asked, his eyes turning shrewd.

“A dozen pyromancers, seven hundred criminals turned out from the Red Keep’s dungeons, one hundred Unsullied,” Obara Sand grunted, “and two hundred Dothraki screamers.”

“And Daenerys Targaryen, with her escort,” added Ser Davos offhandedly. A dwarf, a slaver, a translator and two girls to act as her cupbearers. Not much by way of a royal court, but they were as devoted to Daenerys Targaryen as most were their gods. Ser Davos had never been a man of religion: it unnerved him to see their blind zeal for the woman.

“So few?” Bronze Yohn sighed disappointedly.

“More will come. Jon didn’t want to wait and risk being stuck at White Harbour because of storms. Daenerys Targaryen’s Unsullied sail to White Harbour while the Dothraki hordes at her command ride north along the King’s Road,” Ser Davos said, but he didn’t sound convinced. He was an experienced seaman: the storms had battered Stannis’ fleet during the last lingering days of autumn. The seas had been dangerous enough when he and Jon had finally, safely, docked at White Harbour. He knew little of the Dothraki but had to wonder why Daenerys had not thought it prudent to ride with them to ensure they followed orders. They followed strength, and more and more during their journey, the kos had looked to Jon for leadership as they struggled through the snows. Jon shared his concerns: Dothraki followed strength and Daenerys was not with her Dothraki to remind them of hers – rather, her dragon’s.

“We shall make do,” Bronze Yohn said stoutly. “Let us speak no more of this until the King and his family return to us. Arrangements have been made for you all. You shall be lodged in comfort and warmth.”

“I had imagined neither existed in the North,” said the beautiful Dornishman, his vivid amethyst eyes glittering as he took in his surroundings. “Nor light.”

“The days are shorter, it is true,” said Lord Yohn, leading them through different yards – in some, livestock were being sunned, geese honking and bearded pigs grunting, new lambs shivering as they stumbled on shaky legs, while in others great barrels of obsidian were being transported to the forges and in the largest yard, dozens of men, women and children trained with simple and brutal gladius swords, obsidian-tipped spears and bows and arrows.

“The children do drills?”

“Daily,” said Bronze Yohn. “By the King’s order, all over the age of ten must train with sword, spear and bow. I would ask each of you to take a turn instructing groups. Skilled warriors are few and far between after so many battles, and the Knights of the Vale cannot stretch themselves so far.”

“I will take the girls,” said Obara Sand fiercely, nodding, as she watched a line of children drilling with spears, her angry eyes assessing them for technique.

“Will they fight?” asked Lord Barahir quietly, watching the children.

“If it can be helped, no,” said Bronze Yohn. “But Larra insists they must learn for when we fall they may yet have to take up our swords.” As he led them into the main castle, he frowned over his shoulder. “You have seen them?”

“The Army of the Dead?” asked Lord Barahir, nodding, and Obara Sand scowled, gripping her own spear tightly.

“Are their numbers as the King suspects?”

“Eighty-thousand, I would say – a hundred-thousand to be safe. All the once-living True North commanded by the Others,” Lord Barahir remarked, and Bronze Yohn whistled low, shaking his head and rubbing a hand over his fierce beard. He led the way into the castle and Ser Davos sighed, feeling his body relaxing as the wondrous magic of Winterfell’s heated walls swept over him, chasing away the cold that had gripped him. As they entered the Great Hall, Ser Davos saw the enormous fire roaring in the hearth and headed straight for it. Beside him, the beautiful Dornish knight let out a groan of longing as if desiring to throw himself amid the flames and murder the bone-deep cold clenching his body tight.

As in the yards, the castle teemed with life: everywhere they looked, people were busily working away. They heard laughter and song, and the windows were thrown wide open to entice the rare sunlight indoors; Northern ladies had found pools of sunlight and basked in them, working on their knitting and embroidery, while a great tapestry was being woven by other women, children playing about their feet. Settles, padded stools and large floor cushions had been tossed casually before the enormous hearth and room was made for them by the ladies, who sent maids rushing to find salt, bread and stew, cups of mulled wine doled out from a small cauldron in the embers.

“I thought you did not take wine, Ser,” said Lord Barahir to the Dornish knight, whose beautiful lips twitched, his eyes glittering, as he accepted a steaming cup from a young lady.

“On this occasion, my lord, I shall gladly accept any warmth with thanks,” said the Dornishman. Yohn Royce sent word with his squire to summon the other Knights of the Vale and Northern lords to the Great Hall, in anticipation of the King joining them.

It was a shame, Ser Davos thought, that Jon could not have more time to simply be with his siblings for the first time in years. The sisters he had thought dead had returned. Their family, as much as it could be, was made whole again.

Yet they were at war. Jon had brought people to aid in the siege preparations, to improve their strategy, more bodies to wield weapons against the dead. He had news to share from the south and he also had to prepare his sisters for the arrival of the ever-more spiteful Daenerys Targaryen.

Ser Davos wished he could have given Jon time with his sisters. He had earned it. He had earned the privilege of sitting down with his siblings in private, reuniting and rebuilding the bonds that had been fractured by time and distance, by war and hardship and every unimaginable thing the Starks had endured since Ned Stark was executed.

The Great Hall filled with people: Northern lords, Knights of the Vale, leaders of the Free Folk, Nymeria Sand in her fine silks and velvets and sleek furs, brothers of the Night’s Watch. Bronze Yohn, who had been with Lady Sansa since the Battle of the Bastards, told them about Alarra Snow, the She-Wolf of Winterfell, who had carried her brother to the Land of Always-Winter and back, protecting him all the while, to return and guide the Lady Regent as she ruled the North in the King’s stead. Alarra Snow – just Larra, as she insisted on being called, despite being sister to the King – was as ferocious and cunning as any direwolf, incredibly gentle unless provoked, nurturing and stern by turns. Every word out of Bronze Yohn’s mouth spoke of his deep respect for Larra Snow – not just her viciousness but her thoughtfulness, her cunning nature and the way she built relationships with everyone in the castle, from the Knights of the Vale to the Free Folk to the brothers of the Night’s Watch to the lowliest labourer and the last exhausted shepherd. Children flocked to her, men respected her and women hoped to raise daughters as fierce and strong as her, full of integrity with a fierce respect for her duty to others.

Ser Davos was not surprised, then, when Jon and his sisters arrived at the Great Hall, the three Stark women arm in arm, the eldest in the middle with Lady Sansa and Lady Arya on either side, cuddled close and smiling, Arya talking the eldest sister’s ear off as they following Jon. The King pushed a wheeled chair in which a young man with the long, pale solemn Stark face sat, swathed in furs and heavy woollen robes like a maester’s, deep navy blue and stitched with a strange sigil on his breast – a direwolf with great wings spread wide. The wings were stitched with real, tiny feathers, glossy and glimmering in the firelight, and everyone in Ser Davos’ party blinked and stared as the young man was settled beside the hearth by the King himself, who fussed with the furs in his brother’s lap and served him a cup of mulled wine, bending his head to kiss the young man’s silky dark hair as he chatted amiably, his eyes – so deep a blue they appeared almost black until the firelight caught them – alight with joy as he gestured excitedly with pale, unblemished hands.

As the Starks settled before the hearth, Ser Davos jumped: all around him, applause echoed up to the hammer-beam ceiling. People were cheering the return of their King, yes, but also celebrating the reunion of the Stark siblings. After all they had endured, they had made it back to each other. Lady Sansa’s face glowed: Arya Stark’s strange grey eyes swept across the hall, taking everyone’s measure, unnerved by the attention: and Larra Snow, a stranger to Ser Davos, smiled softly. The Lannister girls darted into the hall, bright-eyed, pink-cheeked, their golden hair rippling behind them as they beamed and raced toward the King, swathed in heavy cloaks and pretty headbands and mittens richly embroidered in the Northern fashion. Behind them strolled Lord Tyrion’s companion, with her cheerful, tattooed face and intricately beaded skirts. Lady Sansa leaned in to Jon, murmuring in his ear, and he smiled, handing her a cup of mulled wine, before making the introductions.

“Sansa, may I present Lord Barahir of Val Hall,” he said. “This is Lord Randyll Tarly and his son Dickon. Obara Sand has already found her sister, it seems. Ser Davos you well remember.”

“I don’t,” said the King’s twin-sister, her shocking purple eyes pinning him in place. Ser Davos stared back at the lady as she unfolded from her settle. She reached out, clasping her hands over his, and leaned in to give him a tender kiss on each cheek. “I am honoured to meet you, Ser.”

“You’re too kind, m’lady,” Ser Davos said humbly. She squeezed his hands and smiled sadly.

“You fought for Jon when he could not fight for himself,” Larra said, so quietly only he heard. It was common knowledge among the Night’s Watch and even some of the Free Folk what had happened to Jon – the mutiny, his murder – yet it was not widely known throughout the Northerners. Ser Davos didn’t know how they would react to knowing their King had been given new life by the Lord of Light even he, Ser Davos, distrusted at best and loathed at worst for the fate of Princess Shireen. Lady Larra tilted her head thoughtfully. “Why did you think of it?”

“It seemed like such a waste,” Ser Davos said honestly. Jon Snow was one of the finest men he had ever had the privilege to meet: it was his honour to advise and guide him – yet as of late Jon Snow had needed little by way of guidance and much more of reassurance, after the fact, that his actions benefitted all.

Startling him, Lady Larra embraced him. She squeezed him tight then released him, leaving Ser Davos touched by the gesture. A little girl toddled up to them, reaching a tiny hand up to the lady, and Larra reached down, scooping up the golden child with corkscrew curls to settle her on her waist. She returned to her settle, tucking the child – one of the Lannister girls – in her lap.

Jon gave Ser Davos a smile, his grey eyes glinting, his lips twitching as if he sensed Ser Davos’ wonderment at being embraced – as if by a daughter, he thought. Lady Larra had embraced him as she might her own father. Jon continued the introductions, ending with, “Ser Gerold Dayne, the Knight of High Hermitage.”

Sansa blinked as if dazed and Larra raised her eyebrows as the most beautiful man in the world took a knee before them, kissing first Sansa’s hand then Larra’s, his fingertips curled under hers, lingering. Wind-tousled hair of palest gold fell to his shoulders, glittering in the firelight as snowflakes melted, a streak of midnight glowing like embers. He was clean-shaven, with exquisite high cheekbones perfectly balancing his strong jaw, and neat pale-gold eyebrows hovered over vivid indigo eyes outmatched in beauty only by Larra’s. His nose was perfect and his lips were full and lush, too beautiful for a man yet balanced by his strong jaw and fierce cheekbones and the anger glittering in those vivid purple eyes.

“We grew up on tales of Ser Arthur Dayne,” said Sansa, her expression sad. She glanced over at Larra Snow, who was watching Ser Gerold carefully, her fingers still resting delicately on his. “Father always spoke of him with the highest respect.”

“A cousin,” said Ser Gerold. “He was the Sword of the Morning.”

“And do you now claim the title?” Sansa asked, and the knight’s beautiful lips twitched.

He was older than Larra, she thought, but not by much. His skin was kissed by sunlight, his hair glimmering like a glacier of silver and palest gold. He had fine, dark lashes that cast his violet eyes in shadow, concealing the expression in them, but Larra watched his lips, how the corners tightened at the mention of Ser Arthur Dayne. Resentment, possibly. Larra knew how it felt to be always compared to another family member – growing up, all she had ever heard from the bannermen was how vividly she resembled Lyanna, to Father’s great unease she was sure – so she wondered perhaps whether Ser Gerold resented people caring more about his dead cousin than himself, living, breathing, thriving before their eyes yet deemed lesser in comparison to the honoured dead.

“No,” said Ser Gerold, his eyes glimmering like violet embers. “Men call me Darkstar, and I am of the night.”

Larra pursed her lips to keep from smirking. At least he does not call himself Darkstar, she thought. Darkstar, the Hound, the Young Wolf, Bloodraven – she had never known anyone who declared themselves by a trailing nickname – except one. Though she herself was known as the She-Wolf of Winterfell, and though she was now the King in the North’s eldest sister and all seemed to think this meant she was now either a Princess or a Lady (none could decide which), she continued to introduce herself as Larra Snow. She was Larra Snow. “Red Vipers, Sandsnakes, Swords of the Morning… The Dornish do adore fanciful nicknames.”

“Lady, we cannot all be the She-Wolf of Winterfell,” retorted Ser Gerold, his eyes glittering as he gazed at Larra. Arya noticed that his gaze had returned to her again and again, awed and almost greedy, as if he was lost in the desert and Larra was a paradise of life-giving water. Arya noticed how they leaned in toward each other, as if drawn to each other, and how Ser Gerold’s hand still held Larra’s. His voice was a deep rumble, his exotic accent husky and rich when he teased, “By the way Lord Royce spoke of you, I expected fangs.”

Larra’s smile widened, revealing her perfectly straight white teeth. Her eyes glittered as they rested on Darkstar’s face and she practically purred, matching the soft teasing tone of the Dornish knight, “I had them filed down: they frightened the men too much.” Darkstar grinned in response, his eyes glowing like violet flames. They were teasing each other, flirting, playing off of each other. “Welcome to Winterfell, Darkstar.”


Hours after the sun had set, smearing blood-red across the clouds and enticing thousands of stars to glitter in the velvety purple sky as the snows disappeared and ice crept into their lungs and darkness enveloped them, the last of the Unsullied marched prisoners through the gates of Winterfell. Behind them surged Daenerys and her tiny court, encircled by Dothraki who had never yearned for high stone walls more than they did now, after nearly four hundred miles of endless snows that fought back against their mounts every step of the way. They had never known nature to not yield to them. Yet they learned more quickly than their Khaleesi that the North was unlike anything they knew or had ever heard of – and it was wiser to heed the strange pale man with no braid but a fierce command over everyone he met.

Daenerys glared through the furs trimming her heavy hood and, unbidden, her lips parted as Winterfell unfurled before her eyes. Thousands of tiny pinpricks of golden light glimmered brighter than the stars, a constellation of them, and though it was dark the sheer number of lights gave the impression of size and scale.

“Winterfell is ageless,” said Ser Jorah, riding beside her, their exhausted horses struggling to keep up with the Dothraki kos’ stallions. “It is the largest castle in all of Westeros. During winter, the entirety of the North gathers here – similarly to the hordes all returning to Vaes Dothrak. Except, here, they gather to ensure their survival, when the snowdrifts tower over twenty feet high, burying entire villages.”

Stunned and disheartened by the merest hint of the castle’s size – a hint of the King in the North’s strength and power – and unwilling to let Ser Jorah know it, Daenerys remained silent. She twitched her furs and cloaks tighter around her and dug her heels in, spurring on her exhausted mare. The entirety of the North, she thought. People from all over the North had poured into Winterfell, living under the protection of their new King for the duration of the winter. Furious though she was to be shown up at every opportunity by Jon Snow, Daenerys had to admit to herself that he knew how to lead, to look after people. There was a reason she admired him so much, why she respected him – and why his rejection of her felt like a festering wound slowly spreading its poison through her veins, sapping her strength and leaving her bewildered and furious and devastated and tearful by turns.

“They have the most admirable selection of stouts and port in their cellars, if I recall,” mused Lord Tyrion lightly. He had insisted on riding, rather than being jolted about for hundreds of miles in a wagon – for which Daenerys respected him, reminded only too vividly of the snickers and snide comments as Viserys reclined in a cart – and the saddle he had designed for himself had proven itself worthy of the journey. He sat in his saddle, his legs undoubtedly aching yet he was smiling in the torchlight as several kos rode either side of him, guiding their horses through the snow and avoiding the siege fortifications looming out of the darkness – a seemingly endless chasm dug around the entirety of the castle’s curtain wall. “And heavy fruit cake glistening with plum jam.”

“I often forget that you journeyed here, my lord,” Ser Jorah said.

“Twice – once as part of King Robert’s court,” said Lord Tyrion, “the second time, with a black brother of the Night’s Watch. We shared the road from Castle Black together.”

“Tell me more about this Night’s Watch,” Daenerys said, frowning. She knew Jon Snow had been voted Lord Commander yet knew little of the history or function of the order – besides the fact that it was a sworn brotherhood.

“Legend claims that it was a Stark who founded it,” said Lord Tyrion, the most well-read man anyone had ever met, including most maesters. “When Brandon the Builder raised the Wall to ward away the Others and those they commanded, the Watch was created to man the Wall. There were thirteen castles along the Wall, yet most now have fallen into disrepair.”

“Why?”

“Because people forgot what they should be frightened of,” Ser Jorah said quietly.

“History became legend. Legend became myth,” said Lord Tyrion dreamily. “For thousands of years, the Night’s Watch has manned the Wall and for just as long, the Starks have supported them. Over time, people stopped believing in the Others as anything more than myth, and the enemy became the wildlings. When a King-Beyond-the-Wall threatened invasion, the Starks called their banners and beat the wildlings back.”

“Until now.”

“Yes. Jon Snow opened the Wall to the Free Folk,” said Ser Jorah.

“Why? They are his enemies.”

“The Others are our enemies,” said Ser Jorah firmly. “The Free Folk were unfortunate enough to be stuck on the wrong side of the Wall when the Others awoke. They have been fighting them ever since, without aid – until Jon Snow allied with them.”

“Wasn’t your father Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch?” Daenerys asked, and Ser Jorah sighed.

“He was. After my father’s murder, Jon Snow took my father’s place,” he said softly. Jon Snow had taken Lord Jeor Mormont’s place as Lord Commander – he had become the Old Bear’s heir, when Ser Jorah had proven himself unworthy. Ser Jorah looked at Jon and saw the man he should have been, the son his father had deserved. Pride in Jon Snow swelled inside Ser Jorah, for being all that his father had deserved in a son and heir, the very best legacy he had earned for himself. “Jon Snow avenged my father. He fought the wildlings back when they attacked Castle Black. His brothers named him their leader. He allied with the Free Folk to strengthen our position against the Others.”

“Would your father have allied with the wildlings, Ser Jorah?”

“If he had a notion what was coming, yes,” Ser Jorah answered stoutly. “My father was a man of integrity. He upheld his oath to defend the realms of men. The realms; that includes those innocents who lingered outside the protection of any lord, stuck beyond the Wall.”

“And you, Lord Tyrion? What would your father have done?”

“Oh, my father would have allied with the Free Folk – for reasons far less altruistic than Lord Commander Mormont’s and Jon Snow’s,” Lord Tyrion said. “During the War of the Five Kings, my father armed the mountain-men of the Vale. He promised them fine steel if they fought for him; any who survived the vanguard returned to wreak havoc on the Vale with the Lannister’s courtesies.”

“The Vale did not engage in the War of the Five Kings,” frowned Daenerys.

“More’s the pity,” Lord Tyrion sighed. “The Reach may muster five times as many men as the Eyrie yet any one of the the Knights of the Vale can outride them. In valour they are second to none.”

“But they did not fight?”

“The Knights of the Vale may have intervened: Ned Stark was ward to Jon Arryn and grew up in the Vale among them,” Ser Jorah said, and Lord Tyrion nodded.

“They were overruled by Lady Arryn, a madwoman,” Lord Tyrion sighed, remembering his time at the Eyrie. Daenerys bristled inside her cloaks. Madwoman… Mad King… “I knew Lysa Arryn from court. Years of miscarriages took their toll on her state of mind: she coddled her surviving child, a spoiled and sickly boy whose mind has never been nurtured.”

“They lack a strong leader,” Daenerys said thoughtfully.

“No surprise then that they turn to Jon Snow,” said Lord Tyrion, to Daenerys’ annoyance. She grimaced and held her breath until a wave of nausea and dizziness subsided – she had been feeling them on and off throughout their journey, exhausted and made ill by the cold and the discomfort. She slept deeply yet woke fitful and achy. At least she was no longer vomiting, she thought: the voyage from King’s Landing had been especially awful, sea-sickness leaving her weak and shaking and bedridden, Qezza and Zafiyah tending to her dutifully while Missandei took the air on deck to combat her own sea-sickness, she said – but Daenerys knew she wished to stay close to Grey Worm. She had been strange ever since Daenerys defeated the Lannister armies in the West. “Ser Davos mentioned the Knights of the Vale remain in Winterfell. They have spent months building relations with the King in the North and his regent.”

“From what you say, they respected a woman’s command,” Daenerys said. “Which means they are just as likely to follow me as him. I will force this boy to yield the Vale to me and the rest shall kneel before me.” The two men remained quiet, and she noticed.

“One thing at a time,” said Lord Tyrion. “First we must defeat the Army of the Dead.”

“And then the real war begins,” Daenerys said, sitting straighter in her saddle as the warm golden glow of a great archway beckoned her into a sprawling, busy courtyard.

Ser Jorah and Lord Tyrion exchanged a look. The real war was this war, Tyrion thought, looking around the courtyard, spotting things Daenerys did not notice as she commanded someone nearby to take her horse’s reins. The siege-weapons tucked out of the way yet ready to set into place at a moment’s notice: the barrels of obsidian: people sparring in another yard despite the darkness, their blades flickering in the torchlight.

Nothing else mattered but this war. This fight for life.

That Daenerys could not see that…it worried him. He glanced at Ser Jorah, whose face was obscured behind cowls. Yet Tyrion saw the deep furrows in his brow and knew the man shared his concerns. They all did. Behind him, he heard the soft whimpers of Qezza Galare and Zafiyah, the Queen’s handmaids. They were utterly exhausted and frightened – both by the Dothraki bloodriders surging around them and the darkness pressing in from all sides carrying the howls of wolves on the wind.

“Is this how these Northerners would greet their Queen?” Daenerys hissed impatiently, slinging her leg over her saddle to dismount. A stable-lad hurried to bring a step to Lord Tyrion and Ser Jorah groaned, in agony, as he climbed off his horse.

“You are not queen here,” Lord Tyrion reminded Daenerys sharply, and the girl glowered, her eyes turning vicious. Unfazed, Tyrion pressed on: “The King in the North has returned safely and brought the lost Stark sister home with him; all are likely celebrating this within the warmth of those towering walls. No-one was to know we would not make camp overnight so that we might reach Winterfell in decent light.”

Daenerys had forced them to keep riding. If her Unsullied could still march, they would ride.

Ser Jorah offered his hand firstly to Qezza Galare, her slanting exotic dark eyes swimming with tears snatched by the wind, her high cheekbones touched pink from the cold, helping her climb off her horse; Zafiyah was openly weeping, her arms shaking as she struggled to climb out of the saddle, her legs unresponsive. She was the weaker rider, Jorah knew, spending no time on horseback before their journey to Westeros, and though she had rich amber skin, heavily-lashed eyes and dark auburn hair, Jorah was reminded of Daenerys, freshly wed to Khal Drogo, her soft body punished by the brutal daily rides of the khalasaar. Back then, Daenerys had had handmaids to tend to her, slaves purchased as gifts by Illyrio Mopatis: it was now the handmaids who were suffering, and Daenerys who stood, unfazed, glaring around her as people hurried past, intent on their tasks. Knowing how dutifully Qezza and Zafiyah had tended to Daenerys ever since Meereen – taken as hostages from noble families as a deterrent against provoking Daenerys’ wrath, and now taken across the world – Ser Jorah offered Zafiyah his arm. Her lower lip trembled and she gratefully leaned on his arm, hobbling beside him as he set a gentle pace through the yard. Lord Tyrion massaged his legs and murmured something about port before calling a stable-boy to him, exchanging a few words, and a tall knight in battle-scarred armour appeared.

He led them through the busy courtyards and into the castle, through dark corridors with heated walls echoing with chatter, laughter and song, illuminated by flickering torches under which people gathered – or away from which couples hid, the better to grope in private during a stolen moment. The North had turned Winterfell into a thriving city, the wide corridors its streets, the halls its taverns and ballrooms, markets and guildhalls. Ser Jorah remembered few winters in his lifetime but he had been a boy the last time he and his family had left Bear Isle to overwinter at Winterfell. He had forgotten what it felt like – alive. Despite the snow and the cold, within the walls of Winterfell, it was vibrant, full of life, song dancing off the ancient, warm walls and laughter echoing through the corridors, children racing about underfoot while women chatted, babies at their breasts, keeping their fingers warm by knitting and crocheting and embroidering, and men played ancient games that had not changed in millennia.

The Great Hall was just as he remembered it. A soaring hammer-beam ceiling, high diamond-paned windows cracked open for fresh air as the stifling heat of packed bodies and the enormous hearth made people lightheaded. Women worked tirelessly on a great tapestry, their voices raised in song, while children played and danced to a band led by Yaskier playing energetically on a lute. Ser Jorah saw shimmering golden curls and glanced at Lord Tyrion, waddling beside Qezza, realising it was the Lannister girls who were dancing with Northern lads. They wore traditional embroidered collars and the cut of their fine woollen gowns was more Northern but he recognised their faces, stunned to see them beaming with delight and laughing as they danced, or teased their younger cousin sat in a young woman’s lap. The hall did not fall silent at Daenerys’ arrival, as she was accustomed to, nor did anyone show her deference or part to let her through, or even noticed her at all. But she saw them.

Her gaze was always drawn to Jon Snow. There he was, reclined on a high-backed settle with quilts and furs, one hand around a drinking-horn and the other…the other loosely clasping the hand of a beautiful young woman with eyes the colour of sapphires, pale skin and fire-red hair drawn away from her face in twists and braids coiled at the nape of her neck in a bun as the rest of her hair tumbled over her shoulders, glimmering like fire. She was dressed finely in feminine leather armour and wool, all in dark sombre hues, and at her throat glinted a silver clasp. Daenerys stood, jostled by people as they passed to refill cups and talk with each other, largely ignored, and stared, her heart sinking. Jon Snow sat holding the hand of this young woman, relaxed by her side, his face open, his grey eyes sparkling with delight as he hung on the every word of a younger man reclined in a wheeled chair. Jon Snow laughed with that wretched sister of his, Arya, as they listened to the young man’s story, gesturing at another young woman whose striking beauty took Daenerys’ breath away. Vivid amethyst eyes, pale skin and dark hair that coiled in rampant curls about her face, tumbling free from a simple braid, glinting lustrously with copper and gold and mahogany, she had high cheekbones, a beautiful rosebud mouth and expressive dark brows. The young man in the wheeled chair said something that startled a deep laugh from Jon Snow. The redhead woman and Arya Stark laughed while the striking beauty with dark hair rolled her amethyst eyes, her lips quirking with amusement; Jon Snow leaned over and gave her a kiss on her cheek, making her smile.

All around them, a crowd surged and swelled, greeting their King, congratulating him and his family – his family – on their reunion.

Daenerys stood still, staring at Jon Snow. This was the Jon people were drawn to. Charismatic and stern, compassionate, amiable, with a rare, handsome laugh and deep bonds with people with whom he shared mutual respect and love.

He held the redhead’s hand as if unconscious of it, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to sit at the hearth with the lady while his people came forward to greet him or thank him or wish him well.

They respected him. They admired and adored him.

They ignored her.

The dark-haired woman with the braid and the entrancing amethyst eyes lifted her gaze only once, and Daenerys’ lips parted, stepping forward – only for the woman to look away, laughing at something the redhead had said, planting a kiss on the cheek of a young boy who raced past yet who stopped short to throw his arms around her neck in a brief embrace before darting off, chasing a taller boy who grabbed a golden-haired girl’s hand to dance, his taunting laugh rippling through the general noise of the hall.

The dark-haired woman had not seen Daenerys, she told herself. Perhaps the light from the hearth did not spread far enough for her to see Daenerys clearly – or she would have risen and curtseyed and invited her to join them at the hearth.

Lord Tyrion sniffed out the nearest cauldron of mulled wine and Ser Jorah looked at one of the polished wooden benches with a grimace, desiring nothing less than to sit down after so long in the saddle. He would stand, stretching his aching legs. They heard loud laughter and he saw Tormund Giantsbane enthralling a group of children and young people with one of his magnificent tall tales, and off to the side, away from the fire but within eyesight of the hearth, Sandor Clegane gnawed on bones. Obara Sand, angry as ever, spoke with some fierce women who could only be wildlings, dressed in furs, while her elegant sister reclined on a cushion by the hearth, speaking with her own sister, the sensuous Lady Nymeria, Lady Tisseia and an absurdly beautiful man with hair almost as fair as the Queen’s.

Lord Tyrin’s gaze was drawn to the hearth, for more than one reason: the mulled wine was kept warm in cauldrons nestled in embers, and around the hearth, seated on one of the settles was his estranged young wife.

She had become a woman since he last saw her, as fierce now as she had always been beautiful. She sat on the settle, cosy beside the King, both of them holding small drinking horns, their free hands intertwined between them as they laughed and listened, enraptured, as a handsome young man spoke energetically – Lord Tyrion stopped and stared, blinking as if struck dumb. It could not be! He looked into his wine cup and back up again, tripping forward into the blanket of light that spread from the hearth. It was, he realised, stunned. The young boy he had last seen carried into this very hall, limp as a ragdoll, sat in a clever wheeled chair, his hair gleaming like raven’s wings and his eyes sharp and clever. It was the same face, a young man’s face now. Brandon Stark, the boy who was broken. Tyrion’s breath gusted from his lungs as he tripped forward, agape. Golden corkscrew curls drew his gaze, shining in the firelight, and he saw the youngest of his Lannister cousins cuddled contentedly in the lap of a strikingly beautiful young woman with eyes more vibrant than amethysts, her immaculate face pale and perfect. The last time he had seen her, she had waved him and Yoren off at the gate, wildflowers in her hair, her hand firmly clamped around that of her youngest, wildest brother to prevent him from dashing off across the moors with his savage direwolf.

Tyrion had left his copy of I Túrin i Cormaron at Winterfell for Larra to enjoy – she was the person at Winterfell whose company he had enjoyed most, and had actively sought out. Charming, vibrant, a little wild, she was beautiful and he had recognised her integrity and her cunning even then. She had been beautiful then, her cheeks pink from the sun and the wind on the snow-speckled moors. Now, she was strikingly beautiful, pale and amethyst-eyed, stern and charismatic and enthralling.

A guard appeared, dressed in Stark colours – a boiled leather surcoat over chainmail – and nodded his head to her.

“Lady Targaryen,” he said politely. “I’m bid to escort you to your chambers.”

“My chambers?” Daenerys blinked.

“So that you may rest in privacy, Lady,” said the guard, his voice steely and stern. She glanced past the guard to the gathering in front of the hearth – where the Starks sat, where they reunited in public because they were not given the luxury of a private reunion when all the living North was invested in their family’s joy – and still, not one of them looked her way. No-one in the hall acknowledged her, but for this lowly guard.

“Very well,” she said quietly, bewildered, but she drifted after the guard, who picked up a torch in the corridor and led her through the sprawling castle, until the raucous noise of the halls was muffled by great stone walls that were warm to the touch and she panted, exhausted and slightly dizzy, as she climbed another staircase. The guard led her down another corridor and finally stopped to light the torches either side of a heavy door of Northern oak.

“My ladies Stark wish you a restful night, Lady Targaryen,” the guard said, opening the door for her. Lady Targaryen… That was the second time he had called her such. Lady Targaryen. Did he not know she was a queen? My ladies Stark… He had been told by the Lady Regent of the North to show her here, to this chamber, to greet her as Lady Targaryen. Nettled, Daenerys entered the chamber. It wasn’t a single room, as she had thought: a suite of rooms, with panelled walls for comfort, wide window-ledges beneath small diamond-paned windows decorated with earthen vases of dried, fragrant herbs, a hearth before which were small, carved chairs, padded stools and large cushions – all in grey, embroidered with direwolves and Northern wildflowers. There was a large round table with a fine mirror, a washbasin and jug but no trinkets, and several doors led off to small chambers for her maids while a larger room contained a heavy, carved four-poster bed piled with soft linens, woollen blankets, quilts and fine furs. The blankets and quilts were all beautifully hand-stitched with Northern wildflowers and, lest she forget where she was, the direwolf sigil of House Stark.

It was silent upstairs, except for the whisper of the wind and the crackle of the fire in the hearth. A maid entered the chamber from the corridor, bearing a wooden tray, and curtseyed at the sight of Daenerys lingering uncertainly in the centre of the room.

“Good evening, m’lady,” she smiled amiably, setting the tray down on a low table beside the hearth. “I’ve brought ye somethin’ to eat. While you sup I shall put hot embers in your bed to warm your sheets for you.”

“I shall have a bath.”

“There’s water in the cauldron to wash yourself with,” the maid said plainly, smiling as she gestured to the cauldron hanging over the fire. “It’ll be lovely and warm by now. Lady Stark sent some perfumed soap for you as a gift but said you’ll likely have your own finery. Is it true, you’ve been to Qarth?”

Daenerys stared at her. She…wanted to converse with her, as if they were equals?

“Yes, I have been to Qarth.”

“They say it’s the finest city in the world, after the Doom laid Valyria low,” said the maid, her open face shining with curiosity. “My brother took to the seas on-board Lord Manderly’s merchant fleet but he’s not yet been so far as Qarth. Do they really ride about on elephants? I’ve never seen an elephant – I’d’ve liked for the mammoths to come south but the wildlings said they’re likely all dead, along with the giants.”

“I am tired,” Daenerys said coldly.

“Ach, I’ll leave you to eat,” said the maid, smiling, unfazed by Daenerys’ rising anger. “The Ladies Stark sent up bread and salt for you, m’lady, as is your guest-right.”

“What is this guest-right people speak of so fervently in the North?” Daenerys scowled. The maid stilled, staring at her.

“You mean, for all you’ve seen elephants and flown on dragons, you don’t know guest-right?” she gaped, and Daenerys felt…incredibly stupid. “Salt and bread, m’lady. It means while you’re a guest under the Starks’ roof, you’re under their protection.”

Daenerys thought inexplicably of Arya Stark and snatched the bread and salt from the tray on the low table, stuffing the bread into her mouth and chewing furiously.

“What happens when I leave Winterfell?”

“Well, then, you’ll be given a guest-gift,” said the maid, shrugging. “That means your safety’s no longer guaranteed. I’m shocked you’ve never heard o’ guest-right. All decent folk live by it.”

“And the not-so-decent folk?”

“The gods punish them. Winter came for the Freys after they violated guest-right.”

“How so?”

“You’ve not heard of the Red Wedding?” the maid blinked, and Daenerys fought a blush as the girl gaped at her. “There was a wedding at the Twins and the Freys turned upon their guests and butchered them. The North remembers.”

“And why should one family’s murder matter so much to the North?” Daenerys asked imperiously. The maid blinked.

“T’was the King in the North who was murdered. The Young Wolf, not the White,” the girl said, staring at Daenerys. “The King and his foreign wife and the babe in her belly. The King’s mother, too. It was awful. They cut the King’s head off and sewed it to his direwolf; they slit his mother’s throat to the bone and threw her body in the river. No-one knows what happened to the Queen. I would’ve liked to see her; I’ve never seen anybody from Essos. They say she was a beauty from Volantis.”

“I didn’t know about the Red Wedding,” she said quietly.

“I’m surprised at that,” said the maid, frowning. Daenerys had heard the pretender Robb Stark had been killed during the War of the Five Kings. She had rejoiced at the death of he who would have stolen one of her kingdoms from under her. With difficulty, she swallowed the bread and sank onto one of the carved chairs before the hearth. The maid dipped politely and withdrew from the chamber, leaving Daenerys in solitude. It was comfortable, she thought, and the stew was good and rich – lamb, with bacon and lots of vegetables, potatoes, carrots and tiny pearl onions in a thick, rich gravy.

She scooped up the last mouthful with her spoon and sighed, reclining in the chair, aching to sit closer to the fire. Dozing, she started to pant in discomfort. Dizzy, she gripped her belly, leaned over and emptied the contents of her stomach on the rushes strewn over the floor. Gasping, she wiped her mouth, shuddering and shivering with a sudden chill. She rinsed her mouth out with herb tea and staggered, shivering, to the bedchamber. She sank onto the bed, her back aching, and her shivering subsided as she relaxed, her fingers still trembling as she unfastened her beautiful fur surcoat and slipped off her boots, tucking herself under the heavy bedding.

As Tyrion tripped into the light spreading from the hearth, the Starks glanced over. Larra smiled softly: Sansa sat up straighter, her sapphire eyes glowing. She wore dark clothing now, Tyrion noted, fine leather armour over thick wool, direwolf clasps at her throat. She was finally mourning her family, he understood instantly. Yet she had been smiling freely in a way Tyrion had seen perhaps but once, when they plotted to sheep-shift the beds of those who had laughed at their wedded bliss.

“Lord Lannister,” Larra said softly, her eyes dancing with delight the same way they had when they had discussed ancient Valyrian odes and argued about cyvasse strategies. The man with the shimmering pale-gold hair looked up sharply from Lady Nymeria, with whom he was playing a game of cyvasse. Larra lifted the child from her lap, tucking them on the settle under heavy blankets, and she went to her knees to wrap her strong, slender arms around Tyrion. Startled, Tyrion embraced her, and saw Sansa’s blue eyes glowing as she watched them. Larra hugged him tightly, and watching Sansa’s reaction, Tyrion knew in that moment that Larra knew it all. Sansa had told her everything. From the moment of his arrival at King’s Landing to that glorious royal wedding and all that had occurred in between, for the brief time they had been bound as man and wife. By Larra’s reaction, Sansa’s account of their life together, brief as it had been, must have been fairer than he would have expected, given all Sansa had endured at the hands of his family.

As she hugged him tightly, Larra whispered in his ear, “Thank you for looking after her.” She gave him one final squeeze then released him. She raked her eyes unabashedly over his face – she never had been shy or retiring, as one would expect of a bastard, not like her twin-brother – and her pretty lips twitched. “Your books have not been kind, my lord.” Her eyes glittered with irony.

“The snows have,” Tyrion said, staring back at her. She was a woman now, her beauty fierce and striking, those strange violet eyes dancing in the firelight. “All thought you to be dead.”

“There’s a certain safety in death, is there not?” Larra mused, her eyes twinkling. “Have you returned to Winterfell to claim your wife, my lord?” She was teasing, and Tyrion found himself laughing softly. Larra glanced over her shoulder at her sister, her expression teasing. “What say you, Sansa? Shall we keep him?”

“That would make things…complicated,” Sansa said warmly, her eyes glowing. She looked…relaxed, Tyrion thought, watching the way her body was leaned in towards Jon Snow, the way their hands were loosely clasped between them, how Jon Snow leaned back against the settle, obviously exhausted but relaxed by her presence. That is interesting, Tyrion thought, shrewdly observing how intimate the two were. He had never seen Jon Snow relaxed in his life, wondered if the poor boy knew what it meant to be at peace. Lady Sansa gently freed her hand from Jon Snow’s and asked Tyrion, “Do you still drink wine?”

The very thing he had asked her on their wedding-night. He smiled warmly at her.

“In abundance,” Tyrion told her passionately, grinning, and Sansa smiled richly, moving to the hearth to refill his cup. He accepted it thankfully, glad of the heat sluicing through his body, though he missed the tang of citrus in the wine – considered a heresy in the North, he remembered. A funny match they had made but Tyrion could not deny he had not grown fond of the girl. Strange to think of her as his wife yet he had protected her as any husband would, even before he had been forced to wed her. Only he – and perhaps Clegane – had cared a whit about the Stark girl, yet after Clegane had fled the burning Blackwater it had fallen to Tyrion to keep her safe. She hadn’t truly needed it. Powerless, yes, but Sansa Stark had not been without weapons: her courtesies had kept her alive. Sansa Stark had outlasted them all, with no help from anyone. He raised his filled cup to her. “Lady Stark. I always knew you would survive us.”

“Did you?” Sansa asked gently.

“Oh, yes. The night of the Blackwater when you told me you would pray for me…as you prayed for the King,” Tyrion said, his lips twitching, eyes dancing merrily. “I knew in that moment, you were cleverer than you desired anyone to know. But I knew: I let you keep your secret. Everyone who underestimated you is now dead.”

“Yes,” Sansa agreed, her smile fading. Tyrion watched Larra, who was sipping her own wine and stroking the golden curls of the child in her lap – a child he recognised. He stared, watching the girl cuddle with Larra, her cheek resting against Larra’s neck as she sucked her thumb, content, safe. Larra glanced down at the golden curls and smiled at Tyrion.

“When you are settled, perhaps you would care to join your cousins in the schoolroom while they take their lessons,” Larra suggested, her voice gentle as the child’s eyelids drooped. “You may judge how they are progressing.”

“The girls… I had all but forgotten them,” Tyrion admitted, with a guilty grimace. He glanced from the one curled in Larra’s lap to those playing dolls with a silver-haired girl and another with violent blue eyes, and those golden-haired girls dancing energetically with some Northern boys. “They seem happy.”

“Today is a good day,” Larra said. Her brow furrowed and her amethyst gaze drifted past Tyrion, into the shadows of the hall, broken up by clusters of candles on the long polished tables where people met and ate and talked. “Did you ride ahead, my lord?”

“No,” Tyrion said quietly, glancing over his shoulder. Qezza had left him, to stand before the hearth warming herself, an arm around Zafiyah, whose face was tearstained and whose body still shuddered with pain from their brutal ride. Ser Jorah was nowhere in sight, but he imagined wherever the surly knight was, the Queen could not be far from him. He also noticed with no small degree of concern that there were no Unsullied gathered in the hall, and no Dothraki but those kos assigned to guard his young cousins, who were dancing with their wards or sharing a horn of ale and playing knife games with some of the wildlings.

“Are you looking for someone, Lord Tyrion?” Sansa asked delicately, and he stilled, noticing the glitter in her eye, the stern set to her petty lips. He noticed the way Larra Snow’s eyes simmered with suppressed anger, how her face turned hard, yet there was a flicker of irony in the corners of her lips.

Cautiously, Tyrion asked, “Where is Daenerys?”

“The Lady of Dragonstone has been escorted to her rooms,” Larra said lightly, playing idly with the doll belonging to the girl cuddled in her lap – the girl orphaned by Daenerys, Tyrion recalled vividly.

“We thought she would be more comfortable resting in private,” Lady Sansa said, shaking her long sheet of copper hair over her shoulder, settling back with Jon and reaching for his hand. Jon Snow hid his face behind a horn, apparently drinking deeply of the mulled wine.

The Lady of Dragonstone, he thought, eyeing both sisters. Arya Stark watched them, too, he realised, and with some satisfaction the youngest Stark sister relaxed somewhat, her eyes glowing in the firelight. Tyrion watched the sisters and knew this was not a lady’s courtesy, providing Daenerys with warmth and comfort: they had not greeted her personally, had actively ensured she would not be welcomed into the Great Hall. She had not been invited to join in the celebration of the King’s return nor the Stark family’s reunion: she was not wanted at either.

He knew what had been going on – at least, that Daenerys had been pining for Jon Snow, had even sought him out at White Harbour, and been rejected, humiliated, by Arya Stark, who followed her brother like a lethal shadow. Jon Snow had taken every opportunity to avoid and actively ignore Daenerys, barely leashing his fury when he was forced to interact with her, and Tyrion was still trying to work out why. He needed to confer with Ser Jorah. Whatever had happened between the two had occurred in the North and were it to continue he dreaded to think how the future would unfold.

Daenerys…truth be told, Tyrion likened Daenerys to a bitch in heat around Jon Snow, panting after him, desperate to be mounted, bewildered when rejected, having no idea what to do with herself after, drowning in her own lusts.

His mouth twitching, even as his heart sank, Tyrion chided, “She has been sent to her chamber without supper?”

“Of course not,” Larra said, her expression serene. “We’re not savages. She shall have every comfort we offer our other guests.”

Except guest-right, Tyrion thought, eyes widening, and Larra noticed.

“There is bread and salt enough for her in this castle,” Larra said, though her voice took on a low, menacing growl, the she-wolf showing hints of her fangs. Tyrion gulped. He glanced from Sansa to Larra and, seeing the way Sansa was leaning in to Jon, how their hands were loosely clasped between them, and chose to approach Larra instead. He climbed up onto the settle, smiling when vivid blue eyes glittered back at him, a beautiful little face caressed by the firelight tucked against Larra’s chest. The child sucked her thumb, cradling her doll contentedly, utterly relaxed in Larra’s embrace. There was a reason Tyrion had sent his cousins north but he could never have imagined it would be Larra who would care for them. He remembered his first visit to Winterfell, how Larra had become beloved by his niece and younger nephew: children had been drawn to her like moths to flame.

Reaching out, he teased one of the glorious curls wound tightly near the child’s ear and tickled her chin, noticing even as he did so that the child lingered in Larra’s lap, nestled around the hilt of a dagger, a very familiar dagger.

Wishing to enquire after the Unsullied and Dothraki, he was temporarily diverted. He blurted, “The catspaw’s dagger.”

Larra reached down and unsheathed the wicked blade. Her eyes were uncannily purple in the firelight as she glanced from the blade that had started it all to Tyrion, who had been one of the many victims of a plot to rupture the Seven Kingdoms. “Funny how these things come full circle. Valyrian steel. A relic of the Targaryen dynasty. Sweet Sister, she is called.”

“A most well-travelled sibling,” Tyrion said, eyeing the blade. Larra sheathed it again. “How did you come to carry her?”

“Lord Baelish gifted her to Bran,” Larra said, glancing across the hearth at her brother in his clever wheeled chair. “One of his few blunders but a mortal one.”

“Where is Littlefinger?” Tyrion asked. The last he had heard, Littlefinger had been courting Lysa Arryn.

“Oh, usually he would be sniffing about my sister,” Larra sniffed, her eyes dangerous, “however I took the liberty of relieving his shoulders the burden of his head.”

Tyrion blinked. “He is dead?”

“You sound disappointed.”

“Only I rather enjoyed outwitting him. His indignation was delicious,” Tyrion grinned. “You took his head?”

“Those who pass the sentence should swing the sword.”

“Ah, I had almost forgotten you Northerners live by the old ways,” Tyrion nodded, watching a few men of the Night’s Watch playing dice with a Dothraki ko and a fiercely bearded redhead who whipped out a bone-handled dagger at the first sign of cheating. His anger quickly forgotten, the wild-man roared with laughter. Dothraki, Free Folk, Night’s Watch, Knights of the Vale, Northmen…even a Lannister had been welcomed by the Stark’s hearth. Everyone was welcome…except for Daenerys Targaryen.

He watched the Dornish knight who had been glaring at him for long moments as he hissed long and low with Lady Nym over a cyvasse board. Then he glanced at Larra. “Lady Larra… I am missing a piece,” he said, his voice low and almost desperate and deeply earnest. “I cannot help if I cannot see. Help me to see.”

Larra regarded him coolly, her expressions masked. That was a change from the vibrant girl he remembered, her fury and her jubilation written in every line of her beautiful face. She murmured offhandedly, “I am sure your lady’s version of events will differ.”

“I am asking you.”

“You should ask Jon.”

“I think not,” Tyrion said sombrely. Larra watched him carefully.

“Because he will not tell you? Or because you dread having to look him in the eye after he does?” Larra asked succinctly, and Tyrion sighed heavily, gazing back at her, those mesmerising amethyst eyes. “Your faith in her is shaken since the Lion Culling.” Tyrion glanced around, hiding his face behind his wine-cup. Larra smiled and rested her cheek against the child’s head. “What better place for us to speak freely? There are so many voices competing…” She sighed and said softly, “You don’t ask me for information; you want me to confirm what you already suspect.”

“Something happened between them in the North.”

“Yes.”

“She… She has done something to turn his mistrust to rage,” Tyrion said, his mouth dry.

“What do you think might have done that?” Larra prompted. Without telling him anything, she had given him the answer he had been searching for. Jon Snow was a man of integrity.

“Many things,” Tyrion answered.

“Name one. Name the worst you can think of.” Tyrion could think of it, clear as day, yet… As if she could read the trail of his thoughts in his face, Larra gave him an almost sympathetic smile.

“She abused him.” Jon Snow, a man of great integrity, who felt the shame of his birth so deeply.

“She committed her armies and thought it her due to ride him as her prized new mount,” Larra said. Her voice was calm but laced with such viciousness, Tyrion shivered. A she-wolf indeed. Gentle unless provoked – and woe betide anything who threatened a direwolf’s pack. Her gulped and fought not to glance over his shoulder where the King reclined, his expression so utterly soft as he watched Sansa Stark chatting animatedly with her long-lost sister.

“I had forgotten how forthright you are,” Lord Tyrion managed to say, his voice low. There was no humour in it.

“If you wish to play the game, speak with Sansa,” Larra said bluntly. “If we survive the Others, I’ll worry about court politics.” She glanced at Tyrion and seemed to gentle somewhat at the sight of him, his brow furrowed, his mind spinning.

The Ash Meadow, the Lion Culling… She had pressured men to marry her before, yes, and they had taken full advantage of the match. This was different. This was… He knew what it was, of course. Rape. Not only was she a murderer, she was a rapist too. With murder, the victim suffered but once. Rape, Tyrion understood, left the victim suffering the rest of their lives. Daenerys had leveraged her armies and taken what she wanted from the King – what she had desired since the first moment he resisted her. His strength of character was deeply attractive to her. Even as he had scolded her for the Ash Meadow, she had been as much titillated by it as shamed.

“May I now ask you something, my lord?” Larra said quietly, and Tyrion gazed up at her as if desperate to disrupt his chaotic thoughts.

“Of course,” he answered softly.

Larra sighed and gazed past Tyrion, to her brother Bran and the enormous hearth-fire roaring beyond him. “Had Daenerys done all she did in Essos using wildfire, would she still have been admired and hailed as a saviour?”

He had forgotten how well-educated Larra Snow was, how cunning. Truth be told he had not thought of the She-Wolf in years. Now, he reflected on their games of cyvasse, their conversations about ancient Valyrian poetry, politics and economics, her perspectives on history.

Tyrion recalled she had been a stout supporter of Princess Rhaenyra’s right to inherit during the Dance of Dragons. Not only because Rhaenyra had been raised to be Queen, but because Alicent Hightower had put the ambitions of herself and her children before the needs of the realm. Alicent and her children had shown their quality through their actions: they valued their own status and ambition over the good of the people they had sworn to serve and protect.

Sighing heavily, Tyrion recalled the Ash Meadow, the Lion Culling…Daenerys had burned those she had sworn she had come to Westeros to protect, while in Dragons’ Bay she had abandoned those she had sworn to build a better world for.

Had Daenerys done all she did in Essos using wildfire, would she still have been admired and hailed as a saviour?

“No,” Tyrion answered Larra Snow grimly, barely meeting her eye. They all knew what she would have been called. Daenerys Targaryen, the warlord. Daenerys Targaryen…the Mad Queen. He glanced at Larra as she gathered up the tiny child in her arms and rose from the settle. Quietly, he warned her, “Be careful.”

“Oh, always. Cautious and cunning,” Larra said, her eyes glittering. Tyrion gave her a half-hearted smile, remembering their cyvasse games – how often she had trounced him, leaving him flummoxed. He had adored playing against her because she was unpredictable. She was a woman of integrity, like her brother Jon, yet on the cyvasse board at least, upholding her values meant making curious choices.

She knows what her values are, Tyrion thought, watching Larra Snow as she gathered up the two girls playing dolls by the fire and his cousins, dancing energetically with Northern boys. Not he brightest, or bravest, or most talented, Ned Stark had done one thing extremely well, Tyrion thought: he had raised his children to become extraordinary.

Larra moaned softly and breathed deeply as she flung open the diamond-paned window in her chamber. Just a breath of it, she thought, gulping down the fresh, cold air. She felt smothered in the Great Hall, dizzy in the heat of so many bodies packed inside, the hearth roaring, and had been as desperate to get away from it as she was anxious to stay, to be near Jon and Arya. Jon and Arya!

They had thought Arya was in King’s Landing. Sly creature, Bran hadn’t said a word. But what a wonderful surprise!

She sank down in her rocking-chair, exhausted from the day, turning her face to the icy air drifting into the chamber.

Gendry found Larra fast-asleep in her rocking-chair, the window pushed open. He pulled it shut again, shivering, and carefully gathered Larra up in his arms. Carefully undressing her, he tucked her into bed and pulled off his boots and clothing, cuddling up beside her as she slept soundly. As he drifted, he realised that was a first – Larra always woke at the slightest disturbance. Perhaps she was finally becoming accustomed to the safety of the castle, he thought, tucking her close and kissing her neck before nuzzling her hair and drifting off to sleep.

Notes:

Fifty points to House Stark for putting Daenerys in her place!

Chapter 45: Truth

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

45

Truth


Larra grimaced and cuddled up under the covers, burrowing closer to Gendry, his scent enveloping her, his warmth searing away the chill teasing the tips of her ears. His heart beat steadily against her ear and she sighed, drifting deeper into sleep, exhaustion plaguing her, all the while pale silvery light beckoned its long, sinuous fingers toward her, summoning her to wakefulness. The weight of Gendry’s muscled arm pinned her in place and she had no strength in her to move it: she smiled, tucked herself against Gendry and sighed, drifting back to sleep.

The dull echo of a knock on the door made her crinkle her nose, flinching away from the noise, from the disturbance. Growing more and more aware of the light, of the birdsong in the godswood, of the voices in the corridor beyond, she fought to ignore it. Her body felt heavy, her eyes stinging with exhaustion. She had not slept for as long nor so well in years yet she seemed perpetually exhausted recently. Gendry told her she expected too much of herself: she should share the burden.

With whom?

Sansa had enough responsibilities of her own, even after they had shared them out equally.

Sansa… Jon! Her eyes burst open, her heart suddenly thundering in her chest. Jon!

While exhaustion still held its iron grip on her, she had almost forgotten. Jon has returned! And with him, Arya!

Bran hadn’t said a word about Arya’s decision to abandon her vengeance in King’s Landing and return home: nor had he warned them about Jon’s nearness. He had left it…a wonderful surprise. Reluctantly, Larra rolled away from Gendry. They had made arrangements to share a private family breakfast in the solar this morning. A family breakfast! They hadn’t dined together since their nursery days – since before Bran’s fall. Since before the King’s visit, even. Jon and Larra had been effectively banished from the nursery to make way for Prince Tommen and Princess Myrcella – they couldn’t have bastards in their midst!

We have not dined together since before King Robert’s visit, Larra thought, strangely awed by the thought.

Tired though she was, her back aching as she rolled to the edge of the bed and sat up, she pushed through the dizziness that rushed to her head, sitting so quickly after lying prone for so long without moving. She felt she hadn’t moved as she slept in the stiffness of her limbs as she washed and dressed warmly. She watched Gendry sleeping – his curls tumbled about his head, and despite his wonderful, neatly trimmed beard he always looked so much younger when he slept. Perhaps they all did. She reached out, gently tucking a lock of hair away from his face, and leaned over him to kiss his brow. She tucked the covers higher – he could never be too warm, the opposite to Larra who couldn’t abide feeling sweltered – and closed the door gently behind her, leaving him to sleep on.

In the solar, the maids had brought provisions for their private breakfast. Larra thanked the scullery maid preparing the fire in the hearth and sent her to the rest of her chores: Larra tended to the fire, building it up, and prepared the breakfast. She had to perch on the edge of the hearth, dizzy due to the intense, unfamiliar heat of the fire, and exhaled slowly as a wave of nausea churned from the pit of her belly, almost tasting it in her mouth as she cooked the bacon and sausages. It was too much rich food – everything was on ration but they had allowed themselves this small indulgence as a celebration: scrambled eggs, mushrooms, baked beans, bacon, sausages and black pudding with fried bread, cooked over the hearth in a heavy skillet the way Old Nan used to prepare their favourite breakfast before they had a long day out of doors.

She was resting her forehead against the cold stone mantelpiece for the calming chill it spread through her body when the door to the solar opened.

“Good morning,” said Arya calmly. She was so softly-spoken now. Slim and shrewd and dangerous. Larra peeked her eyes open, shivering despite the heat of the fire, and gave her a soft smile. Distracting herself from the dizziness and nausea, Larra assessed Arya through her eyelashes.

“You didn’t sleep,” she said softly. Arya poured herself a large mug of stout, taking a healthy swig before sitting down on the settle before the hearth. She turned to examine the engravings.

“It’s the mattress.”

“It’s too soft,” Larra said quietly, and Arya nodded.

“It feels like I’m…”

“About to fall through clouds?” Larra smiled, and Arya nodded again, her eyes lighting up. “You and I, we will never be able to sleep in feather beds again: we’re too used to the hard earth. Ask the carpenters to fix slats to your bed, beneath the feather mattress. It’ll help. You’ll be able to rest, at least. Trick your mind into believing you’re still out there.”

Arya sighed softly. “I had forgotten that I slept in a four-poster bed with a feather mattress,” she said quietly, blinking her eerie grey eyes. “But I can remember every single flower I saw as we walked through the Riverlands. Isn’t that odd?”

“We remember what we need,” Larra said thoughtfully, sitting up straighter to watch Arya. Someone had already, thoughtfully, provided her with new clothing, neatly tailored to her slender figure: a long tunic that reached toward her knees, worn beneath a quilted jerkin, with suede breeches, fine leather boots and a thick woollen cowl that also functioned as a hood if she stepped out of doors. The only display of her allegiance was her sword – the sword Jon had had forged especially for her, and the sword-belt adorned with tiny obsidian direwolf heads. Otherwise she wore no ornaments, no declaration of her House. She didn’t need anything else, Larra realised: the one thing that had always grounded Arya, always reminded her who she was in spite of all she had endured, was that sword. Jon’s sword.

“What did I need to remember flowers for?” Arya asked sceptically, but her eyes turned wistful, almost mournful, as she gazed at Larra. “They reminded me of you… I used to talk about you to Hot Pie…and Gendry.” Her eyes seemed to shimmer like an ice-lake darkened by storm-clouds. “Violets for your eyes…wood anemones for our rides in the wolfswood. Primroses for the posies you used to have me gather for Sansa when you caught me sheep-shifting her bed.”

“There were ever so many posies,” Larra said, and Arya smiled, her eyes twinkling mischievously. She looked more like the Arya of Larra’s memory – passionate, boisterous and kind, mischievous and playful.

“I was starving but I kept picking flowers as if I would walk all the way to Winterfell and give them to you,” Arya said softly. Her eyes suddenly glowed, her face alight with a smile. “The memory of you smacking Joffrey kept me warm.”

Larra smiled wearily. “I’m glad.”

“Not much kept you warm,” Arya said softly. “Sansa said you went beyond the veil of light at the end of the world, into the Land of Always Winter.”

“Yes.”

A moment’s pause, then Arya asked, her voice as soft and wondrous as it always had been when she was a girl, asking Larra to continue the story, “Were the lights as beautiful as Old Nan said?”

“More. On a fine night, you can see them from Winterfell.”

“Can you?” Arya’s eyes glinted with interest.

“Now that winter has come,” Larra nodded. “When you see them, you realise why the Umbers have so many stories about them. Warrior-queens summoning great warriors to their halls to feast and fight and fuck gloriously until the battle that ends all battles.”

“They sound like She-Wolves of Winterfell,” Arya murmured, her eyes glowing with pride as she gazed at Larra. “Jon’s worried the entire journey north about siege preparations. He had no doubt Sansa could manage Winterfell but she has no knowledge of war.”

“She’s a quick study,” Larra said gently. “So are you.” She shook her head and gazed at the hilt of Arya’s little sword. “I can’t believe after all that, you still have it.”

“This is who I am,” Arya said softly, her eyes more mercurial and emotional than Larra had yet seen as she gazed at the hilt of Needle.

“When he had Mikken forge it for you, Jon had no idea how important that little sword would become,” Larra said honestly. She had been there that day at the forge when Jon requested Mikken forge a Braavosi-style sword fit for a slim young girl to wield.

“I thank God every day for Jon’s foresight,” Arya said, and Larra raised an eyebrow in surprise.

“God?”

“There is only one God,” Arya said softly, and Larra watched her.

“And who is that?”

“Death,” Arya said simply. “Do you know what you say to the God of Death?”

“Not today,” said a gentle voice. The door to the solar opened and Bran wheeled himself into the chamber. Footsteps echoed in the corridor and a guard appeared, panting.

“Apologies, m’lady – Lord Brandon insisted – “

“It’s quite alright,” Larra said gently, watching Bran wheel himself toward the hearth. The flagstones were so worn in the Starks’ private chambers that he could glide with ease over them in his wheeled chair. The busier chambers were more awkward, cumbersome, to manoeuvre with the chair, especially when it came to stairs. “Go and break your fast. Bran shall be fine with us for a few hours, although ‘tis fine so he should go out and ride.”

“Should I?”

“Yes, you should. You used to take such joy from riding after your fall,” Larra said. “It will do you good to practise – and the maesters say it will strengthen your spine. Soon we shall have bars and all sorts built into the walls for you to pull yourself up and move about.”

“You can ride?” Arya asked curiously, and Bran nodded.

“Lord Tyrion fashioned a saddle for him,” Larra said. “On his return from the Wall, he stopped at Winterfell and gave it to Bran.”

“Why would he do that?”

“He has a soft spot in his heart for cripples, bastards and broken things,” Bran said, his eyes glinting delightedly, and Larra smiled, thinking of the little man who cast a tremendous shadow.

“And thank the gods he does,” Larra said softly. “You, Jon, Sansa…even the smallest of his kindnesses had lasting impacts on you.”

“Who’s that?” Sansa asked, gliding into the solar, her hair rippling behind her like a waterfall of flame. She wore one of her warm day gowns, the fabric dark charcoal grey and patterned subtly with large leaves, two direwolves meeting at her throat and clasping her feathered collar about her neck. Since Littlefinger’s execution she had dressed less rigidly – with fewer layers – and Larra had noticed her starting to relax. Today she looked the most content Larra had seen her and Larra knew that was owed to Jon’s return.

“Lord Tyrion,” Larra said, as Sansa gave her a kiss in greeting. “We were discussing his kindnesses.”

“We are perhaps some of the few in the realm to know any of them,” Sansa said.

“Or at least acknowledge them,” Larra added, and Sansa nodded.

“I think I only ever heard one person praise Lord Tyrion for his defence of King’s Landing during the Battle of the Blackwater,” Sansa sighed, shaking her head.

“Who was that?” Larra asked curiously.

“Garlan the Gallant,” Sansa said, a gentle smile on her lips.

“You mentioned him before,” Larra said thoughtfully. “He spoke to you on your wedding-day.”

“I imagine many did,” Arya said.

“No; just he,” said Sansa with a delicate sigh. “The rest hid their blushes after their failed attempt to marry me off to Willas Tyrell. But Ser Garlan and his wife Leonette… Ser Garlan saw Tyrion’s worth and Lady Leonette saw my dread… They were kind people.”

“The kind ones have all been killed off,” Larra said, sighing heavily. “Now we’re left with lesser men.”

“There are still men of quality,” Bran said gently, and Larra pulled a face. She busied herself at the hearth, turning the sausages and cracking eggs into a dish before beating them and adding them to a spot in the skillet, diligently moving them about so they would not stick and burn.

Belching softly, Arya wiped her mouth with her sleeve and smiled, setting down her now-empty cup. Sansa stared at her, eyebrows raised, a smile teasing her lips. As children, the septas had been hard-pressed to turn Arya into a lady: now, Sansa couldn’t bring herself to bother. Arya was Arya: rough and rambunctious, just, passionate and…and wonderful. Sansa would not trade Arya for anyone.

“Would you care for another?” Sansa asked, her tone more amused than tart.

“Food first or I’ll slide under the table,” Arya said, smiling. Her voice was soft, now, less rambunctious than they remembered. Everything about her seemed softer: but in her stillness she had become infinitely more dangerous.

“Somehow I find that hard to believe,” Sansa said, refilling Arya’s cup from the jug on the table. The door to the solar opened and Jon tripped inside, rubbing his eyes blearily in the pale light streaming through the diamond-paned windows. He looked absolutely exhausted. When he glanced up, he stopped short. He blinked owlishly, and Larra laughed softly to herself.

“You forgot,” Larra smiled. “Or perhaps you believed it a dream.”

Jon’s smile came slowly, shining from his eyes, and he kissed Sansa’s head where she sat, then Arya’s, before leaning in to kiss Larra’s cheek as she stood, serving them all breakfast from a heavy skillet.

“I didn’t dare believe it,” he said honestly, sinking into a chair beside Bran, who was watching her ration out the black pudding with a hungry glint in his eyes.

“Sansa, put those away,” Larra chided gently, catching the slightest movement from Sansa as she fiddled with something in her lap.

“I am sorry,” she apologised with a sigh, cupping handfuls of raven-scrolls and setting them aside. “The ravens are relentless.” Larra scoffed delicately, glancing at Bran.

“Anything of interest to report?” Larra asked, setting the heavy skillet on the hearth-stone, away from the heat so that a maid could return it to the kitchens. There was only one way to eat a rich Northern breakfast: blistering hot. She glanced at Sansa. “Anything from the Neck?”

“No; nothing,” Sansa said apologetically, and Larra sighed softly, shaking her head. She had been expecting – hoping for – news from Meera. It never came. She wondered if Brandon would tell her if some tragic fate had befallen their friend. He was getting better, she acknowledged: the boy who had greeted Arya and Jon was the closest she had seen him to the Bran of her memory in years. “But there was a note from Sunspear. Lady Nym and Obara will like to hear it; possibly Darkstar too. He was ever so attractive, wasn’t he!”

“Darkstar? Yes,” Larra nodded. “If you like beautiful men.”

“Gendry’s handsome.”

“Handsome. Fiercely handsome. Darkstar is beautiful,” Larra said, smiling, as Arya turned wide eyes on Larra.

“It was Gendry I saw in the yard yesterday!” Arya breathed, and Larra nodded, smiling.

“You’ll see a lot more of him,” Sansa said delicately. “Though not nearly as much as Larra does.”

Jon choked on his stout, hiding a sudden smirk. Arya raised her clear grey eyes to Larra’s face and a smirk lingered in the corners of her mouth. Sansa gave Larra a look over the rim of her steaming teacup. Larra rolled her eyes.

“Gendry?” Arya asked quietly, her head tilted thoughtfully as she watched Larra, who glanced at her sister and nodded slowly.

“Yes. Gendry,” she confirmed.

After a moment, Jon said quietly, “He’s a good man.”

Larra nodded her agreement. “He is.”

“Father would have respected him,” Arya said in her soft voice. It was the first time she had mentioned Father – the first time any of them had mentioned Father since their reunion. Sansa’s eyelashes fluttered and Jon grew still. Larra’s heart thudded painfully in her chest and Bran sighed softly, a wistful noise. Larra glanced at him and he gave her a sad, helpless smile. She remembered what the Bloodraven had once told Bran, ‘I have my own ghosts, Bran. A brother that I loved, a brother that I hated, a woman I desired. Through the trees, I see them still, but no word of mine has ever reached them.’ Bran would always be able to visit Father in his visions but Father would always be just out of reach. None of them would ever interact with Father again, hear his voice or feel his love enveloping them as he guided them.

“Gendry is the best thing King Robert ever did,” Sansa said quietly. Larra was surprised to hear her say that: Sansa had very little to do with Gendry herself, though she knew how much time Larra spent with him, how closely they were bonded. Sansa glanced around at them, her eyes resting on Jon finally. “And we are the very best of Father.” Her eyes shimmered and her voice was soft and hoarse as she continued, “He would be proud of us.” Arya’s eyes lingered on the table for a moment, uncertainty in her grey eyes, but she hitched a smile on her face, her eyes glinting, as Sansa raised her teacup in a toast to them. To their strength and their survival.

“Father will be glad we are together once again,” Larra said sombrely, giving her brother and sisters a half-hearted smile. Half-hearted because she knew why it would have touched Ned Stark so deeply that they had found their way back to each other through war and worse. The gods had never smiled upon him the way they had his children.

Arya murmured, “In winter, we must protect one another, keep each other warm, share our strengths. If you must hate, hate those who would truly do us harm… It was one of the last things I remember Father telling me.”

“I miss him,” Sansa whispered, her lip quivering, and without even seeming to realise it, Jon reached over and cupped his hand over hers, his thumb gently stroking her fingers. She seemed strengthened by his touch, her back straightening, and she gave him a tender smile.

“What was the news from Sunspear?” Jon prompted gently.

“Oh. Princess Myrcella has delivered her baby,” Sansa said, and Larra smiled; she had always liked Princess Myrcella, a gentle girl who had adored collecting wildflowers and learning Northern folk-dances, who had never looked down her nose at Larra for being a bastard. Larra didn’t think there was a nasty bone in her body. “Prince Nymerios Martell. They are both in good health, apparently: she was seen reclining on a balcony to enjoy the sun with the babe at her breast. I wonder how hot the sun is in Dorne during winter.”

“Has there been any news from the Reach?” Jon asked, frowning slightly as he tucked into his bacon.

“There was something about the Arbour,” Larra remembered. “Tyrell ships were spotted sailing from there to Oldtown.”

“Lady Olenna and Lady Alynore Tyrell sailed south from King’s Landing,” Jon said.

“Lady Alynore?” Sansa frowned.

“She’s a younger cousin,” Jon said softly. “Too young to attend court; she escaped the bombing of the Sept of Baelor.”

“How do you know that?” Sansa asked, and Larra gave him a shrewd look.

“She was at Dragonstone,” Jon explained. “She accompanied her grandmother to Daenerys’ court. When the Uprooting of Highgarden occurred, she became the heir to the Reach.” Bran made a thoughtful noise.

“Perhaps not,” he said softly, and Larra gave him a careful look. They hadn’t yet told Jon and Arya about what Brandon was – they had spent the day talking about Arya’s adventures, the horrors Sansa had endured at court, Jon’s journey from steward to King, but so far Larra had avoided talking about venturing beyond the Wall. She knew Jon would believe her, and after learning of Arya’s training, well…Sansa would likely remain the most sceptical of them all, yet even she had accepted Brandon wholly for his unique new gifts.

“Brandon, do you care to share something?” Larra asked, rolling her eyes. His lips twitched.

“After I’ve had my black pudding,” he said, smiling warmly. His eyes glowed the way they used to when he was a boy, excited for something as simple as bacon for breakfast or a ride on his pony. They tucked into their breakfasts, the only sound the fire crackling in the hearth and the delicate scrape of cutlery on plates. Larra eyed her plate, grimacing at the excess: moments later, she sat and stared at the now-empty plate, her stomach full, the taste of eggs and black pudding on her lips, warmth spreading through her, the heat of the fire coaxing her to curl up under blankets and doze.

They finished their breakfasts, not a morsel left between them, and sat in a strange sort of quiet as they glanced across the round table at each other. They didn’t say a word: they didn’t know what to say. It was the first time they had sat together since before King Robert’s visit. After all they had each survived, and done so alone, where could they begin?

“This is awkward,” noted Arya delicately.

Jon grinned.

They started to laugh.

Their laughter echoed around the solar. The guards standing beyond the thick Northern oak door heard it and smiled as the sound drifted down the corridor, strange and unfamiliar yet natural in this place, in their home.

The Starks had returned.

None of them were the children they had once been. They had each endured their own separate journeys, yet all of their paths had led them back to Winterfell. They were stronger, fiercer, wilier.

“We’ve changed,” Sansa said softly.

Larra disagreed, shaking her head. “People don’t change: they reveal who they’ve always been.” Jon glanced at her sharply and Arya sighed softly to herself, her grey eyes shimmering as she worried her lip.

Sansa stared at Larra. She gave Jon a covert look out of the corner of her eye. Arya frowned as she watched the intense look passing between Sansa and Larra. Something concerning Jon.

“Arya…perhaps you would take a ride on the moors with me?” Bran asked gently, and Arya glanced at her brother. His face – a young man’s face – shone with excitement and Arya smiled.

“And I must greet our guests,” Sansa said.

“I should probably join you,” Jon gritted, looking glum.

“No,” Sansa smiled gently. “You travelled with them. You’re exhausted: I can see it in your shoulders. Rest. Why don’t you take a turn about the godswood while the weather is fine? Few will dare disturb you there.”

“You want me out of the castle,” Jon accused playfully, and Sansa smiled, her eyes sparkling.

“I wish you and Larra to have some time to yourselves,” she said honestly, though Arya noticed Larra’s harsh gaze on Sansa’s face. She was unhappy about something but could not imagine what. “And the fine weather will not last long. Go and enjoy it.”

“And what about you?” Jon asked. He frowned suddenly. “What do you mean, you’ll greet our guests.”

“We imagined Lady Targaryen would be exhausted from her journey and so sent guards to escort her to her chambers when she arrived,” Sansa said, her tone almost airy. Jon went still.

His tone almost tart, disbelieving, Jon said, “And her Unsullied and her bloodriders just let Stark guards lead her away?”

“They were in no position to do anything,” Larra said, smirking. Her eyes were alight with a furious sort of satisfaction as she said, “The Unsullied surrendered their weapons to the forges for refashioning with obsidian and the Dothraki allowed their horses to be stabled within the walls of Winterfell to ensure they outlive the snows. All are now garrisoned in Winter’s Town.”

“No Unsullied nor Dothraki bloodrider shall set foot within our walls until we are ready to face the Night King’s hordes,” Sansa said delicately. “The Lannister girls’ sworn arakhs excluded.” Jon stared at them, his grey eyes alive with emotion.

“You did what?”

“We separated Daenerys from her armies,” Larra said plainly, “and gave her rooms the opposite end of Winterfell.”

Jon stared grimly. “Why?”

“Because we do not trust her,” Sansa said delicately. She glanced from Larra to Arya. “You travelled with her, Arya. What is your opinion?”

“Does it matter to you?”

“You saw Joffrey for what he was the instant you met him,” Sansa said, sitting up a little straighter, her chin raised with pride – in Arya’s intuition. “I would know what you think of Daenerys Targaryen.”

Arya’s eyes glowed, watching Jon carefully before she answered, softly, “I know a killer when I see one.”

Sansa nodded. She glanced at Larra, then at Bran, then turned to Jon. “We know this Targaryen girl fancies herself Queen of the Seven Kingdoms. As long as she tries to bully you into ceding the Northern crown, refusing to acknowledge Northern independence, she is our enemy.” Something flickered across Jon’s face, and it was so close to dread that Larra’s rage was kindled anew, remembering why Jon was so reluctant to displease Daenerys Targaryen. Gently, her voice still containing a bite, she assured him, “We shall treat her with the same respect we have every other bannermen or ally who has committed men to the war but she is a necessary ally.”

Sansa added coldly, “She is certainly not our friend.”

“She must learn she cannot treat people the way she does without consequence,” Larra said darkly. Arya’s eyes glowed and Bran smirked softly to himself. Jon, however, looked uncertain. Larra gentled at the worry in his grey eyes and smiled. “Come, let’s walk. If I don’t get outside, I’ll fall asleep.”

They wandered out of the castle, avoiding the busiest passages in a way only a Stark knew how. The godswood was bathed in bright sunlight, the snow glittering fiercely, and the weirbirds chirped and sang high in the boughs of the trees laden with snow. Here and there, great mounds of it had been dumped by overloaded branches, and Larra’s keen eyes spotted the tracks of Northern shrews, stoats and snowshoe hares. Clumps of stubborn hellebores nodded idly as they passed, as if in greeting. Without a word, they made their way to the great weirwood. Larra watched her brother, who remained thoughtful and withdrawn, until they reached the steaming pond. He stopped and stared at the weirwood, and Larra watched his face. Something was bubbling up, something that made his eyes widen and his lips go pale and he shuddered, his broad shoulders rising and falling as he fought to catch his breath.

“Jon…are you alright?” she asked delicately.

He turned wide grey eyes on her, his cheeks wan. Shocked, he blurted, “I was murdered.”

Larra gazed back at him solemnly. Edd had told her. She watched Jon raise a hand to his chest, where he kneaded the heel of his palm against his heart, which had to be thundering in his ears. He looked dazed, startled as if from a great blow to the head.

“Yes,” she said calmly. “Now you’re here. And so am I. And so is Bran. And so is Arya.” She strode to him and gently touched his arm. He stilled, his eyes almost beseeching as they searched her face. “And Sansa’s alive – because of you.”

Panting, Jon grimaced, “I feel…different.”

“How could you not?” Larra said gently, sombrely. She gazed up at her brother, taking in the scars over his eyes, how much the worries and cares he now carried seemed to have aged him. Perhaps it was the neatly trimmed beard he now wore, thicker than he the whiskers he had managed to grow before he left for the Wall. She reached up and cupped his cheek. “They killed you for your goodness. That goodness hasn’t changed.”

“How could you know that?” Jon asked glumly.

“Because you’ll endure anything to uphold the oaths you’ve made…” she said, and he sighed, wandering off. She raised her voice and added, “Even rape.”

That made him go still. His shoulders tightened. She sighed as he turned slowly toward her.

He glanced at her and seemed to buckle. “Gendry told you.”

“He might never’ve…after they returned from the Wall, I saw his face when Karsi said you were unharmed,” she explained gently. “I knew something was wrong. And he worried about you.”

“He’s a good man to have at your back,” Jon mumbled, his shoulders drooping.

“You know, he was sold to the Watch,” she said, walking over to him. “If things had been different, he would have been your brother at Castle Black. Perhaps I would have seen him fighting beside you beyond the Wall.”

“Sam told me he’d shown you the way through the Wall but I didn’t dare believe him,” Jon said, glancing at her, his grey eyes searching her face. “The thought of you out there… You saw me?”

“Twice. We hid in a windmill… I saw you earn those scars, cutting down a warg,” Larra said, and Jon’s lips parted, his eyes widening. She gave him a sad look. “The second time, there was an eerie keep full of wailing women. Dead crows in the snow.”

Jon stifled a shiver and Larra nodded in sympathy. She hated thinking of that keep, of those women. “Craster’s Keep,” he muttered, sighing. His eyes widened and he raised his face to stare at her, blinking quickly. “Shadow. It was Shadow I saw in the woods. Shadow with Ghost.”

“Aye,” Larra nodded, for she had seen Ghost that night, too.

“You were there. You were there,” he repeated, his voice brittle, breaking. He stared at her, bewildered. “You didn’t… You didn’t find me.”

“I walked away…I took Bran north beyond the end of the world. It nearly killed me to,” she said hoarsely, her eyes burning. She reached up and vigorously rumpled his cropped curls. “I’m glad you cut your hair. You can finally see what you’re fucking fighting!”

Jon burst out laughing, his grin gleaming in the sunlight. He looked suddenly much younger. “You always could make me laugh.”

Larra’s lips quivered, her eyes still burning. She went on her tiptoes and kissed his cheek, giving a tight embrace. Her voice was hoarse when she said, “Missed you, little brother.”

“Missed you, too,” Jon said gruffly, squeezing her. He did not release her for a long while, hugging her to him, his hand stroking her long braid. She sniffled and smiled, resting her cheek against his shoulder. When he finally released her, he looked startled.

“What is it?” she asked, smiling gently.

Awed, Jon gusted, “We’re alive.”

Larra smiled. “Wonderful, isn’t it?”

“I’ve never been glad the Red Woman brought me back, ‘til now,” Jon admitted, blinking dazedly at her.

“It’s not surprising,” Larra said gently. She sighed heavily and cupped his cheek again. “You’ve suffered through more than most.”

“Larra…you went north…to the True North,” Jon said, and Larra nodded.

“Beyond the veil of light and beyond the edge of the world. Sounds poetic but there wasn’t much there. Ice and snow and stars…and the great weirwood,” Larra said, and Jon’s face twitched with amusement. “Makes this one look like a sapling.”

Quietly, almost hesitantly, Jon said, “You’ve seen them.”

Larra corrected sternly, “I’ve killed them.”

“And the Night King?” he asked. “Did… You can’t have seen – “

“He came for Bran,” Larra said simply, a bite in her voice that told Jon all he needed to know: she would not talk about it. “I left Summer and Hodor behind.”

Jon stared at her, his face filled with sorrow. “I’m sorry.”

She whispered a hoarse, “Me too.”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t save Rickon.”

Larra gulped, wiping her face. “Neither of us ever could,” she said stubbornly. “He was too wild. I couldn’t take him with us because of it.”

“The wolf-blood,” Jon said, and Larra nodded.

“Stronger in him than any of us,” she said sadly.

“Young and wilful and –”

“And dead before his time,” Larra finished for him. She sighed heavily. “We can blame ourselves all we like, but it won’t change anything. And I wouldn’t change anything. Knowing what’s to come…I wouldn’t change it. Would you?”

Jon’s eyes glittered with anger. “One thing.”

“D’you remember why wolves hunt in packs?” Larra asked, clambering to the roots of the weirwood and finding a comfortable spot amongst the knots to sit.

“They protect each other,” Jon said quietly, finding a spot close by.

“And?”

“And they can bring down larger and more dangerous prey than they could ever kill alone,” Jon said, and Larra nodded.

Grimly, she told him, “The first thing they do is isolate it.”

He gazed back at her and said sombrely, “Be careful.”

“She hurt you. I took Bran beyond the edge of the world because he asked me. I protected him from the unimaginable. Bran,” Larra exclaimed. She frowned at Jon. “What d’you think I wouldn’t do for you? You’re afraid of her.”

“Not her: her dragons,” Jon admitted. “I’m afraid she’ll burn Winterfell to the ground because I won’t fuck her.”

“She’ll burn Winterfell no matter what you do…” Larra told him, shaking her head. There was only Daenerys Targaryen to hold accountable for her choices. They sat in silence, listening to the weirbirds singing, enjoying the sun on their faces. After a while, Larra said, “Tell me about Alynore Tyrell.”

Jon sighed. “For fuck’s sake. I ask one question about the Reach,” he said indignantly. “How d’you do that?”

“She’s the one with the pretty eyes and exquisite breasts,” she said, and Jon gave her a strange look – she shouldn’t know what Alynore Tyrell looked like, after all. “Not your usual type.”

“I have a type?” Jon asked, raising his eyebrows.

“Kissed by fire and feisty.”

“She doesn’t have fangs, it’s true,” Jon conceded.

“But she may grow thorns. She’s young enough yet that the Queen of Thorns may shape her,” Larra shrugged, wondering. “Why did you ask about her?”

“She’s alone: I just want to know she’s not…” He shrugged in an attempt at nonchalance that she saw through instantly. “I want to know she’s safe.”

“You love her,” she smiled.

“I’ll always care for her,” Jon said sadly.

“She’s that important to you?”

“Aye.”

“Tell me about her,” she said gently, curious about this girl whom her brother loved.

“It was…easy,” Jon sighed, looking more relaxed just thinking of her. “Natural as if we were always meant to find each other and care for each other, to be companions.”

“But not lovers,” Larra clarified.

“I love Alynore but I am not in love with her,” Jon said. “Are you going to tell me about Gendry now?”

“What can I tell you that you don’t already know, except what goes on in our bedchamber?”

Jon stifled a shiver. He smiled and said thoughtfully, “He’s brave and gentle and strong. That, I know already. He broke the ice to stop the hordes and pulled me out of it when I fell… He rode a dragon without fear. After she – He knew what had happened just by looking at me. Said I wasn’t the one who should feel shame.”

“But you still do.”

“Not shame. Rage. I’ve been put in positions where I’ve no choice before…Qhorin Halfhand, Ygritte, Hardhome… Everything that happened, I’d do it all over again. I know what’s coming… But her…” He trailed off and for a long while they sat listening to the weirbirds and watched the spires of steam drifting off the pond. His voice simmered with pent-up rage when he finally said, “I’m so angry I could throttle her… There are too many people I must protect and she would see them butchered by the Night King without batting an eyelash if she doesn’t get what she wants.”

“Jon…you’re home now, with us,” she reminded him gently. “What did Father used to say? When the snows fall and the white winds blow…”

“The lone wolf dies but the pack survives.”

“You’re still troubled,” she winced, watching her brother’s face, his distracted grey eyes. “What’s going on in there?”

“There are things I’ve done –”

“You’re too hard on yourself. So you’ve fucked a few women! What of it?” Larra said, and Jon gave her a smile. “We’ve had very little joy the last few years… We’re lucky we have such a deep well to draw from. Where we can, we’ve snatched life back for ourselves. And both with wildlings!”

“And Gendry.”

“Gendry’s different. Gendry’s my partner,” Larra admitted. “If I know nothing else in the world, I know that as truth. It’s not that he completes me; he compliments me, and I him – I think.”

“He’s a good man.”

“You are both good men. Good,” she said, clicking her tongue. “You remember what Maester Luwin used to say about nice and good.”

Jon made a soft noise, smiling grimly. “Goodness does what is right for the sake of it. Niceness will always expect its due.”

“Who does that remind you of? Jon… You are a good man. You fight – you have always fought and acted in the interests of those who cannot defend themselves, regardless of the personal cost – sometimes in blatant disregard to the personal cost… The goal is always the same – you’re blindfolded in the dark but you still know the way. You’re a man of great integrity and goodness. Father would be proud.”

Jon gazed unseeingly at the pond. “Not about Alynore.”

“Forget Father: he had his secrets,” Larra said grimly. “Can you live with it?”

After a long moment, Jon sighed and nodded. “Yes.”

“Then stop punishing yourself for it,” Larra beseeched him. “Jon…”

She trailed off as they heard the soft crunching of footsteps in snow. A moment later, spears glinted in the sunlight. Beetle-like armour glimmered in the sunlight. Two Unsullied soldiers flanked a short woman in an ermine surcoat striding through the snow. Larra’s predatory stillness made the hair on the back of Jon’s neck stand on end. In a swift and pointed movement Larra unsheathed the fine hand-and-a-half sword at her belt, resting the tip in the snow at her feet, turning to Jon as if to ask him something.

The threat was unmissable.

Daenerys Targaryen, in her ermine surcoat and complicated braids, suddenly stopped. She eyed the bared blade and the fierce woman who wielded it.

The King and his twin-sister sat nestled in the roots of a bone-white tree.

She felt, suddenly, as if this place was sacred. That it was deathly dangerous to disturb the tranquillity of the ancient frozen wood…and more dangerous still to impose herself upon the King and his sister, who sat, amethyst-eyed and so hostile Daenerys shivered at the look on her face.

“You’re going to have to talk to her eventually,” Jon muttered.

Larra arched an eyebrow. “She assaulted you. What is there to say?”

Jon lowered his eyes to the blade, his lips parting as he recognised the intricate folding ripples, the lacework in steel. “This is Valyrian steel…and that – that’s the Targaryen sigil.” He blinked at the fat ruby set into the crossguard, etched with a sigil.

“Dark Sister,” Larra said lovingly, smiling as she examined her sword. Jon’s own Valyrian steel sword remained sheathed at his waist. Out of the corner of her eye, Daenerys wavered and attempted to appear nonchalant as she changed direction, wandering toward a towering oak.

“It was lost!” breathed Jon, who remembered his stories. “Wherever did you find it?”

Larra licked her lips and examined the blade, sadness suffusing her. Had she known the Three-Eyed Raven was Brynden Rivers, she would have asked him a lot more questions. She glanced at Jon and said, “Tell me about the maester at Castle Black…” He did: he told her everything. When it was her turn, she told Jon, “Beyond the Wall, we found the last greenseer. The Three-Eyed Raven…Bran became his apprentice, learning how to see through the trees. After years beneath the great weirwood beyond the edge of the world, we learned that the Three-Eyed Raven was once called Brynden Rivers.”

“D’you mean the Bloodraven?”

“Aye. He was forced to take the black after the Blackfyre Rebellions. Maester Aemon went with him to the Wall, so that he couldn’t be used to supplant his brother Aegon,” Larra said, and Jon nodded. “Bloodraven became Lord Commander…then he was lost in a great Ranging beyond the Wall. He was gifted this sword by the brother he loved. He kept it safe. He knew I’d need it to protect my own brothers.”

A great shadow shot over them and Larra jerked her gaze upwards. Jon saw her smile, bright and beautiful. The girl he remembered shone from her vivid purple eyes. They heard the cooing and clicking noise of dragonsong – Jon was not quite as familiar as Larra but dragons made unique sounds in the world. He caught a glimmer of vivid green and slowly stood up, striding away from the shelter of the weirwood’s everlasting ruby leaves.

“Is that Rhaegal?” he asked, going still as he spotted the great green-and-bronze dragon carefully descending from the tip of a coast redwood older than Winterfell itself, carefully climbing down, using its tail for balance and its claws to grip strong branches, delicately, almost nimbly, descending onto a larger swathe of untouched snow.

“They’ve been visiting whenever the weather is fine,” Larra beamed, sheathing Dark Sister and walking to stand by Jon’s side. She noticed his hand lingering at the hilt of Long Claw out of habit. “Even before the sun shines, Rhaegal appears in the snows… Some of the smallfolk in the castle have come to think of Rhaegal’s presence as an omen of fine weather.” She smirked, her eyes glittering. “Not the terrifying, awe-inspiring legacy Valyrians intended.”

“Rhaegal’s been here before?” Jon blinked, staring at her.

“Oh, yes, very often. We’ve become friends, Rhaegal and me,” Larra said, and the great dragon crooned and cooed and sang to her as she approached. Jon stared in awe as she wandered over to the great dragon with no more heed than she would give Last Shadow. She reached out to stroke Rhaegal’s spiked head and smiled. She waved Jon over, and, stunned, Jon’s legs carried him without conscious thought to stand beside her sister as she cooed and praised the dragon, scratching her fingertips at a tender spot beneath the dragon’s great horned jaw. The dragon purred and Larra…Larra laughed, smiling. Jon watched his twin-sister. She had always loved animals – cats, injured dire-eagles, orphaned stoats, cantankerous goats, direwolves – but to see her practically cooing as she petted a dragon… She cooed to the dragon, “You’ve already met Jon, haven’t you?”

Rhaegal seemed to know who she meant: molten bronze-gold eyes fixed on Jon and he felt an absurd compulsion to bow as a sign of respect. Rhaegal clicked and cooed.

“Rhaegal saved my life in King’s Landing,” Jon said softly. He had never been this close to one of the dragons – not consciously, at least: Now that he thought of it, it had been Rhaegal who had flown him and Gendry back to Eastwatch.

“Did you?” Larra asked the dragon, who clicked and cooed and purred as Larra stroked her hands over the dragon’s enormous muzzle.

“Turned the Mountain to ash when he charged at me, ready to cleave me in two,” Jon said dazedly, staring at Rhaegal – at his sister who was petting the dragon, talking to them as she used to Visenya, the ill-tempered goat, or the dire-eagle she had nursed and coaxed back to flight.

“Did you?” Larra smiled at Rhaegal. She blinked and turned back to Jon. “The Mountain? Ah, no wonder Lady Nym’s been so delighted since Obara arrived; she’ll have told her sister about the Mountain’s death. Dorne’s been writhing for vengeance since Princess Elia and her children were brutalised.”

“That’s why Lord Tyrion laughed,” Jon said softly. He was aware of footsteps behind him, and knew Larra was too by the way her shoulders tensed. Her eyes darted almost imperceptibly past his shoulder and her expression turned hostile. “He said the dragon named for Rhaegar brought about vengeance for Princess Elia and her babies when none others could…” Larra was staring at him, frowning fiercely. She stroked Rhaegal’s neck almost unconsciously. “Are you alright?”

Eventually, Larra sighed heavily. She glanced from him to Rhaegal, searching one of the dragon’s fiery bronze-gold eyes. She seemed to come to a decision, calming somewhat despite the nearness of Daenerys Targaryen watching their every move.

Rhaegal dipped a glimmering green wing tipped with lethal bronze claws. With practised ease, Larra used the beast’s tough, knobbly wing-joint to climb, levering herself, and settled on the dragon’s back. Rhaegal clicked and cooed happily and she smiled, patting the dragon’s neck fondly. She reached down her scarred, calloused hand and Jon stared up at her, something like dread settling in the pit of his stomach even as his heart soared at the sight of her – Larra on a dragon!

“Climb up!” she laughed softly, and Jon did as he was told. He gripped her hand, climbed up on Rhaegal’s wing-joint, and settled behind Larra, careful of the bronze spines all the way down Rhaegal’s back to the tip of their lethal tail. Larra smiled over her shoulder and wrapped his arms around her waist, patting his hand almost soothingly as she settled herself more comfortably. “Hold on!”

They shot into the air. Jon grimaced and held on tightly to his sister. Something soared in the pit of his stomach and he couldn’t fight the grin that teased at his lips as he heard Larra’s rich laugh of delight. The wind snatched at them and he was aware of great speed and a gentle quiet but little else.

Larra’s laugh rippled on a gentle wind. She called, “Open your eyes!”

Reluctantly, he did. He didn’t know whether to regret it or be struck dumb with awe as he did so: the world spread out before them, the sun bathing endless meadows with sunlight, casting shadows in ancient canyons and crevasses, making everything glitter. The world was turned to silver and snow, to the great endless pale-blue sky and the soft, billowing clouds that tumbled lazily by as enormous wings beat steadily either side of them. Patting his hand, Larra sat up straighter; he had to do the same, and the tension in his back and shoulders relaxed as he saw the smile on Larra’s face, the way her eyes glowed with sheer joy. The wind tangled in his hair and seemed to caress her curls lovingly.

They did not fly for long, but they covered a great distance in little time at all. Through their bond, Larra guided Rhaegal, who found their way to a secluded and beautiful spot Larra had always wished to see more of when she was a girl, but it was too far away by horse to return before dinner. In the midst of gentle hills turned silver with glimmering snow, a small lake had frozen, the ice as clear and bright as a mirror; jutting into it, at the end of a sinuous causeway, were the crumbled remains of a holdfast, isolated and once proud. Uncle Benjen had brought her here, once, and told her stories of ancient Kings of Winter, curses and bears and fierce maidens. She had often wondered why Benjen had chosen this place…what this place had meant to him. She had wished this was his holdfast, that instead of taking the black he had claimed this place and built a home for them here, away from Lady Catelyn’s cruel glares.

Rhaegal touched down on their favourite perch, the highest, crumbling wall of the holdfast: she and Jon climbed down using handholds and the disturbed stones to help their way. When they reached the bottom, Jon stared up at Rhaegal, now sunning their great wings, eyes closed as they raised their face to the sun, the only source of heat to be had.

He gasped at Larra, “You’ve flown Rhaegal before.”

“Many times,” Larra smiled, her cheeks flushed. “Flying brings us joy.” Her smile faded, however, at the grim look on Jon’s face. “What is it, Jon?”

“At Dragonstone, Lady Olenna said something…”

“The Queen of Thorns give you a prick in the balls, did she?” she asked archly.

“She told me she believed Father sacrificed his honour for his sister’s virtue. For Lyanna’s virtue. To protect us. Father went in search of his sister and returned to Winterfell with her body and twin babies,” Jon said, watching Larra’s reaction. She did not seem shocked or even intrigued. He kept speaking, each word like a death-knell to all he thought he knew. “Lady Olenna knew Rhaegar Targaryen…she said it would have gone against his principles to abuse and dishonour Lyanna… She said he was a grim warrior with the heart of a poet. She said…he believed in love…” Larra sighed heavily, and after a moment she reached into the neck of her leather armour. A golden chain glinted in the sunlight, something heavy dangling from it. She unfastened the clasp and handed the jewel to Jon. “What’s this?”

It was a locket, exquisite and intricate and more valuable than the entire contents of the Northern treasuries, Jon thought. A hellebore rose was painted in enamel on one side, surrounded by a never-ending ouroboros, a platinum direwolf and a dragon with red-gold wings locked in sinuous, sensuous embrace. The dragon had eyes of the tiniest rubies: he recognised the glint of obsidian for the direwolf’s eyes. The jewel hung from a sinuous chain made of fine strands of platinum-silver and delicate pale-gold interwoven into an intricate love-knot.

“Benjen gave it to me,” Larra said, her eyes wide and earnest. She reached over and opened the locket. A straight-haired Larra smiled up at him from one side of the locket. He was stunned by the portrait of the man. Not the palest-gold hair…but his resemblance to Jon in his jaw and the shape of his eyes. He knew who they were, without ever having met them. Rhaegar and Lyanna. Larra sighed heavily, her expression tragic. “It’s true. All of it. He was hers and she was his. They wed on the Isle of Faces. She gave birth to us…” Jon flinched, his heart stuttering. “They were all dead – Rickard and Brandon and Arthur and Rhaegar… She was dying when Father found her. She forced him to swear an oath to protect us. She told him our names…and when he swore his oath, she let go. She joined them. Our mother was in the crypts the whole time.”

Dazedly, Jon murmured, “You used to kick her statue.”

“When the bitter unfairness of having no mother who loved us overwhelmed me…I went and thrashed her statue – for all the good it did me,” Larra said, her tone grim and accepting and terrible because of her acceptance. “You can’t punish the dead.”

Jon whispered, “She was our mother.”

“She was.”

He gulped. Olenna was right. “Ned Stark was not our father.”

Larra paused. Carefully, she said, “He didn’t sire us. It doesn’t matter. From the moment he swore that oath to Lyanna, we were his to protect and raise. He kept her secret: he kept us safe. He loved her more than anything – he protected us over everything.” Her eyes glimmered and Jon felt his burn. He wiped his face and handed her the locket back. He didn’t need to know why Benjen had had it, or even how Larra had taken it from him – that could wait…

“Does Sansa know?” he asked hoarsely.

“She does,” Larra said delicately.

Jon’s breath gusted from him, a great cloud that billowed before him and drifted away on an idle breeze. She knows… She knows I am not her brother… I am not her brother… He gulped. “I never was her brother… After all that, we’re all that’s left of them.”

It was a devastating thought. Larra’s eyes glittered, and she said fiercely, “We were wanted. They chose each other: they wanted us.”

Dazed, Jon asked, “What did she name us?”

He could not begin to comprehend it all… Not her brother… He did not know where to begin. Lyanna and Rhaegar… Not her brother… He panted and stared at Larra, his chest aching. Larra’s lips quivered. “Aella Alarra…”

“That’s pretty,” Jon gasped, his eyes wide. Larra watched him carefully, concern flickering across her face as he kneaded his chest over his heart. Not her brother.

“You, she named Aegon Torrhen,” Larra said softly, almost apologetically, and Jon gave a stunned laugh.

“Torrhen?” he repeated, stunned. Aegon Torrhen. Not her brother…

“The king who sacrificed his crown for his people,” Larra said solemnly. She cupped his face and the warmth of her skin was grounding, soothing. He calmed under her touch and realised his hands shook as he reached up to grip her arms as if afraid the wind would snatch her away. “The King Who Knelt… You are the King who rose.”

Notes:

I hope I managed to convey Jon’s panic at the end there. The rug’s been pulled out from under him – at least Olenna whispered that little nugget in his ear to get him thinking about it before he learned the truth. It had to be Larra, though.

And fret not, a scene with Daenerys is close at hand. Not the next chapter, though – that’ll be something else.

Chapter 46: The Heart of Valour

Notes:

Interestingly, I received a notification from AO3 that someone had requested a password reset. Not sure what anyone could gain from usurping my account.

Oh, by the way Highgarden is inspired by a combination of the Chateau de Chambord and Versailles. I haven’t seen The Great but the set-designs are gorgeous and Catherine and Aunt Elizabeth’s rooms definitely inspired what I envision the interiors of Highgarden to look like. It’s more a palace than a fortress, everything is about culture and elegance, so it fits!

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

46

The Heart of Valour


Panting, he straightened up and gazed around. Everywhere he looked, crimson shone vividly against the shimmering white of the snow that had blanketed the Reach overnight. His armour, dented from a blow he had not been able to deflect or dodge in time, dug in at his shoulder and he grimaced as a war-chorus rose. Not the clamour of battle, but a dirge of death, the broken wails and gurgling chokes of dying men weeping for their mothers, their lovers, the Stranger and other gods who paid them no heed.

The battle had been swift and decisive – decisively in his favour. Though he commanded fewer men, he was battle-hardened, grim and determined.

Partway through the battle, he had taken the high-ground. That had been the end for his enemies. His force had suddenly become the defending force; his enemies, ambitious young bannermen formerly sworn to his House, had realised to soon that they had yielded their advantage and were now fighting to reclaim what they had stolen.

Behind him, a great moat glittered in the sunlight, frozen and seemingly useless against an attacking force, yet those who had fled his blade in the advance had found themselves plunging through the thin ice into freezing waters that pulled on their chainmail and armour. Beyond the moat loomed the great curtain-wall of Highgarden, glittering with frost, shimmering like a veil of mother-of-pearl, and beyond…encircling the hill upon which Highgarden was built and from which it took its name were the gardens: neatly groomed parterres and mazes; arbours heavy with roses and glittering glasshouses filled with precious exotic flowers nurtured by gardeners through all weathers; follies and manmade waterfalls and sweeping mosaic verandas with potted lilacs and trellises of trailing roses, jasmine and clematis hung with glass lanterns; orchards filled with beehives and wild, natural gardens where flowers tumbled over themselves and people found an ideal place to tumble with their lovers, making the foxgloves shiver and the dahlias dance. And encroaching on this abundance of natural beauty was a monument of manmade loveliness. Highgarden. Home. An immense central keep with four great bastion towers, the castle itself had solid foundations, almost plain. Above the foundations rose three storeys of glittering windows made of Myrish glass, some opening onto great sweeping balconies with Lysene sculptures and great Myrish urns overflowing with plants. Above them were open loggias and balconies, where they wandered about during the height of summer hoping to catch a breeze, and above the highest of the open rooftop gardens soared towers, cupolas, gables, lanterns, chimneys, all without symmetry, looking more like the spires of a great city than the points of a single rooftop.

Strange to see it now without their banners flickering in the breeze, to hear no silver trumpets calling him home in the dusk as the great castle glimmered like a pearl in the sunset. In spring and summer, they could smell the perfume of roses for miles around. Now, the stench of battle, of blood and steel, made him gag. The fog of a sharp winter dawn did nothing to stifle the odour. He breathed in sharply through his nose, throwing his head back and reached up to shove his hair from his face, hissing and wincing as the wound he had sustained to his face smarted and throbbed, blood dripping hotly into his mouth. It was his only wound: he thanked the Warrior. His heart thundering in his chest, the battle-lust that rushed through his veins cooling as the cries of the dying started to fade. He panted and lifted his face to the sun as its warmth caressed his skin. Ice and snow crunched underfoot as he turned, cleaning his blade before sheathing it. He mounted his horse and issued commands to his men, who were busy giving mercy to those who had fallen and for whom there was no hope.

He clicked his tongue and his horse responded immediately, cantering down the body-strewn Long Mile, through woodlands and great sweeping meadows, away from Highgarden. He could not step foot inside it without her. Their army was small, which had only helped their incursion against those who had sought to snatch Highgarden from them: they could move faster, at greater speed. His Redwyne cousins had given them the men he needed to encourage his family’s former vassals to recommit their own to his cause, and he was glad he, at least, on a personal level, still had friends he could rely on.

Daenerys Targaryen had done her utmost to destroy the Lannisters yet the same actions that had destroyed the leadership in the Westerlands had made it almost too easy to reunite the Reach.

It had been Alynore who did it, truly. She had looked their vassals in the eye and told them that they would die if they did not unite against an even greater enemy who threatened everything they held precious.

Because Daenerys Targaryen would. She had proven that at the Lion Culling. Innocent babies, pregnant women and wizened old men had been burned to ash for no crime but that of sharing blood with a woman who had had the nerve to outwit her.

He freely admitted he was impressed with Alynore and felt shame he had overlooked her until now – until there were none others left.

Had he been at Highgarden… It did no good to dwell on it.

Garlan had not been at Highgarden when the Lannisters routed it: he had been in the Arbour at his brother’s request, strengthening bonds with their Redwyne cousins, before intending to sail to Sunspear to meet with Prince Doran. Despite the injury to his leg, Willas had always maintained a friendship with the Red Viper, and through that – and the shared grief of losing those they loved to Lannisters – he had hoped that Dorne and the Reach could finally form a true and abiding alliance.

Willas was gone. Loras and Margaery too. Leonette had burned with all the rest and it was only now that relief assuaged his grief – relief that his wife had escaped a worse fate: those who had survived the Sept had been slaughtered in the very gardens where once they had danced and kissed and flirted and lived peacefully and happily. His hands gripped the reins hard and he clenched his jaw, his eyes burning. They were gone.

He was all that was left of the Tyrell men. Him. Second-born, less clever than his older brother, less ambitious than his younger brother, far less beguiling than his sly sister. He was left to lead House Tyrell: an ailing old woman, little girls, and a young woman growing heavier with child.

Never as clever as Willas, he was still clever enough that Grandmother hadn’t bothered to try and convince him the child was Willas’ by a secret, hasty marriage between cousins after the tragedy of Baelor’s Sept. Among their cousins’ prized vines, withering in the winter chill, Grandmother and Alynore had told him the truth: that they had believed Alynore the future of their House and that, through a child all believed to be fathered by Willas, she could retain any power they managed to snatch back. Alynore… A younger cousin who seemed to have aged ten years overnight – or at least, since the last time he had seen her, riding off to war in support of Renly Baratheon’s claim to the Iron Throne. Alynore: gentle and clever and resilient, her nature as beautiful as her face. And sadly overlooked.

It was to her he rode as fast as his battle-exhausted horse could carry him, and he found her in his tent, her hands busy with embroidery as she paced restlessly, while Grandmother slept under heavy furs. It felt jarring to see Grandmother in such a state: he had never in his life seen her…vulnerable. Yet now she actually seemed her age in a way he had never imagined her. He was more shocked and unsettled by his grandmother’s absurd new frailty than the bloodshed of battle.

Alynore turned sharply as he burst through the flaps of the tent and gasped hollowly at the sight of his bloodied face. She started forward but he jerked his head, once, indicating his armour and clothing still smeared with blood and gristle.

She paused, staring expectantly at him.

“It is over,” he said grimly. “We may go home.”

Alynore blinked. “So soon?” she breathed.

“The battle was short,” he told her grimly. “Those who took up arms against us did not last long.” Those who had sought to snatch Highgarden had been young, ambitious lords who lacked basic skill with strategy – they were summer lads who had never seen battle yet fancied themselves famed warriors. He had cut them down with tragic ease.

Alynore let out a tiny sob of relief, dabbing her eyes with the fabric draped from her embroidery-hoop. He ached to go to her, to comfort her; she reached down and grimaced, rubbing her swollen belly. She was getting larger with every passing week. He had to admit that pregnancy looked good on her: she had all the sweetness, innocence and purity of the Maiden in her looks and the Mother’s compassion, wisdom and nurturing nature. He had watched her with their younger cousins, watched her raise them while they moved about the Reach rallying their bannermen, settling squabbles, soothing sore feelings and skinned knees, cuddling and loving them. She had seemingly limitless patience and had dealt with their bannermen as gently and diplomatically as she had their young cousins, who needed constant reassurance, love and the knowledge that they were valued and important. Children and bannermen were no different, truly: once Alynore had understood that, their bannermen melted for her.

He melted for her.

Garlan was awed by her, and ashamed of how much she had been overlooked and underestimated. He adored her. He had come to respect her. He knew he was growing to love her.

Her relief was palpable: Garlan had returned. His armour was dented, scratched and smeared with gristle: his face had been slashed, from the centre of his right cheekbone, down through both lips toward his chin. His dark-gold beard dripped with blood. Her eyes burned and she reached for him, yearning to launch herself into his strapping arms and let him hold her – the way he had the first time he had seen her at the Arbour. As Grandmother had teetered and had to be reclined on a chaise, recovering from her shock, Alynore had silently wept into Garlan’s broad chest, all the while shock, horror and relief warred inside her. Horror that she now carried a child while there was yet a living male heir to claim Highgarden, dread for her child’s fate…

Instead of launching herself into Garlan’s strong, comforting embrace, Alynore lowered her hands to her belly, swollen with Jon’s child thriving inside her womb. She felt them kicking and stretching inside her, felt their heartbeat. No-one had ever told her what pregnancy felt like. After the sickness had subsided, she felt nothing but wonder at the connection, the life growing inside her. The life Jon had given her. She wished he was here now: she wished he could know Garlan. She wished she could tell Jon that she was no longer alone.

And that she did not regret the child he gave her, or their time together, for a heartbeat. She would not change things – now that she was assured of their family’s fate.

Garlan had reclaimed Highgarden. She had done her utmost to support him, garnering support from those who had been bullied into betraying them. She knew half their shame stemmed from seeing a beautiful young woman in tears – had it been Garlan alone, it would have been all the easier for their bannermen to deny him. But set a weeping woman in their midst and their chivalry came roaring to the forefront of their minds. Especially a weeping pregnant woman with no home in which to raise her child: where chivalry failed, motherly instincts prevailed. The ladies of the Reach had pressured their husbands and sons and nephews – had henpecked them until they committed their troops and swore oaths of fealty on bended knee.

Alynore had resolved to let them live forever with their guilt, rather than grant them the relief of a swift execution for their treason.

She had thought of Jon, granting pardons to the children of those men who had butchered his brother and watched his sister suffer in silence. She thought of how furiously loyal those children would forever be to Jon, for he had granted them their lives when it was within his power to strike them down and call it vengeance. That wasn’t Jon, though. He was not vengeful: he was just.

Alynore followed the example of Jon and Lady Sansa Stark. She was just when she could be cruel. Gentle where she could be wrathful. Shrewd and calm and calculating when emotion threatened to overwhelm her.

She reached up and wiped her eyes, which were streaming freely with hot tears that startled her. She hadn’t felt the chill, so concerned with the outcome of the battle. Garlan had returned with news of their victory and her relief overwhelmed her.

“You said Highgarden was not easily defensible,” Alynore said wonderingly. They had never needed to worry about defending their home: they had armies to deter anyone from ever getting close enough. “I did not imagine it could be taken so easily… If we could take it back so easily, what chance do we have if a greater force sets its eye on us?”

When Daenerys Targaryen set her sights on them.

“We must fortify it,” Garlan told her quietly, and he tried to hide a grimace. Her gentle eyes saw it, though: she stoked the fire over which a small cauldron of mulled wine simmered sluggishly. When it was bubbling she dipped a clean handkerchief into the wine, rinsed it out and pressed it carefully to his face.

“How is Grandmother this morning?” Garlan asked, and his lip stung, bleeding freely when he smiled at the stubborn look on Alynore’s face as she relentlessly tended to his injured face.

“She slept ill,” Alynore murmured, tenderly wiping the blood from his face. He clenched his fists rather than grab her and hold on as the wine stung his open wound. “I am sorry,” she winced, as he flinched and hissed. “The wound must be cleaned.”

“I know,” he grunted softly. He gazed down at Alynore, noticing the shadows beneath her eyes, the tight set to her lips. She had been unwell in the early months of their journey throughout the Reach due to her pregnancy, but the last few weeks her sickness had abated. She had been sleeping more restfully and ate everything set before her with enthusiastic gratitude. Grandmother was not the only one worrying, he knew. The girls were too young to understand, and long may they remain innocent of such things. But Alynore…overnight she had taken on the burden of their House alone, and it was not easily handed over to another to carry. Not when she carried that responsibility, the future of their House, in her womb.

“And you? You are pale,” Garlan said softly, catching himself from cupping her face; his hands were covered in blood and gristle.

“The baby kicked all night,” she admitted.

“It could sense your worry,” he said, glancing down at Alynore’s belly. It was noticeably rounded now, and her dark moss-green velvet jacquard skirts swayed with every movement, the hems caked in five inches of sludge. He reached out, again catching himself before pressing his hand to her belly, awed once again by the lengths she had been prepared to go to protect their family’s future. Other men might be horrified, disgusted even, that she had thought of such a thing. But not he: he was impressed by the plot to ensure their family’s future while relinquishing none of its wealth or influence. Only a woman could think of such a thing, he had often thought since he had first heard of his grandmother’s and Alynore’s scheme: only a woman would ever have to think of such a thing.

Gazing up at him, Alynore’s eyes swam and she rose on her tiptoes to kiss his cheek. She wiped her face and rinsed the handkerchief, dipping it again in the boiled wine before cupping his head with one hand so that he could not wriggle away and pressed the handkerchief to his face, making him hiss.

“We must summon the maester. The scarring may ruin your beard. Mayhap the maester can keep the stitches small,” Alynore winced, but she did not faint at the sight of the gore and gristle on his armour and boots, or his face cut open. The blade had been sharp, at least: it had sliced through the skin with ease, not tearing. She examined the wound carefully, without paling. He had learned more about Alynore the last few weeks than he had the rest of her life. He imagined there was very little that she could not handle if she committed herself to it.

Garlan gazed at Alynore, her beautiful face, her kind and tireless nature, and couldn’t resist asking, just one more time, “Promise me that he was good to you.”

She sighed heavily, and he was learning how to read her expressions, what she hid so well. She was reaching the limits of her irritation with him over this matter.

“How long will you to continue to ask that question in hopes I’ll give an answer you can reconcile?” she asked quietly, smiling but with a delicate sting to her tone. She fixed her pale, pretty eyes on him and said sternly, “He was brave and gentle and strong and the very best man I have ever met. If his child is half the man their father is, I shall be proud. Please accept that.” She frowned and searched his face, then said gently, “I was not abused, assaulted or manipulated. I chose this.” She glanced down at her swollen belly. The maester believed she had a scant four moon-turns until the birth, if all went well and the baby came to term. She was young and healthy: they remained cautiously optimistic. “We thought you were – it was just me.” Alynore said, gazing into his eyes earnestly. “I thought I had to do it all by myself…”

“I know,” he said, for he, too, had believed that he alone had survived. Unlike Alynore, however, his thoughts had turned to Essos, to losing himself in the ranks of a sellsword company, even to swearing fealty to Prince Doran as a sworn sword. The last thing he had thought of was reclaiming Highgarden. Why would he do such a thing for himself alone?

“I am sorry for Leonette,” she said softly, his wife’s name barely more than a hushed whisper. Alynore’s eyes searched his face, her shoulders drooping slightly. “I am sorry for her death. She was wonderful.”

“She was,” Garlan agreed, his heart aching. “She was truly a beauty.”

“Garlan… I am glad that you are alive,” Alynore said quietly. “Willas would be too. Everyone said he was the cleverest but he said you were the best of us. He told us all the time that you were the better man.”

“I miss him,” Garlan admitted, the emptiness in his chest throbbing. She grimaced as the baby gave a sharp kick. “Do you have pains?”

“The baby kicks,” Alynore said, rubbing her belly to coax the baby to gentle. “They’re strong.”

Garlan gazed at her belly curiously. “What does it feel like?”

“Now that the sickness has subsided…it’s lovely. I feel them moving and know when they’re sleeping and…and they get the hiccups sometimes in the morning,” she said, her smile beautiful. Garlan’s smile faded.

“Leonette and I were trying,” he admitted. “She was excited to be a mother… I always worried about becoming a father.”

“Why?” Alynore asked gently. “You’ll make a wonderful father.”

“There’s only so much I can do to protect the people I love,” Garlan said, aware that Alynore was wiping blood from his face after doing the seemingly impossible – reclaiming Highgarden with a paltry force and few advantages. “The thought of being powerless to stop them being hurt…”

“You’re so worried about the bad that you’ve lost sight of the good,” Alynore said tenderly. “I can’t wait to hold them for the first time, to see them smile, to teach them how to toddle about the gardens and learn about the world. How to ride and fight and dance and love and…and live. To learn how to be brave and embrace their lives in spite of fear.”

“You’re not worried?” Garlan asked.

“I was,” Alynore admitted freely. “I was deathly afraid. But you’re alive.” She gave him a deeply earnest look full of emotion. “You gave me hope… Now you’ve reclaimed our home for us. No matter what’s to come, we have each other…” Her shoulders drooped and she glanced over her shoulder subtly, gazing at Grandmother before saying, “I know you do not wish to marry me.”

He tensed and asked sharply, “Why do you say that?”

Grandmother had declared that they would wed once they had reclaimed Highgarden or Alynore had delivered her child, whichever came first. Garlan knew his grandmother too well to be insulted by her insensitivity: she was thinking only of their future. He mourned the past in private, as he knew she did. In her mind, the Uprooting of Highgarden had occurred because she had been distracted by thoughts of revenge, desiring vengeance for Margaery – always her favourite. Margaery was dead, and because of her desire for vengeance, the rest of her House had followed Margery’s fate. The Queen of Thorns would make no such mistake again.

Highgarden had been reclaimed. Their bannermen had sworn their oaths to Garlan: Alynore had inspired their adoration and nurtured their dread of Daenerys Targaryen to galvanise their loyalty.

As soon as Alynore had given birth to her child, Garlan would marry her.

“It’s quite alright,” Alynore said, the understanding in her eyes devastating. “If it is your desire not to marry me, I will support you. I will be your ally against Grandmother: we both know you will need one… Just know that if you do not, I shall not be married off to another. I know what I am worth. Our bannermen are undeserving of me.” Fierce pride glowed in those gentle green eyes and Garlan was awed by her self-assuredness, her strength.

He reached out and took her hand, squeezing it. Looming over her, Alynore’s eyelashes fluttered as she gazed up at him. “I will marry you, Alynore.”

She shook her head, and said gently, “We both deserve better than to be married for appearances’ sake.”

He realised she wanted…what he’d lost: respect, companionship, love. Lust, perhaps. His body throbbed with awareness at the thought. He adored her. She was kind and gentle and strong, proud and nurturing, wise and shrewd… He gazed at her, with her pretty eyes and rounded belly, and the idea that one day, perhaps, he might make her heavy with his own child… He and Leonette had never managed it: but they had enjoyed every moment of trying. He hadn’t been with another woman since Leonette yet from the moment Grandmother had decided he should wed Alynore, his awareness of her had grown.

Garlan reached for Alynore’s other hand and drew her closer.

“If you will let me, Alynore, I will wed you. Not because Grandmother commands it or the future of our House demands it… If you would be my wife, I will be a partner to you. I shall respect you and be loyal to only you, share my life with you, be a companion to you.”

“And a lover?” Alynore asked, and he watched the blush tint her cheeks prettily despite her bold words.

“Only if you wish it,” he said softly. For though he kept asking her about her pregnancy, what he truly wished to hear was that Alynore was in love with her child’s father. The fact that she refused told him she did, fiercely, and likely always would – as he would always be in love with the memory of Leonette. They had been ripped away too soon, before their love had the chance to wither.

“What about you?” Alynore asked gently.

“If you will have me, I am yours,” he said earnestly. He gave her hope, she had said: What she didn’t know was that she had given him a reason to live. Her, and that child in her belly. They had given him something to fight for: he would never have reclaimed Highgarden for himself. But for her…for that baby… He had fought for their future. He always would.

And what was the point of reclaiming Highgarden if they allowed the ghosts of the ones they had lost to dance through echoing halls, rather than filling the gardens with laughing children? It would shame him to ignore this second chance the gods had granted them.

It would shame him to mistreat Alynore by making her feel anything less than absolutely desired, cherished and respected.

“What do we do now?” Alynore asked softly, her voice subtly hoarse. “How do we rebuild?”

“We have all we need,” Garlan told her. “There are those in the Reach still loyal to House Tyrell though we may have lost the respect of our fiercest commander.”

“Lord Tarly,” Alynore said, and Garlan nodded. One of the few men Grandmother had ever respected. “He rides with the King in the North.”

“Not the Targaryen girl?”

“He has no respect for her, not after what she did at the Ash Meadow,” Alynore said. She had told him of Dragonstone, and the King in the North’s reaction, scolding Daenerys Targaryen before her court, when she had razed the Gold Road and turned the Lannisters to little more than embers. “She could not compel them to kneel nor command them to take the black. Jon Snow invited them north.”

“A clever loophole,” Garlan said softly.

“Jon Snow knows Lord Tarly’s worth; he was the only one to defeat Robert Baratheon in battle. Ned Stark told his children stories of the Rebellion,” Alynore said. “Were the Tarlys Targaryen loyalists during the Rebellion?”

“The fiercest – they fought for Rhaegar, though, not for Aerys,” Garlan said. He had been a young boy barely out of the cradle when the Rebellion had begun. Willas had had memories of their father and uncles marching off to war, but it had been so very far off and he had been so very young. “Everyone fought for Rhaegar.”

“I wonder what he would think to all this – to her,” Alynore mused.

“What does Grandmother say?”

Her tone dark, Alynore said, “She says she has seen this before.”

“She’d know better than anyone; she’s old enough to have watched Aerys’ descent,” Garlan sighed, watching his grandmother sleep. “I don’t know which to be more afraid of – the lions or the dragon.”

“The dragon,” said Alynore firmly. “The lioness thinks she has won: let her believe it. As long as she is watching for dragons from the North we can rebuild in peace. Let them kill each other.”

In the distance, they heard the cheers. Their men, their soldiers, victorious. Celebrating their victory, as if it had always been inevitable and they had struck in the hour of the wolf because it was a strategic advantage, not because they could not sleep for agitation. Garlan had not slept: the future of the Reach, of his House, his surviving family, rested on the strength and skill of his sword-hand. They heard the cheers and Alynore sighed softly.

“They’ll want to see you,” she said.

“I could not enter Highgarden without you,” Garlan told her. “We’re standing here today because of your words and actions over the last months, not mine this morning.”

But for his slashed lips, he would have kissed her for the look she gave him.

She went to one of the engraved trunks at the foot of the fur-strewn bed and opened it, the firelight picking up the silver sheen to her moss-green dress as the heavy fabric swayed over her belly and billowed at her feet. She picked something vibrant emerald-green of the trunk and carried it to him.

“What’s this?” he asked gently.

“Time for a change,” she said, and Garlan took the folded fabric, holding it up and letting it unfurl. His heart thumped and stood still a moment, grief and pride warring in him. Alynore had stitched a new standard. The emerald background remained the same. Instead of the single five-petal rose in gold, a simple hand-and-a-half sword stood on its tip, embroidered in silver and gold. At the hilt were two roses, their petals blood-red and trimmed with gold thread. Entwined with the blade were vines glinting with thorns and more roses – blood-red and trimmed with gold like those that represented Garlan, his personal sigil of two roses to denote his status as second-born son. He noticed the silver thorns on the vines, and counted the smaller roses – six in total, one larger than the others with a tiny golden bud fit to burst beside it. A rose and bud for Alynore and her child and five more blooms for their young cousins. House Tyrell in its entirety.

“We took the rose for granted,” Alynore said quietly. “Our safety and prosperity… Our sigil must serve as a reminder of what it has cost us.” Garlan nodded slowly, examining every detail, every stitch. “A sword entwined with roses – the sword with which you reclaimed our home. The roses that grow in spite of the swords to which we lost our family. Red for the blood shed at Highgarden. Lest we forget.”

“Lest we forget…” Garlan repeated in a murmur. The thoughtfulness and purpose of each detail was staggering. His eyes lingered on the larger of the roses, the tiny golden bud beside it. The hope it represented. His lips twitched and he licked his lip as it started to bleed once more but he stared at the sigil, remembering… “The North remembers… I cannot help but think of Sansa Stark. Isn’t that curious.”

“You knew her?”

“In King’s Landing when she was married to Lord Tyrion Lannister,” Garlan said quietly. He remembered her, resplendent in copper-gold, her hair glowing like dancing flames, red-gold jewels from the finest Lannister goldsmiths draped about her neck and wrists – Leonette had chided that the Queen could have been more tasteful about showing the Lannisters’ total ownership of the Stark girl: instead, they had trussed her up with gilded shackles like a common slave. Leonette had seen Sansa’s unhappiness – everyone had, but it was Leonette who voiced her concern to Garlan. The young girl’s grief and fright was plain to see – grief for her murdered family, fright for the bedding ceremony that loomed – and all laughed at her scarred, stunted new husband. Garlan remembered Lord Tyrion overselling his drunkenness to spare his new bride the humiliation of a public bedding, how Lord Tywin’s iron tones had settled the dispute when Tyrion had threatened King Joffrey’s life rather than allow his new bride to be degraded.

“Will she remember you?” Alynore asked, and it was a loaded question: Sansa was now Regent to the King in the North after all. She controlled the entirety of the North. If they were ever to regain strength, they needed allies.

“Likely,” Garlan said sadly. “Leonette and I were the only ones to talk to her at her own wedding… Grandmother tried to manoeuvre a match between her and Willas.”

“So the Old Lion married her off to the Imp.”

“He treated her well,” Garlan said, almost defensively. He knew Tyrion Lannister hated that nickname, and his respect for the man had only grown after the Blackwater. “He kept her safe from that malicious brute – Joffrey.”

“Was he so terrible?”

“Worse. He was excited by others’ pain, he relished it…” Garlan growled softly. The idea that Father had so heedlessly entered them into an alliance with the Lannisters, flinging their beloved Margaery at the beast, still nettled. “Margaery did well to manage him so thoroughly. She exceeded even Grandmother’s expectations.”

Alynore sighed heavily. “Grandmother poisoned him.”

Garlan’s beard twitched. He had been a guest at the so-called Purple Wedding, had watched the spoiled boy-king humiliate his uncle. He would never wish violence upon innocent children but Joffrey had never been innocent: rarely had anyone deserved their fate more. “So I’ve heard.”

“You don’t sound surprised, or even appalled,” Alynore said wonderingly.

His voice hoarse with earnestness, Garlan told Alynore, “At the first sign that Margaery suffered, I would have opened his throat without hesitation.”

Their new standard was run up a flagpole. The girls were gathered up and deposited in a carriage with Grandmother. As soon as the maester had stitched up Garlan’s face, he kissed the back of Alynore’s hand and helped her into the carriage, careful of her billowing skirts. It was becoming more difficult to see where she was walking. When she was settled in the carriage between Cassia and Ren, a fur thrown over them all, Garlan climbed onto his horse and took the flagpole from a waiting squire. The banner unfurled, snapping in the breeze, and all eyes seemed drawn to it as he led the way through the camp to the Long Mile. Wherever they went, cheers greeted them, the name “Tyrell” echoing on the crisp winter morning air, along with a chorus of “Garlan!”

He ignored them, scowling as his horse trotted along the Long Mile. He had warned Alynore not to allow the girls to peek out the carriage windows: the great lawns that spread from Highgarden, trimmed with ancient woodlands, were churned up and strewn with bodies. Already he saw Silent Sisters approaching the dead, carts drawn by mules piled high with bodies. Men delivering mercy worked their way through the bodies, too. The dirge of death had grown silent in the time he had been with Alynore: the men had either succumbed to their injuries or been granted mercy. His men cheered as he rode through the great gates and the noise signalled more men, who were cleaning out the remnants who had managed to flee inside the curtain-wall. He directed his horse through the many layers of gardens encircling the castle to the Golden Gate, golden roses entwined around the steel. The gates were opened for them and they trotted the short distance from the gate to the grand marble stairs sweeping upwards to the main entrance, past immaculate parterres, elegant topiary and mesmerising marble statues all glittering with dew in the sunlight, the frost long since melted by a strong sun that made him sweat in his armour.

There were no bodies here. Any blood spilled had been hastily concealed by the pale-gold gravel that lined walkways between parterres and follies. He cast his eye around, assessing for anything that might have been missed, before handing his standard off to a squire: a stable-boy ran up to take control of his horse, and the boy gave Garlan a grin before taking the reins.

Alynore appeared, carefully climbing out of the carriage, and Garlan darted to her, anxious that she might trip. He held out his arm and she smiled, but it faded all too quickly as her pale green eyes swept over the familiar sight of home.

“It looks the same,” she breathed, horror-struck. After all they knew had occurred here – the butchering of their family – Highgarden remained as it had always been: immaculate. “How can it look the same?”

“Highgarden remains the same,” Garlan said quietly, as his little cousins tumbled out of the carriage, smiling widely, their eyes glinting – they were home. “It is we who are altered.” He offered his arm to Grandmother, who grumbled and snarled as she manoeuvred herself out of the carriage, and her grip was tight when she grabbed him for support.

“Here we are, then,” she said plainly, gazing up at the magnificent entry to their home, the sweeping marble stairs and magnificent marble statues – Lyseni statues of beautiful young women with bared breasts carrying trays on which arrangements of trailing plants and flowers would usually be draped, dotted with lanterns to illuminate their graceful faces – to her youngest grandchildren running about the familiar parterres, giddy at being home, and Alynore, her hands gently caressing her swollen belly as she gazed up at the open loggias and the hints of the rooftop gardens and the glittering windows and sweeping verandas. Grandmother reached up and patted Garlan’s hand. “You’re a good boy.”

Grandmother extricated her arm from his, leaning on her cane to hobble determinedly toward the stairs. Garlan gazed up at the castle. It was exactly the same, but for one thing: no-one waved from the loggias or the balconies. There was no music playing: no-one danced in the outdoor ballrooms under canopies of spray-roses and honeysuckle: no longer did children play in the groves of rhododendrons and azaleas, or rush through the parterres to bring their mothers enormous gardenias decadent with perfume while ladies picnicked and embroidered, waiting for their men to return from a hunt, or dawdled beside the fountains for the coolness that came off the water while their children splashed and played.

He had never known Highgarden to be silent.

He was startled, then, when he heard his little cousins laughing and playing, teasing each other. Alyssa and Poppy, Cassia and Ren were playing a game with tiny Amna, hiding behind topiary. The delicious gurgle of their giggles echoed across the still gardens, and he smiled. His lip stung, the stitches tugging, but he watched the girls playing.

Tyrell rosebuds were playing in the gardens once again.

“Leave them,” Alynore said quietly, as Garlan opened his mouth to call the girls to them. “Let them play. Soon enough they’ll learn their mamas are not here to greet them.”

“They know what happened here,” Garlan frowned.

“Yes, but they are children. They do not truly understand; it is too abstract,” Alynore said quietly. She sighed heavily and gazed at Garlan. “We must be ready for their grief when they realise what it truly means.” She nodded at the girls’ septa, who dipped a curtsey and walked near the girls, keeping an eye on them without ruining their game.

Garlan offered Alynore his arm and she looped her elbow through his. She gathered her skirts in one hand as they climbed the sweeping stairs, and Garlan wondered if she was shivering from cold or dread as they reached the top of the stairs. It was eerie, he freely admitted it. The silence was eerie: he had never known Highgarden so quiet. So…lifeless.

It did not help that winter had come, stripping the vitality from the gardens. Only a Stark, he thought, might appreciate Highgarden in winter, for the skeletal structure of the gardens remained, trimmed with snow and glittering with ice. But they remembered how vibrant it was, how glorious the gardens were in high summer.

Now, everything lay dormant beneath the frost. Its time would come again.

So would theirs.


Larra flicked her gaze up as the door opened and she tracked Lord Tyrion’s movements as he made his way toward her, glancing about at the maesters busily searching books and making annotations, looking as if he didn’t wish to be seen as making a beeline for her. The pleasant hum of people meandering through the stacks joined the scratching of quills and the crackle of a fire in the small hearth and Lord Tyrion took note of everyone in the library as he approached Larra. He looked grim and uncomfortable yet determined.

He pulled a chair out and climbed onto it, sighing heavily, his sharp eyes drifting over the contents of the round table on which Larra’s work was spread, books piled high, a Far-Eye and a pair of Myrish compasses use for drafting and navigation glinting in the fading sunlight.

“Siege preparations,” he noted, and Larra nodded.

“Yes,” she said. He paused.

“There have been meetings to discuss strategy, then,” Tyrion said, and Larra’s lips twitched as she continued to read her scroll.

“Not since Jon returned,” Larra reassured him. And now was not the time to insist upon one: after Rhaegal had returned them to Winterfell, Jon had taken himself off to the crypts. She hadn’t seen him since. Larra knew better than to approach him: he needed time to think on all she had revealed. It helped that Lady Olenna Tyrell had prepared him somewhat. He had already been thinking of it, even if only because the idea upset his perception of Ned Stark as their father. Larra had come up to the library to prepare for their next strategy meeting. Larra glanced at Lord Tyrion. “Your brother sent pyromancers north. We need an idea how best we can utilise them.”

“Should you not discuss that at the next meeting?”

“Oh, we shall. At length,” Larra told him, failing to hide a grimace. She despised meetings that dragged on. Thrashing the dead horse, as it were. “It is always best to have some ideas prepared. At least we have a starting-point. Most of these ideas will be shot down for one reason or another.” She paused and looked at Lord Tyrion. “I should like you there, my lord, to provide your insight. You used wildfire to great effect during the Battle of the Blackwater.”

Lord Tyrion watched her carefully. “You request my presence at a war council?”

“Yes,” Larra said, giving him a look. “As I said, your insight will be invaluable.”

“I shall, of course, join you,” Lord Tyrion said. He made no mention of Daenerys. They both knew what Larra insinuated and what he had clarified: that Tyrion’s presence was requested but Daenerys as yet remained uninvited. He fidgeted in his seat. The topic provided a good segue to broach what Lord Tyrion had specifically sought out Larra to discuss. “May I ask why the Queen has not been invited to these talks?”

He knew, of course. It was a formality, hearing it from Larra’s own lips.

She gave him a stern look. “I would rather she not have any inkling how Winterfell is best defended during siege,” she said plainly, and Tyrion gazed back at her miserably.

“Larra,” he said quietly, but there was a warning bite in his tone, almost beseeching. “She saw.”

“Saw what?” Larra asked, turning to her scrolls and making a note.

“This morning,” Tyrion breathed. He wondered if it was true, or whether Daenerys’ mounting wrath had warped something in her mind. “Daenerys saw you make off with Rhaegal.”

Larra glanced at Tyrion, her expression stubborn, almost imperious. She told him, “Rhaegal made off with me.”

He stared, his breath gusting from him in a gasp. “So it is true.”

Larra Snow had claimed a dragon. A dragon? He recalled the Stark children, Jon and Larra included, had bonded deeply with those direwolf pups of theirs. Ghost used to lick his ears whenever he saw Tyrion at the Wall. But a dragon… How could a Stark ever bond with a dragon?

“Yes, it is true,” Larra said, and Lord Tyrion stared at her. She could practically see his mind working. “Rhaegal appeared weeks ago: we’ve been flying together ever since, every time the weather is fine… That look on your face. What thoughts are behind it?”

“You put yourself in great danger,” he wheezed anxiously. Daenerys’ fury had been horrifying to witness. “More than you realise.”

Larra laughed, the soft rich sound beautiful in the calm stillness of the library. Her teeth flashed as she smiled. “I have become intimate with terror in the years since we last met, Lord Tyrion. Of all the things I am frightened of, Daenerys Targaryen is the least of them.”

Tyrion closed his eyes, sighing. “How can you despise her so fiercely when you have never met?” he asked, then remembered what she had intimated on his arrival: that Daenerys had abused her brother. Larra’s intensely beautiful face became soft, thoughtful.

“You remember my dreams? I showed you my paintings,” Larra said, and Tyrion nodded. He had always been intrigued by Larra’s strange dreams of the past, recalling the dragon-dreams of Daenys the Dreamer and Daeron the Drunken. He had spent hours poring over Larra’s paintings, visions of the past, people they both knew and adored from songs and legends and histories. They used to discuss those histories over port and heavy fruitcake while playing cyvasse, Tyrion swathed in furs to fight the chill while Larra lounged in a simple wool frock, crocheting between turns, a majestic-looking longhaired cat purring in her lap. Now, this older, more striking Larra turned vivid purple eyes on him, severe and dangerous. “I have watched her for years. She does not inspire terror in me, nor love, but fury.”

“You once told me that anger makes you stupid,” Lord Tyrion reminded her, his expression earnest, beseeching.

“It does. Why d’you think I won’t meet with her. We gave her guest-right. I spent a long time being patient, being calm – because Bran needed me to be clear-headed and focused, to take all emotion out of my decisions…” Larra sighed, shaking her head. “After what she’s done – after what she did to Jon…I’m worried I’ll slit her throat to the bone if she but gives me a wrong look.”

“Then meet her where you may be stopped from doing something you will regret,” Tyrion told her, almost exasperatedly.

Larra watched him carefully, her anger subsiding to something far more dangerous. A predatory calm that made his skin tingle with awareness. Gently, she said, “I’m not sure you’d care for Daenerys to be around others when she hears what I have to say.”

“Do not anger her,” Tyrion warned her anxiously.

Larra gazed back at him and said calmly, “When she breathes fire herself I shall mind my words. She has made herself my enemy.”

“You are smarter than this,” Lord Tyrion said. Larra smiled. He narrowed his eyes.

She was smarter than this, he realised. So was Sansa… Larra had been dreaming of Daenerys for years and she and Sansa had had months to prepare for Daenerys’ arrival, he understood. Dread filled his stomach as he gazed at Larra’s intensely beautiful face, those exceptional amethyst eyes. Yes, Larra was smarter than this. So why antagonise Daenerys, unless it was for a reason.

Sansa was the model of courtesy. Arya lingered in the shadows. Larra…Larra would draw Daenerys’ ire. It had been decided between them within hours of their reunion. With Rhaegal and Larra bonded, she was always going to become a target for Daenerys’ wrath. Daenerys believed she owned the three dragons, that she alone had the power to command them, that because of them she was special. Larra bonding with Rhaegal threatened that: it would threaten her, the mythology she had built up inside her own head to make herself more god than girl. It threatened everything Daenerys believed.

Daenerys believed any disagreement was betrayal.

Rhaegal bonding with Larra would be perceived by Daenerys to be Rhaegal abandoning her. Betraying her. Rejecting her in favour of another.

She was all that was right and just in the world. To stand against her was to stand in the way of justice and goodness: to stand in her way was to declare themselves evil and worthy of annihilation. Any who opposed her must die, for they were evil.

So Larra would draw Daenerys’ ire and keep her focus. Larra, who had bonded with a dragon of her own, who had spent weeks learning to fly in harmony with Rhaegal as if they were one, who was teaching herself airborne acrobatics and practising her swordsmanship while flying… Larra, who had been highly educated in strategy and knew how to live out in the wilds alone… Perception was everything: let Daenerys believe Larra was the greater threat. Draw her focus away from Jon. Away from Winterfell and the North. With Rhaegal it was possible for Larra to go anywhere…and Daenerys would give chase out of fury and fear of Larra’s ambitions.

“How did she react, when she saw me with Rhaegal?” Larra asked curiously, wondering if her insight was accurate.

Lord Tyrion gave her a dark look. “There was…talk of betrayal, of theft and usurpation, that she should have expected nothing else from Robert Baratheon’s dogs.”

“That’s interesting,” Larra said, though her tone contradicted her words. Lord Tyrion frowned at her. “She didn’t wonder why Rhaegal had bonded with another?”

“No,” Lord Tyrion said slowly. Daenerys hadn’t: he, on the other hand, had been trying to work it out ever since.

Larra watched him carefully. “You’re here trying to mollify her. You want me to welcome her as a treasured friend, to throw myself on my knees before me and thank her for coming all this way and beg her forgiveness for my rudeness.”

“I don’t,” Lord Tyrion said pointedly.

“She’ll be sorely disappointed,” Larra said bluntly. She watched Lord Tyrion wincing, his eyes troubled. “Her rage frightens you.”

“She is…unpredictable.”

“That’s a delicate word for unstable,” Larra said, and Lord Tyrion gave her a subtle grimace of agreement.

“D’you know, I have never once thought ‘I wish Father were here’…now I find myself longing to consult with him,” Lord Tyrion admitted almost wistfully. “He who served Aerys for twenty years, through their youth, through the Defiance and all that came after. I would ask him how he did it.”

“You already know the answer to that,” Larra said gently. “Your father was intimidating.”

“A thing I never was.”

“You are not tall,” Larra corrected. “Your intelligence, your sharp tongue, your confidence and shrewd nature and your goodness – combined, they make you very intimidating. Joffrey lived in terror of you… You’ve forgotten who you are. You’ve forgotten that you are powerful, that you are intimidating and brilliant and strong and just. The gods made you short: your father and Cersei and even Daenerys would make you small. Don’t let them.”

Lord Tyrion gazed at Larra. Slowly, he slid down off his chair, reached to cup her face and gave her a tender kiss on her cheek.

“What was that for?” she asked gently, and Lord Tyrion was almost startled to see her blush as she raised a hand to her cheek.

“I do believe I have missed you,” Tyrion told her, with great feeling.

“I know I have missed you,” Larra said quietly, giving him a wistful smile. “My mind has been stagnant far too long. Would you join me for conversation and cyvasse, as you used to?”

“It would be my pleasure,” Lord Tyrion smiled.

“Good conversation is worth more than gold,” Larra said thoughtfully. “Especially enjoyed over a game… Tell your lady to come to the hall later. She may take the empty seat beside me for the evening meal.”

He smiled miserably and sighed. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“It is a good thing for her that you do,” Larra replied.

“Whatever you and Sansa have plotted – for whatever reason… Be careful,” Lord Tyrion murmured seriously. “Daenerys does not play by anyone’s rules but her own.”

Larra’s eyes glinted dangerously, her expression severe, serious, when she replied, “I know.”


Laughing, Larra stepped hastily out of the way as a pygmy goat kid bleated and frolicked past, then another. Both wore dolls strapped to their backs with ribbons: the dolls held lances – familiar-looking crochet hooks. One doll wore a grey cape: the other wore crimson. All around, men noticed and roared with laughter and children tumbled into the Great Hall, laughing and screaming with delight. Calanthe led the charge, shouting at the goats to stop.

“You’ll get us in troub – oh!” Calanthe skidded to a stop in front of Larra, who raised her eyebrows, hands on her waist.

“Hello, Mummy,” cooed Leona innocently, giving her a pretty smile full of pearly teeth, raising her arms to Larra, who scooped her up and nestled her neatly on her waist. She ignored what Leona had called her, though she noted the look Narcisa and Delphine exchanged as they hung back with Cade, who was trying to look inconspicuous. Larra reached down and scooped up one of the pygmy goat kids bleating about her ankles, the knight dragging amongst the rushes, its lance lost.

“Whose idea was this?” she enquired, examining the cape worn by the knight as she managed to extricate it from the kid. The children remained silent, exchanging quick glances. “Hm. Line up, please. Smallest to tallest – you too, Cadeon.” His lips parted in protest but he shrugged and joined the line spanning the length of the high table, where Jon was already sat beside Sansa, who was chatting with Arya. Bran watched the proceedings with a small smile lingering on his lips. Slowly, she walked along the line, starting with little Rosamund, who smiled contritely up at her.

“Rosamund,” she said sweetly, and the other children groaned. “Would you like to tell me who came up with the game?” Rosamund swung where she stood, pursing her lips and glancing down the line. She glanced up at Larra and shook her head. “No? That’s strange.” She wondered what had been promised to Rosamund, who adored sweets but most of all cuddles. Next came Neva, who blushed scarlet but kept her eyes on the floor: beside her, Briar was fussing over the second kid, her lips quivering as she tried to hide a smile.

Neva wouldn’t betray her brothers and sisters: Briar was too stubborn to either.

Larra stopped before Altheda. She seemed to vibrate with the effort of keeping silent as her gaze darted to the side. Larra smiled benignly at her, waiting, and behind the children, Bran chuckled softly. Altheda squeaked and grimaced.

Then she burst: “It had nothing to do with me! Yes! Alright, I was enjoying it, I admit that, but I didn’t do anything! It was Calanthe! It was all Calanthe. I’m not going to be punished for something I didn’t do! If anyone deserves to get punished, it should be Calanthe!”

Behind them, Jon’s shoulders shook as he hid his laugh in his cup. Bran’s eyes glittered, and the people nearby laughed softly.

“Well, I think it’s safe to say we all just lost a bit of respect for you there, Al,” Larra clicked her tongue. She sighed and gazed at each of the children in turn, doing her best to appear stern. She would be lying if she said she was not tickled. “This is just so disappointing. I mean – forcing these two innocent kids to joust for your entertainment.”

“T’was you we got the idea from!” Calanthe blurted indignantly, and Larra’s eyebrows shot up. “Bran told us you used to do the same thing!” Larra turned to stare at Bran.

“I never!” she gasped incredulously. As the goat wriggled against her, she rubbed her chin over its little head, kissing it. Mischievously, she added: “T’was cats. Trickier to get the saddles on them but infinitely more amusing to watch them saunter about with the knights on their backs.”

“We tried the cats but they’re too small,” Calanthe said disappointedly.

“And their claws are sharp,” Briar said, holding up her hands, which were torn to shreds.

“We thought about racing frogs but the ponds are all frozen over and I’m not going near the one by the weirwood – it’s heated by dragonfire,” Calanthe said stoutly. Larra’s lips twitched.

“There are stoats. I saw tracks in the godswood,” she said gently. “They’d make for wonderful racers. You can go out to the godswood tomorrow and hunt some.”

The children grinned: only Calanthe paused, frowning at Larra – suspicious. She made her face benign and let Leona climb down, latching her hand onto Crisantha’s skirts almost immediately, sucking her thumb. Cade caught Larra’s eye and smirked.

“Do they have any chance of catching a stoat?” Bran asked, as the older children guided the little ones to the table. On special occasions, the children were invited to dine in the Great Hall. Larra wandered around the end of the table, her hems billowing at her feet, and she sighed as she settled down into a chair beside Jon. The kid tucked its head under her chin, calm, and she stroked its little legs and kissed its head.

“No more than you did catching frogs when I sent you and Rickon out to find them,” she said, grinning.

Bran laughed. “You took such delight in tricking us.”

“You were so innocent, it was hard to resist,” she laughed. “I only ever did it when I was close to throttling you.”

“You sent us out every afternoon, searching for one thing or another!”

“I did, didn’t I?” Larra chuckled. She examined the cape worn by the knight that had been tied to the goat kid with ribbons. “At least they’re being creative. Look at the stitching – Cissa made this, though she’ll pretend she’ll have nought to do with childish play.”

“You should send them hunting in the crypts for rodents of unusual size,” Jon murmured, and Larra glanced over at him, laughing.

“After telling them the story of the Rat Cook,” Sansa added, gazing past Jon to Larra, who laughed richly.

“I did play some awful tricks on you, didn’t I?” she sighed.

“You were so playful,” Bran smiled warmly. “And we adored every fright.”

“The best was the Snafflefang,” Arya said softly. Jon and Larra burst out laughing. She had spent months convincing her siblings of the existence of the Snafflefang, leaving clues and tracks and all sorts around the castle, setting them up to believe that in actual fact Old Nan was the Snafflefang of her stories. When Father had learned what she was doing, he had joined in the game. The usually stoic Lord of Winterfell had delivered the bedtime stories Larra had dreamed up and handled the appearance of every clue with utmost sincerity, continuing the ruse.

“I always liked the cards,” said Bran fondly, and Larra smiled. Every night when they were boys, she would cut her deck of painted cards and from the random draw create stories. Rickon used to love the game: it was the only thing that got him into bed, even those nights when he was fraught with exhaustion and in tears, refusing to sleep because he wasn’t tired.

“Do you tease them?” Jon asked, nodding toward the girls. Larra smiled softly.

“No,” she said quietly. “They’ve been frightened enough.”

She stroked the kid and smiled, content with the goat sleeping in her lap, sharing a cup of stout with Jon while they waited for the food to be brought out. The Great Hall became noticeably quiet, and she glanced up. Her amusement seemed to seep out of her: beside her, Jon went rigid, though he did not look up from the table. She reached over and gently squeezed his hand, as Sansa lowered her wine cup, her eyes on the new arrival.

Daenerys Targaryen looked beautiful. Of course she did: she devoted hours to her elaborate braids and had armies of maids to serve her. She had come from Essos with a fortune in Qartheen fabrics and freed slaves who had become her seamstresses. The gown she wore tonight was a work of art, and Larra knew Sansa would be admiring the many hours and the skill of dozens of embroiderers that went into its creation. Gone were the Qartheen gowns, the Meereenese tokars, the horsehair vests and painted silk trousers. Daenerys favoured a new silhouette: her lightly tanned shoulders were bared by a wide neckline that fell off the shoulders, her waist highlighted by tight stays, her bodice drawn to a point. Heavy, open over-sleeves billowed elegantly to the floor while fitted ones were laced tightly around her wrists. The thick fabric was deep and lustrous, like simmering coals, and the hems and lining of her heavy, billowing sleeves were richly embroidered with shimmering, glittering beads and gemstones in fiery tones of copper, garnet and ruby, creating the illusion of flames. The hems of her full overskirts were similarly embroidered, looking like they were trimmed with smouldering embers. They shimmered and glowed with every step, refracting the light from hundreds of candles littered along the tables.

Embers trail her every step, Larra thought, glancing covertly at one of the long tables, where Lord Tyrion watched Daenerys from behind his wine-cup.

She was the only one in the room wearing jewels. They sparkled and shone in the candlelight. She was the only one dressed as if for a court ball. She stood out – as alien and other.

Larra noticed her jewellery – a choker of small black-gold medallions, each of them copying the Targaryen sigil, linked with rubies. A rope of black pearls that tumbled over the bodice of her dress, from which a fat ruby hung. Over her heavily-embroidered sleeves, her wrists were bedecked with elaborate bracelets, configured as many-headed dragons, the black-gold set with rubies and obsidian.

Daenerys swept along the Great Hall, head held high as if she owned the place, her eyes hard. Her pale-silver hair glimmered in the candlelight, and Larra wondered how long her braids had taken – what it was like to have such time to waste on frivolousness such as hairstyles. Only when she reached the high table did she seem to falter, only for a heartbeat, as Jon continued to speak in low tones to Sansa, leaning in toward her – ignoring Daenerys completely. Beneath the table, Sansa rested her hand gently on Jon’s thigh. It was grounding: Jon gave her an appreciative smile.

He could not look at her. Not today.

Not now that he knew.

Beside him, Larra sat lazily in her chair, stroking the baby goat and staring Daenerys down, a challenge in her eyes that grew with Daenerys’ every step closer, until she stood before them and her haughty expression grew uncertain. Her eyes drifted over Sansa, in a simple dark gown, her hair shining more beautifully than any crown, to Jon, willing him to look at her, for his eyes to smoulder with desire as he beheld her in her new gown, and finally…the sister. Jon’s twin.

Daenerys had spent many moments steeling her nerves to enter the Great Hall – so long, in fact, the children had rushed past her without paying her any heed, engrossed in their game. She had watched the Starks laughing and teasing, stunned by the way the Lannister girls flocked to Larra Snow, eager to have her approval, giddy when she joined in their fun, respectful of her when she admonished them. Daenerys had watched Larra Snow, and the way Jon Snow’s gaze often flitted back to his fiercely beautiful sister. She was dressed even more simply than Lady Sansa. Her hair was drawn into two thick, raised braids away from her face, free tendrils curling rebelliously and framing her fiercely beautiful face, the braids twisted and pinned in a thick bun at the back of her head. Whoever did the braids had very clever fingers: her profile was exquisitely beautiful. She wore a dove-grey dress made of wool, with fitted sleeves and full skirts that fell in a pleasing silhouette around her feet when she stood, trailing ever so slightly behind her when she walked. The neckline and sleeves were daintily embroidered with tiny clear glass beads and milky pearls of different sizes. They shimmered and glittered in the candlelight like the sun on frostbitten mountains. Daenerys was reminded of the True North and her fleeting impression of snow-capped mountains and lethal gorges.

An army of serving girls appeared. Daenerys’ entrance was rather lost in the sudden bustle as dozens of girls carried out great tureens of stew and jugs of stout, ale and wine.

“Do sit down before the stew get cold,” said Larra Snow, giving Daenerys a scalding look. Daenerys hurried around the table, blurting an apology as she bumped into the younger brother as she accidentally kicked the wheel of his chair.

“I am sorry,” she blushed. His dark eyes glittered; he raised a pale hand, brushing it aside. As Daenerys settled into a seat between Larra Snow and her crippled brother, she glanced at the brother, who was reading raven-scrolls piled into his lap, and at Larra Snow, who was stroking the baby goat she had confiscated from the children. As a maid set down a steaming tureen and lifted the lid, Larra Snow made a hungry noise.

“Dumplings,” she said hungrily, reaching for the ladle and doling herself out a generous helping of rich beef stew, thick with pearl onions, gravy-drenched carrots, cooked with wholegrain mustard and stout. Steam billowed to the hammer-beam roof and Larra’s eyes glimmered a vivid amethyst as she dug out three knobbly, crusty suet dumplings. The tops were golden and crisp while the bottoms were soft, pillowy and soaked with gravy, and they were filled with herbs and strong Northern cheese. Dishes of cabbage and other green vegetables were placed along the tables, and Larra sprinkled a pinch of ground pepper on hers as a luxury – she couldn’t get enough of pepper. Using her spoon and her fingers, she dug in.

Beside her, Daenerys waited patiently to be served. Only when Larra had finished her first dumpling – she saved the other two for last, her favourite – did Daenerys reach for the ladle and pour herself a bowl of stew.

Lord Tyrion appeared before them, pausing as he wandered across the hall to his young cousins, and gave them both a courteous bow. Daenerys’ lips thinned as she realised he had made no differentiation between herself, his Queen, and the bastard at her side. She knew Tyrion had visited this place years ago but did not know what his bonds were like here at Winterfell. He had interceded on her behalf, of course, to secure an invitation to dine with Larra Snow.

Of all Jon’s sisters, even the eerie-eyed one, Larra Snow frightened her the most.

“If you only ever do one thing right in this conquest of yours, it was naming Tyrion Lannister your Hand,” said Larra Snow, finally acknowledging her presence as Lord Tyrion waddled off to sit beside his eldest cousin. “He’s a good man.”

Daenerys watched Lord Tyrion with his young cousins, remembering the night at Dragonsotne when her Unsullied had defended her from the vicious child. She had not scarred: her bare shoulders were proof of that, and she was glad. She did not like thinking of that night, the night that Jon Snow had scolded her so terribly.

Daenerys said, “I wish I shared your faith in him.”

Larra looked sharply at her, and Daenerys flinched at the severity in her eyes. “That is a reflection on you, not him.”

Daenerys sipped her wine, barely able to hide a grimace. It was not Arbour gold, as she had become accustomed to drinking. “I didn’t ask him to be my Hand simply because he was good.”

“I’m glad to hear it. Goodness only gets you so far. Combine that with brilliance…” Larra Snow trailed off. She ate a few bites of her meal, then said thoughtfully, “Tyrion knows the game better than anyone.”

Tersely, Daenerys asked, “And what game is that?”

“The only one that’s ever mattered to you,” Larra Snow said coolly. “The game of thrones.”

“I did not come to Westeros to play a game.”

Larra laughed softly, and as she did so she noticed the quiet in the hall. Unusual, for mealtime – but then again, so was Daenerys’ presence. It was the first time anyone had seen Larra speak to her, and they watched carefully. “Of course you did. The winner gets the Iron Throne. It’s what you’ve wanted all along. There’s no need to convince me otherwise. You want the Iron Throne and will do anything to get it.”

“And that is why I chose Lord Tyrion as my Hand, because he was good, and intelligent, and knows when he must be ruthless.”

Larra pursed her lips and said tartly, “Something you routinely fail at.”

Daenerys blinked, stunned by her audacity. She blinked quickly and stared at Larra Snow. “I beg your pardon.”

“Oh, you’re perfectly nice…” Larra said, waving a hand airily as she reached for her cup of stout. “You have all the appearance of goodness – you recognise, at least, what doing the right thing looks like…” She gave Daenerys an assessing look, and whatever she saw – or did not see – made her pull a face that made Daenerys blush. “Your mind may be improved by education. You’ve much yet to learn about when to be ruthless and when to be gentle. Sadly that lesson will be learned too late for some.”

Daenerys ignored the jibe about the Lion Culling.

“I thought Lord Tyrion knew how to be ruthless,” Daenerys said coldly. “I thought he knew his sister.”

Larra watched her carefully for a moment before answering. She settled in her chair, casual and confident. “Shortly before my father was named Hand of the King to Robert Baratheon, guards captured a deserter from the Night’s Watch. We were raised with the knowledge that there’s none more dangerous than a deserter. They know their life is forfeit if they are taken, so they will not flinch from any crime, no matter how vile. Cersei has been playing the game better than anyone for decades. She has found a way to murder anyone who has ever crossed her. She understands that her life is forfeit should she lose the game. Cersei has lost her sons. She plays for no-one but herself now. She has nothing to lose but her life. She will defend it viciously.” Larra Snow shrugged delicately, the fabric of her dress shifting over her full breasts, the pearls and beads at her neckline glinting prettily. “Tyrion understood the Cersei who lived for her children. This Cersei, bereft of her sons, is an entirely new monster.”

Coldly, Daenerys said, “I expected it to be an easy thing for him to betray his own siblings.”

Larra sneered at her, saying, “That is your experience.” After a moment, she made a thoughtful, amused noise. “Interesting, isn’t it. I sacrificed a kingdom for my brothers…you murdered yours for a khalasaar.”

The hall became, if possible, even quieter. Only the children, ignorant of the politics at play at the high table, continued to chatter. Larra noticed Narcisa and Cade watching carefully, either side of Tyrion.

Daenerys bristled. “Often I dreamed that Rhaegar had lived,” she said. “I dreamed what my life would have been like had he triumphed at the Trident and been crowned king.”

“You are not alone in that.”

“You have lost brothers, I believe,” Daenerys said icily. “Two of them.”

“I didn’t lose them. Losing them implies there is a possibility, however tiny, that one day they may return,” Larra said sternly. “Rickon was a casualty of battle. Robb was cut down in cold blood.”

“We have that in common. We’ve both known what it means to lead people who aren’t inclined to accept a woman’s rule,” Daenerys said, trying to smile. “And we’ve done a damn good job of it, from what I can tell.”

Larra scoffed. She laughed outright. A grin teasing at her lips, her eyes sparkling dangerously, she said, “Might I ask what you have observed here at Winterfell that leads you to the opinion that Northerners have no respect for female rule? Soldiers tripping over themselves to follow Lady Mormont’s orders; Lady Karstark instructing archery; the leaders of the Free Folk having the King’s ear; Sansa ruling faultlessly in Jon’s stead?” She acknowledged each in turn, raising her cup to the women she had named. Daenerys gritted her teeth. Larra gave her a withering look. “You are projecting your own experience once again. Here in the North, we respect prudence, wisdom, loyalty and mutual respect, no matter where it comes from. This is a harsh land and our people live hard lives. Everything is built on respect, the knowledge that we will always look after each other. We take care of our people and they take care of us.”

Daenerys blinked and attempted a serene smile, though she felt fury rising. “I cannot feel that we are at odds with one another.”

Larra tilted her head in a way only hunters would know was predatory. Silkily, she asked, “Why do you think that is?”

Heedless of the warnings – Larra’s tilted head, her dangerously soft voice – Daenerys answered, “Your brother.”

Larra’s eyes hardened. “And why should my brother put us at odds?”

“You think perhaps I am manipulating him,” Daenerys smiled coaxingly.

“You seriously mistake my brother’s character if you think small tits and elaborate braids will turn his head,” Larra said bluntly, rolling her eyes. She drank from her cup and Daenerys had the sudden urge to smack it from her hand. Those fierce amethyst eyes turned on Daenerys, scathing. “And mine, too, if you believe I’d worry Jon could ever be manipulated…or bullied.”

“Since I was small, I have known only one goal: the Iron Throne,” Daenerys said, nettled. “Taking it back from the people who destroyed my family, and almost destroyed yours –“

“Your father destroyed your family, with no help from anyone,” Larra interrupted, all but hissing. Daenerys jumped at the suddenness of her rage. “It is time you started facing uncomfortable truths. And do not think to use my family’s pain to justify your cause.”

Daenerys blinked dazedly. She was getting nowhere. This was not how it was supposed to be. Why was Jon not interceding on her behalf – why did he allow his sister to speak to her thus? Why had Lord Tyrion not warned her this might happen, that Larra Snow would use this opportunity to belittle and shame her? Did he want to see her humiliated? She shot a nasty look cross the hall at Lord Tyrion. Yes, she thought. Look at him with his cousins. He wants me punished for what happened to his precious House.

“My war was against Cersei,” Daenerys said. She blinked, her anger melting away as she thought of Jon Snow, the one man whom she could rely on, the one man who told her truth absolutely and without apology, who was just and good, her equal in every way. “Until I met Jon. Now I’m here, half a world away, fighting Jon’s war alongside him. Tell me, who manipulated whom?”

Larra laughed softly, shaking her head. Her curls – so like Jon’s – danced about, lovingly brushing her face. There was no humour in her amethyst eyes as she said, “Jon’s war…a war for life for all the people of this realm and every other… Interesting that you had to be manipulated into fighting for those you claim to deserve to rule by blood-right.”

Her face turned hard. She reached across Daenerys to her brother. Lord Brandon, the cripple, reached over a pale hand and passed her something.

“What is that?” Daenerys demanded waspishly, scowling at the tight raven-scroll in Larra Snow’s scarred fingers. Her heart hammered in her chest and her stomach turned as she recognised the seal glinting in the candlelight. A harpy.

His voice so gentle it was horrifying, Brandon Stark told her, “You ripped Meereen apart and stitched up the wounds poorly. But you never treated the rot. Now it has spread. Civil war wages in Meereen. The streets are washed red with the blood of those you had vowed to protect.”

Larra Snow unfurled the scroll and read it before sighing and handing it to Daenerys. “The Meereenese are at civil war. The only thing both sides agree upon is that Daenerys Targaryen abandoned the city: they reject your sovereignty.”

Daenerys felt cold. Her food turned to ash in her mouth.

Larra Snow said, with great sadness, “Daenerys… Those dragons were the ruin of you.”

Daenerys snarled at her. “They were the making of me.”

“Now you are nothing without them.”

Notes:

You waited so patiently for it! I hope it lives up to expectations!

Chapter 47: Motivation

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

47

Motivation


Her elephant stampeded and turned his trebuchet to dust as she cackled triumphantly.

“Not again!” he moaned, slamming his cup down on the arm of his chair.

“These are beginners’ blunders,” Larra clicked her tongue. “Whatever is the problem, Lord Tyrion?”

“I am entirely too sober, that is the problem,” Tyrion grumbled, and Larra laughed softly as he examined his cup. She eyed the tiles and waited for Tyrion’s next move.

“You’re distracted,” Larra accused, hiding her annoyance. She had little time to do as she wished and had wished to spend it playing a challenging game of cyvasse. “Is your lady giving you grief?”

“Which?” Tyrion asked petulantly. Larra raised an eyebrow.

“I can’t imagine Tisseia giving you trouble,” she said gently.

Tyrion exhaled slowly. “No. She is perfect,” he said grumpily. “I am the terror of our chamber at the moment. Thank you, by the way.”

“For what?”

“For putting me up with Tisseia in those charmingly cosy chambers,” Tyrion said. What he meant to say was thank you for removing him from Daenerys’ immediate vicinity. She had to work hard to find him: his private chamber with Tisseia was his one reprieve. The one place he relaxed: Tisseia was devoted to helping him relax.

“I remember how delicate you southerners are when it comes to the cold,” Larra teased, and eyed the tiles before them.

They were playing cyvasse, yes, but Tyrion knew the Stark sisters had begun their own game in earnest the moment Daenerys stepped foot in Winterfell. He had noticed that the chamber he shared with Tisseia was close to the Starks’ own rooms, to the nursery where his cousins were being raised by Larra. He was closer to beautiful, shrewd Lady Sansa than the Queen he served as Hand…

A queen no longer, except within her own mind, he reminded himself: Larra had chosen her moment carefully, delivering the news to Daenerys in public – to provoke a reaction that could not be hidden from anyone. Daenerys had been in a foul temper ever since. Meereen had rejected her. She said that the slaves she had freed had betrayed her. It did not occur to her that she had abandoned the slaves first. And it had not been taken kindly when Tyrion reminded Daenerys that she had left a city tearing itself apart to the care of sellswords who had no loyalty except to their coin-purses.

How Daenerys ached to return to Dragons’ Bay and turn it all to ash. They were saved in that regard: Drogon had not been seen in weeks, since their journey north, Viserion had disappeared on Dragonstone and none could find him, nor spend the time to search…and Rhaegal… Rhaegal had bonded with another: they would never allow Daenerys to mount them – so long as Larra lived. Even if Daenerys got her wish and had Larra skewered by Unsullied for the theft of her dragon, there was no guarantee that Rhaegal would bond with Daenerys – something Tyrion had been quick to inform her.

He was glad to have brought ancient scrolls and texts from the library of Dragonstone, to further investigate historic writings on dragonlore, direct from the – well, the dragon’s mouth, as it were. He had spent his childhood dreaming of dragons and his adolescence researching them and now in his adulthood he found himself observing them in person: his childhood dreams had come true. Tyrion knew that only those with Valyrian blood – with dragonlords’ blood – with Targaryen blood – could claim dragons. The Dance of the Dragons had proven this: dragonseed had claimed the feral dragons of Dragonstone.

Larra Snow had bonded with Rhaegal. A motherless bastard from the North.

Who was the mother? He pondered the same question most had been asking of Ned Stark for years, ever since the most unlikely man ever to father bastards brought two to Winterfell when the Rebellion had ended. There was no Targaryen blood in the Stark family: they had never intermarried with the Targaryens, though history claimed promises of Targaryen brides had been made during the Dance – never fulfilled, of course.

So where did the bond come from?

There were the direwolves to consider, too: he knew from his last visit to Winterfell how fiercely bonded the Stark children were with their direwolves. And no matter their name, Jon and Larra Snow had Stark blood.

Tormund Giantsbane claimed that Jon – and the other Starks – had warg blood: the ability to skinchange. Tyrion didn’t understand it, however, it sounded accurate to the bond between the Starks and their wolves…and if they could enter the minds of direwolves, one of the most cunning animals in the natural world, surely it was not a stretch to imagine they might be able to slip into the minds of dragons too?

He kept his thoughts to himself: the idea that Larra may have an innate power to enter the minds of her dragons might ignite Daenerys’ wrath towards her – and Tyrion was desperate to avoid her anger. Larra, for her own reasons, was not. Tyrion gazed at her, ignoring their game completely, pondering what she thought to gain by antagonising Daenerys.

Jon.

It all came down to Jon. Remembering their historic conversations, Tyrion understood that Larra had been raised to look after her brothers: it was second-nature, and her instincts were fierce. She thought of her brothers first and herself rarely at all.

The wolves are circling, Tyrion thought. He had never seen wolves hunt but he had read about them. They hunted in packs: and they hunted enormous prey to feed the entire pack. They took the risk, knowing they were protected by their pack-mates. They stalked their chosen prey for miles before manoeuvring them away from their herd.

Tyrion was up near the nursery: Ser Jorah was housed near his Mormont relations: the Unsullied and Dothraki were garrisoned in Winter’s Town, their weapons and horses removed from them: Drogon was inaccessible.

Power resides where men believe it resides, Varys’ soft voice reminded him. The Stark sisters were doing their utmost to keep Daenerys isolated from those who gave her power. The Stark women were effectively stripping Daenerys of any power she believed she had – by denying she had any to begin with.

Tyrion moved his rabble, deep in his cup. “Oh, now you’re not even trying, my lord!”

“What?” he blurted, wide-eyed, and she unveiled her hidden heavy horse, obliterating his largest army. “Oh, for the love of the gods!”

“You have not played this game before, my lord?” asked a deep voice, sensual and rich. Larra glanced over at another table set with cyvasse tiles, where Lady Nym played an idle game. Ser Gerold Dayne’s vivid violet eyes seemed more curious than taunting as he examined their tiles, his gaze sharp and assessing.

Tyrion had been uncertain when the two Dornish sashayed so elegantly into the chamber: it would be the perfect opportunity to exact revenge for their fallen prince. No Varys, no Jaime, just Tyrion and a Queen who would not care that he had died, unless he died putting her on the Iron Throne.

Oberyn had been a man among millions. That’s not a monster, I told Cersei…that’s just a baby…

He knew the Dornish considered Tyrion’s life inadequate to their loss. Yet they had to know, surely, that Prince Oberyn had been aching for a chance at revenge for decades. Tyrion’s trial had given him that opportunity and the Red Viper had seized it.

“Something about me seems to have driven Lord Tyrion to distraction,” Larra said, her tone softly teasing, but she watched Tyrion with some concern. She knew why he was distracted: she wasn’t helping him sleep easier. “Last time he was at Winterfell, I thrashed him.”

“You are not alone in this, my lord,” Lady Nym purred, draped elegantly on a chair opposite Ser Gerold. She wore her silks, as always, but heavy velvets, jacquards and furs also swathed her elegant body, all in rich hues of gold, ochre, amber and decadent blood-orange shimmering with embroidery and beading. Her long braid glinted with copper wire.

“In fact, last time we met, Lord Tyrion promised me a delicious spanking over the cyvasse tiles,” Larra mused, and a lascivious grin briefly illuminated Tyrion’s face. Had Robb known the Imp had spoken to Larra thus, despite the saddle design for Bran, Robb’s unsheathed sword would have been the least of Lord Tyrion’s worries. “Dreaming of it kept me sane for many years. The rematch, not the promise of a spanking.”

“Not from me, anyway,” Lord Tyrion winked, and the two Dornishmen chuckled.

“You are truly so gifted in the game?” Ser Gerold asked curiously. “I hear Lord Tyrion’s mind is sharp as the Old Lion’s.”

“Sharper – he keeps it well-honed,” Larra said, smiling softly at Lord Tyrion. “Not like me. It was a pleasure to play him. I’d hoped his game had improved even more in the years since we last met.”

“My heart is not in it,” apologised Lord Tyrion. “Forgive me, dear Larra. I shall return when I may play a game worthy of you.” He slid out of his chair and bowed to her, then to Lady Nym and Ser Gerold.

“Your tiles, my lord,” Larra reminded him. He turned at the threshold of the chamber and gazed back at her, a smile in his eyes that had been lost throughout their game.

“Leave them. I shall return,” he said softly. His eyes drifted over the chamber, where Lady Nym and Ser Gerold sat either side of a table closest to the hearth, and a third game was underway between one of the Knights of the Vale and Qhaero, sworn ko to Calanthe Lannister. “Winterfell has its first cyvasse parlour.”

Larra smiled. Lady Nym and Ser Gerold spoke in low tones as Lord Tyrion disappeared. Lady Nym rose elegantly from her chair. She dipped a polite curtsey to Larra, who smiled softly and nodded as she passed, gliding out of the chamber and taking with her the scent of orange blossom and spice. Larra fiddled with some of her cyvasse pieces, disappointment settling over her like a cloak. She had invited Lord Tyrion to cyvasse because she had wanted his perspective on certain matters: he was tactful enough not to ask for specifics if she gave him hypotheticals, no matter how much he might wonder.

She could only talk to Sansa and her experiences were limited. They had had many war councils while Jon was away, all discussing how to shift battle plans in the moment if necessary…but what happened after? What happened when people discovered the truth? What did it matter, really, unless Jon and Larra chose to do something with the information? What if…what if others chose to use it against them?

Never forget what you are. Others will not. Wear it like armour and it can never be used against you, Lord Tyrion had once advised. Yet in donning that armour, in accepting their name and their blood, the tragic circumstances of their birth, they left themselves more open, more vulnerable to danger than ever before. Father had done well in maintaining the ruse that they were bastards: nobody had cared to look further than Father’s tarnished honour. Yet as…as the trueborn children of Rhaegar and Lyanna…

It wasn’t just Daenerys Targaryen they needed to be mindful of.

Half of Westeros would want them dead: the other half would seek to use them to get close to the Iron Throne. Jon would be the ideal: he was a tried and true warrior, a leader – and male. He could father children, heirs to the Iron Throne. After Jon, the best alternative choice was Larra: young, strong and raised all her life in Westeros. She had no interest in the Iron Throne, of perpetuating three centuries of war, manipulation and political intrigue that had ripped Westeros apart until it was no longer recognisable. The Iron Throne had bathed the continent in three centuries of fire and blood.

Perhaps they should rename the Targaryen dynasty, she mused miserably, fiddling with the tiny dragon piece Robb had once gifted her. The Reign of Terror. It’s not quite over yet…

“Do you still wish to play, my lady?” Ser Gerold asked her, and Larra glanced over, eyeing him curiously. She had spoken with many of the knights and lords who had joined Jon on his journey north – the demanding Lord Tyrell and his lovely son Dickon, who shared his brother’s decent nature, Ser Davos, Beric Dondarrion and even the gruff but decent Sandor Clegane. Ser Gerold had arrived with one hundred Dornish spears, led by Obara Sand: Larra didn’t know him.

“If you would care to join me,” she said politely, and the knight stood up. He was very tall – almost as tall as Gendry, she would guess. He had broad, flat soldiers that would make women sigh, and his pale gold hair glinted in the candlelight, all but that lock of dark hair which seemed to drink in the shadows of the chamber. When he sat before her, his focus on Tyrion’s tiles, she sighed softly and leisurely examined his features. He was incredibly beautiful. Those lush lips and that perfect nose, dark-gold eyelashes that glittered in the candlelight, cheekbones sharper than Valyrian steel.

She had thought Ser Jaime was handsome when he first arrived at Winterfell – shining and golden and perfect, not at all what Larra found attractive, but even she acknowledged that he had been incredibly handsome. Darkstar’s beauty made Ser Jaime’s golden looks seem tarnished and dull by comparison. It was annoying how beautiful he was.

“When you have looked your fill, lady, perhaps you would care to set your tiles,” he said, his accent rich and decadent, and Larra laughed.

“It must get irritating – people struck dumb by the sight of you,” she said thoughtfully. “Perhaps that’s why you’re so angry.”

“Am I angry?”

“Your eyes are angry,” Larra said softly.

“Why do you think that is?”

“You’d rather they remarked upon your skills with a blade than your looks,” Larra said, and Ser Gerold smirked.

“Perhaps,” he agreed offhandedly. “What about you?”

“Me?”

“You must know men are in awe of you,” Ser Gerold murmured.

“Perhaps they’re easily impressed,” Larra said quietly.

“I’ve been at Winterfell long enough to know this is not the case,” Ser Gerold said softly.

“It irritated you when my sister mentioned Ser Arthur Dayne,” Larra observed. “You envy your famous cousin?” Darkstar glanced up at her and she knew she had struck a nerve. She picked up some of her tiles, rearranging them precisely, never breaking eye-contact. “He was a great knight.”

“He had a great sword,” Ser Gerold said coolly. Larra raised an eyebrow.

“The sword does not make the man,” Larra said thoughtfully. She smiled, thinking of Gendry. “It is the opposite: the man makes the sword.”

“You think so?”

“How many famous swords do we know, their stories passed down – through the men and women who wielded them,” Larra shrugged. “Their actions weren’t always glorious and good but we remember them.”

“And your sword?” Ser Gerold asked. It was propped up against the arm of her chair and his eyes lingered on the fat ruby nestled into the crossguard.

“Her story is long,” Larra said quietly. “I’ve yet to add to it.”

“You had no occasion to use it beyond the Wall?” he asked. She liked the way his accent seemed to pour lazily from his tongue like treacle.

“I didn’t receive the sword until our return journey,” Larra sighed, arranging her tiles and pieces meticulously. “Why did you come north, Ser Gerold?”

Darkstar paused. His eyes flicked to her face, deep purple and glowing. He was weighing, assessing his response – assessing her. He sighed heavily and set his pieces carefully. “My prince charged me with escorting Princess Myrcella to King’s Landing.”

“He must trust you a great deal,” Larra said.

“Prince Doran does not trust anyone,” Ser Gerold said darkly. He shook his head. “He does trust in his ability to use those around him to greatest effect… I am the most dangerous swordsman in Dorne.” He said it without arrogance: it was a statement of fact. “I was sent to ensure Princess Myrcella survived her journey to King’s Landing.”

“That explains how you came to be in King’s Landing,” Larra prompted, “but not Winterfell.”

Ser Gerold paused, turning a cyvasse piece over in his fingers. She noticed how large and handsome his hands were – he had long, clever fingers. She was reminded of Jon, somehow, though they were as alike as the sun and the moon. “I saw that monstrous creature your brother brought to the Lannisters’ court. I took an oath, a little different to your brother but the intent is the same: To be brave, to be just and to defend the innocent… I would be ashamed to run from this fight.”

“I wish more honoured their oaths so fiercely,” Larra said quietly. She fiddled with her King and gazed at the tiny direwolf sigil etched neatly onto his cloak. If Robb had honoured his oaths… They wouldn’t be here. Jon wouldn’t be here to lead this fight. Still… He should have honoured his oaths.

Ser Gerold shrugged those broad shoulders nonchalantly.

“Perhaps more will come,” he said softly. “There may yet be men of worth left in the world…but far too few.”

“It is a shame we agree on that,” Larra said, shaking her head. She smiled. “If Lady Nym had known you would be coming north, she would have requested you bring spices.”

“Your food is not spicy, as we are used to,” Ser Gerold smiled lazily, “but it is rich. I enjoy it.”

“So does Nym. She worries for her waistline,” Larra said.

“She will find ways to keep herself active enough that it will not matter,” he said. His eyes twinkled: his smirk was delicious.

“She has made a lot of friends since her arrival,” Larra conceded, smiling.

“Nym was blessed with her father’s charisma,” Ser Gerold said, though he did not smile.

“And his eyes,” Larra replied, and he chuckled softly. “What about you?”

He thought for a moment. “The same, I am told,” he said, holding her gaze. She wondered whether all Daynes had had the same vivid indigo eyes as Darkstar: she knew Lady Ashara Dayne had had purple eyes – she remembered seeing her dancing at Harrenhall.

“I am glad at least you could not inherit the Red Viper’s lusts as Nym did,” Larra smiled.

“Do not be so sure,” Ser Gerold teased, and she laughed.

“I hope you’re not going to cause me too much trouble,” she said, and those beautiful lips of his twitched.

“My mother taught me better than to be a nuisance to a busy woman,” he said softly, and she could hear the humour in his voice.

“Wise lady.”

“You have no idea,” Ser Gerold said softly, the first hint of a true smile in his eyes.

“Did she teach you cyvasse?” Larra asked, but Ser Gerold shook his head.

“I taught her,” he said softly. “It has only just reached Old Town from Volantis. I am surprised to hear a Northern girl knows the game so well.”

Larra sighed heavily. “We had a wonderful maester at Winterfell, before. He was well-travelled. When we studied geography, we didn’t just learn the names of rivers and mountains. We learned languages, and local rhymes and stories and religions, cooked using foreign ingredients, grew exotic flowers in the hothouses… He brought Essos to life in our schoolroom. As we got older, he taught us cyvasse to teach us military strategy. My brothers and I spent weeks planning campaigns and longer playing them out.”

“How often did you win?” Ser Gerold asked.

“Most often,” Larra said. “Outlasting my brothers wasn’t difficult. What came after was tricky.”

Her face went slack, eyes glinting, and Ser Gerold watched her carefully. She looked…devastated.

Outlasting my brothers wasn’t difficult.

“How so?” he prompted, and Lady Larra blinked, drawn back into the chamber: she focused on him.

“After we had wrecked the cyvasse board, Maester Luwin would make whoever survived rebuild, using only the resources left untouched,” Larra said.

“Most would say they had won the war,” Ser Gerold said.

“There are no winners in war. There are survivors,” Larra said softly. “Battle is easy: rebuilding – that is hard.”

“Building… They say you enjoy the hammer,” said Ser Gerold, and Larra searched his face. His features were a gentle mask but his eyes seemed to simmer, his lips twitching into another delicious smirk.

“I prefer the armourer who wields it,” Larra corrected bluntly. Darkstar smirked until her elephants trampled his light infantry.

“We…live more freely in the south,” said Ser Gerold. “We acknowledge marriage for what it is, and live with our lovers without shame.”

“The same as in the True North,” Larra said quietly.

“The armourer is your lover, then?” Ser Gerold prompted, frowning. Larra watched him carefully.

“You’re not turning your nose up at me having a bed-mate, are you?” She smiled at him, claiming his light cavalry. “Did you think I was a virgin?”

“I’d hoped not,” Ser Gerold said, giving her a playful smile and Larra laughed. “We should all be free to love whom we choose.”

“I didn’t realise choice had anything to do with love,” she said, laughing softly. “And I would rather have something more lasting than mere love.”

“Love can shape empires,” Ser Gerold mused. Larra glanced quickly at him, remembering Lyanna’s locket.

“You’ve been reading too much High Valyrian poetry,” Larra said, and Ser Gerold laughed softly. “Swords shape empires.”

Ser Gerold blinked dazedly as her crossbowmen assassinated his King.

“How – ?” he blurted, his indigo eyes scanning the tiles, assessing the pieces he had lost and those Larra still had arranged neatly on her tiles. “I never lose.”

“I like this game,” she said gently, idly handing him back his King. He took it, examining the piece carefully.

“What else did your maester teach you?” he asked quietly.

“A lot,” Larra smiled.

“Why did he make you rebuild after?” Ser Gerold asked, handing back the few pieces he had captured and assessing the pieces Larra had kept, how they were arranged – what she valued, assessing how fiercely she protected it and what she was willing to lose to do so.

“Maester Luwin wanted us to always be mindful of the consequences of war,” Larra sighed. “He and Father instilled in us that war is the very last resort.”

“Your father did?”

“You sound surprised,” Larra said quietly. She watched Ser Gerold carefully. “I have never met a Dornishman before. There are some who view my father in the same light as Tywin Lannister.” Ser Gerold’s eyebrows rose again. “What do the Dornish think of Ned Stark?”

“They say his friends were unworthy of him,” said Ser Gerold.

“His friends being Robert Baratheon.”

“All know Eddard Stark left the sacked city in a cold rage when the Usurper smiled at the dead Targaryen babies presented to him by the Old Lion,” Ser Gerold said coldly. “Eddard Stark built cairns for those who fell in the Red Mountains and returned Dawn to Starfall when my cousin was slain. He was a man of great honour.”

“You wouldn’t be saying that because you think it’s what I want to hear, would you?” Larra asked, and Ser Gerold smiled.

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he said. “Just as I am sure you would not tell me that the North sings songs of praise for Elia Martell.”

“Father told us about the Rebellion. He never talked about Princess Elia,” Larra said softly. “He thought about her, though. If we ever asked about the Sacking of King’s Landing, he would become quiet and take himself off to the godswood. She haunted him, I think – Elia and her babies.”

“Princess Elia and her babies haunt many dreams,” Ser Gerold said grimly. After a little while, he asked, “How else did your cyvasse games differ?”

“We started each campaign with a scenario: we had to negotiate and avoid conflict for as long as possible… If it came to war, Maester Luwin would let us play out our planned campaigns up to a point then he would roll the dice to introduce unexpected obstacles. We had to adjust.”

“There are no dice in cyvasse,” Ser Gerold frowned.

“In Maester Luwin’s version, there are,” Larra smiled.

“What was on the dice?”

“Everything. Anything that could possibly go against you during a war,” Larra smiled sadly. “Smallfolk uprisings, mutiny, weather disasters, religious interference, bankruptcy, treason, droughts and famines, plagues, assassinations. We had to adjust our planned campaigns at the spur of the moment.”

“No wonder you won so easily,” Ser Gerold sighed.

“Would you care to play again?”


Sighing, she curled up on the bed, listening to the crackle of the fire and watching her two kittens grooming each other before the hearth. She smiled as they cuddled up and dozed, and closed her own eyes, allowing the gentleness of the moment to drift through her. Today had been another full day, after far too many other long days.

It was yet another day Jon had evaded her. They had not discussed the information Larra had shared with him.

She worried about Jon much more than she felt bad about publically wounding Daenerys Targaryen. Since that meal in the Great Hall, Daenerys Targaryen had remained ensconced in her chambers. No-one had cared to check what she was up to.

After Larra had delivered the truth to Jon, he had panicked. Days later, Larra was fairly sure why it had hit him so particularly hard: Sansa had finally accepted him.

She had told him that he was a Stark. That was all Jon had ever desired: to be accepted as a Stark, someone honourable and worthy. Everything he had convinced himself he was not thanks to the enduring cruelties of Lady Catelyn. But Sansa had accepted Jon as he was, and given him a name and Father’s sigil as his own.

All Jon had ever wanted was to be accepted as an honourable man. He had been lied to all their lives by the person he believed was the most honourable man he had ever met…

Jon had never been a bastard. Had never been unworthy or dishonourable the way every highborn had treated him ever since Father’s one dishonourable deed. But there wasn’t anyone who had mistreated Jon more for being a bastard than Jon himself: he had joined the Watch as penance for Father’s only shameful act.

Larra knew her brother: she left him to stew until he was ready to talk.

It was too much to think about, especially when she was tired and warm and cosy after a long day. She had flown on Rhaegal, played with the children, researched tactical uses for wildfire as a siege weapon, ate one of her favourite meals, and now lay on the bed in a clean nightdress, calm and content while she watched her kittens, thinking of her upcoming cyvasse game against Ser Gerold while she waited for Gendry to return from the forge.

To ensure the scorpion was ready in as little time as possible, he had been working longer hours in the forges. The bed felt too big without him in it, and she couldn’t sleep in the absence of his gentle snores, his hard body tucked around hers. She drifted, though, dozing peacefully, and smiled when the door finally opened, ever so quietly, and Gendry’s familiar footsteps approached the bed, accompanied by the rustle of fabric and leather as Gendry undressed. She smiled and rolled over and sighed as Gendry tugged his tunics and undershirts off, revealing rippling muscles dusted with dark hair. When he saw she was awake, he gave her a tired grin.

“I feel as if I haven’t seen you in days,” she said, reaching for his breeches, deftly unfastening the buttons.

“And now that I’m here, there’s only one thing you want,” Gendry teased. Larra grinned breathlessly as he reached out, yanking at the hem of her nightdress, tugging it up and off. She tugged his breeches down over his backside and Gendry growled low as he leaned in for a deep kiss, entering her with one fierce thrust of his hips. She moaned loudly, the sound snatched by Gendry’s lips as he kissed her fiercely. He dipped his head to kiss her breasts, sucking fiercely. She gasped at the sting, her breasts sore, but sighed and relaxed against the mattress as his hand found its way between them, his thumb circling ever so slowly. She drew up her knees, fingernails digging into Gendry’s back as he thrust deep inside her, fierce and insistent. His kisses were sweet, gentle, savouring, and she smiled and reached up to caress his face, drawing him in for another kiss, deepening it, until he lowered himself onto her, his tremendous weight settling on her, heavy and delicious, his thrusts slower, deeper, making her toes curl as he tenderly kissed her face, her neck, her collarbones, wrapping himself around her and she knew nothing but his scent, his heat, his fierce thrusts that made her whimper and writhe, embers skittering through her body and catching alight with every deep thrust, the taste of his sweat and the tickle of his wild curls as he buried his head in her neck, stars twinkling in her eyes as he hit that spot they had discovered together, the one that made her keen and whimper and cling to him. She shattered, melting into his arms, and preened against him as he went still, giving a soft grunt of relief as he spilled inside her. Shuddering, he gave her a deep and lingering kiss.

After a long while, dozing in each other’s arms, sated and content, Gendry groaned and stretched, before stretching out alongside her. His colour was high, his eyes bright, and he smiled adoringly at her as she shivered at the sudden loss of his heat, rolling over to get closer to him again.

“I’ve missed you,” she sighed softly, and Gendry made a soft, thoughtful noise.

“How could you miss me, when you’ve got Arya and Jon?” he asked gently.

“It’s different,” she said softly, gazing up at him. She reached up and tenderly stroked his cheek with the backs of her fingers. She repeated, “I’ve missed you.”

He nodded, leaning down to give her a tender kiss, cupping her cheek. When he broke away, his hand trailed down her neck to her breast, settling at her waist, tucking her closer to him. “You’ve been spending time with Jon.”

“Less than I’d like,” Larra sighed heavily, and he caught the sombre, thoughtful look on her face.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she said sadly. “Nothing’s wrong… I had a difficult conversation with Jon.”

“About what?” Gendry asked gently. She gazed at him, tucking herself close against him. He stroked her waist and hip, making her shiver with the delicious warmth his touch spread across her skin.

“After I first flew Rhaegal, you wanted to ask me something,” Larra said, gazing up into those shrewd sapphire eyes. “I wouldn’t let you ask it. Do you remember what it was?”

“I said that only Targaryens can claim dragons,” Gendry rumbled softly, and Larra gazed up at him. Slowly, she nodded. He frowned. She rolled over, picking up the locket from her bedside cabinet, then tucked herself against Gendry, missing his warmth. She opened the locket and handed it to him. Gendry stared at the miniature portraits, then frowned gently at Larra, searching her face. Eventually, he sighed sadly. “You look like them.”

“Rhaegar and Lyanna,” Larra said softly. “They loved each other. Lyanna eloped with Rhaegar on the Isle of Faces. Jon and I were born in Dorne mere weeks after the Battle of the Trident.” The light in Gendry’s eyes dimmed. He stared at the portrait of Rhaegar.

Pale and solemn, Gendry breathed, “My father murdered yours.”

Larra sighed, reaching up to push his curls out of his face. “It’s not considered murder when it happens in battle. Rhaegar was slain by Robert. Robert had every reason to believe Rhaegar had violated Lyanna. And Robert never stopped fighting for the idea of his Lyanna.” She sighed, shaking her head, and took the locket from Gendry to gaze at the portrait of Lyanna. “Rhaegar saw who she truly was; that’s why she chose him. It wasn’t just love: they respected each other. They appreciated each other. They saw each other.”

As they saw each other.

With a sad smile, Gendry caressed her cheek and leaned in, giving her a tender kiss. He gathered her up in his arms, and Larra rested her head against Gendry’s enormous chest, gentled by the sound of his heart beating steadily.

“What are you thinking?” Larra asked, her voice muffled by his chest. He stroked her long braids – she never unwound them, not even when they were fucking: she said it wasn’t worth the tangles.

“What does it mean?” he asked quietly. Larra…was the daughter of Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark, lawfully married. If they had been born after Rhaegar fell at the Trident…

“Nothing, really,” Larra murmured.

“You’re a princess.” She lifted her face, resting her chin on his chest.

“I am Larra Snow.”

“I’m a bastard. Gendry Waters,” Gendry said firmly. “You’ve never been a Snow.”

“I am what experience has made me,” Larra said gently, shrugging. “My blood can never change that. I will always be Larra.”

“You’ve told Jon this,” he said slowly, and Larra nodded.

“He’s the only one who has a right to know,” Larra said, though she sighed heavily. “Father kept the truth secret for years. Too many people know, now, for it to remain a secret. Jon had to know. I couldn’t tell you until he knew.”

“You wanted me to know?”

“Yes. You’re too clever not to realise the truth,” Larra said, smiling fondly.

Gendry frowned. “So Rhaegal…”

“Rhaegal and I have bonded. Perhaps my mother’s blood has something to do with our bond being so strong…I can feel Rhaegal and understand them. When I dream I have seen through Rhaegal’s eyes…if I chose, I could enter Rhaegal’s mind, now, and know exactly where they are… That is warg blood. Stark blood,” Larra mused. “But Rhaegal recognising me as a dragonrider…that is my father’s blood. Rhaegar’s blood.”

“They called him the Last Dragon,” Gendry said, reaching up to cup her face tenderly in his hands. “You look just like your mother – except for your eyes. How can nobody have suspected the truth?”

“We believe what we want to believe,” Larra said calmly. Gendry grew still.

“What about Daenerys?” he asked, and Larra’s face darkened.

“She is our aunt through Rhaegar,” Larra said quietly, and Gendry’s lips parted. So Jon had been abused by their own aunt.

“That complicates things,” Gendry said heavily.

“For us,” Larra said. “Daenerys was raised a true Targaryen.”

“What does that mean?” Gendry asked curiously, noting the curl of her lip.

“If she hadn’t been traded to the Dothraki, she would likely have ended up married to her older brother Viserys,” Larra said, shaking her head. “Incest was not only accepted but celebrated within the Targaryen family.”

“So to find out that you and Jon are her relatives…”

“She wouldn’t care that she raped her own nephew,” Larra sighed. “Not that she would ever acknowledged it was rape… But as Rhaegar’s only surviving son, Jon has the greatest claim to the Iron Throne…and she’s convinced herself that it is her destiny to take the Iron Throne. That she alone is worthy of it.”

“Jon’s the heir to the Iron Throne.”

“That depends,” Larra said delicately.

“On what?”

“On whether he wants to be,” Larra said, sighing softly. Gendry thought about what she said, stroking her long braids, tracing his fingers over her silky scars. She raised her hands to his chest and nestled her head on them, dozing gently.

“I can’t imagine Jon going south to claim King’s Landing,” he said finally. “He’s too…tired.”

Larra laughed softly. She kissed his chest. “He doesn’t need to rule the whole world: he’ll be content to save it.”

Gendry frowned softly, hugging her tighter to him, feeling suddenly cold. Worry flickered through his mind. Not worry for the Night King. “Larra…what does it mean that you are bonded with one of the dragons?” Larra smiled softly, and he glanced down at her. “Why the smile?”

“Because you said the dragons…not her dragons,” Larra sighed softly.

“I’ve been with you long enough to know wild creatures are free,” Gendry smiled, and Larra leaned in to kiss him.

“They are…they should be,” Larra said.

“So? What does it mean? That you and Rhaegal have bonded?” Gendry asked.

“It means things will become more complicated,” Larra sighed heavily. “Daenerys saw me mount Rhaegal and already considers it a betrayal…soon enough, the truth with reach her ears.”

“That’s why you shamed her in front of everyone,” Gendry murmured.

“You heard about that?”

“In great detail,” Gendry grunted. “Cade.”

“Ah,” Larra sighed.

“So, tell me.”

“Her wrath was always going to be directed at me the moment she learned I’d bonded with Rhaegal,” Larra sighed.

“And with what you know about her, you would never have pretended to be her friend,” Gendry sighed. He smiled, realising, “You’re doing what you’ve always done.”

“What’s that?”

“You’re drawing her attention from Jon,” Gendry said. “You’re protecting your brother.”

“It’s what I’m best at,” Larra said, and Gendry smiled.

“I can think of a few other things,” he sighed, and she laughed softly. He hugged her and kissed the top of her head.

“All this worry may all be for nothing,” Larra sighed. “We may all be dead soon… It might even be a relief not to have to worry about it.”

“I don’t think we’re that lucky,” Gendry said, and they both laughed softly. Sobering, Gendry stared at the ceiling, and again his arms tightened around her, afraid she’d slip through his grasp. “It can’t be long now.”

Larra kissed his chest delicately. “We’ve time yet.”

“Time to do what?” Gendry asked softly. Larra smiled and leaned over to give him a kiss.

“Live,” she said, gazing at him, her expression so tender his breath caught in his lungs. He reached up and caressed her cheek as she gazed at him with those entrancing amethyst eyes. She gave him a sweet kiss, and tilted her head as she gazed at him.

“What?” he smiled.

“Marry me.”

Gendry stared, stunned. He gazed back at Larra, at the deeply earnest expression on her face, the deep love and respect and affection and admiration that glowed in her deep purple eyes. He leaned up and kissed her tenderly. Their kiss deepened, tongues entwining, and he cupped her head with his hand as her hands brushed delicately over his bare shoulders, his arms. Her hands rested over his heart, thudding inside his chest. They broke apart and Larra nuzzled her nose against his. She whispered, “Marry me.”

Stunned, Gendry said what he thought: “I didn’t think you’d believe in marriage…” The Free Folk made their own rules and decided to be married or not, with no thought to the gods. And Larra had lived among them.

Gendry sat up, Larra in his lap, and she gave him a gentle, almost heartbroken look. “I am yours, and you are mine. I don’t want anyone to ever question that we’ve chosen each other, on purpose.” Her eyes glowed fiercely. He reached up, stroking his thumb against her cheek. When she was like this – emotional, vulnerable – he was in absolute awe of her. To him she revealed the true Larra, the one who was emotional and devastated, who loved deeply and fiercely, who cared about everyone – but not about what they thought – who was playful and mischievous, studious, calm and unflappable, generous and courageous. He saw the Larra who was tender, emotionally open, vulnerable and gentle, who loved relentlessly.

He cupped her head and drew her in for a deep kiss.

“Ask me again,” he murmured against her lips. She panted softly, and he smiled as she gave him the most tender look he had ever seen on her face, as if he had corralled the moon and decorated the sky with stars just for her.

“Marry me,” she whispered against his lips, and he nuzzled her nose, stealing a deep and lingering kiss, rolling her to her back.

“Alright,” he agreed, after they were spent once again. She shivered in his arms, panting for breath, and he grinned lazily at the sight of her overwhelmed by the pleasure he had wrought in her. “I’ll marry you.”

He caught her tiny, sweet smile as she burrowed against him, the way she always did when she couldn’t get enough of his heat, his smell. He draped an arm over her and tucked her close.

Hours later, he still couldn’t sleep. The fire had burned itself to embers: the kittens purred softly as they cuddled, and beside him Larra slept soundly. He gazed at her in the pale silver moonlight drifting weakly from the window. Slowly, he became aware of pinpricks of light – the moonlight trapped in Larra’s eyes.

“What’s keeping you awake?” she asked thickly, sighing heavily as she nestled her head in the crook of his arm.

“I can’t stop thinking about them. Rhaegar and Lyanna. I don’t know why…it makes me sad,” Gendry said softly. Larra sighed.

“Because it is sad,” she murmured, stretching and cuddling up again. “It’s devastating. Rhaegar wanted to heal Westeros. He and Lyanna died because Rhaegar cared so much about his people that he couldn’t bear to let them down, to have them think ill of him. He knew exactly what needed to be done; he was too slow in doing it.” Gendry smiled sadly himself, chuckling. “What?”

“We’ve been left to fix what our fathers broke.”

“I suppose we have,” she sighed, and Gendry tucked her against him, tugging the quilts and furs higher over himself – she hated the stifling weight of the blankets but couldn’t get enough of him. He smiled as she tucked herself against him.

Marry me…

He smiled. I am yours and you are mine.

He drifted off to a deep sleep, entwined with the woman who wanted to marry him.

Chapter 48: A Legacy of Ice

Notes:

This chapter is very short but took a very long time, for two reasons: firstly, the last couple of terms at school were chaotic and took it out of me! Secondly, I couldn’t get the perspective right.

I’M SO EXCITED FOR HOUSE OF THE DRAGON! Given that the Rogue Prince is Larra’s favourite, guess who I’ll be supporting!

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

48

A Legacy of Ice


“Calanthe Lannister!”

The young girl jolted as if struck by lightning, whirling around as she dusted off her hands. Larra watched, her heart in her mouth, her mind racing back years to gentle summer days spent playing with her brothers and sisters…and Bran, clambering over the roofs as quickly and nimble as a squirrel. The day was warm, the sun shining hotly, making the snow shimmer blindingly, yet watching Calanthe scurry down the wall using the same handholds Bran had discovered all those years ago made Larra go cold.

Calanthe’s face was flushed, her emerald eyes sparkling excitedly. “I climbed to the top of the Unbroken Tower and used the Far-Eye. There are people coming. Thousands of them!”

Larra exchanged a quick glance with Ser Gerold, who had joined her on her tour of the yard as she assessed the progress of the archery lessons as well as the rebuilding of the First Keep and the Broken Tower.

“Which direction are they coming from?” Larra asked, her stomach clenching. Calanthe looked up, orienting herself, and pointed.

“That way,” she said.

“Southeast,” Larra said, the knot in her stomach loosening. Ser Gerold exchanged a look with her. With every moon cycle, they became more and more aware of the time passing. More aware that the Night King’s army was imminent. They were waiting. And yet while they waited, they were becoming more comfortable in their home: life went on. Despite the daily drills and constant war councils, the longer the Night King’s army took to reach Winterfell the longer people had to become complacent about the threat.

She turned to climb up to the battlements, careful of the gritted steps. Calanthe bounced eagerly beside her and Larra smiled softly to herself, smoothing Calanthe’s unbound hair from her face. To Calanthe, this was an adventure – it was exciting.

 “We’ll have to do something about all this hair,” Larra sighed. “Now…where did you see these thousands of people?”

Calanthe pointed and Larra carefully tugged Maester Luwin’s Far-Eye open, raising it to her eye. She scanned the horizon to the southeast and made a stunned noise. Calanthe was right. They had been expecting Daenerys Targaryen’s forces for weeks yet neither Unsullied nor Dothraki hordes had arrived at Winterfell. The weather had remained fine for the last two weeks, the sun shining, birds singing in the godswood: everyone was happier because of it, most of the castle turning out to enjoy the sun while it lasted. It was perfect Northern weather, Larra thought. Perfect for moving armies. Larra caught sight of movement on the horizon, darkness against the blinding, shimmering whiteness of the snowbanks and frowned.

She was accustomed to the shell-like Unsullied leather armour, watching them spar and drill in Winter’s Town, and of the Dothraki’s rough, pieced together clothing of leather and fur, their long braids oiled and decorated with tiny bells that tinkled with every movement. Every day, she had been out with the Lannister girls while their kos taught them how to ride without fear: Larra knew the style of the Dothraki saddles, their patterned blankets and the breed of horse they favoured. The approaching masses were neither Unsullied nor Dothraki. She scanned the column, frowning when she could see no standards raised above the riders, no identifying sigils to give them notice of who approached.

Dread flickered through her mind. They were not Unsullied nor were they Dothraki. They were Westerosi but who led them? Why had they come north? Had they been sent by Cersei, to annihilate the threat while all her enemies were settled in one place, unable to flee? They were preparing for a siege against the Night King but defending their home against an army of men with siege weapons…that required far more machinery and entirely different tactics. Yet Cersei was proud: her lion sigil would be splashed everywhere, the crimson of their embellished armour vivid against the grey and white background of the North. She would want them to know the armies had been sent by her and fought on her behalf.

“You have more guests,” said Ser Gerold. His rich voice was a welcome rush of warmth, exotic and strange and enticing, especially in the cold of the North. Every woman who ever saw him swooned: yet when he was not sparring, Darkstar preferred to drink tea and play cyvasse with Larra, or recline reading in his chamber, swathed in furs for warmth – so he claimed. As yet, Larra had heard no gossip that Darkstar had claimed a lover amongst the women of the North to keep him warm. Larra frowned through the Far-Eye, trying to discern the faces of those riders at the head of the column.

“Possibly,” she said, lowering the Far-Eye to glance at Ser Gerold. He had been training in the yard below: his cheeks were flushed with colour, his violet eyes vivid and sparkling in the sunlight. His silky hair was tied back with suede cord, gleaming like golden pearls, a few loose wisps caressing his handsome jaw adoringly. “I cannot make out their faces.”

“What of their sigils?”

“They carry no standards,” she said, and Ser Gerold frowned bemusedly. “Either the weather has forced them to embrace practicality over ceremony or they do not wish us to know who approaches.”

“They are not Daenerys Targaryen’s promised armies?”

“No. They seem Westerosi,” Larra said, and Ser Gerold held out his hand for the Far-Eye. As he held it to his eye, Larra turned to the little girl fizzing with excitement beside her. “Calanthe, go to the solar. Tell Lady Sansa and the King that there is an army approaching.” She turned to Ser Gerold as Calanthe darted off, careful of the gritted steps, skidding across the yard as she headed inside, her long golden hair rippling behind her. “How many, do you think?”

“Fewer than five thousand,” Ser Gerold murmured. “There are carriages.”

“Carriages?” Larra frowned. “What self-respecting commander remains inside a carriage during a march? Are they marked?”

“Too far away to see clearly,” Ser Gerold frowned. “Ah, I can see the sigil on the door of one of the carriages: yellow and red and black. And now the others…teal.”

“Teal?”

“Teal,” Ser Gerold repeated, his beautiful lips twitching with amusement. Larra had not grown up amongst artists. Colours in Winterfell were limited, and the men in her family even more so. She doubted Jon would know what teal was.

“Any siege weapons?” Larra asked.

“None that I can see,” Ser Gerold said. “There are wagons, though. Siege weapons may be disassembled for transport.”

“I know what I’d value during a winter campaign,” Larra said grimly, “and it isn’t trebuchet and ballistae. If they are wise, they brought provisions.” She held out her hand for the Far-Eye and Ser Gerold handed it to her: she scanned the horizon and watched the approaching column carefully. “Well, we know at least that they do not intend to lay siege.”

“And how do you know this, lady?” Ser Gerold asked, almost purring. Dressed plainly in his leather tunic, he hunched his shoulders and started to rub his arms to chase away the chill that had caught him now that he was no longer sparring.

“Rub your chest,” Larra told him. “Keep your heart warm and it will take care of the rest. They keep to the King’s Road and their pace is gentle.”

“Perhaps because of the carriages,” Ser Gerold mused, rubbing his gloved hands over his heart.

“Consider their speed. If not weapons, what do you imagine is in those carriages?”

Ser Gerold smiled softly to himself. “Women.”

“You don’t bring your ladies on campaign,” Larra said, and Ser Gerold shook his head. Larra gazed through the Far-Eye and made a thoughtful noise. “Especially not for a winter siege.”

“They have come to support you.”

An hour later, dozens of knights and lords pushed their way into the Great Hall, groaning with relief and gratefully accepting bowls of stew and flagons of ale. Some went straight to the great hearth where enormous logs popped and snapped as the fire licked at them, creating a blaze that made the cavernous hall seem stifling to Larra. She glanced up at the high windows, opened a crack to coax in fresh air and the sound of the birds singing in the godswood. Lord Tarly, the ancient Umbers, Ser Davos and Bronze Yohn Royce stood clustered near the end of the high table, among others, armed and armoured, grim-faced, watching the newcomers.

They were a mixture of grizzled old men, fierce warriors, young men with battle-lust glinting in their eyes and a handful of women and more children. They were also a unique combination of young Westerosi men with unblemished armour and older men who, like Ser Jorah Mormont, wore Essosi garb beneath scarred Westerosi armour, accompanied by Essosi squires. As they poured into the Great Hall, gratefully accepting guest-right, Larra noted any sigils, no matter how faded they were. She watched older Knights of the Vale and Northern lords muttering amongst themselves as more men poured into the hall. Some of the newcomers confidently approached the querulous Lord Tarly, who seemed stunned by the sight of them. Larra watched the women: there were scarred Northerners as tall as redwoods – they converged on Lady Mormont – but the others were Essosi women of surpassing loveliness loosening their clutches on luxurious furs as they gazed around the Great Hall.

The Lannister girls had rushed from the nursery, eager to get away from their embroidery to share in the rare excitement in the Great Hall, and led by Calanthe they claimed a spot at the end of one of the long tables. The moment Leona saw Larra, she beamed and toddled over, accidentally knocked over by an enormous man with a scarred eye, dangerous two-inch bronze pyramid-studs covering his brigandine and a handsome Myrish dirk in one of his armoured greaves. He silently scooped Leona up off the floor and tenderly brushed away the tear that had slipped down her cheek. Larra watched him silently hand Leona over to Crisantha, who had noticed Leona’s fall and risen to look after her.

Excitement rippled through the Great Hall as the newcomers settled in, groaning as they sat down at the long benches, accepting stew and ale, salt and bread. Larra watched them pour in, and how people reacted to their arrival. The fearsome, scarred Lady Maege Mormont and her surviving daughters Alysane, Lyra and Jory converged on Lady Lyanna, to her consternation: it took a lot to rattle the Little Bear. Larra turned as a growl echoed over the noise.

A giant of a man ploughed through the crowd and stopped short at the sight of Larra.

Haggard and thin, Larra still recognised the magnificent beard and the piercing flint-grey eyes that widened at the sight of her, sweeping past her to the pale-faced man sitting calmly in a wheeled chair behind the high table. His jaw dropped.

He started to laugh.

His haggard, lined face broke into a fierce grin as his laugh echoed around the hall. It sounded as if he had not laughed in years and it all now came tumbling from his body like a tremendous rockslide.

Never one for ceremony, the Greatjon grabbed Larra and lifted her off her feet. He was still laughing as he crushed her in a bear-hug. When he released her, she staggered back and the Greatjon chuckled.

“Larra,” he said, chuckling. His eyes were filled with tears of mirth and he wiped them away, sighing softly. His gaze fell on Bran in his wheeled chair and he reached for Larra, cupping her chin in a startlingly affectionate gesture. The Greatjon’s grey eyes shone but his face fell. “I failed them. I could not defend your father. I could not protect your brother.”

“You didn’t let them down,” Larra said quietly. The Greatjon’s eyes shone with grief and with guilt. Father had never had a more loyal friend than the Greatjon – except perhaps Lord Howland Reed. Her voice thick with emotion, Larra repeated, “You did not let them down.”

The Greatjon smiled sadly, his eyes sliding to Bran and back to her. “You did what armies could not.”

“Was there ever any doubt?” she asked, and the Greatjon chuckled softly, smiling.

“The King always said you were tougher and wilier than him and all your brothers combined,” Greatjon said. He stroked her cheek and sighed.

“The King,” Larra repeated in a whisper. She had never known Robb as King in the North. The Greatjon had named him King, had rejected sovereignty of the Iron Throne. He had placed the crown on Robb’s head. She cleared her throat and called, “Jon! Come, kiss your grandfather.”

Little Jon glanced over: he, Ragnar and Cade were pestering the Lannister girls while Little Sam read complacently to Rosamund, one of Larra’s storybooks open between them. Rosamund had her head resting gently on Little Sam’s shoulder, cuddling a doll as she listened. Little Jon stood and joined Larra, and she smiled as he stood as tall as he could, his shoulders pinned back.

“Lord Umber, you may not recognise your grandson. This is Little Jon,” she said, and the Greatjon blinked quickly, startled.

“He was a babe-in-arms when your brother called the banners,” the Greatjon rumbled dazedly.

“Soon he shall be as tall as you,” Larra said, “and just as strong.”

“If not stronger,” the Greatjon chuckled softly. “I’m not what I once was.”

“You’ve been on your knees too long,” Larra said, and Greatjon grunted his agreement. “Perhaps you would remember your old strength better if you grasped your sword. Teach the young lads a thing or two.”

“I’ve already forgotten more than they’ll ever learn,” the Greatjon laughed heartily. Larra smiled but frowned when a sudden clamour rang through the hall, shouting voices and the unmistakeable sound of weapons being drawn. Haggard as he was, the Greatjon’s instincts were just as sharp as ever – not quite as quick as Larra, who unsheathed the hunting knife at her back and flung it at one of the Unsullied guards shoving a travel-worn man to his knees with their short sword drawn. His sword hit the flagstones with a clatter. The Greatjon seized a second Unsullied, lifting him off his feet as if he weighed little more than one of Leona’s ragdolls, a thick arm pinned around the soldier’s neck, twisting his arm unnaturally – yet the Unsullied refused to relinquish his hold on a gilded scabbard. A third Unsullied who had shoved the man to his knees moved to guard a diminutive figure in white.

Lady Targaryen’s face twisted in an unpleasant snarl. Her ribbed fur overcoat drew Larra’s gaze ever so briefly: the tufted, short white fur so intricately stitched flickered as she bristled with anger, while vivid red embroidery and beadwork made it seem like blood was oozing into the fur. It was the most expensive garment Larra had ever seen in her life. The time and effort to stitch each individual inch-wide strip of fur together alone!

It reminded Larra rather vividly of a snowbear she had once battled and then slaughtered for food in the True North.

Silence fell suddenly. Sweet Sister in hand, Larra strode forward and deftly kicked the short sword away from the Unsullied solder: the man with the scarred eye and a handsome dirk in his greaves picked up the sword and weighed it contemplatively in his enormous hands.

“You dare attack my guards?” hissed Lady Targaryen, ever so calmly.

“You will not lay a hand on those under the protection of guest-right,” Larra said, her voice as gentle and as lethal as snow. She nodded at the Greatjon, who grunted curiously. She nodded a second time and he shrugged then released Lady Targaryen’s commander. She glanced down at the travel-worn man on his knees before her. A leather glove had fallen to the ground: gilded steel glinted in the light streaming down through the high windows. She held out her left hand, pulling the man to his feet. “Welcome back to Winterfell, Ser Jaime.”

“My lady,” he answered softly, straightening up. His emerald-green eyes – so like Calanthe’s – swept over her face and recognition flickered. He had been polite as an instinct but now he remembered who she was. And he looked stunned. He glanced from Larra to Grey Worm, who cradled his hand. “You’re fast for a dead girl.”

“Fortunately for you,” Larra said. “I apologise for the manner of your welcome, Ser.”

“What’s happened?” a voice asked, but Larra did not need to look up to know who it was. Jon had arrived.

“Our guest oversteps her authority,” Larra said quietly, her eyes on Lady Targaryen.

“I demand that this man is brought to justice,” snarled Lady Targaryen.

“Justice?” Larra repeated, her voice so silky and so soft that Ser Jaime Lannister was suddenly taken back to his captivity, to a young man’s impossibly gentle voice and a direwolf’s lethal fangs a hair’s breadth from his throat. He suppressed a shiver.

Lady Targaryen’s expression grew harder and seemed to pull herself together, trying to make herself appear larger. She looked almost comically small, with her elaborate braids and her fur coat, especially compared to the tall and elegant Lady Larra in her simple leathers and frock.

“When I was a child, my brother would tell me a bedtime story about the man who murdered our father, who stabbed him in the back and cut his throat, who sat on the Iron Throne and watched as his blood poured onto the floor,” Lady Targaryen said, her soft voice full of cruelty. “He told me other stories as well, about all the things we would do to that man once we took back the Seven Kingdoms and had him in our grasp.”

Larra scoffed. “Well, you haven’t taken back the Seven Kingdoms. Nor is Ser Jaime in your grasp. We have stories too, older than yours. The Greatjon will remember this one. Ser Jaime himself bore witness to it,” Larra said softly. “It happened in the throne room of the Great Keep, perhaps yards from where the Mad King was slain. You remember of what I speak, do you not, Ser Jaime?”

Ser Jaime cleared his throat softly, flicking his emerald eyes at her as if he barely dared raise them from the flagstones. He said softly, “Lord Rickard Stark’s trial-by-combat.”

“I doubt Lady Daenerys ever heard a bad word spoken of her father,” Larra said, cold fury slashing like shards of ice through her veins. “In the name of educating her, perhaps you could tell us why the Mad King’s death was celebrated by so many. Perhaps you could start with what happened after Prince Rhaegar ran off with Lyanna Stark?”

Ser Jaime stared at her for a moment then cleared his throat gently. “Lord Brandon Stark rode to the Red Keep, demanding justice for his kidnapped sister. He and his friends were seized and imprisoned, charged with plotting the murder of Prince Rhaegar,” Ser Jaime said, and the older Northmen in the Great Hall murmured darkly amongst themselves. They all respected Ned Stark but they had grown up with Brandon Stark, the Wild Wolf. Some in the hall had lost brothers and uncles alongside Brandon. “The King sent summons to their fathers, to answer for their sons’ crimes. He assured their safety until they reached King’s Landing. When they arrived, he had them all arrested. Lord Rickard Stark…demanded a trial-by-combat.”

The Greatjon growled low. Something flickered in Ser Jaime’s emerald-green eyes. “King Aerys laughed… He chose wildfire as his champion. Lord Stark was suspended from the rafters above wildfire lit by pyromancers. Brandon Stark… Lord Brandon’s hands were chained behind his back, a leather cord wrapped around his neck…it was all connected to a Tyroshi device. The more Brandon struggled, the tighter the cord became…but the King left his legs free, and a sword placed just out of reach.” Ser Jaime swallowed hard: his eyes were glazed. His voice was soft and hoarse with memory. “The King told Lord Brandon that if he freed himself, he could save his father. Lord Brandon strangled himself, struggling to free himself, while his father was burned alive in his own armour… His skin blistered and smoked and his hair caught fire and his eyes…his eyes melted. And Brandon… Their deaths were excruciating and undeserved. What the King did to his people…to his wife…he deserved his death and worse.”

The Great Hall was deathly quiet.

Larra’s eyes burned but she exhaled slowly, sniffing delicately. “You had newly been named to the Kingsguard, Ser Jaime.”

“Yes, my lady,” Ser Jaime answered politely.

“How old were you?” she asked, more curious than anything.

“I was sixteen then, my lady,” Ser Jaime said quietly. Larra’s breath gusted from her.

“Younger than I was when I fled Winterfell with my brothers,” Larra said softly. “It must have been horrifying.”

“Worse than the sounds of their screams was the King’s laughter,” Ser Jaime said softly, and the Great Hall seemed to bristle with anger. A collective memory – a shared rage. For a long moment, the hall remained silent. Larra turned her gaze from the haunted Ser Jaime to Lady Targaryen’s guard. He still clutched the scabbard: the Greatjon had his hand clamped on the Unsullied’s shoulder. When Larra snatched the sword from his grip, all Grey Worm could do was glower.

Larra examined the intricate details of the scabbard, unsheathing a few inches of the blade. The rippling steel seemed to glow sunset-red, while the rubies set into the hilt flickered like live flames. The crossguard was formed into lions’ paws, sharp claws digging into the rippled red blade.

“This is newly reforged.” She swung it in her hand, her wrist loose, the blade singing through the air. Gendry sat sprawled on one of the benches, Crisantha perched daintily beside him, Leona sucking her thumb as she cuddled in his lap. Larra sheathed the sword and passed it to Gendry, who freed a few inches of the blade to examine it.

“Tobho Mott’s work,” Gendry sighed appreciatively, clicking his tongue. “See his mark?” He exhaled softly, awed. Larra saw the spark of inspiration in Gendry’s eyes. “It’s beautiful work. Wherever did you get the steel?”

Ser Jaime cleared his throat awkwardly, glancing almost apologetically at Larra. “Your father’s sword.”

“Ice.” A gasp of horror seemed to hiss through the hall. Ice had a storied history in the North. It had been passed down from father to son, uncle to nephew, grandfather to grandson, since before the Conquest.

Larra stared at Ser Jaime, her vision dizzy as her heart stuttered. Stunned, she breathed, “You melted a greatsword down and made an ornament?”

“Two,” Ser Jaime grimaced contritely. “Its twin has guarded your sister well.”

Larra blinked and turned to Lady Brienne, looming over Sansa as always. Her sister’s sworn sword stood with her grip loose on the hilt of her sword, clear blue eyes assessing. “Oathkeeper.”

Larra’s lips pursed. Gendry handed the sword back to her. “Does this bauble have a name?”

“Widow’s Wail,” Jaime cringed. Larra glanced sharply at him.

“Oh, that won’t do at all… This sword is descended from Ice, wielded by hard men of great honour - and of brutality… Your father had Ice melted down and tried to reshape the steel anew, eradicate all that Ice stood for; and in spite of all his intentions, the blade has brought you here to Winterfell, where the blade has always belonged,” Larra said, and she smiled richly. “It’s brought you to fight for the North, to protect the very people your father intended to murder. The irony is delicious.”

A soft voice said, “Honour.”

Larra glanced over her shoulder. “Sansa?”

“The blade. It should be named anew,” Sansa said, from her position behind the high table. Larra wondered vaguely when she had taken her seat. “Ser Jaime’s actions are those of a man of honour. As we fled to Castle Black, Lady Brienne told me the story of how she came to be in my service. You made a bargain with my mother, Ser Jaime: that in exchange for your own freedom, you would keep her daughters safe. You went against your own family to arm and armour Lady Brienne, to be your sword and my shield, to protect me when you could not. My mother was murdered before I could be returned to her but your oath was honoured nonetheless. Lady Brienne named the sword you gave her well, Ser Jaime. Its twin deserves a name just as worthy of it. It shall be named Honour.”

Larra gazed at her sister then turned to stare at the blade bared in her hand. She turned her gaze finally to Ser Jaime, who could not look more different than he had the first time he had visited Winterfell. The golden lustre had been scrubbed away and Larra thought they could now see the true steel.

Carefully, she sheathed the sword and offered it to the knight. “Let it be always a reminder to your House when they must choose between what is right and what is easy.”

He reached for the sword but Larra remembered his gilded hand. He could not buckle the belt easily – and she would not humiliate him by forcing him to attempt it in front of everyone. She unwound the belt and stepped forward, reaching around the knight, to secure the belt around his hips.

As she did so, his expression flickered. His eyes widened subtly, his lips parting, and when she fastened the buckle and stepped back, he reached out with his remaining hand, cupping her jaw the same way the Greatjon had. Where the Greatjon’s gesture had been affectionate, Ser Jaime’s seemed unconscious, as if he didn’t realise he was doing it. He stared at her, breathless, as if he had never seen her before.

He stared into her eyes.

Finally, his gaze drifted past her – to Jon, sat behind the high table.

Ser Jaime’s dark gold eyelashes flickered as his gaze darted between Larra and Jon. He dropped his hand as if burned.

He cleared his throat softly, murmuring an earnest, “My apologies, my lady.”

“You’re pale, Ser,” Larra said, frowning. He had seen something in her face – in her eyes – and she believed she knew what it was. Who he had seen shining from her eyes. Perhaps he noticed more in Jon’s face than anyone ever could. Quietly, wondering why she was taunting him even as she asked it, she said, “Have you seen a ghost?”

Ser Jaime stared back at her, his eyes still wide – wondrous. As if he could not quite believe his eyes. Sadly, he said, “I think perhaps I have.”

Notes:

I love the idea of “the stupidest Lannister” being the one to figure out the secret, even before Tyrion! I’ll introduce a lot more of the other knights and lords in the next chapter – they’re important for the story post-Night King. We need driving forces to get Larra and Gendry out of Winterfell to continue the game against Daenerys!

Chapter 49: Legacy

Notes:

Thank you so much for all the reviews!

I need to hear Ramin Djawadi’s score for HotD so I can ‘borrow’ one of the Targaryen’s themes for Larra. I’d love her to share Rhaenys or Daemon’s theme!

Okay, so there are a lot of face-claims for this chapter! I’ve also taken knights and lords from ASOIAF who have not really been expanded on in the books and made them my own. Ser Jorian Gower and Ser Arthur Wylde’s appearances and personalities were inspired by Josh Brolin and Jason Momoa’s characters in Dune. Winston Duke’s M’Baku and Danai Gurira’s Okoye from Black Panther inspired Lord Carys and Lady Calista Velaryon, with Jessica Chastain inspiring Carys’ Lysene wife Vialle and their children inspired by Dolores, Camilo and Antonio Madrigal from Encanto. Lord Ivar Dondarrion is modelled after Ivar the Boneless from Vikings and Ser Rey Musgood and Dag Storm were inspired by Bors and Dagonet from the 2004 King Arthur. Mads Mikkelsen in Clash of the Titans inspired the appearance of Lord Richard Lonmouth. Sia’s face-claim is Gemma Ward: Noor’s is Madalina Ghenea. Lord Yomer Lantel is obviously heavily inspired by Karl Urban’s excellent Eomer, and Lady Rohanne Lantel’s face-claim is Claire Holt. Joy Hill’s face-claim is Blake Lively.

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

49

Perspective


Larra watched as Ser Jaime carefully accepted bread and salt from a trencher. She flicked her eyes over the rest of the lords and knights gathered in the hall. “Tell me, Ser Jaime, have you emptied the south of its lordlings?”

Ser Jaime’s eyes shone with something like irony. “These men were present at the Dragon Pit,” he said softly. His voice carried across the hall, everyone silent to hear their conversation. “We all saw what your brother – what His Grace has been fighting.” Ser Jaime’s eyes flicked to Jon. There was something sorrowful and earnest in his face, his voice, when he added, “There is still honour and courage among the southern Houses.”

“I’m certain there is,” Larra said, thinking of Samwell, of Yaskier and Edd and all Jon’s southern brothers, of Stannis who had abandoned his thoughts of the Iron Throne to stop the invasion of the Free Folk and liberate the North. She cast her eyes over the crowd. “Would you be so good as to introduce your companions?”

“It would be my honour,” Ser Jaime said gallantly, giving her a subtle bow. She stepped back, sheathing her knife and dagger, perching on the edge of the high table and glanced back at Sansa as she settled more comfortably into her chair. Sansa gazed imperiously down the hall as several men moved through the crowds to stand alongside Ser Jaime. The knight was no longer trapped inside ostentatious armour, the obnoxious red and gold of House Lannister emblazoned on his chest. He had shed the weight of that inheritance. He looked…like one of them: just one of the many honourable men who had seen the true horrors they were to face and, far from fleeing, had run toward them.

Larra had never before looked upon the Kingslayer with respect: she did so now.

First to be introduced were Lord Bryndn Cole, Lord Ivar Dondarrion and Ser Mateu Morrigen of the Stormlands. They were all younger men – about Larra’s age – and battle-lust seemed to glint in their eyes, especially Lord Ivar, who had glacial blue eyes and a handsome, somewhat insane grin.

Next to be introduced was Ser Rey Musgood, a shorter, broadly built man with a shaved head who kept his thickly muscled arms bare despite the cold. The children that teemed around the hall all seemed to belong to him, and he carried two in one arm as he wrangled one of his sons out of a brawl with his sister, who was thrashing him soundly. Entertaining some of the other children was the scarred man with the handsome dirk in his greaves: he was introduced by Ser Rey as “Dag” – Dagonet Storm, the half-brother of Ser Arthur Wylde, who was an olive-skinned giant of a man with wild dark hair and a neatly trimmed beard, an attractive smirk and a soft, rumbling voice.

Ser Arthur was a supremely confident man who oozed charisma and had already caught the attention of the majority of the women in the hall: he seemed to enjoy taunting one of his companions, Ser Jorian Gower, an older warrior with a close-shaved head, a silver-and-salt trimmed goatee that brought out his strong anvil of a jaw and piercing ice-blue eyes that saw everything. Ser Jorian wore incredibly plain armour and roughspun clothing beneath it: his only adornment seemed to be a small seven-pointed star carved from wood and hanging from a leather cord around his neck. He bowed low to each of the Starks and gave Lady Sansa, the only Stark rumoured to have anything to do with the southern gods, a blessing.

“Thank you, Ser,” Sansa responded demurely. “May the Warrior give your sword-arm strength and the Father wisdom to guide it.” Gentle approval seemed to flicker across Ser Jorian’s handsome face as he bowed and withdrew. Larra tried not to bristle or roll her eyes: she despised the Andals’ gods – because the only person she had ever known to worship them had despised her. It said a lot about the southern gods that a woman who wished death upon innocent children was considered to be godly.

Larra stared as Lord Carys Velaryon approached. Not because his skin was dark as midnight and as lustrous as velvet, and she had never seen anyone from or descended from the Summer Isles, but because he was taller than the Greatjon. The only person she had ever met taller than the Greatjon was – well…giants. Lord Carys had cropped dark hair and a short beard swathing his strong jaw, and Larra thought he was incredibly handsome. He was accompanied by a dazzling redhead with creamy skin and sapphire eyes, children surrounding them: their skin was not as dark as Lord Carys’ but there was no mistaking that they were his children, from the elegant young woman standing taller than the redhead, her tight curls piled high on her head, to the older boy with an easy grin and sparkling hazel eyes, the younger boy with a shy smile and wild black curls, and the twin toddlers clinging to the redhead’s skirts. The entire family wore rich furs and the details in their clothing were all in varying hues of teal. Larra glanced across the hall to the hearth, where Darkstar caught her eye and winked, smirking. It gave the immediate impression of togetherness, of belonging – of strength. The Velaryon seahorse was worked into the embroidery on the ladies’ gowns, the eldest son’s cloak and studded on the pauldrons of Lord Velaryon’s thick leather armour.

“Your Grace,” Lord Carys said, his voice deep and attractive. “May I introduce my wife, Lady Vialle of Lys, and my sister, Lady Calista of Driftmark.”

Larra sat up a little straighter, a smile tugging at the corners of her lips, and she hoped Calanthe had a good view of Lady Calista Velaryon as she strode forward confidently, her dark eyes full of challenge. She shared her brother’s decadent dark skin: her head was shaved shorter even than her brother’s yet Larra thought she was undeniably beautiful, possibly even more so because her shorn head threw her features into relief. Strong, fierce and beautiful. Much shorter than her brother, there was a ferocity in Lady Calista’s eyes that made up for the height difference. Lady Calista wore vibrant Essosi garb – richly embroidered, patterned textiles and beadwork in hues of teal, faded by sunlight – under scarred Dornish-style leather armour and carried a simple spear. Looking at them both, Larra knew instantly that Lady Calista was far more dangerous than her brother, who exuded an air of calm and warmth, smiling as he lifted one of his twin daughters into his arms, carrying her easily on his hip. Gesturing to the willowy young woman with deep, warm skin and tight curls piled high on her head, tumbling around her temples, Lord Carys said, “This is our eldest daughter, Lady Viana, our sons Callan and Cosimo, and our youngest daughters, Caryna and Cora.”

“You are very welcome at Winterfell,” Sansa said warmly, and Larra smiled at the little girl hiding behind her mother’s skirts. Lady Viana seemed close to Larra’s age and her elegant features blossomed into a smile full of warmth when she caught Larra’s eye.

“We bring five hundred heavy horse and a thousand spearmen and archers,” Lord Carys said. “And my sister is worth more than a dozen Unsullied on her worst day.”

“I can believe it,” Jon said, eyeing the lady’s scarred armour and determined scowl. Lady Calista’s chin rose, her scowl softening, and several men behind her chuckled softly.

Ser Crissofer Caron and Ser Cassander Swann came next, bowing low. Larra glanced subtly over her shoulder as she heard Sansa rustle her gown, and saw her sister’s gaze resting with barely disguised mistrust on Ser Cassander Swann. She reached out and touched Sansa’s hand: Larra tilted her head curiously but Sansa just smiled blandly back at her.

“Ser Cassander, have you met my sister Lady Sansa before?” Larra asked, as the knight rose.

“No, my lady, I am sorry to say that I have not yet had the honour,” he answered politely. “My brother Balon serves in the Kingsguard and knew Lady Sansa at court.”

“Ah,” Larra said softly, nodding, and noticed Ser Cassander looking rather contrite, his gaze flicking to Sansa. He had not been at court but the whispers of Sansa’s mistreatment at the hands of King Joffrey’s vicious pet Kingsguards had spread far. Ser Balon was no Meryn Trant, Sansa had told Larra, but he had done his duty by the King, no matter that chivalry should have demanded he protect Sansa instead.

“Ser Balon is a man of duty and valour,” Sansa said quietly. “Our Dornish guests tell me that Princess Myrcella could ask for no finer protector.” Ser Cassander bowed graciously, giving Lady Nym and Darkstar a sidelong glance. Darkstar glowered back.

Next came four men who resembled each other fiercely, all of them good-looking and scarred and as tall as the steeples of a sept. Their fur-lined cloaks were stitched with white quills over the breast, and their armour was dented and scratched but well-made. Ser Cadmian, Ser Castor, Ser Cormac and Ser Cedric were brothers from the Parchments.

“House Penrose?” Jon frowned subtly, glancing over at Ser Davos.

“Their brother Ser Cortnay remains castellan of Storm’s End, Your Grace,” Ser Davos reminded him. “He refused to yield the castle to Stannis.”

“And he holds it still,” said Ser Cadmian stoutly – or was it Ser Castor? There were too many Penroses, and they looked far too similar thanks to their beards. “Until a true heir returns.”

“He’ll have a long wait,” someone muttered, but Larra noticed Ser Davos’ beard twitch as he glanced surreptitiously at Gendry. Gendry caught Larra’s eye, his expression solemn.

After the Penroses came Ser Yomer Lantel, a tall man wearing traditional plate-armour of the Westerlands, covered with leather for the winter yet still emblazoned with two snarling lions rampant. Chain-mail glittered beneath the red-dyed leather embellished with gilded-steel details. Ser Yomer had very long blonde hair and dark brows drawn in almost perpetual anger over dark, cunning eyes.

Offhandedly, he introduced his sister, Lady Rohanne. She wore a fine dress of red wool twill, delicate gold jewellery and a simple golden braid entwined with sinuous gold chains and ribbons, and dipped a pretty curtsy, her braid falling over her shoulder. Despite their long journey, her crystalline pale-green eyes were bright as she said, as if she had been holding it in for too long, “Your Grace, you train your women to fight?”

Her brother interrupted before Jon could answer.

“Rohanne, war is the province of men,” he scolded her.

“What is province?” Karsi muttered to a Knight of the Vale, frowning. His response got an angry scoff from the fierce Karsi.

“In the North,” Larra interjected with a bite, as Karsi narrowed her eyes on Lord Yomer, muttering quietly to her companions, “we acknowledge that those without swords are the first to die upon them. And we need every able-bodied person to fight if we have a hope of surviving the battle to come.”

“Have you ever fought, my lady?” Lord Yomer said coolly. Larra held his gaze.

“More often than you, by the state of your armour,” Larra responded coldly. The Northern lords laughed richly; the Valemen looked as if they wished to but honour demanded they respect a fellow knight – even a Lannister knight. He was a Lantel, a cadet branch, not a true Lannister, but that was close enough. From her perch, little Lady Lyanna Mormont gave Ser Yomer such a chilling look that it was a wonder he did not expire from frostbite.

Ser Yomer barely managed to rein in his disdain as he swept his dark eyes over her. She gazed past him, to a young woman with billows of curling blonde hair the colour of ripe wheat in the sunshine, a pretty nose and sparkling dark-emerald eyes. She wore a wool gown similar to Lady Rohanne’s, but where Lady Rohanne’s was dyed a vibrant blood-red, the bodice and sleeves richly embroidered with gold-work, the dye on her dress was less striking, and the only embroidery was a hint around the cuffs and at the high collar.

“Who is your companion?” Larra asked, and it was Ser Jaime rather than Lady Rohanne who answered.

He stepped forward, and Larra noticed that he gestured to the young woman with an affectionate smile, a lightness in his eyes as he glanced at her. “My lady, this is my cousin – “

“Joy!” The young voice rippled through the quiet of the hall, and a heartbeat later there was a banging and scraping of benches and the Lannister girls flung themselves at the young woman, wrapping their arms around her waist and tugging on her skirts, gripping her hand.

“Careful, girls,” Larra admonished gently. “You’ll rip her to shreds if you’re not careful.”

“My lady, this is my cousin, Joy Hill,” Ser Jaime said, and his gaze drifted to the Lannister girls.

“We believed the bowels of Casterly Rock had been emptied of Lannisters,” Larra said quietly, and the hall chuckled at her use of words.

“It would seem not,” Ser Jaime said, watching the Lannister girls carefully. He glanced at Larra, a question in his gaze.

“Girls,” she called gently, and they stopped chatting animatedly with Joy Hill to peer at her. She had rarely seen the girls so excited. “You’ve forgotten your manners. Introduce yourselves to your cousin.” She nodded at Ser Jaime.

Narcisa, ever the lady and their leader, swept an elegant curtsy. “Seven blessings on you, cousin. I am Lady Narcisa Lannister. This is Lady Delphine and Lady Crisantha.” The two girls curtseyed; Crisantha did not raise her eyes off the floor. “This is Lady Altheda and Rosamund and the baby is Leona.”

“And I’m Calanthe,” declared the girl, striding forward in her leathers. She did not curtsey. Instead, she boldly strode up to Ser Jaime and said, “I wish to see the stump.”

Larra laughed.

“Calanthe!” Narcisa hissed.

“What?” Calanthe asked, wide-eyed.

“Your cousin Calanthe remains untamed,” Larra told Ser Jaime, whose eyes glittered with humour.

“How refreshing,” Ser Jaime said, his lips twitching.

“We are constantly reviewing tact,” Larra told him. “Calanthe…” Calanthe sighed heavily, rolling her eyes in annoyance.

“Fine,” she huffed, then frowned at Ser Jaime. Firmly, she vowed, “Later.”

Ser Jaime glanced at Larra, who smirked. “You dare not refuse her,” she said richly, and Ser Jaime smiled.

Joy Hill curtseyed prettily to the high table and allowed her cousins to lead her eagerly away, Delphine resting her head on her cousin’s shoulder, Rosamund climbing into her lap for a cuddle. Larra felt a sharp pang in her chest as she watched, a sudden sadness gripping her – as if she was losing them. Leona glanced over at her, her curls bouncing about her ears, and smiled around the thumb she was sucking: she waved a hand eagerly at Larra. The tension in her gut eased, and Larra smiled back. Ser Jaime watched her carefully.

Lord Tarly failed to conceal his reaction when the last of the lords and knights stepped forward to bow deeply at the high table. He was an older man, and gazing at him, Larra was struck by how handsome he was, even in his later years. He was richly tanned, with icy grey eyes and steel-grey hair braided messily down his back. His trimmed steel-grey beard had two fierce streaks of silver-white from the corners of his firm lips that brought a long-toothed snowcat to Larra’s mind. He was broad-shouldered and muscular still, and he wore battered Westerosi armour over Essosi style robes, the sigil over his breast scarred with many deep gouges and scratches. She noticed that knights and lords stepped away silently to make way for him and he moved through the crowds as if he was used to being minded whenever he entered a room. Larra managed to discern lips and skulls on his battered armour and her lips parted.

“Your Grace,” he said softly, bowing deeply to Jon. Then he turned to Sansa and Larra, bowing deeply to them, and gave a third bow to Brandon. “I am Lord Richard Lonmouth.”

He gazed unabashedly at Jon, then at Larra, holding her gaze confidently. Beside him, Ser Jaime watched Jon and Larra carefully, flitting his gaze to Lord Lonmouth.

“These are my wives,” he said, gesturing behind him: two ladies – two Essosi ladies of surpassing beauty, dressed in their traditional garb under heavy, lustrous furs – stepped forward. They were light and dark. “Sia of Lys and Noor of the Old Blood of Valyria.” Sia was a willowy, ethereal beauty with a sheet of shimmering pearl-gold hair that fell straight to her bottom – glorious proof of her Valyrian ancestry – and wide sky-blue eyes that gave her an air of absolute innocence. Her opposite was Noor, an exotically beautiful woman with delicious olive skin and sultry dark eyes enhanced with kohl. She had incredibly full lips and a figure that could stop a dragon in its tracks.

Larra couldn’t help wonder if she in any way resembled Robb’s Volantene wife.

“Wives?” Larra smiled. Sia and Noor had to be half Lord Lonmouth’s age at least, closer to her own. “My lord, you must be fond of ear-ache.”

Lord Lonmouth chuckled, though his humour did little to thaw the iciness in his pale eyes. “I would like to introduce my son by my deceased wife…Ser Rhaegar.” A good-looking man a few years younger than Larra stepped forward and bowed.

At the sound of his name, a hush seemed to fall over the hall, which then rippled with whispers.

There were likely many men across Westeros named for the Last Dragon: before the Rebellion, he had been the most famous man in the seven kingdoms, respected and praised, admired and lusted after by everyone. Larra had just never met one.

“You fought for Prince Rhaegar during the Rebellion,” Jon said. Larra glanced over her shoulder at him. He had yet to approach her to discuss the awful truth but she was not yet running out of patience. She knew Jon better than anyone: it would do more harm to force the issue.

“And I would do so again, if history were to repeat itself. Ser Rey, Ser Jorian, Lord Carys and I fought for Prince Rhaegar,” Lord Lonmouth said, without any shame. “Lord Carys, Dagonet and Ser Arthur Wylde over there were all young squires who had their first blood fighting beside the Last Dragon.”

“You have been in Essos ever since?” Larra asked.

“Under the Usurper’s rule we were branded traitors,” Ser Rey said, pulling a face. He seemed easy-going and good-humoured, but the stain against his honour stung.

“Ever since the Usurper’s death, Westeros has called us home,” Ser Jorian said, his voice rich with barely suppressed emotion.

“You could not have long reclaimed your homes when the armistice was called,” Larra said solemnly. To make it home, after so long, only to leave it? “I know how much you sacrificed to leave them again.”

“If we did not, we would not long hold our lands as our own,” Lord Lonmouth said simply. “For our children, and their children, we must fight. If we shall live, we shall live, but if we must die, it shall be an honour to die beside you, fighting for what is right and good.”


Dry paper rustled and Larra jerked her head up, blinking blearily as the firelight flickered, logs crackling merrily in the hearth. Disoriented, Larra glanced around, sitting up straight. She had sat down with her crochet: it rested in her lap, fingers tangled with yarn. The papers she had been reading through had tumbled to the flagstones.

“You’re sleeping more than you used to,” Sansa said, and Larra moaned softly, rubbing her face, and glanced around. Her sister sat in her fur cloak, hair glimmering copper in the candlelight. Larra eyed the fine leather gloves Sansa always wore.  The panelled walls of the library made it far warmer than most of the halls and chambers yet Sansa still wasn’t quite used to the bitter cold of the North after so long in the capital. “The bruises under your eyes are finally fading.”

“How long was I asleep?” Larra sighed.

“Not long,” Sansa said, smiling softly, the corners of her eyes rather pinched. “You obviously needed it.”

“What are you doing?” Larra prompted, untangling the yarn from her fingers and leaning over to gather the papers she had dropped. Her head spun with momentary dizziness and she moaned, settling back in her high-backed armed chair. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw several maesters rummaging in the stacks and sitting at tables beneath hammered bronze sconces, candlelight illuminating them and shedding more light on their parchment as they worked.

“Ravens finally made it through the storms,” Sansa sighed heavily.

“Dark wings, dark words,” Larra muttered grimly, pinching her eyes.

“Not all,” Sansa said.

“Truly? People rarely send ravens to share delightful news,” Larra said. She frowned. “I suppose all news may be delightful from a certain perspective.”

“Shall I start with something delightful first?”

“No, chase the sour with a little sweetness,” Larra grumbled. She heard Sansa tapping one of the raven-scrolls against the table and glanced over. “You look worried.”

“Some of the Riverlords have sent word that the Kingsroad is littered with bodies. The horde is travelling north,” Sansa said quietly.

Larra went still at her tone. “They’re raping and enslaving their way north?”

“No,” Sansa said. “They are…behaving, by all accounts.”

“So why do you look so grim?”

“The maesters say the pale mare rides with the Dothraki.” The rustling of the maesters was stifled by the crackling of the fire in the hearth.

Immediately, Larra’s stomach burned with dread. The pale mare. Dysentery. The only force in the world powerful enough to wipe out entire armies – besides dragons. And the Dothraki were riding along the Kingsroad, at the end of which the entirety of the North was confined in Winterfell.

If the diseased Dothraki reached Winterfell, all the living the North would be wiped out in days. If she attempted to take the North from them, Daenerys would be queen not of ashes but of corpses. She and the Night King would have else something in common – beyond the burning desire to dominate all life and turn it to their will.

“Have they reached Moat Cailin?” Larra asked.

“Not yet,” Sansa said, checking the scrolls.

“I’ll ask Bran to keep an eye on them. Hopefully they’ll take opportunity to shelter at Moat Cailin,” Larra said.

“And if not? If they continue north, spreading disease as they go?”

“Happily the entire North has already emptied to Winterfell,” Larra said. “That is both blessing and curse. Our people are safe from the spread of disease as the Dothraki journey through our lands… But if they reach Winterfell, they risk every man, woman and child confined here.”

“So what do we do?” Sansa asked. She gazed at Larra with wide blue eyes, her entire body turned to Larra. She wasn’t asking as an offhand comment: Sansa was looking to Larra for answers because she had no idea what to do.

“Maester Luwin always separated us when we suffered sicknesses,” Larra mused. “He burned our linens and clothes, kept us bathed and clean and prevented us from joining the nursery even for days after we recovered… In the True North, the Free Folk know that cleanliness prevents sickness… There’s a reason the south is riddled with plagues while the North rarely suffers such devastation.”

“There aren’t enough people to spread it,” Sansa said, and Larra nodded.

“I am no maester but continuing to keep ourselves clean and segregating any who suffer sickness seems the most sensible way forward,” Larra said.

“And when the Dothraki arrive?”

“If they arrive,” Larra said, sighing heavily. “Dysentery is the dread of armies all over the world… With Lady Targaryen’s screamers travelling as one horde, they are incredibly vulnerable to disease. Not to mention, she burned any provisions they might have claimed. Their resources will be spread too thin. The weakest will fall to sickness first and it will spread like wildfire through the rest.” She sighed heavily, rubbing her face and trying to remember all she had learned from Maester Luwin about the Dothraki, and all she had learned from observing them during Bran’s memories of Daenerys Stormborn’s life since her marriage to Khal Drogo. “Saying that, though, the Dothraki are brutally efficient when it comes to dealing with threats against the horde. They will eliminate any threat at the first signs of sickness.”

“What if their loyalty to Lady Targaryen overpowers their better sense?” Sansa asked.

Larra pondered this for a moment. “The Dothraki follow strength: Lady Targaryen is nowhere to be seen, let alone follow. The horde is led by her chosen commanders: they will make the decisions to protect the horde.”

“Maester Luwin burned our things,” Sansa said softly, gazing at the fire, and Larra nodded, frowning at her. “Daenerys would never entertain the idea, no matter how many lives it would save.”

“What idea would that be?”

“The Dothraki spread disease throughout the Riverlands and threaten the North,” Sansa said. “If the Dothraki have not done what is necessary, it may fall to us to eliminate the threat they pose before they can reach Winterfell.”

“You’re not in the capital any more, Sansa,” Larra reminded her. “Say what you mean.”

“If the horde threatens to bring disease to Winterfell, you may need to use Rhaegal to burn them before they can infect us all.”

Larra stared at Sansa, unable to form a response. The faint scratching of quills had gone silent.

Sansa had never been in the schoolroom with them – with Larra, Jon, Robb and Theon. She had never engaged in the fiery debates Larra and her brothers had had about the Targaryens and their moral responsibilities to the people they ruled over as dragonriders – and their failings, most clearly highlighted in their actions during the Dance of the Dragons. Sansa had cared only what the Queen Who Never Was had worn to her wedding, how Queen Alicent wore her hair in the sept, what the court fashions had been under the influence of the Realm’s Delight, whether Queen Helaena had preferred embroidery or music as her hobby. Arya had been the one enthralled by the strategies adopted by the Blacks, wept furiously at the deaths of Vermithor and Seasmoke, Sunfyre and Vhagar, had listened with wide eyes to Larra and Robb debating what might have happened had Aemond One-Eye sided with the Blacks, or had Princess Rhaenyra never abandoned court but rather built political alliances and strengthened her position to take the throne once King Viserys had died. Arya had listened to Larra and Theon arguing themselves hoarse over the moral implications of unleashing dragons on human armies, and Robb and Larra arguing about why no Westerosi lord had ever dared bare swords against the Targaryens, for the simple fact that the Valyrians had used their dragons to enslave millions of people in the most fearsome empire known to history.

Larra had always believed that it was morally abhorrent to use dragons as weapons to destroy and terrorise people into subservience. As a girl, she had believed – believed even more strongly now – that dragons had been rare and precious creatures after the Doom, that for millennia they had been yoked to the wills and whims of humans and forced to go against natures. But they were wild creatures and now, more than ever before, thanks to her bond with Last Shadow and her time in the True North, she was firm in her conviction that wild creatures should be free.

She was bonded with Rhaegal, as she was with Last Shadow, but that bond did not mean ownership. Last Shadow had been her companion and protector, sometimes her provider, her guide and her last ember of hope. Though the bond with Rhaegal was newer, they were no different. Rhaegal was a wild creature born to live free, to soar high above the tallest mountain, sailing through the clouds, nothing but stars above them, diving to the ground only to hunt and to sleep. They were as wild as Last Shadow and the more time Larra spent with them, the more she knew that Rhaegal was just as cunning and clever as the direwolf, as intuitive and loyal, their bond as deep and abiding as hers with Last Shadow’s.

Larra would no sooner force Last Shadow to fight for her than she would Rhaegal. To force an animal to do what she was perfectly capable of doing herself – hunting, killing…

Staring at Sansa, her voice as solemn as she had ever heard Father’s, Larra said quietly, “Those who pass the sentence should swing the sword. Those are Father’s words, why he always executed deserters and traitors… If you are to take a person’s life, you owe it to them to look them in the eye and hear their last words. If you cannot – “

“Perhaps they don’t deserve to die after all,” Sansa said, clearing her throat awkwardly. She had heard Father’s words from her before: Larra should have realised Sansa would remember them.

“It should never be easy, to take another person’s life from them,” Larra said grimly, suppressing a flinch as memories of her time in the True North clawed and clamoured inside her mind. “Dragons… Even in our own lifetime, we have seen how easy it is to unleash a dragon’s wrath upon armies. She never gave it a second thought, except to congratulate herself on her easy victory. She never looked those men in the eye to see their terror, their fury, their desperation to return home, to see it in their faces as they realised that they would never see their loved ones again. She never saw their courage as they met their deaths. In the Field of Fire, she didn’t see thousands of men with lives and families and stories of their own. She dehumanised them. That’s how she could relish burning the Lannisters. And in a heartbeat they were no more than ash, the wind carrying the ghosts of their screams away.”

“I shouldn’t have asked you to use Rhaegal,” Sansa said softly.

“You won’t be the last,” Larra said grimly, her voice full of dread. Dragons had been extinct for a century and a half. They had been used to terrible effect to forge the Seven Kingdoms and the first Westeros had learned of their resurrection was the Field of Fire, the Lion Culling. They were creatures of immense power. Many would fight to either kill or control the dragons before history could repeat itself, before the Targaryens – Daenerys – could regain their hold, before the dragons and those who rode them became a threat to every person in Westeros who had enjoyed their freedom from a magnificent and terrible dynasty.

Westeros had been rid of dragons for a century and a half. And with the dragons’ deaths, the power of the Targaryen dynasty had waned, until their once-splendid family was reduced to nothing more than two vagrant children begging in the dust of Essos.

“The Targaryens did what the dragonlords always did in Valyria: they used their dragons to enslave and intimidate,” Larra said softly. “We’ve been free of that dread for a century and a half. I won’t let Rhaegal be used to confirm Westerosi lords’ worst fears about dragons.”

“Even if it means thousands will die?”

“The Dothraki know how to rule themselves,” Larra said. “I could fly Rhaegal down to the Neck and pre-emptively burn the entire horde to prevent disease from spreading any further than Moat Cailin but I would forfeit the healthy riders to stop the sick ones. It’s also not my place to interfere, when the leaders within the horde are likely discussing how to stop the disease from wiping them out: the Dothraki are brutal but they aren’t stupid. They will be as worried about the disease spreading through their riders as we are of them bringing the sickness to Winterfell…” She sighed and shook her head. She glanced at Sansa. “I could fly to the Neck tonight and burn the entire horde and we could say it was to prevent the threat of disease…but what happens the next time we hear of a potential threat? Shall I fly off on Rhaegal to deal with it before it can affect us? That’s how the Valyrians created their empire. It’s how the Targaryens ruled for a century and a half. It is not who I am. It’s not who Father raised me to be… I will not turn that magnificent creature into a weapon. They’re as wild and as free as Shadow and should be allowed to be so.”

“I’m sorry that I’ve upset you,” Sansa said quietly.

“You haven’t,” Larra said dully, shaking her head. “You will not be the last to suggest I use Rhaegal for their firepower now that we are bonded. It’s just the first time I’ve said aloud what I feel about it. It’s better we discuss it than me tearing the head off some poor lordling for suggesting it.”

“I’ve yet to see you truly snap at anyone, even when you’re angry,” Sansa said gently. “And I have seen you angry in council meetings.”

“Have you, then?”

“Your anger is so cold it burns,” Sansa said sagely. “When you’re truly angry, you go quiet. It’s scarier than any red-faced lord bellowing across the table. That’s why everyone listens to you.”

“Because of my glacial rage?”

“Because your rage is as beautiful as it is terrifying. And unlike the men’s tantrums, your fury is constructive,” Sansa said. “It seems to sharpen your focus.”

“I suppose it does,” Larra sighed. She reached up to rub her aching eyes. She frowned. “You said there was good news, comparatively.”

“Oh. Highgarden has been reclaimed by Ser Garlan Tyrell.”

“I thought the Tyrells were all dead, but for the rosebuds Jon met at Dragonstone. Which is he, then?”

“Garlan the Gallant,” Sansa said, her eyes lighting up. “The second son – Margaery and Loras’ older brother.”

“And now heir of Highgarden. What is his nature?”

“As his nickname suggests. At my wedding to Lord Tyrion, all of the guests shunned me – all but Ser Garlan and his wife Lady Leonette. Ser Garlan told me that Lord Tyrion is a ‘bigger man than he seems’ and that I would have been far happier with him than with Ser Loras… Ser Garlan danced with me. He was very kind.”

“And now he shall rule the Reach,” Larra mused. “Well, he sounds wise enough.”

“How do you know he is wise?”

“He saw Lord Tyrion’s true worth,” Larra said simply. “Did the raven-scroll say anything else?”

“It detailed the allies who helped reclaim Highgarden and mentioned that Lady Olenna Tyrell, despite being fragile from poor health, has returned to the Reach with her surviving granddaughters, including Lady Alinore Tyrell. She’s the young widow of Willas Tyrell. They married quietly after the bombing of Baelor’s Sept.”

“Willas was the eldest son?”

“Yes, and heir to Highgarden before the Uprooting. Lady Alinore is heavy with child, according to the maester who wrote the raven-scroll,” Sansa mused.

“Narcisa sometimes mentions the rosebuds they met at Dragonstone,” Larra said thoughtfully. “She seemed impressed by Lady Alynore’s elegance, which is something… Well, at least Ser Garlan has Lady Olenna to guide him as he rebuilds the Reach. The smallfolk will have continued on as they always have, likely already planted their crops long before the Lannisters raided Highgarden’s stores. The smallfolk have prepared for the winter – though I do wonder what the new Lord Tyrell will do with those crops.”

“What do you mean?”

“Winter harvests are limited. That means Lord Tyrell must choose between feeding his people or selling the crops elsewhere at a premium,” Larra sighed. “I know what I would do.”

“Keep your people fed.”

“Father raised us with the belief that ruling is a responsibility, not a right. Few share that sentiment. The Reach’s wealth comes from its fertile lands. Though nobody admits it, that wealth relies on the people who work the land,” Larra said. “The Tyrells don’t work the fields: the smallfolk do. Without the smallfolk, there are no crops, there is no wealth.”

“What about the places that rely on the Reach?” Sansa said.

“King’s Landing will be the first to succumb to famine, as it did during the War,” Larra said, and Sansa nodded thoughtfully. “Thousands will die of famine before sickness grips the city.”

“You think a plague will strike the capital?”

“It usually does,” Larra mused. “War, famine, plague… One tends to follow the other. They are brothers in competition to see who can create the highest death-toll… The War of the Five Kings was unique in that a plague did not strike, but then again the Tyrells prevented a famine in the capital.”

“So not only did Daenerys Targaryen murder an entire House that kept the Westerlands united, she has likely sown the seeds for a famine that will weaken the capital,” Sansa sighed.

“I do hope Cersei is smart enough to use that to her advantage,” Larra said thoughtfully.

“You sound almost as if you support her on the Iron Throne,” Sansa said.

Larra shrugged. “Cersei likely blew up the Sept of Baelor, yet I feel far safer with her on the Iron Throne than Daenerys.”

“Because of her dragons,” Sansa said quietly. Any conversation about the Iron Throne and Daenerys inevitably returned to the topic of dragons.

“We’ve seen what she does with them when she doesn’t get her way,” Larra said. “Aegon, Rhaenys and Visenya managed to strike a very precarious balance during their reign…Jaehaerys managed it, too. That’s why he remains the most celebrated king of the Targaryen dynasty… He understood that dragons were a last resort where politics failed. Daenerys has no understanding of politics. She places no value in them whatsoever.”

“She’s managed to get this far.”

“Through her dragon’s brute power. In Meereen, she made a half-hearted attempt at politics and when she faced pushback from the nobles and the freed slaves, she imposed her will through Drogon, regardless of the wants and needs of the Meereenese people,” Larra said. “She ruled through absolutism, the same way Maegor did.”

“Absolutism?”

“Maester Luwin used the term to describe Maegor’s reign. Royal power unchecked and unrestrained by any other institution – whether it was the Citadel, the Faith or the nobility,” Larra said. “Maegor answered to no-one, thanks to the dragons.”

“In fairness to Lady Targaryen, I do not believe she is as tyrannical as Maegor.”

Larra gazed at her. “Not yet. He was not born Maegor the Cruel. Just like Princess Rhaenyra: she did not turn from the Realm’s Delight into Maegor with Teats overnight.”

“Then how did it happen?” Sansa asked quietly.

“They made choices. Little ones, at first. Choices in their own lives, then choices they made in reaction to things that occurred outside of their control,” Larra said. “The same as Daenerys has: she has made choices. She made the choice to set the Lannister armies ablaze, along with the food from the Reach. She made the choice to murder the Lannisters in cold blood. She made the choice to abuse Jon.”

“And she made the choice to join the fight against the Night King.”

“Yes,” Larra said, admitting, “We saw in Brandon’s memories that Daenerys’ choices were usually well-intentioned. I do believe that she began with the best intentions.”

“But?” Sansa prompted, smirking, her eyes alight. Everything before the word ‘but’ is horse-shit.

“But her dragons have enabled her to get her way,” Larra said. “She does not have to listen to anyone’s better judgement if she doesn’t wish to. Daenerys confuses her arrogance with experience. She believes that she is right and good and that anyone who defies her is evil and her enemy. And she is allowed to continue believing this because she has the power to murder anyone who gets in her way. When she murders people she believes are her enemies, it further enforces that she is doing what is right and just. Otherwise, wouldn’t they have the strength to stop her?”

“So she is as ignorant as I am.”

“You are far from ignorant. You have learned from every experience you have survived,” Larra said. “You were once naïve: your mother fought to preserve your innocence as long as possible. But you were educated, as a lady, yes, but you were educated. You had lessons in history and basic economics and geography… You learned at your mother’s knee what it means to rule a castle. Daenerys has had no education whatsoever. She has had no formal tutoring but she also refuses to learn from those with more experience. Anyway… Enough talk of her. What does Winterfell’s capacity stand at, with our new guests’ arrival?”

“We are almost full,” Sansa said. “Any more people arrive, we will have to house them in Winter’s Town.”

“Any complaints from those newly-arrived?” Larra asked.

“No. they’re happy to have sturdy walls and a blazing fire,” Sansa said, gazing at Larra. “It was interesting to see who joined Ser Jaime to come north. Most of those men fought beside Prince Rhaegar. He must have been one man in a million to inspire such loyalty even after death.”

“Like Jon.”

Notes:

FIVE DAYS! I need House of the Dragon.

Chapter 50: Preparation

Notes:

Fifty chapters! I remember when I was struggling with chapter seven! Valyrian Steel has become so much more than I thought it would be – I’ve realised that I’ll have to break up Larra’s journey into different stories, otherwise this story will have 200+ chapters!

HAPPY D-DAY!

Can anyone remember if Arya knows about Jon and Larra? I’ve completely forgotten if I’ve told her!

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

50

Preparation


A fierce wind howled beyond the diamond-paned windows, shuttered to the darkness and the cold, and Larra rocked contentedly in her rocking-chair, fingers busy with her crochet, one of her kittens, Arianwyn, purring deeply around her neck while Uhtred lay curled up before the hearth, a tiny ball of charcoal fluff. She gazed across the hearth, watching Gendry. They had sent the children to bed after baths and his hair was starting to curl beautifully all over his head as it dried before the fire. His head was bent over Dark Sister, the blade turned to the firelight. His lips moved silently as his thumb stroked the blade almost lovingly. He was counting the ripples. Counting the folds in the steel. By day, he spent his hours hammering at the anvil, working on anything and everything Winterfell needed to rebuild and to fortify. Larra had insisted that Gendry be given the time every day to work on his Valyrian steel.

They had to continue as if they would survive the war to come. And that meant that Gendry had to continue working on his skill with the complicated techniques inherent to forging Valyrian steel – a process unlike any in the world. Its art had been lost.

Gendry was the first in over four centuries to create fresh Valyrian steel. Every blade in existence could be re-forged yet only Gendry understood the technique and had the skill to forge it anew. He spent a lot of time talking quietly with Bran in the library, discussing technique and long-forgotten lore about forging Valyrian steel.

He sighed softly and sheathed the blade, resting the scabbard against the mantel and leaning back in his chair, frowning thoughtfully.

“You’re quiet this evening,” Larra said. Even with the children, who usually coaxed rich laughter and creative play from Gendry, he had been gentle. Not subdued, but not as open and charismatic as Larra knew him to be. He had sat quietly with Neva and Briar, reading.

“I’ve just been thinking,” Gendry sighed.

“About what?”

“We finished the scorpion,” Gendry said quietly, glancing over at her. His eyes glowed sapphire in the firelight.

“That’s a good thing,” Larra said.

“I didn’t think we’d have the time to finish it,” Gendry said, glancing at her. She was reminded once again that Gendry had been to the True North, had faced the enemy, had looked them in the eye and fought, and had survived. He knew what they were to face, better than most.

“The Wall still stands,” Larra told him gently. “Until the Others find a way to bring it down, I thank the gods for every moment more we have to prepare.”

“There’s only so much preparation we can do,” Gendry said. “Soon, we’ll have full armouries, the Unbroken Tower will be rebuilt with the scorpion in place… Winterfell will be the best-fortified castle in Westeros…and we will have to wait. The men are…”

“The men are what?”

“Some question whether the Night King exists at all…else they believe he’s just another lord or a wildling king who’s taken a fancy name. They think him and his armies will be stopped by any storm,” Gendry said.

“You know the truth,” Larra said. She gazed at Gendry. Sansa and Jon spent a lot of time with the lords and knights. Gendry heard the muttering from the smallfolk. “But you are right, there will come a time when there is no more work to do… People will become bored, then worried, then angry… What do you think we should do?”

“People need something to do…but we also need something to look forward to,” Gendry said softly. “You know…I still remember when the King threw a tourney for your father.”

“You’re not suggesting we host a tourney?”

“No,” Gendry chuckled at her appalled expression. Tourneys were a southern institution – the pastime of a people who had forgotten what it meant to fight to live, who made a spectacle of warfare, turned brutality into a pageant. “But we need something. Something that keeps us motivated. The longer the Night King takes to get here, the less people will take the threat seriously.” He glanced at Larra and gave her a small smile, adding, “The dances help.”

Almost every night, there was music and dancing. And Larra had ensured the halls were opened to anyone, not just the nobility: the smallfolk enjoyed a dance as much as any highborn. Not everyone turned up to the dances but there was always a vast array of people eager to dance – to court their sweethearts. Larra often took the older Lannister girls, dragging Cadeon along: it was the only chance Narcisa had to dress up and show off her dancing skills. And it was an opportunity for Larra to educate the girls in manners: she encouraged the girls to dance with whoever asked them, no matter how lowborn – because she did the same. She loved to dance: she loved the music. No matter how exhausted she was, she took the time to enjoy a few dances.

It was also good for the smallfolk to see one of the Starks among them, to see her as approachable: and many did approach her. Many issues that might have escalated to a significant problem for Jon were diffused by Larra in the dance-hall. She saw things and heard things that rarely made it up to the King’s solar. She was reminded of Father inviting someone to dine with him every day, to hear about their lives and their troubles, keeping in touch with the fears and desires of his people. Jon had yet to come to the dance-hall yet he was just as active about Winterfell, ingratiating himself among the smallfolk who were the life’s-blood of the castle, whose work allowed everything to run smoothly, even when no-one saw it. Jon had spent too much time at Castle Black, where every man’s efforts contributed to their survival, not to appreciate the invisible workforce that kept Winterfell going.

“When are you going to come dancing with me?” Larra asked, and Gendry smiled softly, his eyes glinting in the firelight.

“Not tonight,” he said, chuckling as she yawned widely, shuddering. She smiled blearily, disentangling her crochet from her lap.

“I think it’s high time you learned how to use one of those,” Larra said, nodding at Dark Sister. Gendry raised his eyebrows. “I know you favour your hammer…but what if it is lost? You need to be able to wield whichever weapon you can get your hands on.”

“I see what you’re doing. You’re trying to work me to exhaustion so you can get a good night’s sleep,” Gendry said, winking, and Larra laughed, grinning.

“And deprive myself the pleasure of your body?” she said, her eyes roving over his muscled body. She gently pulled Arianwyn from around her neck to snuggle with Uhtred on the hearth and Gendry reached for her hips as she climbed into his lap. She cuddled up close, enjoying his scent and his warmth. He leaned up to tenderly kiss her throat, her jaw, and she cradled his face in her hands, stroking her thumbs over his cheekbones, before leaning in to give him a tender, lingering kiss.

“Promise me you’ll learn to wield a sword,” she whispered, her eyes filled with earnestness. “I know you know how to fight. You can kill a man with one blow of your fist if you had to… I don’t want you surviving this war to be a matter of chance.”

He reached up, smoothing away the curls tumbling about her face, and sighed heavily. “Would you still marry me if I didn’t?”

“I don’t know,” Larra said honestly. “Your bedsport’s not enough to make me forget you had the chance to learn how to defend yourself to the best of your abilities and you wouldn’t take it.”

“Hm. So when should I go to the training yard, then?” Gendry asked, his smile gentle, and Larra released a breath, a knot unfurling inside her chest. She hadn’t realised how much she had been worrying about Gendry being untrained with most weapons. Possibly because she worried about so much that each individual worry seemed negligible unless she focused her energies on it.

“I want to find someone who has the time to train you properly,” Larra said.

“You don’t want me joining the other smallfolk?”

Larra sighed heavily, admitting to Gendry, “Most of them will die in the battle. They’re being taught enough to give them hope that what they know will be enough to keep them alive, so they have the courage to fight at all.” Gendry nodded solemnly. “After the war, Jon will need a master-at-arms. I’ve seen you teaching in the forges, Gendry. You give clear instructions, you demonstrate, you’re enduringly patient and you’re always learning. Most masters-at-arms have had a sword in their hands since before they can even remember, even a wooden sparring-sword. It makes it harder to teach when you already take the fundamentals for granted…”

“You want me to be Jon’s master-at-arms?” Gendry asked.

“I want you to have as many options as possible,” Larra said honestly.

“And what about the forges? Valyrian steel? What about that?” Gendry prompted.

“You are the only person in the world able to forge fresh Valyrian steel,” Larra said. “That makes anything you create priceless.”

“Why do you sound as if that’s a bad thing?”

“I’m not sure how you can capitalise on it,” Larra said. “Even if people learned what you’re capable of, they wouldn’t believe it unless they saw it with their own eyes – and who is going to journey to Winterfell, just to see if the rumours are true?”

“What if we didn’t stay in Winterfell?”

“Where else could we go where either of us would be safe?” Larra said quietly. She remembered how Jaime Lannister had looked at her in the hall the day he had arrived: she remembered Lord Lonmouth’s shrewd pale eyes as he gazed at her and Jon. The rumour was Richard Lonmouth had been squire to and knighted by Prince Rhaegar himself during the Rebellion. Benjen, Bran, Larra, Meera, Sansa, Jon, Gendry – too many people now knew the truth.

It was no longer a secret.

Too many people knew the truth about Larra and Jon’s parentage. Too many people looked at Gendry and were struck by his resemblance to his father Robert Baratheon.

Rhaegar’s daughter and Robert’s son.

She remembered what the Penroses had said about their brother Cortnay, who held Storm’s End in readiness for a true heir to return. She had seen Ser Davos’ glance at Gendry, the last known Baratheon bastard.

Larra’s sleep was restless of late, dreading what happened if they did survive the Night King.

“One thing at a time, then,” Gendry said quietly. He tilted her chin with a gentle touch and kissed her. “Who are you going to get to teach me?”

“I have an idea,” Larra said. “I wonder whether he’ll agree, though.”

“Not the Kingslayer?”

“No,” Larra chuckled. Skilled as Ser Jaime undoubtedly was – he had worn the white cloak of the Kingsguard, despite everything – he was skittish as a scolded cat. He had not yet had the time to settle down in Winterfell: very few in the castle actually appreciated that he had given up so much to come so far – on his own. He did not come as a Lannister of Casterly Rock: he came to Winterfell as an anointed knight of the Seven Kingdoms, sworn to defend the innocent. “He could have a lot to teach you, but I don’t think it wise to put Robert Baratheon’s son before him. He undoubtedly has his own feelings about his brother-by-law.”

“More than a few, if it’s true he cuckolded him,” Gendry snickered, and Larra rolled her eyes.

“Cersei was a fool,” she sighed, shaking her head. She scoffed. “She and Princess Rhaenyra made the same mistake: they were arrogant enough to believe they would never have to face the consequences of their actions.”

“Rhaenyra had a dragon, though,” Gendry pointed out.

“And her father’s love,” Larra sighed, shaking her head. “Cersei certainly had neither.”

“No; she had a drunk fool husband,” Gendry said. He frowned at her. “You’ve mentioned Princess Rhaenyra quite a lot lately.”

“Have I?”

“Yes,” Gendry said. “She’s been playing on your mind.”

“I suppose she has.”

“Why?”

“The Dance of the Dragons was essentially a family squabble over succession,” Larra said quietly. “When it becomes known who Jon is – what he is, the tension with Lady Targaryen will escalate. People will make their choice between a woman who had never set foot on Westerosi soil, but who has dragons, and a man who has sworn his life to defend the realm, a celebrated swordsman and a leader of peoples he united, who had the political savvy to survive some of the most cutthroat cultures in Westeros, who puts his people first. He’s the son of a highly respected High Lord and has risen to the rank of Lord Commander and King through his own tenacity. Jon will be dragged into any conflict over the Iron Throne regardless of what he wants. There will be too many people who have no desire to see either Cersei or Daenerys on the throne – in spite of the fact Daenerys has dragons. Jon is the surviving son of Rhaegar Targaryen. A male heir takes precedent over everyone else in the line of succession.”

“Explain it to me again,” Gendry frowned. “Where does Daenerys come in the order of things?”

“Aerys fathered Rhaegar, Viserys and Daenerys,” Larra said, sighing heavily, more exhausted than she wanted to admit. The bed called to her: but her time alone with Gendry was precious and she would not waste it. “Rhaegar fathered Rhaenys, Aegon, Jon and me. After Rhaegar died and Aegon was killed in King’s Landing with Aerys, Jon became King the moment he was born.”

“Though he’s never been crowned.”

“By anyone except the North, where he’s earned his crown,” Larra said proudly, and Gendry nodded, frowning.

“If Jon was to sit on the Iron Throne, now, what would the line of succession be?” Gendry asked.

“If Jon took the Iron Throne and died without children, any male children I have would be considered for the throne,” Larra said carefully. “Though that has not always been the way of things. Princess Rhaenys was passed over, and so was her son Laenor – likely the lords of Westeros did not want a regency with Princess Rhaenys ruling in her son’s stead, among other reasons.”

“What about Daenerys?”

“She wouldn’t get a look in,” Larra said, shrugging, as she stroked Arianwyn, who had leapt up onto the settle with Uhtred, who was pouncing on Gendry’s fingers as he wiggled them playfully. “The only reason people would support her is through fear of her dragons – the same way the early Targaryens retained power.”

“Why does she say she was born to rule the Seven Kingdoms?” Gendry frowned. “Why does she keep going on about how the Iron Throne is hers by right?”

“She doesn’t know about Jon. She was raised believing the Iron Throne belongs to Targaryens: as far as she knows, she is the last of them,” Larra shrugged. “By process of elimination, she is the last Targaryen left to claim the title. As for her being born to sit on the Iron Throne – that’s pure arrogance.”

“What happens when she finds out about Jon?”

“We’ll find out soon enough, I imagine,” Larra sighed gloomily.

“I’d best practise with that sword if I’m to protect Jon,” Gendry mused.

“I’m afraid even Valyrian steel doesn’t hold up to dragon-fire,” Larra said, resting her head against Gendry’s chest. She felt his enormous body tense, though his heart thumped steadily.

“That’s what you’re worried about,” he said quietly, and she sighed.

“She’s burned anyone who got in her way,” Larra said softly. “And no matter how worthy Jon is of ruling the Seven Kingdoms – and he is: he’ll always do his duty by his people – she’s made up her mind what she wants. He stands in the way, threatens all she has convinced herself is her destiny. She’ll burn him just to stop the confusion.”

“Even though she desires him?”

“Especially because she desires him,” Larra sighed. “She’ll consider it a betrayal.”

Three betrayals you shall know. Once for gold, once for blood and once for love.

Larra sighed and rubbed her face, tucking herself closer to Gendry. She put little stock in prophecy but the strange woman’s words resonated with her in that moment.

Once for blood… Daenerys had betrayed her brother in Vaes Dothrak.

Once for gold… She had betrayed the Wise Masters of Astapor.

Once for love?

Who did Daenerys love?

There was no good dwelling on prophecies. If reading High Valyrian epic poetry had taught Larra anything, it was that prophecies never came about the way people convinced themselves they would.

“Larra…”

“Mm?” she murmured, her eyes closed, dozing in Gendry’s arms.

“Would your children be in the line of succession if they were fathered by a bastard, even if we were married?” Gendry asked quietly, and Larra’s eyes opened. She gazed up at Gendry.

“I suppose it would depend on how many people supported us,” Larra said quietly. She gazed at Gendry. “It…”

“What?”

“I don’t know what’s going to happen after the war,” Larra said, hedging, “but we may need more southern allies.”

“You mean Stormland allies,” Gendry said. She smiled: he was so shrewd! She always appreciated just how sharp he was – as sharp as the Valyrian steel he alone could forge.

“There’s an abundance of them,” Larra said, “and they know who you are just by looking at you.”

“Most of them fought against my father,” Gendry said, and he scoffed. “Says a lot about him that Robert’s own bannermen chose to fight for Rhaegar.”

“Not all of them,” Larra said gently, though Lord Lonmouth’s sharp eyes flickered through her mind, the grim Ser Jorian Gower, the charismatic and handsome Ser Arthur Wylde and his half-brother Dag. Men who had followed Prince Rhaegar into battle without hesitation, honoured his memory even now.

“They chose to spend over twenty years in exile rather than kneel to a lesser man,” Gendry said sadly. Larra leaned up, cradling his cheek, and pressed a gentle kiss to his lips. She knew Robert Baratheon’s worst traits weighed on Gendry – the whoring and abandonment of the children he fathered so carelessly, the disinterest in ruling, blinding himself to Cersei’s treason, leaving the Seven Kingdoms vulnerable to a cruel tyrant and a gentle boy.

“You’re nothing like him,” Larra said softly, and he gave her a glum smile. “Except that you have it in you to inspire as much loyalty as my father had for Robert.”

“You want me training with Stormlords?” Gendry asked.

“Actually, no,” Larra said. “I have asked Darkstar.”

“The Dornishman?” Gendry asked, and Larra nodded. She had noticed Ser Gerold’s gaze focused on Gendry often enough, those beautiful violet eyes of his narrowed with anger. Larra could only assume it was residual fury against Gendry’s father – for the man who had smiled down at Princess Rhaenys and Prince Aegon, their bludgeoned, bloodied bodies draped in Lannister cloaks, and called them “dragonspawn.” The North remembered the Red Wedding, but Dorne had never forgotten their princess.

“He is an exceptional swordsman,” Larra said softly. Darkstar was exceptional: she had watched him training in the yard, facing off against multiple opponents with a single sword. She had heard of Braavosi water-dancers but Darkstar truly made swordsmanship a form of art, mesmerising and breath-taking, a fluid, lethal dance.

“He spends a lot of time gazing at you,” Gendry remarked.

“Does he, then?” Larra asked. Gendry nodded, his sapphire eyes searching her face.

“When he’s looking at you seems to be the only time he’s not angry,” Gendry mused. He caught Larra’s eye. “But I can taste his fury whenever he looks at me.”

“Robert was vile about Princess Elia’s murder, and the butchery of her children,” Larra told him. “The North remembers, but Dorne has never forgotten their princess.”

“It was the Lannisters who butchered Elia and her babies,” Gendry frowned, then sighed. “I suppose Robert benefited from it, stepped over their dead bodies to take the throne.”

“That’s what they say,” Larra sighed gloomily.

“So why – “ Gendry frowned at her, scrutinising her expression. “Why pair me with a Dornishman?”

“As I said…we will likely need southern allies,” Larra sighed. “You’ve seen how hot-headed Lady Nym is, felt Darkstar’s anger. It would not be beneath the Dornish to seek vengeance for Elia by assassinating you, just for being sired by Robert Baratheon. If ill-feeling toward you would keep them from allying, better they can learn for themselves the very best of you before it ever becomes an issue.”

“You sound so confident I’ll win them over,” Gendry said, with a wry smile.

Larra leaned in and gave Gendry a gentle kiss. She adored this fierce, gentle, cunning, kind man. “You shall.”


Days later, Larra wandered the battlements, gazing down into the training yards. Grit crunched underfoot and a gentle breeze gentled the sting of the sunshine against her exposed skin. It was always informative to learn what went on when people thought no-one else was watching. Though she had no reason to distrust Ser Gerold Dayne, Larra wanted to see what happened when he and Gendry were alone.

The Darkstar had agreed to train Gendry but Larra was no fool: she knew he had agreed purely because she had asked him.

From what she could see, though, Darkstar took his charge seriously. He had his silver hair tied back with a suede cord and wore leathers rather than armour, his boots dirty from the grit and sludge in the courtyard his cheeks were flushed with colour as he sparred with Gendry. Next to Gendry, Darkstar looked as slender as a whip and almost short, neither of which he was – he was well-built with broad shoulders and stood as tall as Jon, yet Gendry dwarfed all but the Greatjon and Lord Velaryon. Larra watched Darkstar but she also watched Gendry. Shrewd as he was, Larra knew he had it in him to be an expert swordsman. As she watched, she could see him assessing Darkstar’s every movement, anticipating every strike, reading his intentions in the subtlest movements of his body.

Darkstar seemed to understand very quickly that Gendry was incredibly bright, and as Larra watched he pushed Gendry from rudimentary skills every highborn lad learned before he was six to trickier techniques. And the longer the sparred, the more Gendry learned to read Ser Gerold’s movements, the less Darkstar gave away.

“I hear you’re behind this,” said a familiar voice, and Larra smiled as she turned to Ser Davos.

“For better or worse,” she acknowledged.

“It’s right he should learn to wield those swords he’s so skilled at crafting,” Ser Davos said stoutly. “I’m no swordsman myself, but he looks a natural at it.”

“Gendry’s incredibly shrewd,” Larra said, watching him and suppressing a swoon. The way his body moved… He had removed his overcoat and jerkins and sparred in his leather trousers, tall boots, undershirts and the black linen shirt she had darned only days ago: the fabric was wearing thin from the constant friction against his muscled body. He was solid in a way many men were not: his sheer size was as much an advantage as his cunning. Darkstar understood that, too, adjusting how he taught Gendry certain movements to accommodate and increase the advantage of Gendry’s size. “He’s anticipating what Ser Gerold will do next. That’s the mark of an expert swordsman.”

“It’s the difference between life and death,” Ser Davos said bluntly, and Larra nodded.

“Did Jon send you out here to assess the progress of the lessons?” she asked.

“Came out here to enjoy the sunshine,” Ser Davos said, his eyes crinkling with tension as his beard twitched. “I don’t anticipate we’ll have much opportunity to bathe in the sunlight soon enough.”

“Not too soon,” Larra said, raising her face to the Unbroken Tower, still undergoing reconstruction – but even though they had more than adequate manpower to rebuild, they were still limited by the same constraints all builders suffered, no matter the season: they were beholden to each different aspect of the construction being completed in a timely manner, and when one workman encountered a setback it affected everyone else. Currently, she could see the workmen sitting on the high hammer-beams, laughing and talking and sharing a song as they watched the fighters below.

“Aye, not too soon,” Ser Davos agreed. He had not been beyond the Wall, Larra recalled, yet he believed Jon wholeheartedly and supported him – had supported Jon since King Stannis had appeared at Castle Black, blocking Mance Rayder’s army. Ser Davos’ beard bristled again. “My lady…”

“I’m not a lady,” Larra said softly, sighing. No-one at Winterfell seemed to know how to address her: Larra herself did not know. All she knew was that Jon had earned his crown, though he had never worn one. What he had done on his own merit had no bearing on who she was.

“Perhaps not,” Ser Davos said, shrugging, “though it makes folks happier to call you one. Must be odd, all these people who once treated you as Ned Stark’s bastard bowing and curtseying and vying for your approval.”

“The ones who treated me as a bastard are dead,” Larra said, aware her tone was cold and grim. In truth, the only person who had ever made her feel like a bastard was Lady Catelyn. Everyone else had known and liked her for her nature, regardless of her name. “What is on your mind, Ser Davos?”

“It’s Jon,” Ser Davos said bluntly. “He’s…spooked. More so than after Eastwatch. In a way I’ve not seen him… I know many of his brothers are dead, yet even Samwell Tarly he keeps at arm’s length.”

“He hasn’t spoken to you about what troubles him?” Larra asked.

“No,” Ser Davos said. “I know I’m Jon’s advisor purely because he had no others but –“

“Jon trusts your judgement,” Larra said quietly, glancing at Ser Davos. “Don’t underestimate your worth, Ser Davos. You have influence with Jon because he respects you.”

“Either way… Something’s happened that he won’t share with me,” Ser Davos said. “I don’t meant to go behind his back, and I’d never ask you to share anything you know without his permission…”

“But?”

“There’s that tricky word – your brother told me everything before the word ‘but’ is – “

He broke off, remembering that he was speaking to a lady. Larra smirked. “Is horse-shit.”

“Aye,” Ser Davos chuckled. “I’d never ask you to betray Jon’s confidence but if he won’t talk to me, I’d ask you to speak to him. He needs someone to talk to about whatever has him so wound up.”

Larra smiled sadly. She was the last person Jon wanted to speak to. She was the one who had turned his world upside-down with news about their true parentage, had thrown him into chaos trying to work out what it meant that they had never been bastards, that Father had lied to them, that Prince Rhaegar had sired them, that Lyanna…Lyanna, who had been in the crypts all their lives, their mother, had been dead all along…

She had allowed Jon the time to approach her, knowing best how to handle her brother when he was overwhelmed, yet perhaps his time at Castle Black and in the True North had changed him in ways even she could not know. It was a sudden, horrible thought, that she didn’t know Jon nearly as well as she once had. At his core, he was still the Jon she had always loved and respected, even admired. But they had spent nearly eight years parted. Half the lifetime they had spent together.

They had both endured things they could never accurately share with each other. How could they?

Yet despite their different journeys, they had both made their way back here. They both had the same secret that they hadn’t even realised they had been carrying in their blood for decades. They shared Father’s greatest secret, the best-kept secret in Westeros. They shared the tragedy and trauma of being the surviving children of the Last Dragon, of being the product of the tragic romance between Prince Rhaegar and his beloved Lady Lyanna.

“I’ll speak to Jon,” she promised Ser Davos. His beard bristled as he gave her a strained smile, bowed, and walked away, idly strolling the battlements and gazing out over the moors, glittering with fresh snow. She sighed and turned back to the courtyard, frowning when something caught her eye.

Though people passed through the gates, no-one ever stopped at the enormous stone direwolves situated either side of the heavy oak door leading into the crypts, let alone entered through it.

But someone did. She watched a travel-stained cloak disappear into the darkness, and watched for a good long while, waiting for the figure to re-emerge. They never did, and she was drawn by curiosity and a fierce sense of protectiveness – only Starks went into the crypts. It was the resting place of the Kings and Queens of Winter.

She turned her attention to the courtyard, watching Gendry and Ser Gerold sparring, yet was always mindful of the cloaked figure that had slipped into the crypts. When a half-hour had passed and still no sign of the man reappeared, Larra slipped down the gritted steps into the yard and tucked her cloak around her as she descended the dank steps into the crypt. It was always so much colder in the crypts than anywhere else in Winterfell, even the ice-stores primarily used by the maesters.

The soft golden glow of candlelight coaxed her deeper into the bowels of the crypt, and she pondered whether the sight had been welcoming to the intruder. Or whether they had been relieved to find a glimmer of golden light in the pressing darkness, aware that the spirits of the dead Kings of Winter did not take kindly to being disturbed by an outsider.

Most of the lit candles were clustered around Father’s statue, where his bones now rested after their long journey home. They cast eerie shadows along the great hall of kings, as if the very shades of the men and women who had been interred here walked among them. Larra frowned in the darkness, watching silently as the figure before Father’s statue reached out, clumsily attempting to light another candle.

“A haunting likeness, isn’t it?” Larra said softly, and Ser Jaime turned sharply toward her. He grimaced as candle-wax burned his finger, and he hastily set the candle down.

Straightening, he turned his gaze to the statue. “He looks as grim and tired as I remember him.”

Larra chuckled softly: to those who had not known him, Father had been grim-faced and stern. He had always been tired, Larra remembered, from the responsibility of so many lives in his hands.

Ser Jaime murmured, “He must have been exhausted, carrying the weight of it with him all those years.”

Larra sidled up to him and gazed into Father’s face. Her stomach hurt, looking at him. How she wished he was flesh-and-blood. “What weight would that be?”

Ser Jaime gazed at her steadily. “The truth.”

Her lips twitched, and she reached out to light a candle. “That’s a funny word, isn’t it?”

After a long moment, while Larra lit a candle and nestled it carefully among the others, Ser Jaime said, “All these years, he kept you here, safe and protected. No-one ever even suspected – not even Robert.” He went quiet, then scoffed, saying in a scalding tone, “Why would he? He was thoughtless!” He shook his head, his dark-gold hair glinting subtly in the firelight. His eyes shone like the purest emeralds, and they remained focused on Larra’s face, wide and truly seeing what no-one else had. He shook his head slightly. “No-one gave it a second thought that Ned Stark fathered bastards during the War. Especially as you grew up to look exactly like him… It was never Ned you took after. It was her.” He glanced down the hall, to the serene likeness of Lyanna, where her bones were interred between her older brothers. Candles flickered all around her, and Larra wondered if Ser Jaime had lit any for her. His tone soft and thoughtful, he admitted, “I danced with her, once, at Harrenhall. You’re exactly like her,” he said wonderingly, gazing at Larra now. “Except for your eyes and your smile. They’re his. And your brother’s voice: I should have recognised it when I heard him speak in the Dragonpit. Rhaegar had the same iron tones in his voice…” He shook his head, sighing heavily. “You were never Ned Stark’s bastard. You weren’t hers, either.”

“No?” Larra asked blandly. “How would you know that?”

Ser Jaime seemed to think of his response carefully before he turned to her, his eyes gleaming with earnestness, solemnly telling her, “Because Rhaegar Targaryen was everything people ever said he was. He was the most honourable, decent and thoughtful man I have ever known.” Larra just smiled sadly, but she froze when Ser Jaime said, “Lord Lonmouth was there when they wed.”

“Oh, was he?” she smirked delicately, though her heart squeezed with dread. They had spoken of Rhaegar and Lyanna – of Jon and Larra?

“On the Isle of Faces, before the Old Gods and the New,” Ser Jaime said fervently. “Rhaegar wed Lyanna…and Ned Stark spent the rest of his life protecting their secret. Their children…” He scoffed gently, shaking his head again. “Robert used to say it must have been a rare wench who made Ned Stark forget his honour.” Ser Jaime gazed at Larra, his expression almost heartbroken. “He sacrificed his honour out of love for his sister. Which makes his life – and his death – so much more honourable and tragic than anyone could ever have imagined.” He sighed, and Larra thought he looked rather haggard in the flickering candlelight. His shoulders slumped, and Ser Jaime Lannister looked bereaved as he gazed at Ned Stark’s stone countenance as if he would find the answers to all life’s questions chiselled in the stone. “He haunts me as much as Rhaegar.”

“They haunt you?”

Ser Jaime murmured, “In my dreams, I see them.”

“Why do you think that is?” Larra asked quietly.

Ser Jaime’s lips twitched and his eyes glinted with the irony he shared with his younger brother. “Trying to guide me between choosing what is right and what is easy…” He tilted his head and watched her carefully. “You knew all of this.”

“Father never spoke of it. Not a word of it, not even to us,” Larra said honestly. She hadn’t known Lord Richard Lonmouth had attended Rhaegar and Lyanna’s wedding. “I learned of it months ago; Uncle Benjen confirmed it.”

“What are you going to do?” Ser Jaime asked.

Larra blinked. “What do you mean?”

“You – your brother – you are the heirs to the Iron Throne – “

“On which your sister sits. Over which, Daenerys Targaryen is willing to burn the Seven Kingdoms to ash,” Larra reminded him. “The Night King threatens to bring an end to this world; that is all I have it in me to think about. It’s all Jon and I care about.”

“Lord Lonmouth took one look at you and guessed the truth,” Ser Jaime said urgently. “Word will spread.”

“There’s not much anyone can do about it while we’re snowed in at Winterfell,” Larra said, shrugging delicately, “even if we wanted to.”

She gave Ser Jaime a meaningful look and wandered back to the stairs, climbing out of the crypts.

Footsteps echoed softly in the darkness and Jaime sighed, turning away from the empty stairs to gaze at the elegant statue of Lady Lyanna and her noble brother Ned.

Out of the darkness, Tyrion waddled into the warm glow of the candlelight. A stoppered wineskin hung limply from one hand, his wine-glazed eyes sharper than usual as he stared open-mouthed at Jaime.

Jaime’s lips parted but he had no idea what to say.

Tyrion said something Jaime would never forget, because he had never heard it from anyone before: “I think perhaps you’re the cleverest Lannister.”

Notes:

I thought it would be interesting to start setting up things like succession and Larra’s perspective on what it means to be a dragon-rider, and how dragons should be used (if at all), and the fact that if Larra or Jon play the game of thrones, it won’t be out of personal ambition but out of others pushing them into that position.

I just love the Lannister brothers’ relationship. Oh, also, I can’t wait to find ways of including whatever we learn about Larra’s dagger from HotD in this story!

Chapter 51: The Spider and the Raven

Notes:

For Emmylou2234 and your astounding commitment! I hope you had a good long nap!

HOTD SPOILERS: I’m writing this post-premiere of House of the Dragon episode one. I loved it. I’d also forgotten how brutal and gory GoT could be! I like that the showrunners made a point that Aemma’s childbirth was something that was being done to her rather than her having any decision in – highlighting that she is the Queen but she is still part of a deeply patriarchal society that puts the King’s heirs above all else. Also, Alicent’s anxiety is palpable throughout the episode – the nail-biting and finger-picking, poor girl! Anyone else need a shower to get the grease off when Otto Hightower suggested she go visit the King wearing one of her mother’s gowns? Putting her in her mother’s gowns is forcing her to assume an adult’s role. The writers and Emily Carey did a fantastic job in making young Alicent a very sympathetic character. And Daemon…my Daemon. Matt Smith was always going to be excellent, but he really was fabulous in this episode. The oozing charisma, the undercurrent threat of violence, the distrust toward Otto (saying what we all know but which Viserys refuses to see) and his genuine love for his family and compassion during the funeral scene... Fabulous. Oh, and the prophecy!!! It wouldn’t be included without George’s approval, which says a lot. It’s likely that was the prophecy Rhaegar discovered in his youth, which prompted him to become a warrior. Also, it makes Rhaenrya’s motivations to take the Iron Throne more than purely just ambition – she always has the prophecy in the back of her mind.

What did everyone else think?

Also, I have been watching a lot of YouTube lately and found Hill’s Alive’s video “Mhysa Is A Master” which goes into great depth about the situation with Mirri Maz Duur and the implications for Daenerys’ arc, and details why Daenerys succeeded in hatching dragons while Aegon the Unlikely failed at Summerhall. It’s worth a watch.

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

51

The Spider and the Raven


Parchment and paper rustled as Larra looked through her old sketches and studies.

“What are you doing?” Bran asked quietly, his eyes lighting up as he played with Arianwyn and Uhtred in his lap, Uhtred’s tiny claws flashing in the firelight as he swiped at Bran’s long, spidery white fingers.

“We spent all our childhood outside with Maester Luwin, learning,” Larra said, sighing heavily. “Running about the godswood collecting nuts and leaves and feathers and all sorts, searching through the library’s archives to learn what treasures we had collected. We learned through exploring the world around us. Until we defeat the winter, the children must suffer to learn from stuffy old books… Maester Atten tells me the girls are losing interest in their lessons. I would, too, shut inside that dreary old chamber for hours on end. I thought these might spark something if we were to scatter them about the schoolroom with Rickon’s treasure troves. At the very least, they’ll brighten up the schoolroom.”

“These are not your dream-paintings,” Bran said softly, turning his inscrutable dark eyes on Larra’s drawings and labelled sketches and diagrams.

“No,” Larra said. “Maester Luwin said I could be a naturalist – he said some maesters devote their entire lives to gathering samples of every species of flowers and birds and such. I used to think maybe I’d spend my days riding throughout the North doing the same – documenting every plant, flower, fungi, bird and mammal north of the Neck.”

Bran’s smile was sad and slightly ironic. “You never did get the chance to document all your discoveries.”

“No. Killed a fair few of them, though,” Larra said, and Bran’s eyes glinted as he chuckled softly. Glimmers of the little boy he had once been shone through that rare smile. “How are you feeling today?”

“I’m very well, thank you,” Bran said softly. His eyes glimmered with that rare excitement. “Lord Tyrion has completed designs for a funicular.”

“Is that fancy lordling teaching you strange tongues?” Larra teased, and Bran laughed.

“They have them in Casterly Rock,” Bran said, his eyes lighting up with enthusiasm. “A funicular has two counterweight carriages attached to opposite ends of a haulage cable. They’re used to mount a steep incline. As one carriage ascends, the other descends at an equal speed… Lord Tyrion believes he may even be able to design a miniature version to put inside the Unbroken Tower so that I can move freely with my chair rather than having to leave so many lying about.”

Larra lowered one of the studies she had been examining, of numerous wildflowers that grew abundantly in the moors around Winterfell. It was one of the last paintings she had completed before they had had to flee. She remembered the day she had spent with Rickon, Bran lying on a blanket in the tall grasses with his head resting on Summer as Rickon gathered flowers for her. Rickon had found the nest of a tiny harvest mouse. She could still hear his excited cries echoing over the moors, see his hair glimmering gold as he gestured wildly for her to join him – and his wide eyes as a snowy owl had soared through the air, swooping to snare prey. Her stomach hurt and she winced.

“Bran, is it your wish that you take up the Tower as your home once it is complete?” Larra asked. They had done what they could to make Winterfell as navigable as they could for Bran in his wheeled chair – but it was simply too old. Tight spiral staircases and uneven floors worn down over a thousand generations made it difficult to adapt things for Bran, especially considering that no space went unaccounted for while the entirety of the North was in residence.

“Where else shall I find a place for myself?” Bran asked, in his gentle, sad voice. His eyes glinted, however, and Larra smiled at the enthusiasm in his face, that little boy she so loved shining through this young man’s mask. “The maesters have designed it especially for my use. I shall have an unimpeded view of the godswood – and access to it, if the craftsmen are truly able to build a funicular from the top of the Unbroken Tower into the godswood.”

“But would you be happy there,” Larra said earnestly, “separated from the rest of us?”

Bran gazed at her, his expression almost curious. “I bear the name of Stark but I am so much more than that now…and yet so much less. I cannot be a son of House Stark – I will never bear arms and fight for Jon, nor hold lands in his name, nor marry to strengthen political ties on his behalf, or father children to take my place once I am gone. I am memory. No more and no less. Memories are all well and good but they do tend to get in the way of what needs to be done.”

“Memories are important,” Larra said, almost defensively. She wouldn’t have Bran belittling his own importance, though in truth his words resonated with her. She had known it the moment they reached the great weirwood, seen Lord Bloodraven in his throne of weirwood roots – Bran was no longer Brandon Stark. He was…other. A strange, unknowable being with eerie power – the power of knowledge. He had become something else. He would exist as he was now: the world’s memory trapped in living flesh.

“We live only as long as the last person who remembers us,” Bran said thoughtfully.

“You remember everything,” Larra countered.

“Yes.”

Frowning, allowing herself a small moment of curiosity about Bran’s unnerving gifts, Larra asked, “Do you…do you disappear into the past often?”

“Not very often,” Bran admitted, his voice gentle. “Only when it is necessary.”

She cleared her throat. “Have you… You haven’t slipped, have you? The way… You told me you slipped into Hodor’s mind, that’s why he – Tell me you’re being wise with your talents.”

Bran smiled blandly. “I do only that which is necessary.”

“Such as?” Larra prompted, but Bran just smiled, stroking Uhtred’s ears while Arianwyn pawed daintily at his paralysed leg, asking for attention.

“Lord Bloodraven showed me the path,” Bran said enigmatically.

“Bran…” She wanted to say so many things: that she feared losing him to the memories, to the past. That she feared more his ability to slip into people’s minds even in the past. She dreaded that anyone might find out about Bran’s power – and manipulate or threaten him into using his power to do their bidding, whether or not they understood that the past was already written. There was no altering it…

Working out Hodor’s fate and Bran’s part in it, and reconciling it with that nugget of wisdom from Lord Bloodraven, was an ongoing process for Larra.

Instead of telling Bran her fears, she said instead, “When you find yourself bored, do you revisit entertainments from the past?”

“Sometimes,” Bran admitted. His eyes saddened. “Nothing in the last century, though.”

“Why is that?”

“It would be too…tempting,” Bran admitted. “I am less likely to lose myself to the memories if I remain removed from the lives of those I revisit.”

Her heart squeezed, realising in that instant that if Brandon outlived them all – and Lord Bloodraven’s extended lifespan hinted at such a thing for Bran – he would deny himself the ability to visit them. They would be too tempting for him. He might be lost under the waves.

“What do you like to visit? Tourneys?” Bran had always wished to be a knight, after all, and he never had seen a tourney before his fall.

“No, not tourneys. Plays and festivals and musical galas,” Bran said, smiling softly.

“You never showed a fondness for music before,” Larra mused.

“It’s all here, in my head,” Bran said, raising a slender finger to his brow. “I can listen any time I wish.”

“Bully for you,” Larra said. She adored music and dancing, had often bemoaned the dearth of true musical genius in the North, had tried to coax Father to encourage the birth of culture in Winter’s Town. He had laughed and said most people did not care to bring culture to the bearded wildmen of the North. Yet Lord Manderly had always arrived at Winterfell for any feast or gathering with musicians in tow, ready to play until their fingers bled to please Lord Stark – and please Larra. She smiled at Bran. “Crisantha and Rosamund have that lovely pianoforte. Perhaps you could learn to play. We could play together! It would keep your fingers warm.”

“I have pondered other ways to do that,” Bran said thoughtfully.

“Such as?” Larra prompted, after a moment’s silence. He gave her an enigmatic smile.

“Sansa tells me you wished to discuss the Dothraki horde travelling along the Kingsroad,” he said, evading her question. Larra sighed.

“Yes,” Larra said. “Did she also tell you that she asked me to burn the horde if they ventured too close to Winterfell?”

“I do not believe she would have asked if she had not been confident you would refuse,” Bran said thoughtfully.

“Testing the waters, was she?”

“She is right to do so,” Bran said. “You are a dragon-rider now, Larra. There are many who wonder how you will use Rhaegal.”

“Rhaegal wasn’t born a weapon,” Larra said, with a bite. “I shan’t treat them as one. I’m… I am truly blessed to be bonded with them.”

“Yes,” Bran smiled softly, his eyes glinting with that familiar warmth and excitement she had so missed in her brother’s unfamiliar face. “Daenerys looks at Drogon and sees power. You look at Rhaegal and see freedom.”

“Some would argue they are one and the same,” Larra said quietly.

“Some. The wisest know better,” Bran said softly. Larra sighed and returned to her studies, organising them into neat piles – insects, amphibians, the far from abundant Northern reptiles, birds, mammals, trees, nuts and wildflowers. She smiled softly, realising she was missing one particular, incredibly rare reptile. Rhaegal.

She was one of only two dragon-riders in the world. For a century and a half, dragons had been extinct. Now she had the opportunity to share the knowledge only she could accumulate – that only she knew how to share.  

Larra gazed at one particular study she had done, of seven species of Northern newts, annotated to the very last detail and painted with vibrant watercolours until they nearly jumped off the page. It occurred to her, not for the first time, that she knew this land – its cultures and customs, its past and its people and every creature that had adapted to thrive here, in the harshest environment on the continent. She was as much a part of the North as it was of her: the North was in her blood and in every decision she made. Her fate had been intrinsically tied with the land. She had been raised with the knowledge of those who had come before her, the wisdom of a man who understood his people and his responsibilities to them. She had been raised with Ned Stark’s deep sense of duty. She had never once heard Father talk about their entitlement.

It was one of the vast differences between herself and Lady Targaryen – but perhaps one of the most significant.

Larra had been raised to think how she could utilise Rhaegal’s potential to benefit as many people as possible.

Father would have balked at unleashing a dragon, even upon an enemy army. They may be enemies, but they were people – they had lives of their own, families who longed for their return, relied upon them. Who was Larra to deprive them of their protectors?

“Brandon…” She only ever called him Brandon when she was speaking to the greenseer rather than her little-brother. And there was a distinction. She cleared her throat. “Is it possible, do you think… After all you have shown me about her path thus far, is it in Daenerys Targaryen to change her course – to avoid becoming Maegor or Princess Rhaenyra?” She gazed at Bran, her eyes full of earnest worry.

The best and trickiest way of defeating an enemy was to nullify the threat they posed. If Daenerys continued on the trajectory she had set herself on, Larra knew it was a matter of time until someone had to stand in her way – to defend the realms of men.

And Larra was the only other dragon-rider in the world. Whether or not she wished it, the responsibility of stopping Daenerys may fall to her.

“Jaehaerys is credited with saying that every time a Targaryen is born, the gods flip a coin – and we hold our breath as we wait to see how it lands. That seems to oversimplify things,” Larra said thoughtfully. “We are not born one way or another: we become who we are through our choices. Daenerys chose villainy when she murdered her slave Mirri Maz Duur. Daenerys believed her slave had dared rebel against her. Perhaps she even believed Mirri Maz Duur would better serve her in death than in life.”

“That’s an interesting observation,” Brandon said softly. “Why do you say that?”

“The Tragedy of Summerhall,” Larra said. “The only difference between Aegon the Fifth’s attempts to hatch dragons and Daenerys’ was the death of a magi.”

“The Ghost of High Heart,” Brandon sighed, his eyes twinkling with the shadow of a smile.

“Aegon the Unlikely was close to doing it, wasn’t he – to hatching dragons into the world again,” Larra said, and Brandon nodded slowly. “Pity. Then again, I shudder to imagine King Aerys on dragonback.”

“Yes,” Brandon said quietly. Something glinted in his eyes and Larra narrowed hers at him.

“Was it an accident that Aegon failed?” Larra asked, eyeing him shrewdly.

“A dragon was born that day at Summerhall,” Brandon said enigmatically. “The only dragon we needed.”

“Rhaegar.”

“The Last Dragon,” Brandon breathed. His eyes glinted again. “So people believe.”

“Let them,” Larra said sharply. She sighed and shook her head. “Daenerys couldn’t have known how close Aegon was to successfully hatching dragons. But what happened with Drogo and their unborn child…the child born a grotesque, dead in her womb – the reason Drogo remained a husk despite the trade… Only death may pay for life. Daenerys learned only that lesson: not that she was morally reprehensible for murdering a slave she had only a belief had rebelled against her.”

Larra bit the inside of her cheek, worrying her lip as she thought things over. Time and again she returned to the memories Brandon had shared of Daenerys’ rise to power. Every time she reflected on them, she saw something new. The more she saw, the more she learned, and the more she dreaded.

“Could Daenerys be made to see how her choices are leading her to a precipice? If she continues on as she has, she will fling herself over it,” Larra said. “Is it possible to bring her back from the edge? To make her understand the dangerous line she’s flirting with?”

Brandon mused on the question for a while before answering. “The past is written: until the quill touches the parchment, the future constantly transforms itself. With very decision made, it shifts – even the minutest decisions have far-reaching consequences…like sinking a stone into water, the ripples spreading out.”

“Can…can you see the future?” Larra asked, her heart in her throat.

“I can see possibilities. There are so many of them. With every decision made, the possibilities become fewer,” Brandon murmured. “When you bonded with Rhaegal, you altered the course of many lives. Almost as many as when you chose Gendry as your partner.”

Larra sighed softly. She did not care to know what Brandon did – when had the dragon-dreams ever helped the Targaryens who had come before her? Even her own dreams had plagued her, yet Larra believed she had experienced them through Lord Bloodraven’s interference – so that when the time came, and Bran told her about his dreams, she would believe him. Support him. Do everything in her power to bring him to the three-eyed raven. So that they were in this position now.

Still…the knowledge Brandon had was closer to prophecy than reality and prophecies were notoriously unreliable. She knew that from the old poems and from watching Daenerys Targaryen’s growing discontent and paranoia about the prophecies she had received from Mirri Maz Duur and the shadow-binder from Asshai, Quaithe.

“Brandon… We were speaking of Daenerys Targaryen. Does she have it in her to change her course?”

Brandon’s eyes glazed over, the hand he had been using to stroke Arianwyn stilling, and eventually he sighed, his eyes sharpening one again. “Possibly,” he conceded, though Larra noted the lack of conviction in his voice. “First, she must learn to listen.”

“She’ll never listen to anyone,” Larra scoffed. “The dragons mean she doesn’t have to.”

“She’ll listen to a Targaryen,” Brandon said softly.

Larra eyed Brandon sharply. “Enlightening her about myself and Jon will only push her closer to the edge.”

Brandon smiled. “I wasn’t talking about you or Jon.”

“Who, then?” Larra frowned. She grumbled half-heartedly, “Don’t tell me there’s another!”

Brandon gave her an enigmatic smile. After a moment, he asked, “Which of your ancestors would resonate with Daenerys, do you think?” Your ancestors… It still sounded strange to her ears. She was part of the most notorious dynasty in millennia, though so few knew it. She was happy to keep it that way, though was by no means naïve to think it would remain so.

“She has convinced herself she was born to sit the Iron Throne…” Larra said, frowning softly. A female dragon-rider with a heightened sense of her own entitlement. “Princess Rhaenyra.”

Brandon’s eyes glinted. “The Realm’s Delight. Yes,” he said softly. “There are many lessons Daenerys could learn from Rhaenyra. I can show her many things.”

Larra started, gulping. “Do you think it wise to share your abilities with her?”

“A facet of them, perhaps,” Brandon shrugged. “The past is fixed: no power in the world can alter it.”

Larra stared at him. “Except you.”

Brandon paused. He turned his dark eyes to her, and she could see the sorrow and regret in those fathomless dark eyes. “I have learned much since Hodor…because of Hodor,” he said sadly. “And from the Bloodraven. He shared many secrets. It is time I shared some of them with you.”

“Me?” Larra asked, then frowned, sighing heavily. She was far too tired. Her daily routine, though fulfilling, could be gruelling. Exhaustion had gripped her every night and Gendry had had to dig her out of the blankets when the maid came to wake her this morning – a rare thing. Meetings with the maesters, council sessions with the knights and lords, private lessons with Narcisa, time spent with the children, touring the courtyards, sitting with noblewomen, taking tea with the newly-arrived ladies, training in the yard, touring the castle to check on the progress of fortifications, writing new chapters for her story The Princess Bride to keep up with the demand from the children in the nursery eagerly awaiting the next instalment at bedtime – it was exhausting.

Flying on Rhaegal was her one respite from the constant demands on her time. She knew she took on too much yet she knew Sansa, even this cultured, mature version of her, well enough to see when she was becoming overwhelmed. She lightened Sansa’s burden while her sister familiarised herself with a handful of necessary duties. Gradually, Larra would drip-feed the rest back to Sansa. But there were some aspects of castle life that Sansa had little interest in and less knowledge of – anything involving warfare. Her lessons had never extended to weapons, armoury, fortifications or strategy. She listened carefully to everything Larra said during council meetings and they picked over everything other knights and lords suggested in private to better Sansa’s understanding…but she wasn’t going to become an expert strategist overnight.

And the cost of failure was too great to risk allowing Sansa to cut her teeth on planning the defence of Winterfell.

So, she listened and observed when the older, more experienced lords and knights gave their input, as Larra did: she was still learning, too. And though she knew Winterfell better than anyone else present, she was not an experienced commander. She had ideas, and the knights and lords discussed their merit or adjusted the details that would be detrimental to their efforts.

Larra rubbed her eyes. “I don’t think I have the patience to learn any more secrets.”

“Lost knowledge, then,” Bran smiled. “There is much you must learn, too.”

“About what specifically?” Larra grumbled.

“How to train your dragon,” Bran smiled warmly, and reached out, swatting at Uhtred, who yowled but leapt from the settle. Bran cupped his fingers over something on the settle and glanced at Larra. “When the last dragon died, the culture of dragon-riding died with it. Knowledge the Targaryens had brought from Valyria was forgotten, and then lost.”

“I don’t need to train Rhaegal,” Larra frowned obstinately. “Training means the same thing as bending them to my will…Rhaegal is a wild creature – they should remain free.”

“Free, yes. Yet you are bonded,” Bran said lightly, peering into his cupped hands. She wondered what he had trapped in them. “Rhaegal will always be drawn to you, and you to them. Your bond with Rhaegal is different than the Targaryens’ historic bond with their dragons.”

“Because of the blood of the First Men.”

“Yes. The warg lineage you inherited. The bond between you and Rhaegal is not born of blood sacrifice, which makes your bond with Rhaegal unique amongst dragon-riders…” Bran sighed heavily, tilting his head at Larra, his expression gently defiant. “I will share Rhaenyra’s life with Daenerys – and you. You are the only true dragon-riders in the world. It is important you both understand what that means.”

Larra gazed back at her brother. She voiced the worry that had been niggling in the back of her mind since Sansa posed the question about the Dothraki horde. “Do you have the same worries for me as I do for Daenerys?”

“Never,” Bran answered immediately, with absolute certainty. It was…heartening. A knot unfurled in Larra’s chest, and she relaxed slightly in her seat. “Your life has been utterly different: you learned young to rely upon yourself, your education and your cunning, your physical power. You know what you are capable of: you have no need to rely upon a dragon to get what you want.”

“All I wanted was to keep you alive,” Larra said honestly.

“And you did,” Bran beamed. “You did what no-one else in the world could do. But you’ve yet more to do… I would like to take you into the past, Larra. You were always entranced by the Dance of the Dragons, by the idea of the Rogue Prince and the Sea Snake and the Queen Who Never Was… Learn from them what it means to be a dragon-rider.”

Larra frowned. Only the Sea Snake survived the Dance – Cregan Stark had to be convinced by Corlys Velaryon’s own granddaughters to spare his life. As for Princess Rhaenys and Prince Daemon… They had been the height of the Targaryen dynasty, a family at its most powerful, a time of the most plentiful dragon-riders in Targaryen history this side of the Conquest…and they had been instrumental in its decline.

The only thing with the strength and will to destroy the House of the Dragon was itself. And in tearing themselves apart, the Targaryens had ripped the Seven Kingdoms to shreds along with them, leaving nothing but a smouldering husk behind.

Her voice cool, Larra said, “I’d rather set a new precedent for what it means to be a dragon-rider.”

A knock on the door echoed inside the chamber and Larra started. “It is Maester Arys, my lady.”

“Let him come in,” Larra called, mildly bewildered. She had not called for a maester. The door opened and Maester Arys, with his enviable beard and twinkling eyes, bowed low as he entered the chamber.

“My lady,” he said, then bowed to Bran. “My lord. I received word you require my assistance.”

“Do we?” Larra asked, glancing at Bran, who smiled blandly.

“Yes, indeed,” he said softly, his eyes on Maester Arys. “Maester Arys, thank you for coming all this way.”

“The Maesters’ Tower is but a short distance, my lord. Are you or your ladyship in some discomfort?” the maester asked.

“No,” Bran smiled serenely. “I have a favour which I would ask of you, Maester.”

“A favour I shall gladly grant, my lord,” Maester Arys bowed low again.

“Once upon a time, my sister Larra took lessons in High Valyrian with Maester Luwin,” Bran said softly.

“I am aware, my lord,” Maester Arys nodded. His eyes glinted. “Maester Luwin’s progresses regarding the education of you and your siblings are much talked about in the Maesters’ Tower. There is discussion that the Citadel should recommend they be the high standards to which all highborn children are educated.”

“Maester Luwin was very thorough with our education,” Larra said. “I’d say he would be proud, but Maester Luwin was the humblest man I have ever met.”

“Maester Arys, if it is agreeable to you, I would like you to continue my sister’s instruction with High Valyrian,” Bran said, and Larra raised her eyebrows at him.

“I would be honoured, my lord,” Maester Arys said, inclining his head toward Larra. “I look forward to our lessons, my lady.”

“Don’t speak too soon. Have you ever heard High Valyrian spoken with a Northern accent?” Larra asked, and the maester chuckled.

“I am sure you speak High Valyrian as finely as you do Dothraki or any of the dialects of the Free Folk which I have oft heard you speak, my lady,” Maester Arys said generously.

“Larra…would you please leave Maester Arys and me alone? There are some things I would discuss with him private,” Bran said.

She stared at her brother. Indignantly, she reminded Bran, “This is my chamber!” Bran just smiled benignly at her. “Oh, very well. I shall go out to play with Arya and Calista Velaryon.”

Larra tidied her studies and sketches away and rose from her rocking-chair, dusting off her split-skirt. She nodded at Maester Arys, who bowed and stepped aside to let her pass.

The heavy oak door opened and closed, Larra disappearing beyond it. Her footsteps echoed faintly in the corridor beyond, then were lost.

“Join me, please,” Brandon said softly, nodding to Larra’s vacated rocking-chair.

“Have you some pain, my lord?” the maester asked. His chain glinted in the sunlight and the links clinked and tinkled as he sat.

“I have not suffered pain in many years,” Bran murmured. “I wished to speak to you of Larra.”

“Of her lessons?”

“No.” Bran stared at the man, who shifted uncomfortably the longer Brandon stared. “You and I are the most well-informed men in Westeros. Forever, I shall be limited by my broken back, you by your birth, yet that does not mean we cannot have profound influence… And influence is largely a matter of patience.” The maester went still, watching Bran carefully, his blue eyes shrewd and wary. “Yet without allies, patience gains little.”

“If I may humbly boast, I have many allies, my lord,” the maester said quietly.

“But I do not,” Brandon said silkily.

“And you wish me to be your ally?” the maester replied sceptically. “I am honoured, my lord, yet I do not understand. There are many in far greater positions of power than myself who would be eager to assist you.”

“Others play the game for their own benefit,” Brandon said quietly. He turned his inscrutable dark eyes on the maester. “You play for the benefit of those who will never have the influence to play for themselves. That is why I have chosen you.”

“I still do not understand, my lord.”

Brandon sighed. “I am Brandon the Broken, bound to this chair. Yet I have more knowledge than anyone could ever dream of possessing. You need my mind, as I need your body, if we are to realise the endgame.”

“What endgame is that, my lord?”

“A world where those with power are duty-bound to defend the vulnerable, not punish them for being so,” Brandon said. “Where lives are not wasted on wars fought for vanity, where the smallfolk thrive under the protection of great leaders who would rather take blows for them than see their people bleed. A world wherein we treat each other with dignity and respect. Where the abhorrent is no longer celebrated.”

“That sounds like quite a world,” the maester said softly.

“Yes,” Brandon said wistfully. “Yet it is not so far beyond our reach as to be an impossibility within our lifetimes. You have already taken the first steps. I wish to be your guide as you continue your journey, for you shall advise others along the way where I cannot.”

“I shall, of course, do all that I may to assist you, my lord,” said the maester humbly, bowing his head.

Brandon nodded, lowering his eyes to his hands. The maester followed his gaze and watched as Brandon raised his hand to reveal something nestled in his other palm. A thick, fat body and long, wiry legs covered in bristly hairs, moving erratically. “When a maiden marries, we oft gift her a newborn kitten to keep her new home free from vermin. Yet everyone overlooks spiders. They hunt the irritants that oft go undetected until rot has long set in.” He held out his hand to the maester. “Be so kind as to set this spider free. He must continue to weave his webs.”

His dark, inscrutable eyes held the gaze of the maester, who stared back, unsettled and filled with dread. Yet the maester cupped his hands around Brandon’s and took the spider, setting it free on the mantelpiece among Larra’s trinkets and little paintings.

Brandon sighed contentedly and settled back as the maester sat.

“We have much to discuss.”


The yard echoed with the song of steel. Everywhere, smallfolk sparred with spears and arrows whizzed through the air, embedding themselves in targets rigged to a contraption that moved them erratically. Larra winced. The way the roughspun dolls moved reminded her all too vividly of the unpredictable, lumbering gait of the rotting wights. Knights sparred with each other, and Larra paused for a moment, watching Darkstar and Gendry engaged in a duel. They were using edged blades, both of them dressed casually but with lethal intent etched into the furious, stern planes of their faces. Other knights and their squires had paused in their training to watch Darkstar and Gendry, or else their attention was torn between them and a secondary duel taking place between Lady Brienne, Arya and Calista Velaryon.

Larra gravitated toward the latter, leaving Gendry to spar rather than risk him losing focus. He was with Darkstar to learn: she would only be a distraction. As seriously as Darkstar took his role as instructor, Gendry was equally devoted as a student. It was that dedication and passion that drew so many eyes.

Through the crowds of people milling about – some training, others going about their work, traversing the courtyard to get across the castle – Larra spotted Jon.

It was easy to tell the difference between a true Northerner and any of their southern guests, even without sigils and the style of brigandines and tunics and armour. Among a sea of heavy surcoats, fur-trimmed cloaks and thick leather gloves, true Northmen stood out in their brigandines and tunics, hands bare, hair pulled back, eyes bright and cheeks pink from the exertion. They enjoyed the sunshine and puffed and heaved with the effort as they sparred, laughing as they sparred with southern lordlings laden down with cumbersome cloaks over unwieldy armour.

And among them stood Jon, with his shorn curls and simple, reinforced leather brigandine and plain gorget, boots scuffed and caked with dirt from the yard, arms crossed over his chest as he watched Lady Brienne sparring with Arya and Lady Calista. Larra moved through the yard toward Lady Brienne, her golden hair gleaming in the sunlight as she sparred with both Lady Calista and Arya. They both wielded long spears, attacking almost in unison: Lady Brienne deflected them with Oathkeeper.

 “To think, young girls are taught to dance until their toes bleed,” Larra sighed, sidling up beside Jon, who stood with Lords Tarly, Royce and Umber and Ser Lyn Corbray, who had the point of Lady Forlorn, his family’s ancestral Valyrian steel sword, resting in the sludge, wrists crossed idly over the hilt. Arya was knocked off her feet, while Lady Calista pulled herself up from the sludge, breathless and smiling despite the blood welling on her lower lip. “This is the only dance worth knowing.”

“My lady,” Lord Royce bowed his head respectfully, as Arya grunted, clambering off the ground and dusting off the seat of her trousers.

“Move your feet, Arya,” Larra called. “You must be swift and quick as shadows to best Lady Brienne.”

“I’m not so worried about Lady Brienne as the Others,” Arya panted, as Lady Calista twirled her spear idly in her hands.

“Then you’re being far too reckless,” Larra told her sombrely. “You’re fighting with emotion, not strategy.”

Arya frowned at her. “How d’you know that?”

“I’ve seen enough of King’s commanders to know,” Larra said grimly. Arya flicked a glance at Jon.

“You’ve fought them?” Lady Brienne asked quietly, peering at Larra. Jon started, staring at her.

“Aye,” Larra grunted, suppressing a flinch. Hold the door…

“You fought the Night King?”

“No. I’d be dead,” Larra said bluntly. “Killed some of his commanders, though. And not nearly enough of his foot-soldiers.”

“What are they like?” Arya pressed.

“Which?”

“Either. Both.”

Larra sighed heavily. “The wights are mindless, possessed by the single urge to kill. They are corpses: they often have parts missing. That makes their movements erratic, unpredictable. They feel nothing: no fear, no pain. They need neither rest nor sustenance. For every one you kill, dozens take its place... The commanders are entirely different. They are honed precision. Utterly emotionless, pure skill. Calm and implacable. They take the time to consider every movement, anticipate every strike and counterstrike – they are unparalleled swordsmen. They will give Darkstar a run for his money.”

“Yet you defeated them,” Lady Brienne said gently.

Larra shrugged. “Perhaps they have no idea how to account for the unpredictability of Men,” she said. “Their will has dominated all life without exception – until – “

“Hardhome,” Jon said quietly, and Larra nodded. Until Jon had wielded Longclaw against one of the Night King’s commanders, and they had learned what was their only advantage: that to kill a commander was to kill all his foot-soldiers.

“Hardhome,” Larra agreed with a heavy sigh. “Until Hardhome, they had met no true resistance.”

“When did you face them?” Jon asked, his voice oddly hoarse. Larra glanced at him. It was the first time they had spoken in days.

“We fled the great weirwood in the Land of Always Winter when they found us,” Larra said. “The Night King and his commanders came.”

“Why?” Arya asked bemusedly.

Larra sighed. “For Bran.” Her voice slipping into a low growl, Larra said, “But I wouldn’t let them have him.”

“Woe betide any man who comes between you and your brothers,” the Greatjon chuckled richly.

“Or woman,” Larra muttered darkly. She glanced at Jon, whose dark eyes rested on her, frowning.

“I leave the training under your capable supervision,” Jon said to the lords gathered. Running away, Larra thought, frowning, as Jon turned and left. It had to be odd, she thought, not to have to bow to men who would have considered Jon less than the shit they scraped off their boots had he not earned the crown of the North.

“My lords, excuse me,” Larra murmured, dipping a tiny curtsy, and stalked after Jon. She called, “Jon, have you a moment to speak with me?”

“I’m expected in council,” Jon said over his shoulder.

“As am I – we can walk together,” Larra said, yet Jon did not slow down. She stopped, narrowing her eyes, and raised her hands to her hips. Sharply, she said, “Excuse you. I am back here.”

Jon paused. His shoulders tensed as he dithered. Then she heard him sigh, his posture relaxing. He turned and returned to her, almost shamefacedly. He hadn’t looked her in the eye for days and regretted ignoring her, she knew. She knew her brother too well.

“Ser Davos is worried that there is something weighing on your mind,” Larra murmured, aware that the bustle and chatter about them concealed their conversation from curious ears.

“Is he, then?” Jon asked, his tone sharp, defensive.

“I like him,” Larra said simply. “He shoots straight.”

Jon smiled slightly. “There must be a bit of Northern blood in him.”

“Jon… He knows something is wrong. He says you’ve been keeping Sam at arm’s length. And you won’t look me in the eye,” she said softly, peering into Jon’s face even as he tried to avoid her eyes. She pressed her lips together, then asked gently, “Are you angry at me for telling you the truth?”

Jon’s dark grey eyes shot up to her face. More sharply than he meant to, he said, “No.” He flinched at his harsh tone.

Larra nodded. “Then you’re angry at Father for keeping it from us.” Jon winced. “Jon… Father is no less noble for having kept the truth from us. He devoted his entire life to protecting us, to fulfilling the promise he made to our mother. To our mother.” She said the word with awe. They had a mother.

“I’m not angry at Father,” Jon sighed heavily. He looked utterly defeated – and exhausted.

“What, then?” she prompted gently.

After a long while, Jon admitted, “Sansa. Ever since she appeared at Castle Black…it’s the first time she’s ever accepted me…”

“As a Stark. All you ever wanted,” Larra said, smiling ruefully. “We never had the name but we have always been Starks. That is how Father raised us. Nothing about our parentage changes who we are. It doesn’t change who you are. And Sansa cares about who you are, not your name. We are who we are. The past doesn’t change that… I wish you’d talk to me.”

“You can’t talk to Gendry?” Jon asked.

“It’s not for my sake I want you to talk to me, Jon,” Larra said sombrely. She sighed. “If not me, someone.”

“I can’t talk to Sansa about this.”

“Arya, then.” Larra frowned. Did Arya know? It was difficult to know what Arya was aware of – she seemed to observe everything, knew far too much. Only Bran knew more about what went on in the castle than she did.

“Have you told her?”

“No,” Larra said quietly, watching Jon. “I thought you would have.”

“I haven’t,” Jon said.

“Perhaps you should,” Larra said. “She always came to you with her worries: it’s your turn to confide in her. You need to talk to someone, Jon. I can’t – I can’t keep worrying about our future alone.”

Jon raised his dark eyes, frowning.

“Jon… I have bonded with Rhaegal. That alone is irrefutable proof of our parentage. The truth will come out – too many people know already,” Larra said plaintively. She licked her lips. “What happens when she finds out? All of these fortifications… You’re so focused on the Night King – as you should be – but if we have even the faintest hope that we’ll survive this war, what happens after? When there’s no great enemy to unite against? When people want to return home, and Daenerys decides it’s time to press her claim…only to be told she has none. That it’s you who should take the Iron Throne.”

“I’ve no ambition for the Iron Throne,” said Jon, sounding exhausted to his marrow.

“D’you know something? That’s what would make you the best king to ever sit upon it,” Larra said, smiling sadly. “You would never take the throne for yourself. But you’d do it, to do your duty to the people who need you the most. Blasted thing – it should be melted down!”

“Perhaps that’s the solution,” Jon said. “You fly Rhaegal to the Red Keep, now, melt down the Iron Throne and be done with it.”

“And plunge the realm into chaos? Say what you will about her, Cersei’s the only thing keeping the southern kingdoms from descending into absolute anarchy,” Larra said, sniffing delicately. She eyed Jon. “Sansa asked me if I’d burn the Dothraki horde if they threaten to bring sickness to Winterfell.”

“I know.”

“I will not unleash Rhaegal on innocent people, even if it means the guilty go free,” Larra said sternly. She sighed and shook her head, acknowledging something that had been on her mind since the discussion with Sansa. “But when it comes to it I will put an end to her.”

“If.”

“What?”

“You said when it comes to it. Not if.”

“Fine, if… I’ve been speaking with Bran about whether it’s even a possibility she can avert her own fate. After what she did in the Westerlands…what she did to you…” Jon flinched, and Larra reached a hand out, resting it on his arm. He raised his eyes slowly to hers, haunted and guilt-stricken. He felt ashamed for what Daenerys had done to him. Anger simmered deep in her belly. “I’m beyond sceptical. For the sake of doing everything and anything to avoid what I know she’s more than capable of, I’ll hold on to a faint glimmer of hope that she can be convinced not to choose violence any time she doesn’t get what she wants…” She glanced away, drawn by the ringing of clashing steel, and admitted to him in a quiet, tremulous voice, “I worry, Jon.”

“About her taking the Iron Throne?” Jon asked. It was interesting that that was his first question, said a lot about what had likely been at the forefront of his mind.

“I worry what she’ll do when she learns the truth. Will she step aside and encourage you to claim the Iron Throne? Or leave you here in the North, acknowledging the independence of our kingdom? Think about what you know of her,” Larra said sombrely. “Of her past actions, her personality… She’ll never be content to leave you alive: the truth threatens everything she believes about herself.”

“I don’t care about the fucking Iron Throne,” Jon said, with true heat behind his words.

“I know that,” Larra said, giving him a rich, genuine smile. “Anyone who knows you will respect that.” She held his eye and her voice was more earnest and more stern than ever as she told him, “Regardless of your will, your blood puts you in her way. As long as you are alive, you are a challenge to everything she believes. And it… It may not be up to you.”

“What do you mean?” Jon asked bluntly, wincing even before she answered – he knew what she meant.

“Ser Jaime Lannister knows the truth. I imagine Lord Lonmouth does, too, or he has guessed it. You, me, Sansa, Benjen, Meera, Bran... Too many people know the truth to let it remain a secret,” Larra said, sounding as tired as she suddenly felt. “And if it comes down to a choice between Cersei, Daenerys or you, the majority will support you.”

“I’m not a ruler,” Jon said. “I’m only King because the Northern lords declared it after the Battle of the Bastards. I don’t rule – I plan military defences.”

“You’re a leader. You’ve united armies that were once enemies to fight for a common goal,” Larra said. “And the majority of Westeros has been raised with the belief that military success makes you a good king.”

“Aye, which is why most of the Targaryen kings were shite,” Jon groused, and Larra laughed.

“They were,” Larra said. “And they historically discounted people who would have been far better suited to rule purely because they lacked a cock.”

Jon gazed at her shrewdly. “Perhaps you should sit the Iron Throne.”

“You’re being silly – stop it,” Larra snapped, as Jon smirked. “Jon, I am being serious. Do you think all the schemers died with him when I severed Littlefinger’s head from his body? When this becomes known, you will cease to be Jon Snow. Everyone in Westeros will know you as the Last Dragon’s only true heir. They may even demand that you take the throne. And where will that leave us, with Daenerys on dragon-back determined to burn anything that gets in her way?”

“Alright,” Jon grunted, scowling. “Alright… I understand.” He deflated, his anger drifting away on the gentle wind. He sighed, his expression softening to sadness as he gazed at her. “Can we just… Can we just focus on surviving the Night King?”

“No,” Larra said bluntly, and Jon’s eyebrows rose. “We must be prepared to handle things when people find out the truth – when Daenerys learns the truth. I’m not saying we ignore preparations to devote hours wringing our hands over potential plots to install you in the Iron Throne – I’m just asking that we take the time to sit together as a family and decide what to do – what’s best for all of us.”

Jon sighed heavily, gazing out across the yard, where Darkstar dodged a particularly brutal slash from Gendry.

“You’ll bring Gendry,” he said quietly.

“Not if you don’t wish him to be there,” Larra said.

“No: he should come,” Jon said, glancing at Larra. “I know how important he is to you.”

“Do you?”

“You’ve chosen him, haven’t you?” Jon asked gently. “He’s yours. You’re his.”

Larra smiled. “Yes.”

Jon nodded to himself. “Then he should sit in with us. Maybe he can talk some sense into you.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Think I don’t realise why you’ve been goading Daenerys?” Jon said, his tone almost scolding. “Letting her dwell on her anger toward you, instead of – “

“Instead of pursuing you,” Larra said, and Jon gazed back at her.

“Aye.”

“After what she did to you, I’ll have no hesitation putting an end to her,” Larra said bluntly.

Jon cleared his throat. “You know?”

“I know,” Larra said gently. “Jon… If she ever tries to pressure you – in any way – no matter what she does, I want you to remember that you are free to reject her. You are not beholden to give her what she wants.”

“We need her armies –“

“I see no armies but the one you united to fight beside you,” Larra said. She leaned closer, trying to catch his eye. “You owe her nothing. Look at me. I never want you to feel you must appease her, keep her sweet.”

“Even though we must.”

“Why must we? Because she has a dragon?” Larra asked. She scoffed gently, then growled, “So do I. You remember that, little brother. Remember that I will always protect you.”

Notes:

A few things needed to be said!

Chapter 52: The World is Ahead

Notes:

Thank you so much for the positive reviews!

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

52

The World is Ahead


She sighed and kneaded her eyes, grumbling as she crossed out several notations, marking an X beside another sketch of Winterfell. The door to the library opened and closed softly, and she barely glanced up, pausing only when she realised who had entered the hall. Ser Jaime stood uncertainly at the end of the first stack, glancing at her.

“Ser Jaime,” she said politely.

“My lady,” he said, bowing to her handsomely. Since his arrival, he had been bathed, sheared and provided with thick winter clothing. He looked warm, and handsome in his fur-trimmed surcoat. She set her pencil down, glad to give herself an excuse to take a break from her work.

“How are you settling in to Winterfell, Ser?” she asked.

“Very well, my lady, thank you,” Ser Jaime said generously.

“The tailors did well,” Larra said, eyeing the cut and stitching of his surcoat. “You do not lack for warmth, I hope?”

“No, my clothes provide ample warmth,” Ser Jaime said softly.

She eyed his metal hand, the gilded steel glinting in the light. “We should send you to the forges, and have you properly outfitted. A hook – no. That won’t do. It would be in danger of lodging between ribs… A dagger, perhaps – or a mace, or morning-star. Can you imagine Calanthe’s face? You would be her hero forever.”

“She’s enthusiastic,” Ser Jaime said drily, and Larra chuckled.

“And we love her all the more for it,” Larra said, and he smiled.

“I have already thanked your lady sister for the new clothes…” Ser Jaime said quietly. His expression was completely earnest when he said, “Thank you, for interceding on my behalf on my arrival.”

“I don’t waste good,” Larra said simply. “You have been speaking with the lords and knights on the war council?”

“Yes, my lady – and I have taken many tours of the castle, examining the siege preparations,” Ser Jaime said.

“And what is your assessment?” Larra asked, and at Ser Jaime’s hesitant look, she added, “If there is even the smallest thing you have noticed, or wish to query, please voice it. I value as many experienced commanders sharing their insight as possible.”

“The other lords have been very generous,” Ser Jaime said. “Lord Tarly especially. He has a particular eye for strategy and does not lack for patience when I voiced some concerns.”

“And those concerns were addressed?” Larra asked, and Ser Jaime nodded, approaching the table where she sat.

“They were,” he assured her. “You may be content that every eventuality is being accounted for.”

“Except, of course, the ones that none can account for,” Larra said, groaning softly as she rubbed her eyes.

“Tyrion has told me how you play cyvasse, my lady,” Ser Jaime said gently. “And you, perhaps best of all, knows what to anticipate from the coming threat.”

“Why do you say that?”

“They say you shifted your form into that of a great she-wolf and traversed the True North, your brother riding astride you, battling White Walkers,” Ser Jaime said, and Larra burst out laughing.

“Do they, indeed?” she laughed. “What colour does my pelt take?”

“Oh, black. They say you’re only distinguishable from that great she-wolf companion of yours by your eyes – even in your she-wolf form, they remain as vividly purple as ever,” Ser Jaime said, his lips twitching softly as Larra continued to giggle, tickled by the idea.

“I tell you what, it would have made things far easier,” Larra said honestly, wiping her eyes, still smiling.

“They’re not wrong, are they,” Ser Jaime prompted carefully. “You were beyond the Wall, all these years.”

“The world thought us dead,” Larra said, shrugging. She smiled ruefully. “There’s a certain safety in death, isn’t there?”

Ser Jaime blinked at her, his lips parting. “That is…what I have thought before.”

“Truly?”

“I thought it of your sister Arya. While all thought her dead…she remained safe,” Ser Jaime said.

“Safe from your family, you mean.”

“Yes.”

Larra smiled, making a thoughtful noise. “If ever there was a case-study about the dangers of underestimating young girls, it’s Arya, Sansa and myself.”

“You’re very impressive,” Ser Jaime said.

“Only because we’re the exception,” Larra said, shaking her head sadly. “It’s more of a reflection on our society’s expectations than our abilities, wouldn’t you say?”

Jaime stared at her, then said almost regretfully, “You’re everything Cersei wishes she was.”

Larra narrowed her eyes. “I’ll take that as the compliment I believe you intend it as.”

“I do,” Ser Jaime said. “Cersei always chafed against her gender, the body she believes she had the misfortune to be born into. Your sister Sansa embodies the Maiden, your sister Arya the Warrior… You seem to maintain a balance of both.”

“I never put stock in the southern gods, but I thank you for the compliment,” Larra said, and Ser Jaime nodded. “Speaking of maidens – have you been to see the girls?”

“In the school-room,” Ser Jaime nodded, “yes. They are – happy.”

“You needn’t sound so shocked,” Larra said.

“After the treatment your sister endured, you will forgive me if I am,” Ser Jaime said shame-facedly. Larra shrugged.

“Sansa’s stronger for what she’s learned through those experiences,” Larra said honestly. “She would’ve remained a little girl forever if not. Did Crisantha speak to you?”

Ser Jaime frowned thoughtfully. “No. Why?”

“She hasn’t said a word since she arrived here,” Larra said. “I had hoped she might warm to you… She’ll speak when she’s ready.”

“I’m told you take an active role in their care,” Ser Jaime said carefully. Larra nodded. “I am grateful.”

“One day, we must speak of their futures,” Larra said distractedly. They were wards of the King in the North but one day, they would come of age. They would be marriageable – and as the only surviving female descendants of House Lannister, they would be hugely valuable in brokering alliances within the Westerlands – and throughout the Seven Kingdoms. Ser Jaime was also the eldest male heir of House Lannister: he was the head of the family. He would decide the fate of House Lannister, and all who shared his name. “But not today. Today…I do battle with geometry.”

“What is it you’re working on?” Ser Jaime asked curiously. Larra gave him a grim look and showed him a sheaf of paper she had been annotating.

“Sansa told me, everyone talked about Lord Tyrion’s strategy with wildfire during the Battle of the Blackwater, even if they never gave him true credit for it,” Larra said. “I’ve been struggling with how best to utilise wildfire.”

“From what I gather, the intent is to defend Winterfell, not attack the enemy,” Ser Jaime said.

“It is. Winterfell is the best hope we have. As long as we stay within its walls…” Larra said. “But that does not mean we cannot use everything we have to our advantage. We have far more limited resources than Lord Tyrion when he planned for the defence of King’s Landing. Any cache of wildfire the pyromancers can brew up must be used with absolute precision.”

Ser Jaime cast his eye over the paper she had handed him. “A star?”

“I’ve been experimenting with geometry and how best to cover the moors with wildfire without wasting it but also ensuring the blast radius will annihilate as much of the Night King’s army as possible…” Larra said, rubbing her eyes. “Thank you for sending them, by the way.”

“What?”

“The pyromancers,” Larra said, then frowned curiously at the knight. “May I ask why you sent them to Winterfell? Wildfire is your sister’s favoured weapon during siege – during the Blackwater and the Faith’s reign of terror. Why would you deprive her of it now, when she could be using this time to build up a great cache of wildfire to prepare for war against Lady Targaryen?”

Ser Jaime sighed heavily and let the paper drift back to the table. “My brother used wildfire to ensure there were as few casualties as possible,” he said quietly. “My sister does not share his qualms about excessive loss of life. I did not kill King Aerys only to have my sister burn millions of people to ash in a ham-fisted attempt to preserve her control over the city… I was never a good student.” He gazed at the books lying open, the pieces of paper scattered with her drawings, sums and annotations.

“Perhaps you had a poor teacher,” Larra said fairly, as Ser Jaime sat down on the chair beside her. “Rickon could never sit still; he learned best outdoors, exploring things. Robb was lazy unless he was passionate about something.”

“He enjoyed strategy,” Ser Jaime said quietly, and Larra stilled.

“He enjoyed strategy,” she agreed. She cast a sidelong look at Ser Jaime. “And you learned from him. You did at Highgarden what Robb did at the Whispering Wood.”

“There are always lessons in failure,” Ser Jaime said to her. “Had he lived to learn from his failures, Robb Stark might have built a legacy to outshine my father’s… He was decent.”

“How do you know?”

Ser Jaime gave her a rueful smile. “I was his prisoner.”

“It was an argument we always had.”

“How to treat prisoners of war?” Ser Jaime asked, his eyebrows raised. Larra smiled.

“We were not raised alike. Robb…was raised by his mother to believe that nobility came from birth,” Larra said, pulling a face. She sighed heavily. “I always disagreed utterly. If you want to know a person’s true character, watch how they treat those more vulnerable than they are, not how they act amongst those they consider their equals.” Ser Jaime looked thoughtful for a long while, as Larra turned back to her calculations. She glanced up as the library door opened and Lord Tyrion appeared. 

“Princess Alarra,” he said, bowing low. Larra bristled as he pulled a face. “That doesn’t sound right. Lady Alarra?”

“Call me what you like,” Larra grunted.

Lord Tyrion’s lips twitched with amusement. “You are like Benjen. He was clever and intimidating too.”

“Am I intimidating?”

“The only thing sharper than your aim is your tongue,” Lord Tyrion said, and Ser Jaime smirked. “I do wonder if perhaps you and your terrifying uncle are anything like Cregan Stark.”

“The Hour of the Wolf,” Ser Jaime said appreciatively. Everyone knew the story of how Cregan had come down from the North with his Winter Wolves – to clean up the mess the Targaryens had made with the Dance of Dragons.

“Possibly,” Larra said, shrugging. “Cregan’s only one of the most well-known Starks in recent history, though. I imagine Benjen as First Ranger more resembled Theon Stark.”

“I thought he was a Greyjoy,” Lord Tyrion said, glancing from Larra to his brother and back.

“Named for a Stark. Theon Stark was known as the Hungry Wolf on account of the constant state of war the North was in during his reign. He repelled the Andals, threw them back into the sea,” Larra said proudly. “He defeated Argos Sevenstar in the Battle of the Weeping Water. Then he strapped Argos’ body to his ship as a figurehead and sailed across the Narrow Sea, burning a score of Andal villages, slaughtering hundreds, and mounted their heads on spikes along the eastern coast – lest anyone be in any doubt what would happen if they tried to take the North from its people.”

Her voice had turned low, threatening. Lord Tyrion held her gaze.

“Well, I think we can dispense with the pikes,” he said amiably. “Your demonstration in the Great Hall was more than enough.”

“Was it?” she asked tartly.

Lord Tyrion exchanged a significant look with his brother as he approached the table. Larra glanced between the two as Lord Tyrion pulled out a chair and took a seat on her other side. One brother sat either side of her – she wondered if this had been planned, or whether Lord Tyrion intended to take advantage of a situation presented to him.

Either way, she arched an eyebrow and said coolly, “Surrounded by lions.”

Lord Tyrion gave her a very arch look. “I shouldn’t imagine a dragon has any dread of such things.”

She sighed heavily, sitting back in her chair. Giving Ser Jaime a look, she said, “That didn’t take long.”

“Oh, no need to give my sweet brother such a chastising look, my lady. I was in the crypt, lingering beyond the candlelight,” Lord Tyrion said, and Larra closed her eyes. She hadn’t even thought to check. Who dared go into the Stark crypt? She sighed and rubbed her face as Lord Tyrion said quietly, “The final puzzle piece I was missing. I had wondered why it was you went out of your way to antagonise Lady Targaryen.” He sounded almost annoyed not to have realised the truth himself. “When she finds out the truth, Daenerys’ first thought will be you rather than Jon…” He stared longingly at Larra. “I have always dreamed what it would feel to have a sister who loved me absolutely, who would do absolutely anything – even the reprehensible – to protect me.”

Coolly, Larra asked, “Is there a question in there, my lord?”

“People speak at great length of your potential with a meat hook,” Lord Tyrion said brusquely. “One wonders what you will do with a dragon.”

She just prevented herself from rolling her eyes, but her annoyance seeped into her voice. “That seems to be the theme of discussion at the moment.”

“Lady Sansa told me about the Dothraki,” Lord Tyrion said offhandedly. “You refuse to unleash dragonfire upon the horde even to kill the sick and stop disease from spreading.”

“The Dothraki aren’t stupid. They know how to protect their horde,” Larra said. “It’s no-one’s place to interfere in their business.”

“Lady Targaryen would disagree.”

“Lady Targaryen burned their most sacred place and ordered them halfway across the world to die so could sit her arse on the Iron Throne,” Larra said sharply. “Let’s not pretend her motivations since Qarth have been altruistic. She has been striving to return to the Seven Kingdoms and claim the Iron Throne since she married her horse-lord.”

“She has helped many lives,” Lord Tyrion said quietly – and the quietness told Larra what she needed to know. He had never been shy about anything, but the half-hearted nature of his defence of Daenerys spoke volumes.

“She has overturned many lives,” Larra said. “And accumulated wealth and armies as she went. What do you think she had always intended to use them for? She lacked the patience to stay and put in the work to establish an educated, progressive society that ensured the abolition of slavery for good. You were always a champion of curiosity, of learning. What is your opinion on a ruler who is boastful about having no formal education and refuses to learn?”

Lord Tyrion groaned. “You delight in presenting me with problems, don’t you?”

Larra’s smile was as dangerous as a direwolf’s. “Since we met.”

“Days ago…when we sat to cyvasse…” Lord Tyrion mused thoughtfully. “It was not a casual gesture, inviting me to play, was it?” Larra fiddled with her pencil – because she had sought Lord Tyrion out. She had yearned for his advice. Because of everyone she knew, she trusted his insight. “You were angling to ask me something.”

“Hardly matters now,” Larra sniffed, trying to sound unconcerned, but it did sting – not to be able to trust in the advice of a man she respected.

“How so?”

“I wished to speak in hypotheticals,” Larra said honestly. “But you know the truth. There is no such thing as a hypothetical question discussed between us.”

“I should hate to think that we cannot still be earnest with one another.”

“After the Lion Culling, you should know better than to think you will never be allowed to serve two masters,” Larra said, and Lord Tyrion gazed sombrely at her, temporarily lost for words. No matter his personal opinions, his position had been made clear by Daenerys: he could support her or die.

“We may not have open and honest discussion?” he asked gently.

“Absolutely, if you have ambitions to become kindling,” Larra said. Lord Tyrion’s lips twitched, his eyes glinting.

“Despite preparations for siege against an unknowable terror, you sought me out for advice on politics. That tells me you have some hope, however small, of surviving the war and you worry about the wider implications of the truth,” Lord Tyrion said gently. His gaze was earnest, his eyes terribly discerning as he continued, “You worry more for your brother than for yourself, though you are both now, with or without your desire to be, players in the game.” He sighed, his eyes darting over the various books and scrolls she had been working from, the sheaves of paper she had covered in annotations. Finally, he said very seriously, “In my position, knowing what I do, my advice to you is the same as the advice I gave your brother so many years ago: Never forget what you are, Alarra Targaryen.” She flinched at the name. It was the first time anyone had ever called her such. “Others will not. Wear it like armour and it can never be used against you.”

“You think I should embrace it – we should embrace it,” Larra said quietly, aware that Ser Jaime sat silently on her other side.

“You have claimed a dragon, Larra,” Lord Tyrion said gently. “There is no going back. Word of your lineage will spread. You can either decide to embrace all that that is, and take control of your fate, or you can hide from the truth and risk others controlling you with it.”

Larra closed her eyes. She knew he was right. That was what she was afraid of – that she did have to embrace her birth-right or risk others manipulating her with it.

Lord Tyrion turned to Larra’s sketches. After a few moments, he slipped from his chair and went searching among the stacks. Ser Jaime watched her carefully. When her features were relaxed, contemplative, she appeared her age – young. He forgot how young the Starks truly were. And how long they had been left alone to cope in adult roles suddenly thrust upon them. But Lady Larra had not only had herself to think about – as her sisters had: she had put her brothers first. Ser Jaime vaguely recalled the little one, the one who had died before he reached adulthood, slain for sport before the Battle of the Bastards – so it was said. He shied away from thinking of the other, the little dark-haired boy with bright eyes that saw too much. Lady Larra had been left to care for the boy Jaime had broken. Tyrion was one thing: Brandon was quite another. With the snow and wind howling around the castle, Jaime could imagine the True North: but he could not imagine how Lady Larra had not only survived beyond the Wall but ensured her crippled brother also lived.

He watched Lady Larra carefully. With her features soft, she looked as young as she was – and so beautiful! Her long, pale face, those high cheekbones, her delicate rosebud mouth, those pretty lips, neat eyebrows hovering expressively over those intense violet eyes – Rhaegar’s eyes. Yet her shoulders slumped slightly, and Jaime reflected on her conversation with Tyrion. She had remained guarded, always mindful that Tyrion indeed served another master – one who wanted to conquer all life in Westeros. His loyalty to Daenerys Targaryen would be brutally enforced. Therefore she could not trust his judgement.

“You really did want my brother’s advice, didn’t you?” Ser Jaime said gently.

“There’s a line. Before…and everything that came after,” Lady Larra said, her violet eyes shining, her voice slightly hoarse as she said, “Everyone from before is dead – except for him. He’s the only one – He is one person whose opinion I value.”

“You trusted him.”

“Yes,” Larra said softly. “And when he gave Bran designs for a saddle so he could ride – that is when I loved him.”

“It’s a rare person who sees Tyrion’s true worth,” Jaime said. “I...hate the idea of him in such danger yet he is perhaps the only person in the world with the skill to manage Daenerys Targaryen.” Lady Larra scoffed, her expression scornful. “He’s done it before.”

“Joffrey feared your brother,” Lady Larra said. “Daenerys doesn’t fear anyone – and if she even thought him a threat, she would feed him to Drogon.”

“Tyrion thrives best when confronted with a challenge that engages all of his skills,” Jaime said.

“Daenerys is certainly that.”

“We need him to be by her side, to guide her…if we want to have any chance of surviving her,” Jaime said, wincing. They all knew the dangerous position in which Tyrion now found himself. He would have done better to remain in the fighting pits, Jaime thought.

“Even he can’t stop her from indulging her worst instincts – when no-one has ever dared point out that her actions are evil, no matter her intent,” Larra said miserably.

“I’ve been thinking what my father would do if he had to deal with this mess.”

“Verbally thrash everyone into submission?”

“That would be a good deal of it, yes,” Jaime said, his lips twitching at Lady Larra’s tart tone. “He would also have many plans in motion at the same time, to neutralise the threat – so that if one plan failed, he never had to think about what to do next.”

“From the cyvasse board to the battlefield,” Lady Larra sighed heavily.

“You worry Daenerys will learn the truth and declare you her enemy.”

“She’s already my enemy,” Lady Larra murmured, something dark shadowing those brilliant eyes. Rhaegar’s eyes. When this battle’s done, I mean to call a council. Changes will be made. I meant to do it long ago, but…well, it does no good to speak of roads not taken. We shall talk when I return… It was the last thing Prince Rhaegar had said to Jaime before he took the long road to the Trident. And Jaime still remembered the way the prince’s eyes had darkened with a mixture of anger and despair when he spoke of making changes. The young woman before him had little by way of Rhaegar’s looks, except for the eyes – Lady Larra took after her mother’s beauty so fiercely – yet those eyes, they were Rhaegar’s. It was easier to see Rhaegar in her twin-brother, with his pensive nature and steely voice.

“Is it wise to let her know that?” Jaime asked gently. “Whether you wish it or not, you share blood. You are…family.”

Lady Larra flashed a glare, all but baring her fangs. “She is not my family.”

“Perhaps…allow her to believe she could become your family. She’s alone in the world. If she thinks she has your support – I don’t mean ceding Northern independence, I mean – support her claim to the Iron Throne,” Jaime said. “Befriend her. Make her love you…” He watched her lip curl with distaste – and agitation. He smiled. “It’s not in your nature to be deceiving. Perhaps Tyrion is right – you are Cregan Stark. He tolerated none of the nonsense in King’s Landing. He did what needed to be done… For myself, I know what she has done that is unforgiveable. Dear as you hold my nieces, I do not flatter myself that the Lion Culling holds the same weight for you. What has she done that you cannot move past?”

Lady Larra narrowed her eyes, saying carefully, “She…wounded Jon.”

“Is there anything you would not do to protect your brother?” Jaime asked.

“I would do murder, if that’s what you mean – but befriending her…that is distasteful to me.” Her lip curled again. “I lost my tolerance for mind games in the True North.”

“If you wish to protect Jon, you may have to stomach them,” Ser Jaime said. He sighed heavily, leaning forward. When he spoke, his voice was gentle yet filled with such earnestness, Larra could no look away. “Remember, Lady Larra…your father’s honesty got him killed. He refused to play the game – and hundreds of thousands have died because of it…”

Larra stared at the knight, until he became flustered. “What?”

Cocking her head to the side thoughtfully, as she observed Ser Jaime’s handsome face, his earnest demeanour, Larra said, “I believe I’m starting to understand what Lady Brienne sees in you… Lord Tyrion – come quick! Your brother is blushing!”

She heard Lord Tyrion chuckle, and Ser Jaime gave her a look, rolling his eyes as if he was used to being teased – by his brother. She smiled softly to conceal how deep Ser Jaime’s words had struck. Everyone said honour had killed Father: his devotion to Robert Baratheon’s memory and their friendship. None had admitted the truth: that Father had sealed his fate the moment he had confronted Cersei Lannister about her bastards.

Father had died because he didn’t understand the game, and his role in it. Or perhaps because he did understand his role – and refused to play in spite of it.

Larra flinched as a wave of nausea rolled through her, the taste of bile strong in her mouth. She inhaled sharply, her vision dancing, as heat surged through her veins, making her hands tremble. She closed her eyes, resting her head back, and stifled a soft moan as a new ache throbbed at her temples. Feeling decidedly ill, she focused on breathing in and out, slowly, rather than on the threat of spewing vomit all over the calculations she had been working on all morning.

“My lady… You are pale,” Ser Jaime said gently. “I shall summon a maester.”

“No,” she moaned softly, eyes still closed, head still resting back. “I am perfectly well. I shouldn’t have broken my fast with eggs and black pudding. I’m not accustomed to rich food anymore.” Her hands shaky, she reached up to wipe a trickle of sweat from her brow. She felt more ill than she let on, her head swimming, dizziness making the nausea worse.

“You’re panting,” Ser Jaime said concernedly. “You’re not well.”

“I’m alright,” Larra insisted, though without any heat in her voice. “I just…need to rest, ‘til it subsides.” She breathed out slowly. When the dizziness subsided, and the nausea was a memory lurking in the back of her mind, she opened her eyes. It was no use, though. The headache that had begun faintly now throbbed at her temples and she winced.

“Blast these calculations,” she grumbled, rubbing her eyes. “I’ve been staring at them so long, they’ve started dancing… If you will excuse me, Ser… I must go and take some fresh air.”

“If it’s all the same to you, my lady, Tyrion and I will stay and work on the calculations,” Ser Jaime said, and Lord Tyrion nodded. His eyes were shrewd as he watched Larra, but he gave her a small smile as she nodded and left the table, sitting up straighter to look over the papers with his brother. Larra dipped the two a respectful curtsy and departed the library.

As the door swung behind Lady Larra, Jaime turned to his brother, frowning.

“Is it true, she’s taken Robert’s bastard as her lover?” Jaime asked.

“Well, I don’t imagine they’re playing tiddlywinks in that chamber they share,” Tyrion said, smirking. “Why?”

“She’s pregnant.”

Tyrion blinked at him. “How could you possibly know that?”

Jaime shrugged. “Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps she is just sick to her stomach from rich food and being stuck inside this stuffy library all morning,” he said fairly.

As Larra wandered the corridors, breathing through another wave of nausea that had her sweating, pausing as the flagstone floor lurched, she was met by Bran. He was alone, wheeling himself around, carrying several books in his lap. He smiled when he saw Larra.

“Rhaegal is waiting for you,” he said gently, his eyes alight with enthusiasm. “Enjoy your ride.”

“Thank you,” Larra said softly, fighting through the nausea with a smile. She reached out and smoothed his hair from his face. “I shall see you at dinner.”

Tyrion noted his brother’s stillness as Lord Brandon Stark wheeled himself into the library. He gave them both a soft, enigmatic smile, inclining his head, and turned to wheel his chair among the stacks with surprising swiftness. Tyrion turned to Lady Larra’s calculations. He appreciated the precision of her sketches and annotations, and went through her works to find a good starting point. There was no point repeating her work. She had drawn out plans for five, a seven, twelve and fourteen-pointed stars, sketching them around a scale drawing of Winterfell in its entirety. She had completed the calculations for the twelve- and fourteen-point stars as needing far too much wildfire to be feasible, while the five- and seven-pointed stars covered too little ground to make an impact. Tyrion picked up the graphite pencil and compass Lady Larra had left behind and set to work, sketching and annotating. He smiled to himself as Jaime lost interest in watching him and abandoned the table. He rose and Tyrion noted that Jaime made no show of meandering amongst the stacks: he went straight to the boy in the chair.

He watched as the young man reached up to slot a book back on the shelf, stretching his torso so that he could reach. A small frown creased his brow, and Lord Brandon sighed, gazing up at an empty space just out of his reach.

“Here,” Jaime said softly, and Lord Brandon glanced over at him. Jaime stepped forward, flustered when he offered his right hand on instinct. He cleared his throat and offered the left. “Let me help you.”

Lord Brandon held up the heavy book for him to take hold of. It was heavy, and awkward, and Jaime struggled to slot it back in its place on the shelf, even with his gilded hand. It was awkward.

“You will adapt,” said a soft, sorrowful voice. Jaime glanced down at the young man in the chair – the chair Jaime had put him in. “It will take time, but you will.”

Jaime stared down at him. This was his fault. He had broken a little boy. The things I do for love… Had it ever been love? Or was it just it just Cersei’s way of controlling him, as she felt compelled to control everything around her because she had so little control over her own life? He gazed down at Lord Brandon, remembering those dark eyes widening with sudden horror as he realised, a heartbeat before he fell. He remembered the howling of the wolf-pup, how it chilled his marrow. He remembered the soft thump of impact, in a way he barely remembered the blood-curdling death-screams of the countless men he had slain in battle.

“I’m sorry for what I did to you,” he said softly, steeling his nerves to look the young man in the eye.

“You weren’t sorry then,” Lord Brandon said lightly. He gave his shoulders a little shrug beneath his heavy fur-trimmed brocade surcoat. Beneath it, Jaime saw he wore a long tunic, the hem brushing his ankles. To keep his useless legs warm. Lord Brandon gave him a bland smile but his eyes glinted merrily. “Had you not pushed me, neither of us would be where we are today. We would not be who we are today. Join me, Ser Jaime.” Lord Brandon gestured to the hearth, where a settle had been arranged and a low table piled with books, one of them open to a history of the Conquest. The illuminations glimmered in the light from the fire, and the high, mullioned windows shedding rare Northern sunshine into the rafters.

Ser Jaime joined Lord Brandon by the fire but frowned. “She doesn’t know, does she?” he asked. “If she had known, she would never have stopped Lady Targaryen’s commander from taking my head in the Great Hall.”

“Do not misunderstand Larra,” Lord Brandon warned gently, still smiling in that enigmatic way. “She is a cyvasse master. She understands how one decision has lasting consequences. The repercussions of your actions, Ser Jaime, have shaped our world. Without them, King’s Landing would have been laid low. I would never have become what I am – and nor would Larra. Without realising it, you have defined the course of the future. May I ask you something, Ser Jaime?”

“Of course.”

Lord Brandon sat with his pale hands clasped in his lap, his head tilted to one side, dark eyes glinting in the firelight. For some reason, Jaime was reminded vividly of a curious raven watching something interesting. “What do you wish your legacy to be?”

Jaime blinked. “My father used to ask the same thing…though never in a way that made me think he actually cared to hear the answer.”

“Your father was Hand of the King for twenty years. For another twenty, he remained at Casterly Rock. You spent twenty years in the Kingsguard,” Lord Brandon said softly. He asked curiously, “What do you imagine you could accomplish with the next twenty years? What legacy would you wish to leave?”

“I thought I would die wearing my white cloak,” Jaime said honestly. He had been too reluctant to leave Cersei to think of any ambition for himself, even when presented with the choice of freedom by his father – though that freedom was an illusion. Being heir to Casterly Rock was a cage of a different design.

“Your entire life, you have been motivated by your devotion to your family. To House Lannister,” Lord Brandon mused. “But your finest moment, the moment that defined you, was when you acted not for personal glory or your father’s ambition, but for the good of the realm. You forfeited your life when you killed King Aerys.” His impenetrable eyes rested on Jaime, and something like respect, almost fondness, radiated from the young man’s face. “You knew you would be executed for regicide even as you drew your sword… You were brave, you were just and you defended the innocent. You upheld your oath as a knight of the Seven Kingdoms.”

“I’m not sure I agree with you.”

“You are a good man, Ser Jaime,” Lord Brandon said softly. “It is time you let the world know it.”

“There’s no rewriting history.”

“No, the ink is dry,” Lord Brandon said, with a twist of his lips, as if he was amused by Jaime’s words more than he let on. “But you can write your future.”

“Not with this hand,” Jaime said, eyeing his left hand. He should go to the schoolroom with his cousins, sit beside little Altheda and Rosamund as they practised their letters with chalk on slate, or dragging a stick through a tray of sand.

“What do you wish your future to be?”

“You assume I will survive this war,” Jaime said quietly.

“Indulge me, then,” Lord Brandon said, and Jaime knew he could deny the boy nothing. “Play along.”

“I would be…not a perfect knight…but a good man.”

Lord Brandon’s smile was radiant. For a moment, Jaime could see the boy he had once been, shining from his eyes. He was pleased.

“You’ve already begun. You’ve made opportunity for yourself to be that man,” Lord Brandon said, all but stating that in abandoning Cersei, Jaime had made the right choice. Lord Brandon gave him a stern, understanding look, as if he could read Jaime’s thoughts. He warned Jaime gently, “Don’t waste it.”


The cold was welcome. It chilled her skin and combated the sweat beading on her brow, which she wiped away hastily, annoyed both by the sweat and by her shaking hands. The headache, her dizziness – it all went away the moment she stepped out of doors. Fresh air, that was what she had needed.

Rhaegal swooped and circled, and they glided through the clouds. Nothing but the sound of the wind and of Rhaegal’s chirps and coos. The more they flew together, the more vocal Rhaegal was becoming – sometimes, Larra believed she and Rhaegal were truly conversing. The pitch and tone of Rhaegal’s coos and grumbles, their expressive snorts and the rumbling chortle like laughter changed in response to what Larra said.

Some maesters had supposed that dragons were more intelligent than men. That said little, but Larra was inclined to agree. Rhaegal, at least, was very clever. Almost wolf-like. She had spent enough time with Last Shadow to recognise familiar traits: elusiveness, cunning, protectiveness, ferociousness, playfulness, loyalty.

Like wolves, when Rhaegal was left to their own devices, they were gentle and companionable. They remained true to their nature – which had little to do with fire and blood. Dragons used their fire to cook their meat: she had seen Rhaegal use their flames only once, when they had hunted a lone aurochs, charring it and snatching the corpse in their talons. They had flown Larra back to Winterfell and fed on the aurochs beyond the curtain-wall, to general interest from anyone along the battlements with a decent enough view.

Rhaegal did not use fire to spread fear, to subjugate. They used it to hunt, to sustain themselves. Not to dominate life.

Larra sighed and gazed out across the sea of billowing clouds, gleaming in the sunlight. The sky above them was endless forget-me-not blue, the clouds fluffy and white as lamb’s wool. The sun was hot, the breeze sharp and cold. And she was free – free of calculations, of tricky conversations, of the gnawing worry in the pit of her stomach.

Rhaegal banked around a towering column of cloud and she inhaled sharply, tightening her thighs, and her entire body tensed as she went dizzy. Clinging to Rhaegal’s back, Larra moaned and fought the wave of nausea and dizziness that threatened to overwhelm her. Rhaegal clicked and cooed, vocalising anxiously – she felt the flicker through the bond, and her stomach knotted as Rhaegal angled their wings and they began a gentle descent.

They flew low over the wolfswood, snatches of birdsong darting about her ears, the ice-capped tips of evergreens glittering like emeralds just out of reach, and Rhaegal cooed and sang as they gently alighted in an untouched ice-meadow, sparkling like a lady’s finest jewels.

Larra hastily descended from Rhaegal’s back. The moment her boots hit the snow, she doubled over and retched, emptying the contents of her stomach.

Gasping and coughing, Larra wiped her mouth and moaned. Her hand shook again, and she felt sweaty and unsteady. As she kicked snow over the small puddle of vomit, Rhaegal clicked and cooed, nudging their great muzzle against her side.

“I think I just – I just need to sit for a bit,” Larra said breathlessly, staggering away from the concealed vomit, to drop in the snow. All around Rhaegal, it was melting swiftly: she sat on a snowbank and reached for handfuls of the powdery stuff, using it to cool her forehead, the back of her neck. She shoved some in her mouth to cleanse it of the taste of vomit, spitting it out again. She knew better than to eat snow: it had to be melted and boiled first. But it did take away the taste of sick.

Rhaegal clicked and cooed curiously at her as she leaned back, lying in the snow. It felt good to lie down, and even better to lie against the cold snow, soothing the trembling of her overheated body. The clouds tumbled overhead as Larra lay in the snow, panting.

“I feel better out here,” Larra told Rhaegal, who cooed softly. Larra tilted her head to gaze at the dragon, who seemed to be watching the snow melt all around them. Rhaegal snorted softly and rustled their enormous wings, which gleamed as vibrantly as the ice-glazed evergreens around them. The veins of copper glowed vividly and Larra smiled, watching them. “You’re happier up there, aren’t you? That’s where you were always meant to be.” She sighed and gazed up into the endless forget-me-not sky. She admitted to Rhaegal, “I’ve no idea where I’m meant to be – except with you.”

Rhaegal chirped.

“You’re right: and Gendry.”

Rhaegal cooed, snorting gently.

“I am feeling better,” Larra told them, and Rhaegal rustled their wings. “Go back? I suppose I must.” She grumbled, climbing slowly to her feet. The world no longer spun or lurched about her, and she breathed a sigh of relief, trudging through the snow back to Rhaegal. Snowmelt glittered all about Rhaegal where they lay. “I’ll have to speak to the saddlers, though. What do you say to a saddle? It’ll stop me falling from your back if I have a funny turn – and it may be more comfortable for you, not having my feet digging into your back.”

Rhaegal chirped happily. Larra nodded, walking up to Rhaegal’s enormous head. One vivid bronze eye gleamed as she rested her hand on Rhaegal’s long muzzle. They snorted delicately and chirped, nuzzling against her until she rested her entire weight against Rhaegal’s head. She rested her head against Rhaegal, gently stroking the tough skin beneath that great eye, and smiled softly as she listened to Rhaegal cooing and singing tenderly. Like dogs and even horses, Rhaegal used their great muzzle to rub against her, showing affection. She could feel it, thrumming through the bond.

She felt Rhaegal’s delight sparking through her veins as Larra clambered onto the dragon’s back, their palpable relief as Larra settled into place on Rhaegal’s back – as if Rhaegal had missed her there, felt incomplete without her. Larra smiled and brushed her hand against Rhaegal’s skin, rough and hot, a simple gesture that echoed the thoughts and feelings she sent through the bond. She knew she was meant to be here, too. She knew how right it felt.

“Brandon’s going to show me some of your ancestors,” Larra told Rhaegal, who clicked curiously. “I’ll take a look at their saddles and see what we can come up with that’s comfortable for us both.” Rhaegal made a pleased noise, and Larra smiled. She sighed. “I imagine Brandon’s the only one who will ever know where you came from.”

Rhaegal cooed curiously. “We all come from somewhere. I had no idea where I came from – just like you.” She sighed. “No idea where I came from: now I have no idea where I’m going.”

It was a daunting idea, and yet…and yet it filled her with a strange sort of excitement.

The world is ahead.

Notes:

I think we all know what’s ahead for Larra!

Chapter 53: The Heirs of the Dragon

Notes:

Prepare yourself, this is a long one. I’m off sick from work and thankfully have HotD Episode 7 to re-watch. What a masterpiece! My feelings for the costumes aside, the show is amazing! I can’t wait for the soundtracks to be released.

Also, I've realised that if I continue to write Valyrian Steel the way I want to, the story will end up hundreds of chapters long, and that is daunting! So I'll find a natural stopping-point for this story, rename it (Child of Ice and Fire) and create a 'series' - if I can figure out how! The series will still be entitled Valyrian Steel, the first story will be Child of Ice and Fire, and the next instalment may be something like Daughter of Dragons or something like that (suggestions welcome!) So if this story suddenly disappears by the name Valyrian Steel, don't worry!

As always, thank you for the reviews!

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

53

The Heirs of the Dragon


The door swung open and Larra briefly glanced over her shoulder. Gendry strode into the room, yawning widely. He smiled blearily when he saw her, sat at the work-table. He came over to kiss her head as he fiddled with the buttons of his sweat-soaked tunic. “What are you up to?”

Larra sighed heavily, muttered, “An act of contrition.”

“You’re grumpy,” Gendry observed, smiling.

“Everyone’s pissing me off today – except you,” Larra grumbled. Gendry chuckled.

“So you’re saving us all a tongue-lashing by hiding here, are you?”

“The masses rejoice,” Larra said drily, turning back to her desk and cleaning off her paintbrush. “How’s your day been?”

She heard Gendry sigh and approach. “Stand up.”

“What are you doing?” Larra exclaimed, as Gendry lifted her bodily by the waist, shoved her chair out of the way and lifted her work-table, careful of everything littered upon it, and turned it about, setting it down again.

“Moving your table, so you’re not having a conversation with the wall,” Gendry said, setting her chair behind the table – in the corner, so that she faced into the chamber. Larra raised her eyebrows at Gendry then smiled softly, leaning up to kiss him.

“Thank you,” she murmured against his lips. His eyes softened as he gazed down at her, and they shared a few soft, lazy kisses.

“Now, are you going to talk to me?” Gendry asked, stripping off his tunic and undershirts. Larra blinked rapidly at the sight of his rippling muscles and sat down rather heavily, distracted. She licked her lips. Gendry tugged on a fresh linen undershirt and unlaced his trousers as he walked behind her table, leaning over with his fist on the table to observe what she had been working on, his cunning eyes taking everything in. Her paints – running sadly low, remnants leftover from before – were set before her in their tiny rectangular ceramic pots, all nestled in a bamboo watercolour box all the way from Qarth. Hot-pressed watercolour paper and paintbrushes from Myr – also remnants of a more vibrant time – had been set out before them, with jugs of water. She had spent several hours sketching until she had the details correct and now enjoyed how the sketch was coming to life with the addition of paint. Gendy glanced from the almost-completed painting to Larra. “What’s going on? What’s this?”

Larra sighed, glancing up at Gendry. She rested her cheek against her fist and gazed miserably at the painting. It was not large, perhaps eight inches tall, yet it was gloriously coloured – if she did say so. She had not forgotten the joy of painting, of bringing things to life. In the interminable bleakness of the Land of Always Winter, she had not forgotten colour.

“It’s Lady Targaryen’s first husband,” Larra told Gendry. The handsome warlord had been fashioned by the gods themselves for women to swoon over – all those rippling muscles... She eyed Gendry, biting the inside of her cheek.

“The horse-lord,” Gendry said, frowning. “Why are you painting him?”

“The game,” Larra grumbled, sighing heavily. She sat back in her chair as Gendry observed the details of the painting – Khal Drogo’s heavy golden belts, his scars, the tiny silver bells in the braid he wore longer than Larra’s. She sighed deeply, wrinkling her nose in annoyance. “It was pointed out to me that it may be more beneficial to keep Lady Targaryen close rather than obviously making myself her known enemy. This is an overture of…friendship.”

“You look like you’d rather go to the gallows.”

“You know what she did to Jon,” Larra said darkly. “What did she did to the Lannisters. What she tried to do to Ser Jaime in this very castle.”

Gendry watched her carefully. Quietly, he warned her, “You’re going to have to bury that anger, Larra. Is there anything you do like about her?”

“I like the look of her first husband,” Larra said, smirking as she took the painting from Gendry. “Bronzed and burnished…mmm…” He clicked his tongue and took the painting from her, careful not to damage it, and set it on the table.

“I’m being serious. You need to find something real, something genuine,” Gendry said. Larra pulled a face at him. “Even…what about her clothes?”

“She is stylish. Her embroiderers have exceptional talent,” Larra conceded. “And her hair always looks immaculate. Though even her braids make me wary.”

“Why?” Gendry blurted indignantly.

“The Dothraki only ever cut off their braids when they are defeated in combat. The horse-lords are slavers and rapists – they’re conquerors,” Larra said, frowning. “The Dothraki continue to motivate her choices.”

“You’ve put a lot of thought into her braids.”

“You’ve seen Sansa. Do you think every aspect of her appearance isn’t carefully thought out? She dresses to armour herself – and reinforce her Northern-ness,” Larra said, shaking her head. “She’s worried people will remember how much time she spent in the South and think her less of a Stark for it. How a woman dresses is one of her few weapons.”

“Why do you never wear your hair down?” Gendry asked, genuine curiosity in his voice.

“I’ve too much to do,” Larra said simply.

“Did you ever wear it down?”

“For celebrations,” Larra nodded. “When all I had to do was look pretty.”

“You’re always beautiful,” Gendry said warmly. He smiled at her. “One day, you’re going to wear your hair down for me.”

“Am I?”

“Yes. Don’t think I’m going to let you distract me from what we were talking about,” Gendry warned her. “I want you to find one thing you appreciate about Daenerys Targaryen.”

It took a good long while. The bias she had against Daenerys – decidedly well-earned – stood in the way, but she knew Gendry was right: she would have to play at making nice, to find something that she could think of when that anger at Jon’s abuse bubbled up, making her teeth ache to take a chunk of flesh…

“I suppose…even though she’s deluded herself into thinking she’s claiming the Iron Throne to free the masses from the yoke of tyranny and justifies reprehensible actions as a means to do that…she cared about the crucified children,” Larra said quietly. She sighed heavily. “They were probably the only thing she truly cared about for the sake of themselves, not what they could do for her… She cared that they’d died.”

“There you go,” Gendry said softly, kissing her head.

“Where are you off to now?” Larra asked, dipping her paintbrush into a jug of fresh water.

“Training. Ser Gerold’s expecting me in the yard,” Gendry said. “I think he’s disappointed every time I show up and you’re not with me.”

“Why should he be?”

“Every time you’re near, he watches you.”

“Does he?”

“He’s not the only one,” Gendry said. He didn’t sound jealous – rather, he sounded guarded, suspicious. “Lord Lonmouth watches your every move and Jaime Lannister –“

“What about him?”

“He can’t hide what he’s thinking, the way Lonmouth and Darkstar can,” Gendry said, shrugging. “He seems to look at you and sees someone else.”

“He knows the truth,” Larra told him, and Gendry’s eyes widened. “So does Tyrion. I imagine Lord Lonmouth has figured it out, too. And Darkstar?”

Gendry frowned thoughtfully. “Well, he hates me. But he seems almost greedy for the sight of you. I’d say he desired you but Darkstar doesn’t strike me as shy. If he wanted you, he’d act on it.”

“Yes, I believe he would,” Larra chuckled softly.

“You play cyvasse with him,” Gendry said, frowning.

“And he’s training you,” Larra countered, wondering where his thoughts were leading him.

“What I mean is, what’s he like when you play cyvasse?”

“Quiet,” Larra shrugged. “We just play cyvasse.”

“That’s it?”

“There’s a lot to be learned from the way a person plays cyvasse,” Larra told him, almost defensively. She knew Gendry wasn’t a jealous man: he would never accuse her of having ideas of being untrue. Still…even if he did not voice that concern, others would think it. Would gossip. Stuck indoors with all of the North, gossip was rife.

“What’ve you learned about him?” Gendry asked curiously. After a moment, thinking carefully about the games she had played with Ser Gerold – sometimes winning, sometimes losing, but most often reaching an infuriating impasse – Larra answered.

“He’s brilliant. Calculating, shrewd, adaptable, naturally fiery but he’s learned to be patient. He refuses to stoop to the easy strategy. If there is a choice between retreating or fighting before he is ready, he will retreat and bide his time until he is prepared,” Larra mused. “He’ll take the knock to his pride rather than risk his plans failing because he was impatient.”

Gendry’s eyebrows rose. “You learned all that about him from cyvasse?”

“It’s a wonderful game.”

He smiled gently. “Maybe you’ll teach me.”

“Not tonight,” Larra sighed heavily. She glanced over at him as he tucked in his fresh undershirt and laced up his trousers. “I won’t be there for supper in the nursery.”

“No?”

“I’ve promised Brandon I’ll dine with him… He’s going to invite Lady Targaryen to join us,” Larra said, putting a lot of effort into not wrinkling her nose in distaste. “Or rather, an invitation will be sent on my behalf to join us. So that Brandon can… Can do what Brandon does.”

Gendry stared at her, pausing. “He’s going to take you diving again?”

“Is that what you call it?”

“You’re diving into the past, aren’t you?” Gendry shrugged. It is beautiful beneath the sea, but if you stay too long, you will drown…

“Diving… Yes.”

“Is that wise, to show her what he’s capable of?”

“He seems to think it is,” Larra said, giving Gendry a dark look that showed her feelings on the matter.

“What does he want to show her?” Gendry asked curiously.

Larra grinned. “The Dance of Dragons.”

“So that’s why you’ll suffer to dine with her,” Gendry rolled his eyes. “You want a peek at the Rogue Prince and Aemond One-Eye.”

“Absolutely,” Larra said, with great relish.

“Tell me all about it tomorrow?”

“I will. Pick out a gown for me to wear before you go?”

“I thought clothes were a woman’s weapons. Aren’t you heading into battle?”

“I don’t need any encouragement to engage in combat,” Larra said grimly, and Gendry chuckled. “Best not tempt myself.”

“Wear the dark purple dress, the one with the flowers and direwolves,” Gendry said. “It’s pretty when it sparkles in the candlelight. And you’re always happy when you wear it.”

“It’s the first gown I’ve ever owned that has Father’s sigil on it,” Larra said softly, and Gendry went still. He approached her, leaning down to kiss her head.

“I’ll see you later,” he promised. “Enjoy the Dance.”

“Which? Rhaenyra’s – or Daenerys’?” Larra asked, her tone subdued, but Gendry coaxed a smile from her with a lingering kiss. She sighed heavily as the door shut and turned back to her painting, willing herself to keep going.

She would much rather have been working on illustrations of Princess Anemone and her sweet Wyman, or Ozias Vollanar the Braavosi water-dancer seeking vengeance to complement her rewrites of The Princess Bride, but she had amends to make.

The game, Sansa called it. Father had hated it. Politics.

Ser Jaime had told her, “He refused to play the game – and hundreds of thousands have died because of it…”


Hours later, Larra tucked another small log on the fire, nestling it among the flames, the tiny beads and gold and silver embroidery on her sleeve catching the light and glittering exquisitely. Tureens had already been sent up from the kitchens, one resting on the table and the other amongst the simmering ashes to keep the food warm, while a large half-wheel of cheese rested in a specially-crafted bracket that tilted the exposed cheese toward the flames. The cheese was glistening, starting to soften – soon it would be melting, ready to be scraped onto their plates, and she itched to scoop some up on scraps of fresh bread.

“Are you warm enough there?” Larra asked, glancing over her shoulder. Bathed in candlelight as the large dining table was, Bran was far enough from the fire that she worried about him feeling the chill.

“Yes,” Bran murmured distractedly, and Larra frowned.

“What have you got there?” she asked, drifting over to the table, glad to be away from the stifling heat of the fire. The silk of her aubergine-purple gown rustled softly against the floor and she twitched her skirts so that her hem released the rushes that had snagged on the fabric, leaning over the table as Bran’s long, pale fingers caught the light, flickering over the table-top. She clicked her tongue and reached out to tweak Bran’s ear playfully. “I’ve been looking everywhere for these!”

Bran smiled softly as he laid out three cards before him. Larra had created many decks of cards over the years: she and her siblings tended to play with them until they disintegrated – or tore, as was more likely the case with Rickon. Card-games were the only kinds of nursery games Sansa had joined them in once she was old enough to understand that she was a lady. Apparently, sitting was the prerequisite for games approved for ladies to enjoy. Over the years, the cards had evolved, with Larra adding and removing different ones in collaboration with her siblings to suit the games they created amongst themselves – simple games even Rickon could win and trickier ones that engaged Larra and Robb’s keen minds. The deck Bran now played with had four suites. Each suite had a weirwood, the numbers two through ten, a maiden-queen, a warrior and a direwolf. Larra had illustrated each of the cards, so that even the numbers were incorporated into the design – there were two lovers, three horses, four castles, five shields, six hellebores, seven swords, nine weirbirds and ten horseshoes. Each of the four suites within the deck had a painted border and a coordinating symbol – a red weirwood leaf, a grey direwolf head, a black raven and a white winter rose. The cards Bran had apparently pilfered from Larra’s wicker basket of projects beside her rocking-chair had been tied together with a periwinkle ribbon of softest Qartheen satin, worth more than the entirety of the cards and all the materials she had used to make them, but it was the cards she and her siblings had always valued.

The wind rattled the diamond-paned windows behind their shutters and Larra sighed, listening to the fire crackling. On restless nights like this, Rickon could always be calmed by a game of cards – especially if he was sat between Larra and Robb. That had been his special treat – his time with just them, his most favourite siblings. Especially after all the rest had left them.

“I think they may need replacing soon,” Bran said in his soft, sad voice, picking up a four of leaves. The thick paper was rippled and crinkled badly and the watercolours had long since bled out because of large splotches of water, obscuring the four castles until they more accurately resembled Harrenhall than any mighty holdfast.

“I don’t think I could bear to burn them,” Larra said quietly, picking up the maiden-queen of weirwood leaves. Larra had painted her to look like Sansa, as the winter rose maiden-queen looked how they had always imagined Lyanna Stark crowned as the Queen of Love and Beauty, the maiden-queen of direwolves resembled Arya and the maiden-queen of the ravens resembled her. “Even to replace them.”

“You should,” Bran told her, smiling up at her. “You enjoy painting. You should do more things that you enjoy.”

“I’ve too much else to be getting on with,” Larra sighed, rolling her shoulders. They ached, after sitting over her table for so long, her fingers too – from holding the paintbrushes. Even that was unfamiliar now, her body long ago becoming accustomed to gripping a dagger’s hilt rather than a paintbrush. She missed it. She missed the days when her hands had never needed to grip the hilt of a weapon.

“You take on too much,” Bran said softly, and for a moment, his eyes shining with worry, he looked ten years old again. He had always been such an intuitive boy, picking up on the emotions of everyone around him.

“I do my fair share,” Larra protested, though she did feel exhausted. Bran smiled warmly at her, resting his hand over hers. It always unnerved her, seeing how large his hands were – they dwarfed hers, long though her fingers were.

“Do you remember how to bind books?” Bran asked her gently.

“I do,” Larra said, sighing. How often had she yearned to have the materials available to make books under the great weirwood, and fill them with all of the knowledge the Children had shared with her?

“I would like you to teach me,” Bran said softly. Larra blinked at him.

“You don’t need anyone to teach you anything, anymore,” she murmured. And she was right, she knew she was. Bran’s eyes twinkled but he appeared sad.

“I should like you to teach me, all the same,” he said.

Larra cleared her throat. “What would you fill the books with, if I did?”

Bran smiled broadly, his eyes sparkling. “Our games.” He indicated the cards before him with a flourish of his pale hands. “All the games we created as children. Their names, the rules, descriptions of the cards you created… I did wonder whether you would paint miniature versions of the cards to include in the book.”

Larra stared at her brother, raising her eyebrows. Almost indignantly, she said, “That’s what you’d write about? The knowledge you have access to, and that’s where you’d start?”

Bran smiled sadly. “I thought I would start with something precious to our family. I…”

“What?” Larra prompted softly, seeing her brother’s hesitation.

Bran reached into the folds of his furs and withdrew a scroll. He unfurled it and glanced almost bashfully at Larra as he spread the paper out.

“I need to practise my handwriting,” he said, and Larra peered at the paper. She burst into laughter. She laughed until her eyes stung with tears of mirth, her stomach hurt from laughing so hard, her entire body shuddering from the strength of her laughter. Bran’s eyes twinkled merrily in the candlelight, the boy’s face shining from his smile, his lips twitching at the corners as he watched her rocking with laughter, blind to the scratchy lettering penned on the flimsy paper.

Bran possessed all the world’s past, its secrets. What he had not possessed, over the last seven years, was a pencil or quill. Nothing to practise his handwriting.

Nothing yet had shown the long-lasting effects of them being so brutally ripped from their home. Nothing quite captured the way Larra and Bran had been cut off from their lives – that their lives had stopped beneath that great weirwood. Years had passed, yet the experience and knowledge Bran had gained was so abstract it could not be quantified. He had spent years learning: Larra had spent those same years stagnating.

It was the first time Larra realised that, in as many ways as she had, Bran had also been stagnating beneath that weirwood. Lord Bloodraven may have taught him much about the weirwood trees and the greenseers who could peer through the ancient faces…but Bran’s formal education had stopped the day Larra and Osha had led them from Winterfell, from the Greyjoy men and their hounds chasing them like rats.

Bran had not picked up a pencil or quill in all those years, as Larra had not.

It was absurdly comforting to Larra that Bran, despite his unimaginable wealth of knowledge, was still human. She did not relish that his education had been so abruptly stopped. She hated that her own had, and was now determined to make up for all those lost years, throwing herself into research about siege preparations, geometry and conversion and even her painting – it was a skill, just as darning and skinning animals were.

But it was the only moment that truly affirmed that Bran was still there. This gentle-voiced young man was not an imposter: Bran was there, under the serene mask. His handwriting betrayed his inexperience, despite Lord Bloodraven’s tuition.

She wiped her face, still chuckling, and leaned over to wrap her arms around Bran. He sighed and hugged her back. Her eyes stinging, Larra whispered, “I can’t remember the last time I laughed with you.” Bran squeezed her gently and Larra found it exceptionally odd to realise how big he was, how wide his shoulders were beneath his fur-trimmed tunics. He had grown up. His absurdly childlike handwriting highlighted just how much Bran had missed out on, stuck beneath that tree. She tried not to dwell on how much she had missed out on, stuck there watching him. Her life had stagnated for years. She sighed, sadness settling over her like a cloak. Sighing thickly, she admitted, “I miss you.”

“I’m here,” Bran murmured against her collarbone.

A knock echoed on the door and Larra started. Bran’s smile was gentle as she sat up, sniffling gently. She wiped her face as a sentry called, “Tis Lady Targaryen, m’lady.”

“Let her come in,” Larra called, and the door swung open. The firelight glimmered off Daenerys Targaryen’s pearly silver hair, which she wore elaborately braided and coiled over her head and tumbling freely from her nape to her waist. As she entered the room, she swept her eyes over the candlelit solar. Larra swept her eyes over Lady Targaryen: she wore a Meereenese tokar fashioned from the finest – and most translucent – iridescent blood-red silk organza, the hems sewn with a heavy fringe of garnets. Larra was interested to notice that Lady Targaryen’s figure, highlighted by the organza, was not as slender as it had been on Dragonstone. Diminutive as she was, and despite the new roundness to her figure, Lady Targaryen seemed tiny while shrouded in a heavy cloak entirely of ermine and lined with crushed velvet the colour of oxblood.

Lady Targaryen’s eyes rested on Larra and Bran at the table and Larra saw all of the anticipation snuff out in her eyes.

“Good evening,” Lady Targaryen said quietly, her eyes resting on Bran. Larra watched her carefully. Everyone reacted to Bran in one of two ways: either they avoided eye-contact altogether, uncomfortable in his presence and pretending he was not there, or they stared openly, curious. Lady Targaryen watched Bran with a mixture of hesitance and curiosity. Larra imagined she had never met anyone like Bran before.

Larra held her eye. “Not the brother you were hoping for.”

Lady Targaryen raised her chin, saying coolly, “I appreciate the invitation to dine with you, my lady.”

“Come in, then,” Larra said, nodding to the pretty brown-eyed sentry beyond, who nodded and shut the door rather abruptly behind Lady Targaryen. She glanced over her shoulder as if startled. Larra went to the hearth, turning the half-wheel of cheese closer to the open flames.

“Come and join me,” Bran said softly to Lady Targaryen, beckoning her gently with a pale hand. She eyed him carefully, tucked her cloak around her and stalked to the table. Her eyes scanned the table, set with the tureens and a stack of earthenware plates and silverware, and the cards Bran had laid out before him.

“These are…quite lovely,” said Lady Targaryen, her eyes illuminated by the candles flickering fiercely in the centre of the round table.

“Larra painted them, years ago,” Bran said softly, picking up one of them – a tear splitting it nearly in two.

“They seem to have seen better days,” Lady Targaryen said genially.

“Haven’t we all,” Larra grumbled. Bran chuckled softly.

“We were discussing our childhood games,” Bran said softly. He glanced at Larra. “Perhaps we could play?”

“After supper. And you’ll have to remind me of the rules,” Larra said. “I’ve forgotten most of them.”

“No, you haven’t,” Bran said, smiling softly. “But I shall explain them, all the same.” He turned to Lady Targaryen, explaining confidentially, “I have decided to construct a book wherein I lay out the rules and aims of the card-games we created together as children.”

“I never had books when I was a girl,” Lady Targaryen confessed, her eyes shining.

“The library’s open to anyone,” Larra said, glancing over at her. It would do Lady Targaryen well to explore the stacks. Perhaps curiosity would lead to inspiration, and from there she may be open to educating herself. “As long as the books are returned in their proper state when you’re finished with them, you’re free to read what you wish.”

“There are accountings of Queen Alysanne’s visit to Winterfell, which might interest you,” Bran said softly. “We are lucky indeed that the fire did not consume anything precious.”

“Is that what destroyed the tower?”

“No: the Broken Tower was struck by lightning, over a century ago,” Larra told her.

“A century? Why not rebuild it ‘til now?”

“We had no need of it,” Larra shrugged. “The Broken Tower, the First Keep, they’re all ancient parts of the castle that long ago fell out of use as the castle grew.”

“It is the largest castle I have ever seen,” Lady Targaryen said, and Larra was impressed that she did not sound begrudging. “Its construction is unlike Dragonstone, however.”

“The Valyrians used fire and blood-magic to create the castle of Dragonstone,” Larra said. “Tis the only true relic of Old Valyria left in the world.”

“You do not count Valyria’s daughters?”

“The colonies? They’re a warped reflection of their parent,” Larra said. “With the Doom, we lost the best of Valyrian culture. Lys, Volantis, all the rest – they reflect the worst of their Valyrian roots.”

“You mean slavery,” Lady Targaryen said, and Larra nodded. “Ser Jorah told me that your father wanted his head for selling poachers to slavers.”

“Aye,” Larra said sombrely. “We have no tolerance for slavers in the North – anywhere in Westeros, really, except the Iron Islands. They think themselves law unto themselves.”

“No longer. They sail under my colours.”

“Yara Greyjoy does, I’m told, with her small fleet. Her brother used to tell us stories of their uncle, Euron. He upholds the values of the Ironborn,” Larra said quietly.

“And for that, he should sit the salt throne?”

“Like your Dothraki, the Ironborn follow strength,” Larra said, her lips pursing. “Euron took the salt throne. And it will remain his until someone takes it from him. Not that it’s of any value to take.” She pulled a face.

“Have you been to the Iron Islands?”

“I’ve never been south of White Harbour,” Larra said honestly. “Theon often used to speak of the Iron Islands.”

“Theon was your…”

“Foster-brother,” Larra said quietly, aware of the subtle bite to her tone. She chose not to think too often or too deeply on Theon. It was entirely too confusing to reconcile the beast that had chased her and the boys from their home, giving Ser Rodrik a brutal and lingering execution in the very yard he had trained Theon to spar, with the miserable, cowering wreck that had saved Sansa from torture and death and encouraged her ever northward – the only reason Sansa had made it to Castle Black. To Jon.

In a way, Theon was indirectly responsible for the reunification of the North, for the success of the Battle of the Bastards, for Jon being named King in the North.

No: that confusing thought did not bear dwelling on.

Not sober.

“Theon taught us some dicing games,” Bran mused, with a careful look at Larra. “Perhaps I shall include them in my book.” He glanced from Larra to Lady Targaryen. “I shall need to play the games with someone, so that I know I am explaining the rules correctly. We shall have a game after supper.”

Larra glanced at her brother. He did not specify that the game would necessarily be played with cards. She knew which game Bran intended to play – one that used emotions as weapons just as much as knowledge.

“Best eat up, then,” Larra said. She stood and went to the hearth, carefully picking up the tureen that had been left in the ashes. She wrapped it in a cloth before carrying it over, and Bran smiled to himself as he handed out the earthenware plates. Larra took the lids off the tureens, great wafts of steam billowing from one of them, and took the linen cloth off of the basket of crusty bread on the table. Small boiled potatoes, cold cuts of meat – there was gammon and mustard-encrusted roast beef, some salamis and a bit of cold chicken, enough for each of them to have a generous portion – pickled onions and gherkins, and fresh lettuce sprinkled with sharp vinegar dressing. She turned the half-wheel of cheese toward the flames to ensure that it was bubbling nicely as they helped themselves. “Have you taken your fill?” She glanced at Lady Targaryen, who looked rather nonplussed, and Larra scooped her plate away, turning to the fire.

Using her hunting knife, she carved the melted cheese off of the wheel and onto Lady Targaryen’s plate, smothering the boiled new-potatoes and cold cuts, before serving the plate back to her. “There. That’ll stick to your ribs.”

“You have a very strong accent,” Lady Targaryen observed, glancing with something like shyness up at Larra as she took Bran’s plate.

“I’d have thought you’d be accustomed to it, all those Northmen on Dragonstone,” Larra said, turning to the fire again.

“They’re not especially talkative.”

“No,” Larra laughed. “Northerners save it for when it counts.”

“You and your sister Lady Sansa have a very different manner of speaking,” Lady Targaryen observed. “Yet you were raised together, were you not?”

Larra scoffed delicately and Bran’s eyes glittered as he glanced at her. Bran explained, “Sansa grew up at my mother’s knee. Our father used to say that Larra was raised by the North itself, as much a part of her as she is of it.”

Larra smiled sadly into the fire, waiting for the cheese to melt again.

“And there’s the fact that Jon and I were raised as bastards,” Larra said from the hearth. “Lady Catelyn was always diligent in imposing rank.”

“My advisor Ser Jorah tells me that Lady Catelyn Stark had no love for you or your brother.”

“She had nothing for us,” Larra shrugged. She was old enough – and Lady Catelyn dead enough – that Larra no longer felt the sting of that neglect. “No love, no acknowledgement, even. The only time she ever acknowledged Jon’s presence was when she told him it was he who should have fallen from the Broken Tower and dashed his bones upon the ground beneath.”

“I have often thought that to be ignored would be a lesser cruelty than having pain inflicted on oneself,” Lady Targaryen mused. Larra glanced over from the hearth. Lady Targaryen’s tokar shimmered and glowed in the candlelight, as if her body were swathed in fire itself. Her pale eyes rested unseeingly on the candles in the centre of the table, a thousand leagues and years away.

“Have you?” Larra glanced over at Daenerys, remembering the little girl she had once been, the little girl Bran had showed her. The timid girl afraid of the sound of her own voice – lest it wake the dragon.

“I often wished that I…”

“That your brother ignored you,” Bran murmured.

Here we go, Larra thought.

“I often wished that my brothers would allow me to eat a meal in peace,” Larra remarked, scraping a good amount of melted cheese onto Bran’s plate. She gave him a reproving look as she set his plate before him and reached for her own. Bran’s eyes twinkled. Lady Targaryen watched him, her expression unsettled. Larra glanced at Lady Targaryen. “Eat up, before the cheese cools.”

She scraped melted cheese onto her plate, removed the half-wheel from the fire and returned to the table. For a few moments, cutlery flickered in the candlelight and the only sound to be heard was the soft, appreciative noises from Larra as she enjoyed her meal. Something about the saltiness of the meat and the rich, decadent melted cheese hit the spot perfectly. Lady Targaryen picked delicately at her meal.

“’Tis not honeyed mice and persimmon wine, I know,” Larra told her, “and likely looks plain to your eyes, but this is hearty Northern food.”

“I am used to spices and strange delicacies,” Lady Targaryen said, with a slightly apologetic smile. “I find Northern food very heavy. I feel I must sleep after each meal – and find I do not need to dine quite so often throughout the day.”

“Lady Nymeria’s the same. Northern food’s designed to fill the belly and keep you warm through all weathers,” Larra said. Genuinely curious, she asked, “What do pomegranates taste like?”

“Pomegranates? Sweet and earthy, with a tang,” Lady Targaryen told her, after some thought. “I always preferred lemons.”

“Sansa does, too. Any shipment of lemons that reached Winterfell, Father always had lemon cakes made up as a treat. They were her especial favourites,” Larra told her.

“Had I known, I should have brought crates of them,” Lady Targaryen said, with a warm smile. It was dangerous, that smile: that was the smile that coaxed legions to follow her command, to act in her name no matter what she asked of them. “What would you have brought from Essos?”

“An elephant,” Larra said, and Lady Targaryen laughed.

“Truly?”

“Paints,” Bran said softly. “Watercolour pigments from Qarth. Larra is a skilled painter. In fact, she has something for you.”

Surprised to find her plate empty, Larra wiped her mouth on a napkin and glanced at her brother. “Lady Targaryen is still eating, Bran.” She refilled their glasses and sipped hers quietly, relaxing in her chair while Lady Targaryen finished the last few bites of her meal. Lady Targaryen gave her a curious look as Larra stacked their plates, with the empty tureens and bread basket, ready for the maids to whisk away.

“Let’s go to the settle, it’s more comfortable,” Larra said, and Lady Targaryen stood up, already halfway to the hearth before she glanced over her shoulder, aware she was alone. Larra saw her blush when she realised Larra had stayed back to help move the obstacles in Bran’s way: he wheeled himself to the hearth, slotting between an armchair and the settle in what had become his spot when they all congregated around the hearth.

“Do you need me to do anything?” Lady Targaryen asked, and for a moment Larra caught a glimpse of the gentle, kind-natured girl she had once been. She lifted the painting from its hiding-place on the mantelpiece.

“No, thank you,” Bran said softly, settling himself in place, as Larra slipped into the settle. She grimaced and plumped a cushion, her back smarting as she sat. Bran gestured for Lady Targaryen to take the armchair beside him.

“I painted this for you,” Larra said, reaching past Bran to hand the small painting of Khal Drogo unceremoniously to Lady Targaryen.

For several long moments, Lady Targaryen sat, stunned. Her violet eyes – paler in comparison to Larra’s yet still strikingly vibrant – glittered as they swam with unshed tears. Larra glanced at Bran, doubting the gift the longer Daenerys remained silent.

“It is my husband’s likeness exactly,” she whispered hoarsely, stroking her fingertips over the painting, as if half-hoping to feel warm flesh. “His expression…it is the look he gave to no-one in the world but me.” She whispered, “Love comes in at the eyes…” Tears splashed down her cheeks as she raised her gaze to Larra. It was the most heartfelt – and heartbroken – Larra had ever heard her when she whispered, “Thank you.”

Larra sat and relaxed in the settle, hands resting over her stomach, tired, full and content. After a long while, Lady Targaryen asked, “How do you know what Khal Drogo looked like?”

Larra raised her head, opening her eyes blearily. The firelight danced in her vision before her gaze steadied on Lady Targaryen. Her hair gleamed like pearls in the light and her violet eyes shone. Larra glanced at Bran.

“Bran…is unique,” Larra told her. “He is blessed and cursed to see the past as if it were the present.” Lady Targaryen’s eyes darted to Bran, filled with uncertainty and, Larra thought, a flicker of fear. Gently, Larra said, “He would like to show us something.”

Brandon extended a pale hand to each of them. Larra sighed, adjusted her cushions, and rested her hand in his waiting palm. She glanced at Lady Targaryen, who hesitated, biting her lip, before hesitantly reaching for Brandon’s hand.

Sunlight blistered down and made her eyes water. The relentless noise of a bustling city echoed high above parched terracotta roofs and despite the sun, Larra could almost feel the chill of the stone as an enormous monument loomed over them. It was a great square structure, domed and imposing.

“This is the Dragonpit, but not as I saw it,” Lady Targaryen breathed, her lips parted in wonder, eyes wide. She turned to stare at Larra, balking at the sight of Brandon stood tall and handsome, his arms clasped behind his back and a benign smile on his face, which was turned upwards, rather than towards the enormous, armoured carriage drawn by four black stallions draped in Targaryen red, escorted by an armoured knight in a pristine white cloak. “How are we in King’s Landing?”

“We have entered the past,” Larra said quietly, shielding her eyes as she turned her gaze upwards. Wherever Brandon was looking was important. A heartbeat later, they heard it – dragonsong. A great yellow-gold dragon soared into view, its wings churning up dust in a great cloud that would have both blinded and choked them – Daenerys threw up her arms yet Larra, seasoned in Brandon’s memory-walking, did not flinch as the yellow-gold dragon landed heavily and settled. She was interested to note the people lingering nearby in linen robes, their heads shorn, carrying eight-foot-long poles sharpened to points at one end.

Larra marvelled at the golden-yellow dragon. It looked sleeker and more serpentine than Rhaegal, almost as if they were a different breed. She remembered Brandon showing her and Gendry the ancient city of Valyria in its prime, and all the many different dragons she had seen there. She had taken it for granted that dragons of Old Valyria came in many shapes and sizes – but the histories had never mentioned the differences in the Targaryen dragons beyond their colour and size. Thinking of the studies she had been wanting to make of Rhaegal, her fingers itched to pick up a sketching pencil and paper and make quick studies of the dragon before her.

With a soft grunt, a slip of a girl climbed off the dragon’s back. She was dressed finely in heavy riding gear embellished with tiny silver dragon clasps, the shoulders of her riding-coat overlapping like scales. Her waist-length silver-gold hair was straight, braided neatly from her face, and her eyes – vibrant lilac – glowed with pleasure as she stroked the neck of her dragon. The dragon purred contentedly at her touch and climbed obediently toward the entrance of the Dragonpit, driven by the dragonkeepers.

“Welcome back, Princess,” said the knight with the white cloak – a Kingsguard. The young girl bit the finger of her gloves to pull them off, striding toward the armoured carriage. “I trust your ride was pleasant.”

“Try not to look too relieved, Ser,” Princess Rhaenyra said, a smile dancing in her eyes.

The Kingsguard chuckled. “I am relieved. Every time that golden beast brings you back unspoiled, it saves my neck from a spike.”

Princess Rhaenyra strolled leisurely toward the armoured carriage as the door opened and another young woman emerged. Dressed in cornflower blue, the dainty embellished oak leaves at her neckline and dainty earrings reminded Larra only too much of young Sansa. She would have adored a dress like that, simple and dainty and elegant all at once. The young woman had auburn curls tumbling down her back and rich dark eyes that sparkled as she smiled, glancing from the princess to her dragon.

“Syrax is growing quickly,” she said, smiling. “She’ll soon be as large as Caraxes.”

“That’s almost large enough to saddle two,” Princess Rhaenyra said, gazing up at her companion.

“Who is that?” Lady Targaryen asked.

“That is Princess Rhaenyra. Her dragon is Syrax. And her companion is Lady Alicent Hightower,” Larra observed, noting the easy intimacy between the two girls – and they were girls. Princess Rhaenyra looked barely older than Sansa had the last time Larra saw her, when their family had been torn apart.

“I believe I’m quite content as a spectator, thank you,” Lady Alicent smiled. Princess Rhaenyra grinned as the auburn-haired girl ducked into the carriage. Behind her, dragonkeepers guided Syrax into the Dragonpit. Lady Alicent’s voice called from inside the carriage. “Stop dawdling, Rhaenyra! You’re due at Council within the hour.”

“Gods forbid the Small Council must fill their own cups,” Princess Rhaenyra muttered, ascending the steps and settling herself inside the enormous and elegantly-furnished carriage. It served as both protection and a vehicle for luxury, velvet cushions and eiderdowns draped everywhere, little carafes of chilled lemon-water and cherry cordial Princess Rhaenyra helped herself to as the carriage lurched into motion.

Larra glanced at Brandon, wondering why he insisted they follow Princess Rhaenyra and Lady Alicent as they spent the duration of their ride through King’s Landing gossiping about the ladies at court, bemoaning the lack of handsome young knights and eagerly anticipating the completion of new gowns for the upcoming tourney. Princess Rhaenyra suggested they practice their dancing, making Lady Alicent blush at the idea of being courted by eligible young lords vying for the hand of the Hand’s daughter. They followed the girls all the way to the Red Keep as they giggled and gossiped and grumbled about their septa’s dull lessons in etiquette and history and discussed which jewellery each should wear with their new gowns, Princess Rhaenyra offering a pearl necklace for Lady Alicent’s use.

Larra had seen glimpses of the Red Keep nearly two centuries in the future, during King Aerys’ reign. She had seen Queen Rhaella’s chambers, where morsels of ecstasy and bitter tea had been shared between mother and son. She had witnessed Prince Rhaegar’s anger at the evidence of his mother’s continued abuse, his bond with Ser Arthur Dayne, whom he called “brother.”

The Red Keep of Rhaenyra’s time was bustling with people, the servants all dressed in Targaryen red under their aprons. Courtiers lingered everywhere. The Seven Kingdoms’ prosperity was evident everywhere she looked: in the rich dyes used even on the servants’ garments and the luxurious imported textiles worn by the nobility, the gold glittering everywhere and the variety of fashions, every lady vying to be noticed, to lead court fashions. Flowers tumbled out of enormous Myrish vases and the walls were hung with eye-wateringly expensive tapestries and paintings. Crystal glittered and silks rustled, and Larra could smell heavy perfumes and incense mingled with the scents of everyday life, fresh fruit ripening in great ceramic dishes dotted here and there for anyone to take at their whim, more carafes of wines and cordials of every colour.

They left Rhaenyra only long enough for her to change hastily out of her riding-coat, Alicent brushing her hair as she pulled on a pale-gold frock that she was starting to outgrow. Hair brushed, dressed and bejewelled, Rhaenyra sauntered through the halls of the Red Keep, until the halls themselves became less crowded, and Larra realised these were the royal chambers. The Queen’s chamber, specifically: Rhaenyra entered a room dense with incense and crowded with servants, a septa lighting candles and a maester working diligently at a desk. Beneath the open windows, a beautiful woman lay reclined in a dressing gown, bare-footed, her shimmering pearl-silver hair tumbling over her shoulder, fanning herself as she rubbed her swollen belly.

“Ah! Rhaenyra!” she called, her lavender eyes lighting up. She gently chastised, “You know I don’t like you to go flying while I’m in this condition.”

“You don’t like me to go flying whether you’re in any condition,” Princess Rhaenyra replied, giving her mother a look, her eyes sparkling. Queen Aemma smiled warmly as her daughter approached, bending to kiss her mother’s cheek.

“Your Grace,” said Lady Alicent respectfully, hanging back by the door as mother and daughter sat together.

“Good morrow, Alicent,” Queen Aemma said.

“Did you sleep?” Rhaenrya asked.

“I slept.”

“How long?” Rhaenyra pushed. Queen Aemma smiled warmly at her daughter.

“I don’t need mothering, Rhaenyra,” she said softly.

“Well, here you are, surrounded by attendants, all focused on the babe,” Rhaenyra said, some indignation in her voice. “Someone has to attend you.”

Queen Aemma smiled and gazed at her daughter. Larra had never known such a look. Neither, she remembered, had Daenerys Targaryen.

“To know a mother’s love,” she said quietly, and Lady Targaryen nodded sadly, gazing at Queen Aemma as if seeing Queen Rhaella in her face.

Queen Aemma poked Rhaenyra with her foot. “You will lie in this bed soon enough, Rhaenyra. This discomfort is how we serve the realm.”

“I’d rather serve as a knight and ride to battle and glory,” Rhaenyra said stubbornly, and Larra scoffed delicately. Had not Arya said the same thing?

“We have royal wombs, you and I,” Queen Aemma said softly. “The childbed is our battlefield. We must learn to face it with a stiff lip.” Something haunted flickered across her pretty eyes. She smiled, and the shadow disappeared. “Now take a bath: You stink of dragon.”

Rhaenyra did not bathe: she hastened to another part of the Red Keep, where several men were laughing at a joke told by the man at the head of the table, bathed in light from the balcony behind carved screens. Only one man did not see the humour in the King’s joke – for it was King Viserys shelling a boiled egg at the table. A dark-skinned man with a commanding demeanour sat opposite the king, his pale hair worn in the style Lady Viana Velaryon called dreadlocks. Those pale dreadlocks – his Valyrian heritage there for all to see – framed a very handsome face but it was clouded with concern, Larra would almost say turmoil. He wore several gold chains and on his breast, a seahorse had been stitched with cloth-of-silver and tiny glass beads.

Larra glanced at Bran, grinning in awe. The Sea Snake himself…

“My lords,” he said, his rich voice cutting through the laughter. “The growing alliance among the Free Cities has taken to styling itself the Triarchy.” Lord Corlys Velaryon pushed up from his chair and unfurled a colourful map, brandishing it upon the table. “They have massed on Bloodstone and are presently ridding the Stepstones of its pirate infestation.”

“Well, that sounds suspiciously like good news, Lord Corlys,” King Viserys said jovially.

“A man called Craghas Drahar has styled himself the Prince Admiral of this Triarchy,” Lord Corlys continued urgently. “They call him the Crabfeeder, due to his inventive methods of punishing his enemies.”

“And are we meant to weep for dead pirates?” Lord Corlys frowned, opening his mouth to reply – Larra could sense his frustration at the King’s disinterest growing – but was interrupted by the doors to the Small Council chamber opening. A glimmer of gold and Rhaenyra strode into view.

“Rhaenyra, you’re late!” the King chided. “King’s cupbearer must not be late. It leaves people wanting for cups.”

The princess bent to kiss her father’s cheek, telling him, “I was visiting Mother.”

King Viserys made a show of sniffing at Rhaenyra, teasing, “On dragon-back?”

As Rhaenyra went to the long table loaded with food and decanters, picking up a large glass jug full of wine, an older man spoke up, “Your Grace, at Prince Daemon’s urging, the Crown has invested significant capital in the retraining and re-equipping of his City Watch. I thought you might urge your brother to fill his seat on the Council and provide an assessment of his progress as Commander of the Watch.”

“Do you think Daemon is distracted by his present tasks?” King Viserys asked, his gaze flitting to the empty chair at his left. “And that his thoughts and energies are occupied?”

“Well, one would hope so, considering the associated costs.”

“Then let us all consider your gold well-invested, Lord Beesbury.”

“I would urge that you not allow this Triarchy much latitude in the Stepstones, Your Grace,” Lord Corlys said urgently, his voice more heated than before. “If those shipping lanes should fall, it will beggar our ports.”

“The Crown has heard your report, Lord Corlys, and takes it under advisement,” said a raspy voice dripping with boredom and disdain. Larra saw the golden hand clasped to his chest and her eyes narrowed on the well-dressed but rumpled man sitting at King Viserys’ right hand. His thinning hair seemed windswept, and he appeared barely able to disguise his dislike for Lord Corlys, who seethed back at him. “Shall we discuss the Heir’s Tournament, Your Grace?”

“I would be delighted,” King Viserys said, and sounded utterly relieved to change the topic of conversation away from anything as taxing as training soldiers or preventing the realm’s bankruptcy due to encroaching foreign powers. “Will the maesters’ name-day prediction hold, Mellos?”

“You must understand that these things are mere estimations, my king,” wheezed the drooping-faced maester, “but we have all been poring over the moon-charts and we feel that our forecast is as accurate as can be.”

“The cost of the tournament is not negligible,” Lord Beesbury said delicately. “Perhaps we might delay until the child is in hand.”

The last man at the table, who had thus far remained silent, now spoke up, frowning, “Most of the lords and knights are certainly on their way to King’s Landing already, to turn them back now –“

“The tourney will take the better part of a week,” interrupted the King. “Before the games are over, my son will be born and the whole realm will celebrate.”

“We have no way of predicting the sex of the child,” said Maester Mellos quickly.

“Of course, no maester is capable of rendering an opinion free of conditions, are they now?” King Viserys said, and Larra smirked. Maester Luwin would have set him straight. Maester Luwin was the very best the Citadel had to offer: wise, impartial and earnest, devoted to his duties and to imparting his own love of learning to others. Men like Luwin were rare, she had grown to understand. King Viserys had dire need of a man like Luwin yet he was surrounded by…well, Ser Otto and Grand Maester Mellos. And the realm had bled. “There’s a boy in the Queen’s belly. I know it. And my heir will soon put all of this damnable hand-wringing to rest himself.”

Larra sighed heavily. She remembered what was to come. And the glimpse of Queen Aemma and her relationship with Rhaenyra made her heart ache. She glanced at Lady Targaryen, wondering just how much Daenerys had been taught of her own family’s history – and how warped the perspective had been.

They followed Princess Rhaenyra again, from the Small Council chamber to the Throne Room. Ser Harrold Westerling escorted her, telling her, “He passed through the Red Keep’s gates at first light.”

“Does my father know he’s here?” Princess Rhaenyra asked, glancing about inconspicuously as she fiddled with her rings.

“No.”

“Good.”

Ser Harrold pushed the doors open and scoffed indignantly. “Gods be good!”

At the far end of the great hall, silver hair glimmered in the light shed over a horrifying and magnificent throne – the Iron Throne, the thousand swords spilling over the steps to the seat that had cost more lives than any other in history.

“It’s alright, Ser,” Princess Rhaenyra said quietly, and, clasping her hands loosely behind her back, she sauntered down the steps into the hall, idling her way toward man with silver hair past his broad shoulders.

Quietly, her voice carrying in the empty hall, the Princess asked in High Valyrian, “What do you think you’re doing, Uncle?”

“Sitting,” Prince Daemon replied, his tone bored. “This could well be my chair one day.”

“Not if you’re executed for treason,” Princess Rhaenyra warned him playfully. “You haven’t come to court in an age.”

Prince Daemon sighed heavily. “Court is so dreadfully boring.”

Princess Rhaenyra smirked. “Then why come back at all?

“I heard your father was hosting a tournament in my honour,” Prince Daemon smirked back.

“The tournament is for his heir.”

“Just as I said.”

“His new heir,” Princess Rhaenyra clarified.

“Until your mother brings forth a son, you are all cursed with me,” Prince Daemon sighed, standing from the Iron Throne and looming over the dainty girl. He strolled idly down the steps toward her, a smile flirting on his lips.

“Then I shall hope for a brother,” Princess Rhaenyra said, her eyes glittering.

Prince Daemon smiled, and spoke in the common tongue as he said, “I brought you something.” He held out his hand, from which a necklace dangled, bloodstones and rubies glowing in the light, a pendant made up of a love-knot embedded with a bloodstone or red dragonglass in the centre. “D’you know what it is?”

“It’s Valyrian steel,” Princess Rhaenyra said, examining it carefully. “Like Dark Sister.”

Prince Daemon snatched the necklace back – but instead of reaching for it, Princess Rhaenyra leaned back, hands clasped behind her back. A subtle power-struggle between them: Daemon had offered and then withdrawn the trinket, but the princess, so much younger, had refused to take the bait. Refused to engage. He broke the stalemate.

“Turn around,” he ordered, and in that moment, Larra knew she would have done anything the Rogue Prince asked, if he’d asked with that rumbling voice and wicked, playful glint in his eye. Rhaenyra removed her own necklace as she turned, gathering her hair over one shoulder and presenting her bare neck to her uncle. He clasped the necklace delicately around her throat. “Now you and I both own a small piece of our ancestry.” Rhaenyra let loose her hair and stepped back. Daemon’s eyes glowed like slumbering embers as he gazed at her, wearing his jewel. “Beautiful.”

Hours later, Princess Rhaenyra played with her Valyrian steel pendant as sunlight dappled through the sun-scorched leaves of a slender weirwood. Her head rested in Lady Alicent’s lap as they bickered amiably about the readings assigned to them by their septa.

Lady Alicent sighed, “You’re always like this when you’re worried.”

“Like what?”

“Disagreeable,” Lady Alicent smiled down at her friend. “If you’re worried your father is about to overshadow you with a son…”

“I only worry for my mother,” Princess Rhaenyra said, waving aside Lady Alicent’s concern. Gold shone on her finger as she played with a long blade of grass. “I hope for my father that he gets a son. As long as I can recall, it’s all he’s wanted.”

Lady Alicent frowned, “You want him to have a son?”

“I want to fly with you on dragon-back, see the Great Wonders across the Narrow Sea and eat only cake,” Princess Rhaenyra said lightly.

“I’m being serious.”

“I never jest about cake.”

“You aren’t worried about your position?” Lady Alicent pressed, and Larra watched, frowning thoughtfully. With Prince Daemon as named heir, how drastically would Princess Rhaenyra’s position change with the birth of a brother? Very little – she was and would remain the King’s eldest daughter: the privileges and responsibilities associated with that would always be hers. She would be wed – and well, to the wealthiest, most powerful man in the Seven Kingdoms. Who that was, Larra did not know.

“I like this position, it’s quite comfortable,” Princess Rhaenyra muttered idly. Lady Alicent huffed, slamming her book shut. Rhaenyra swore, “Fuck. Where are you going?”

“Home,” Lady Alicent snapped. It was interesting to see the dynamic between the two girls. “The hour has grown late.”

Hands clasped behind her back, Princess Rhaenyra sidled up to her companion, reciting, “Princess Nymeria led her Rhoynar across the Narrow Sea on ten thousand ships to flee their Valyrian pursuers. She took Lord Mors Martell of Dorne to husband and burned her own fleet off Sunspear to show her people that they were finished running.”

Princess Rhaenyra reached for the book Lady Alicent had been hastily checking and ripped out a page. Lady Alicent gasped, “What are you doing?”

“So you remember,” Princess Rhaenrya smiled, handing the page back.

“If the septa sees this book, then –“

“Fuck the septa!” Giggling, the two girls meandered inside. The sound of their giggles drifted up to the open windows as King Viserys leaned over cushions, his back bared to a young maester. A festering sore oozed pus, which was being cleaned off – to no avail.

“Is it healing?” the King asked.

“It has grown slightly, Your Grace,” wheezed Maester Mellos.

“Can you say yet what it is?”

“We’ve sent enquiries to the Citadel,” said the young maester, with a handsome voice. “They are searching the texts for similar cases.” Larra frowned. Small good it did anyone, to hoard the knowledge possessed by the maesters. Maester Luwin never hesitated to share his knowledge with anyone who needed it.

“It’s a small cut from sitting the throne,” the King protested, and Larra’s lips parted. She glanced at Lady Targaryen. “It’s nothing.”

“Did your brother ever tell you that the Conqueror designed the throne to ensure no King ever sat comfortably upon it?” she asked Lady Targaryen, who glanced away from the King, who was flinching despite the gentleness of the young maester’s ministrations.

“No,” Lady Targaryen said gently.

“Superstition claims that the Iron Throne can tell who is worthy to sit upon it,” Larra said quietly, watching Maester Mellos withdraw to confer with Ser Otto Hightower. “King Maegor was found upon the Iron Throne with his wrists slashed. Some say it was the throne itself. Throughout the Targaryen dynasty, people have linked instances of kings cutting themselves upon the Throne with unworthiness… It is interesting that King Viserys suffered a cut from the Iron Throne and it refuses to heal.”

“Your father was covered in scars and healing scabs from cutting himself upon the throne,” Bran intoned idly, and Larra glanced at him.

She listened to Maester Mellos ooze to Ser Otto, “The King has been under heavy stresses, preparing for the birth. Bad humours of the mind can adversely affect the body.”

“Whatever it is, it needs to be kept quiet,” Ser Otto rasped.

“We should leech it again,” Maester Mellos told the King.

“It’s a wound that refuses to heal, Grand Maester,” said the young maester. “Might I suggest cauterisation?” Larra nodded. Burn away the rot. Any wildling would tell you they should have burned the cut to begin with.

“Cauterisation would be a wise course of treatment, Your Grace,” Maester Mellos blustered. “It will be painful –“

“Fine.” The King, frustrated and impatient, rose from his seat. He picked up his jerkin and dressed himself as he strode through the Red Keep to his wife’s chambers, where he found the Queen in candlelight, submerged in a fragrant bath. Her pretty features were relaxed, and she stirred as the King’s footsteps echoed off the mosaic floor of her bathing chamber.

“You spend more time in that bath than I do on the throne,” King Viserys teased.

“This is the only place I can find comfort these days,” Queen Aemma said. Through the murky water, only the very tip of her bulging belly could be seen: she rested a hand upon it, her jewelled thumb stroking absently as she turned her head to her husband. He dipped down to kiss her brow, kneeling beside the bathtub and dipping his hand in the perfumed water.

“It’s tepid,” King Viserys complained.

“It’s as warm as the maesters will allow.”

“Don’t they know dragons prefer heat?” King Viserys asked, and Aemma smiled.

“After this miserable pregnancy, I wouldn’t be surprised if I hatched an actual dragon,” she sighed.

“And he will be loved and cherished,” King Viserys said, taking his wife’s hand and kissing it.

“Rhaenyra has already declared that she is to have a sister,” Aemma told him.

“Really?”

“She even named her,” Aemma said, an affectionate smile lingering on her lips.

“Dare I ask?”

Aemma gave her husband a coy look. “Visenya.” Viserys scoffed. “She chose a dragon’s egg for the cradle that she said reminded her of Vhagar.”

“Gods be good,” King Viserys sighed. “This family already has its Visenya.” Lady Targaryen frowned.

“I think he’s implying Princess Rhaenys – the Queen Who Never Was,” Larra said. “His cousin, and wife to Lord Corlys.”

“Has there been any word from your dear brother?” Queen Aemma asked.

“Not since I named him Commander of the City Watch,” King Viserys said, and he smiled. “I’m sure he will re-emerge for the tourney. He could never stay away from the lists.”

“The tourney…to celebrate the firstborn son that we presently do not have,” Queen Aemma said, glancing up at her husband. “You do understand that nothing will cause the babe to grow a cock if it does not already possess one?”

Larra laughed.

“I like her,” she said softly, her eye warm as she gazed down at the Queen. “She shoots straight.”

“That is a quaint turn of phrase,” Lady Targaryen said. In other words, she had no idea what Larra meant.

“She says things as they are,” Larra said softly, watching Viserys and Aemma. There was a heart-breaking intimacy to the scene: they were not the King and Queen but a husband and wife who adored each other, discussing the impending birth of their child and the excitement of their daughter to welcome them. Larra found it very interesting that Princess Rhaenyra worried more for her mother’s health than for her position. The Realm’s Delight, indeed, yet Larra could only see her, not as a princess or even as a dragon-rider, but as a young girl who had been indulged – had been loved – by parents who adored her and were active in her life, a girl who was kind and clever, who surrounded herself with people who understood her, had lovely bonds with her parents, held her ground against a formidable relative and gained a Valyrian steel necklace for her efforts, and was excited to become an older sister to a new baby.

The Princess Rhaenyra they had observed so far was a beautiful reflection of her mother, of the time and care that had been put into raising Rhaenyra.

Sadness flickered in Queen Aemma’s eyes as she rested back in the fragrant water.

“This child is a boy, Aemma,” the King said, a quiet fierceness in his tone. “I’m certain of it. I’ve never been more certain of anything…” He clasped his wife’s hand and said passionately, “The dream, it was clearer than a memory. Our son was born wearing Aegon’s iron crown and I heard the sound of thundering hooves and splintering shields and ringing swords and I placed our son on the Iron Throne as the bell of the Grand Sept tolled and all the dragons roared as one.”

“Born wearing a crown,” Aemma said, a haunted smile on her face, her voice tremulous. “Gods spare me. Birth is unpleasant enough as it is…” Her lip trembled, and she rose from the water to face her husband. Her lavender eyes glowed in the candlelight, full of sorrow and love, regret. “This is the last time, Viserys… I’ve lost one babe in the cradle, had two stillbirths and two pregnancies ended well before their term. That’s five…in twice as many years.” Larra sighed softly to herself. Queen Aemma’s infertility struggles were well-documented yet no account ever breathed life into the sorrow and grief she had to endure time after time as each child slipped away from her. “I know it is my duty to provide you an heir, and I am sorry if I have failed you in that, I am…but I’ve mourned all the dead children I can.”

It was devastating to see the love between Viserys and Aemma.

Larra had only ever known them as names written on brittle old pages. But there they were…real.

The bathing chamber melted away but the darkness remained, torchlight flickering fiercely as a clamour rang in her ears. Dozens of men beat their gauntleted fists against their breastplates, their armour flickering in the torchlight, gleaming off of the golden cloaks swathed over their shoulders. Between them, Prince Daemon prowled, elegant and predatory.

“Commander on the floor!”

The men fell silent, watching their prince, waiting. Their excitement, their respect for their commander was palpable, barely breathing, focused entirely on the Prince.

“When I took command of the Watch, you were stray mongrels – starving and undisciplined,” Prince Daemon told them, his eyes simmering as he gazed around at his City Watch. “Now you’re a pack of hounds – sated and honed for the hunt!” The men howled to the night air. When they fell quiet, the Prince continue, “My brother’s city has fallen into squalor. Crime of every breed has been allowed to thrive. No longer. Beginning tonight, King’s Landing will learn to fear the colour gold!”

He knew how to inspire respect and admiration, and by the night’s end, Larra understood why it was he also commanded fear.

They watched, agape, as the Rogue Prince earned his name. His City Watch scoured King’s Landing, rounding up every known thief, rapist and murderer – and dispensed justice on the spot. Prince Daemon unsheathed Dark Sister to cut down murderers where they stood, as rapists were gelded and thieves’ arms were hacked off. So many were punished that night that long before dawn, a large cart was overloaded with severed limbs and the dismembered corpses of those for whose crimes justice demanded death.

The unctuous Ser Otto took first opportunity to rouse King Viserys out of bed and mutter in his ear, stopped short only by Prince Daemon’s presence in the Small Council chamber, hair tousled, armour smeared with blood and looking smug and sated as if he had spent the night in a brothel with the world’s finest courtesans. The King chastised his brother – but Prince Daemon departed the Small Council chamber with a swagger, knowing his brother’s words lacked heat.

The true Targaryen fire belonged to Daemon, after all.

“What he did was not justice!” Lady Targaryen gasped, horrified.

“And yet you did the same in Meereen,” Brandon said gently, and Larra went still, watching the Small Council descend into bickering, King Viserys’ head hanging as he reached the limits of his patience. “You dispensed the justice you felt the nobles of Meereen deserved.”

“It is not the same thing.”

“It is the same thing,” Brandon said calmly. And perhaps it was his unyielding stoicism that did it: Lady Targaryen’s heat could not inspire a reaction in him. He withstood her fire. “Prince Daemon rounded up all those who were believed to have done evil deeds. He punished them without evidence, without trial… What he did was not justice. He brutalised people for their perceived injustices, as you did to the Meereenese masters.”

Larra watched Brandon carefully, a knot tightening in her chest.

She had not anticipated that he would take point and provoke discussion with Lady Targaryen, that he would draw her attention – and possibly her ire.

Larra watched silently as Brandon, so tall and handsome in this memory-world where he could roam freely, looked down at Lady Targaryen, yet never looked down on her, gently guiding her with subtle comments and open-ended questions. He was inciting her anger yet anticipating it, managing it – he forced Daenerys to open her eyes, against her will, and withstanding her rage.

It was…masterful.

He drew all her focus.

Larra watched carefully as Lady Targaryen’s anger mounted. She watched as Bran’s relentless stoicism broke through the rage. She watched Lady Targaryen’s anger turn to humiliation, then despair…finally, grief, guilt, and resolve. Acceptance.

By the time Brandon was finished with her, Lady Targaryen understood the very grave error she had made in Meereen, not the act of crucifying the masters itself but of convincing herself that she was just in doing so.

Larra watched, and a memory of her own crept into her mind, one she never cared to dwell on. It hurt too much. A broken windmill, illuminated by a single candle: crannogmen huddled in a corner, Hodor slumbering gently against the wall, Osha’s eyes glinting in the firelight, and her brothers arguing about who loved each other more.

“Listen to me, little lord…”

“Don’t worry,” Bran said gently, understanding and grief pouring from his dark eyes. Wisdom made him seem far older than his years. “I’m not asking you to come with me. It won’t be safe for Rickon.”

“Me?” Rickon blinked, realising what Bran meant. Stubbornly, he declared, “I’m coming with you.”

“No. You and Osha and Shaggydog head for the Last Hearth,” Larra said, glancing at Osha, who ducked her head slightly in acknowledgement, already reaching for supplies. “The Umbers are fierce warriors honour-bound by their oaths to protect you.”

“I’m coming with you,” Rickon repeated stubbornly. He appealed to Bran, “I’m your brother. I have to protect you.”

“Right now, I have to protect you…”

Larra’s lips parted as she realised the truth.

Bran had not invited Daenerys to watch the Dance of the Dragons for the sake of educating her and changing her course. Perhaps Brandon was even more sceptical than Larra that Daenerys could change. Perhaps he had seen things he had not, for his own reasons, shared with anyone. Yet, watching her, Larra was starting to believe Daenerys might. With the right people guiding her, people who would not back down to her… Yet even if she did alter her course, that would be a happy by-product of Bran’s intent.

His true purpose in bringing her into the past was just what he was doing now: incurring her wrath and withstanding it, calmly and patiently and persistently driving her, in a manner that reminded her so vividly of Maester Luwin it hurt, to the truth.

He was diverting Daenerys’ attention from Larra, as she had from Jon.

“Right now, I have to protect you…”

That little boy, forced to become an adult before his time, had been wise even then. Burdened with a strange, unknowable power, yet he had remained thoughtful and compassionate. He had thought first of those he loved. He had done his part to protect them, limited as he was by his broken body.

He was doing his part to protect her.

He was playing the game the only way he could.

Bran was using the only weapons he now possessed to protect those he loved.

Larra watched Brandon, in awe of him. Gentle and compassionate yet enduring – he was a weirwood, ageless, quietly enduring every storm.

Unease settled in her stomach. Brandon’s greatest weapon was his mind: his ability to slip seamlessly into the past, an observer who harvested knowledge and wisdom from all he witnessed and shared it carefully.

Yet he had one other gift, one considered unnatural, its use a crime against nature.

He could slip into the minds not just of beasts but of men.

Hodor.

They knew the consequences.

But if it came to it…

Bran had slipped into Hodor’s mind twice, both times by accident – through sheer panic. They had been under threat.

If Bran found himself under threat again, would he use that skill to defend himself?

If there was no other way to protect those he loved…would Bran use that skill to attack?

Bran was not vulnerable, Larra realised darkly. Not in the way she had believed he was. He was perfectly capable of stopping anyone who attempted to hurt him.

He was perfectly capable of stopping anyone.

All he had to do to shatter their minds was to enter them.

The very same ability his mind now harnessed broke others without effort.

She knew Bran’s best nature. But what was he capable of if he felt backed into a corner, forced to defend those he loved?

She had convinced herself that Bran was still a boy, still innocent, in need of a caretaker. But he was a man grown. His handwriting may be that of a child but his mind was that of a warrior – someone devoted to defending all that they loved, fiercely, and giving his life if necessary.

Was he willing to do whatever it took to keep them safe?

She had been willing to do whatever it took to keep them safe. With a sinking feeling, she realised Bran had learned from the example she had set.

Daenerys wiping tears of frustration and grief from her face, Brandon took them to the beginning of the heir’s tourney, to Rhaenyra in red with a standing collar of shimmering organza sewn with pearls and glass beads, flustered and excited by the news of her mother’s labour, shared by the King with the spectators gathered to watch the tourney. Beside her sat Lady Alicent in a lovely blue gown – Larra admired the cut and style and thought the simple, effective design would work well on Arya, the crossed bands of the bodice echoing the Kingsguard’s armour, symbolically binding them to their vows of duty and honour. Lady Alicent wore the multi-strand pearl necklace Rhaenyra had promised to lend her, and sat pretty and fresh amongst the darker brocades and jacquards worn by the older members of the court. Rhaenyra, Larra noticed, wore the Valyrian steel necklace Prince Daemon had gifted her: she fiddled with it as the first knights readied for the joust.

As the tourney field became a battleground, blood was spilled within the walls of the Red Keep.

Queen Aemma’s labours to bring new life had instead summoned death. It waited patiently, as only Death was infinitely patient, and as they watched the maester’s blade gleam brightly in the sunshine, Larra heard Brandon whisper to Lady Targaryen, “Do not look away. Larra will know if you do.”

The Queen was brutalised for the sake of the babe in her belly, dosed with milk-of-the-poppy until everything was incomprehensible, and all the while, King Viserys smiled. She died frightened and screaming, betrayed by the man she loved.

Larra wept over her, hot tears searing down her cheeks. She watched the light leave Aemma’s eyes and with it, the life drain from Viserys. Their newborn son whimpered and croaked in the arms of the maester, whose eyes darted with grim concern at the child before his expression smoothed away.

Prince Baelon was cremated beside his mother, a too-small bundle on a too-small pyre. Dazed and silent, the King wept. Prince Daemon lingered by his niece, murmuring words of strength to her. The princess, pale in her black mourning clothes, eyes rimmed red, commanded Syrax to breathe fire upon her mother and brother.

The heir for a day…

“You cut the image of the Conqueror, brother,” said Prince Daemon, striding along the great hall. Sitting upon the Iron Throne, bedecked in Jaehaerys’ crown, King Viserys grasped the hilt of Blackfyre.

His Kingsguard standing at attention at the foot of the dais, King Viserys asked quietly, “Did you say it?”

“I don’t know what you mean –“

“You will address me as Your Grace,” King Viserys commanded, his voice echoing in the empty hall. The Iron Throne, and Blackfyre among the thousand broken blades, gleamed in the firelight, “or I will have my Kingsguard cut out your tongue.”

Prince Daemon said not a word. Refused to surrender that small measure of power over his brother – deference.

“’The heir for a day’,” Viserys said. It was the only time Larra had ever heard him seething with anger. “Did you say it?”

Brandon had shown them the whorehouse, had shown them Prince Daemon drowning his misery in his cups, seen him roused to a speech by his men who demanded a performance from their Commander. Had shown them the Prince’s lover Mysaria, filling his cup and coaxing him to celebrate. He had shown them the Rogue Prince’s sorrow.

And yes, Prince Daemon had named his nephew the “heir for a day” – yet his voice had been filled with sorrow and danger. The revellers had sobered at the dark glint in his eyes and Mysaria, wisely, had guided him to a private chamber before his fingers could twitch toward the hilt of his dagger.

Ser Otto Hightower had not, of course, related this information, the context in which the words had been spoken. He had jumped at the chance to sow discord between Viserys and his only, heir, the most dangerous man in King’s Landing.

Prince Daemon did not deny he had said the words. “We must all mourn in our own way, Your Grace.”

“My family has just been destroyed, but instead of being by my side, or Rhaenyra’s, you chose to celebrate your own rise, laughing with your whores and your lickspittles!” Viserys shouted, his voice echoing. “You have no allies at court but me! I have only ever defended you! Yet everything I’ve given you, you’ve thrown back in my face!”

“You’ve only ever tried to send me away – to the Vale, to the City Watch, anywhere but by your side!” Daemon bellowed back, catching Viserys off-guard. For a heartbeat, Prince Daemon sounded like a wounded boy. Perhaps Viserys heard it. A boy desperate for his brother’s love and approval. Perhaps Viserys did not care to dwell on the truth of Daemon’s words, or the feeling in them. “Ten years you’ve been king and yet not once have you asked me to be your Hand.”

“And why would I do that?” Viserys seethed.

“Because I’m your brother,” Daemon said fiercely, and Larra could hear the love he had for Viserys in his voice. She had seen it, at Queen Aemma’s funeral. Viserys looked taken aback. “And the blood of the dragon runs thick.”

“Then why do you cut me so deeply?” Viserys demanded hoarsely.

“I’ve only ever spoken the truth: I see Otto Hghtower for what he is,” Daemon said sharply, unapologetically.

“An unwavering and loyal Hand –“

“A cunt!” Daemon interrupted fiercely, and Larra scoffed, smirking. “A second son who stands to inherit nothing he does not seize for himself.”

“Otto Hightower is a more honourable man than you could ever be.” Larra coughed and glanced at Brandon. Did he not often wish those he observed could hear him – did he not wish to take these two brothers who loved each other and knock their heads together, to put some sense into them?

“He doesn’t protect you!” Daemon shouted. “I would!

Viserys sneered, “From what?”

His voice almost gentle, Daemon said, “Yourself.” Then he said something that altered the course of history. He made the greatest mistake by telling the grieving, insecure King, “You’re weak, Viserys. And that council of leeches knows it: they all prey on you for their own ends.”

Viserys’ hand tightened on the hilt of Blackfyre. Yet he was no warrior. He knew it. The only power he had was the power his crown gave him. It was the only weapon he had to hurt his brother, the same way Daemon had just wounded him.

“I have decided to name a new heir,” he said softly.

“I’m your heir.”

“Not anymore,” King Viserys said. “You are to return to Runestone and your lady wife at once. And you are to do so without quarrel, by order of your King.”

Daemon’s lips parted and he started forward: as one, the Kingsguard bared their blades in warning. Daemon froze.

“Your Grace.”

Daemon strode out of the Throne Room. Larra watched the conflict on the King’s face – anger gave way swiftly to sudden regret. His eyes shone, his lips parted – but to call Daemon back, to go back on his own commands, was to prove Daemon right. Prove that he was as weak as people thought.

He let Daemon go.

Yet the king winced as he collapsed against the Iron Throne. Blood beaded on his little finger.

“Did you see it?” Brandon asked, watching the king carefully.

“He cut his hand,” Daenerys said, frowning softly.

“That wound causes the destruction of House Targaryen,” Brandon murmured sorrowfully.

“Which?” Larra asked. “The nick to his finger or the broken bond between brothers?”

Brandon glanced at her, his eyes glinting in the firelight, and smiled.

“Both.” He sighed and glanced at Larra. “There is one last thing I wish you to see.”

“Are we not to see the Dance?” Lady Targaryen asked, her gaze flitting momentarily from the Iron Throne.

“In time,” Brandon promised.

Larra blinked, and her lips parted as a tremendous dragon skull loomed over them. It was illuminated by thousands of flickering candles, meagre light beaming down from a skylight. A kingsguard’s armour rattled as he escorted the young princess to her father, who waited by the skull, his hand held over the candles. Rhaenyra still wore her mourning gown.

“Father,” Rhaenyra prompted.

“Balerion was the last living creature to have seen Old Valyria before the Doom,” King Viserys said. “Its greatness and its flaws. When you look at the dragons, what do you see?”

“What? You haven’t spoken a word to me since Mother’s funeral, and now you send your Kingsguard to –“

“Answer me,” King Viserys urged. “It’s important. What do you see?”

Rhaenyra gazed up at Balerion’s skull. Larra did too, comparing its size to Rhaegal. Rhaegal was diminutive by comparison. Rhaenyra said gently, “I suppose I see us.”

“Tell me,” Viserys pushed.

“Everyone says Targaryens are closer to gods than to men,” Rhaenyra said thoughtfully. “But they say that because of our dragons. Without them, we’re just like everyone else.”

Larra gave Lady Targaryen a sly look.

“The idea that we control the dragons is an illusion. They are a power man should never have trifled with. One that brought Valyria its doom,” King Viserys said, glancing up at Balerion’s skull. “If we don’t mind our own histories, it will do the same to us. A Targaryen must understand this if they are to become king…or queen.” He let the word linger in the air. Rhaenyra’s brow creased and she glanced uncertainly at her father. “I’m sorry, Rhaenyra. I have wasted the years since you were born, wanting for a son…” He took her hands and clasped them, as he had once clasped Aemma’s. “You are the very best of your mother. And I believe, as I know she did, that you could be a great ruling queen.”

“Daemon is your heir,” Rhaenyra said, visibly flustered.

“Daemon was not made to wear the crown but I believe that you were,” Viserys said fiercely. “This is no trivial gesture, Rhaenyra. A dragon-saddle is one thing, but the Iron Throne is the most dangerous seat in the realm.”

Earnestness poured from his eyes – and love. He knew the danger he was putting Rhaenrya in, yet there was no undoing it – not without proving Daemon correct. Viserys had made a mistake in sending Daemon away, for so many reasons, yet the most dangerous consequence of it was the naming of Rhaenyra as heir. For better or worse, Viserys had to stand by his decision – his pride compelled him to, though the wiser choice would have been to call Daemon back. Gazing at him, Larra knew he regretted it. He regretted putting his daughter, the last lingering vestige of Aemma that he had, in danger.

Brandon glanced at Larra, his eyes reflecting a thousand pinpricks of light, ageless and knowing, and a slight curl to his lips did nothing to prepare her for what Viserys said next.

“There’s something else that I need to tell you,” Viserys said, dread and guilt thick in his voice. “It might be difficult for you to understand, but you must hear it… Our histories, they tell us that Aegon looked across the Blackwater from Dragonstone and saw a rich land ripe for the capture. But ambition alone is not what drove him to conquest. It was a dream. And just as Daenys foresaw the end of Valyria, Aegon foresaw the end of the world of Men.”

Rhaenyra frowned at Viserys. Daenerys’ eyes widened. Larra watched Viserys with the stillness of a predator. And Brandon watched them all.

Rhaenrya did not expect it, or understand it. She never would: but she would carry the weight of its responsibility for the rest of her life. Daenerys heard only what she wanted to hear. Larra listened, and dread and wonder warred in her heart.

“It is to begin with a terrible winter, gusting out of the distant North,” Viserys said, his voice gruff with emotion and urgency. “Aegon saw absolute darkness riding on those winds, and whatever dwells within will destroy the world of the living. When this great winter comes, Rhaenyra, all of Westeros must stand against it.” He believed – as Targaryens believed so wholly, so tragically – in prophecy. This was the foundation-stone of the Targaryen dynasty.

Not ambition. Not to break better men.

A higher purpose. To defend the realms of men.

“And if the world of Men is to survive, a Targaryen must be seated on the Iron Throne – a king or queen strong enough to unite the realm against the cold, and the dark,” King Viserys urged.

Jon, Larra thought, watching Viserys. A man in a generation with the strength and courage to unite enemies, to do what was right no matter the personal cost. To lead… Viserys told his daughter, his heir, the future of his House, the future of the world of Men as he saw it, “Aegon called his dream the Song of Ice and Fire.”

Larra’s breath hitched, her eyes darting to Bran.

The song of ice and fire: that was what the Children had called the song they had taught Larra.

“This secret, it’s been passed from king to heir since Aegon’s time,” Viserys said. “Now you must promise to carry it – and protect it.” Viserys voice became soft yet still urgent, earnest. “Promise me this, Rhaenyra. Promise me.”

Promise me, Ned… Promise me…

Notes:

A few subtle hints throughout this chapter, about Daenerys. I liked making all the links between Daenerys and Larra and Aemma/Rhaenrya/the prophecy. And who could miss the link between Viserys and Lyanna Stark? Such a subtle way of reminding us of R + L = J and the true implications of Ned’s promise. What do you think Daenerys heard in that prophecy? I’m also laying the groundwork for Daenerys learning the truth later.

I won’t be doing an episode-by-episode recount of HotD in this story, this was a one-off, but Larra will certainly be shown more by Bran and it’ll affect how she handles things.

Chapter 54: Choice

Notes:

It is over… I’ve just watched the final episode, and am currently listening to the HotD soundtrack. Absolutely love it! I am also usurping “An Impossible Choice”, “The Prince That Was Promised”, “Protector of the Realm” and “The Language of Girls” for Larra’s themes!

So this fic’s word-count is now over double the word-count of the first Game of Thrones book. Yikes!

I’ve also been watching Top Gun: Maverick on repeat and am trying desperately to work some of that inspiration into this story! Top Gun – with dragons! I’ll need more of them though…

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

54

Choice


Brandon left them with the lingering image of Princess Rhaenyra standing before all the high lords of Westeros as her father invested her with the title Princess of Dragonstone and Heir to the Iron Throne. Beyond the Red Keep, the red worm Caraxes had shrieked and clawed his way through the sky, the Rogue Prince on his back. Rhaenyra had looked absolutely stunning, wearing a fiery red gown richly embroidered with golden dragons, a golden cloak draped over her shoulders with a mantel of black velvet exquisitely embroidered on the back with two dragons rapturously entwined within a radiant sun. She wore a golden collar, heavy gold earrings embellished with pearls and a high, curved headdress, old-fashioned to Larra’s mind yet beautiful, richly embroidered and encrusted with glittering ruby beads that evoked the Conqueror’s famous Valyrian steel crown embedded with square-cut rubies.

The great chain of office of the Prince – now Princess – of Dragonstone was draped around her slender neck by the Grand Maester, the gold gleaming in the light, each link elaborately embellished with the sigils of each of the Great Houses, and a last link, dangling beneath, bore the seven-pointed star of the Faith.

The Iron Throne was all that linked the seven kingdoms – all that kept them united – ready to stand against the impending doom Aegon had once foreseen.

The symbol of the Faith dangled, an afterthought – the Targaryens had brought their own gods from Valyria and kept their ancient worships alive for generations after the Doom. The Faith had been joined with the Crown only through the actions of Jaehaerys the Conciliator.

Rhaenyra had looked absolutely stunning, and carried herself magnificently – young though she was, a slip of a girl, she wore her gown, her headdress, the heavy chain of office. They did not wear her. She looked beautiful, young and slightly threatening. She stared down the high lords who grumbled, embittered about the past or begrudgingly kneeling to a woman. Larra had smiled bitterly as Lord Rickon Stark swore his oath before the young girl, as fiercely and as earnestly as any Northerner ever swore their oaths.

Oathbreakers were considered the height of dishonour. The North remembers…

Larra could not wait to see Lord Cregan Stark. The Hour of the Wolf. That had always been Robb’s favourite part of the Dance – a stern Northerner bringing swift justice to the festering viper’s nest that was King’s Landing.

Robb have done the same, had he not forgotten his oaths.

The solar emerged as if from a great mist and Larra’s fingers twitched as they unlaced from Bran’s. She felt inspired to pick up her sketching pencils again. Princess Anemone could wait – she wished to paint Queen Aemma and Princess Rhaenyra.

It was easier to think about breathing life into the long-dead than dwell on the troubling knowledge Brandon had imparted. A Targaryen prophecy.

They said that Prince Rhaegar had been a great lover of books until the moment he discovered something in an ancient text and decided he was meant to become a warrior.

Was this prophecy, Aegon’s song of ice and fire, the very same prophecy that had motivated Prince Rhaegar to train as a warrior, had put him on the path that had ultimately led him to the Trident?

The same path that had led him to Lyanna. To Larra and Jon.

Daenerys blinked around the chamber and Larra saw in her the instantaneous sorrow and bitter disappointment of realising they had returned to their own lives, that those they had watched remained in the past, untouchable, forever out of reach. Bran was blessed to be able to see them any time he wished but he was forever cursed to remain little more than the echo of a voice lost on the wind, a wraith walking through time, unable to touch or interact with people.

He was left to watch as people came to regret their decisions.

Some of those decisions had consequences that rippled through time. Daenerys was living proof of that. The seeds of the Dance – Aemma’s death and Ser Otto sending his daughter to beguile the grieving king – would lead to the destruction of the greatest power in their history. The seventeen dragons boasted by House Targaryen would be killed, butchered by the smallfolk in riots that spread throughout King’s Landing: the power of House Targaryen would be broken. Generations later, a mad king’s viciousness would spark a rebellion that consumed the continent and cast the fractured remains of a once-magnificent House to the rippling golden grass seas of the Dothraki…and the endless snow-meadows of the North.

Larra had to include herself amongst them, now. Never forget what you are…

Queen Aemma’s death was the beginning of the end for House Targaryen.

“Tell me again the King’s prophecy,” Lady Targaryen said softly, gazing wide-eyed at Bran.

Carefully, Brandon said, “It shall begin with a terrible winter, gusting out of the distant North. The darkness brings the end of the world of Men.”

Lady Targaryen blinked. “No, what King Viserys said!”

“Aegon’s prophecy was as I said. In his dreams, he saw those that do not fear the dark and the cold, those whose eyes gleam bright and blue with cold fire. He saw the Others marching out of the mist and laying waste to the world.”

Larra watched Bran carefully, wondering if whether he or Lord Bloodraven was responsible for the Conqueror’s dragon-dream. Or perhaps another greenseer. Brandon kept saying the past could not be rewritten yet she knew Bran had slipped into Hodor’s mind in the past, with devastating consequences. Bran had no idea what he was doing – then. Now…

“No,” Daenerys snapped, frowning at Bran as if he was being purposely thick. “What he said about a Targaryen sitting the Iron Throne to unite the realms.”

“That is not prophecy,” Brandon said quietly. “It is the excuse Targaryen kings used for generations to keep a stranglehold over Westeros.” Larra glanced subtly at Daenerys, who looked as if she had been slapped. “Aegon foresaw a winter without end. What he did after he had his dream, how he shared his knowledge, was entirely up to him. His preparations for an invasion only he saw coming defined House Targaryen for generations, until his knowledge was lost.”

“It was rediscovered,” Larra said quietly, and Brandon nodded his head slowly.

“Yes,” Brandon said lightly. “Prince Rhaegar found it. He did ever so love his books. He rediscovered Aegon’s song…”

He said it wistfully, almost romantically, his eyes glimmering as he smiled into the firelight, and for a moment, Larra knew instinctively that Bran was thinking of Jon.

Of Aegon Torrhen, a child born of ice and fire. Named to honour the king who knelt – and the Conqueror to whom he had surrendered his crown.

Larra wondered suddenly how Aegon’s prophecy linked to Torrhen’s surrender.

Had Aegon shared his prophecy? It would explain so much – why Queen Alysanne had reinforced the Watch, and why the North had been left to its own devices since the Conquest.

Had there been an ancient understanding between Aegon and Torrhen? Had that knowledge been passed from lord to heir? Had the secret of Aegon’s prophecy, of the true motivation for his conquest and unification of the Seven Kingdoms, been carried by the Starks? Had it been lost with Rickard and Brandon, as Viserys’ secret had likely been lost with Rhaenyra?

King Viserys had embellished the Conqueror’s prophecy, yet what Viserys had told Rhaenyra was true, in part. Whether by chance or design, a Targaryen had been exactly where he needed to be, to unite the realms and lead the defence of the world of Men.

Jon had the blood, though he did not go by the name Targaryen.

Daenerys was not to know that. How could she? Yet even as Larra watched, she saw Daenerys take hold of the prophecy, of Viserys’ words, of the implications – of her certainty that Aegon’s prophecy meant her – Daenerys, with her dragons, in the North, ready to defeat the Others who came to destroy the world of Men.

It served only to strengthen Daenerys’ belief that she alone was destined to sit the Iron Throne.

Larra did not point out, at that moment, that Daenerys neither sat the Iron Throne nor had she united any of the realms of Westeros.

The Iron Throne was not important: uniting the realms of Men was. And it was Jon who had succeeded in doing so. He had united Night’s Watchmen with wildlings, wildlings with Northmen, Northmen with Knights of the Vale. He commanded the respect of everyone who met him because he led them.

Aegon’s purpose had become lost amidst the grandeur and tragedy of the Targaryen legacy. The Iron Throne did not matter: keeping the people of Westeros united did. Defending the realms of men did.

Anything else was people making excuses to cling to power.

Larra had a newfound sense of respect for the Conqueror. He had not been motivated by arrogance and greed but by a sense of duty.

Larra noted how Lady Targaryen relented when Brandon spoke. She took him at his word. She backed down, in a way Larra had never seen her do before. Perhaps she respected Brandon’s insight, in a way she respected little else. His formidable, unknowable power struck a chord in Daenerys, who had obsessed over the visions shared with her by the House of the Undying and by Qaithe, the words of the slave Mirri Maz Duur she had taken as pure prophecy and lived by more stringently than most did the Book of the Seven.

Lady Targaryen jumped as the door to the solar opened and a maid bustled in. She saw them and stopped short. “Oh! ‘Pologies, m’ladies – m’lord!”

“It’s quite alright,” Larra said, giving the flustered girl a gentle smile. “Go about your work.” The maid curtseyed and set about tidying the table. Larra noticed the tureens and piled plates she had left ready to be cleared away.

She glanced at Bran. “How long were we gone?” she asked.

“Little more than an hour,” Bran said softly. “I believe I shall take myself away to my chamber and rest.”

A game after dinner indeed, Larra thought, glancing again at the table, where her cards were neatly stacked, as Bran wheeled himself over to the table. He reached for the stack of cards and, eyes glittering, gave Larra a sweet smile as he tucked the cards safely into the billowing sleeves of his great tunic, the same way Maester Luwin always used to have puzzles and games tucked up his sleeves for them to discover.

“I shall retire, too,” Lady Targaryen said softly. She gazed at Bran. “You have given me much to think about.”

“You will return,” Bran said gently, glancing up at both of them. “I shall invite you to take tea with me for our next voyage.” He saw the look on Lady Targaryen’s face. “You do wish to see more, do you not?”

And there is the lure, Larra thought, Lord Bloodraven’s voice echoing in her ears. It's beautiful beneath the sea, but if you stay too long, you drown.

Did Bran intend to drown Daenerys?

This was perhaps his tactic: to distract Daenerys by the past to ensure she did not dwell on the present – or the future.

“I await your invitation, my lord,” Lady Targaryen said, dipping into a small curtsy.

“I’ll escort you out,” Larra said, glancing at Bran. Right now, I have to protect you… She bent to meet Bran’s eye, whispering, “I have questions.”

“Compile your list,” Bran said, his eyes twinkling. “We shall discuss them – at great length.”

She leaned in and kissed Bran’s cheek. He smiled, and a glimmer of the sweet boy he had once been shone from his eyes. With less and less effort, he turned his chair about and wheeled himself to the door, knocking. The pretty brown-eyed guard opened the door carefully and nodded an awkward bow as Bran wheeled himself past. He blushed when he caught sight of Lady Targaryen’s translucent gown, and realised Larra had caught him noticing. She smirked and winked and he blushed hotter, clearing his throat and murmuring politely as Larra swept past. Lady Targaryen, with her shorter stature, hastened to keep up.

When Bran wheeled himself off into a side corridor, Lady Targaryen cleared her throat delicately.

“You have no desire to have me remain in your home,” she said quietly, and Larra glanced at her, “and even less respect for me, I fear.”

Larra didn’t deny it. She gazed down at Lady Targaryen, thinking of Queen Aemma. A straight-shooter but an elegant woman. She would have found a way to speak the truth in such a way that others would thank her for the gift, rather than see the insult for what it was.

“Long before you arrived at Winterfell, I learned of your life,” was what she told Daenerys Targaryen.

Lady Targaryen licked her lips slowly, thoughtfully. “Your brother showed you.”

“From Illyrio Mopatis’ manse to the great grass sea and the pyramids of Meereen,” Larra said quietly.

After a long while, Lady Targaryen spoke. Larra thought perhaps she was thinking of her own reactions to Daemon Targaryen’s actions. How favourably would her own actions be viewed by an impartial person? “You did not look upon my actions with favour.”

“I think perhaps had I been with you, as Ser Jorah was, I may have been swept up with the magnificence of it all…the dragons,” Larra said, and something tightened almost imperceptibly around the corners of Lady Targaryen’s eyes. Something hardened. The dragons. Rhaegal – a sore spot. They had not yet reached a confrontation about Larra’s claiming of Rhaegal. What was Lady Targaryen to do about it? What could be done about it? “I benefited from distance and perspective.”

“You dislike me,” Lady Targaryen said, and for a moment, she looked young and sounded…vulnerable. Soft. In a way she had rarely been since her husband died. There had been glimmers – with her lover Daario. He had seen the truth of her and not shuddered away yet she had not been wise enough to listen to him.

Larra did not deny it. “I have no respect for the choices you’ve made in wilful ignorance.”

“I received no formal education.”

“You’re a child no longer,” Larra said, glancing down at the translucent gown that hid none of Lady Targaryen’s emerging curves, the rich ermine furs she draped herself – furs fit for a queen, worth more than most of the smallfolk could earn in their lifetimes put together. “You are a woman of means: there is no excuse for continued ignorance. Or cruelty.”

“Have I been cruel?” It was a question asked with such vulnerability in her voice, and a haunted kind of resignation in her eyes. She remembered, perhaps, Prince Daemon’s scouring of King’s Landing. The comparisons Brandon had drawn between his actions and her own. He had not mentioned the Field of Fire or the Lion Culling. Perhaps he was saving that discussion for Tumbleton. The first or the second, it did not matter which. Perhaps he would save it for Aemond One-Eye’s actions in the Riverlands. There were tragically too many opportunities in the Dance of the Dragons for Brandon to warn Daenerys about the misuse of dragons.

Larra stared at Lady Targaryen and told her the truth: “You put Jon in a very cruel position. A powerless one. If you knew it, that is one thing, but if you can look at me and wonder what it is I speak of, that is far worse, for it means you have no qualms about what you did, that you do not even consider it reprehensible.”

Lady Targaryen stared at her. Her cheeks tinged with a flush – from anger or humiliation, Larra could not tell. Likely both. Her eyes shone, and spoke more eloquently than Lady Targaryen ever could.

She knew.

In her heart, Daenerys Targaryen knew she had done Jon a grave injury when she had forced her way into his bed.

“He has… The King has been distant since Eastwatch-by-the-Sea – cold,” Lady Targaryen said, clearing her throat awkwardly. “Towards me. Since we – Since I climbed into his bed.”

“Jon is the kind of person who appears once in generations. Everything that he is, the man he has become… To know him is to love him,” Larra said, and Lady Targaryen flinched at the sadness and kindness in Larra’s voice in a way she never did when Larra bared her fangs and injured her men in the Great Hall. Larra spoke truthfully but she spoke gently, compassion pouring from her. And for Lady Targaryen, that was far worse. “Perhaps you are in love with him. Somehow, you have convinced yourself into believing that love is reciprocated. Perhaps because that is what you have always so desperately yearned for.”

“And what is that?” Lady Targaryen asked, a subtle bite in her tone.

“Safety. Security. Unconditional love. I think perhaps you have convinced yourself that the Iron Throne will grant you those things you have chased for so long. A sense of belonging. And Jon…” Larra sighed. “He is a vision of the glory of kings, undimmed… He goes out of his way to ensure everyone feels they belong, that they are worthy and safe. I do not blame you for falling in love with him. But I will not excuse your behaviour because of it.”

“He – he did not say anything,” Lady Targaryen said, catching herself, biting her lip and closing her eyes.

“What would you have done if he had?” Larra sighed. She gazed down at Daenerys Targaryen, and hoped she heard the warning with the good intentions Larra gave it: “Your pride is your undoing. Good night, my lady.”

She left Daenerys Targaryen at the large door separating the Stark chambers with the main thoroughfares and made her way to her chamber, wishing to climb out of her fine dress and curl up with her sketching pencils and paper.


The sound of giggling and singing beckoned her to her chamber, and she smiled as she slowly pushed the door open, peering into her chamber and catching a glimpse of Gendry, his curls rampant, Leona sitting on his shoulders and sucking her fingers, half-asleep. Little Rosamund was cuddled up beside him, while Neva sat in his lap letting him braid her hair, a book spread open before her. Neva sang with Altheda as Briar teased Uhtred and Arianwyn before the hearth, the kittens clawing at the hem of Narcisa’s gown as she peered at Gendry’s handiwork, adjusting braids and nodding, smiling proudly at Gendry and nodding.

Larra stopped at the door, peeking through, savouring the sight. Her heart ached, watching her gentle giant, dark as a thunderstorm and as dangerous, surrounded by dainty little girls and lavishing love and attention on them, his hands gentle, voice calm and rich and encouraging. It was quite something to see dark-haired, fiercely masculine Gendry utterly tender and completely besotted with their girls.

Their girls. They were. The Lannisters, Neva, Briar – they were their girls, Gendry’s and hers. She watched Gendry with them and may have swooned ever so slightly at the proud little smile on Gendry’s face as he completed Neva’s braids. She definitely sighed at the look of absolute adoration on Narcisa’s face as she gazed at Gendry, and the way her expression turned gently yearning as Gendry chuckled and turned his head to give Leona, who had peered upside-down into his face, a kiss on the cheek. She dimpled with a smile, her pearly teeth flashing as her eyelashes fluttered, and hugged his neck, resting her head on top of his, her golden curls tangling with his dark ones. He smiled contentedly to himself and his eyes glowed as he smiled at Neva, who finished the page she was reading and raised her fists in triumph, eyes sparkling – she had never read so far before without errors, Larra could tell by the illustrations on the page.

Briar clambered off the floor and chased the kittens across the chamber, where she paused at Larra’s table. Larra watched quietly from the doorway, peering through unseen, as Briar tilted her head thoughtfully, her silky black hair rippling over her shoulder, and rested her fingertips daintily on the edge of the table, as if afraid to touch anything. Her enormous sapphire eyes roved over the table, and, with a subtle glance at Gendry, who had plucked Leona off his shoulders to cuddle her in his lap, Briar carefully freed several of Larra’s papers from a pile. They were the studies she had completed of flora and fauna of the wolfswood. Briar, Larra knew, had a deep and abiding love for all living things. She adored animals in every form. Her vivid sapphire eyes, so enormous in her pale face, with her bee-stung lips and freckles, seemed to glow with curiosity as she examined the painted studies.

Uhtred tried to make a break for it, darting out from under the bed toward the door and Briar jumped as if struck by arrows as she followed his path and realised the door stood ajar and Larra stood beyond it, watching her.

Larra smiled warmly and entered the room, even as Briar flushed hotly and seemed to shrink as she tucked Larra’s paintings back where she had found them. As the door swung open, Gendry glanced up. He grinned, relaxed and happy, enjoying cuddles with his little girls.

Larra approached him, noting how Leona’s eyes were heavy, cuddled so cosily in Gendry’s strong arms. She reached out and tenderly brushed her fingers through Gendry’s dark curls, leaning down to share a kiss.

“I thought you’d be gone far longer,” he murmured against her lips, his striking eyes intense on her face, noticing everything – the tension easing at the corners of her eyes, the tearstains on her cheeks.

“While the wolf is away, you get to play, is that it?” she teased softly.

“Absolutely,” Gendry grinned.

“May I join you?” she asked quietly, and the girls nodded eagerly.

“We’ve been reading,” Gendry told her, showing her the book Neva had been reading from. One of the stories she had long ago written for Rickon. “We’ve all had baths and listened to Lady Vialle sing an operetta.”

“An operetta?”

“Apparently she was trained as an opera singer in Lys, on account of her voice,” Gendry said, and Larra pouted, disappointed to have missed the performance.

“I wish I had been there,” she sighed. “What are you doing now?”

“The girls have been trying to convince me to style their hair the way Narcisa’s been teaching me,” Gendry said, with a subtle frown-line between his brows.

“Perhaps I can help,” Larra suggested, removing her shoes and tucking her skirts under her as she climbed onto the bed. She sat close enough to Gendry that their thighs touched as she crossed her legs, arranging her skirts.

“What have you got there, Briar?” Gendry asked, glancing across the chamber. She still held one of Larra’s studies in her hands. Briar was far from shy and retiring yet she was still finding her feet. Winterfell was as new to her as it was to the Lannisters, though they expected finery as their due. Briar no longer shuddered away from putting on even the most worn of Larra’s childhood frocks, preserved in trunks, but the schoolroom was still foreign to her despite the maesters reports to Larra that she was a very bright girl.

“This is a Great Northern Dire-Eagle,” Briar said, approaching with the study Larra had painted. Larra’s heart panged at the sight of it: she had completed the studies while rehabilitating the wounded dire-eagle she had bonded with so long ago.

“It is,” Larra said gently. Just as Briar was with animals, Larra kept her voice low and her movements gentle around Briar: she was not skittish the way Neva and sometimes even Cade could be but she was wary of everything around her.

“What does this say here?” Briar asked quietly, pointing to the paragraphs Larra had written around the colourful studies.

“It’s a description of their preferred nesting sites, their diet and how a mated pair cares for its young,” Larra said. She pointed at a long line annotated with numbers. “This is a measurement.”

“What’s a measurement?”

“It tells you how big something is,” Larra explained quietly. As the daughter of a farmer, Briar had never been exposed to the kind of vocabulary Larra took for granted. She often caught herself, especially for Ragnar and Briar, explaining what words meant in simpler terms. “This is a measurement of the dire-eagle’s wingspan…this is the measurement of one of its eggs.”

“What’s that?” Briar asked, pointing to a scrawny, featherless creature.

“A newly-hatched chick,” Larra said.

“What are these called?”

“The pictures? The maesters call them studies,” Larra said. “I sketched them then painted over the sketches.”

“You made these?”

“I did,” Larra nodded. Briar turned her great blue eyes from Larra to the studies, and Larra could see her mind working, the way the maesters knew Briar may not be able to read or write or have any knowledge of histories or any of that, but she absorbed everything and had a fierce curiosity matched with a sharp mind.

“How?” Briar asked.

“I could teach you, if you’d like,” Larra said, and Briar’s enormous eyes widened, her face lighting up.

“Truly?”

“Truly,” Larra nodded. “I can teach you how to sketch and paint. When the snows melt, we shall go exploring and record everything we can find!” Gendry glanced at her, expression soft, and he gave her a gentle smile.

“Shall we?” he prompted quietly. He leaned in and kissed her, murmuring, “Shall we see the snows melt?”

She reached up and stroked Gendry’s cheek, leaning in to give him a kiss. She hoped so. Sometimes it was easier to believe than others.

“Bran wants me to teach him book-binding,” she told Gendry instead.

“Whatever for?” Gendry asked, frowning.

“He says he’s going to write a book.”

Gendry’s eyebrows rose. “About what?”

“Games.”


The girls finally tucked up in bed, Larra cuddled under a fur, her sketching pencils beside her and a firm board in her lap, paper clipped to it. She sketched away, covering the page with studies of all she had seen, little glimpses of the past, fragmented like sunlight through crystal, vibrant and ephemeral.

Gendry stripped, folded his clothes neatly into the trunk at the foot of the bed and sighed as he climbed into bed beside her. She smiled softly to herself as he wrapped an arm around her, shifting her into his embrace, propping his chin on her shoulder and gazing down at the studies she had covered the page with – Aemma, the Seasnake, Rhaenyra, Viserys, the Rogue Prince in his plumed dragon armour, even Alicent in her tourney dress.

“She’s very pretty,” Gendry murmured, as Larra used her little finger to delicately smudge the shading of Queen Aemma’s lips. He sighed. “Who is she?”

“Queen Aemma,” Larra said softly. Escorting Lady Targaryen from the solar, the girls being in her chamber had all served to keep at bay the crushing grief that had been threatening to overwhelm her since Aemma bled out in her bed.

Jon had not turned before his birth, either. And yet as tragic as Lyanna’s death was, hers had been a far gentler death than Aemma’s. Her will to live, her will to protect her children, had given her the strength she needed to linger long enough to secure her children’s lasting protection.

Larra had never known a mother’s love beyond that fierce maternal instinct to protect. She had never felt the pride and adoration and delight Aemma had so obviously had for her daughter, the deep understanding of her nature and appreciation of it.

The closest Larra had come to it was Osha, whom she had come to view as a surrogate mother and older sister together, whose wisdom she had relied upon, as she had allowed herself to rely upon no-one else since.

Watching Rhaenyra and her mother…it was not the same. Their lives were not the same. Yet the patience and wisdom and humour and gentle intimacy Aemma and Rhaenyra had shared…Larra had known that – with Osha. Larra knew she had trusted Osha as she had trusted few others in the world.

Larra grieved Lyanna for the lives they might have had but she missed Osha.

Her eyes burned and her lip trembled. Her voice was hoarse and tremulous as she told Gendry, “I spent all my childhood playing pretend with Jon and Robb and Arya, imagining we were the Queen Who Never Was and the Rogue Prince, riding Sunfyre and Vhagar and re-enacting the Battle Above the God’s Eye… We reduced their lives to their most heroic – or most nefarious – acts. But they were people.” Her lip trembled and she wiped her eyes, sniffling. “Flesh and blood, as real as you and me. I did not expect to feel this much… I did not expect to feel.” She sighed and closed her eyes, hot tears slipping down. “Brandon showed us the beginning of the end. The Great Council at Harrenhall…and Queen Aemma.” She gazed mournfully at her sketch of the gentle, discerning queen. Her voice hollow, she said, “The histories overlook her. She was forgotten. She deserved better.”

Gendry reached up, delicately brushing her tears away with his thumb. Tenderly, he coaxed, “Tell me what happened…”

She told him, aided by her sketches. Everything Brandon had shown her – including the song of ice and fire. Gendry’s sapphire eyes darkened, grim understanding pouring from them. Aegon’s prophecy.

“The Conquest…all of it… It led us to where we are,” Gendry said, staring at her. Like his little sister, Gendry’s vibrant eyes shone with intelligence. He caressed her chin gently. “It led us to you.”

“It led us to a Targaryen uniting the realms,” Larra said quietly. “Just not in the way Aegon imagined. It all led to Jon.”

“And you,” Gendry added gently, and she gave him a sad smile. Gendry sighed. “I wonder if he saw you.”

“He saw the Others,” Larra said, nestling her sketches on the bedside cabinet and curling up close to Gendry, soothed by the warmth and scent of his skin. “That was enough.”

The candles had burned low as Larra told Gendry about Brandon’s memories. Now, the last of them lingered, a feeble light against the encroaching dark. The faintest glimmer of hope. Yet it burned on.

“I didn’t even ask you about Daenerys,” Gendry murmured, and felt her tense against him. “Oh no. What did you do?”

“I do not have the energy to pretend. We shall never be the best of friends but now she at least understands why I distrust her,” Larra said quietly. “But I will no longer be openly hostile toward her.”

“Really?”

“I wish to believe that she may yet change her course – that what I dread most will never come to pass.”

“But you don’t believe it,” Gendry said quietly, his deep voice rumbling in his chest.

“I…will remain hopeful but vigilant.”

“What did she think to what Brandon showed you?”

“She was appalled by the Rogue Prince’s actions as Commander of the City Watch – until it was pointed out to her that she had done the same thing in Meereen as Prince Daemon did in King Landing.” Gendry grunted, and Larra continued with mild indignation, “I didn’t point it out to her, Brandon did! Oddly enough, I think Daenerys truly listened when Brandon spoke to her. Then again, she has been shown to grasp onto prophecy with a stranglehold. If she were to listen to anyone, it would be him. Perhaps I need do no more than show up to watch the Dance unfold. Brandon will do the rest.” She sighed heavily, nestling closer to Gendry, who wrapped his arm around her and tucked her close. “His wisdom…unnerves me. It feels – wrong. Unearned. It makes me dread the cost that must be paid.”

Gendry sighed heavily. After a long moment, he rumbled gently, “I think you already know the cost.”

Larra flinched. She knew it, as she had always known it. She had known it the moment they reached the great weirwood. “His life.”

Saying it out loud… Restoring the Broken Tower was one thing. Admitting out loud that Bran Stark was dead – that in his place Brandon the Broken would linger, forever bound to his chair, lost to the past…

“The life he might once have had,” Larra said hoarsely. “It is a strange thing, how something tragic in itself can have such devastating consequences. A fall from a tower…death in childbirth. One never knows how they will alter the course of the future until it is too late. They killed Queen Aemma for the babe in her belly and it led to a war that tore the Seven Kingdoms apart. Bran fell from the tower and I carried him to the great weirwood and back again…”

“As I said…it all led to us being where we are now,” Gendry murmured, stroking her arm. His voice had taken on that rich smoothness that came just before sleep, when exhaustion weighed on him and he was halfway into dreaming. “We’re exactly where we should be.”

Curled up with Gendry, Larra let herself believe it.


Head aching from her discussion with Bran, Larra turned and stared at the breakfast spread the maids had brought up. She had been curious about the truth of Aegon’s song and the implications for Torrhen Stark, and perhaps Bran knew it: he had successfully evaded answering her about his true intent with Daenerys Targaryen – the belief Larra had that he was using memories of the Dance to divert Lady Targaryen’s attention and wrath away from Larra.

Bran hummed contentedly, hands clasped in his lap, watching the fire in the hearth as they waited for Arya and Jon and Sansa to arrive.

“Are you going to tell them?” Bran asked.

“Tell who what?”

“You should tell them that you and Gendry will be married,” Bran said softly, and Larra glanced over at her brother.

She didn’t ask how he knew. She didn’t ask what he could foresee as the consequences of her choice.

Robb had made his choice. They had suffered the consequences – the entire North had suffered them.

While she waited for the others to arrive, the sky beyond the diamond-paned windows starting to lighten as the sun rose, Larra sketched. She was so engrossed that she barely noticed Sansa arriving with Arya, Jon joining them moments later.

“Put that away so that we might eat,” Sansa chided, and Larra grunted softly, glancing over the top of her sketch-board. Her fingertip was blackened from smudging her pencils and papers were scattered over the miniature of Winterfell as she filled them with studies of dead royalty.

“When you set aside your scrolls,” Larra countered.

“Both of you, put your things away,” Jon said, sighing heavily as he sat beside Bran at the table. It was rare that they got to share a meal together, just the four of them. As Larra set aside her sketching pencils, she realised that they were starting to take it for granted that they would spend time with each other again. They were starting to move forward: they were starting to heal.

“Wait a moment,” Sansa murmured, frowning down at one of the raven-scrolls. She read it carefully. After a moment, she told them, “Queen Cersei has delivered twin children. Lita, the Princess Royal, and Tybalt, Prince of Dragonstone and Heir to the Iron Throne.”

“Children? Did we miss a scroll announcing her marriage?” Arya frowned.

“No,” Sansa said coolly. “The same man who fathered these twins fathered all her other children.”

“She’s passing off bastards born of incest as legitimate,” Arya scoffed, shaking her head.

“She sits upon the Iron Throne,” Sansa sighed. “She may do as she wishes…until the day comes that she may not.”

“A day that cannot come too soon,” Arya murmured darkly.

“Does the scroll say anything else?” Larra asked. Ser Jaime and Lord Tyrion would want to hear of this news.

“No. It was sent by the Hand of the Queen,” Sansa said, crinkling her nose as she tossed the scroll aside. “He stresses that the Queen and the Heir to the Iron Throne are both in good health.”

“They were born too soon,” Brandon said softly, his eyes faraway. “The daughter she rejected flourishes while the son she fusses over fails to thrive.”

Larra exchanged a look with Sansa.

“What do you mean, rejected?” Larra prompted.

“The Queen has no need of a daughter,” Brandon murmured. “But her son ensures her line. A Lannister dynasty that lasts a thousand years.”

“Does it?” Larra asked, something like panic swooping in her belly. Brandon’s lips twitched.

“No,” he said.

“Cersei must see the value in her daughter, surely,” Sansa frowned. “If she survives, she will be marriageable.”

“Well…” Larra pulled a face. “The legitimate daughter of a king or queen is a desirable match many would covet. Cersei can say what she wishes on the matter of the child’s paternity – or say nothing at all – but those who follow the Faith will despise her for the double insult. Children born not just on the wrong side of the sheets but of incest declared as heirs to the Iron Throne.” She frowned, reaching for the tureen of porridge.

“I’m just surprised she was able to conceive a child at her age,” Arya mused, crinkling her nose. Larra glanced at Brandon.

“Is Cersei in good health?”

“Cersei is not young and her labour was long,” Brandon told them. “The birth took its toll.”

“But will she perish?” Arya pressed urgently.

“No,” Brandon said softly, and Larra saw the slight triumph in Arya’s face as she settled back. She knew why Arya was pleased Cersei would not succumb to complications of the birthing-bed: she was still at the top of Arya’s list.

“How does this news affect things?” Jon asked Sansa. He tended to defer to her on matters of southern politics.

“At the moment? Very little,” Sansa said. “The children must first survive their infancy. If they do that… Cersei has an heir, and whether or not she acknowledges it, a daughter to marry off strategically for political ties. With Princess Myrcella married into the Dornish royal family, Cersei might look to strengthen ties with the Stormlords or…”

“Or?”

“I don’t know,” Sansa admitted.

“The Tyrells have reclaimed Highgarden,” Larra reminded them.

“Cersei will be paranoid about the Tyrells retaliating for the Sept,” Sansa intoned.

“If I was Cersei, I would do whatever I could to ensure the Tyrells never regained their full strength in the Reach,” Larra mused. “That would mean arranging a marriage to a lesser but ambitious House that would owe their rise to Cersei.”

“Cersei wouldn’t sell her daughter to a lesser House,” Arya remarked darkly. “She is arrogant – she would expect loyalty without offering anything in return.”

“Both might be true,” Jon said quietly, frowning. They glanced at him. “Cersei’s proud but what about her Hand? The people who advise her have to have something between their ears or King’s Landing would be in anarchy by now.”

“Cersei would expect absolute loyalty as her right,” Sansa said slowly. “But she will do whatever it takes to maintain power – even sacrifice her own children. If she can use them to get what she wants…”

They turned to their breakfasts and Larra finished her bowl of porridge before Bran turned his gaze from her to the others.

“As we are sharing news,” he said, his eyes glittering, “Larra has something to say.”

“Do I?” Larra said, feeling hot. Bran’s eyes twinkled, a smirk playing at the corners of his lips. The smirk faded into a genuine smile, his eyes full of warmth, love – encouragement.

Larra sighed softly then turned her gaze from Arya to Jon to Sansa. She could imagine her siblings’ reactions. Jon had too much of the True North in him, like her. Arya wouldn’t care. Sansa… She would immediately see all the implications – the consequences. The risks. The danger.

“Gendry and I have decided to marry.”

She felt married already. She had chosen her mate as wolves did – for life. It was good enough for her. But she was no longer in the True North: claiming they were married did not make it so. Not in the eyes of everyone south of the Wall. Whether they were Andals or First Men, Rhoynar or Ironborn, there were ancient customs to honour, sacred oaths to declare.

She felt married already yet for the sake of transparency… She wished everyone to know they had chosen each other. She wished there to be no secrets. No doubts. She wanted everyone to know that her choice was intentional.

“Who?” Sansa blinked, startled.

Arya stared at her, eyebrows raised, silently appraising.

Jon frowned gently at her. “She means they intend to marry each other.” He watched her carefully, a soft, sad look in his eyes – wistful. “I thought there was too much of the True North in you to care about such things.”

“Not so much that I’ve forgotten the way of things here,” Larra sighed. “It is a formality.”

“You have been living as man and wife for months,” Sansa said quietly. Larra waited: it was the closest Sansa had come to reproaching Larra for living with her lover blatantly and without shame.

“As I said – a formality,” Larra said. She shrugged delicately, admitting, “I think it’s more important to Gendry than he wants to let on.”

Larra gazed at Sansa, full of anticipation – she could see Sansa’s mind working behind those brilliant blue eyes. All of the implications, the potential consequences. Littlefinger’s attempts to manipulate Larra into a marriage to remove her from Sansa, and the oath Larra had given – that she would declare her intentions when she found a man she deemed worthy of her. But how would the Northmen and the Knights of the Vale react to Larra marrying a blacksmith? She was the King’s twin-sister…

“Gendry is to be my brother,” Arya said wonderingly, a small smile touching her lips. Her grey eyes brightened and her face shone with a light Larra had dreaded was lost forever. “We shall be his family.”

Jon stood and bent to kiss the top of Larra’s head. “You’ve chosen well,” was all he said – all he needed to say – and left the solar. Larra glanced at Sansa, who looked pale and worried. She sighed, rose from the table, touched Bran’s shoulder in goodbye and followed in Jon’s wake.

Better to leave the solar than provoke an argument. Better to leave Sansa to think everything through before she confronted Larra about the wisdom of her choice.

But Larra had made her choice. Nothing else mattered.

In that moment, Larra finally understood Robb. She understood Rhaegar. And she understood Lyanna.

Notes:

Thoughts?!

Chapter 55: The Prince of Winterfell

Notes:

I like the idea that Rhaegal is still learning how to be a dragon. They’ve only ever seen Viserion and Rhaegal. I like the idea of Rhaegal watching the direwolf pack and learning from them. I also like the idea that, as in the books, when a warg bonds with an animal, they become as much a part of the animal as the animal is a part of them. The bond between Larra and Rhaegal will be even more intimate than a normal dragonrider’s emotional connection: they are a reflection of each other. So Larra’s personality will affect how Rhaegal behaves and Rhaegal’s desire to fly and be free will always affect Larra, causing an inner conflict for her.

Also, I’m bringing back Arya-who-wears-dresses. In the books, she’s not as fiercely tomboyish. Also, I’d like to think she has too much respect for her mother and Sansa (and in this ‘verse, Larra!) to disdain feminine women and reject dresses as a sign of weakness. Also, if her spying demanded she wear dresses, she’d do it.

The character of Nestor Maegos was inspired by Homer Jackson in Ripper Street. He was always such an interesting character!

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

55

The Prince of Winterfell

“That is something I have never seen before,” breathed a voice full of wonder.

Gendry smiled and glanced away from Rhaegal, who was chirruping and chirping amidst a pack of direwolves resting and playing nearby and using Rhaegal’s tremendous steaming body as a source of heat to warm themselves, pups jumping over their taloned feet, hiding beneath their wings. The direwolves were respectful of Rhaegal but not afraid of them: and Gendry got the sense that Rhaegal was watching the direwolves, learning from them. The old tales said dragons were cleverer than men: Gendry could imagine that was true. Rhaegal seemed curious. They reminded Gendry of Briar – quiet but fiercely curious. Learning from everything they saw.

Rhaegal had finished their meal, all but the last enormous mouthfuls of an aurochs they had hunted elsewhere and carried back to the moors – Rhaegal seemed to respect that their livestock was forbidden – and the wolves now feasted. Ravens cawed and flapped their wings, teasing the pups and yearlings while they waited their turn.

“Good morrow, Lady Sansa,” Gendry replied politely. “You’re far from the solar today.”

“As you are from the forges,” Lady Sansa said. She was swathed in her heavy, fur-trimmed cloak and rubbed her gloved hands together, her breath pluming before her. It was a beautiful day – dry, bright and sharp. He enjoyed the sunshine beaming down despite the cold, waiting for Larra to join him from the schoolroom. It occurred to him then that Lady Sansa had to have known he was here – and that Larra was not. Lady Sansa had never yet sought him out.

“The saddlers have completed a design for Rhaegal’s saddle,” Gendry said, his lips twitching, “though none dares approach them to fit it properly.”

“And so the dreaded task falls to you,” Lady Sansa said. She frowned. “If I remember my histories correctly, dragons do not take kindly to any but their bonded rider mounting them.”

“A good thing that I’m merely fitting the saddle, not climbing into it,” Gendry said.

“Then why linger so far from Rhaegal?” Lady Sansa asked.

“They’re eating,” Gendry said, jerking his chin toward the direwolf pack surrounding Rhaegal. “I may have grown up in a city but even I know better than to get between wild animals and their food.”

After a moment, Lady Sansa said, “Less wise still would be to come between a direwolf and its mate.”

Gendry frowned, glancing at Lady Sansa. Her hair shone vividly, the brightest and most colourful thing to be seen for miles. He sighed and asked, “To what do I owe the honour of your seeking me out, Lady Stark?”

“Larra tells me you intend to wed,” Lady Sansa said bluntly, and Gendry went still.

“She told you that?” he asked, aware of the knot in his stomach easing somewhat. Larra had asked him: he had agreed. But that had been the last they discussed of it. Lady Sansa gave him a shrewd look.

“You thought perhaps Larra was not in earnest.”

He shrugged his massive shoulders. “Larra doesn’t say anything she doesn’t mean. I just know she’s in no rush.”

“Yet she agreed to marry you.”

Gendry chuckled. “I agreed to marry her,” he clarified, and Lady Sansa looked slightly bewildered. He smiled. “Larra proposed the idea to me.” He sighed, shrugging. “I don’t think it matters to her, one way or another – she says she feels as if we are married already.”

“You live as if you are,” Lady Sansa muttered, and Gendry couldn’t help the smirk.

“How long have you been biting that back?” he asked, his tone almost teasing. Larra was aware of the gossip surrounding them – that they did indeed live together as man and wife in spite of having made no vows – but did not care.

“Larra is a creature as wild as any of them,” Lady Sansa said, lifting her chin toward Rhaegal and the direwolves. “Even more so since her time in the True North. There is no controlling her – yet I believed her more shrewd than this.”

“Than marrying a bastard blacksmith, you mean,” Gendry prompted, and Lady Sansa had the grace to blush. Yet she raised her chin and levelled a cool look at him.

“Bedding her secretly is one thing. Flouting it is quite another. And marrying her,” Lady Sansa said. “She is twin-sister to the King in the North and – “

“Larra’s not stupid, and nor am I,” Gendry interrupted. “We could live our lives together as lovers and never marry and be content. There’s a reason Larra asked me to marry her.”

“And what reason would that be?”

Gendry squinted in the sunshine blaring off the fresh snow all around them. “She and Jon are heirs to the Iron Throne.” Lady Sansa’s eyes widened. She froze. Gendry sighed. “I know, my lady. Everything – she’s told me everything.”

“Then you know that is even more reason to be prudent – “

“You could marry Larra off to anyone, as the King in the North’s twin-sister,” Gendry interrupted. “Anyone. They’d choke on their disdain that she was born a bastard but they’d take her, and they’d use the connection to the King to their advantage. But as an heir to the Iron Throne… Once it becomes common knowledge what Jon and Larra are, that they are the key to the Iron Throne, to ruling the Seven Kingdoms –“

“Jon will never abandon the North,” Lady Sansa said fiercely.

“No, you’re probably right about that. But men will rip each other to shreds to claim Larra – for her claim to the Iron Throne,” Gendry said sternly. He hadn’t discussed this with Larra but he was no fool. Neither of them were. “The Northmen won’t care about her claim, but others will. I am sure many of the Knights of the Vale are as honourable as they believe they are, and most of the Stormlords who’ve returned from Essos likely just want to go home… But there will be some who never realised how ambitious they are until Larra provided an opportunity.”

“Why do you suspect the Stormlords and the Knights of the Vale?”

“The Stormlords have spent over twenty years together in Essos. They are united,” Gendry said. “Once they return to the Stormlands, they’ll be a force to be reckoned with. They’ll dominate the Stormlands – and the way Lord Lonmouth looks at Jon and Larra… Besides them, the Vale is the one place untouched by the War of the Five Kings. Their fighting men are well-fed, well-rested and they have strong leadership. If the Knights of the Vale wanted to take King’s Landing, they could do it in a day. All they’d need to legitimise a claim is Larra.”

Lady Sansa frowned at him, her expression shrewd but nettled, as if she had not anticipated his reaction. She did not know him well enough to know that he was as clever and cunning as a direwolf himself. She did not know him well enough to know he would not shrink away in dread because she was a highborn: he would hold his own.

He’d never liked bullies. He would not tolerate being wronged, or insulted. He would not endure having a hand laid on him. He did no such things to others and demanded the same from them. Lady Sansa was no bully yet she was used to giving orders. She was getting used to being minded – she was getting used to people being intimidated by her presence.

“And what of you?” Lady Sansa asked icily.

“I’m a bastard blacksmith,” Gendry said.

“You are Robert Baratheon’s son.”

“I am Robert Baratheon’s son just as much as Jon is Rhaegar’s,” Gendry said quietly, and Lady Sansa’s eyelashes fluttered as she balked. “They sired us. I don’t know what it means to be a Baratheon any more than Jon and Larra know what it means to be a Targaryen.”

“But you have Robert Baratheon’s blood,” Lady Sansa insisted. “You have his looks, his strength – there are no other Baratheons left. You could claim Storm’s End. And from there, with Larra your lady-wife…”

“Lady Sansa… I am a blacksmith,” Gendry said. “If I was to take Storm’s End, I’d first need a following. I may have Robert’s looks and his strength but I am just a bastard from Flea Bottom. Nobles from ancient Houses will never follow me.”

“They follow Jon.”

“May I speak plainly, Lady?”

“Please do.”

“I’m probably one of the only men in Westeros who doesn’t give a fuck about the Iron Throne.”

“Have you no ambition?” Lady Sansa asked, her eyes flashing, as if she was more insulted that Larra would lower herself to marry a man who lacked ambition.

Gendry sighed. “My ambition is to become the very best armourer and swordsmith I can possibly be. I will devote my life to mastering the artistry of Valyrian steel. I wish to constantly improve my skill. And Larra knows it. There’s a reason she’s chosen me.”

“More than one, I imagine,” Lady Sansa said, her voice gentling. She swept her vivid blue eyes over him. “When they learn what Larra is, some will think to kill you to get to her.”

“People have been trying to kill me for years,” Gendry shrugged. He sighed. “I know the dangers in marrying Larra: my eyes are wide open. I know how to take care of myself…but I also know how to take care of Larra. And I think I’m probably the only person Larra will allow to take care of her.”

“She is fiercely independent,” Lady Sansa sighed.

“Experience has made her so,” Gendry said. He shook his head. “I don’t think she’s even aware just how important she is. Have you noticed? She never thinks of herself. She puts everyone above her. It’s as if she believes her only value is in caring for others.”

Lady Sansa’s shoulders drooped slightly, her face falling. She suddenly looked, not an icy Northern she-wolf but a vulnerable girl. “When we were younger, Larra understood that Arya and I would be married off. A bastard daughter could be married off well if not for true-born daughters. Because of us, she had no value. Mother made sure she knew it. Larra feared that my mother would never allow her to remain at Winterfell so she made herself indispensable to our brothers – to Robb especially. She expected to remain at Winterfell all her life, to aid Robb’s wife in ruling the castle and help raise their children… Larra knew she would have no life of her own. She knew there was no point in wanting a life for herself. So she devoted herself to others.”

“That must have been a hard thing to accept,” Gendry said quietly.

“As I said, Larra is a wild creature. She said there was a certain freedom in bastardy.”

“Do you believe that?”

“I believe she’d halfway convinced herself,” Lady Sansa said. “The alternative was too sad – that she would have no husband, no children. That her presence would be tolerated only as long as she remained useful… Even after everything she endured in the True North, she still believes that. They may not be his children, but the Lannister girls are Jon’s wards: Larra is raising them. She is helping to rule this castle, to plan its defence… She is slipping into the only role she would ever have been allowed, rather than carve one out for herself.”

“It’s harder to conquer fear – harder still when you’ve spent a lifetime with it,” Gendry said quietly.

Lady Sansa said sorrowfully, “My mother’s…behaviour toward her taught Larra that no matter what she does, it will never be enough.”

“Larra is extraordinary,” Gendry said earnestly.

“If you are to marry Larra,” Lady Sansa said, turning to him, her expression more wolf-like than he had ever seen her, “you will devote yourself to ensuring she knows that.”

“Does that mean you approve?” Gendry asked her.

Lady Sansa sighed, her eyes calculating as they swept over his face. “Larra knows and trusts herself. She has chosen you.”

“You did not answer my question,” Gendry said, and Lady Sansa’s eyes glinted.

“Larra does not desire my approval nor would she ever seek it,” she said. She gave Gendry a thoughtful look. “You see her. If you desire my approval, for that alone you would have it.”

He didn’t comment on how surprised Lady Sansa looked, as if she had only just realised she approved of him. Likely all he had said to her had altered her opinion of him drastically. He heard voices and shielded his gaze to glance up over the moors. He smiled when he saw two figures approaching, one of them wearing a heavy maester’s chain, their fine beard shining, the other dark and slim in glittering obsidian-embellished leather armour and tall fur-lined boots, fine leather gloves tucked into one of their belts, a Valyrian steel dagger on one hip, her hunting knife nestled at her lower-back. Larra’s dark hair shone in a single, neat, raised plait down her back, her pale hands moving animatedly as she talked with Maester Arys, who had his hands hidden in the billowing folds of his robes. Larra moved easily through the snows, tall and elegant. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes were bright. A Northman considered weather like today the finest of days and enjoyed the kiss of the sun on their skin.

“Good morrow, Lady Stark,” panted the maester, dipping his head respectfully. “Good morrow, Gendry.”

“Where have you come from?” Lady Sansa asked.

“The schoolroom, by way of the moors,” Larra said, her eyes dazzling as she smiled at Gendry. “Some of the Free Folk have joined to play games with some of the smallfolk. I’m surprised you can’t hear the shouts and laughter from here.”

“What kind of games?” Lady Sansa asked.

“Rough ones,” Larra grinned.

“Not rugby?” Lady Sansa asked quickly, grimacing. Larra grinned.

“Yes, rugby,” she said passionately.

“What is rugby?” Gendry asked, and the two women turned to stare at him.

“Do they not play it in the south?” Larra asked.

“It is a game created by the smallfolk,” Lady Sansa said. “And it usually ends up with broken teeth, ears shredded to ribbons and broken bones.”

“Only if it’s a good game,” Larra added, mildly defensive.

“Lady Larra has been translating the rules of the game into High Valyrian,” Maester Arys said.

“No gouging – that’s a big one,” Larra nodded.

“It was rather exhilarating,” Maester Arys said. “How is it you know the game, my lady?”

“Whenever Father’s bannermen gathered at Winterfell, their men drank and played rugby out on the moors while the highborns feasted,” Larra said. “Robb and I used to steal a skin of cider and some cheese scones and go out to cheer them on.”

“Southerners have tourneys: Northerners play rugby,” Maester Arys mused.

“Northerners don’t make sport of war,” Larra said grimly, and Maester Arys made a thoughtful noise.

“What is that you have there, my lord?” he asked Gendry, who blinked at him.

“A saddle – for Rhaegal,” he said.

“It looks enormous,” Lady Sansa remarked.

“Rhaegal will dwarf it,” Gendry assured her. “It’s only a prototype. We’ll make adjustments.”

“We? Where are the saddlers?” Larra asked, approaching him and the reinforced leather saddle that the saddlers had completed.

“Huddled beyond the range of Rhaegal’s fire,” Gendry chuckled. Larra examined the saddle: it had been made to her specifications and design, modelled after the ones she had seen on Syrax and Caraxes in Brandon’s memories. She had drawn studies of those saddles but the one for Rhaegal was far simpler – it was functional, with lots of support for the back and legs and buckled bags for storing things. When all the adjustments had been made for the best fit, the intention was to line the seat with thick furs so that Larra sat snug and warm in the saddle. As Larra said, it was cold up there.

“Well, let us get on with it,” Larra said.

What proceeded was a half hour of Lady Sansa laughing and Maester Arys watching with glinting eyes as Larra and Gendry chased a playful Rhaegal around the moors, the dragon’s chirrups and trills teasing as they bounded through the snow, taunting them as Larra and Gendry approached, only to silently spread their wings and shoot upwards, twirling through the air to land gracefully mere metres away.

“You’re laughing at us!” Larra exclaimed indignantly, red-faced and panting from the exertion as Rhaegal shook their great head, their entire body shuddering in its wake. Rhaegal chirped and snorted then cooed gently to her, crooning and singing – almost as if in apology for teasing her. Rhaegal lowered their great head and nuzzled Larra’s entire body affectionately. Larra smiled softly and pressed a hand to the enormous muzzle, resting her head against Rhaegal’s nose, feeling their heat against her skin almost like a brand. She sighed, murmuring to Rhaegal, “I know you are no pet, nor beast of burden. You are so much more than a mount. But it cannot be comfortable for you to have me grabbing onto your spines. And it is dangerous for me to rely only upon my own strength to cling to you and remain on your back.” Rhaegal grumbled without heat, snorting delicately. Hot air billowed around her and warmed the tip of her nose. “Let us fit the saddle and we shall make it so comfortable for you, you will not know it is there.”

Rhaegal made a thoughtful, considering noise. Their molten copper eyes gazed at Larra and finally, the tremendous dragon relented. They shuffled their wings, tucking them in close, and lowered their body to the earth. Larra glanced shrewdly at Rhaegal, anticipating that the dragon would dart off again or bump Gendry away into the snow, as they had before. This time, though, Rhaegal remained still – eerily still, in fact, as if they were holding their breath while Larra helped Gendry lift the enormous, heavy saddle and manoeuvred it in place.

“You carried this all the way from the castle?” Larra grunted, as Gendry threaded straps through buckles and tightened them, adjusting the saddle, feeling for gaps and assessing the fit.

“I did,” Gendry said, and Larra stared at him in amazement. She was so used to his gentleness that she often forgot his strength. “You’ll need to sit the saddle. Your weight will affect the fit.” He cast a sidelong glance at her, adding quietly, “Though not by much.”

Larra dug her elbow into his ribs. She was putting weight on, steadily, and was nowhere near as deathly thin as she had been when she had arrived at Winterfell. Gendry grinned at her and looped an arm around her shoulders, drawing her close and tucking her neck in the crook of his elbow, giving her a gentle kiss.

“They are bonded deeply, it would seem,” Maester Arys intoned to Lady Sansa. Sansa was unsure whether the maester meant Larra and Gendry or Larra and Rhaegal. Either was true.

“Rhaegal reminds me of Larra,” Sansa replied, watching Gendry and Larra working together to fit and adjust the saddle on Rhaegal’s back. “She was always playful and clever. She liked to tease us.” She glanced at the maester. “I wonder that you and the other maesters do not crowd Rhaegal every time they appear and make copious notes about their appearance and habits.”

“If any dared, I am sure they would be eager to fill volumes,” Maester Arys said, eyes glinting with good humour. “As it is, Rhaegal remains in the vicinity of Winterfell so infrequently – and then only comes to whisk Lady Larra away for hours on end – that it is quite impossible.”

“I am not sure Larra would agree to you making studies of Rhaegal, anyway,” Sansa said thoughtfully.

“Why is that, my lady?”

Sansa stared at the magnificent dragon Larra was currently clambering all over, cooing and praising them, laughing when they rustled their wings threateningly. “When people see Rhaegal, they think of flight and flames. They think of power. The power to destroy and dominate.”

“Targaryens destroyed and dominated the Seven Kingdoms for centuries,” Maester Arys mused.

“Yes. That is the Targaryens’ legacy,” Sansa said. She gazed thoughtfully at Rhaegal. “As I said, most think of dragons and associate them with destruction and conquest. When Larra looks at Rhaegal, she sees a rare creature that is unique in the world. Dragons were once extinct: Larra knows how truly precious Rhaegal is, that they exist in the world at all… To study a thing is to learn its strengths – and its weaknesses. I do not believe Larra would like for anyone to understand Rhaegal’s weaknesses. If Rhaegal is left to thrive, it is possible that dragons may return to the world.”

“Dragons have not soared the skies in number since before the Dance of Dragons,” Maester Arys said. “King Viserys the First’s rule saw the height of dragon numbers since the Doom.”

“Yes,” Lady Sansa sighed. “I know my sister – her strengths and her weaknesses. As a girl she loved animals. She once nursed an injured dire-eagle back to health, setting its wing, helping it re-learn how to fly, setting it loose into the wild once again… She reared Last Shadow from a pup: see how her family grows.” She indicated the direwolf pack, lounging in the snow, playing, gnawing at the bones of the aurochs.

“Do you imagine Lady Larra wishes the same for Rhaegal?” Maester Arys said.

“I think Larra would be absolutely devastated if the opportunity to breed more dragons into the world was lost,” Sansa said honestly. “Not for the sake of power, you understand – for themselves alone.”

“And yet there is inherent risk to dragons taking to the skies once more,” Maester Arys asked, with a gentle sigh, “magnificent though they may be.”

“You would not be alone in voicing such an opinion,” Lady Sansa said. She sighed. “Larra says wild animals are true to their nature. Unless hungry or threatened, they are content to live and let live. What would dragons be if they were left to their own devices, untethered to anyone who would use them for their own gains?”

“I imagine we are unlikely to discover the answer to that question,” Maester Arys sighed almost wistfully.

“I must return to the castle and my chores,” Sansa said. “Will you join me on the walk back, Maester, or are you content here?”

“I shall join you, my lady,” Maester Arys said. “Is there some task I may assist you with?”

“Not at present, I thank you,” Lady Sansa said politely. “I am to consult with some ladies and their finest seamstresses.”

“Then I shall return to the Maester’s Tower,” Maester Arys said, bowing politely. They made their way back to the castle, leaving Larra and Gendry to wrestle with a dragon.


“This is your revenge, is it?” Larra grumbled, stubbing her toe and wincing. She stumbled. Eyes bound with a blindfold, she grimaced. “You shall allow the marriage but torture me for the inconvenience it causes you.”

“A dress-fitting is hardly torture.”

“I am blinded and being stuck with sharp objects,” Larra said coolly. “What would you call it?” Sansa ignored her. “Sansa!”

“Keep the blindfold on!” Sansa scolded.

“If I am not to fall and break my teeth upon the flagstones, I suggest you give me a hand,” Larra groused, blind to everything about her. The fine hairs on the back of her neck were prickled with awareness, however: Sansa’s chamber was filled with seamstresses. “Why must I remain blindfolded? ‘Tis only muslin, I can feel it. I need not be blindfolded for this.”

“I do not wish for you to see any part of the gown until it is complete,” Sansa said patiently.

“I do not need a new gown –“

“You are a bride, Larra,” Sansa said firmly. “It is a special occasion.”

“It need not be. I told you already – and at great length. You and Jon and Arya witnessing us before the heart tree is all that I desire,” Larra said.

“You’re twin-sister to the King in the North. It will not suffice,” Sansa said. Larra grumbled. Sansa told her, “You keep saying that people need something to look forward to. A royal wedding is just that.”

“I am not royal!” Larra protested. She suppressed the urge to shiver and snatch her limbs away as she felt fingertips pinching at folds of coarse fabric. “Let people have a game of rugby and a play and a dance and leave me out of it. I’ve no wish to be a spectacle.”

“That is out of your hands, I am afraid,” Sansa said, smirking to herself. “You forfeited that right when you claimed Rhaegal.” Larra sighed heavily.

“I do not need a new gown, Sansa,” she said quietly, sounding uncomfortable. “What use have I for a bride’s gown I shall wear but once?”

“It shan’t be merely a bride’s gown,” Sansa assured her. “This gown, you will have the rest of your life.”

“Not if it is white,” Larra said, and in spite of the blindfold, Sansa saw her nose crinkle. “White is so dull. Not to mention impractical.”

“It is not white,” Sansa smiled. “Nor would I ever allow one of your gowns to be dull.”

Larra sighed again. “I trust your creativity,” she acquiesced grudgingly. “But why must it be kept secret from me?”

“Because it is my gift to you,” Sansa said. “I wish you to see the gown in all its magnificence.”

Sansa saw Larra shiver. “I do not need magnificence, Sansa,” she said awkwardly.

“Yet you shall have it regardless. You are the King’s twin-sister, after all.”

“Marrying a blacksmith,” Larra said, shaking her head. All about her, seamstresses measured and pinned muslin in place. Larra did a wonderful job of not flinching every time someone touched her. Sansa could barely tolerate it even without a blindfold. “Am I to meet Gendry before the weirwood in his darned linens?”

“Do not worry about that,” Sansa smiled, stitching away steadily. She had commissioned tailors to create a wardrobe for Gendry worthy of his status as the King’s brother-by-law – and had sat in discussion with embroiderers about his sigil. He was a blacksmith, and a bastard, yes, but he was a Baratheon bastard. If Jon could invert Father’s sigil – a white wolf on a grey background, rather than the Stark grey wolf on a field of snow – then Gendry had the right to claim the Baratheon coat of arms. A black stag, uncrowned, upon a golden field was the original Baratheon sigil. If he wished, Gendry could claim a golden stag upon a field of black as his sigil. Yet Sansa knew Gendry had no desire to claim it. Besides, Arya had said that a bull would be more appropriate – it had been Gendry’s nickname when they first met. He had the strength of a bull, too – the strength, the stubbornness and the virility. Yet bulls were gentle unless provoked – as all animals were. Much like Gendry himself – fiercely strong in body yet calm by nature.

Sansa stitched away and watched the seamstresses work. She had shared her ideas for the design of the gown with the seamstresses and the embroiderers. This first session was to measure the muslin to create a mock-up so that they knew how much of the expensive fabrics they might need. Only when everything was fitted to perfection would they make the first cut in the expensive textiles imported from Essos, gifted by Lord Manderly. Sansa desired no waste anything: she knew Larra would be mortified by the implied expense of the fabric alone. But it would be worth it.

She intended this gown to last a lifetime. And it must be fit for a queen.

Larra sighed. “Will you tell me what it is I am being fitted for? It seems like an awful lot of pins,” she said.

“The gown is designed in two separate pieces,” Sansa told her. “A fitted cote-hardie that you may wear alone if you wish, and an overdress for warmth.”

“A fitted cote-hardie?” Larra frowned. “I am still putting on weight since my return. I shall not long fit it.”

“I have asked the seamstresses to add some clever panels that may be folded and buttoned away so that the gown may be adjusted,” Sansa said.

“You have thought of everything,” Larra grumbled, and Sansa smiled. She grinned when Larra said, “I think it highly unfair that you are torturing me while Arya remains unscathed. Let her stand here and be pinched and stuck with pins – that can be her bride-gift to me.”

“Arya shall have new gowns too,” Sansa smiled. “She sat with me while I met with the seamstresses and embroiderers, you know. Some of the design for your gown was her idea. It was… I always remember Arya as fierce. I’d forgotten she used to look up to you. And you always liked your frocks. But the look in her eyes when she ran her fingers over the fabrics… I thought she might weep.”

“She lived so long in one set of clothes, I imagine she appreciated the fabrics for what they could be. I would not be surprised if she allowed you to nurture a love of fashion in her,” Larra said. Sansa saw her smile and they both laughed.

“Poor Septa Mordane – she tried so valiantly to turn Arya into a lady,” Sansa said, her eyes stinging.

“Your mother wished for Arya to be a southern lady,” Larra said, and Sansa smiled sadly. “Arya has always been of the North. She is a lady in such a way that only Northmen could ever appreciate.” Larra sighed softly. “Your mother used to sit with you both, designing your new dresses.”

“She did,” Sansa said quietly, and Larra sighed.

“That is where she always shall be,” Larra said.

“What do you mean?”

For a long moment, Larra remained silent. Then, softly and sadly, she said, “She is in every new gown you will ever design. Every single stitch you create. That is where you will always find her.”

Sansa’s eyes burned and she wiped them on an embroidered handkerchief. For a long moment, she fought the burning in her eyes, her throat, the desire to weep. Her gowns were black, or shades of richest grey: she was officially in mourning. She was finally allowed to formally mourn. Yet she had wept too often and too long. She had resolved never to weep for her family again: they were gone, and her tears would not bring them back. Yet Larra’s words had touched her heart where it ached, and soothed her.

“I wish you had such memories of your own mother to hold onto,” Sansa said honestly.

After a little while, Larra told her, “I have memories, not of Lyanna…but of a woman as close to a mother as I ever had.” That woman, Sansa knew, was not Lady Catelyn. Larra did not say more. She became quiet and Sansa sat with her embroidery, glad of the small fire in the hearth keeping her fingers warm. She glanced up occasionally, wondering whether Larra had learned to sleep standing up. She was still as any statue in the Sept. It was a predatory stillness, Sansa realised. A stillness Larra had learned to better hunt her prey.

Larra was alert as any sentry, Sansa realised. She was on her guard.

“Thank you,” she told the seamstresses, when they had finished their work and removed the muslin mock-up from Larra. “Please keep me informed of your progress.”

“You are welcome to the workroom, my lady, at any time,” the head seamstress curtseyed.

“I shall stop in to see how things are coming along,” Sansa vowed. The gown had to be perfect: she would oversee its completion personally and ensure there was no dithering. Larra had no wish to delay her wedding, though she did not seem particularly interested in the ceremony itself. All Larra had requested was a breakfast with her family after a dawn ceremony, with heavy fruitcake and an old bottle of port wine to share after supper. She and Sansa had discussed whether they could afford to treat everyone in the castle to something – and decided upon sweet buns of dough enriched with butter, milk, nuts and dried fruits. The raisins and dates would only last so long. The kitchen could make up thousands of the buns within hours and the making of them involved lots of skills for the younger kitchen servants to practise.

“May I step down now?” Larra asked.

“Yes, you may,” Sansa told her. Larra snatched the blindfold off in a heartbeat, rubbing her face. “Will you stay and sit with me?”

“Bran has asked me to join him in his chamber,” Larra said, her eyes sparkling. “And then I must visit the children in the schoolroom.”

“What shall Brandon show you this time?” Sansa asked curiously. Larra had been sitting with Bran rather frequently – always joined by Daenerys Targaryen. Sansa had noticed that Larra was no longer flagrantly hostile toward Lady Targaryen, but they were far from friendly.

“Debauchery, he promised,” Larra said. “The last time he took us diving, we witnessed two royal hunts. One for venison, the other for crabmeat.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a royal crab hunt,” Sansa laughed softly.

“Otherwise known as the War for the Stepstones,” Larra smiled. “I learned a lot about strategy. Laenor Velaryon surprised me – the Rogue Prince didn’t.”

“Was he as heroic and monstrous as the histories claim?”

“More so,” Larra smirked. “In fact, he’s probably the only person in the entire Dance whose true nature was recorded with any accuracy. It is uniquely frustrating to realise how warped the truth has become.”

“One wonders how history will remember us,” Sansa murmured.

“Ser Jaime told me people believe I may shift my form at will into that of a monstrous black direwolf. That Bran rode upon my back as one would a horse, as we traversed the True North,” Larra said. She sighed wistfully, looking miserable.

“Yes. Some say similar of Jon – that he rode into battle upon Ghost,” Sansa said, smiling. She sighed. “They said the same of Robb, too. They claimed he and his soldiers shifted into wolves and tore apart the Lannister armies.”

“Perhaps people will one day believe Robb escaped the slaughter and transformed into a great grey wolf that mauled the guards so that he could slip into the kitchens and poison their wine,” Larra mused, her tone sorrowful. “And like a grey mist he disappeared into the woods, never to be seen again…”

“They butchered Grey Wind,” Sansa said softly. “Even that part of Robb is gone.” She sniffed and forced a smile. “I’d like to see your new paintings when you finish them.”

Ever since Brandon had started taking Larra diving into the Dance of Dragons, she had produced copious amounts of watercolour paintings, recording everything she glimpsed, from portraits of beautiful, tragic queens to glimpses of tourney jousts, an anxious young lady-in-waiting forced into her mother’s gown to seduce a grieving king, confrontations over dragon-eggs on a sinuous bridge choked with fog, a king carving out a miniature city, attempting to breathe life into that which had been lost, funeral pyres and bridal processions and tremendous dragon-skulls illuminated at an altar. Larra saved the ones of elegant ladies for Sansa to peruse: Larra knew Sansa appreciated the fashions. She had taken inspiration for Arya’s new gown from a simple, elegant pale-blue one Lady Alicent Hightower had worn to the Heir’s Tourney.

A knock echoed on the door and Sansa glanced over sharply as it swung open without invitation. Larra glanced over at the pretty brown-eyed sentry. He looked pink-cheeked and more flustered than usual.

“M’ladies – apologies – you’re needed in the Great Hall,” he blurted.

“Whatever for?” Sansa asked.

“I’m not too sure m’self, m’lady,” he said apologetically. “I was only sent to fetch ye. Something about men approaching.”

“From the north or south?” Larra asked sharply.

“They were spotted travelling along the Kingsroad from the south, m’lady,” the guard said, and Larra visibly relaxed.

“More men to fight?” Sansa said. She glanced at Larra. “Lady Targaryen’s Unsullied have finally found their way through the snows.”

They had as yet heard no word of the Unsullied, nor of Lady Targaryen’s great horde. Larra wondered whether their continued absence contributed to Lady Targaryen’s increasingly sour and paranoid moods. With each passing day, and her armies’ continued absence, Lady Targaryen increasingly believed she had been betrayed. So claimed Lord Tyrion, with whom Larra played cyvasse almost daily.

Brandon had yet to share any insight into the doings of the Unsullied or Dothraki: Larra made a note to ask him. They needed all the men they could get: they needed to best utilise every sword and spear they had. And that meant accounting for every man and where they would be placed to best defend Winterfell.

The brown-eyed guard skittered before them, obviously anxious, and Sansa frowned, glancing at Larra. As they followed the guard, she asked Larra, “Am I intimidating?”

Larra tilted her head thoughtfully at Sansa. She didn’t immediately start laughing, which was something. “I’d say unapproachable, more than intimidating.”

Sansa blinked. “Unapproachable?”

“Yes. You’re very guarded. With good reason – but it does make it harder for people to be comfortable about you,” Larra said honestly. “It is the difference between a lapdog and a hunting hound: you are always on edge, therefore those around you will be, too.”

Sansa frowned. “That is not a good thing.”

“You’re healing. You’ve becoming more confident and more comfortable since I relieved Littlefinger of his head,” Larra said gently. “Anyway, Jon more than makes up for your prickliness. You two make a balanced pairing.”

Prickliness? “We do not always agree but we are working out how to work together to lead the North,” Sansa mused.

“You mean arguing with Jon in private then presenting a picture of unity to the bannermen in public.”

“That’s it, exactly,” Sansa said, with a smile. “Though I do wish I won more of the arguments.”

“Your time will come,” Larra said. “War is what Jon was raised for.”

“But not politics.”

“He has to have some political savvy to have survived this long,” Larra said thoughtfully. “But he has no experience with the south. That’s when he’ll look to you for advice.”

“It is not infallible.”

“What do you mean?”

“We decided upon our strategy but in hindsight it was poor judgement to allow Lady Targaryen to know we consider her our enemy,” Sansa sighed heavily.

“That’s oversimplifying,” Larra said. “We decided you would court and coax her while I distracted her from Jon, nurturing her ire.”

“As I said…it was perhaps not the wisest strategy,” Sansa said. “It was not sustainable.”

“Of course it is.”

“Yet you seem to have changed your mind about it,” Sansa said, and Larra glanced sharply at her.

“I haven’t. Not truly,” Larra said, sighing. “I have merely allowed someone else to take my place.”

“Who?”

“Bran.”

“What do you mean?”

“The whole reason he keeps inviting us to the Dance. He is using his gifts to lure her, to draw all her attention away from Jon and from me,” Larra said quietly. “Lord Brynden warned that it is beautiful beneath the sea but if you stay too long, you will drown.”

Sansa frowned, thinking. “And that is Bran’s intent, to drown her?”

“He invited us to dive into the Dance when I asked whether Lady Targaryen’s path could be altered. He uses every opportunity to teach her,” Larra said, keeping stride with Sansa as the guard hurried before them. “Ultimately, the Dance of the Dragons was about the Targaryen family self-destructing. Their own strength became the tool of their unmaking. The dragons were their own undoing.”

“And you believe that Lady Targaryen may follow the same fate?”

“She is arrogant in the way the early Targaryens were – believing that the dragons make her closer to a god than a girl,” Larra said. “I believe her pride – her arrogance – will be her undoing. I just hope that Drogon and Viserion are not the cost that she must pay for it.”

“And if they are?”

“Then we must endure with the shame that, if not for human arrogance, the dragons may have returned to the world once again,” Larra said quietly, and Sansa thought back to her conversation with Maester Arys. She smiled to herself: she did know Larra.

“You are not afraid?”

“Of what?”

“That dragons may return to the world in number?” Sansa asked.

“At the height of its power after the Doom, House Targaryen was bonded with seventeen dragons,” Larra said slowly. “It took over a century to achieve even that – and most of it in peacetime under the Conciliator’s reign.”

“Why were so few dragons hatched?” Sansa asked. There were few enough texts and scrolls on dragonlore to offer much insight on the subject: Sansa had checked. No more than what Arya had so greedily consumed as a girl, obsessed with the idea of dragons.

“I imagine there is something in the fact that dragon lifespans are measured in centuries rather than decades,” Larra mused. “Perhaps they are like dire-eagles – fewer hatchlings means more food, stronger offspring, a greater chance of survival. And if too many dragons are hatched, there would be the inherent risk of their source of prey being overhunted.”

“They would die out from starvation,” Sansa said.

“Or from hunting each other,” Larra said darkly. “Some animals hunt their own kind when prey is scarce. Only the strongest and healthiest would survive to dominate, and reproduce. Their offspring would have a greater chance of surviving because the competition for food and territory has already been settled.”

“I cannot imagine how the Valyrians maintained such a vast number of dragons,” Sansa said, suppressing a shiver. “How many dragons did they have?”

“There were two-score families that vied for control of the Freehold at its height but it is unknown whether each of those families boasted dragons,” Larra said. “When Valyria clashed with Prince Garin of the Rhoynar, they sent over three hundred dragonriders to war.”

“Over three hundred dragons?” Sansa breathed, horror-struck.

“Garin lost,” Larra said bluntly. “Princess Nymeria led the survivors to Dorne in ten thousand ships before the Valyrians could arrive to enslave them.”

“And Nymeria’s War began.”

“You remember your lessons.”

“More and more I find myself interested in the histories.”

“Be wary of them, Sansa. Most records contain only the merest whisper of truth buried beneath hearsay and lies,” Larra murmured, sighing. “Until the wolf learns to write, history will be written by the hunter.”

“Why is Bran practising his handwriting?” Sansa asked. They continued through the bustling thoroughfares, almost everyone who caught their eye stopping to bow or curtsey or wave a hand and give a smile in greeting, busy about their work – weaving baskets, fletching arrows, sewing tunics.

“He wishes to create books. I told him, he should start by transcribing everything Baelor burned, no matter how banal,” Larra said, and Sansa smiled. “It is the principle of the thing.”

“You and your books. After what Brandon has shown you, I’m surprised you put as much stock in books as you once did,” Sansa said.

“Histories are notoriously unreliable,” Larra said. “But histories are not all that are recorded. Thankfully.”

“My lady…” A good-looking man with olive skin and neatly-groomed dark hair and beard pushed away from the wall he had been idling against. He was dressed as the formerly-exiled Stormlords were – in a mixture of Essosi and Westerosi garments, more specifically, wearing a fur-lined doublet of thick, quilted velvet with a richly embroidered trim, intricately patterned, vibrantly-coloured sashes knotted intricately about his waist where multiple belts were buckled, from which dangled small pouches and tools that tinkled against each other with every movement. He wore a gorget and pauldrons and under both arms were tucked vicious daggers. He smiled easily as Sansa drew up short, eyeing him warily, her gaze dipping to the intricate hilts of his daggers poking out from under his arms. “Apologies.” He smiled charmingly, his voice low and soft. He glanced at Larra, whose amethyst eyes were narrowed shrewdly. “May I have a moment of your time?”

“Exactly one: we are due in the Great Hall,” Larra said sternly.

“I’ll not detain you; if I can walk with you,” he suggested.

“Keep up,” Larra said, striding on ahead, and Sansa glanced at the guard. He kept pace with her, while Larra strode ahead. Sometimes, Sansa was happy to let Larra take the lead. The man had danger written all over him, no matter how handsome his smile and gentle his voice. “Your name, ser?”

“Not a ser, my lady,” he said. “My name is Nestor Maegos.”

“You are one of Lord Lonmouth’s men,” Larra said.

“I’m many things, Lady,” he answered.

“You brought a pretty wife with you, I recall,” Larra said, and Sansa gazed at the back of her head, the links of her long braid glistening as they passed lit torches. As Larra prowled the corridors, Sansa watched her elegant, predatory gait, the way she held her shoulders. With the braid dangling loose down her back, Sansa was reminded of Last Shadow’s long tail.

“Pallas,” Nestor said. He glanced over his shoulder at Sansa before turning back to Larra. “You don’t forget a face, my lady.”

“I do not,” Larra confirmed, her tone rather dark. “How can we help you, Nestor?”

“It is I who wishes to offer you help, Lady.”

“How so?”

“I’m a surgeon, my lady.”

“We have maesters enough, Ser,” Sansa spoke up.

“Maesters aren’t surgeons, my lady,” he contested. “They’re little more than paper-mites.”

“You will not disparage the work of our maesters,” Sansa warned coolly.

“They’ve served you well, I know. Your brother,” Nestor said. “The one in the chair. He’s a marvel. The one who tended him was truly gifted. Maesters serve their purpose, to guide and advise you. But they study too many things and far too broadly to be experts at anything.”

Everything before the word ‘but’…

“And you consider yourself an expert?” Larra asked, her tone soft – as if she was baiting a trap.

“More so than your maesters,” Nestor said, with easy confidence. “I wish to propose that you allow me to train apprentice surgeons. You’ve hundreds of thousands of people living here in this castle and barely more than two-score men all too focused on reading ancient scrolls and counting coppers to be of any real use when it comes to helping the sick and wounded. And when this war comes, you’ll need people who know how to treat the survivors.”

“You would train surgeons specifically to treat battle wounds?” Sansa asked, surprised.

“Learning the theory of healing is one thing. It takes a person with a certain kind of nature to be able to handle themselves in such highly pressured situations as dealing with amputations and the like,” Larra said, frowning. “Maester Luwin said so.”

“As I said, you’ve hundreds of thousands of people here at Winterfell and just shy of fifty maesters with the desire or know-how to treat their illnesses and injuries,” Nestor said, and Sansa glanced at Larra, reluctant to admit that he was right. Because admitting it meant that they had been failing to do their duty to their people, to provide care.

“You want us to allow your trainee surgeons to practise their skills on our people?” Sansa asked, horrified.

“You mistake me, Lady. It would do too much harm to either to allow such a thing. Experience and confidence must be nurtured as much as the acquisition of knowledge,” Nestor said, his tone a touch provocative, almost flirtatious – as if he rarely took anything too seriously. “I’ve taught before. I always begin with theory – with anatomy and botany and techniques – then have my students watch as I perform operations so they may see theory in action. It quickly weeds out those unsuited. It’s also how they learn that things rarely go as described in books. They have to learn how to think on their feet. When they’re ready, I supervise my students during their first operations.”

“And how long does it take to train someone as a surgeon like you?” Sansa asked.

“There are no surgeons like me,” Nestor said, his eyes glinting, smile arrogant. “Years, to be able to do some of what I can do. But I can teach people what you need them to know – to stitch wounds and set bones, amputate cleanly, assess sickness and prepare remedies.”

“And who would you conscript to be your students?” Sansa asked.

“Anyone with a desire to learn,” Nestor said.

“You will find few amongst trained knights and warriors who will set down their sword in favour of a needle, Ser,” Sansa warned him.

“There’s more in Winterfell than highborns, Lady Stark,” Nestor answered with a shrug.

“And how much would you charge for this service?” Larra asked.

“I’m a guest in your home, my lady,” Nestor said, “eating your food, warming myself beside your hearth. All without giving anything in return.”

“As is your right as a guest under this roof,” Larra said, taken aback. Nestor’s smile was subtle but warm.

“Still, I wish to contribute,” Nestor said. Larra gazed at him appraisingly. Suddenly, she smirked.

“You’re bored.”

“The days are long, it’s true,” Nestor said. “I rebel against stagnation.” Larra chuckled, giving him another appraising look.

“I fear you will be frustrated by the limits on our resources, Ser,” she said earnestly. “Winterfell is no port city. We use what we have access to, as we always have.”

“Improvisation’s the best way to learn,” Nestor said, shrugging, and they strode through an antechamber leading into the Great Hall. “Give me leave, Lady, and I’ll train a host of surgeons the best the North has ever seen.”

They entered the Great Hall, which was eerily quiet despite the hour. Pale sunlight sluiced through the smoky air, the great hearth crackling away merrily, and a great number of men were warming themselves beside it, shoulders sagging in relief as they warmed their hands, serving girls offering trenchers of stew, bread and salt.

Sansa’s breath hitched in her throat as her eyes danced over the men, all of whom wore scarred leather armour and faded overcoats of salt-stained, waxed cloth. Standing close to the high table… It could not be.

Larra snarled. Swift as a direwolf, she pounced.

“Larra?” a familiar voice cried in bewilderment – and a howl of pain rang through the hall. A man with shaggy hair crumpled at Larra’s feet, a hand clamped over his nose as blood blossomed. All around him, the Ironborn chuckled, grinning.

Larra froze as the man on the floor groaned and sat up, blinking quickly. He gasped and gazed up. Sansa strode past the brown-eyed guard standing agape, unsure what to do – restrain Larra or the man bloodied on the floor? Nestor Maegos stood with raised eyebrows, as if mildly entertained by the Northern kiss Larra had just given Theon Greyjoy.

Sansa caught her sister’s expression, at once mutinous and wrathful yet filled with anguish and shame – shame that she had lashed out so viciously.

Theon did not see Sansa. He seemed unable to tear his gaze from Larra.

The last time they had seen each other, Sansa recalled… The last time they had seen each other, Larra and the boys had been Theon’s prisoners. He had hunted them with Ironborn and with hounds.

He had betrayed them.

Larra stood, bristling, over Theon. Sansa could hear her panting for breath – whether from rage or from the memory of fear, she could not say. But guilt, shame, sadness and understanding flickered across Larra’s face as her vivid purple eyes gazed unseeingly at Theon, shining with unshed tears.

Beyond Theon, a plain-featured woman in weathered armour emblazoned with the kraken of House Greyjoy stood smirking. She carried a sword and axe and men stood gathered behind her.

Larra blinked fiercely and seemed to catch her breath. Her expression gentled and remorse coloured it. She reached out her hand. Theon glanced at it, then back up at Larra’s face. Slowly, he clasped hands with hers: she pulled him to his feet. Theon stood before her, bleeding, but Sansa doubted he even felt the hot blood dripping over his lips. He stared at Larra, who stared back. His expression flickered with intense emotion. Larra seemed able to read it: her eyes shimmered, her shoulders relaxed, and before anyone could move, she had thrown her arms around Theon’s neck, embracing him as fiercely as she had ever embraced Sansa or Jon or Arya. Sansa heard Larra’s voice but could not hear what she had whispered to Theon, down whose face tears were freely falling as the two parted.

Larra turned to Nestor Maegos, indicating his broken nose. “You can start now.”

Notes:

I think Larra handled Theon’s reappearance rather well! A good old Northern kiss – a head-butt! Also, introducing Nestor sets things up for the future.

Chapter 56: The Heart Tree

Notes:

You’ve been waiting for this…

I’ve just realised that Larra’s favourite colour – purple – is made up of red (Targaryens) and blue (Starks). Completely unintentional – I used purple for Larra because of flowering heather found in Northern meadows and her eyes!
Millie Brady (Aethelflaed from The Last Kingdom) would make an excellent adult-Arya.

If anyone wants to see the images that inspired Larra’s wedding gown, they’re available on my Pinterest board – ‘Larra Snow – Valyrian Steel’ under the section ‘Larra’s Wedding Dress’. The design comes from someone’s stunning artwork turning Sansa’s coronation gown into a Burgundian-style dress, as well as Bernadette Banner’s recreation of a 1400s cotehardie (the same design used by the designer for Alicent’s famous green dress). The one thing I knew I wanted to usurp for Larra’s gown was the sleeves from Sansa’s coronation-gown!

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

56

The Heart Tree


The last of the stars glittered with stubborn brilliance as dawn approached, the velvety midnight-blue of the endless sky fading gently to a decadent purple with whispers of red streaking past an enormous full-moon hanging low. A howling wind and snowstorm had died out during the night and a breathless calm had settled over the moors, the fresh snow gleaming blue in the moonlight.

As Larra walked the corridors and halls of Winterfell, she heard a sound that reminded her of the wind caressing its fingertips over the snow on the endless ice-meadows. Whispers flowing together in an endless sigh. Dawn came late yet the castle did not stay idle in the darkness: people had been awake and working for hours. Now they stopped. For her. They stopped and gathered to catch a glimpse of her as she made her way through the castle to the godswood. The corridors and halls, the yards and walkways, the battlements, were crammed with people.

Torchlight flickered and people lining the corridors and halls sighed in awe, smiling to themselves, curtseying or bowing, eyes sparkling from the sight of her. The torchlight glittered off the lining of her trailing sleeves and glistened off her unbound curls, tumbling riotously to her bottom. Behind her, as her bridesmaids, Sansa and Arya had gathered the hems of her skirts to prevent them staining or catching.

Her sisters looked beautiful. Sansa had shed her mourning black in favour of a gown of strong silver-grey, the fabric shimmering subtly and patterned with falling leaves. The structure of the high-necked bodice echoed the leather armour Sansa had recently taken to wearing, the edges of each interwoven strip of fabric glittering with tiny glass beads, each of the strips embroidered with interlocking circles – not a maester’s chain but the chain Sansa wore. Her bodice shimmered and sparkled, reminding Larra of chainmail. Her sleeves were close-fitting, the wrists trimmed with a narrow border of silver fur, with trailing over-sleeves of icy grey silk lined with floaty silver organza trimmed with tiny glass beads, shimmering and gleaming in the torchlight, and above the fur-trimmed neckline, a silk sash of the same icy grey was knotted around her throat, embroidered with two racing direwolves. She wore a short cape about her shoulders, lined with silver fur, the velvet quilted to resemble stylised fur, as on the Stark sigil. Her hair was drawn away from her face by two braids, gathered in a dainty twist and decorated with a freshly-picked white hellebore rose, the rest of her hair falling loose to her waist. Today, if only for a few hours, Sansa was a girl again: she wore her hair simply, girlishly. Her gown was beautiful – neither overtly feminine nor masculine but a beautiful melding of both. It was Sansa. Sansa wore her needles and she wore her wolves: this was a gown of strength.

Beside her, Arya had never looked prettier. Her gown, made of the same fabric as Sansa’s, was ice-blue, exquisitely embroidered and beaded from shoulders to hem with jagged, irregular lines, so that she shimmered and sparkled with every movement, reminding Larra so vividly of fissures cracking across the surface of a frozen lake. The beauty of the shimmering surface only hinted at the lethal danger beneath. As Sansa did, Arya wore a fur-lined cape, which glistened with embroidery – the design of her Braavosi sword in miniature, repeated over and over again. Arya’s hair having grown out, she now wore it as Sansa did – braided away from her face, decorated with a white hellebore rose, the dark locks falling just past her shoulders. It was the first time she had worn a gown – a lady’s gown, not a girl’s. She looked beautiful, the warmth in her grey eyes a rarity.

It had been a quiet, sombre moment when Arya accepted the gown from Sansa. Claiming the gown had meant accepting that the past was behind them, that none of them were children any longer, that they were now entering different phases of their lives. Arya was no longer a wretch traversing the wilds, any more than Larra was. The instincts were still there, though – Larra understood Arya in a way Sansa never could. Arya might put on the dress, but she would always be anxious without Needle within reach. Arya would always be restless. Sansa was confident in her gowns – they were her armour, as they had always been. Her weapon and her protection. For Arya, they were a remnant of the past she had thought lost to her: to Arya, accepting the gown meant reluctantly allowing even the merest spark of hope that the tragedies of her past were just that – in her past. That she no longer needed Needle. That she no longer needed disguise and armour herself.

That she could be Arya Stark of Winterfell once again.

The gathered crowds whispered and sighed, smiling at each other, jostling for a closer look. They admired Lady Stark and stared openly at Lady Arya in her gown, struck by her prettiness. But they were awestruck by the She-Wolf.

Before her sisters strode Lady Larra, tall and regal. Everyone at Winterfell was familiar with Lady Larra yet none of them had ever seen her like this. She wore her hair down for the first time, gleaming treacle curls bouncing to her bottom, dainty twists gathered at the back of her head and pinned in place with red weirwood leaves, dainty sprigs of fern and white hellebores.

Her sleeveless wool overdress was neither ice-blue nor silver but the rich dark grey of thunderclouds, the hem of the trailing skirts trimmed with gleaming black velvet, as was the wide neckline, a thick band around the shoulders that dipped to a point at the waist: a thin panel of the same black velvet fell from the waist to the hem, all trimmed with tiny beads of obsidian and silver embroidery that caught the light beautifully with every movement. A belt of silver filigree weirwood-leaves, interlinked with intricate spirals, was fastened around her waist. The wide neckline of the overdress revealed the vibrant ruby-red fabric of the cotehardie beneath and the clasps of silver filigree weirwood leaves fastening the bodice. Close-fitting red sleeves were fastened at the wrist with hidden buttons, clasps of silver spiral filigree added as purely decorative. Beneath the grey overdress, shown off by the wide neckline and by the skirts that trailed beneath the wool overdress, the cotehardie was made of the same fabric as Sansa and Arya’s gowns, this time dyed a vivid, rich ruby-red. The elaborate, billowing oversleeves of the cotehardie had been threaded through the arm-holes of the woollen overdress and now trailed behind Larra as she walked: they were lined with the same silver as Sansa’s gown and both the sleeves and lining were elaborately embroidered from elbow to hem with silk threads and tiny glass beads in hues of ruby, garnet and blood-red, hundreds of weirwood leaves shimmering and sparkling as they caught the light of the torches.

No-one but Larra could see that amidst the embroidered leaves on the sleeves were the daintiest of spirals, the spiral of weirwood groves held sacred to the Children of the Forest. Only Larra could see that the embroidered and beaded weirwood leaves were fashioned from tongues of flame.

Sansa had sat with Arya and Bran and seamstresses to design the gown. The red of the weirwood leaves would mislead anyone but those who knew the secret – that the red, as much as the black velvet trim, were to honour Rhaegar Targaryen, while the thick grey wool and the white hellebore roses Larra wore in her hair were for Lyanna Stark. That the weirwood leaves fashioned of fire united House Stark and House Targaryen, as Larra did.

The weirwood leaves and the sacred spirals were to honour the sacrifices Larra had made for Bran. He had insisted they be included, to the point of agitation whenever they had tried to alter a design without them. He said Larra had denied herself all the years she had been his sword and his shield: he insisted that it was now her turn to embrace all that she was and all that she had the potential to become. He wished to honour Larra’s devotion and strength.

Stamping his feet in the fresh snow, Gendry’s breath plumed before him as he fidgeted for warmth. Beside him, Jon waited with as much patience. Bran, eternally calm, rested in his chair amongst the tangled weirwood roots, a slight smile on his face. Just waiting.

“Never in my life seen so many people gathered in the godswood,” Jon muttered, glancing around. Everyone in Winterfell had been invited to stop their work and watch the bridal procession: the nobles had gathered in the godswood. The closer they were to the royal family, the closer to the weirwood they stood. Northerners surrounded the weirwood: beyond them stood Knights of the Vale and the Stormlords. Every man, woman and child present stood in their finery: not a weapon was to be seen, nor hint of armour.

Clustered near Samwell and Gilly, the Lannister girls were all beaming with excitement, each of them dressed in a fine new woollen gown, dyed in varying tones of red, the cut of the gowns echoing that of the Westerlands, asymmetric, yet covered in Northern-style embroidery and embellishments, high collars and wide oversleeves. Each of them wore fur-trimmed cloaks and a padded headband that covered their ears, richly embroidered: the eldest girls had pinned their mother’s brooches and jewels to them to make them sparkle.

Calanthe caught Gendry’s eye and grinned. Beside her, Altheda waved, giving him a gap-toothed smile: she had lost another tooth just last night. Gendry waved back and glanced to his left, where Cade stood in his new finery – looking about as comfortable in it as Gendry felt in his own – with Briar and Neva waiting hand in hand. Their gowns, Gendry knew, were made of the same material as the new gowns Arya and Lady Sansa had had made for the occasion – Neva in silver, Briar in blue, both of them wearing the high collars favoured by Northern noblewomen, padded and richly embroidered. Neva’s featured Northern wildflowers in abundance, in hues of grey, silver and lavender: Briar’s featured animals of the North, intricately stitched and beaded. They each wore a circlet of hellebore roses for the occasion, picked by Larra herself before sunset yesterday.

All this fuss wasn’t what Larra had wanted: it was what Winterfell needed. Spectacle and magnificence. A royal wedding.

Larra would sooner have married in private with her family in attendance than put up with all this: so would Gendry. Yet at the same time, he couldn’t help but feel proud that the prospect of marrying him in front of so many hadn’t put Larra off. Marrying him – a bastard blacksmith – before the entirety of the North made a statement.

“I hope she’s still coming,” Gendry said, as he swept his eyes over the crowds. Jon laughed richly. “She keeps saying she’s spent too much time beyond the Wall to think of weddings as anything but a concession to society’s expectations. What are weddings like beyond the Wall?”

“I’m not sure,” Jon frowned. “The only time I heard tell of a wildling wedding, they said that if a man wants a woman, he has to prove he’ll give her strong and cunning songs… When she tries to slit his throat, he doesn’t let her. If he stops her, they’re married.”

“Simple as that?”

“Simple as that,” Jon nodded. “And they’ll tolerate being married only so long as they desire to be.”

“What, they kill their husbands?”

“If they’re enough of an annoyance,” Jon said, grinning. He shrugged. “Or they leave. It’s not the way of the Free Folk to be bound. Do you hear that?” Jon’s eyes twinkled in the light of hundreds of torches lining a path to the weirwood. He raised a finger to his ear, and over the noise of the gathered crowds, Gendry heard it: a quiet but growing cheer – applause, growing louder. Coming nearer. The smallfolk cheering at the sight of their lady, the She-Wolf of Winterfell.

Gendry started to pace then, sudden nerves making his palms sweat despite the chill. It was nowhere near as cold as it had been some mornings when he had crawled reluctantly out of bed – out of Larra’s embrace – and made his way through the castle to the forges as quickly as possible, eager to get to the heat of the fires. But it was still dark, and there was a damp chill in the air that belonged to that moment just before dawn, no matter what season it was.

Gendry stopped before the Lannister girls.

“Is it nearly time?” Rosamund asked, her eyes glowing with delight.

“Soon,” Gendry promised. While Larra had prepared with her sisters, he had been left to corral the children, aided by Gilly, Zharanni and Tisseia. They were so excited for the wedding that it took little to coax them out of bed, no matter the dark and the cold – they were becoming accustomed to dark, cold mornings. He smiled at Narcisa, who was maturing more and more every day, slowly becoming a stern, discerning young lady. “How do I look?”

“Very handsome,” Narcisa answered, smiling serenely.

“It’s too much,” Gendry said, glancing down at his new clothes. They had been a gift from Lady Sansa personally. The rich fabrics, furs, leather and expensive trim had made him feel ill, feeling undeserving of such luxury. But the embroidery... The embroidery had awed him. Not because it was completed using silk threads the colour of old gold, which themselves had to be costly. No: it was the fact that Lady Sansa herself had stitched a sigil of her own design upon the breast of his heavy great-tunic.

“I thought to use the stag of your father, but after our conversation it did not seem fitting, somehow,” Lady Sansa had told him, lifting a heavy garment to show him the embroidery. “Arya told me you were nicknamed the Bull long before she met you.”

Lady Sansa had created for Gendry a personal coat-of-arms: upon a black background, his war-hammer and a blacksmith’s hammer were crossed, and the horned head of a bull was superimposed over them, all stitched with thread the colour of old gold. Robert Baratheon’s House colours inverted – just as Jon’s coat-of-arms was the Stark sigil with the colours reversed.

“It is nearly time,” Bran said quietly, and they all glanced at him. His chair was nestled amongst the tangled roots of the weirwood, draped in furs, his eyes glittering in the torchlight, steam from the unfrozen pond drifting about him. “Jon…go and meet Larra.” Jon nodded, clapped Gendry on the shoulder, and strode down the aisle of flickering lanterns. Bran turned his glittering eyes on Gendry, who approached, eyeing the younger man carefully.

“You’re not cold, are you?” he asked. Larra would kill him if Bran caught a chill waiting for them to wed.

“No,” Bran smiled. He lifted something from his lap, offering it to Gendry. “For Larra,” he said simply. Gendry realised, Lady Sansa had not fashioned a bride’s cloak for him to wrap around Larra. Except, she had: he knew, because he could see Lady Sansa’s stitches in the embroidery glittering at the points of the lapels and on the back of the cape. The cape was of black velvet. Glossy black fur lined the inside – in the custom of the Free Folk, and the way Larra always wore her furs now, turned inward for greater warmth – and metallic silk threads and tiny glass beads glittered. The edges that fastened with hidden closures were pointed downwards, the points glittering with flames and weirwood leaves in ruby and oxblood-red threads and beads. On the back of the short cape, Gendry examined the sigil – then stared at Bran, his stomach filling with sudden dread.

Bran answered his solemn expression with a coaxing smile, his eyes glittering.

Worked in red, black, silver and old-gold embroidery threads and beads of gold, ruby and garnet glass were two crossed hammers superimposed with the never-ending ouroboros of a dragon and direwolf from Larra’s locket. Encircling the sigil in shimmering beading was a delicate spiral pattern.

The hammers were for himself, Gendry understood. He knew Larra would be overwhelmed to wear the Stark direwolf, after being denied it her entire life. He didn’t know what the spiral pattern meant. But he knew the dragon, stitched onto her bride’s cloak, would draw many eyes. People would wonder. They would ask questions…

“Lady Sansa stitched this?” Gendry asked.

“It is time Larra embraced all that she has it in herself to be,” said Bran quietly. His eyes twinkled.

“And if she does not wish to?”

“Until she claims her true identity, the ouroboros will remain a representation of Last Shadow and Rhaegal,” Bran said, shrugging his shoulders beneath his fur-trimmed great-tunic. There were those at Winterfell who had witnessed the wedding of Prince Rhaegar and Lady Lyanna, so claimed Ser Jaime: Lord Lonmouth might recognise the ouroboros on Larra’s back as the same sigil created for Lady Lyanna by her prince.

Gendry frowned but said nothing. He draped the cape over one shoulder – it was too small to fit across the breadth of his shoulders – and waited. Soon, the cheers of the crowd grew louder and then hushed, and the crowds gathered by the weirwood turned to watch in the dawn light as Larra walked down the aisle of lanterns.

The first of the sun’s rays peeked over the curtain-wall, streaks of vivid purple and red burning as a golden sun rose, giving way to a vivid sky without sign of clouds. The sun illuminated the leaves of the weirwood, making them glow and sparkle like rubies.

As she passed, everyone sighed in awe at the sight of Larra, resplendent in her gown, arm-in-arm with her brother and trailed by her sisters.

Gendry gaped at Larra, her hair down for the first time, treacle curls tumbling and bouncing to her waist, her head framed by weirwood leaves that caught the new sunlight and glowed brighter than any flame.

She had never looked more beautiful, her pale face glowing with anticipation, with eagerness and with unabashed love as she gazed back at Gendry. Her eyes glowed purple in the sunlight, her cheeks flushed pink from the chill.

Jon walked her to the tangle of bone-white roots where Bran waited in his chair. They stood on one side of Bran: Gendry stood on the other.

Every part of the ceremony had been meticulously planned, no matter how simple it was. Larra wanted no septon, Gendry wanted no priest: but if Jon was to walk with Larra to meet Gendry, he could not also officiate. The only person Larra respected to preside over their union…was Bran. Northern weddings took place before the heart-tree in a godswood. Bran could see through the faces in the heart-trees as any of the Old Gods could.

Bran smiled softly and asked, “Who comes before the Old Gods this new day?”

“Alarra, born of the House Stark, comes here to be wed,” Jon answered for her. “A woman of the North, fierce and noble. She beseeches the blessing of the Gods. Who comes to join her?”

“Gendry, born of the House Baratheon, wishes to join with her before the Old Gods and the New,” Gendry replied solemnly. Larra’s eyes danced, a smile flirting with her lips.

“Has this union the blessing of the King?” Bran asked, and Gendry rolled his eyes when Larra scoffed, then coughed delicately. Jon’s lips twitched, too – it hardly mattered if they had his blessing, and he knew it.

“I, Jon Snow, Lord of Winterfell and King in the North, blesses the union of Alarra and Gendry before the Old Gods and the New this day,” Jon said, his eyes glittering with mirth. There were some things they did for others alone – this was one of them. Larra would have been content to be wed in the ways of the Free Folk, Gendry knew. And if she was content, he would never have worried that they were not wed. Things were expected of them…

“Larra, will you join with this man, and share your life together, and be but one flesh, one heart, one soul, now and forever,” Bran said gently. “Will you share your light, to warm him when the night is dark and full of terrors?”

Larra smiled. Larra had her Old Gods: Gendry had been raised in the Faith of the Seven but witnessed with his own eyes the power of the Lord of Light, and believed there was no harm in asking for his blessing as well as the other gods’. Larra’s eyes glowed and she said, her voice rich, “I will.”

“Gendry, will you join with this woman, and share your life together, and be but one flesh, one heart, one soul, now and forever,” Bran asked, gazing up at Gendry. “Will you share your light, to warm her when the night is dark and full of terrors?”

“I will. I vow to protect her with all my strength, to give my blood for hers,” Gendry said, and Larra’s eyes flickered in surprise. His voice rich with feeling, Gendry continued, “I shall guard her secrets, ride by her side and defend her name and honour.”

In the crowd, Ser Jaime’s eyes went sharply to Gendry. He remembered the words, though Gendry’s vow was slightly altered from the one he had sworn four times to four different kings – they were the oaths of the Kingsguard.

“I swear to ward the King, with all my strength, and give my blood for his. I shall take no wife. Hold no lands. Father no children. I shall guard his secrets. Obey his commands. Ride at his side and defend his name and honour.”

Ser Jaime glanced around in the crowd and found Lord Lonmouth with his silver-streaked beard, his eyes ablaze with intensity as he watched Gendry and Larra. Though he was swearing his vows as a husband, Gendry had incorporated the old vows of a knight swearing fealty to their king…or queen.

Bran smiled from his chair and glanced to his side. Briar and Neva stepped forward, each bearing a single ribbon – one silver, embroidered with direwolves, the other black, embroidered with crossed hammers. Larra and Gendry smiled as Bran took the ribbons and looped them over their joined hands. He rested his hand tenderly on their joined hands, gazing from Gendry to Larra. His eyes shimmered with tears and he smiled tremulously up at his sister, and the boy he had once been shone from his face, so much pride and love pouring from him that those watching felt their own eyes grow hot with unshed tears.

“Now you shall join your flames together,” Bran said, his gentle voice hoarse, and he carefully unwound the ribbons from their hands, freeing them. Larra and Gendry each reached for the torch at their sides, moving to stand beside a single torch left unlit beside the pond. Together, they lit the torch.

In the flickering firelight, Gendry pulled the cape from his shoulder, holding it before her so that she could see the sigil her sister had designed. Her purple eyes flicked up into his for a moment, and they shared a look of understanding: the ouroboros. Smiling coaxingly, he wrapped his arms around her and draped the cape about her shoulders. It fit snugly, reaching to her elbows, and he fastened the hidden closures over her bodice, the points glittering with those ruby weirwood leaves as he tucked another hidden closure into a loop in her silver filigree belt, latching the cape in place.

It was not a traditional bride’s cloak, which would have been in his colours, showing that she had passed from the protection of her father to her husband. Larra needed no such protection. What the cape had given her was the truth of her own identity.

They had spoken often about it, whether Larra should acknowledge it. Lord Tyrion had advised that Larra embrace what she was, use it as both weapon and armour rather than let anyone use it against her.

She could either claim the ouroboros was merely Last Shadow and Rhaegal, as Bran had said. Or it could be the first declaration of her true heritage. That she was a trueborn daughter of both House Stark and House Targaryen. Either way, they would face the consequences together.

Gendry fastened the last clasp and drew Larra close, sighing as he closed his eyes and rested his forehead against hers. A moment of calm, of quiet – of intimacy – between them, indulging in the scent of her, her warmth. He felt her hands resting on his forearms as he cradled her waist and heard her soft sigh. When he opened his eyes, she was smiling up at him softly, the way she did in quiet, intimate moments when they were alone, and content to believe they alone existed in the world, that nothing lay beyond their bed, that nothing could tear them from each other’s embrace.

The rest of the world faded away in that moment. There was nothing but the colour of each other’s eyes, the intimacy of each other’s smile, the contentedness of being in each other’s arms.

“I am yours,” Larra whispered to him, and he echoed her. Together, they murmured, “You are mine. From this day until the end of my days.”

He reached up to cradle her face and kissed her.

The crowds cheered. Bran wiped his face. Jon grinned, while Arya and Lady Sansa applauded, their eyes shining. The Lannister girls swooned, while Briar and Neva beamed at them.

“Now, wife, I’m to carry you to the Great Hall for breakfast,” Gendry said, and Larra shouted a laugh as he bent down, looped his arms around her knees and hauled her over his shoulder.

“In your arms, you ass!” Larra laughed freely as he strode on, heedless of her weight, and his laughter rumbled through the godswood as people cheered and laughed. Grinning, he set her down on her feet only briefly, to scoop her up in his arms. Her eyes glowed and she looped her arms around his neck as he carried her along the aisle between lit torches, people cheering as they passed. Behind them, Sansa and Arya linked arms and Jon pushed Bran in his wheeled chair. Cade, growing taller by the day, walked hand-in-hand with Neva and Briar, while the Lannisters formed a procession behind them, the little ones led by Narcisa.

In the Great Hall, they were met by the cheers of the maids and servants, and Gendry grinned as he carried Larra to the high table. As they brought steaming tureens and platters, the maids and servants offered their congratulations. As it was their wedding, Larra and Gendry sat at the very centre of the high table, with Jon beside Larra, Sansa on Gendry’s other side.

It was Jon who handed Larra the gift she intended for Gendry, as Sansa handed Gendry the gift he had secreted to her for Larra.

Before they broke their fast, they exchanged gifts.

Larra inhaled sharply at her bride’s gift – a small, beautiful dagger, its hilt of weirwood inlaid with an obsidian direwolf. Obsidian bound the hilt to the blade with short fangs. The blade itself was rippled with thousands of tiny folds, like smoke on molten silver.

“You finished it,” Larra breathed, gazing up at Gendry. Gendry nodded.

“The first fresh-forged Valyrian steel since the Doom,” he said softly, and Jon made a stunned noise.

“Does it have a name yet?” Larra asked, examining the blade, the obsidian set into the bone-white hilt.

“Fang,” Gendry said, smiling softly at her. I had them filed down, she had said to him the first time they met, when he had teased her about having fangs herself.

Gendry laughed softly when Larra handed him her gift: a ring.

The ring was silver-and-gold, the elegant band figured like a rearing golden stag and a silver direwolf, meeting to cradle a multi-faceted stone of obsidian striated with silver-quartz – a rare stone. It was the ring gifted to Larra by Robert Baratheon himself – a ring he had intended as a bride-gift for his betrothed, Lady Lyanna. He had kept the ring for decades, until he had seen Larra Snow and been reminded once again of the face he had long forgotten. Struck by the uncanny resemblance Larra had to Lady Lyanna, Robert had gifted Larra the ring. He had told everyone that she looked so like Lyanna, and was so vibrant, that he couldn’t bear to bury the ring in the dark with the bones of his beloved: he wanted to see Larra wearing the ring, with flowers in her hair and the sun shining down upon her.

He had never guessed that Larra was Lyanna’s own daughter. She wondered what Father must have thought, when Robert gifted her the ring, how he must have dreaded that anyone might guess the truth.

“When he visited Winterfell and named Father his Hand, King Robert told Father that he had a son, and Father had a daughter – that they would join their two Houses,” Sansa mused. “I do not think either of them imagined it would happen this way.”

“Different roads oft lead to the same castle,” Jon intoned, digging into his breakfast. Gendry stared back at Larra, touched by the gesture of the ring. It was a beautiful jewel, exquisitely crafted, the gemstone cut perfectly, the gold and silver of the highest quality. It was no small thing to give it away – more so because it had been a gift from the King, given not as a payment for a night’s pleasure, as Briar’s own small collection of inherited jewels was, but out of genuine feeling. That had to have been rare for King Robert – to feel it, and to acknowledge it so publically.

“This was meant for your mother, Larra. I cannot accept it,” Gendry said gently.

Larra sighed softly, “Any more than I can accept this dagger.” She smiled. “The first fresh-forged Valyrian steel in over four centuries, Gendry… This dagger is yours.” She leaned in and kissed his cheek. She took his hand and stared into his eyes, earnest and beseeching. “Keep it on you always.”

He remembered her beseeching him to learn to wield weapons. Knew what they were soon to face. Understood better than anyone what it meant that he had a Valyrian steel dagger to wield when the army of the dead descended upon them. Knew the best person to teach him to wield it was Darkstar, who had stood behind the Lannister girls and watched the entire ceremony with Lord Tyrion and Lady Nym, Yaskier and Edd, Tisseia, Zharanni and Qhaero and all of the Tarlys, Missandei, Lady Mormont, the Greatjon, Little Jon and Ragnar. Darkstar now sat at one of the other tables, along with Lady Nym and Obara, breaking his fast and occasionally glancing up at the high table.

They kept their gifts: Larra tucked the ring on her finger, and Gendry sheathed the dagger and attached it to his belt. Sansa and Jon laughed at their generosity, refusing priceless gifts.

The atmosphere in the hall was different: brighter, somehow. More vibrant. They broke their fast on rich scrambled eggs and bacon, beef stew with cheesy dumplings, porridge with golden syrup, and sweet buns three inches high enriched with copious amounts of butter, chopped raisins, dates and citrus, glazed with honey. People were happy. They were delighted to treat themselves, and excited by the prospect of a troupe of mummers who arrived in costume, bowing to the high table as Arya slipped away from it, smiling to Larra and Gendry as Yaskier joined her before Larra and Gendry.

“Our gift to you, on your wedding day,” Arya smiled, her grey eyes glittering.

“For your entertainment and delight, a comedy,” Yaskier grinned, “made almost entirely of errors.”

“A play?” Larra asked, as they were chivvied out of their seats by servants. They carried the chairs and tables out of the way, replacing them with a small stage and settles, floor-cushions and chairs, hastily replacing the old rushes on the flagstones with fresh ones.

Special attention was given to the placement of a newly-completed settle that still smelled faintly of varnish, the seat stuffed and upholstered with leather, the back richly engraved – one half devoted to Gendry’s journey through the Riverlands, an anvil and Harrenhall and a rowboat glimpsed in the design, Larra’s through the True North, a true spearwife in her furs, Last Shadow at her side, the Children gathered behind her, meeting at the heart-tree of Winterfell’s godswood with hands joined. Bulls and direwolves were featured, as was a dragon in the sky above the weirwood. The back side of the settle was engraved with the crossed hammers and ouroboros. It was their settle, a gift from the Carpenters’ Guild. The seat itself lifted to reveal blankets and quilts and richly-embroidered cushions stuffed with goose down, all made by the ladies of the North as wedding gifts. Lord Tyrion produced a bottle of hundred-year-old port, and consented to sit close to Larra to enjoy a sample, with a portion of heavy fruitcake glazed with plum jam.

Arya, they learned, had conspired with Yaskier. He had written a comedy: she had trained people as mummers and directed the play, secured costumes and sets and all sorts.

The comedy of errors had everyone roaring with laughter. Even the severe Lord Tarly, and Karsi, a fierce spearwife who understood little of the culture south of the Wall: that was the brilliance of the play, Larra thought, wiping her eyes, her stomach hurting from laughing so much. The humour was simple and universal. She could see the underlying themes even if few others would, which added greatly to the enjoyment of the experience. Even the littlest of the Lannister girls was giggling as they watched, applauding along with everyone else. Gendry, who had grown up with mummers of varying levels of skill in the streets of King’s Landing, grinned from ear to ear, wiping his eyes and hiccoughing as Yaskier twinkled a cheeky wink at him.

By the time the play had ended, the sun was setting. The mummers bowed to thunderous applause, and Larra glanced over at Sansa. “Be sure they’re given silver,” she said, and Sansa nodded, smiling more freely than Larra had ever seen. Her cheeks were flushed and she looked relaxed, sat beside Jon and sipping from a cup of wine, in only her silvery gown – one of the rare times Larra had ever seen her without her enormous weighted cloak on.

“Imagine keeping all this a secret,” Jon said, giving Arya a glowing smile full of pride. “I had no idea you had such talents, Arya.” Arya looked as if she would rather melt into the hearthstones than have all eyes on her – in her experience, attention meant death. But she smiled warmly at Larra and Gendry. For them, she would endure the attention – and the praise.

“The mummers did well,” Arya said gently, her grey eyes glowing.

“What will you write next?” Sansa asked Yaskier, who shrugged.

“Something tragic, perhaps,” Yaskier mused.

“A love story is always good for tragedy,” Larra said, and Yaskier laughed.

“What about the Prince of Dragonflies?” Sansa suggested.

“That’s a history, not a tragedy,” Larra protested.

“Cannot it be both?” Sansa countered, and Larra shrugged.

“I suppose so,” she said softly, gazing back at her sister. A look flickered across her face, and Larra felt certain Sansa had been thinking of Rhaegar and Lyanna. For Larra certainly had: a love story that was both history and tragedy.

“It’d do people good to have a laugh,” Jon said, his eyes bright. He looked happier than Larra had ever seen him since their return. “We’ve had precious little to laugh about in a good long while – and we’ll have little enough to celebrate soon.”

“Another comedy, then, by the King’s command,” Yaskier smirked playfully. Jon rolled his eyes.

“Will the mummers perform again?” Larra asked.

“For you? If you’d desire it,” Yaskier said.

“Not for me,” Larra laughed. They had been sat nearly three hours together, and she was very glad of the padded leather seat and embroidered goose-down cushions, the blankets she and Gendry had cosied up under while they drank port and ate heavy fruitcake. “As Jon said, a laugh would do people the world of good. Send the mummers out to perform for the rest of Winterfell.”

“With your blessing,” Yaskier smiled.

Larra smiled and gazed back at Yaskier, wondering… He had such a sharp intuition about people, an incredibly quick wit and sense of humour that was accessible to everyone. She wondered how he would treat a play based on historical figures and events…

The mummers bowed again, accepting silver from the other nobles, and the stage was dismantled. Yaskier corralled the mummers out of the hall, their stage and props following, yet Arya remained behind. The mummers were replaced by musicians, tables returned to the hall, and servants brought in the evening meal. By the time people were full, and warm, and relaxed and content, thinking only of their beds, the musicians started playing more energetic songs. The servants moved the tables to the edges of the hall and the children were some of the first on their feet, Delphine gasping with delight and recognition at the sound of a particular jig.

They had spent the morning laughing until they cried: and the evening dancing until they dropped. By the fourth dance, Larra had removed her grey-and-black overdress to reveal the vibrant red cotehardie beneath, to the awe of onlookers everywhere: she was simply too hot to keep her new cape and overdress on. Larra did not sit a single dance out: she indulged in every opportunity to force Jon to dance with her, the way she always had when they were younger, determined not to let Lady Catelyn win and send Jon skulking into the shadows for fear of her glowering. She danced with Jon, and with Sansa, and even Arya stumbled through some of the nearly-forgotten dances Septa Mordane had tried in vain to teach her. Gendry laughed and applauded from the settle, occasionally keeping drumming the beat on his knee, but he had not been taught how to dance.

Feeling overly hot, Gendry accompanied Larra as she slipped outside into the crisp night air. Torchlight flickered, and all around them, they could hear music – not just echoing out of the Great Hall but in the yards too – and people laughing and singing. They were dancing. In one small yard, the stage had been set up for the mummers, to tremendous laughter and applause.

“They’re happy,” Gendry murmured, and Larra smiled, tucking herself against him. He wrapped an arm around her and she sighed, smiling to herself.

“We need little provocation to be happy,” she said softly. Gendry kissed the top of her head.

“Are you happy?” he asked.

She smiled, glancing up at him.

“You make me happy,” she told him, and he smiled gently.

“I love you,” he said richly, and she smiled.

“I know.”

They kissed, and Rosamund came to find them, taking Larra’s hand and pulling her back towards the Great Hall. After a few dances, Theon was shoved forward by his grim-faced sister Yara, who today was in high spirits. He awkwardly asked Larra to dance: they danced a violently energetic Northern jig that sent Larra twirling around the hall, laughing giddily, onlookers applauding as the dancers kept pace with the music. Today was not a day to hold on to anger: it was a day to remember, yes, but to celebrate. Robb most certainly would have celebrated with them.

The lively dances had always been Larra’s favourite, and she danced for hours, with anyone – whether it was Sigorn of the Thenns, Little Jon, Dagonet Storm, Altheda Lannister, Dolorous Edd, Dickon Tarly, Narcisa or Neva or Maester Arys. When the musicians struck up a familiar, elegant tune, Larra smiled, slightly stunned, when Gendry found her in the crowd and offered his hand: the crowd thinned as people went to the edges of the room, reaching for goblets and resting on settles.

Larra did not stop smiling in wonder as Gendry flawlessly led her in the laendler, a dance introduced to Westeros first at the court of the Conqueror, a favourite of his sister-wife Rhaenys. The Valryian dance was a sequence of complicated arm movements and delicate steps flowing beautifully, the partners dancing together becoming a never-ending ouroboros – no beginning, no end. Joined and forever entwined.

As they were.

Notes:

The laendler of course being the dance from The Sound of Music. I just love that scene! And the idea that the laendler is a Valyrian dance designed to mimick dragon coils that became a Westerosi ‘court’ dance is just… I imagine Sansa teaching Gendry how to dance so that he could surprise Larra.

Chapter 57: Litter

Notes:

Thank you for your patience! This chapter is a long time coming!

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel         

57

Litter


Breath fogging the diamond-paned window as she peered too close to the glass, watching the diamond-dust glitter and sparkle in the air. A vicious cold oozed through every tiny crack in the ancient stones and she was glad of the insulated walls, heat pumped throughout the castle. For the first time since her return to Winterfell, she kept her gloves on and tucked a heavy fur-lined cloak close. It was the coldest day the maesters had on record in over a century. Yet it was also one of the most beautiful days, the particles of water in the air frozen and glittering like jewels as they floated in the still air.

It reminded her of the great weirwood. How many times had she watched the air sparkle like diamonds from the cave entrance? The quiet was the same, even here; Winterfell had slowed down. It was too cold to risk going outside.

For weeks, they had endured relentless storms – some of sleet, some of snow, some of thunder and lightning that had made the foundation-stones of Winterfell tremble. They had been trapped inside the castle proper, the sun a stranger veiled from sight. They had lingered in darkness for too long: it was beginning to take its toll on those unused to it.

Larra had grown accustomed to an enforced patience that ate at the pit of the stomach and wore away at the will to endure, as surely as the wind carved through stone. With ceaseless perseverance. It was an old companion of hers; but she could appreciate people’s frustration. This was the first winter in far too long and most in the castle had yet to experience true cold.

She watched the air sparkle and sighed softly to herself. It was truly a wondrous gift of nature, the diamond-dust, no matter how dangerous it was. In nature, danger and beauty were often intertwined. The bait and the trap.

Attuned to the castle about her, Larra’s ears twitched at the sound of footsteps echoing in the hall outside. She recognised Gendry by his walk and smiled softly to herself as the great oak door burst open, Gendry already untucking his sodden shirts. The castle may be quiet but the forge was not idle.

He smiled and bent to give her a kiss on the cheek before going to the trunk, pulling out a fresh linen shirt.

“How is the forge?”

“Busy. People have a sudden fascination with blacksmithing,” Gendry said, his eyes alight with easy humour.

“Put them to work,” Larra muttered, and Gendry nodded. He tucked his shirt in and glanced at her.

“What did the maesters say?” he asked. Only until her breasts had been sore to touch had Larra paid any mind to the dizziness and nausea she had occasionally endured, the strange sensation in her belly. For all the injuries she had suffered the last seven years, Larra had never once taken ill. At Gendry’s urging, Larra had finally gone to consult the maesters.

Larra sighed, turning away from the window to watch Gendry. “Nothing helpful,” she said quietly. “I spoke to a healer trusted by the Free Folk.”

Gendry nodded. “What did he say?”

Larra stared at him. This magnificent man. Her husband. “She said I’m with child.”

Gendry glanced up quickly. Larra’s heart sank at the light dancing in his eyes, the broad grin that snagged immediately at his lips. The sheer, undiluted delight. His excitement.

She gazed back at him, still too stunned to know how she felt. It was the first time she had said it aloud.

She was with child. Pregnant.

Gendry’s smile faded quickly, a shrewd glint in his eyes as he frowned at her. Approaching her, he squatted before her and took her hands in his, carefully examining her face.

Carefully, he said in a gentle voice, “If this isn’t what you want, we can go to the maesters for moon-tea.”

Larra reached out and stroked his cheek, her smile miserable. “Thank you for saying ‘we’.” She rubbed her eyes. “Anyway, it’s too late for that. I’ve felt them. I’ve been feeling them…fluttering.”

She gazed down at her belly, still stunned that anything could be growing in there. She had been putting weight on but she was still slender as a whip. And as far gone as she was… The healer had told her it was not uncommon not to show signs of pregnancy – especially slender as she was. She had described the sensation of feeling as if butterflies were flitting about in her belly and the healer had cackled, smiling at the confirmation that Larra was indeed as far along as she had guessed. The healer had advised that “the little one’s comfortable”. She had taken Larra’s hand and pressed it to her abdomen, telling her what exactly it was she was feeling. A kick. She could feel it kicking already.

And she had had no idea…

She had had no idea she was even capable of bearing children, so deathly thin that her moon-blood had stopped years ago. It had only returned, and irregularly, since she returned to Winterfell and ate regularly, since she had started to put weight back on.

Gendry gazed up at her, reading her so well. “You’re upset.”

She admitted quietly, “I don’t know what to feel.”

“Tell me,” Gendry coaxed. He rubbed his thumb over the back of her hands, coaxing her to relax her grip, and raised her palms to his lips, his eyes saddened at the sight of the bloody crescent-moons in her palms.

“The healer said I’m nearly six months gone…” Larra said, her eyes stinging, and she was aware that her voice was thick and wobbly. She didn’t know what to do. “Six months, Gendry. It’s been too – it’s been too long already. Six months since we – Six months since you came south from the Wall. You saw the Night King’s hordes. What’s he doing?”

Gendry watched her carefully. He weighed his words before he spoke. “He can’t get past the Wall – they can’t get past.”

“Yet. They cannot get past the Wall yet. But they will find a way,” Larra said, her voice trembling. A baby. It changed everything. “And they will march south and then – and then I’ll either be carrying our child or…or I’ll have a babe in arms and… And I can’t sit by with my sword sitting idle just out of reach, Gendry. I will not watch as we fail.”

“We won’t fail – “

“We might,” she interrupted, sniffing harshly and wiping her eyes. “And I cannot be the last one left. I cannot watch…”

“Come here.” Gendry sighed and gathered her up in his arms. She was enveloped by his heat, his scent, and melted into his embrace. The only safe place in the world.

“Promise me…if it comes to it and you must make a choice between me and the babe…” she whispered hoarsely. “Please choose me.”

Gendry leaned back, his brilliant sapphire eyes intense as they held her gaze. He cupped her face in his hands, tenderly kissing her lips. “Always.” He enveloped her in his arms again, hugging her tight. He stroked her long braid, soothing her. After a long while, he said softly, “A baby, then?” She could hear the smile in his voice.

“A baby,” Larra nodded, wiping her face as she sat back. She gazed at Gendry sorrowfully. “I’m so sorry.”

Gendry stared at her. “Why?”

“You were so excited,” she said miserably. “I ruined it.”

“Larra…” Gendry smiled then sighed. He kissed her lips. “How could I be excited when you’re so frightened?”

“I am frightened,” she admitted. She gazed at Gendry beseechingly. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Nor do I,” Gendry smiled easily. “I don’t know anything about babies, except they need milk and love.”

“Milk and love?” Larra repeated. Was it that simple?

“I can’t help with the milk but…there’s no-one I know who loves more fiercely than you,” Gendry said warmly.

“I can start there.” She nodded, her eyes glittering with tears. She still looked spooked – pale, wide-eyed. He gathered her up in his arms, holding her tight. He stroked her hair and breathed deeply of the scent of it, sighing and squeezing her. Squeezing them, he realised, and grinned into her hair, kissing her head. She gripped the back of his jerkin and gradually relaxed in his arms as he rocked her and she sighed contentedly, “I love you.”

He smiled to himself. “I know.”


The fire crackled in the hearth, illuminating the dark solar that was quiet but for the scrape of cutlery. They had taken the opportunity to share a meal – Gendry and Theon were present. They were family.

A soft knock echoed on the door and one of the maesters’ apprentice darted inside with an ill-practised bow.

“A raven, Your Grace,” he murmured, gazing across the illuminated table at Jon.

“I’ll take that,” Sansa said, and the apprentice bowed again, handing Sansa the scroll. The apprentice disappeared beyond the solid oak door, leaving them to their meal.

“Open it, then,” Arya said softly, her tone only slightly impatient.

“It is news from the Reach; it can wait until after we’ve finished eating,” Sansa said, but at Larra’s coaxing, she unfurled the scroll. She broke the wax seal and scanned the elegant writing. “Oh! Lady Alynore Tyrell has given birth to her child. Willas Tyrell’s posthumous child. A daughter – well, that must be a relief to the Tyrells. It makes things simpler. Garlan remains Lord of Highgarden rather than an infant.”

“A daughter?” Jon said, and Sansa nodded, still reading the scroll. Larra gazed across the table at Gendry, whose eyes glittered in the candlelight. She saw his smile and returned it; his excitement was infectious. For days, Larra had tried to work through the news of her own impending motherhood. She was terrified – of the timing, of the risk, of loving the baby too much – but Gendry calmed the worst of her worries. She was coming around to the idea of being excited.

It was difficult. She had never imagined that she would ever have children of her own. Had never dared to even yearn for the possibility. She had known her place at Winterfell and in her brothers’ lives and had taught herself never to wish for a thing that could never be.

“What did they name the child?” Larra asked.

“Hm? Oh… Alysanne,” Sansa said, and Jon choked on his stout, coughing. He wiped his mouth and set his tankard down, avoiding Larra’s questioning gaze.

“It is a good name,” Arya said, nodding her approval. “The only Targaryen with any sense.”

“You only like her because she was a fierce advocate of the Queen Who Never Was.”

“Imagine if Alysanne had outlived Jaehaerys,” Arya sighed. “Do you imagine the Dance of Dragons would ever have occurred?”

Larra chuckled and glanced at Jon, who smiled: they were both reminded of their lessons with Maester Luwin, their cyvasse tournaments where they rewrote history to learn how single events, even the innocuous, could alter everything.

Arya continued, “House Targaryen would never have reached extinction. The dragons would never have disappeared from the world!”

“Dragons have returned to the skies, Arya,” Larra reminded her.

Bran murmured, “And the Targaryens are not yet extinct.”

Gendry caught Larra’s eye across the table and gave her an encouraging nod, smiling. His eyes glowed in the candlelight.

Larra cleared her throat.

“Gendry and I had something we wished to tell you…” She glanced around at her family. Flushing, she told them, “I am expecting a baby.”

Their reactions were almost comical. Certainly, Larra herself had had no idea how to respond to the news. But Arya’s excited gasp, Jon’s eyes glittering with tears, Sansa’s hesitant look were not what she might have expected. She glanced at Sansa, who was assessing her much the same way Gendry had. Whatever she saw in Larra’s face made Sansa’s guarded expression melt, warmth pouring from her, excitement glinting in her eyes.

“Our first litter!” Arya exclaimed. “It’s about time – pups! We’re to have a baby!”

Gendry stared at Arya, eyebrows raised. “I would never have imagined you’d be so excited, Arry.”

“Why shouldn’t I be? Oh – when they’re old enough I shall play every trick on them you ever taught me, Larra!” Arya grinned. “And I shall teach them how to wield a knife and – “

“Oh dear. An infant assassin,” Sansa said, and they laughed.

“ – and they shall ride every day across the moors!” Arya continued. Gendry laughed as Arya went on. Sansa remained quiet, watching Larra carefully. Larra glanced at Bran, who remained silent. His eyes glittered in the candlelight, a warm smile on his face. Bran, her brother, shone from that smile, a little boy full of excitement that matched his sister’s.

“When will the baby come, Larra?” Jon asked. “I do not believe I can outlast Arya’s anticipation.” Arya jabbed him in the ribs with her elbow and he reached out to muss her hair, chuckling.

“Soon; fewer than three moon-turns, the healer said,” Larra said, glancing at Gendry. His soft smile soothed the nerves that always rose to the fore when she thought about it. Childbirth. Motherhood. The Night King’s hordes. It was all happening too quickly – and yet not quickly enough.

Arya bounced in her seat, her eagerness palpable. Gendry laughed and teased her. Theon approached her and gave her a gentle kiss on the cheek, congratulating her and wishing her above all things a safe and easy labour. Bran took her hand and held it, smiling contentedly, his eyes shining. Only Sansa remained reserved in her reaction; Larra suspected she did not wish to cause any upset by revealing her true feelings on the matter.

Larra told her quietly, as Jon and Theon congratulated Gendry and clapped him on the back for a job well done, “Any reservations you have, Sansa, I have already thought of them, and dread them. Whatever happens, I need to be able to rely on your support.”

Sansa gazed back at her, relaxing somewhat, but her expression was sad and grim. “You will always have it, Larra.”

Notes:

I know, it’s short! And I’m sorry I’ve been neglecting Larra for so long. I got to the point where I know what I want to happen but couldn’t adequately put it into words!

Chapter 58: Twice-Damned

Notes:

The real drama starts to unfold…

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

58

Twice-Damned


Before answering the knock that echoed on the solar door, Sansa glanced at Larra, whose eyes were nearly crossed with exhaustion, following a path through the intricate ledgers brought to them by their newly-appointed steward, a Dustin. She set down her quill and rubbed her eyes, sitting back in her chair and hiding a grimace at the twinge she felt in her back. Her pelvis was starting to bother her, only sometimes – when she was idle for too long.

“Come in,” Sansa called. Jon and Theon, murmuring quietly with Lord Royce, Bran, the Greatjon, Lord Lonmouth and Lord Tyrion around the model of Winterfell by the hearth, ignored the sound completely. The door to the solar opened quietly and the handsome brown-eyed sentry dipped an inexpert but earnest bow at Larra and Sansa.

“M’ladies, ‘tis Lady Missandei,” he said apologetically. The warm-skinned beauty appeared, looking slender in fur-trimmed leathers. She had adapted her unsuitable Essosi clothing, the same way the Stormlords’ wives were – with lots of fur, embroidered shawls, felted and embroidered collars, gloves and fur-lined boots.

“Good morrow, Missandei,” Larra said, and the translator dipped a curtsy as unpractised as their sentry’s bow. Missandei had been taught to bow, to expose the back of her neck to her betters that they may choose whether to be merciful.

“Lady Stark,” Missandei said, smiling softly. “Lady Larra.” Her smile faded uncomfortably as she glanced at the men gathered around the hearth, still muttering low to themselves, arguing about strategy. “I… I had hoped to ask a moment of your time, whenever it may be spared.”

“You can have it now,” Larra said. “Come and sit. You look cold.”

“I never knew how quickly you could forget what warmth was,” Missandei said, her dark eyes shining. Larra grunted softly and frowned over at the men now arguing a little louder about strategy.

“My lords,” Larra said gently, “perhaps it would be advisable to test your strategies outside, rather than argue them in here.”

“We apologise for the disturbance, Lady Larra,” Lord Royce said, bowing his head gallantly. Larra saw the look Missandei cast Jon as he suggested to the others that they take a walk around the curtain-wall.

“Jon…stay awhile,” Bran said, as he wheeled his chair toward the fire. “Lady Missandei, please join me by the fire.”

“Thank you, my lord,” Missandei said courteously. She kept her gaze lowered to the worn flagstones as the man stomped past, already bickering about their conflicting strategies. Larra pinched her eyes.

“We need to ensure, Jon, that we have as many backup strategies in place as possible, that we all know and can implement, no matter where we are or where we end up,” Larra said, glancing at her twin. Jon, glowering at the model of Winterfell, nodded distractedly.

“What is it you wish to speak to us about, Lady Missandei?” Sansa prompted gently, her eyes glowing like sapphires in the sunlight spearing through the diamond-paned windows. Lady Missandei flicked her gaze anxiously at Jon before clearing her throat delicately.

“I… I have come to speak to you of Her Grace – I wish to speak to you of Lady Targaryen,” Missandei said, correcting herself.

“We have not seen her for weeks now,” Sansa said. “Not even Larra and Bran, and she seemed to have so enjoyed her time with them.”

“Indeed,” Missandei said. “Lady Targaryen was for many weeks filled with enthusiasm to learn about her distant family… However, recently, her rejection as sovereign in Dragons’ Bay weighs ever on her mind.” Larra resisted the urge to glance at Sansa.

“We have had sparse updates from Essos,” Larra told Missandei. “But we know that Meereen is currently fighting a bloody civil war.”

“That is…” Lady Missandei sighed softly. “It is good that the Meereenese people shall decide for themselves who rules them.”

“It seems your lady does not share your sentiments,” Larra said. “She has taken to sulking in her chamber.”

“I wished to speak with you on another matter,” Missandei said, growing more and more uncomfortable. Sansa glanced at Larra.

“What is it?” she prompted gently.


Larra grunted and kicked aside the dented shield, scowling.

“Keep your shield up unless you wish to have your head rung like a bell!” she panted, her breath pluming around her, sweat tickling her throat. Her opponent, a young squire from the Vale, looked abashedly around him. Dotted around the yard were stern-faced warriors who muttered amongst each other, watching them closely.

“Pick up your shield!” she grunted, and though the lad picked his shield up off the sludge-strewn ground, he did not raise it to defend himself.

Not again, she thought angrily.

This was the fifth person to refuse her spar with her in the last hour.

“’Pologies, m’lady,” he stammered, his gaze flicking to her torso. To her belly. The midwives said she had “popped”. Whether it was because she now had knowledge of her pregnancy or because she was farther along, Larra did not know, but either way, in the last week her belly had become pronounced. News had spread through the castle like wildfire. She could not move about the castle for people congratulating her, wishing her well, praying to the gods for a healthy and speedy delivery. They took her impending motherhood as a symbol of Northern strength: the Starks had returned, and were strong – and were starting to reproduce.

The first Stark child of its generation…she had heard some already calling her unborn babe the heir of the North, the future king – or queen.

They seemed to adore the idea that it was Larra’s child that would inherit. Their fierce she-wolf, who had conquered not only the True North but a dragon.

It upset Larra more than anything, made her anxious to hear such things. No small amount of horror accompanied thoughts about this child’s future – whether it would have one at all, what it would look like. How long until the Night King marched his armies south?

Even if the birth was easy, and swift, and they both came out of it healthy and strong, what would this child’s life be like – short, and brutal?

Children…made everything harder. More terrifying.

More and more, her anxiousness about impending childbirth and her dread of the Night King’s coming gave her sleepless nights. Not even Gendry’s intense lovemaking could exhaust her enough to sleep dreamlessly now. The only thing that soothed her was drifting off with her hand curled around Dark Sister’s hilt.

And less and less was she able to find anyone willing to spar with her, to keep her training fresh, to keep her agile and quick on her feet despite her growing belly. She was not large, and the midwives said this had everything to do with her being slender as a whip to begin with: her belly was elegant, Sansa said.

Her belly was small and neat.

Not like Lady Targaryen’s.

The tiny young-woman had grown almost as round as she was tall, the illusion not aided by the heavy quilts and furs she swathed her body in, trying to conceal what her mind denied.

Fury and grief fizzled through her veins, and she glared at the squire, jerking her chin in silent dismissal. She was panting from exertion but also from anger – and confusion. Devastation for Jon.

Missandei’s words echoed through her head.

“Her Gr- Lady Targaryen is heavy with child,” Missandei had said softly. Jon had frozen. Sansa’s eyebrows had risen; Larra stared at Missandei, willing her to keep speaking, to drown out the rushing noise roaring in her ears. “She has always insisted that she can bear no children yet she has not bled in months, not since Dragonstone. She sleeps ill, and has queer dreams. She is getting large. I asked the maesters to examine her for fear she has a tumour… They confirmed she is with child.”

“And what do you expect us to do about it?” Sansa had asked coolly.

“Lady Targaryen refuses to even speak on the matter,” Missandei said apologetically. “She has forbidden me from doing so.”

“Yet you are here,” Larra had frowned. “Why?”

Lady Missandei had glanced at her, her brown eyes dipping to Larra’s small belly. Larra had frowned. Oh.

“I do not know why she is frightened,” Missandei had said, “but Lady Targaryen is… I worry for her health – and that of her child.”

“Why?” Sansa had asked quickly. Jon was staring at Missandei, his expression stark. Larra had glanced at her brother, knowing him well enough to know that he was panicking, no matter how well he hid it.

“She refuses to believe she is with child and ignores our pleas to take care of herself. She will not eat for fear of getting fatter,” Missandei had said. “Lady Targaryen ordered special stays to be made, sewn with laces tightened to make her waist smaller. She even sleeps with them on, convinced she can force herself to be slender.”

“What is it you wish us to do about this?” Larra had asked, frowning at Missandei.

Missandei glanced apologetically at her. “Lady Targaryen has…been in the habit of taking advice from no-one for far too long to listen to her servants. But I believe you may be able to get through to her. She respects you.”

She respects you.

Those words ricocheted through her head, making her scowl, grinding her teeth, as she swung her sword idly from one hand, her wrist loose. She was itching for a fight – desperate for any way to rid her body of this feeling, this itchy, uncomfortable, too-big feeling scraping at her insides.

Daenerys Targaryen had no respect for anyone but herself.

She had certainly had no respect for Jon the night she had conceived his child.

And it was Jon’s child.

They all knew it. Even Missandei.

They all knew that at Eastwatch-by-the-Sea, when Daenerys had invited herself to Jon’s bed, she had taken him as she desired. And she had conceived, against Jon’s will.

Yet Daenerys Targaryen had convinced herself that she was barren – because she had taken a witch’s warning as prophecy. Absolutely refused to believe she was with child – no matter how fiercely the child in her belly kicked, making her gasp, even as she fiercely denied to Larra that she was expecting.

Daenerys Targaryen carried Jon’s child in her belly.

Worse, than that – worse than the fact she carried Jon’s bastard in her belly – worse than the fact that Jon’s child had been conceived during Daenerys’ assault of Jon – was that she refused to acknowledge it.

Larra had consulted with the maesters, asking what harm the child may be suffering due to its mother’s negligence.

She had consulted with Gendry about when specifically they had returned to Eastwatch. How far along Daenerys Targaryen was. She was due earlier than Larra, certainly – by at least a month.

That poor child had as little as a moon-turn left before it would be brought forth into a world where its mother had conceived it during the rape of its father, and its own mother denied its very existence.

The unfairness of it was bitter on Larra’s tongue and her eyes smarted. One thing about her own pregnancy was that she had noticed how changeable her emotions were. One moment she could be calm and delighted, the next filled with dread, only to laugh until tears ran down her face – or fury consumed her, so fierce that she needed to exhaust herself with training.

There was no opportunity to talk to Jon: he was consumed by guilt, shame and dread. Shame for the assault he had endured; dread for the life this child would face; guilt that he could not bring himself to do anything about it. He could not face Lady Targaryen.

And Larra…she was so angry she could have hit her. Furious about Jon’s assault, furious that Lady Targaryen denied his child – was potentially harming his child as it grew inside her. The child grew inside her; how could she…? Larra frowned and reached down, grimacing as she rubbed her belly where it itched, the skin stretching to accommodate her child’s growth. She felt her child, more active now that she was further along but also because Larra knew what she was actually feeling – her child, thriving, growing. She felt it kick, felt its hiccoughs, felt it squirming after each meal as if it was as revivified by a dish of hot stew or soup as she was. In the evenings, the babe was calm, because she was calm; the moment she opened her eyes, it started to squirm. The babe was active all through the day but especially after meals. The children were intrigued, watching her belly move beneath the fabric of her dress, as her babe stretched and kicked. Calanthe was not impressed: the others were filled with anticipation, though Narcisa’s was somewhat more reserved. Aware, perhaps, that pregnancy was the most dangerous time in a woman’s life.

There were times Larra forgot that the Lannister girls had ever belonged with anyone else. They were so much a part of her life, and they had built a life for the girls here, that Larra sometimes forgot that they had had lives before they arrived at Winterfell, that they had families. She sometimes wondered what the girls had experienced before life at Winterfell. Still mute, the lovely Crisantha loved nothing more than cuddling up with Larra, and Larra couldn’t help wonder why she was calmed by her belly. Narcisa had told her that Crisantha was the only girl in her family but that she had had many brothers – most of them younger.

It explained why Crisantha was soothed by sitting with her: it reminded her…of sitting with her mother.

Small wonder Larra had had to have it spelled out for her: she had had no mother, after all.

Just as her niece or nephew would not.

She was filled with dread for the babe now, growing inside the womb of a woman not just hostile to its existence but denying it could exist at all. And she was filled with sadness for the life the child might endure, an unwanted bastard. To Lady Targaryen, the child was, well, proof that everything she had built herself up to believe was based on a lie she had convinced herself was the truth. To Jon, the child would always be a reminder of Eastwatch, of the imbalance of power, the advantage Lady Targaryen had held over him, taking what she wanted from him. She had taken so much more than they realised. She had taken a child from him.

Jon’s worst fear – to father a bastard. To condemn an innocent to the life he and Larra had been forced to endure.

His poor child had been twice-damned the moment it was conceived.

She rubbed her face, snarling in irritation and wishing Rhaegal was nearby to take her to the skies. Nothing cleared her head quite like the incomparable views she experienced from Rhaegal’s back.

“Give yourself rest, Larra,” someone grunted, and she glanced around to see Gilly, with Little Sam clutching her skirts as she doled out soup for ancient spear-wives who had been teaching drills to young squires.

“If I stop training now, it will make it all the harder to go back to it after,” Larra said, grumpy and agitated. She needed to go flying. She needed to hit something. She was denied flight; someone would train with her. And yet, more and more, the men refused to train with her. She carried the heir to the North; they would not risk her. And she was furious. “And that is one less sword against the Night King’s army… If I have to make a choice between dying so that my child will live, and sitting safely inside when one extra sword could make all the difference…I am going to fight… Training is keeping me healthy. It is keeping me sane.” Gilly watched her carefully, as Larra’s voice grew low and soft. Frightened. “I know the Night King is coming. Until he is here, this is all I can do to stop the feeling of complete terror and hopelessness from consuming me.”

She hadn’t seen Darkstar, sparring with some of the Umber and Dustin men. Not until he carried a bowl of soup over to her, offering it to her. She could smell the leek and potato wafting on the sharp breeze.

Larra gave the bowl of soup a dubious glance, frowning. Why was he bringing her food?

“Eat, lady,” he said softly, his exotic accent warming the air between them. “You are snarling and scaring the men.”

“Am I?” Larra grumbled.

“They displease you and they know it,” Darkstar said. Larra pulled a face. “They would rather take your displeasure than take the risk of hurting you.”

“Bold of them to assume they’d be able to get past my blade,” Larra sniffed, and Darkstar’s beautiful lips twitched.

“Indeed,” he sighed. She accepted the soup with a quiet word of thanks and took her time, savouring each mouthful. It was thick and creamy, scalding her throat on the way down; she could feel it in her belly. After a long moment, Darkstar punted the tip of her boot with his own. She looked up, an eyebrow raised. His expression was intense, his eyes deeply violet. “I will train with you.”

“You will?”

“Mm.”

“You do not share the others’ concerns?” Larra asked, her tone nettled.

Darkstar smirked. “I trust that I have enough skill with a blade, lady, to avoid such a large target – trim as your lovely little belly is,” he said. Larra perked up. Everyone else refused to spar with her for fear of hurting her.

She frowned. “Why?”

“Why do I trust – “

“Why do you want to train with me, when all others fear the babe in my belly?” Larra asked.

Darkstar’s eyes shone. “I have been at Winterfell and observed you long enough to know that you spend all of your time taking care of everyone else. If this is how I may take care of you, my lady, then so be it.”

“Why would you care to take care of me?” Darkstar gives her an enigmatic smile.

“I’ve taken a shine to you.”

“I didn’t know dark stars could shine.”

“Oh, it’s a rare thing,” Darkstar smirked. “I usually despise everyone I meet.”

“I know,” Larra rolled her eyes. “You hate Gendry.”

“I thought I did. I believed I should,” Darkstar nodded. He shrugged. “I gave it up very quickly; it was no use. He is a very decent man. I would go so far as to say one of the best I have ever met. He’s afraid to lose you. That’s a good thing. It means he appreciates just how precious you are.”

Every day that it was fine, Larra met Darkstar in the yard. They continued to spar: he was excellent. Not just with a sword but with adapting her training to her needs. She had to learn to hold her sword a little differently, to accommodate her belly. But, as pregnant spear-wives amongst the Free Folk could attest, there was nothing stopping her fighting. She just had to take care not to fall; Darkstar was always cautious never to land a blow to her belly. But the opportunities to do so became fewer the longer they trained together. Darkstar was an exceptional swordsman and a gifted trainer: Larra not only adapted to fighting whilst pregnant but actually improved.

And she proved to anyone watching that though she was pregnant, that was not all she was. By necessity she had been forced to become a warrior; to support Sansa and Jon, she had become a leader.

It was the leader part that caused the arguments with Gendry.

For weeks, Larra had been training daily with Darkstar. It never interfered with her other duties. But the implication – that when the time came, Larra would be ready to fight – was what upset a lot of people. The idea that she would put herself – and her child – in harm’s way.

Gendry had scowled at the sight of a bruise on her shoulder, where Darkstar had landed a blow. It was mottled purplish-black, the edges tinged with green.

Somehow, his concern had turned to ire. It had turned to an argument.

“Would we be arguing over whether I should be fighting if I wasn’t pregnant?” Larra burst angrily.

“Yes!” Gendry fumed.

“Why?”

“Many reasons. You rule the North. Sansa is learning how to rule from your example. Jon…it’s as if you’ve brought him back to life,” Gendry said heatedly. “Arya is gentler than I have ever known her because she feels safe with you. And you’re not just a mother to that little one…you’re a mother to all the others. Ragnar and Neva and Briar and Calanthe and –“

“I am not their mother,” Larra interrupted quietly.

“Yes, you are. Think I haven’t heard Leona calling you ‘Mummy’? And you don’t correct her – because you don’t know what to say,” Gendry said, his face softening, his anger drifting away, replaced with sorrow. “With or without this baby, there are plenty of people who will be devastated to lose you.”

“I can’t. I can’t sit back and do nothing, waiting,” Larra said, her eyes stinging. “I did that for far too long and it almost killed me.”

“I know. And I can’t sit inside knowing you’re out there commanding armies trying to save us.” Gendry sighed and nodded when her eyes widened. “I know – you wanted me to stay behind because of my skill… I came to Winterfell for the same reason you refuse to sit by while others die to protect you. We’re both fighters… I’m sorry I asked you to change who you are out of fear of losing you. You wouldn’t be the woman I love and respect if you refused to fight… Whatever comes, we’ll face it together, side-by-side.”

She had no use for her anger; she let it melt away. When he held out his hand to her, a promise, she accepted it. “Always.”

He gathered her up, sighing heavily as he rested his cheek on the top of her head, arms wrapped around her. “I love you.”

“I know.”

Notes:

The next few chapters will be shorter, I think, because I’m trying to get us places and we’ve got lots to get through.

Chapter 59: As You Wish

Notes:

Thank you all for your patience! I feel like I say that a lot – alas, full-time work must take priority.

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

59

As You Wish


Dozens of little faces gleamed in the firelight, gazing enraptured at the storyteller who held them spellbound with the latest instalment of a sweeping tale of colourful characters engaging in murder, revenge, true-love, treachery and miracles. The gilding on the leather cover of her book glimmered in the firelight as she adjusted the book in her lap to turn the page, avoiding her swollen belly.

“Wait a moment,” one little girl frowned, her emerald eyes slits of disdain. She grumbled, horrified, “This isn’t a kissing story, is it?”

“Oh, my darling! It is so much more than a kissing book,” the storyteller enthused. “Fencing. Fighting. Torture – revenge. Giants, monsters, chases – escapes! True love. Miracles!”

“It doesn't sound too bad,” the little Lannister yawned widely, shifting to settle beside a dark-haired beauty with enormous sapphire eyes, who was sucking her thumb and cuddling with a slim pearl-haired girl. The two little girls were always together, moonlight and shadow. The golden lioness yawned, “I'll try and stay awake.”

A bedtime story had been in order the last few nights, as storms buffeted the castle and spooked even the white-beards. Stories had been shared by Valemen and by Free Folk and by Bran Stark. Tonight it was Lady Larra’s turn: she had just finished binding together The Princess Bride.

“Oh. Well, thank you, dear. It's very kind of you,” Lady Larra sniffed from her settle. “Your vote of confidence is overwhelming. All right. The Princess Bride by Larra Snow, She-Wolf of Winterfell.” She cleared her throat and settled in to read. “‘Chapter One. Anemone was raised on a small farm in the country of Florin. Her favourite pastimes were riding her horse and tormenting the farm boy that worked there. His name was Wyman, but she never called him that.’”

“What a wonderful beginning,” murmured one of the ladies, stroking her children’s hair as they cuddled close to her. Surrounding Lady Larra’s settle were many other seats, benches, the floor piled with cushions and children cuddled under blankets, their eyes glinting in the firelight as they gazed at her. Around them were adults, too: Nestor Maegos and his lady, Lord Lonmouth, Duncan Storm and Lord Velaryon. Darkstar’s amethyst eyes glittered in the firelight like slumbering purple embers, watching her carefully as Lady Nym lolled sensuously beside him, sipping expensive southern wine she shared from a skin tucked close to Lord Tyrion.

“Yeah. It's really good,” Calanthe Lannister muttered without feeling. Lady Larra gave her a deadpan look.

“’Nothing gave Anemone as much pleasure as ordering Wyman around. ‘Polish my horse’s saddle. I want to see my face shining in it by morning,’ she would order. Wyman would answer gently, ‘As you wish.’ As you wish was all he ever said to her. ‘Farm Boy, fill these with water…please.’ As you wish, he replied. Day after day, Anemone did this, until one particular day when she was amazed to discover that when he was saying, ‘As you wish,’ what he meant was ‘I love you.’ And even more amazing was the day she realised she truly loved him back. ‘Farm Boy, fetch me that pitcher.’ As he always did, Wyman replied, ‘As you wish’. Wyman and Anemone fell deeply and irrevocably into a love so pure and so true that –“

“Hold it, hold it!” Calanthe Lannister blurted indignantly. “What is this? Are you trying to trick me? Where’s the danger? The duels? You said this is more than a kissing book!”

“Wait, just wait,” Lady Larra chided gently.

“Well, when does it get good?” Calanthe asked indignantly.

“Keep your bonnet on, let me read!” Larra said, clearing her throat. She turned back to the book. “‘Wyman had no money for marriage. So he packed his few belongings and left the farm to seek his fortune across the sea. It was a very emotional time for Anemone –‘“

“I don’t believe this,” Calanthe sighed disdainfully, and Lady Larra’s pretty lips twitched. She started to read, giving each character their own distinctive voice.

‘“I fear I shall never see you again,” said Anemone.

“Of course you will.”

“But what if something happens to you?”

His voice like iron, Wyman told his lady, “Hear this now: I will come for you.”

“But how can you be sure?” asked Anemone tearfully.

“This is true love,” answered Wyman, with an ironic little smile. “You think this happens every day?”

Wyman gave her a coaxing smile full of confidence. Anemone’s tears dried and she smiled, flinging herself into her lover’s arms, kissing him passionately. When he left, Anemone stood and watched until long after Wyman’s golden hair had stopped glimmering in the sunlight… Every day, Anemone watched the road to her family’s farm. Every day she was disappointed, yet every day she returned… Wyman never made it to his destination. His ship was attacked by the Dread Pirate Aeros, who never left captives alive. When word reached Anemone that her beloved had been murdered – “’

“Murdered by pirates is good!” Cadeon grinned, and Calanthe sighed contentedly.

‘“ – she went into her room and shut the door. And for days, she neither slept nor ate. Before the Old Gods and the New, Anemone vowed that she would never love again.”’

“You said this was a story about murder and revenge! Where is the killing?!”

“May I keep reading?” Larra asked, and Calanthe groaned, flinging herself back against a cushion. Larra told the story of The Princess Bride, and by the time the Braavosi water-dancer finally skewered the vicious, cowardly Myrish nobleman with the extra finger, the audience was enraptured, though the atmosphere in the hall had changed throughout the story’s telling, with whispers and murmurings and exclamations, people putting their heads together, exchanging papers. Curious but focused on her story, Larra’s eyes glowed vividly, glittering with tears, her voice thick with passion as she exclaimed, “’I want my father back, you son of a bitch!’ hissed Ozias Vollanar, stabbing Needle through the Myrman’s shrivelled black heart.”

The audience loosed its breath, shaky sobs and outright cheers rippling through the crowd, and Arya brushed tears from her eyes, smiling, as Darkstar nodded slowly, applauding, his violet eyes afire. Larra closed her eyes, feeling the trickle of tears down her cheeks, and for a heartbeat, she believed it: Father was alive, and her fairytale had come true. She sniffed, wiped her face, and cleared her throat, reading, “’The Myrman slumped to the blood-splattered flagstones. Ozias Vollanar’s vengeance was complete, his father finally avenged. Peace, pure and light, spread through the water-dancer’s body. Clutching his still-bleeding belly, Ozias Vollanar did something he had not done in decades. He smiled.’”

“What about Wyman?” breathed Briar, her enormous blue eyes wide, mouth hidden behind her fingertips.

“’As Ozias Vollanar finally sheathed his blade, a dagger was drawn in a bridal chamber. Princess Anemone, resplendent in her shimmering gown, sat at her dressing-table, pressing the tip of a jewelled dagger to her breast. For, as she had told the feeble, kind King, she had every intention of joining her beloved in death. As she was about to plunge the dagger into her heart, a voice spoke in the stillness of the chamber: ‘There’s a shortage of perfect breasts in this world. It would be a great pity to damage yours.’ Anemone whirled. Reclined on the bed was none other than her beloved. She raced to Wyman and flung herself at him, showering him with kisses.”

Larra read on, taking care with the voices and accents of the characters, the timing of their lines, lingering on her words to build tension. Over the course of the story, the audience had grown larger. The jokes and innuendo that went over the children’s heads made the adults smirk and chuckle, enjoying the story every bit as much as the children.

‘“You know, it’s very strange – I have been in the revenge business so long, now that it’s over, I don’t know what to do with the rest of my life,” Ozias Vollanar sighed.

“Have you ever considered piracy?” asked Wyman. “You’d make a wonderful Dread Pirate Aeros.”

The two men jumped from the balcony and mounted their bright steeds. The four glorious white horses carried their riders triumphantly into the moonlight. They rode to freedom, and as dawn arose, Wyman and Anemone knew that they at last were safe. A wave of love swept over them. And as they reached for each other…”’

Larra cleared her throat, sniffed delicately, and shut the book. Uproar.

“What? What?!” shouted Calanthe. Briar’s protests could be heard over the raucous cries of the audience, anxious to know the ending.

“No, it’s kissing again. You don’t want to hear it,” Larra said, waving an idle hand, delight fizzing through her veins as her audience implored her to continue, a smile twitching at the corners of her mouth.

Calanthe sighed, settling back to cuddle with Briar and Neva. “I don’t mind so much.” She waited patiently for Larra to open the book, resting her chin in her hand, a look of gentle delight illuminating her emerald eyes. Larra smiled gently at Calanthe, drinking in the sight of the three girls – one of pearl, one of gold, one of obsidian – cuddled together, content and happy. It was a sight she yearned to paint. How rare it was.

“Alright,” Larra conceded, hiding her smile, and opened the book to the very last page. “’Since the invention of the kiss, there have been five kisses that were rated the most passionate and the most pure… This one left them all behind. The End.’ Now… I believe it is time for bed.”

Amid the protests, it was gentle Crisantha who approached Larra, her amber eyes bright, her cheeks tearstained from weeping over Wyman’s mostly-death, her lip bruised where she had bit it during Anemone’s close encounter with the shrieking krakens and then again during Wyman and Anemone’s tussle with Rodents of Unusual Size in the fire-swamp and Ozias’ final duel with the Myrman, her eyes bright with relief and delight at the ending.

In a voice as gentle as a summer breeze, she asked, “Lady Larra, please would you read it to us tomorrow night?”

It was the first time Crisantha had spoken.

Larra gazed at the gentle girl, with her billows of frothy blonde curls and glowing amber eyes, her hands clasped in supplication, and smiled gently. She reached up to tenderly cradle Crisantha’s beautiful face in her hands and leaned in to kiss her brow, as she always did. She lingered, though, her eyes stinging.

“As you wish,” Larra replied, and Crisantha’s eyes glittered as she smiled, understanding what it meant to hear those words. Larra pressed her forehead to Crisantha’s, a calm and tender moment shared between them, broken only by Leona toddling over and lifting her arms up to be carried.

Larra reached out to smooth her hair but could no longer lift her; though her belly was neat and trim, not an extra ounce of fat on her anywhere, she did have a belly. She could no longer lift Leona, or cuddle with her on her lap. Her daily exercises with Darkstar continued but at a much mellower pace. Nestor Maegos had witnessed them sparring and encouraged her to remain active, instructing her on different exercises and stretches she should do to retain flexibility and strength without risking herself or the child.

Now that she had reassured herself about keeping her skills sharp to best defend herself and those she loved, Larra felt far calmer: she had started to enjoy her pregnancy for what it was. She was creating new life; and she was slowly falling in love with pregnancy, with every intimate movement she felt and experience they alone shared. The connection she felt with the child growing within her was profound. She provided everything the child could need: all it knew was her. Her strength, her love, the beat of her heart, the sound of her voice. She had grown healthy and strong and now gave that strength and health to her child. Her and Gendry’s child.

He appeared out of the darkness to scoop Leona up into his strong arms and deposit her in Cadeon’s arms, leaning in to kiss Larra and tenderly brush his hand against her belly. She had not yet dropped; the women around her were on the watch for it. It would be the tell-tale sign she was due to give birth.

As much as she had been in a hurry to have the Night King and his army march upon Winterfell, to be over and done with things one way or another, Larra was in no hurry for childbirth. Not out of dread, as she would have expected: out of regret. The connection she felt with the child, part of her as she was of them, was too beautiful. She would have kept baby exactly where they were if she could. She loved feeling them move.

And move baby did. Throughout the story, she had felt baby stretching, its tiny feet pushing out noticeably against the left side of her belly. Some hawk-eyed listeners had been watching the fabric of her gown shift over her belly as the child kicked and stretched.

Now, the crowd started to disperse. Or rather, the ladies took their children to bed, leaving only adults behind. And they seemed more intrigued with Larra now that the story had ended than they had during its telling.

“My beloved former-wife tells me that The Princess Bride came into being to make fun of the romances she used to adore,” remarked Lord Tyrion, walking over with Tisseia, whose eyes shone. “Do you know, in writing this satire of popular romances, you may just have created the greatest love-story ever told.”

“I thank you for the compliment, my lord,” Larra smiled at Lord Tyrion.

“My especial favourite was the fate of the repugnant Prince,” Lord Tyrion smirked, his eyes glittering with irony. “A duel ‘to the pain’? Whoever heard of such a thing? One need not think too hard on where such inspiration came from. I imagine you and your family dreamed up many a punishment for my repulsive nephew after what he did to your father.”

“I would be lying if I said I had not spent months dreaming nightly of watching him be torn apart by wights. I must content myself that Ozias Vollanar will always get justice for his father,” Larra said. Her eyes slid over the crowd, to Arya. Ozias Vollanar had developed as a way to get justice for her own father but he was also a warning. Ozias Vollanar lived for nothing but revenge: without it, he was nothing. His entire identity had been tied up with his pursuit of revenge. She feared that in her pursuit of revenge against Joffrey and Cersei and all those she had added to her list, Arya would become nothing more than that list of names, nothing more than a sword in the shadows.

“Well, it was refreshing indeed to have the seemingly perfect prince be revealed for his true, revolting nature,” Lord Tyrion mused. “It would do well for the young ladies of Westeros to read The Princess Bride as a lesson.”

“And what lesson have you taken from it, Lord?” Larra asked.

“Why, that wealth and beauty often disguise – and excuse – horror,” Lord Tyrion muttered. “Myself, I am repulsive – people are only too quick to believe the very worst of me. But my handsome brother Jaime – a multitude of his sins have been forgiven for his beauty, have they not?”

“Politics have more to do with your brother’s pardons than anything,” Larra said. Lord Tyrion made a thoughtful noise, his eyes glowing.

“It was a wonderful story, Larra,” Tisseia beamed, her dimples winking. “Truly.”

“Thank you, Tisseia,” Larra smiled. “Though there were parts I think that did not captivate as much as others.”

“What do you mean?” Tisseia asked innocently. Lord Tyrion’s eyes gleamed shrewdly.

Gendry lingered, putting his arm around her shoulders and drew her close for a lingering kiss. When he drew back, his face was unusually sombre. Lord Tyrion gave Larra a courteous bow and he and Lady Tisseia disappeared into the throng of people.

“What’s wrong?” she asked Gendry quietly.

“Large crowd for the story tonight,” Gendry muttered, and Larra nodded, watching his expression carefully. Her shrewd husband rarely betrayed his thoughts in his expressions but she knew him well enough to know he was concerned.

“I’d like to credit my story-telling skills,” Larra said, “but your worry makes me think something’s happened.”

Gendry sighed heavily. “All afternoon, I’ve been hearing things,” he said softly, reaching inside the folds of his heavy over-tunic. “I’ve never known the forge to be rampant with gossip but it’s spreading through the castle.”

“What is?” Larra asked cautiously.

He handed her an aged scroll. Holding it to the firelight, she saw the four-legged dragon of House Targaryen imprinted in the wax seal, broken in half. Raising her eyes to Gendry’s face, he watched her quietly. She glanced back at the scroll as she unfurled it, her gaze turning to the elaborate text beautifully scribed and illuminated on it.

Larra was never more aware of the eyes on her than in that moment: the hall seemed to have held its breath.

“This is a royal proclamation,” she blinked, slightly dazed. There were their names – Aegon Torrhen and Aella Alarra – written plainly for all to see, surrounded by elaborate illuminations. Below them, the signatures of several men made her stomach turn over – or was that the baby, wriggling into a more comfortable position?

Lord Commander Gerold Hightower. Ser Arthur Dayne. Ser Oswell Whent… Prince Rhaegar Targaryen. Beside each, a smaller seal set in wax – the ancient sigils of each knight’s House and that of Prince Rhaegar… It was not the four-legged dragon but the ouroboros: a winged dragon and the direwolf of House Stark, the initials R and L intertwined within the never-ending circle.

The document was a royal proclamation announcing the birth of Prince Rhaegar’s legitimate heirs by Lyanna Stark, Princess of Dragonstone.

“Who gave this to you?” Larra asked, glancing up sharply at Gendry.

“The Greatjon,” Gendry muttered. Larra glanced back at the proclamation, carefully rolling it up again. The wax was incredibly fragile. Aged. “Lord Lonmouth saw the Greatjon give it to me and showed me an identical one that he’d received. He was looking for you, agitated. I told them Rhaegal had taken you out. That did nothing to settle Lord Lonmouth.”

A break in the storms had her taking to the skies with Rhaegal, desperate for fresh air and cold and quiet. Rhaegal had touched their muzzle to her belly when Larra had gone out to them: Rhaegal knew what it meant, perhaps could even hear the child’s heart beating like a tiny bird’s, and had flown with noticeable care. The more Larra flew, the deeper her connection with Rhaegal: and perhaps that connection told Rhaegal all they needed to know about Larra’s pregnancy.

“The Greatjon received this?” Larra asked quietly. Gendry nodded.

“Samwell says ravens have been arriving all day, from all over Westeros,” Gendry muttered. “He had no idea what they were talking about until I showed him this proclamation. Apparently, lords and ladies all over Westeros – and beyond – have been receiving these proclamations over the last few weeks, declaring your legitimacy as Prince Rhaegar’s only surviving heirs. People have been writing, seeking confirmation from House Stark – from the King in the North, the bastard Ned Stark raised, the child he brought back from the war after finding his sister dead in Dorne. They’ve put the pieces together.”

“No-one has said anything to me,” Larra frowned.

“Jon won’t acknowledge it,” Gendry said. “He’s too focused on siege preparations; he won’t entertain discussion about it, even. And Sansa… She asked me to show this to you. She doesn’t know what to do. Won’t do anything without consulting you.”

Larra examined the proclamation. Too many people knew already, even within Winterfell. It was only a matter of time until it spread like wildfire. She just hadn’t imagined it would be so soon – or that it would be spread from outside Winterfell. Someone, somewhere, had discovered the truth. They were using her and Jon as pawns.

Gendry asked quietly, “What in seven hells would anyone gain by spreading this truth – after so long?” Larra sighed heavily.

“Information is a weapon, as dangerous as any dragon,” Larra said. “Whoever is behind spreading this information is doing so to destabilise Cersei’s reign and call into question the legitimacy of Lady Targaryen’s claim.”

“They’re assuming people will believe it.”

“People only believed Rhaegar was a rapist because Robert won the Rebellion,” Larra said sadly. “Had Rhaegar won, he would have been celebrated as the greatest romantic hero of our age, the beloved prince torn between his love for his father and his duty to his people, and Robert the jealous warmonger that whored his way through life, dishonouring his House until he was cut down by the better man.”

“And now that Robert’s dead,” Gendry mused, “and this is revealed…”

“People are allowed to remember Rhaegar as they knew him, not how Robert wanted everyone to think of him,” Larra said. “This gives them permission to love and respect the Last Dragon, as they once did… It’s more than that, though. This proves Rhaegar left a legitimate son to inherit the Iron Throne. And the lords of Westeros will cling to that like a lifeline thrown to a drowning sailor… The alternative is either Queen Cersei or Lady Targaryen – and so far they’ve both gone out of their way to prove to the world that they are brutal and incompetent fools.”

“This changes everything,” Gendry said urgently, his eyes alight with dread.

“We’re snowed inside this castle – will be, for years potentially,” Larra reminded him. She raised the proclamation. “There’s little anyone can do about this.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Gendry said, frowning.

“What are you worried about?” Larra asked him earnestly.

“I’m worried that you’re not more concerned,” Gendry said.

“Who says I’m not concerned?” Larra sighed. “I wonder who had these proclamations all these years – and who released them into the world. What their agenda is beyond destabilising Cersei and Daenerys. If they have a goal beyond that.”

“Whoever it is, they know you and Jon are alive,” Gendry muttered, and Larra frowned at him.

“Why do you assume that?”

“Otherwise, this knowledge would be utterly redundant.”

“They could find pretenders anywhere,” Larra said negligently.

“They don’t need to – not when you’ve bonded with Rhaegal,” Gendry said. “Someone knows.”

“It would be foolish to imagine what happens at Winterfell stays at Winterfell,” Larra sighed.

“So there are spies in Winterfell.”

“Oh, there always have been – and always will be,” Larra said. “But I imagine Lady Nym and Darkstar and the Knights of the Vale have written home about what happens here.” Larra closed her eyes, sighing heavily. When she opened her eyes, her gaze rested on Lord Lonmouth. The pale stripes in his beard shone like silver in the firelight, his eyes glittering as he watched her intensely.

“I would like to know who had these documents,” Larra said quietly, “though I suppose that doesn’t matter nearly as much as what they intend to do with the chaos they will likely have created. I would like to know who is attempting to use us in some scheme to grasp for power.”

Without even turning, Gendry grunted, “I’d say he’s your likeliest bet, only he seemed angry that the proclamations have been sent out.” She knew Lord Lonmouth had been a squire to Prince Rhaegar and had attended the wedding of her parents on the Isle of Faces. But he had only known she and Jon were children of Rhaegar when he first set eyes upon them. He had not been at the Tower of Joy, to her knowledge. And he had also been living in exile in Essos for over two decades.

Who would know to send a raven to Lord Lonmouth here in Winterfell?

Spies. There had to be hundreds of them in Winterfell. But who did they report to? Cersei, the Citadel, Essosi princes and magisters? All, most likely. Anyone with coin to pay handsomely to mitigate the risk in providing this information.

Why would Lord Lonmouth be annoyed that the truth was known, when he was still Prince Rhaegar’s greatest supporter? “Someone has interfered with his plans.”

“What plans?”

“He remains devoted to Prince Rhaegar,” Larra said quietly. “He saw me and Jon and knew the truth with no need for proof. And he has witnessed Jon rule the North. He’s no fool. With Queen Cersei and Lady Targaryen frothing at the mouth to attack each other over the Seven Kingdoms, Lord Lonmouth will not be the last to think of putting Jon on the Iron Throne in their place.”

“You think that’s what Lonmouth’s after?”

“I doubt he’s had the time – and most definitely does not have the resources or influence in Westeros – to plan to put Jon on the Iron Throne,” Larra said, “even if he’s thought about it. He remains Rhaegar’s most loyal supporter; why wouldn’t he conspire to put Rhaegar’s only legitimate surviving son on the Iron Throne?”

“Especially when faced with the alternatives,” Gendry grunted, and Larra nodded.

“Someone’s beaten him to it,” Larra sighed.

“I wonder who,” Gendry muttered.

“Oh, it could be anyone – likely someone who’s never met Jon and doesn’t give a shit that he’s alive. They just care about what his existence can do for them as a political weapon,” Larra shrugged. “We’re likely to find out, I’m sure. Though while I’m focused on the Night King, I can’t bring myself to care who it was – or why.”

The proclamation in hand, Larra strode over to Lord Lonmouth, who was conversing low with Lord Tarly.

“You look as though you are aching to break someone’s jaw,” Larra said, by way of greeting. “I assume it has something to do with this.” She was aware that many of the lords and knights in the hall drew closer.

“There are many men in this castle unsettled by these proclamations,” Lord Royce spoke up from behind Lord Lonmouth. His face was apologetic as he bowed courteously to Larra. “I, for one. Ned Stark and I grew up together in the Vale. We sparred together as boys; as young-men, we fought side by side in battle. I believed I knew his true nature. And yet I all too easily believed the gossip that he had fathered bastards, though in my heart I had never known him to be the type to dishonour a girl, lowborn or not… I believed the worst of Ned Stark. And I am heartily ashamed.”

Larra stared at Lord Royce. Bronze Yohn was a stalwart man, carved from the windswept mountainsides of the Vale, decent and honourable, loyal and unyielding. He had the blood of the First Men in his veins, the same as her. He had grown up with Ned Stark. And he looked devastated that he had ever thought ill of his friend.

“My father went out of his way to ensure everyone believed it,” Larra said quietly, aware of the hush around her as lords and ladies craned their necks to listen. “He wished everyone to believe the lie, to protect us.”

“Then it is true,” Lord Tarly rumbled, looking stunned. “You are the blood of the dragon.”

“Rhaegar Taryaryen sired us, it is true,” Larra sighed.

“Then your brother is the true heir to the Iron Throne,” Lord Lonmouth said calmly. “The true King of the Seven Kingdoms.”

“Jon was named King in the North by those he has united, those he leads, all of whom were ignorant of the truth of his birth, including Jon himself,” Larra interrupted sternly. “He has earned his crown, as few ever have. He has devoted his life to fighting the Night King and his hordes. The truth of our lineage has nothing to do with it. Neither he nor I will be distracted from the threat of the Night King – especially to put Jon on the same southern throne that killed our father.”

It was easy for those who had never seen it to ignore the threat of the Night King. It was too abstract for them. Many had to see to believe, and such was the case with the Night King’s army. It was far easier to wrap their minds around the idea that usurpers sat upon a throne rightfully Jon’s, to be incensed and driven to act against those who had taken what was rightfully his. Scheming and politics, human wars of succession, they were all things they had been exposed to throughout their lives, could wrap their minds around. They knew what to do and how to fight that threat.

“The King refuses to acknowledge these proclamations,” Lord Lonmouth said.

“I have no doubt some southerner is trying to use them as a weapon against Queen Cersei and Lady Targaryen,” Larra said, “but here they are nothing more than a distraction that could cost us all our lives. Understand this, my lords; we cannot afford any distractions. The war is all that matters – the war against the Night King.”

“And when that war is over?” Lord Lonmouth prompted. Lingering nearby, Darkstar tilted his head thoughtfully.

“This war will be unlike any you have ever heard of, even in the ancient legends of the Age of Heroes,” Lord Tarly said sombrely. He had experienced the Night King’s hordes and he gazed at Larra with something close to respect in his eyes. “Lady Larra is speaks the truth: it is not worth the risk to indulge in this distraction.”

“I would thank you all to tell your friends the same,” Larra said, gazing around sternly at the men. Begrudgingly, most bowed and departed: she watched them muttering amongst themselves as they left in small groups. Lord Lonmouth lingered, but it was Darkstar who remained the longest, watching her as if making a study of her.

“The proclamation was not news to you,” he remarked, his rich accent dripping off his tongue, decadent and sensual.

Larra sighed. She admitted, “I learned the truth of things months ago. And it matters as little now as it did then.”

“You are wrong.” Darkstar lingered closer, frowning at her, his violet eyes glowing in the dark of the smoky hall. Those violet eyes, his shimmering pearl-silver hair, he looked every inch a Targaryen. He was subtle and she did not doubt he could be wicked when he wished; he had a tart tongue and a wry sense of humour. Sensuality and masculine energy oozed from him, utterly comfortable in his own skin and luxuriating in its effect on others. Even Lady Nym seemed somewhat wary of him, as if he was a puzzle she could not quite work out. His strategy in cyvasse revealed more of his patient, tricky nature. She wondered what he could see in all this mess.

“How so?”

“It matters because all these men have had months to learn who you and your brother are without titles, without even a name,” Darkstar said, his accent so beguiling Larra might have become lost in it. She imagined idle nights under a lambent moon, the air full of spices and scents as strange music drifted on the heavy air whenever he spoke; he evoked visions of a place she had only ever imagined. Were all Dornishmen like him? Threatening to seduce with every syllable, no matter how benign? “These men have learned who you are and what you value, how you treat others who are in need and those who have something to offer.”

“So?” Larra prompted, aware how stubborn she sounded.

Darkstar sighed. “One day, gods willing, they will return to homes ruled by Queen Cersei – or Lady Targaryen… And they will remember how it felt to be led by House Stark, who respected them, collaborated with them, gave all the opportunity to be heard and valued, who united them and led them and provided for them when they were at their most vulnerable. And after not so very long, they will yearn once more to bend the knee to someone they respect. They will ache to pay fealty to House Stark once again.”

“I don’t know who you’re putting more faith in – House Stark, or everyone else’s opinions of House Stark,” Larra said. Darkstar’s smile was ironic.

“You are not wrong to scold the others for their lack of focus,” Darkstar sighed. “But do not imagine for a moment that they will not take the first opportunity to begin plotting.” He sighed, reaching out and squeezing her shoulder. “You have until the war is won, lady. Then the games begin in earnest. Do you desire to be a pawn or a player?”

“Perhaps I wish to take myself off the board entirely.”

Darkstar smirked but his eyes remained unaccountably sad. “You should know that such a thing is impossible. In death, Prince Rhaegar is now as much a piece on the board as he ever was in life. So, you must choose.”

Larra wrinkled her nose, irritated, and rubbed her tired eyes. The fresh air from her ride with Rhaegal and the smokiness of the hall now exhausted her. “I do not have the capacity to think about it.”

“Yes, you do,” Darkstar said, a steely strength in his tone that reminded her of Jon. “You just do not wish to.”

Frowning at Darkstar, Larra was prevented from replying by Samwell Tarly, who rushed over looking agitated, his hands full of raven-scrolls.

“What fresh hell is this?” Larra grumbled, and Darkstar smirked, his eyes flashing with amusement.

“There have been ravens, Larra,” Sam blurted breathlessly.

“About the proclamations, I know – Gendry’s caught me up.”

“No – yes – no. This is something different,” Sam said. “Ravens from the Neck, Larra, and from Gulltown and the Fingers.”

“What has happened?” Larra asked sharply.

“Dothraki have been seen travelling south along the King’s Road.”

Larra frowned. “South? They were headed north – and the white mare rode amongst them.”

“Maesters from the Neck have been sending ravens, keeping us updated: the Dothraki have left scores of their dead, burned, along the King’s Road.”

“So they have stopped the spread of the sickness?” Larra said, relieved.

“As much as they know how to,” Samwell said. “They’re brutally efficient: even the suspicion of sickness and they’re cut down. They’re burned, along with their possessions – even their horses – to stop the spread.”

“Well, that is good news,” Larra said. Had she not told the others that it was not up to them – or Rhaegal – to eradicate the threat of sickness, that the Dothraki were quite capable of doing so themselves? “So why are you cringing with worry?”

“There have been more ravens,” Samwell grimaced, “from Moat Cailin, among others. The bogs had frozen over but with all the horses, the ice broke – they lost so many horses, the horde was forced to stop. They could see the horde from the battlements with a Far-Eye.”

“And?”

“Well… It appears they turned on each other,” Samwell said.

“The Dothraki were not made to ride in such numbers,” Larra said grimly. “They were bound to come to blows – I am glad they did not make it here before such a thing happened.”

“Well, now it seems they’re divided. Most rode north, finding their own path around the bogs,” Samwell said. “The others that survived tried to aggress Moat Cailin but gave up as soon as they realised how efficiently a few good archers can defend it… They turned south, back the way they had come. They’ve started attacking easier targets.”

“What?” Larra’s sharp tone made Samwell jump.

“It seems Lady Targaryen’s influence over them has waned in her absence,” Sam said. “They’ve been stealing livestock, poaching in the forests… People have fled to their lords’ castles for protection. But if they couldn’t reach them in time, if their lords barred the gates –”

“They’ve taken slaves.”

“Ravens have been sent to ensure people are prepared for their coming but…”

“But winter has come,” Larra said heavily. “People will be safe from enslavement but not starvation.”

“I don’t know what is to be done to help,” Samwell said, his thoughtful face creasing with concern. What could be done for those under siege? Had not Robert Baratheon foreseen this?

“Let's say Viserys Targaryen lands with forty-thousand Dothraki screamers at his back. We hole up in our castles. A wise move. Only a fool would meet the Dothraki in an open field. They leave us in our castles. They go from town to town, looting and burning, killing every man who can't hide behind a stone wall, stealing all our crops and livestock, enslaving all our women and children… How long do the people of the Seven Kingdoms stand behind their absentee king, their cowardly king hiding behind high walls? When do the people decide that Viserys Targaryen is the rightful monarch after all?”

It wasn’t the frightened and furious Viserys III Targaryen who had brought Dothraki to the shores of Westeros. But it was his sister who had allowed them to slip their leash. Cersei was a vicious idiot but Larra knew she would remember her conversation with Robert about the Dothraki hordes – it was the only time she had ever brought up Lyanna Stark, the one occasion Robert had been absolutely truthful.

But Cersei was also selfish. She would protect what was hers – she would protect King’s Landing, the seat of her power, surrounded by hundreds of thousands who would have to die before any army reached her. And King’s Landing had what other settlements did not: Blackwater Bay. The Dothraki feared saltwater, had no idea how to sail: they could not blockade the bay. At the very least, the people of King’s Landing could fish the bay to survive, send ships to Essos. As for defending the city, well, its walls were strong. Yet Jaime Lannister had brought her pyromancers north. How could Cersei not just defend King’s Landing but attack the Dothraki?

And how would Westeros respond to Lady Targaryen’s hordes pillaging and enslaving? If she condemned the Dothraki, it would be admitting she had no control over them. It would show her as weak. She would never do such a thing. Not now. Before, perhaps. Had she not already been rejected by Meereen, there might have been a chance that Daenerys Targaryen would condemn the actions of the Dothraki who sullied her name… But if she got what she wanted – people turning against Cersei for her inaction in dealing with the threat of the Dothraki… What did it matter? Those who spoke against her would be dead anyway. But if she claimed the Dothraki acted on her behalf, she would invoke the wrath of every lord and lady in Westeros. No matter what she did, Daenerys Targaryen would be teetering on a double-edged sword.

And with news of Jon and Larra’s true lineage…

The proclamations being disseminated now made a little more sense.

It was no longer a case of choosing sides between Cersei and Daenerys. There was another option. Jon was the better option – and the best hope they had.

It was the last thing Jon wanted.

“You mentioned Gulltown and the Fingers,” Larra prompted. Samwell cringed again.

“There’ve been…bodies, washing ashore, for weeks,” he said apologetically. “A raven came from House Elesham on the Paps, reporting the sinking of several ships during a brutal storm. Some of the ships were dashed upon the treacherous rocks off the shore of the island, others were swallowed by the waves. The maester said that after the storm abated, wreckage washed upon the shore of the Paps, including bodies of Unsullied. Coldwater, Snakewoods, even in Strong Song they’ve reported bodies of Unsullied washing up on the shore, dragged from the wreckage site by the strong currents.”

Larra listened grimly, something tightening in her belly. The Dothraki had turned on each other, though some were resolutely trying to find their way north to their Khaleesi with her tremendous winged mount. Thousands of Unsullied had been claimed by the Drowned God.

The armies Lady Targaryen had committed…had been decimated.

There was a reason Larra had encouraged them all to plan for the assault of Winterfell with what they had already at Winterfell.

“Do we know if any of the Unsullied survived?” Larra asked.

“The storm was so bad, the maester couldn’t be sure through the Far-Eye,” Samwell said. “I’m afraid we’ll just have to wait and see if any of Lady Targaryen’s ships reach White Harbour.”

Darkstar, his eyes alight with a strange irony, asked, “Who will tell Lady Targaryen that winter came for her armies?”

Notes:

There had to be repercussions for Daenerys re the armies mobilising in winter. No way the Dothraki wouldn’t turn on each other when things got tough. Only the threat of Drogon kept them united. And if the seas were rough already when Sam and Gilly went south to Oldtown, they have to be horrendous now!

It really tickles me to imagine Darkstar and Larra talking. Darkstar, with his delicious Oberyn accent with the rolling Rs and Larra, with her blunt Northern accent – two ends of the accent spectrum!

Chapter 60: Jon's Honour

Notes:

Forewarning. Non-descriptive childbirth and Jonsa.

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

60

Jon’s Honour


Bloodcurdling screams ripped through the frozen air, shattering the silence, tearing at frayed nerves. The sounds echoed hideously off the ancient stone walls and sent shudders skittering down the spines of battle-hardened warriors. These were not the screams of wounded soldiers in agony on blood-soaked battlefields. These were women’s wails. The chorus of childbirth.

Maids and maesters bustled in and out of the chamber as Larra and the others lingered beyond the threshold. Jon remained absent; Arya scowled in the shadows and Sansa paced to conceal her anxiousness. Larra admitted it freely to herself; the sounds were horrifying.

They would have been enough to frighten her to death about her own impending labour, had she not known just why Daenerys Targaryen was in such a state. It had little to do with her labours and everything to do with her own mind, her own terror that her body was rebelling against what her mind had convinced itself.

For hours, Lady Targaryen had been screaming bloody murder – in fact, her Unsullied had hurried to her chambers fearing she was being attacked by assassins.

It was Missandei who had noticed her mistress’ waters had broken all over the rushes before the hearth, sent a maid hurrying to the solar to inform them. It was Missandei who, days ago, had informed them that her lady’s belly had dropped in preparation for impending birth. They were prepared. Even the child itself was prepared.

Lady Targaryen, even until the moment maesters and midwives had bustled into the room, denied she carried a child in her womb.

Her confusion – and her terror – was palpable.

She refused to believe she was with child and thus her labour pains…her pains bewildered and terrified her.

And the sound of her terror set Larra on edge.

The fear had drawn her into Lady Targaryen’s chamber, though. Seeing her sprawled on her bed, pale hair shimmering in the meagre light, eyes wide with fear, pupils blown, chest heaving like a wounded animal, her belly enormous, screaming in agony as her mind refused to acknowledge what her body was trying to tell her… It had reminded Larra too sharply of Queen Aemma. The fate of that gentle, wise woman – and that of her child – had provoked Larra to act, as nothing else would.

Because in that moment, Larra had looked down at Daenerys and feared not for the life of the woman before her but for the babe in her belly. She had never sympathised with King Viserys more than in that horrifying heartbeat when she had considered turning to the maesters and telling them to do whatever was necessary to save her brother’s child, regardless of the mother, for whom she cared not at all.

Her brother’s child. It was Jon’s child in Daenerys’ belly, Jon’s child struggling to come into the world – perhaps as if she already knew she was not wanted and determined to come into the world regardless, defiant. Her mother refused to acknowledge her and her father could not love her.

But Larra… It was for that innocent child that Larra had sat calmly on the edge of Daenerys’ bed, drawing her focus as she heaved and panted, collapsing against pillows after a wave of contractions had ripped through her. Daenerys had screamed through them, her face brilliant red, her eyes mutinous – rioting against her fear even as it overwhelmed her better sense.

“Daenerys,” she said quietly, wincing as Daenerys hissed and contorted, her fingertips white as she clutched her belly, panting. Sweat shone on her face, her usually pristine hair dank around her flushed, sweaty face, swollen from exertion. Gently, she prompted, “Dany.”

She had not been called that in years. But the shock of being called that ancient nickname drew her gaze to Larra’s face and she seemed to settle, just for a moment.

“Dany, your body is preparing to give birth,” she said calmly, her voice low and steady. Larra felt far from steady, far from calm – she had no experience of childbirth. She knew violence – she understood gruesome injuries and pain and the even more perilous healing journey after sustaining wounds…but she had yet to experience childbirth. Not long now… It was the most precarious moment in their relationship. It would define how things were between them going forward. Daenerys would always remember how Larra treated her now. She had no wish to scare Daenerys when she was already mindless with terror. Larra had no love for Daenerys Targaryen but she was not without compassion: she would not terrify a woman already mindless with fear.

Yet if they did nothing to break her from the hold that terror had over her, Daenerys risked her own life, as well as that of Jon’s child. “If you do not listen to your body, you will die. These people are here to help you. That is all they want to do.”

“I cannot have a child,” Daenerys grimaced, puffing hard.

“You are having a child,” Larra told her quietly. “Please let them help you. After all you have survived, will you let your fear be the thing that kills you?”

Larra had helped Daenerys sit up, moving to a more comfortable position – ignoring the maesters who protested, while the midwives clucked and cooed encouragement. Through her pains, Larra had remained, grimacing as Daenerys squeezed her hand so tightly it felt as if her fingers might break. Yet Daenerys was tiring. She had spent so long fighting her pains, putting all her strength into screaming and resisting, that when she needed it, she had little strength to bring forth the child.

At a certain point, and Larra was not certain why, she was banished from the chamber by a gaggle of wizened midwives. To be present for childbirth was one thing: to be an expectant mother herself, as yet inexperienced in the true, grisly nature of it, was quite another. They banished her apologetically from the chamber, promising it was best that she not be present for what was now occurring in the birthing-bed. Larra could only imagine – and did not wish to.

“Arya,” she murmured grimly, and her sister perked her head up, her grey eyes gleaming. “Find Nester Maegos.”

“The surgeon?”

“I would have him consult with the midwives,” Larra said quietly. When it came to childbirth, there was no maester alive who could truly understand what was happening. Midwives were exceptional resources for information and knowledge, wisdom passed down through generations. It was them Larra trusted more than anyone in that chamber with Lady Targaryen. And it was Nestor Maegos she trusted to interpret the information the midwives could share with him, to help as only he had the skill to.

Had he been there, Larra would have trusted Maester Luwin implicitly. Not so these strange maesters who favoured books to real experience when it came to healing. From what she had learned of and discussed with Nestor Maegos, he did things very differently than were taught in the Citadel, or indeed anywhere else – things that made other surgeons and maesters raise their eyebrows and make snide comments, until they were proven wrong by Maegos’ skill. He had studied and experimented and crafted surgical methods of his own invention, applying them combined with a high standard of cleanliness – boiling instruments between uses, keeping himself meticulously clean while attending to patients – and strict instructions for care post-treatment. He had conducted studies amongst pregnant women on exercises to increase flexibility and strength and thus increase the likelihood of uncomplicated births and improved survival rates. He had an incredible working knowledge of internal female anatomy – which he had shared with Larra when she confessed to understanding little about what was actually happening inside her own body – and he had used it to tremendous effect the last few months, both to prevent miscarriage and or to induce it when necessary – or desired – and to repair damage after traumatic births. He had already saved many lives with his knowledge: Larra felt confident supporting his endeavours to train apprentices.

Being unceremoniously banished from Lady Targaryen’s side, Larra felt it necessary to call Nestor Maegos to the birthing-bed. Larra was not surprised the maesters had not summoned him: they looked down on anyone who had not studied from the books of the Citadel, thought him a strange foreigner who took risks they would never dare. He was an ingenious healer: most of the maesters felt threatened by his knowledge and skill. Excluding him, when he was Larra’s favoured healer, was a statement.

Larra inviting him to intervene was another.

“Sansa...you need to go to Jon,” Larra said quietly, watching the heavy Northern oak door shrewdly. She had been removed from the room out of the midwives’ fear for her – that she would fear her own impending birth due to whatever she witnessed inside that chamber. Some things an expectant first-time mother did not need to know about the birthing-bed. The times it went wrong.

If it went wrong – if it was going wrong – the implications were…

Truly, it would simplify things. With the Dothraki divided and the Unsullied given to the Drowned God it would make no difference if Daenerys died. She no longer had armies to command from dragon-back.

If Daenerys died tonight, the world would breathe a sigh of relief.

If the child died… It would be a sad thing. Denied even the opportunity to thrive from the moment they were conceived. But Daenerys would not have the leverage of Jon’s child to hold over him, to hold over the North. Jon would not be put in a position either to reject the child as his progeny, deny them outright and deny Daenerys that leverage, or acknowledge them, and accept all the risk of claiming a child with Daenerys.

Larra did not know what she hoped for. She would not pray for anything, either way. She was not Lady Catelyn. She refused to condemn her own blood purely for the sake of its mother. She refused to wish the child dead. In her heart, she knew what the ideal scenario would be.

Let the child live, she thought, even though she had already lived the life this child would be condemned to. If its mother lived, it would be a pawn. If Lady Targaryen died, it would be the King’s bastard.

“He will not come,” Sansa murmured to her, as a scream ripped through the air. Sansa glanced over her shoulder at the door, visibly shuddering.

“That’s not what I said; go to him,” Larra said quietly. “He needs someone with him.”

“You should go,” Sansa said.

“No. Not this time,” Larra sighed, glancing at Sansa. “In this, there is only you who can understand how Jon is feeling, what he must be thinking.” Sansa’s shrewd sapphire eyes glowed in the light flickering in the sconces on the walls.

She left Larra by Lady Targaryen’s door, passing Arya with the colourful, handsome Nestor Maegos with his thoughtful, curious face, as she stalked through the halls and bustling corridors. Upstairs, Lady Targaryen’s screams had driven most of her neighbours to the far corners of the castle, leaving the chambers empty but for those who were bedbound. The rest of the castle was bustling. Sansa knew where Jon would be, if he was not in the solar. When he was overwhelmed, he went below.

Sansa was surprised by how calm Larra had been, how vigilant she was, guarding Lady Targaryen’s door. She had frowned when Larra sent Arya for the foreign surgeon but, she supposed, though Lady Targaryen was indeed their enemy, she was also a woman who needed help and support. The life of her child – Jon’s child – depended on it.

Larra would not condemn a child for its mother.

Realising that, Sansa knew why Larra had sent her to find Jon. To Larra, that child was their blood, no matter who its mother was. Nothing else mattered. She would do what was best for Lady Targaryen because it was what was best for Jon’s child.

But Jon…

She found him in the crypt, as she had many times over the last few weeks, as more and more ravens appeared seeking confirmation about the proclamations that had been disseminated around Westeros. Larra had given a handful of the lords a stern talking to and they had spread word around the castle that nothing was to distract them until the war against the Night King was won. It did not prevent discussions about the Iron Throne, succession, the Last Dragon, the tragic heroine Lyanna Stark, true heirs and political coups, but at least they did not bring up the topic during war councils. They remained focused: every day, they drilled an ever-changing sequence of strategies tailored to a multitude of near-unimaginable circumstances.

Larra had asked their advisors to account for everything. The very worst things that could possibly happen. “No-one should ever have to waste time thinking what to do next. Anticipate. Every one of us – every commander, every soldier – must know these strategies by heart, able to switch tactics without warning. Soldiers must be able to take the place of commanders should they fall.”

“Are we so expendable?” one of the Knights had blustered indignantly.

“In this war, we are all expendable,” Larra had replied quietly.

Larra remained devoted to preparations for the war. As did Jon: strategy meetings and war councils, tours of the siege preparations, observing the pyromancers’ efforts, all served to distract him from the proclamations and the imminent birth of the child taken from him against his will.

He stood before Father. The set of his shoulders was painfully tight. She could feel the tension and despair and impotent grief rolling off him in waves like cold radiating from ice.

“This is the only place I can find peace,” Jon murmured to the statue as Sansa approached. She tucked her cloak around her, glad of her many layers, her fur-lined skirt and quilted petticoats.

“I fear you’ll find none today,” she sighed, sidling up to Jon and gazing at Father’s sombre, tired face. Jon’s breath plumed before him, illuminated by the candlelight, as he sighed heavily.

“Has it come?”

“No. Larra has sent for Nestor Maegos,” Sansa informed him gently. “The midwives banished her from the room.”

“That sounds ominous,” Jon muttered. Sansa nodded her silent agreement. Quietly, Jon admitted, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to hope for.”

Sansa gazed at Jon, his profile illuminated by the flickering candlelight, illuminating his thoughtful grey eyes, the scars puckering his cheek and over his eye. He had earned those scars, and so many others, betraying the woman who loved him, and whom he had loved. He had betrayed her because no matter what he felt, his sense of duty was stronger than anything else. Jon was a man accustomed to making the hardest choices a person should ever have to make.

She could never understand that aspect of Jon’s life, his life as a brother of the Night’s Watch. It was too abstract, too unsettling; it belonged to ancient legends.

But this…

Standing before Father, overwhelmed about the future, all his hopes and dread bound to one tiny life, Sansa had never understood Jon more.

“Every time I bled,” she said quietly, “I thanked the Old Gods and the New and whoever else was listening. Most married women are disappointed by their moon-blood. It gave me hope. Every time I bled, I was reassured that his seed had not taken root inside me. That I did not carry his child… To bear his child, to be forced to allow it to draw strength from mine own body as it grew like a parasite, to risk my death to bring it into the world – knowing that the moment I produced a son, I sealed my own fate. I prayed that if I ever bore a child, I would die in the birthing bed – for living would be a fate worse than death. Forced to raise a child I could not love for fear of its father, forever terrified of how they would be hurt. How they would be used to hurt me. Held prisoner out of fear for what would be done to it to punish me… Worse than all that, to watch it grow and become its father.”

The tension in Jon’s shoulders disappeared. He slumped, his moon-bright eyes closing as he sighed. His relief was palpable. Tears trickled silently down his scarred cheeks, disappearing into his trimmed beard. Tucking herself close, Sansa reached up, tenderly brushing away the tears, lingering to caress his cheek.

“I always feared I would father a bastard,” he said hoarsely. “What I have done is much worse. I have condemned this child… If she lives…if she accepts this child…she will use it.”

“How so?”

“To get what she wants.”

“This child is her blood, too. She considers herself more god than girl; she will likely believe the same of this child,” Sansa said. “Especially as she believed she could bear none. This child…anyone would think it miraculous. Larra thinks…”

“What does Larra think?”

“Larra believes Daenerys rejects the child because acknowledging it would undermine everything she has convinced herself about her life, her destiny. This child would force her to question everything she thinks she knows. She is incapable of shattering her own illusions. But I do not believe – I hope – that she would use her own child.”

“I can assure you, she will. It will be hers or mine depending on her mood, her needs, her whims, her health, her breakfast,” Jon scowled. “Whichever way the wind is blowing. I have not given her a child… I have given her a weapon for her to murder us with.”

Sansa sighed, taking Jon’s hand, and stood close enough to feel his heat, smell his scent.

“Then the best possible outcome in this,” she sighed softly, “is for the child to live, and Daenerys to perish. Then the child is ours alone.”

“The best possible outcome for all…is for neither to survive,” Jon said grimly. “The child is not wanted by Daenerys and I – I cannot force myself to love it, as it deserves to be loved. It will always…”

“The child will always remind you,” Sansa said quietly. She knew better than anyone what Jon felt when he saw Lady Targaryen. The pure dread and the sheer panic that it would happen again, that they were powerless to stop it, that they had no choice or they risked everything they cared for.

“It’s not fair,” Jon murmured, looking heartbroken. “The child is faultless in this yet it is the one being punished for being born.”

“I hate her for doing this to you,” Sansa said coldly. Jon was the best man she knew. Clever, stalwart, dutiful, deeply loyal, shrewd and humorous, courageous, devoted, wise, merciful and kind. Daenerys Targaryen had brought to life his worst fear and was already using it against him.

She wanted to go to that birthing chamber and send all the maesters and midwives and Larra’s clever surgeon away. Let inaction do what guest-right prevented them from doing. Let her die. Let her die. Let that monster disappear, nothing more than a memory. What use was she without her armies? What was she, without her dragons? A leader? No. A commander – of armies she had lost, of people who had rejected her when she abandoned them. A vengeful woman hell-bent on getting what she wanted, no matter what she sacrificed to do so.

All Jon had built, he had done so on his own merit. He had no dragons or armies. Only his sword and his word and it was the latter that had united so many. The former, he used to protect, cautious about unsheathing it but resolute when he did, the fiercest fighter in any conflict, not hovering miles above it, untouchable, removed – above everyone and everything else. What was Jon without armies? A great man who was also good, who nurtured loyalty and mutual respect amongst his allies as well as his enemies, who made the hard choices that benefited others, often at the cost of his own personal safety. He had risked his life time and again for others. Made impossible choices so that those who would never even meet him or know his name to thank him would remain safe. Sacrificed his honour, his reputation, the woman he loved, so that others might live.

“I am glad only that it is I who must endure it, and not you,” Jon said, turning those glowing grey eyes on her. He sighed and leaned in, resting his brow against hers.

“Why must it be you?” Sansa asked thickly, her eyes stinging. “Why must you continue to endure? Do the gods believe you are strong enough to take it?”

“Not strong,” Jon sighed. “Hard, perhaps.”

“You are not a hard man,” Sansa breathed, blinking at him in bewilderment. “A hard man is incapable of feeling. And you feel so deeply, Jon. You always have. Not even death has changed that.”

“It’s changed me,” Jon said quietly. “It took something of me. I feel it. I know it in my heart, I am changed. For I never before would ever have…have considered abandoning my own blood.”

Sansa stared, frowning. “What do you mean?”

“If it lives, the kindest thing I can do for that child…is do nothing,” Jon said miserably. He sniffed, turning his gaze to the statue of Father. “Ned Stark pretended to have sired Larra and me to protect us. To protect this child – my child – I must pretend that I did not.”

Sansa realised what Jon must be thinking. Daenerys could not use the child to punish Jon…if Jon rejected the child as his. Even though all knew it was. She murmured, “Hostages only have value that people give them.”

“As you well know,” Jon muttered. She nodded in silent agreement. After a long moment of quiet contemplation, Sansa sighed.

“I should return,” she said regretfully. Jon grunted softly. Her cloak whispered against the ancient, worn stones as she turned toward the shadowy staircase. Before she reached it, she turned, agitated by something Jon had said.

Her voice rang out clearly in the darkness. Jon turned from the candlelight, which caught in his grey eyes, glinting off his gorget and pommel, glinting off of Longclaw’s ruby eyes.

“You say you would never have made this choice before you were killed… But that is not true. If it came down to it, your place in this child’s life versus them having a life, you know what you would have chosen, even before,” she said firmly, returning to stand before Jon. She had to crane her neck, he was so tall. She often forgot how tall he was, weighed down by so many cares and worries. Jon started to shake his head, denying her. She persisted, “You would have sacrificed so that they might live. You would have. You know you would have! The same way you sacrificed your place at Robb’s side to defend the Wall with your brothers. You have always made the hard choice. Especially when it comes at the cost of your own suffering.” She sniffed and wiped her eyes, frustrated for him. “You say you cannot love this child but…isn’t sacrifice the greatest declaration of love there is? You can love the child and hate its mother for what she has done to you both. You can love it…even if no-one will ever know.”

Jon stared at her, his eyes vivid, glowing silver in the firelight, full of turmoil and relief. Cradling her face, he leaned down and pressed a kiss to her lips. Gentle yet simmering with emotion she felt warring inside his body, barely leashed. She gasped, startled, and leaned into him, a tiny moan escaping her lips as he drew an arm around her waist and pulled her closer. Cradling her face, gazing deep into her eyes, Jon traced his thumb over her cheekbone, and when he leaned in to press his lips to hers a second time, Sansa met his kiss.

Fiercely passionate and tender, their kiss lingered. She had never been kissed like this – never kissed like this, her body alive, full of energy, as if light was dancing through her veins, making her fingers tremble.

Jon broke their kiss, looking aghast. He stared at her, stunned, as if suddenly remembering who she was – who she always had been to him, but wasn’t. Not truly. What they had been raised as no longer mattered. Too much time had passed; they had both endured far too much for it to matter, especially now that the truth was known, and by more than just them.

“Jon – “

“I love you,” Jon gasped, staring at her. “I love you. I will not keep it secret. Not from you.”

Sansa blushed. Visibly flustered, Jon moved to step away. She reached up, cradling his neck, and drew his face to hers. She pressed her lips firmly against his, confidence growing with each kiss, with each tiny sound Jon made as they embraced, every time his hands moved over her body, every time he squeezed her close as if he could not help it, and she sighed and moaned with every press of his lips against hers, gasping as he slid his tongue against hers, clinging to his shoulders on tiptoe, desperate to get closer.

Locked in tight embrace, they kissed until Sansa was shaking and Jon panting, his breaths pluming, caught by the candlelight. The rest of the world was forgotten: it was his taste, her scent, their heat, her heartbeat fluttering against his tongue as he kissed her throat, his enormous hands so gentle as he held her tight to his body. Bewildering – and freeing. She had never felt safer. He felt his blood singing in his veins, alive as he had not felt alive in ages.

Swollen lips concealed by the darkness, Sansa hid her smiles as she strode through the castle. The very kisses that had excited them had then calmed them: Jon had left her to return to the solar, intent on working until supper, while she went to check on Lady Targaryen. After supper, they would… Well, Sansa did not know. An hour spent kissing in the crypt was something, she just did not know what.

All she knew was that she loved Jon. And she would do anything to protect him.

Jon would not incur the wrath of the gods by causing Daenerys Targaryen harm under their roof, their protection…but there was always a way around things. If they were denied the freedom to act then inaction was their only weapon.

It was too late, she learned.

The chamber door stood open: Sansa entered, frowning to conceal her apprehension. What would she find? Nestor Maegos, his shirtsleeves pushed up past his elbows, his hands and forearms splashed with blood and who knew what else, was gathering up queer-looking steel instruments. The maesters were huddled in a corner, muttering to themselves, watching the foreign surgeon with something close to awe. All but one of the midwives had left the chamber and the one that remained watched Lady Targaryen carefully, a slight frown on her face.

Lady Targaryen herself was reclined on the bed on fresh linens and a pile of pillows, her face puffy. Her hair had been combed but fell loose about her shoulders rather than bound in elaborate braids. Her eyes were stark, brittle in a way Sansa recognised from her first true horrors as a prisoner in her own home. The nature of Lady Targaryen’s delivery had been traumatic: she seemed to be in a state of shock, dazed.

There was no sight of Larra. No sound of a babe crying.

Sansa approached Nestor Maegos. Larra trusted him in matters of medicine. He glanced up, his instruments clattering and ringing musically as he dropped them into a gleaming steel tray. “Lady Stark,” he said politely.

She cleared her throat uncomfortably. “What has… Where is my sister?”

“Lady Larra has returned to your private rooms,” Nestor Maegos told her. He gathered his things in a structured leather bag buckled at the top and gestured to the door. “May I have the privilege of escorting you back on my way out?”

“You may,” Sansa replied. She glanced over her shoulder at Lady Targaryen, who did not so much as stir as the maesters also left the chamber, talking amongst themselves. The single midwife remained, sat by Lady Targaryen’s side. Keeping a close eye on her.

She had survived the labour.

But what of the child?

Jon had said the best thing for all involved would be for both to perish. And failing that, that Lady Targaryen did not survive. Yet Lady Targaryen had lived. If the child had died… That did make things simpler.

Nestor Maegos did not speak until they were well away from the rooms given over to Lady Targaryen’s advisors and servants.

“The child lives,” he told her without preamble. “A good weight, long legs. Dark hair. Strong lungs, too. She settled easily, too, as soon as Lady Larra embraced her.”

“She? It is a girl?” Sansa asked, somewhat startled. In all the agonising about Jon fathering this child, none of them had actually considered the implications of the child’s possible gender. A son would have claim to Jon’s throne after him, something Lady Targaryen could have used in the future. But a daughter…

“Yes. She’s healthy and strong, despite the odds,” Nestor Maegos said, somewhat grimly.

“You said Larra held her?”

Nestor’s face fell, his eyes darkening. He sighed, pausing in the corridor, and turned to look at Sansa. “Lady Targaryen struggled with the birth. When the babe was presented to her, she refused to hold it. Screamed for it to be removed from her presence. I have never seen a new mother so furious.”

“What?”

“It may be the trauma of the birth. Once the shock wears off, Lady Targaryen may think differently,” Nestor told her grimly, “but until then, I… I feared for the safety of the child in her proximity. When Lady Targaryen rejected the babe, screamed for it to be removed, no-one knew what to do… The babe cried and that made Lady Targaryen worse… Lady Larra took the babe in her arms and she gentled. She took the babe away. That is all I know.”

Nestor Maegos bowed his departure and left Sansa, who hurried to their private rooms.

Hearing deep voices and chaotic conversation, she burst into the solar. Jon stood rigid and pale by a window, sweating in the heat of the chamber, as lords and knights and maesters argued by with Lord Tyrion and Missandei and Ser Jorah, who all argued amongst themselves. Lord Tyrion cast his glance over at the hearth, his expression unreadable. Sansa stopped, staring. It was the first time she had seen Larra sit so close to the fire; she hated to be overly hot, while Sansa could not get close enough to the flames.

Gendry sat beside Larra, enormous and sturdy and protective, and Sansa was stunned to see him offer his pinkie-finger to the small bundle in Larra’s arms, wrapped in thick quilts and furs. More stunned to see tiny fingers reach up and clasp the end of his finger. Even over the noise, she heard a baby’s tiny coos and whimpers. Standing behind the settle, peering over Larra’s shoulder, was Larra’s new cyvasse partner and trainer, Darkstar. His pearl-silver hair gleamed in the firelight as he gazed own at the bundle in Larra’s arms, wrapped in thick quilts and furs, and for a heartbeat, the expression on his face reminded Sansa inexplicably of Jon.

Jon looked stricken as he stared out of the window. Sansa reached to squeeze his arm then drifted through the solar, sidestepping a belligerent Greatjon arguing with Lord Tarly and Bronze Yohn, to stop before Larra, just as she looked up at Darkstar, who was saying, “If you are to claim her as yours, you should name her.”

“What?” Sansa blurted, staring at Larra. She glanced up. It was odd to see Larra holding an infant, even more so because she had to navigate the child around her own swollen belly. It was even more absurd watching Larra gaze at the baby.

Love poured from Larra’s amethyst eyes, so fierce and so pure Sansa might have wept. It reminded her too vividly of her own mother and the last time Sansa saw her alive – bidding her goodbye in the courtyard, clasping Sansa’s face in her hands, wondering how she would have grown by the time they saw each other again. Had anyone ever looked at Larra with that much love in their eyes? Perhaps her own mother, before she had drifted away. No-one since, though. Larra had no memory of being looked at like that – of being held, the way she now held that infant. As if they were the most precious thing in the world. The most beloved.

Larra raised her gaze to Sansa, and Sansa thought in that moment that Larra had never looked more like a dragon, fierce and unknowable.

Stunned and instantly panicked, Sansa gaped, “You have taken Lady Targaryen’s child from her?”

“Lady Targaryen rejected the babe,” Lord Tyrion said solemnly, walking forward. A tense quiet settled in the room, but it was nowhere near as awful as the tension she had felt in Lady Targaryen’s chamber. The atmosphere was different here, though many of them present were still furiously catching their breaths from stopping mid-argument: Larra sat calm and composed with the babe in her arms and others seemed to feed off her serenity.

Raising her chin defiantly, Larra said coldly, “I will not give her the opportunity to change her mind. This child is of the North. She’s our blood. She deserves more than a mother who despises her or would use her as a weapon against her enemies – against her own family.” Sansa felt a jolt go through her body, as if Larra knew what had been discussed – what had happened in the crypt – while she had lingered by Lady Targaryen’s birthing-bed.

Sansa glanced across the solar at Jon, who turned fraught grey eyes on her.

Larra glared at Sansa ferociously. “She’s ours.”

The ferocity with which Larra spoke, how tenderly she held the baby… She may despise Lady Targaryen, want her dead for what she had done to Jon just as Sansa did, but Larra would not punish the innocent child for its mother’s crimes. She would love it in spite of her mother.

She would be…what Sansa’s own mother should have been to Jon and Larra.

Enveloped by her love, protected by unyielding ferocity.

Perhaps the fierce maternal bond that had formed between Larra and the baby had something to do with Larra’s own pregnancy, her own impending birth.

Whatever it was, no-one dared question it. Dared question Larra.

Lady Targaryen’s advisors, all gathered in the solar, could argue amongst themselves all they wished.

But they could not deny that Larra removing the rejected infant from Lady Targaryen’s household was the wisest course for all concerned – the child especially.

“Ser Gerold is quite right. Babies should be in good order. The child needs a name,” said Lord Tyrion, a strange expression on his face as he watched Larra.

It was Jon who spoke. His voice raspy, he croaked, “Aella. After you, Larra. It was the name our mother wished for you, though she never had the chance to use it.”

Larra gazed across the solar at her twin-brother.

Gendry smiled warmly, “She does look like Larra.”

Sansa peered closer and, to her astonishment, saw that Gendry was right. The infant looked so like Jon – so like Larra. Even the shape of her hands and tiny ears, the length of her fingers, the curve of her faint eyebrows, the shape of her tiny rosebud lips. Larra was right: this child was theirs. Daenerys Targaryen had left nothing of herself in her daughter. She was all Jon. All Stark.

“Aella Stark,” Sansa mused, and saw Jon jolt where he stood as if he had been struck by an arrow. “It suits her very prettily.”

“Aella Stark?” Larra repeated, raising her eyebrows at Sansa.

“As you said, she is ours. She is of the North. A Stark of Winterfell – as you and Jon are,” Sansa said stoutly. “As you should always have been.”

Larra gazed at her for a long moment, sadness swirling in those amethyst eyes. Nothing could rewrite the past; the ink was dry, as Bran liked to say. But with the proclamations, the acknowledgement of Jon and Larra’s legitimacy… It changed everything.

Father had always said Jon and Larra had his blood, even if they did not have his name. But they were always entitled to it.

Sansa doubted very highly whether Jon or Larra would ever consider claiming the name Targaryen. It was Stark they cared about. Everyone in the family knew it: they had always wanted to be acknowledged as Starks of Winterfell.

It was Sansa’s mother who had denied them their birth-right.

“This is your choice, then?” Darkstar murmured to Larra, who gazed up at him with a fierce expression.

After a long moment, seeming to read his features, she replied firmly, “I’m nobody’s fucking pawn.”

Notes:

Larra’s made her choice. Larra’s motivations for claiming Aella are very complicated. It’s not as simple as her purely feeling fierce maternal instincts for the baby but it also wasn’t a premeditated political move against Daenerys to gain leverage. Larra is very much conscious of the consequences of claiming the baby but at the moment, all she cares about is the baby. Will there be consequences down the line? Absolutely.

I was going to have Daenerys bleed out near to the point of death, and Aella be taken against her will while she is in a coma but this way works a lot better, especially considering Daenerys’ mental state. Turns out maternal rejection of infants is a real thing, affecting 1% of new mothers and occurring more usually among new mothers with pre-existing mental-health struggles.

Just a heads-up, we are nearing the end of ‘Valyrian Steel’ as a standalone story – its sequel will begin after the War for the Dawn (spoilers, I guess!). Name TBD but possibly Dragons’ Daughter. I will be turning ‘Valyrian Steel’ into a series – the overarching name will be ‘Valyrian Steel’ but I may change this story’s unique name to Child of Ice and Fire with Dragons’ Daughter as the sequel. What do you think?

Chapter 61: The Calm Before...

Notes:

Forewarning. Non-descriptive childbirth.

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

61

The Calm Before…


Aella.

It was absurd how quickly and how deeply Larra had bonded with the baby. One glimpse of her tiny little face, the faintest whimper of a cry and all her instincts had honed on the child, desperate to provide – protection, love. Anything she needed.

She was a marvel. Despite the odds against her, Aella had been born healthy and strong. She was delicate, perhaps smaller than most babies but the wet-nurse said she had appetite enough that soon, it would not matter. She was putting on weight, growing every day.

Aella was theirs now. Hers and Gendry’s: they had claimed her, and loved her. She slept in a cradle in their chamber, the wet-nurse lodging in a chamber next-door for the sake of ease. And Larra watched, learning from the wet-nurse. How to nurse a baby. How to coax them to latch even when they were fussing. How to hold the infant to burp her when she was in discomfort; how to swaddle her to soothe her; to look at her hands to check whether she was hungry or sated – closed fists indicated hunger, relaxed fingers said she was full. How to bathe her to soothe her even if she wasn’t messy. Ellys the wet-nurse taught Larra how to tend to Aella’s needs: but she said Larra needed no guidance on being a mother.

It was instinct to cradle Aella, to keep her close, keep her warm. To smell her hair and feel the strength of her tiny fingers as she gripped Larra’s fingertip. To smile when Gendry laid Aella on her tummy on his chest, one enormous hand curled over her as she yawned and unfurled those tiny fingers like the petals of a flower unfurling toward the sunlight. It was instinct to listen for every tiny sound, cooing over her when she was in distress, praising her when she was content. It was a joy to sit with her, smiling and fussing and playing, letting Aella learn her voice and her face, her expressions. It was instinct to shower her with kisses and affection, to hold her close, to let her feel Larra’s heat and learn her scent.

Aella did not know Larra was not her mother but it did not matter. Every time she fussed, it was in Larra’s arms she gentled.

Despite her growing belly, Larra wore Aella strapped to her chest with wide bands of cloth, in the same fashion that both the Free Folk and Volantene slaves wore their infants (and those of their masters). It was not an uncommon sight to see Larra wandering around Winterfell with Aella cuddled up in her carrying-cloths, half sitting on Larra’s growing belly. The ladies of Winterfell had already been preparing for the birth of Larra’s own child but they soon came to appreciate that Larra considered Aella her own. And everyone treated her as such. There were questions in everyone’s eyes despite their smiles when they greeted Larra, peering at the tiny black-haired bundle fastened securely to Larra’s chest. The rumour-mill in Winterfell was churning out stories: the truth was of course the most salacious and tragic story. Lady Targaryen had conceived Jon’s child and rejected Aella at her birth. She had been claimed, though, by the Starks – by the North: she was theirs. And she was welcomed.

Aella looked like one of them.

The Free Folk claimed all babies were born looking exactly like their fathers, lest they be killed as another man’s offspring. Aella had been born looking exactly like Jon. And Larra loved Jon more fiercely than anyone: she had embraced Aella because…well, because she looked like Jon. She looked like Larra.

Larra wondered whether everyone – even she – would have been quite so welcoming of Aella had she taken after Lady Targaryen’s looks.

She did not know whether it was because she herself carried a babe in her belly but Larra’s reaction to Aella, the way she had embraced her whole-heartedly, was very different to her sisters’. Sansa remained guarded and aloof when it came to the baby, seemed uncomfortable about the idea of holding her. But Sansa had never had much to do with babies or children anyway. That had always been Larra. Inexperience made Sansa wary. As for Arya, the moment Larra had claimed Aella, Arya had accepted the infant as Larra and Gendry’s child – and treated her as such. But it was different: Arya cooed and played with her, held her, but would hand her back and leave the chamber for her other duties without another thought. Aella was always on Larra’s mind.

She wished she could say she had never experienced a time in her life when she was more exhausted – and exhilarated – but of course that was not true in the slightest.

But as exhausting as Aella was – and how could she be so exhausting when she was so utterly tiny? – it was utterly exhilarating to be her parent.

She wondered if this was how Father had felt, upon first seeing her and Jon?

The sense of awe and wonder, of duty and love mingled with a dreadful sense of worry and hope that throbbed at the pit of her stomach, growing stronger every time she wondered who Aella would grow to become. The giddiness and joy she felt every time Aella looked as if she might be smiling, the contentedness she felt when Aella sighed and snuggled in her arms. The terror that such a pure and vulnerable creature was her responsibility alone – to nurture, to cherish, to defend, to prepare.

The grief, that it was she who had the privilege to experience all these feelings with Aella, not the woman who had given birth to her.

As far as Larra knew – and she remained updated daily by the midwife tending to Lady Targaryen, and by her advisors – Lady Targaryen had voiced no interest in her child, either to have her brought to her or to learn what had become of her. By all accounts, Lady Targaryen remained as Larra had last seen her: mindless with shock, ignoring all that had occurred.

Nestor Maegos pondered whether the trauma of the birth, combined with Lady Targaryen’s firm refusal that she was indeed pregnant, had created a schism in her mind. As if it was all too much to handle, and rather than having to do so, Lady Targaryen’s mind had broken and reshaped itself to remove unpleasant thoughts.

Larra wondered how long it would last.

And she was aware that her grip on Aella tightened every time she thought of her being taken away.

Ned had made his promise to Lyanna.

Larra made no promises to Jon: she had made her unspoken vow to Aella the moment she claimed her.

No matter what, Larra would love and nurture, cherish and defend Aella – from her own mother if it came to it.

The first weeks of Aella’s life were chaotic, unsettled, exhilarating, filled with confusion but most of all with love.

Aella had been rejected by her mother but she had been embraced by a family. Larra, Gendry, Neva, Briar, Cade, all the Lannister girls were thrilled to have a new entertainment. They absolutely adored cuddling with her, watching her sleep; they gasped their delight when Aella appeared to smile; sang to her when she fussed; and the elder girls were swept up with enthusiasm for sewing quilts and blankets, snowsuits and frocks, making dolls out of rags; reading her stories. There was rarely a moment Aella was left alone, even when Larra was not carrying her.

Neva read stories to her; Briar rocked her in her cradle and told her all about the animals of the North; Crisantha sat by the hearth, cradling her in her arms as if she had done so a thousand times. Seeing her, Larra was reminded anew that Crisantha had lost younger brothers in the Lion Culling. She was a natural with Aella because she had been accustomed to cuddling her brothers. Cuddling Aella seemed to soothe Crisantha; the tiny vulnerable life relying on them all to look after her brought Crisantha out of her own mind in a way nothing yet had.

Larra couldn’t help look at Crisantha, though, and wonder about Lady Targaryen. It had taken months for Crisantha to loosen the hold her trauma had on her mind, to appreciate that she was safe and protected here in the North. It had taken her longer to speak. It had taken Aella for Crisantha to take a more active role in her own life, rather than just letting the tide pull her where it wished.

With Neva, Briar, Cade and the elder Lannister girls, Larra and Gendry shared the truth: that Aella was the child of Jon and Lady Targaryen but that they – Larra and Gendry – had claimed her to raise her and love her. It was harder for the little ones to understand what was going on. They saw Larra’s belly and assumed the babe in her arms was the one they had been waiting for.

“All these babies being born,” Larra sighed, gazing over the snowy moors. “How many are there now? Prince Nymerios Martell, Lady Alysanne Tyrell, Prince Tybalt and Princess Lita and now Aella.”

“And your own, soon enough,” Bran mused.

“Not soon enough,” Larra said, grimacing grumpily and itching at her side with a soft groan. The midwives said she was imminent, though she had not yet dropped. And she was becoming more uncomfortable; she would rather be done with the birth and have the babe in arms, to focus on the next thing. The midwives laughed at her impatience, teasing her that this was the easy part. But they did not understand, not truly. All this waiting…

Somehow, Aella’s arrival had calmed her. Pouring all her devotion into Aella gave her purpose – she was simply too exhausted to think about anything else.

Not entirely true. In quiet moments, Larra was gripped with the familiar terror she had felt the moment her breath plumed before her in the passage under the great weirwood.

They were coming.

Only they were taking their bloody time about it.

Anticipating childbirth and anticipating the Night King’s arrival had become the same to her – equally irritating because they could not prepare any more than they already had. They could only wait and see.

And she was tired of waiting. She scowled out over the moors. The pyromancers had labourers pacing the circumference of an encircled decagram star, carrying clay pots of wildfire along precisely-measured lines. Off in the distance, Rhaegal feasted on roasted aurochs – a treat gifted by the labourers in thanks for their efforts. Rhaegal had melted the snows and thawed the earth to sink their viciously sharp talons into the dirt and help the labourers start digging. At each of the thirty vertices of the overlapping ten-pointed star, equidistant around Winterfell, caches of wildfire were being buried.

The pryomancers had spent months experimenting with wildfire. They had discovered that wildfire itself did not freeze. Not only that but the cold did nothing to affect how the wildfire ignited – or burned. But the sudden addition of heat had a catastrophic effect. While they could ignite a single seam of wildfire directly, the consequence of it melting the snow around it heated any wildfire in proximity of its blast-radius.

That was what the maesters, the pyromancers and Lord Tyrion called it – a “blast-radius”. And the bigger the cache of wildfire, the bigger the blast-radius. So if someone was to set alight a cache of wildfire, it would then set off a chain-reaction, setting alight every other cache of wildfire – as long as they got the equations correct. It meant they did not have to waste wildfire by dousing the moors with it: they could be strategic and sparing but still gain maximum effect – create maximum damage.

The maesters and Lord Tyrion had been working diligently on those equations. Unless they were absolutely sure, they would never have dared suggest it was time to prepare the moors with wildfire.

The trickiest thing, Larra had learned from discussions with the maesters and the pyromancers, was how to ensure Winterfell itself was not consumed by the blasts. They could not bury the caches of wildfire too close or they would take out the curtain-wall and much of the castle’s defences. That meant there was a certain level of risk: no matter how much of the advancing army the wildfire burned, there would still be some closer to Winterfell that would evade the wildfire.

As long as they could burn the majority of the Night King’s hordes, Larra had some hope that they could deal with the remnants. Caches of wildfire were placed strategically to ensure that explosions radiated outwards, away from Winterfell, getting bigger as they went to cover a greater blast-radius – with more and more caches buried in the northern moors.

It was not about keeping every single wight away from Winterfell: it was about destroying as many of them as possible before they could overwhelm the castle’s defences.

They had the numbers, the weapons, the tactics. They were prepared, as much as they could be prepared without seeing the army itself. And when people saw what they faced, the hardest job they each had would be to remain rooted to the spot and fight, rather than listen to their instincts and flee. They would be relying on those who had experience with the Others, with the wights, to remain calm, to command people through their fear, to inspire courage, whatever people needed to motivate them to fight.

“They are leaving,” Bran murmured and Larra peered over the wall. Out of the North Gate, she could see a small number of people swathed in heavy furs heading out. They quickly dispersed, spreading out as they walked. None of them was to head in the same direction. Amongst them, the wargs sent their bonded beasts off – dire-eagles, hawks, bears, snowcats. Plunging into the snows, into the wilds.

The Free Folk, restless in one place for so long, had been only too eager to go out and scout for signs of an invading army.

“And the ravens?”

“Sansa beseeched whoever remains at Last Hearth to come south to Wintefell at once,” Bran said quietly, shifting uncomfortably in his chair as he attempted to peer over the wall. It was simply too high.

“Will they come?”

“Many,” Bran said quietly. “The mountain clans converged on Last Hearth at Ned Umber’s summons. He is a boy yet he has a man’s wisdom: he convinced them to come to Winterfell, not because they believe in the Night King and his hordes but because they do not wish to add to the King’s troubles by refusing him. Their sense of duty overpowers their stubbornness.”

“Thank the gods,” Larra said, smiling grimly. That was the nature of any true Northman, she thought: duty over all else. Oathbreakers were reviled; and each had sworn their oaths to the King in the North. If they did not believe, that was their choice, and Larra would not blame them: but they were loyal, still, and honoured their vows. She sighed. “Little Jon will be happy to see Ned again.”

“Yes,” Bran smiled, but his eyes seemed pained. “How sweet it will be for them to see their brothers again.”

“Will they reach us in time?” Larra asked, thinking of fierce little Ned Umber. The fact that he had remained at Last Hearth was a point of fierce pride to the Greatjon – and of devastation. His young grandson’s ferocity, sense of honour and duty and decency were staggering to him.

“They will,” Bran nodded. Rarely did Larra ask for information from Bran: Brandon was rather a miser about it, for good reason.

“What is taking them so long?” Larra scowled, rubbing her belly and bouncing slightly when Aella stirred against her. “I do not wish to be a crone when they finally deign to attack us.”

“They seek that which will bring down the Wall,” Brandon murmured dreamily. “They are close…so close now. It is almost within their reach.”

“How long do we have before they breach the Wall?” Larra asked, not hopeful she would get a straight answer from Brandon.

After a long moment, Brandon answered, “A little more than a moon’s turn.”

How much more was a ‘little more’ than a month? Days? A week or two?

Larra turned from Brandon to the endless moors. On the horizon, the woods loomed, dark and eternal. Beyond them, a haze of endless snow and shadow as the veiled sun dipped low to the east.

It was odd.

Larra turned over Bran’s words and felt a sense of calm envelop her. Little more than a moon’s turn.

The wait was over. It was the waiting that was killing her. It had nearly killed her, under the great weirwood. The interminable passage of time with no end in sight, no relief.

She was relieved. Relieved to know their time was running out.

It gave her a renewed focus.

“We must start evacuating Winter’s Town,” she mused.

“And you must teach others your song, Larra,” Bran said softly. He raised his solemn eyes to her face. “The song of ice and fire. You woke ancient magic from its slumber when you went to the heart of Winterfell… As long as the blood of the First Men sings the song of ice and fire they will be protected by the ancient magic imbued into the very foundation-stones of this castle.”

“Very well,” Larra said uncomfortably. It felt strange to share the song taught to her by the Children. It felt sacred, somehow – because it was. It was ancient magic, in an ancient language thought dead and gone from the world.

But she taught it. She spent her days working, Aella strapped to her chest or slumbering in her cradle nearby, and her afternoons singing. Lady Vialle Velaryon offered to teach her how to strengthen her voice – it was incredibly beautiful, she said, but lacked power and polish gained from purposeful training – and together they spread the song through the castle, until even in the kitchens and the barns and the forges, the song of ice and fire could be heard.

It was beautiful and eerie and evocative. Sung in chorus, it was absolutely aweing.

Larra sat listening in the hall, smiling through tears as the divine chorus of voices threatened to raise the hammer-beam roof. She had given Lady Vialle the freedom to form a choir composing hundreds of voices – Free Folk, Essosi, Dothraki, Unsullied, Westerosi, it mattered only that they wished to sing and were open to being instructed – and trained them. She had turned the song of ice and fire into something extraordinary, something otherworldly and awe-inspiring. Hundreds of voices all raised in song, beautifully balanced and harmonised with each other. It was an exquisite composition. Larra was overwhelmed by its magnificence.

She winced and rubbed her belly before applauding with everyone else who had been struck dumb, listening in awed silence, from the moment the first young voices started to sing high and pure, joined by deep tenors and exquisite sopranos and altos who raised their voices higher than anyone, coaxing the gods themselves to join them in Winterfell’s great hall.

Larra let out a shaky breath, wincing again, as she applauded. With effort, she rose from the settle and went to congratulate Lady Vialle for her triumph – and that of the choir.

“You look pale,” Lady Vialle said concernedly, peering into Larra’s face.

“Tis the heat of the hall,” Larra said. She exhaled slowly, shakily, almost forgetting Lady Vialle was there, too focused on breathing through the pain starting to ripple through her abdomen again.

All afternoon, she had felt the tugging and cramping.

She knew what it was.

Larra remembered Lady Targaryen, shrieking bloody murder as she flailed viciously… No, that would not do. She would not do that to herself. She would not terrify everyone around her with her behaviour.

Her terror was over. It was time.

“Allow me to escort you to your chamber, my lady,” Lady Vialle said kindly, her clear blue eyes searching Larra’s face carefully. “I do not wish you to walk back alone.”

“I think… I think that would be wise,” Larra said, hissing at a sudden sharp pain. She grimaced and exhaled slowly, purposefully. “And if you would be so good, Lady Vialle, might I ask that you have the girls sent from the schoolroom. I wish to see them but I think…I think I will not be able to tuck them in tonight.”

“Of course,” Lady Vialle smiled soothingly. She coaxed Larra to lean against her, letting her support Larra as she made her way out of the great hall and through the many passages and corridors and halls of Winterfell.

“How long have you felt pains, my lady?” Lady Vialle asked kindly.

“Mm… Since before midday meal,” Larra admitted, grimacing slightly. “I thought it was hunger at first. Now I know…”

“I shall send for the maesters and midwives,” Lady Vialle said.

“Gendry. Send for Gendry,” Larra gasped. They made it into her chamber and she sank onto the rocking-chair with a sigh. “Gendry knows what to do.”

“Viana,” Lady Vialle said, and her beautiful daughter appeared – perhaps she had followed them upstairs. “Go and find Lady Larra’s husband. He will be in the forges.” Viana nodded, curtseyed to Larra and departed. Breathing out shakily, slowly, Larra grimaced and gripped the arm of the rocking-chair as pain rippled through her. “How may I make you comfortable?”

“I don’t know,” Larra admitted tearfully. She opened her eyes and gazed at Lady Vialle. “I don’t know what to do now.”

Lady Vialle gave her a warm smile. “Your body knows,” she said soothingly. “What do you need?”

“A distraction,” Larra said, and Lady Vialle smiled. Though her pain came like waves rushing to shore, sometimes abating, other times fierce, Larra found herself calm, almost peaceful. This was meant to happen. And it was finally time. The waiting was over.

She did not have to be afraid anymore.

Larra had planned for this. When her time came, she refused to be surrounded by maesters who would dither and argue about archaic texts they had read rather than respond to what was happening before their eyes. She wanted Gendry, an experienced midwife she could trust – and that was it. Nestor Maegos would remain close by in case his intervention was needed. It was better to be prepared than not.

And while she waited, becoming calmer the more she listened to her body and became attuned with what her pains were telling her, Lady Vialle kept her company. She entertained Larra, sometimes singing, sometimes massaging Larra’s back, helping her with the stretches and exercises Nestor Maegos had taught her to encourage and ease delivery, and curtailed the majority of the children’s enthusiasm when they came to visit. Larra listened to their news, cuddled with Leona on one side as Neva read to her on the other, brushed Narcisa’s hair until it shone and braided Crisantha’s so it did not tangle as she slept, cooed and praised Briar for her first attempts with drawing-pencils and chatted away happily with Ragnar in the Old Tongue while Cadeon brought her a cup of tea brewed over the hearth.

Gilly, Tisseia and Zharanni came to visit, wishing her well before escorting the children to bed, and Jon, Sansa and Arya arrived with Gendry. They kissed her and wished her well but did not linger: Arya was wide-eyed and out of her depth as she had not been in years, and Sansa was uncomfortable. Jon embraced her, lingering with her in his arms, before he kissed her and gave her a look of such deep love, her eyes stung. He touched her cheek and withdrew from the chamber, leaving Larra alone with Gendry, Lady Vialle and a wizened crone, one of the Free Folk. She had delivered more babies than anyone north of the wall, it was said: she was also sensible, encouraging and no-nonsense.

She encouraged Larra to listen to her body, as Lady Vialle had. Indeed, the two seemed to be of the same mind. They coaxed Larra to listen to her body, and do what she needed – whether it was walk around the room, do her exercises and squats, have Gendry massage her back or simply just hold her. They encouraged her to drink tea, rest between her pains, even coaxing her to try to sleep, and brought her soup and stew to eat. As she sweated and panted through her growing pains, Gendry kept her cool, draping her neck with cloths soaked in ice-water. He cupped her breasts to lift their weight off her lungs; and when she rested, he joined her. At her request, he had brought Aella to her. When they rested, she slept between them.

It was all for this. All this pain. It was all for this. For their child.

She knew what came after. No matter how painful, she knew what it was all for – she knew that it was worth it.

It gave her exceptional focus and a sense of calm that inspired Lady Vialle.

She watched them carefully, wondering whether she had ever seen a new other quite so calm and composed. Inner strength radiated from Lady Larra. The birthing-room – her own chamber, shared with her husband and the child they had claimed – was warm, a cool breeze wafting in pleasantly from the diamond-paned windows Larra herself had opened to cool herself. She hated to be hot. Her husband remained by her side, and Lady Vialle smiled, reminded of her own husband. He had been by her side through each of her labours, too, had pulled the twins from her, so confident in her own skills in birthing their babies that they had not thought to call a healer. She hadn’t needed one. Nor did Larra, she could tell.

For comfort, perhaps, and for guidance, but not for assistance. She was listening to her body, learning what she needed. It was a beautiful thing to witness. She rested in the bed with her husband, curled up, or wandered the chamber in her loose nightdress, her skin shining with sweat, her heavy braid coiled down her back, curls rampant around her glowing face, occasionally squatting and doing exercises to encourage the babe. The fire was lit, the crackle of the flames soothing. It was wonderfully calm.

When her pains came sharp and quick, the wizened crone Gendry had brought up to the chamber examined her and cackled softly with excitement.

“You’re ready,” she hummed encouragingly. Larra gasped and panted for breath, nodding her head. It had been hours since Vialle had escorted her upstairs, yet through it all, Larra had remained quiet, calm – gentler than Vialle had ever seen the fierce she-wolf except with the youngest children. But she was tired, Vialle could see it. She could see it in Larra’s eyes – and those eyes rested on Vialle as she panted.

Grimacing, she whispered, “Will you stay?”

It occurred to Vialle that Larra had no mother. No aunts, no grandmother even. Her sisters were young and unwed – they had no babies of their own, had never experienced childbirth. She had seen them: both seemed skittish. Vialle reached out and tenderly pushed the wet curls from Larra’s sweaty face, smiling gently.

“Of course I shall,” she promised. Larra nodded. Vialle had stayed with her all afternoon, had eaten her evening meal with them, stayed by Larra’s side and helped her. For whatever reason, Larra wanted her nearby – perhaps even she was not aware why. Perhaps her presence soothed her. Perhaps she needed someone – a mother – to be there, to support her. When Viana’s time came, there would be nothing that could stop Vialle from being by her daughter’s side. It struck her as exceptionally sad that she, a new friend bonded with Larra through singing lessons, was the closest thing Larra had to a maternal figure to support her in the birthing-chamber, and purely by accident – because Vialle had simply been there, had noticed Larra’s discomfort. She wondered if Larra would have continued to work through her pains had Vialle insisted she escort Larra upstairs. More than likely. She had rarely met anyone so active – even besides being pregnant. But she was pregnant, and her tirelessness was remarkable. Having many babies of her own, Vialle knew Larra had to be exhausted, though she never showed it.

Though she had asked Vialle to stay, Vialle remained for the most part tucked away. She remained sat on the settle, except to help Larra walk around the chamber occasionally. Otherwise, she sat with the embroidery Viana had brought her or read her book, keeping an eye on Larra as she rested.

When the time came, she remained out of the way. Larra was focused on nothing but herself and her husband.

She did not lie back on the bed, as maesters would have forced her to for their own convenience. Nor did she sit in the birthing-chair that had been brought in sometime during the night.

It was on her husband that Larra leaned for support – quite literally. She stood with her arms around his neck, her head hanging low as she breathed heavily, leaning on him; he stood, enormous and strong, rubbing her back, her arms, kissing her head, murmuring tenderly to her. The ancient midwife lingered nearby, ready, but did not interfere while Larra was exhausted, more vulnerable than anyone had ever seen her.

Gendry held Larra as she pushed. The longer it went on, the more vocal Larra was, often whimpering between pushes, clinging to Gendry. When she needed to be in a different position, he helped her, coaxed her, and supported her, rubbing her back and thighs, holding a hot towel between her legs to soothe her pain. He listened to what she needed and helped her, more than the midwife. And that, Vialle knew, was because Larra trusted him explicitly. Trusted him to love her but also to listen to her. She trusted him with her body. She trusted him to listen to her about her body.

And when she was on her knees, screaming through gritted teeth as she pushed one last time, she collapsed back into Gendry’s waiting embrace as she gasped and reached between her legs, pulling her child from her own body.

The first embrace her child knew was its mother’s.

Face shining with sweat, eyes closed as relief and exhaustion warred with exhilaration, Larra clasped her child to her chest. The midwife approached with clean linens to wipe the fluids from the child and rub it into awareness.

Vialle wiped her eyes, sniffling delicately, and beamed.

Larra’s strength was extraordinary. Tears flowed freely down Gendry’s cheeks as he held his wife and their child. The midwife tied the cord and carefully snipped at it. Larra lay back in Gendry’s arms, supported by his strength, sweaty and exhausted, dazed. In the soft dawn light glowing from the diamond-paned windows, the newborn squinted and wriggled, making those delicious noises that only newborns could make.

Recovering from her daze, Larra blinked quickly. She glanced down at the babe gathered to her chest, looking bewildered. Then awed. Then the tears started to fall, making the infant wriggle as they splattered its face.

“I had a baby,” Larra said, her voice wobbly. She glanced up at Gendry, looking almost startled. Tremulously, she said, “We have a baby.”

“We have a baby,” Gendry repeated, closing her eyes and holding her close. Relief and awe seemed to drift off him in waves. He kissed her head and hugged her, reaching to curl one hand over his newborn child, utterly tender. Larra held her child close, tears streaming down her face seemingly without her notice. It was an intimate moment, one Vialle knew she was privileged to witness.

“We have a son,” Gendry sniffled. “What do you wish to call him?”

Larra stared at the newborn baby in her arms, this child she had conceived with Gendry. It was Gendry who had helped her bring him into the world. The first embrace he had ever known was hers.

A son…

The first embrace Larra had ever known was Ser Arthur Dayne’s. It was he, not Prince Rhaegar, not Ned, who had stayed by Lyanna’s side as she laboured to bring her and Jon into the world.

Her first and fiercest protector.

“Arthur,” she said thickly. “His name is Arthur.” She tenderly touched his head and leaned in to kiss him. “Arthur…” Gendry kissed her head and sighed.

Notes:

Naming him after Ned would have been too tragic.

Chapter 62: The Storm

Notes:

Are you ready?

Gendry’s armour: imagine The Mandalorian’s Beskar armour in obsidian combined with The Witcher’s leather trousers/linen shirt combo. Who’s drooling? I’m not drooling!

And I hope you’ll note Larra’s mild (but infuriating) hypocrisy in this chapter. It’s born of her own sense of self-worth and the role she was raised for versus what she actually has the potential to become.

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

62

The Storm


A silent wind tore at the barren trees. Though they bent and warped they did not creak or groan. No animals scurried nearby. Even the snow did not dare crunch underfoot.

The Other walked calmly through the forest, drawn unerringly to the tang of residual magic. His brother had been slain here, years before.

He took a knee, bare hands reaching into a snowdrift. Slowly, almost curiously, fingers tipped with talons of ice felt the time-worn curves of an ancient horn.

The snow made no sound as it fell away, revealing the horn.

The Other’s eyes glowed in the persistent gloom of the storm-lashed forest. He tilted his head as if in thought. He stood, slowly, his attention on the horn. It was plain. Unadorned. Unremarkable.

He raised the horn. Brought it to lips black with frostbite.

Blew. Any sound it made was swallowed.

But a soft hiss echoed in the darkness.

It grew louder as the earth started to tremble.

All along the Wall, great fissures appeared in the ice, the pressure of each violent crack hurling fragments of ice large as giants into the darkness, tremendous avalanches of ice and snow and ancient stone burying crumbling fortresses and ageless forests on either side.

Miles away, the King watched on in silence. Satisfaction and anticipation glowed in his eerie blue eyes.

Miles away, Bran Stark woke and sighed remorsefully.


They had felt it.

Somehow, they knew. Whether it was some long-forgotten instinct or something else, they felt it in the air, even without Brandon’s announcement. The world felt different. An ancient malice was slowly spreading.

All eyes turned northwards.

Yet despite Brandon’s announcement in the quiet of the dark solar, dawn had still come.

The sun had risen. The day was incredibly fine – though cold. Brittle and sharp, as if one breath might shatter it.

The mountain-men and the Umbers were hurried inside the curtain-wall as the siege preparations were set out in the yards, on the battlements, secured in the Unbroken Tower, every access point barred and locked. The scouts returned, one after the other: the wargs now sent their bonded beasts out from behind the safety of the walls. Winter’s Town was emptied, the halls and corridors of Winterfell crammed with people.

Winterfell was the Wall now: it guarded the realms of Men. Crows no longer manned the defences but Free Folk and Essosi, Unsullied and Dothraki, knights and criminals, men and women, young and old. It did not matter. They were all Night’s Watchmen now.

As they had been before, during the Long Night, they were so again: Man had united to fight the Others. It did not matter who they were or where they were born, just that they fought side by side, with everything they had.

The next day, if the sun rose at all, it was veiled by storm-clouds black as Shadow and as dangerous. Forks of lightning whipped relentlessly through the sky, illuminating the forests churning in an evil wind. Snow and sleet and rain thrashed all at once, freezing in the deathly cold and turning the yards and battlements into a death-trap. Salt and grit was spread about, the ice broken with picks and axes. Thunder boomed so loudly and so long it spooked even the unshakeable Thenns, afraid the castle was ripping itself apart from the foundations.

Larra sat cross-legged on her bed, gazing at her children cuddled together. Tears stung her eyes as she leaned over them, tenderly stroking their soft heads and pressing lingering kisses to their eyes, their tiny noses, their exquisite little lips, their tiny little fingers curled by their faces. For as little time as they had had together, they had known only her love. And that was perfect. Their lives had been perfect. No matter what, while she was theirs, she had made sure her children’s lives were perfect.

Climbing off the bed, separating herself from them, was one of the hardest things she had ever done. Some lingering discomfort from Arthur’s birth remained with her always, a subtle reminder. She bled still; soreness was eased by terrycloth soaked in ice-water. But there would be no numbing her discomfort. She would do whatever was necessary. To protect them. To ensure they had a future – not a short, brutal life where the only warmth they knew was hers.

Aella whimpered and fussed as Larra slid from the bed, straightening up: Arthur sighed and Aella stilled, drawn to the sound. She had been that way since Arthur was born; soothed by his presence.

Larra wiped her face and slowly went to Gendry. They shared a solemn, silent look and Larra helped Gendry fasten his armour over his leathers. He was no knight; he was a fighter. Darkstar had taught Gendry how to wield many of the weapons Gendry had been forging for years; he had taught Gendry how to keep his head on his shoulders. The light armour Gendry had fashioned for himself – leather reinforced with steel and stitched with plates of obsidian – was not a knight’s armour but it would protect Gendry as he fought. And Gendry was a fighter: that was what they needed – as many men and women who had the courage to fight.

Gendry had worked more with obsidian the last few months than Valyrian steel but as he had told her, if he didn’t work on the dragonglass they needed to fight and win this war, he’d not live to work on Valyrian steel.

It was to Gendry most owed what little obsidian they wore as armour. And though everyone was armed, few who realised that only the more experienced warriors were armoured with obsidian said anything about it. They armoured those most likely to be able to continue the fight.

Larra latched and buckled everything in place and stepped back. Grim and unyielding, he looked every inch the warrior.

Gazing at him, Larra could not help but wonder at how fiercely he resembled the young Robert Baratheon. Had he been a fraction of what his son had become, he may have actually been worthy of Lyanna. Gendry was the very best of Robert Baratheon.

He belted Fang around his waist. A sad-looking thing, really, compared with Dark Sister resting against the trunk at the foot of their bed. But life-preserving. That dagger was priceless for more than one reason.

Gendry sighed, gazing from the weirwood hilt of his dagger to Larra’s face. Carefully, he helped her dress and armour herself. There was nothing he could do to stop her from doing her part in this fight. Gendry knew that. He could armour her as best he was able – and he was the best – but ultimately they all understood that every able sword was needed in the fight if they wished to survive to the dawn.

Linens, leathers and a fur-lined vest for warmth made her feel overly warm. The chainmail vest of obsidian weighed heavily on her; she had forgotten how heavy it was. Perhaps she had never noticed, before. She had become so accustomed to it. The leather armour Sansa had had made for her shimmered in the firelight, and she put it on with mounting despair, thinking of Sansa. Her face had leeched of colour entirely when Brandon had delivered the news. Preparing for siege was one thing. Human armies were one thing. Sansa had no idea what was coming. There was no way to truly prepare her. She had to take it on faith and trust that they had done all that they could to defend Winterfell and protect their people. She had to be able to look their people in the eye and coax and cajole and calm them when their panic threatened to overwhelm them.

A gorget of obsidian was fastened in place over her leather armour, with new pauldrons of steel-reinforced obsidian. They were perfectly fitted to her body. The leather gauntlets he handed her, covered in tiny plates of obsidian, were too.

She gazed up at him and read the sorrow and grief warring in his sapphire eyes. She reached up, cupping his neck, and drew him for a lingering kiss.

For as long as they had had each other, they had loved each other – fiercely, completely.

They picked up their children – Aella in Gendry’s arms, Arthur in Larra’s – and made their way to the solar. They were hurried along by the sound of raised voices, and Larra was startled to see how packed the solar was: as crowded as it was, the majority of the people squashed into the room remained silent – armoured and grim-faced but silent. The arguments of a few kept everyone else quiet as they watched and listened, waiting for a verdict.

Lady Targaryen, her hair meticulously braided, her chain gleaming from shoulder to hip, was arguing vehemently with her own advisors and with Jon, Lord Tarly and Lord Lonmouth. Across the solar, the Little Bear was arguing fiercely – almost desperately – with her mother and sisters.

Closer to the Mormonts, Larra glanced at Gendry and they manoeuvred their way through the crowd towards the arguing women.

“ – I have trained! Every day – I will fight –“

“You have trained but you are not prepared – nothing can prepare you for this!” Lady Mormont cried plaintively. Her eyes widened when she saw Larra approaching. “Lady Larra – please – tell her!”

Larra glanced at Lady Lyanna. The Little Bear wore armour scaled to her size, a mutinous expression on her face, furious tears glittering in her eyes. A leader though she was, she was no older than Narcisa. Larra held Arthur tighter in her arms as she gazed at the Little Bear.

“You wish to fight.”

“My mother thinks to forbid it,” Lyanna Mormont hissed, glaring at her mother, “though I have trained and I have fought before! You think I am too young and too weak –“

“It is not a commentary on your strength,” Larra said quietly. “Nor of your courage. Your mother is right. You should not fight.” Lady Lyanna blanched. Larra explained kindly, “Lyanna, you have led the people of Bear Island since your apron-strings were cut. You were a child forced to take responsibility for others – for their safety and survival. You learned how to trust your instincts and to make the best decisions for your people. You guided your people, held them together, and when they needed you to, you chose best for their safety. You did that. You are a leader. And when the war is won, and we have counted the cost…the hardest job of all shall fall to you. It is you who shall help lead the North as it rebuilds. You can die with your people…or you can devote your life to providing for them.”

Something gentled in Lady Lyanna’s face. Behind her, her mother and sisters visibly relaxed. Their faces shone with respect, even as Lady Lyanna asked Larra quietly, “But why are you fighting?”

Larra sighed. Arthur squirmed in her arms. She gazed across the solar to Sansa, who had been watching their interaction. Though Sansa wore her leather armour, she bore no weapons: it was ceremonial. Her hair was unbound, but for the Northern crown hairstyle she had taken to wearing, to remind everyone of her Northern-ness. She was swathed in the weighted cloak it was next to impossible to move freely in. It was Sansa who would rule the North. Sansa who would lead the survivors as they rebuilt.

Even if everything went to plan, Larra knew… In all likelihood, the majority of the people in the solar would die.

And though the compromise Larra had come to with Gendry was to command, for as long as possible, until the walls were breached… Realistically, they knew that Larra would fight.

If they died, but the Others were defeated, it was Sansa who would rule the North. Sansa would become Queen in the North. It was Sansa who would raise Aella and Arthur. She would name Arthur her heir.

Larra’s son would be King.

He would live. Even if she did not live to see it.

She had never understood her mother more.

“I will do my part, for as long as I am able,” Larra said quietly, resting a hand on Lyanna’s shoulder. “If not for your mother or yourself, do it for your people – for the ones who will be left behind. They will need strong leadership to rebuild the North. And Sansa will need fierce allies such as you to defend it.”

Lady Lyanna seemed to grow several inches. She raised her chin, set her shoulders back. Her cunning dark eyes slid past Larra to Lady Targaryen, arguing vehemently across a model of Winterfell. Her expression hardened. House Mormont knows no king but the King in the North… After a moment, Lady Lyanna nodded.

“Very well,” she said curtly. Her voice full of conviction, thick with emotion, she said fiercely, “For our people.” Lady Lyanna slipped out of the solar: Larra wondered if she would try to sneak out to the battlements. Lady Mormont squeezed Larra’s shoulder as she passed, a silent look of thanks – of respect – illuminating her haggard face. Several of the men around them exchanged telling looks.

“What’s going on here?” Larra murmured, joining Gendry beside Bran, who was complacently practising his handwriting on a slate.

“ – you cannot win this war without Drogon!”

“We must,” Jon said, his tone brooking no debate. Yet despite the iron tones in his voice, Lady Targaryen persisted. When she opened her mouth to argue again, Jon gave her such a glare that would have blistered marble. “If we lose even just one dragon to the Night King, we are fucked. Fucked.”

“Why am I here if not to ride Drogon into battle?” Lady Targaryen hissed.

“We had hoped for support from your armies,” Ser Davos said, his voice gentle, yet the reminder – the subtlest hint of her failure to provide such armies – made Lady Targaryen bristle.

“Jon is right; we cannot risk the dragons,” Tormund Giantsbane spoke up. “Snowcats and bears we can handle. Even a fucking mammoth wight we can bring down… We have before. But a dragon?”

“We do not need the dragons,” Larra said quietly, adjusting Arthur in her arms. She rocked gently side to side, patting his bottom rhythmically as he cooed. Lady Targaryen’s eyes flitted from Arthur to the bundle in Gendry’s arms and she turned away, her expression stark and aloof. “And we must make do without the extra armies. We have prepared for this. Every possible eventuality has been accounted for in our strategies. We have drilled so often, I imagine we will be able to change tactics on a word even as they burn our corpses!”

There were a few chuckles at that. The last few weeks had been gruelling in terms of drilling different strategies. They had spent hours going through every single permutation of different tactics that they could think of. Lord Tyrion, Darkstar, Lord Tarly, Jon, Lord Lonmouth, the Greatjon, Lady Mormont, Obara Sand, Ser Jaime – every man or woman with military experience had added their insight to develop a ridiculous number of tactics that they could slip seamlessly into at a single word, adjusting without warning. Commanders and foot-soldiers alike knew all those words and what they meant. They also knew what to do when their commanders fell: anyone who was able had to assess and give orders to shift tactics. Every single person who could wield a weapon had been drilled to exhaustion: it was worth it.

Preparation was the key to maintaining calm.

And though word had spread that siege was imminent, there was no panic. People knew what to do. They knew their roles. They knew where they needed to be and what was expected of them. They knew who to report to, how to wield the weapons they were outfitted with. They had been given time to prepare – to say their goodbyes, to leave nothing unsaid. They had time to spend their last hours with those they loved.

And they did. There was a gentle quiet in Winterfell as everyone savoured their last moments with the people they cherished most.

The Great Hall was filled with people. Before the hearth, Larra and Gendry sat surrounded by their children. They ate their supper together and played games, telling stories. They shared cuddles and kisses. Aella and Arthur were cooed over, fussed and spoiled by the older girls, while the boys admired the armour and weapons of every knight and warrior who came and went.

The children were so used to the people of Winterfell walking about in their armour that it was unremarkable to them. Just another evening spent in each other’s company. And if Narcisa noticed that Larra was bright-eyed and let Leona linger in her lap longer than usual, until the tiny girl was all but asleep in her arms, and if Cadeon watched Gendry’s solemn face carefully and subtly sharpened his knives, they did not let on that they had realised something was different tonight. At bedtime, Larra and Gendry kissed their children goodnight and went to tuck them in. When they were all settled, Larra sat at the end of the bed. Cuddled together, the children’s eyes glittered in the candlelight, eyelids becoming heavier and heavier. They were calm, and content, and would sleep soundly. She started to sing a lullaby, aware that her voice was rich with emotion:

“Lay down

Your sweet and weary head

The night is falling

You have come to journey's end

Sleep now

And dream of the ones who came before

They are calling

From across the distant shore

Why do you weep?

What are these tears upon your face?

Soon you will see

All of your fears will pass away

Safe in my arms

You're only sleeping…”

Gendry kissed each of the children and as they left the nursery, they exchanged looks with Lady Vialle, Tisseia, Zharanni and Gilly, whose eyes glittered. She gave them a tremulous smile and stroked Little Sam’s shining golden hair, sniffling and wiping her eyes. In the corridor, Gendry wiped the tears from his cheeks, glittering in his beard: they walked slowly, hand-in-hand, back to the Great Hall, where Aella was tucked into a fur-lined cradle by the hearth, rocked carefully by her wet-nurse. Larra arranged herself on a settle and took opportunity to nurse Arthur.

No-one had told her about the connection she would feel, nursing her child. It was a thing unlike anything else in the world – even warging.

 She sighed and rested back against the settle, cherishing her time with Arthur. It was far easier to remain in the moment, focusing only and entirely on Arthur, than to let her thoughts linger in the nursery and the dozen little hearts that would be shattered this time tomorrow.

But why are you fighting?

Because she could not bear to stand by, to wait for the hordes to overwhelm the castle and tear her children to shreds before her eyes.

A parent should never have to suffer the death of their child.

If there was anything in the world that could break her, it would be that.

She would gladly die a thousand gruesome deaths if it meant she never had to witness the death of any one of her children.

So she would fight. Because she feared the alternative far more.

And if it meant that she died but they lived full, glorious lives, so be it. That was the natural way of things.

It was how she knew Lyanna had died at peace. She had been assured that her children would live even if she was not privileged to experience it.

That was a worthy sacrifice.

And there was a small part of Larra – rather a large part, really – that feared being the one left behind.

She had been left behind before. Robb had left her behind with Bran and Rickon.

Robb and Rickon were both dead; Bran was altered.

And she… She had lost herself, for so long it would take years to undo the damage. It did not matter how long she had been home. Gendry, Aella, Arthur… They were extraordinary. And absurd, in a way. She sometimes felt as if she was still beneath the great weirwood – as if this was a dream she had made up, her mind stagnating, rebelling against the dread, the paralysing terror, the impotent terror. Anticipating an enemy she could never hope to confront.

Hold the door…

She, better than almost anyone, knew what they were to face. She had already faced it head-on – and fled.  Those at Hardhome had witnessed it. Samwell had survived it at the Fist of the First Men.

This time, there was no fleeing.

They would stand their ground. They would defend their home. They would fight.

And many would die.

She had been waiting for this fight for so long it felt almost a relief, cuddled with Gendry on the settle with their children in their arms, to hear the three blasts of the horn.

Three.

White Walkers.

They heard it, faintly, through the tumult of the hall. Larra glanced at Gendry. His heat and scent soothed her in a way nothing else did. She gazed into his face and those sombre sapphire eyes calmed her, grounded her.

They had done all they could.

And remembering the last time she had been in the position of facing the Others…

It was laughable that she and Bran and Meera had even made it out of the caves beneath the weirwood, let alone past the Wall. By rights, they shouldn’t even be here.

But they were.

Hold the door…

As Gendry had said, so many months ago, everything had led them here. Led them to this.

And that was an encouraging thought.


Salt and grit crunched, melted sludge squelching underfoot. The hurried calls of men and women racing to their positions were snatched away by a brutal wind that forced the snow and icy-rain to dance in the air.

They lined the battlements, staring out into the darkness.

Lightning forked violently, like ice fracturing across the surface of a lake. A volley of thunder followed, reverberating in their bellies, turning their insides to liquid. For the lightning revealed an ocean, waves ceaselessly thrashing, the tide drawing ever closer. An ocean of the dead.

Lord Randyll Tarly sighed grimly. “So it begins.”

“No,” Larra said quietly, something light and strangely delicious sparkling through her veins. Relief. After so many years, it had finally come. The great battle of their age. “Now it ends.”

Notes:

I know how this part of the story is going to end but I wondered if anyone wanted to discuss potential plot-lines for the next instalment of this story (Dragons’ Daughter). I know who the ‘big bad’ will be, and general plot-points, political intrigues, backstabbing etc., but I’m still considering some ideas and moving things around to see how they best make sense. I’ve also considered who the main political players are going to be, going forward. Some are canon; some have already been introduced; others will appear later. If you want a hint of what’s to come or have anything you’d love to see happen in the next story, message me on Reddit (same username). I’d love to chat about it!

Chapter 63: Fire

Notes:

The “Helm’s Deep” chapter. Writing this on what has been the hottest day of the year thus far is very odd! It is really hard to write battle scenes in general, I found!

I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube videos about different ASOIAF theories, particularly about Varys/FAegon and Dornish conspiracies. I have my own ideas for this story but I’ll be fleshing out a lot of the politics with ideas inspired by these theories – particularly, Bloodraven’s actions, the true identity of “FAegon” and a Dornish conspiracy for Rhoynish revival at the expense of a Targaryen (Valyrian) restoration.

Also, I was wondering whether the Azor Ahai prophecy – tempering his blade in the heart of his lover to defeat the darkness – is more metaphorical, or can come about a different way than most anticipate: my belief is that Jon sacrificed his love (Ygritte) for honour and duty, which forged him into the weapon that he has become to unite Men and fight the White Walkers. Since his resurrection Jon is also filled with the fire of R’hllor, making him the “burning sword”. He is also technically a “son of fire”, having been reborn through R’hllor’s power (for which Melisandre is a conduit). Melisandre says “a warrior shall draw from the fire a burning sword”: a warrior (Ser Davos – not a knight or soldier but someone who fights for what is right and just) drew from the fire (Melisandre) a burning sword (Jon). Without Davos’ encouragement and belief, Melisandre would never have attempted Jon’s resurrection.

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

63

Fire


The roar of the dead was a harrowing battle-tactic that sent horror to their very marrow, freezing them in place, turning their minds to terror, anticipating their fates. As forks of lightning lashed the churning black sky, they illuminated the endless waves of the dead, churning and thrashing furiously. Rotting snowbears and ice-eyed direwolves; snowcats with gleaming fangs and innards trailing them like ribbons; and giants with blood frozen in their beards riding mammoths. They weren’t the worst.

Fear was the greatest weapon of all.

And lines of dead children spanning the horizon, ice-eyed and broken, inspired fear like little else. They led the vanguard, inspiring true horror as they drew closer.

Not even the children had been spared.

Beast and babe alike would fall to his will, little more than meat in his army.

A chorus of gasps and startled cries, muted whimpers and yells of fright hissed around the castle. But here and there, dotted amongst the rabble, were grizzled warriors who appeared, not frightened, but resolved.

They had looked the Night King in the eye before and were prepared to meet him in battle once more. As the rabble turned to their leaders for reassurance, their stoic faces and steady hands spread calm through the ranks as nothing else could. Larra gave reassurance without hesitation, aware that it was to her that many faces turned, seeking courage.

“D’you remember when we were children?” Larra murmured to Theon, who gaped at the sea of the swarming dead, his eyes on the dead children that turned their ice-blue eyes to the ramparts as lightning forked overhead. “During storms, you used to frighten us with stories of the ocean rising up to consume the Iron Islands, giant krakens rising up from the deep to drag us to the depths and devour us.”

Theon exhaled sharply, giving her an apologetic glance.

“This is why Winterfell was built,” Larra said quietly, tilting her head as she watched the seething ocean of the dead. Tears dripped silently from Sansa’s sapphire eyes as she gazed out, her eyelashes freezing together before she could blink. It was important she saw, that she knew: she would not fight but Sansa would know exactly what their people faced. Why they fought. Why every sacrifice was worthy. She wept silently. She was not alone.

Under the great weirwood, Larra had fled, her only focus putting one foot before the other. Not the storm lashing around her, the wights chasing her, Hodor and Summer, Leaf and Lord Bloodraven left behind to be torn apart… Now, she watched, feeling strangely calm – almost at peace. There was no more running: there was only this battle. Nothing else mattered. Her voice calm, almost dreamy, she sighed, “To defend the realms of Men… They will break upon Winterfell like water upon rock.”

“You sound almost confident.”

“To be anything else is suicide,” Larra said quietly. She caught his eye and they shared a grim smile. They had to believe they might outlast the Night King. Belief was powerful.

“There are so many,” Sansa breathed, her eyes wide with horror and despair.

“They were Free Folk,” Tormund Giantsbane said throatily, his eyes glittering with tears as he gazed down at the Night King’s horde, his eyes lingering on the children. “Now they are slaves.”

“Kill the commanders and they will be free once again,” Jon said simply. It all came down to killing as many of the Night King’s commanders as possible.

During their meetings, the knights and lords had worried that Jon slaying the Other at Hardhome would put the Night King on the defensive: they had revealed his greatest weakness. No experienced commander would leave his army vulnerable by exposing that weakness. The Night King would never leave his commanders exposed. He would hide them. They would never get close enough to kill the commanders, thus their strategy was to eliminate as many of the foot-soldiers as possible in the hopes of evening the odds and increasing the likelihood that the commanders would be exposed.

It was the only hope they had.

A single short, sharp burst from a horn shattered the grip of terror the Night King held over them. They peered over the ramparts, squinting through the snow and the ice-rain, at the small figures moving gracefully through the snowdrifts. Behind them, a large figure sat astride a dying horse.

A fork of lightning seared through the sky and Larra’s breath caught in her lungs.

“Open the gate!”

“What?”

“Open the gate!” Larra called, breathless with shock. She turned and descended the heavily-gritted steps, calling again for the gate to be opened. All around her, the rabble gripped their obsidian weapons, glancing wide-eyed at her as she passed, glowering in bewildered anticipation as strong men used great hammers to break the ice that had formed over the bars blockading the gate shut.

Stillness came to them as the newcomers slipped into the yard. The gate was set and bolted behind them.

All eyes turned to the new arrivals, half as tall as any man and clad in strange garments of woven leaves and tree-bark. The flickering torches – burning defiantly against the icy rain and snow – illuminated golden and green eyes that glowed like a cat, large ears and dark skin dappled like a doe. Claw-tipped fingers clutched bone-white spears tipped with obsidian.

Everywhere they stood, the implacable Thenns dropped to their knees, proffering their weapons and pressing their palms and brows to the ground in supplication.

As she strode through the crowds, those that sang the song of the earth turned their green-golden eyes unerringly to Larra. She greeted them in their custom, reaching out and gently, almost tenderly, clasping her fingers together, bringing them to rest over her heart.

“We believed we fought alone,” she said in the Old Tongue, awed. The Thenns turned owl-eyes on her as they straightened: they left their weapons at their feet as a mark of respect.

“Our long dwindling comes to its end. We follow the giants into the earth, our bane and our brothers. They call to us from the stones and the trees where we are awaited, from the earth where we shall become one with all that shall ever be,” their leader said gently. “In the dawn of your days, a great pact was forged that we may all live with the land. For thousands of your years, we honoured our friendship. When the Others brought the great winter without end, we fought and died together. We have come to honour the Pact we made with Men before the gods. We shall make right an ancient wrong. We bring word from he with a thousand eyes and one.”

“Lord Bloodraven?”

“Once he was known by such a name yet never to us,” sighed the leader.

“What does he say?” Larra asked sadly. To the greenseers, time was as fluid as any ocean. They could dive into its depths and surface whenever they chose. Lord Bloodraven had travelled through the weirwoods, through time itself, to leave this message with those that sang the songs of the earth.

In the common tongue, their leader said, “When the last arrow has been loosed, and your need grows dire, it falls to you, child of ice and fire, to wake those who have slumbered, bound to their oaths.”

She frowned at them, blinking snow from her eyes, and those who sang the songs of the earth held their hands to their hearts, bowing their heads. She pointed vaguely behind her, thinking of her journey to Winterfell’s foundations. The crowds parted, drawing back and staring in awe as the Children of their ancient tales and legends moved gracefully past, drawn to the ancient oak door into the godswood that had stood untouched for ten-thousand years. The last Children to enter it may have been those who carved the face into the heart-tree. Brandon Stark had built Winterfell around the godswood; every generation of Stark since had prayed under the sorrowful gaze of the weirwood, soothed by the gentle sigh of the wind through the ruby-red leaves, bolstered by the enduring strength of the bone-white trunk, the ancient roots embedded deep into the earth. A symbol of the strength and the endurance of House Stark, some said – while the direwolf told of their ferocity and cunning.

To withstand the storm, it was the strength and cunning of all their ancestors that they needed now.

The Children melted into the gloom of the godswood, the shadows swallowing the glow of their weirwood bows and bone-spears, the wind eating the rustle of their footsteps in the snow. People stared openly. The Thenns gaped, their jaws slack. Even Tormund Giantsbane remained speechless.

Jon staggered past her, knocking her slightly, and Larra turned to watch him. Someone ran forward to take the bridle of the half-dead horse that had limped into the yard behind those that sang the songs of the earth. A tall, lean figure in a tattered cloak had climbed off the horse and now peeled back a threadbare hood.

“Uncle Benjen!” Jon gasped, striding toward him: they embraced as fiercely as brothers. Tears stung Larra’s eyes – not for herself: Benjen’s fate had eaten at Jon for years. It was ultimately how the mutineers had lured him to his murder. Releasing their uncle, Jon stepped back, scrutinising Benjen’s gaunt, scarred face.

“You were beyond the Wall,” Jon said, aghast, staring at Uncle Benjen’s face, noting his unnatural pallor and the bluish tint to his lips. Benjen simply nodded. Jon deflated somewhat, a devastating sort of sadness emanating from him. Jon had held on to the hope that their uncle had found some way to survive against the odds. And, though he stood before them, Benjen was clearly not unharmed. Clearly…different. Not Other but altered.

 “You’ve been busy,” Benjen replied, staring back at Jon. And in that moment, Larra swore Father stood before them, his tired face radiating a rare pride so tangible it warmed her. Benjen reached out to clasp Jon’s shoulder, his eyes creasing at the corners. He nodded, a fond smile shifting his features back to those of Uncle Benjen – their Benjen, the genial, observant uncle who devoted hours to them, listening to their triumphs and woes, soothing hurts, slipping them cups of wine at feast, dancing gaily with Larra, teaching Jon how to wield his hunting-knife without losing fingers. Their beloved uncle who brightened Winterfell whenever he flew down from the Wall to visit. Father had always been happier when Benjen was near: so was Jon. So was Larra. How often had she wished he had claimed them as his own and raised them in a holdfast, creating a home for them all away from the cold glares of Lady Catelyn? How much faith had she put in Uncle Benjen to keep Jon safe when he had taken her twin to the Wall? But it was Benjen Stark the First Ranger who looked at Jon now, his grey-blue eyes shining with pride, as he said, “A man gets what he earns when he earns it, Your Grace.”

Jon snorted. Then he smiled grimly at a memory, the advice Benjen had given him before he set out for the ranging from which he had never returned – the ranging that had led to the Night’s Watch’s first discovery of a wight. Benjen’s last ranging had set much in motion that could never be undone. As it should be. All this was as it should be.

So said Brandon. Larra believed in him wholeheartedly.

Benjen’s grey eyes – Jon’s eyes, Stark eyes – gazed around the yard, a smile in their depths. Proud. His unyielding gaze drifted over the Free Folk in their furs; Yohn Royce in his ancestral bronze armour that had been first worn by those that fought beside the Children; the smallfolk wielding obsidian daggers; Northmen in breastplates and boiled leather, hair tied brutally back; Unsullied armour gleaming like beetle-shells in the torchlight; Dothraki bowmen perched precariously atop towers and rooftops, held in place by ropes as on a ship in foul weather; and the siege weapons dotted strategically throughout the yard, precarious shards of obsidian jutting out lethally.

Larra gave him a tremulous smile. “I’m glad you’re here, Uncle.”

“I told you,” Benjen said sombrely, reaching his hand out to touch Larra’s cheek. His gaze lingered, as it always did, on her face – Lyanna’s face. He said almost regretfully, “I still fight for the living.”

“We are glad for your sword, Uncle,” Jon said quietly. Benjen nodded.

“Where do you need me?” Benjen Stark, First Ranger of the Night’s Watch, asked. Their reunion was over: there was much to do. Jon gave a hollow laugh. Where didn’t they need him?

“Benjen!” boomed Donal Noye, his broad face creasing with a grin. The one-armed smith waved his obsidian war-hammer in summons and Benjen smiled, loping off to his black brothers, grasping forearms, clapping each other on the back in greeting – and in gratitude.

If Benjen had survived beyond the Wall all these years, he brought hope to all the rest.

And he had arrived in the company of those that sang the song of the earth. Larra pondered this but had little time to give it serious thought. They were here: that was what mattered.

They climbed to the ramparts once more, observing the Night King’s hordes. They were still thrashing like violent waves in a storm: they were the storm. Larra gazed along the ramparts, to the rooftops and turrets where bowmen perched precariously; to the burly labourers who stood by trebuchets, ready to load them with carefully-crafted ammunition; the Unsullied positioned strategically along the ramparts, in command of smallfolk and soldiers armed with obsidian-tipped spears or halberds supporting archers, the Unsullied ready to relieve the archers at every crenelated battlement, drilled to rotate to give each other precious reprieve; and the lads…the young lads armed with obsidian daggers and torches. Torches to light the dead.

One thing that never changed, no matter what their strategy: burn as you go. Leave no fallen soldier within their walls to join the Night King’s army.

If they turned on each other, they were doomed.

They had planned. They had drilled. They had done this over and over again over the last few weeks, through all weathers. They had prepared as best they could. And in the face of the unimaginable, Larra was proud to see that their resolve was unwavering. Though they may whimper with fear and horror as the army of the dead swarmed like a furious nest of hornets, no-one abandoned their posts.

Quietly, as if barely daring to speak lest it trigger an assault, Sansa asked, “What happens now?”

Looming over her, the horrendously burned Sandor Clegane grunted, “We wait.”

They may not know the army of the dead but every knight and lord in Winterfell was raised on battle strategy – tactics in open warfare, yes, but specifically, to defend their own holdings and how best to lay siege to castles they intended to claim by force.

They may not know the Others. But castles were something the Others knew nothing of.

Beyond the Wall, they had had every advantage.

But here at Winterfell…thousands of generations had outlived siege after siege with worse odds – facing starvation, sickness and siege weapons.

At Hardhome, the dead had swarmed the unsuspecting Free Folk without hesitation. They had been deterred only by the precariousness of the frozen lake yet had attacked at the earliest opportunity. That was the Night King’s pattern: to send out his legions to overwhelm with sheer numbers. No strategy whatsoever. He relied on those numbers and the terror that overwhelmed his soldiers’ victims as they realised what their fate was to be. He relied on that terror to prevent anyone fighting back.

Lightning whipped across the sky. Thunder boomed so loudly Larra felt it reverberate in her belly. The sea of the dead churned as if discontented, irritated.

“What are they waiting for?” Arya murmured. This Arya, trained by exposure to years of brutality in the Riverlands and in the arts of the Faceless Men, showed her fear in a different way than she might have as a girl. Scowling and impatient, rather than wide-eyed and uncertain.

“They’re not waiting,” Larra said, sighing heavily. She had seen the wights frozen still as statues, waiting for their orders. It was the eeriness that sent shivers up her spine. She still remembered the sight of them standing beyond the kiss of flame as the Night King held out his hand.

“What are they doing, then?” Sansa pressed.

Larra sighed heavily again. “They’re frightening,” she answered.

“The Night King thinks to break our courage,” said Lord Beric Dondarrion. Larra noticed that though ice clung to Arya’s eyelashes and Sansa’s unbound hair, Lord Beric stood lightly steaming as the snow whirled around him. The Lord of Light’s fire burned within him, she supposed. The same fire that had brought Jon back to them.

“Horned fucker,” Sandor Clegane swore, scowling.

“I’d rather we didn’t have to wait,” Arya frowned. “Waiting is interminable.” Larra snorted.

“You’ve no idea,” she muttered, and Arya glanced at her. Larra simply gazed out over the ocean of the dead. Years, she had been waiting, almost a decade, lingering beneath the weirwood, gripped by the fear of – this.

“They came for you,” Sansa said softly. Larra nodded. “You survived.”

Larra sighed, her breath pluming before her, and she glanced at Sansa, her expression grim. “Not all of us.”

Hold the door… She flinched.

Sansa watched her carefully.

“We should walk,” Larra said, sighing softly. “They need to see our faces.”

“I do not think they wish to see what my face may show,” Sansa said. Larra glanced at her.

“They need to see your fear,” Sandor Clegane growled softly. Larra glanced at him as Sansa frowned bemusedly. “They’ll fight all the fiercer to protect you.”

“I would rather they fought for themselves,” Sansa said quietly.

“Sometimes that’s not enough,” Clegane grunted. “When it comes down to it, nothing matters but the ones you’d die to protect. And a beautiful young woman… Half the lads here have convinced themselves they are in love with you… They’ll fight for you.”

If Sandor Clegane was capable of a declaration of love, that was it.

Larra hid her smile and edged away toward Darkstar, murmuring with several of their commanders who had been sent off to relay information to different parts of the castle. She frowned at the sight of the unfamiliar weapon he held reverently in his grasp. The blade was milky white and seemed to radiate its own light. Or perhaps the torchlight reflecting off the snow made it appear so.

“A new sword?”

“Hm?” Darkstar appeared distracted, unusual for him. He raised his purple eyes from the milk-glass blade and blinked at her. “A very old sword. It is Dawn, the sword of my family.”

Larra raised her eyebrows. “The Dawn?”

“It is sharp as Dark Sister,” Ser Gerold said softly, his tone wondrous. He raised the blade for Larra to examine. “As bright as Valyrian steel is dark. Forged from the heart of a fallen star, it is said in my family, during the Age of Heroes.”

“Given to the Sword of the Morning when he has earned it… Yet you claim you are of the night… How did you come by Dawn?” Larra asked, awed. She had heard stories of Dawn from her father, who had carried it back to Starfall as a mark of respect to Ser Arthur Dayne – his loyalty and his sacrifice, Larra now realised. Her heart panged and her arms felt suddenly bereft: she missed her son’s weight in them, his warmth against her chest.

“I stole it. Rather, my mother stole it on my behalf,” Ser Gerold said, his tone thoughtful as he gazed at the glowing blade.

“Your mother stole it for you?” Larra smirked, and Darkstar grinned, his eyes flashing.

“You have not yet met my mother. If ever there was a time to wield swords of legend, even stolen ones, it is now.” Darkstar’s cunning gaze swept over the army of the dead.

“Your mother could never have known you’d be facing this when she stole it. I am afraid there is no rewriting the past,” Larra said, with a heavy sigh; Darkstar simply smirked in response.

“You believe that the means are not justified by the ends?” Ser Gerold suggested. Larra glanced at Ser Gerold. Darkstar’s eyes glittered in the torchlight, his silver hair snatched around his head by the wind, and for a heartbeat, she was reminded of Lord Bloodraven, leeched of all colour, all life, his single eye glittering in the faint light, surrounded by bone-white roots. Throughout his life, Lord Bloodraven had always justified the means with the ends, and the more she thought of him and the circumstances of her and Bran reaching the great weirwood, she could not help but wonder how often Bloodraven had meddled in the past. How often had he committed acts considered heinous even to the old gods? Kin-slaying, dark sorcery, skin-changing into other men…

What had Lord Bloodraven done to ensure that she and Bran reached him beyond the edge of the world?

What had he done to ensure she and Jon stood here, waiting to face the Night King?

“When the last arrow has been loosed, and your need grows dire, it falls to you, child of ice and fire, to wake those who have slumbered, bound to their oaths.”

What had Bloodraven done to get them here?

What had he done to ensure they were born? Children of ice and fire – born of the blood of both the First Men and of ancient Valyria, both wargs and dragon-riders.

The very thought made her blood run cold.

And it was not the time to dwell on it.

Ser Gerold said darkly, “I know only this; she feared I would need a sword that holds its edge.”

Larra wondered if Ser Gerold had perhaps come to some trouble in Dorne. Given his skill and nature, she would not be surprised if he had, though doubted very much any answer was as simple as that. There was always much that Ser Gerold kept to himself; he revealed very little. Sometimes, though, his anger and bitterness shone past the irreverent mask he kept assiduously in place. She had often wondered at the anger but was more intrigued by the cunning in his purple eyes. His anger was honed like a weapon; he was not lost to it, as others often were. He wielded it as he wielded his cunning and his charisma. Darkstar gazed out over the churning masses. He swung Dawn with a loose wrist, the mark of an expert swordsman. Weighing it in his grasp, familiarising himself with it, already imagining himself slicing off wight heads. “Now that I have it… Perhaps my cousin Ned may yet grow to wield it himself.”

“Ned?” Larra frowned, glancing at Ser Gerold. His smile was almost cruel.

“Edric Dayne. Nicknamed for the honourable man who returned Dawn to House Dayne in place of the knight who wielded it,” Ser Gerold said, giving her a sly look.

Larra frowned. The Daynes had named their son and heir after Ned Stark? “Odd.” Ser Gerold nodded his silent agreement. The Daynes had named their son in honour of Ned – after he had slain their brother and left his bones in the mountains of Dorne, and, it was rumoured, either he or Brandon Stark had dishonoured and impregnated Lady Ashara Dayne at Harrenhall. Lady Ashara, who had flung herself from the tower of Starfall in her grief over a stillborn child possibly fathered by a Stark, her body never recovered. That was the rumour, anyway. So why honour Ned?

Now was not the time to think on the implications – and there were many.

It was tempting, though, to think about the far-distant Starfall and the legendary knights and beauties that had come out of that place as a reprieve from the writhing masses barely leashed from overwhelming them. More comforting to dwell on furious Darkstar than on calculated Lord Bloodraven’s historic and potentially horrific intervention.

“Dawn has not been wielded since Ser Arthur Dayne was Sword of the Morning,” Larra said, and Darkstar’s eyes pinched slightly at the corners, as they tended to whenever anyone mentioned his famous cousin.

“No,” Darkstar agreed.

Larra cleared her throat and sighed heavily. Her breath plumed before her, mingling with the snow and ice-rain that spit at them. “That means it was last wielded in the defence of my mother.”

Darkstar gave her a sidelong look. She smiled grimly and gazed out across the ocean of the dead. They had been born under Ser Arthur’s protection. Now his sword, the sword named for the morning, forged, legends claimed, as the Others brought the Long Night, was active once again, just as darkness threatened to consume the world and everything in it.

Larra glanced down at Dawn. As it glowed she imagined it shone as with the light of a star.

What had Maester Luwin said of the Sun? That it was itself the greatest star in the sky, that the other stars were themselves suns an unknowable distance away. Larra had once posed the question to Maester Luwin, whether those distant suns warmed distant worlds. And whether the Long Night of Old Nan’s stories was possible, because the Long Night implied the Sun was destroyed, yet how could the Others have the power to freeze a star? Maester Luwin had been unable to answer; they had spent an afternoon discussing the possibilities, though when she had mentioned that perhaps there existed another world wherein bastards were not punished for being born while wrathful wives considered pious were put in their places for their true wickedness, Luwin had steered their conversation to Valyrian irrigation systems, the crop-rotation system newly employed across swathes of the Reach for greater yield and categorising different regions by their agricultural exports.

She had forgotten that afternoon, that conversation. A just world, where the innocent were protected and those who believed themselves superior because of rules people like them had created to protect and enhance their own positions over others were held to account.

Here at the end of it, Larra sighed and pushed from her mind the possibilities of a better world.

Theirs was flawed to its foundations yet it was still worth saving.

Every man, woman and child who bore arms to fight the Others was a testament to that.

There was still something worth fighting for – they were worth fighting for.

Arthur and Aella, Neva and Briar and Cadeon, Ragnar and Little Jon, Narcisa and Delphine, Crisantha and Calanthe, Altheda and Rosamund and Leona.

Bran and Arya and Sansa and Jon.

Gendry.

Her chest ached and she winced as she raised a hand to rub it over her heart. The action spread warmth through her. The weight of Dark Sister in her other hand grounded her, soothed her. The calls and shouts of their armies drew her focus, reminding her.

It was tempting, all too tempting, to delve into the past, to drift beneath the waves, to let them wash over her, avoiding the threat, avoiding her life. That was the danger Bloodraven had always warned them away from. He had lost himself to it, purposely Larra believed: he had warned them not to delve too deep or too long, never to delve into the minds of others. Never to do as he had done, what he had forced himself to do, justifying every action as a means to the end – this end, Larra believed. The end of the Long Night.

It all came down to this.

To Aegon’s dream, Larra understood.

“From my blood will come the prince that was promised, and theirs will be the Song of Ice and Fire,” the blade of Sweet Sister read, in hidden runes embedded by pyromancers before the Conqueror’s death. Everything Bloodraven had ever done, from the very first Blackfyre Rebellion, was for House Targaryen – its survival and its security. Everything for Aegon’s prophecy.

She wondered if the Conqueror’s dreams had only ever been his, or whether – with his First Men blood through his mother Melissa Blackwood – the Bloodraven had delved deep into the past through the weirwoods and through warging to sow the seeds of this moment, of her and Jon standing on the ramparts of Winterfell ready to stare down the Night King, to end the Long Night.

The Bloodraven had been loyal always to House Targaryen…but perhaps also to this fight.

And though he had sacrificed his own honour, had become a kin-slayer and violated his gods’ most holy sacraments, had ultimately sacrificed his life, he had warned both her and Bran from doing the same – from delving too long and too deep on the temptations of the past, of doing what was convenient over what was right, because they still had a future that could be honourable. Brynden Rivers never would. He had accepted that. He had done everything in his power to secure House Targaryen…to honour the Conqueror’s vision of a united Westeros to fight the Others when they roamed free of the frozen North once again.

“All this waiting,” Ser Gerold sighed, frowning out into the fathomless, churning sea. “We have waited for months, now this Night King wishes to make us wait longer.”

“You wish us to make the first move?” Larra asked quietly. They had planned and prepared. Casting doubt now would only be detrimental.

“I wish to do something,” Ser Gerold muttered. “This…impotence is infuriating.”

“I did not take you for an impotent man,” Larra replied, earning a sly smile from Darkstar, his eyes glittering. Dark humour drew him out of the worst of his moods, she had learned. “Don’t fret: it won’t last long.”

The Night King had proven time and again he knew nothing of patience or strategy. Outside the great weirwood he had not waited; nor had he lingered at Hardhome. He had been too hasty, desiring the end of the Bloodraven and of Brandon: and too arrogant, sending his commanders amongst the rabble at Hardhome. He had revealed his weaknesses: Meera had slain a White Walker with an obsidian-tipped spear, Jon another with a Valryian steel blade.

No strategy, just pure, single-minded purpose. Find and eliminate the Three-Eyed Raven. Exterminate all life.

Why?

Those that sang the song of the earth had created the Others as a weapon against Man. Yet they had turned on their creators.

Perhaps that was why.

Perhaps…and she had never considered it before…perhaps there was some part of the man still lingering deep within the mind of the Night King, the one who remembered – remembered who had made him… Perhaps they remembered who they were. Perhaps they understood exactly what they were, the monster they had been made into. Perhaps they sought answers, as to how they could be unmade.

History had become legend, legend had become myth. All was forgotten…except by Brandon. He knew all the vilest truths of the world. He saw through the tangled mire of time to the very heart of things.

“Do you see them?” Darkstar asked.

“In all this? Even my eyesight’s not that strong,” Larra said grimly, sniffing. She wiped her sodden face, wincing at the sting of leather against her ice-chapped skin. “When we were under the weirwood, he strode ahead of his infantry… But at Hardhome, and the frozen lake, he remained astride his dead horse, observing from behind the bulk of his forces.”

“Then that is surely what he will do now,” Ser Gerold scowled, his purple eyes sweeping the horizon as lightning lashed at the churning black clouds. Ser Gerold sighed. “A Far-Eye would be useless…”

“Wargs less so,” Larra said, glancing over her shoulder. They had wargs amongst them, and she caught the eye of one in particular, bonded with a dire-eagle. It made her wonder whether she should not have put her efforts into strengthening the bond she had with the dire-eagle she had nursed and released…but no, that creature was wild and free. She scanned the skies. The snow and ice-rain was not so violent that birds could not take wing.

She left Ser Gerold at his station, his sharp attention on the horizon as he swung his wrist, Dawn held in his hand, keeping himself warm, keeping his joints loose, ready. The warg from the Ice River clan gazed sightlessly, her eyes milky-white as Dawn. She was so accustomed to it from Bran that Larra did not react, though many around the warg shot her unnerved looks. After a long while, the woman’s eyes returned to their usual muddy brown colour and she focused slowly on Larra.

“The Others ride ‘mongst the dead,” she said, tilting her head sharply in fierce imitation of a bird watching its prey. “The King…” The woman shuddered, gazing out over the ramparts and pointed north-east. “They can see the torchlights. They watch. And they wait.”

“Wait?” Ser Jaime Lannister muttered, frowning at the woman. Here in Winterfell, many had learned to take it on faith whenever Brandon – or one of those he was often in the company of – spoke, no matter how outlandish their words.

“For the dead to march past,” the warg muttered, her eyes widening. “He led the army here. Now they surround us. Most to the north and east, though. None to the northwest – thanks be to the gods for the Wolfswood.”

“None to the northwest?” Larra repeated, frowning, glancing at Ser Jaime, who gave her a bemused look. To reach the godswood one was best served approaching it from the northwest, through the Wolfswood. Winterfell’s twin curtain-walls and battlements, not to mention the newly-Unbroken Tower, still stood between an advancing army and the godswood, but strategically, the most direct path to the godswood – and the great weirwood at the heart of it – was from the northwest.

“They would draw our forces away from the godswood,” Ser Jaime said, “focusing only upon the North Gate and the northeast defences? Why?”

“A diversion,” Larra answered grimly.

“Your brother said their target will not be your people but him,” Ser Jaime told her, deeply earnest. “Will the Night King expect your brother to be in the godswood?”

“Likely so,” Larra answered.

“Then the King will not want his rabble blocking his direct path to him,” Ser Jaime said. “The armies are a distraction, to keep us occupied long enough to…”

“To breach the walls and find Bran,” Larra said, her stomach heavy. Of course, they all knew this: Bran had insisted for months that the Night King sought him – and him alone. He had insisted – the brave, fierce, protective little boy of Larra’s memory shining through – on being the bait, the lure to coax the Night King to take the risk and expose himself. They knew what he wanted – though not why – and had accounted for it in their strategy meetings. And they would use it to their advantage, though it tasted sour in Larra’s mouth to think of using Bran as the lure, after so many years evading danger.

“He is arrogant,” Ser Jaime declared, aghast. Larra nodded distractedly.

“How long until the his armies surround us?”

“Within the hour,” the warg sighed heavily.

“You saw no movement in the Wolfswood?” Larra pressed.

“None as I could see, though the storm and lightning made it hard to tell a shadow from the Others,” the warg admitted. Larra nodded.

“I’ll spread the word,” Ser Jaime said grimly. He shook his head, his weaker hand gripping the hilt of Honour at his hip. “An hour. May I be relieved we shall not endure a siege without end in sight?”

“I have endured a siege without end, waiting for this,” Larra said quietly. “Swift, brutal conflict, I prefer.”

“Battles are like wounds – best dealt swiftly and cleanly, without much warning,” Ser Jaime said sagely.

“Those who worry suffer twice,” Larra replied, and Ser Jaime gave her an ironic little smile. He strode off, spreading word of the warg’s sightings. Larra did the same, going along the ramparts, giving encouragement to those gathered, sodden and cold but dutifully remaining at their stations. She spoke with their commanders, confirming her suspicions with the others: Carys Velaryon and his sister Calista, who kept an eye on Rohanne Lantell, armed with obsidian; Ser Arthur Wylde and his brother Dag; Lord Ivar Dondarrion, grinning madly, his vivid eyes alight with anticipated bloodshed; Ser Rey Musgood, murmuring the names of his children as he traced his fingertips over their names scratched into the battered leather of his vambrace, a prayer; and the devout Ser Jorian Gower, who, when asked, had sombrely but dutifully led a simple service of the Faith in the small sept Father had built, bringing comfort and strength to those who needed the Warrior’s courage with them. Ser Crissofer Caron, Ser Cassander Swann, Ser Lyn Corbray and Lord Yohn Royce silently knelt in prayer, while the Penroses huddled outside the sept, quiet but grateful in each other’s company.

They were grateful to fight beside their brothers.

Larra climbed up the ramparts and called to Qhaero, Calanthe’s sworn bloodrider, conversing with him in the Dothraki tongue: he was sharp eyed and fearless but leery of the storm as forks of lightning lashed closer. Qhaero nodded and tested the strength of his dragonbone bow, gazing out over Winterfell, and Larra turned away.

“You speak the savage’s tongue well,” said Lord Tarly with begrudging respect.

“Maester Luwin said I had an ear for languages – though not the accent!” Larra said, and Lord Tarly gave a rare chuckle. “How do you do, my lord?”

“I have made another tour of the ramparts and yards,” Lord Tarly reported. “All appears in order. The archers – “

“Father!” a voice called, and, shivering and blinking quickly in the snow and ice-rain, Samwell hurried across the yard. His thick black cloak billowed behind him but he wore no gloves; he had left the castle in a hurry. And the reason why was carried haphazardly in his arms.

“You were to blockade yourself with the others,” Lord Tarly scolded Samwell, who stopped before them, puffing.

“I – I know,” Samwell stammered, and he offered his father the package he had been carrying with great difficulty. Lord Tarly’s stern eyes dipped to the offering and his expression went suddenly slack. “Heartsbane. I stole it from Horn Hill – I know, I shouldn’t’ve – only I’m glad I did.”

“You knew the value Valyrian steel had against the Others, when none believed the Others were anything more than a legend to warn us away from the North,” Lord Tarly said, slowly taking the sword from Sam. He unsheathed it even more slowly, almost reverently. The thousands of ripples in the steel seemed to move in the torchlight, smoke dancing rapturously over silver.

“I knew it was doing no-one any good hanging on the wall at Horn Hill,” Samwell admitted. “And someone here was bound to be able to wield it.”

“But not you,” Lord Tarly said, and Larra noticed it was one of the rare times Lord Tarly’s tone lacked heat or accusation when speaking with Samwell of what he had historically considered to be Samwell’s weakness, his cowardice. Slowly, and with some discomfort, Lord Tarly had started to understand the true strength of his firstborn son, his cleverness, his loyalty, his decency and his courage.

“I’d love nothing more than to be able to defend my family with it,” Sam admitted, adding without shame, “but I can barely hold it upright.” Lord Tarly scoffed softly but did not insult his son.

“Then it is I who shall wield it,” Lord Tarly said, looking his eldest son in the eye, “to defend my family.”

Samwell stared back at Lord Tarly. “Thank you, Father.”

It was no small thing, what Lord Tarly had said. Veiled though it might be – Lord Tarly was still a proud man – he had claimed Samwell, Gilly and Little Sam as his family, after outright rejecting Samwell, threatening his life and condemning him to the Wall.

Accepting the sword from Samwell meant accepting that Sam would never be a burly warrior, a knight who led men into battle – and it was no longer shameful, as Lord Tarly had once believed. He knew his son’s true worth – as Sam had always known Jon’s, Larra thought, in spite of Jon’s bastard birth.

Lord Tarly unsheathed Heartsbane, handing the jewelled scabbard back to Samwell – there was no need of sword-belts and scabbards. They would not be sheathing their weapons. They would die with them in their hands or remain clutching them as the last wight fell. Every trained warrior knew that to lose one’s weapon meant death. Every untrained soldier feared the same.

As Sam hurried back to the Great Hall, Larra glanced at Lord Tarly. She cleared her throat quietly and said, “He’s the best of them, you know.”

“He is just like his mother,” Lord Tarly said mournfully.

“She must be an exceptional woman,” Larra said, and Lord Tarly nodded fiercely. They made their way along the ramparts, Lord Tarly barking orders and ensuring everything was as it should be. Larra made her way around to her own position, greeting the soldiers beside whom she would fight, conferring with the knights and Free Folk, the Unsullied and the Dothraki who looked to her for courage and leadership.

She hated the waiting, though knew the moment the Night King commanded his armies to act, they would endure chaos they could never imagine. She had had a taste of it, the Night’s Watchmen and Free Folk even more. So had Gendry, and Beric Dondarrion, Obara Sand and Lord Barahir, Lord Tarly and Sandor Clegane. They understood the true scope and horror of the Night King and his hordes.

Larra paused by Ser Gerold, who had tied and braided his hair away from his face with leather cords, throwing his handsome features into stark relief as he glared over the ramparts at the writhing masses. He was one of the many who had never seen the Night King’s army yet he was one who had trained more viciously than any other in preparation for battle against them. He had trained not only Larra, keeping her sane, but also Gendry.

“There is much I owe you, Ser Gerold,” Larra told him.

“You owe me nothing, Lady,” Ser Gerold replied quietly, his expression softening for a heartbeat as he gazed at her. A particularly vicious volley of lightning made her flinch, holding a hand over her eyes, which seemed to dance in the flashes of blinding light and inescapable blackness. The booming thunder that followed almost instantly made her bones ache. It continued, longer than ever before, and she exchanged a look with Darkstar, whose eyes glowed vivid amethyst in the blasts of lightning, his expression stark.

As far as the eye could see, the moors were covered in the thrashing undead. The Night King’s armies flooded the moors as waves flooded the shores.

In an instant, the tide stopped.

The wights froze.

The lightning ceased. The thunder was stifled. Though it tore at them, snatching at their hair and slicing at bared skin, the wind made no sound.

Silence fell.

“Archers!”

Slowly, the Night King’s vanguard of beasts and babes marched forwards. Orders were passed along the curtain-walls, bellows ringing out over the swirling snow and ice-rain thrashing the castle. She heard Lord Tarly’s voice – and Gendry’s, booming louder than anyone’s. Robert Baratheon’s battle voice had been legendary: his son had inherited it. Larra heard Gendry’s voice and was heartened. He sounded confident and in control.

This battle would turn many men into true warriors. She suspected it would make a leader out of Gendry. He had always been a fighter, fierce and courageous, smacking down bullies, defending the innocent. But he had never been tested like this before. He had never had opportunity to show his true potential. It would be the making of him.

She heard his voice and was bolstered by it.

“Here they come,” Ser Gerold said grimly, and Larra nodded, watching carefully. They had dug a deep trench, raising a motte around the castle and fortifying the downward slope closest to the curtain-walls, riddled with obsidian traps.

The archers let loose their arrows. In a heartbeat, hundreds of once-thrashing wights stilled on the obsidian traps, stopped short by obsidian-tipped arrows. The more wights they shot down, the higher the motte grew, the harder it was to scale. Single-minded as the wights were, driven by pure purpose dictated by their King, the wights’ rotting bodies did not hold up against the strain of ever-shifting ground.

They were a snarling, writhing mass, their unearthly shrieks shattering the air, the snap of shattering bones echoing gruesomely, the squelch of impaled bodies sickening. In the next flash of lightning, another volley of arrows struck their targets and the motte grew taller once again, dead wights tumbling down the near slope, caught on obsidian traps, mangled and entirely immobile. Their eyes were hollow, no longer glowing ice-blue in the darkness.

The order came to ceasefire. They nocked arrows, waiting for the order to draw.

This was part of their strategy. Use the dead themselves to increase their defences, slowing the advance of the army but not entirely halting it. Because they needed some of the Night King’s soldiers to advance, to come within range.

They needed to give a little to gain a lot.

They needed to light the biggest fire the North had ever seen.

The Night King’s own soldiers would be the kindling that swept wildfire through their ranks.

They could be sparing with their arrows, for they needed some of the wights to get close, to come within range. They all knew it.

The onslaught was relentless.

They sent volley after volley, felling wights, building that motte higher and higher, allowing some to evade their arrows between volleys. Flashes of lightning showed the wights haring frantically headlong toward the curtain-walls, heedless of any danger.

A short, sharp burst of lightning faded slowly, revealing the true scale of the Night King’s hordes. Across the horizon, as far as the eye could see, the wights pressed ever onwards, churning, relentless. The light lingered long enough to sow terror into the hearts of those who had been so far unshakeable, duty-bound to remain at their stations. The true scope of the Night King’s armies was daunting.

“It’s hopeless!” one soldier whimpered. “There are so many!”

“We are not without hope,” Larra told him sternly. She called, “Nock!”

“Do you hear that?” Darkstar asked, frowning. A clap of thunder had followed the lightning and faded moments ago yet she heard it…a relentless thundering, booming louder and louder.

“The sun is rising!” someone commented, for light had begun to spread. Rich, golden light, chasing away the shadows.

“Since when does the sun rise in the south?” Larra shouted back, whirling, bewildered, blinking rain and snow out of her eyes and gaping at the river of firelight spreading around Winterfell from the south.

She heard it, then: screaming.

Qhaero hollered in answer. Dothraki. A horde of Dothraki screamers, too many to count, the combined din of their horses’ hooves like ceaseless thunder.

They watched in awe as a river of fire spread around Winterfell, bloodriders screaming their battle-fury as they rode heedlessly into the sea of the dead, their raised arakhs aflame.

Around the curtain-walls, cheers rang out, louder and louder, answering the Dothraki’s battle-cries.

The river of fire pushed back against the sea of the dead.

Archers waved their bows over their heads, cheering.

The Dothraki’s screams echoed on the air, thousands of tiny flames dancing on the surface of the water. The river of fire was pushing back a great swathe of the Night King’s infantry yet now…now the tide was turning.

Larra’s heart sank like a stone.

“They’re charging the Dothraki!” she shouted, and all along the ramparts, orders were bellowed, a swift change in strategy. The wights were no longer charging toward Winterfell but around it, toward the east, where they were less heavily fortified.

“Their fires are burning out,” Darkstar noted, and Larra saw it, too. It had been tremendous to witness the horde charging, their arakhs alight, yet now the river of fire, the column of Dothraki charging with flaming arakhs, was shorter, narrower. The Dothraki were dying. Their battle-screams became screams of terror, of agony as their horses were torn apart under them, pulled from their saddles. Here and there, dotted amongst the rabble, Larra was awed to see glimmers of firelight, burning brightly, persistently, surrounded by the churning waves of the dead. The Dothraki fought.

And they died.

“When the Night King raises those fuckers, we’re dead!” Sandor Clegane bellowed. The shout went along the curtain-wall to those on the eastern ramparts. As their own men nocked arrows, Larra glanced across the castle, watching a volley of flaming arrows soar through the air amidst the dying Dothraki.

An echoing thud boomed around them, the stone beneath her feet shuddering, and Larra frantically peered over the ramparts, anxious that the wights had made it to the North Gate. But no, the sound had not come from mammoths charging the gate or giants hurling missiles at their walls.

A hideous shrieking wail startled her. Larra’s heart sank like a stone as the familiar clap of dragon wings unfurling drew her gaze behind her.

Perched on the ramparts, people scrabbling away from his spiked tail and mighty wings, Drogon roared. People fell about, clutching their ears – the din was ear-splitting. A diminutive figure began to climb Drogon’s back, her white fur coat shining in the light of thousands of flaming arakhs.

“What the fuck is she doing?!” snarled Darkstar.

Larra’s mind seared white-hot with rage. The taste of copper coated her tongue.

“She’s trying to be a hero,” she sneered, fury enveloping her. She had worried that the Little Bear would insist on sneaking out to join the fight. She would sacrifice Lady Lyanna’s life gladly if it meant Daenerys didn’t do the stupidest thing possible.

“She will cost us everything!” Lord Tarly shouted.

“Light the moors!” Larra shouted back urgently.

“And if Drogon and Lady Daenerys are caught up in the wildfire?” Ser Jaime shouted, squinting in the snow and ice-rain.

“So be it!” shouted Lord Tarly. “Rather that beast dies by obsidian and wildfire than returns under the Night King’s command!”

Gendry bellowed at the Unbroken Tower, commanding men to arm the scorpion with obsidian bolts.

“What is she thinking?!” Darkstar hissed, signalling their archers.

“She’s thinking the only people in the world loyal to her are being slaughtered,” Larra said grimly. “If we don’t light the moors now, they’ll all join the Night King.”

“Foolish girl!” Lord Tarly bellowed.

“DON’T!” Larra screamed at Daenerys, imploring. If she did this, they were as good as dead.

Larra took stock of the wights now tumbling freely over the motte and the river of fire that had dried up to little more than a stream.

“Archers!” Darkstar bellowed. “Trebuchet! LIGHT!”

Enormous projectiles were loaded onto the trebuchet and set alight. All along the ramparts, lads ran to light arrows with their torches. Archers nocked their flaming arrows and waited for the signal.

Lord Tarly gave the order. “LOOSE!”

They held their breath. Their hearts sank as the trebuchet missiles soared through the air, the ice-rain and winds smothering the flames that engulfed them. They collided, and exploded with echoing booms that shook the earth, sending shards of obsidian a hundred yards in every direction. But the flames did not catch.

The storm seemed to worsen in a heartbeat. Not because it became more violent but because it became crueller. Snow ceased to fall. Freezing rain thrashed down, pounding their heads, tearing at their faces, obscuring their vision, making it precarious underfoot. Maester Luwin called them glaze events; the smallfolk called them silver storms. They were gentle – and deadly. They left the world covered with a thick glaze of heavy ice.

Drogon took flight.

He soared into the air, shedding the ice-rain that covered his enormous wings, knocking people over with the sheer force of his wings beating.

Another volley of trebuchet missiles were launched.

Drogon soared, circled high above Winterfell, and dived.

No-one saw it through the ice-rain.

A single spear of ice, hurtled with horrifying precision.

Agape, Arya saw the spear soar through the air. Cringed at the deep, resounding thud of impact.

Screamed in pain, clapping her hands over her ears, as Drogon’s shriek shattered windows of Winterfell’s high towers. Ravens burst forth from the maesters’ tower, their cries lost on the winds, and dropped, their feathers weighed down by the ice-rain that froze them in mid-flight.

Drogon fell, hurtling toward the Wolfswood.

Larra watched, her heart in her mouth.

“Archers!” she screamed. Darkstar ordered half their archers to cover Drogon as he hurtled to the ground. The Unbroken Tower aimed its scorpion, prepared.

Drogon had not gained height. He did not fall far but he fell hard, and his screams were agonising to hear – eardrums shattered and many flailed about, writhing and screaming in pain, clutching their heads as they felt they would burst.

The Dothraki fires were burning out.

Wights clambered over the motte.

Drogon screamed and flailed, a spear jutting from his chest, sending spurts of flame into the air, thrashing and contorting with pain.

“RUN!” Gendry bellowed – a moment’s warning before Drogon flailed violently, thrashing his tail, and screamed, vomiting fire.

The North Gate was destroyed, wiped away as if it had never been. Drogon’s fire blasted through two curtain-walls, sending debris a hundred yards into the air, missiles colliding with Winterfell itself, peppering the yards, great chunks of ageless stone colliding with the ramparts, the towers. There was no outrunning it. No anticipating where it fell; some were pinned by debris, others crushed outright, all knocked off their feet by the force of the blast.

Flames licked at the charred holes now gaping in the curtain-walls. People scurried about, some screaming in agony as they fell to their knees, disintegrating to ash, blanketed by Drogon’s black fire; still more fled, clutching bleeding stumps and supporting each other as they bled freely. Others held onto their weapons, resolutely taking up new positions, covering their new weakness. Archers aimed their bows at the now-gaping hole in the curtain-walls.

“The godswood!” Larra shouted.

Drogon had burned a hole through the curtain-walls. The godswood lay vulnerable. The one place they had not fortified. Because how could they fortify a forest?

The Dothraki fires had burned out.

The wights still charged the motte.

But more hared toward the breach in the walls.

“Archers!”

“We need to light the moors – whatever it takes!”

Drogon screamed one last time; the ice-spear shattered.

He flapped his wings once and took off, fanning the flames now licking at the curtain-walls.

He disappeared into the darkness, the beat of his wings nothing more than the sound of thunder rumbling far into the distance.

He was a wild animal in pain. Drogon was no trained warhorse nor fool: when he suffered pain, he fled.

“The fire may yet keep the wights at bay!” Lord Tarly shouted, commanding archers to cover the gaping breach.

“Not for long!” Darkstar bellowed back, scanning the advancing armies. There was no order to them now. They ran pell-mell, unpredictable, and in such numbers they would be overwhelmed in moments.

“The missiles won’t catch!” Lord Lonmouth hollered.

Calm, smiling, Lord Beric Dondarrion said in his rich voice, “I know what must be done.”

He shrugged his cloak from his shoulders, handed off his obsidian weapons, took hold of a pitcher of oil and descended the steps into the yard, his one remaining eye fixed on the breach.

“What are you doing?” Sandor Clegane growled, his scarred face alarmed.

“Where are you going?” Arya screamed, hurrying toward Lord Beric.

“Fear not,” Lord Beric said, pausing by Arya. His smile was deeply affectionate and he rested a hand on Arya’s shoulder. “I’m to see your father. I shall tell him all you’ve become.”

She gaped at him.

Lord Beric Dondarrion strode fearlessly through the breach. Covered by archers, he strode through the fallen wights, his steps never faltering, and, Larra noted, barely breathing, into range.

The Dothraki’s flaming arakhs had not ignited the wildfire; their flames had been extinguished by the wights before they could ever touch the ground.

Lord Beric cut his way through the advancing armies, covered by their arrows.

He reached the marker.

Doused himself with oil.

Murmured a prayer and lit his sword. Closed his eyes, smiling. Finally at peace, he pressed the flaming sword over his heart.

Arya cried out as Lord Beric Dondarrion burst into flame.

He stabbed his flaming sword through the frozen earth.

For a moment, all was quiet.

Then the first explosion erupted. It knocked them off-balance, gaping at the sheer power of it. Explosion after explosion shook the earth itself.

Wildfire spread, turning the frozen moors to an ocean of emerald fire.

It consumed everything in its path.

The fires spread, igniting more caches of wildfire, the explosions more distant but more violent, consuming the Night King’s armies.

Inside the castle, people crowded the windows, gasping.

Sansa stared, rocking a troubled Aella in her arms as she whimpered. She was fussy without Larra; even Arthur’s nearness could not soothe her. Sansa squinted in the unearthly glare of the vivid emerald fire spreading away from Winterfell across the moors.

It was as if the sun had risen; the entire castle was bathed in the emerald glow she was so familiar with. Wildfire.

It burned for ages, greedy and demanding.

Lord Tyrion had limited the damage caused by wildfire to King Stannis’ fleet out on the Blackwater. She had never seen the burning husk that Baelor’s Sept had become. But Winterfell…

She wondered what the moors would look like after the wildfire had sated itself.

It occurred to her that because the moors burned, they may yet survive to see dawn.

Sansa smiled at the ladies gathered around her, wringing their hands in worry.

“Larra’s strategy has worked,” she declared; she would give all credit where it was due. Lord Tyrion had never received a word of acknowledgement or appreciation for his efforts during the Battle of the Blackwater but from Ser Garlan Tyrell. Now, she glanced down at Lord Tyrion. “Your calculations were accurate, my lord.”

Lord Tyrion took a deep drink from his wine-skin.

“If only I were out there, I could –“

“Die,” Sansa said bluntly, giving him a reproving look. “You have done all you can; but our part is not out there. This is where we must be. This is where we are needed most.” To keep everyone calm and feeling as if they were safe, that there was hope. The explosions they had heard, the shrieks Lord Tyrion had admitted with great dread were dragon screams, had made them all leery.

“We might see something everyone else is missing,” Lord Tyrion said. His tension and helplessness were tangible. He was desperate to be out there, to be useful. To be doing something. “Something that makes a difference.”

“The wildfire has made all the difference, Tyrion,” Sansa told him gently. It was Ser Jaime’s contribution yet Lord Tyrion’s calculations had ensured the strategy could succeed.

“Remember the Battle of the Blackwater?” Lord Tyrion reminded her. “I led the charge through the Mudgate –”

“And had your head cloven nearly in two,” Sansa retorted. Lord Tyrion frowned.

“You might be surprised at the lengths I’ll go to avoid joining the armies of the dead,” Lord Tyrion remarked. “I can think of no organisation less suited to my talents.”

“Yes, I’m told they’re mute,” Sansa said, and Lord Tyrion’s eyes glittered. “Your almost-witty remarks are unhelpful. Your ceaseless pacing and doubt is unhelpful.” She spoke sternly and fairly; his gaze softened as he stared at her. Lady Sansa was a woman now, no longer a little dove trapped inside a gilded cage. Solemn and stern, she was straight-backed and proud, settling the fretful babe in her arms and humming to herself in between speaking with the people gathered in the halls. She would wander in and out of the Great Hall, to speak with those lining the corridors and crammed into chambers. She sighed, gazing around the hall. “There is nothing we can do. That’s why we are here.” She sighed and stared at Tyrion, her smile sad but accepting. “It’s the truth. It’s the most heroic thing we can do now…look the truth in the face.”

Lord Tyrion gazed up at her. She was a true beauty, and always had been, but now the true Northern steel he had seen glimmers of beneath the silks and half-smiles revealed itself in full force. Lady Sansa had grown up. She was a woman now, and a fearsome one at that. Her experiences had made her who she was: Tyrion wondered how much credit or blame she gave him in that.

Tyrion sighed. “Last time we spoke like this, we were at Joffrey’s wedding.” He still remembered the cold look on Sansa’s face as the dwarf actors had jousted astride pigs and dogs, making a jest of the War of the Five Kings – making a cruel joke of her brother’s murder, among others. “Miserable affair.”

“It had its moments,” Sansa said tartly, and Lord Tyrion grinned. She sighed and gazed down at him. “I owe you an apology for disappearing.”

“It was rather uncomfortable, trying to explain how my wife disappeared moments after the King was poisoned by his own wedding pie,” Lord Tyrion mused, shrugging. “Had I been in your position, Sansa, I would not have hesitated either.”

“I do regret leaving you,” Sansa admitted. “In awful circumstances, you remained only ever kind to me.” Lord Tyrion nodded. “Somehow, we both survived.”

Lord Tyrion gazed up at Sansa. He remembered the fragile, pale girl with red-rimmed eyes, weeping uncontrollably over the lemon-cakes he desperately wanted her to eat, somehow pulling herself together, squashing her grief down deep, lacking the freedom to indulge in mourning her beloved family. He had tried to reassure her that she could mourn them freely, in their rooms, under his protection…but Lady Sansa had learned quickly not to trust. It had saved her life.

“Many underestimated you,” he said softly, appreciation rich in his voice. He was one of the few who had not. I will pray for your safe return, my lord…just as I pray for the King’s. His lips twitched at the memory. “Most of them are dead now.”

She gave him an unreadable smile. He recognised it, vaguely, from King’s Landing, yet there was an edge to it now, a wryness. She no longer had to hide her intelligence. She had embraced it, as others would a sword. He pondered, “Perhaps we should have stayed married.”

Lady Sansa’s smile lit up the room brighter than any wildfire.

“You were the best of them,” she mused, after a long moment. She rocked the babe in her arms and Tyrion was gripped with the sudden vision of what life might have been for them. He had always admired her beauty and had had a growing appreciation for how deftly she had learned how to navigate court politics, outliving almost everyone who had ever abused her.

“What a terrifying thought,” Lord Tyrion stammered, flustered.

Sansa’s smile was beautiful but sad. She sighed and said, “The truth is either terrible or boring.”

“I could use some boredom in my life,” Lord Tyrion mused.

Sansa eyed him shrewdly. “I do not believe the gods love you enough to allow you that privilege.”

“You are likely correct,” Lord Tyrion sighed heavily.

“As long as we are speaking terrible truths,” Lady Sansa said, “what shall you do once this battle is won?”

“I do admire your optimism,” Lord Tyrion deflected. Sansa arched an eyebrow imperiously. He remembered Ned Stark had rarely wasted words when a single look would suffice. Larra utilised the skill to tremendous effect, her beautiful face harrowing in its iciness when angered. “But why ask now?”

“What better time to discuss it?” Sansa asked. “The survivors of this battle will determine the fate of the realms. They will shape our world. Dornishmen, men of the Reach, Knights of the Vale, Stormlords, Ironborn, Dothraki, Riverlords, Free Folk – they have all gathered here, they have followed Jon into a battle against death itself. When the snows melt and the survivors return home to lands rife with troubles, who will they trust to call on for aid?”

Lord Tyrion sighed.

The game continued, as it always did. There was no reprieve from it, especially not in wartime. War was a time of opportunity.

Chaos is a ladder, Littlefinger had once claimed.

Outside, they fought with swords.

In the Great Hall, they duelled with words and ideas.

Notes:

This chapter was tricky. Trying to balance the tension with action and perspective shifts and the action with moments of calm to contrast inside/outside, showing that what happens inside is just as important as outside during a siege.

Chapter 64: Blood

Notes:

This chapter has taken me forever to get through.

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

64

Blood


Night became day.

The moors glowed like an ocean of emeralds dancing in sunlight.

Lady Larra staggered back, as much from the force of the blasts as the shock plain on her face, the grim awareness that, along with the wights, they had condemned to death the Dothraki bloodriders still fighting with their flaming arakhs. Ser Gerold reached out a hand to brace her and gave her a grim look. They all understood that there could be no hesitation, no moral qualms – nothing to get in the way of their goal: to defeat the Night King. Nothing else mattered. Not their lives, nor the lives of any other.

They knew this battle may be their last: their lives were forfeited when they had committed to defeating the Night King. Whatever the cost. No matter how steep, their survival would be paid for in blood.

Still, the reality was far more devastating than anything they could imagine.

The sheer scope of the Night King’s armies – men, women and children who had once been Free Folk and Night’s Watchmen sworn to stopping them – was horrific. So much needless loss.

So many left unprotected.

It was shameful.

Ser Gerold’s vows echoed in his ears and he sighed heavily. His respect for the King grew even more, for it was he and no other in history who had afforded the Free Folk the same protections that the people of the North – of all of Westeros – took utterly for granted. It was Jon Snow who had united the realms of Men and stood as their leader – and their shield.

So did his sister, shocked tears sparkling like the purest peridots on her cheeks without her notice as she stared, her mouth a grim line.

It grieved her. There was no triumph in her face as the moors burned, though a great chorus of cheers echoed all around them.

They must be allowed to relish this moment of relief, Ser Gerold thought, though it left a sour taste in his mouth to celebrate the massacre of innocents enslaved to the Night King.

He noticed Lady Larra’s clenched fist and reached out, snatching her wrist and glowering a warning at her. She unfurled her fingers, as if she had not even realised she was clenching them, revealing smears of blood where her fingernails had dug into her palm. A habit whenever she was under duress.

“It would not do well,” he warned gently, “to wound yourself before the fight truly begins.”

Lady Larra pulled her gauntlets on, wiping her face distractedly.

While the wildfire burned, they assessed and regrouped. Lady Larra, the Greatjon, Ser Jaime, Lord Tarly and Lord Lonmouth bellowed orders, relayed by Gendry with his booming battlefield voice: archers were relieved and runners darted about with drinks to warm them, relighting torches. Men were ordered to clear any rubble they could, building a makeshift blockade to slow the advance of any wights that evaded the wildfire. They aimed trebuchet missiles wherever the moors were slow to catch alight, keeping the wildfire fed, ensuring it spread.

The injured were hauled away. Mercy was given. The dead were burned where they fell. Orders had been given: there was to be no hesitation in burning those who succumbed to their wounds. The bodies of the burning dead could be used as blockades.

It was heartless and considered by all to be in bad taste. Yet if they wished to survive, they would utilise every advantage they could create. And neutralise any weapon the Night King may use against them.

This was no war between Men.

They would not win this war with scruples.

It was a testament to their training and their constant drills that they moved seamlessly into another strategy, regrouping, allowing the archers to rest, mobilising their forces to repair the damage, utilising everything they could as a barricade, clearing the dead and injured.

The wildfire had not only cleared the vast majority of the Night King’s forces but it had given them something even more precious: time. While the wildfire burned, they could catch their breaths. They could assess and redeploy people. They could rest. Share information. Take stock. And prepare themselves for the next onslaught.

They left the breach in the walls burning. Though smoke stung their eyes, the fire was an asset. It had stopped wights before: it did so again.

Hours later, during which Lady Larra nursed her son and relayed reports back to those who lingered within the protection of Winterfell’s great halls, the wildfire burned itself out. It had taken an age and yet seemed to burn out all too soon. And though it was well past dawn, the night began closing in once more, swallowing the embers glinting emerald in the gloom.

Relief that the Wolfswood had not been engulfed was swiftly replaced by sharp focus as ice-blue lights glowed eerily in the darkness settling across the moors. The eyes of the wights.

A few legions of wights had evaded the flames and now marched across the charred, smoking earth. But far fewer than they would have had to contend with. Far fewer.

They had sacrificed the Dothraki but they all knew they would do so again if it meant ridding the Night King of his terrible host. What were the Dothraki to them but another threat they would have to face after the ice melted?

Leading the wisps of eerie blue lights, astride dead horses, armoured in black ice and armed with their great carved ice-spears, were the Others. More than they had suspected or even dreaded.

Larra remembered the heat of the flames disappearing in an instant as the Night King held out his clawed hand. The harrowing, jerky movements of the wights as he commanded them silently to attack. The predatory stillness of the Others.

They had eliminated the hordes. And perhaps that was what the Night King wanted: for them to clear the way, so that the satisfaction of claiming the kill would be his alone.

“There are so many,” someone gasped, horrified.

Grimly, Dolorous Edd sighed, “Craster’s sons.”

Night’s Watchmen spit on the ground.

“ARCHERS!”

The ground shuddered and their breath stopped short in their lungs as a new sound added to the din of the wights snarling and the strain of bowstrings, the echoing boom of trebuchet missiles exploding, and the sharp whistle of obsidian spears hurtling through the air, unleashed by the scorpion. The obsidian bolts were aimed at one of the dozen rotting mammoths charging headlong toward the curtain-wall.

“BRING THEM DOWN!” Lord Tarly bellowed. Sharp-eyed, assessing, he and Gendry bellowed orders at the top of their lungs; but Gendry no longer simply relayed orders. He assessed and issued them on his own instinct. Lord Lonmouth organised his men; Ser Rey Musgood growled in readiness as he raised his fists, his disturbing dual-knifed knuckle-dusters gleaming like liquid black fire in the firelight, anticipating the first onslaught; and Dag hefted his great-axe in his grip, his scarred face grim. Lady Brienne – Ser Brienne, knighted by Ser Jaime himself in the Great Hall for all to see – commanded her men, organising archers behind lines of infantry armed with vicious halberds that seemed to capture the intoxicating light of the flames, burning deep in the heart of the obsidian, red and purple and blue. Living weapons – to fight the dead.

“Aim for the eyes!” Tormund ordered, and the scorpion swung around. “The eyes!”

Larra caught sight of movement in the yard, beyond the barricade, and went cold. She caught Theon’s eye across the ramparts. She gestured wildly at the internal redbrick wall, parts of it already crumbled beneath the weight of debris from the ramparts. “BRAN!”

Theon’s gaze darted wildly until he spotted the wheeled chair disappearing into the godswood through the ancient oak doorway.

“IRONBORN!” Theon bellowed, brandishing his sword toward the door. “WITH ME!”

The first wights fell to the flames.

The next crawled over burning, shrieking corpses, hissing and snarling, reaching broken fingers to tear the flesh from their bones even as they shrieked and hissed and burned.

“SWORDS!”

Bottleneck, they had called it. Choke-points. Funnelling the army of the dead where they wished them to go. Controlling the onslaught as best they could. They poured through the breach in the wall like ants disturbed from their nests.

Those closest faced the dead, covered by archers. Flaming arrows whizzed past, explosions continued to make the earth tremble – both from trebuchet missiles and from mammoth wights throwing themselves headlong at the curtain-wall, trying to break through to the godswood beyond.

The dead swarmed them.

Across the yard, Arya was dancing around Sandor Clegane, coaxing the warrior as he gazed in senseless horror at a burning wight snarling and hissing its way toward him. She gripped Sweet Sister fiercely, her double-ended obsidian spear lost beneath a wave of wights. At Arya’s scream of pain, Clegane lurched into action, a sight to behold as he tore through wights to get to her, clearing the way – and retrieving her spear. Their long journey together was clear in their fighting stance – no longer adversaries but partners, fighting side-by-side, or rather, Arya dipping and ducking in a sinuous dance around the ferocious, sturdy Sandor Clegane as he bellowed, commanding those around him to fight. And if he, who feared fire where he feared nothing else in the known world, could raise his obsidian weapons to decimate hordes of flaming, grotesquely decayed enemies, they could too.

Lord Carys and Calista Velaryon led a war-chant of discipline and courage, their fierce voices emboldening the spearmen they commanded. Obara Sand channelled all her rage as she fought beside Ser Jaime, who wielded the morningstar Ser Gerold had retrained him to bear with his left hand, stabbing out with the obsidian pike that replaced his golden hand. Beside him fought his squire, the seven-foot, gangling Hoster Blackwood, his slim shoulders bulked out by obsidian pauldrons and gorget, his big black eyes glazed with horror but his movements swift and elegant as a willow in a storm as he whipped away with his obsidian gladius and dirk. Lord Lonmouth slashed out artfully with twin gladius blades of obsidian, his ice-blue eyes wicked, his firm lips a grim line, fighting beside his son Ser Rhaegar: Lord Ivar, untroubled by the sacrifice of his uncle, grinned from ear to ear, his straight white teeth flashing brilliantly from his grime-splattered face as he danced among the wights, dodging flaming arrows with a mad laugh and a wink at Lady Arya, who rolled her eyes and twirled Sweet Sister in her hand before reaching beneath Clegane’s arm to strike down a wight screaming as it hurled itself toward Clegane’s unguarded back. She seemed to sense things before they happened, always in the right place at the right moment to strike. Her movements were fluid and seemingly without effort, an elegant and terrifying dance.

Lord Tarly wielded Heartsbane, leading a charge of Free Folk, Night’s Watchmen and smallfolk to clash head-on with the wights. In battle, they were all equal in his eyes.

Gripped by a vice of familiar terror that the barricades and wights stood between her and Bran, Larra began her dance, willing calm into her veins, focusing on nothing but holding her ground and swinging her sword. Dark Sister sang as she sliced through the air, cutting down wight after wight. She switched between Dark Sister and her shorter obsidian dagger, light on her feet as if dancing, her expression calm but extremely menacing, her presence heavy and commanding, splattered with gristle and black blood, relentless and ruthless. She led those around her, fierce and fearless.

As grim and ruthless as any she-wolf of Winterfell who had come before her, Lady Larra was a ferocious, implacable leader, a winter warrior-queen. And people followed her example. They forgot their fear in the face of her subtle menace. She went where courage wavered and bolstered those she fought beside: those not filled with hope by her fighting beside them were filled with awe. Their lady, a she-wolf of Winterfell, a new mother with everything to lose, fought with inspiring tenacity. And she expected the same of them. There was no other option but to rise to meet her expectations.

She acknowledged their fear but challenged them to confront it, to use it, to let it make them quick, and strong. To be defiant.

They remembered the rumours: that Larra Snow had survived the True North and all its unimaginable horrors through sheer strength of will alone. If she could do that – and dragging her crippled brother no less – then what did they have it in themselves to do?

The first of the Others sauntered calmly through the breach, cutting down charging smallfolk without breaking stride, without any emotion flickering across his face. Lord Tarly let out a roar of fury and brought Heartsbane down upon the Other: the wretched creature shattered into thousands of shards of ice. All around them, wights dropped like stones, taking them by surprise, throwing many off-balance. Commanders bellowed orders, recovering quickly and ensuring none lost focus, startled by the reprieve – too late for some, as a fresh onslaught of wights took them by surprise.

They were losing ground. Flaming arrows whizzed past, striking their own men as they fell, lest they should rise again.

The Others strode through the breach, calm and eternal as glaciers. Flaming arrows and obsidian felled some but more merely strode relentlessly past, dealing out brutal blows to any brave or hopeless enough to charge them.

They were slow as glaciers but deathly as silent, sudden ice-rain.

A great surge of wights swept through the breach, filling the yard with their shrieks and howls, the snap of bones and the sickening squelch of guts spilling out, causing the gritted ground to become slick and unstable underfoot. Everywhere, men and women fought with unwavering ferocity, obsidian gleaming eerily in the firelight that choked out smoke and spit embers that alighted on wights’ ragged furs, some catching, most not.

The yard was in chaos, flames burning brightly in defiance of the ice-rain, wights shrieking as they burned, blue eyes blazing, tumbling over each other in their mindless pursuit of any living creature they could reach to tear apart with broken fingers. Archers aimed carefully, felling wight after wight, even a few of the commanders, their bodies bursting into thousands of shards of ice that riddled those nearest.

Fearsome bellows drowned out the screams of the dying and the shrieks of the wights. Coded orders were shared.

Those who could climbed. They clambered out of the yard by any means possible: all around the yard, lining the ramparts and battlements, archers turned their arrows on the Others. Working in concert, they had a far greater chance of finding their target. Arya scooped a bow from the ramparts and shot without thinking, Anguy’s words echoing in her ears: Your eye knows where it wants the arrow to go. Trust your eye.

She trusted her eye. Shot straight. Killed one of the Others then a second in quick succession.

Yelled as someone knocked her off-balance. A spear of ice whistled past her head, so close she felt her hair stirring.

With a roar, Clegane hurled his great axe into the yard, its wicked blade embedding itself in the skull of the White Walker glaring maliciously at its missed target. Clegane grabbed Arya and hauled her through the gate into the greater yard as the command came to retreat. The first yard was lost.

Hideous, tortured screams rent the brittle air as they retreated to the next yard, the portcullis dropping to bar the way, trapping any too slow to slide beneath it to safety. They were torn apart, their harrowing screams cut short by a swift arrow. Yet the wights could go no further: the latticed grille of the portcullis had been heavily fortified with foot-long spikes of obsidian, and any not impaling themselves upon the spikes were targeted by those standing by with obsidian-tipped spears. Earthen jars suspended high above were targeted by flaming arrows, shedding fire down upon the wights, clearing their bodies, sending flames licking out into the yard where more traps lay in wait. Another volley of explosions shook the foundations, this one far smaller though no less vital.

Flaming arrows collided with barrels of pitch dotted about the yard, setting off another, larger volley of explosions.

A cheer came up from the Unbroken Tower, celebrating as the death-roar of another mammoth echoed on the air, its feet lost beneath it as it tumbled to the ground, broken, an obsidian spear jutting from its rotting skull.

The fires burned brightly, their warmth invigorating. The flames gave them hope.

And yet shouts came from the Unbroken Tower, those atop it waving a torch frantically in signal. As wildfire had lit the moors with emerald-green, now ice-blue fires glowed from within the castle. Screams of panic echoed. Orders were barked across the ramparts.

“It is the Children!” Larra shouted, even as dread gripped her like a vice.

“The curtain-wall is breached!”

“Bran!”

“Go!” barked the Blackfish, sparing a glance as Lady Larra hurtled toward the tumbling redbrick wall at the far side of the yard, shadows and fog shrouding the godswood beyond, illuminated sporadically by the eerie ice-blue fire. Her eyes caught those explosions, turning them into living violet flames, vivid against her grime-streaked face. She was covered in gore, her hair slick from blood and gristle and the braids sewn in place were messy. Blood smeared from her nose where she had taken a hit, colouring her lips crimson. She seemed not to notice the taste, or her limp, or a slash to her left upper-arm just shy of the obsidian rings glimmering in the light of many torches. The Blackfish fell into step behind her, covering her flight to the godswood and his niece’s last living son, who had snuck out of the castle, as reckless and defiant as any of his father’s family. The Blackfish remembered the Wild Wolf, Brandon: his ruthless fury shimmered in Lady Larra’s eyes. Bran Stark shared his namesake’s defiance and stubbornness. Brynden hoped his grand-nephew did not follow the Wild Wolf’s fate.

The death-shrieks of the wights were harrowing: they thrashed as they burned, blue eyes full of mindless malice as they slashed out with gnarled fingers and rusted weapons. Among them, the Others stood stoically.

Waiting.

The fires burned lower. Then extinguished. Yet still smoke curled everywhere, thick, stinging their eyes, spreading long fingers to choke them. Wherever one of the Others walked, the ground hissed and cooled, ice spreading and cracking from their footsteps, until they walked amidst steam that entwined their legs. Smoke and salt-grit, and amidst it all, eyes burning, coughing but resolute, warriors fought on. Their bellows echoed on the quiet air. The sound of the sea – of the churning wights thrashing and hissing – was gone; the wind had dropped. It was eerily calm now.

Along the ramparts, people were relieved and others redeployed to cover the yard and the gaping hole that had been battered into the curtain-wall. Wights entered the godswood for the first time in tens of thousands of years.

Slowly, patiently, the Others dawdled under the eaves of ageless trees.

Beyond the Wall, not even nature had dared make a sound in the presence of the Others: the trees of the godswood were ancient, strong and full of memory. They sang their joy at those that sang the songs of the earth returning amongst them: a non-existent wind whipped them into a fury of creaks and menacing groans as the Others, those abominations of nature itself, trod beneath their boughs once again.

From the ageless trees, those that sang the songs of the earth took up their last vigil. Their last stand. They sang and they prepared. They waited, bone-white weirwood bows strung tight, obsidian spears sharpened. Here and there among the trees, torches flickered defiantly, the source from which archers dotted throughout could light their arrows before letting them loose. And they did.

With dogged determination and unceasing focus, wights pelted through the godswood, stumbling as the snow snared them, drifts up to their knees in many places, halting their advance. Drifts of soft snow, treacherous and unstable, encrusted by the ice-rain so that unwary wights attempting to pelt across the snow found themselves snarling, hissing and shrieking from within the snowdrifts, thrashing – and clawing their way through the snows. Others hurtled ever forwards in one direction. They were guided not by their ice-blue eyes glowing in the dark but some instinct – some command. They were drawn to their target like maesters’ magnets.

Larra hurtled through the godswood, knowing her way even in the dark. It felt…strange – the same as before, yet different. The creaking and groaning of the trees, the shrieks of wights as they thrashed in the snows, the sting of the snow and ice-rain – it was all the same. Her flight from the great weirwood come again. Yet this time, she was different. Not malnourished and exhausted, driven to the very brink of her tolerance and sanity, blinded by grief and guilt.

Now she was calm. She was sure.

She knew what the Night King wanted. Had always known who they wanted. Now she knew they had the strength to defy him. To protect Bran.

Her blood was full of fire yet her hands were steady. Her breath came in sharp bursts as the ice-rain bit at her face, her ribs aching from an earlier blow, her breasts agony from being unable to nurse Arthur for the last few hours. Though she tasted blood she could feel no pain – not in the cold, not like this. Not when Rhaegal’s strength sang in her veins, their bond igniting the fire in her blood.

She felt Rhaegal’s strength, their heat, their ferocity.

And she was not alone.

It was not Meera with her this time. It was not one but many: Sandor Clegane and Lord Tarly and his son Dickon with a battered breastplate; Darkstar and the sisters Obara and Lady Nym; the enormous Dag Storm and the charismatic Ser Arthur Wylde, his cloak billowing about him as he stood tall and proud in his armour. Ivar Dondarrion, grinning like a madman as he slashed and hacked at his foes, dancing with Arya while Gendry roared and sent wights flying in shattered pieces as he heaved his tremendous obsidian war-hammer. Ser Rey Musgood, one eye-socket now empty and freely bleeding, bellowed as he fought wights seemingly with his bare hands – his wicked knuckle-dusters shattered wights as he punched and sliced, roaring and heaving like an angry bull. They had followed her into the godswood, among others. Ser Jaime, Ser Brienne – there was no sign of Podrick – and Ser Rhaegar, fighting side-by-side with Hoster Blackwood, Qhaero and the other kos sworn to the Lannisters. Night’s Watchmen and the Blackfish, Lord Barahir. The eerily calm Hobb with his obsidian hog-splitter and knives. Lady Karstark, her bowstring singing.

And the Ironborn… Ironborn that had once taken this castle, had drowned Mikken and murdered Ser Rodrik, had chased her from her home and murdered little boys in her brothers’ places…now stood vigil around Bran in his wheeled chair, an honour-guard, tirelessly defending him. A grim smile lingered on Larra’s lips as she exchanged a glance with Theon, Robb’s ancient jokes echoing in her ears, Ironborn… Aye, they’re ferocious fighters. They’ll keep fighting – because they’re too stupid to die! The memory gave her a surge of warmth, like donning a fur-lined mantle, the warmth golden and good as it shone in her heart and spread, the memory of them – of her and Theon and Robb and Jon, idling away a miserable afternoon over a cyvasse board, laughing and arguing good-naturedly.

Beyond the godswood they could hear the shrieking clamour of the wights, the howls of the dying and the clash of weapons. Every now and then, wights would drop like stones without warning as the Others were slain in different parts of the castle. They were starting to get wise, separating commanders from their legions. Or perhaps they did not care. Larra thought it likelier the latter. The Others needed no great strategy, after all.

The godswood became unearthly. Thunder rumbled low and incessantly threatening while the sky was torn apart by lashes of lightning. The ice-rain thickened, leaving everyone breathless. And amidst the lightning and thunder, great explosions of icy-blue flame shattered horrifying shadows throughout the godswood, distorting sound, making the entire godswood seem an eerie echo of itself, leafless and barren, the great trunks of ageless trees bending and warping, groaning in agony, rage and despair as twigs snatched like gnarled fingers at their hair and faces.

They fed their fires and hoped that the flames would outlast the ice. And, somehow, they did.

The wights lingering elsewhere in the castle were but a diversion: the bulk of their forces remained on the ramparts, forestalling the legions with trebuchet missiles, with fire, with arrows – with everything they had.

But everyone who could reach it gathered in the godswood.

It is before the heart-tree of Winterfell that the doom of Men shall be decided, Jon thought, racing through the snows and severing wights’ heads as he passed them tearing apart one of the smallfolk, no longer screaming. He scooped up their obsidian dagger as he went, tucking it into his belt. Longclaw had grown heavier in his hand through the night; they were all beginning to feel the weight of exhaustion. Of hunger and cold and pain. They were becoming slower. That was the danger. The Night King’s commanders had sat back on their rotten mounts and watched, waiting.

Now they struck.

She moved ever closer to Bran, evading blows that would have taken too much energy to block, preserving her strength to slash out fierce and fast. She darted and danced, engaging with Other after Other, almost forgetting her exhaustion. She felt no pain, her blood singing in her veins, spurring her ever on. She struck down wight after wight, challenged and defeated the Others unflinchingly.

This was her home. This was her place of strength. They would not frighten her.

A gentle lull in the onslaught. She heard the grunts and clashes of warriors fighting nearby. Lightning rent the air. The thunder seemed to subside, leaving everything in eerie silence broken only by the occasional shriek of a wight or the ringing clash of steel. The sound of obsidian taking impact was eerily beautiful, almost like a song.

She ached. Her back ached, her thighs burned with spasms and her palms, she was sure, were blistered. She yearned to put her hands to her knees and pant for breaths. In the time between one attack and the next, all she could do was stretch out her back, flinching as pain smarted through her body.

“They are coming,” she told Darkstar, whose shimmering starlight-silver braids were now bloody and mussed. His fierce expression and the hairstyle reminded her, ever so suddenly, of the Rogue Prince fighting in the Stepstones. Darkstar’s hair was shorter, though, and his eyes were a vivid violet rather than the mercurial lilac of Prince Daemon’s. But the ruthlessness was the same.

“You can tell this?” Darkstar murmured, glancing at her. She adjusted her grip on Dark Sister. Her ancestors’ sword – wielded by Queen Visenya, the architect of the Iron Throne itself who galvanised her brother as a weapon to unite the realms in the face of this threat, and by the Rogue Prince himself. She could not help wonder what they would have made of the armies of the dead. What the Rogue Prince would have made of her and Jon, his descendants, defying the Night King.

She wondered whether Queen Rhaenyra would have thought it all worth it. Whether the ends justified the means.

Their shared relative Lord Bloodraven had – believed the ends justified the means.

Larra nodded silently. “In all of nature there are signs – warnings. I have not the time to teach them to you.”

“How did you learn them?” Darkstar panted, wiping sweat from his brow with an angry swipe of his forearm.

Larra listened carefully, tasting the air, scenting it. Even the cold could not eradicate the stench of rotten meat – not in such quantities, not when they wore matted, stinking furs. A single wight, alert and hunting, could be incredibly dangerous. But a band of them, heedless and aimless… She had learned how to bypass them. Had learned how to listen and scent for them. Many of them were clad in furs embellished with bone and seashell that clicked and clacked against each other with the jerky, erratic movements of the wights.

Grimly, Larra muttered, “Experience.” She listened and breathed, “On your right. Be ready.”

Ser Gerold glanced to his right. She had known, before he saw the tell-tale blue eyes glowing, before the wights surged out of the shadows. She had sensed them, as a wolf senses its prey. Had heard them, perhaps, with hearing sharper than his own, and senses and instincts that had been honed over years. She knew these creatures. Here in this place, they had become her prey. As he engaged with a small band of wights, despatching them with brutal efficacy, he flicked the blackish blood from his milk-white blade and scanned the shadows, assessing for more glowing ice-blue eyes. Lady Larra felled one of the Others that had dawdled idly through the woods without Ser Gerold’s notice, a decisive thrust through the heart: ice shattered everywhere and the She-Wolf of Winterfell straightened, sighing heavily, her expression full of calm, chilling menace to rival any of the Night King’s commanders.

He had seen her face every adversary head-on, unflinching, implacable – undaunted. Beneath the warmth, humour, cunning and kindness she showed to those she loved, her children and friends, Larra Snow was a hard woman who had survived an even harder place. Ever since the battle had commenced, a light had shone in her ferocious violet eyes that Ser Gerold had been trying to name. Now he believed he understood what it was: relief. He wondered what she had endured that this horrific battle was a relief to her.

Ser Gerold fought side-by-side with Larra: she was undaunted, relentless. Her calm menace was chilling as it was steadying: he felt calmer in her presence. As he sliced another wight’s head off, he caught a glimpse of Larra dancing in the snow, her dark blade flashing in the lightning as she drove the tip of Dark Sister into the heart of an Other. It shattered into thousands of shards of ice: Larra turned without reaction to engage and fell more wights, another of the commanders striding through the snow toward her. As Ser Gerold clashed with an Other, he was aware – always aware – of his surroundings, of more wights circling and heading around their conflicts, tearing toward the heart-tree, and of Larra, courting the Night King’s commanders in a deathly dance. She was utterly unmoved. Undaunted.

So he was stunned when his own adversary exploded in a shower of ice shards and he saw beyond, to a cluster of wights now haring doggedly through the snowdrifts toward Lady Larra.

Dark Sister drooped in her grasp.

She took a step back.

A giant of a man lumbered toward her, wearing roughspun and tattered rabbit furs, bearing no weapons, his eyes glowing icy-blue in his ripped but otherwise preserved face.

And Lady Larra gasped in horror, tears splashing down her cheeks.

Ser Gerold’s heart lurched and he snarled, slashing through the wights trying to encircle him, felling them, and raced for Lady Larra. She had engaged the Others without a hint of dread, felled wights with brutal efficiency, some larger and most more gruesome than this one. Yet something about this wight terrified her.

He had never seen Larra Snow afraid.

The strength in her fingers failed; she felt Dark Sister slipping from her hand.

Because it was Hodor.

Her sweet giant.

Hodor, his face ripped to shreds, his tattered furs failing to conceal the body that had been ripped apart, revealing his ribcage… They had torn his heart from his chest, she was sure of it, ripped his innards out as he screamed, as he – as he held the door and gave her and Meera precious moments to flee with Bran.

The gentlest creature she had ever known, ripped apart while he still lived, his mind shattered long ago as he saw his inevitable and unconscionable demise.

Hodor.

Hodor here.

Bumbling toward her. One of the Others wandering casually behind as if he knew… He knew…

She had been relentless, undaunted, fury firing through her veins, her love for Gendry and Bran and Sansa and Arthur and Aella and everyone else pushing her ever onwards, fighting not just for her life but theirs. She was unstoppable. Fierce, powerful, undaunted. When she had already endured the worst, what had they left in their arsenal to break her?

Hodor.

The most tragic of all her regrets – for she alone had cost Hodor his life.

Hold the door… It was her screams that had echoed through his mind since his adolescence. All that he knew once Brandon had shattered his mind. Her voice, echoing in his ears. All his life he had known her dark form disappearing into the snowstorm, as monsters behind tore him to ribbons. All his life, he had known his fate – the fate she had condemned him to. She had chosen a broken boy over the man he had broken.

She was ashamed. And heartbroken. Hodor.

Her sweet giant.

Her gentlest protector. Now turned into a weapon against her. To cripple her. Shame choked her as grief blinded her.

She heard the hisses. His ice-blue eyes blurred in her vision, becoming many, closer and closer. A sob escaped her. Hodor roared a hideous inhuman shriek – and crumpled.

A gleaming white blade skewered him. Obsidian flashed and Hodor’s blue eyes dimmed.

More wights dropped around Hodor.

“Sword up!” growled Ser Gerold. His chest rose and fell as he panted like an angry bull, his violet eyes glowing furiously as he glared at her. He killed the last wight with a careless flick of his wrist, sending an obsidian dagger to its throat, and reclaimed Dawn.

He gripped Larra’s chin roughly, painfully. His gloved fingertips were slick with blood and rough with gristle, scratching against her skin.

He glared at her.

With surprising tenderness, Ser Gerold said, “Dry your eyes, Lady. You must fight if you wish to live and weep for the dead.”

As the Other lingered closer, it smiled.

The pure malice of it ignited a fury in Larra like nothing else ever had.

It knew.

It had pinpointed where she was and unleashed Hodor upon her as a weapon to break her as nothing else could, as even the Night King’s commanders could not withstand her.

Fury simmered in her veins like molten obsidian. That malicious smile galvanised her fury and her grief and shame and too late the Other realised its mistake in believing it could break her with her greatest shame.

Hodor was her greatest shame but by no means her sharpest sorrow.

Rickon’s execution and Robb’s murder had not shattered her. Years of isolation had not broken her.

Beloved as Hodor was to her, he did not have the power to break her. Her shame and grief had no place in the battlefield. Except to use it to destroy those who had hunted them, those she blamed for forcing her hand. She had left Hodor behind…because the Others had hunted them. And Hodor alone had the strength to keep that storm at bay. He had given them precious moments.

He had given them life.

She would not waste it.

But she would eradicate anyone who tried to use that against her.

She would fight. She would avenge Hodor. And Summer. And Leaf. And Lord Bloodraven. And Jojen. And every single one of those hundred-thousand Free Folk and Night’s Watchmen who had fallen to the Others.

Ser Gerold nodded distractedly to himself as he engaged in another duel: Dark Sister sang to his left as Lady Larra danced her lethal courtship. She fought on.

They fought their way to the weirwood tree.

Carcasses had been piled high and stood burning, choking out putrid smoke: the Ironborn had used these makeshift pyres to create a flaming motte around the weirwood, both as a defence and as a means of lighting their arrows. Beyond the motte, the snows were carpeted with the dead. In a lull, covered by archers within the motte, the Ironborn retrieved their precious arrows and covered the other warriors. A snarling Lord Tarly cleaved through wights, as the willowy Hoster Blackwood wielded Ser Jaime’s Valyrian steel sword Honour, the hostage squire fighting side-by-side with his knight. Ser Brienne fought two Others at once, easily cutting down the first and making short work of the next: she grimaced in pain but set her shoulders, brilliant blue eyes glinting with fury, and stalked several wights now thrashing toward Dickon Tarly.

Uncle Benjen swung his flaming crucible and wielded a short sword of obsidian. Sandor Clegane barked orders to smallfolk while Arya danced around him, hastily plucking obsidian daggers from the corpses of fallen wights, adding them to her belt: she had lost her spear but now wielded with even more confidence the Braavosi-style sword of obsidian that Gendry had crafted especially for her. Some of the Mormonts fought side-by-side with spearwives and Lady Nym whirled elegantly, brandishing her obsidian-tipped whip and a gladius sword; her sister Obara snarled and bellowed her rage – and horror – as she fought beside Darkstar, now moving hastily toward the weirwood, analysing quickly where they needed more cover.

Another lull: the godswood was quiet. No more wights could be seen or heard amidst the trees. Larra could only sense the nearness of the Others and said so.

“Why do they stay away?” Obara Sand snarled, panting and heaving like a wounded rhinoceros.

“We are giving them a fight they did not expect,” Ser Gerold said, as Ser Jaime panted, adjusting the obsidian pike that had replaced his gilded-steel hand. Hoster Blackwood reached out and hastily tightened the bindings for him.

“They plan to take us unawares,” Lord Tarly growled, bleeding freely from a deep cut along the side of his head. “Overwhelm us with numbers.”

“We need someone up high,” Karsi said, beside Theon, tending to his sister as she bled freely from a gash under her eye. Yara spit a mouthful of blood on the snow at her feet.

“Which is the tallest tree within earshot?” Ser Jaime asked, turning to Larra, who raised her eyes to the trees.

Using Dark Sister, she indicated the ancient redwood, panting heavily and suddenly, in the quiet and the inaction, starting to realise her pain.

 “I will climb it,” Lady Karstark was saying behind her. The Ironborn gave her a quiver of arrows and one of the Thenns gave her a boost to the first branch, and she disappeared into the snow-laden boughs of the ancient tree.

Larra staggered to the weirwood, to Bran. She braced herself against the weirwood, panting and shaking, her breath coming in agonising bursts of sharp pain. Bran withdrew a wineskin from the folds of his furs and uncorked it, passing it to her. His dark eyes on the arm she used to brace herself against the weirwood as she drank deeply of cold, clean water, Bran retrieved a roll of fresh bandages from inside his furs. His eyes followed a thin but steady stream of blood falling from her left arm. Her blood shone like rubies in the snow, glinting in the light of the fiery motte. His head tilted to the side and his lips quirked at the corners before he reached up, taking the wineskin from her and tenderly wrapping the bandage around her upper-arm. She hissed and winced in pain but Bran simply smiled, knotted the linen and sat back in his chair, looking complacent.

A shrill whistle pierced the air some time later. Lady Karstark called, “More are coming!”

It began again. The archers covered them but fewer arrows were loosed as they fought the wights. Dozens of knights and warriors felled hundreds of wights as they continued an onslaught – irregular bursts of activity, sometimes a handful of wights attempting to draw them out and another hundred lurking beyond their sight ready to tear them apart. But they had trained for this: they were too efficient. They covered each other.

Free Folk, Dothraki, Dornishman, Ironborn, Northman, Stormlord – it did not matter. They were the living: they fought side by side.

But fewer and fewer arrows were loosed. And more and more wights came.

And after a flash of lightning, Lady Karstark, up in her perch, screamed that a sea of black waves had crashed over the breach in the curtain-walls. The dead were pouring from the Wolfswood, where they had lurked, hidden, protected from their sight by the trees. Thousands of them were pouring through the breach, into the godswood.

Their strategy had succeeded…until now. The Night King had held some of his forces in reserve, hiding them. The rest hadn’t mattered: he only needed a few hundred to take the castle now that the walls were breached.

Larra gazed past the weirwood, glowing in the light of the fiery motte, at Gendry, her heart aching with sorrow. He was scowling and snarling, his enormous chest heaving as he panted, heaving his great war-hammer higher in his grip as blue eyes glowed in the gloom, snarls and hisses echoing everywhere. He was magnificent.

“We’re out of arrows,” Theon said dully.

Behind him, sat tucked in his furs, Bran caught Larra’s eye. Pride and anticipation seemed to glow in his eyes.

When the last arrow has been loosed, and your need grows dire, it falls to you, child of ice and fire, to wake those who have slumbered, bound to their oaths…

Though legions of the dead stalked the godswood, it remained quiet. The flaming motte around the weirwood crackled and hissed, the firelight dancing merrily, and the weirwood leaves – eternal, glowing like brands in the firelight – sighed as they brushed against each other in a soft breeze that coaxed the warmth of the flames to them, taking the bite out of the cold and bolstering them like a dose of hard liquor. Lord Beric’s sacrifice endured, heartening them.

All around them, blue eyes shone in the gloom.

The hissing and groaning of the wights grew to an ear-splitting roar as they converged, surrounding the weirwood. Ice-blue eyes glowed like stars in the gloom, endless as the skies. It drowned out their pants for breath, Obara’s dark curses, Yara Greyjoy’s yell of pure rage as one of her men set her dislocated shoulder, wrapping her hand in a bandage, and even Gendry’s voice was lost, cracked and hoarse as he shouted a reply to Lord Tarly and Lord Lonmouth, who, with Ser Brienne’s help, had dragged his son’s body within the circle of flaming pyres and plunged an obsidian dagger into his heart himself, weeping silently.

More than one of them started and gazed around, perplexed, when the sound of singing broke the silence. A low, mournful, beautiful song echoed gently off the snow and seemed to gentle the trees waving in the wind. It was not a funeral song, though Lord Lonmouth bowed his head over his son’s body as if it was. They listened, entranced; even the godswood itself seemed to sigh with something like reverence…

The sound of the sighing grew louder, and louder, until they could almost make believe that they heard the march of thousands of people walking in step, the echoes of the bright ringing clang of weapons, the deep rumbling boom of spears and axes and war-hammers drumming against shields, the creak of boiled leathers and the soft hiss of chainmail, the whip and snap of cloaks caught in a high wind.

Lord Tarly stumbled and stared, and Ser Jaime gaped in open horror as figures of shadow and moonlight emerged from the gloom. Standing beside Hoster Blackwood and Sandor Clegane, Arya’s lips had parted in awe. For a long moment, the defenders of weirwood stood and stared, bewildered, lost for words, gazing around as they witnessed the impossible.

They gripped their weapons tighter and the Ironborn uttered a prayer to their Drowned God as a strange silver mist seemed to unfurl from the depths of the pond beside the weirwood, taking the form of ancient men with straggly beards; hard-faced young boys whose eyes glinted with cunning and fury; handsome men with laughter on their lips and bloodlust in their steely eyes; long-faced girls comfortably holding weapons in their hands, their hair unbound beneath circlets of steel; wizened men with sorrowful eyes, stooped but proud, their grasp on their sword-hilts sure; fearsome women with axes and daggers looped into their belts and the Crown of Winter set firmly on their heads; solemn beauties with their hair braided and adorned, draped over breastplates embellished with the direwolf of House Stark. Some rode astride destriers, others…direwolves. All bore weapons.

Legions of the dead, called from their uneasy rest to fulfil ancient oaths.

An army of them.

The strange mist thinned but the shades of the Kings and Queens of Winter remained, armed and armoured, the standard of House Stark flying amongst them as they beat their weapons against their shields and marched side-by-side, intangible yet ferocious in their presence. Thousands of them.

Thousands of Starks bound to their oaths.

Theon inhaled sharply as one of the shades took up their position beside him, battered armour rattling softly. He nodded solemnly at Theon then gazed past him to Jon, whom he gave a grim, determined smile.

Somewhere in the distance, beyond the godswood, a wolf howled a signal. Larra knew that call: it was Last Shadow. It filled her with strength even as the others shivered with instinct that warned them of danger.

The wights advanced, hissing and snarling, roaring.

Without a word or signal or even a sound, the Kings and Queens of Winter charged.

And dotted here and there amongst the wights, the Others stumbled back, startled and frightened, as the Kings and Queens of Winter charged headlong through the throngs of the dead, intangible yet laying waste to everything in their paths. Whatever dark powers animated the dead were neutralised by the Kings and Queens of Winter as they rode through the legions: everywhere they looked, the rotting corpses crumpled, blue eyes instantly dim.

The strange silvery luminescence of the Kings and Queens of Winter illuminated the godswood as they swept through the legions of wights, like a pale imitation of dawn.

It was enough, though. They could see: it made the world of difference. Any wights that evaded the Stark shades were felled swiftly by any one of the weirwood’s many defenders.

Yet while they seemed to fear the echoes of the dead, the Others could not be slain by them.

They converged around the weirwood, a tangible rage emanating from them like a chill, pure menace in their every movement, anger etched into every line of their eerie faces. Before, they had been superbly confident – even indifferent: something about the dead rising had unnerved them as nothing else.

The screams of the wights and the echoes of the clash and clamour of shadow weapons wielded by the Kings and Queens of Winter grew softer, more distant, yet the light of the echoes of the past remained, giving everything a silvery glow even as the Others raised their hands in unison and the burning motte around the weirwood flickered and extinguished. Black smoke billowed from the pyres, obscuring their view of all but ice-blue eyes glowing in the dark. The godswood felt instantly colder. Yet the light of the Starks remained.

Dark Sister gleamed in Larra’s hands, the Valyrian steel blade an almost living thing, silver and smoke swirling together, glimmering and glinting in the eerie light of the dead. Beside her, Ser Gerold’s milk-white blade glowed bright as starlight – no, as daylight. Bright as dawn.

The pyres, choking black smoke, hissed and crackled but no heat nor light emanated from the charred remains of wights they had felled. In the distance, wights screamed and people bellowed orders; small explosions boomed; the echoes of the Starks swept through the godswood and the yards, hunting down every single last wight, to the horror and awe of the living.

“They do not know fear,” Ser Gerold murmured in his soft, sultry accent, his eyes vicious and calculating as he gazed past the smoking pyres to the Others. “Let us teach it to them before they die.”

“Don’t get cocky,” Larra warned, her voice scratchy and hoarse.

Darkstar gave her a sidelong smirk, his eyes twinkling in the light of Dawn. “I must be as I am, Lady,” he purred, twirling Dawn, his wrist loose, as if he wasn’t exhausted and battered, his breastplate dented painfully. Blood splattered the snow at his feet.

“What are they waiting for?” one of the Ironborn groused.

“For us to do something stupid,” Yara Greyjoy muttered, then snapped, “Hold your ground! Reform the line. No-one gets past the pyres.”

Theon glanced at Jon, needing to know if Jon had seen what he had.

“It was Robb, wasn’t it?” he panted, swiping blood from his nose. “He’s here with us.”

Solemnly, Jon nodded. “Aye, he’s here… They’re all here.”

Jon knew Uncle Benjen had fallen – only because his ghost had charged the wights with the rest, younger and more carefree than Jon had ever known him, running ahead of the vanguard with his brothers.

Jon’s heart thundered in his chest but his hands were steady, assessing the Others. There were at least three dozen in front, more joining them from other parts of the godswood. They were waiting, as Yara said. Waiting for them to something both very brave and very foolish.

“Hold your ground!” he called, finding that his voice was choked by the smoke and by strain. They seemed all to be feeling it. And while his voice was scratchy as he had heard Larra’s was, they had heard him. And they knew: they had to hold the line. Wait for the Others to make their move first. Defend the weirwood. Defend Bran.

He had been right all along. They would come directly for him. He was the perfect bait.

Without warning, the Others acted.

Ser Gerold engaged two at once, Dawn glittering and glowing as it carved through them, turning them to shards of ice that tinkled as they fell to the ground. Ser Jaime and Hoster Blackwood slew one together while Gendry, every inch his father’s son, swept through a great swathe of Others converging on him, swinging his great war-hammer, sheer brute strength overpowering them: his bellows of encouragement to Hoster Blackwood, the Ironborn, Karsi and the Thenns echoed on the air, though a roar of purest anguish from Lord Tarly cut through everything as Dickon was skewered before his eyes. Trembling with grief and fury, Lord Tarly squared off against the Other that had slain his son.

Gendry chased after an Other and shattered it with a single swing of his hammer, snatching a winded Lady Nym by her wire-wrapped braid before she could buckle into the steaming pond and drown. He set her on her feet, covering them both as two Others stalked them, giving her precious moments to suck in a breath, then another, and another, and picked up Benjen Stark’s obsidian crucible. Larra covered Bran. The ground glittered beneath her boots as she darted and danced with her sister, Arya’s eyes wide and harrowed but gleaming with determination.

A Thenn engaged in a brutal battle with one of the Others was losing ground, and stumbling over Dickon Tarly’s prone body, the Thenn roared in pain, sustaining a death-blow before roaring and throwing himself at the Other, which shattered into thousands of shards of ice – and the dying Thenn collided with Larra, knocking her off her feet out of nowhere.

Dazed and winded, Larra blinked up at the stars, glittering in and out of view as heavy thunderclouds tumbled swiftly past. Arya was dancing off near Bran, fending off two Others with her tiny obsidian Needle. She hissed in an agonising breath, her lungs crackling and searing with pain, and scrabbled about, feeling for the hilt of Dark Sister amidst the shards of ice.

One of the Others advanced on Larra, his smile cruel.

Poised to skewer her, Larra caught her breath – and screamed as a dark figure jumped over her, running into the spear of ice meant for her.

With a roar, Theon decapitated the Other. Its body shattered, and he stumbled back.

“Theon!” she cried, but he shook his head, pulling the ice spear from his chest.

“Bran!” he groaned, blood on his lips. Larra glanced around, scooped Dark Sister from the ground and hurtled toward Arya, now alone and losing ground against a monstrous Other wielding a crucible of ice. As she ran, Larra picked up a fallen Ironborn’s shield and flung herself between the Other and Arya, who was stumbling closer and closer to Bran. Larra threw herself between Arya and the crucible, screaming in pain as the shield burst into splinters on impact. Bran handed Arya an obsidian dagger from inside the folds of his furs: she hurled herself through the air while the Other was distracted, leering at Larra, and embedded the dagger into the Other’s shining blue eye. Larra jumped, startled, and covered herself as the Other shattered into shards of ice; she shook them off, with the splinters of her shield and gripped Dark Sister, though pain seared up her arm.

Jon yelled over the tumult, shouting and gesturing toward the weirwood even as he duelled two Others, a third joining them. Larra and Arya glanced around, saw Bran now undefended…and the Night King, strolling idly toward him, his eerie gaze hungry.

With growing horror, Arya raised before her eyes the obsidian dagger Bran had given her. His only weapon.

They ran for Bran.

Two Others blocked their paths.

Larra’s heart stuttered, then soared, as beyond the Others, a familiar figure appeared, hair braided back and bloody, armour dented, his sword shining and shimmering like snow in sunlight, and calmly engaged the Night King.

All around them, the fight continued: Lady Nym cracked a whip around the neck of an Other bearing down on her sister, while Lord Tarly covered Hoster Blackwood, blood streaming freely down his arm, and Ser Jaime duelled side-by-side with Ser Brienne. Encircled by Others, Dagonet Storm and his brother Ser Arthur Wylde fought back-to-back, protecting each other. Karsi and Yara Greyjoy held their own as Thenns hunted the Others. Ser Jorian Gower and Lady Calista Velaryon fought on, the latter bleeding profusely from a head-wound.

Longclaw had been sent flying from Jon’s grasp by a brutal hit: with no time to seek his blade, he fought with obsidian daggers.

Darkstar and the Night King engaged in a duel, the like of which had not been witnessed in generations. They watched, not daring to interfere lest they break Darkstar’s concentration.

He was an exquisite swordsman, focused, intent and intuitive, anticipating the King’s movements, deflecting and aggressing in turns, a beautiful, lethal dance. Calm, lacking any arrogance whatsoever. Dawn held firm against the King’s blade, shimmering and glowing, but Darkstar was injured and exhausted, and the sight of the blade itself seemed to anger the King. His lip curled and he redoubled his efforts, snarling.

The King had the advantage. Yet even so, Darkstar fought on.

He stumbled.

Dawn went flying.

The King smiled cruelly as he made to deal the killing blow.

Dark Sister sang as she deflected the hit meant for Darkstar.

The King slowly raised his gaze to Larra. Recognition gleamed in his eyes: his expression grew gloating, almost intrigued. With every beat of her heart her arm seared with pain, her head spun, her lungs ached but every beat of her heart was a victory against him. Every second she stood in his presence and did not flee was a victory.

He remembered her.

She had fled him once.

She would not flee now.

She held her ground. Held it for them: for Arya, who took up her position by Bran, and Gendry, who raced to Bran, reaching to scoop him out of his chair and carry him to safety – where, he did not know.

“No,” Bran said gently, adjusting himself in his chair to watch Larra push back the King through sheer force of will. Unflinching, undaunted, Larra stared the Night King in the eye and raised her sword. She was bloody and battered, more injured than she knew, but she held her own against the King. Because she had to.

Darkstar had taught her well.

But he had no strength left and slumped to his knees, Dawn falling into the snow, its light dimming.

No-one dared interfere with Larra’s duel.

Swift as shadows, nimble as a cat, Arya advanced on the Night King, joining Larra in her lethal dance. The King’s eyes narrowed as they pressed their advantage, pushing him back, challenging him. They gave him nothing.

He had to fight harder, faster.

As Jon joined them out of nowhere, the King hissed his frustration.

The three of them continued their joint assault yet the King was dauntless, unmatched. He seemed to anticipate every action before they had decided it, blocking and deflecting every hit, redirecting their blades toward each other. He used them to distract each other, knowing instinctively that no matter what they had agreed upon, that every sacrifice was worth it, it went against everything they were to harm each other.

Arya was sent sprawling in a spray of ice and blood. The King smiled maliciously as she stirred briefly in the snow then collapsed, her obsidian Needle still in her grasp.

Jon found an opening and stabbed the Night King with his obsidian dagger.

The Night King paused.

Glanced down at the blade embedded in his breastbone. Tilted his head to the side. Backhanded Jon across the clearing.

Larra’s heart thundered as the Night King pulled the dagger out of his chest. Dropped it idly at his feet as if it was no more than a splinter.

Her arm in agony, she raised Dark Sister.

Larra continued the duel alone.

Though the weirwood’s defenders made them earn every inch they took, the Others gained ground.

And Larra was tired…so tired, and in agony – she realised too late, gasping, her heart thudding with sorrow and regret, that she could see Bran over the King’s shoulder… He had manoeuvred his way between them.

The King smiled.

Dark Sister was knocked from her grasp. The King reached out, his eyes glinting, and wrapped his hand around her throat, lifting her off her feet.

His expression creased, frowning bemusedly, as an obsidian-tipped arrow whistled out of nowhere, glancing off his pauldron into the snow.

Sharp as any predator, the King’s attention shifted to the redwood.

Larra struggled against his grip.

Collapsed in a heap, stunned, as he released his hold on her. Coughing and spluttering, she gasped and glanced up, squinting in pain at the bright light emanating from the King’s chest. A shard of solid light, so bright it was like gazing directly into the sun, piercing his chest.

Behind him, his hand still wrapped around the hilt of Dawn, stood Jon.

Simultaneously, every single one of the Others burst into thousands of shards of ice. Arya stirred as she was sprayed with debris, and she lifted her bloody face from the snow, her fingers convulsing instinctively around the hilt of Needle.

The King seemed confused. His grey eyes gazed down at the blade and for a heartbeat Larra thought he was weeping.

She stared. Grey eyes.

The King was not weeping.

The ice was melting. The horns of his crown dripped steadily, melting away, revealing dark hair. Natural, pale skin.

Jon wrenched Dawn from the King’s heart. He stumbled, grey eyes wide, bewildered.

They fell on Larra, who remembered… The petrified grey eyes of a man bound before those that sang the songs of the earth, their killer, now their captive, soon to be their weapon.

He stumbled again. Larra caught him, lowering him to the ground as his legs gave out. Blood glowed crimson on his lips as his gaze darted unseeingly, writhing in confusion and pain. He gazed at Larra, almost as if he recognised her, and his bloodstained lips parted soundlessly as he writhed, agitated. She lifted her hand from his chest: blood, warm and sticky, soaked her glove. His grey eyes struggled to focus but landed on her hand and he blinked, confused, at the sight of his blood soaking her glove.

As the first songbirds started to chirp high in the trees, Larra whispered in the Old Tongue, “Now you are free.”

He sighed softly, relief shining from his grey eyes, and his body relaxed. Blood pooled around him, crimson as the weirwood leaves sighing above them.

The ice melted away, leaving a man.

Just a man.

They heard his last breath, a soft slow sigh as if drifting into the deepest sleep.

Hoster Blackwood collapsed to his knees, his armour rattling; beside him, Lord Tarly patted his shoulder, weeping silently. The Sandsnakes embraced each other, picking their way through the debris to the weirwood, to Ser Gerold who sat propped up against the trunk of the weirwood, exactly where Ned Stark had once sat cleansing Ice after the execution of the Night’s Watch deserter who, in what they had then believed to be his own madness, had reported seeing White Walkers.

Yara Greyjoy took a knee beside her brother’s body, bowing her head. Ser Jaime crawled through the snow and ice-shards, his obsidian pike lost, and he fumbled to cradle Ser Brienne’s head in his lap, clumsily pushing her bright blonde hair from her face. Her eyes, clear as the purest sapphires, glittered with tears as she smiled up at him.

“The sun is rising,” she said faintly. She squirmed and panted a breath, blood trickling from the corners of her mouth.

All but Ser Jaime turned their gazes to the sky, stunned to realise that heavy thunderclouds were being chased away by a glorious sunrise, retreating as if scalded by the gold trimming their edges from the sun’s rays as it rose bright and unyielding above the treetops, painting the entire sky a hazy rich orangey-yellow, its caress warming them.

Birds chirped and started to sing throughout the godswood. Ser Brienne smiled but caught Ser Jaime’s gaze. A frenzied gleam came into her eyes, her expression earnest as Ser Jaime had ever known it, and she panted, whispering urgently, “Don’t waste it… Don’t waste it, Jaime.”

Ser Jaime let out a sob, openly weeping.

Sigurd of the Thenns growled, lifting his weapon as a rustling startled him: he went to aid Alys Karstark as she clambered down the redwood. Her empty quiver was still strapped across her back; her bow trailed in the snow beside her as she drifted toward the weirwood.

Her gaze landed on the dead man in the snow.

Jon said in a low, hoarse voice, “It was your arrow.”

“I saved my last,” said Alys, who lived only because Jon had insisted she not pay for her father’s treachery with her life.

She had used her last arrow to distract the King before he could throttle Larra.

She had allowed Jon to take up Dawn when a bleeding Ser Gerold offered it and take the King unawares.

Jon’s mercy had saved them all.

He kissed Alys’ brow, thanking her on a breathless murmur.

The sun rose higher, hotter. The birds sang.

“He was just a man,” Lord Tarly said hoarsely.

“Taken. He tortured and mutilated by magic,” Larra said, wincing. She could barely speak above a strange squeaking whisper, her voice strained.

“Now he is at rest,” Bran said softly. His dark eyes drifted sadly around the godswood. “Now they may all rest.”

A deep knock echoed on the thick Northern oak doors, barred and braced. The sudden quiet had woken many of them. Sansa peered at the sunlight streaming bright and dazzling through the high windows as she neared the doors.

“Come on out of your cage, little bird,” a gruff voice said gently, and Sansa gasped with recognition – and relief. “Tis over.”

“Open the doors!” she gasped.

Sansa glanced up into Sandor Clegane’s face, afraid even to ask. He knew what she wanted to hear: “They’re alive.”

The fight over, he had not known what to do except…find the little bird.

She clutched his hands, unafraid to gaze up into his face and beam at him.

Sansa sobbed and raced out of the castle. Sandor called for maesters and healers and Nestor Maegos’ surgeons and sank onto a bench, bloodied, exhausted, and finally, finally, started to weep. Relief swept through him. They were alive. The wolf-bitch and his little bird. He grinned to himself, a swell of affection invigorating him as he thought of Arya and of Sansa, and started to laugh through his tears.

The sun rose higher, hot and bright, making the ice and snow sparkle dazzlingly. The light played merrily on the surface of the pond and a light breeze sighed through the weirwood trees, which trembled and shivered as if aching to embrace each other.

Though a breeze coaxed the thick white smoke to dissipate as it rose, nothing could cause the echoes of the ancient Starks to waver. And though the sun shone hotly and the snow glittered, the light of the Kings and Queens of Winter could not be dimmed. Their silvery glow seemed brighter, their shadows more pronounced, more tangible, every detail discernible as they gathered. Wiry old warriors and buxom queens, fair maids whose veins had once flowed fiercely with the wolf-blood, solemn beauties and hard men, they gathered, armed and armoured, tall and proud, even the most stooped of them – the Old Man in the North – and the youngest of them, sad-eyed and grim but fierce. The ones who had been dead so long, their names were lost. Ones whose names were legend. And the ones who lived on in the hearts and memories of those they had left behind. Those they had risen to fight beside.

Arya’s eyes stung and she wept openly as a familiar face gazed with soft, solemn pride at her, his eyes saddening terribly as they rested on Jon, on Larra. He stood beside a fierce-looking male with a wild glint of wicked humour in his eyes, and Uncle Benjen, a gentler, wry humour twinkling in his eyes as he nodded proudly. Their father stood beside them.

And Robb…

Robb smiled softly beside Father, handsome and bearded and stern.

Sansa edged through the godswood, picking her way past the dismembered dead and the rotting corpses of the wights. The stench was unbearable – rotting flesh and soot and smoke yet the breeze was crisp and sharp and carried the worst of it away. Her steps slowed as she approached the shimmering mass of intangible bodies, armed and armoured, many of them crowned with the familiar crown of the Winter Kings – and Queens, she noticed. The shimmering figures parted silently as she drew closer, and she noticed their grim eyes and proud smiles and some dipped their heads in acknowledgement, as if they knew her.

From the windows, they had seen the silver glow seep out of the godswood and spread across Winterfell yet Sansa had no idea what they were. She knew where they had come from, though: as she approached the weirwood, her eyes blurred with tears of shock and she watched Larra struggle to her feet, clearly at the limits of her strength. She was almost unrecognisable, smeared with blood and muck and who knew what else, her armour battered, her clothing torn, bloodied bandages tied hastily around her arm, her braids tangled, but her violet eyes glowed vivid in the sunlight, sparkling like the finest amethysts.

Jon stood, covered in grime as he had been after the Battle of the Bastards. But there was no rage in him now; she did not have to snap him from his bloodlust, his desperate drive to punish those who had harmed her. He was exhausted, drained of vitality. He stood with his hand on Arya’s shoulder as her sister wept openly: their identical grey eyes lingered on a grim, tired-looking man standing silvery under the weirwood. Bran’s dark eyes shone as he, too, stared at the ghost of Ned Stark.

Ned, Robb, Benjen…even Brandon and Rickard Stark let their proud gazes linger upon Bran and Arya and Jon and Larra, and Sansa, as she stumbled toward her siblings, half-blinded by tears of relief and shock.

Jon reached out and took her hand, steadying her.

Larra stepped forward, slowly. Exhausted, she could focus only on Father’s face.

“It’s alright, love.” Ned Stark’s voice was gentle and tired and seemed to come from the sighing weirwood leaves.

Larra stared at Father, her heart aching to let them stay, to keep them here, with them…

They had done their duty.

Tears streamed down her face, hot and scratchy. She gazed at Father’s ghost, and as she said the words, she spoke not only of his actions this night but every day of her and Jon’s lives. He had protected them not merely this night but every single moment he drew breath from the moment he had claimed them as his own.

“I hold your oaths fulfilled. Be at peace.”

The Kings and Queens of Winter, long interred beneath the weirwood, restless to fulfil their ancient oaths, sighed in contentment, and as a gentle wind picked up the shimmering silver figures faded to nothing more than a glint on the wind and disappeared, leaving nothing but birdsong and the sigh of weirwood leaves behind.

Notes:

I finally did it! I liked the idea of the Night King being an imperfect, unpractised swordsman by Westerosi standards, and that it was a group effort – the lone wolf dies but the pack survives – to hunt and fight the Night King. And Jon ultimately getting the kill.

But it’s important that Ser Gerold was there with Dawn. Remember that later.

Chapter 65: Dawn

Notes:

A.N.: Thank you so much for the reviews – I really appreciate them! This will be the last chapter of this story – the first in the Valyrian Steel series. The sequel will be called Dragons’ Daughter.

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Valyrian Steel

65

Dawn


Rich laughter echoed on the air with the clatter and resounding clang of hammer and tongs, the grunts and shouts of labourers toiling to rebuild. The joyous birdsong of the godswood created a beautiful harmony. Frost glittered in the sunlight, still clinging to the shattered stone of the broken curtain-walls but elsewhere, where the repairs had long since been underway, seams of obsidian fused the stone. They glowed fiery purple and blue and fuchsia as the obsidian absorbed the sun’s heat. Rivers of fire that, instead of eroding the stone, bound it and made it stronger than ever.

The obsidian weapons without those to wield them had been melted down once again, used in place of grout and pointing. Every time someone looked at the northern curtain-walls, they would see seams of obsidian: there would be no forgetting the Battle for the Dawn. Obsidian that had once defended Winterfell now repaired the damage it had sustained and made it stronger than ever.

It had been Gendry’s idea, inspired both by the way Northerners used the recourses available to them and by the Qartheen method of piecing together damaged valuables by using precious metals to bind them, adding more value while respecting the object’s history rather than masking it, which he had seen demonstrated only twice in a Qartheen jeweller’s atelier in King’s Landing. The obsidian would forever remain part of Winterfell, part of its history.

The more Gendry had worked with it, the more he had learned and experimented with obsidian, thanks in large part to Brandon sharing his knowledge. Gendry was overseeing the creation and construction of the obsidian gateposts and the gates. The gates themselves were to be made from weirwood, from wood that had fallen from the great heart-trees across the North during storms, saved for the special use of House Stark, weirwood being more precious even than the Goldenheart of the Summer Isles due to its rarity and its continued association with the Old Gods.

Aella squirmed against her chest and Larra glanced down to assess whether she was awaking hungry and likely to fuss, or simply wriggling in her sleep. When she had recovered from her exhaustion and finally left her and Gendry’s chamber, Tisseia had taught Larra how to ‘wear’ her babies the way Essosi slaves did, using swathes of linen knotted intricately, carefully binding the babies to her in their swaddling to prevent hip dysplasia, but allowing them to know her warmth and her scent and the beat of her heart.

She had rarely put her babies down since the Battle had ended.

Larra had refused to let Nestor Maegos tend to her until she had nursed Arthur. And, in her exhaustion bordering delirium, when Aella had fussed Larra had brought Aella to her other breast without thought. She produced more than enough milk to sustain the two babies and saw no distinction – they were both her children. She could provide for Aella as she could Arthur and did so. The Battle had shown them all what was important: to Larra, there was no distinction between Arthur and Aella. They were both hers.

Aella yawned widely, her fine dark eyelashes fluttering open as she squirmed. With a faint sigh she settled, though Larra saw the light sparkling off Aella’s open eyes. They had paled since her birth and were now an incredible lilac colour, delicate as a winter dawn yet vibrant, eye-catching in their purity.

In the first days and weeks after the Battle, they had slept and healed and Larra had nursed the babies. Gendry burped them: he was the only one who could settle an uncomfortable Aella after she had nursed, to her former wet-nurse’s consternation. Their medicine after the shock and traumas of the Battle was lots of sleep, cuddles with the babies during intermittent feedings, which became fewer and fewer throughout the night as the babies grew bigger and stronger. Aella remained small, which Nestor Maegos said had everything to do with the circumstances of her development in the womb and her trying birth. Arthur grew long, his hair dark and his eyes…his eyes changed to the same deep, rich amethyst as his mother’s. Aella was the fussier of the two, and weeks after Arthur slept through the night, Aella still whimpered and cried every other hour. As soon as she was cradled in Gendry’s arms, she was content, cooing and smiling. Aella had learned to smile: it was her favourite thing to do: she had taught it to Arthur as they cuddled together in their shared cradle.

Aella’s smiles and Arthur’s coos soothed Gendry when he tore himself from nightmares: wights haunted his dreams. It calmed him to cuddle Aella and Arthur and take them on slow walks to and from the solar, then the nursery and the ramparts as his leg healed. Nestor encouraged him to exercise his legs, getting out into the sunlight. Day by day, Gendry physically recovered: he still woke nearly every night, gripped by the terror of his nightmares. He had to reassure himself that they were all alive and safe, often stalking to the nursery just to check on Cade, Neva, Briar and the Lannister girls.

Larra suffered no such terror: she told Gendry she had lived with it for far too long. She had defeated the monsters of her nightmares. They had no power over her.

It was not dread of the Night King’s armies that gave her sleepless nights now.

Dread of people made her restless.

Despite a broken arm, Larra had remained mobile: she was now frustrated and counting down the days until Nestor would assess her broken arm and remove the cast around it, for it had been weeks since she had allowed it to deter her from doing what she had always done. Until then, she made do, as she always had, finding ways to keep going around the annoyance of the cast. After two weeks and many rich broths and honeyed herb teas to soothe her throat and coax her voice to return, she could communicate verbally again, speaking with the Free Folk and the surviving Dothraki and Unsullied and to her family.

Many of those who had commanded had also lost their voices, temporarily. It was a common side-effect of spending hours bellowing orders across a castle. The surviving commanders communicated mostly in grunts and exasperated huffs as they were tended to by Nestor Maegos’ small army of apprentices, who had earned the right to call themselves surgeons with their dedication and practical display of their new skills in the days immediately after the Battle.

They had triaged everyone still living, treating the most obviously injured first. After peering closely at her face, dreading a fractured cheekbone and potentially a broken eye-socket, Arya had to be carried into the castle on a stretcher. Ser Gerold Dayne, while still conscious, was just as concerning to Nestor Maegos, due to the fact that despite his obsidian-encrusted armour, Darkstar had sustained a wound from his left shoulder to his right hip, which had bled freely. Darkstar’s hand had shaken as he had waved the surgeon away. One of Larra’s few vivid recollections from the sudden end to the Battle was giving Darkstar a raspy, squeaking, barely-audible order to let Nestor help, and the Dornish knight had peered at her through bleary eyes then given in, collapsing against the heart-tree, silently weeping either with relief or pain or a combination of both. The Battle was over: he no longer had to remain on his guard. If he wished to live, he would allow the surgeon to do his work.

There was nothing to be done for Ser Rey Musgood’s lost eye, though. Gendry’s inner-thigh had been slashed badly and required cleaning and many sutures but Nestor remained highly positive: Gendry’s femoral artery had not been severed, or he would have bled out in moments.

As he had healed, Gendry had chastised himself for forgetting Yoren’s words of wisdom the day Goldcloaks had accosted them on the Kingsroad: “It's a funny thing; people worry so much about their throats that they forget about what's down low.”

Gendry had forgotten but unlike the fierce, loyal, wise, unpolished Yoren, he had lived.

He had lived because of Yoren: as had Arya, who troubled Nestor Maegos due to her inability to rest. Larra had to be very strict with Arya in the days after the Battle, ordering her to rest: it was too ingrained in Arya to distrust being able to lie down and sleep restfully, safe and sound. Only Bran sitting by her side by the hour settled her, and even then she woke as often as Gendry, tearing herself from dreams, until Nestor had had to resort to dosing her with milk of the poppy to allow her body to heal while she rested. She was irascible when she woke from her drug-addled sleeps, furious that she had allowed herself to remain vulnerable for so long. But her fury – and the mottled greenish-yellow of her bruises across her face, no longer swollen to twice its normal size – spoke of her continued recovery and growing strength. Bran withstood the worst of her ire with a gentle smile.

Arya’s and Darkstar’s were the worst injuries to have been sustained by those who survived the godswood, followed closely by Gendry and Ser Jaime, though theirs were by no means the most harrowing injuries suffered by any of the survivors of the Battle. Lord Randyll had received a head-wound and Hoster Blackwood a nick to his clavicle that Nestor had had to set and bind. Nestor reassured Hoster that he was young and would heal swiftly and likely the bone would set stronger than it had been before: but he cautioned Hoster against sustained archery practise for a good long while. Hoster Blackwood had assured the surgeon that he would restrict himself to books.

Prised from Ser Brienne’s prone body, something about his own wound made Ser Jaime laugh almost hysterically. Later, they learned that he had taken a wound in the exact same place that, years ago, Ned Stark had sustained his wound in a skirmish with Ser Jaime and Lannister men in the streets of King’s Landing.

As the warriors had lingered between life and death, healing and sleeping deeply, it was Lady Sansa Stark who took charge. She had proved that she was adaptable, level-headed, forward-thinking, pragmatic and decisive. She had proved just how much she had learned from her older sister.

Larra had fought because she could not bear the idea of being the last one left.

She had fought knowing that the North was left in capable hands.

She had gone to her death appreciating that her son would be King after Sansa.

But she had survived.

Larra had always dreaded being superfluous – having no place. Not being needed. Being cast out of the castle as unnecessary.

And in many ways, had she been conscious of more than her pain and her need to nurse her babies and reassure the children, Larra would have realised that surviving had proved her worst fears far sooner than she did. And the wound may have been more devastating, its effects longer-lasting and embittering.

Because of the circumstances, Larra did not feel anger or bitterness or grief but pride and relief and a sense of calm that she had done her job and could leave Sansa to do hers.

Still, it niggled at her in the quiet moments when the babies were settled and Gendry slept soundly beside her. Sansa had proven herself a more than capable leader. She had organised the aftermath of the Battle largely alone but following plans laid out by Larra: deploying the healers and surgeons; ordering the kitchens to be busy with restorative soups and stews; sending the skilled craftsmen out to assess the damage and begin preparations to start repairing them. Sansa had made herself the first authority at Winterfell through sheer necessity. Even the King had been bedbound with more injuries than even he had realised he sustained: a broken leg, fractured ribs, a head-wound and internal bleeding that Nestor had leeched before discussing with Sansa her opinions on allowing him to investigate the bleed.

Nestor had opened Jon up, using clamps and all sorts of equipment he had designed himself, and found the source of Jon’s bleeding, stitched him up with sutures, closed up the precise, clean wound, and monitored him by the hour to ensure no rot set in. Jon’s bleeding had stopped. Nestor Maegos had saved Jon’s life. Sansa had come to Larra’s chamber, wild-eyed, bursting into tears as she threw her head in Larra’s lap, overwhelmed with relief that she had made the right decision to allow Nestor to operate on Jon. It ruffled the maesters – the “grey rats”, as Lady Dustin called them uncharitably, though Larra was starting to notice that there was something obscure in the maesters’ self-righteous fury about advances in knowledge, skills and practices that did not align with the teachings of the Citadel.

It was as if they feared progress.

They hissed and muttered amongst themselves whenever they spied Nestor Maegos. There were exceptions, a few of them, those men who respected knowledge and bettering their understanding of things, who remained curious and hungry to learn despite their time in the Citadel, which Samwell Tarly reported was “mind-numbing drudgery” – and from someone who had idolised the Citadel all his life, that said everything Larra needed to know about the institution of the Citadel.

The maesters had been up in arms and the people sceptical when Larra had announced her support for Nestor Maegos’ programme to apprentice surgeons in the Essosi way: in the days after the battle, the survivors – and their families – praised Larra’s foresight. There were simply too many injured, and the few maesters were under-trained and overwhelmed to deal with them.

There was a great difference between castle-based maesters and battlefield surgeons: Nestor had taught them what it was. Surgeons needed to be swift, decisive, clear-headed, creative, intuitive, unflappable and calm, compassionate but firm with unparalleled knowledge of human anatomy, able to assess any injury and its unseen consequences and complications. Nestor relied on knowledge of the human body and how it worked not obscure remedies that were just horrendous concoctions of ingredients that were, in isolation, absolutely vile and unlikely to do anything but hasten death.

In ages to come, people would look back at the Battle for the Dawn as the specific event during which maesters’ influence and power in the North, specifically, fractured, heralding the dwindling influence of maesters in general throughout Westeros: it was surgeons who came into prominence as masters of the discipline of medicine, healing and life-saving medical procedures championed by Nestor Maegos. And it was Larra who had championed the first surgeon.

After going about her daily visits to those still recovering from their injuries, Larra had come outside for fresh air and to enjoy the sunshine while it lasted, keen to see the moors for herself after the first snowfall since the Battle. All around Winterfell, the moors had turned pristine white, sparkling beautifully, concealing the bare, charred earth. Snow would disguise the blackened earth until the first hint of spring in the years to come. If not for the gaping holes in the curtain-walls, one could be forgiven for believing Winterfell had withstood no armies: the moors were a sweeping expanse of pure white. Even before the first snowfall, the moors had boasted no bodies. No carrion came to pick over the remains of the fallen. The wildfire had swept across the moors and consumed everything it touched, leaving only ash.

Her wildfire.

Lord Beric Dondarrion had set it alight but it had been her strategy to lay caches of wildfire across the moors. Those caches of wildfire had burned through not just the armies of the dead but the Dothraki hordes.

She felt a twinge in her chest, discomfort at the countless deaths she had caused. Yet she knew she could never feel truly guilty for the sacrifice of the Dothraki: they were the price to be paid for the obliteration of the Night King’s armies.

Only death could pay for life.

And their deaths here at Winterfell had served two purposes: destroying the Night King’s armies and diminished her dread about Dothraki hordes pillaging Westeros by half. In many of their minds, though, especially as the fairer weather continued and the southerners at Winterfell grew stronger and started thinking of home, they began to consider the Dothraki in their thoughts. How did the rest of Westeros fare with hordes riding rampant, unchecked? Larra wondered how Essos fared, without the hordes to check the growing power of the Free Cities. Were the uprisings and rebellions Daenerys Targaryen had inspired across Essos enough to distract the Free Cities from looking westwards? She dreaded what it meant for Westeros that Essos may draw strength from the Dothraki’s absence and take advantage of the weakness of Westeros after so many conflicts.

While they healed, she kept her concerns to herself: they should be allowed time to rest and rejoice.

And though she had come outside to enjoy the sunshine and witness the snow-covered moors and praise those working diligently to repair the damaged castle, making sure to be seen, as their people liked to see the Starks, Larra’s gaze returned time and again to the clusters of men she had noticed in and around the yards and godswood and the untouched ramparts and the Unbroken Tower.

More and more, she had noticed that the southerners were beginning to congregate, sometimes in pairs and trios, sometimes in smaller groups. She had heard of meetings of the southern knights and lords in halls. This would not have been noteworthy but for the fact that Gendry had been involved. She had witnessed him walking back from the godswood one day, looking serious and thoughtful, followed behind by Lord Lonmouth, Ser Jorian Gower, Ser Davos and several of the other surviving Stormlords, Ser Jaime and Lord Yomer Lantel, Bronze Yohn and Yara Greyjoy. Hoster Blackwood – freshly knighted by Ser Jaime himself – came lolloping behind them, reminding Larra only too vividly of their direwolf-pups as they had grown, all giant paws and too-long limbs and eagerness. It was odd seeing the only two of the four Penroses. Ser Cadmian, the eldest of the four, and Ser Cedric, the youngest, had both been slain, leaving Ser Castor and Ser Cormac at rather a loose end without their brothers. Larra did not envy them their grief: she knew it far too intimately.

Winterfell was rife with it – grief. And yet there was great joy, too.

While many had been slain during the Battle, in the aftermath babies were still born. Children reached new milestones as they grew. And there was a great rash of weddings before the heart-tree that were presided over by first Sansa and then by Jon once he had recovered and been cleared by Nestor to resume some of his less physically strenuous responsibilities around Winterfell.

Death had gripped Winterfell. Yet life found a way.

And life did not stop. They had defeated their enemy yet the rest of the world remained beyond the snowbanks, ready for them to re-engage and see what had become of things in their absence.

Larra was not alone in worrying about what lay beyond the snowbanks.

She could already sense it: people were preparing. The Knights of the Vale, the Stormlords, the few Westermen who had journeyed north with Ser Jaime to wage the only honourable war.

Though many would look back on the Battle for the Dawn with scepticism – contemporary accounts were regarded with suspicion if not discounted completely for the absurdities they documented – it was the event around which the most important political, military and dynastic connections were made that shaped Westeros forever after. So said Bran, during one of his visits to Larra in the early days after the Battle.

And his words echoed in her mind as she watched a cluster of Stormlords pretending to take in the sunshine, their expressions serious, urgent, casting glances toward the northern gate, where Gendry was working with the stonemasons. Something was happening. She feared Gendry was at the heart of it, whether he intended to be, and pondered whether her admission to him weeks ago – that Sansa’s success in leading Winterfell in the aftermath of the Battle had rendered her, Larra, redundant – had anything to do with his involvement.

It had been a dark moment, born of pain, frustration and most of all grief, when she had admitted to Gendry that she did not know that they had any future at Winterfell and dreaded having to take a step back and allow Sansa – or rather, Jon – to truly embrace being the ruler of the North. She would be left to advise, if she was lucky, or relegated to raising the children. Aella had spent the entire night before mutinying against sleep and against any attempts they had made to settle and soothe her: Larra had cried that she was already halfway there. She had already taken Jon’s child to raise as her own.

The night she had cried into Gendry’s chest and admitted her worries had followed one of the hardest days after the Battle: the day they had interred their dead in the crypts.

Sansa had wanted to keep the crypts beneath Winterfell for the Starks who would come after them – their children and grandchildren.

Larra had argued that every man and woman who had fallen to defend Winterfell and its people had earned a place amongst those honoured dead who had risen to fulfil their oaths.

Jon had agreed with Larra.

Statues had been carved for the lords and knights and chieftains of the Free Folk who had fallen in defence of Winterfell, the stonemasons careful to preserve their likenesses down to the patch over Crowfood Umber’s eye and the fierce, wild beard of Tormund Giantsbane and his furs, the fierce fighting bear etched into Lady Maege Mormont’s armour and the gentle strength of Dickon Tarly. All who had died defending Winterfell had been interred: those without statues to preserve their likeness had their names recorded, to be inlaid in obsidian in the weirwood gates.

Ser Jaime vowed to have a statue of purest white marble carved in the likeness of Ser Brienne the True, with sapphires for her eyes. Sansa claimed her sworn-shield would have been flustered by the attention, that being knighted – and by Ser Jaime no less – would have been the highest honour for her. Ser Jaime had wept at that, his body buckling with grief. Beyond him, Larra had watched Lord Lonmouth, whose grief was beyond tears, light a candle for his son Rhaegar and then turn down the crypt toward the old graves, where he had lit another candle for Lyanna Stark.

He had told Larra that he had witnessed the wedding of Lyanna and Prince Rhaegar under the heart-trees on the Isle of Faces. He had told her that, as a father himself, he knew it would have broken Rhaegar and Lyanna’s hearts to know what their children would grow up to survive. Their hearts would have burst with sorrow – and with tremendous pride at the people they had become.

He honoured Ned Stark for raising two of the most extraordinary people he had ever met. Prince Rhaegar would have been grateful beyond anything for the people Ned had raised them to be: “I can give Ned no higher praise than that.”

Prince Rhaegar had believed in the Prince Who Was Promised. He had believed in an ancient prophecy he had read in a forgotten scroll that told of a winter without end and a darkness that brought the destruction of Men.

Larra’s heart, already in agony from the sheer scope of their losses during the Battle, had lashed pain through her body, appreciating that Rhaegar’s actions, while they had led to the doom of the Targaryen dynasty and the Seven Kingdoms tearing themselves apart, had also ensured that strong leaders were indeed ready to unite armies against the gathering storm with the strength to defy it, as the Conqueror had foreseen. Children of ice and of fire, of House Targaryen, who had the foresight to prepare for the Others’ awakening and House Stark, with whom the Others had always been so intimately intertwined and who were best situated to stop them.

“All he did…he acted to fulfil that prophecy, to become the warrior that we needed…or sire them,” Lord Lonmouth had said, in his quiet, calm voice that Larra felt always hinted at a lethal promise.

People had clearly overheard Lord Lonmouth’s admission – all but confirming that the documents that had circulated months before, declaring her and Jon’s legitimacy as trueborn children of Prince Rhaegar and his second wife Lyanna Stark – and word had spread throughout the castle. It was taken for granted now that Prince Rhaegar and Lady Lyanna Stark had wed and that Jon and Larra were their trueborn children.

There was dishonour in being born bastards but there was far more danger in being the true heirs of the Iron Throne.

Larra knew which she preferred to be.

Yet she was also wiser than to believe she now had any choice in the matter. If she did not embrace her heritage, it would be used against her.

Lord Tyrion had warned them of it years ago – wear it like armour and it can never be used to hurt you.

She frowned at the cluster of men watching Gendry work intently.

“Why do you keep watching those men?” Narcisa asked quietly. Her emerald eyes shone brightly as she turned her face away from the sun, the embellishments of her raised collar glittering nowhere near as brightly as her shining golden hair.

“Hm? Oh… I suspect a coup,” Larra murmured, half to herself, “though I am uncertain what its outcome shall be.”

“What do you mean?” Narcisa asked.

“There are murmurings among the Stormlords.”

“Perhaps they’re upset so many of their men died. They are regretting it, now faced with the prospect of returning home to reclaim their lands without such large forces to support them,” Narcisa suggested, which was a fair assumption. Larra glanced at Narcisa, concealing a smile. Their lessons on strategy were going well.

Narcisa had grown almost overnight: at some point during the Battle, she had become an adult.

It wasn’t that she had grown taller – though she had – and her figure was starting to fill out – which it was, to her constant annoyance, the seamstresses having to make adjustments to her gowns to accommodate – but the fact that Narcisa had developed a sense of maturity. Larra had seen hints of it early on, in the way Narcisa guided, protected and often coddled her younger cousins, but now it was clear for all to see: she had shed her childhood like an old cloak she had outgrown. She had shed the parts of her that belonged to her childhood, to the Lannisters; her pride and her selfishness, her petty jealousy built on insecurities and her aloofness and elitism. Narcisa, the eldest of them and Calanthe, the boldest and shrewdest, had bonded during the Battle. The two appreciated just how much danger Larra and Gendry were in, and they acknowledged just how much Larra and Gendry meant to them.

Overnight, Narcisa had blossomed into a beautiful young woman, and it had very little at all to do with her golden looks. The Battle and its aftermath had polished away the least beautiful parts of Narcisa’s nature, leaving only the very best shining brightly.

“Perhaps,” Larra sighed, unconvinced. She glanced back at Narcisa, feeling odd about discussing coups and politics with her. It reminded her too vividly of two young girls thrown into the political viper’s nest of King’s Landing. They had been too young and ill-prepared: it had torn the Seven Kingdoms in two. She decided to deflect Narcisa’s attention: “Who are you visiting this afternoon?”

“Ser Hoster,” Narcisa said, with a delicate blush. Larra chuckled softly. In the immediate aftermath of the Battle, Narcisa and Calanthe had been especially clingy: they had needed near-constant reassurance of Larra and Gendry’s survival. Calanthe had been content with cuddles but Narcisa had needed the kind of attention and encouragement that only Larra could provide, and had, during their private lessons. Larra had continued to instruct Narcisa on history and geography, economics and ancient lore, but when it became too much, she had sent Narcisa to read to the other invalided warriors. She had sent Narcisa off to read to her uncle Ser Jaime, who in turn had diverted her to his newly-knighted squire Ser Hoster Blackwood. He was close to Narcisa in age and had inspired in Narcisa an enthusiasm for learning that was delightful to witness.

Gendry had smiled at Larra’s delight that Hoster seemed to be inspiring a love of learning in Narcisa: he had teased that even while injured and nursing, she just could not help herself – she was already thinking how best to coax Narcisa further along her journey toward education.

Young Hoster Blackwood, all sixteen years and seven feet of him, had been a hostage of Ser Jaime’s since he broke the siege of Raventree Hall after the Red Wedding. House Blackwood had been the last Stark loyalists after the slaughter of the Northern army at the Twins: Lord Tytos Blackwood, Hoster’s father, had yielded only to King Tommen, and only when Ser Jaime had interceded personally – Lord Tytos Blackwood had refused to bend the knee to the ancient rivals of his family, House Bracken. Lord Tytos had convinced Ser Jaime to take his son Hoster as hostage, rather than his only daughter. Rather than leave a Stark loyalist vulnerable at court, when Ser Jaime had ridden north with his company he had brought Hoster Blackwood along as his squire. He had brought a Northern loyalist to the safety of Winterfell, as he had once sent Podrick Payne out of the city as Ser Brienne’s squire to ensure his safety after Lord Tyrion’s arrest.

The gangling boy – the same age Jon had been when he took the black – was fond of books and possessed a sharp, curious mind and a different way of seeing things that Larra enjoyed; when she had rested and became active in the castle once more, she spent a lot of time checking on Hoster Blackwood, at Narcisa and Ser Jaime’s insistence – Ser Jaime, because he felt responsible for the boy and Narcisa, because she enjoyed his company and knew Larra would appreciate his intelligence.

It was from Hoster himself that Larra learned of the circumstances that had led to Hoster being in Winterfell as Ser Jaime’s squire. She had brought him books to cure his boredom: he was desperate to hear about Robb and Rhaegal, though she could not tell which he seemed to idolise more. His brother Lucas had died at the Red Wedding alongside Robb, and it was with great satisfaction that he shared the rumour with Larra that either Larra herself or Arya had had some part in the queer happenings at the Twins that wiped House Frey out of existence. Hoster said rumours were running rampant about where Arya and Larra had been in the time between Ned Stark’s execution and the fall of Winterfell and their subsequent reappearance years later at the gates of their ancestral home. They fed into the old rumours that Robb Stark could shift his form into that of a giant grey wolf, the embodiment of Winter, hunting any foolish enough to believe they could withstand it. Listening to Hoster recount the rumours made Larra laugh for the first time since the Battle. She had a fondness for Hoster: he reminded her of her brothers, before the gods got their hands on them.

“You had better make your way indoors,” Larra told Narcisa quietly, glancing past her to Calanthe, who was arguing good-naturedly with Qhaero. He was soaking up the rare strong sunlight, his furs tossed aside to bare his torso and arms, his scarred bronze skin glowing decadently, a deep contrast to Calanthe’s pale skin and shining golden hair. The healing wound from temple to jaw made his handsome face if possible more attractive: perhaps it was the glint of humour and cleverness in his eyes. Larra wondered if she would know it was humour and cleverness had she not persevered with her Dothraki to converse with him and learn that he was shrewd and sharp, learning from everything around him. Qhaero had adapted the best of all the Lannisters’ kos; he was curious about their culture and keen to learn. Exposure to Westerosi customs had shifted his perspective about some aspects of his own, specifically how he had been raised – how Dothraki were all raised – to view women.

He had nothing but respect for Larra. They had fought side-by-side, after all. He knew she was as fierce as any ko, and fiercer than most screamers.

He wore proudly, bound to his long braid, tiny obsidian bells Larra had had Gendry make for the few Dothraki that had survived the Battle. As Calanthe played with his long braid, making the many tiny gold, silver and bronze bells chime, the obsidian bells made an entrancing sound. It was an odd sound, at once mesmerising and eerie. To Larra, it was a beautiful sound: it had the same effect to her heart as a dose of fiery whisky. But to the unworthy, she imagined it would be a queer, unsettling noise.

“I didn’t know Calanthe spoke Dothraki,” Narcisa observed, following Larra’s gaze.

“Children absorb new things,” Larra said quietly, so that Calanthe didn’t hear herself being referred to as a child. Calanthe was ten – nearly a woman grown, according to her: she was almost a warrior. She smiled at Narcisa. “Come, let us leave Calanthe to her mischief.”

“Qhaero must be very patient,” Narcisa remarked, and Larra laughed as they made their way down the steps into the yard. The cluster of Stormlords saw her and exchanged hasty looks before bowing to her. She smiled tightly and walked past with Narcisa. Glancing over her shoulder as she reached the door inside, she glimpsed the Stormlords approaching Gendry.

What’s going on there? Frowning, she tried not to let her imagination run away with itself, and turned instead to the cool dimness of the stone passages, through which she walked with Narcisa, who diverted as they approached Hoster Blackwood’s small chamber, smiling and kissing Larra’s cheek before departing. Larra heard Hoster – Ser Hoster, she reminded herself – greet Narcisa enthusiastically.

Larra continued down the corridor until she reached a now-familiar door: she had spent a lot of time hovering around this chamber in particular in the days after the Battle, after she had rested and others, who were not nearly as fortunate as she had been in the injuries they sustained, were still bedbound.

Darkstar was propped up against a mound of pillows, now, an improvement: in the early days of his recovery, his pain had been secondary to his frustration at being bound to his bed, flat on his back. Nestor had wanted to alleviate any strain on Ser Gerold’s chest, which had been stitched shut with meticulous sutures, dressed and bound with clean linen bandages. Those dressings had been changed daily and assessed personally by Nestor Maegos, to ensure no rot set in. Darkstar had slept for much of his early recovery, aided by doses of milk of the poppy which Nestor had weaned him from carefully as Darkstar’s pain faded and his healing improved.

Joy Hill huffed as Larra entered the chamber and tossed a book down on the end of Darkstar’s bed. He had that familiar gleam in his eye that Larra appreciated more than any other. The glitter of mischief.

“He’s being an absolute shit again,” declared Joy. Larra liked that she did not curtsey and that, with Larra at least, she spoke plainly. Joy was a bastard born of one of the greatest families in Westeros: they were more alike than anyone else Larra had ever met. Like Larra, Joy had learned to keep her head up high or spend her life gazing forlornly at the flagstones. She was a Lannister by blood, if not by name, and that made her superior to most people she’d ever meet. Even if they’d never acknowledge it. Joy did rise from her chair, though, and swept her long golden braid over one shoulder, shooting Ser Gerold a seething look. Darkstar’s amethyst eyes glowed as if with live purple fire, his lips curving into a decadent smirk that he knew compounded Joy’s ire.

“Have you forgotten your charm lessons with your septa?” Larra raised an eyebrow at Ser Gerold, whose smirk deepened.

“Never had any,” Darkstar said airily. Larra exchanged a look with Joy, who curtseyed and withdrew from the room. When the sound of her soft footsteps in the corridor beyond had faded, Darkstar swept his fierce amethyst eyes over Larra. She lowered herself onto Joy’s vacated seat, relaxing against it, relieved to sit. The exhaustion of the Battle was nothing to the perpetual draining exhaustion of motherhood. There were no knighthoods given for the heroic devotion of mothering.

Aella squirmed but Arthur gazed contentedly at her with amethyst eyes identical to Larra’s own, his long, beautiful black eyelashes feathery and soft when she kissed them. Larra unfastened the bindings and settled Aella in the crook of Ser Gerold’s arm. He accepted her readily, cooing softly and offering her a finger to grab when Larra freed her arms from her swaddling. After a moment, Darkstar settled back and gazed at Larra. “Why a Lannister?”

Larra raised her eyebrows at the query then smirked. “Have you truly not worked it out yet?” she countered. “No true Dornishman of this age would ever suffer to expire in the presence of a Lannister.”

Ser Gerold gave her one of his slow, predatory grins. His eyes twinkled with irony. “You worry I shall perish in the night and send a Lannister to provoke me to endure.”

“Joy’s company cannot be so terrible.”

“It is not,” Darkstar smirked, shrugging his wide shoulders idly. Sometimes Larra forgot that he was Dornish: sometimes it was unmistakable. There was a looseness, a sensuality to his movements that no other Westerosi could ever imitate. Dornishmen were unique to the continent, thanks entirely to their Rhoynish ancestry. The more time she spent with Darkstar and Lady Nym, the more Larra appreciated that Rhoynish flair. It saddened her that so much of Rhoynish culture had been destroyed by wars with Old Valyria. “I enjoy her. That lioness has fangs, though she shows them but rarely.”

“That she does,” Larra agreed. For a little while, they sat in companionable silence. Darkstar fussed and played with Aella while Larra remained quiet and contemplative.

“What is wrong?” Ser Gerold prompted after a little while. Larra rubbed her face, exhausted.

“The Stormlords,” she admitted. “They plot.”

As a Dornishman, Darkstar’s first instinct was to scowl with distrust. The millennia-long rivalry between the Dornish and the Stormlords was well-documented. He shifted in his bed, stroking Aella’s fine dark hair thoughtfully.

“You know this?”

“I suspect it.”

“But you do not fear it?” Darkstar prompted, watching her shrewdly.

“I didn’t say that.”

Darkstar cast his amethyst eyes over her. She could see his mind working but she was never able to speculate what he was thinking about. He was a shrewd and cautious thinker and though he wore his intelligence like armour, he kept his thoughts to himself.

“There is much that you must fear now.”

“Must I?” Larra retorted quietly.

“Why is it that you dread the Stormlords colluding?” Ser Gerold asked.

“I worry they involve Gendry in their plans,” Larra admitted.

“He is the son of their liege and king.”

“They lived in exile rather than kneel to Robert,” Larra reminded him; Darkstar shrugged.

“They rejected Robert but the Baratheons held their loyalty for generations, as did the Durrandons before them,” he said idly. “What purpose could they have for you, do you think?”

“Nothing good.”

“Not for you. The son of the Usurper and the Last Dragon’s only surviving daughter,” Darkstar mused. “How many aspiring kingmakers do you think there are in this world? They will kill each other to put you on the Iron Throne. They will kill Gendry to take his place at your side. I wonder which would outlast all the rest. My gold is on Lonmouth.”

Larra frowned shrewdly. He spoke too casually of something she dreaded, as if he had spent a long time thinking about it. If he had thought of it, others were thinking of it too.

“The Seven Kingdoms have never accepted a bastard as their sovereign,” Larra said, rolling her eyes impatiently. Darkstar should know better than to believe Westeros would accept a bastard on the Iron Throne. He may be Dornish, where bastards were treated better than anywhere else in the Seven Kingdoms, but he was no fool. Gendry would never sit upon the Iron Throne.

“Outside of Dorne, the people loved Robert Baratheon. He gave them seventeen years of peace,” Darkstar said thoughtfully. “That is not forgotten – in fact I would go so far as to say people hold onto their fond memories of Robert’s reign more fiercely than ever. Winter has come, following years of the worst wars our continent has suffered since the Dance…” He gazed at her, his amethyst eyes illuminating with something like irony or delight, or both. “Robert’s son and Rhaegar’s daughter ruling together from the Iron Throne.”

Larra bristled. “Don’t even say it.”

“I am not the only one to say it: of all those who do, it is I who says it to your face,” Ser Gerold said unapologetically. “The idea of you – peace between Robert and Rhaegar through their children, forgiveness of the old wound that tore our continent apart, reconciliation… The hope your son embodies for a future. That is powerful.”

“I don’t want Arthur to embody anything. He is not the personification of all the wrongs committed by our fathers made right,” Larra bristled, holding Arthur closer to her. “That is… That is an awful thing to put on an infant.”

“And yet… It will be, by your will or not,” Darkstar warned, his eyes on Arthur. “Your birth reveals the truth of things between Prince Rhaegar and Lady Lyanna. Your son’s birth will be seen by all to be Prince Rhaegar and his cousin Robert reconciling from beyond the grave. Healing Westeros, as Jaehaerys healed the Seven Kingdoms, as Aegon the Unlucky and his ill-fated brother Viserys healed the realm after the Dance.”

“If that is what I represent, what of Daenerys?”

Darkstar’s face darkened.

“Her. You are familiar with the Blackfyre Rebellions,” Ser Gerold mused. “I like the symmetry. A cadet branch of House Targaryen growing overly ambitious only to be humbled.”

“You equate a trueborn daughter to a bastard son?” Larra raised an eyebrow.

“In this analogy,” Ser Gerold shrugged, stroking Aella’s hair thoughtfully. “Daenerys is the last-born female descendant of a past king. You and Jon are direct descendants of that king’s eldest son. You have the only claim that matters. Whatever claim Daenerys has, she has dreamed up. Besides…cast to Essos, deprived a genuine Targaryen upbringing, isolated and lacking allies strong enough to withstand the true might of their relatives, Daenerys embodies the threat of the Blackfyres.”

“History does tend to rhyme, doesn’t it?” Larra mused, settling back in her chair, mulling things over.

“At the height of the Dance, Aegon the Elder fell from Sunfyre and shattered his body. Lady Targaryen began her conquest and stole a great victory in the Reach and the Westerlands yet in her hubris she suffered the same fate as Aegon the Elder,” Ser Gerold continued thoughtfully. He glanced up at Larra out of the corner of his eye. “Has there been any change?”

Two days after the Battle had ended, Ser Jorah had set out from Winterfell to find Drogon – and Lady Targaryen, if he could. Somehow, he had managed it. Lady Targaryen had been thrown off Drogon’s back and lay shattered. Only Drogon’s intense body-heat had prevented her from perishing in the snow. But her body had been broken. Both her legs had been shattered, along with her hips, and until she woke they could not determine just how independent her mobility might be. They could not tell if she had broken her back until she woke.

Larra did not wish to be there when she woke. She could not imagine the reaction of the Mother of Dragons were she to learn she would never walk again.

She thought of Bran’s saddle, designed by Lord Tyrion to enable him to ride even though he would never walk.

Would he design a saddle for Drogon? Would Drogon accept it? How would Lady Targaryen access it? One had to be able to climb onto a dragon to mount it.

A khal who could not ride was no khal.

Larra held his gaze. Quietly, she said, “She sleeps.”

Something flickered across Darkstar’s eyes.

“It has been weeks. Yet still she sleeps,” he sighed. She could not help but wonder at his choice of words when Darkstar continued, “Perhaps she dreams too deeply.”

Larra stared at him.

Bran had told Larra often that when he had slept after his fall, he had dreamed. Terrible dreams that had frightened him. Some he could not remember, others he remembered all too vividly yet had difficulty explaining to Larra in a way that satisfactorily instilled the same dread in her as he had felt while enduring them. That was before: now Brandon had the power to show her.

Lady Targaryen had been sleeping for weeks. She was wasting away, as Bran had after his fall: she was being kept alive with honey and warm milk, kept warm and bathed often, her healing limbs moved tenderly by Nestor Maegos, who visited her routinely and gave instruction for her care. Lady Missandei tirelessly tended to her. Larra and Sansa had had to intervene when they feared for Missandei’s health.

It had not occurred to Larra that the reason Lady Targaryen had been asleep so long was because she was drowning in dreams.

Now that Ser Gerold had inadvertently pointed out the obvious, Larra was filled with a strange sort of dread.

It is beautiful beneath the sea, but if you stay too long, you will drown…

Darkstar sighed. “It would be kinder were she to drift away rather than wake from her dreams if indeed they are so lovely.”

Larra glanced sharply at him. She understood the implication. Fiercely, she told him, “Guest-right will never be violated under the roof of this castle.”

Darkstar was boldness itself, to suggest to a Stark that they violate guest-right.

“By you, perhaps,” Darkstar murmured, his eyes glinting. “There are many more residing beneath Winterfell’s roof who have a stake in the Stormborn’s survival. After the Lion Culling… I never thought I would ever have it in me to find sympathy for Lannisters…but now all the world knows what Daenerys Targaryen does when she does not get her way.”

“She is under the protection of guest-right,” Larra repeated firmly, and sighed, “Even if she was not, she is the mother of my niece.”

Darkstar gazed down at Aella. There was something soft in his features as he gazed at her. Darkstar was rarely soft. But Aella was innocence itself, too fresh and new to know any evil.

“The child she fell pregnant with after raping your brother,” Darkstar said, his voice a soft, low growl. His eyes indeed glinted like dark stars, the violet swallowed up by shadows. “The child she rejected… You know better than any what it feels like to be rejected by someone who should love you as a mother.”

She hated that he was right. She hated that she was filled with righteous fury on Aella’s own behalf for being rejected just for being born. “And for that I should allow Daenerys to be murdered?”

“No. For the good of Westeros, she should be allowed to drift away as nature intended,” Darkstar sighed, wincing slightly as he adjusted himself on the pillows. He picked absently at his bandages.

Larra sighed heavily, and admitted, “It’s not that I don’t have the stomach for it. I have done plenty in my life that fills me with shame, but in the moment it was necessary and I know that if I had to relive it, I would make the same choices.” She fell silent. She knew everything she had said was the absolute truth. She would repeat it all again. Every choice she had made. Even the horrendous ones. Even the ones that had cost her Rickon and Osha and Jojen and Summer and Hodor. She rubbed her face. “It would be the easiest thing in the world to smother her and be relieved that the threat was dealt with… I choose not to dishonour myself any more than I already have.”

“Then you must live with what comes next,” Darkstar said. He sighed heavily. “Let us play cyvasse. We can discuss what you shall say when you confront Lord Lonmouth.”

Larra frowned. “You believe he is the ringleader?”

“You do not?” Darkstar challenged. “Lonmouth is loyal to the Last Dragon, still. Rhaegar’s son is already King in the North…but his daughter…” He gazed at Larra so intensely that Larra started to fidget. “The Stormlords need a ruler with a steely will, whom they respect and admire, whom they would die to defend and who they know would fight to the death for them in turn.”

Larra swallowed under the intensity of his gaze.

They played a game of cyvasse. Darkstar won. Larra was distracted, thinking of the conspiracy of Stormlords.


She did not seek out Lord Lonmouth to confront him, nor did she seek out any opportunity to do so. Not for weeks: she wanted to get her own thoughts in order about the whole debacle – claiming Storm’s End. She mentioned it to no-one but Darkstar, who left the confines of his chamber weeks later with Nestor Maegos’ blessing and could now irritate Joy Hill wherever he found her.

And he did often seek her out: Larra suspected he had grown fond of her and missed her now that she was no longer duty-bound to visit him.

Larra wandered to the Great Hall to dine with the rest one evening. Irritated by a fresh bout of nausea and sleeplessness despite Aella now sleeping through the night, she was in no mood to be in company, and if she had she not been so grumpy she would have cautioned herself against confronting anyone, let alone the elusive ringleader of a potential coup. She spotted Lord Lonmouth purely by chance.

Without the burden of her children bound to her chest – she had on her grey, black and red bridal gown – she stood upright, shoulders thrown back, and levelled Lord Lonmouth with a dangerous look, cutting off his path.

“Do not ever conspire to use Gendry to manipulate me,” she warned him. Lonmouth’s eyes gleamed. “If you want something, ask it of me directly. I promise you, you’ll find more satisfaction trying to convince me than conspiring against me. What is it that you want, Lord Lonmouth?”

Something like delight glittered in Lonmouth’s pale eyes. Appreciation, perhaps, but sorrow as well. What did he see when he looked at her? Who did he hear when he heard her voice? She waited for his reply. He chose his words carefully, trapped in a wolf’s den.

“The Stormlands are in chaos. All the men are dead; those left have seen too many winters, or too few. They are last-born sons, distant cousins, lads who never expected to inherit, who have never been taught to rule. They are dominated by advisors with their own agendas. Or there are no men left. Women must rule for their infant sons and they are left vulnerable,” Lord Lonmouth said grimly. “The Stormlands need someone to unite them, to lead them. To rule them.”

“And you think Gendry can do that?” Larra asked, testing him.

“Gendry is a good man. People respect him, they follow him,” Lonmouth replied carefully. She narrowed her eyes at him, waiting. If he did not say it, she would know he could not be trusted to speak his mind to her, and she worried about someone who conspired to use her but did not trust her to know the truth of it. Lonmouth sighed heavily, his expression almost regretful. “But he has not been raised and educated to rule. When I asked him about claiming Storm’s End, he told me he’d likely do more damage through his inexperience. He advised we looked instead to his lady.”

Gendry had not said a word to her.

And that worried her.

After dinner, she sought out Bran. He had not come to the hall: Jon said he had been practising his handwriting in the solar the last time he saw Bran.

Irritated by her confrontation with Lord Lonmouth, annoyed that Gendry kept quiet about his part in arranging a coup around her, she sought out Bran, desperate for familiarity. For simpler times when it had been just them and all they’d had to worry about was wights and wildlings.

Nothing was simple now.

It should have excited her. Her mind was whirring with possibilities, waking up – as if she had been sleeping for a very long time, her muscles aching. Her mind ached because she had not had to use it for so long. Years spent under the great weirwood, she had learned the Old Tongue and how to smith obsidian but that was the extent of her learning. Every day had been stagnation.

She entered the solar, rubbing her belly, and had to do a double-take before she realised what she had stumbled upon.

Darkstar loomed over Bran, a dagger unsheathed in his hand.

Without thinking, she pinned him to the wall, Fang at his throat. Bran sat serenely in his chair, his pale hands folded on his lap.

He spoke gently but firmly, telling her, “Larra…leave him be.”

Larra glared at Darkstar, fire burning through her veins. Fury ignited her mind. Rubies glittered at Darkstar’s throat: she eased the pressure of the blade against his throat and Darkstar gasped. She blinked and assessed what she was seeing.

Darkstar looked flustered, bright-eyed and almost haggard – shocked. Not because of her, she knew instinctually.

“I meant the boy no harm, Lady, I swear it. He…startled me,” Darkstar said, gulping. Larra had never seen him rattled before, not even when duelling the Night King. She released him, and Darkstar fled the chamber.

In the dark corridor beyond, Ser Gerold paused, pushing his hair out of his face with a shaking hand. He let out a shuddering breath, his heart thundering uncomfortably in his chest.

Larra turned to stare at Bran, who sat complacently, unruffled.

“You’ve got to stop doing that,” Larra said shakily, scowling. “Frightening people. One day, someone is going to hurt you.”

“Aren’t you going to ask what Darkstar and I discussed?”

“That’s your business. I’ve enough secrets; I don’t need anyone else’s,” Larra snapped, too angry about the Stormlords’ conspiracy.

“A secret may be shared,” Bran breathed, gazing into the firelight. Then he smiled, and turned to Larra. “How are you feeling?”

“Irritable,” Larra snapped. She felt nauseous and bloated and could not get comfortable. She took a seat near Bran. His eyes glittered warmly. Larra gazed at him, as Bran smiled at her.

He leaned in and reached for her hand, clasping it gently in his own. Larra was struck again by how large his hands were, how long and clever his fingers were. He had a man’s hands, a warrior’s hands. Unlike Jon’s, they were unblemished by callouses. She read the soft smile and the glitter in his dark eyes. Gentle joy seemed to radiate from them, and she frowned. “It’s time for you to go, Larra.”

She blinked, confused. “You wish me to leave?”

“Long have you have sacrificed your life, Larra. You set yourself aside for me, everything that you were and could have been, you tucked away,” Bran said softly. “For me… You let me fly. Now it is your turn. Embrace all that you are and become who you were born to be… Journey south and claim Storm’s End. That is your future.”

Larra felt herself close up as hot fury suffused her body. Heat pricked her eyes despite her anger. Hurt lashed through her. “My family is here.”

Bran sighed softly. “Father raised you to rule. And you have taught Sansa magnificently. You could remain here, as a Stark of Winterfell, with your husband and your children…and as time wears on, you will be consumed with dread and discontent. You will find yourself without purpose. And the greatest fear you have always had, Larra, is to be useless.”

Larra wiped her eyes, and said hoarsely, “That’s a delicate way of telling me there is no place for me.”

Bran squeezed her hand, and she glanced up. Bran’s eyes blazed. “There will always be a place for you, Larra.”

“But?”

“But if you stay here, you will wither and crumble to ash. The fire that sets your blood alight will cool and you will resent the choices you did not make.”

“I love you. After all that we have endured, I do not wish to be parted from you.” She wiped her eyes again, startled by how upset she was, how quick to tears. She sniffed and Bran’s expression gentled softly, his gaze filled with understanding and deep love.

Bran leaned closer, cradling her face in one of his large, soft palms. He stroked her cheek with his thumb, his eyes enormous and adoring. They glittered wetly. His voice was hoarse, thick with love and sadness, as he said, “There is nowhere you can go that I will not be with you.”

Tears slipped down her cheeks, burning. Bran rested his brow against hers and breathed deeply, calmly. She mimicked him, taking his calm into her with every breath. “This is how we set each other free…” He kissed her brow tenderly. “The Stormlords conspire to install you as their Liege. Let them. For that is where you need to be.”

She raised her gaze and wiped her eyes. “Need to be?” She frowned. Then she was filled with dread. “What has happened?”

“Nothing, yet,” Bran said softly. His eyes twinkled appreciatively. “Though I am gratified to know you have already anticipated more troubles to come.”

“How could I not?” Larra said quietly. “The entire known world has been thrown into chaos.”

Bran nodded solemnly. “A false dragon flies across the Narrow Sea,” he said dreamily. “It sets its gaze upon the Seven Kingdoms, gold following wherever it goes.”

“You’ve been cryptic since meeting Bloodraven but this is ridiculous. Speak normally,” Larra growled, and Bran’s eyes twinkled.

“A young man believing himself to be the son of Rhaegar Targaryen and Elia Martell has contracted the Golden Company to claim the Iron Throne for himself,” Bran said simply.

“Believes himself to be?”

“They have every reason to believe he is the child of Rhaegar,” Bran mused.

A thought niggled her about the Golden Company and an alleged Targaryen. How had this false Aegon survived walking into the midst of the Golden Company let alone contracted them? The Golden Company had been founded on the principle of removing the Targaryen line from the Iron Throne and installing the heirs of House Blackfyre to it.

Bran snickered delicately to himself, as if indulging in some private joke. Larra assumed that he was. “The Sun blinded the Spider.”

“You are doing it again.”

“It is a rare thing to keep a secret from Lord Varys,” Bran smiled. “And Elia Martell did not lack for guile.” He glanced at Larra. “Before the Sacking of King’s Landing, Lord Varys removed the infant all had been led to believe was Aegon from his cradle, switching him with a babe from Pisswater Bend in Flea Bottom… Varys was not to know that Prince Aegon was never in King’s Landing. Clever Elia secreted her son away from Dragonstone the moment she received summons from King Aerys.”

Larra stared. “So the babe murdered by the Mountain…”

“A nameless infant from Flea Bottom,” Bran sighed.

“What about Princess Rhaenys?” Larra asked, something leaping in her chest. Bran’s eyes dimmed, sadness radiating from him. He stroked his thumb against the back of her hand, for this was Larra’s sister.

“Rhaenys was already known at Court. Any switch would have been found out immediately,” Bran sighed. “Elia made a terrible choice.” He glanced at Larra. “One you can respect.” Their eyes went to the small portrait of Rickon on the mantelpiece.

Larra’s heart ached. “I miss him.”

“I know… Me too,” Bran sighed miserably.

“You get to see him whenever you wish.” Bran’s smile was pained.

“It does not do to dwell on dreams,” he said softly, and Larra thought they were both thinking of the Bloodraven when Bran continued, “I shall not waste away, lingering in the past.”

“You turn your eye to the future. You believe mine lies to the south,” Larra prompted. Bran smiled at her, as if they were sharing a secret.

“Listen to the whispers in the deepest part of your heart, the part you have been trained all your life to ignore… What does it yearn for?” Bran smiled. “I know what it cries out for. To be useful. To embrace your ambitions and utilise your honed mind, to lead. To unite men and build great cities. To be able to protect and provide for, not just one crippled brother, but realms.”

Larra sat back and thought about all Bran had said, quietly wiping her eyes on her sleeve. He wished her to leave Winterfell, to embrace her potential that would otherwise be squandered. He had frightened the unshakeable Darkstar. And he warned of an invasion to the south.


An hour later, Larra sat in bed watching Aella and Arthur cuddle as they slept in their cradle. She heard Gendry’s footsteps and sighed. She waited until he had kissed her in greeting and stripped off to join her in bed. His movements were freer; his leg no longer pained him except on the days he had worked too hard.

She curled up against him when he opened his arms to her. He relaxed into the bed, cuddling her close to him.

“You didn’t tell me about the Stormlords.”

He sighed heavily. “The day we buried our dead, the night you wept in my arms… You told me you feared you’d have no place here… I wanted to know what the Stormlords were offering before I came to you. I should have known no distraction could ever prevent you from noticing. You’re too cunning.”

“I have been distracted,” she admitted, “but not so distracted that I didn’t notice what was before my eyes. The Stormlords could learn a thing or two about the art of subtlety from the Dornish.

“I don’t think it’s in Stormlords’ natures to be subtle,” Gendry chuckled. “Except Lonmouth… He scares me.”

“He scares me too,” Larra admitted, sighing heavily. “Darkstar’s convinced Lonmouth is loyal to Rhaegar’s memory. He’ll do anything to see me… I don’t know. Jon is King here but I…”

“D’you think he’d try and put you on the Iron Throne?” Gendry frowned.

“I’d like to think Lonmouth knows the Iron Throne has only the power we give it,” Larra mused. She curled against Gendry. “He is cunning. The same way Darkstar is… Jon told me that your uncle Stannis confessed he realised his mistake almost too late – Ser Davos convinced him that he was trying to win the Iron Throne to save the Seven Kingdoms but what he should have been doing all along was trying to save the Seven Kingdoms. The Iron Throne would then have been his by virtue, not inheritance.”

Gendry frowned thoughtfully at her.

“I only saw Stannis once,” he said, and Larra glanced at him, startled. He gave her a rueful look. “Before he fled King’s Landing and the Hand of the King died – they both came to Tobho Mott’s shop. To see me. The same way your father came to see me a few months later… Your father was stern and kind. Stannis was stern… Donal Noye says my father was the true steel; Renly was bright copper… Stannis was bitter iron. He’d break before he bent.”

“Donal has a keen instinct about people,” Larra said. She watched Gendry carefully. He spent a lot of time in the forges, working alongside Donal Noye. Noye had built Robert his great war-hammer for the Rebellion, had grown up at Storm’s End. She knew Gendry respected the old armourer. “Does he know about this?”

Gendry nodded. “He said if we’re to go south, we’re to take our own men with us. Him, and others. Men of the Night’s Watch are Jon’s brothers – their blood runs black, same as his. That makes you their sister as much as Jon’s.”

A memory stirred, something Bran had shared with her…Yoren. The reason he had nearly killed his horse to get to King’s Landing, and Father, and deliver the news straight to Benjen Stark’s brother that his wife had taken the Imp. Loyalty. The Night’s Watch were brothers. They rewarded loyalty in kind. They were loyal to Jon; she had proven she was worthy of their loyalty too, fighting side-by-side with them during the battle.

“They’ll fight for you, because they love you,” Gendry said. He was not upset that other men might covet her; he knew it was love born of respect. “They know you’ve fought for them.”

“You’ve been thinking about this,” Larra said quietly. Gendry sighed heavily.

“You love your family.”

“But?”

Gendry’s lip twitched. He knew everything before the word but was horseshit. “But you won’t be happy here. Bran told me that if we stay here, it’ll be like you’re back under the great weirwood. You’ll put yourself last, tuck yourself away, until there’s nothing left of you.” Larra stared at him. “Tell me you’ve not been thinking of it, too.”

“Of course I’ve been thinking of it,” Larra murmured. She admitted, “I don’t want to leave my home, Gendry. I don’t want to be separated from my family, not after what we’ve all been through to get back to each other.”

There is nowhere you can go that I will not be with you…

She would carry them all in her heart, as she always had. They would be tucked there, safe, like Rickon and Robb and Osha and Hodor and Theon and Father. Always with her. Always safe.

Eyes burning, she admitted hoarsely, “But I know I will not survive staying here.”

Gendry squeezed her to him, kissing the top of her head.

“I know,” he said gently.

She sat up, wiping her face. “I have the strength to leave this place behind… But if we agree to leave, everything we will face, was must do so together. We must appear united in all things.”

“Even when we’re not?”

“Perhaps that is something we must agree on, too: we work things out together in private, before we ever declare ourselves to others,” Larra said, grasping his hands and gazing earnestly at him. Gendry’s expression was fierce as he nodded.

“As we do already,” he said, smiling at her. She smiled back but her tear-stained skin pulled taut, scratchy.

“And if we go south…it is not to seek out power. It is not to stake a claim on the Iron Throne,” she said carefully. “I’ve no interest in it and that must be understood from the outset. I will have no part in conspiracies to place me on the Iron Throne. If we go south, it is to give our children a home. We will unite the Stormlands to safeguard everyone in those lands from invasion.”

Gendry blinked at her.

“An invasion – from who? Who’s left?” he asked, almost indignant.

“Westeros is more vulnerable now than it has been since the Dance of Dragons,” Larra said sombrely. “Without the Dothraki to check their influence, the Free Cities will rise in power and wealth – unless revolution takes hold and the slaves rise up. Bran told me that the Golden Company threatens to invade Westeros led by a false dragon.”

Gendry smiled softly and leaned in to kiss her. “A good thing we have a real one to guard it.”

Was he referring to Rhaegal or to Larra? Did it matter?

He sighed and gazed at her, suddenly serious, almost apprehensive. “To Storm’s End, then?”

Larra reached up and stroked his face. She would leave her brothers and sisters behind. To guard the realms of men. “To Storm’s End.”

Notes:

A.N.: I wanted to make a huge distinction between Larra’s motivations and Daenerys’. Daenerys wants the Iron Throne because she wants it: Larra knows that Westeros is vulnerable and if people are already conspiring to unite under her leadership, that’s a good starting point to galvanising support against invaders. Larra’s learned from the past: her mentioning Stannis’ philosophy is important – as is the fact that it originated from Ser Davos.
Larra’s story continues in Dragons’ Daughter.

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