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Cersei Lannister is not her mother. Her was born at Riverrun between the Trident and the Tumblestone, slipping into life amidst thicket and bower, leaf and trellis and glen. In that place (like the dense green heart of an emerald), snow was only a word, north nothing more than a thought that caused a shiver and a wary glance. Yet she was her father’s daughter, though her hair was red as her mother’s—red as blood, as the leaves of a weirwood. She had eyes like ice and skin as fair as snow: a prophecy made flesh, the echo of three drops of blood on a swath of white linen, the only gift Catelyn Tully ever gave her daughter. Ned Stark whispered into the tiny whorl of his first child’s ear that the North was her blood and her birthright, even if Winterfell would not be.
Her mother was already dead, and Robert Baratheon had decreed that Ned Stark—his brother by choice, his strong left arm where Jon Arryn was his right—would wed the Lannister girl in his place. Mourning, it seemed, was given to kings alone.
Cersei Lannister has never been a mother to her, in name any more than by blood. Sansa has spent a long time yearning for the sweet words she sing-songs against Tommen’s plump cheek, for the feel of those long, pale fingers sliding through Myrcella’s golden hair. When that particular jealousy fades (though it never dissipates entirely, lingering like smoke about her eyes), another kind replaces it: Lady Stark is the most beautiful woman Sansa has ever seen, will ever see in her life, perhaps. Her hair gleams, a chink of light that draws the eye in bustling yard or crowded hall, and her smile flashes like the shine off a knife. She is like a diamond, Sansa thinks, polished to a high sheen; an ornament, men might say, but Sansa is acquainted with that hard, winking edge, the parts of her that are honed to cut. If Sansa could be anything it would be that—a wolf, a lioness, some perfect creature with a heart carved of ice.
Sometimes Lady Stark says, little dove, my beauty, sweetling—in company or before her lord husband—and her green eyes catch on Sansa’s bowed lips and lustrous hair, the white curve of her throat and her fine hands, exquisitely folded in her lap. The girl can feel the weight of that gaze and somehow it presses on her narrow shoulders more heavily than that of any boy in the streets of the Winter Town, any blacksmith’s apprentice or stable hand that ever stared at her in open-mouthed desire.
When they are alone she says instead, Snow, though Sansa is a Stark by blood and name, her father’s trueborn child. Lord Eddard loves his motherless girl best of all. (Sometimes Cersei is possessed of a ravenous fear that he knows the truth about her own children, that one day she will find them knelt on the stones of Winterfell’s yard, Ice flashing through the quivering air above their warm skin.) Her lord husband brings Sansa now blue winter roses, now a fine white cloak made from the pelt of a great snow bear. Now, last and best of all, a direwolf pup abandoned in the late-autumn snow, a tiny beast the color of the winter sky that turns its face without hesitation into Sansa’s shoulder in search of warmth or food. There is nothing for Cersei’s children—not even for Joffrey, who will be Lord of Winterfell one day (one day soon, she prays.) In moments like these, Snow—sweet and soft in her honeyed voice once her husband has gone—is her favorite weapon.
Sometimes she thinks it may be her only weapon. The girl is beloved by all—by cooks, who slip her lemon cakes (she shares them with little Myrcella, and Cersei hates the sight of her daughter squealing with delight and kissing the cheek of Catelyn Tully’s whelp); by washer women who take extra care with her fine things because she is such a beauty, their Lady Sansa (theirs as if she were their protector, as if she would ever be lady of Winterfell); by the low folk of the Winter Town who bow and scrape when she rides past clad in gray and white, throwing coppers from horseback with that beast trotting serenely in her wake.
Were it not for her mirror, Cersei Lannister might have died years ago in this bleak expanse of green-gray country, this place where the sky hangs heavy and the trees cluster dense and foreboding beneath it. It is so unlike the hills and fields of her childhood, the craggy, sunlit coast where she was born, that sometimes she hardly knows how she has come to be here. She thanks all the gods—though she believes in none of them, not really—for her mirror; at least she will not forget herself.
He comes to Winterfell as often as he can; every time he reins up his horse and emerges from the lion-crested helm, she feels something come right, like the pain and relief of a bone setting. Sometimes, it takes every well-trained muscle, every ounce of strength she possesses, not to run to him there in the yard beneath the avid gaze of every member of her household—her twin is a spectacle none of them like to miss. She waits for night when they make their separate, careful ways to the tumbled-down tower that is their habitual haunt, their place in this home that will never truly be that for either of them. Splayed on the cold stone she clenches her teeth so hard her jaw aches the next day to keep from crying his name. She opens herself, and he fills her like water, like there is no part of her he has never touched. She sinks her nails into his shoulders and back, savoring the sticky smear of his blood, the salt copper taste when she licks it from her fingers afterward. Face to face, shaking, they knit together like a scar and he says, You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. You are the most beautiful woman in the realm. In the world. You are the only woman I have ever wanted. He has been saying it since they were little more than children, and yet hearing it now makes her weak with happiness. Her stone-faced northman has never called her beautiful, and Jaime knows it. When she told him (after a year of marriage when she cried in his arms because Joff’s birth had nearly killed her, because he had not been there, because she missed the Rock, the stone garden, the Sunset Sea) he had offered to carve out Ned Stark’s eyes and present them to her. She had graciously declined.
It is on one of their scarce nights together in the ruined tower that Jaime first speaks Sansa’s name—at least, it is the first time Cersei can remember. They are speaking of Myrcella (undeniably Jaime’s, as all her children are), when her twin says, “Come, let’s be honest—it’s Sansa who’s your true protégée.” His tone is flippant as he sprawls on his back, the grin palpable in his lazy drawl, and she is frozen momentarily, breathless with rage.
“How dare you—”
“Calm down,” he says, in that tone he’d used when they were children, when he would take a running start and fling himself into open space, her heart contracting as his body fell and fell toward the shining sea. “But you must admit, she has her charms. She’s you in miniature.”
He says more—they both do, no longer touching, feeling for their discarded clothing on the pitted floor. But that is enough. She can hear Jaime’s voice humming at the back of her skull, impossibly faint, his words of only moments before. Only now they have twisted and warped, become the words of someone she does not know; it is as if he said that Sansa, and not she, were the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.
The heat of that not-quite betrayal smolders beneath her breastbone for three days, and she feels it a little more every time she breathes. On the third day, she tells Jaime that she wants the girl dead. She whispers right into his ear (while he is inside her, just before she comes) that he will be the one to do it.
“Cut out her heart,” she says afterward, “And bring it back to me in this.” It is an old jewelry box—their mother’s, he thinks, golden and inlaid with rubies, its soft inside the color of new blood.
At first he scoffs, hair falling into his eyes as he laughs at her. He takes the box from her hands like she is a child and it a precious something that is not to be toyed with. He leans in to kiss her, and she slaps him across the face.
“I would do it myself,” she says, “But this castle is full of eyes and the walls are full of ears. You will do what I cannot.” My brother, she thinks, my other half, my love, my truest self. If I were a man, I would kill her with my own two hands. I am not, but yours will be enough.
Sansa is to wed a son of Highgarden, and now that she has flowered, Cersei suggests perhaps it is time the girl be sent on to the place she will one day rule as Lady Tyrell. Though they have never met, they have been betrothed since Sansa was in swaddling clothes—Cersei saw to it herself, receiving rare praise and an even rarer smile from her lord husband, though all she had truly wanted was to send the girl as far away as possible (and the Tyrells, unlike the Dornish, were a breed she could understand, whose machinations were not so very different to her own. She could trust that they would not go against the wealth of Casterly Rock to back Sansa’s claim to Winterfell, if it ever came to that.) When the boy was crippled and Ned soothed Sansa with kind words—All this proves is that your husband is a brave man, sweet girl, Cersei could barely contain her mirth. It was almost as funny as a daughter of Casterly Rock wrapped up in a white and gray shroud, offered up to the gods of the frozen north like some blood sacrifice of old. She said, You must be a loyal wife to him despite his lameness, sweetling, and one day you will love your lord husband as I love mine. Cersei watched Sansa’s eyes turn from water to ice, felt her own contempt sour slightly in her belly when the girl said, I shall try to be as good a wife to Willas as you have been to my father, my lady.
Ned agrees that perhaps it is time. A sadness sinks into the lines of his face—when, she wonders, did they become so much older than they were? She thinks of Sansa’s name in Jaime’s mouth and feels nothing but the sharpest pleasure when she says that it will have to be soon. Winter is coming, she says, and it is not merely a recitation of the Stark words—just that morning a white raven of the Citadel landed on the maester’s arm, folding its pale wings, a wordless message.
“They will leave a fortnight hence,” Cersei declares, “And my brother will escort her to Highgarden. I do not trust a handful of household guards with the care of my sweetling. I will rest easy knowing she has Jaime for a protector.” Ned agrees to it without an argument, and somehow that irritates her—it is as if losing Sansa has driven the fight from him.
Cersei wonders if he still sees Catelyn Tully in his daughter—if he loved her, once. If that is why he could never have loved a second wife.
The morning of their departure is bright and cold as glass, last night’s snowfall glittering underfoot and lying over the castle like a veil. As Hullen helps her into the saddle, Sansa thinks that this is how she would like to remember her home—the stones in the courtyard pricked out by frost and everyone pink-cheeked from the chill, how the world smells clean and cold. Myrcella and Tommen are both weeping while Joffrey slouches beside his mother, lips quirked in a grin that is only playful now but which could, she knows, turn cruel at any moment. But he can’t pull her hair or pinch her now, and he wouldn’t dare call her Snow in front of their father. She will remember him like this, a golden lion cub ready to pounce.
Lady prowls about the hooves of Sansa’s horse, her ears erect and her large, yellow eyes moving over the assembled crowd. They rest on Jaime Lannister, resplendent in golden armor and lion-crested helm, and then on his twin. Lady Stark’s face is pale and lovely above a white fur cloak that is pinned at the throat with a lion’s head brooch. Her mouth is bent in an approximation of sadness, her gloved hands very still as Lady’s unblinking eyes rest on her.
Her father rides out with the column, but reins up when they reach the Kingsroad. He leans across to kiss her cheek and to say, “You are a daughter of Winterfell, and a child of the North. Do not forget what is in your blood.”
She remembers a story Old Nan told her once, three drops of blood on a cloth white as snow.
She follows Jaime Lannister down the Kingsroad, away from the snow-brushed world she loves, the only home she can imagine having. Away from the bed she nearly always shared with Jeyne Poole or Myrcella—her little darling, her sweet sister and special favorite—and away from Tommen’s little boy laughter when Lady would lick his ears. She does not look back, keeping her eyes fixed instead upon the scarlet cloak that stirs in the breeze.
He allows her to draw up alongside and says, “Are you overcome with joy at the prospect of meeting your betrothed, my lady? Forgive me for saying so, but you do not seem aflutter with feminine delight. But doubtless that will soon follow.” As always, there is a tone of mockery laced into the smooth fabric of his voice.
“Of course, ser” she says, “I have loved Willas from afar since we were promised to one another. I am sure that I will love him all the more once I have the chance to know him better.”
Jaime Lannister smirks. “The idea of loving a person one has never met has always been beyond me, I’m afraid.” Sansa blushes. “Is that how it happens in the songs? I confess, I’m not one for bards and ballads.” Sansa imagines a boy with chestnut curls and a lame leg, and then she thinks of Highgarden, pale marble colonnades and slim, graceful towers, trellises heavy with wisteria and climbing vines, orchards and flowerbeds sprawling down toward the Mander and candles hung in all the trees.
She glances down to see Lady’s bright eyes fixed on her, liquid gold beneath the shadow of towering sentinel pines. She doesn’t know where the courage comes from when she says, “Have you never known love yourself, ser? What a very great pity.”
“I loved a maid as fair as summer,” he sings out, startling her, “With sunlight in her hair.”
She is struck by the sweetness of his voice before she realizes that she is being well and truly mocked. Lady growls low, and Sansa kicks her horse into a canter, the direwolf loping at her side.
Jaime watches her go—all that red hair flying, Cersei in the set of her jaw and that ramrod spine. Something about it touches him, snaking in through a chink in his armor, slipping between layers of mail and leather and wool to where it can slide hot against his skin. He remembers his sister at her age—no, younger, for it now seems to him that Cersei’s eyes were opened long before she was as old as Sansa Stark is now. This girl is like someone asleep, he thinks, and one day soon she will wake to find that her dream was sweeter. He wonders if the bitterness will seep into her blood, will turn her eyes hard and her fingers calculated. He wonders if it will make her the thing she wants to become—the woman whose words are not pitched quite right in her girl’s voice.
Once when they were young he had told Cersei that they would run away together. They would make for Old Town by land (disguised as peasants, her in a gown of roughspun, he with gold tucked into his boots), and then they would find a ship for Braavos. They would wed once there, or perhaps the ship’s captain would agree to marry them, and they would do nothing but float down the canals in a brightly painted boat and eat pomegranates from the fruit sellers, just as they did in all the stories one heard of Braavos. Cersei would dress in gossamer silks and wear her hair loose; at night she would don Jaime’s clothes and they would stalk the alleys and wine sinks. They would know every glittering inch of Braavos and once they did, he had thought, it would have to be a home to them.
Even now, he can see light dancing in Cersei’s eyes, the smallest glimpse of pink as her lips parted in a smile that held nothing but joy. They were young then, believing they could make their own world and live in it together. Believing they were like any two lovers from a song, any man and woman in love. Now Cersei is the Lady of Winterfell and he will be the Lord of Casterly Rock—or so his father has decreed. Lord Tywin commands his presence at the Rock, and doubtless this detour via Winterfell and now Highgarden will not render his temper any sweeter or his patience any more forgiving. Jaime remembers the places in the bowels of the castle that he and Cersei would frequent, remembers the weight of the Rock poised above them. It had seemed a comfort then, but now he cannot shake the sense that it is waiting to bury him beneath its bulk. If he goes home, he knows, there will be a wife waiting; some cousin from a lesser branch, perhaps—his father likes the idea of a pure blood line, and a marriage so like his own would surely appeal to him. Perhaps she’ll even be like Cersei, Jaime reasons, Golden-haired and green-eyed, the familiar bones beneath her flesh. But just as there are no men in all the Seven Kingdoms like himself, there are no women like his sister.
When they make camp for the night Sansa Stark barely speaks to him, but her direwolf’s luminous eyes are ever watchful, and he feels them wherever he goes.
They ride south, passing through forests as old as the Wall, through the bogs and wetlands of the Neck. All the while, Jaime thinks of how he will do it. Cersei’s golden box is pillowed in his bedroll; he touches it and remembers his fingers on her lips, parted in sleep and impossibly soft. But they have not spent a whole night together in years, and he finds it difficult to recall how she looks in sleep, her face devoid of pretense. There are the Stark guardsman to be dealt with, but those are few enough—a smaller party would make better time, it was thought, and would attract less unwanted attention in such troubled times. He could kill them all if he had to, but in the end it does not come to that.
When they are less than two days’ ride from the Trident, bandits fall upon them. Clearheaded as ever in the midst of battle, Jaime falls back, keeping Sansa Stark on her shying mare behind him. He watches as half their number are slain—the brigands feathered not a few with arrows before anyone knew what was happening. They have not so much as brandished a blade in the direction of Sansa or himself, and that is how he knows that he and the girl have been deemed worthy of a good ransom. When the Stark men number only ten and the outlaws turn their attention to their prize, Jaime grips his golden sword a little tighter. He kills them one by one, and his body knows the motions like the steps of a dance, a sensation as distinct and as right as holding Cersei in his arms. There is blood on his sword and his armor, blood on his horse’s flanks, blood on the leaves that, this far south, are still mostly green.
Sansa Stark at the center of her small knot of guardsmen is untouched. Her white cloak is still spotless, her white cheeks marred only by tear tracks when she dismounts to kneel before him. “I thank you for my life, ser.”
What if he killed the rest of them now and slit her fragile throat here amidst the corpses and bloody earth? That is what Cersei would do. Sometimes it still surprises him, slipping in between his ribs like a blade, the realization that he is not Cersei.
They ride on.
On the nights between inns, the men toss and turn—the howling of wolves disturbs their sleep, snapping branches and rustling leaves rub raw their nerves. Wrapped in her fur cloak, Sansa sleeps serene. Now and then Jaime sees shadows flit across her face and remembers sleeping with his forehead to Cersei’s, trying to guess what she was dreaming. He was always right back then, but he does not try it now with this other girl, however like his sister she has made herself. She is still a wolf, a creature of winter, still a child. Part of him hopes that she dreams of peach trees and pleasure barges, of sweet songs floating down the paths of Highgarden.
Soon, the wolves lose patience. Two men have gone off to relieve themselves—two because they are afraid to go alone, even with blades in hand—when there is a rushing as of a great wind, and suddenly all around them there are yellow eyes between the trees. The men are dead in minutes, the wolves undeterred by those who remain. When the beasts stalk nearer, Sansa’s direwolf bursts from the underbrush like a gray ghost, like a plume of smoke. She lunges with teeth and claws and her smaller cousins scatter before her, the armed men cowering uselessly in a ring about Sansa.
Lady sits down neatly in the clearing, raises her head to the moon and howls high and sweet. The woods fall silent around them. Sansa says, “I dreamed of this. I watched them coming.”
The direwolf pads to her mistress on silent feet, lies down beside her, and rests her graceful head on two delicate front paws, licking blood from her muzzle. Sansa buries her face in the shaggy coat. Some of the men look at girl and wolf askance, and Jaime knows that feeling—they say beastling, skinchanger just as they say Kingslayer, just as they would say other words if only they knew. He understands, too, what it is like to keep a part of one’s soul in the body of another.
Every night that follows, he watches Sansa’s still form swathed in white and curled against her sleeping direwolf. Somehow, from afar, he feels the pressing weight of Casterly Rock as though he is still a child, still thriving below in that cool dark with Cersei at his side. He wonders how it is that this girl has so much of the North in her, so much snow and wolfsong, yet he has nearly none of his own home. Cersei took all their share and still was denied the place they were born to hold, relegated to be some man’s wife. This is why he is a soldier—battle is easier than making sense of the games they play, killing is simpler than manipulating the strings of all those intricate marionettes.
As they continue south they pass from one season to another—the Reach is still in the first flush of autumn, trees flaming and falling leaves dropping lazily like fat snowflakes of red and brown and gold. Sansa Stark tilts her head back and smiles, and Jaime half expects her to open her mouth, but she does not.
“I’ve never seen such trees,” she says.
With a sweeping gesture he says, “Your kingdom, my lady—famed for foliage and chivalry alike,” and Sansa Stark giggles, her perfect posture and serene expression rippling like water into a picture of childlike joy.
Sansa bites back a quip about chivalry, about honor and true knights, an unformed thought about the irony of a man with no honor serving as her escort into this place where courtly ways still hold strong. He is not, after all, quite the monster she half expected he would be. She thinks of him whirling, sword in hand and ready to drive its point into the throat of a bandit on the Kingsroad; him covering her again with her cloak after Lady killed the wolves, as she tried not to taste the blood in her own mouth; him singing to amuse her, though the song had been far from respectable and she had feigned distaste from beginning to end. What will he do, she wonders, once she is safe in Highgarden? Strange as it is, when she thinks of the moment he will leave her to ride back north and west to Casterly Rock, she feels it thrum deep in her belly like the low note on a lute, something from a sad song she heard once. He is the only thing she has left of her home, though she cannot fathom how this golden man has come to remind her of the Wolfswood and the Wall, of the smell of snow and pine trees.
Two days from Highgarden, a Tyrell party rides out to meet them on the Rose Road. It is small, only a handful of household guards, and two lithe youths as similar to one another as the Lannister twins, and nearly as beautiful. Loras kisses her hand with a flourish and grins up through a tumble of chestnut curls, and Margaery embraces her like a sister—her skin is impossibly soft and she smells of rosewater and honeysuckle. Watching the three of them in the flood of autumn leaves, Jaime wonders if Cersei would have taken to her Targaryen prince, had things been different. Even now the idea of her smiling beside Rhaegar Targaryen—the secret smile that is only for him, the one that turns her eyes soft—makes rage simmer in his belly. But she was only a girl when she thought she would be queen, and he cannot fault her for having wanted things to be easy and sweet, just like in the songs. He wanted that too, and he would have taken her to Braavos to get it—farther, even. He would have made them a home in the ruined temples on the banks of the Royne where there was no one to see, no one to call it anything other than love.
As he watches Sansa and the Tyrells riding slightly ahead, Jaime feels his resolve—what little was left of it—slipping, fraying into a senseless tangle of threads that he finds difficult to grasp. Cersei’s face swims before his eyes, cold and beautiful, sending him away and commanding him to kill a child for no other reason than jealousy and spite, a desire to destroy what she could not possess. He thinks of her eyes, green and wild and somehow, after all, not so very like his own.
When the sun sets they make camp amidst the trees, the Tyrells overjoyed as if it is some great farce. Sansa seems to catch their happiness too, no longer quite so proper, her spine losing its rigidity little by little as they settle down beside the fire and watch the smoke rising toward the vast harvest moon. Margaery Tyrell is leaning close to Sansa, murmuring in her ear tales of how things will be—Jaime cannot hear her words, but he imagines they are already planning hawking excursions, trips down the Mander on painted boats with green and gold sails, masked balls amongst the flower beds and soon enough, sledding on the frozen river with honeyed wine to follow. And then, as she kisses Sansa’s cheek and meets her brother’s eyes, Margaery produces from one flowing green sleeve a perfect, ruby-red apple.
“For you, sweet sister,” she says, offering the fruit to Sansa. “Your first taste of Highgarden.” All around them the trees are heavy with apples of green and gold and blushing pink, but not a single one is like that which Sansa takes in her cupped palms—large, shining, dark as blood against her white hands. Something in it makes Jaime’s skin prickle and his heart beat a little faster, but he says nothing. Later, he will think of this moment as very like the one in which he drew his golden sword and plunged it into the Mad King’s bowels—only this time he steps back and waits for the gates to open, for the host outside to come flooding in with steel and fire. He has broken so many vows in his life that he finds it hard to remember which were sworn to whom, which truly mattered, in the end.
Sansa’s small, white teeth sink into sweet fruit flesh, and she licks juice from her lips before falling into Loras Tyrell’s arms. Her wolf snarls, leaps at the boy so that he lets go of her mistress and looks to Jaime, as if he could somehow control the beast. Margaery stands for a moment, surveying the scene before her, her face expressionless. Then she has leapt up into her saddle faster than he would have believed possible, and her brown eyes have gone hard, her smirk sharp. “Come, brother,” she says calmly. Her guardsmen make no comment, mounting up behind her.
When Jaime draws his sword she says, “Put away your steel, ser. You must take up your misgivings with your own sweet sister—this is her doing, not ours.” She wheels about and disappears into the night like some woodswitch, her horse’s hoofbeats muffled quickly by the carpet of autumn leaves. Her brother is gone soon enough, too, possessed only momentarily of a desire to cross swords with the Kingslayer before he comes to his senses. Lady snaps and rages at his horse's heels but stays in the clearing, unwilling or unable to leave her mistress. The Stark guardsman leave soon after, riding halfheartedly in the opposite direction for help—their lady lies unmoving, and Jaime knows that they take her for dead, or as good as. They eyed him with suspicion after Margaery Tyrell's comment, clearly baffled, but in the end they followed his command. The direwolf sits by Sansa Stark's side, her howls almost like keening, like the high sad song they sing for the dead in lands far off across the Narrow Sea.
He waits for what seems like the entire night, sword bare across his knees, his mind strangely empty. He is protecting the unconscious body—not lifeless though, for somehow she is still warm, her skin pale but distinctly alive—of the girl he swore to kill, whose heart he promised to carve out with his golden sword and bring back to Cersei in a jeweled box. For hours, even after Lady has ceased her mournful cry and lain down with her head on Sansa’s heart, there is nothing but mist and the sounds of night birds, and the gentle rustling of leaves.
And then Jaime Lannister blinks, for his eyes must surely deceive him. He sees a small figure framed by the slim trunks of trees; a figure very like that of a child, slight and small and graceful as it nears them. There is more than one—children, all roughly of the same size, silent and advancing as he watches. When they are near enough to be lit by the feeble remains of the fire, he sees that their faces are not the faces of youth. Their eyes are large, their hands small, and their hair is the color of the autumn wood. There are seven of them, and Jaime finds that he has no words with which to address them. The direwolf raises her head, but does not so much as growl at the Children of the Forest—for that is what they are, Jaime knows now.
“She sleeps,” says one, kneeling beside Sansa and stroking the disarranged auburn hair from her smooth forehead. Together the Children smooth Sansa’s skirts and lay her hands neatly by her sides. They shift her so that her head is pillowed on the stump of a weirwood--he had not noticed it amidst the flaming trees of autumn--her red hair fanning out in all directions.
“She sleeps, but she will wake,” says another. “She dreams.”
“I have seen her like before,” ventures a third. “Not so very long ago, a girl full of wolfblood.”
“This is not that girl,” says one, turning Sansa’s palm over in her small, wizened hands. “But she is of the same pack.”
Yet another says, “I dreamed of her, and then of a lion in the snow, a golden beast with a heart of ice. Gilded were her claws, and her eyes were terrible. She cut down the wolf lord, and the snow was red with blood. Three drops of red on white.” Jaime’s head swims. He cannot quite think the words, Ned Stark is dead. My son is lord of Winterfell. He has no son, not truly. He blinks.
“This one smells of ice, and there is winter in her heart.” The tiny woman at Sansa’s head turns her great, amber eyes on Jaime. “Queen she shall be,” says the woman, “I have seen as much. Queen in the North, child of winter. The Dragon and the Wolf shall lie down together, and all men will lay their swords at her feet.”
“And you shall be the first,” says another, very close to Jaime in the dark beneath the trees. “Go now, swear your oath and wake her.”
“How?” Jaime asks, his voice a croak, his head swimming as if this is a fever dream, some lucid fantasy out of a song.
“You were a boy once,” says the woman by Sansa’s head. “It was not so long ago. You remember.”
The leaves whisper underfoot as Jaime steps close to Sansa’s prone body, setting his golden sword at her feet. Then he kneels by her side, the Children moving back so that they become like shadows once more. When their lips touch, he feels it burn through him like he is a wick and this girl a small, dancing flame. He draws back; her eyes open, blue as ice. His stomach clenches as her face flits between confusion and fear and calm composure—between Cersei’s face and her own. He is not sure whether he wants to hold her or kneel before her, whether he loves her because she is like his sister, or because she is not. Perhaps it is only because she is like him.
“I swear my sword to your service, my lady. By earth and water, bronze and iron, by ice and fire.” He has seen enough of the North to know how these things are done, to remember the words she expects to hear. He says them all as he kneels on the wet grass in the pre-dawn haze, the world still forming around them, making itself anew.
“My father is dead,” she says. For a long moment she looks everywhere but at him—her eyes pass over the Children rapidly disappearing into the trees, to the bitten apple lying where it fell, to the pale weirwood stump that had been her pillow. Then she says, “This is not where I belong. Take me home,” and her blue eyes meet his. They have crossed a thousand miles to get to where they are and it seems to him that he has lost a little more of the man he thought he was with every step. And yet he does not balk at the prospect of going back, of facing Cersei (Cersei, his other self like a mirror fractured), of keeping the vow he made to this girl he knows both frighteningly well and not at all.
Sansa stands, Lady at her side, and says, “Rise, ser.” They stand together in a luminous dawn, pink and gold stretching from the east to set the trees afire. Sansa turns them north and feels her heart beat faster, quivering in her chest like a compass, her blood calling her home.