"My love is like to ice, and I to fire:
How comes it then that this her cold so great
Is not dissolved through my so hot desire,
But harder grows the more I her entreat?
Or how comes it that my exceeding heat
Is not allayed by her heart-frozen cold,
But that I burn much more in boiling sweat,
And feel my flames augmented manifold?
What more miraculous thing may be told,
That fire, which all things melts, should harden ice,
And ice, which is congeal's with senseless cold,
Should kindle fire by wonderful device?
Such is the power of love in gentle mind,
That it can alter all the course of kind"

- Edmund Spenser

The darkness surrounded her in this moment with the faint sound of Lark´s mandolin playing in the background as she found herself tracing the fabric of his ragged shirt. It was a mixture of torn leather, flaky strains of material and his chest just hard muscle under her hands. His face observed hers as she felt his hands move a little braver up over her spine to cup her shoulder blades. In the back of her mind it was just them, alone. Together.

No Lark, no bastard children singing the anthems of the northern winds, no, it was only the prickling of an open fire along with his arms around her which really mattered at this moment. It was a childish dream she knew that and it was something her silly older sister dared to wish for. She had heard about the tale of kindred spirits finding their way to each other, if only the Gods let it be.
In a way she wondered if this was under the eyes of the Gods that they where watching them swaying together to the sound of a heartbreaking lullaby.

Now all she felt was his breathing against her temple and how he´d pulled her so close she could sense the muscles twisting and turning with the way they moved from side to side, slowly. Like the long branches of willow trees that they had spend some nights under and the wonderful sounds the willows would make as they hushed her to sleep. His arms where her branches with him she felt safe like she had been at home in Winterfelt with her parents, her siblings and her wolf. In the slightest moment now she was lost in the feeling of his warm hands piercing heat through the thin layer of cloth that covered her back and the way his breathing like the wind blew the willow´s branches sang to her.
You are safe here.

In a moment she felt strong and gazed up into his iron blue eyes that had followed her all the way from the end of the earth to this little Gods forsaken plot of land. She looked into those eyes that had agreed to sell their smith skills to keep a roof over her head and food in her belly. He never asked for anything in return.
You would be my family she had once told him, but never got the response she hoped for which was that she wasn't just a high born he had decided to protect. She was his partner. They where equal now. He was a bastard king and she was a runaway lady.

His breathing fell shallow as she looked over his face all from his beard that had laid itself around his jawline and down to his neck. He had become a man over their long period of travels; the type of man her father would say could give her babes and stand by her side in their castle. She never thought about that through the war, that she had a choice in anything other then to fight for her life. His lips parted as she watched him gazing down, analyzing her face the same way she was his, the silence was deafening even with the background noise. It was just them. Alone.

-"Thank you for the dance, my lady" he whispered between them and she felt him pulling away. His hands slipped down from her shoulder blades to her hips as he held her steady waiting for a response.
This time around she wasn't giving him up that easily, the stupid bull was wrong when he said that he wasn't her family. He was everything in this moment.
-"Another dance" she whispered back moving her nose up to his chin, feeling the thickness of his beard playing over her flesh. The smell of his skin and clothes was empowering. He smelled like wood that she felt crackling in the fire and like himself, in the way her wolf would hunt after prey she knew that she could find him by his scent easily.
-"As my lady commands" he answered back, swirling her around under his arm, making her spin for him. She let out a chuckle, high and happy like she had been when she was a child. He spun her again.

She was free. She was a wolf.

She was Arya Stark.