"Once upon a time in the middle of winter, when the flakes of snow were falling like feathers from the sky, a queen sat at a window sewing, and the frame of the window was made of black ebony."
The tale's best told by Old Nan when she sits by the hearth-fire with her knitting, with the little ones in the castle all around her. But it's only a pretty fable spun for children and starry-eyed little sisters, after all. She's read the truer tale in the maester's books, of the King of Winter slain by fell sorcery by his southron queen, of his bastard daughter, fair as snow, who'd fled to the wildlings and allied herself with their prince to win back the north.
In Old Nan's story, Snow White is a princess, another Sansa. In Maester Luwin's books, she's only a bastard, living on her wits.
Rickon's curled up on Sansa's lap, both wide-eyed in wonder even at the hundredth retelling. Arya and Bran are playing at knucklebones, pretending they're too grown-up for baby stories but they're listening all the same. Lord and Lady Stark watch over their brood with indulgent eyes, Theon sits at the edge of the children's enchanted circle, making mock of their innocence and longing for it at the same time.
Saranya leans against Robb's shoulder and thinks that she rather prefers the maester's books to the nurse's stories.
He can hear Old Mother Mander sighing. The bells of the pleasure barges on the river tinkle, the willows trail their lacy skirts in the watergardens and whisper to one another. Children shriek and play on the wharf, squires and maidens laugh and play in the bowers, minstrels sing and mothers scold.
This is what he can hear - the heart of Highgarden.
The girl is come from the godswood, bearing a drift of scarlet leaves. He can hear her too, though she is silent. A wariness, a watchfulness to her which was not there when Loras first brought her. Like a sheen of frost over a rose. She sets about arranging the leaves in a bowl of blue-veined marble, the very picture of grace itself. His grandmother has taught her well.
"You did not go sailing with Margaery on the river?" he asks her.
"I begged Lady Olenna's leave to pray in the godswood," she says. "She said my piety did me credit but that she hoped that I might offer my prayers to the Seven when I was Queen."
"And will you?"
She gives him a little smile. "If I ever become Queen, I will be certain to offer my prayers to your lady grandmother. She has done more for me than any of the gods I know."
"Have you ever prayed in a sept?" he asks curiously. "I know you northerns hold to the ways of the First Men."
She smiles. "My lord father had a sept built special for Lady Stark," she says. "She taught me and Robb the rites and the stories when we were little children. My earliest memory is kneeling before the Mother and a flood of rainbow light from the windows." Her voice turns bitter. "I thought Lady Stark was my mother, until I was about three. That was when my half-sister Sansa was born. Lady Stark tired of playing with her husband's bastard once she had a daughter of her own to love."
"She did not ill treat you," he says. "Lady Hewitt makes her husband's bastard daughter wait on table."
"My lord father is not Lord Hewitt," she says stiffly. "Lady Stark was good enough to me when I was a child. But after I flowered, after I became a woman well..."
Lady Stark looks her over, gauging her price as she would a filly to be sold. "So now you are a woman. Do you have the least idea of what that means?"
"It means that I am now fit to be wedded and bedded, and to bear children for my lord husband."
Her Ladyship nods brusquely. "Your lord father will see you suitably dowered," she says. "You have been as well brought up as my daughters and you are pretty enough. Perhaps one of our Karstark kinsmen, Lord Rickard has three sons-"
She is to be sent far away, banished and forgotten, as soon as Lady Stark can arrange matters. She is twelve years old and it is this fear that gives her courage to speak up. "Begging your pardon, my lady, but I don't want to be married."
She does not even look up from the little smock she is stitching for the newest baby, Rickon. "Every maiden fears the marriage bed, Saranya. It is nothing new. You will do your duty as all women do, as I did."
"You were a Tully of Riverrun, my lady," she says timidly. "It was your duty to marry my lord father. But I am only a bastard. I cannot hope for an advantageous match to serve the family so I thought- I thought that I might ask not to be wed."
Lady Stark looks up. Her eyes make one think of Old Nan's tales, of the White Walkers with eyes as blue as death. "Indeed. And what do you plan to do if you will not marry and care for your husband's home and children?" Her voice says, what else is there for a woman to do, and she is right. Certainly nothing honourable save marriage, an exile with dignity.
"I would stay at Winterfell," she says sheepishly for she has not thought it over. "I could attend Robb's wife as one of her ladies when he marries, I-I could help Maester Luwin. You know I love to read, my lady."
"Yes," her father's wife says very sweetly. "I know how passing fond you are of the maester's tower. Of the godswood and- the archery court, I think."
She swallows hard. "I-I..."
"You are not a child any longer," Lady Stark says slowly and clearly. "You are a maiden flowered and men will look at you differently now." The lady rises and remembering her manners, the bastard curtseys. "My husband will see you amply dowered but not all the jewels of Qarth can pay for a broken maidenhead. Let us hope that you can remember that, girl. For sure your mother, whoever she was, never did."
She glances over at him. "It will be sundown soon, Willas. Shall I bring you a shawl? You might catch a chill."
"That is kind of you," he says. "But I think I am capable of fetching a shawl for myself." He waves wryly to his cane, resting against the stone bench.
"I would like to spare you the trouble," she says sheepishly. "You have been so good to me ever since I came here."
He pats the bench. "Then you must be good to me, child. Come sit with me, we can watch the sunset together."
She drops down next to him and peers at his scroll. "The Sisters of the Maidenvault," she reads aloud. "Being a history of the lives of the Princesses Daena, Rhaena and Elaena and the influence they did exert on five kings, including the story of their cousin, Queen Naerys." She sighs wistfully. "I would love to read through it once you are done."
He isn't done, not quite but he offers it to her all the same. "Saranya, Sansa and Arya," he says as she flips the pages. "Did Lord Stark have the naming of you three girls?"
"I expect he did," she says candidly. "He never spoke to me of my mother."
"Never?"
She shakes her head. "I know as little about her as Lady Stark does."
"He must have loved you well to give you such a name," he says gently. "Those are northern names, of the tongue of the First Men. Just like his sister's name, the Lady Lyanna."
He had thought to cheer her but her face falls. "Lyanna," she repeats and there is a queer sort of bitterness in the way she says it. "Everything comes down to her in the end, doesn't it? The old servants always said that I had her look, the Stark look. Lady Stark did not like that, all of her children save Arya had the Tully colouring. And then ever since the King came to Winterfell, all I have been valued for is how much like her I look."
"It is valuable," he says diplomatically. "But there are other things that you are valued for, child."
She ignores him. "I had a queer dream about her," she says softly. "At first I was the Queen and I wore a gown like silver moonlight. I went through the halls of the Red Keep and the ladies curtseyed and called me Queen Lyanna and only smiled when I said I was not. I went to the Throne Room and the lords knelt and called me Queen Lyanna and laughed in my face when I said I was not.
I feasted under the royal canopy and all the men and women who had gathered to see me hailed me as Queen Lyanna and would not understand me when I said I was not. Then I went to the royal bedchamber and the King came in and called me his Lyanna. I did not say anything but then he cried that I was not his love, that I was a bastard and then he beat me-"
He puts his arm around her trembling shoulder. "Hush, child. King Robert will love you even though you are not his little lost love."
She bites her lip. "Rhaegar Targaryen raped and murdered Lady Lyanna for his mad lust," she whispers. "And men thought him the perfect prince. What will King Robert do to me when he wearies of his lust?"
"It will not matter then," he says quietly, stroking her hair. "For by then you will have given him a son. A trueborn son. Lord Stannis will be here soon, to confer with Lord Renly and before you know it, the King will be here too."
"And my lord father," she says, biting her lip. She sighs heavily. "I was such a fool."
"We are all fools, little one. What folly do you think you have committed?"
"The deadliest one of all." She smiles wanly. "Falling in love."
His plate was intricately fashioned and enameled as a bouquet of a thousand different flowers, and his snow-white stallion was draped in a blanket of red and white roses. After each victory, Ser Loras would remove his helm and ride slowly round the fence, and final y pluck a single white rose from the blanket and toss it to some fair maiden in the crowd.
To the other maidens he had given white roses, but the one he plucked for her was red. "Sweet lady," he said, "no victory is half so beautiful as you." Saranya took the flower timidly, struck dumb by his gallantry. His hair was a mass of lazy brown curls, his eyes like liquid gold. She inhaled the sweet fragrance of the rose and sat clutching it long after Ser Loras had ridden off.
"He's very handsome," Sansa whispered to her, clutching her own white rose.
"Not half so handsome as Prince Joffrey," she said automatically.
Jeyne, on Sansa's other hand, smiled and said, "I think he likes you, Saranya." And then they both giggled.
Bored, Arya wriggled in her seat and Septa Mordane was about to open her mouth to reprimand her. "Just a little longer," Saranya said quickly, putting her arm around Arya's shoulders. "If you're good now, I'll help you with your needlework tonight before bed." She was tired, but it was the only way to keep her little sister in check.
Sure enough Arya's face lit up even as Septa Mordane said approvingly, "You do have a good effect on her, Saranya. A mother's touch, I should say. It will stand you in good stead when you have children of your own."
"Tyrell children," Jeyne whispered to Sansa and they giggled even harder.
"That's for Father to say," Saranya said primly.
"But it's perfect," Sansa, her heart filled with romance, insisted. "You two will look so lovely together, he's only two years older than you. nd he's only a third son so..."
And I'm a bastard, she thought but did not say. Her sister meant well. Sansa would marry the prince and her sons would rule from Dorne to the Wall. Saranya would marry the third son and her sons would be household knights if they were lucky. That was the way of the world.
"Loras is a good boy," he says gently, defending his brother. "He only did what he was told to. In the end all he did, he did for love."
She nods. She has heard the gossip about Loras and Lord Renly. "He courted me as I had never been courted before. I never said a word to Father or Septa Mordane, though I ought to have. I thought it would be all right."
"Did you never have a sweetheart to court you before?" he asks her curiously. "I know Winterfell is the end of the world-" he laughs as she punches his shoulder playfully, "-but was there no stablehand nor squire to pay the tribute your beauty deserves? You are a pretty girl."
"No," she says dryly. "I'm not pretty. I'm beautiful. Everyone says the Lady Lyanna was and I look like her." She toys with his rings, sliding them in and out of his fingers - the emerald rose shanked in gold that is his signet ring, the ruby Prince Oberyn had sent on his last nameday and his little sister's silver band. Her fingers trail down to the thick scar that stretches from his wrist to his shoulder - from his first and last tourney.
"I did have one," she says slowly. "Not a sweetheart but a- a..." She flushes, looking for a moment extraordinarily like Margaery caught red-handed.
He raises his eyebrows. "Will you tell me?"
She looks thoughtfully. "Will you tell your grandmother?"
"You know I will," he says calmly.
"Then... no."
He nods. "I would not expect you to do anything. You would be a fool to trade your secrets for nothing."
She smiles wryly. "One learns that in your family. Will you tell me a secret of yours if I tell you mine?"
"Why not?" he asks lightly. "This is one you need to unburden yourself of and I have one that might interest you."
Ser Waymar Royce is the youngest son of an ancient house with too many heirs. Grey-eyed and graceful, slender as a knife she thinks that insofar as clothing is concerned, he has found his true calling. He will look splendid all in black.
Sansa is already wildly in love with him, drunk on the music that Lord Royce's pet minstrel dishes up to them at the feast. Jeyne thinks him too delicate-looking to be quite manly, her preference for Robb is but ill-concealed. But they are only children, ten years old. She is a maiden flowered of years three-and-ten and she is in love with a true man, not some whey-faced boy.
She watches him in the training yard and the archery court, besting Robb, laughing together and walking back to the castle with their arms around eachother's shoulders. It reminds her of the old days, when they were children playing monsters-and-maidens together, before she had begun to bled and they had begun to shoot up.
But now things are different. His smile makes her heart race faster till it pounds so hard at the supper table that she is sure that Lady Stark will hear it and talk to her father of how forward and unmaidenly she is. He smiles very often at her. Her father says life is not a jest, but to him it is. Everything seems to amuse him, from her deep blush when he asks her to meet him in the godswood to the way she flies to the sewing gallery and safety when he asks her again.
She does eventually.
He brushes an errant curl from her face and his fingers linger tenderly on the curve of her cheek. He cups her chin in one big hand and she melts as she looks up into his inky eyes. Her knees turn to water as his lips press gently on hers and it is only his arm around her waist that holds her up. She knows of his ways with the serving girls and the whores in the winter town, how Father disapproves of it.
She has been told countless times that her reputation is a dower without price, she knows that what might be construed as a harmless flirtation in another girl would be a sin in her because she is baseborn and lawless lust runs wild in her blood.
But... but it will be different.
"You are your father's daughter for all that you are baseborn," he tells her one day, in a hidden nook of the godswood. "The King will need to cement an alliance between the rebels and his allies. When the time comes, I shall choose you. Lady Stark would prefer to marry her own daughters south but you... you would not mind marrying me, would you, my pet?"
"No," she whispers, and lets him slip his hand beneath her bodice. She will be his lady wife, the greatest lady in the Iron Islands just as Lady Stark is the greatest lady in the North. It makes her so happy. And then, "No. No, Theon... please, no."
"Yes," he says firmly, unlacing the ties at the back. Her gown slips off her shoulders and one arm tightens around her waist. There are butterflies in her stomach and she could fall to her feet and let him have his way with her but one thing stops her. The memory of her father's face, the thought of his eyes filled with shame, loathing... and Lady Stark right behind, full of righteousness.
"No, Theon," she says, covering her breasts with one hand, shifting. He is holding her too tight. It hurts. "I will give you sons, trueborn sons..."
He laughs shortly. "It's not sons I want now, my pet. It's you."
"No, I can't. Please don't ask it of me..."
"You do," he whispers enticingly, pushing her backwards. She feels the roughness of the tree against the smooth skin of her back as he presses her harder, shoving his knee between her legs, pining her in place. She feels trapped, frightened. "All maidens say that, their first time..."
She opens her mouth to scream and his fingers twist her nipple cruelly. "Do you want Lady Catelyn to hear and come running?" he whispers. "She's in the sept. She could hear you if you screamed. She'd know it was, that only a little whore in the making would come here to meet me. She'd know that you were just like your mother, a common randy little slut who seduced a lord. I'd tell her how you liked it, how you moaned and touched me..."
She whimpers softly and begins to cry. It is true.
He laughs shortly. "If you're a good girl, I'll be gentle with you. And I won't tell a soul. I'll send you well-trained enough to please any man into whose bed Lady Catelyn throws you. You should be grateful to me."
They hear the twang of a loosened bow and the arrow flies right over Theon's head. He lets her go and she slips and falls to the ground. She huddles down and tries to cover herself while her brother looks at her and then him. His face is chalk-white and there is bewilderment and hurt in his eyes. But who is he angrier with? His half-sister or his best friend?
Theon smiles. "Ask her, Robb," he says lightly. "I'll leave her to tell you the truth." And then strides away, as cocky as ever.
She kneels on the ground, sobbing and hiccuping and he stands there and watches her for what seems like forever. And then he sighs and wraps his cloak around her shoulders. "Shh," he says, as awkward and uncertain as her, "It'll be alright. No matter whatever you've done, whatever he's done... it'll-it'll be alright." He straightens her hair and her gown for her and half-carries her back to her room, as he would Rickon.
He never asks her, he never asks Theon. He does not know whose fault it is, he does not want anyone to get into trouble. She never tells him and Theon never tells him and they all pretend that they have forgotten, that it never was.
She hides in the tower more often and never, never comes down to the archery court again. And when her lord father, with a great deal of hemming and hawing, suggests that they visit some noble houses with sons of an age with her - the Cerwyns, the Karstarks, the Umbers - she cries so hard that he lets her be.
"Thirteen is too young," he justifies to his lady. "Even if she has flowered, she's still a child. I would not force her as my own father did Lyanna." Lady Stark, who's noticed how frosty she and Theon and Robb are with eachother, only says that thirteen might be young for some girls but that bastards grow up faster than trueborn children.
"I am to be wed to your sister."
She can't help it, her eyes drift to his legs. Crippled. "She won't like that. Father won't like that."
He looks at her steadily. "You will. Or my grandmother will make you like it."
She bites her lip. "Sansa's only eleven," she protests. "Just a little girl. I can't force her-"
"And you are only four-and-ten," he reminds her. Somehow he cannot help the words from bubbling out. "And you will marry a man for whom you have no love, no respect, no admiration, who will shame you - one whom you actively fear."
She looks slightly ill after he is finished. "As to that you are wrong, Willas," she says finally, standing up and drifting over to the ledge of the balcony. "Of course I respect him. He is the king."
"And you would be Queen," he says, in a flash of understanding. They do not call his grandmother the Queen of Thorns for nothing - her wits are as sharp as her tongue. She has fed on the girl's fears and hopes, guilts and unuttered dreams for long enough, shaped her into the form she wants. "You would be Queen because for once you want to see Lady Stark curtsey to you."
She smiles wanly at him over her shoulder. "Cersei Lannister committed treason," she reminds him. "His Grace will need a new Queen. And if not me, so pretty and pliant, then who?"
Margaery, he thinks for a moment. Margaery, just as pretty and pliant as you, and with the bounty of Highgarden to match the gold dragons of Casterly Rock. Instead he teases her, "Starks are supposed to be honourable, aren't they? Above all petty jealousies and the backstabbing southron ways? Whatever happened to you?"
Her face darkens. "I'm not a Stark," she says sharply. "Just a Snow. Conceived in deceit and lawless lust, treachery and wantonness run thick through my blood."
"Did she tell you that?"
She gives him a brittle smile. "If I were a boy," she says thoughtfully. "Perhaps it would not be so bad. She would not see me so often, we would not rub along eachother airing out spite and malice in the sewing gallery, her thinking always, always of my mother when she looked at me, me looking at her daughters and wishing I had more than just a father who would pet me and forget about me by turns.
That's why I always escaped to the maester's tower when I could - Father thought it was because I was most diligent in my studies. I went because I knew she would not chide me if I made myself of some use to Maester Luwin, instead of running underfoot everywhere to escape my sewing as Arya did. I-I did not like her to chide me. Truly, I tried to be as good as I could, just as good as Sansa but it never worked."
"Just as I can never be Loras," he tells her softly. "Bastards, cripples and broken things."
She gives a start. "The Imp told me that," she said. "He came to see the godswood and I was there praying. We spoke awhile, of the way the King looked at me and how ill it pleased the Queen and Lady Stark."
"When the King made a royal progress through the Reach after the Greyjoy Rebellion, I met with Tyrion Lannister as well," he says. "He does a lot of travelling for such a small man."
"He went to the Wall too," she says. "And on the way back to Winterfell he made a special saddle for my brother Bran. You've heard of his accident, surely?" She narrows her eyes dangerously. "He was such a sweet little boy, he wanted to be a knight of the Kingsguard. When he was five I stitched him a white cloak and he would not take it off for weeks. The Lannisters will pay for what they did to him."
"You have no proof," he reminds her.
"Lady Olenna says he must have seen something he shouldn't and then there was the man who took a dagger to him. A child asleep why would they do that but to hide their guilt? And after what Lord Stannis and Lord Renly and the late Lord Arryn knew-"
"The ways of the world are strange," he says. "You'd best keep your hands to yourself if you don't want them to be burnt in the fires of court intrigue. That's why I've always kept myself far from my grandmother's plotting - she has Garlan and Margaery to scheme with her and Loras to be the knight nonpareil. I will be Lord of Highgarden and secure a powerful alliance and that is all." He smiles. "I actually prefer it. I have my hounds and my hawks, my books and my roses. A quiet life, safe and happy."
She smiles a trifle wistfully. "You're nice," she says childishly. "Any girl would be lucky to have you."
"Except my little queen-in-waiting," he says, tweaking her nose. He says it a trifle wistfully too. "Tell me, has my grandmother convinced you that it is your duty to wed Robert Baratheon?"
She flushes. "The Queen is guilty of incest, adultery and high treason," she says defensively. "She's a monster and she ought to be put down."
"And you ought to step up in her place? Do you truly want to be Queen?"
She looks miserable. "Does it matter?" she whispers. "Now that I am shamed, now that I wilfully ran away from my father with your brother... you know she'll throw me to the streets if I don't do as she tells me to and Lady Stark will make sure that father does not take me back. And I-I think I want to be Queen too."
"Most girls of your age treated the way you were would. But it is a hard life to live without love - and you will lose that of your sisters and your father."
She throws him a bitter look. "I thought I was in love with two men and I thought they loved me back too. I think I am done with love."
"Where are you going, Saranya?"
She beds down with her sisters, Sansa and Arya, in the Hand's Tower. It is Sansa who stirs as she throws on her darkest cloak. She is grateful that it is not Arya - Arya would want to go with her.
"The godswood," she says quickly, slipping on a pair of supple leather boots.
"Now?" She is sleepy, but not that sleepy. "It's pitch black."
"To pray for Bran," she lies. "Hush now, go back to bed." She stoops to kiss her sister's forehead. "Sleep well, Sansa Lemoncakes." It is her petname for her sister, just as Arya Underfoot is Arya. Sansa lets herself be tucked into bed and Saranya slips out to the godswood.
He is waiting for her under the heart-tree, a great oak whose ancient limbs are overgrown with smokeberry vines. She is reminded of the night they knelt to offer their thanksgiving for Bran, of her sisters curled up asleep amid the dark red blooms of dragon's breath that looked like gouts of blood. Her father had put his arm around her and told her a new story when she would not sleep, of the Knight of the Laughing Tree who was seen in the Year of the False Spring.
The wolf-maid had been his sister. She told him that the Lady Lyanna reminded her of Arya, so fierce and ungovernable. Perhaps her little sister will grow into the beauty their aunt had been - that would please Lady Stark.
He asked her who it had been who'd given Arya her Needle and in the sight of the heart-tree she could not lie. "Robb," she admitted.
"And you must have aided and abetted."
"I taught her a few little tricks I knew," she admitted. "Those Robb taught me when we were little. You know I'm not wild like Arya."
"No," he had said, touching her hair tenderly. "You were always my gentle one, shy and sweet. Not like your mother."
"Who was she?" she asked.
He sighed heavily. "I will tell you when you are older. When you are married and have a child of your own."
Loras' cloak is fastened at the throat by a rose of jade nested in leaves of gold. She finds her courage when she kisses him, they will ride all night and be wed in a sept near the city come dawn. Her father will be horrified and the King's rage will be fearsome to behold but by then she will be a married woman. She will be beyond his reach, his lust when she is in Highgarden.
"You love me, don't you, Loras?" she whispers to him. "You won't let him hurt me?"
"Of course," he says and kisses her cheek. "Of course I won't."
"I was wet with lust for him," she says. "But he said he would do it the proper way, at Highgarden. Was the septon even a septon?"
He shakes his head. "A masquer bought for a coin."
"Then it will be little and less to annul my marriage. He was not a septon and I am a maiden still," she says. "The King will tap me on the shoulder with a sword and bid me rise as Lord Eddard Stark's trueborn daughter and as quick as your grandmother can lace me into a wedding gown, I will be wedded and bedded."
"It was planned since men made note of how the King looked at you," he tells her. "But he never touched you."
"I was his best friend's daughter," she protests. "My father would never sacrifice me as other men might do to their daughters, bastards or otherwise. He would want to see me happy." She sighs. "He frightened me but he- he tried to be kind to me." She jingles the moonstone drops she wears in her ears. "He gave me these at Winterfell because he said they would suit my pretty eyes. He did it at supper in full view of everyone, as though he were a kind uncle. The Queen walked out and Lady Stark looked ready to boil me alive but he said he would find me a good husband in King's Landing."
"Your father did not want you to go."
"Of course he didn't," she says shortly. "But Lady Stark would not have at Winterfell when he was not there and I begged not to be married off. So... Lord Stannis wrote to Lord Renly of his suspicions, did he not? And my father wrote to Lord Stannis."
"Lord Renly thinks it best that the King come to know of the truth at Highgarden, when he is surrounded by more faithful swords than those of the Lannister woman."
"And Lady Olenna thinks it best that the King come to know of the truth when he is close to me. Now that I am a married woman he can do with me as he will. A married virgin. What a sweet cherry to be plucked."
"Your father who has come to know of the Queen's grave treacheries and her cunning but still pities her has suggested she take herself and her children to Casterly Rock - but without giving a reason."
"So she does not suspect?"
He laughs shortly. "If Cersei Lannister suspected, trust me, we would know."
"She will be executed," she says, her voice full of spite. "Her and the Kingslayer - my father said the man had it long coming. But the children?"
He lies to spare her the grief. It will haunt her for the rest of her days, sure enough, but there is no need for her to know now. "He will spare them. He has thought himself to be their father for years - the boys will be fostered out as Lannister bastards, he will arrange some marriage for the girl across the Narrow Sea."
She nods. It is acceptable. "Tommem was a dear little thing and Myrcella a perfect princess but Joffrey was a horror," she says. "The incident with Arya and the butcher's boy... and my direwolf was killed for it."
"Direwolves in the snow," he says softly. "Your brother Robb found them, didn't he? What did you name yours?"
"Ermine." She smiles. "Her pelt was as white as snow and as sleek as the fur."
"I'm sure it was." He looks at her closely, sees the ill-concealed longing in her eyes. And you, bastard-born, would be wed to some minor lordling's younger son. You would never be high enough to wear ermine as your sisters did. He squeezes her hand. "When you are Queen, you will wear gowns like spun sunlight and moonshine." And if you were my lady, I would crown you with flowers I plucked with my own hand.
He feels a queer pang of sadness as he thinks of her being handed over to the brute king. You brought it upon yourself, he thinks, trying to assauge his guilt. But you never would have if you had not been pushed. So is it your fault after all or is it ours?
"I will miss you when you go to King's Landing."
Her face falls a little. "So will I," she says softly. "I wish you could come with me."
He shakes his head. "Highgarden is my place. You will have Margaery with you. You seem to like her well enough."
"She taught me a few things," she admits. "Things about men and the world that no one ever thought to teach me or my sisters, though we might have had need of it. But how can I like her when I can never trust her?"
"Do you trust me?"
She gives him a wry smile. "No. I should not. But I cannot help it - I like you. I know that you would not hurt me."
"Why would I not?"
She rests her head against his shoulder, just as he has seen his mother do with his father sometimes. He winds a curl of her hair around his finger, thinking that she looks remarkably like his sister - sweet-faced young girls with long, soft brown hair. Once Renly Baratheon had even schemed to wed her to his brother because he thought she looked like Lyanna Stark. But Saranya's are grey while his sister's are brown. Another pliant girl the Tyrells can shape as they choose - Lord Stark will have little liking for the court after King Robert has spent his wrath on the Lannisters.
"Bastards, cripples and broken things," she reminds him. "We are too alike. You will come to my wedding feast at least?"
"Of course. Prince Oberyn will be there and he and I are connouisseurs of horseflesh. We will spend a merry time in the markets at King's Landing."
"Willas!"
"I will," he promises her, though he thinks it will make him ill to see the innocent child bedded to the monster. "Beauty and the Beast."
Her eyes light up. "Sansa used to love the story," she tells him. "I liked a different one though. It was about a bastard from Winterfell who married the prince of the wildlings and waged war against the wicked southron queen."
"Snow White," he says, chuckling. "She was poisoned with an apple."
"But her prince rescued her," she says stubbornly.
"In the song," he reminds her. "The real one is sadder, she perished with her unborn babe and the kingdom of the north passed to a cousin."
"But life is meant to be lived as a song," she says restlessly. She stands up and twirls around like a child. "I will be a queen like one in a song," she says stubbornly, as though she can will it in being. "Like Good Queen Alysanne. I-I want to be everything a queen should be because people will not expect it of me, not of bastard. Because I owe it to be pure and noble and honourable, just like my father. Lady Stark may think anything she pleases of me, I'll show her, I'll show them all."
He thinks of her in a gown spun of moonbeams, doing good deeds. What a precious innocent. It is sweet that he would like to believe it and he almost does. "Bless you, child," he says, catching her hand as she twirls round and round, her skirts flaring out. "I do believe you will."
A/N: Next up - the epilogue.