Sansa could no longer remember when she had started shaking.
She realized it most acutely on the bad nights: the nights where she awoke to a bright moon and a month's worth of nightmares; the nights when she curled up panting in her sheets with her thoughts so jumbled that she half expected her lady mother to sink next to her on the bed and soothe her troubles away; the nights when she sent her maids scuttling to the kitchens to bring her tea to relax her muscles so that they would not snap her bones.
The nightmares' potency provoked an uncontrollable need for her to fight them with the few pleasant memories she could still summon that were still almost equally potent. Of course, they could never force the nightmares away, but they could help her hold the terror at bay long enough for the maids to bring her tea.
Rickon's singing laugh; Robb's tumble into the creek when he charged Jon too enthusiastically when they were playing knights; the giggle Bran only produced when Arya made cross-eyed faces at him; Father cracking one of his rare smiles when she presented him with a carefully cross-stitched cloak on his name day; Mother's delight over the bouquet of roses Sansa had spent an hour arranging into the shape of a Tully fish - they were real, and they had happened, and they had stitched themselves into Sansa's heart before the shaking started. Before mad things happened and mad rulers flayed Westeros into ruin and mad dragons flew into the North and madder Walkers smashed the Wall to pieces and the maddest of them all drove his sword through Arya's heart. Before all she had left were Bran, Jon, the splendidly unpredictable Dragon Queen, and the nightmares. And the shaking.
For a long time, Sansa had thought the shaking had begun the day she had watched as Ser Ilyn Payne slashed her father's head off of his body and left her alone with monsters for the first of many times. Years later, she had speculated that perhaps it had started earlier, on the day her father had beheaded Lady. No, the day when Cersei Lannister had made Father behead Lady, and King Robert had done nothing about it, and even Father, her brave, strong, wise, wonderful father, could not protect her. Lately, Sansa had begun to wonder if all along it hadn't begun even earlier, on the day that Joffrey Baratheon and his cursed family had first darkened her family's door and brought with them some strange, destructive, terrible force that had torn her away from her beloved family forever.
But, whenever it had started, the shaking had never really stopped.
Sansa, of course, had become a master at hiding it. Shaking meant weakness, and weakness made one easy fodder for the Lannisters and Boltons and every other predator under the sun. Porcelain dolls broke far too easily, so she gradually constructed a mask of ivory to hide her tear-streaked face when in the compan of others. Usually, she could wear the ivory skin until she was in bed and utterly alone, until she could scream into the pillows and smash her fists against the mattress and pretend, if any prying maids caught her, that she was having nightmares. By that time, it had become the truth. Some nightmares came while she was asleep and others while she was awake, but they were all nightmares no matter when they came.
Sometimes, though, the skin cracked. It cracked during the horrible minutes when those depraved thugs had cornered her in the alley and the Hound had been barely in time to rescue her. It cracked when Joffrey threatened during her very wedding feast to finish the task those thugs had started, and just a few minutes later when she'd begun to undress before Lord Tyrion in her chambers. It cracked again when she learned of Robb's and her mother's brutal deaths, and again when Petyr Baelish first found her and spirited her out of the city. It cracked far too many times again - when her cousin smashed her snow-built Winterfell, when her Aunt Lysa's madness erupted, when her nerves and body froze in front of the moon door, and when she was called in front of the lords of the Vale to give her account to them. It had cracked nearly to the point of breaking before she'd finally confessed her real name. Once she had done so, the Vale lords' faces had filled with pity and wonder instead of anger. Their sternness had melted into kindness, and she'd almost stopped shaking for once. But the the lords had let her go with Petyr, and Petyr had led her into the Boltons' den at Winterfell, and Ramsay Bolton's monstrosities had made Cersei's schemes and Lysa's madness sound like mewling kittens in her memory. She had nearly come undone that first horrible night, and on many of the nights after, until one night, halfway numb from illness, she'd discovered that sometimes he would hurt her less if she shook less.
So she fashioned a skin of steel. It preserved her through Ramsay's worst atrocities, through her impossible flight from Winterfell, through her and Jon's even more impossible quest to regain the North. It gave her the will to stare into Ramsay's bloodshot eyes as his hounds tore into their final feast, the nerve to push past Petyr as he spouted the poisonous dreams by which she once would have been so easily ensnared, the stomach to strike the killing blow into his chest when he'd tried to take a dagger to Jon in the crypt, and the courage to leave Bran at Winterfell and face down the wights at Jon's side.
But all the time, she had been shaking.
She had shaken as Queen Daenerys and the dragons had thundered onto the battlefield beside her and Jon. She had shaken with sobs over Arya's dead body, the sobs she'd been too numb to muster at Rickon's burial after the battle for Winterfell. She had shaken as she'd begged Jon and Bran to forgive her for tripping over the dead wight's hand, which had left Arya to strike the Night's King alone and die by his blade at the moment he'd died at the edge of Needle's. She had shaken when she, Jon, and Bran had said their farewells to Daenerys and her dragons, when one of them glared at her with eyes as bright and piercing as Arya's, which though forever closed had not stopped taunting her conscience. She had shaken every day after that no matter how many warm baths she took, no matter how many fires Jon had had the servants light on her behalf, no matter how many blankets she stole from the spare bedrooms to cover herself when she sat at the council meetings with Jon and Bran or sat in her solar trying to knit more clothes for the children orphaned on the Battlefield of the Dawn.
It had taken her months to reach the end of one day and realize that she had not shaken during it, whether from nightmares or chills or anything else. Bran had said at dinner that it was the first time he had seen her smile since before she had left Winterfell for the last battle. She had graced him with another smile then, and he had promptly turned to Jon and announced that together they could perhaps coax a smile out of even his grumpy face, and they had all laughed together, however carefully.
Sansa had had no nightmares that night, and when she awoke she thought that perhaps, in another week or so, she would go a day without shaking again, and perhaps after a while, ensconced in Winterfell with her brother and cousin, she would be calm enough to stop shaking even more than one day a week. Perhaps.
The next day, the Dragon Queen's messengers had arrived to summon Jon and Sansa to the Red Keep, and Sansa had begun shaking again. It had gotten so bad by the day they'd left Winterfell that Jon had raised one dark eyebrow and asked if she was sure she did not wish for more blankets to cover her as she rode. She had turned him down as politely as she could, but by the third day on the road south he had gotten concerned enough to ask her if she needed a maester, and she had gritted her teeth and said she'd take the blankets as long as they came with no more questions from him.
She'd managed well enough after that until the day after they first arrived at the Red Keep. Daenerys, never one to spend much time on small talk, had met privately with Sansa and Jon and without prelude informed them of her healer's recent confirmation that she was in fact barren and would remain so for the rest of her days. Naturally, the queen had said as though announcing the next night's dinner menu, although she had respected her nephew's refusal to mount the Iron Throne and even his odd desire to remain in the North as regent to King Bran, she could no longer overlook his lack of a wife or heir. When Jon finally opened his mouth, Daenerys had arched one blonde eyebrow at Jon's pointed look - perhaps the only outward characteristic, Sansa had reflected, that the two had in common - and tilted her golden head in a gesture that Sansa had quickly learned brooked no protest, even from her nephew. She understood that Jon did not care for the South, she had said, and she also understood that he would wish to disrupt his life at Winterfell as little as possible. Therefore, why should he not marry a lady who herself already lived at Winterfell - his cousin Sansa, the most beautiful and noble-blooded lady in the North?
She turned to Sansa with a smile of steel as she said it, and Sansa could feel her own steel skin shattering. Queen and courtesy and honor be damned, she had turned and fled and not stopped fleeing until she had reached her chambers high in the Keep's northernmost tower. Scarcely had she reached it when she had begun vomiting violently into her chamber pot.
After the battle had been won and the Dragon Queen had returned south and left her and Jon and Bran alone, she had dared to hope that she could escape another marriage for the foreseeable future, and perhaps altogether. Her brother and cousin, she knew, had spent the past year writing refusal after refusal of offers from lord after lord for her hand in marriage. That is, she reminded herself as she bent closer to the chamber pot to compensate for the next wave of bile rushing upward from her stomach, Jon wrote the refusals and Bran signed them. Bran, after all, was still young and still loved trees more than council chambers, and Jon, after all, understood far better than Bran or anybody else why Sansa would shake whenever Winterfell received yet another missive begging him to let her become yet another lord's wife. During one particularly bad bout of the shaking, she had admitted to Jon that she would sooner fall on Longclaw and take her place beside Arya in the crypts than chance being at the mercy of a man who would treat her with any fraction of Ramsay Bolton's cruelty. She had apologized to Jon the morning after her outburst, but he had only shaken his head and assured her that she had nothing to be sorry for and nothing about which to worry, because he and Bran and Longclaw would guard her very well.
How great was the irony, Sansa thought as the bile left her stomach. Not a month ago, she had thought that the shaking might lessen, that the skin of steel she had begun forming so long ago had worked. But now the dragon queen had done to Jon's vow to keep her from yet another forced marriage what the lion queen had done to her father's ability to protect her from the terrifying reality of her first betrothal. It did not matter for the moment that her marriage would be to Jon and not a cruel stranger; marriage was still marriage, and heirs must still be had, and thinking of what it would take to get them, whether at the hand of Jon or another, made her stomach send up more vomit. The skin of steel had shattered, and she did not know if she had the strength to build a harder one around it.
So engulfed was she in her shaking and her vomit that at first she failed to feel the hand drawing her hair off of the chamber pot to hold it away from her face. It was only when she felt another hand's gentle rub to her back - one she could have sworn belonged to her mother, back when she was a girl - that she turned and glimpsed a face much more masculine, but just as worried and just as kind and just as concerned.
Between the flush to her cheeks and the remnants of vomit leaving her stomach and the shaking - oh, the shaking - the ivory cracked and splintered as surely as had the steel, and for a moment she was made of porcelain again, and one of the tears her eyes had squeezed into being as she had vomited trickled down her cheek.
She shook hard enough in that moment to shatter, but Jon's hands held her steady, and his voice whispered soothing shush-shush sounds next to her ear. Slowly she began to breathe again, and the shaking began to subside, and when she dared a glimpse at Jon's eyes, they were as gentle as Joffrey's and Tyrion's and Petyr's and Ramsay's had never been, as gentle as Lady's eyes had been right up until Father had killed her on the day when the shaking had begun.
But the shaking stopped, and she no longer vomited, and her hands relaxed their grip on the chamber pot. And when Jon helped her up and put a blanket around her, she almost felt warm.