Margaery writes of long limbs, fiery hair, eyes as blue as the noonday sky.
Loras writes of shy smiles, gentle courtesies, a sweet voice.
Grandmother writes of guarded warmth, bruised kindness, hidden intelligence.
What Willas gets when Sansa Stark slides down from her horse is a girl, a broken girl with shadowed eyes and so much grief in the line of her shoulders that he can hardly find any words to say to her beyond a falsely cheerful greeting, because he is utterly horrified at just how small and hurt she is behind the careful mask of manners and the almost-real smile.
He catches Margaery's gaze, a gaze just as calculating and scheming as Grandmother's, if a little better guarded, and his sister seems to understand just how furiously angry he is with the deception. He still forces himself to be polite to Lady Sansa, offering her his arm and leading her into the castle with as light a smile as he can produce.
Loras, at least, told him the truth – Sansa's answering smile is shy, her courtesies are gentle and her voice is sweet, but Margaery and Grandmother lied outright when they told him that she was a woman. Sansa is a girl, regardless of having flowered, and he already feels guilty at the knowledge that within a week he will be taking her to wife, that he will be made to bed her even though he knows full well she is not prepared in any way for such a thing.
Because Willas has as little choice in the matter as Sansa – his father has made great efforts to remove his crippled son as heir to Highgarden, and a condition of his marrying Sansa is that Father will no longer consider pushing Garlan ahead in the line of succession.
Willas' marriage prospects have not been so hopeful as they should have been with his status as heir to Highgarden and the Reach, and to marry a Stark of Winterfell, even if she is little more than a girl, is better than to not marry at all.
He barely sees his betrothed in the week leading up to their wedding save at dinner each night, which is always shared with Margaery, Mother and Grandmother – it would be made more bearable by Garlan's presence, he thinks, but of course his brother is allowed to romance his lovely lady wife away from the rest of the family.
Sansa is reserved, keeping her eyes lowered unless addressed directly and even then answers barely enough to be polite. Willas watches carefully as Margaery tries to coax Sansa into conversation about this knight and that lady, the way she might speak with Megga or Alla, but the more Margaery speaks of the Red Keep the further into herself Sansa seems to retreat.
"Mayhaps tomorrow, we might take a turn about some of the smaller gardens?" he suggests quietly three nights before their wedding, while Grandmother and Mother are arguing loudly over some small detail of the wedding feast and Margaery is attempting to forge peace between them. "Highgarden is famed for its beauty, after all, and you have seen so little of it, my lady."
Her eyes are flat and shielded when she smiles, empty of any true warmth, but she nods graciously. He wonders what she is truly thinking, whether or not she actually likes the idea of walking at his regretfully slow pace about the endless gardens, if she'd rather just spend her days with Margaery and their fool cousins.
"I would like that, my lord," she replies, her voice even lower than his and incalculably different from normal, somehow. "Some peace and quiet would be most welcome."
Willas had hoped to draw Sansa out of her shell of manners without Margaery dancing attendance – he knows that Sansa does not truly trust anyone who would be willing to ally themselves with the Lannisters, and he cannot blame her because of what the Lannisters did to her father, and because he thinks his family is signing their own death warrant by supporting the Bastard King – but she remains remote.
She is every bit as clever as Grandmother said, even though he can tell that she limited herself to the studies of "women's" things while growing up, ever striving to become what her septa doubtless told her was the perfect lady – her knowledge of horticulture and geography prove slim, but she understands so much more about beauty and expression and colour than he thinks she even realises. She allows herself to ask questions about the roses, and her eyes light up with something other than fear and that devastating sadness he's glimpsed once or twice when he leads her to the stables.
"Your mounts are talked about even at Winterfell," she tells him, wandering along the line of stalls which are home to his favourite horses – his own horse, Gardener, and Margaery and Garlan's horses, Sweetling and Florian, are here, as well as Comet, who he had intended bringing with him when he visited Sunspear. Plans for his trip to visit Dorne had been curtailed by the outbreak of the war, of course, but he makes sure that Comet is kept in good order for when next he has an opportunity to present the horse to Oberyn Martell in return for the delicate sandsteed Oberyn gifted him when last he visited Highgarden.
"I can ride only with a special saddle now, and even then I will never be able to ride in a joust, but I find it very peaceful here at the stables," he hears himself say. "Grandmother detests horses, so it is one of the few true refuges to be had."
Sansa laughs, so quietly and for so short a moment that he almost thinks he imagined it, but he wishes that she would do it again. It would almost reassure him that she does not hate every single person and every single thing south of the Neck if she were to laugh even just once more.
Garlan wakes him the morning of the wedding with a sympathetic smile.
"Do try not to look as though you are marching to your own funeral, brother," he japes, aiming for lightness and missing by a breath. "There are few men lucky enough to marry a woman as lovely as Lady Sansa."
Willas grunts and rolls off his back, taking his brace from the nightstand and motioning for Garlan to give him more room.
"She is a child," he says, fitting the leather and steel around his ruined knee and buckling it in place. "Grandmother has reminded me no less than seven times that Sansa is flowered and therefore a woman, but look at her, Garlan – she is a child, and a frightened one at that."
"Margaery seems to think she's more than ready to be wed," Garlan comments, throwing himself across the foot of the bed and leaning up on his elbows. Willas envies him the ease of movement, the chance to do something so simple as jump onto a bed without fear of causing harm. "Mayhaps she's a better judge of what a woman is than you, Willas."
"Margaery has thought herself a woman since she could walk," Willas says drily, rolling his eyes as he heaves himself to his feet with the help of his cane. "Mother is the only judge I trust in this, and she agrees with me."
"And yet she has made no move to put a stop to the wedding."
"She also agrees that the only way to truly keep Sansa safe from the Lannisters is to keep her here, and how else might we keep her here than as my wife? You are already married, and Loras would be as capable of bedding her properly as Margaery even had he not been appointed to the Kingsguard."
"Why should we concern ourselves with the safety of a traitor's daughter?" Garlan challenges, rising to his feet and bearing Willas' weight against his chest so his brother might pull on his breeches without sitting back down. "I know that Grandmother's schemes have often been too subtle for my comprehension, but this makes no sense whatsoever."
"She thinks to bind us to both the Lannisters and the Starks through mine and Margaery's marriages," Willas explains, wincing sharply as his weight rolls onto his bad leg for a heartbeat. "If the Lannisters win, we might say that Sansa visited as Margaery's friend and she and I were fools for love. If the Starks win, we might say that Joffrey was a monster and left Father no choice but to agree to a match between him and Marg."
"The cunning old witch."
"That's one word for her, I suppose."
He cannot deny that she is exceptionally beautiful on Garlan's arm when he walks her to the altar in the sept. Her hair is loose down her back for the first time since her arrival, and it is truly magnificent – fire and amber and sunshine and rose gold (appropriate, he thinks, for a Tyrell) all at once.
The Stark cloak that she and Margaery spent the past week sewing under Grandmother's watchful gaze is a work of art, a confection of ermine, seed pearls and cloth-of-silver, with a direwolf that seems to dance as he removes it from her narrow shoulders.
It may be his imagination (he does not think so), but she flinches slightly when he drapes his colours around her and clasps the golden rose at the base of her throat, and she is like an exquisite marble carving when he cradles her face in his hands and brushes his lips over hers.
Theirs, he senses, will not be a passionate marriage.
She sits dutifully by his side all through the feast, her smile brilliant to those who do not look past the veneer that is so thin and brittle that even just hearing Margaery shout for Mother seems to send another crack spiderwebbing across it, until that despair that he finds so perversely compelling is almost exposed in Sansa's eyes – not that he takes pleasure in her pain, never that, but he wants to tease it out, to provide what aid he can to help her overcome it.
He thinks that perhaps, once she is settled here at Highgarden, he might promise her a visit to Winterfell as soon as the war is over, but quickly dismisses the idea – there is every chance that her family will be dead at the end of the war, whether it be in battle or on the edge of Ilyn Payne's sword, and he cannot afford to make promises that he cannot keep, not when she is already so delicate, so fragile.
He wishes that there was something, anything he could do to make her smile more genuinely, or perhaps even to make her laugh – and so he turns to Garlan, murmurs a question in his brother's ear, and soon Sansa is spinning about the floor in Garlan's arms, her head tilted back as she laughs.
Willas doubts that he will ever be the one to make her laugh so, and he is surprised by the level of disappointment he feels at that thought.