When Sansa wakes, she does not know where she is.
Her eyes skip around her, cataloguing her surroundings. She is lying in a bunked bed built into the wall. The light in the room is meager, but she can see that it comes from several small round windows, set high in its wooden walls.
Is it her imagination, or is the room rocking to and fro?
Aha! She is in the cabin of a ship – a luxury ship, from the look of it. It is narrow, as all ship's quarters tend, but lovingly made. Its paneling gleams with oil; its jointings are of polished brass.
Next to the pillow lies a damp cloth, which she suspects was laid on her forehead. For next to the bed is an empty pail with the tangy scent of sick.
That's right. She was ill last night - she remembers now. A dark figure had escorted her here, and guided her into the bed, and set the cold cloth over her eyes.
There is a rustling noise at the door.
"Who is it?" she calls, suddenly uneasy.
"It is I," says a voice, as clear as cold water. "Essis."
And who is Essis? She is a maid, of no more than eleven, with skin the color of a purple-black plum. Her long knotted braids hang nearly to her waist. She wears a white linen shift, and golden rings on almost all of her fingers and toes. A knife in a leathern scabbard hangs round her neck.
Sansa's brow furrows. "Are you…my handmaiden?"
Essis laughs. "I am here to help you, yes. But I am no servant, Sansa."
"You know my name?"
"Aye." Essis pronounces the word with a gulp. A dialect of some far-off place, one that Sansa's never heard tell of, most likely. "My father told me your name, and that you were a piteous land-loving thing. No stomach for the sea, he said, nor a sea-leg stand on, neither."
There are thumps on the ceiling overhead, and then they hear the ringing of a bell.
"Come," Essis says, and helps her to her feet. "Let's go and eat, and see if you keep anything down."
Sansa follows her out of the cabin, thinking on how quickly it's become her way, to rely on the kindness of strangers.
#
The Sossanae sit cross-legged on the deck of the Nymph, talking and laughing, enjoying the last of the evening's light. They pass baskets of fish and of biscuit, and high-sided tureens of coconut stew, and flagons of a dark, foul-smelling liquid that can only be drunk in the tiniest of sips.
"There are so many crew aboard," Sansa whispers to Essis, as they walk down the stairs from the deck, "and the ship is so small. Where do they all sleep?"
"Down below in the hold," Essis says, tapping her toe on the planks. "Like schools of fishes under the sea."
"All together?"
"Aye. Whyever not?"
Sansa balks for a moment, not knowing what to say. "Where I'm from, women do not lie with men who are not their husbands."
Essis makes a face - one that means "Westeros nonsense," as Sansa will soon come to know.
"Sossanae do not take husbands, nor wives," she says. "We take who we will, when we will. We are bound only to our own hearts, and to no one else, not even the lovers we beget children by."
Sansa would answer this, but she stops in her tracks. Petyr Baelish is coming out of the ship's captain's cabin, over the stern; he walks down the steps to the deck. There is a Sossana at his side, a man with an air of great authority. He has a ragged scar running from forehead to chin, but he is gentled by his eyes, large and velvety as a fawn's.
"Father," Essis greets him proudly.
"You have roused her!" the Sossana booms, looking at Sansa appraisingly. "How fares our guest?"
"My lord," Sansa says with a curtsey, and is startled when the Sossana throws his head back, roaring with laughter.
"Enough of that Westeros nonsense," he exclaims. "We have no lords here."
"Omer is captain of this fine vessel," Baelish helpfully supplies to Sansa. He has been looking at her this entire time. His voice drops, grows softer. "Are you feeling better, my lady?"
"No ladies, neither!" Omer reminds Baelish, giving him a powerful clap cross the shoulders.
"Of course not," Baelish says to Omer with a small smile. He gestures forward. "Let's dine together, my friend."
Sansa half-expects Littlefinger to offer her his arm, to guide her to her place at the feast, wherever it may be. But he brushes past her with Omer, and they settle together somewhere near the center of the circle. They take flagons, toast each other, and drink, and seem to pay no further mind to the girls.
Reluctantly, Sansa sits down by Essis, and looks across the deck at him. He is not wearing his usual garb – his long, fitted cloaks of brocade, jodpurs, and high-heeled leather boots. He wears a loose tunic in soft gray silk, knee-length breeches of the same. No shoes. His legs are as thin as a bird's.
Essis eyes Baelish, curious. "He brought you aboard," she says, taking a biscuit from a basket, and passing it on to Sansa. "Is he your father?"
"No." Sansa takes a biscuit, too, and nibbles on its ragged edge.
"Your lover, then?" Essis guesses.
"Why would you think that?" Sansa asks, as her cheeks both color.
Essis shrugs. "My mother took a Westerosi with silverish hair, once. But she did not keep him long, for he would not live at sea." She takes a bite of biscuit. "He must be your lover, or either your bloodkin," she says through the biscuit.
Sansa decides to skirt the question yet again. "He is…he is my protector."
Essis spits through her side teeth onto the deck, as if this idea warrants contempt. "Can your own people not protect you?" she wants to know.
"They are too far away."
"Can you not protect yourself, then?"
"I wish I could," Sansa says, feeling very humble. "But I cannot swing a sword at those who would hurt me. Nor sail a ship away from them."
"Well," Essis says. "Perhaps you can find another way one day." She dips the biscuit into the stew, scoops it up, and eats it greedily.
"I hope to," Sansa says, and watches Petyr Baelish.
After the meal is over, the Sossanae lie on the deck and softly chatter with each other. One plucks a berembao; another claps his hands and sings. A group of children play at jax, even though the lilting ship often sends the pieces skittering away.
A woman with a dancer's gait walks across the deck, hips swaying like a pendulum. She goes to Baelish, takes him by both hands, and says something Sansa cannot hear.
Baelish clears his throat, and says something that Sansa can hear, but cannot understand. For he speaks in Sossanis, and Sossanis is all clicks and gasps and whistles.
Omer laughs, slaps the woman on her thigh, and gestures her away, clicking and gasping and whistling all the while.
"What was that?" Sansa asks.
"I thought you said he wasn't your lover," Essis says, somewhat mean-spiritedly.
"Wha – " She falters mid-word. "Please, Essis, tell me what happened. Who was that woman?"
"That is my eldest sister, Rizza," Essis says. "She would have taken your lover and lain with him, but he told her his heart had bound him to another."
Sansa cannot speak. What is this roiling emotion inside of her? She would know, for it cannot be jealousy.
"It's the standard reply," Essis says with a shrug. "If your answer's 'no.'"
"What did your father say?"
Essis blows a strawberry. "He told her, 'get on, girl. You know the Westerosi are modest as mice.'"
"Rizza's just like him," she adds, again aloof. "They're both always hankering for somebody new."
Sansa sits still for a moment, contemplating the Sossanae and their strange ways. And, when she fails at that, she contemplates her Westerosi self, and has no success there, either. For when she looks across the deck and sees Rizza, lovely as a willow on a riverbank, and thinks that Petyr Baelish denied her for her sake - something swells in her, and it is not pride of beauty. No. It is something else entirely.
#
She is undressing for bed, and a memory will not leave her mind. It was the last time she saw her mother, the night before she and Arya left Winterfell for King's Landing. Catelyn had sat them down in her bedroom, very seriously, and said that she must have a word with both of them.
They'd thought they were in trouble, but it'd turned out to be far worse.
"I cannot send you South without a due warning," she says. "King's Landing is different from Winterfell, and filled with perils, especially for maidens. You must never find yourself alone with any man who isn't bloodkin. You must not let him kiss you – not beyond a brush of the lips. You must not let him touch you, either over or under your dress. And, finally, you must not let him lie on top of you, whatever else you might do."
Gods, this is confusing.
"Why on earth would he want to lie on top of me?" Sansa wants to know.
"It's how babies are made," Arya says.
Sansa turns to look at her, shocked.
"What?" Arya says. "I've seen the pigs and dogs do it."
"That's disgusting. Mother, tell her it's not the same with people."
Catelyn coughs.
"It's the same with all beasts," Arya says, like the little know-it-all she is. "The boy's thingie gets stiff and he pokes the girl in the bum with it."
"Arya!" Sansa squawks, and turns to her mother to save her.
"Arya," Catelyn says, reprimand in her tone.
"Well, you don't have to worry about me, Mother," Arya declares. "I'll stab any man who tries to lay me down."
"As if any man would want to!" Sansa snaps at her sister, still embarrassed by her own inferior knowledge.
"Girls." Catelyn's voice is steely again. "I'm telling you these things because they're important. No matter how strongly you may feel for a man, you must grant him no liberties that are reserved for your husband."
"Did you ever, Mother?" Arya asks, curious. She is always eager to hear about anyone breaking the rules, especially rules that are currently being impressed upon her.
Catelyn barely, just barely, blushes. "When I was a girl – even younger than you, Sansa - I played at kissing with a ward of my father's."
"You kissed a man who wasn't Father?" Sansa is scandalized.
"A boy," Catelyn corrects. "But yes. I thought it harmless. We all did. And yet it brought great sorrow to our house."
"What happened?"
"He had no name, you see. And his family's holdings were a little more than nothing. So when he said he loved me and would marry me, my father laughed in his face."
Catelyn purses her lips, considering how much of this story to tell.
"But my sister loved him well," she says, skipping a chapter ahead, "and one night she crept into his chambers, secretly, and gave to him her maidenhead."
"Does that mean he lied down on top of her?" Arya asks.
"Lay down," Catelyn corrects. "Yes, Arya, I suppose it does." A twinge of distaste passes over her face.
"And then, a few months later – " She pauses, decides to skip another chapter. "She could not marry him, you see. He was too lowborn for her. And with her virtue compromised, Father was hard put to find her a husband."
"But she… did find one?" Sansa asks, alarmed by the alternative, even though she knows well that her aunt Lysa was married to the late Hand of the King.
"Yes. An older, colder man than she'd wished for, I'll warrant."
"Whatever happened to your father's ward?" Ayra wants to know.
"Oh, I'm sure he's done well enough for himself, in spite of everything. These things don't damage men's reputations the way they do ours."
Arya frowns. "Why not?"
"Oh, Arya, I don't know," her mother says, impatient. "It's just the way it is."
"But that's not fair."
Catelyn doesn't even shrug. "No one ever said it was."
"Hey-ho," Essis sighs, interrupting Sansa's pondering. "I'm to bunk with you again, Westeros. Shove over." She wedges herself into the bed, without waiting for Sansa to move.
"Why are you here? Wouldn't you rather be in the hold with the others?"
"I'd rather be at the watch at the top of the masthead," Essis answers, as though that were something that went without saying. "But Father says I must stay with you, to make sure you don't fret overmuch, when you remember there's no dry land at your feet. G'night." And she blows out the candle.
#
Days go by – days that seem like weeks, for the wind blows not, and the sails hang slack, and the Sossanae are all as cross as hatchets. Yet Petyr Baelish barely speaks to Sansa. He sleeps until late in the day, in a hammock in the hold, and comes out on deck only to sun and to sup. Evenings, he retreats to the captain's cabin, where he and Omer sit at table, drinking prodigious quantities of wine, and tell their stories in the way that only men who've come from nothing can. Now and again, they point at places on maps whose curled edges they pin down to the table with the many bottles they've emptied. Then they laugh, and drink some more, and tell more stories yet.
Sansa strolls the deck, nights, and purports to look on the stars. But in truth she watches Petyr though the cabin's round window, and waits for him to look out at her.
He doesn't.
Did she imagine that he kissed her as the sun set over the sea, as flower petals fell down from the sky like rain?
She would play coy as ladies do, but she has no notion how to, not with a man so inscrutable.
What does he want of her? Does he want anything?
#
Sansa bounces the ball and snatches at jax, and succeeds at five on her first pass.
"Five!" she declares, and looks up, expectant. "Essis," she prods.
Essis shakes herself. "Sorry," she says, without sounding sorry. She is listening to a woman who stands in the center of the Sossanae, reciting a long poem. It sounds like the beating of myriad drums.
"Tell me what she says," Sansa asks for the third time, but Essis only shakes her head.
"Sossanis poetry cannot be translated."
"Well, what's it about, then?"
Essis's eyes are far-away again; the woman's tale has ravished her. "Dragons."
"But there are no more dragons."
Essis makes a noise through her nose. "Not in Westeros, perhaps."
Suddenly, synchronously, all of the Sossanae raise their heads, as if they're heard something that Sansa cannot. They whoop and leap to their feet.
"What is it?" Sansa asks, and then it hits her body like a slap. If she were still wearing her Westerosi dress, she would have been blown into the sea. For it is a gale, a southerly, the mightiest of sea-winds, and the only thing more cherished by the Sossanae than their poetry.
Omer jogs by and touches Essis on the shoulder, and clicks his tongue, and she looks up at him with eyes like stars, and beams.
"My father's given me the watch," she booms to Sansa, exultant, "from now until the dawn!"
Sansa looks up at the main masthead. It is a dizzying height.
"You're going to stay up there all night?" she asks, incredulous.
"Aye!" Essis throws over her shoulder; she is already halfway to the mast.
"Won't you be cold?"
Essis laughs. "Nay," she yells, setting both hands on the ropes. "For I am Sossana! The ship beneath me is my blood, its sails my heart, and the wind my lover!"
She clambers up the rigging, quick as anything, until she reaches the top, and swings herself into the lookout at the top of the mast.
The other Sossanae are scattering all over the ship. They climb the masts, tie and untie knots, draw down sails, turn the rudders. Everyone has a job to do.
Sansa rubs her bare shoulders to dull the bite of the wind, and tries not to feel so lonely, and boring.
"She brings to mind your sister, doesn't she?"
It is Petyr Baelish. He is standing behind her, looking up at Essis on the topmast. It is the first full sentence he has spoken to Sansa since the first evening she stepped onto the deck.
Sansa turns away without answering him. She is quaking in the wind, though she wishes she weren't. It makes her feel weak.
Baelish unbuckles his cloak and makes to set it over her shoulders, but she stalks past him, eyes cold, and heads straight to her cabin, leaving the jax behind.
#
When she hears him come in and pull the door to, her heart flounders in her chest.
"My lady Sansa, I gather you're angry at me," Baelish says.
"Why would I be angry?" she answers, her tone as bland as porridge. "I am grateful to Lord Baelish for escorting me from King's Landing, and granting me safe passage home."
"Enough of that court talk," he tells her. "We're not in King's Landing, not anymore."
"I apologize if I've spoken rudely, my lord," Sansa says, with the slightest of curtseys. "I'm afraid that our customs are different up North. I do hope my breaches of etiquette will be met with indulgence."
"Enough," he says.
Sansa lifts her gaze to his. "I have been waiting five days for you to speak to me again," she says, hardly daring to believe her own nerve. "What have I done to you to warrant such...coldness?"
Baelish stares at her for a moment, then a strange glimmer appears in his eye.
"Have I been neglecting you, little bird?" he says, as a smile spreads across his face. "Did you want me to sit with you and Essis on deck, and tell tales of knights and ladies? Or perhaps play at jax, or braid hair?"
Sansa closes and opens her eyes, to slick away burgeoning tears.
"I know I am young, and ignorant, but I am not stupid," she says, her voice tremulous. "Please don't make fun of me, Lord Baelish."
The soft way she says the words nearly destroys him.
"You kissed me, before we boarded the ship," she whispers. "Why?"
"Why?" he repeats. "There was no why." He looks away; his voice drops to nearly a mutter. "Only a man who was foolish, and forgot himself."
Sansa doesn't speak. She is suddenly, viciously angry. At her father, for taking her to King's Landing in the first place. At her mother, for letting her go. At her septa, for telling her stories of the handsome prince she would one day meet and marry and love. At Joffrey, for taking that story, and everything it promised, and turning it to...turning it to shit.
And at Shae, for convincing her to open her heart to the man who stands before her. And at the man who stands before her, himself - for kissing her, and then ignoring her. For sending her head spinning, until she does not know what she wants from him, or why.
"Sansa." Baelish sighs. "We'll reach the Fingers in another day. One day more, and we'll be off again, down the river to Riverrun. There I will deliver you to your mother and your brother, and then I'll be on my way."
He takes a step closer to her. She can feel the warmth of his skin through the thin silk of his clothes.
"What would you have me do in the meantime?" he says, his voice low again. "Romance you?" He takes a lock of her hair and rolls it between his fingers. "Charm you? Try to make you love me?"
Sansa swallows.
"I once loved a lass of high birth," he says, "so I know. There can never be anything between us."
"There was a kiss, once," she says, as though she would spar with him.
He smiles, sadly. "You're still of an age that believes that a kiss has the power to change your whole life."
"Doesn't it?"
He raises his hand, touches her neck. The tip of his finger glides down the seam at the back of her ear.
Sansa shivers and sighs, startled by the power of this solitary touch.
"Gods, you are lovely," he says, surrendering.
Sansa has never embraced a man before, not one who wasn't bloodkin. Her father's body was bulky and padded, and thick with muscle underneath. She remembers the feel of it well, from the times he would return home from riding, smelling of leather and horse-sweat, and greet her with a one-armed clasp against his side. Jon and Robb were thin and knobby and coltish when they were boys, when they were yet young enough to wrestle her for the toys and sweetmeats she was supposed to share with them, but didn't.
Petyr Baelish is all sinew and wire, muscle and bone, without any superfluous flesh. He feels as keen and as dangerous as a drawn knife.
Her hands touch down on his shoulder blades, and then over top of his shoulders, and then down again, to the small of his back, covertly exploring his body. They finally come around his chest and settle on his collarbones. She tests their sharpness against her fingertips. It is a defensive gesture disguised as a caress. Or is it the other way around?
Sansa doesn't know. She is terrified; she is terribly excited. One magnifies the other, until she doesn't know which she wants, to push him away, or – oh. No. She shouldn't want that.
But he is kissing her now – feverishly, with his mouth open, his tongue burning against hers - and kissing is – Gods, kissing is glorious; why didn't anyone ever tell her how glorious it would be! He breaks into her, rolls, retreats, and breaks again, as the sea breaks, rolls, retreats and breaks against the shore. She yields to him, and yields to him yet more, but even now, locked together as they are, she is frustrated. She feels she cannot yield enough.
His hand presses into her side, into the spot where her waist is the narrowest. It is not a gentle caress; it is so forceful it almost pains her. Yet there is pleasure in it, too. She thinks she might like him to press her even harder.
Then he takes two steps forward, and she matches him with two steps back, without even thinking, as though they were merely dancing. That is before she realizes that he is laying her down on the bed.
You must not let him lie down on top of you, whatever you else may do, her mother's voice rings in her ears.
But he is on top of her now - or halfway so, at least - and his hand is staggering down her side, up her shift and around, to clutch the place where her thigh meets the curve of her backside. It is a rough, proprietary grab. His fingers press into her flesh, dangerously close to her sex.
Then his leg is sliding between her legs, pushing them apart, and though she knows next to nothing of men, Sansa knows enough to know what this means.
She must stop him, and so she does, with a noise somewhere between a gasp and a sob. The heels of her hands dig into his chest, cordoning him from her body.
Petyr looks down at her. He seems only half-surprised.
"What is it, little sparrow?" he would know.
Sansa is far too abashed to answer. Her face searches his for understanding, or, failing that, sympathy.
"Ah," he exhales, realizing her meaning. "You're worried that…I might take certain liberties? Ones that, properly speaking, belong only to a husband?"
Sansa flushes, feeling exponentially stupid. She opens her mouth, but Petyr shushes her before she can speak.
"No, my dove," he says, very gently. "You needn't fear. I won't take your maidenhead."
He trails his finger down her bodice, begins to pluck apart its knotted strings. "But…if you want…" he offers, trailing off.
His hand nudges aside the fabric covering her chest. It cups her breast, thumb circling over her nipple, and Sansa lets out a soft, involuntary moan.
"…there are other things we can do," he whispers.