Sansa

Sansa emerged from her bath warm and wet, her skin scrubbed pink by her maids. She stood naked before her mirror as her maids dried her, trimmed her nails and brushed her long, thick auburn hair until it shined and fell in soft ringlets down her back. Then they anointed her with her favorite perfume. The perfume was placed on her fingers, behind each ear, under her chin and then lightly on her nipples.

All the while Minisa Liddle sat on Sansa's bed, her eyes watching her, transfixed.

"Oh you are so beautiful my lady, the most beautiful woman I've ever seen. I do not think even Queen Daenerys could outshine you and the singers say she's the most beautiful woman in the world. Would that I had but a portion of your beauty."

Sansa stared at her face and Minisa's face reflected in the mirror. Minisa was fiftteen years old, tall and pockmarked, men judged her passably fair but not pretty. Sansa was eighteen years old, tall as Minisa, but her countenance was flawless, every feature perfectly in accordance with the standards of beauty for the age in which they lived. She was aware of the power of her beauty over men, she had been the object of their lusts since she had first flowered and was as well practiced in the art of denying men as her sister Arya was in slaying them.

Sansa turned away from her reflection and spoke to Minisa, "You are lovely, my sweetling. And will make some lord a fine wife one day if he has the wits to appreciate you. A woman's worth is more than her appearance."

And a fair face often hides a black heart, she would have added but stopped herself because it would be discourteous to imply that Minisa was plain but goodhearted. Here she thought of her time in King's Landing, her handsome prince Joffrey who had his Kingsguard beat and strip her naked, his beautiful mother Queen Cersei who had killed Sansa's direwolf Lady and who repaid Lord Stark's mercy by cutting his head off. Even Margaery Tyrell proved to be a rose with sharp thorns, she had befriended the friendless Sansa, earned her trust and then betrayed it by framing her for the murder that the Tyrells had orchestrated. Sansa had good reason to distrust a fair face, instead her measure of beauty was whether the face was honest. By that standard, Minisa was a surpassing beauty, and Sandor ...

The seamstress knocked then, she was admitted into Sansa's quarters bearing the long-awaited dress.

"Try it on! Try it on!" Minisa urged excitedly. "But close your eyes. Don't look yet."

Sansa did as she was bid. She closed her eyes and lifted her arms as Minisa and her maids dressed her in her silk smalclothes. And then she felt the gathered acres of the gown's rich concoction of gray silk and velvet and expensive Myrish lace over her head. The gown's skirts fell over her face with a smooth swoosh.

Sansa felt embarrassed at the expense that went into the gown, "I had rather we spent gold on glass from Myr than lace from Myr," she had informed the Hand of the King, Davos Seaworth. The Glass Garden was a greenhouse heated by the hot springs of Winterfell, it grew flowers and vegetables and fruits. The Bastard of Bolton had destroyed it during the razing of Winterfell. Her brother had ordered it to be reconstructed as one of his first commands as King in the North. But years later, it had yet to be completely repaired due to the great expense of importing Myrish glass.

Davos had replied that the cost of her gown was a pittance compared to the cost of completing the Glass Garden. "You are a beautiful girl Sansa. You shall have a gown more lovely than any you presently own, a gown befitting a princess of the blood," his voice was serious discussing this matter as if he was discussing a matter of state, filling Sansa with trepidation. This is not about gowns, she thought. And then Davos requested that she attend a private dinner with Bran and himself. The simple requested filled Sansa's heart with a pang of dread.

Sansa kept her eyes closed as many busy hands went about her person, lacing things here and there, smoothing the fabric in some places, spreading it out in others. Even after their hands withdrew there was a long moment of silence.

"May I open them now?" Sansa asked.

"Aye, my lady," the seamstress replied hesitantly.

When Sansa opened her eyes and stared at her reflection, she understood the silence. The gown was as ill-fitting as the ones she had inherited from her Aunt Lysa who had been a largish woman. It gaped about the bodice and her waist, where it should have been snug.

"I can't understand it, my lady. I took your measurements most carefully," and here she showed Sansa her notes with the measurements written neatly down, each measurement consistent with Sansa's mental estimates of her figure.

The seamstress took out her measuring tape again and measured Sansa's waist and bosom.

"Ah that explains it, then my lady. See here your waist has gone down to eighteen inches and your bosom to thirty-two."

"You are thinner, my lady. I've noticed that you hardly eat since Aegon's been courting you. You didn't even touch the lemoncakes Cook made for you last night," spoke Minisa.

Food bored Sansa these days, as many things did. Her thoughts were consumed with the Targaryen royal visit and with Sandor, there was little room for anything as mundane as hunger.

"My lady should not starve herself in order to impress the Targaryens. You need not worry that Queen Daenerys will overshadow you, you are her equal if not her superior," the seamstress declared, her voice slightly admonishing her in a tone her mother Lady Catelyn had used.

"Is there something that troubles you?" Minisa asked, standing close and gently placing her hands and her chin on Sansa's shoulders. They both stared into their reflections in the mirror.

Minisa had declared Sansa to be the most beautiful woman she had ever seen. Yet as Sansa stared into their respective faces reflected in the mirror, it was Minisa' she judged to the greater beauty, for in that girl's face was a sweetness, a poignant insecurity and innocence that Sansa no longer possessed.

Sansa's face had lost the fullness of childhood, it was not that she was losing her freshness, but instead of beauty, she acquired something of a counterfeit to it. She turned her head in profile and ah there it was - that look of invincible prettiness that she saw in certain pampered, expensive cats.

No, not cats, lions, the comparison came to her, unbidden.

And from this unwelcome thought came others, memories Sansa had half-buried, of a woman that had been defeated but who still continued to haunt her.

My brother learned to fight with sword and lance and mace, while I was taught to smile and sing and please. He was heir, while I was to be sold to some stranger like a horse, to be ridden whenever my new owner liked, beaten whenever he liked, and cast aside in time for a younger filly. His lot was to be glory and power, while mine was birth and moonblood.

"I thought you would happy, yet you seem to be so sad. You will be the Younger Queen of the Five Kingdoms, as you were meant to be. Is it Aegon that worries you? By all reports, he is a maiden's dream. How could you not grow to love him?" Minisa whispered, with a girlish sigh, in Sansa's ears.

It was not just anonymous reports that praised Aegon. Lord Davos had gone to King's Landing to negotiate the peace between the Five Kingdoms and the independent Kingdom of the North. He had came back to Winterfell commending the Targaryens, in particular Aegon.

In the Great Hall of Winterfell he had told his King and all in attendance, "Aegon is a proficient warrior in various martial disciplines - both the style of Westerosi knight and the art of water-dancing of the Braavosi. He is a learned scholar, he has mastered several tongues and is an accomplished student of history and law and poetry. He is a defender of the Faith of the Seven and yet respectful of other creeds. He has lived with the smallfolk and knows what it is to hunger and to be hunted. True, his deeds are small in comparison to Daenerys, but her greatness lies in conquering lands and people, I think Aegon's greatness will be in governing them. Daenerys is a great hero, equal to the North's own. But like all the Targaryens before her, she thinks kingship is her birthright, that her family is alone fit to rule because of their dragon's blood. Aegon does not share her belief, dragon or stag or lion or wolf, blood is all the same to him. He knows that kingship is a duty, not a right, and that a king must live and rule for his people."

Sansa took Lord Davos' good opinion seriously. No man was a better judge of character than him. In some ways, he reminded her of her father, though the stations that they had been born to could not have been further apart. Lord Davos had something of Lord Eddard Stark's hard integrity but salted with a measure of prudence and pragmatism.

When Aegon and Daenerys presented their suit in a letter to her kingly brother, Bran asked Lord Davos whether they should consider this most unusual match, "He is a worthy husband for Princess Sansa. And I can think of no match where two people are more well suited to each other. This arrangement is of course unorthodox, but Targaryen kings have taken more than one wife before and they must have a Queen consort now, for Daenerys is barren."

And then he turned from Bran, to appeal to Sansa directly, "Aegon has sworn to honor you and he will take no other wife after you. Princess, you have the education, the breeding and the temperament to be their Queen consort, the Younger Queen to Daenery's Elder. Moreover, the Throne requires a ruler who is a Westerosi, a native daughter who understands this country and its people. Aegona and Daenerys, for all their noble intentions, are but foreign invaders. I love you as do I a daughter, this match is as well suited for you as it is for them. Aegon is no Joffrey, no Harrold Hardyng. You will find him to be gentle and brave and strong."

Gentle. Brave. Strong. Lord Davos had unwittingly used the very words her father had used to describe her future husband, the words he had used to describe his match for her after he informed her he was breaking off her engagement to Joffrey. She cringed with shame and guilt at the memory, how she spoken to him afterward and how she had disobediently run to Queen Cersei when her father told her he was sending his daughters back to Winterfell.

Gentle. Brave. Strong. And so Lord Davos had bound her to this match, with these three words he had destroyed her secret hopes and dreams, and with greater effect than if he had threatened her with harsh words or harsh blows.

Sansa tried to imagine this paragon of manly virtue, practicing arms, reading history and writing poetry, fishing with the smallfolk. But she could never hold a picture of the courtly and handsome Aegon for long in her head, her imaginings kept turning him back into Sandor, scarred and fierce and crude. You must not think of Aegon like that, or else he may see the disappointment in your eyes when you meet.

And then other voices, not her own, filled her head.

"I will make you a match with a high lord who's worthy of you, someone brave and gentle and strong," her father spoke.

"I don't want someone brave and gentle, I want him. We'll be ever so happy, just like in the songs," her younger self replied, though it was not Joffrey she spoke of, but his Dog.

"How could you not grow to love him?" Minisa said.

"Love is a poison, a sweet poison, but it will kill you all the same."

Sansa saw the confused expression on Minisa's face in the mirror. She realized that she had unconsciously spoken her thoughts aloud. They were Cersei's words but Sansa's sentiments.