SANSA

They had been riding for almost a week, and still Ser Shadrich refused to unbind her hands or tell her where they were going. "I might, if I thought you were like to be a tender maid," he said mockingly. "I thought you were fair and gentle and sweet, but after that clout I had to give you to get you to come, I'd fear for my virtue if I did."

I am not a tender maid. Sansa had been a frightened girl once, but not any more. Her time in King's Landing and then playing Alayne had burnt away all but shreds of it, betraying Petyr had done the last, and now knowing that she was reliant on no one but herself to find a way out of this had left her no leisure at all to be fair, or gentle, or sweet. She had already tried that, attempting to make conversation with Ser Shadrich, or flatter him, or ask him cordial questions, but he flippantly disregarded any and all of her attempts. "Was I a few years younger, and not so utterly skint broke, I might well consider marrying you myself and coming into your castle," he said, and laughed. "Shadrich Stark, Lord of Winterfell and Warden of the North. It does have a ring to it, now I think. But as for crossing up Ramsay Bolton. . . even if they call me the Mad Mouse, I'm not so mad as that. I'll gratefully accept the mountains of gold he'll pay for you, and get the buggering hell out of his way."

We will never get there. Not if I have anything at all to say about it. Surely their absence had been marked by now – Littlefinger at least and likely the Elder Brother as well would have sent men after her. But Ser Shadrich, who had eked out his living by possessing a hedge knight's cunning, opportunism, amorality, and caginess, had taken them on a looping, roundabout ride through the barren northern foothills of the Mountains of the Moon. He always stayed where there were trees or underbrush for cover, never venturing out into open country, and once when they spotted riders in the colors of House Arryn, Sansa took a deep breath and prepared to scream at them, but the Mad Mouse gave her another clout that left her head ringing. "That," he said, "was not very wise. And not very kind either, considering the service I'm doing by taking you back home. Next time you try, I'll gag you so well as bind you. Your choice."

And besides, that night, he let her in on a much darker secret. "Doubtless you'll be wondering how all your plans went downhill," he said, as he roasted a scrawny squirrel, casually tore it in half, and threw it in her lap, still leaking blood. "That would be thanks to Petyr Baelish himself. He was the one who told Lords Belmore and Templeton about the minor upset in the north. I just happened to hear about it from a maid who heard them."

Belmore and Templeton. Sansa remembered Randa telling her that Littlefinger was having breakfast with them, on the morning of her abduction. He'd wanted her to come as well, and she'd made up the excuse about her moon blood to steal off and visit the Elder Brother in private. I was supposed to hear as well. She didn't want to beg Ser Shadrich for anything, but she couldn't hold back. "You said that – that it was Lady Arya who escaped from the Boltons." My sister. My little sister. She could barely imagine Arya marrying anyone, or even exactly what she had looked like.

"Actually, as per my trusty informant, it wasn't. Littlefinger told Belmore and Templeton that the girl he sent north to wed Ramsay Bolton wasn't Arya Stark at all. He thought they should know, for their position as wealthy and influential Lords of the Vale would, he intended, come into play quite soon. For he had a certain plot in train to restore the North to its trueborn heiress, and hoped he'd be able to count on their support."

Sansa couldn't eat that well with her bound hands – not that the greasy, half-charred chunk of squirrel was so appetizing anyway, but she was so desperately hungry that she didn't care. Yet at that, her appetite deserted her. He is not lying about this. It was too sheerly Littlefinger, to the bone. "It – wasn't – Arya?" she said at last. "But then – who?"

"Who knows?" Ser Shadrich shrugged. "Some steward's brat, he said. No one of consequence. No wonder Ramsay Bolton is so irritated."

Some steward's brat. Sansa's heart sank into her stomach. There was no proof, nothing – nothing but the fact that her best friend, Jeyne Poole, had been taken from the rooms they shared soon after the massacre of her father's household. Taken away and never seen again. And Jeyne was a northerner, daughter of Winterfell's steward, who in a grey dress and white cloak could conceivably pass as Arya to those who hadn't met her before. And if Littlefinger had sent her to marry this monster, it stood to reason that he would then be keeping very, very close track of what transpired afterwards. His little birds are everywhere, just like Lord Varys'. How else was he to know when to stage her wedding to Harry, have them march in glory to liberate the North from the Boltons?

My friend. Littlefinger did that to my friend. Sansa felt even sicker. He would have done the same to me, if I wasn't born who I was. If my brothers were still alive. . . he would merely keep me for his own, he would not need to bother with this plotting and scheming. She remembered vividly what Petyr had confessed to her aunt Lysa, before he pushed her out the Moon Door: the only woman he had ever loved in his life was Catelyn Tully. And I look very like my lady mother.

Sansa's gorge rose in her throat. Hungry as she was, she knew she would vomit if she chanced even a bite. Clumsily, she threw the squirrel away from her into the dirt.

Ser Shadrich's eyes flickered after it. "Wasting food? I call that foolish. You never know if there will be any on the morrow. Eat."

"No." At that moment, Sansa made up her mind. She would starve herself to death before allowing Ser Shadrich, or Ramsay Bolton, or Petyr Baelish, or Harry the Heir or anyone, to claim her as a prize. That decision, at least, was still within her purview.

The look on the Mad Mouse's face had turned ugly. "I said eat, girl."

"No."

Ser Shadrich shrugged. There was a long, frozen moment, as he and Sansa stared at each other. He started to turn away, and she let out half a breath. Then, fast as a snake, he lunged.

She didn't have time to deflect it. He hit her twice as hard as his size would suggest, wrenching her tied hands up and over her head, slamming them into the dirt. He threw a hip into her to pin her down, then smashed one hand over her nose, cutting off her air. With the other, he slammed the squirrel halfway down her throat. "EAT!"

Sansa gagged and thrashed, trying to steal a breath, but he rolled with her, lithe and strong as an eel. She saw red, retched and struggled, was dimly aware that she was on the verge of blacking out, and, sobbing, tore off a bit of stringy raw flesh with her teeth. She gulped it hard, felt it start to come back up, and forced it down again.

"Better." Ser Shadrich removed the meat, just long enough for her to suck an agonized breath. "Now, again." He shoved it back.

"No!" She could barely speak; her chest was beginning to heave in panicked spasms like a frightened bird. "Plea – please – st-stop, I'll – eat, please. . .!"

"Coming around to me, are you?" He put the meat down, but remained heavily on top of her, elbows digging into her shoulders. "I knew you would. But I've had a thought, now. It really doesn't seem quite fair for me to go all to this trouble to cross the North and take you home, without the slightest reward for it. And while I still don't intend to marry you, I've never known that to stop a man before. Bastards aren't found under cabbage leafs, after all." He smirked.

At first, Sansa didn't understand what he meant. And then, horribly, she did.

Ser Shadrich unsheathed his knife and cut her bodice open, and the freezing night air stung her bare skin. Don't think about it, don't think about it, it's nothing. She had been stripped half naked before, and that with the entire court of King's Landing looking on. Now he was fumbling at the laces of his breeches, and he breathed in her ear, "It doesn't matter if you're a bit ruined, does it? From what I hear, that's how Lord Ramsay likes them. And don't tell me that Lord Baelish didn't get up your slit a time or three. Any man could have seen the way he looked at you." He got an arm underneath her, jerking her up hard. "Now lie still like a good girl, and this won't hurt."

His breath was coming shorter and shorter with excitement. "Ah – you're not even struggling at all, are you? You slut, you must have been hoping this would happen from the moment I took you – what maiden doesn't want – to be carried off and ravished – by her fair knightly savior? Yes, you're a slut, a little girl with a head full of empty dreams, and now you're about to get them all – "

No, Sansa thought. No, I'm not.

Ser Shadrich had his breeches down around his knees, and was fumbling under her skirts with his free hand. He wasn't paying attention to holding her own hands, and she managed to swing them down to her side. The knife he had dropped was almost in reach. Her fingertips batted the hilt, and she heaved to one side, dragging Ser Shadrich with her. He muttered something in an annoyed tone and got hold of her braid, yanking it so hard that she thought he'd torn her scalp off. He was between her legs, but she didn't even notice, she didn't care. Nothing mattered but that knife, and now it was in her hands.

Sansa saw the trees above her, the sky, the stars, Ser Shadrich's flushed, leering face. She closed her fingers on the knife. The ropes were tied around her wrists tight enough to chafe, but that didn't matter either. Clumsily, but very calmly, she brought the blade up and stabbed Ser Shadrich in the neck.

He jerked. The expression in his eyes transformed from greedy lust to shocked rage. She hadn't gotten it very deep; skin was stronger than she'd expected, she had to shove hard to break it, without hesitating. But the knife was still there, and she had only instants before he'd roll off her and grab his longsword. It doesn't matter if you're a bit ruined. . . that's the way Lord Ramsay likes them.

This time, all the rage of betrayal, abandonment, abuse, isolation, terror, murder, lies, and fury was behind her blow. I am the north. And the north remembers. She slammed the knife into Ser Shadrich's jugular vein so hard that it exploded out the back of his neck.

This time when he convulsed, it wasn't a pained and irritated thrash. His eyes were already glazing over, his blood pulsing hot into her skin and clothes and hair. He collapsed on top of her in a grotesque simulacrum of the act of lovemaking, and died.

Sansa lay under his corpse for several moments, still feeling queerly, bizarrely calm. It was only after that that the shock set in. She twisted out from beneath him and sat huddled and shaking on the ground, dripping in blood. The wolves will smell me here. But why should she fear them? Father killed Lady so long ago, but I am still a wolf. I am Sansa, Sansa Stark.

The words sounded so good in her head that she had to say them again, after so long playing Lady Lannister, after playing Alayne Stone, after lies and lies and lies. "I am Sansa Stark," she said out loud, wonderingly, and started to cry.

It didn't last long. It was a spurt of released emotion like a cloudburst, hard and shattering and quickly over, as she wiped her eyes on her sleeve and sniffed and gasped and choked. Then, with an aghast awareness of what she was doing at once subsumed by acceptance of the practical necessity of it, she knelt at Ser Shadrich's side and began to loot his corpse.

There was barely any money – he was, as he had said, utterly skint broke. Only one silver stag, and a handful of copper pennies, but she tucked them into her pocket nonetheless. There was the longsword, which she briefly considered taking, but it was too heavy for her and she had no training to wield it. There was the knife with which she had killed him, which was better, and his heavy cloak. His horse had reared and shied at the scent of blood, but its hobbles had held.

The next order of business was to get her hands untied. Sansa twisted and pulled at the ropes until they were almost rubbing her bones, but could not loosen them. So finally she wedged the dagger under a rock with the blade pointing up, slipped her hands over it, and began to saw back and forth. She winced every time it nicked her skin, until her palms and knuckles were covered with small weeping eyes by the time the last fibers parted. She tore a few strips off Ser Shadrich's tabard and looped them around as makeshift bandages, then tied them in place.

Sansa was still so fragile and euphoric that her new reality only then became apparent. She was utterly alone in the dark woods, with not the remotest idea of where she was or where she was going. There was no way she intended to continue meekly on to get bought by Ramsay Bolton, yet she was equally sworn not to go back to the Vale. She could always try to find her way to the Quiet Isle, and likely should. The Mountains of the Moon were filled with wolves and wildlings and winter, and she had few provisions, no way to hunt, and she was still the kingdom's most sought-after prize. Perhaps more so now, if Littlefinger had leaked the word of her true identity in order to recruit help to search for her. She did not know if he would have or not.

I am free. It was a dizzying thought. From the moment she left Winterfell so long ago, with Father and Arya, she had not been free. King's Landing had been a dream that turned into an unending nightmare, and then the mummery of the Vale and her growing awareness that she was just as caught as she had been before. She wondered if there was anywhere in Westeros that was safe for her right now. I could try to make it to White Harbor, take a ship across the narrow sea. She couldn't be far from the coast, could hire a boat to cross the Bite to Lord Manderly's seat, and Lord Manderly had always been a staunch friend to her father and to her brother Robb.

What awaits me across the narrow sea, though? As a girl she had been enchanted by the tales of the exotic splendors of the east: the canals and courtesans and bravos of Braavos, shadowbinders from Asshai, the striped zorses and the moonsingers of the Jogos Nhai, the basilisks of Yi Ti, seas of Dothraki ghostgrass and the paradise of the Summer Isles, the smoking ruins of Valyria. . . all of it had seemed both too wonderful and too frightening to be true, to a little girl growing up in the grey walls of Winterfell. She knew no one, spoke none of the languages, had no money, and would only be able to trade on the faint and fading hope that some adventuresome soul would want to involve himself in the mucky politics of Westeros for a smile and a kiss. Or more.

Unable to riddle out an answer, Sansa untied the horse and led them as far away from Ser Shadrich's body as she could, hoping not to blunder down some unseen cliff and break her neck in the dark. She pitched the small tent, fumbling the knots with her bandaged hands, and crawled inside and lay down. She still could always starve herself out here in the wilderness, but that idea had already lost its savor. I have to live, I want to live.

Using Ser Shadrich's cloak as a makeshift blanket, she slept, woke, and dreamed fitfully, startling awake half a dozen times certain that she heard intruders in the woods. Finally, too sore and cold to sleep anymore, she crept out in the greyness before dawn and ate a few crusts of hard bread that she found in the saddlebags. Then she washed off the blood in a frigid spring, gasping and spluttering at the icy needles. After that, there seemed to be nothing to do but get up on the horse and find out where fate would take her.

I have to do something, I'm too recognizable the way I am. She considered returning to Ser Shadrich's body and taking his clothes, but couldn't bring herself to do it. She tied his cloak around her neck, then pulled her long braid free and unsheathed her knife.

Sansa had always loved her hair. It was long, thick, and lustrous, dyed brown when she had been Alayne but starting to show through with the true Tully fire. My lady mother's hair. But for that very same reason, it was much too dangerous. Gritting her teeth, she slipped the blade up beneath the back of her head and cut it all off, then dropped the braid on the ground. Her head felt oddly light. It looked as if she'd left a limb behind, and she grimaced and turned away from it. She grasped the bridle of the palfrey, and awkwardly clambered astride. She'd never ridden a courser by herself, in rough country.

Only one of the things I have not done, and must. She pulled up her hood over her newly shorn hair, and spurred away.

The day passed slowly. She went downhill where she could, following the river. It has to reach the sea eventually. Once she left the trees behind, she continually glanced over her shoulder for any signs of pursuit, but the countryside was utterly deserted. It was beautiful in a cold, bleak way – the Mountains of the Moon serrated the distant horizon behind her, summits shrouded in gauzy haloes of windswept cloud. Before her, the land tilted and rolled in terraces and fields, but the harvest had come and gone, and they all lay dry and dead.

Past noon Sansa had to stop and get down; her legs were cramping badly, and she walked as bowlegged as an old knight. She nibbled a bit more of her remaining food and watered the horse. The sun was pale and ghostly, drifting in and out behind thin streaky clouds, and there was a lacerating chill in the air. I must find shelter before nightfall. It will snow, and soon.

Afterwards, she wearily hauled herself back up. I should think of a name to give, in the event I meet someone. Yet all her invention was deserting her. I could be a girl on her way to a motherhouse, no one asks too many questions of a would-be septa. Petyr told me that. She did not want to think about Littlefinger, perhaps even less than she wanted to think about all the rest, but she knew that she would have to take his lessons to heart, have to remember her poise and polish and secrecy and lies, if she wanted a hope of surviving and ever seeing. . . the gods alone knew what she would see again.

At last, as dusk was falling, she came in sight of the coast. Far out to sea she could glimpse what were unmistakably the grey rocks of the Sisters, and her heart gave a horrible wrenching hoping leap. I know where I am, it isn't far. White Harbor might be her best hope. I could stay there until the trouble is over, the Manderlys would shelter me. It might not be nearly far enough to deter Littlefinger, however.

There was a small village built around the Bite ferry port, and Sansa rode down into it with every nerve on edge. A girl on a knight's palfrey was bound to attract attention, and not many of them were likely to be altruists. But her belly was gnawing itself out with starvation, and she was exhausted, cold, frightened, alone, and finally beginning to feel everything that had happened to her in the last fortnight alone. She would have to risk it.

As might be expected of a seaport, there was a small inn, and the pockmarked stable boy took the horse without asking any questions. Nervously fingering the few coins in her pocket, Sansa ventured inside.

The inn wasn't very busy. The low beams were blistered black with peat smoke, there was a pervasive smell of fermented ale and unwashed man and dirty cloth, but nobody leapt up at her entrance, and nobody looked like a murderer – only tired fisherfolk and the lower class of merchants, who followed the circuits through the highlands of the Vale and the small towns on the Bite and the Fingers. An innkeeper in a stained apron was making a fussy perambulation through the common room, but he detoured over when he spotted her. "Yes?"

Sansa swallowed. "I – could I buy a room for the night?"

"Two stags," the innkeeper said offhandedly.

"I – have one stag." She held it out like a peace offering. "And – some pennies." She spilled them out, cursing Ser Shadrich's impecuniousness.

"What do I want with pennies, girl? Two stags, I'm running a business here, not a charity. Be quick about it, now. I've paying customers to serve."

"Please. I've ridden a long way, and – and I'd gladly – "

"That's what they all say. Either that or they have some old mother who's dying, whom they're trying to get back to see for the last time and they hope that by the gods' mercy I'll do them this one kindness. You have a dying mother too, girl?"

My mother is dead. "No."

The innkeeper snorted. "That makes you twice as honest as most. If only you had twice as many stags. Get out. Run along. Hurry up, go."

"Please – "

"Go, girl. Out!"

Helplessly, Sansa backed away from him. Mayhaps there was another inn in town, smaller and meaner and less-reputable no doubt, but for one night she ought to be safe enough. I have my knife. If another man tries what Ser Shadrich did, I'll kill him too.

The small, muddy courtyard was as black as pitch, though the moon showed a sliver from behind a cloud. Cold kisses of snow were already starting to fall; it would be another very uncomfortable night outside if she couldn't find sufficient accommodation. She stumbled forward, hands outstretched. I'll have to get my horse back. Then she'd just –

And at that moment, she walked very hard into a big, cloaked man, who'd been proceeding across the courtyard in the opposite direction, toward the inn. Hard enough to knock her hood back, and send him retreating a few reeling steps, with a snarled curse.

"I'm – sorry, ser," she blurted out, seeing the hilt of a longsword protruding from beneath the cloak. "I didn't see – "

Strong fingers seized her beneath the chin, forcing her head back. For a fathomless, endless moment, there was nothing but silence, and shock.

"I'm no ser," the rasping voice said, like stone and steel. "Bloody hell, girl. You know that. I'm just a dog without a kennel. And now – " he got her by the arm, half-carried and half-dragged her back toward the inn, even as every bone in her body was screaming, no, it can't be him, I'm dreaming, he's dead, it can't be, don't make me believe this – "you're a bird without feathers. So it seems to me – " he slammed the door open, and a rush of snowflakes followed them inside – "that now – we're – bloody – even."