Her advisors and household management worked out a schedule for reaching King's Landing. Sansa and her queenly escort of servants, guards, and advisors would take seven weeks to get there from Winterfell, which would give Sansa ten days before the new king was formally chosen to strike trade deals, gather intelligence, and perhaps forge alliances in backroom meetings.
However, it was an unspoken but accepted truth that such time estimates for travel were always best-case scenarios. Realistically, they'd lose a few days along the way.
The first and best leg of the trip, six days long, was in a sleigh over smooth fields of snow. The sleigh glided along, and they covered great distances, but since it was so smooth and efficient, that part of the trip ended soon. Further south, the snows thinned and the road climbed into the hills, so sleighs would not serve. Sansa got into a four-horse carriage, and the rougher part of the journey began.
The dirt roads were covered in deep ruts and potholes, all of which were frozen rock hard. The carriage wheels would catch in the ruts with a great creaking sound and the whole carriage would stop hard, sending Sansa leaning over. Then men would groan and push on the carriage back while the driver whipped the horses, and the whole thing would lurch back and forth until it got free from the pothole or rut. The endless lurching made people throw up, stinking up the carriage interior.
After the first such day, Sansa decreed that no one in her carriage would eat breakfast, though she was not so dumb as to lay such a harsh command on her servants outright. Rather, she encouraged them to eliminate breakfast in order to achieve more graceful figures for their entrance into King's Landing.
On just the third day in the big carriage, a horse cried out in pain. It had stepped in some hole and broken its leg. Sansa got out of the carriage to look and found them finishing the beast off. The men looked downright happy as they cut its neck. She thought at first that they were happy to see their queen out and walking around; later she learned that it was because they were looking forward to horse stew that night.
A wheel broke on the fourth day, and another horse and a wheel both went down on the seventh. On the ninth, a snowstorm blocked halted them for seven hours, and on the tenth, Sansa got to ride in the sleigh again, which felt like flying on a smooth cloud after being in the creaky, lurching carriage.
Days were only six hours long at that latitude, though they were getting longer as they continued south. Still, they had to move through part of the night by torchlight to make reasonable progress toward King's Landing. On the eleventh day, Sansa was back in the carriage, and a couple nights later, another horse broke its leg on the dark road.
Good thing they'd brought plenty of horses.
Such was always how such trips went, save for days in either late spring or early fall when it had not rained for a few weeks and everything was dry. Sansa lost a day here and there, and it started to look that they'd hardly make it to King's landing with more than a few days to spare.
Along the way, Sansa slept in the keeps of her various lords and vassals. Some of the lords were poor, and though they gave Sansa their best rooms, the beds were lumpy and the blankets smelled of livestock and old beer. She longed at those times to stay in the inns that merchants preferred, but such was unacceptable for a queen. She could not insult her vassals by refusing their hospitality, and she knew that those lesser lords would tell their children about hosting the Queen of the North for generations to come.
Her grief for Bran came to her now and then through the journey's first week or so, though it was not so heart-rending as many sister's would be for a brother. She'd never been close to Bran, really. He'd been an adventurous but aloof boy when they were both children, one to run and climb and explore rather than sit and talk. Then she'd gone off to King's Landing with her father, and so many horrible years passed.
When they came back together after so many years, little Bran was no more: he was the Three-Eyed Raven. He knew all the answers, but this foresight robbed him of humanity. He was beyond uncertainty, fear, and excitement. His thoughts were only prophecies and histories. His deep voice haunted her, and the sentences he uttered were hopelessly remote and strange, like statements from a book that had been written at the end of time.
How could anyone relate to a being like that? Love them, cherish them, have a connection?
So Sansa did not cry for the Three-Eyed Raven. Rather, she cried because she felt guilty for never knowing her own brother and for being denied any chance to ever know him more. She cried hardest when thinking of how Bran looked as a child – his long hair, his bright eyes, his hands grabbing so energetically and eagerly on the castle's high parapets. She recalled her father's voice chastising Bran, and then she cried a bit for them both.
However, these tears were few, and within a week of starting her journey, her grief for Bran had passed. From that point on, the fate of her Kingdom and of the Six Kingdoms to the south worried her more.
The fact was, she'd never fought a war to break free from the other kingdoms. From her readings of history over the years, that seemed to be required to gain independence.
It was easy to see how she'd gotten away with it. No one had wanted a war right after Daenerys Targaryen and the Night King devastated the land. So at the council to decide on the governance of Westeros after Daenerys was killed, everyone there had acquiesced to letting the North leave. Each kingdom had been too depleted of men and resources to contest anything then.
That had changed; Bran had rebuilt the Six Kingdoms well. No longer was the realm on the edge of chaos and starvation. Now, a new generation of boys had turned to men, and they would be prime fighting age, with a few grizzled veterans from the prior wars to train and lead them. If the new king or queen wanted to shore up their support, centralize power, and unify the Six Kingdoms more than ever, they might organize all those men into armies and declare war on an external enemy. For creating an external enemy seemed, again from Sansa's readings of history, one of the most common ways to unify a large and diverse realm.
However, a war was ultimately unlikely. More probable was using the threat of war to gain concessions from the North. Or, likelier still, the new monarch might raise prices on everything the Six Kingdoms sold to the North—which was nearly everything besides timber, furs, fish, and wool.
Sansa kept well-read on the situation in King's Landing and knew who the most likely candidates for the throne were. By far the most likely was Bronn of Highgarden. He'd already been Master of Coin and was an experienced military leader; more than that, in his rise from assassin to commander to high lord, he'd shown incredible ambition.
Bronn would be old now—she'd have to get her maesters to check, but he was around fifty when she'd last seen him in King's Landing eleven years ago. Still, plenty of leaders ruled into their sixties. Tywin Lannister had done a fine job of it. So had Olenna Tyrell.
Sansa had heard that Bronn now walked with a limp due to some illness she didn't quite understand, and that his hair was all white and mostly fallen out. But poor health and old age would not stop a man of that ambition. With the wealth he commanded and the fact that he'd already worked with many of the realm's most powerful people, he was obviously most likely to be the next king. In fact, his low birth and coarse manners were the only reason his election was not a foregone conclusion.
Sansa recalled with a giggle how her uncle Edmure Tully had nominated himself when Daenerys died; he might try something similarly silly this time around, but he was not a serious contender for the throne.
She knew who she'd vote for if she could: Tyrion Lannister. From all accounts, he had been an excellent Hand of the King under Bran. Some even said it was his administrative skill and diligence that had rebuilt the Six Kingdoms as much as Bran's foresight. He had good character, showing this in how he'd stayed respectfully back from her during their arranged marriage. He was entering the mellower part of middle age and could rule for a few good decades before they'd have to repeat this voting procedure.
Tyrion had no chance of winning, however. The other lords did not like him and had a dozen reasons why: He flouted decorum, rank, respect, and tradition; he kept whores in the Tower of the Hand; he got too drunk at royal events; he was short and ugly; he was a Lannister; he'd served the Dragon Queen; he'd been friends with the Spider. And perhaps the biggest reason of all: He was smarter and more educated than nearly anyone outside the Citadel and knew it—and sometimes, he rubbed it in the faces of the other lords.
On top of all that, he'd served so many different monarchs that his loyalty seemed quite in question. There were even those who still whispered that he'd poisoned his own nephew. Bran had trusted Tyrion because Bran could see the past and knew Tyrion didn't do it, but no one else would trust the Imp.
No, Tyrion had no chance at all.
Not that Sansa could vote or nominate anyone. Instead, they'd talk to each other behind closed doors. She'd be in those discussions, and that might be where things really got decided. Some would seek her influence; some might seek her counsel; some would offer her gifts or offer their vote in exchange for the right price or alliance. And if she could stumble upon the correct secrets and strategies in her time there, she might pull strings and force a few of them to vote the way she wished.
Littlefinger had been an excellent teacher about such matters. She almost missed him sometimes. His shrewd maxims about how to play the game of power would float into her mind in tricky situations and guide her through troublesome moments. If he'd failed to outwit her at the end, it was only due to how well he'd taught her, or perhaps due to some slip of his mind—everyone got old, after all.
Over the course of her journey, Sansa thought about all this a great deal. Of course, she was reading raven messages from Winterfell in every town she passed, for she still had to make decisions and rule her northern kingdom while on the road. Some messages received immediate replies; for more difficult choices, she would contemplate them on the road and send a response back in the next town or large keep they passed through.
The journey was horribly long: Two months on the road, ten or more hours a day in the carriage. Her moods changed through it all, as people's moods do, and she still found time to admire the scenery.
Many parts of her northern realm were beautiful. Her carriage rolled through silent forests with giant trees older than Winterfell's foundations and taller than its highest towers. They climbed winding roads into the hills, with boulders and exposed rock on both sides looking gray and picturesque against the white snow. Sometimes they'd come around a bend on a hilly road, and a valley opened below them. In its center would be villages of stone houses with steep-eaved slate roofs to keep off the heavy snows. They passed deer grazing and lumberjacks singing ancient local songs while they worked. In one valley was a long lake where they caught huge fish and carved their bones into tiny shapes of ships and wild beasts.
Here and there were castles, some of them built within the past few generations and looking impressive but lonely amidst the snow-covered vastness; other castles were half-ruined heaps of stones that could've predated Aegon's Conquest by centuries.
Now and then they'd pass a humble house by the road. These places warmed Sansa's heart and made her long for a simpler life, with their lanterns in the window, their rustic rooms, and their scent of baking bread.
The people in those houses and castles and villages trusted her as their ruler. Did they know they'd have no grain for the crusts of their wholesome meat pies if she didn't make the right deals down south?
Yet Sansa was confident. She'd do anything and everything to get that grain. How far she'd have to go, she'd no clue, but Bran had known she'd get it and sent her that message of confirmation despite knowing he'd die the next day.
The days grew longer as the carriage got further south, and their speed increased. The winter landscape of white snow and green pines and silent meadows stretching powder-covered to the horizon slowly turned to the uglier landscapes of the Six Kingdoms. Here the snow had melted and refrozen a few times, so instead of white it was gray-brown and deformed into various shapes and textures—rough and jagged; smooth as glass; blocky and heavy; drooping down off the side of a rock in long icicles and forming frozen puddles at the bottom. Farther south still they passed grain fields frozen hard and with snow only in the long unused furrows. It was an ugly place that would turn green and smell of fresh flowers and tender green leaves when summer came.
Whenever that would be.
When Sansa was over halfway to King's Landing and had passed out of the North, she received a message she found quite curious. It said that none other than her cousin, Robin Arryn of the Vale, would run for king.
This information so puzzled her that she wondered if it were mistake. Robin was a spoiled, lazy, and somewhat foolish boy—or no, he was a man now, not much younger than herself. But his intellect and emotions seemed to have halted their maturation in his early teens. He'd also shown a streak of cruelty as a child, though admittedly that had not shown up in a while from what she heard.
What made it more ridiculous for Robin to try and be King was that he didn't even rule his own realm. The local power holders in the Vale placated him with hunting, gifts, parties, fine foods, and all manner of frivolous and strange diversions. While he was so distracted, they made all meaningful decisions. For the most part, from what Sansa had heard, Robin cared so little for ruling that he never argued with the suggestions of his advisors and simply agreed to whatever they came to him with.
Sansa wrote an immediate reply to the message questioning the source of such information and sent it at the keep of one of her vassals. On the road the next day, however, she had time to turn it over.
It struck her that electing Robin was brilliant.
He would rule the Six Kingdoms in the same absent-minded, uncaring way he did in the Vale. The other power-holders in the Six Kingdoms would make all the meaningful decisions. They'd retain the effective administrative structure, trade agreements, and infrastructure improvements Tyrion and Bran had brought in.
Most importantly, by voting in Robin as king, they kept out potential tyrants. They ensured this election system and balance of power would continue, and that no power-hungry monarch could abuse their royal powers too much-or establish another dynasty like the Targaryens or the Lannisters.
Yes, if she could vote, she'd vote for Sweet Robin.