CHAPTER 27

SANSA

Sansa looked out the window of her room in King's Landing. The city beneath her was sad and dirty, but the sky above was clean and bright, with pink clouds on a blue sky and a fiery orange sunset. She sighed. Tyrion would be coming back soon, and she didn't want to see him, so she jumped out the window.

The clouds whooshed around her as she flew on the wind, spanning miles in seconds. She crossed fields, forests, and rivers. When she looked down the landscape was a blanket of snow. She landed running, her tongue out. A dog came out of the woods to run with her and she leapt around him and nipped his ear, the two of them playfully bounding through the snow.

Suddenly there was a clap of thunder. Sansa spun around; froze. Dark clouds rolled over the clearing. All around her, animals screamed and cried from their hiding places in the forest. A bear cub moaned piteously at the base of the pines. Twittering songbirds flew from the trees.

In the shadows, Sansa saw the flash of her sister's eyes and teeth. She followed her gaze. A man stood on the ridge behind them, a doll shaped like a wolf by his side.

He means to skin me, she knew.

The realization jolted her awake. Her conscious mind brought the rational thought, wolves run from men, there's no shame in it, as she fought to escape the place between dreams and waking. She shook her head. The thought was not her own, and she found herself arguing with her own mind—nowhere to run—before she realized she did not know where she was.

She felt disoriented and struggled to escape the sense of freefall that came with it. It gave way as her eyes adjusted to the dim light. She lay under soft furs in a supply tent. The interior's primal appearance reminded her of the dangerous camp of the Mountain Men in the Vale. If whoever held her here meant to hold her hostage, the best course of action would be to escape. She rose to her feet—and fell back down as a sharp pain shot through her legs. Curling her feet under her, she saw that the soles were purple, red, and covered in blisters. And they were numb—she could barely feel her own hands rubbing them.

Sansa scooted back under the blankets. Through the stuffy pain in her head, she tried to remember how she got here. . . . The last thing she remembered was Sandor carrying her under the starry night sky. Before that they had been trudging through the snow . . . she remembered a bag of gold, heavier than what her father would have payed a peasant family after a year's work, changing hands. Lady Dustin's Master of Horse calling Stranger "swarthy", "ill-tempered", and "mean".

The tent flap opened and Sansa shielded her eyes from the bright daylight, but not quickly enough to stop the pain stabbing into her forehead like a hot knife. Somehow—from his heavy tread, his heady scent, or just her intuition—she knew it was Sandor.

"You sold the horses . . ." she groaned.

"Just Stranger. Lady's lost." He knelt at her side. "How are you feeling?"

"Awful," she whimpered, though she enjoyed his attentions, his hand on her forehead, stroking back her hair. "Sandor, I . . . I can't walk . . ."

"You'll be fine. Listen to me. I want to tell you as much as I can before they come back. I don't care how nice these people are; they'd sell your skin to the Lannisters if they knew you."

"Who . . . ?"

"We're in a Wildling camp, Sansa. Obviously, I couldn't tell them who we really are, so I told them we're refugees from the war in the south."

". . . What?"

"Just don't chirp anything that will give us away." Sandor stood up, looking down at her with a mixed expression. He looked angry and, she thought for the first time, a little afraid. He hates to lie, but he does it for me.

At that moment the flap opened again, and two barbarous looking women came in. "Wildlings!" Sansa almost exclaimed, but slapped her hand over her mouth. The first girl had a smattering of freckles across her beak-like nose. The woman behind her was even taller than Sansa, had a mess of frizzy hair, and a snaggletooth that stuck out over her lip. They were clothed in the furs of northern animals and the little one carried a flagon between her hands.

Sandor kept his gaze on Sansa, stern, and the women held serious expressions as he passed them on his way out. The air was so heavy between them she wondered if Sandor and these women hadn't had some argument. But as soon as he was gone, they erupted in smiles and cheer.

"Yer up! That's good," said the taller, older girl. "Did yeh sleep all right? Wyndi and I tried to keep yeh comfortable. That's my sister, here. I'm Grtta."

"Here, drink this. It will help you get your strength back." Wyndi tilted the flagon to her.

"Thank you," Sansa started to say, but Wyndi shoved the narrow end of the bottle to her lips as soon as she opened her mouth. Sansa drank from it complacently, a warm broth that tasted of meat stock.

"We're healers, so yer lucky yeh found us," Grtta went on. "That husband of yers had no right draggin' yeh through the snow like that!"

Sansa coughed, splattering meat broth everywhere, and Wyndi wiped her and the furs down with a kerchief before trying to shove the bottle back in Sansa's mouth. Apparently, Sandor had not had time to tell her all the details of the lie he'd come up with.

"If yer goin' north, yer gonna need the right equipment, skills, and know-how to get yeh there."

"Like these shoes," Wyndi let Sansa hold the flagon herself and used her free hands to hold up two strange looking pieces woven of sticks and branches. "If you had these, your feet would be fine now."

"My feet! Will I . . . will I be able to walk again?"

"Of course!" Grtta laughed. Wyndi pushed the blankets up and opened a jar that contained a minty smelling salve. She rubbed it into Sansa's feet and then tied each one in a leather wrap.

"I'll teach you how to make this, in case you get stuck in the cold again. Your feet'll be soft as a baby's, once the blisters pop!"

"Thank you," Sansa said, "I suppose if I'm to travel through a northern winter, there's no one better to learn from than Wildlings like yourselves."

"Ooooh!" Grtta yowled, and Wyndi locked her piercing eyes on Sansa and shook her head.

"We call ourselves the Free Folk. Didn't you know that?"

"Sorry," Sansa apologized, her cheeks tinged red. I should have remembered that. "I'll remember. You've treated me so well, it's the least I could do."

Grtta shrugged. "We're not so selfless. Yer husband also gave us a lot of money."

"I'd heard that the Free Folk only lived north of the Wall," Sansa ventured. "You must have come a long way."

"Aye. Lord Commander Snow let us down through the Wall, and our clan's been travelling south ever since."

Lord Commander Snow! Sansa felt a hot flush of pride. That was her brother they were talking about! "Oh, what good news! That's excellent! Er, that you came down from the beyond the Wall, I mean. Because it must be, uh, very cold at this time of year."

"Wasn't the cold that chased us off," Grtta said. "We can handle the cold." She had a strange look in her eyes, like she was staring at something a foot above Sansa's head.

Sansa gave Wyndi a sidelong glance. "What was it then?"

"It was the dead."

"The . . . dead?"

Wyndi nodded slowly. "First one to go was an old hunter. He went out into the woods and didn't come back before dark. No one thought too much about it until the next morning. That's when our father put together a scouting party to look for him.

"They found him just outside the village, cut almost in half from shoulder to groin. His blood was frozen black. They looked around, but couldn't find any evidence to who had done it, human or animal. Pa and the rest brought the body back so his wife would know what happened to him and for the funeral.

"We made the funeral pyre and got ready to throw him on just after dark. His wife was wailin' and cryin', why my husband die, why life end, and all that. That's when he got himself up.

"What?" Sansa interrupted. "That's impossible."

Wyndi shrugged. "That's what happened!"

"But you said he was cut nearly in half."

"He was, and walkin' around real strange because of it. We didn't stay to watch, though. Soon as that happened, all of us jumped up and ran ourselves back into the nearest cabin. We could hear him moanin' and bangin' around just outside. Sounded like he was saying, 'Me tie doughty walker! Gimme her!"

Sansa looked between the sisters, aghast. "What did you do?"

"No one was volunteerin', exactly, so we pushed his wife out."

Sansa covered her mouth with her hand.

"'Lead him far away!' we told her. 'Then you come back.'"

"Did she?"

"Oh yeah. Came back the next night, face half gnawed off, chokin' out, 'Gimme her! Gimme her!' . . . This time, we drew lots. Momma lost. She ran as fast as she could, and she must have run far, because they didn't come back for a whole night."

Sansa gulped. She no longer thought the story was funny, especially if it was true how their mother died.

"But then they were back. All three of them. Chanting, 'Gimme her! Gimme her!'"

"We knew we couldn't just keep sending people to die out there. They were coming for a reason. They wanted someone. We had to figure out who it was."

"Did you?" Sansa asked. "What were they looking for? Why were they at your village?"

Wyndi stared deep into Sansa's eyes. Wyndi had the same piercing eyes as a bird of prey. Sansa searched them, as though the answer could be read there. Finally, she spoke. "They came for—"

"YOU!"

Sansa screamed. Tight pain inflicted her shoulders. For a moment, she thought she'd been pounced on by a wildcat. The creature was hanging onto her back. She screamed again. Then she realized Grtta and Wyndi were laughing. In front of her, the younger girl had tears in her eyes, and Grtta's laughter was in her ear, her fingers firm around Sansa's shoulders.

"Gods!" Sansa laughed with them. "You got me so scared!"

"Yeah we did!" Wyndi congratulated her sister.

"And it was nothing more than the kind of stories my brother Bran used to like. To think I believed for a moment in wights and Others!"

"Well yeh should," said Grtta, and Wyndi added, "Just because they can't get you south of the Wall doesn't mean they aren't real."

"Oh, okay," Sansa said, but if the girls noticed her tinge of sarcasm, they ignored it.

Over the next several days, Grtta and Wyndi made good on their promise to teach her skills that would be useful to know for winter travel. She was hopeless at skinning animals and starting fires, but could make snares, weave nets, and build snowshoes. At first Sansa worried about having to pretend she wasn't from the North, but it turned out to be easy among the Free Folk, who considered everyone from below the wall Southron. Although she missed sleeping next to Sandor, who stayed in the longhouse with the rest of the Free Folk while Sansa recovered from frostbite, she liked the sisters and enjoyed making new friends. For Grtta and Wyndi's part, when they realized Sansa was talented at sewing they brought out a wolf pelt and some furs they'd been meaning to sew into a cloak and had her finish the chore with them. They chatted as they worked, as women have since time immemorial.

"You two don't know how good you have it with your husbands," Wyndi lamented. She was at least ten years younger than her sister, and her accent was fast disappearing. "I have no idea what kind of man I'll marry! I don't want to be given away like you Southron women," she looked apologetically at Sansa. "If my husband's craven then I won't know until it's too late! And I'm not sure anymore that I'd like to be stolen away like you were, sister."

"And why not?" Grtta asked. She had been stolen by a great hunter of this clan, named Aarrn. For the Free Folk, "stolen" was synonymous with getting married. She'd brought her sister in as they came down the Wall. "I fought to test him, but it was all play. I'm happy he stole me."

"It's not the way things are done here. Besides, the clans are all scattered now. I doubt a man from one of them could even find me."

"To be fair," Sansa offered, "it's only noble daughters that are given away. Most people just decide on their own marriages."

"Is that how it was with you?" Wyndi asked her.

Sansa felt a surge of pride as she answered honestly, "Yes."

"Well whether he's a Southron or not, any man that wants to get yeh away from me will have to steal yeh! I wouldn't trade yeh for anything." Grtta mussed her sister's hair despite her struggling, and Sansa tied off the piece of the cloak she was working on with a smile. She knew that Grtta spoke the truth—she loved her little sister too much to give her away to anyone, regardless of how things were done in the south.

As she started on the next piece of the cloak her thoughts returned to the time when she was Wyndi's age, young and full of romantic dreams. She'd been promised to Joffrey then. Sansa repressed a shudder, her mouth suddenly dry. She'd loved Joffrey. Before she even knew him, she'd preferred him to her own family. What was wrong with me? She shook her head at the thought. But seeing how adamant Grtta was in her opinions made Sansa sure of the answer—she'd just been raised that way. She felt a swell of anger rise against her parents, that they had accepted the match without even knowing the boy. And why not? She had to forgive them, too. Joffrey was her father's best friend's son. They could not have made a more perfect match for the daughter they raised to be a perfect lady than marrying her to the boy who would be king.

Sansa sighed. Marrying Joffrey would have united all his lands in the south with her equally large kingdom in the north. That's why she had been promised to him. Their families had planned it out, probably before she could even talk, to prevent a war that had started anyway. She stabbed at the skins with her needle, although carefully, so her work would not suffer. Have I always been treated as a pawn, she wondered, even by my own family?

"I don't think women should be given away or stolen," she decided, adamant. "I think every woman should have the right to choose her own husband."

"There's an idea!" Grtta teased her. "Now if we could just get the nobles to stop treatin' their daughters like property, maybe we won't have to bend the knee to 'em no more, either!"

Sansa considered this. "If I were a noble, I wouldn't care if the Free Folk bent the knee to me or not, so long as they followed me and kept peace in my land."

"Let's hope you're the Princess in the North then!" Wyndi enthused.

Sansa was taken aback. She looked at Wyndi, startled, and was about to say something when Grtta interrupted. "How many times do I have to tell yeh? There's no Princess!"

"There is so. I heard people talking about it when we were in town, and I even heard about her before, when we were at the Wall, too. The King forced her to marry a demon who was half man, half monkey, so she used magic to turn herself into a winged wolf and flew away."

"And you believe that?" Grtta interrupted again.

"You know it can be done," Wyndi glared.

"There's no such animal as a winged wolf!"

"Let me go on with my story!" Wyndi whined, and turned to her more respectful listener. "She flew off to a castle in the sky, but one of the Queen's warriors found her. He followed her scent like a dog and tracked her down."

"Through the sky!?"

Wyndi ignored her sister. "He fought a hundred men to take her, but instead of taking her back to the Queen for ransom, they fell in love. Now they're coming north to Winterfell, to rule as King and Queen, make the North its own again, and kill those awful Boltons!"

Sansa smiled. It was the kind of story she would have loved when she was younger. Grtta continued to argue, and Sansa felt that same old twinge of annoyance she used to get when Arya voiced her boyish opinions.

"That story dunna make any sense. If she can fly, why didn't she just go to Winterfell in the first place? Why she need a man to take her? And what makes you think that the Princess would even marry him?!"

"They are married," Wyndi blushed, and Sansa recognized the look. She'd had it on her own face, in conversations with her own sister, from having to defend her favorite—the romantic—part of a story. "Didn't I say he stole her away?"

"Now yeh say that, when yer always sayin', 'It dunna work like that down here!'"

Wyndi turned her nose up in the air in a gesture of stubbornness, and though Sansa had been paralyzed quiet for most of the conversation, could not help but voice her support for this whimsical fantasy. "Maybe it did work that way," she offered. "After all, the Princess is a northern girl."