Sorry it's late! Formatting nightmare.

CHAPTER 32

SANSA

Sansa woke up slowly, her fingers idly stroking wolf fur. When she opened her eyes, it was not the dead coat beneath her hands—it was her direwolf Lady, tail thumping on the bed.

"Lady!" Sansa sat up. The puppy rose to kiss her. Sansa had forgotten how big she was. It was hard to believe she'd been able to hold the pup in both hands before she'd been weaned. But Lady was gentle, as Sansa had always encouraged her to be, and stepped round and round to touch her whole body to Sansa's. Sansa buried her face in the wiggling puppy's fur.

They were in Winterfell. Her room was just as she'd left it. The tapestry with the unicorn warmed the walls, books she'd saved from the library sat in a proud stack on the table, and a hairbrush with a pearl handle rested on the vanity. She got up and Lady jumped off the bed, too. Although there was no maid to help her, Sansa put a dress on and headed down to the Great Hall to have breakfast.

Her father was waiting for her there. He was so happy to see her. Eddard Stark held her in his strong arms. He smelled like iron and wood smoke. "Your mother will be here soon," he promised.

Robb strode in with his enormous direwolf, Grey Wind, at his heels. Bearded and burly, he looked more like a man than she remembered. He carried himself like a noble. "Sansa! Look at you!" He caught her in a bear hug. "Grown up into a proper princess, haven't we?"

Breakfast was a delicious meal of biscuits and honey, sausages with a heaping side of mustard, and a heavily spiced fruit pie. Robb and her father asked her a multitude of questions and the three of them chatted amicably. Lady and Grey Wind had a wrestling match on the floor, though Grey Wind never deigned to rise for it. Then Robb wiped his mouth and announced that he was headed for the yard. His direwolf jumped up to go with him, so Sansa and Lady followed, too.

There were so many people to say hello to that by the time Sansa made it Robb was already practicing at swords with Jory Cassel. She wandered through more of the castle. Everything was in its place, but seemed different somehow. It's because I've been away for so long, she decided.

She went to her room to lie down, where she fell asleep quickly and had a strange dream. She was a gyrfalcon, looking down on a white landscape. Below her, a big man raced a dogsled over the snow. She was a shadowcat stalking through the pines, and she watched a host struggling on tired horses up the Kingsroad. She was a great elk, antlers catching the snow that fell outside a burned and ruined Winterfell. She was a crow watching her brother Jon ranging with his great white direwolf, Ghost.

But these animals were people in their hearts. There they kept the memories, thoughts, and feelings of their human lives. There were creatures like them all over the North. There were several not far from her castle. She learned the magic of jumping bodies. And pacing the treeline, Sansa was a wolf again.

She forced herself out of the dream, the wintry chill leaving her body, replaced by the warm comfort of her room and her direwolf puppy's kisses. Sansa dressed as she had the day before, the memory of a handmaid itching at the back of her mind. This day was much the same as the first. Her mother was not there. She caught her father looking sad, his thoughts taking him far away.

That night Sansa had another vivid dream. She was a wolf again, and she followed an army of men with her wolf-brothers. They marched in the chivalrous pink regalia of her enemies. She wanted to eat a straggler. Beyond the ravenous hunger of a wolf in winter, Sansa felt another, human desire—the desire to kill for revenge.

These were the men who had skinned her family. Their pink banners flew high above the white snow. Her heart was filled with anger. She knew that man there, Ramsay Bolton, meant to skin her. The realization that she was not an animal, but a human in an animal's body, jolted her awake.

Sansa felt faint even after waking and went to the godswood to pray. She didn't want to talk to anyone or look too closely at anything; she felt that Winterfell was slipping away from her.

But the trees and the open air made her feel better. The godswood was persistently ethereal, so here she could ignore the feeling that something was amiss. She spent the whole day there, kneeling silently in prayer before the heart tree and tossing sticks for Lady.

At twilight she heard a familiar voice call her name. "Sansa!"

Sansa spun around and looked into the forest. She did not see anyone.

"Sansa!" she heard her name again, coming from the tops of the trees.

Sansa thought she recognized the voice. "Bran?"

"Sansa!" Now she saw it. There, atop one of the weirwoods—a black crow. Sansa laughed behind her hand. "My dear crow! You sound just like my brother."

It flapped its wings angrily. "I am your brother!"

She had never heard a crow speak more than a single word and this announcement shocked her so much that she took several steps back, stumbled, and landed on her butt.

"What are you doing here?" it demanded in its boyish, child's voice. "There must be a Stark in Winterfell!"

"I—I am in Winterfell," Sansa stuttered.

The bird's voice changed to a man's—deep, gruff, and hurt. "You stupid girl."

Fear gripped Sansa and she scrambled to her feet and ran back to the Great Keep, the bird's voice taunting her as she left it behind.

That night Sansa had more troubling dreams. She saw peasants all over the north praying, crying, dying, damning her, damning the Starks, damning the Old Gods. It was blasphemy, but it was wrought from the pain of their lives—lives filled with famine, poverty, and death. Sansa felt that the totality of these dark emotions reached an fathomable depth; like she was in a boat skimming the surface of a black lake that would swallow in despair whatever tipped in. She heard their prayers for mercy, warmth, food, safety. Give respite from the cold. End the murders. Stop the Boltons. She heard their desperate, accusing cries. Can you even hear us? People died, and their frightened family members needed wood to burn them. They chopped her down and threw her in a fire. She watched their sad, gaunt faces through the flames until she burned away.

Sansa knew that she was going mad. These nightmarish visions felt more real than her waking life, here in this gossamer castle with its spectral inhabitants. She crawled to the godswood and prayed for them to take her madness away.

It only got worse. Staring at the heart tree, she had a vision that it shared its roots with all the weirwoods outside of Winterfell. They tangled through the ground and came up in different places, the tree in Winterfell the heart that pumped blood to them all. The North was one great body, one enormous living thing.

But without a Stark in Winterfell, the North was dying. The heart tree was supposed to pump life through the North, but it was empty. The people were starving and scared. The animals were vicious and troubled. Sap froze in the trees. The wind, a fierce minstrel, howled and whistled a dissonant song. Snow fell hard.

And the Dreadfort, like a diseased limb, caused sepsis in the rest of the body. The North could not survive with such a sickness plaguing it. It had to be cut off. Good blood ran strong, but bad blood had to be purged. It was something she knew—she was the heart.

Her nightmares filled her with dread. Men poured into Winterfell, stepped on its floors, slept in its beds, ate from its granary, pissed in its chamberpots. She recognized them—as a wolf.

Sansa woke in the middle of the night feeling incredibly sick to her stomach. Something was stuffed up inside of her, coagulating. She reached for her bedpan and threw up. There was blood. Sansa moaned and clutched her stomach. She was going to throw up again. Her throat opened and something solid and slimy slid out of it. There, writhing in the pan, swollen fat and black with blood, was a leech.

It was the most vibrant, alive thing she had seen since she came to this world. Sansa fainted.

Her eyes fluttered open in the morning. She was on the raised bed, covered in furs. For a moment her naïve, silly heart wished it were the tent where the wildling sisters had watched over her, but she knew it was not so. Her bed was clean, the leech gone.

Sansa did not get up. She was dying. Her body grew hot with fever. Maester Luwin came to examine her, but she didn't pay attention to what he said. She knew what was wrong. Her brother and her father came to her bedside, promising again that her mother would be there soon. She asked for Bran and Rickon, and Arya, but they wouldn't come. Her father held her hand and brushed her hair back from her sweating forehead, while Robb entreated her to get well.

For the first time, she understood what was wrong with them. The answer crept up on her slowly.

Winterfell is full of ghosts.

"Oh, Lady," Sansa sighed. She didn't belong here. She put her arms around the beautiful wolf one last time. "Goodbye, my friend."

She was so tired. She closed her eyes and slipped away.

x x x

Sansa woke up feeling rested, the cool air kissing her eyelashes before she opened her eyes. She was wrapped in furs inside the snow cave, the ceiling blue from filtered sunlight. She stayed quiet for a while, thinking about her strange dreams. Then she turned to Sandor.

He was very tangible and real. She scooted closer to him and watched him take the long, calm breaths of sleep. He must be very tired, to sleep into daylight, she thought as she rested her chin on his chest. He grumbled and wrapped his arms around her. It brought a soft smile to her lips. Even an unconscious Sandor was gentle and affectionate with her. After several minutes, he cracked his eyes open.

"Little Bird," he said, his voice especially hoarse in the mornings, "It's past dawn. Wake me next time."

"I need you rested, for all the things I want from you."

Sandor gave a short laugh and reached back to scratch his head. Sansa took the opening and nestled closer to him, so that when he dropped his hand it rested lower, on the small of her back. "What things?"

She felt him, so he growled at her and gathered her up in his arms, rolling her beneath him. "Oh, Little Bird…"

The wildlings were right, Sansa thought. It was as though they were married. In the wildling way, at least. Sandor kissed and caressed her, and she bloomed under him, opening like a flower. And he was the rain pelting her; rigid, blunt, and torrential. As long as she was flexible and receptive, she was resilient. He was pushing into her. It was the greatest feeling of her life.

Until now, knights beating her had been the strongest physical sensation she had ever felt. Some of the strongest men in the Seven Kingdoms took turns beating her. Joffrey had ordered his men to hit her and they had done it. Noble knights, splitting her lip on their fists, bruising her delicate body. Men at arms were used to being hit and hurt, but Sansa was a lady not used to rough treatment, and every blow hurt the worse for it.

Sandor had been there then, too, but he had never beat her. Some exchange had passed between them and the boy-king knew not to ask him to do it. Her fear of Joffrey had been primal, like the fear settled in animals' hearts, but existential. He humiliated her, but he himself could not physically hurt her. His men did the dirty work for him. All except for Sandor, who would never hurt her.

She almost wanted him to beat her now. She could take it. She'd had it worse from weaker men. She pulled him into her, deeper. She wanted to override the horrible physical sensations that her body remembered. They had been the most extreme she ever experienced, but they didn't have to be. Her mind was awash with pleasure. Sandor had always been the strongest.

Sandor heard her. Somehow, he understood. The two of them could replace the bruises, the broken skin, the mailed fists smacking into her, with strong hands holding her in place, with Sandor's body pushing into hers, with the electric feeling of sex. She fell deeper into her feelings the more he kissed and caressed her, chasing the intensity she got from kissing him deeply. He touched the very core of her heart.

Sandor had a lot of pain inside himself, too. She could feel it. She wanted to draw it out of him, like sucking out poison. He spoke to her gruffly and told her vulgar, salacious things. She wanted more. She loved it when he was rough with her. Take me. Take it out on me. Let me feel it. He pushed his hands into her flesh like he was trying to pull out her bones, kissed her with his tongue out and his mouth open, took her breast in his mouth and shook his head from side to side.

She kept her eyes closed and whispered to him. She knew it could hurt more, in the safest way possible. He was reluctant at first—he didn't really want to hurt her—but she relaxed into him and he broke. He held her wrists above her head with one hand and with the other angled her hips to meet his. She knew she could take everything he had to give her. And through this he would wipe her mind, and her body would forget everything from before. She went limp. She was nothing but a fragile little bird.

When it was over Sansa felt a desperate affection for him in her heart, while her sweaty and trembling body was aflame with the aftermath of passion and so weak that she felt something close to terror that he would want her again too soon. She could barely think, and those feelings were exactly what she wanted. She meditated on the sensation of being totally present in her besieged and overwhelmed body, the painful memories of her youth forgotten.

Sandor wasted little time in rising and getting back to work, serving to put some distance between them. Sansa was torn between wanting him to stay as close as possible to her and being so sensitive to touch that she was almost afraid of it, but she understood that he was not used to being so close to anyone and needed to be alone for a little while to feel himself again. She knew things about him, even some things he hid from himself. She made sure she was dry and got dressed and then crawled from the cave to meet him outside.

The dogs were yelping and happy, ready to run, and the gyrfalcon was perched on a tall pine nearby. They were at the edge of the wolfswood, which meant they were close to Winterfell. The easy weather they enjoyed was giving way to a cloudy grey sky that threatened storm and snowfall. It would not be long, Sansa knew, before she faced the disturbance she had seen in her dreams.