"My lady."
"My lady."
Servants and soldiers greeted and bowed their heads to her as she walked the halls of the keep back to her chamber. Once she arrived, she closed and barred the door behind her and collapsed against the heavy oak boards before sliding down to the floor in an exhausted crouch. A sob threatened to rack her chest and escape her throat but she stilled it quickly.
None of that, my lady, she told herself sternly. She rose now and crossed to her washbasin where she snatched up a linen and submerged it into the water with both hands.
"My lady," she repeated scornfully, and wrung the linen out with all her strength.
My lady, he always called her, even when they were alone together. He never called her Sansa; his father called her Sansa, as was his right.
His father was her husband; and she was not his lady, but his father's. The Lady Umber of Last Hearth.
Lifting her skirts, she reached up to wash herself. She pressed the cool towel to her tender folds to calm her ache and to clean away the sticky seed from her body. She rubbed herself briskly and sunk the linen back in the water again and left it there so that his seed would not dry and stiffen the fabric. Her maid could make what she wanted of her carelessness. She withdrew her smallclothes from the pocket of her gown and stepped back into them, tying the drawstring in a perfect bow.
Her husband may want her tonight. He usually did when he returned to the castle from a journey. She has become careless indeed, risking propriety for her own selfish desire.
Sansa sat gingerly on the edge of the bed. Her marriage bed.She wrung her hands together as she looked about the chamber, their chamber, and wondered how her life had come to this.
So quickly, it seemed. No sooner had Lord Renly defeated his brother Stannis in the field than he had stormed the walls of Kings Landing with his army and freed her from her nightmare of captivity. He had even gallantly presented her with Joffrey's head.
"A gift for you, Lady Sansa, to take to your lady mother. I am sending you home to Winterfell. You are now a princess of the North," he had sounded in the throne room as she bent the knee to him in gratitude. King Renly Baratheon had let her brother keep his title of King in the North when Robb had defeated Lord Tywin and moved to capture Casterly Rock. The castle, the lands and its gold mines were now the property of the crown of the Kingdom of Westeros; the North belonged to the Northerners, and was to be ruled by the Stark kings again. They had lost their father but gained a kingdom.
But her joy at being reunited with her remaining family had been short-lived. Her brother Robb was king now, and with a grim and commanding countenance, he told her that it was her duty to wed one of his loyal bannermen; and none was more loyal than Lord Umber, the Greatjon, who had first declared him King in the North.
Sansa was so accustomed to her armor of cool courtesy and unthinking obedience that she had merely lowered her head and murmured: "My king." But in her chamber she shook and wept: was she still nothing but a pawn, even to her own family? Her mother had tried to comfort her:
"Sansa, I know Lord Umber is not the man you dreamed of, but surely you cannot have forgotten how the prince of your dreams turned out? Lord Umber is kind, and a Northerner. He loved his first wife and treated her well; he'll be the same with you, my darling girl, for how could he not love you?"
Sansa lifted tear-filled eyes to her. She knew that even her lady mother found the Greatjon overwhelming in size and in his nature. She had heard her say as much to her father once before Lord Umber had arrived with his sons as their guests at a harvest feast; and now she expected her to be his wife.
"Your brother is a king now," she continued firmly, "and has a king's responsibilities. He married where he was promised, and so once did I; and now you must do the same."
Robb had promised to marry one of Walder Frey's daughters in exchange for his fealty and his armies. He had kept his word and had brought the girl back to Winterfell. Roslin was pretty and demure and devoted to Robb. But Robb had selected a girl from a Westerman's family to be one of his queen's ladies, a prettier girl named Jeyne Westerling, and many secretly suspected that she was the one Robb truly loved.
Soon after her return North, Sansa had journeyed to Last Heart and wed the Greatjon in their godswood. After the feast, the huge old warrior had scooped her up and carried her to their chambers in his arms. She had cried afterward, and apologized for crying, and then cried even harder. The old man had patted her head like a child and told her that their bedding had been necessary to legitimize the marriage, but now she would have her own chamber and he would wait. But it was too late: Sansa missed her next moonsblood and exactly nine moons to the day of her wedding she bore Lord Umber another strapping son.
"You are mother to his child now, Sansa," her mother told her gently after the birth which she had attended with the maester and a mountain midwife, "and so you can be a wife to him again. Did he…did he not treat you kindly?"
Sansa nodded over her child's sleeping head but did not meet her mother's eyes. "He-he was gentle; or at least he tried to be." Lord Umber was as tall as Hodor and twice as wide.
"Then you know what you must do," Lady Catelyn replied simply. So when the maester declared her sufficiently healed, Sansa handed her son over to the wet nurse, donned her prettiest embroidered bedgown under a fur robe with her hair loose down her back and walked the torch-lit hallway to her husband's bedchamber. The next morning the servants moved her wardrobe and dressing table into his chamber and from that night they shared a marriage bed as man and wife.
The Greatjon was kind and gentle with her. Though he blustered and shouted at soldiers and servants and even his own grown sons, he never raised his voice to Sansa. He smiled with his whole face when he saw her, and she dutifully smiled back for him. He brought her gifts from his journeys: a silver cuff from White Harbor, velvet ribbons from a merchant in Deepwood Motte, a carved direwolf from a visit to one of the mountain clans. He loved their son, naming him Eddard after her father and teasing her about the red cast to his hair. He tickled the boy until he wet himself, and showed him sleight of hand tricks with coins that he let him keep and he put his first wooden sword into his son's hands himself one night in the solar as Sansa held their newborn daughter by the hearth fire.
Her children were her husband's; of that there was no question for they could not have been anyone else's then. She had wanted to be dutiful and honorable, as befit a Stark lady and a sister of the Young Wolf. She had even told herself that she must be happy, for she had no reason not to be.
She was a good wife and mother and Lady of Last Hearth. She had been raised for this, and she did it well: the Greatjon beamed with pride at her when they welcomed noble guests to their hall and when she sat at his side during audiences for the commons, for those who came all wanted to see the beautiful sister of the King in the North. He often prompted her to sing for him and others and though she blushed, she always obliged him graciously. But he was of an age or even older than her own father, and she felt his affection for her was like that of a father to his daughter; unless they were abed together. Her own affections never surpassed respect, and gratitude for his protection and his kindness to her and their children and for his fierce fealty to Robb.
It was Lord Jon, the Smalljon, who seemed to notice her quiet withdrawal into herself, though she did all that was expected of her. Mayhaps because he was of an age with her brother Robb he sympathized that she was wed to a man of his father's age. She blushed harder the first time she saw him staring at her, certain that he knew her secret; and she jumbled the words to Florian and Jonquil, to her husband's delight, and he laughed hugely.
"Even when my Sansa does it wrong, she does it better than anyone else," he crowed. "Is that not right, Smalljon?"
"It is, father," he had replied, his eyes warm on hers. Bewildered, she looked away as she thanked him.
AN: So it is the Umbers. Sorry if that is not exciting to sansan shippers, but I was inspired by a great fic titled "Further North" on AO3 by SecondStarOnTheLeft. When I was writing the first chapter I thought readers would be disappointed to discover that the man was not Sandor, but then I thought: "What if he were not her husband?"