"…more and more of them. Nearly a dozen attacks in this last moon's turn alone…"

"These are not raids; the wildlings are not stealing and heading back behind the wall but trying to head further south."

"…but why should they and what is it they seek there: that is what we should be asking ourselves if we are to stop…"

Sansa sits beside her husband in the great hall as they feast his return and she is grateful for a reason to wear a pretty gown and put up her hair at the crown and let it cascade down her back in a shiny fall and she feels equal parts happiness for looking beautiful and shame for wanting another man to look at her. Except that he is not looking at her but discussing the wildlings with his father and great-uncles. The fearsome men had frightened her when she first came to Last Hearth but they have treated her respectfully as their lady though they clearly see her as naught but a pretty bedmate and provider of excess heirs for Lord Umber. They neither of them have wives of their own, but they can see that she has made them a prestigious alliance with now royal House Stark. After their meal, she sits and steals glances as the younger Lord Jon wanders the hall with a horn of ale in his hand and makes merry jests with the soldiers of the garrison and the castle's workmen. Sansa feel foolish and she fidgets with the heavy garnet pendant the Greatjon has gifted her this time.

"Is it to your liking, Sansa?" he asks her now, his booming voice breaking into her thoughts.

"It is very fine, my lord. You are too generous to me and I am ever grateful." She places her hand gently over his on the wooden table and smiles for him as she knows she will again when he reaches for her in their bed this night. When she looks up again, the Smalljon is watching.

The next morning after she has taken her bath and knowing that her husband is training in the yard with his garrison, she once again creeps to the tower room and this time he is waiting for her. There is a wooden chair now and a large crate and a shearling rug at his feet. He is bent over in the chair with his head in his large hands. He is his father's son: tall and broad and strong and bearded though is hair is a tawny brown and not grey and he wears leathers with just a fur at his collar and he only has lines around his eyes, lines from squinting at the sun and at the glare off of fallen snow for many years, she knows; she is Northerner too. Why could it not have been him? He served Robb as well-

"I cannot give you gifts, my lady," he tells her sadly, "even though I would like to."

She walks over to him and stands clutching her hands together. "You care for my happiness, Lord Jon: that is your gift to me," she tells him softly. Without thinking she reaches a hand to his shiny head of brown hair but he catches her wrist before she touches him and he pulls her down into his lap.

"No," he confesses in an anguished voice, "I want my own happiness as well. I want you, my lady: don't you see?"

She does see. Why else would she have dressed so that he would look at her? Why else would she have come here? She knows that she should not want this but she cannot remember the last time she wanted something just for herself and for her own happiness and not to please someone else. And so she leans in and kisses him tenderly and lingers close so that he can kiss her like he did the first time.

Lord Jon takes her face in his hands and kisses her back; he kisses her deeply and fills her mouth with his tongue and her lungs with his breath and she sighs dreamily. He runs his large hands over the bodice of her gown and when she presses herself into his palms, he reaches around and begins to loosen the laces of her gown. Sansa feels the cool air blowing through the tower room on her skin when he draws her dress down from her shoulders and bends his head to kiss her naked breasts. She sinks her fingers into his tawny hair and writhes in his lap as he tongues her nipples and caresses her skin. She boldly let her other hand slide from his chest down between his legs and caresses in turn the hardness of his member through the rough wool of his breeches and he reacts by groaning and sucking fiercely on her nipple, making her moan and arch her back. She cannot seem to get close enough to him, to feel him as she wishes to and so she turns to him and presses her body into his and drags her leg over his lap to straddle him with her gown raised indecently and he shoves his hands under her skirts and presses his forehead into hers as he pants and waits for her to act next.

Sansa's lip trembles as she speaks: "Yes," she breathes.

With that word, he tears her smallclothes from her body and cups a warm hand over her sex before sinking his fingers between her swollen folds. Sansa clutches his shoulders and lets her head drop back as he frees himself from his breeches and thrusts up into her. She cries out though there is no pain and he clutches at her waist and her hip and grinds her into him as he growls through clenched teeth and pants like a hunting dog at the chase. Her toes barely graze the wood floor but she rides him harder than the elegant grey mare she has been given as her mount in Last Hearth. Their first coupling is quick and rough and fiery, and she finally knows true passion and the pleasures of her own body, and his.

When he is done, he throws her down on the shearling rug and falls on top of her. He pushes open her legs and holds them that way as he takes her again, his body working at hers with a boundless strength and ferocity as though he were the savage giant of his own house sigil, broken free of his chains. He groans when he reaches his completion but he stays inside of her and rocks his hips gently and slowly and her want begins to build again, differently this time. A hot tension strains her insides and makes her stretch out her limbs and rock herself together with him and he is soon hard again and he starts to glide in and out of her slowly and deeply, holding himself inside her before drawing back and rearing over her again and again and Sansa gasps and whimpers and her breath catches and she is more alive than she has ever felt before.

"That's it, that's your pleasure peaking, my lady," he whispers huskily. "Show me that you love this, that you love me inside you…now, now, yes, now."

Sansa arches and keens long and breathlessly, a burst of heat and a tingling courses through her body and then she is weak and helpless and near tears but she is happy somehow and laughs deep in her throat as he thrusts and holds and spends himself inside her and settles on her heavily and closes his eyes like a man at prayer.

She goes every morning now to the tower and sometimes he is there but more often he is not; the Smalljon must also train with the garrison or leave on patrol or to hear petitions from commons living across the river in the Lonely Hills or further away along the shore of the Bay of Seals. When she is alone, she lies on the shearling rug and dreams of him taking her like the passionate lover he is. She feels like a lady in a song: a sad and lonely lady with a secret love who will rescue her from her unhappy fate.

Then within a fortnight of his last departure, she misses her moonsblood again and she does not know whether to weep for joy or for shame because now she is no longer a lady in a song with a secret lover but an adulteress who has dishonoured herself and her husband and may be carrying a bastard fathered by his own son and heir, but she wishes fervently that it is his child, his son, because she loves him still and wants to be carrying his seed inside her, his seed that he has spent inside her again and again when they are in their tower.

"Sansa?"

She turns her head from the roaring hearth fire in the solar now to look at her husband. He is waiting expectantly and she realizes, as does he, that she has not been listening to him.

"Pray forgive me, my lord-"

"Do I truly have reason to forgive you, Sansa? Is there something you needs tell me?" he questions, and she cannot keep the startled expression off her face because she is suddenly convinced that she has been found out but he chuckles and his eyes twinkle and he takes one of her slender her hands in his huge paw, the one with the missing fingers bitten off by Grey Wind. "Every time you have behaved so distractedly, you have been in a family way; tell me now," he drops his booming voice confidentially though they are alone this night, "are you with child again?"

She gives a small nod and feels her cheeks turn hot. "I believe so, my lord."

The Greatjon brings her hand to his lips now and kisses it and she feels the whiskers of his beard against her fingers. "You make this old warrior very happy, Sansa."

She looks at him, at his happy smile and his kind eyes and his greying beard and hair and dressed in his shaggy furs and she knows that she is a dreadful and deceitful and ungrateful woman who loves his son instead of him.

She swallows hard and answers in a hoarse whisper: "Thank you, my lord."

He still holds her hand in his when he stands and so she stands as well and leaves with him as they retire to their bedchamber because though she does not love him, she is his wife of nigh five years and the child may well be his because Sansa has never once denied her lord husband. She had never cried again after her wedding night.

She wishes that she could cry now.