Chapter Eleven – Returning
Robb
On the far distant wind Robb heard the howling of a she-wolf, and he looked up from the bowl of green paste in his hands. Glaring he stared out over the waters of the Gods' Eye, towards the east and away from the setting sun, and absently he noticed that both Grey Wind, Ghost and Jon looked with him. None of the others reacted.
Again. It was one of those shapeshifter things, again. It had to be. Unknown, always unknown, he had not an inkling of how it worked or what it was. But perhaps this place can provide answers. "Your Grace?" Robar Royce asked of him, and he shook his head to clear it and turned back to face his loyal followers around the campfire. "Your Grace? Is anything amiss?"
"It's nothing, Royce" Robb shook his head and cast a glance around the campfire they had set in the middle of a clearing, at the few people that he had brought with him to meet the Green Men. It was said that the winds and the waves turned away all who would come to the Isle of Faces, on the middle of the Gods' Eye, pilgrims and explorers alike, would be turned away by wind and sail, but in two small boats Robb had noticed no such things. It had supposed to be one boat only, but Grey Wind and Ghost had insisted on coming along – for some reason. Now the two lay huddled together in the grey shade of one of the thousands of Weirwoods that lay around the island. They were beyond number all around them, their crowns filled with red leaves that looked almost like hands, and their faces… their faces were all different. Old men, women, children, bearded or shaven or stern or glad, all around one tree amongst the myriad. "You were saying?"
"That message you had sent to Joffrey after Harroway, your Grace" he prodded uncertainly, Lyra Mormont glancing at him as she ate her own bowl of green paste beside him. To the left of Robb and Jon sat Rymund and Maester Ebbert, and beside young Edric Dayne on their right sat Roren Bulwer, glowering all around them with his bloodshot, tired eyes. Not a one of them wore armour but Royce, who wore his pauldrons, his greeves and his bronze gauntlets. If the stories had been true and their boats turned over, swimming was easier without armour on. Robb did not like being on that lone island, strange and foreboding without armour. He could feel… something. Something in the ground beneath his feet. Something was watching them. Not even in the godswood of Winterfell he had felt so small.
"Aye, it's like prodding a sleeping bear and expecting it to be your friend when it wakes up" Lyra Mormont said as she, with a face of profound disgust, scraped the past they had been provided off her teeth. Robb too picked at it. It was a green, thick paste of a slurry, made of onions and shallots and garlic and pine oil, spiced with thyme and rosemary and large grains of salt. The very taste of it lay thick against his tongue and brought tears to his eyes.
"It's supposed to" he coughed. There was something else in it too. It was pieces, pieces of something white and earthy, something that stuck in his throat, something they had to wash down with the elderflower wine the attending children. But he was starved after an entire day on the Isle of Faces without food, and so were the others, so he ate of it anyway. Edric, on account of his weak stomach, was the only one who didn't eat. He had been sick on his way over the lake, just like Jon had though much worse. At least the two were brothers in their misery, and had each other to cling to and lean on. Robb had been considerate enough not to laugh. Lyra and Ghost hadn't been, though Ghost did it silently, as always.
Only Grey Wind noted Pale Brother's amusement, but he and Robb blended together so easily now. It was hardly an effort anymore to see from his eyes and speak to him in his thoughts.
"If Joffrey hurts Sansa, the same will be done to all the Lannister prisoners we have a thousandfold again" Jon said for him, idly patting him on the back while Robb sipped of that queer, weird wine. It was like iron on his tongue, and it even had the look of sanguine red, yet it tasted of flowers and acorns, earthy and rich. "He will not hurt her – he cannot. We have seen to that. We want him angry. We want to send his forces out to die on our pikes in his rage".
"The Southron's military strength relies on knights" Robb finally got his mouth cleared of that prickly taste, though now it was replaced by an iron aftertaste that made him think of walking in Grey Wind's skin and fighting Lannister men. "Short spear formations, close ranks, lightly armoured footmen, crossbowmen – their armies are cumbersome and slow and not nearly as effective as they think. War is fought by marching and won by speed and shrewdness". They gave him odd looks, uncomprehending, and inwardly he sighed. It felt obvious to him, but none of them got it. It was difficult to explain, but he wanted them to understand. Well, if they did not, his enemies most likely did not either. "Rymund – play something to fill the silence, will you?"
"Gladly, your Grace" the Riverlander seized his lute closer and began to softly pluck at the strings with his fingers. "I loved a maid as fair as summer" he began, voice quivering with emotion as the sunlight faded around them and shadows began to move through the trees "with sunlight in her hair". And as he sang Seasons of my Love Robb saw them around him.
It was odd. "I loved a maid as red as autumn, with sunset in her hair". There were stories of the Green Men, of travellers returning from the Isle of Faces with legends of men with skin of living green and horns protruding from their brows, but no such men had been seen. On the shore they had been greeted by a young child, dressed in whispy rags and undeterminable gender and with a mop of red-blonde hair, calling himself, herself, itself, Birch. It had led them to the glade, telling them that men in red had tried to cross the lake from the Battle at Harrenhal but "lost their way". Its brothers and sisters, a few of them, brought them bowls and goblets of wine and told them to wait. The Green Men would come, they said. All questions would be answered if they only ate and waited.
And there they were, appearing once again as if grown from the earth or as if they had stepped out of the trees, living shadows come to listen to the songs of men. "I loved a maid as white as winter, with moonglow in her hair". A dozen of them, maybe two, maybe more, their eyes shining in the penumbral twilight from out among the trees as the stars, one by one, came into sight overhead, and it was odd, all so very odd, for nightfall was not supposed to come for another long while. Hours at the very least. No, something was different, for the darkness was falling around them and the campfire before them grew bolder and stronger, the fire blazing brighter.
In the back of his mind he felt Grey Wind drift off into something that was… that was like sleep, yet not. Distant that Direwolf became to his mind, as if something was intruding on what bound them together like a tower coming between oneself and the summer sunlight, drenching one's body in shadow and darkness. "I loved a maid as sweet as spring, with flowers in her hair". Where there more eyes in the woods now? He couldn't tell. He felt that iron taste on his lips and that deep, earthy, rotten paste clog at his throat, and the eyes in the forest, impossible to tell apart from the eyes of the children and the eyes of the Weirwoods themselves, began to glow like stars, white and green and red and winter blue.
"And I loved-" Rymund went to sing on, but his words were slurred, his hands drifting away from the neck and body of his lute to fall to his side. "I loved-" but he said no more, as he slumped down, though almost all of the others seemed to not notice – or not care.
"Master Rymund!" Edric was alone in jumping to his feet, eyes darting all about them as he stood terrified. "Ser Royce! Lord Stark! Lady Mormont! Your Grace!" He approached Robb though the darkness was thickening, and there was a distant whisper, a whisper past Grey Wind's presence, something strange, something that he had to listen to. "Your Grace! Rouse yourself! Do not subcome! Nothing-!" Why was he shouting and shaking him by the shoulders? There was no reason. No reason that was important, anyway. All that mattered was the stars and that taste in his mouth and him reaching through the darkness to find that –
Things… things were not as they seemed. "Sometimes darkness can show you the light, young Stark". From the Weirwood scenery a solemn form intruded, a tall and gaunt man, green robes pulled close about his body to cover all of him but his hands, hands inked and spotted with green, a crown of horns and thorns and thistles on his head and a mask carved from rough oak, still clad wholly in bark, before his face. Only his eyes could be seen through that mask – green, burning green, streaked through with blood red and winter blue in a swirling maelstrom pattern.
Edric noticed how Robb looked up at that shadow of a man who approached their campfire, and the boy Lord of Starfall turned around to see too – but his reaction was different from the others'. While Ebbert and Rymund and Jon looked confused and Roren looked relieved Edric was afraid. Very, very afraid. He trembled where he stood, mouth falling open, and he scrambled backwards and away.
The man in green raised his hand the way of Edric, and suddenly he stood still. "Sleep, Starchild" the Green Man's voice was soft and deep, like the burrows of the deep world, hidden from the light of the sun and the coming of the kingdoms of man. "Sleep deeply, and forget my true visage". Edric's eyes slid to the back of his head and he slumped to the grassy forest floor, falling into a torpor-like rest within mere moments. That done the Green Man lowered his hand and folded his robes about him as he sat down in the place that the boy lord had vacated, his robes rising up just a little to show his gnarled and twisted feet, hard and dark like the hooves of an old horse, bare within his sandals. "You sought to speak with me, Robb Stark" he spoked aloud. "We have been waiting for your coming for centuries. When Bat mingles with Direwolf powerful blood is made".
"I-" Robb shook his head and rubbed at his eyes. They hurt, head and eyes both, and there were questions he wanted to ask but could not ask. He would not let himself. "I heard the stories. You are supposed to be here. Many of you. But there are only children here, and you. Where are all the others?"
"It has been a long time since new blood came into our brotherhood" the Green Man spoke in reply, his voice twisting and distorting itself on the night air. "To open ourselves to the Old Power, what little of it remained, we had to" he paused, and Robb had the feeling that there was so little he understood "change ourselves. Many years have passed, and few of us can walk like men anymore. The transformations have progressed beyond mobility. Still we listen, still we wait, still we tend to the Heart's Trees side by side with the Children". Robb thought there was something off, something strange, but he said nothing of the sort. "Few of us have the Blood. None of us had the Green in us before the Trees gave it to us. Which is why your family, the one dead, the one living and the one yet to live, is so important. Especially the one yet to live".
"What?" He did not understand, and there was something on the edge of sound, a whisper on the winds, that sapped his strength and brought the pains to his head and the agony to his eyes. "I- I don't… where are the Greenseers?"
"There is only one Greenseer living in this world that has the blood of man" the Green answered his question, a very different question than the one he had intended to ask. "And only one, perhaps two, with the potential to become Greenseers. To listen to the Songs within the Heart's Trees and see the world and the ages unfurl in the Song of the red leaves – it is a thing like your bond with Grey Wind, young Stark, but with the Trees themselves. You will never have it. You have only traces of Green in your blood. But like your father, and his father before him, you may pass it on. And if you join the Wolfsblood with the blood of the High Tower, the blood of Dragons traced so faintly in it, and the blood of the Eater of Infants, the Blood of the Old One, the First One" he paused, and Robb had the feeling he was smiling. He also had a sense that such was not a good thing. Not at all.
"Tell me of the Wolfsblood" Robb asked, glancing aside at his companions. None of them were looking at him or even listening, their lips and hands and eyes moving on their own as they sat facing the Green Man, as if they were all of them having their own conversations that none of the others could hear. Robb too, yet somehow it seemed… unimportant. Yes, unimportant. There were questions that needed to be asked. With the air and the leaves whispering around him, why would he care about them? The whispers said that it was unimportant. Why should he not believe the whispers in his mind? They were his thoughts, after all… weren't they? "Sometimes I enter my Direwolf's mind. I become as if one with him. What powers makes me do that? What foul sorcery is it?"
"The power is nothing but your own, Robb Stark" The Green Man told him softly, his voice a whisper on the wind, a single whisper amongst thousands. "It is in you. It is in your blood. It has been in you ever since before the First of your line buried your people in stone instead of earth to keep you from the roots of the Heart's Trees. A Green trace of the Old Powers. A shade of green, a shadow of the world as it once was".
"Your words are riddles" Robb spat at him, anger burning in his chest, in his blood, in the part of him that was red and burning and alive. "Speak plainly! What is this?" The voices were growing louder, louder and ever louder, a crowd of singers moving through his mind with the swaying of the Weirwood leaves above him. "What magic is this?"
"Magic it is, young Stark" the Green Man answered, amused by his anger and his defiance and his mistrust, amused by his scepticism. "A power that is wholly yours. Skinchanging, skinwalking… warging. You, young Stark, have to be the weakest Skinchanger that I have ever come across in all my years". The Green Man chuckled, and his mirth was the sound of wood creaking in the storm, of trees twisting in on themselves and of ice breaking. "You can enter the mind of a creature you have bonded, that much is certain. Yet you cannot bond easily, almost not at all. And even when you part your own body you cannot move, you cannot act. You can only watch and listen, and sometimes speak. The weakest sorcery I have ever seen".
"How do you know this?" Robb demanded, but his head tumbled and turned, the ground heaving beneath his feet, and he put his face in his hands, the paste he had been fed burning in his stomach. "Have- have you poisoned me?!"
"I have opened your eyes, little king, because you would not listen to the warning that we sent you" the Green Man replied, the shadows dancing in grass around him, faces shimmering in the trunks of the Weirwood trees, moving in the same song that raged through Robb's head. "The Red Star burns in the sky above you, and still you do not see. The Red light brings life to that which never dies. It wakes the sleepers. The Old Powers are returning. The Others are not your real enemy. There are no enemies. No enemies, no heroes, no victory. With the blood of your Gods I have opened your eyes".
"The Others?" Robb choked. "Are… the White Shadows? The Others?"
"Would you fight them, simply because you think that they are not like you, those who were once your kin, those whose blood you have in your veins?" the Green Man asked, sorrow on his voice. "Would you fight them, simply because they take back what is rightfully theirs, what you swore you would let them have? Would you fight them, simply because stories tell you that they are evil? Would you fight them, simply because those blinded by the fire tell you to?"
Robb wanted to ask something else, something important, and so he made to rise, but he stumbled and fell, no strength left in his legs to carry him upright. He crashed into the ground and landed on his side, his cup of blood-red elderwine tumbling from his hand. Jon was right in front of him, lying on his side, mouth and eyes opened in silent fear for his life.
"He is much stronger than you, with the Old Powers at least" the Green Man's voice boomed through his head amongst the cacophony of singing children inside his head, put there by the trees around him. "All of them are. Your siblings are more powerful than you, all of them. Even this White Wolf in black. Even the girl with the shifting face. Even the caged little bird with her sweet, enchanting songs. And especially the broken pup wearing the stone chain. He is the strongest in the Old Powers to have walked this world in a thousand years. He will save you from the cold, if you let him. But it is you who will lead them".
The Green Man smiled. It was a terrible thing to behold. "Robb Stark. The King in the North. The King Who Brought Magic Back".
And then Robb heard no more, nothing more than the Song.
And he flew.
The gardens were warm around him, Highgarden towering above her yet casting no shadow over her, and hand in hand with her brothers she walked the white pathways between the colonnade and smelled the golden summer roses.
The godswood loomed quiet and imposing around him, Winterfell's towering holdfasts standing tall like the giants that had built them around her, and she walked alone across the soft moss and under the red leaves overhead and smelled the blue winter roses.
The forest was silent about him as she walked it, wild and vast and untouched by the hands of men, men who had reduced the Southron lands to a shadow of what they once were, and as she skipped and sang roses, red as smouldering coal and burning flame, bloomed behind her.
The ice stood tall around him, mountainous and gargantuan in crystalline glory against a cold and starry night of endless beauty, and as she sang in the silent and endless night amongst the halls of her brothers cold roses bloomed all around her, roses made of ice.
Ice, ice and fire, raging against each other, and so the ice was melted and the fire extinguished until the waters covered the world. It sank into the earth, and so life sprang up everywhere, the land made green and living anew.
Fire. Ice. Life.
"And so you wake". That voice – the Green Man? It was cracking now, a thousand times deeper than it had been, and he sat up with the world spinning around him to still see him sitting there, that man in the robes and the oaken mask. "I thought you would. You are the weakest of all of them. There is almost nothing of the Power in you". Robb's stomach cramped, his entire body twitching, voices not his own filling his head with songs of long-forgotten horrors, and as the shadows danced before his eyes he thought he could see the mask moving. It was no mask. It was the Green Man's face, antlers pushing bloody and twisted from his brow like maggots from the eyes of a corpse. His mouth opened, filled with teeth and blood and Weirwood sap. His eyes burned blue and cold, like the heart of Winter. Like the end of all things.
And then he was gone. All of him, all faded into the shadows and the Weirwoods, all but for his voice. "All of it returns, little king" it drifted from the leaves of the trees around him, a wind filled with voices that boomed within his head. As Robb stood he coughed, blood spilling out over the back of his hand, agony pouring from his eyes. Still he could see. Somehow. The Green Man would not let him do anything but see. He saw what he had led his friends and guards into.
"You hear and you see, but yet your eyes remain closed. You think the world is as simple as light and dark? That is not the nature of the world that we live in". Rymund lay the closest, writhing on the ground, his hands closed around his throat, screaming and screaming until blood flew from his lips and something broke inside his throat, yet still he howled in the silence on a voice made forever quiet, the nightmares scourging at his mind. Robar sat some distance away, propped up against a Weirwood tree, his pieces of armour torn from his body yet shining like a beacon in the darkness, and with his fingernails he carved patterns into the skin of his shoulders, his upper body covered in bloody runic scratches and the redness covering his hands, silent prayers to the Seven forced out in whispers through teeth ground together almost until the point of breaking.
"Why should sorcery be any different? Earth and Water, Bronze and Iron, Light and Shadow, Fire and Ice– all are one. All are intertwined. All are different. All are the same". Jon was prone of the ground some ways off, a murder of crows circling above his head, wolves dancing about him, all cawing and howling along with his silently moving lips, his eyes rolled up far back into his head and his mind in all of them, yet none of them, his soul adrift and lost on the winds. Lyra was elsewhere, charging through the trees, bears hounding after her, ripping at her, snapping at her with bared fangs, carrying her upon their shoulders as ravens pecked at her eyes and the earth trembled beneath her every step, and she laughed as she ran, shrieking madness upon the wind.
"All of it is coming back. The Doom has lifted and the tides are coming back in. Magic is coming back. The old powers are returning to your world. Your Gods have reawoken". Ebbert's chain had melted and extended and encircled the whole of the Weirwood that he was now strangled against, the links choking him as his hands were pressed against that white trunk with his fingertips first, nails torn away, foam oozing from his open mouth and tears running down his cheeks in his silent, seized terror. And then there was Roren Bulwer, sitting by the Old Tree, cradled in its branches like a sleeping babe, the carved face moving silently in a lullaby that only Roren could hear in his dreams.
No. "All of them are returning. All of it is returning". The Old Tree had a mouth full of bloody teeth and curses, eyes full of burning blue hate, and Its branches were not cradling Roren but burrowing into his flesh, pushing out his eyes with sounds of slick popping and crushing, enveloping him, choking him, drowning him in red sap, slashing into his soul and infecting him with darkness. The Darkness within the world, the Darkness within the trees, that Darkness in which the Children slept.
And now they woke from their aeonian slumber. "Winter is Coming, little king. And the cold knows no mercy".
"Your Grace! Your Grace!" And he woke up, Edric shaking him awake by his arm. He bolted upright, panting, his lips cracked and his heart hammering in his breast. "Thanks the Gods!" the young boy exclaimed as he sat back and away from Robb in the morning light of dawn as the sun rose over the Isle of Faces. "I thought that-!"
"What did you see, Edric?" Robb asked, his clothes and cloak and the skin of his body all slick with fever sweat, grabbing the youngster hard by the shoulder and affixing his starry eyes with his own. "What did you see? What did He make you see? What do you remember?"
"I-" the boy furrowed his brow and looked in confusion to all the others, all as one lying prone on the grassy ground of the clearing around the now so faded and cold campfire, before he turned back to Robb. "I was sitting with you, and then Master Rymund started to sing, and I can't remember anything after that. I must have fallen asleep, your Grace, for I dreamt of Starfall. I dreamt of a woman with black hair and eyes like mine, crying as a man that looked like Lord Jon held her and kissed her and took her in his arms and-" he shook his head and rubbed his face. "I can't remember, your Grace. I woke up moments ago, but I can hardly remember anything of my dream".
"Good" Robb nodded and made to wet his lips, but on his tongue was nothing but the taste of blood. "Good". The less Edric remembered the better. Gods, it would have been better for all of them if they had never come there, to that accursed Isle of Faces. Lies and prophecy and riddles all – it had to be – and he hardly understood a tenth of it. Think not of it. He tried to rise, but flowers had grown over his legs and lower body as he slept. Thorny and barbed blue winter roses, petals streaked red with his blood, their roots having burrowed through the fabric of his britches and planted themselves in his skin. "Sorcery" Robb growled and winched in pain. "I fucking hate sorcery".
Edric helped to cut him loose, and then they set about waking the others. Ebbert gibbered and twitched the most, weeping as he slept, so they woke him first, and when they did he rambled at first, spitting out fragments of words, his hands clutching at his Maester's chain like it was half a lifeline and half a noose. Soon, he began to calm down, though it was hardly an improvement as he did. "I'm sorry, your Grace" he whispered as he clung to the fabric of Robb's doublet like a frightened child. "We were so pathetic, thinking we knew so much. Sanctity of inconsequential knowledge. Blind, blind, all of us blind. Gods keep my soul, the things that I saw. The things that I saw…"
Jon and Lyra woke easily, too, but both of them seemed to easily forget themselves, and Lyra especially shuddered, her eyes rolling far back into her head every so often without she actually intending them to, and when she did the birds in the trees lifted off their branches and whirled in the sky above, cawing in shock and apprehensive fear. She had to be shaken out of it every now and then. At least she was better off than Rymund and Robar.
"I am well, your Grace" Ser Royce told him, though that was not so the truth. The scratches on his body were far fewer than what Robb had seen before, in that nightmare of a vision, but they were still there. The skin of his shoulders were bare and bloodily decorated, deep gashes made by his fingertips around his collarbone, twisted, jagged runes all. Robb recognised them as the same runes as were stamped into the bronze plates of Royce's armour, though more precisely made and a little different – the originals as opposed to the copies, it seemed to him. But for Royce's pale countenance and his fever shudders he was nothing to the side of Rymund.
Rymund rose when roused and tried to speak, but his so melodious voice did not come out. Eyes shooting wide in confusion and pain he tried to speak, to speak and speak again, clutching his throat where he sat on that stony seat beside his lute, yet still no words escaped him. Only strangled hisses, distorted and crushed, breaking again and again, and when he realised that nothing he did could bring his songs back he began to weep. From out of the shadows of the trees a shape did then intrude. Not one of those brown-skinned and chestnut-eyed children – had they been children, or Children? – but not one of the Green Men either.
"The Gods took your voice for a reason, my friend" he said and laid his hand on Rymund's shoulder, but still that hopeless weeping did not stop. "They have given you power you cannot even imagine. All of us". He then looked to each of them in turn, skipping past Edric to finally turn his gaze on Robb. "Your Grace" Roren spoke and bent his head in a bow, and Robb was startled enough to lay his hand on his sword.
Those once so tired brown eyes, no life or strength left in him, were now bright and filled with fire. A green fire, a green light that had spread throughout his body so that his every vein, thick and writhing and bulging at his skin, was green. Green, green all over, an emerald fire burning in his eyes and swirling at his temples, pushing outwards like it wanted to escape. His body was covered with vines beneath his skin, faintly glimpsed past his finery, and magic burned within his heart. Robb could… he could feel it.
Gods have mercy, he could feel it in all of them.
"We should never have come here" he bared his teeth and turned towards the shore and the boats that waited there, and they rose along with him, looking at him to lead them. Why did he feel like a blind man leading the blind? He had no inkling of where to lead them, what to fight, what to do. The world had been torn away before him, and what had he left to do now?
Justice. Justice and vengeance. That was what he could do. That was what he could give the world. After that… he was sure that he would think of something. He did not know now, but the Gods would show him the way, just like they already had.
But what had that Green Man said, in that dream that was partly reality and more feverish nightmare than anything else he had ever seen? That his blood, the Wolfsblood, was powerful? That they had waited on him, on someone with his blood, for generations? Bat mingled with Wolf – Houses Tully and Whent, his maternal Grandfather Lord Hoster and his late Grandmother Minisa Whent of Harrenhal, joined to Stark? And what had he said after that? The blood of Dragons in Hightower, the blood of the Old One in… Grey Wind had said that Margaery had the blood of the Old One. The Eater of Infants. What was-?
No, superstitions all. The Gods were not good. They were tyrants, steals of voices and bringers of visions and pain and nothing more, and they could very well go shove their prophecies up their wooden arses. Prophecies then, flashes of things to come and things that would never come to pass, but more than that – he reached out to Grey Wind, and the drowsy wolf and him became as one mind near-instantly. The connection was deepened. Strengthened. All of them, their powers strengthened. So perhaps the Gods were not tyrants after all.
Perhaps they were just bloodthirsty.
"We return to Harrenhal" he proclaimed, and slowly the lot of his followers nodded, even Edric. "The Gods have given us strength. Let go use it to shove a sword up Joffrey Baratheon's arse".
To the inbred Fuckwit that sits on the Iron Throne –
You have been lying to me, abomination.
I do not take kindly to being lied to.
All this time you have been treating with hand half-empty. My littlest sister is safe, in the Riverlands and well out of your reach. You have been lying to me, Joffrey Hill. You have only Sansa. Agree to my demands, give her back to me, and I will spare you and your incestuous family.
You bested Stannis, and his Red God. My Gods are far older than his, and much older than yours. And you have angered them. You have woken the North, Lannister bastard. And Winter is Coming.
I will have my sister back, or Winter will come for House Baratheon and the Westerlands next.
The North remembers.
Robb Stark, Slayer of Lions
King in the North
Sansa
"I have to get you out of the city, Lady Sansa" Ser Dontos said as they moved under one of the waterfront bridges of the outer harbour in disguise. "The King is enraged".
Sansa was thankful for Dontos Hollard, the last living member of his House. He was a kind soul, bereaved for misfortune, and she was glad that she had urged Joffrey to save his life, even if she had felt the repercussions for it tenderly. He had been her sole source of comfort for a great long while, meeting in the godswood of the Red Keep to discuss their plans of escape and departure, though always he had urged her to be cautious, to remain, to stay quiet and obedient and play their game and the part as the little bird. But that night had been different. He had waited on her earlier than usual, clad in dark clothes and holding the same for her, telling her that they needed to leave that very same night. He said that Joffrey, having heard of the capture of Harrenhal some five days hence, had called for her execution.
She knew, in her heart of hearts, that there was something strange about that. Still she did not protest. She was too eager to leave, and she had brought the only precious things she owned with her to the godswood. She suppressed the mistrust she felt of it all as they, by the ropes Ser Dontos provided, let them make their way down the side of the Red Keep that faced the sea to a small ledge carved into the rock, all but invisible to the naked eye from above or below. From it handholds descended, towards the Blackwater and the waterfront. The night was dark, black as ink with the clouds overhead blotting out both moon and stars, and she saw terrors in the shadows cast by Ser Dontos's dimmed lantern as they laboriously had made their way down the side of the cliff.
She was not a climber. Bran had been the climber, and Arya too, in part. She had not been like them. She had attended all her lessons on song and dance and sewing instead. She had learned all those things she now knew were false, about honour and nobility. But she had the blood of climbers. Her grandmother had been Lyarra Stark, who in turn had been the daughter of Arya Flint, who had been the greatest climber of them all. Some stories said that the Flints had climbed the Wall and traded with the Wildlings in ages past. That they had interbred with the Wildlings and… other things.
Stories of Snarks and Grumpkins all, but she had clung to those stories closer than she clung to the handholds in the sharp rock that would have cut her palms apart if not for the gloves on her hands. The stories, she thought, knew that she could climb. All she had to do was believe.
There was power in belief.
After what felt like hours upon hours, and since the night was dark she had no way of telling the passing of time, they had made it onto the craggy outcroppings at the bottom of the cliffs, and carefully they climbed it, and Sansa had pulled her smelly disguise, dark and morose, closer about her body over the white cloak she wore over her shoulders. In her mind, despite the many washes she had put it through to get the large stains of blood away, it still smelled of him. Her brave Hound. He took a song and a kiss, and left me nothing but a bloody cloak. Nothing but a bloody cloak and memories.
In silence she and Ser Dontos Hollard crept down the streets of the waterfront, keeping low and under and out of sight. "What has made the King so angry, Ser Dontos?" she asked quietly, but he waved her on and ignored her question at first as they moved ahead once again, hurrying down the waterfront path, avoiding the few people that stood on the piers and docks around them. Disguises were all well and good, Sansa's red hair hidden by a drawn up hood, but still it was better if she remained perfectly unseen. Her heart hammered in her breast, and she could scarcely believe how frightened she was, or how much she longed for the freedom Ser Dontos claimed to give her.
"The King's raging" Dontos told her softly as they went under the cover of a small bridge, her dirty clothes wrapped around her despite the stink, but as long as they brought her safe out of that nest of vipers she would hold them close and luxuriate in their stench as if it was the scent of dewdrops. "He's furious at Lord Tywin. I heard it from- from a friend. We have common acquaintances. He said the King threw his goblet at Lord Tywin, screaming so hard that Grandmaester Pycelle had to give him Milk of the Poppy to calm him down".
"Why is King Joffrey so angry?" she asked, but she remembered what Tyrion's sellsword goon had once said. There's no cure for being a cunt. Joffrey was a mad dog, an inbred beast with his salivating maws filled with bloody rabid froth. Of course he raved. His heart was as black as those cells that he frequented so often. Only the Gods knew what happened to the people he threw into the Black Cells.
"He got a message. My friend managed to steal it" Dontos confided and reached into his sleeve to pull out a parchment, crumpled and dirtied, to hand over to her. As she read the short message, certainly originating from a raven's bearings, Dontos went on speaking to her half-listening ear. "Your brother, he's… he's beaten all armies sent against him, my Lady. The North itself was attacked, by Reavers, but he bested them too. He's got Harrenhal, he's got Jaime and the Mountain. And some say he's making an alliance with the Tyrells. I've heard that he's got an new commander at his side, too, who rides a Direwolf into battle-"
Sansa, having read all the message and heard the words, smiled like she had seen the sun for the first time in a year. And she felt just like it. Arya had been a menace, always, but she was safe and she was glad. Praise to the Gods, the Old and the New. "The North remembers" she whispered and crushed the message in her hand before taking it for herself, putting it into her bodice. "Winter is Coming".
"You are very beautiful when smiling, my Lady" Dontos offered suddenly, and she looked to him to notice a shimmer in his eyes and a blush in his cheeks before he averted his gaze with a flinch. "B-but you sound very scary when you say that".
"Pardon me, Ser Dontos. I did not mean to" she said aloud, but inside was a whole different matter. Of course I do… Southron. Of course it sounds scary. You should be scared. You've woken the North. Winter is Coming. You should all be very, very afraid. Somehow, now, after all those days spent in the capital, she felt as if she breathed clearly for the first time. Her family was out there. And now she was going to get back to them.
Time passed slowly in the dark, yet there they stood, waiting, until someone in the far distance began to play some strange melody on a flute. It was a song she did not recognise of a style that she did – minor keys, mournful and despondent, serious in tone, to a melody clearly inspired by ancient drone music. It was Northern. She could have played that herself – on the harp or the fiddle, of course, not the flute, she had never been too good with the flute – and at Winterfell it would not have seemed out of place at all. In response to the melody Ser Dontos whistled like some indeterminable bird.
It was a signal. Soon, from out of the darkness, came a long rowboat manned by men so ordinary that to a one they seemed to have been walking the piers before they decided for a bit of late-night sport at rowing, their oars muffled and padded all. One of them, the one at the helm holding a dimmed lantern, the man who Ser Dontos hurriedly approached as the boat neared their little walkway under the bridge, wore a padded fencer's vest in leather, and when it flapped open in the nightly breeze she caught sight of a silver broach. Silver and circular, bearing the shape of a mockingbird.
One of Lord Baelish's men.
Of course. That must have been Ser Dontos's friend on the Small Council. Friend… no. Lord Baelish had no friends. Only lackeys, enemies and people he used like pawns for his own gain. Why was he doing any of this? Why risk his position at court to bring her out of King's Landing?
Rumours at the court of the Red Keep said that Lord Baelish had boasted about bedding Mother, about claiming her maidenhead when the two of them were young and raised together at Riverrun. She thought long on that as Ser Dontos and that boatswain, Dess of no surname, helped her aboard the boat before they turned it about and headed for the open wreck- and ash-filled waves of Blackwater Bay. She knew that the rumours, if true, lended itself to nothing. Mother had told her that the only man she had ever been with, the only man she had ever loved, was Father. But they did make something apparent: Lord Baelish loved Mother, or at least desired her. Had desired her. And she knew that she looked much like Mother had in her youth. Everyone kept telling her that.
Especially Lord Baelish, though not with his words. When the boat was firmly out on the Blackwater she considered that. Lord Baelish also asked her, always, to be more familiar. To call him Petyr. She did not want to, and she did not like the way he looked at her. Ever since he had returned from Bitterbridge, citing Margaery Tyrell's disappearance as the reason why he had failed in his mission to bring the Tyrells into the royal fold, he had often run into her as she walked the halls and the palace grounds of the Red Keep, as if by happenstance, and talked to her in what seemed to her to be hours, given how little she cared to listen to him. Still she knew better. And she knew better than to trust anyone in King's Landing, especially those with hidden agendas and uncertain allegiances.
What did Petyr want with her? She would not put it past any other man with his inclinations to abduct her and take her for his own, but that was not Lord Baelish's way. He would not have been so careless for passion's sake. No, this was for political gain, somehow. Was he intending to bring her to aunt Lysa and so curry favour with the Lady of the Vale? Or did he perceive of the Baratheons of King's Landing as losing the war against Robb, and so sought favour with her brother by returning her to him? Or was she supposed to be handed off to someone else?
Lies within lies, rings within rings, schemes within schemes – such was the game the nobles played.
At last, while she shivered in the cold winds as they made across the Blackwater's black waters, she saw it up ahead: a ship, the name struck from is prow by hastily painted white, a merchant vessel that was all but a barge, its sails sleek and flying colours she did not recognise, came into sight around a bend of black cliffs. It was lit by dimmed lanterns at bowsprit, midcastle and aft, and when they came to it ropes were slung down the sides of its railings by tanned sailors with suspicious eyes. Ser Dontos was first up, relief and gladness both on his face, but when he was up at the ship he was told something by someone that helped him remember his courtesy. He helped Sansa aboard – and she found that her suspicions were true.
On the deck of that ship were two men the most principal amongst the sailors and the hired guardsmen; Ser Lothor Brune, quiet, loyal, stocky and strong, with his squashed nose, square jaw and a mat of nappy grey hair, stood to the side of his master in dark clothes replacing his armour but his sword still slung from his hip. It had never been that much of a secret. Everyone who knew to look deeper than just the surface of things knew who his employer was. Lord Petyr Baelish had the look about him of a taskmaster long at work that night beneath the sails, not a one carrying the green and black-orange-white of his house about their body as livery but everyone still the same seeming his servants. That nameless vessel was his ship, and on its deck he had no need to seem as humble and unworthy of note as he did at court. On the deck he was master.
On the deck he was king.
"Here she is, my Lord" Ser Dontos smiled gladly the way of Lord Baelish as the Master of Coin beckoned her towards him, and she hurried to his side even as Ser Dontos began to praise himself. "I did as you asked, my Lord. Will you take me out of here now, away from this wretched city? I've half a mind to return to Duskendale, even, despite all. The gold I was promised, my Lord – when will I-?"
Ser Dontos's question was cut short by Lothor Brune, who stepped up to him, drew his sword and opened the last Hollard's throat in the same single, almost liquid motion. Fear seized her heart, and for a moment she felt terrified as Ser Dontos slumped to the deck at Ser Brune's feet with a thud, his blood spilling over his shoddy shoes. "Hush, Sweetling" Petyr took her by her shoulders and turned her away from the carnage, pulling her into an embrace that was part fatherly, part amorous and all in all equally unwelcome. Still she let him, as long as she did not have to look at that murderous brute of a man. Dontos had been kind. Greedy, perhaps, but kind. She did not want to look at his killer, or know that he was there.
"He's taken care of, Lord Baelish" the brute of a false knight – she knew that there were true knights out there in the world, there had to be, surely it was not all lies – nodded the way of Lord Baelish before he wiped his sword down to keep it from rusting and shoved it back into its sheath. "How should I dispose of the corpse?"
"Throw it overboard when you are further out to sea". Lord Baelish spoke quietly, his words still carrying far over the deck of the ship and the open waters beyond. "Perhaps outside Dragonstone or Driftmark. Let Stannis Baratheon be blamed, if anyone should be". He took Sansa by the shoulders and led her away from Ser Dontos, her Jonquil, and his cooling body on that so open and hostile deck, feeling in her heart as if she had merely traded one prison for another. "Don't think less of me, Ca- Sansa. You must understand why I had Ser Brune end him, Sweetling" Lord Baelish whispered into her ear, his breath warm and sickening and entirely too close, close enough to choke her. "A purse full of coin buys a man's silence for a time. A blade across the neck buys it for eternity".
Slowly she nodded as the ship was, by help of long oars, turned about and she was led towards the aftcastle, sat down by a small table some ways off from the rudder, the furnishings there affixed to the deck by sturdy bolts. "I-I understand, Lord Baelish" she wet her lips, and at the sight of the tip of her tongue Lord Baelish's eyes twinkled.
"Call me Petyr" he urged her for the thousandth time, and for the thousandth time she ignored the urging. It was not proper. More than that, she did not want to. "Sit here, Sweetling" he asked her and gently forced her down on one of the chairs by the aft railings. "Wait here. I will be with you in another two or three days, and we will take you to safety. The King mustn't think we left the city together. In the mean, listen to Ser Brune, Captain Raan or Dess, the Water Dancer. Keep to yourself" he went on as he gently pulled the rags from about her shoulders, but he said nothing more afterwards. He stared at her inner cloak, her second cloak, the white cloak her brave Hound had left her that night, the only thing she praised in her captivity. He stared at it as if it were woven from writhing snakes before he forced his lips tightly together and stalked away.
And so she was left alone, in the silence, as the ship creaked around her and the waves lapped softly against the hull along with the wind. She shivered in the breeze. Robb, Jon, even Brandon and Arya – they had always been better with the cold than her. Father and Uncle Benjen, when he came to visit, would say that it was a Stark thing, that she was in almost all things Mother's daughter. Tully in all but name. In the quiet, as she thought, she heard a bird's twitter on the wind, and watched in silence as a Snow Shrike, its downy coat white and grey with the coming of winter, landed upon the railing close to her, brave despite its size.
She leant against the railing and watched that little bird, so unafraid and slight. It looked to her, cocking its head to the side as it bounded around to face her proper, and she smiled at it. It chirped, and she parted her lips, drew in a breath and let out a soft tone in response.
Faintly she heard the ship around her, the men walking its deck with light or heavy steps, Lord Baelish's voice a whisper as he spoke quietly to Lothor Brune. Her will to cry for herself, for Brave Dontos, for her Hound: all of it was gone as she reached out towards that bird and stroked its gown of fluffy feathers with the tip of her finger. Faintly, as she touched it as the two of them sang together, a chirp and a twitter traded for a tone and a melody, she felt a spinning in her mind and a whisper at the very edge of hearing, then-
"You hear that?" Lord Baelish spoke quietly, down by the midcastle and the main deck, but somehow she heard it as if he was standing close to her, his words coming in sharper every time she touched the Snow Shrike's eiderdowns. "Song of heavens. She is a perfect creature, the most precious thing I have ever come across in the days of my childhood. And he'd marry her off to the Imp!"
"Lord Tywin's wits have been failing him, my Lord" Ser Brune answered quietly, his voice dark and distorted and filled with edges and a sharpness that had not been there before. "Ever since he took that quarrel to the leg when he forced Stannis from the Blackwater. That battle was hard fought. The Stormlanders even breached the gates. No doubt the war is weighing on him".
"If Lord Tywin's wits were failing him, he would not have me sent to Highgarden to make sure this Tyrell-Stark alliance never came to pass" came Lord Baelish's distinctively accented voice in retort. "Loras and Willas Tyrell would make marriages in name only, given their respective" he paused "situations. Still, perhaps enough to make an alliance – and make peace. But perhaps I shouldn't. Perhaps I will support the alliance, and perhaps I can convince the Young Wolf that his sisters would be safer in the Eyrie. With me and their aunt. Perhaps I'll have him call me uncle".
"I appreciate the trust, my Lord – but the less I know, the better" Ser Brune intercut the scheming readily with the tone of a man loath to knowledge. "You're tired. Overworked, and you speak too readily, my Lord. Go back to the King and Lord Tywin, my Lord. I will keep the hostage secure, and meet you again at Stonedance".
They moved again, their steps echoing strangely, and Sansa pulled her finger away from the bird that looked up to her in question. All sounds were muted and soft and as they always had been once again, suddenly, as if the bird was the source of that power. She made a few tones at it, and it chirped back, ending their song as it lifted from the railing and fluttered over to sit, light and graceful, on her shoulder. She smiled at it even as she made an effort to remember Lord Baelish's hushed words. Whatever deviltry, whatever sorcery had allowed her to hear beyond her ears, she was thankful for it. She smiled at the Snow Shrike, and it chirped back and put its downy head against the side of her neck.
It was a little bird, white and grey and native to the North. She remembered them singing outside the windows of her Winterfell chambers, the Snow Shrike, melodious and quick. It was a little bird, far from home.
It was a little bird returning home.
END
A/N: I was supposed to put this chapter up on the 30th – but I was too drunk and in much too good company, and on the 1st I was too hung over. Sorry about the delay.
Most of the Ilse of Faces portion and the dream sequence was written in a haze of prescription medication, antibiotics, strawberry soda, Preston Jacobs A Song of Ice and Fire theories videos and the Swiss folk-metal band Eluveitie's Inis Mona on constant repeat. I'd be hard pressed to find actually explain anything that goes on there in short terms.
I'd probably need to write an entire essay on the subject to get my point across. And I won't. I can't be asked. Things will become clearer in time. But there is something I will say right now:
You thought that the Rose in the title of this story was Margaery, didn't you?
Tee hee. Fooled ya ;-)