"King's Landing?" She exclaimed, incredulous. "I'm being shipped off to King's Landing?"

She was sitting in front of the weirwood of the godswood with her father. Above them, the sky was overcast and grey, the air carried with it a promise of rain, and the branches of the ancient tree rattled in the wind. She was wrapped in a thick wool cloak, and since she had left the warmth of the castle she had been shivering in the early morning cold. But now, with the heat of anger coursing through her veins, she felt as if she could last hours out there in just her smallclothes.

"You are to marry Daeron Targaryen, Raya," her father responded evenly. "Your place will be in King's Landing, as a princess of the Iron Throne." He fixed her with a stern look from his dark grey eyes, which were so much like her own. Stark eyes, Raya thought angrily. Eyes of the North.

"I'm a princess of the Throne of Winter, father," she argued. "This is where I belong. In the North, not in some southern city."

"I know it is a big change," her father said, "but you've known for quite some time now that you were to be married to a lord outside of Winterfell."

"I've known I was going to be married, but not to some prince outside the kingdom! And I am your eldest daughter. Why is it that I must go to Daeron Targaryen and become a princess of the South, and he cannot come to Winterfell to become a prince of the North?"

"You know that is not how this works, Raya," her father responded, and he attempted to place a comforting hand on her shoulder but she brushed it away.

"And you know that out of all of your children, I have the truest Stark blood running through my veins. I belong in the North. In Winterfell." She countered. For a moment her father only looked at her, his expression unreadable, and she knew that he wouldn't deny what she had said. Raya's two younger siblings, Jon and Edrick, were both Manderly through and through, with their round faces, dusky brown heads of hair, and green-blue eyes. But she was a true Stark, made slender and lean, with dark hair and eyes the colour of the sky above them.

"Yes, Raya, you are a true daughter of the North," her father said slowly. "But in the Vengeful War those of ice and those of fire joined together for the first time in hundreds of years. Since then, House Stark and House Targaryen have been as close as any two houses in Westeros, though they rule over separate kingdoms. Through your marriage to Daeron, you will make this alliance even stronger."

"So marry Edrick to one of the Targaryens," Raya responded icily. "I plan on living and dying in the North."

Since she had been born, Raya had never doubted her place in the windswept moors surrounding Winterfell. She could spend hours riding horseback (of course, only in the company of her guards) across the land or through the Wolfswood; she had never found a place where she felt so at peace than when she was sitting beneath the spreading, bone-white branches of the weirwood, as she was now; and when snow fell down in icy drifts and men and women turned rosy-cheeked from the cold, she felt as if she came alive, as if she had been asleep in those years when winter was merely coming. Out of her siblings, she was the only one who sought peace of mind in the quiet solitude of the godswood; while Jon kept the old gods, he preferred a sword in the courtyard to quiet meditation in the godswood, and Edrick took after their Manderly mother, turning to the seven-pointed star of the Faith and the small sept of Winterfell in times of trouble.

Yet now it seemed that she would be ripped away from the place she loved with all her heart. The bearded, wild lords of the North, whom Raya had always gotten along with, would be replaced with prim, soft-spoken, southern lords and ladies wearing not boiled leather and hard iron, but Myrish lace and gilded steel. The cold, clear air that rolled off the open moors of the North would become hot and stuffy. And, above all, the small piece of freedom she had had in Winterfell would change the moment she crossed the border into the South. No longer would she practice sword and shield in the darkness of dusk, away from the eyes of those who might think it unfit for a lady to fight. No longer would she be able to speak as freely as she did within the walls of Winterfell. She had always known that her father had been lenient with her, allowing her to experience things that no other woman in Westeros would. She knew that it was because he saw that she was more Stark than Manderly, dark-haired and grey-eyed and wild, and she reminded him of his sister, who had died long before Raya was born. Yet still she had felt restricted, had felt tied down by the fact that she was a woman. She could only imagine how suffocated she would feel in the South, where women were nothing more than wives to their husbands.

To Raya, it seemed terribly unfair that her father would tear her from the North, when the North was who she was.

"You will marry Daeron, Raya," her father's sharp tone cut through Raya's melancholy thoughts, bringing her back to the present. She noticed that it had begun to rain, softly now, but there was a hint of a storm in the heavy air. "This is not your decision to make."

"I won't –"

"The arrangements have been decided. You will leave for King's Landing in two month's time." He said, interrupting her before she could protest. She gazed at him, and for once found that she was speechless, struck dumb by the weight of the emotions coursing through her mind and through, it seemed, her very veins. He paused, and must have seen the look in her eyes, for his expression softened and he ran a tired hand across his face, suddenly looking much older. "I know this isn't what you want, but it is what must be done."

With that, Eddard Stark stood up, glanced once at Raya with something like regret in his dark eyes, and then walked away, leaving her to her fate beneath the weirwood. As he swept past, his thick wool cloak brushed across her shoulder, and with it came the smell of earth and stone and smoke. The smell of Winterfell. As her father's footsteps faded behind her, Raya gazed up at the blood-red leaves of the tree of the old gods, then at the the twisted face in its trunk, and she felt her heart ache for all that she would soon lose. As if in response, the heavens opened above her and the storm broke, fat droplets of rain falling down from the sky in sheets. The water mixed with the scarlet tears that leaked out of the face of the weirwood, and as they began to fall in earnest it was as if the old gods, too, were mourning.