SANSA

She regretted ever challenging Bran. Curse her words. After Bran had almost fallen to the ground-Arya catching him before he did-a sudden change in his demeanor o'ertook him. He no longer stood as straight, and his body seemed to want to haunch into a position lower to the ground, which he might have fallen to, had Arya not been there. Suddenly his eyes snapped open, and the most eerie thing of all was that his blue eyes-his Tully inheritance-were gone, instead replaced with sharp yellow ones.

"Bran?" asked Sansa cautiously, and he began to growl. No, not Bran.

Suddenly he-it fought to get out of Arya's grasp and quickly an all out fight broke out between the two. They began to knock into chests and trip over stray toys left strewn about the room, causing an utter disaster. This awoke Rickon, who scared and failing to understand what was going on, clung to her. Sansa tried to call to them to stop it, but her voice failed her before she could get any words out and the only thing she felt she could do was scream.

Not a moment later, their mother came bursting through the nursery door. The moment she saw Bran, Sansa saw a look of utter horror o'ercome her face. At this point Arya had almost pinned the thing in her brother's smaller body to the ground, but it used his small stature to wriggle out of most grasps.

It wasn't until Father came charging into the room himself that Arya had managed to pin the beast in her brother's body to the ground.

"What's going on here?" demanded her father.

"What did I tell you?" was her mother's response and she seemed desirious to leave the room, but a look at Rickon's frightened face instead brought her to the bed, and Rickon, hesitatingly at first relinquished his grasp of Sansa and transferred it to his mother, which their mother willingly accepted.

"What's wrong with Bran, mama?" asked Rickon as he buried his head in her side. For whatever reason, their mother chose not to give him more of a reply than a gentle soothing. Their father meanwhile was more concerned with getting through to Bran, badgering Arya with questions she either wouldn't or couldn't answer. His questions however came to a stop after he met Bran in the eyes. It was here that Sansa decided to take hold of herself a make a risky gamble.

"I'll tell you what happened, Father," she announced, drawing his attention to her.

Her father nodded slowly and indicated for her to leave the room with him.

"Make sure your brother doesn't... hurt himself," urged Eddard to Arya, and she silently nodded her head.

Sansa and her father left the nursery and closed the door behind them. He then turned to her and said almost cooly, "Tell me everything. Even if you think not I'll believe you."

Sansa's now felt that her gamble's stakes had, as Petyr once told her, been increased. Everything depended now on what she chose to tell her father. But she hardly knew herself where to begin. Would he believe the whole truth? No, probably not. She knew her father to be an understanding man, but there were some things that others accepted easily that he could not. So the entire truth was out. But a partial truth, about an already accepted subject -perhaps that might work.

"Bran said he was a… a… skinchanger." There she said it. It wasn't a complete lie, it was in fact the truth, even if she did leave out how he knew he was. And once she'd decided her course, the rest of the tale came easy enough. She went on about how Bran had found a direwolf in the forest (this she again took a risk on, but her father's reaction seemed to indicate that something along those lines had occurred) and how he'd felt almost at one with the beast (this she took from her own dream-memory of Lady-oh Lady! But she couldn't dwell there if she wanted to convince her father of her story. And on and on she continued, the words coming out easier now that the dam had been burst, of how Bran had told them he had dreams of being the wolf and sometimes he could even see through the wolf when he was awake. He'd been boasting of this ability to her and she'd foolishly dared him to prove it to her, causing him to become as he was, where he neither responded to his name, nor seemed to know who his siblings were. She threw in for good measure that Bran had told Rickon of these dreams before any of them and Rickon had started to go along with the idea, seeing it as a game and pretending to be a warg as well with a wolf called Shaggydog and Bran calling his Osha. She hoped this might ease tensions around her baby brother's protests-well, most of them.

Her father listened with a quiet his youthful nickname had spoken of, never betraying one thought. And when she had finished her tale of half-truths and lies, he spoke as only a man of the North could, with an almost icy chill.

"You should have come to me before this."

"I know, Father. I realize that now." said Sansa, giving her best impression of a reproachful little girl. She then decided to test how much he had accepted of her story with the seemingly innocent question, "Do you think Bran was right? I mean before he went wild his eyes…" and that final detail seemed to set off something in her father that she took to mean he might be considering her story as the truth.

"You saw them too?" asked her father, his icy exterior fading for just a moment.

"They turned yellow. Bran has blue eyes, not yellow," said Sansa, and with that detail, Sansa felt she had cinched his belief-or at least cast enough doubt to make it sound reasonable. But before she could confirm it a crashing sound was heard from within the nursery.

Immediately they returned to find Arya on the ground, knocked unconscious. Mother had taken Rickon from the bed, clutching him as if for dear life and backed away as far as she could from the released monster in her brother's body. It was quick and immediately darted out the door, down the hall and down the stairs. It was trying to escape!

"Sansa, stay here and make sure your sister isn't hurt too badly," ordered her father, and he took his leave of the nursery, as Sansa tried to wake her sister.