Warning for Baelish and everything his behaviour towards Sansa usually entails
Chapter 33
The Silly Hearts of Women
Where women talk
xx
Sansa
Sansa carefully opened the not so heavy door leading to Septa Lemore's chambers in the Red Keep. Her own was heavier, dark wood reinforced by iron, almost as if the chambers she had been graciously allowed to use were built with a dungeon cell in the carpenter's mind. She had asked King Aegon for permission to see his special prisoner, and he approved. "I will also come and speak to her later," Aegon told Sansa. "Do tell her that."
The Hound left Sansa after the midday meal was served. His absence turned immediately bothersome, and the last late summer blueberries served for desert bitter, in a way she could not entirely explain. He will come back, he told me so, she tried to tell herself.
The truth was he did not.
He never makes any vows, Sansa remembered, well, not without the weirwood mask if truth be told. She patted the object she had grown to treasure in the side pocket of a thick travelling attire she donned as soon as she was alone. He said, Aegon's young guards will look after you when I am gone, she recalled, and one possibility of what he meant made her cold all over, despite the warm dress she wore.
The company of Gendry, the latest member of the Kingsguard, and Nymeria, was somehow inappropriate. Insufficient. It occurred to Sansa, dressed for travelling for no reason at all, that it might be pleasing to have a cup of tea with the ladies, but which ladies was another matter. The company of Lady Margaery or Lady Olenna was not very inviting. The kind septa who raised Aegon seemed like a safe choice, and maybe, maybe if Sansa was lucky she would even have some words of comfort, from the seven faces of one god, to restore a semblance of peace in Sansa's bouncing heart.
Much to Sansa's misfortune and disappointment, Septa Lemore was not alone. She was already having tea with Septa Tyene. Or rather, she was pouring boiling water over a set of strongly smelling herbs in a large tea cup in front of the younger septa. The word stink came to Sansa's mind but it was not the proper word, not even for the thoughts, and much less for the tongue of a lady. The entire room was soon smelly and Sansa's belly turned all tender from it.
The chambers were well furnished and spacious, with as much golden light as the autumn could still offer. Aegon did not spare an effort for the septa he regarded as a mother, in a little time they had both occupied the royal palace on the hill of his famous namesake, Aegon the Conqueror.
"Tansy," Septa Tyene sniffed the fumes and confirmed her finding wryly, sitting way too upright in a carved wooden chair, where a stag devoured a dragon under her, and behind her black clad back... It boded well, in Sansa's opinion, that Septa Lemore was open minded enough not to mind treacherous furniture.
"Thank you, Ash... Lemore," the younger septa exhaled with relief, eyeing Sansa with suspicion. "It gladdens my heart that you could still find it with the change of seasons."
"May I join you for a cup of tea?" Sansa inquired shyly, blushing immediately when both septas gave her a bewildered look, almost on the verge of laughing.
"Surely, my lady," Septa Lemore managed to utter, "you are familiar with this special brew you are asking for? You have reason to look after some aspects of your health?"
"I do not," Sansa said, "but it would seem only polite to accompany you in your conversation."
"This is used for a peculiar ailment of a woman's body, my lady," explained Septa Lemore, steadily in control of her will to giggle, visible on the edges of her dark purple eyes. "The Seven blessed me with inner peace so I never had to drink it since I became a septa, but Septa Tyene is less lucky. She had not yet had time to inform me of how her illness came to pass this time and what... was its cause."
The condition of Septa Tyene was seemingly another source of the older septa's amusement while the quaint violet eyes of their host studied both of her guests.
"Lemore," Septa Tyene spoke slowly, struggling against an invisible foe who must have made it incredibly difficult for her to speak. "It was... it was..."
And no words came. Only the rustle of black folds nesting up and down restlessly on the chair, her behind now on the top of the stag, and now on the top of the dragon.
Being seated appeared not to be pleasing for the younger septa at all.
"Shouldn't you lay down?" Septa Lemore asked, slightly worried, her joy exhausted in a moment.
"No, Lemore, thank you," the younger septa declined politely, sipping her tea. The taste apparently matched the strong odour because her dark-skinned face wrinkled in disgust. "It was different, this time," she succeeded in saying something about her illness, at last.
"Not what you thought? An unprovoked attack?" Septa Lemore asked with interest, when it finally dawned on Sansa that they have not been discussing health at all.
"Yes, and no," Septa Tyene said softly. "It was like a desert storm fever that drains you, such as I have never lived through before. And the only thing that it left me with was a taste of what it could have been. In a different place and in different time. And had I been a different woman."
She downed more of her tea, lips narrowing with a line of sadness, cup rising higher, revealing dark spots on her wrists.
"Tyene!" Septa Lemore exclaimed with emotion. "You should use a bath. I insist! It will do you good." Sansa stood to leave but the kind septa stopped her: "Lady Sansa, please, do stay another moment, we could use a woman's help." Sansa experienced a strong contentment in being called a woman, not a girl, while Septa Lemore called Ned Dayne, on guard in front of her chambers. The bath was brought in no time. Sansa noticed how Tyene truly needed their help to undress and step in the tub, gingerly. Her illness seemed to have laid heavy on her.
When Septa Tyene finally sank in warm water, Sansa was stunned with the sight of other marks on her agile golden brown coloured body. Some of them reminded Sansa of her own bruises when Joffrey ordered her beaten, in another age of the world. So much had changed since then, that Sansa had almost forgotten about Joffrey. Almost. At least the destiny does not betray only the honourable, Sansa thought. It plays tricks on everyone, honest or evil. Septa Tyene looked as the courtiers gossiped that Lolys Stockworth did, when she had returned home after the mob raped her, even less witty than before. A careful look at the robes discarded on the floor told Sansa that the sober dress of the Faith was jabbed at the edges, torn and damaged, and hastily assembled together to keep up the appearance of propriety. There were odd sticky stains on parts of the garments, and Sansa did not wish to know what they were. She was certain that whatever misfortune struck Septa Tyene must not have been pretty.
"It is crazy," Tyene whispered, "and utterly silly..." She stretched slowly in too hot water with difficulty. "But I wish it could be done again. Not as it was, but with more... more... . "
"Time?" Lemore suggested.
"That is only one word," Tyene smiled sharply, wandering in her thoughts.
"Care?"
"That is for you, not for me, Lemore," Tyene refuted the notion.
"Oh, Tyene, you must suspect there is more to the folly of the senses than what you have been willing to admit…" Lemore said abandoning all pretences.
"Love is an illness," Sansa said, not knowing where the words surged from. "Queen Cersei said it was a poison, sweet, but deadly all the same. Pray, Septa Tyene, if your ailment was but a man, just for the sake of make-believe, what would you want from him?"
"Everything he could give me," Tyene answered immediately, black eyes honest and shining.
She bedded a man, he hurt her, and she wants him to hurt her again, Sansa rightfully concluded, wondering who the man was, at loss to understand why any woman would want so violent a thing to occur again. It was one thing to accept such out of duty to one's lord husband but another one to long for it, willingly. Miranda Royce wanted her lovers to please her, not hurt her. Would I be like this if Sandor bedded me? He is stronger than most men. They slept apart the night before in the Red Keep, Sansa in a too big empty bed with dusty curtains, and Sandor in a too small one in the adjacent chamber... And now he is gone, and I am left to wait for him to return.
What if Petyr bedded me? The thought of the latter filled her with repudiation. Sansa shivered and recoiled from the tub.
"Tyene," Septa Lemore said, seriously, "you mean it."
"I do. Everything he could give me, and more," the bathing septa repeated.
Sobs fell upon her out of nowhere, and the bath water mingled with Tyene's tears.
Sansa gently raised Tyene's head on the edge of the tub, and removed patches of wet black hair from her sticky cheeks. Her fingers became coloured. Septa Tyene was obviously dying her hair, just like Sansa did, not so long ago.
"Is it always this way?" Sansa asked Septa Lemore, brazenly. "This illness?" They are septas! she thought, They cannot bed men. Then again, the kings and their knights were also not supposed to harm women, yet it frequently came to pass in the light of the Seven. Why should it be any different with other things one was taught to expect?
"It is different for everyone," the sincere answer flew her way, "Tyene is not new to it. She knows about this illness and its treatment."
She was not a maid, despite being a septa, Sansa read through the words and suppressed a sound of further disapproval. "And if you don't?" Sansa continued, "Know, I mean. What do you do when the attack of this plague is upon you out of your own choice to suffer it, and you wish for it to end well. Do you fight it?"
"You don't," septa Lemore said, "it is like a sea in which you plunge, and you dive, and you get lost, but you never drown. And it washes you away before it brings you back to the shore, changed. Alive. New to the world and the greatness there sometimes is in it, if only too well hidden behind so much pain."
She is not a maid either by the sound of it, Sansa thought and admonished herself for being reproachful. A woman could become a septa as a widow. There was nothing shameful in that. Yet Lemore's words of the act of a man and woman together, far less detailed than what she was used to hear in the Vale, tickled her curiosity more than Miranda's favourite discussion concerning the properties and the feats that could be achieved by manhoods.
"Lemore," Tyene sighed from the water, tears drying, body finally relaxed, dark eyes larger than ever, "I never agreed with you on this, but it may well be that you are not so wrong."
"What made you change your mind?" her friend asked.
"It was terrible, Lemore. Terrible! Before, and after. Like when as a child you open the room where your parents have hidden a present for your name day. It is almost within your reach. But then the door is closed, and you can never find it again, nor your present. Or if you see the door, you can never open it again. You know it is possible, you know it exists, but it will never be for you. And maybe someone else will enter behind and find your lost treasure. Such is my ailment now."
"Was the cause of your illness brought to the capital from Dorne?" Sansa asked cautiously, curious, if unwilling to add to Tyene's discomfort.
"The cause of it is new to me and to this land," Tyene confessed.
"From across the sea then," Sansa thought of Aegon. The young king was handsome but maybe he also ordered his guards to rape women.
The explanation came from Septa Lemore. "No, Lady Stark. It descended to the capital with the winter, flying on the wings some of us can only dream about, disturbing the strings of a lute, or maybe riding a sturdy brown horse. Is that not so, Tyene?"
Mance Rayder? Sansa was profoundly shocked. He wouldn't do it! He is kind and brave and fond of songs!
But Tyene's bruises spoke differently when she kept confessing.
"Lemore," she said, "I never believed you on another matter, that it could happen to me that I should feel for someone else's pain."
"Compassion," Septa Lemore professed, knowingly. "By it we are lost. The most dangerous and twisted way to a woman's heart. We can sincerely uphold the virtue in almost everything, and then be conquered by allowing the misery of others to touch our being. Such is the way of love, to walk in on us through the back door."
"Shall I look for a clean set of clothing?" Sansa offered to do something, eager to run away from Septa Lemore's words. They reminded her too much of the Hound. She was afraid for him almost ever since she met him. Even when she was in love with Joffrey.
She took the absence of an answer as a yes. Septa Lemore's wardrobe was a miracle of sorts, a stockpile of dresses from all lands. The likes of some Sansa had never seen, smelling foreign beyond count. Several pairs of heightened shoes adorned the bottom. She took out a clean set of septa robes, but Lemore already stood silently behind her and robbed her of them, pointing persistently at the heavy costume of a silent sister in one of the corners.
"War is upon Highgarden," the older septa commented aloud as if she had spoken about the weather. "The silent sisters will depart in the evening to tend to the unfortunate dead, haven't you heard, Tyene? May the Seven bless their holy work!"
"Lemore, hold your tongue," Tyene objected. "What use is explaining what the Faith does? The lady here is not one of us."
Sansa gratefully pressed the robes of a silent sister to her chest and bowed instead of thanking to the violet-eyed septa.
"Indeed, I am not a septa," she said. "And with your permission, septas, I will now take my leave."
But before she left, she stood on the doorway for a moment and spoke, accidentally, as if she was telling a story to herself: "I heard a bard singing a new song, of a heart of a man who only ever knew winter. It had run away from him and it has gone to Oldtown so that he could not find it any more. But another man, one to be recognised as a fat crow, may know where his heart dwells. It's a very beautiful rhyme, septas, you should listen to it when your holy duties allow."
Lemore gave her a nod of stern approval, proud of Sansa for some reason, while Tyene blushed almost green from embarrassment all over her darkened face. "I didn't mean..." she said. "When I said..."
"But you did," Sansa retorted, a voice colder than her father's when he acted a lord. "I am a wolf with no pack, or a fish on dry land. I do not wish that on anyone. I do not wish for you to know what I have become. Such were my parting words to you, Tyene, and I ask for no service in return. Do with them what you will."
xxxxx
Sansa's second tea that afternoon was a much less pleasant and more subdued affair than the first one, Tyene's lack of faith notwithstanding. The shrewd eyes of Lady Olenna Tyrell studied Sansa's woollen dress and a closed bundle she carried, while Margaery pretended to stitch and look a proper widow in the back of her grandmothers' lofty chambers. Not so long ago, Sansa would have believed the genuine elegance of her posture. But that girl had descended a sharp flight of stairs after Joffrey's wedding, spurted wings and disappeared on a ship which would not take her to safety.
"Lady Stark," Lady Olenna said, "it is a pleasure to see you again so soon after yesterday's dinner."
Everyone omits to call me Lady Lannister, Sansa thought. The name has lost its appeal these days. She didn't know how she should feel about it. The Faith will remember, she mused. And the High Septon did not appear to be either forgetful, or forgiving.
"I felt obliged to pay my respects before the tragic events may force you to return to Highgarden, my lady. The words of war are on everyone's lips. I feel for your trouble and that of your people."
"Men exaggerate," Margaery offered from the background. "My brothers are very brave. They will prevail over the enemy as they have done before."
"I hope that they do that," Sansa said, wondering how best to find out when the silent sisters were departing and from where. "If you could suggest me an appropriate way, I would like to send some medicines or other useful gifts."
"My dear," Olenna said, amused, "your lands are far away and your resources scarce, how would you pay for that?"
Sansa blushed and lost the gift of speech. The truth was she didn't even think that far.
"Listen to me, dear," Olenna continued straightforwardly, in a tone of a good-natured grandmother, but her repeated calling Sansa dear sounded even less courteous than when she was being called a girl. And what Lady Tyrell proposed was the worst of all, if not unexpected to be heard of, again. "The best we could do for you is to marry you to Willas now. His wealth as the heir of Highgarden would be enough for both of you. He would accept you even as a used good."
Sansa's blood boiled slaying her shame. Maybe I have courage after all, she thought being afraid of Lady Olenna all the while. Or I have spent too much time with Nymeria in the wood, and too little sipping tea with the ladies? she considered the possibility.
The old, wise and friendly Lady Olenna suddenly turned into an old hag bargaining for Sansa's maidenhead, offering her, what exactly, in exchange? A crippled grandson who will soon be heir to nothing if the rumours of the one-eyed man who led the invasion of the Reach were true at least in part. The winter will make beggars of us all, Sansa thought, straightening her neck as, long ago, she would see her mother do when the proud Lady Catelyn would see off an inopportune guest. I can find out from servants about the silent sisters departing. If there is anything that this castle has never lacked, it is rumours.
"I am honoured by your kind consideration, Lady Olenna," Sansa said. "For gently allowing the possibility to join the blood of my house to yours."
"Old blood is worth little in itself, my dear," Lady Olenna still did not quite understand. Sansa, the girl just flowered, who would have gladly married Willas and bore him sons called Eddard and Brandon, had gone away with Petyr Baelish one night, and she had never come back.
"Indeed, my lady," Sansa said, "you took the words from my mouth. Lord Willas should propose to a Frey. They have lands and riches now to give their blood a better colour. Or to a daughter of Lord Bolton, Warden of the North, if his wife bears him one."
"Lady Walda is pregnant?" Lady Olenna asked with renewed interest.
"Alas for the poor widow, Lady Walda, worthy of her weight in gold," Sansa said sweetly, recalling everything Mance had told her about the changes in the north when the rest of their companions slept in the woods not far from Harrenhal. "They say that a host of wildlings conquered Winterfell, skinning Lord Bolton and his heir. Imagine only, to flay the flayed men. So cruel and against the king's laws."
"Have you had ravens on that?"
"Why should I need a raven?" Sansa's words poured out of her like golden wine sweetened with poison. "Men talked of how I murdered King Joffrey on his wedding night and grew wings to run away. They whispered that the Starks had strange powers. Haven't you heard, Lady Olenna? Of wargs and skinchangers in the north…"
"My dear," Lady Olenna said with pity, her face changing from interest to consideration that Sansa may have lost her mind. "I only ever had your best interests at heart."
"Of course you did, Lady Olenna," Sansa said. "Especially when you plucked a single fruit from a net of amethysts I wore in my hair, one night in the middle of the long summer. The bards will sing of that for many lives to come. And I have so befriended one. Also Joffrey's real father is still alive, and free. He may want to know the truth."
"The Kingslayer will not live long," Olenna exclaimed, shrewdness back in her eyes.
"Maybe just long enough to pay you or Lady Margaery a visit," Sansa said, noticing with satisfaction how Margaery's next stitch turned more crooked than Arya's needlework ever was. So she knows, too.
"Lady Sansa," Lady Olenna admitted with newly found respect, "do forget my hasty words from before. My grandson, Willas, would be more than honoured to have you as his wife."
"Before some time," Sansa said, "I too would have been honoured with your proposal."
"After your stay with Lord Baelish, you can hardly speak of honour," Lady Margaery commented lightly, and Sansa decided to ignore her, all her attention on her grandmother.
"I thank you for your kind offer, Lady Olenna," she judged, "but I could not longer bear to dilute the blood of your noble house of stewards with my own of the Kings of Winter, only eight thousand years old, and ruling over half of Westeros. It might yet ruin the freshness of your very recent lordship. Alas, I value the good name of your house too much to impinge such a punishment on you even if what you ask of me is very small a thing, to give my hand to a crippled heir of a small land in the south, which may soon no longer be his, and where the crops will die with the arrival of the winter."
They had nothing to say to that. Sansa was pleased, but her soul ached tremendously from the wickedness of others, and from the new harshness she had been forced to find in herself. The godswood appeared like the only safe place to go next, hoping that the old gods could provide her with guidance and peace.
Red dragon's breath grew high under the old oak in the time that Sansa was away from King's Landing. The dragons have returned, she thought, why couldn't the wolves return as well?
"Help me," she prayed aloud, "tell me what do do."
She should have known better than to hope for anything.
"My beautiful daughter," a voice spoke behind her, icing the red liquid in Sansa's veins, almost stopping its natural flood.
She stood up but there was nowhere to go. Sansa was trapped. Stupid, she cursed herself. Of course it is not safe to be in the godswood. That's where you met Ser Dontos, and he worked with Petyr. There is no place where you can be secure.
The breath full of mint drew closer, more suffocating than the acrid fumes of Tyene's tea. Sansa backed to the heart tree as Petyr's only hand held a dagger pressed to her belly. The steel was sharp, and she could not move.
"There are only two ways out of this for you, sweetling," he said. "Either you will obediently take my hand, leave the Red Keep and travel back to Harrenhal with my faithful guards, or the brave young knights of King Aegon will found the crimson of your blood mixed with the redness of this grass.
My aunt Lyanna would have known what to do, Sansa thought. Arya would know. Nymeria could kill him.
But her aunt was dead, Arya lost, and Nymeria was not there. And even her aunt had needed Prince Rhaegar to save her from his father.
There was only Sansa.
She tried to remember Petyr's own lessons in the game of thrones. Confuse them, she thought. Confuse him.
The path back to the serpentine stairs loomed open behind Petyr, fluttering with the breeze of liberty, and she still had the robes of the silent sister in her hands stiff with apprehension.
"Father," she tried saying, and he observed her new humility with utmost suspicion.
"Sweetling," he said, "your kindness will not serve you this time. There is no one who can help you now. Understand that."
"Petyr," she continued just to say something, in a voice thick with fear. "If I go to Harrenhal, would you take me to wife?"
"Only if you are a very good girl and deserve it," he said in his false tone of concern, as a good honest father admonishing a naughty ungrateful child. "Robin Arryn is alive. Aegon doesn't want you and Daenerys is a woman. The Boltons are dead and through you I could still rule the north. But I could just as well kill you and inherit the north as a widower of your aunt Lysa."
Sansa was amazed. She took a deep breath and focused on a way out behind Petyr's back.
"Petyr," she said, trying to remember with precision the hateful coarse words of the man who might have been riding to Highgarden by that time. "You see, it is not that I would not want to be obedient and thankful. Some things have been done to me that you are not aware of."
The slightest look of question on his face bid her continue. I know everything about everyone, his eyes affirmed, but there was doubt in the corner of his lips.
"There was a man," she said, willing her voice stern like her father's when he would sentence a man to die. She suddenly saw him, in her mind, cleaning his sword after a beheading he was forced to carry out, in the dark grove of the old gods in Winterfell.
There was wind in the red dragon's breath, bending it to its will.
The small cut in the stomach would heal, and going to Harrenhal seemed worse than dying. Being Alayne again. Being what others wanted after she was allowed to be herself for weeks.
"This man was very strong, Petyr," she spoke with the voice of Lord Eddard Stark, watching the face of Lord Baelish for reaction. "One night," she thought hard until she could repeat all the ugly words as they were, one by one, "he buried his cock in my cunt and he kept on doing it until I screamed..."
The eyes of the mocking bird blinked for an instant, and it had to be enough. It would be her only chance.
Sansa yanked the dagger away, posing a bundle she carried between her tummy and Petyr, feeling blood trickle from the gash the knife still made in her stomach and the fabric of her dress.
If he had two arms, Petyr might have caught her. But thanks to Nymeria, he only had one. Sansa lifted her skirts high and ran on the path and down the stairs as she never did before. She didn't stop running until she was out in the open, in front of Maegor's Holdfast, and there, as if sent by the Seven, by the old gods, or the ghost of her father wandering the keep, were carriages and horses, and the silent sisters gathering to travel to the Reach. The crowd was dense and noisy.
She cowered behind a large wagon still waiting for its horses to be found and pulled the bundle she was carrying away from her stomach, studying the cut under it. It was not deep. She tore both sleeves from her dress in haste. They were widening below the elbow. She used one to press the wound to stop the bleeding as she had seen the Elder Brother do when Gendry's stomach was all spilled out, and used the other one to tie the bandage tightly around her waist. The borrowed robes of the silent sister fitted her perfectly and the stain of drying blood they soaked in on one place melted conveniently in the darkness of the fabric. What will be the last mask I will wear? she wondered, not knowing the answer.
She was not even the last silent sister in one of the carriages. Before sunset they were ready to go. Sansa was happy to notice that neither Lady Olenna nor Lady Margaery used the opportunity to leave the capital.
Either the situation in Highgarden is so bad that they are afraid to go home, or they still believe Aegon will marry Margaery.
Somehow she could not believe that the latter would ever happen. Margaery, she thought ludicrously, you may yet die a maid, at least in the eyes of the people and the High Septon.
Sansa wondered how many lovers Margaery had had and if she loved any of them. Her thoughts roamed further imagining what Lady Olenna must have done in her youth, having a husband or not.
The sea that washes you away, she remembered the image Septa Lemore painted for her. What she had said was almost as beautiful as the songs Sansa loved so well, yet also somehow real. Charged with promise and premonition.
She wished there were cruel arms around her waist in place of the fattest and the heaviest double set of robes she had worn in her life.
I will find you, she thought. And when I do, I will no longer be a maid.
xx
A/N One of the author's favourite chapters in this story