Of all the ways Sansa had imagined meeting her brother again, this was somehow both the furthest from her imagination and what she should have expected all along.
Those dreams of a grey-clad knight rushing the throne room of King's Landing and skewering the king upon a great-sword of Valyrian steel had died with Joffrey at his wedding, well after news of Robb's own death should have killed her hope. Her expectations changed after that. His remains, perhaps, she would one day see lain to rest beside their father's in the crypts of their ancestors. Or maybe he had gone to rest with Mother and her fathers past in the Trident, and left Sansa to bury only her memories and grief for both.
She should have known when first word reached the Capital that her brother's corpse could not be found, when first Joffrey yelled bloody murder at his Grandfather that the Freys failed to lay Grey Wind's pelt at his feet. She should have known – deep down, she thinks she did know; something primal that hadn't died with Lady, far down in the back of her mind, twinged and itched with the truth since the very start.
But knowing and believing were two entities of all their own. What Robb had survived… it was simply beyond any belief.
"Maester Symon thinks you are a gift from the Stranger," she commented one evening, in conversation once again with Grey Wind. The wolf healed well, only a tiny limp in his gait and patches of baldness lingering from his mending. "How silly is that? The Stranger."
If anything, the wolves were the Old Gods' gifts, though Sansa had never seen them as the merciful type – death was death in the cold North, nothing stoppable and nothing to try and beat. Her Mother's Gods were the ones you went to with requests, with demands, with things to beg for. Sansa had always loved them better, deep down.
Grey Wind yapped, nudging against her hand for more scratches. He seemed to grow happier in the days since Sansa's arrival. More active, more alive. The same could not be said for Robb, though his varied bouts of consciousness were longer-lasting, and his fever had thankfully broken the night before.
It was all very lucky, according to Maester Symon, but Sansa suspected there was more than luck at play.
"You knew to come to the Gate. You knew I would be here, didn't you?" she asked the wolf.
More nuzzles, and a long purr of a whine once Sansa gave in. Sansa did not speak wolf – and neither did Grey Wind speak the common tongue, as far as she knew – but she suspected that was a 'yes'. Her brother's wolf certainly acted as though Sansa was the goal of his journey, hardly leaving her side and pouncing around her constantly since the second he saw her – before that, even. She remembered his frenzied scratching at the sick room's door once she crossed by.
It did not shock her even one bit. Lady and Nymeria always had keen knowledge of the other's whereabouts, her wolf knowing without fail where to meet her wild sister after hunts on the road. That Grey Wind knew where to find Sansa, even through the thin guise of Alayne that had fooled so many, was only natural.
"Do you think you could bring us to Ghost?" she asked, and smiled as Grey Wind's ears perked, his massive tail swinging about in a sudden fury. "Yes, you know that name, yes you do! Your brother Ghost? Could you lead us to Brother?"
No reply did she receive, for a long groan and the shuffling of bedsheets called Grey Wind's – and Sansa's – attention.
Since his fever broke, her brother had yet to wake. Now, as he blinked the sleep away, no more of that sick haze lingered in his vision, soon landing on Sansa.
"Robb?" she whispered, and took a cautious step towards the bed. Then another and another still, more sure, once her brother's gaze seemed to settle. He squinted, searching her face, eyes darting around as he made sense of his situation, until something approaching clarity sent his brows high. This time, the name he muttered was hers, garbled and unsure, and Sansa smiled to hear it. With another labored breath, a hint of a smile turned his lips, too.
He coughed, then graveled:
"What did you do to your hair?"
Sansa couldn't help the laugh that bubbled up from her chest, half a sob itself. It took all of her strength to keep from throwing herself into him – Robb was still too weak for that. She did, however, perch atop his bed and help as he struggled to sit upright.
"Where are w- ahg-!" Robb's good hand swung up to clutch his side as his effort disturbed his arrow wound.
"We're at the Bloody Gate, in the Vale," Sansa answered, and watched as confusion undercut his pain. "You needn't worry about that now. We're safe here. Both of us, no one knows where we are. Lay back down, alright? You'll pull the sutures."
He did as bid, though clearly the source of his pain had not yet dawned upon him, just that it was. Even as he bit his lips through it, Robb's brow remained drawn in unease, his eyes flickering with a million unasked questions. Sansa let him stew – half for his own benefit, and half for hers. She doubted her readiness to guide him through all of what he sought.
(Though, she would be lying to deny her own curiosities.)
Slowly, Robb circled each shoulder, then flexed his fingers as much as his splinted arm would allow, brows drawn in intense focus as he mapped his pain. When that mapping reached his hips, though, all motion ceased. His fingers froze mid flex, and his eyes shot open.
"My leg," he choked. "Sansa, I can't feel… is it…?"
"No, no, it's still there. See?" She folded the covers down just enough to expose the leg in question, mostly whole if lacking a noticeable chunk in the thigh, even through the splints and bandages. "It's broken, but all of the infection is gone. The Maester says you were very lucky. You may yet walk again."
That did not seem to be the comfort Sansa had intended. Robb just continued to stare down at his wound, squinting and prodding around the bandages himself as though it would explain his situation further. There was an empty confusion behind his eyes, as though he only half-believed anything that was happening – as though he did not recall at all where and how he might have come so close to death.
It made enough sense – all he'd had to eat of late were small bowls of watery broths and twice that in milk-of-the-poppy. A little disorientation was deserved.
"Uncle Edmure's wedding. At the Twins?" she prodded, though Robb just stared back blankly, shaking his head in a baffled stupor. "Don't you remember?"
She regretted her words immediately.
"Yes," Robb choked out, "but that doesn't… No. No, this isn't… Why- Why didn't they take me back to Riverrun? The men, we were supposed- supposed to be riding North by now, we should already- we should have taken back Winterfell by- by now- And Jeyne, Jeyne she's still in the Riverlands, why didn't I – why are- what are you doing here? Where's mo- mother, where are the-"
He rambled on for a moment, voice growing hoarser and hoarser with each word less coherent and only spiraling further into confusion, until Sansa laid a tentative hand on his shoulder, making him flinch but shutting him up quick enough.
"Robb, everyone thinks you're dead." It was half a whisper, half a question – a question her brother answered with even fewer words as the confusion vanished from his eyes in a heartbeat, replaced with a horrid clarity:
"Oh."
Sansa caught his hand, and squeezed. Robb kept his eyes turned downward. But, after a moment, his fingers started to curl weakly up around hers. He said nought else for the rest of the day. Sansa did not push it. Burn though her concern may, Robb had just learned he was still alive – she would give him all of the silence in the world if it meant he could stay that way.
Days passed, though to Sansa each was but the next, a cautious continuum of tedium and worry. The hour – the very cycle of day and night – mattered little. Robb woke sporadically in infrequent bursts, with no regard for Sansa's exhaustion or the position of the sun. It mattered none. She was there beside him for every waking moment, coaxing his health to return in all of the ways she knew how (which were, admittedly, few).
Mostly, the Maester had her tend to his spirits, attempt, at the very least, to fend away the lonely gloom that lay heavy in the air between them.
For so long, all Sansa had done was keep herself alive, keep her own skin thick to her captor's torments in a hope of rescue so wafer-thin and vain it could barely be called hope at all. Now, having to shed that skin felt like a vulnerability rather than the relief it should be. So much shame and grief and the heavy burden of guilt over letting herself be used against her own family – it all lay beneath that skin. Sansa was not ready to spill it all, not even for the brother she'd betrayed.
And now she had to take on his burdens, too? Robb's spirits could hardly be any more broken, but Sansa did not want to test it regardless.
She had helped him over to a seat by the chamber's window that morning, and there he spent the better part of the day staring out the glass at nothing. It was better than rotting away in his sick bed, though, so that little would have to do.
Long gone was the brother who would play the knight to her imperiled maiden, who could lift her like a princess and twirl her around, or toss Arya into a pile of snow as she yelped in delight, or poorly stifle his mirth as little Bran struggled to mount his pony.
Robb used to laugh, bright and loud and loose, and often. It made him an odd fit with their gloomy half-brother, though of anyone in the castle, Robb won most of Jon's smiles through their childhood.
Sansa imagined he hadn't had much to laugh about since then, even before the wedding, and now, Sansa would be lucky to earn even the simplest of hello's.
None had she received that morning, or the morning before that. Most of their days went by without even a glance from her brother, and Sansa tried to content herself with a new embroidery hoop supplied by Ser Waynwood. And she talked. Robb may not respond, but she talked to him anyway, mostly of her time in the Capital. There was something cathartic to her rants, though she simultaneously never wished to think of that wretched place again.
(Winterfell and their childhood were too sore of subjects, as were anything to do with Mother or Bran or Rickon, or even Jon – which left her options quite limited.)
"-and the cats. Gods, the keep was littered with cats! Lady would never have put up with it, no she would not. Honestly, I don't know where she would have stayed anyway, if she had survived the journey. She never would have been happy in that tiny Godswood – if you can even call it that. There wasn't even a heart tree. How can you have a Godswood without the Old Gods?"
Robb said nothing, as he was wont to.
Little and less were her brother's words, and dour were the few he spared her. The week prior, he'd finally asked about her marriage, avoiding her eye the whole time. There was little to say, little reassurance to give aside from the lack of a consummation, but it seemed to be enough to learn she had not been spoilt. 'And if I had?' she dared not ask. Sansa did not think she would like that answer.
(Robb had turned his army westward after her marriage. Did he think she hadn't noticed that?)
Perhaps, she mused, as her needle pierced the wool of a tunic, his mute sorrow was for the best.
"Arya would catch the cats. She brought me one once, an orange, mangy thing – she said we matched," Sansa remembered. A stitch landed three threads too high as she faltered upon it, overcome with a sudden wave of sadness. She had scoffed at and chastised her sister for her cat hunts, back when her sister was still around to be scoffed at. Why now had she come to miss Arya's bothering?
You mustn't, she scolded herself, and shook the grief away before it came. Arya was the only of their siblings Robb seemed to tolerate in her rambles, and she wouldn't ruin that with tears of her own.
"Father had her in these odd dancing lessons. Water dancing, or something. Anyway, her tutor apparently told her once that chasing the cats would-"
"-is she alive?" Robb mumbled, raspy and low after days of silence. It caught Sansa so off guard that she jammed her needle right into her hand, missing the fabric by a mile. She hissed in pain, to which her brother took little notice, just keeping her eye with a steely focus he'd never had in their childhood.
Sansa huffed, flexing her pricked palm and twisting her mouth in discontent.
"I do not know. Maybe. She vanished on the day they arrested Father."
He turned his gaze back to his lap, where he picked listlessly at a loose thread in his top blanket.
"That long ago?"
Sansa could only stare for a moment, unsure of what she could possibly say. She knew what it was to fault one's self for the death of one they loved – had she not taken to the Godswood to weep nearly every night following Father's execution? And Robb, who had first Bran and Rickon under his care, then Mother, all three ending in tragedy.
Throat cleared and posture straightened, Sansa rose her needlework back up and punctured the linen once more. She'd had no design in mind that morning, and though her floss was a rich red in color, she found the snout of a wolf taking shape – perhaps Grey Wind, playing the perfect model where he napped close by, or perhaps no specific wolf at all. A house crest was always a low-hanging apple of a subject matter, and Sansa had already made up plenty for the time in King's Landing where she dared not reach for it.
Her eyes flicked between her brother and her craft, watching his face twist in dismay.
"Don't blame yourself for that, Robb. There was nothing you could have done-"
"There was, Sansa. There really was."
"Maybe for me," she conceded, with a resentful twist in her chest that she did her best to ignore, "but Arya was lost before you even had a chance to leave home. You know her. She probably slipped into a sewer and escaped the Capital moons ago."
But Robb was once again lost to the window, and said no more on the issue.
As the days grew colder and shorter, Sansa left her brother to his solitude more and more.
Half of the reason was Robb himself, less and less tolerant of her rambling as his memories and grievances came back to him. Though she hated leaving him to wallow, seeing what a husk he was becoming was quite disheartening. In that was the other half her reason – try as she might, Sansa was doing little to help him. She had little clue how.
Jon had been the blanket to Robb's fire in their childhood. Though he brightened slowly, Sansa was a poor excuse for kindling, still afraid of being burned.
A cacophony of morning birds woke Sansa that day, a pleasant change. Robb often woke her with his screaming (in his solitude, more and more of his memory returned of the wedding. It seemed – Sansa dared not broach the topic to be sure). The good days like this one, those occasional mornings he didn't, she could at least be sure he would take a meal with her.
With that optimism, Sansa threw on her dressing gown and a heavy cloak, patted Grey Wind's head where he rested by her bed, and trod down to the kitchens.
"It's porridge form now on; you lot are runnin' my stores dry," grumbled the Gate's head cook as he piled her morningly meal tray to its capacity. Sansa thanked him in kind – as had become their routine in the last few weeks, an insult for a gratitude – and plod along towards the guest wing.
At Robb's chamber, a voice spilled through the small crack in the door.
"…know this is hard to hear, lad."
With a start, Sansa pressed herself back to the corridor's wall, blanket clutched up to her chest. She had not expected her brother to have company, especially not so early. Even more unusual, she found him sat upright in his bed upon a quick glance, a small piece of paper unrolled in his fingers. Ser Waynwood stood beside him.
"It was likely not her choice," the knight continued. "Lady Sybil was a tool of Tywin Lannister, as much as the Boltons were. Pleas for your wife's hand were already being tossed around only a week after the mutiny."
His wife. Jeyne, was it? It was still so odd to think of Robb as a married man – and odder still because he refused to say a word about his widow, just froze up and bit his tongue at even the suggestion of her. Sansa did not know what to make of it. Didn't he love her? Didn't he sacrifice everything for her honor? Why should her name bring him such great anguish?
As her brother read the parchment with shoulders slumped, his head bobbed in a nod of bitter acceptance.
"Do any live?" he asked, as clear a change of the subject as anything. "From the… the wedding."
Sansa frowned. If his Jeyne was a silent weight between them, the wedding filled the air like a noxious gas, invisible and hardly ignorable and slowly eating away at Robb and Sansa alike. That he could so blatantly address it with the Knight of the Gate, but shut down entirely whenever Sansa even breathed a note of it, twisted sharp and livid.
"Your uncle lives a captive, but we have every reason to believe he was kept alive." The knight scratched his beard in thought. "There are rumors of an Umber and a few of your guard held at the Twins – a Mormont, maybe, I cannot quite recall. Shall I compile a list for you?"
"Aye," Robb nodded. Sansa thought she heard tears in his voice, though his face was obscured from her vantage. "There… there's no chance of my mother…?"
The look the knight gave Robb, pitying and careful, was answer enough.
"No. I am sorry, lad."
Suddenly, Sansa wanted to flee. Breakfast left by the door, she slipped away, never even noticed.
Her room was comfortably warm, when she returned, mouth drawn in a tight line and a whole slurry of emotions threatening to make her weep. Beside her bed, Grey Wind lifted his head and yawned, meeting her with his golden eyes. As she plopped down atop her mattress and curled her knees up under her chin, he claimed the rest of the bed. Sansa smiled sadly and ran pets over his gray muzzle.
"I don't know if I can help him, Grey Wind."
The wolf cocked his big head in question, which Sansa answered with more pets behind the ears and a long sigh. She remembered the day that her brothers ran through the gates of Winterfell, pups spilling from their arms as they raced to be the first to show off their new friends to her and Arya. There were six then, so many that Mother had fretted all evening about what ever they were to do with so many beasts in the castle.
Then, circumstance had picked them off one by one, starting with her own precious Lady. Now, she would give anything for Mother's fretting, for Nymeria and Arya to return to their wild play, even for Shaggydog and Bran's wolf, who's name she'd never learned.
"Just two of you left," she lamented to Grey Wind, only half talking of wolves now.
Just two left, of so many.
No, she remembered, bolting upright and kicking herself for not considering him sooner. Two wolves, maybe, but we are still three!
Suddenly, a path forward screamed to life: one leading far north, one leading to Jon, who might stoke Robb's embers into life.
"I have a new plan," Sansa announced not too many mornings later, a tray of breakfast balanced in one hand with the other full of clean bandages.
She found Robb exactly where she usually did: propped up in his seat by the window, a pair of crutches leaning against the sill and a stack of papers spread across a make-shift desk in front of him. Letters to Ser Waynwood, whispers and updates from Lords and Maesters all over the continent, compiled and proffered to Robb as a means of keeping some semblance of value in his days.
(That had been Sansa's idea, she was proud to admit.)
He looked up from one such letter, an unimpressed glower upon his face. Today was one of his good days, unmarred by nightmares the night prior, but even those days were not safe from Robb's scowls.
"Oh?" he asked with all the wonder of a dead fish. "Are you marrying me off to Arienne Martell this time?"
Sansa scoffed. Robb had made a frustrating game of her attempts to plot their escape, in which every time she came to him with an idea, he found a thread so loose and unrelated to tug at that it sent her stomping back to her chambers to mull over a new one.
Needless to say, he'd had a lot to say of her once-almost-betrothal to Willas Tyrell.
"I never even suggested you wed Margaery, you made that part up! The Tyrells were good to me – that's all I meant!"
Sansa cocked her chin upwards, "Besides, you are already wed."
It was a risky move, but her mind was set. If Donnel Waynwood got to speak to Robb of his wife, then so should his own sister! She dropped the tray of food right on top of his letter, her point made. Robb frowned, but accepted the food quick enough (near-death had siphoned away all joy from Robb's world, but left quite the appetite in its place).
"Thank you. I had forgotten," he mumbled, dry, a warning if ever there was one. He grabbed a small loaf of bread and ripped in with haste. "Doesn't matter much, seeing as I am dead. Jeyne will soon be wife to a Frey."
He sounded resigned to his wife's fate, more than anything. Sansa had never met the woman, but thought she deserved at least a little more than helpless pity from the man who lost a war over her maidenhood.
"If she knew she were not a widow, any other marriage could be ruled null," she plied. A futile attempt; Robb just frowned into another bite of bread, brows drawn close and upset.
"She is a widow, by all witness and knowledge."
"But that's wrong."
"Perhaps."
"It is! Robb, you're acting ridiculous!"
Ridiculous, but stubborn. Robb shrugged and bit off another hunk of bread, intent not to be prodded more on the issue. Clearing her throat, Sansa dropped her supplies by the bed and patted down her skirts before announcing:
"Then we can go to the Wall. The Watch can take you in and I can beg the Umbers' hospitality at Last Hearth."
It was her best idea yet.
Both Robb and the Maester had immediately rejected her last proposal, which involved carting Robb up to the Eyrie. The latter deemed it to high a risk in his fragile state, the former wanting nothing to do with their aunt. She ignored Mother and refused my every call for aid, he had argued. Why should I trust her to give it to me now?
For her other previous best ideas, Riverrun (and their last un-imprisoned uncle) was too deeply besieged to risk bringing Robb within a kingdom's distance of the keep, and aside from that, the suggestion had only shut him off further. The gentle nudge of returning to his stranded wife, of course, left Robb staring blankly at the fire until supper.
Sansa knew when a no was a no, even in not so many words. Rather than fight against an avalanche, Sansa had just sighed and moved on.
In comparison, the Night's Watch seemed the perfect escape. Plenty of miserable men found themselves at the Wall – Jon had, and he was one of the most miserable people Sansa knew. They can be miserable together, she reasoned, in a moment of selfish frustration, and leave me with no burden of bearing it.
Jon once knew how to dim his brother's fire. Perhaps he would know better than her how to feed it.
But the look Robb gave her in response was all doubt, and rather than hear the depressive contrarian he had become fight her on it, Sansa blurted out the obvious:
"Well, you cannot stay here, can you? We're just down the mountain from a dangerous man who knows you live!"
"Am I to leave?" Robb groaned, gesturing pitifully towards his leg, propped up on an adjacent chair. "Walk out of the keep for two month's trek northward – in the snow, no less? Winter is hardly weeks away, Sansa, you must feel it. There is no chance of us making it to the Wall when I can't even feel my knee!"
Sansa wanted to remind him of his luck that he kept the limb at all, both visions and the phantom odors of rot and medicine still ripe in her memory, but decided it would not help a thing. Instead, she grabbed a small pair of shears and began to cut away stained gauze from the wound in question.
"We needn't walk," she argued as she worked. Robb kept his face to the window (which was probably for the best; he couldn't afford to lose his appetite). "The Watch sends down recruiters to every keep and castle that can hold a prisoner. We only need to wait." Which you seem keen on doing either way. Sansa kept the last piece to her own thoughts.
Robb just turned her a dubious eye.
"Why are you so insistent on this? You never even liked Jon."
"But you loved him. Besides, he's still our brother."
With the bandages gone, Sansa looked upon a largely healed wound – the sutures were removed only days before, and with as careful as they all had been with Robb, it was now more of a scar. Still red and angry, but at no further risk of infection. She blotted the closed wound with a strong salve, as the Maester instructed, then covered it up once more, re-situating his splint as she went. The bones were still mending and the feeling had yet to return, which more than anything else left Robb with some worry, but the worst of his battles with death were behind them. (Sansa shouldn't be shocked – even Cersei had fumed over Robb's stubborn refusal to lose.)
Robb coughed.
"If everyone thinks me dead anyway, there is no use in going through that trouble." He picked at the fresh bandages and drew his brows together. When Sansa threw him a frown, those bandages suddenly seemed to fascinate him. "I'll change my name. Once I can stand again, perhaps the Bloody Gate will be in need of a new guard."
"You look too much like a Tully. That won't fool anyone around here."
The frown he threw in reply was rich with offense. Robb had once been a king (odd as that was to imagine now) – none of the other kings Sansa knew took well to criticism, either.
"Plenty of people have red hair," he bristled. "It's hardly that remarkable."
"It will be to the men of the Gate who knew the Blackfish—or to anyone who has ever seen the Lady of the Vale."
"So? They will think me a bastard. There are worse fates." (If they made it to the Wall, Sansa would have to ask Jon what he thought of that.) "Besides, everyone knows Uncle Brynden as a perpetual bachelor. An illegitimate son popping out of nowhere would shock few; it may be the finest disguise I could hope for."
Sansa stared in disbelief.
"And Grey Wind? He will surely not attract a single eye – he is only, what, one hand taller than you are? Oh, but plenty of people have a direwolf, too, I suppose."
At mention of his name, Grey Wind yawned from his nap by the hearth and looked towards Robb with sad, golden eyes. Sansa pitied the wolf. He hid his grief better than Robb did, though hints of Lady must still have lingered on her; even after weeks reunited, he sniffed and nuzzled her as though searching for something hidden in the pockets of her skirts.
Robb continued to frown, but a lot of the bite had drained from his voice. Those was common now, too, quick bouts of fire that stole all of his energy.
"Sansa, if you-"
"-Don't say it, Robb," Sansa interrupted, knowing where Robb would steer their argument otherwise. "I am not going up, and I never will."
She never should have told him of Littlefinger's efforts to cart her up the mountain – had she known that Robb may agree with that terrible man, that he would continue those efforts, she wouldn't have. The Gods, in their apathy, cursed Robb with the stubborn duty of an elder brother, and Sansa knew he only had her safety and secrecy in mind.
Still, Sansa would not be traveling even a meter up that mountain, regardless of her brother's good intentions.
So, while he grumbled, she pivoted to her next best, and next riskiest, idea:
"Maybe there is a Northern lord we could send a raven to? Someone you trust?"
Robb frowned deeper and shuffled through the papers on his desk, handing one over to Sansa with a look of regret.
"Read this, and then you tell me."
Sansa plucked the letter from his hand, curious. Stamped with the gloved fist of House Glover, a messy hand scrawled in brief, concise terms. Sansa read it once. To be sure, she read it again, then once more. Gods, she lamented, how much did I miss squirreled away for all these months?
Lady Sybelle Glover signed off the note, addressed, curiously, not to the Gate's knight. (Even the Eyrie had spies, so it seemed – or perhaps that, too was Littlefinger's influence.)
"Stannis Baratheon? I don't understand…"
"Theon's sister took Deepwood Mott months ago. Stannis liberated them, and now holds the keep, as you read. I never did a thing to help Lord Glover reclaim his castle once Greyjoy took it, just sent him into the Neck and then suffered a mutiny." His frown deepened. "No, worse than that. I set Theon loose upon the North to begin with, all because I thought… I trusted…"
That sat rotten in Sansa's gut.
"Well, you have other bannermen with closer keeps than Deepwood Mott. We'd never be able to travel that far north anyway."
"Had other bannermen. I'm no king anymore," Robb grumbled, snatching back the letter. "Do not fool yourself, Sansa. If the Glovers side now with a Southron man, there is little hope for us in the North."
"But that's only because they think you are dead," she pointed out. The letter said nothing disparaging of her House, nor even of Robb. "Stannis is against the Boltons. That is a good thing for us, Robb – if Galbart Glover would rather take his side than that of the man who betrayed you-…"
"Then the North is better off in Baratheon's hands. At least he won't lose it."
Mother help us, Sansa cursed to herself, sighing and collecting her supplies in a tiff.
What had she expected? Asking her brother to invoke his former kingship was always a stretch, but Sansa had not imagined just how tight of a stretch it was – just how eager he would be to leave that chapter of his life in the past. Maybe she should be grateful for that. Sansa was coming to understand now what rule did to men, and a sizable part of her beamed that her brother was ready to free himself of that blight.
But Gods would that ambition be a weapon to wield.
"Will you at least think about it?" she asked, quiet. "If not for yourself, then for me. You owe me that much, Robb."
The noise that left Robb's mouth, halfway to a groan, was one of utter defeat. "Tell Ser Waynwood to keep the letters coming," he compromised, "and maybe I can find a lord for you."
Sansa nodded and spared Robb a small, thankful smile.
And, for once, he returned it – briefly, but sure. A king he may no longer be, but a brother he would remain, as long as Sansa had anything to say about it. Those duties, those to his kin, he would be harder pressed to abandon now that no kingdom stood to distract him.
The first snows of winter followed promptly on the tail-feathers of a white raven.
With it, came a flurry of activity at the Bloody Gate, men rushing about, setting rooms and making arrangements for mule trips to and from the Eyrie. Every morning, Sansa watched as ice was picked away from the steps, salt and pebbles thrown down atop it lest someone slip. A big fuss, in her opinion – Winterfell hadn't ever panicked so over a little freeze, but Winterfell also was not built into a sheer clif-face.
The bigger issue, in her eyes, was why such a storm was being stirred in the first place.
The castle, it turned out, was completely evacuated every winter. Tough though Mya Stone and her mules were, even they could not cart up loads of rations when the pin-thin roads were nought but ice and snow. So, the Eyrie would become a ghost for the coming years, and her occupants would shelter away down the mountain.
Time was running out faster than Sansa had hoped – in a matter of weeks, Littlefinger and Lysa would be passing back through the Gate. Gods help her, she would have Robb out away from that man by then, if only he would hurry up and come to a decision about where they needed to go!
Even still, as she tapped her heels and wrung her palms in worry, the snow brought with it a certain childlike (perhaps, childish) optimism; Summer had ripped them asunder. With the freezing winds and snow came a comfort, deep and warming, that winter would see the scattered scraps of her family pieced together once more.
One such scrap shrieked upon a handful of melting snow dropped down the back of his shirt.
"Sansa!" he yelped as Sansa laughed, his shoulders scrunching upwards to squirm away from the sudden intrusion. Sansa just bounced on her toes and giggled all the more. "You-! What by the Gods-!"
"It's snow!"
Robb looked at her like she was a mad woman, arms frozen in their lifted state, eyes wide and befuddled.
"Aye, Sansa. It's snow. Why is it in my nightshirt?"
Sansa rested her mitten-clad hands on her hips. Many a wool layer had she acquired in her stay at the Bloody Gate, and she spared none of them that morning – upon first glance out her chamber's window, upon the seeing the courtyard dressed in white, she'd piled them all on and spent the next few hours frolicking among the snowflakes.
"Because you're stuck in here," she gestured to Robb at his little window seat, then up and out beyond the glass, "and the snow's out there. A shame, that. I thought you might want to see the season now that it's here, oh King of Winter."
Robb rolled his eyes, mumbling bitterly over her choice of words ("king of late summer, more like" she heard, amidst it), but peeked out of his window with a curious turn to his eye, mouth pulled to the side in consideration. Grey Wind, she knew, rolled and pranced about carelessly in the storm, yapping in canine glee at the winds and biting at the air like a child trying to catch snow upon his tongue.
When he whipped back to face her, there was a resolution in Robb's expression that had been sorely missing before.
"Help me down there, will you?"
A crutch under his left arm and Sansa under his right, Robb struggled down the Bloody Gate's narrow, harshly cobbled stairs, cursing and grumbling the whole while. She wouldn't hold it against him – the inner courtyard was the furthest her brother had been from his bed since he was dragged there.
Robb only wore a wool coat over his night-clothes, she realized, and shed her outer-most cloak to instead drape atop his shoulders. He was not, technically, supposed to be out of his chambers, so no heavy wools had he been provided yet. But the joy that lit his face when they finally stepped into the fresh, untrod snow was well worth the punitive scolding the Maester was sure to give them for risking a head cold.
He laughed, loud and seeming to surprise himself – which only made him laugh more, Sansa following in short order.
"I cannot recall the last time it snowed!" he cheered, spinning about as best he could on his crutch (which was poorly), an eagerness in his eyes as he took in the scene around him. She was sure that, were his leg in any functioning order, Robb would already be running about, packing up balls of snow to fling Sansa's way.
(Maybe she was lucky, then, that the limb was as good as useless. Not that she would tell him so.)
"It was snowing when I left Winterfell," she remembered. "When I bade you farewell, there was snow all in your hair. Do you remember that?"
Robb smiled, shallow. In an odd mockery of before, snowflakes caught red hair once more – first the long, unkempt curls that now fell past his shoulders, then to his scruffy beard that he really needed to shear off, in Sansa's own opinion – little pocks of ice, melting as soon as they touched.
He leaned his weight on his crutch and breathed out long and loud and clouding up before his mouth. With his free hand, he motioned towards a wooden bench just off the keep's entry.
"Bran used to beg me to sit with him, when there was little else he could do but sit." He twisted his mouth and sighed, regret seething out with it. "I rarely ever did."
Sansa hummed, leaning her weight into his side. There was nought to say to that, so instead she helped her brother over to the bench. She doubted her own gripes with him (the ways he'd left her stranded, too) would be much of a salve to his guilt. She could do better, though; she could show him what he should have done. Now that Robb could do little more than sit and seethe and sigh, and she would not let him feel abandoned by his own poor judgement.
After a stretch of silence, she peeked up and found him staring at her, something indescribable in his eyes.
"What?" she asked. "You're not about to drop snow down my back, are you? I'm sorry for earlier, if that makes it better."
Robb blinked, shook his head, and turned his gaze back to where Grey Wind continued to pounce about, chasing snowflakes. The wolf yapped at them, tail wagging furiously, before tumbling down into an icy pile to roll about.
"No," he chuckled, then eyed the could, in thought. "What are the chances a raven will make it through this snow-front?"
Immediately, Sansa perked back up, twisting in her seat towards her brother and clasping her mittens together at her chest.
Several times she had walked into Robb's sickroom to find him mulling over letters, lips twisted in thought as he jotted down timelines and details, concentrating with an effort he'd only ever given to his studies before. She knew that he had taken her offer at its face. She knew he was trying to do good by her – for her, and for the safety he owed her. But whenever she asked after his progress, all he had to give were dismissive hand-waving and 'maybe later's that bode poorly for his findings.
This, though – talk of ravens – this was promising.
"You've decided, then?"
Robb nodded, brushing some snowflakes off of his cloak and clearing his throat.
"Aye. Wyman Manderly. Tell him."
Sansa pursed her lips. Though happy to have a direction, that had not been the name she expected to receive.
"Manderly? He hardly seems the most leal of men." The lord of White Harbor was a jovial soul, but none would praise his wit or strength. But, she reasoned, Robb had more time in his council, more knowledge of not only Wyman but of his sons as bannermen.
Robb nodded again, an affirmative hum seconding Sansa's concern. To her confusion, he clarified:
"The Umbers would be my first choice, if by loyalty alone I chose." Robb brushed his gloved hand over the bench's armrest, wiping away accumulated snow. "But winter has come – the journey to Last Hearth would surely kill us. White Harbor is big, it's south of the season's worst freeze, and it's leagues easier to reach; we will not need to travel far, only to the closest port. Everyone that lands around here sails into White Harbor. If we can strike a wager, that's an easy in to the city."
A spark lit his eyes as he spoke. This was a well-mulled-over plan – the fruits of all of his silent window-gazing, if Sansa could optimistically guess.
"And you trust Lord Manderly?" she asked, still skeptical. Though the Lord of White Harbor had been nothing but charm and cordiality when last he visited Winterfell, all Sansa though of now was Joffrey's gallant facade when first they were betrothed. "How do you know he is not sided with the Boltons, too?"
"I do not," admitted Robb. The glint did not leave his eyes, though, even as he winced in pain from adjusting his seat. "I trusted Theon, wholeheartedly. I trusted Roose Bolton, too. For what that matters. No, I cannot say I hold much faith in any man, but Manderly's son was murdered at the… at the Twins—"
Robb's voice caught on the memory. He shook his head, loose snowflakes springing away with the motion. Sansa did not need to hear any more, and nodded in understanding – it was a good enough reason to assume no ill allegiance, at the very least.
"Alright. Wyman Manderly." Only vague, old memories did she have of White Harbor's lord. He had tussled Bran's hair upon arriving to their father's castle for a visit, her little brother still clinging to Mother's skirts, timid of the massive, jolly man smiling down upon him. "He was fond of Mother," she recalled. "When he visited Winterfell, do you remember how he gushed over her Sept?"
Something passed over her brother's face, lost in time.
"Hardly. I believe I was too busy entertaining his granddaughter. Wylla, was it? With the... green?" Robb leaned back in his seat, adjusted his slung arm, and huffed. A grin appeared. "I think Father had hopes for a courtship between us."
Sansa hummed, contemplating. "I should write to her, then."
"Hey now, what did we say about marrying me off?"
A long-lost humor laced his complaint, as did Sansa's subsequent scoff.
"Did I say anything about marriage? There you go, putting words in my mouth again! Poor Jeyne. However did she bear you?"
"Anxiously," Robb answered, still grinning, wistful and mournful and light all at once, "and with more patience than I deserved. She would like you, Sansa."
The snow fell. Big, fluffy flakes, slow and gentle, beckoning in the season as a mother wakes a babe. Sansa watched them pile up, clinging to the wool of her skirts and her mittens where they lay twisted together in her lap. Wet from her mouth froze upon her lips as she ran her teeth over the bottom one, worrying at it as she worried over what to say next. This was good, their path of conversation. A veritable growth from even days prior.
Mother Above, did she not want to muss that up. But she needed to know. She needed to.
"Don't you miss her at all?"
Don't you want to go back? To Jeyne, to all of it?
Sansa regretted the words, even as they left her mouth to hang in the silence of their wake. But it was a good day indeed – Robb's surprise quickly softened to Sansa's concern, a dim half-smile on his face.
"Of course I miss her," he answered, earnest and quiet. "And mother, too. Doesn't mean either of them are coming back."
The snow fell.
Sansa remembered the day Father was killed, all of her pleading and groveling worth nothing but his blood trickling in red rivulets down the holy stairs of the Sept. Maybe if I had been a better daughter, a better betrothed, a more pious maid, she had thought in her desperate mourning, Maybe someone would have listened to me. Maybe I could have saved him.
She knew her brother thought the same. If only he'd been faster, if he'd been a better son to their mother, a closer listener, a more patient king. The blood of their parents would stain their fingers both, forever if they let it.
Wether or not Robb saw reason to, Sansa would have hers cleaned, the blood washed away and soaked into the earth, buried under the white winter snows that fell and fell and reset the land to something blank and unsullied.
Even the distant peaks now huddled under white blankets, hunkering down for the long cold years to come. She would be happy to reach White Harbor – though Father had never taken her along on his visits, the tales he brought back of the massive, seaside city had painted her childhood daydreams of grandeur.
She imagined them, the white limestone halls of the keep of New Castle, teeming with courtiers and parades of silks and sundries from the city's ports, ports perhaps akin to the Capitals, but kinder, as they brought her closer to her real home. A pang in her gut sought to sell away that daydream – a little child's blathering, as it was – but though King's Landing had killed Sansa's illusions it could never kill her hope. Perhaps Robb was right to distrust. The Gods knew she held little trust these days. But Father had hated the Capital from the start, and he'd never had anything but praise for White Harbor. That must count for something.
There, below the mountains and the freeze and the whispers, she and Robb could spend the coming season in relative warmth and comfort. And safety, she smiled, and cozied up into the bundle of her cloaks, content for now with the chill biting her cheeks. Alas, we will be safe.
But Robb, as ever, had other ideas.
"Sansa," he blurted, with a nudge to her side and a warning in his voice, "you must be ready to leave me here, should Manderly decide I am not worth the risk."
Her cloak slipped down her shoulder as she sat straight, meeting Robb's regretful gaze with disbelief.
"What? No! You just said-!"
"-I gave you a name, not a promise."
"But-"
"-Sansa. Please."
For lack of else say do on the matter, Sansa slumped into her brother's side and buried her cheek in his furs.
Yes, there were still grievances to resolve. But even those paled to the sharp pang that wrenched through her at the thought of having to lose Robb again, of having to be alone once more. So she clung to him, gripped his furs tight enough to hurt, and let the reciprocal arm he wrapped around her shoulders ward away the winter snows and the lonely fear that threatened to steal her.
The quiet plodding of paws disturbed the fresh snow, then Grey Wind's muzzle nudged into her brother's other side with a soft whine. Robb shivered, still sallow and weak, and accepted the wolf's head onto his lap. Weak, maybe, Sansa thought, but alive. And for now, safe. Loathe as she was to admit it, there were few other places she could leave him, if it came to that.
"Fine," she grumbled into his shoulder before leaning away to meet his eyes – shining dully, but shining all the same. "But that won't happen."
The shadow of the brother she left two years before smiled back at her, snow dotting his curls.
Many a letter had Sansa drafted in her frequent bids for safety.
There was the one that she regretted more than anything – more than her bitter words to Arya, more than marrying the Imp, more even than letting Petyr Baelish steal her trust: the one she let herself be tricked into writing in the vain hope it would save her father. Robb never asked her about that letter. She, in turn, never brought it up; her brother would surely know by her efforts now that those words had been Cersei's, the hand that scrawled them merely acting upon a need to survive.
(And, truly, he did not need any more blame to shoulder. Not for now, at least.)
There were letters unsent, too, half-written pleas to the North and apologies to her mother that met their end in a hearth fire. The roll of parchment she held now would not meet that fate. All night she had labored over it, draft after draft after revision after tedious revision, until both she and Robb were satisfied. That effort would meet no fire.
-To the Honorable Lord Manderly, a princess pleads your graces-
A kinder flame she lit now, atop which a dollop of wax took a melting shine.
-I am trapped in the Vale of Arryn. You will have heard of my brother's fate by now, of the travesty enacted by those he once believed held his side. Indeed, he suffers greatly, as not one of those wounds brought him the death they intended. Only to the nearest coast can we travel safely. It is his hope that you, Lord Manderly, most leal and true to your king, may find us passage to your grand city.
I haven't any proof but the raven that carried you these words and the trust Robb holds for you. There are few for whom he reserves that honor after facing such grave betrayal.-
Robb had fought her on that line for a good hour. No one cares for the trust of the King who Lost the North, he'd groaned in between more piteous whinging. Don't waste precious parchment evoking it. He only relented once Sansa accepted a succeeding paragraph lamenting of the news of Lord Glover's new allegiance and caking the notion with so much saccharine, placating sentiment she felt queasy penning it. But if Manderly was as driven by whims and tears as Robb believed, she would not argue his angle.
It was an angle she knew well, after all, playing the groveling, pious young maid. That her brother wished her to deploy that maid one more time, she would forgive once it earned them sanctuary.
Grey Wind was being readied in the courtyard, her brother by his side, making sure he saw the raven leave roost – the wolf was their key in this, the only thing bringing her letter any legitimacy, if he followed the raven as closely as Robb promised he would. A letter by itself meant nothing. A direwolf following her claims into White Harbor could hardly be ignored.
-Our mother shared your Gods. Under their eyes, against their custom was she slain beside your son, during the dearest and most sacred of the Maiden's own celebrations. It is in her memory I now beg your help to right such a wrong.-
A lone raven squawked it's anticipation as Sansa signed her plea. She used to envy the ravens, watching them fly to and fro the Red Keep with little notice or care from those hundreds of feet below. The feeling barely returned as she opened the bird's cage, distracted it with a snack of worms, and twined her hopes to its leg. Though carry those hopes away she could not, little jealousy twinged her heart when black wings gave a cursory flap.
For the first time in what felt like forever, Sansa felt no desire to fly away with it, no need to abandon all and leap from a ledge to her rescue.
Before, there had been nothing to abandon. Now there was Robb.
(-Winter does not forgive- he added to the letter upon their final revision, -and neither do we.- If Sansa thought the addendum a mite dramatic, she said nought. Robb earned the right to a little drama after everything.)
He needed her now, as much as she needed his council – his mere presence. He was the wind to her wings, though shallow now and in need of an easterly gust to invigorate him, to keep her in the sky. She would flap her feathers all the harder to make sure that happened, and see both of them soar high and free once more.
With a long breath, Sansa leaned forward and pitched the raven into flight.
I accidentally posted this chapter into a different fic yesterday - issue is fixed now, but apologies for any confusion!