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‘She will make an excellent wife,’ Margaery had written, full of charity. ‘Most biddable and comely,’ Garlan had added later, with an exhortation somewhere between the words to his elder brother to do as well as he could by his bride. Lady Olenna, Willas Tyrell’s grandmother, had been quite blunt. ‘With no remaining family she is sure to love you.’
It had certainly been brave of Petyr Baelish to keep Sansa Stark safe until she had demonstrated to him her innocence of any complicity in her husband Tyrion Lannister’s crimes. It had certainly been magnanimous of Margaery, queen of the Seven Kingdoms, to press for an annulment of Sansa’s marriage. At least – it would have been so if Willas had been inclined to believe in such boundless generosity.
He could have expected almost anything, by the time the outriders and the wedding party had paraded down Highgarden’s leaf-strewn approach road to the castle’s gates. He had been prepared for a fearful meek maid, or open gratitude and eagerness to please. (Gratitude? He was seven-and-twenty, an old man, and no great prize had he been heir to all seven Great Houses.) When the riders drew up in the rose-hung courtyard and he limped up to his bride’s sadly toed-out grey horse to greet her, something gave him immediate pause.
Sansa Stark bore herself with the utmost decorum. Sansa Stark answered his greetings in all the right ways and spoke no word out of place as he escorted her through the castle’s splendid gardens in the not-so-splendid drizzle. Sansa Stark said the right things to the castellan and the maester, to the elderly Tyrell great-uncles and the minor knights who had chosen just this day to present petitions to Highgarden. Sansa Stark was, she said, most content to be wedded at once. She had bride-clothes, a gift from Margaery. The mare had also been Margaery’s gift, and that more than anything else convinced Willas that all was definitely not well: Margaery knew better than to select a horse that would be lame before it was five years old.
“I understand you follow the old gods,” he said to her at the mouth of the godswood, a serene stand of willow and alder around an oak heart tree. “Would you wish to wed in the godswood as well as the sept?”
“We will wed however you judge best, my lord,” Sansa answered, with a polite smile. Willas felt relieved to call upon the septon: he had no notion of the proper conduct of a northern marriage. His pleasure felt odd, though, as if viewed through window glass.
They were wedded in the Highgarden sept the next day, with Sansa’s escorts and Highgarden’s extended brood of Tyrells as their guests. Sansa was charming and correct through ceremony and feast: correct like a new knife, correct like a picture of a horse in an anatomy book that could never be replicated in any breeding. When the hall was cleared for dancing, she initially refused all requests for her hand, until Willas bade her accept. He watched her turn around the floor with knights from the retinue the king and queen had granted her, and wished his knee were not immobile.
He did dance with her in a different way, later, which Sansa bore with similar restraint and poise. There was just a moment when Willas looked at her pale face below him and thought he saw some trace of emotion in her, but in the end she showed no real sign of discomfort or of pleasure. The next morning, he woke to find her bathing, and when he and the estate treasurer showed her the housekeeping ledgers later, she showed no sign that she regarded either of them with more warmth than the other.
*
Their first month of marriage passed them slowly. Willas received letters, and Sansa one or two, containing tantalising details from the capital. Cersei Lannister was still the “guest” of the High Septon. Jaime Lannister gave advice in the small council that managed to be both insightful and deeply unwelcome to Willas’s father, and pressed for a resolution to Queen Cersei’s position. The High Septon apparently insisted that private prayer was a suitable occupation for widows.
Margaery wrote to both Willas and Sansa that Arianne Martell was proceeding to King’s Landing as her father’s envoy, to take the council seat that had been vacated upon her uncle Oberyn’s death. Willas had already received a note announcing the Dornish princess’s passage through the Reach, and had invited her to stay for a night at Highgarden as she journeyed up the roseroad.
Sansa received one letter from her half-brother Jon Snow requesting Willas’s provision of men for the Wall. Willas gave her leave to write back with a polite refusal. Though the ironborn ships had ceased their raids on the coast, every man was needed to guard against their return; he had none spare to escort criminals north.
His young wife had endeared herself to Highgarden. Servants Willas had never noticed before seemed to sprout like roses from the castle walls, with delicacies for Sansa, full cups of her willow-bark tea for her recurrent headaches, shawls to keep their new lady warm in an autumn that a northern woman could scarcely find cold. Cousins Willas had not seen for months or years emerged to form a bower around his wife and the few ladies she had brought from court. Sansa bore their attentions with stately grace, whether riding with them or sitting in the solar to sew and sing; once she entertained them with a northern ballad about another daughter of Winterfell tending her winter roses, though she later apologised to Willas for bringing such a cold draught into his warm halls with her song.
“You are a long way from home,” he told her at that. “You are permitted to miss it.”
“This is my home, my lord,” she answered.
Later, he watched her walking with the ladies through the bower, with late rose petals falling around them like floral rain, and tried to examine his dissatisfaction. She was young: she would change – but he could not help contrasting her with Margaery, two years her senior. Margaery had always had women around her for reasons he had never cared to investigate, but they had laughed and played together for endless hours. Sansa spoke to her ladies with the same quiet reserve she used towards Willas.
Oberyn Martell would have known how to talk to Sansa, how to destroy that façade that Willas was sure she’d erected. But Oberyn was dead, and however many candles Willas lit in the sept, his old friend’s guidance was beyond him.
*
Another month passed in much the same way, and more small news from the capital arrived. Cersei Lannister had demanded a trial, which the High Septon had been persuaded to arrange. The master of coin, Garth Tyrell, requested his nephew’s opinion of some accounts, which Willas was happy to provide. The ironborn fleet had withdrawn to Pyke and appeared to have partially foundered upon doing so, for far too few ships had reappeared in the Iron Islands. Willas made a personal tour of those costal defences that were within a fortnight’s ride, to settle in his own mind that the ships really had had withdrawn from the Reach.
Sansa greeted him on his return with the same complaisance she had shown on his departure. She presented him, though, with a three-day-old request for permission from one of his landed knights to hunt on Highgarden lands in order to set venison before Arianne Martell, whose progress through the Reach was as stately as it was slow.
“I gave them leave to hunt on this occasion,” Sansa informed him. “I pray you are not displeased.”
“I am not.” He considered. Arianne – he did not know her, and yet – “Would it please you to welcome the Dornish princess to Highgarden?”
“It would please me to welcome whichever guests you choose, my lord,” she answered with a graceful curtsey. Willas restrained a sigh and sent several ravens to keeps Princess Arianne was likely to visit, begging her to consider breaking her journey at Highgarden for a few days rather than a night only. He visited his wife’s chamber that night, and realised how rarely he had done so, or, in truth, had wanted to do so.
*
Princess Arianne and her train rode through Highgarden’s castle-town on the eve of the six-month market, drawing crowds of curious peasants and highborn alike. The princess professed herself delighted to break her journey at Highgarden when they greeted her at the gate. Full of seemingly vague talk, she told Willas in a bare aside that her father had been most displeased with her cousins, Oberyn’s daughters, to the extent of forbidding Tyene Sand – Arianne’s bosom companion – from travelling with her. Sansa, at Willas’s side, almost seemed to twitch at that, but the moment passed and again she became the matchless hostess.
The dinner they set before Arianne eminently befitted her status. The princess sat at Willas’s right, and as his servants fed her slow-poached sea salmon and sweetest honeyed pork, she fed him – and Sansa – tales of Dorne and Oberyn. Sansa certainly listened intently enough to ask intelligent questions; Willas hoped he did. Arianne’s words evoked a tapestry of a different place and time where life and people were simpler. He wondered if Sansa coveted Arianne’s southern gown, pale silk that clung to her body in appealing places, or whether she felt – as Willas’s grandmother and mother would have done – that the Dornish manner of dress was less than demure.
His father had once rubbished any notion of wedding him to Arianne, thanks to his painful first meeting with Oberyn. Now, with his chilly northern wife on one hand and the smile-filled southern princess on the other, he wondered how the small incidents in life could change the larger ones so profoundly.
In the morning Sansa invited Arianne and her ladies to inspect the market stalls with her. Willas, familiar with Highgarden’s markets, was more than pleased to see the stands much increased on the previous three offerings; the war was mostly done now, and winter was approaching.
The ladies inspected haberdashery stalls and bought flowers for their corsages and scattered pennies to the right people. Arianne bade two of the best minstrels play for the crowd in advance of the usual evening festivities, and she led her ladies-in-waiting, along with Sansa’s, into a short dance set. Sansa did not join them. Stands of cushioned benches had been set up on the edge of the market, for the use of fatigued ladies; she sat on the central seat with roses twining above her head, watching with nary a sign of sadness on her face. Willas had to leave them, at that: he joined his huntsmaster inspecting the horse traders well away from the central square.
He did not even know whether he should be angry with his wife – his wife, whom his family had bought for him no differently from the way men bought horses here and now. Was her blood tainted, as mad soothsayers always claimed of traitors’ children? He’d assumed these months there was something beneath the polite smiles and the courtesy.
As Margaery had said, she was a perfect wife for a lord: her grace and conduct in all things were spotless. Willas disliked perfection. He had a powerful desire to see beneath Sansa’s mask.
Barely mollified by the acquisition of a well-conformed mare to add to his breeding stock, Willas returned to the town square, from which the ladies had already withdrawn to sup before the scheduled dance that evening. He would tell Sansa to dance, he decided. His inactivity was enforced; there was no need for hers to be as well.
Some business with his steward delayed him, and he sent word to his wife that he would not join her for dinner. When he finally limped to the market square, well after sundown with the minstrels’ music already playing, he saw Princess Arianne sitting on the rose-decked cushioned bench that Sansa had taken earlier, flanked by two giggling ladies who were completely indistinguishable from each other down to the cut of their blue and white gowns. Sansa, though, was notable by her absence.
Just as Willas approached, Arianne dismissed her ladies with a laugh and they hurried hand in hand towards the group of figures waiting for the next dance to start. She looked up as Willas approached, and rose to curtsey. He bowed in return, acutely conscious of his game knee. “My princess, please accept my apologies.”
“Oh, I understand; I have the same business to deal with, and always at the wrong moment.” The princess sat back on the bench and motioned for him to join her. He sat a respectful distance from her, on the edge of a cushion. He was a married man, and he had never believed all the tales about the Dornish. “Sansa informed us that you would be delayed. It is such a pity she is indisposed. I begged her lady to let me sit with her and sing to her, but Alayne assured me Lady Sansa’s headache was so severe that she could only bear to lie still and quiet until it passed.”
“That sounds unpleasant.” Far worse than most of Sansa’s headaches. But – “I shall send the maester to her, unless Alayne has done so already.” Alayne? He had never heard Sansa refer to a lady of that name.
“Alayne said she’d taken a draught of willow bark: she didn’t mention the maester. Where is she?” Arianne peered at the dancing circle. “Ah, there – in the set with Jeyne and Jennelyn.”
Willas looked, and saw quite a tall maid all in dark colours, indistinct in the smoky torchlight. The dance was a rustic ronde, for groups of three men and three women: Sansa’s lady Alayne was between the twins Jennelyn and Jeyne. She had one hand in each of theirs and all three were laughing together as they skipped around and between the men. The graceful sprightly turns of their womanly figures and the whirl of their gowns’ skirts, brown for Alayne and blue-white for the twins, left Willas torn between a longing to join their dance and an odd delight that he could not, that he must watch instead of joining them in the dancing circle.
But it was so hard to see… Alayne’s silhouette was familiar, but he could not place her.
The dancers turned about each other one last time and the dance ended. The women drew into a little knot together, away from the stage. Willas rose and limped towards them, pausing to greet a few cousins and bannermen on the way. When he reached the circle of ladies, the smiling faces in the ring were all familiar, and none Alayne’s.
The women were most content with the evening’s simple pleasures. Willas escorted Jeyne and Jennelyn Fowler on their arduous ten-yard walk back to Princess Arianne’s rose-strewn chair. He asked after Alayne. “She has gone to minister to Lady Sansa,” one of the twins told him. “The lady begged her to enjoy her evening, but it is her duty to serve, she said.”
Willas accepted the answer, but was still uneasy. Long brown hair, a dress of the same shade trimmed with gold; he ought to remember, but did not.
He sat almost impatient at the head of the dance for hours, until he saw that the princess seemed fatigued and escorted her back to Highgarden proper. After they had parted he went to his wife’s chambers.
“Sansa?” he said softly, as he tiptoed as best he could into the room.
“My lord?” her sleepy voice answered from the bed.
“Do you need the maester?”
“My head only pains me a little now. I will be well.”
The room was unlit. He saw bare outlines, if that. “Is your lady-in-waiting with you?”
“I sent her away. I did not need her.” He heard her turn over in bed. “Was your evening pleasant, my lord?”
“Pleasant enough, though your presence would have only improved it.”
“You are too kind.”
He wanted to touch her, to reach down to the bed and take her into his arms, but he feared to exacerbate her illness. “Sleep well, my lady.”
“Thank you, my lord. I will endeavour to do so.” He withdrew and stared at the runewood door of his wife’s chamber for several minutes, barely able to breathe and cursing himself for a fool.
*
Sansa took breakfast in her bedchamber the next morning, but emerged soon afterwards full of soft apologies for Princess Arianne. Arianne brushed them aside: she could not possibly be offended when a hostess was ill, and she was anxious to show Sansa her horses – sand steeds of Dorne, from the Martell stable once run by Oberyn.
Willas, ostensibly at his stables to inspect his gravid mares, cast approving eyes down Arianne’s train at the last crop of horses Oberyn had bred. Each one’s conformation was as excellent as he had come to expect. Sansa and her ladies had arranged to ride with Arianne’s party, and Willas watched them trot away two by two with Sansa and Arianne at the head. He looked for the lady Alayne among the women, but she was not present.
Willas’s mares were well; after a further discussion of their care with his master of horse he went to his kennels, only to meet the unwelcome news that one of his best bitches had whelped three dead pups and one that, if it lived, would certainly be too small and sickly to serve as a hunting dog. He hadn’t the heart to drown it, and left it weakly suckling from its dam.
A report of a beacon fire in one of the watchtowers along his costal line took him on a long diversion away from Highgarden. It was a fine day, and he thought he saw the ladies occupied at games in the riverbank meadows as he cantered past. When he had established from the old soldiers manning the tower that the next beacon along had been lit to warn of nothing more dangerous than a few fishing ships, and that they would have sent word of the false alarm had they had any ravens, he was able to return in a more relaxed frame of mind.
As he rode back to Highgarden the sun sank towards the west. The whole country seemed bathed in a golden-orange glow before the clouds that were massing on the horizon. As he sighted the castle towers he began to think of the night’s entertainment, of Sansa and Arianne.
Suddenly his horse squealed and he felt it rear under him. He looked down in time to see movement in the grass. With hands and thighs he fought to keep his seat, but he felt himself slip too far: as his groom grabbed his panicking horse’s reins, Willas slid backwards out of the saddle and landed hard on the ground.
For a second all was a cacophony of noise and light. Willas stared up into the blazing sky. A mounted woman’s silhouette shone in front of him, black outline against the orange-red sun: Alayne, he thought, but as he pushed himself half-upright on his elbows he realised it was Sansa, with Princess Arianne behind her.
“Stay on your horse,” he croaked as his wife seemed likely to dismount. “There’s a snake in the grass. My horse trod on it.”
Arianne’s quick Dornish eyes started scanning the ground. Sansa, for a miracle, seemed uncertain of herself. “Are you injured, my lord?”
“No – no.” His groom had calmed his horse: now the man helped Willas to his feet and assisted him to mount. Once in the saddle, some little trace of his dignity emerged and he walked his horse to Sansa’s side. She did look so pale.
“Are you feeling all right?” he checked.
“Yes, I am quite well.” She raised her head and looked him in the eyes, and he stared down into her face and realised he’d come to know what his wife looked like when she lied.
*
Willas looked across the chattering hall, counting smiling faces and goblets raised in toasts to friends and allies. Dornishmen, Tyrells – and Sansa’s ladies. The women never all sat at the high table together: one or two always seemed to be occupied in some duty or other, and at present there was simply insufficient room to accommodate all of Sansa’s companions along with all of Princess Arianne’s. Most of Sansa’s bower sat scattered among lower tables. Willas did not see Alayne among them.
He had far more pressing cares than a lady he had seen once in his life – a Dornish princess and a sick puppy among them. But somehow his mind kept slipping back to Alayne and the way she had moved in the market’s dancing circle.
Sansa, at his left, had regained her equilibrium and her charm along with her evening gown and headdress; her conversation with the Dornish knight on her other side was light and pleasant. Arianne, on Willas’s right, was frowning slightly at the minstrels on the gallery as she sipped her wine – Arbor wine, and Willas realised that she would consider it northern wine. “What is that man playing? I don’t know it at all.”
“A song a decade old now, from Robert’s Rebellion.” He looked sideways at the princess. “I trust we have kept you tolerably entertained during your visit.”
“Oh, yes. I have greatly enjoyed making your acquaintance at last. My uncle always had a great deal of good to say about you.”
“That was kind of him.”
She smiled, and Willas was uncertain how deep the smile ran. “And your lady wife is charming. You should plant some winter roses soon.” She nibbled another morsel of veal. “Highgarden is known as the fount of roses, after all; you need some blue ones to grace your bushes along with all the yellow ones.”
The minstrel sang of the northern levies, proud behind the Baratheon and Stark banners. At Willas’s side, Sansa’s flow of small talk paused for a bare instant. The Dornishman by her likely thought it coquettishness; Willas knew better.
“Does your headache trouble you tonight?” he asked Sansa the next time she paused for breath.
“No, my lord.” He raised his eyebrows at her, trying to let her know her mask was slipping. “My only trifling ailment is spiritual,” she continued, as if it were nothing. “With your leave, may I visit the godswood before I retire?”
“Certainly.” She bowed her head in thanks and, presently, returned to her discussion with the Dornish knight.
The meal continued into the night. Sansa retired as soon as the covers were cleared, taking only Jeyne Vyrwel with her: once they were gone, Arianne turned to Willas with a smile. “I fear Lady Sansa does not enjoy dancing. I have two of my own minstrels in my train: may I have them play for us to dance?”
“Of course, my princess.” Did Sansa like to dance? She was certainly good at it, as Margaery had attested. But it was impossible to say whether she liked it.
He watched from the daïs as the hall tables were pulled aside under Arianne’s instruction. Just as the Dornish musicians began to play a somewhat jaunty southern song, Sansa’s lady-in-waiting Jeyne Vyrwel reentered the hall and returned to the high table.
Willas frowned. “Where is Lady Sansa?”
Jeyne went pale and curtsied. Her dark hair bounced in its net. “My lady sent me away. She was quiet at her devotions: I think I did disturb her as I walked about the godswood. She bade me dance and make merry –”
“It is well enough.” Willas leant back in his heavy carved chair and sipped his wine. “Maybe the lady Alayne will attend her.”
“The princess’s lady?” Jeyne sniffed. “If it is – right, my lord, I am sure she will.”
Willas lowered his cup and looked at her. “I beg your pardon?”
“The lady Alayne…” She lowered her voice. “Her name is Stone, my lord. Of course, the princess has cousins, and she will – a bastard princess is a most superior personage, of that there is no doubt. But Alayne Stone – I understand she sits below the salt, and that, at least, is correct.”
“The princess’s lady, Alayne.”
Jeyne looked startled. “Yes, my lord.”
Willas felt like his head was full of feathers. Arianne had named Alayne as Sansa’s lady – why would she lie? She could keep as many bastards around her as she wished; none would openly gainsay her.
Across the hall, the minstrels ended the dance, and the ladies, lords and knights changed partners. Willas stared at the crowd below him without seeing anyone, just wondering. With a bright flare of pipes the music began again: a Dornish dance, where the men would hold their places in the set and the women would dance between them, facing each for a few moments only.
A familiar silhouette caught Willas’s eyes. He looked. The hall was by turns too dark and too bright, in accordance with the torchlight, but he recognised Alayne at once.
The music rose and fell as the lady no train would acknowledge danced through the set. The rose-shaped buckle in her dark brown hair glinted when she lingered in the pools of light, and her dress – blue, but so deep it seemed near-black – whispered when she moved. She was laughing again, smiling at each new partner, full of joy as she danced between them. But as the last pipe played, Alayne’s gaze strayed to the daïs and suddenly she met Willas’s eyes.
Willas froze in semi-recognition of something he could not even articulate to himself. A second’s pause, and Alayne seemed to disappear into the crowd of dancers, not hurrying at all but simply melting aside while Willas sat frozen in his chair.
Was he dreaming?
A rattle of rain on the heavy window glass made him jump. He waved to a page: “Have the main shutters closed,” he ordered. He wouldn’t risk the expensive glass in what seemed a heavy storm.
Sansa. Unless he had – she was still in the godswood.
Willas rose and wobbled a little as his leg tremored under him. Arianne, about to take to the floor with a Dornish knight on her arm, looked towards him. “Will you join us, my lord?”
“I fear that that is beyond my power. Pray continue the festivities.” He gestured to the rain-blown window. “I will return when I have seen Sansa in from the godswood.” He gave her a stiff bow: her returned curtsey was almost as perfect as one of Sansa’s.
He sent a page ahead with an order to ready the horses as he limped to the closest door, the one to the gardens. His leg always ached in rain like this. Sansa, outside – and her veneer of perfection, which Arianne seemed not to require –
A pair of grooms had brought the horses to the garden door before he arrived. It was raining with enough force to rip petals from the late roses, as if the gods were tossing buckets of water from the sky. Willas scowled at the puddles on the ground. “Fetch a pair of lanterns, and follow me,” he ordered, and as the men bowed in acknowledgement he cantered away across the wide manicured gardens towards the godswood, with Sansa’s mare on a leading rein behind him.
The godswood was as dark as the Stranger’s mantle. Willas slowed the horses to a walk at its edge and picked his way through the underbrush. His cloak had soaked through already. He should have waited for those grooms. “Sansa?” he called. No answer came: maybe he was too far from her, or maybe she couldn’t hear him over the wind. He urged his skittish horse ahead into the dark and tugged on the leading rein of Sansa’s. He would injure one or both of the horses if he continued. “Sansa!”
“My lord?” Her voice was some way ahead of him: he stared into the dark and saw nothing. “Where are you?”
“I’m here.” A light was glinting somewhere behind Willas; the grooms, following. At least she’d see where he was. “You should have returned before it started to rain.”
“I am sorry to have troubled you.” She sounded closer, and genuinely upset. “I did not notice the storm approaching. I tried to walk back when it started, but my lantern blew out.”
“Never mind that now.” The groom had almost caught up to them; Sansa’s pale face was visible among the forest gloom. Her headdress sat limp and wrinkled in her hands, ruined by the rainstorm, and her hair lay sodden and dank against her brown cloak.
The groom dismounted to help Sansa into the saddle. Willas reached over and took her clammy hand in his. “I hope you do not take a chill.”
“I will not, I am sure.” She smiled at him, and it seemed real. “Thank you for coming for me. I am a most fortunate wife.”
She rode slowly away towards the second groom. The first man seemed about to mount but bent to the godswood’s leaf-litter carpet instead. “My lord? Lady Sansa’s lost her brooch.” He passed his prize to Willas, who turned it over and over in his hand, letting the rain wash off the dirt as he evaluated it.
It was the blue rose buckle he’d last seen in Alayne Stone’s dark hair.
*
Sansa had retired to bathe in kettles and kettles of hot water. Willas, once slightly drier, rejoined Princess Arianne and her party and stayed in the hall until the hour grew late and the festivities began to fade in their lustre. He escorted the princess to her rooms and, after an impressive degree of dithering, went to Sansa’s chamber.
She was sitting in her armchair with candles around her, reading a heavy book, but she rose and set the book aside as Willas entered. She was dressed in a warm velvet robe, and her hair fell silky around her like a cloak, shining red in the candlelight. “Good evening, my lord.”
“Good evening, Alayne.”
Sansa seemed to freeze in place. Willas went up to her and pressed the blue rose brooch into her unresisting hand. “Why?” he wondered. “There is no benefit in this – disgrace.”
She blinked, long and slow. “My lord, you are under a misapprehension,” she said quietly. “Alayne Stone is the daughter of Lord Baelish, a maid of excellent bearing, but one who could never move in the highest of circles.”
Some little trace of reason began to seep in at the edges. “Alayne Stone,” Willas surmised, “is the lady of no castle, with no husband at her side. She can dance and laugh with no fear that her husband or her retainers might misunderstand.” She did not deny it. “Sansa –”
“We spoke of Alayne, my lord,” she murmured.
Part of him wanted to order an end to this farcical game, but the rest remembered Arianne’s beautiful departure from perfection. “If – Alayne – could take a husband, could choose to – be herself – when with him… what would she do?”
Sansa’s smile in the candlelight was something more than she’d ever shown him before. “She would see the good in her husband, and would be the best wife she could to him.”
“But not a perfect wife.”
“Alayne is not perfect.”
She stood on her tiptoes and kissed him, and it seemed that Alayne kissed him too, for there was little of Sansa’s demure cold manner in it. He held her against him and wondered about the hardiness of winter roses, as improbable in a way as the determination of a dog to cling to life when it should have died at birth.
“Sansa, would you like a puppy?”
She smiled, deep and happy. “Yes, Willas, I would. Thank you.”
*
Sansa turned over in bed and watched the grey half-light in her chamber slowly brighten into dawn. Willas lay asleep at her side. His deep, regular breathing was warm on her bare shoulder.
Her eyes rested on the willow bark cordial on her table by the window, and she fancied she could see what else was mixed into the bottle. Petyr had told her to keep taking it, as surety for the headaches she was sure to have in Highgarden when she proved to be barren. It was for the best, he’d said. It would lead her back to Winterfell in the end, unencumbered by a husband and free to rule the north in her brother’s place.
Perhaps he had been wrong.
She would take the cordial no longer. She did not need it. She tucked her hand into Willas’s; as his sleeping fingers twined into hers, she smiled into the pillow. She would give him sons called Eddard and Brandon and Rickon, and he would come to love her for herself. And she would have a puppy. He’d promised.