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When the letter came from the far north bearing a direwolf pressed into grey wax, Allyria's heart had leapt into her throat and she'd run away from Elaida and the steward and the maester and the septon as fast as she could, away from the men who were sending her into the arms of the family who had destroyed hers.
Arthur and Allem had been laid right on the coast, right where Ashara had cast herself into the surf, and there's a stone raised for Ashara here, too, all of them small and elegant and carved from white marble which won't wear away as quickly as most other stones.
"It should have been yours, Ashara," she weeps, "Winterfell should have been yours - I don't want it."
She has vague recollections of Ashara, she thinks – soft, dark hair, a lilting voice singing lullabies, warm eyes the same violet as her own. Maester Lomas says that she is the very image of Ashara at six-and-ten, that they both were the image of Arthur save the colour of their hair, that they are-were-are all the image of their father, of Allem.
Allem always told her that Ned – her nephew Ned, not the horrible bastard Ned Stark who killed her sister – is the image of Arthur, and Allyria has never been able to see anything of herself in Ned's face. They have the same eyes, yes, but Allem always said that there hasn't been a Dayne in years without those violet eyes – Elaida says that Allem was talking nonsense, and that Allyria knows full well that there have been plenty of Daynes who didn't have the violet eyes, because Father's eyes were green – mad, wild green that laughed when he swung her up and around and around under the pear trees in the orchard.
The Palestone Tower, the highest of Starfall's four, the southern tower, looms high behind her as she kneels at the graves of her brothers and sisters, although Allem was more father than brother. She wishes he were here now, because she knows that he would never send her away to Winterfell – even Ned would be a help, but he is gone to squire for Prince Oberyn at Sunspear and is of no use to her now.
Ned arrives home the day she is due to leave, and he fights tooth and nail with Maester Lomas and old Barldon Gerwick, their steward, and Septon Hymal, but it is too late – they refused to listen to Allyria and Elaida's arguments, sealed the marriage pact without consulting their lord, his mother, or even his aunt, to whom the pact pertained, and Allyria hates every one of them with a passion she knows borders on madness.
Her fate is sealed – she will go north, and the life that should have been Ashara's will be hers, but without the love Allyria knows her sister must have borne for Ned bloody Stark.
The only saving grace is the opportunity to mayhaps meet her other nephew, Ashara's son. Allyria knows that Ned Stark raised Ashara's son with his trueborn children, and she aches with the hope that he has Ned and Allem's glossy-pale hair and her own violet eyes. She hopes that he is a Dayne, a familiar-faced stranger in the terrifying land that she is being thrown into.
Far away to the north, on the same day that Allyria Dayne leaves Starfall for what may very well be the final time, Catelyn Tully – Catelyn Stark – is vindictively happy.
Oh, she knows that Allyria will be arriving soon – she fought almost as hard as Allyria did against the match, although neither woman will ever tell the other that – but as she watches Jon Snow leave she is relieved that Ashara Dayne's ghost is finally gone from Winterfell in her son's glossy dark hair and over-full mouth.
That Allyria is reportedly the very image of her dear departed older sister twists a knife in Cat's gut, an old, rusted knife that she thought she would finally be rid of the day Jon left Winterfell. Having Allyria here will be another constant reminder that Ned loved another woman, that he dishonoured her before she even had a chance to love him, and she wishes desperately that Ned could have found someone – anyone – else to be Robb's wife.
Allyria's furs are thick and dark and luxurious, heavy around her shoulders and in the lining of her deep hood. Robb's hands are clenched tight into fists to hide the way his fingers shake with nerves.
Her escort is all Dornishmen, dark and pale alike with suspicious eyes. Robb is surprised when the lad riding beside her, a pretty chap not much younger than Robb himself, mayhaps of an age with Sansa, with the biggest eyes Robb has ever seen, is introduced as her nephew, Edric, the Lord of Starfall.
Allyria herself says nothing, hiding deep in her hood with her hands clutching her reins so tight that the leather of her gloves is stretched across her knuckles.
Eventually, though, she must dismount – she holds her nephew's hand and he watches her with worry in those enormous eyes – and she drops into a curtsy, so elegant as to make Sansa jealous, at his feet.
Her hood falls back when she stands up, the top of her head barely reaching his shoulder, and her eyes – oh, he can't look away from those eyes, violet and warm and alive with a sort of passionate kindness that is tempered by a bone-deep fear that takes his breath away.
"My lady," he says softly, taking her hand and pressing a kiss to her leather-bound knuckles. "Welcome to Winterfell."
She manages a smile, but the fear never fades from her luminous eyes.
"Thank you, my lord," she whispers, and he escorts her inside before Mother or Father see the tears that threaten to spill down her cheeks.
She is to spend two moons at Winterfell before she and Robb marry, Allyria is told, and in that time she comes to know this Northman who will be her husband.
Robb Stark, she finds, is nothing at all like the dark-eyed spectre who haunted her nightmares all the way from Starfall. His eyes are bright, clear blue, warm and open, the same as the sky on the cloudless days she and Ned ate their lunch on the flat roof of the Skyward Tower on Starfall's northern corner.
He is also endlessly kind – he worries that she will be uncomfortable, admits that he hopes she will come to see Winterfell as her home, that she will grow used to the cold that pervades every nook and cranny of the great keep. She eats with him every night, sometimes with others but usually alone, and she wears heavy furs around her shoulders even at table, even when he settles her into a huge, deep armchair by the fire in his solar.
"I would like for you to be happy here someday," he says quietly – he always speaks quietly, softly, gently to her, as if by speaking aloud as he does with his brothers and Theon Greyjoy he might frighten her away – with his fingers linked through hers, kneeling at her feet.
She slides down out of the chair, pulling her furs with her, and presses against him. He is always warm, so warm, and he is such a comfort when he allows himself to relax his iron-hard honour and hold her close even for a moment.
"I may be," she says, her voice even quieter than his, and she wonders if he hears her at all. "Someday."
Allyria makes it her business to avoid both of her goodparents-to-be, because Lord Stark – Ned bloody Stark – looks at her with the strangest mixture of grief and longing (not desire, but mayhaps a longing to repair something he knows he broke so long ago), and Lady Stark watches her with a resentment so deep that Allyria is sure nothing will ever make it go away.
Lady Stark is easier to ignore – she avoids Allyria as much as Allyria avoids her, after all – but Lord Stark…
Allyria and Ned – her Ned – grew up with Ned Stark as one of the unnamed but acknowledged villains in so many of Allem's stories about the silver-haired white knight and the lady so beautiful men wept to look upon her, along with Robert Baratheon and Tywin Lannister and the rest of them, although Ned Stark was always the truest villain because he slew Arthur and broke Ashara in so many ways.
Allyria knows that Robb loves his father with the same fierce adoration she reserved for her mother before she passed away, and she knows that if she is to ever truly become part of Robb's life, part of Winterfell and the North, she must resolve some of the outstanding issues she has with Ned bloody Stark.
"Was it guilt that drove you to choose me as your son's wife, guilt over everything you denied my sister?" she asks when she finally plucks up the courage to speak to him alone, stealing into his solar when she should be sitting with Sansa and Arya. He cannot look her in the eye, and that is all the answer Allyria needs.
She just prays that that guilt will not colour her and Robb's marriage. She always dreamt of a marriage like Allem and Elaida's, full of laughter and happiness. She knows that it is a queer, morbid thought, but she would like, someday far in the future, to look back on her marriage with fondness and warmth, to smile that sweetly sad smile that Elaida always smiles when she thinks of Allem.
Robb kisses her for the first time four days before their wedding, and Allyria can do little more than clutch at him and try to stop her knees from buckling.
She's kissed boys before – Quentyn Martell among them, Seven bless him and his dreadfully stiff spine – but Robb kisses her like a man, his mouth hot, so hot on hers, the first true warmth she's felt since crossing the Neck. His hands are enormous on her body, skimming across her as if he wants to touch every inch of her and wishes that her gown was not between him and her skin, and by the time he pulls away neither of them can catch their breath and Allyria feels her cheeks pink with something other than the cold for the first time in weeks.
"In Dorne, even the coldest days are warm, and in the North, even the warmest days are cold," she complains to him the night before their wedding when they dine with his family and her Ned and Elaida. She and Robb are sitting beside one another, of course, and so it is easy to whisper between themselves while ignoring his mother's frosty gaze and his father's queer mix of guilt and shame.
"Winterfell is the warmest castle in the North," he laughs, shaking his head. "I will find warmer chambers for you, my lady, I promise it, but I think you will grow used to the cold – you did, did you not, Mother?"
Lady Stark seems frozen by surprise at the question, but she rallies admirably.
"It is not so warm in the Riverlands as in Dorne, I am told."
Allyria cannot help but think that Winterfell would be as warm as Starfall if Lady Stark were to leave.
She wears lavender, and her maiden's cloak is heavy with the cloth-of-silver lining under the deep purple velvet. She and Elaida stitched it carefully over many nights on the long journey from Starfall, and Allyria feels as if she is betraying her home when she meekly allows Robb to unclasp the star-and-sword at her throat to remove her cloak and replace it with ermine and pearl and winter skies.
His fingers are unbearably gentle, though, and gentler still when he clasps the delicate direwolf brooch in place to hold her marriage cloak around her shoulders.
It still takes all of her strength not to weep when he takes her face in those gentle hands and tips her lips up to his, because she is no longer a Dayne, and she does not know how to be anything else.
Fallen and Reborn, she tells herself, I can be reborn as a direwolf if need be.
The bedding is…
Well, the prelude is deeply unpleasant, but she'd been expecting that. Elaida had warned her that the men would be drunk, and that being as beautiful as she is – Allyria hates being reminded that she's apparently a beautiful woman, so like her legendary sister in looks and so like her legendary brother in manner that she wonders if ever she'll be her own person – will incite them to be rougher, greedier with her than is proper.
She is dumped into the bedchamber completely naked (stark naked, she thinks bitterly) and thoroughly handled, but Robb – as naked as she is, but less nervous of it – slams the door shut against the tide of drunkards who seem to think the consummation of her and Robb's marriage should be witnessed in rude detail.
"I am sorry, my lady," he says earnestly, very studiously not looking at the fall of her hair over her breasts, matched between her legs, startlingly dark against the silver-paleness of her skin. "I- I had hoped that they would show you more respect."
She hesitates, but curiosity overtakes her reserve and she presses the palm of her hand over his heart. It's racing just as fast as her own, and there in his eyes is a mirror for the panic and fear she feels herself.
"Allyria," she breathes, stepping closer, feeling suddenly, madly safe with this man-child who is hers now. "My name is Allyria, Robb. I would have you use it, if it please you, my lord."
"If you will use mine, my- Allyria."
Yes, she thinks as she lets him lead her to the bed, she is his Allyria now. It is a notion that will take much getting used to, she thinks.
She supposes that there are worse men to belong to, especially when Robb seems so determined to give himself over to her guardianship with every filthy whisper against her skin, every searing touch of fingers and lips and tongue – oh, his tongue, where in all the seven hells did he learn that?! – and every gentle embrace when they finish, the first time and every time after, even when he wakes her up with his mouth moving up from her knee once again and she's too sensitive to even consider actually lying with him again.
The prelude to the bedding might have been unpleasant, but Allyria is certain that if Robb Stark is always this bloody good in bed, she'll never manage to roll out from under his furs.
Robb provides her with the warmest furs and cloth for her dresses, the thickest, softest wool for her shifts and smallclothes, but Winterfell is still cold, colder than anything Allyria has ever known. The only time she feels truly warm is when she and Robb lie together at night with the fire throwing strange shadows across the walls and across his skin. When his long, clever hands trace the shape of her, when his mouth trails wet and soft across her skin, when she's stretched tight around him and it all feels so unbearably, blissfully good, she can almost forget the cold that creeps past the shutters and under her furs.
Sometimes they don't quite make it to the bed, and Robb pushes her down into the furs in front of the fire and gasps of all manner of utterly obscene things at her – he has a thoroughly disgusting mouth, her husband, and it's embarrassingly arousing when he whispers filthy things and she reacts quite as powerfully as she does – and she digs her nails into the hard muscle of his back, wraps her legs around his lean waist and feels the shudders rolling down his spine as he comes, releasing him only so he can kneel between her legs and lick into her until she keens and wails his name and twists her fingers into the glory of his hair
Tonight, though, tonight she pushed him down onto the furs, and although he went willingly enough, he watched her speculatively until her teeth grazed across his nipple - then he was hers to do with as she would, and she intends to make use of that as thoroughly as she can, sitting up on her knees high above him, revelling in the weight of his gaze on her body, following the heavy curve of her breasts, the dip of her waist, lower around her hip, watching with ragged breaths as she sinks down onto his cock, and as the heat from her cunt spreads right to the tips of her fingers, Allyria feels truly warm for the first time since she crossed the Neck.
When Allyria's belly begins to swell some six moons after her marriage, she longs for Elaida, long returned to Starfall, or Mother, dead only three years.
Most of all, though, she longs for Ashara, the sister she never knew, the woman that the entire realm seems to whisper of.
Sansa and Arya are curious and kind and Allyria is fond of them, it's true, but they are not truly her sisters, and she longs for a sister of her own more than anything.
Of course, now, here, in Winterfell, she has the best source of information on Ashara left in the Seven Kingdoms, save perhaps Barristan Selmy or Oberyn Martell, in the form of her goodfather. Ned Stark loved Ashara enough to get a child on her, to bend his famous honour and bed her before wedding her – surely he knew her well? Surely he did.
She asks him once, daring only because he is ill - Robb won't admit it, but she knows that Ned will be lucky to live long enough to meet the babe Allyria is carrying - and she knows she will never get a chance again, somehow finding the courage to ask him something that's plagued her since she first heard of her betrothal to Robb.
"Do you ever think of her?" she asks, sitting at Ned bloody Stark's bedside with her hands folded atop her swollen stomach – the babe is due in just a few weeks, and Ned is holding on as best he can – and she receives a reply that near breaks her heart:
"More often than you know."
Ned dies just days before Allyria births a daughter with dusky dark hair and vibrant Tully eyes. Allyria musters up the strength to whisper the name "Ashara" before she falls asleep against Robb's shoulder, the babe nuzzling against her bare breast.
Robb looks at his wife and their child, Allyria and Ashara, and he is certain that there will never be anything that can possibly make his heart ache so sweetly as it does in this moment.
He wonders what his mother will have to say, though.
Allyria nags and nags and nags at Robb until he gives her leave to visit Jon Snow at the Wall, this nephew who is as alien to her as her Ned is familiar.
Robb is reluctant to allow her to go, more so when she had suggests bringing baby Ashara with her, but she wins out in the end and now she cannot help but stare at this man who is so Stark but has eyes the same shape as Allem's, even though they're dark, dark grey, and lips the same shape as her own.
He has Allem's laugh, too, an almost shy sound, and there is a twinkle in his eye that reminds her so powerfully of her Ned that she's heartsick and homesick and just sick with grief at all she lost, even though she has gained so much – because becoming a Stark was not the terrible punishment that she feared, because Robb is so much more than she ever dared hope for, because Ashara is the most perfect thing she has ever seen – and, on impulse, she passes Ashara to Jon just to see these two who share her blood together.
She takes her daughter back from Jon's outstretched arms, laughing at the mild panic on his familiar-but-not face, and is gratified that when asked, he tells her that he hopes his mother was just like his aunt.
Elaida and Ned come to visit for Ashara's first name day, bearing gifts from Starfall and the Water Gardens and Sunspear and Godsgrace and all the other places Allyria loved best in Dorne. There is a letter from Sarella Sand, too, and so much candied blood orange from Princess Arianne and her brothers that it is all Allyria can do not to weep at how far from them she is.
Still, she won't let it be said that Winterfell cannot match Starfall or Sunspear, not now that she is its lady, and so the feast is nothing short of magnificent.
She noticed the way her Ned watched Arya in the yard that morning, the way he watches her now, and so by the end of the third day she puts her nephew sitting beside Arya at every meal, encourages Arya to bring Ned out riding to show him the North, pushes them together at every opportunity.
Arya and Ned seem to be weakening under her constant assault, and Robb doesn't seem to be quite sure how to feel about that.
He stands at Allyria's side and watches his sister and her nephew sparring in the yard, though, and he wonders aloud how it is that it took him getting married for them to find a man who might someday be suitable for Arya - someday, though, because they're both a good deal too young to worry about that just yet.
Allyria is more surprised than anyone when she begins to swell again not long before Ashara's second name day.
Jon is part of a recruiting team from the Wall who visit Winterfell in the weeks following the announcement that Lord and Lady Stark are expecting a second child, hopefully a son this time, and it is in seeing her nephew and her husband together that Allyria realises that she loves Jon, the only true link she has to her sister aside from her own face, in the same way she loves her Ned.
They've had to behave themselves since the Tyrells arrived to collect Sansa, and it's been driving both of them mad - Allyria's barely four moons along with the child, and Maester Luwin warned them that while it was still safe for them to lie together, some of their more exuberant activities would have to be curtailed, which meant the godswood was off limits for anything other than prayer.
But they've all but had the run of Winterfell since they wed, and now, to have to limit themselves to just their chambers is almost painful, and they have their limits - which is how they ended up here in their solar, Allyria bent forward across Robb's desk with her smallclothes around her ankles and her skirts thrown up over her back, Robb driving into her, one arm wrapped around her waist, his fingers stroking her into a frenzy, while the other hand was twisted into her hair, holding her still and keeping her in place so she had to beg for mercy, for release, for anything-
The door creaks open and slams shut, and Allyria barely catches a glimpse of flaming hair before Robb is pulling out of her and rushing to right her clothes, his clothes, her hair, his desk - "Pray that it wasn't my mother" - and they barely even look at one another for the rest of the day, terrified that Lady Catelyn caught them fucking on his desk on top of all his papers, but when they walk into the hall for dinner that night and it's Sansa whose cheeks flood red, both Robb and Allyria breathe a sigh of relief because they both know that Sansa will always be too embarrassed to tell anyone what she saw.
The look on Robb's face when he arrives home from a long tour of the North to find her with a belly so big she cannot see her feet makes the desperate ache in her back worth it.
Maester Luwin tells her that this pregnancy is different because she is carrying low, because she is apparently carrying a boy, and when she tells Robb this his face lights up with a fierce sort of pride.
She never doubts that Robb loves Ashara – he carries their daughter around on his hip as much as Allyria and the septa and the nursemaids will allow, more, because he constantly steals her out of the nursery to give her sweets or some new toy or trinket. He adores Ashara, she is certain of that, but there is something else entirely in his eyes at the thought of having a son, an heir, and although Allyria's Dornish sensibilities object to the notion of placing one gender above the other, she is glad that she can give Robb this.
Allyria's second labour is so swift that it almost feels as if she sneezed particularly forcibly and Rickard was being placed in her arms, Robb's hair and her eyes and silver-pale skin.
Ashara is fascinated by her little brother, constantly sitting at Allyria's side while she holds Rickard, petting his hair and playing with his fat little fingers. She is so gentle that Allyria often finds herself pulling her daughter close and pressing her face into Ashara's dark curls, so like her own, just to stop herself from weeping strange tears of achy joy.
Allyria sings constantly with the children, her voice lilting through happy songs and heroic songs and laughing songs.
She cradles Rickard in her arms and keeps Ashara close, often falling asleep on the sofa in Robb's solar with Rickard sprawled across her chest and Ashara's head in her lap.
Jon looks at the three of them - the four of them, usually, because Robb almost always curls himself around his wife and their children in the evenings when they sit before the fire when Jon visits from the Wall - and he thinks that mayhaps he recognises the melody of the lullabies Allyria hums and almost knows the soft salt-sand-sunshine scent of her hair, as if from a distant memory.
Ashara giggles from her seat at Sansa's side and twists another rose into Samara's chestnut curls, and Allyria strokes Rickard's red, red hair as he nurses at her breast.
"I wonder if my sister ever had a chance to nurse Jon," she wonders aloud, noticing the way Catelyn's jaw tightens just as it does at any and every mention of the first Ashara, the way Sansa's cheeks flush as they do at every sign of her mother's distaste.
Allyria never knew Ashara or Arthur, but she is fiercely loyal to their memories, and Catelyn Tully will always have to live with the knowledge that Ashara Dayne, the most beautiful woman in the Seven Kingdoms, had given her heart to Ned Stark and brought him to the point where he bent his famous honour - and for that, Allyria will make no apologies.
Sometimes, after they've made love and Allyria is asleep in a tangle of sheets and limbs and marks from his mouth and fingers, Robb will find himself just looking at her. He'll remember the first time he ever saw her, before her willowy figure softened and curved from carrying his children, before laughter had traced tiny lines of warmth around her wide eyes, when she was young (so was he, then) and wrapped in so many furs that it was comical, her lovely face shadowed by a deep hood and an escort of shivering Dornishmen
But her eyes (Robb loves her eyes, more than he loves the full swell of her lips or the weight of her breasts in his hands or the dizzying heat and perfect fit of her around his cock) had been luminous in that shadow, violet and warm and alive with a sort of passionate kindness that had burrowed deep inside him somewhere and refused to let go - he'd heard that Allyria was the very image of her older sister, and in that moment, Robb could understand why his father had loved Ashara Dayne, if she had eyes like Allyria's.
It makes the scene he came upon earlier – Allyria and Mother screaming at each other across the room while Ashara and Rickard clutched each other and trembled under the table, all over the colour of cloth for Ashara's new gown – both easier and harder to bear, because while he understands his father on some level, he thinks that mayhaps he can understand his mother as well, because the thought of Allyria ever bearing another man's child makes him sick and angry.
Allyria's eyes are everything Robb never knew he needed in life, though, whether they're bright with laughter when he whispers some terrible, debauched thing he wants to do to her later on at dinner, or shining with pride when Ashara takes her first steps and Rickard calls her "Mama" for the first time, or dark with desire when he does that terrible, debauched thing, or dull and sleepy when she leans her head against his shoulder after a long day of keeping Winterfell and the children - he looks at her eyes, huge in her face and the colour of crocuses and pansies and bluebells all at once, and he feels as if he can do anything.
He loves Allyria, and some small part of him hates his mother for refusing to accept his wife.
They are a strikingly beautiful family, Cat will admit that even though Ashara's glossy dark hair (a different kind of dark, not Stark dark at all) and Rickard's huge violet-blue eyes (not Tully blue, never Tully blue, Maester Luwin says that there must be Valyrian blood in the Daynes) make her sick in a way she can't quite understand and wants to ignore.
Robb adores his wife and his children, is actively worshipful of Allyria in a way that Ned never was of her because Ned was more reserved than Robb, too much a Stark to ever sweep his wife into his arms before the whole of Winterfell and kiss her breathless, to ever get caught in the library on his knees under his wife's skirts.
She loves that Robb is so happy with Allyria, loves that he has such a wonderful marriage, but still Catelyn must fight back a wave of bitterness at seeing that her grandchildren are so entirely Dayne, and she has to stop herself from wondering if Ned regretted that his children did not have violet eyes and glossy hair.
Sometimes, the only way to be sure they won't be interrupted is to go somewhere that nobody would expect to find them, where the children know not to come without supervision, where Lady Catelyn will not tread - so, of course, they go to the godswood.
Robb loves spreading her out on furs before the heart tree, loves to kiss between her legs until she screams and then bury himself inside her, moving frantically until they lose themselves completely and can hardly bear to move, much less cover themselves up and return to the keep and their positions as Lord and Lady of Winterfell.
Allyria's favourite times are when the sun just peeks over the horizon, lightening the grey sky to silver and Robb lets her pull him into the hot pools and the heat sinks into their bones, and she's warm, so warm, and his skin flushes pink and she twists herself around him, clinging to him as they move together under the water - she's sure that it's during one of these mornings that they conceived their second son, and because they made him at dawn and because he is the first of their children to have that dawn-silver Dayne hair, she names him for the last man to wield her House's sword.
Then she remembers that she is a Stark now, not a Dayne, but Elaida visits not long after Arthur takes his first steps and says that he is already like his namesake, and Allyria knows that she could never have named him anything else.