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No one recognizes him. They are far from King’s Landing, and burns are not so uncommon these days, with the Mother of Dragons on the Iron Throne, her crown won with flames, her children with their wide wings casting shadows of ash across the realm. His face is as gruesome as ever, but these have been war years, winter years, and everyone has their scars. He does not stand so tall as he once did, his limp sometimes so bad that his leg is nothing but a weak, dead thing he drags behind him, and even with his gravedigging, some of his muscle has gone to fat. He is -- old is not the right word, they’ve only just celebrated his thirty-third name day, but he’s not young, either, not as young as he was, young and angry, furious as only a man still in his prime could be.
Inside of him is that beast who made the whole realm quake with fear, but now he is only an ugly man with a pretty wife. Now he’s nobody at all.
Before they came to this village, before she believed she could trust him -- trust anyone at all -- she cut his hair with a sharp knife, cropped it close to his head so that you could hardly tell the color. His scar was livid, but he looked different, too. Like a different man. ‘I suppose you can’t make me any worse to look at,’ he’d sighed, rubbing his scalp, and she thinned her lips together to stop herself from smiling. How long since she’d smiled? She couldn’t remember.
She pressed the knife into his palm and he tugged her hair away from her neck. She looked too like her mother. She looked too like the girl who killed a king. ‘My turn,’ she said, and when she heard the scrape of the knife, felt the swing of her hair above her shoulder and saw the auburn strands slipping to the floor, she tried not to cry.
*
‘You might go to him,’ he said one night.
They were working in an inn, and had been for many moons. She cooked and cleaned, and he shoveled hay and tended the horses, and in return they were given space in the stable to sleep and enough food to eat. They stayed on; there seemed no better place for them to go, two runaways thought dead by the rest of the world.
‘Might find your brother, be a lady again.’ He had given up drink, but she caught him gulping water like it was wine, sometimes, wishing for a haze to cloud his brain. He did this now, grimacing at the taste of the water, his words beginning to slur, but only with tiredness.
He will miss me if I go, she thought.
But of course. She’d missed him when he left King’s Landing. We miss the ones who know us as we really are, who have looked upon our brokenness without flinching.
That night, she kissed him, to see if it was like when the Blackwater burned. It wasn’t. His skin was strange beneath her touch, and his lips were hard, rough, chapped from the years of winter. He pulled away from her, frowning. Was he furious again, as he had been in King’s Landing, even though this time she wasn’t trembling, wasn’t a hostage of his terror? Even though this time she could look him in the face. In her memory all she knew was his weight, his hunger, the scent of blood and wine, a moment like a dream. Maybe it was. Maybe none of it happened at all -- she never sang for him, never wrapped his white cloak around her body after he was gone. She never felt his knife prick her throat. He never looked at her like she was both the flames that he feared and the water that would quench them.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said and meant to turn away. She meant to forget it. She was good at forgetting. But he grasped her by the shoulder with his big calloused hand, and he pulled her into his chest and held her there, her cheek pressed to the rise and fall of his breath, the thud of his heart. His arms around her were warm, and he smelled of horses, and she thought, fleetingly, of Petyr, of Harry, of her father and Robb, all the men who’d held her close, but the day had been long, the rooms to clean and supper to cook, the guests to avoid as best she could, taking orders with her eyes downcast so they wouldn’t see the softness of her woman’s face, and she was tired, tired of the inn, tired of all that time she’d spent running, the time she’d spent trapped, and his embrace was a comfort, somehow. For the first time in years she felt safe.
When she woke, long before sunrise, he was still awake. His embrace was loose, his hands gentle on her back.
She said, ‘I can’t go to King’s Landing. I won’t play their game again.’
‘And your brother?’
‘We wouldn’t have each other for long. He would have to marry me off to a Tyrell or a Martell or one of the queen’s Dothraki men. A new alliance, another man who can use me as he likes.’
She once thought she would give anything to see her family again. She was more realistic now. Everyone she ever loved was dead, except for Jon, and he, in the good graces of the queen, a member of her small council, had no need of the sister who had never treated him well enough. In truth, she would resent him. She would want Winterfell. But he had been named Warden of the North, and Winterfell was his true home at last.
She loved him. He was the only person in the world she loved. She wouldn’t take his home from him.
‘What will you do, then? Keep scrubbing chamber pots till you die?’
‘No.’
She looked up at him and in his eyes she saw that same hatred -- hatred of the world, hatred of himself -- that scared her so badly in King’s Landing.
She thought after he left that she would never see such hateful eyes again, but, as usual, she had underestimated the world and its cruelties. At wartime, there are more hateful eyes than kind ones, and even with the war over, every last king crowned with his own blood, she’d come to realize her own heart held more darkness than light. Her sister, her brothers, her father, her mother. Her innocence. Her home. Traded and stolen. Murdered. And all for a girl queen to fly in on her dragons and claim the throne and stop every last player in his tracks.
If she had dragons and armies and power, she would raze the land. She would burn King’s Landing to the ground. She would burn the Twins and Dreadfort and all of it. She would leave Westeros with a scar to rival the Hound’s.
But she didn’t have dragons. She didn’t have armies. She had a crippled dog who was loyal to her and an ember of desire to feel happiness again, to feel anything but sorrow and rage: the taste of lemon cakes, a friend’s laughter late in the night as they gossiped about knights and kissing and courtly kindnesses, the memory of her family without the bitter aftertaste of guilt. Pain cannot last forever. She believed that to be true, she must’ve, or how else could she have made it through each day in King’s Landing? We must either stop hurting or die from our wounds, and gods and kings and Littlefinger had spared her from death, so the hurt had to heal, eventually. Even he, with his face as terrible as it must’ve been the day his brother pushed it into a fire, had to heal. Somehow.
She made herself smile at him. ‘We must start over,’ she said and knew it to be true. ‘We might even be happy, you know, if we were anybody else. If were just lived a whole new life and pretend that none of this ever happened. Nothing ever happened to us at all.’
*
They try.
The first village, there were too many questions. She posed as his sister, and they kept to themselves, but the townsfolk watched them with suspicious eyes. Did they suspect the dead were in their midst? Or perhaps the villagers just did not believe their lies: they saw her stiff formality, his gruff awkwardness, and knew they could not be brother and sister.
They traveled northwest and ended up a day’s journey from Riverrun, but the people did not know her. Her eyes were far too cold to be Tully blue. The cottage they rented, if it can be called a cottage, was at least no worse than the stable of the inn. He found work digging graves and doing labor for the local septon, a near-blind old man whose sept, already a modest affair, had been badly damaged in the war.
‘And who is this girl?’ the man had asked, squinting at her.
‘Her? ’ He made a sign of discomfort. They hadn’t discussed it, but of course they could not be brother and sister again. On both sides the assumption had been made that they would tell a better lie this time. ‘She’s -- ’
He couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say it. Did he think it a fate worse than King’s Landing, a fate worse than becoming a bartering chip in another struggle for power? Certainly it could be no worse than being alone.
She stepped forward and smiled at the blind man. She said, ‘I’m his wife,’ and in that moment took her third husband.
*
They are married, as much as two people who don’t exist can be married. The people they once were are both presumed dead, but a man called Brandon marries a girl called Minisa, and it doesn’t take long for the names to settle. They never got the hang of calling each other by their proper names before, so the new ones come easy enough. But he calls her his bird, still. And, late in the night when he shivered with a fever she thought would kill him, she’d whispered, ‘I won’t be made a widow again. I forbid it,’ and he grinned that old grin of his, less terrifying than it used to be, and asked her to sing.
She wiped sweat from his face. ‘I don’t remember the words.’ But she hummed until the sun rose and his fever broke.
They share a bed in which they do not touch. They do not kiss. He tells her, once, that he would not begrudge her if she found a young village man to cuckold him with, and her laugh erupts like a sob from her chest. She does not find a village boy. She’s not sure she could; they are all eager enough to watch her as she tends her little garden, or at the market where she sells what she can spare, but they fear her husband the gravedigger, the holy man’s assistant. Even with all his fierceness faded, even with the cane that he must use on bad days, he still gives off the scent of dog -- vicious, protective, teeth bared and hackles raised.
Yet, compared to King’s Landing, he is nearly gentle. He does not touch wine, though she knows how it must tempt him. When his leg cramps she wishes he would drink something to ease the pain, but he refuses, and when she offers to massage the aching muscles, he turns away without saying anything.
When the village women ask why she isn’t with child yet, she tells them, ‘It’s my fault, I’m sure it must be my fault,’ and they press herbs into her hand that she does not take and recommend remedies that she does not try.
News comes from King’s Landing on the wings of ravens. The baker’s wife has a sister in the capital who writes badly misspelled letters with gossip from the city. The baker’s wife, barely literate, will sometimes ask her to read the letters aloud, in exchange for a fresh loaf or a slice of cake, and in this way she learns what executions the queen has ordered -- men of the North, men of the South, men who betrayed the Targaryen cause -- and which lucky few are raised up to power. The Dragon Queen takes Margaery Tyrell, still cunning enough to have landed on the right side of this war, into her favor; Margaery’s marriage to Tommen, the poor boy now dead, is annulled, and she is engaged to Jon Snow.
Jon Snow, she learns, is not her half-brother at all. He is a Targaryen, and the queen’s heir.
‘Could be you,’ he says when she tells him. She does not like to talk about the people they were before, but he would hear eventually. Jon might be king one day. His children will rule.
‘What could be me?’
He tears into the loaf she has brought home to eat with thin beef soup and chews it thoughtfully. ‘If he’s no Stark, then it seems to me you’re the rightful heir. Could be what they call a good match -- heir to the Iron Throne and true Warden of the North. You’d be a damn sight happier with him than you are with me, even if he used to be your brother. A Targaryen isn’t like to mind such a thing as that.’
‘You’d have me marry Jon Snow?’ She nearly laughs.
‘You’re a lady, whatever you like to tell yourself.’
‘Oh, am I? And are you a knight?’
He scowls, a flame of anger licking behind his glare, but she’s not afraid of him anymore. She’s lost everything, everyone, even the people she wasn’t sure she wanted to keep -- Harry, Sweetrobin, Tyrion, Petyr -- they were taken from her and she had no say in it at all. She was afraid of what else she might lose. She was afraid of worse. She saw -- she saw a thing she cannot think of, even now, the creature that killed Petyr Baelish and held her gaping throat to speak, the woman who smelled of death and looked out of a face too familiar. A face ravaged but known -- loved -- missed.
That was fear. This man with his broken heart and his ugly soul, he can’t hurt her. She learned long ago that she is stronger than him in all the ways that count.
‘I’m not her,’ she says. ‘You must put that girl out of your mind.’
That night, as they lie in bed, he says, ‘I never took you for a coward, girl.’ She can’t see him clearly in the darkness, and she finds herself wishing she could. She knows his face well enough to read it now. She knows it well enough not to look away.
Is it cowardice, she wonders, to survive? Is it cowardice to let the past stay in the past and to forget the pain and the lies and the songs?
She reaches for him, the broad length of his shoulders, the bulk of his arm. Some part of him, still so human and warm. But he jerks away from her touch.
‘And you call me a coward?’ she whispers, and rolls away from him, squeezing her eyes shut. The blackness behind her lids is the color of blood at her mother’s throat.
*
She learns a great many things, being poor. It is harder than being a bastard. She must keep their little cottage warm and comfortable, though it is but two rooms and could be blown over by a strong wind. She haggles over the price of meat, and when the crops in her garden do not grow, she must buy what she can from shrewd neighbors every bit in need of money as they are. She, who once had beautiful, fine gowns and the richest of silks, sews her own clothes now from rough homespun cloth that she rarely can afford to dye. Still, she is known as a gifted seamstress, and soon many of the villagers come to her for dresses and embroidery. Many a late night she spends with a length of fabric on her lap, needle in hand, and does not think of her long-dead septa, or her long-lost sister, the girl who so hated needlework. She pricks her finger and blood wells and she does not think of her first marriage, or her second, or her maidenhead that was valued far above her happiness.
‘Come to bed, little bird,’ he will say from the doorway of the small room they share.
She shakes her head. Another cold night, untouched. Another dream that belongs to a life that has ended and a girl that is dead. Better to stay with her stitching, watching the fire slowly die.
*
Illness sweeps through the town, and no queen, no soldier, no dragon, can stop it. Four babies die in the first two days. Many of the villagers disappear from the streets, bedridden, and each day there is at least one fresh corpse.
She sews and works in the garden and ignores the chill that crawls through her, like wrenching fingers of ice inside her stomach, even in the warmth of the sun. She doesn’t mention it to him when he comes home, dirt and sweat on his face, hands calloused, sometimes bloody. He has more work than ever, and each night he grits his teeth against the pain in his leg. Best not to add to his burden. She holds on to the wall to keep steady and does not sleep beside him, for fear it will catch.
He finds her in the main room one morning, huddled as close to the fire as she can get without being set alight, and still she is not warm. ‘You’re shaking,’ he says, and she tries to say that she’s perfectly fine, that she’s just a little tired, but she can’t find the words, can’t even remember the words, can’t remember anything but the ghost of her mother, soaked with blood, and a boy king who sneered at her while she begged him for mercy, and her father, her poor father, his head beneath the swing of a sword. She remembers a bird in a cage, beating its wings against the bars till all its feathers fell out and its heart, a weak little thing, could not take it anymore and simply gave up. And an old blind dog with a face full of sorrow.
‘Buggering hells,’ a voice says, and she laughs.
Give me my needle, she wants to say. I need to work.
Once, she remembers, once someone sewed her up tight, sewed her mouth closed so that she couldn’t speak and sewed her eyelids shut so that she couldn’t see and her ears closed so she couldn’t hear. She was stitched closed, all of her, and nothing could get out, and nothing could get in.
Once, she remembers, when she was all closed up, she opened her eyes inside a raven and saw how far she could get from everything that held her down and threatened to hurt her, and she knew then she could never go back.
Someone clasps her close and calls a name she does not recognize.
*
When she wakes again, she is on the bed, wrapped in bedding damp with sweat, and he tells her it’s been three days. She can see from the pallor of his face and the redness of his eyes that he’s barely slept in all that time.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I knew I was ill. I only thought -- ’
‘You knew?’
‘I should have told you earlier. I know I was stupid.’ She frowns at him. ‘You don’t need to tell me I was stupid.’
He laughs and it sounds ugly and furious. It sounds like the man he used to be. ‘You were bloody more than stupid.’ With rough fingers he grips her forearm, tight enough to hurt, and she wonders, distantly, if this is the first time he’s touched her on purpose in years. But no -- he must’ve carried her to bed. He must’ve looked after her when she wasn’t well. ‘Do you give a shit that you might’ve died?’ His eyes, cold as winter itself, meet hers. ‘You could have died, and I’d have been away digging your fucking grave without even knowing it.’
She surprises herself by flinching at the coarseness of his language. That’s something the other girl would have done, long ago, but there was no need for a villager’s wife, a one-time bastard and current nobody, to put on airs. She lifts her chin and forces herself steady. ‘And if I had? Would you have cried for me, ser?’
‘Don’t -- ’
‘Don’t call you ser. You are no ser. You are no knight. I remember that well enough, but do you?’
He dares to be angry with her, when all she has done all along is try to move on? All she has done since Joffrey cut off her father’s head and Walder Frey killed Robb and her mother and Theon Greyjoy murdered Bran and Rickon and Arya was left to die in some terrible, unknown place, alone and hurting, all she has done is try to move on. What else is there for her? Sansa Stark was a daughter and a sister, Alayne Stone was the bastard of a clever man, but all of that is gone now. Now she must be someone else. And that someone else may die, yes, but she is no one at all.
‘Don’t expect me to forget who I am, little bird. There are things in life that you don’t forget. And try all you like, you can’t forget who you are either. You pretend you’re lost but you’re right here, and you’re alive. You wanted to survive, and you have. You are alive. You -- ’ His clamps his mouth closed, his jaw shuddering, his eyes burning now, and wet.
‘I am your wife now. Only your wife.’ She looks at her hands, small things, useless, really. Compared to her words and her smiles, her hands were weak. But they once touched this man’s face as she prayed for mercy for them both. Her hands once pushed a blade through the heart of a woman who was not her mother, a woman who had gaspingly, bloodily, asked to be granted peace.
Shaking, she reaches for his hand with her own and asks, ‘Please, don’t you want me for your wife?’
She’s seen how he looks at her. She’s seen what sharing a bed has done to him. She is no fool and no innocent -- Petyr Baelish made certain of that -- and she knows that he wants her, as a man wants a woman, as a husband wants his wife. If only he would say it, and they could begin their lives for true.
He rasps, ‘I want you for a queen.’
‘That isn’t an option, and you know it.’
‘Bugger that. Aren’t you sick of pretending you don’t want it? Sick of pretending the North isn’t yours by rights?’
‘It doesn’t matter how I feel. Haven’t you realized that yet? You say you want me to take the North, because it is my birthright. Perhaps it is. But you only care because you’ve given up your life from before, and now you want it again. You think I haven’t noticed how restless you’ve become? You say you wish for me to be your queen, but all you really wish is to hold a blade once more. To kill. You’ve grown tired of digging graves and wish instead to fill them.’
It would be better to spare him the truth, but he is right about one thing: she is sick of lies. This time, she can tell the truth.
‘Understand that you are a broken soldier. You wouldn’t be half the fighter you once were. You’re crippled now, and softer, and there is not enough hatred inside of you anymore.’
He slumps a little, gripping his thigh. ‘A broken soldier?’
‘I’m afraid so. And I’m a broken queen.’ She takes a deep breath and smoothes the bedding over her lap. ‘If you prefer not to be married to me, then we shall end it. I will go my way and you will go yours. We’ll call ourselves by new names and it will have never happened.’
‘Do you mind being married to me?’
She smiles sideways at him. ‘Not at all. You’ve been better to me than anyone else would’ve.’
‘Sansa, I can’t say I know how to be a good man. Never have. But I will try.’
‘Don’t call me that,’ she says, tucking her hair behind her ear. Too long again. Too auburn. She looks in the mirror and sees her mother sometimes. ‘But thank you.’
*
When she kisses him, he presses back, softly, softer than she ever imagined, his embrace barely there, as if waiting for her to break away. She pulls him closer instead, and sleeps that night beneath the warm weight of his body.
She will bear no children. She dreamed of them once, her boys and girls, all of them named after her siblings, all of them bright and beautiful children who would live forever. Now she knows better; the weight of motherhood is too heavy a burden to bear, with the world so fragile, and death and pain and humiliation inevitabilities. She acquires moon tea when she must, and though she does not say a word to him, she does not doubt he understands.
In the dark, she makes herself touch his scars and tell him that she doesn’t mind. Eventually, she doesn’t.
‘Will you ever love me?’ he asks her one night, his voice rough and quavering.
She wraps her arms around his chest and listens to the slow march of his heartbeat. He exhales and she tastes his breath on the air. He will die one day. She will, too. Jon, and Margaery, and the Dragon Queen. All of them will plummet into the vast cold darkness waiting for them, and they will all go alone, utterly alone.
‘No,’ she answers, wishing it were a lie. ‘But I am happy. I am happier than you know.’
Her tears wet his skin, and he strokes her hair until she falls asleep, humming a song that she knew a lifetime ago.