Chapter Text
Jon took each man’s head with a single sure stroke. They spasmed and were still as blood sprayed out across the snow, black as soot in the torchlight, spreading in pools. The heads fell and rolled across the courtyard.
Her father’s legs had spasmed just so, when Ser Ilyn took the greatsword Ice and cut off his head. Her father’s head had fallen just so, rolling from the High Septon’s pulpit down the steps of the Great Sept of Baelor to the cobbled square below. The crowd had roared, screamed, surged towards the steps. A man in a mustard yellow doublet had lunged for her father’s head, raising it by the hair, blood dripping; then dropped it, doubling over, when one of the goldcloaks put a mailed fist into his belly. And later Joffrey had taken her to the walls, where the smell of decay had mingled with hot tar and she had seen it again, staring blindly out over the city.
Sansa breathed and tried to still the trembling in her legs and belly, to allow her eyes to dry. This was not the sodden heat of summer in King’s Landing. The air was hard and tasted of smoke and ice, muting the smell of blood and shit as the dead voided their bowels.
“Lord Snow,” Captain Mollen said, “Do you wish the heads placed on spikes?”
A single drop of blood dripped from the sword in Jon’s hand. “No,” he said. “Burn the heads with the bodies.” His face very still. “Lord Glover, a word with you, if you please.”
Murmurs rose, then conversation, as Lord Glover followed job from the courtyard. Captain Mollen gestured forward the waiting cart and his men began to load the bodies upon it. Lady Maege and old Lord Flint left together, speaking quietly. As Lady Dustin made to the follow, Sansa raised her voice. “Lady Dustin. Will you walk with me?”
The lady paused, though her iron spine did not permit the suggestion that she hesitated. Her thin lips twisted, but she opened a hand in agreement.
Sansa and Lady Dustin walked side by side through the ruins of Winterfell towards the North Gate. Alysane Mormont and Wynafred Manderly followed behind, an honour guard of sorts, and Ghost paced silently, white against the dirty snow. Heavy clouds still roofed the sky, but below them to the east and south the sun rose blinding in the clear sky.
Over the towers flew the banners of the Northern lords: the battle-axe of Cerwyn, Tallhart’s pines, the merman of Manderly, Locke’s crossed keys, the Umber giant, the stony hand of Flint; chevrons russet and gold for the Stouts, Slate in grey and white; the horse heads of the Ryswells of the Rills in grey, russet, black and gold. And there Lady Dustin’s banner, the spiked crown over crossed longaxes of Dustin quartered with Ryswell’s horse.
The widow of Barrowton was of an age with Sansa’s father, not yet forty, though the grim set to her face made her seem older. She had been luckier than Lady Hornwood in her widowhood: in the long peace of King Robert’s reign, when Lord Eddard ruled in Winterfell, none had dared displace her, nor seize the lands she held in trust for her husband's heirs. I could learn from this woman, Sansa thought, were it not for the grudge she bears my family.
Sansa said, “Who is your heir, Lady Dustin?”
The lady answered readily enough. “Denys, he is named. A cousin in the second degree of my late husband. I left him to mind Barrow Hall. He is competent enough, though dull.”
Sansa knew the name, though she had never spoken to the man. Denys Dustin was of an older generation than Lady Barbrey, descended from the lady’s grandfather-in-law. In the summer of her youth Sansa had seen him at Winterfell on feast days. He had made no particular impression on her at the time, being neither young nor handsome. “He has a son, I think, who is married to a niece of Lord Slate.”
“Yes, and through them Denys has two granddaughters and a grandson—although the son is not yet weaned. Thus the succession of House Dustin is assured.”
They paced through the courtyards, and around them men and women worked: clearing rubble, building scaffolding, mortaring stone, digging out the old channels of the hot springs and laying new pipes of fired clay. Outdoors when the wind was calm, indoors when the snow fell, in shifts through the short days and at night by torchlight, the smallfolk were labouring to rebuild Winterfell.
The workers were paid in grain, in copper, in as much hot barley water as they could drink, and one meat meal a day. Jon had ordered the hunters to range afield and bring in meat for the workers and smallfolk as well as the lords and their retinues while the weather held. They must be able to work, he had said. They must be able to fight . She knew he was worried about how much food would be needed; how much grain, how much salt, how much meat, how much vinegar.
Already much of the livestock had been slaughtered and set to salt and the ice houses beneath the earth, so that the beasts would not need to be fed grain that could go to people. The Baratheon army had fished a lake dry on their ride south, Alysane Mormont had said; and all knew the false spring would end soon, and the hard frosts would come again, the snows deep enough to bury a man as he stood; and whatever work they had completed must last all the long winter. Yet the work of hundreds of men and women over many weeks had undone only a fraction of the damage done the day and the night when Winterfell had burned.
Sansa said, “Lord Snow means to take wards to foster at Winterfell.” It had been her idea, but Jon had thought it good. “Young men and women of high birth. Once my brother Rickon is returned—” if my brother Rickon is returned — “he will grow up alongside his future vassals, so he will know their measure and they his when he comes of age.”
Lady Dustin snorted. “As Robb Stark knew Theon Turncloak?”
Robb. Sudden tears stung in Sansa’s eyes. She is testing me. “There are many reason that lords take wards, Lady Dustin. Patronage, fealty, bonds of obligation or kinship—I believe the late Lord Bolton’s first son served in your household as a page in his youth. But since we are speaking bluntly—so that they might stand surety against the good-conduct of their noble parents. As Theon Greyjoy did until my brother released him.”
At the inner wall they turned, pacing its length to the newly built stables. Horses had been saddled, and guards waited to accompany them.
Lady Dustin said, “You mean to take hostages. Whom would you take from my cousin Denys? The babe in arms?”
“How old are his granddaughters?”
“The younger is four. The elder is ten or twelve, I forget exactly.”
Arya’s age, Sansa thought. She had once thought Arya returned safely to the north before their father’s death. Later she had thought her dead when Winterfell burned. Lord Manderly said Bran and Rickon had survived, but he had known nothing of Arya; she had never come to White Harbour in her own name. Perhaps she had never left the city and was buried in some potter’s field in King's Landing. I dreamed she was alive, though. In a foreign city built of stone, behind doors carved of ebony and weirwood. “Until the boy is of an age to come to Winterfell, I would invite the elder daughter to join the ladies of my household.”
“You honour us,” Lady Dustin said dryly.
At the foot of the First Keep they passed the entrance to the crypts below Winterfell. The First Keep had been empty for generations, and workers had not cleared the rubble strewn all about it: great chunks of shattered masonry, burned beams, broken gargoyles. The door to the crypt has been repaired and its door locked and guarded. Sansa and Jon held the only keys now, and she had given orders that no-one was to enter save them. She saw Lady Dustin’s head turn to the door and thought, Jeyne was right .
“If your brother is returned he will need a bride,” Lady Dustin said.
“A betrothal would be a matter for the Regent of Winterfell to decide,” Sansa murmured.
“Betrothals are women’s work. The Lord Regent will take your advice.”
“And your cousin Lord Denys’s younger daughter is of an age with Rickon.”
“As you say.”
“I will think on your words.”
They crossed the frozen moat to the outer wall. The day had darkened as the sun climbed above the clouds, and their breath clouded the still air. There were smallfolk in the winter town now, mainly those whose daily tasks took them beyond the walls to the fields or the Wolfwood, to hunt or gather firewood. Each time Sansa had passed through the winter town she had watched for the Hornwood crofters who had offered her hospitality on her lonely journey north, but she had not seen them.
Sansa and Lady Dustin rode in silence; behind them Alysane and Wynafred and the guards spoke softly as they rode, their voices a murmur in the still air. Dirty snow lingered in drifts and piles in each sheltered shadow. Past the barren winter fields was the defile at the edge of the Wolfwood where the bodies were burned. The taste of smoke and charred flesh hung heavy in the still air as they rode towards the defile, rich as roasting pig. It made Sansa’s belly turn over and she swallowed down bile.
The picket was outside the defile, for no horses would go near the fires. A boy wrapped in heavy furs took their horses to add to the line. Alysane stopped to consult with him about stone in her horse’s hoof while Wynafred followed Sansa and Lady Dustin as they passed beneath the cliff.
In the south this work might have been done by the silent sisters, sworn to the service of the Stranger and the dead. But there were no silent sisters in the winter town—few enough in the whole of the modern—so the men of Winterfell had built a rough stone fire-pit in which they burned the dead.
Charcoal was best for cremation, the red priestess had said, because it burned hot and clea. The forges had more urgent need for charcoal than the pyres, though, to make nails and hinges and iron brackets for the rebuilding of Winterfell. Instead, the dead of Winterfell lay upon a platform built of her ruins, the fires fed by the splintered, blackened timbers that could not be re-used.
The three heads Jon had cut off had been placed next to their bodies upon the platform built above the fire, gazing sightlessly across the defile.
The foreman came to her side. “Lady Sansa, m’ladies” he said, bobbing polite bows to her and her companions. His face was smeared with soot from a careless hand, his leathers greasy.
“Your name is Hobb, is it not?”
“Aye, m’lady, Hobb Halfaxe they call me.”
“How many are to be burned today?”
“Some dozens, m’lady.”
“What are they?”
“Four old women dead from cold or hunger, and three old man,” Hobb said. “There was a man who fell from the scaffolding on the bell tower and another who passed out drunk in the snow and froze to death. A still-born babe, a child of six months, a child of three.”
“The workers found a dozen older bodies buried beneath the snow and fallen stones by Guards Hall and brought them to us,” another man said.
“Those were near bones already,” Hobb confirmed, “But we burn them anyways, together with what all the carrion cart brings us. Then there are the dead from last night: maidservant, guard, stable-hand, the wildling called Kingsblood, and the broken men.”
“Thank you,” she said.
“If you would, m’lady—” he hesitated.
“Please go on,” Sansa said gently, when he did not seem able to continue.
“It’s about the ashes, m’lady.” He gestured to the mouth of the defile, where rough crates were stacked.
“Yes?”
“We were wanting your decision on what we were to do with them. Lady Stark. The ashes, and the charred bones, those that haven’t broken apart. Wood ash would go to make soap, or in winter we sometimes use it to make ice on the paths less slippery. But we’d not use these ashes so, for it seems disrespectful like. Bonemeal is a good honest fertilizer, but not in the winter. It'd be washed away in the thaw without ever feeding the crops. But the crates are piling up some and we was wondering where to put them.”
“Oh,” Sansa said faintly. She could not tell how many crates there were; she counted fifteen, but they seemed to be stacked deep as well as high. She had known manure was used as fertilizer, and the contents of chamber pots, but she had never heard of bonemeal. It seemed just as disrespectful as using the ashes on the paths to her, but she was not a farmer. “They can be stacked in the lich house, I suppose. We won't be storing any bodies there this winter.”
“M’lady.” He bowed, bashful, and moved away.
The men were skilled with fire. They had fireboxes filled with smouldering coals, which they briefly coaxed to a roaring blaze in the kindling beneath the pyres. Sansa watched, fascinated, as wood smoked and caught. The heat was immense, the bodies dark shapes on the makeshift bier. Despite the horror of it Sansa could feel the warmth ease the tightness in her neck and shoulders.
“Why did you bring me here?” Lady Dustin asked eventually.
At last, Sansa thought. She said, “Your late husband died fighting King Aerys’s Kingsguard in the mountains of Dorne, Lady Dustin.”
“Defending your bastard cousin, yes. Your father did not trouble to bring his bones back to me.”
“I am sorry for your losses. The Dustins and Ryswells have had their share of grief, in both Robert’s Rebellion and the War of Five Kings. I know you must have little love remaining for those causes, and I know your pain. My brother’s bones are lost in the south, and my mother’s as well.”
Lady Dustin’s expression was thoughtful as she looked at Sansa. “Your brother was born in the south, the one they called the Young Wolf.”
“That is true,” Sansa said. She was the first of her siblings to be born within the walls of Winterfell, for Robb had been born at Riverrun and Jon even further south in the red mountains of Dorne.
“Your brother went south to defend your father, and stayed in the south to avenge your father’s death. He was in the south when he became Lord of Winterfell. In the south he was named king, and in the south he died. He never set foot in the North he ruled.”
“I know it.” Two generations of northern men had gone to fight in the south; and the handful that returned were broken and brutal, carrying their wars with them. As Lady Dustin still carried the war that killed her husband. “We cannot afford further wars in the south.”
“I am glad you recognise it.”
“Lady Dustin, I will speak bluntly. Winter is here and we have need of every hand. Will yours be turned against me and mine?”
“Since we are speaking bluntly, I will not be imitating the men upon that pyre. I have little love for the Starks, but assassination is a fool’s game.”
“I do not think you are a fool,” Sansa said. She found she had the trick, still, of looking without truly seeing, as she had looked on the tar-dipped heads of her father and their King’s Landing household a lifetime ago in summer. But if she shifted her gaze and her focus she could see the twisted expressions on the three faces through the fire. Their hair was alight, skin beginning to pull back from bone, steam boiling from the sockets of their skulls.
I can choose what I see or do not see , Sansa thought. For Rickon’s sake, I must always choose to see. “So much for the living. What of the bones of the dead? How long must I keep able-bodied men idle in guard on the crypts of Winterfell, so that you cannot feed my father’s bones to your dogs?”
She heard a gasp behind her, a muffled oath. Alysane had rejoined them, and Wynafred would be listening as well. She saw Lady Dustin realise it, and realise the significance of the Mormont and Manderly women hearing this conversation. Her brows drew down. At last she smiled, though the expression was bitter. “Well, and perhaps I was a fool – to trust to the silence of Theon Turncloak.”
The fire had slumped into a bed of shimmering coals. In a shower of sparks, the bier of bodies collapsed. The workers had put aside their sheepskins and furs and laboured in their shirtsleeves in the furnace heat of the fires. They used long metal rakes, the handles wood wrapped in rags, to stir the coals and the dark lumps which had once been people, to make sure they burned down to ash and splintered bone. Snow was beginning to fall, dancing in the heat of the fires and melting before it reached the ground.
Feeling the words out, Sansa said, “There may be cures to treasonous thoughts, if not treasonous deeds. We spoke of betrothals earlier, Lady Dustin. I will say this: Rickon must choose his bride carefully. He would need a bride who can bind the North to him. If you can offer that when the time comes, Lord Snow and I will consider your suit.”
“And I cannot offer that with one hand and take my revenge with the other.” Lady Dustin’s words were breathed out on a sigh. “Your father’s bones are safe from me, Lady Sansa.”
It was the first time Sansa had had the courtesy of Lady from the widow of Barrowton. She knew better than to think it a victory.
-
In summer the Godswood had been dark, shadowed by the thick canopy of leaves, but now it was winter and the leaves had fallen. Thick black trunks of ironwood, oak and ash supported a canopy of skeleton branches higher and more intricately vaulted than any castle hall. The pale winter sun shone silver on the fresh snow and the frost-rimed needles of the sentinel pines. The stream had thawed in the false spring. Branches and ferns that dipped into it were hung with ice shaped like bells which chimed as they brushed against each other, small clear tones that fell into the silence like music.
The dead man had been busy all day with the wreckage of Willem Snow’s treason: it was only in the fading afternoon that he had a moment’s respite. He sat upon a stone beneath the heart tree, Longclaw laid across his lap.
The shades of the dead crowded close around him, shapes in the corners of his eyes, a shadow in the steam from the hot pools. They did not seem to see him, yet they pressed around him more closely than they had since the Wall. They were silver against the black wood, the white snow, and above him the arterial red of the weirwood leaves. As he drew the polishing cloth down the steel of his sword it occurred to him to wonder what they wanted.
He felt the crunch of snow under his other self’s paws. A breath of wind blew steam from the pool across the path; the russet of his cousin’s hair was bright against the white snow. The dead parted as she passed, stirring and murmuring silent courtesies. He thought she did not see them, no more than Ghost did when he slipped inside the wolf’s skin… but Ghost was uneasy. Beneath the smells of ice, leaf-mold, soap and wool, the lingering bitterness of charred trees at the Godswood’s edge, there was some stranger scent, something sweet and wrong. He breathed deep, trying to understand.
Sansa said, “Your blade is Valyrian steel. I hadn't realised.” She found another rock and sat, arranging her cloak and furs neatly around her.
His hands had stilled on the blade. He began to move again, rubbing oil into the dark steel, the ripples where the metal had been folded back on itself a hundred times in the forging. “Longclaw belonged to Lord Mormont, who was Lord Commander of the Night's Watch before me.”
“Lady Maege’s brother?”
“Yes. She recognised it today, and bade me tell her how it came to me, and what I knew of her brother’s death.” Betrayed by his men, just as the dead man has been in his turn.
“I wondered where you were, and I remembered Father used to come here after an execution… Ser Ilyn Payne, the king’s executioner, took Ice after father’s death,” she said. “But when I saw him later, at King Joffrey’s wedding, he was no longer carrying it. I don’t know what has happened to it.”
“I knew Ice had not been returned with father… with Lord Stark’s bones.” He closed his eyes against the shades of the dead, opened them to see her watching him, her eyes concerned. Blue, like her mother’s. He said, “I offered to return Longclaw to House Mormont, now or at my death. She told me that she would be pleased instead to see it come to the young Lord Stark of Winterfell once he was of age.”
Sansa sighed. “That was a challenge, I think. I am sorry.”
It had amused him at the time. No doubt Lady Maege would be pleased to ensure the sword – and rule of Winterfell – came to Rickon Stark by force, if Jon Snow were behindhand in relinquishing power on his liege lord’s majority. “She may test me all she likes.” He shook his head. “You were right. I can see that now. There was no-one else you could have chosen.” She had told him so, but it has taken Willem Snow’s treason to show him the truth of it. A dead man, yet he was the best option available to her.
“Jon?” She sounded worried. As she should be, he thought, if he could not hold Winterfell; if he could not hold the North.
The wind was rising, silken as a knife. The limp red leaves of the weirwood tree brushed together, whispering. Something in the sound made her stand, run her fingers across the carved face in the ancient tree. “The heart tree is rotting,” she said.
He frowned. “Weirwoods don't rot.”
“I don't understand it. They say a weirwood tree will live forever unless fire or axe destroy them.”
Ghost raised his head. Through his eyes the clearing was empty.
The dead man slid Longclaw back into its sheath. “It's starting to snow again,” he said. “ You should go in.”
“Go ahead without me,” Sansa said. “I, too, need to pray today.”
“Keep Ghost with you,” he said. “And don't stay out too long.”
The dead had parted to let her pass. Around him, they crowded so tightly he felt he could barely breathe. Here was Maester Luwin, his neck open from the neat curve of a mercy cut. Here was a wildling spearwife, arrows in her back, here an ironman, bleeding from a dozen slashes. Here was Ser Rodrik Cassel, who had taught him how to use a sword. His left arm was a stump, his face stained with silver blood. Others were strangers, dressed in wool or fur or leather. He looked for Lord Stark, who had been his father, but could not see him in the crowd.
-
Sansa watched Jon walk away across the frosted ground. There was something strange, stilted, about the way he moved; as there had been something strange in his eyes as he gazed at the shifting mists rising from the pool. His eyes – Sansa shuddered – had been as cloudy as the eyes of the heart tree.
She wanted to ask what he saw at these times when his eyes seemed to focus on nothing. She wanted to ask about the wound on his breast that would not heal, the last remnant of his death on the black ice of the Wall. She wanted to ask almost anything except that: there were so many things she still did not know of the years since they left Winterfell. How he came to carry House Mormont’s valyrian steel, to be Lord Commander, to have those scars around his eyes.
Clouds had gathered, obscuring the sun; snow was beginning to fall.
Something made her stand, run her fingers across the carved face in the ancient tree. The sap was crusted and rough beneath her fingers, the scent musky. The eyes were crusted and milky. “Blinded,” she murmured. “How can you be healed? How can he be healed?” What sacrifice must we make to you?
The First Men had killed their captives before the heart tree. Maybe Jon should have taken the traitor’s heads here in the godswood, and watered the heart tree with their blood . That did not seem right. She did not know what desperate prayers the dead traitors might have carried to the old gods, but surely they would not have been healing for their executioner.
No. That is no true sacrifice. For a sacrifice, you have to give up something that is truly your own.
Had she thought that? She wasn't sure.
On the shore of the Long Lake, half dead with cold and hunger, she had prayed to the heart tree of a ruined village, and thought it had answered.
The silence of the godswood was profound. Even the chime of ice in the streams was muted by the falling snow. She realized she was straining to listen–as if, if she listened hard enough, the heart tree might answer her.
Ghost was perfectly hidden against the thin dusting of snow on the ground. She did not see him until he brushed against her side. Her heart jolted and she stumbled, and caught herself against the heart tree, a scraping graze across her left palm and tore off part of her thumbnail. The blood was shockingly warm on her cold fingers. Splinters had lodged themselves in her skin. Fingers shaking, she tried to pinch them free. One piece was lodged deep in the heel of her palm, and she couldn’t get a grip.
What sacrifice must we make?
Something that is truly ours.
She pressed her hands to the weirwood’s mouth, an offering of blood. She scarcely knew what to pray for. “Show me what to do,” she said at last, and raised her fingers, sticky with blood and weirwood sap, to her mouth.
-
In her dream she was in the winch room of the Eyrie, amid the great wooden capstans, the wide circles worn in the stone floor by a thousand generations of oxen. Their frozen bodies hung from the beams, ice crystals crusted on their clouded eyes. Their throats had been cut before the last people descended from the Eyrie, and they had been gutted, the entrails tossed to the falcons.
She did not want to be here.
The Crescent Chamber was empty, the tapestries taken down from the walls, a little drift of snow in the hearth. She turned away from the steep marble stairs that climbed to the Lower Hall, slipping into the undercroft. The cellars held the wicker and wood baskets that carried men and supplies from the waycastle Sky, great storage chests sealed with wax against the weather, barrels of oil to store the winch-chains and metal fittings, proof against rust until spring came again.
In the kitchens more snow had stolen down chimneys to gather in the hearths. In the first few days it had melted, frozen, melted again; now a thick layer of ice lay in the grate and crust of icicles grew on the mantel. Frost crept beneath doors and down from shutters. It patterned the slate floor and the scoured, scarred tables.
Her feet carried her onward, through the dark halls to the Morning Hall above the kitchens, then the arcade. The solar was bare and empty, its Myrish carpet sealed away in cedar chests with the tapestries bedding and drapes, her aunt's wardrobe, all the cloth they had not brought down the mountain before the snows closed in.
From her aunt's balcony she could see the empty godswood. Once she had built a castle there from snow. Now the drifts were as tall as a man, burying the fallen statue and blocking the courtyard doors.
In the end, as she knew she must, she came to the High Hall. Its doors stood open. She passed among narrow fluted pillars, the marble walls veined in blue. The weirwood throne was empty upon the dais. The sconces were empty upon the pillars and the carpets had been taken up for winter storage.
The Moon Door was closed and barred. She lifted the first of the three bronze bars that held it shut. It ought to be bitingly cold in her hands but she felt nothing. She wondered why she was doing this, and why she could not stop. She lifted the second bar and set it beside the first, a deep dread curdling in her belly. No, not this way, please.
The third bar lifted free. She had barely touched the latch when the heavy wooden door flew inwards. Snow had built up around the frame and it blew skirling into the hall. Outside the world was white. The Eyrie was inside the cloud.
The shoulder of the mountain was six hundred feet below the Moon Door. The men of the Eyrie had not been able to recover Lysa’s body from those crags after she fell. Mya had told Alayne Stone that in the Age of Heroes all the Lords of the Vale had been given to the falcons when they died. She was a Tully before she wed, though. The Tullys give their dead to the river.
Wind tossed snow in the air, the flakes so fine that they spun and rose instead of falling… it was ash, she realised suddenly, for there were drifting sparks and embers within it.
She turned away from the door and for a moment, in the dimness and swirling snow and ashes, she thought she was standing in a winter godswood, the pillars transformed into skeleton trees and on the dais a great weirwood, the great tree the throne had once been… and a dark shape flew at her out of the shadows of the hall, pecking and clawing. She stumbled back, her hands raised to protect her eyes, shrieking “No, no –”
– and she was falling. In winter even the falcons fled the high peaks. My body will be frozen until the spring comes, she thought, dizzy, as she plunged through the sky, too frightened even to scream.
Ashes tumbled around her and the wind tore at her hair and her skirts. A crow was spiralling down above her, just out of reach.
Sansa, the crow said. Or was it a raven? She thought it was the one that had pushed her. Sansa!
“Falling,” she whispered. “Please, I don't want to fall. Aunt Lysa fell and they never found her body.”
The mists were swirling with glowing, shifting colours, now green, now orange, now flaring bright to cast an army of shadows across the sky.
Sansa, you need to listen.
The voice was so familiar… “Bran?” She whispered. “I dreamed you were dead.”
Embers and ash spun in the wind of her falling, and she could hear the bells, a great clamour and alarum, ringing, ringing, singing as they burned. Lights bloomed across the sky, orange and green. The sky had looked like this on the night the Blackwater Rush burned.
Sansa, listen, you did something the night Jon died, and now everything’s out of balance. You have to undo it.
“I didn’t do anything,” Sansa said. “I don’t understand.”
The blood of Winterfell, he said, as if he hadn’t heard her. Her hand was bleeding, the drops spinning out into the sky. Surely you’ve seen it. You know something’s wrong.
“But I don’t want Jon to die,” she said.
Look , said the crow, as if it had not heard her.
Her eyes were stinging, watering with the wind that tore at her hair and skirts. Far, far below her she could see mountains, silver threads of rivers between dark trees, the red blaze of weirwood in scattered godswoods, as if they were a painting on vellum, a map painted on the hide of an aurochs. Cinders swirled around her, and everywhere they touched new fires sprang up.
“The North is burning,” she told the crow.
Not exactly , the crow said.
“What do you mean?”
Look.
There below her was the snow castle she had made, that long ago morning in the Eyrie; white and shining with crystal snow, the lichyard bark, the godswood twigs; Winterfell rebuilt, the glass gardens standing once again, the roofs back on the old halls. But something was wrong. “The heart tree,”she said suddenly. It towered over the other trees in the godswood, brooding and patient and blind. “The heart tree is rotten.”
Not rotten, said the crow who was her brother. It's burning up, like a poisoned wound.
“How is it poisoned?”
It draws the poison up from its roots.
“Where are its roots?”
Look, he said.
She did not want to look.
Look! he said again. The heart tree raised its eyes from the water of the pool at its feet. The eyes were not filmy with rot but clear, and they saw through her. And she was still falling, faster than ever. I will wake when I hit the ground. I will wake—
But it wasn’t the ground she hit. It was the black mirror of the pool at the heart tree’s feet.
The water was warm, and cradled her. The crow had gone away. She could not breathe underwater, and at first that frightened her, but then it seemed she did not need to breathe after all.
And in the darkness, a point of light.
She saw a seed fall into dark earth beside a pool of black water. The weirwood grew from it, a slender line of ivory and a shock of russet leaves beneath the canopy of ancient trees that grew tall across the land. Creatures moved through them, fox and boar, silver-white deer, great mammoths. Wolves moved like shadows across the moon, and the sun circled the northern summer sky and never set.
Men were born and grew and drew stones from the fields and made drystone walls to guard their creatures and crops, and stone crofts to live in. They carved eyes in the face of the weirwood and bathed in the black water at its roots. They made swords for themselves, bronze sickles and bronze crowns, and when they died, worms and time turned their bodies to rich dark soil which fed the roots of the trees, and the trees grew tall and put out leaves and weathered summers and winters and were felled in turn.
Old stones went to new buildings, and the new buildings lived and died in turn. She saw houses rise and fall, crumble, be extended and destroyed. The forests were felled for their timbers, for beams and rafters, wainscoting and panels, and in time their timbers burned to ashes, and the ashes went to earth. And through it all the weirwood kept watch over the water, and its roots grew into the dark earth below. Into the catacombs where the kings of winter rested.
The heart tree grows from the dead . She knew it for a certainty; it rang in her like a bell. But the tombs were empty. On the shores of the Long Lake Sansa had tasted weirwood sap and the dead had risen from the crypts of Winterfell to walk the earth. And she had been so near death that ghosts crowded around her, waiting to welcome her into their number. Jon was dead, they said. For a day and a night he had been dead. What followed when the Red Woman brought him back? She had seen the shades of the dead on the road north, walking in the waking world. The heart tree grows from the dead, but the tombs are empty, so what is there left to nourish it?
She saw it whole, in that moment: the heart tree that grows from the dead, that watches over the living, who become dead in their turn, a perfect circle. And trapped in that circle, the man who had once been her brother, who had died but was no longer dead. Who had been brought back with fire and blood. The blood of Winterfell .
The light of an oil lamp gleamed in his eye as he descended, like a man sleepwalking, step by step into the dark earth.
She rose out of the black mirror of the water.
-
Night had fallen. Men were still laughing and drinking in the great hall as she crossed the courtyard and curving paths. She took a lantern from the stores and lit it, her hand aching still with the splinter she had been unable to get out. Her steps were quiet, only squeaking slightly on the fresh snow. At her side Ghost made no sound at all.
The door to the crypts was no longer guarded. It was black inside, even with a lantern, and she could barely see the steps spiralling down. She descended, one hand on the wall to steady herself. Ghost’s teeth were bared in a silent snarl. “I know,” she said. The way was narrow and steep, the steps uneven and dished from the feet of centuries of stone carvers and kings.
The crypts branched and spread beneath the earth like the roots of a great tree, long vaulted tunnels held up by pair upon pair of granite pillars. These are the roots of Winterfell . Here the Starks were buried, the Kings of Winter sitting their thrones.
She had rarely come down to the crypts as a child, fearing the dark and the dead, but she was a woman grown now and must be brave. To calm her fluttering heart she told off the kings as she passed them. Here was King Jon Stark, who drove raiders from the White Knife and built the fortress called the Wolf’s Den at its mouth; here his son Rickard, called the Laughing Wolf, who defeated the Marsh King and brought the Neck into the North through his marriage. Some were cleanly realistic, others stylised, snarling like the direwolves carved at their feet.
The kings were not the only ones buried in these dark halls. Behind the statues were galleries, sinuously carved, with slabs covering stone slots where the children of House Stark were buried, and the king’s wives, all gone down into the darkness of the grave.
Sansa had never expected her bones to lie in Winterfell with her ancestors, although she had been conceived and born within its walls. She had always known that she would leave, as her mother had left her childhood home, to marry some lord, be his wife, bear him children, run his castle and care for his lands, and be laid to rest at his side in some lesser tomb or sept.
Here was Theon Stark, who conquered the Three Sisters islands in the Bite, and Edrick Snowbeard, who lost them to House Arryn. Iron swords had been places in their laps to keep the vengeful dead from walking… but many of the swords had rusted away to red flakes. The lantern’s shadows seemed to waver around the edges, as if behind her, the kings were rising from their thrones to pace at her side, as they had in the nightmare of her long journey north.
Here was the statue of Torrhen Stark, the King Who Knelt. Now she was walking among the Lords of Winterfell who ruled beneath the Targaryen kings. Lord Bennard, who had ruled as regent for his young nephew Cregan, and been imprisoned when he would not give up the regency. Here was Jonnel Stark who married her namesake, Cregan’s granddaughter Sansa; here the tombs of that Lady Sansa and her sister Serena. There were no statues for the ladies, only inscriptions. Here was Lord Willam, who fell to the King-Beyond-the-Wall, and his brother Artos who avenged him. The dim and shifting light made their stern faces stir and shift as she passed.
Here was the statue of her grandfather Lord Rickard, who burned in the south. He no longer held a sword; neither did Uncle Brandon, who would have married her mother. Here her father: the carving had been begun before Winterfell was burned, but it had never been finished. Her father had broken with tradition to have a statue made for his sister: Lyanna Stark, who had died in her sixteenth year.
Here, at her feet, the body of her son, who had outlived his mother by less than a year. Ghost ran ahead to him, sniffing, searching, nudging at Jon’s arm.
He was very cold. The weirwood splinter in her hand burned like a brand when she touched his wrist. She could not feel his heartbeat. “Jon, come back to me,” she whispered. “Come back.”
-
The dead man was very cold. He had been looking for Lord Stark, who had been his father. He had looked and looked among the shades that pressed around him but even here in the crypts before Lord Stark’s half-finished statue and the wall niche where his bones rested, Lord Stark could not be found. And as he searched among the shades, they seemed more able to see him, to press against him, chilling him to the bone, until he had sunk to his knees on the floor, unable to hold himself up.
The dead man’s head was half turned on the stone, facing into the dark of the crypts. His cheek ground against the gritty floor. The only warmth he could feel was the slow trickle of his heart’s blood. It had soaked through the bandages and his shirt, a sluggish trickle across the stone floor. He thought he could hear words, the rumble of distant storms, the granite tongues of the stone kings who surrounded him. He couldn’t make out the words, but he thought he knew them from his nightmares. Thief, traitor, murderer, oathbreaker. This is not your place.
He could taste the hard grey smell of stone, lamp oil and rust. He could see himself collapsed on the stone floor of the passage, smell the musty scent of blood. Ghost’s tongue lapped at the trickle, the brassy taste of fresh blood. He had half expected the taste of carrion.
Through Ghost’s eyes he could see the shadows shift, a gleam of light on bright hair, the rustle of cloth and fur. Sansa’s fingers felt like a brand on his wrist, his cheek. He wanted to tell her to run, but he was too weak. Run, Sansa, he thought. They’ll kill you, as they’ve killed me, and I couldn’t bear that. Run. Live long and well. Leave Winterfell to me and the ghosts.
He had thought for a time that he might be able to live after all; but that was wrong. He had died those weeks ago at the wall; and the dead had no place at the feasts of the living.
Ghost was uneasy, his fur bristling, casting about. He sniffed at the statues, stuck his nose in the dead man’s ear, at Sansa’s fingers. Sansa pulled her fingers away, but Ghost followed, sniffing. “What is it?” she said. There was a strange smell there, one which did not belong here in the crypt with the dead.
Through Ghost’s eyes he saw her frown, lifting her hand away. Then her eyes widened. She found her belt knife and clumsily, left handed, knicked the palm of her hand. The blood was coppery, and beneath that was the rich brown smell of the living earth. Sansa’s breath hissed out as she scratched at her palm with her fingernails, drawing something pale from the heel of her hand. Then she stilled. Her eyes were wide, staring into the dark at morning Ghost could see.
With an effort of will, he turned his head. She was on her knees at his side, but her gaze had lifted, arrested to meet the eyes of the dead shade who stood over him. It was an ancient king, his beard long and his crown wrought of bronze. “I saw you,” she said. “On the road north, I saw you.”
The king inclined his head. She was looking around, and he knew, from the bright terror in her eyes, that she saw them all. But she swallowed and spoke again. “You’re killing him. Don’t you know him? He is your blood, your kin, the blood of Winterfell.”
This time they both heard the whisper of words. This is not his place . He does not belong here.
“No,” she said. “The living have no place at the feasts for the dead.”
He is not of the living.
“I know,” she whispered. “That's why…” her eyes fell to the dead man's. “That's why it isn't working,” she said. “It's why his blood is poisoning you. It's why the heart tree is rotting. You need the living blood of Winterfell, and he can't give it to you. But I can.”
She took up the knife again, hands trembling, and sliced deeper into her palm, until the blood oozed and dripped once, twice, on the stone of the floor. There were tears in her eyes. “If he is dead, stop killing him .”
The king saluted her, hand over heart, and bowed. His pale hands lifted her to her feet, turning her bloody hand palm up. He drank from the blood pooling in her palm.
Then he was gone.
The dead man heaved a breath. He felt as if a stone weight had been lifted from his chest and his lungs could move freely for the first time all day. For the first time in weeks . He lay gasping on the stone floor of the crypts and one by one the ghosts came. They wore ringmail and rags, fine cloth and boiled leather, pelts of bear and wolf, crowns of stone and bronze and iron. He saw greybeards, crones, and newborn babes, men and women in their prime, and children dancing between them all, scrambling and laughing. One by one they came to Sansa where she stood, tall and fierce, her hair shining like silver, blood on her hands, blood on her dress. One by one they drank from her palms and their ghost light faded.
There were many and more of them. A youth with an arrow in his throat kissed Sansa’s brow and knelt to take his libation. Next came a young woman, slender as a spear, who claimed a kiss from Sansa’s lips. Sansa laughed, surprised, and pressed her fingers to her mouth, the blood a black smear across her chin. She was shining, the ghostlight turning her hair to shadows and moonlight, her skin luminous. She knelt to hold out her hands to the children, dead of fever and cold and accident, and there were tears on her cheeks as she greeted each one with a whisper and a smile. He loved her for her kindness and he marvelled at her strength.
Sansa's fingers were trembling. He thought he should go to her, but he couldn't yet find his feet.
Ghostly fingers brushed over his forehead. Don’t be afraid, a man's voice murmured. Jon turned his head and saw a face that could have been Uncle Benjen’s, could have been his own in the mirror, though the voice was choked by the strangling cord that hung from his neck. She draws her strength from the heart of Winterfell.
“Father?” he asked, “Lord Eddard, I mean?”
Brandon was shaking his head. He was not yet in the North, he said.
Slowly the dead man was able to push himself off the ground, to his hands, then his knees. He saw the wildling spearwife from the godswood, the faces of this he had known in his childhood, others whom he recognized from status of the crypt. His grandfather Lord Rickard, blackened and burnt, brushed Sansa’s forehead in blessing and left a smear of ash behind.
At the last came a lady, a girl. She was his own age, he thought, or younger. She wore a crown of roses and her hands and gown were smeared with gore. He had seen that solemn face before, in dreams, on the statue his father had broken with tradition to have placed in the crypts beneath Winterfell.
Lyanna Stark’s fingers were cold on his cheek. My son, she whispered. Even now you can choose . You have to choose.
“Choose?” He whispered.
You cannot be both the shadow and the light that casts it. If you try to make yourself into a bridge between the living and the dead, it will tear you apart.
Her eyes were sad as she turned away.
She stood before Sansa like a mirror. In the ghost-light even their hair was the same colour. She took Sansa’s hand.
Then they were alone. His cousin was swaying, the light that shone through her diminishing like clouds cast over the face of the moon. The cuts on her hand bled sluggishly and her fingers trembled with pain. Her mouth shaped his name, but no sound came.
Jon barely caught Sansa as she collapsed to the floor. The light was diminishing, the ghosts fading into the darkness of the crypts.
The air was still and warm, and smelled of stone, dust, and dry dead things. Sansa was heavy in his arms, warm and alive and real, and after a moment her arms closed around his back, fingers curled to protect her injured hand. She pressed her face into his neck. Her cheeks were damp.
In the darkness he found her face. Her eyelashes fluttered under his fingers. Clumsily, he wiped her tears away.
“I thought I’d lost you,” she whispered.
“No,” Jon said. “I'm here.”
She gripped his hand and held it tight.
-
Lord Wyman had told Sansa of his wariness of maesters, so she was not surprised that the message, when it came, was not carried by raven, but by Robett Glover, flushed with cold and smelling of horse. Sansa went at once in search of Jon, moving so swiftly her guards had to lengthen their stride to keep up. Those she passed directed her to yards; thence to the stables; and finally she ran Jon to ground in the walled gardens where the glass-houses had once stood; where, now, one stood again.
The glass-house was the smallest of the old glass gardens, a lean-to built up against a south-facing wall, barely taller than she was. The glass was cloudy and a little bubbled, but it glistened in the cold light of winter. Jon stood at its entrance, speaking to the glassmith. He wasn’t smiling but there was a lightness in his expression she had not seen in years.
“Jon?” she said.
He looked around, and beckoned to her. “Sansa, come and see.” Inside, water from the hot springs ran in channels along the floor. The steam made it as warm as King’s Landing in the summer. Already, beds had been constructed along the walls and filled with black soil. Delighted, Sansa laughed out loud.
He said, “The glassmith is working as swiftly as he can, and the steward found him apprentices in the winter town, two boys and a girl.” He gazed up at the glass roof, the scarring around his eye pinched as he smiled. His eyes were clear; since that night in the crypts she had not seen that dreadful cloudiness again. “I spoke with some of the farmers and the groundsman from Castle Cerwyn, and he spoke with the builders, and they think if they fix bolts and brackets on the walls a second trough could be placed above this one, though it wouldn’t be able to bear as much weight.”
“If it can be done, it should be,” Sansa said. “If the winter lasts half as long as people say, we will need as much food as we can grow.”
They both knew that even the glass gardens of Winterfell before she burned could not feed the castle, let alone those sheltering in the Wintertown. The glass gardens could grow enough colewort and winter beans to ward off scurvy; and they were a refuge for the sun-hungry in the brief hours when the sky was clear. They could not keep a castle alive. Sansa removed her gloves and tucked them into her belt, then pressed her hands into the soil. It gave under her fingers, loose and rich with loam. “What will we grow?” she asked.
“Anything,” Jon said. “Everything. You’re getting dirty.” His eyes were crinkled at the corners, though his mouth was solemn again.
Sansa bent to rinse her fingers clean in the stream, then flicked water at him. He twitched, tried to keep a straight face, and failed, a smile creeping across his cheeks. She laughed, unable to contain the sound, and splashed him again, then shrieked and twisted away as he threatened to put a handful of dirt down her collar. “Unfair!” she exclaimed. “That was water, not dirt— ”
“Fine, fine.” He dropped the dirt, and crouched to wash his hands, then flicked water right back at her. She shrieked, took a double handful of water, and tossed it in his face. Spluttering, he raised his hands in surrender, mopping the water off his face. They were both breathless and grinning.
“I was coming to you on another matter,” she said, remembering. “Robett Glover is arrived from White Harbour. He says King Stannis’s Lord Hand is a day’s ride behind him, and with him–”
His eyes rose to hers in shock. “Rickon,” he breathed. “Is he – are you sure it is truly–”
“He has a direwolf. A great black beast with eyes like wildfire, Glover said. I don’t think there can be a mistake.”
Jon’s brows drew down, concentrating; after a moment, he said. “Yes. I had not thought… I will send Ghost to him. A day’s ride?”
“No more. And so Winterfell must prepare to welcome its lord.” Sansa had dreamed once of a triumphant homecoming, banners flying; a Stark in Winterfell once again, and all restored to the golden days of her childhood. She could not welcome him with the feasting the Lord of Winterfell deserved, but at least Rickon would arrive to a living castle, not a carrion-field.
They went to the door to the glasshouse. The air tasted of cold, the end of the false spring. The glassmith had withdrawn to his workshop, the guards withdrawn to a respectful distance. Jon paused on the threshold.“Even when spring comes, it will take years to rebuild Winterfell,” he said. “And many and more years after that to restore the North.”
She thought of empty fields, of bread and salt. A generation of young men lost in the south. “Years?” she said. “I think it will take a lifetime.” If she and Jon could hold it; If Rickon could be tutored and raised to the careful governorship it would require. If; if.
“In the crypt,” he said, “Mother told me I had to choose. The living or the dead, the shadow or the light that casts it.”
“I remember,” she said. “You chose the living.”
“I chose to live,” he corrected her gently. “And given a choice, that is how I would choose to spend my lifetime.”
“You had a raven this morning,” she said.
“I did. News from the north.”
“You must return there soon, I think.”
“Yes.” He frowned at the sky, the scars around his eyes puckering and making him look older than his years. His eyes were very pale where the light caught them. She wondered if it was her imagination, or whether there was a hint of Targaryen purple in the grey. “I fear I’ve already lingered too long. I can stay until Rickon is arrived, but then I must ride out.” he turned to look at her then, his gaze direct. “Will it be well?”
Would it be well? Could she hold Winterfell, protect their brother, without his presence? Without his authority to bolster her own? There was a Stark in Winterfell when Lady Hornwood died. But he must ride out, she knew it; and he had to be able to trust that he would have something to come back to.
She said, suddenly, “When I was coming north I slept one night beneath the heart tree in an old godswood on the shores of the Long Lake. That night I dreamed you died. I thought it madness – I am sure I was more than half mad by then, with hunger and cold and desperation. But later I counted the nights and found that was the night your brothers betrayed you.”
“Sansa–”
“No, Jon, listen.” She drew in a breath. “The night I dreamed you died, I dreamed other dreams. I dreamed of Rickon, running with Shaggydog, and then Lord Manderly said it might be so. I dreamed of Bran, alive but sleeping, entombed in some dark crypt. And I dreamed of Arya in a city of stone. I had thought all three died when Winterfell burned. But if Rickon is alive, then perhaps… perhaps Arya and Bran…”
Her voice failed. She remembered chasing Arya through this courtyard in the summer snows. The way Rickon shrieked with laughter when Robb chased him around the yard. Bran, who had loved the same stories of southern chivalry that she did. Perhaps when spring comes we all might be together again, the way we were in the summer of our childhood. She didn’t dare say it aloud, but he took her hand and held it, and she thought he understood.