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Chapter Text

’ A thing of beauty to remember

But a sorrow to forget’

Sansa I

Sansa Stark is three namedays and she dreams of the lemon tree her Father has promised her.

She has left the keep, giggling, happy, and eager from the words that her mother had promised her. She thinks of lemon cakes upon lemon cake, rich and sweet and tart on her tongue. She giggles more, twirling in summer snow. She knows her lord father is to come soon. She knows it. Mother had promised. Mother never breaks her word, and if her father is to be here soon, Sansa knows he will be there. Before the heartstree, she will wait. She knows without fail, her Father will come here.

She giggles again. Won’t he be so happy to see her?

She hops, careful of her fine wool cloak, of the pretty velvet and wool skirts she wears. Dashes through the safe godswoods of the Old gods. Sansa wears her prettiest dress, blue and red from her Mother’s house, and she has brushed and brushed her hair to the prettiest shine. Her Father will find his Little Lady, beautiful and perfect and excited to see him and only him. Sansa has missed her father. He has been gone forever.

When the air grows warmer, Sansa Stark looks up at the ugly, scary face of the heartstree.

Father loved this place. That was why she was there. Sansa wonders if it hurts to cry so much, even if the face is scary and ugly. She doesn’t like to cry. She cried very hard when her Father left, and she hated every minute since he was gone. She reaches forward, slipping off her glove. Reaches and reaches as far as she can to touch at the stream of red tears. 

It is warm on her fingers.

Sansa blinks. Her tears are warm too.

“Does it hurt?” she whispers, to the gods, quietly, “Does it hurt very much?”

She soothes a hand gently on the cheek of the tree, soft and careful. The leaves, red as the tears on her fingers and on that great face, move. She hears its rustles. Sansa tilts her head. Reaches forward her head, standing on the very tips of her toes. She kisses the great, wrinkled cheek of the tree. Just like her Mother and Father do when Sansa cries. She presses her head against the face, ugly and wrinkled as it is. 

"I am here," she tells the tree.

The bark is warmer beneath her palm. She hums. Something breaks behind her. Sansa Stark turns. On her lips, she feels the warm tears of the heartstree. She licks her lips. The tears, she realizes, taste sweet on her tongue.

“Father?” she calls, and she feels excitement. She pats at her face to make sure she is clean of the tears. She must be perfect for her Father.

Mother’s words came true! I knew it, I knew it! Father would be here !

She slips off of the roots of the heartstree, almost stumbling in her excitement. 

“Father!” she calls, running in the direction of the sound, “Father, Father!”

She stumbles to a stop. A man. Smaller than father. He is looking at her, dressed in a cloak and- Sansa blinks quickly.

“I apologize, my lord,” she whispers, and she steps back, curtsies as Mother taught her. 

She looks up at him. He’s a man she’s never seen before. His eyes are gray-green, like a cat, with something sharp in them. He is bearded, but unlike the Lords of the North she remembers it is small, not long along on his pointy face. He breathes, his breath small and misty in the summer cold. Even from her distance, Sansa smells mint in his breath. His smile is not… Not finished. It takes a moment to see what it is, and she realizes that his smile does not bring light to his eyes. 

“Hello sweetling,” he says simply, and he gives her a proper bow in response to her, “No offense given. I am simply… admiring the wood. I didn’t expect to find anyone here.”

She shuffles in place.

“It’s the godswood. Our heartstree is here. That’s why I’m here. I’m waiting for Father!”

The man is still smiling. Wind blows. Shifts her pretty Tully skirt and her dark red hair. The man tilts his head.

“Ah. It is a wirewood, is it not? I have never seen one.”

“It’s father’s favorite. I wish to wait for him. Mother says he is to be home,” she explains.

“Your father?”

She beams. 

“Father is Lord Eddard. Lord Eddard is Warden! He left with the King. He is to come home. Mother said so!”

“How lovely. You must be excited, sweet Lady Sansa Stark.”

She nods.

“I have missed father so very much. I wish he had taken me South. I ever so wish to be South.”

Something changes in his cat eyes.

“Do you?”

She does. If it means she will be with her father sooner, yes, she would very much like to be South.

“More than anything!”

The man nods, slowly to himself.

“Will you show me to the wirewood, my Lady? I very much wish to see it.”

She nods. A lady must be kind! She reaches a hand carefully to the man. Something hard and heavy slams into her head. She falls to the ground. She blinks, crying, and sees that what has come from her is a red bright and vivid on the snow. The same color as the wirewood’s tears come from inside her. Her small glove, from the pocket of her cloak, lays beside it. She looks up.

The man, the stranger, holds a dagger in his hand. The scabbard is in his palm. The hilt, black, is also red. Tears of the heartstree... Mine. I did not know that the body could cry as the eyes. It hurts. 

His cat eyes are cold as he looks down. Sansa scrambles to her feet. Takes a half of a step back. The man lunges forward. The man swings down. The blow makes her see black spots. Sansa cries out again. She screams. The trees and snow echo it back to her. The man hums . 

And he swings again.

And again.

And again.

Sansa Stark tumbles down.

Alyane Stone rises in the arms of her father, bleeding, held carefully to the mockingbird embroidered on his surcoat.

Chapter Text

Blood on snow and the smallest of gloves is all that Ned Stark receives when he comes to Winterfell. He returns home with the Castle in an uproar.

A devastation is all that greets Ned Stark when he returns from War, hostage at his side. 

Another girl of Winterfell is gone, and this time it is not his reckless sister running from her responsibilities and towards fanciful dreams, but his dutiful, lovely babe of a girl. It isn’t her choice like it had been Lyanna’s, that much is certain. His daughter is three namedays, his perfect, beloved babe of a lady, and she is gone among the scared forest of trees, amongst snow and what should have been a holy and safe space. His daughter is gone. His wife had already sent ravens to the seven corners of the Realm, to every house from the Wall to the Neck, and had sent search parties in every direction. Upended the Castle to the point that she does not realize he is home until she nearly crashes into him in the hall. 

Sansa had slipped past her caregiver, she told him.

Sansa had gone to the godswood, where his child should have been safe . All they found was blood, much of it, what could only be his child’s, and her little glove. 

At the foot of the wirewood, hours later with his men settled, with everything he could possibly think to do done, the words of his wife, near mad in her grief, is still echoing in his ears. Ned Stark is staring up at the hearttree, and he sinks to his shaking knees. He has ridden hard, on this last stretch. Sansa was to turn four in a handful of days, and he wanted to be home in time for it. He wanted to ring the bells of Winterfell, as he had done every nameday since her birth, and he wanted to gift his little Lady the sapling he cradles in his palms. Tucked into against the small, thin branches of the lemon sapling, is Sansa’s glove.  He had hunted the rabbit fur himself because he adores his children and wanted them in the finest. He had dye imported from the Riverlands for the wool because Sansa always ran her hands delightfully pleased by her mother’s Riverland dresses especially. She loved blue, loved the way it shone on her skin, and the way it looked like Robb’s eyes. Ned places the sapling, carefully, pot and all, before the wirewood. Rubs his hands against the wool of his daughter’s glove. When he prays, he is usually silent. His prayers are usually for the gods’ ears only.

But today- Today he wishes for the entire world to hear his prayers.

“She is to be four namedays,” he tells the gods, and his voice, sounds foreign to his own ears. Even in his greatest grief before this day, his voice has never sounded so small, so hoarse to him.   

He had howled in Jon Aryn’s arms when he heard what happened to Brandon and his Father. Howled himself hoarse until he could barely breathe. But his grief had been a fury, a ragging scream inside him. He had become silent then in his grief. Silent with fury that had made his hoarse voice a scream even a whisper.

This grief-

It reminds him too keenly of his grief when he found Lyanna on her birthing bed, clutching at her son. She lay amongst winter roses, babies breath, and her own blood. A helpless sort of grief that came from your entire world shifting left. The knowledge of Lyanna’s actions that had caused the Rebellion had taken his fury swiftly from him. This grief is sorrow, hated, and heavy against him. A helpless sort of sorrow that threatened to drown him.

I had thought my children were safe. 

“Please,” he begs, “Please, do not take her as well. Bring her home. Bring Sansa home. Please . She is afraid of the dark, and it is to be dark soon.”

The last time Ned had cried, had been when Sansa was born. He did not expect his next tears to be for her, especially in such horrible grief. A sound. A scuffle on the snow behind him. Ned whirls, hand clenching at the glove. Hope. Hope comes swift.

Sansa! Mayhaps she was frightened. Mayhaps she thought herself in trouble if she were caught!

It has only been a handful of hours.

“Sansa,” he calls, running in the direction of the sound, “Sansa! Sansa!”

What he finds is instead Jon. His blood. Lyanna’s boy, red-eyed and crying. His son, truly, for he has raised him. 

“Did you find her, father?” he pleads, and he swipes desperately at the tears in his gray eyes, “I heard you calling for her, is she near?!”

Ned’s hope dies. He sobs, shakes his head desperately and he cannot help but fall to his knees again. Jon is but six namedays, and he reaches to steady Ned’s superior weight.  Clumsily, Jon Snow cradles him, cradles him as if he is the babe, not the other way around.

Ned weeps.

Cat looks for her husband, and she finds him just a little way from his heartstree, sobbing in his bastard’s lap. For a single, furious moment, Cat wishes to strangle the boy. Wishes to dash his head against the tree behind him, let his wretched blood coat the snow he is named for, just like her Sansa’s had. 

It should have been you, she thinks, ugly and hateful as looks at the boy, You should be missing, hurt, and away from us. My daughter should be with me, in my arms.

The thought is unsaid. It is what she had thought every single moment she had seen the boy since Sansa failed to break her fast that day. In the setting of the sun, in the twilight in the godswood, Catelyn Stark feels something else for the first time.

As the bas- As Jon Snow’s words finally register to her, Cat feels…

Shame .

“We will find her,” Jon Snow says, simply. He is babbling, startled, no doubt, to have to comfort his father. But his words are the earnest, simple knowledge of a child who knows that only Good will win, “We will! Sansa will be home and eating lemon cakes and we will find her the prettiest of dresses, and we will find her bard after bard to sing to her. We will make her happy when she is home, I know it. Do not cry, father. Please, do not cry. Sansa will cry if she sees your tears. You know she will.”

She has kept Jon Snow away from Sansa. She had little hope for Robb, the boy loved his baseborn brother as his first playmate, no matter what she said. For Sansa, had more control, and more time to keep the bastard away from her.

Yet .

The boy knows of her love of lemon cakes, of dresses, and singing bards. Knows that her daughter cries when others cry, an empathic creature that she is. The boys know it all, just as he knows that his father would end his tears at the thought of Sansa’s reaction to them.

Cat stares. 

The boy comforts her husband, soft and solemn. Earnest and kind.

She thinks she cries then. She has not cried yet. Too desperate. Too focused on her tasks and attempting to find resolve and solution for her missing daughter. But she cries in shame. She had wished him gone. Wished him in Sansa’s place. Yet all Jon Snow is comforting her husband, unknowing of her cruelty beyond her carefully crafted indifference, and all he does is love her daughter as the sibling he too, has lost.

Cat is ashamed. 

So ashamed.

Perhaps it is the Mother, she thinks, as tears slip down her face, Who has done this . Who has seen my hatred of a motherless child and thought me fit to teach a lesson. I have wanted Jon Snow gone since I came to Winterfell, Robb in my arms. I have prayed and prayed for it, and she has answered my cruelty with cruelty of her own.

My most innocent, beautiful child is gone instead.

Cat weeps, hand over mouth. Stifling her sounds desperately.

Jon Snow is a keen boy. He finds her. Flushes violently red. Nudges at Ned, who turns and looks at her in his horror and grief.

Catelyn Stark steels her spine.

“Heed your boy,” she tells him, even as she swallows thickly, even as she feels her tears flow heavy down her cheeks, nearly blinding her, “We will find Sansa, Ned. We will.”

Her husband closes his eyes. Covers them with his hand- It holds Sansa’s little glove. Something in Cat fractures at the sight of it.

“Yes,” Ned’s voice is small, devastatingly so.

She has never seen him like this. Him, who lost his mother, father, brother and sister by the age of twenty namedays. Who called to war against a Dynasty for his kidnapped and murdered King.   

He will do that and more for Sansa.

“I will call my banners,” he tells her and swallows thickly, and his voice grows stronger, “I will send letter after letter to every Keep from the Wall to Dorne. We will find Sansa.”

“Promise me, father,” says little Jon Snow.

Ned stills. He looks down at his son.

“Promise me you will never stop looking for Sansa. Promise me, Father,” he says, and it is with a determination that reminds-

That reminds Cat so much of Ned. For the first time since she had seen him in Winterfell’s nursery, in the crib that should have been Robb’s alone, Cat does not resent him for it. 

Her husband blinks.

The last of his tears drip off his lashes.

“I promise, Jon. I promise you. We will find Sansa.”

A wind whispers through the frost-touched broughs. It sounds- For the oddest reason, Cat thought it sounded like a woman’s contented sigh. 

“We must go inside,” she tells her husband, “No good will come of our tears now. Sansa needs us.”

“Another search party, from top to bottom of the Keep. Another sweep of the godswood, of the wolfswood,” her husband replies.

And he is calmer. Determined as he rises. He starts to move. To the Keep. 

Jon Snow smiles, softly. Cat feels shame, more so than ever, when he looks at her.

“Father promised,” he says with the certainty of the babe he is, “Father will find Sansa, Lady Stark. No more tears until Sansa is home, My lady.”

Cat swallows thickly. Gently, for the first time in her life, she reaches for Jon Snow. He flinches. She keeps course and lifts him into her arms. He’s heavier than Robb, but Cat is a mother twice over. He stares at her, eyes wide and trusting and with no hate that he should feel. Something in Cat’s chest warms, and changes, as she looks at Jon Snow in her arms. She shifts him. Holds him with one arm. The boy blinks quickly. Hesitantly, he curls his hands around her neck.

“Yes,” she tells the boy, even as she uses one hand to cradle his cheek softly, “No more tears. And supper, lad, to gather our strength. Sansa will want us strong.”

“Yes, My Lady.”

Cat carries him to the Keep. Easily, trustingly, Jon Snow tentatively presses his little face against her neck. Unlike what she had just said, Cat cries a few more tears at the gesture. Just a few. They slip into Jon Snow’s curls, unknown to anyone but her.

A tear in her heart, so small and insignificant in the wake of Sansa’s loss, mends.

Jon Snow evokes yet another promise.

A heart of stone slips back to flesh.

Jon Stark is drafted on raven’s wings, in Lady Catelyn’s hand, with love in each stroke of her quill.

Alyane Stone knows nothing.

Knows not why her father nearly cries with laughter every time her nameday passes as she grows. For days afterward, he receives a missive with a running wolf upon its wax seal, for the Little Lady Stark who ran into an evil wolf and died in the woods at his jaws. Who the Northern Savages swear lives yet. 

He laughs and laughs at their hope, not cruelly . But in sadness. Her Lord Father could not be cruel, as he loved her, dearly, fiercely, even if she was a bastard as he told her again and again. She knows she would be scorned by most lords. But not her Lord Father. He is too kind. He is too good. He loved her mother too much.

He has told her again and again.

And holds her close, calls her precious and his sweetling, his lovely lady. 

Strokes her copper-red hair, and holds her tightly to him. Touches at the scar underneath her hair. Even though it is ugly.

For her Lord Father calls her his , with love in his cat-like eyes.

Chapter Text

Alyane Stone does not know when her father went mad.

Was it back when his grief began, for her beloved mother? Was it when he failed his promise to wed her before she died bearing her? Was it when he arrived in the Fingers, found its huts and lone tower, with a babe in arms and no wealth to his name? Was it when Alyane had begun to blossom into a woman, instead of a girl? 

Erasing her in his mind, as she had grown, as her features lost childhood fat, had he seen more and more of his lost love? She has yet to bleed, yet, she is already taller, with budding hips and breasts… Her father’s hands linger there, at her shoulders, her hips, his grip too strong, too steady… She knows not when she realizes that her father...

That her father stopped seeing her, and instead only saw the ghost of her mother.

“Perfect, sweetling, so perfect. So much like her. Only your skin is different, fairer, for you are safe here with me, instead of hard at work-”

She knows the tale, old as time. As familiar as the tale of Joquill and her Fool. Her mother was a common girl who lived in the Riverlands, who talked sweetly to the Lordling ward of Lord Hoster Tully, who sold river flowers by her small barge. She sang as sweet as a dove, she had coarse hands, she kissed sweetly like Arbor Gold… She was swayed into a not-so-innocent love and fell pregnant by the time that Alyane’s Lord Father had been making his way to the Small Council. All she knows is that her mother had died birthing her, and on that day she had died, her Father had made a vow, to all the gods that would listen, that he would wed no woman but one like her mother. A woman who would fit the delicate ring he had made for her, all those years ago, a token of his love, a token meant to turn into the Wedding Ribbons of the Seven, but never had the opportunity to. 

He had kept the ring, and Alyane had long heard the tales of the various women that had offered their hand to his, when he had finally risen as Master of the Coin, and how he had slipped on that ring as a test of faith and the will of Gods. How he had grown his House and its seat for the wife that would become her mother… Yet, to her horror, last nameday past her father had given her the ring, slipped it upon her hand with intent in his pale eyes. Alyane only knows that her only course- her only course now to keep any semblance of dignity, and sanity in the face of what this ring means to her father is to run, flee into the night, to never see her father again. She looks across the expanse of the Fingers’s Keep from her window, the sea and the rocky jut of the cliff that the Keep stood on, fiddling with the ring he had gifted her but moons ago-

“Yours, my sweet. But I knew it would be.”

She shudders. The memory has long become a nightmare, a horror that haunts her every waking moment. 

It is a ring that she has known all of her life, kept safe and careful by her father. Silver, delicate, set with blood-red rubies and brilliant sapphires, to match her mother’s hair and eyes. Scaled and rippled like a fish, in honor of his father’s friend, Lord Tully, for Housing him, her father had told her. It was a ring she had thought little of, and now…

It was a match to her , and her father in his madness had thought it a sign. 

It is only when- When her father had begun to speak of how fine a wedding cloak for her he would make, that Alyane had seen what he truly wanted, what he was commanding her to do. 

I may be a bastard, Alyane thought with grim certainty, hands flexing around the damned ring, But I do not wish for this sin. I do not invite it by merely being, it is my father, sick and twisted by ghosts and grief I had never realized possessed him. I know not what no septon would rightly choose to allow incest, but Father is clever, even in madness, his hands are slick with dragons plenty, and perhaps a not-so-pious Septon could be swayed. A stranger far from the Fingers could be brought, and lied to, and what power do I have to stop it?

She is but one and ten, unbled, not a woman, in the power of her Noble father, and worse, a Stone who many would say had bewitched her father for this sin.

She had wept her tears. Pleaded to the Seven. She had thrown meal after meal from her stomach into the privy. But she could not stop her father. Not peacefully. Any hint of active resistance has been harshly stopped by him, and his madness has not taken away his command of this Keep, or of her, she has been dismayed to find. Her cursed wedding was to take place, much as she had tried to delay her Father. She had set impossible tasks, fanciful and ridiculous, and Petyr Baelish had done them in a handful of moons. Her desperate tactics to delay her father, perhaps bring him to sanity, had done naught but encourage him. He was to make her wedding an event, more grand even than that of King Robert and Queen Cersei.

And in that, Alyane had found the only weakness in her father’s plan.

If there was one thing that Petyr Baelish wished for by the realm at large, it was acknowledgment.

He feels slighted by his losses his low status, and he has clawed his way to Master of the Coin, and he demands the respect of it. 

So Alyane had come sweetly to her father, and asked him to make her a bride like no other. A maiden cloak, a cloak made of all the feathers of all the birds of the world, to praise him for his personal symbol of the mockingbird. When he had brought her such a cloak, she had then asked for a wedding dress like the night sky, sparkling as the stars and the dark of the night. He had granted her a dress of black Yi-Ti Silk, samite, and richly woven silk and gold in Dorne in the shape of stars, that twinkled like the night itself. She had then asked for another dress, shining flames like the sun instead, and he had made her a dress of golden, orange, and red silks, with golden jewelry of the West, bright and shining like the Sun. When she had called for yet another dress, shining like the moon, he had made a dress of the richest velvet, white silks, and gossamer layers of grey Myrish silk that shone like the moon.

She was to wear them all, switch between Sept, dancing hall, and just before the bedding…  

And he thought her too stupid to realize that he was setting himself up as her groom. He spoke nothing of another man, nothing, and demanded she give him more and more kisses, lingering too close to his mouth- And more and more servants she has known as a child have gone, disappeared. Perhaps even dead, to sell even more to the world that Alyane Stone was not Petyr Baelish’s daughter, but his bride from another House that he had deemed beautiful enough to uplift from her bastardy. Word whispered among the new servants was that she was a Frey bastard. And she quietly thought her father sane enough for the logic- the Freys were plentiful enough that no one would question the addition of a new child amongst their ilk, especially a bastard one, and no one would care to look too closely.

She swallowed bile, hands trembling around the ring, the stupid ring, that had convinced him of this madness. 

If I fling it from this window, Alayne thinks, into the sea. Quick and without anyone to know- And she slips it off, raises it, palm slick with sweat- But it is her mother’s, the only thing she has of her, beyond tales of her sweet songs and pretty flowers she had mongered, pressed in a book of sweet poetry that her father kept yet, and a silver chalice that would have been their wedding goblet. That he told her would be her’s. 

She breathes. 

Her hand curled around the damning ring, rubbing at the scales of silver that line its side. She cradles it in her palms. Stares down at the rubbies and sapphires, at the scales of the Tully’s. She feels a tear slip down her cheek. She has only one choice, really, one she had been thinking of since before this madness took her father.

He has only ever spoken illy of one Land, one realm in all of his travels, her a babe in his arms.

The North is not safe.

Wild, untamed, the prison of his childhood friend, Catlyn Tully, the woman he says had encouraged his love with my mother. He called her dear, and he called her mind broken by the ways of the North. The Wilds and cold hold the largest Kingdom of the Seven. I’ve read stories, since I was very young, of the way they flay men alive, the way they drape their enemies from their heathen trees. That it is practiced still, or so all my servants whisper since two Stark girls went missing from their Household. One was raped by a mad Prince, one a babe barely beyond speaking age. 

But. But it is in those wilds that she believes she has a chance. Her father is the Lord of the Fingers, a small House thought he may lead, he is Master of the Coin, one of the richest men in Westeros. His reach is upon every land, save one.

So, Alyane has planned.

Planned for tonight, the eve before guests are to arrive for my accursed wedding .

She breathes. Slips the ring upon her finger once again.

She is on a ship to White Harbor before the sun sets. She does not even see the City Watch alarm raised when they leave Fingertown’s small harbor.

She is both relieved and… Angry, at how simple it was to slip from her Father’s Keep. There were barely any people watching her, careful of her doings, and she wondered if her daughterly obedience had led her father to believe she would never defy him. She has been a good daughter, she thinks, always careful of his rules and his demands, until now. 

But had it really never occurred to her father that Alyane would never run from him? 

“I like to play a game , sweetling.” 

He had preached to her about always being aware of people around them, and always understanding that the motivations of others are paramount to understanding how to utilize them. And how they are attempting to utilize, or undermine you, or overpower you. And she wonders why, or when he had stopped playing his game with her. When he had stopped seeing her as a person with her own possible wants and needs, as more than just-

Or did he always see me as something that would never turn against him?

She swallows, thickly, tears stinging her eyes.

She looks across the reddish sunlight against the water, watching the Fingers slip further and further away. The salt air is cold, biting, hitting like a knife. She wears her cloak of feathers, warmer than she ever dreamed, beneath a cloak of plain dark wool, her pack is her wedding trousers; her impossible dresses, her mother’s book and silver chalice, a dagger with a bone handle she had found in her father’s office, the most food she could carry for the week-long ship ride, a full waterskin, her sewing kit, a near King’s ransom in coins and the stolen maid’s dress she wears underneath her cloaks. All to ensure she could make her way to the vast forests that her father had called haunted. Her red hair is now dark as pitch, and her mother’s ring fits on a small chain between her breasts.  

For the first time in moons, Alyane Stone smiles , despite her tears.

I am free, regardless of anything. Father forgot. Father forgot that I am Alyane, not a ghost who loves him, and that means that I am free of him .

Chapter Text

She reaches White Harbor, and she thinks it is a dream.

When she steps upon the North for the first time, tears begin to leak from her eyes, unbidden. Heaviness she had not known she possessed, lifts from her heart.

The North. 

The North .

It feels right she is upon its soil. She does not know why. Why she is overtaken with such emotion that she stumbles from the ship-plank and finds a tree not far from the surprisingly large market in White Harbor, to lean against. Taken with an emotion she cannot suppress. Tears and tears slip from her eyes. She sits upon its roots, eats the last of her stale bread, sips at her waterskin, and takes it in. It looks nothing like what her father would have said it to be. For one, it is much grander than the Fingers’ largest hamlet, and though it is nothing to the seat of their House at the Finger Keep, Alyane cannot say it is much poorer either. And, she can say with certainty, even from the scant few minutes she has seen them, the people in the North-

Do not look wild.

But all of my texts, she thinks, bewildered, even as she stares at the wares and merchants and people at the market ahead of her, her pack tightly against her front. Their clothing is similar, same fabrics, and similar colors, with only the dripping of the woman's clothing being significantly different- The Vale prefers long, draping things about the neck. The North seems to prefer high collars and strictly structured bodies. Even wearing her maid, Myra's clothing, she thinks she stands out. The market of White Harbor is large, much larger than she would think of the North.

She smiles, laughs, a little, and she wishes, wistfully, that she could stay there, in White Harbor. Find work, as a seamstress, or perhaps a singer, or even a flower monger like her mother… Foolishly, because, she knows it's but a week from the Finger’s harbor, and her father would find her swiftly. She is not surprised if he has not already sent men after her, in all directions he would think to find her. 

She does not think anywhere with people will be safe for her. Anyone can be bought, for the right price, and her father is one or the richest men in Westeros. 

Or so he said, something in her whispers, but Father has already proven himself a lair, a craven man.

Alyane stands, but one and ten, and feels so much older, brushing away the crumbs of her stale bread across her skirt. Her namedays feel wrong, illy counted out. I have turned from ivory to porcelain. I feel as if the cold North will shatter me. But perhaps I should reforge myself, like steel.

She hums, softly. 

She needs more food. Not bread, beyond perhaps a small loaf to eat before she leaves the city. The bread from the Fingers Keep had turned stale within days, and she had learned enough to know that she would not be good at eating much more. Hopefully, she will find things that are ready-made when it comes to the rest of her supplies. New clothes, or cheap cloth if she must make her own. They are in Summer, but Autumn could come at any time, and the Northern climate seems to be frigid, more so than the Fingers already. She is adept enough at the needle, even if she has more practice in embroidery than practical clothing. More dye for her hair for her river journey to Wintertown, her last stop. She is hoping to arrive there, and then disappear into an area of the Wolfswood that would be safe for what she thinks may be years of her life… 

“What do you mean the next ship up the White Knife will not be in a fortnight?” her voice is higher pitched than she would like. 

The boatsman frowns at her, scratching at his thick beard. Longer than she’s ever seen on any man. The man sighs.

“For the last time, girl,” he says, voice impatient, “No goods, means no travel. The White Knife ain’t no Southern river to be flitting up and down at yer fuckin’ leisure.”

She flinches slightly at the course language.

He stares at her and then sighs again.

“Right, if yeh’re that in a hurry, I suggest you make yeh way the ferry near Winterfell. Won’ but take yeh a fortnigh’ to reach it than on horseback. That crosses the Knife abou’ every other day. Town not but a day's ride from there.”

She swallows.

“How do I reach this ferry? Where is-”

“Follow the river North, won’ be hard, miss.”

I need a horse then , she thought with desperation, even as the riverman assured her that travel would be in the next fortnight with the goods to Winterfell and that if she was patient, she would be at Winterfell with nearly the same amount of time. She is not a good horsewoman, but the journey on foot would take her moons she does not have, and the trip up the river would simply give leave for her father to find her.

“Are there Inns along the river?” she asks, desperate.

“A few. Look, girl, if yer not adept at the travel just wait-”

“Thank you,” she says, sweetly, swallowing, and she presses a few bronze coins into his palm, wary to give him any proper coin less he makes a correct assumption of the wealth she has stashed away, sown mostly into the underskirts of her current dress, “For your time and your advise, thank you.”

She left, mind whirling, as she dashed back into the market.

First, she went hunting for her food. She buys what the Northern woman assures is jerky and a hard tack that will last her the way to Winterfell Ferry, and recommends the Wolf Inn that is midway up the White Knife, assuring her that her cousin has the best pies in all of the North, and cheap room and stable for her use. She thanked the woman kindly and took her mention of another kinswoman selling 'proper' clothes for the trip to the heart. In the end, she selected two gowns and undergarments that the woman at the shop insisted would be necessary in the cold riding on horseback. It was an extremely warm, extremely form-fitting set of small clothes that would cover her neck to ankle. Alyane bought four, out of precaution. She changed in the shop, even if she longed for a bath- She wore a Northern bodice with her Vale skirts, trying to keep her wealth with her, and was deeply grateful for the new smallclothes. They were warm, and with her feathercloak, Alayne did not even think she'll need a fire at night as she traveled. She bought a sleeping roll, flint despite her hopes and saddlebags for the last of her supplies. It was barely getting to midday by the time she was finished.

Agonizing whether or not to stay the night at an inn within White Harbor, Alyane settled for finding a stable instead. The less time she spent here, the less time her father would have means to catch her.

The horse she bought was a gentle, beautiful mare. She was white, thick, nearly sixteen heads. She was two dragons, and while she didn't present herself as a girl of means by her state of dress, Alayne could not bear to part with her the second she walked past her in the stable.  For the horse reached its great head out of her stall to press its nose against Alyane's face. Huffed gently across her skin, and Alyane was in love. 

The stable keeper was astounded.

"Winter don' take to no one," he told her, "Was meant for the youngest Lady Manderly, but she bucked her right off. Been having trouble convincing his lordship to keep her on as breeding stock. Says she's too wild, and I haven't been able to get her to keep any rider."

Alyane hummed and ran a delicately gloved hand across Winter's nose. Another necessary purchase.

"I will take her."

"She's a prize, miss. Won' be much good for travel."

Alyane shook her head.

"I will take her."

"If you can mount her, she's yours's. Two dragons. Will include saddle and all if you can manage it." 

Alyane could mount her. She had no idea what the youngest Lady Manderly had done to be thrown off, but Winter was as gentle as a lamb. She hoped that the ferry would allow horses, for Alyane was already desperately fond. 

She got her new saddle and tackle, and was on her way along the White Knife before the sunset. 

She rode steady, well until the night, and only stopped when Winter took into the trees, away from the road.

Alyane nearly screamed as the horse took to galloping, narrowly missing the trees with a few spans of fingers. In her haste, the horse weaved and jumped along the forest with the ease of a deer. Alyane could do little but cling, the half-moon across the sky barely lighting the road. She pressed herself as flat as she could to the enormous horse, and could only pray she did not twist her foot in the roots- 

Winter eased into a canter and then a steady walk.

Alyane carefully lifted her head, hands trembling on her reins.

Winter snorts.

“What was that?” she scolds the horse.

The horse prances in place for a beat, before it continues. She tugs at the reins. Winter flicks her head, seemingly in annoyance.

“I have made a mistake,” she tells the horse.

It drops, and Alyane lunges forward with a shriek. The horse makes a snort again. And she realizes that she is in a clearing, a ground full of soft moss. A stream runs through the outer bits of it.

She blinks.

“Perhaps, I have not made a mistake.”

The horse knickers. 

Alyane laughs slightly. She sets up camp and is amazed when Winter settles to sleep next to her, large head tucked into her neck. She is almost too warm with the horse’s warmth, so she does not bother for a fire. 

Alyane sleeps peacefully.

Chapter Text

Alyane on the seventh day of travel, felt agony between her legs. As if she knew, Winter walks with the daintiest of steps. It still sends a rushing throb up her core. The hill she had just passed over had been the worst of it, and she could barely breathe. 

She swallows, thickly, tears stinging her eyes. 

Alyane has, at most, done leisure rides upon a horse. Nothing as strenuous to take her more perhaps a handful of hours- Now she is feeling the regret of that, and she wished she had thought to add more blankets for the saddle. For perhaps thicker small clothes. Even with the Northern ones she aches. She keeps her course, she keeps going. Because if she did not, she knew she could very well be caught by her father. She has been traveling hard, for a handful of days, and she knows if she stops, if she does not reach empty woods far, far from any settlement, her father will eventually find her. He will find her, and force her to marry him.

She shudders  

“Thank you, Winter,” she whispers, slouching forward on the horse’s neck. 

The horse whinnies, and it shouldn’t have sounded so much like a tired sigh.

Alyane sighs softly into the mare’s neck. She is tired. It isn’t even mid-day. She wonders when the first Inn will appear. She has not seen any indication, beyond the general maintenance of the road, that many people travel this way. Do they prefer the ferry? Do they think the ride on horseback is too far, too tedious?

How do people travel this way? She, partially, wishes she had waited for the ferry up the Knife after all.

Yet, perhaps it is all for not.

Behind her, the first thing that tells her of trouble is the gallop of other hooves. She intends to slip into the woods at the sound, but before she can even think to direct Winter, the party behind her crests over the hill that had caused her so much pain moments before. 

They see her.

She knows it. For the second they crest the hill, there are shouts and triumph in the air. The men wave banners of muted green, with the Titan of Bravos and his burning eyes screaming for Alyane. Next to that official banner, is a mockingbird sigil. She is in agony, a week of hard riding for a girl who hadn’t ridden more than a handful of hours. Alyane knows, with certainty and dread, that she is about to be ridden down the old Northern road.  Alyane spurs Winter, shrieks and kicks at the mare to run, as fast as she can.

Winter gives a horrifying shriek, as loud and breaking the peaceful hold of the road and the river beside them. 

Winter is still screaming as she hits the trees, just as she has done every night of Alyane’s travel.

“Faster, faster,” she begs her friend, even as the men behind her call her name.

Call for ‘Lord Baelish’s wayward bride’. Because she is fearful and agonized by the thought of her horrifying fate in her father’s madness, Alyane reaches for the knife strapped to her waist. 

“Faster, faster,” she calls.

They shoot at them. Alyane does not realize it at first. It takes an arrow to the back for her to realize that she is being shot at. Alyane screams, nearly falling off Winter as the searing hit pierces her shoulder. It is only her desperate clench of her thighs, and her arm barely managing to hold the horn of the saddle. When she looks back, she realizes that Winter’s flank is studded in arrows, yet the horse runs.

She sobs.

“YOU’LL KILL THE BRIDE,” calls a man, a hiss and frustration in his words.

I am no bride, Alyane vows, promising it to herself.

Once, that was all she wished for. To be a bride, to hold a sweet babe in her arms. Now… Now Alyane would rather die.

No, she thinks, she promises, I will not wed the man who dares to forget he is my father. No. No, no, no.

Another arrow is one too many in Winter’s fetlock, and Alyane Stone tumbles down.

Blood touches summer snow.   

Alyane thinks she faints, for a moment. For does not remember the fall, and everything hurts. She crawls on hands and knees, in the snow of the North. Something of her blood on snow- Something of it makes her weep so hard she shakes with it.

Winter whinnies, pitiful and struggling to reach her. Trying to stand. Still trying for her. 

“Please,” she begs, to aloud for the helpless fear, “Please, someone, help us.”

Her blood touches not snow, but the cold earth of the North. A gail ripes through the boroughs above her. It sounds like a song. Another melody is added to the gail.

Wolves's song. 

Alyane barely manages to turn when the first scream ripes through the throat of her father’s hired men. A wolf. It tares through his throat, a snarl that echoes through the trees. Alyane sobs. The wolf, she realizes, is too large to be an ordinary wolf. It stands taller than anyone, larger than Winter.

Running on a field of snow. Winter is Coming. That is a direwolf.

The next man is felled. Not by the wolf. No. It is a woman, with a sword and it pierces the eye of the man. The sword is slender. Meant for a woman’s hand. Like the blade in her palm, Alyane knows it is fine steel, dark, glossy, and gleaming like fire, ripples of red, yellow, and orange gleaming in the dark metal. The next man is killed by the wolf, who moves with an echoing snarl. They move in tandem. In elegant savagery, they kill with the precision of a dance. Alyane yanks her gaze back to her horse. 

If I reach Winter, we can run.

She crawls and drags herself through the ground in a desperate bid to reach her horse. Near a dozen men are dead in less than a minute. For the sounds of their screams and the snarls of the wolf end in deadly silence. 

Alyane breathes, half atop of Winter. Dares a glance back.

The woman is looking at her. Her great silver eyes gleam with a life there own, like starlight, or perhaps the moon. Alyane breathes a gasp, cringing away from the woman, so obviously supernatural. She looks young. She is a woman with a long face, hair as dark as the pitch that Alyane had falsely colored her hair, and a sweetness to the shape of her mouth, to the set of her brow. Never mind that she had slaughtered a nearly dozen men with a direwolf at her side. The lady is crowned with Winter roses and a baby's breath, Alyane sees, chest heaving, back in agony. The lady wears a long gown of Northern fashion, the purest white silk, covered by the gore of her father’s men. It is samite, the hem of the gown, large and trailing, touched by gleaming fire, waves glittering red and yellow and orange, with wolves and brambles of blue roses. Winter Roses.  

The woman smiles. Her lips are painted red with blood. 

“ There, ” her voice is the gail, it is the shift in the wind, the whisper of the trees, “ You are safe. ”

Alyane swallowed.

The men were still at the woman’s feet. Dead, she knows. Killed for her. Killed for her. Bile rises in her throat. Blood has been spilled for her. 

“Why?” she sobs.

The woman gave a long, languid blink.

“ Do you think yourself so unworthy to save? Did you not beg for help, here as your blood spilt upon the North’s soil? ”

Alyane flinched back. Confusion fills her. 

“I want no blood spilled for me-”

“ So much blood was split in my name, sweet, sweet girl, and I think you worthy of such and more . These men meant you harm. To drag you back to a fate much worse than death. ”

“And what is your name?” She dared ask, tears falling from her eyes.

The woman huffed and laughed like a bird, or a brooke- a sound that did not sound like a laugh of any woman. She tilts her head. The Direwolf mimics the gesture. It, like the lady, is covered in blood. Its gaze is locked on Alyane. 

“ Names have power, child. I cannot tell you mine, not as you are. Much as I wished to… You called me Lady, and I will take that much. ”

“I ask not a name, then, but a reason. Lady though perhaps I should call you a queen- you wear a crown of it, like a queen of love and beauty,” she returned.

The woman smiled. There is sorrow in it. Sorrow but joy. 

“ To answer your question, sweet girl, a promise was made to me, once, ” the woman said softly, sweetly, “ And who would I be to not return the spirit of that promise for the one who loved me so? And oh, I like to be named a Queen very much. Let that be how I be known to you. It is close enough."

She pressed a snow-white hand against Winter's neck, and the horse whinnied painfully. The woman hummed. Alyane swallowed at how she had appeared, so swiftly, so suddenly next to her. Tears followed down her cheeks. The arrows in her flanks would have to be removed and tended.  But they were alive. And her Lord father would not have her. Alyane dares to reach for the woman’s hand. Grabs it tightly in her’s.

"Your grace, I- thank you ."

The Queen hummed again. Squeezed her hand with the delicateness that stunned Alyane.  

" Thank instead this sweet thing. She brought you here. I think she has been trying to get my attention."

"Winter brought me here?"

The woman laughed her not laugh.

" She has been guiding you. She felt what you hold in you, and she knew I would have need for you. She is Northern. The North knows, and it has waited… If I had the chance then, perhaps it would have known sooner… But you are here. And that is good."

Alyane shifted.

“Why would you need me, your grace?” she asks, stunned, “I am just a poor girl, running from the horrible man I would be forced to wed. I am nothing. I am a Stone, I have nothing.”

The Queen sighed. It sent a gust through the trees. 

“ Oh, my sweet, sweet summerchild. You are not nothing. ”

Alyane cries her tears.

“I know I am nothing. I have been a shadow, a ghost of someone long gone. I am nothing. I am not anything.”

The Queen cups her face. Smiles gently.

“ No, sweet Little Lady. You are everything. You are mine, as he has become his. Not- not a trade we willing made. But one I will cherish. ”

“I do not understand!”

The Queen tilts her head again.

“ Rest, my girl .”

She kisses Alyane’s forehead, and Alyane knows nothing but the sensation of soft sleep.

Chapter Text

Alyane wakes. 

She is unaware of anything but the sweet relaxation of true, deep sleep. A warmth of body, an ease of her breath. Her mind is but a muddle of soft dreams of lemons and the voice of a woman, soft and rolling in her mind. Alayne realizes she is cradled in fur, it’s surprisingly coarse against her skin, and when she runs her fingertips through it, dense and shockingly warm. And it takes her a moment to understand that it is not a bed fur, but instead a cradle of living, breathing animal that she rested upon. For each breath is a rocking motion bellow her, the She-Wolf’s heartbeat like an even, steady drum beneath her cheek. She feels safe. Warm and safe against the She-Wolf.

Yet, Alyane cannot help but stiffen at the realization she is atop an animal that could be so savage. She does not bolt, as much as she wishes for it, only holds her breath as steady as she can. 

“ The She-Wolf is the best of beds, ” calls the Queen who has claimed her, “ You have slept well, my girl. ”

Alyane gently sits up at the Queen’s words, cautious of direwolf at her back.

She expects pain. In her shoulder. In the space between her legs. She feels only rested, only warm and she is dressed in a shift that is beautiful beyond her understanding, a pale and pearlescent thing that shines in the dark of the woven brambles of the space she occupies. Alyane blinks. Across her lap, the maiden’s cloak of feathers serves as a blanket. The space is like a Sept, hushed quiet, of its wide and woven branches of various trees. White, dark lines the space around her. Light, like the moon, shines through the gaps of the branches. Above her, it is a canopy of wirewoods . 

She blinks. 

The name comes unbidden. 

She cannot recall when she has heard the name. But she knows the red five-pointed leaves, the pale bone of its bark, could only be wirewoods. A heart. A tree at the center of-

They cry tears. Tears that I hold within me. 

Her head throbs. She holds in a wince. 

“ You are safe and well tended for. You slept for nearly a moon. I have done as best I can for your ills, dear girl. Forgive me. Your… Humanity was hard for me to remember. How fair you, Child? ”

She shifts in place. Wishes desperately to touch her temple and soothe the ache. She feels no bandage upon her skin. Yet when she reaches where the arrow pierced her, Alyane feels nothing but smooth, delicate skin. Unscared. Unmarred.

She looks around herself.

The Queen is across from her at the base of the largest tree, a behemoth that must be twice as wide as Sansa is tall. It has a face carved into it, but the face is not a wizened, crude thing she expects of an alter of the old gods. It is the face of a woman, young sweet looking. Beautiful. She looks like the Queen who saved her, but it is not her. A kinswoman, perhaps?  

“I am well. Where am I, your Grace?”

The Queen hums. Turns. Her eyes shine like stares against the pale velvet of her skin. She wears a gown that looks like shadows, whispering across the ground. She smiles. 

“ At the heart of things. Welcome, Child, to the Heart of the North. ”

“The heart?”

Moonlight eyes gleam at her.  

Her own heart is a trapped bird. It's wings a flurry within her ribs. She blinks. The Queen is before her. Cups Alyane's chin in calloused hands. The Queen clicks her tongue. Glides her hands across her cheeks. Touches at Alyane's temples.

“ You lied. You are in pain. ”

Alyane shivered. She feels like a fox, trapped in the gaze of a hunting dog. The Queen hums. 

“I-”

“ Do not coo to me, like a dove. I need no pretty chirps from you, Child. I care not for your cloak of feathers. It is merely a pretty thing. Warmth and facade… It is not who you are. Not truly, sweet girl. No lies here, Child, not in the Heart, not in this sacred space. ”

Alyane tried to bow her head. The Queen held firm. Soothed at her temple with her rough fingertips. The pain left her like a soft sigh. Eased away from her. Alyane blinked. The Queen hummed. 

“ There. Come, we are to break our fast. We have much to do. ”

The Queen is gone from her sight, swift as the wind, as a blink of an eye. Alyane jolts to her feet. 

“ When you are ready, Child! ” calls the woman’s voice.

The She-Wolf who had been her bed rises. Alyane watches it with her heart rising in her throat. For the She-Wolf just… Kept standing, a long, lazy movement. Alyane, absently, realized that the She-Wolf was bigger than she had thought. Or perhaps this… ‘Heart of the North’, this glade of wirewoods, made her appear so much larger. For the tips of her ears touched at the lowest branches of the wierwoods. Glazed across them like a breeze, a slight rustle. She reaches forward, in a queer, long stretch of a bowing motion. Her large tongue comes out, pale pink and curling in a yawn. The She-Wolf reaches for Alyane after her stretch, in her space, and Alyane freezes.

Her eyes are a deep, luminous gold. 

Warm. Intelligent. And something in them touches something Alyane. Something deep, and warm within her. She will never harm me, Alayne realizes, and all the fear in her leaves like the pain at the Queen’s touch. Like a sigh. She is reaching for her. Distantantly, some part of Alayne is alarmed by her own calm, as she touches the enormous head of the wolf. Her fur is coarse beneath her palms, and it sinks, and sinks. She realizes that there is two layers to the fur, and the inner layer is as soft as velvet. Something in her settles, and Alyane realizes she is crying. 

The She-Wolf touches at her chest. Soft and gentle. Her nose is wet, and her breath from it throws the dark, strangled dark of her new hair across the exposed span of her throat. The She-Wolf gave a sort of soft sound. It wasn’t quite a whimper, and did not have a high-pitched whine to it, but it wasn’t as harsh as a howl, or a bark. It was soft and gentle. A rough, wide tongue touched at the rapid beat of her heartbeat at the base of her throat, and Alyane jumped. The She-Wolf snorted and nudged at her.  Alyane drops her own head against the wolf’s.

Together, they breathe. 

Breath for breath, inhaling and exhaling in tandem.

“Thank you,” she whispers to the She-Wolf. The She-Wolf’s eyes gleam, and she whispers the truth, no pretty lies as her Father would have wished for her, “For killing for me. I am horrified that those men were only working for coin. But I am not for the fate that awaited me. Thank you.”

A hand is on her shoulder.

Alyane looks. The Queen looks at her seriously with gleaming, moonlight. She smiles.

“ I once ran from a man’s marriage bed, ” she tells her, “ Blood was spilled in my name, Child. Do not feel ashamed. My sins in regard to this were worse. Innocent people were killed in my name. People I loved. These men? There was evil in their hearts. Else, I would not have brought my blade to them. ”

She blinks.

“You were human, once, my Queen?” she asks.

The woman, not a woman anymore, nods.

“ Once. We… I tangled in magics nearly unseen in three hundred years. I- I did it to live. I changed myself, lost myself, or parts of myself in the process. It was for the best. I have a purpose. Reason to be beyond a man- ”

She speaks in half-truths, Alyane realizes. Half words of what she had gone through, to become… Whatever she was. This creature of magic and who has brought her to the Heart of the North. For the Queen touches at where the space of her womb is, and she looked… She looked sorrowful. Regretful. Her father had taught her to look at people and know their emotions.

“I thought there were no lies in this space,” she dared whisper, “You regret, your Grace. Some things that passed,  you do wish she could have changed.”

The woman stared at her. And she looked- She looked so young to Alyane in that moment. She looked to be her father’s age, thirties namedays, perhaps, but… There is something fragile in her face, something so delicate it takes Alyane’s breath. 

“ You remind me so much of my Brother, ” she tells her, and her lips smile, even if her eyes look like they are near tears.

“I-”

“ He is the best of my Kin. He made me a promise. ”

She stares.

“That promise is what caused you to protect me?”

The woman gave a nod. Earnest. 

“ Yes. For your blood has touched Northern Soil, child, Twice now, and Twice touched is once Called. ”

Alyane blinked. 

“Twice? I do not understand. What does my blood have anything to do with this?”

The woman sighed. A half-frustrated sound.

“ There are rules, Child. Rules of Magic. I am bound by them in my current form. I cannot tell you certain things. Same as I cannot reach for my Kin unless I am truly Called by them. ”

Alyane frowns.

Twice touched, once Called. A ritual? Blood magic was said to be practiced once in the North. 

“I don’t- I don’t understand.”

The woman sighed again.

“ I was never good with words, not as you seem to be. Forgive me for that. But I can tell you that you are within my protection now, and that is all you must know. That Man will not find you. ”  

The She-Wolf tugs absently at the hem of her shift. Her jaws are astonishingly delicate.

The woman laughed.

“ Well. Enough of words unspoken. You must eat, and then, we will get to work. ”

Alyane frowned.

“Work?”

The woman, not woman, hummed. 

“ I am tasked, sweet child, to work upon the North. I am its Daughter, and I will do what I must. You, underneath my protection, will follow. ”

“What does that entail?”

The woman smiled. 

“ Magic, sweet girl. Magic . ”

Her lost niece is brimming with magic, bound and trapped beneath her hidden name. Beneath a mask of lies woven into the very aspect of her soul by that horrible, horrible man who had taken her. 

Lyanna Stark takes her from the protection of the Heart of the North, and she wishes, desperately, to shove Sansa Stark back into that sacred, protected space.

Something in Lyanna is wishing to bite, lash, and snarl at that unknown seal upon her niece’s flesh. To tare it apart with her bare hands, claw at it like a savage animal, she so hated it. The Mockingbird had bound a child of the North, her kin, her blood, and if he ever came North, Lyanna would kill him, serve his blood to the Heartstree at the Heart of the North, and let the old gods tear him asunder for eternity. 

‘Alyane Stone’ is a poison upon her niece, and she is helpless to do anything about it directly.

She wished to scream her niece’s name, the second she had felt her blood touch the North once again, but she was bound herself by the very magic of the North, its soul... She could not speak the name of others without making them her’s, and much as she wished to unleash Sansa… To speak her name, to bind her, would only be exchanging one form of chains for another.

She would rather die than chain a woman to an unwanted fate. 

Poor Sansa knew nothing of the fate she did want, she was too young to know what she wanted. And Lyanna was not going to be the person to force her one way or another. She could only offer her a place to grow, a place to grow to know herself, and hopefully, invoke her own name. Lyanna could not free her niece, or return her to Ned and her mother where she belonged... Just as Lyanna could not raise her own son. But she would give what her brother had given her beautiful Jon.

A chance .

What Sansa makes of it will be up to her. 

“ She has been waiting, she has missed you, ” she whispers, sweetly, and she smiles Sansa cries out in joy.

Winter the Horse whinnies in joy in return, as Sansa converges to her. She kisses her face, carefully and sweetly. The horse throws her head back and then continues to chew upon the sweet clover at her feet. They stand in the far North, a few leagues from the Wall. The Heart’s magic allows them to pass through any place in the North at their whim. She has placed Winter here, safe and touched with her magic to keep her unharmed from the creatures of the woods, and people of the North, or even past the wall. Winter would be safe, and she would heal.    

“ She will be well here, ” she tells her niece. 

Sansa looks at her in confusion. 

“I- Can I not be with her?”

Lyanna sighs. 

“ She was heavily injured, Child. She cannot be your mount, not yet, not for the magic we must cast. For that, our She-Wolf will be our mount. I just thought you would like to see her before we depart. ”

Lyanna had been able to call Blood to Blood for Sansa and heal her quickly. Winter will have to heal the longer way, with only a touch of magic to bring her through. 

Her niece shifts in her dress, made of silk, that which looks like weirwood tree leaves. Woven by Lyanna herself, and she is happy for it… Lyanna knows not what she feels that she has chosen to don the cloak of her captor over the dress she had woven for her. The cloak of quills is a masterwork, nearly on par with the magic that Lyanna herself weaves to make clothing, but it is a reminder to her that her niece is enchained in magic that the Mockingbird unknowingly invoked when he stole her very name from her.

That is old, dark magic, she despairs, The Power of Names. The Power of Self. He is no mage, no wizard, but magic cares not about who casts it. Only that is woven true. And he did so, unintentionally when he stole a child of Stark blood and forged a new name for her. All of the children of this generation are strong in such a sense, and vulnerable for it. And poor Sansa was caught before I could do anything to protect them. Her siblings are safer, but it is too late for Sansa. 

Damn him for this. Damn him.

Lyanna would tear him apart. She swore upon her husband’s, and her wife’s graves.

“What magic?” whispers her niece, young and innocent and so very much brimming with potential. 

Lyanna smiles.

“ I am a Daughter of the North, child. As its Daughter, I tend to it. ”

The She-Wolf who had been her companion since she had given birth to her son, appears.

Sansa is already reaching a hand for her. The She-Wolf crowds her niece, sensing their connection. Lyanna smiles, gently at the sight. 

“ You will tend with me. ”

That confused her niece.

“I am not of the North, your grace-”

“ The man lied to you. Would you trust any of his words? ”

The girl goes pale.

“My… My mother is not of the Riverlands. She was Northern?”

Lyanna bites her tongue. Even as she wishes she could speak. She is bound.

Oh, sweet child. So close.

She can only stare seriously at her.

“I am of Northern blood?”

That, she can answer. She nods. 

“ Come, Child. I shall show you the wonders of your homeland, ” she tells her, and she swallows back her true name like poison. With difficulty, with agony. She took her niece’s hand, “ Let me show you your birthright. ”

She takes her niece upon her friend, her dearest friend now that her loves are dead, and she brings her to the North.

It sings for them.

Chapter Text

The Queen tends to the North, and that is her magic.

That is her purpose. 

The Queen simply lifts her to the She-Wolf’s back, as easily as if she is a babe, and jumps behind her. Her arms are warm and smell sweet like flowers, the woods, and metal like blood. The animal herself smells just like the Queen who claims her, with the exception that the animal smells- 

Like snow and blood too. 

It is a sweet perfume that makes all of the tension in Alyane unwind, like a thread from a spindle. She nearly faints with the lack of tension. Let's out a gasp that is a half-strangle sob. The Queen hums, and the She-Wolf shifts. The Queen is not a large woman, yet she snuggles Alyane into her arms and completely cradles her to her breasts as if she is a child, not a woman grown herself. She soothes her hands through the mess of her newly pitched hair and touches softly at the curve of her cheek. 

“ There sweet Girl ,” she whispers and places a chin atop Alyane’s head. There is something content, and warm in her voice.

The She-Wolf gives as soft growl, low and deep that it vibrates up her body. Alyane feels the tears start then. The gentle, maternal note to the Queen’s voice. The sweet grumble of the She-Wolf.

“Why are you doing this?” she whispers.

Why care, she truly asks.

The Queen hears her. 

And Alyane will ask that question for years to come. The Queen squeezes her arms slightly. 

She could never answer with Alyane’s question being the incorrect one. 

“ A promise made. A promise returned,” the Queen answers, truthfully. 

Cryptic. 

Unclear. 

Alyane huffs. The Queen sighs a sad little thing. 

Yet Alone would never fell safer, than today, in the arms of this Daughter of the North, this Queen who dwells in the Heart of the North. Not even when she was small, and still thought as her father’s daughter, rather than his bride. Attop the She Wolf, with this Daughter, Alyane Stone feels safe. 

She breathes.

The Queen breathes.

The She-Wolf breathes.

“With me, sweet Promise,” the Queen says, “You are with me and that is all that matters.”

“I-”

“Hush. Now. Watch me work, my Promise.”

The woman twists gently on Alyane’s nose in gest. Before she can so much as squeak in protest, it starts. 

Magic blooms. 

Unravels like a flower to the sun. 

She clings to the Queen’s arms as the magic surges. She feels it from the tips of her toes, vibrating through her to the top of her head. She can do nothing but cling. It moves from the Queen, from her heart, from the very base of her, the breath in her lungs, the blood in her veins. It starts small, and then it ripples from her. 

It builds, a rush of energy that Alayne feels through every part of herself. 

It is a song. 

The Daughter of the North calls with melody upon her fair lips.  

All of the North answers. 

For it is living, breathing mass. It is not simply soil and pitch and wood. It is more. A holy land. A holy land that breathes in time with all that which it has birthed. Alyane feels her tears stop. Her very breath, the beating of her heart. For the North, the song itself-

It reaches into her.

Alyane feels it. Know it. She is a daughter. Not simply to a man. She is of this land. It's blood that runs through her. She is of the North. 

She was born here. 

The North calls to her as well. Tentatively, yet joyously. As if-

As if it is greeting me from a long journey. 

Alyane cries. 

Wretched sobs as the Queen runs her hands through her hair. 

The Northern winds gather forth like lovers, sweet and desperate for one another.  The earth beneath their feet is the drums of a song, steady and ripped from beneath the claws and strides of the She-Wolf as she moves .  She runs, steadier than a horse, yet more powerful. It as if she is not moving at all, yet Alayne knows it must be fast. It takes her breaths, and awes her further. What would have been called savage by any she had known before-

It is sacred. 

Alayne feels as the Queen gives part of herself to the North itself.  The North echoes that sacrifice and returns to the Queen. Power for power, song for song. 

The She-Wolf howls . Tears run freely down her cheeks. Furious, heaving sobs leave her. On magic and claw, on a running direwolf, The Queen breathes life and tends to the North with her magic. Like a gardener. Or a shepherd thinks Alyane.

Or the greatest of Queens. 

A queen that gives all or part of herself to the people she claims her own.  Alayne has never known such things existed.  She sobs in the Queen's arms. The Queen presses a kiss to her temple.

“ I will show you the way, Sweet girl, blood of our land,” she claims her, “ My Promise .”

She claims Alyane, a stranger that she is- The Queen in the North claims her as her’s. 

“ You too, are a Daughter of the North. You too shall tend to it, sweet girl, sweet blood of my people, ” she soothes, “ Welcome home . ” 

Jon Stark was not always known as a Stark.

Once, in the eyes of man and by blood, Catelyn Stark was not his Lady Mother.

He was young when that changed. He was young when her hands turned from forever out of reach to gentle against him. He was young when her cold mask of indifference had changed, softened, warmed and turned loving. He remembers the first time her blue eyes had been anything but cold chips of ice when they looked at his face-He remembers the way that Catleyn Stark had taken his brother and sister as far as she could for him, instead of gathering him just as close.  Lady Catelyn Stark is not his birth mother. She is the only mother he has ever known, but he is not of her womb.

He remembers it, too well, when he had been Jon Snow.

He was still a bastard, legitimate or not, but many ignored that after the Lady Wife of his Father had changed it all by quill and on raven’s wing. Everyone that was not of House Stark knew called him lordling now, or my lord, never Jon nor Snow. The only exception is Theon Greyjoy, and even then he had stopped calling him Snow the day that Catelyn Stark threatened to bare him from Wintertown if he dared to do it again. 

Jon still feels the name, Snow, sometimes, even when most of his younger siblings do not even remember when he hadn't been allowed to sit next to each other at the same table. Arya had been a babe in his mother’s arms when the missive from the King's legitimacy had come. He remembers the stunned, pale face of his father. And he remembers how mother's face had warmed and glowed as she had read over his shoulder. He remembers how Lady Cat had gathered his face in her palms and kissed at everywhere, and softly whispered onto his brow:

“You are a true son of House Stark, and while you might not be of my blood, you are my son, Jon Stark.”

He will remember that I until he is old and gray in his bed, he knows. 

Part of him wonders if Mother did it as a prayer to the Seven. A penance, a bargain. Wonders if it was meant to be a trade to find little Sansa at last. Fufill that vow that she had made to him in the Godswood to always look for her. He knows now that his sister is dead. Knows it as surely imposters still try to take her place each year come to her nameday when the Bells of Winterfell and Wintertown ring for her and they call for her to come home. Knows it, knows it even as her small face fades from his mind. Even as he heard mother and father argue whether or not she should have a grave in the crypts. His life changed because of little Sansa. 

And he knows he would change it all again, destroy his life, abandon his Lady Mother’s esteem, holding the name Stark, if little Sansa was alive, well, and in his place.

He feels like a thief.

He feels an imposture in Stark Colors, in Stark name, that he has stolen his trueborn sister’s place when she had been taken and murdered from their walls. When he goes to sit underneath Sansa’s lemon tree, unbloomed, even though it is fully grown, he apologizes, even as he lays flowers and trinkets at the roots. Because Sansa had loved flowers, soft silks, and small little pieces of lovely embroidery, and he has no grave to place them upon instead. He places them all into the chest that his Lady Mother had commissioned when Sansa would have been ten namedays, her trousseau that she will never bring to her husband’s house.

It is a daily ritual. 

To leave something to Sansa, and mourn the little girl he can barely remember. 

Robb, Mother, and Father all do the same. Arya, Bran, and baby Ricken don’t, if only because they had never known the missing girl of Winterfell. They had no memories of her. Of the way, she would sigh and awe at every bard, awful or not, that passed through Winterfell. She imitated the way that Lady Catelyn walked, swaying hips and all, at just three namedays. That she would smile, kindly, to everyone and all who crossed her path, even the sullen bastard of her father.

He thinks of this all, the morning that everything changes. 

He is unaware of how big a change is coming.

Unknowing, as he steps into the glass garden to leave a soft grey lace from Myr that he had purchased from White Harbor a few days prior. All he knows is that when he reaches Sansa’s tree, he freezes.  His lungs seize in his chest.   He is the first of his family to come, every day. His mother stops by after afternoon prayer in her Sept and sews in the tree’s roots. His father comes when dark moods take him, or just after the evening meal. Robb comes by after sword training, lies down in the roots, and whispers into the air how his life has changed since she had left it. Jon always likes to come when before he breaks his fast, so he is always first.

The lace in his hands falls to his feet.

Jon turns and starts to run .  

He reaches the Great Hall in a blink, even as he shoves the doors open impatiently. 

“Mother, Father, Robb!” Jon stumbles into the Great Hall, flushed.

“My son?” says Lady Catelyn, surprised.

“It’s Sansa’s tree!” he yells. 

Arya blinks, small long face rearing back slightly, Bran frowns and Rickon blinks quickly. Even as all of the older members of his family push away from their seats, and start to run. Jon turns straight back around and runs back to the Glass Gardens, his family at his heels. He feels more than he sees when his father and mother, and Robb see Sansa’s tree. 

It is like string, being struck, and felt through them.

He knows his mother is crying, for she sobs and slumps against his side. He holds her, and lifts her steadily by her waist. His father stumbles forward, hands reaching.

Robb is stock still and slumps into Jon’s side.

For there in the glass garden, the lemon tree that father had brought Sansa, does something the gardener hired for it had called impossible.

“It… It must be a sign,” whispered his mother between sobs, “It must. ”

Father reaches the broughs, and gently, with a hand that Jon sees is trembling, touches at the full, heavy flowers abloom in Sansa’s Lemon tree. Beautiful lemon flowers, for the first time in eight years the tree had been barren. 

His father is quiet, for a moment, before he lets out a soft sigh.

“Cat-”

“No, Ned, look, it was supposed to be impossible! The Gardner of Dorne said that the tree would never bloom in the sunlight of the North, but look at it! Look !” she cried, joyous.

She wrenched away from Jon, hands reaching for the flowers. 

“Is this not beautiful? Perhaps the next girl who-”

“Cat, I am tired ,” whispered his father, and his voice broke.

His mother stopped. Jon felt his throat close. Robb gripped his hand, his fingertips trembling.

“I am tired of girl after girl entering our halls with lies, trying to take my child’s place.”

Jon flinches. 

“Ned-”

“I believe little in signs,” he says, firmly, “But, perhaps you are right. Perhaps this is a sign. A sign that we must- We must stop. ”

His mother reared back as if she was struck.

“We made a vow. We swore to Jon we would never stop looking .”

“Please Cat. I want her to have a statue, a place-”

“ I do not want Sansa in the crypts! ” his mother screams, “She is not dead, she cannot- ”

His father’s face is dark.

“Cat. It has been eight years. And she is a Stark, I wish to lay her spirit to rest, the Crypts is where she should be, with her kin-”

“You promised ,” whispers Robb.

Their father flinches. Look at them. Robb’s jaw is trembling, he is clenching his teeth so hard. 

“Is the word of Lord Eddard Stark so little?” he snaps.

His father pales. Robb tugs at his hand and drags him away. Even when they close the door, they can hear their mother weeping. Jon looks at the floor, uncaring as his elder brother drags him away from their parents. 

“She’s alive,” Robb whispers, after a moment, “She’ll come home, one day. She must.”

His voice is small. 

Jon remembers that Robb had smiled the hardest when Sansa would toddle after him, reaching for him. And that now, Robb’s smiles are fewer, sterner, than they had been then. Jon remembers his thoughts before he saw the tree before he saw its little white flowers, that Sansa must be gone. He cannot think of anything else that makes much sense for her.

“I wish that was true,” he whispers, to himself, after a moment.

Robb lets go of his hand.

“Do you think her gone?”

Jon flinches.

“She is gone Robb,” he says, swallowing at the hurt in his brother’s Riverland eyes, “In my heart, I wish it otherwise.”

“Wish? Not know?”

“I cannot say for certain. We never found anything after her glove,” he admits, swallowing.

Robb looks at the ground.

“Father went as far as the Wall to the Riverlands looking for her,” says Robb, “Yet, I cannot help but hope to find her, Jon. She’s my sister.”

Jon flinches back.

Robb freezes.

Reaches for his hand. Grips it.

“Our,” he corrects, voice even smaller than before.

“Our,” Jon agrees.

Because he remembers a time when he wasn’t even allowed near Sansa.

In grief, he thinks, softly, he could claim her. 

" The flowers," Jon said, and he looked away from Robb, "Mayhaps they bear fruit soon."

"We could make lemon cakes."

"We could burn the castle to the ground," he returns, laughing. 

Robb laughs back. Small. Short. As it always is now.

Chapter Text

She is selfish. 

Lyanna Stark, once a Princess and wife, once very beloved of her sister-wife, knows this. She is a selfish creature. It had been her selfish insistence of secrecy that had killed so many people that she loved. That had made the blood of Westeros run against the land and its waters uselessly with red that should have never been spilt. It was her selfish, desperate need to hold onto her life, some semblance of independence that had cost her the ability to raise her son.  A trade. A compromise. 

Where no one is happy, but also where there is no true misery. 

No magic was without sacrifice. When she had laid in her birthing bed, blood, and roses, Ned finding her, she had seen her limited choices. 

Green dreams had sang through her mind. 

Her son. Her boy, slaughtered like her beloved Elia's children. My other children. Her body an altar of misplaced worship.Her womb, slave, cattle for Baratheon seed. Heirs and spares, children brought into the world through spite, not love. Fists and bruises and pain upon her for never being the creature the Usurper claimed her to be. 

Or.

Or had sung the North.  he land of her birth had crooned to her. Sang her it's Daughter. Serve it had said.  Be ours. 

Or.

Or.

Or.

Between Robert and a servant to the land that had birthed her- between her Visenyon dying? It had been the easiest choice she had ever made. The easiest, and the most selfishly beneficial. 

Freedom. Protection of a false name for your child. 

Her Visenyon was safe. Her boy cloaked in Stark Grey and White, made a boy of Snow. No one saw that he was Ice and Fire. That he was born in a stone tower, with a blazing light of red overhead as Ned held her hand, as she cried her tears and screamed in blood and roses.    A bargain, Lyanna had thought, for so many years. Missing her son. Her last connection to the ultimate happiness she had but briefly. And then. The gods . The gods took her choices and spun them viciously on their heads. She had felt when Baelish had done his own binding. 

Sansa.

Stolen . 

Sansa was chained and bound as Lyanna would have been. To an odious man who thought he owned her. Changed as her son to bear a false name.  She had wept when she had felt Stark blood spilled. She had raged for the first time against her own state of being between the realm of Magic and the realm of Men.  Because Sansa's first blood had not been enough for Lyanna to save her.  It had not been enough to cross in-between spaces so easily. By the time that Lyanna had broken through he realms between, Sansa Stark had been far out of her reach. In a land untouched by weirwoods, her blood never spilt upon the living grounds of the North… Sansa had been twisted. Changed to Alyane and turned to stone .

But Starks endure , thinks Lyanna. 

She looks at her niece, sees her wobble off of Wolf-Mother, laughing, sobbing at the taste of the power that she would offer her, and she swallows thickly. 

Starks always endure. Especially its women. I miss you, my Elia, my Rhaegar. I miss our babes, Our three heads of the Dragon. I miss Rhaneys and her sweet laughter and sticky hands. I miss Aegon and his gentle coos. I miss my boy, my Visenyon with his Stark eyes and the shape of Rhaegor's chin. 

She misses her loves, she misses the family she never got to properly have with an ache that near consumed her.  She also misses her Father. Despite the rift she had caused between them when she had begged and screamed for a break with House Baratheon and the lout that was its Lord. She misses Brandon, with his wild laugh and the strength of him. She misses Benjen and the promise of adventure.  She misses Ned. Sweet Ned that had started a war for her.  Gods she wishes and wishes and dreams of all of them. 

But she was selfish. 

To remove this mantle of a Daughter of the North- To remove it and expose herself to Robert after all this time? To leave her son vulnerable? Even to reveal Sansa, return her to her proper kin? S he could not.

Would not. And I would loose this . 

She felt the North. The echo if it. It was a melody that sang in her veins, in the very marrow of her. And she was selfish enough to be glad her abducted niece was now at her side and would join the song with her. To relish in her sweet home and the returned Promise to her brother.

An unwilling trade. 

But one she would honor . 

One I adore . 

“Your Grace?” Sansa. Sweet Sansa Stark who did not know her true name looked at her. 

Lyanna Stark swallowed. Emotion made her tremble. 

“Your first Lesson, my Promise, is simple,” she breathed, “You have already felt the North through my power, yes?”

Sansa nods, eyes wide and afraid. 

But eager. 

So eager. 

She swallowed.

I have your daughter Ned, I have her safe, and protected from the evil that would harm her. 

She smiled. 

“Now,” she bares her wolf teeth, cups her pup-turned-fasle-feldging's face carefully in her palms, “It is your turn.”

She hopes in Winterfell, some part of Ned can know that Sansa is safe. 

It is not the first, or even the last, that Eddard Stark dreams of Sansa. 

He is not surprised this dream comes. It has come with such frequency, it has become a bittersweet comfort. Because it was his greatest shame, to see his daughter. But it was good to see her. Even if she is his greatest failure. His greatest failure, once, had been his failure to bring Lyanna's bones home. With an empty grave, a lie on his lips, and a child to protect. With memories of blood and roses and a light so intense he had lost his own sight for a near hour afterward. 

He wished it was his biggest failure, preventing whatever Lyanna had invoked that day.

It haunts him still. But it is not the worst. Lyanna had been nearly grown. Lyanna had made her choices. Sansa never had the opportunity to make them. His truest failure was Sansa. His little Lady. His sweetest child. Lost forever. Gone from the safety of their home. 

After the first day her lemon tree had bloomed, Ned dreamed of her again. 

She is still the babe he had last seen. He does not think he will ever know her as anything but the child he lost. Though he had promised Jon and Cat alike, Ned thinks her gone. Murdered by kidnappers that had not known who they had taken, or murdered in a failed attempt of a ransom.  So that is what he sees.

What he always sees. 

The girl of nearly four name days, young and wearing a single rabbit’s fur glove colored blue of her Mother’s House. In her hair, there is a baby's breath and the cursed Winter Roses that had unknowingly become his sister’s wedding crown. Sansa is at the foot of her lemon tree, sitting, peacefully, curled back against its pale brown limbs. Her back to him. She is singing. Sweet and warm. Her voice- he had forgotten. Had forgotten the cadence of it. The sweet, clumsily wobble of a child with the promise of a sweet singing voice once it was properly trained. Ned knows it is a dream. Knows it even as he falls to his knees and cries her name despite it all. Sweet and pleading.

“Sansa,” he wishes and wishes.  

Because she is my babe.  She will not respond to his words. She has not, not once, in the years since he has lost.

This dream is different.

Sanas’s song falters. Her back tenses. He watches, heart thundering, as she rises.

“Is someone there?”

Ned leaps to his feet, and he is reaching-

He wakes. He is in his marriage bed, and his wife sweet with sleep beside him. His heart aches. His breathing is labored. 

He remembered Sansa’s voice. 

It is not the first time Ned Stark weeps for Sansa Stark. It will not be the last.

Chapter Text

The first of the rumors begins from White Harbor. 

Shadows. Queer lights. 

Then it comes up the river, like a tumbling leaf in the current, a prelude before the flood. A friend of a merchant is a bard man, and he has seen the Beast . A queer mass with glowing eyes like the sapphire of the deepest waters. Then, comes the flood waters and all the muck of it. 

There is a Beast in the North, coming down the river. 

An animal of the water. It skips across the Waters, dipping and weaving like a fish. An animal of the land another whisper says. It leaps through trees. Runs amongst the undergrowth.Yet another calls it an animal of the air, and that it falls on swift wings upon its prey. The story changes. Shifts between each mouth that retells it. Whispers. Calm. Japes. A snark they say. A shadow cat. A grumpkin. A dire wolf south of the wall. A child. Then, some whispers become not so calm. Then the whispers are monstrously frequent. Then the whispers are plain talk.  Sightings. Encounters. A monster is lurking on the walls. Sleek, shadow cat, grumpkin. A snark. A child-

A Beast is haunting the North. 

Jon Stark pays it little mind, at first. Everyone does. And then one person, one after another, comes to Winterfell with wild tales of shadows filtering through the trees. A creature walks upon water. Queer, twin lights the brightest blue anyone has ever seen. 

It grows. 

Howls in the dark. 

A Song flickering through the trees. 

“ ‘Tis smallfolk foolishness,” hisses Theon Greyjoy, disdain in the man's voice. 

Jon looks up, and he can see- unease in the man's face. Sees it in the nervous set of his mouth. 

“I dare you to call Lady Mormount a smallfolk to her face,” says Arya, eyes bright. 

His lips twitch. The stern Matriarch of Bear’s island claims to have seen a beast with a coat of all colors in the middle of her courtyard a fortnight past, just that morning, had lead a tense, unsure air to fill the keep. It had jolted up the wall like a spider. And suddenly at her word, enough credence has been given that the Beast of the North is no silly rumor.  

His father was calling forth old records, if this be a beast that is known in the past, Maester Luwin will find it. 

“I heard it stalks the Wolf Wood at twilight,” Arya says, excited. 

“It was dawn,” replied Bran, voice scolding. 

Arya shoves him. 

“ Twilight , stupid,” she hisses.  

They tussle, and little Rickon claps his hands in delight, teeth bared in amusement. 

It is Robb that rips them apart. But then, it always is. He holds them by the scruff of the neck, and his older brother scowls at them both. They dangle from his hold. Push against it like wayward pups. 

“Don't fight,” he says with the sternness of their father. 

Jon immediately straightens, shoulders pushing back, even as he dips his head. Robb always evokes in them all. Little Arya scowls at her hands, even as she tries desperately to shake them off Robb's hold. 

“Stop it,” says Robb, voice turning harder.

Arya wilts. Her grey eyes shimmer with her discomfort. The ghost of little Sansa Stark breathes between them. All of Robb's actions are touched by her. By the ache of her absence. He drives his body to perfection. I will protect my pack, Jon hears. He is sterner on them all. You will not wander out of my sight, Jon hears.  Jon thinks it is Robb who had died a little inside at Sansa's disappearance. He remembers a boy who smiled often, who laughed loudly and proudly. That boy has been killed, and become this stern man. Jon wonders if Sansa's fate had changed Robb's fate the most, not his own. 

“We should hunt the Beast,” whispers Arya, voice timid and a touch sullen, “Be heroes!”

Robb sighs.

“No, Arya.”

“Please! It is in the woods, it is! We could do it!” she counters.

Robb is stern with all of them- That much Jon knows is true. But he is also infinitely weak to his siblings. For Bran and Ricken brighten at the prospect. Even Greyjoy seems interested, eyes glimmering. 

His brother sighs. Yet, his own eyes gleamed with curiosity. 

“We cannot ride at twilight,” he grinned, “But the dawn is doable.”

Bran cheers.  

Arya sighs.

“It is at twilight,” she swears.

It is neither dawn nor twilight when they find the Beast of the North. 

It begins like this-

Jon is riding, ahead of his siblings. Their hunt has shifted, and changed, into a race. There is no better ridder at Winterfell than Jon. His father once gently said he was half-horse. And so Jon is ahead, laughing when he first spots the ripple of queer feathers sprinting adjacent in the woods. 

Jon blinks, and his horse is moving in that direction before he can think. 

And then he sees the lights, luminous, brilliant as the sky on the perfect day.  Like a moth to a flame, he chases. He chases and chases. 

What he finds at the end-

Jon Stark feels as if he has been kicked in the chest.

The creature- the girl who he had seen as a creature- sits at the fork of the wild wirewood tree. Her face past the shadow of the quills of her queer cloak, it is-

Beautiful.

His heart beats like a drum, and he swallows thickly. Her eyes are a vivid blue, so brilliant and large, her cheekbones high and fine, her lips like a bow. Luminous. The lights, he realizes. Her skin is like the summer snow, where it isn’t touched by a pink like his mother’s blooms in the glass gardens. Her hair is perhaps the worst of her, matted dark, a struggle of long locks that escape her hood of quills, a startling contrast to her lily-white skin. Her foot, bare, foolish, dangles, mud touched, near past her bare and slim ankle. She is what, perhaps, a few years past ten, a girl of perhaps three and ten. He blinks. Quickly. 

“I have chased you nearly two leagues,” he tells her, and he swallows thickly, astounded at her speed and grace through the woods, in bare feet, nonetheless, against a horse, “And here I expected the Beast of the North to be more than just a girl.”

His blood is up, he can admit, his heart thundering now, as he realizes the thing they had thought was a snark or grumpkin or some other fantastical creature is just a pretty girl in a queer cloak. The Beast of the North, and it's just some girl in a queer cloak. Jon Stark nearly laughs, even as he swallows thickly past the dryness that has come to him, at the arresting look in her startling eyes.

So blue, he thinks, and he blinks quickly. 

"Be you a Child? A Shadowcat? Or are you Snark?"

She tilts her head slightly, her chest heaving. Her queer cloak of feather quivers with the heaving of her, the overlapping quills rippling and moving, and he can see how quickly how sightings of her have made the smallfolk confuse her with something supernatural. He takes a step forward.

The girl’s bare leg snaps up, and her hands- her hands so small and pale, brace themselves against the branches of the wirewood. Her skin is nearly the same color as the wood. 

“Perhaps not a Snark at all,” he tells her, lifting his hands up, and stepping back, “Instead a Child of the woods.”    

Jon can admit it.

When the girl smiles, it stops his breath, completely, for a single moment. It is a beautiful smile, and he does not wonder how on earth she had managed to stir the entire North into their older beliefs again. She is as fair as Jonquil, as wild and bewitching as Jenny with her lilies in her hair. With her wild manner and her hood, it is not so queer to him that people have become confused because of her. She has appeared in the North and stirred up trouble. He wonders, with a twisting stomach if she’s a wildling, come over the Wall.

“Will you call me a Grumpkin, next, my lord? Snark, Child- I am but a poor girl, who lives in the woods, nothing more, nothing less,” she says, sweetly, and it is a curious voice, a touch of North and- he thinks perhaps the Vale? He is not so sure. It is a lovely voice nonetheless. But it is the cadence of it that makes him dispel the thought that she is a wildling at all.

“I would rather call you by name if you would allow me,” he tells her. His voice is breathless. Jon blinks, quickly.

“Never mind my name, I ask, Lord, why you have chased me for two leagues?”

Her lips purse. She hangs so precariously in the tree that Jon wishes to lunge forward and be ready to catch her. But her grip is sure, as is her footing. She hangs in the tree as if she was born to do it.

“... I was told the Beast of the North, supernatural, is here at twilight, or the dawn, but I see no magic here, beyond your beauty,” he replies.

She blushes. She blushes, and it is so pretty that he feels his breath stolen once again. Jon blinks.

“I am Jon,” he tells her.

She bites her lip.

“And I am the Beast of the North,” she returns, laughing.

It is a bell across the woods. His heart beats yet harder. 

“Surely your parents gave you a name I can call you by,” he says, smiling-

But it is then that the girl’s smile dies. Something dark goes across her beautiful eyes. Sorrow. Terror? He is unsure.

“I am called by no man, by no parent nor kin,” she says finally, even if her voice is flat, hard, “Will that mean that you leave me alone, Lord Jon?”

He stares.

“I have brought you ill memories, my lady?”

She lifts her chin.

“I am not a lady,” she says, simply.

He inches closer.

In the fork of the weirwood’s branches, the girl stands, rippling quills. She is tall. Much taller than he expected for a girl with such small hands. He blinks.

“Stay back,” she says simply.

He stills.

“I mean you no harm,” he implores.

“Yet you have chased me for nearly two leagues,” she replies, “I may not be a lady, but I do not appreciate being hunted like an animal. Charming that you are, my Lord.”

He breathes, eyes wide.

“So you find me charming, Lady Beast?”

Her lips purse.

“Did I not just say that I am not a lady?”

“Yet you are as graceful as any lady I have spoken to,” he replies, grinning.

That at least gets him a twitch of the lips.

“Have you had little ladies in your time, Lord Jon?” 

He smiles.

“Many, actually. I boast a lady for a sister, at least. Thought woe any man to call Arya a lady,” he laughs.

She blinks. 

“You have many siblings, then, Lord Jon?”

“Aye, that I do, Lady Snark. I have five- Four living.”

Her expression falls. Slightly. Her brows crumple and her lips are bitten. 

“I am sorry for your loss,” she replies.

“She was young,” he replies, softly, “I remember very little of my other sister. But she was sweet. She loved lemon cakes, and… And she liked hearing the singers in the great hall every chance she could. My lord's father promised her a lemon tree when he left for Greyjoy Rebellion. It stands still, in our glass gardens. We call it her tree. Mother often sits in the roots of it… She was a lady. A child, but the little lady of our keep nonetheless.”

Sansa Stark was a distant dream, a lost and fading memory. He remembers her childish beauty, in an off way, remembers how she had appeared the loveliest thing he had ever known, but he does not remember her face. He doesn’t remember much of her- 

“I lost my mother to childbirth. I never knew her. Be content, Lord Jon, to remember her as well as you do.”

He looks up at the girl.

“Just Jon from you, Lady Beast. I am no great lord. Just a second son without a keep.”

She smiled, slightly.

“Still more than I am, Lord Jon. And if you insist to call me Lady, I shall call you Lord.”

A howl fills the air. The girl looks towards the sound.

“My lady, quick,” his hand goes to the hilt of his sword, Long Claw, " 'Tis a lone wolf. There is danger-" 

She frowns.

“Stay your hand my Lord, or I will hate you forever more.”

He freezes. Looks up at her.

“What- there is a wolf- they are dangerous!”

She laughs. Sweet and gentle.

“Oh no, my Lord, that is much worse. That. That is a Direwolf. ” 

It is a beast, unlike anything he has ever known. Even if he has seen its depiction all of his life, he is not ready for the visual of a fully grown direwolf in person. It is enormous, perhaps the size of the draft horse he rides, and it comes from the shadows with pulled-back teeth gleaming in the dimming light. 

His Lady Beast slips down the tree, queer cloak rippling.

"Behind me, my Lady!" he whispers, even as he tries to reach for her-

The wolf presses its enormous head against the girl, and the girl does the same. Soothes her lily-white hands against its giant maw. Jon loses his breath.

And then.

Five more wolves slip from the darkness of the forest. Young, not as large as the wolf.

"Stay your hand, Lord Jon," says the girl, and she lifts her head.

Jon- Jon feels his hand slip from his sword. The girl beams. Soft and so beautiful Jon loses his breath yet again. She is then astride the largest wolf.

Perhaps he had not been wrong, to call her a Child. Or perhaps she is snark still. He blinks, quickly.

"Farwell, Lord Jon."

The younger wolves flee into the forest, and the largest wolf is a step behind them.

“Meet me again,” he calls after her, heart in his throat.

The large direwolf stops and the Lady Beast looks over her shoulder.

She smiles. Bright and lovely as the dawn and Jon cannot think of anything more beautiful.

“Mayhaps, Lord Jon, Mayhaps!”

Chapter Text

They do not believe him. 

Jon Stark sees it, in every face around him, that his claims the Beast of the North is but a girl, wild, with eyes like sapphire and hair as dark of pitch, with mud on the soles of her feet, and a cloak of feathers as her mantle is not true.

They think I am lying.  

His father looks at him, face impassive and quiet.

“Son-”

“I saw her,” he swears, “She moved like-”

He swallows. His words feel like ash in his mouth. 

They think I am lying. Why? Why will they not believe me?

Old feelings of hurt, old feelings of the name Snow creep upon him. Did they not believe him because of who he had been? When they believe Lady Mormont without question with her own encounter with the Lady Beast? Why not him ?  

Is the name of Stark still not much for the bastard boy that carries it?

“She moved like the wind. I was on horseback, father, and I chased her for two leagues-”

Theon Greyjoy snorts. 

“Jon,” his Lady mother’s voice was soft. 

“She rode a direwolf. It was larger than my horse and her eyes- they shone with an inner light. I swear it, on my honor, the Beast of the North is a girl in a feather cloak. Like a Child of the Forest, but a human girl but not-” Jon insists. 

There is a mummer in the hall.

“Robb, did you see this Lady Beast? The direwolves?” asked his Lady Mother. 

Jon felt his heart sink. They did not believe him. They thought he was lying-

“No, Mother, I did not. No one but Jon did. We found him an hour after he ran into the woods. There was no trace of anyone else.”

Jon jerks, his head staring at his eldest brother. The boy sends him an apologetic shrug.

“I will find her,” he swore, “I will bring her before you, Father, this I promise .”

In the central seat at the highest table, Eddard Stark winces at his declaration.

Jon Stark does not care. 

A promise is a promise, and he will find the Lady Beast if it is the last he does.    

Alyane is being foolish. 

A stupid little girl. 

She knows it. Her Queen had told, again and again, that in the Realm of Men, she was not to interfere. They are not our concern. We tend unseen, that is our duty. She tends the living, sentient lands as was her duty. She is a Daughter of the North. Her allegiance and world is between the Realms of Men and the Gods. Her home is the Heart of the North. Her duty is to tend to the North from its heart and then from its flesh. She is the Promise of the Queen of the North. She is her feet. Her eyes in the Realm of Men. She can leave the Heart much more easily than the Queen. She draws less attention, as she has not given her True Name to the North. So she is not so otherworldly, as limited in the world of Men. Yet- she is no longer of the world of Men. No more should she reach for it. She knows this well. 

So Alyane knows should not see the lordling named Jon again.

She should not. 

Yet, Alyane finds herself before him, hidden in the gaps of the trees, leaping from branch to branch to follow his path when she hears his footsteps pass a weirwood. She follows his heavy footsteps as he returns to the wild wire wood tree, again and again. He calls for a Lady Beast. He prays for her .  

A moon passes, and he makes an effort to ride out every mid-morning as if he wished to find her. 

He follows wolf tracks, no matter their size, in hopes of her. He heads Wolfsong if it lifts through the trees. She has scaled the walls of Wintertown, balanced on thin and sharp rooftops and traced his journey from Winterfell to the orphanages. She has watched as he touched the faces of the young and been gentle. She has been the wind and shadow beside him as he rode hard and fast to White Harbor, siblings around him, with knights and guards aplenty. She has danced between stalls and wares she had once walked as a frightened child.

She has followed and seen and felt-

Longing to see the bewildered, aching awe she saw in him when she had smiled. 

He does not smile often. She has seen it. Felt joy lacking in the set of his shoulders. A burden in the shape of his mouth. There is sadness to him. A melancholy to his long face. Alyane feels a knowing in his temperament. An echo of the girl she was. 

That was foolish, of course. 

She was the bastard girl of a small Lord. Master of the Coin or not. Her father was mad, and her mother was dead. She had caught herself in a tangle of Ancient Magic, mercy in the grace of someone Graced by the old gods. He was the second son of the Lord of Winterfell. Warden of the North. 

His line had been made, unbroken, eight millennia ago. 

She would have been nothing to this lordling. A face in a crowd, if they had ever crossed paths before.  Yet, here she is, her gaze colored by petals of so many colors. Alyane lays flat on her stomach, peeking between the blooms of flowers from all over the realm, growing heady in the summer light.

She-

She is being foolish.

A stupid girl who should learn better. I am not of Men. I am not for Men. I should ignore them entirely. 

Yet, oh yet, does Alyane ache for humanity. She aches for the Lordling with the eyes like the silver dark of the morning mist of the North. To see his rare smile. To hear his Northern voice call for her, even if he only calls her Beast. 

He sits at the foot of a lemon tree. Eyes closed. In his hands, he holds a blue rose.

Winter roses. 

One of the symbols of her Queen. It is always upon her brow. Alyane takes it as a sign. She takes an even, deep breath. And lets it out slowly. The flowers sway in her breath, stirring as they were in the gentlest of breezes. Lordling Jon smiles. Softly, as the scent and breath reaches him. It takes him a moment. Half of it, really, is to remember he is within the enclosed glass garden. He bolts up. Stupefied. Eyes wide as he reaches for a knife at his belt. Alyane is behind him. She hooks the knife in her hand before his fingertips can close around the hilt. Her lips twitch in a smile as he looks stunned at his empty belt. 

She jolts to the delicate branches of the lemon tree. 

She hums as softly as she dares. The buds, delicate and just reblooming, surprise her. Instead of unfurling softly as she intended, the tree soaked in her song greedily, and suddenly made its fruit ripe and ready for eating. She blinked. Shifted back in surprise. She watched in horror as the fruit rained down upon poor lordling Jon. He was pelted. 

Alayne covered her mouth as he swore viciously. To cover giggles or her remorse. She is unsure. 

“Forgive me,” she called, after a moment. 

Lordling Jon stumbled to his feet. 

Turned wildly. She slipped from her perch. Smiled hesitantly. 

“I only meant to tease,” she said, earnestly as her bare feet touched gently at the soft earth beneath the lemon tree. 

His chest was heaving. 

“You're real ,” he breathed so awed it made something in her chest still, “They said you were not. But I am no liar!”

She twirled his knife. 

“Is all of Winterfell armed at all times?” She questioned. 

She saw even the girl, his sister who rarely wore dresses of her station, also carried a knife. All of his siblings did. 

They were identical. Wolves inscribed meticulously on the castle wrought steel. Dark dyed leather wrap, a gorgeous deep blue, with a pristine white ribbon dangling decoratively from the hilt. His jaw tensed. He still was looking at her as if she was-

Impossible. 

“A mandate of my Lord Father,” he explained, “... My sister Sansa, the one I mentioned? She was taken from the safety of the keep. She was only a child.”

She blinks quickly.  

“I am sorry,” she whispered, even as she offered the blade back. 

He took it gently. Touched carefully at the white ribbon. 

“You made the tree bear fruit?”

She touched softly at the red brilliant feathers of the Northern Cardinal on her cloak. Trembling fingertips touch at the brilliant feathers. 

“Yes.”

“Have you done this before?” He demanded. 

She blinked. He took a step closer. Alyane frowned. Twisted away from his view. She returned to the bed of flowers. 

Jon gasped as she slipped from his view. 

“No. This is my first time beyond Wolfswood… I try to avoid entering any Keep if I can.”

He whirled around to her. He blinked wildly.  His mouth parted in awe which made something in Alyane burst in pleasure. 

“We were told this tree would never bloom,” he said simply, “Yet, two years passed- it, bore flowers for the first time.”

“A prosperous sign,” she replies.

And she smiles. Like before, Lordling Jon's face trembles in awe. Furiously, her heart leaps and dances in her chest. 

“Hello again, Lordling,” she says. 

“Jon is fine,” he assures. 

She shakes her head. 

“Names have power.”

His brows furrow. 

“Is that why you do not tell me yours?”

She twitches. 

She remembers her Queen's face when she had asked to give her name to the North. 

“You cannot.” 

“But- I am willing! What does the world of Men have for me? Please, my Queen-”

“Child. I will tell you as plainly as I can. You cannot give your true name.” 

“But-”

“ Try .” 

And Alyane failed. 

The North did not take Alyane Stone. Would not take her name.

Even when she tried.

Again. 

And again . 

She looked at her hands. It was as her Queen said. She could not give her true name. 

“It is precious,” she says, after a moment, “It is part of you. How it is said, how you are called- It  matters, Lordling.”

“Will you not give me your name?” he begged. 

Alyane shook her head. 

“No. I cannot give it. It isn’t-”

Worthy.

“It is not mine to give anymore,” she settled on. 

A lie. Alyane did not like to lie. But she could not bear any part of her to be connected to the girl she had been before her Queen had called her Promise. 

She did not-

She did not want this Lordling to have any connection to her father, to the man who would have sullied her and called her wife, instead of daughter. 

“But… What can I call you?”

“Am I not your Lady Beast?” she says, smiling. 

He seems to stop breathing. 

“It seems horrible to call such beauty a Beast.”

Her heart- It beats sweetly within her. 

“But it is fine enough, Lordling.”

He smiles, distantly. 

“Is there no way you can call me Jon?”

She smiles, mysteriously sweet.  Then. Within her. A call. A song. Her Queen beckons her to the Heart between. She turns her head. She bites her lip.

“Lady Beast, what is it?”

“I am Called. I must go,” she whispers, worrying her fingertips against the white downy feathers of a dove.

“No- wait, I must have proof that you are real-”

Alarm sings through Alayne. 

“Why?” she asks, sharply. 

He looks at her with helpless, grey eyes. 

“No one believed me that you were real. They called me a liar-”

Alyane was called a liar more than once. She stops. Bites her lips. Quietly, she sings. Eagerly, the Glass Gardens surge with more life, at her song.   

She smiles. 

She knows her eyes glow with a fresh surge of power. She plucks at one of the peacock feathers on her cloak. She knows they are far, far from the edges of Sothoryos. Not native to the North, nearly impossible and expensive to have in Westeros. 

“Let them call you a liar now, Jon,” she whispers, and she dares to say his name. 

It is sweet, like sugar on her lips. His eyes go wide and his knees buckle as she calls it. Curiously, she realizes that she has not grasped his true name. Not… fully? Else he should have fallen to his knees completely. Perhaps Jon is short of something? A moniker? Or perhaps not saying Stark has given him room to stand. Perhaps she has not gotten the cadence of it. She twists, and she is gone from his sight. 

She slips the feather into the scabbard of his dagger.

She laughs as he whirls around to find her. 

“Please see me again,” he whispers, eyes searching. 

Searching.

Wanting to find her for moons. Alyane slips away. To the Heart. Away from the Realm of Men. Yet- her heart beast soft and sweet.