The Old Gods and The New (Sansa Stark/Margaery Tyrell)
The Seven had never done a thing for Margaery Tyrell. Nothing good, that was. Praying in the sept had never brought her anything other than a chance to whisper wicked words to whichever cousin knelt primly at her side. And when she had truly needed to have her prayers answered, her pleas had been met with resounding silence. If the Seven existed at all, they had truly and utterly abandoned her, just as they had Cersei Lannister and every other little girl who had knelt before the Maiden’s altar. The Old Gods, though, were different. They never promised anything and yet gave so much. She realised that when news of Sansa’s ascension to power in the North reached Kings Landing. The Old Gods looked after their own, and Sansa was nothing if not a creature of the North, a direwolf to the bone, no matter what people believed.
“There is once more a Stark in Winterfell,” Margaery had read aloud, her heart quickening its beat. “I am Sansa Stark, Queen in the North, and I will make those who wronged my family pay.”
Chief amongst those who thought Sansa a Tully was Margaery’s grandmother, the aptly named Queen of Thorns. Upon hearing her granddaughter read out the raven-brought message, Olenna had merely scoffed and wondered how long it would take Sansa to end up as dead as her brother.
“Tullys all end the same way in this war,” Olenna sighed. “Stubborn, stupid and deader than dead. That is what you get for taking a fish as your sigil.”
But Margaery had not been listening. She excused herself, knelt before a heart tree and prayed. When her Tarly guard her asked what she had prayed for, she told him that she asked forgiveness for worshiping the Seven and asked the Old Gods to keep her heart safe. Her words were carefully chosen. Religious awakening was not new in times of war and praying for their hearts was expected of young women. What she did not tell him was that the heart she had prayed for had not been the one fluttering in her chest, but the one held captive by the newly crowned Queen in the North. She had stolen Margaery’s heart with that reckless show of courage and compassion when she had exposed Joffrey’s true nature with little thought for her own safety.
Within a month of Margaery’s first tree-side prayer, there was another bird from the North. Stannis’ Red Priestess had been taken and with her a woman she had held captive, Balon Greyjoy’s heir. Asha Greyjoy had sworn upon her release to make the Lannisters pay for all they had done to her new queen and, following her lead, the Ironborn had made history and bent the knee.
“Now that is interesting,” Olenna had commented, taking another sip of her lemon tea. “The fish has conquered the kraken.”
“The wolf,” Margaery had corrected distractedly, trying very hard not to come over like a maiden swooning over a dashing young knight at a tourney. From her grandmother’s shrewd and lightly disapproving look, she had not succeeded.
Another month later, the news came that slaughtering the Red Priestess had brought the wildlings to Sansa Stark’s cause and that, with them at her side, Sansa had swept south and fallen upon the Freys and Boltons with all the terminal ferocity of the winter snows that came with her. News of her victory drove the marching of a Lannister army out from the capital, determined to end the Red Wolf the way the Freys had ended her brother. The colour had drained from Margaery’s face when she had heard and she took to praying in the Godswood four times a day, her grandmother’s disapproval be damned.
“Seven preserve me,” the Queen of Thorns said bitterly. “Are all my son’s children so easily swayed by a pretty face and a glittering crown?”
With the majority of the Lannister strength marching North, Kings Landing had been left vulnerable to an unexpected Dornish attack from the South, and Margaery had found herself pressed up against the wall of Ranyll Taryl’s quarters with Tyene Sand’s knife at her throat.
“My, my, aren’t you a pretty one?” the honey-haired septa had cooed, her knife cold against Margaery’s fear-flushed skin.
“Oh my good septa, you have no idea,” Margaery murmured seductively.
Tyene proved particularly susceptible to Margaery’s favoured negotiation techniques. They spent the invasion battling amongst silken bedsheets, spilling far less blood than the men clashing in the streets outside and achieving far, far more than the song of steel ever could.
Thanks to Margaery’s persuasive politics and Willas’ arrival in the city, the invasion of King’s Landing had been a stroke of luck for House Tyrell. The remaining Lannisters scattered and for once Margaery had not found herself betrothed to the latest occupant of the Iron Throne, though she was happy enough to bend the knee to Queen Myrcella Martell. Tyrells had always been good on their knees. It was how they always managed to come up smelling of roses, no matter what turn the ever waging wars of the Seven Kingdoms took.
“One thing can be said for these Dornishmen,” Olenna had conceded, Willas’ crippling conveniently forgotten, “they know the value of a woman.”
By order of the new queen, Margaery was sent with Nymeria Sand and a Tyrell and Martell escort as a peace envoy to the Queen in the North. They set out for White Harbor on a ship named The Maiden’s Spear, on which Margeary had a spacious chamber and a large, luxurious bed where she thoroughly tested the snake’s skill for bedding a rose.
“If this is how you practice politics, I can see why Myrcella insisted it be you who treated with the Red Wolf,” Nymeria said one afternoon, her eyes black and body tingling in anticipation as Margaery shrugged off her gown. She stopped her provocatively slow walk towards the bed when Nymeria’s words filtered through her lust and did not take the Dornishwoman into her bed again. For the first time in her life, she felt guilt for indulging her ever raging desires. If this was love, then she did not think she would like it.
At Maidenpool, the Greyjoys boarded the ship and escorted them up to White Harbor. From there, they travelled on horseback into The Neck where they found Kevin Lannister’s army laid to waste before the Stark host. Their column rode through the desolation of the battlefield and into the city of tents where Sansa Stark held her court. There, their Greyjoy escorts showed them to a great white tent emblazoned with the noble direwolf and inside, Margaery found a sight which would have made her grandmother smile and forget all her reservations about the northern queen.
Sansa Stark sat upon a weirwood throne, with a weirwood crown atop her blood-red hair and a weirwood sceptre in her hand. She looked not at all like the Tullys from whom it was often said that she derived her look, but like a heart tree itself - skin as pale as white wood and hair as red as their bloody leaves and sap. She was a Stark of the North and no one would ever doubt it again.
Beside the queen stood three women whose history a Greyjoy man-at-arms had told Margaery a little of during their time on sea. At Sansa’s right hand was the black-haired Asha Greyjoy who dressed all in salt-stained brown leather and a cocky grin. On Sansa’s left was the finely boyish Mya Stone, a beautiful bastard from the vale who stood with her hand on the hip of the equally beautiful blonde wildling named Val. Margaery yearned to get to know these bold women she had heard so much about, but not as much as she ached to reacquaint herself with the Queen in the North.
“My Queen,” Margeary greeted, briefly meeting Sansa’s eyes before bowing her head subserviently and going down to her knees. She clasped her shaking hands and tried to still her shaking breaths. “It is a great honour and a personal pleasure to bend my knee to you in the name of House Tyrell.”
When she raised her head, she saw that Sansa was not looking at her but at Nymeria, who had not followed Margaery’s example.
“The Dornish do not kneel,” Nymeria said defiantly.
“Unbowed. Unbent. Unbroken,” Sansa said, recalling Septa Mordane’s lessons. “My sister had a direwolf with whom you share your name.”
“Then your sister has good taste,” Nymeria countered.
Margaery saw a shadow flicker across Sansa’s face. The mention of her sister was still painful. Years had passed with no news of what had become of the youngest Stark girl.
Seemingly bored with the Dornishwoman, Sansa rose to her feet and walked gracefully over to Margaery, touching her shoulder with one snow-white hand but never looking down at her. “Leave us. I wish to treat with your envoy in private.”
The tent emptied at her command, but not before Mya Stone could whisper a few choice innuendos in her queen’s ear.
“Get up off your knees,” Sansa said when they were alone.
“But, Your Grace, we Tyrells are so good on our knees, as you would have surely found out had you married my sweet brother.” The look she gave Sansa was teasing and suggestive, exactly the sort of look she had never dared to give the sweet, innocent Sansa who had stolen her heart in King’s Landing. “Would you like me to give you a demonstration?”
Sansa’s blue eyes were like fire. Margaery wondered whether it was the crown that did it. In Margaery’s experience, they seemed to have that effect on people.
“That, I believe, would be most conducive to negotiations,” said Sansa with all the unashamed boldness of a queen.
Margaery could not hide her surprise.
Despite their coy reunion, negotiations were uneventful. Sansa was a shrewd queen and her utmost priority was securing an alliance that would put an end to the war. Her terms were reasonable. She would reign over her father’s North, her mother’s Riverlands and her cousins lands in the Vale of Arryn. Everything else would belong to King’s Landing.
“But what, Your Grace, of The Reach?” Margaery asked as they walked around the camp. She had to be mindful both of her family’s interests as well as her own desires. “Queen Myrcella has not yet laid claim to it. What are your intentions towards my beautiful homeland?”
Sansa looked thoughtful, tilting her head and gazing out at the misty, cold afternoon. “Without The Reach, Myrcella’s lands would be far inferior to my own.”
“Your lands would make up three quarters of Westeros,” Margaery agreed, “but all your current lands are feebly fertile and unable to support your people. The Reach could be your garden and vineyard, and the North would never again starve through a long winter.”
“The Westerlands would be cut off from the rest of Myrcella’s kingdom,” Sansa said. “No tenable peace could come from that.”
“Tommen, Cersei and Jaime Lannister are still live. The Westerlands still belong to the Lannisters. They will not challenge their daughter’s rule.”
“Is it true then that Jaime is acknowledging Cersei’s children as his own?” Sansa asked curiously. “I had thought it an ill-meant rumour.”
“Oh, it is quite true,” Margaery promised, smiling coyly. “He had admit to it when Cersei’s belly got too big to hide. She was in the later part of her pregnancy when she, Jaime and Tommen fled. One of Queen Myrcella’s first duties as queen was to legitimise herself, her brother and any siblings yet to come. She is the sister to kings, it does not matter that she is not a Baratheon. Her claim to the throne is as strong as Stannis’ or Renly’s ever was - stronger, even. In Dorne, it is the eldest heir who is first in line to the throne, regardless of sex. That law is now in act throughout Myrcella’s kingdom and, it would seem, in yours.”
Margaery had not begrudged or hated Cersei for the truth when it had finally and undeniably come out. Love was not something you could control, the Tyrells were more than familiar with that. As were they familiar with the rumours of how poorly Robert had treated his wife and that Lyanna Stark had gone more than willingly into Rheagar and Elia’s arms. Perhaps now Cersei could finally be happy. Margaery wondered if she would become more palatable now. She doubted it. The habit of a lifetime is hard to overcome. Especially when it had been so essential to her survival.
“What happened to the babe?” Sansa asked. She was concerned for Cersei and her children despite everything the Lannisters had done to her.
“A little girl named Joanna. She was born at Casterly Rock. The raven came just before I set sail.”
Margaery could not read Sansa’s expression, but she did not speak for a long while. Margeary had taken to watching the fur-clad Northmen busying themselves around the camp when Sansa finally spoke.
“Tywin Lannister was the cruellest man to ever live. What he did in Robert’s Rebellion and the war of The Five Kings was unspeakable, but it was his children who suffered the most. They suffered every day of their lives from what Tywin did to them. If my late Lannister husband ever did anything I am proud of, it is killing his father.”
“A sentiment I must echo,” Margaery said, eyeing Sansa curiously. She had changed, grown up. She had a perspective on the people around her that would make her queenship one that would go down in the history books. “Your Grace, what of The Reach?”
Sansa sighed and showed her into a nearby tent.
“I cannot take The Reach,” she said, letting the tent flap close behind them.
They were, Margaery realised, in Sansa’s personal chambers. It was not at all what Margaery had been expecting. When Sansa had been in King’s Landing, she had favoured beautiful pastels in silk. This place was nothing but furs in browns and shades of grey.
“Winter is coming to the neck,” Sansa said by way of explanation. “The autumn was unexpectedly long, but it finally coming to a close. Stay here a night and you will be thankful for the furs.”
Margaery could not resist dipping her head and shaking with laughter. “Did you really just say that?”
Sansa broke into a girlish smile. “Us Starks have practical words.”
“And you are so fond of reminding people of them,” Margaery countered.
“Go on then,” Sansa dared, sounding like the giggling girl that Margaery had once walked hand-n-hand with through King’s Landing’s gardens. “Put your own words into a sentence.”
“But Your Grace, I am put at such a disadvantage in your presence. My mind is not quite my own when my eyes behold your beauty, which is growing strong and has multiplied infinitely since we last met. Though, had you told me that then, I would have thought it impossible.” She had meant it to be teasingly triumphant but her voice betrayed her by coming out shaky and sincere.
Sansa’s mouth opened and froze there, absurdly recalling to Margaery’s mind her grandmother’s insistence that Sansa was a trout.
“Forgive me, your grace, it seems that my tongue is not my own in your presence either.” Margaery blushed genuinely for what was possibly the first time in her life. Sansa, for her part, had flushed cheeks of her own.
“Do you remember, Lady Margaery, the day you gave me a rose to cheer me up and then schooled me in what married life held for me?”
Margaery could feel her confidence growing. “How could I forget? To see you so distraught broke my heart. I only wish I could have done more to prevent what happened next.”
“So it was your family’s doing then?” Sansa asked, making no effort to hide her hurt.
“My grandmother employed Littlefinger to save me from my wedding night, yes, but his involving you was entirely for his own interests. We had thought to remove Tyrion also, but not by implicating him, and by extension you, in Joffrey’s death.” Margaery’s eyes fell to the floor. “It was my suggestion. I wanted to free you too. I meant to keep my promise to wed you to Highgarden.”
Sansa made a gasp that held back her tears. She had learnt no longer to cry where others could see her. “You should have known not to trust Littlefinger.”
“It seems we were not as erudite of King’s Landing politics as we thought,” Margaery said sadly, shivering at the cold. Snow was a new and unpleasant experience for the rose of Highgarden.
“No one ever is,” Sansa sighed. “I blamed you for a long time. Of anyone in King’s Landing, you were the person I would have trusted with my life. You were the one I let myself be truly honest with.”
“You should have been safe with me,” Margaery said wistfully. “If I had had any say in it, you would have been. Even my grandmother wished to keep you safe, but we do not always get what we want. I am sorry for that.”
Taking pity on her, Sansa reached for a wolf pelt and wrapped it around Margaery’s shoulders - hood coming up and over her head. She looked strangely beautiful in another’s skin. Perhaps it reminded Sansa of the North, or perhaps it touched on a need for possession that all kings and queens had inside them.
“You look good as a wolf,” Sansa told her, smoothing down the fur that framed Margaery’s face. The rose’s cheeks turned pink with a blush.
“Not half as good as you would look amongst the rosebushes of Highgarden,” Margaery countered, reaching up to take Sansa’s hand and press into it a single, thornless lavender rose.
Sansa brought it up to her nose and smelled it. It had been so long since she had smelt the sweet scent of a rose. Not since her last walk in the gardens with Margaery.
“Do you know the language of flowers, Sansa?” Margaery asked, knowing full well that she did. Sansa’s look of surprise when Margaery had long ago gifted her with a red-tipped yellow rose had assured her of that.
“Yes,” Sansa admitted, embarrassed. The young naive girl she had once been had been proud of such romantic knowledge, but the queen she was now must leave all of that behind.
“What does a lavender rose mean, Sansa? Why have I given it to you?”
“It… it means royalty,” Sansa stuttered. “And I am Queen in the North. You are here to treat with me and broker a peace.”
“Quite right, but that is not why I gave it to you. Tell me, do you know its other meaning - made double fold by its lack of thorns?”
This time, Sansa shook her head. Though Margaery was quite sure that she knew the second meaning too.
Taking a step closer to her queen, Margaery reached for the hand Sansa had curled around the rose and kissed her fine white fingers. “Lavender roses and those roses lacking thorns mean “love at first sight” - the way I have felt about you from the moment I saw you in the throne room, so sad and so beautiful.”
Sansa was trembling. “I… I can’t.”
“Why not?” Margaery whispered, drawing closer still. “You are a queen, you can do as you please.” She bowed her head and looked back up at Sansa through her thick Tyrell eyelashes. “Do I not please you, Your Grace?”
“No. I mean, yes… But the people…” Sansa began, only to have her words grown quiet when Margaery stepped back from her and began to undo the laces at the front of her gown.
“The people are not inside this tent,” Margaery argued. “I am.”
Sansa gazed, transfixed, when Margaery shrugged off her bodice, her nipples hardening in the cold winter air, whilst Sansa’s did the same from desire.
The truth was, that for all her newfound maturity, Sansa Stark was still maiden. The only person she had ever come close to being with that way was Mya, and even that had not gone beyond kisses before she had shied away - visions of Margaery’s sweet face swimming behind her eyelids.
It must have been the look in her eyes, but Margaery seemed to understand and her smile went from wicked to indulgent and loving. She drew Sansa to her and placed a chaste kiss on the corner of her mouth. When Sansa turned to deepen it, Margaery smiled and guided Sansa’s hands to her bare waist. Slowly they wandered, skimming gradually up her sides but never quite reaching where Margaery wanted them.
“Please,” she begged in a tone of submission that she knew a queen would never be able to resist.
When Sansa’s hands covered her breasts, they were as smooth and cool as the wood of a heart tree. Margaery gasped, surprising herself with its sincerity.
“That’s it,” she murmured against Sansa’s lips.
Emboldened by her response, Sansa squeezed and pinched Margaery’s nipples, swallowing her rose’s gasps and revelling in them.
Before she realised what was happening, she had Margaery on her back on the fur-strewn bed - kissing and touching as Margaery’s hands made quick work of the fastenings of Sansa’s own bodice. She sat up a little to allow Margaery to brush it off her shoulders, and immediately blushed at being revealed to her. Margaery smiled and stared at her shamelessly, not for a second trying to hide her appreciation of Sansa’s body.
“Gods, but you are beautiful,” Margaery murmured, before arching up to run kisses down from Sansa’s shoulder and take her breast into her mouth.
Sansa’s world turned white with pleasure and when her senses returned, she was on her back with Margaery atop her hips, still suckling and nipping at one breast whilst her fingers brought pleasure to the other. Unable to take it, Sansa pulled Margaery up to kiss her, her lungs screaming for lack of air but unheard over the fire that consumed her body.
“Let me see the rest of you,” Margaery begged, slipping her free hand under the material of Sansa’s skirt. “Oh sweet Sansa, let me show you what it is men go to war for, the reason they write songs of us.”
Sansa gasped, leading Margaery’s hand to where her skirt fastened over her left hip. When Margaery opened up her skirt and slipped a knee between her thighs, Sansa realised from the slickness against her thigh that somewhere along the way Margaery had lost her own skirts.
“Gods,” Sansa swore, her head arching back.
“Yes, my love,” Margaery whispered, entwining her fingers in Sansa’s blood-red hair whilst the other hand slid through the matching curls between her thighs, “I do believe they would approve.”
A long time later, after Margaery had made her see stars and Sansa had eagerly returned the favour twice over, they lay entwined among the furs - hands caressing soft, cool skin as their lips fluttered together in a never-ending kiss.
“How does it feel, my Queen in the North,” Margaery whispered, nuzzling against her lover, “to leave your maidenhood behind?”
“There are those,” Sansa countered breathily, “who would say that I am maiden still until some man has had me.”
Laughing, Margaery pressed her knee up between Sansa’s legs and watched her squirm. “All of them men with no idea of how to please a woman or how good we women are at doing just that. Tell me Sansa, do you still feel like maiden?”
Sansa’s eyes fluttered closed. “No.”
Margaery’s smile was catlike when Sansa finally opened her eyes. “I would not want to think that I had underperformed - that you were disappointed.”
“No!” Sansa exclaimed, only realising when she had said it that Margaery had been teasing her. Strangely, it did not make her feel foolish, like it once would have done, not with Margaery looking at her like that.
“Good, I would not want to think that I had disappointed my Queen.”
It was the way she said ‘my Queen’ that made Sansa shiver. She wondered what it would be like for a moment to take Margaery as her queen, but that was nonsense. That could never be. Life was not a fairytale.
“I will take The Reach,” Sansa decided. “Bran needs a wife and you need a husband. That will make The Reach mine.”
Margaery smiled like this had been her plan all along. It was a plan that sounded quite familiar to one they had once schemed up in King’s Landing.
“The Reach,” Margaery agreed, guiding Sansa’s hand back down between her thighs, “and me.”
“And you,” Sansa confirmed, surprising Margaery when she slipped powerfully inside her, pushing her onto her back and claiming her rosebud lips in a kiss.
Margaery and Bran were married a month later in Winterfell’s Godswood, but when Margaery was pushed naked into her chambers later that night, it was not Bran waiting naked for her on the bed, but her queen.
“There is once more a Stark in Winterfell,” Margaery had read aloud, her heart quickening its beat. “I am Sansa Stark, Queen in the North, and I will make those who wronged my family pay.”
Chief amongst those who thought Sansa a Tully was Margaery’s grandmother, the aptly named Queen of Thorns. Upon hearing her granddaughter read out the raven-brought message, Olenna had merely scoffed and wondered how long it would take Sansa to end up as dead as her brother.
“Tullys all end the same way in this war,” Olenna sighed. “Stubborn, stupid and deader than dead. That is what you get for taking a fish as your sigil.”
But Margaery had not been listening. She excused herself, knelt before a heart tree and prayed. When her Tarly guard her asked what she had prayed for, she told him that she asked forgiveness for worshiping the Seven and asked the Old Gods to keep her heart safe. Her words were carefully chosen. Religious awakening was not new in times of war and praying for their hearts was expected of young women. What she did not tell him was that the heart she had prayed for had not been the one fluttering in her chest, but the one held captive by the newly crowned Queen in the North. She had stolen Margaery’s heart with that reckless show of courage and compassion when she had exposed Joffrey’s true nature with little thought for her own safety.
Within a month of Margaery’s first tree-side prayer, there was another bird from the North. Stannis’ Red Priestess had been taken and with her a woman she had held captive, Balon Greyjoy’s heir. Asha Greyjoy had sworn upon her release to make the Lannisters pay for all they had done to her new queen and, following her lead, the Ironborn had made history and bent the knee.
“Now that is interesting,” Olenna had commented, taking another sip of her lemon tea. “The fish has conquered the kraken.”
“The wolf,” Margaery had corrected distractedly, trying very hard not to come over like a maiden swooning over a dashing young knight at a tourney. From her grandmother’s shrewd and lightly disapproving look, she had not succeeded.
Another month later, the news came that slaughtering the Red Priestess had brought the wildlings to Sansa Stark’s cause and that, with them at her side, Sansa had swept south and fallen upon the Freys and Boltons with all the terminal ferocity of the winter snows that came with her. News of her victory drove the marching of a Lannister army out from the capital, determined to end the Red Wolf the way the Freys had ended her brother. The colour had drained from Margaery’s face when she had heard and she took to praying in the Godswood four times a day, her grandmother’s disapproval be damned.
“Seven preserve me,” the Queen of Thorns said bitterly. “Are all my son’s children so easily swayed by a pretty face and a glittering crown?”
With the majority of the Lannister strength marching North, Kings Landing had been left vulnerable to an unexpected Dornish attack from the South, and Margaery had found herself pressed up against the wall of Ranyll Taryl’s quarters with Tyene Sand’s knife at her throat.
“My, my, aren’t you a pretty one?” the honey-haired septa had cooed, her knife cold against Margaery’s fear-flushed skin.
“Oh my good septa, you have no idea,” Margaery murmured seductively.
Tyene proved particularly susceptible to Margaery’s favoured negotiation techniques. They spent the invasion battling amongst silken bedsheets, spilling far less blood than the men clashing in the streets outside and achieving far, far more than the song of steel ever could.
Thanks to Margaery’s persuasive politics and Willas’ arrival in the city, the invasion of King’s Landing had been a stroke of luck for House Tyrell. The remaining Lannisters scattered and for once Margaery had not found herself betrothed to the latest occupant of the Iron Throne, though she was happy enough to bend the knee to Queen Myrcella Martell. Tyrells had always been good on their knees. It was how they always managed to come up smelling of roses, no matter what turn the ever waging wars of the Seven Kingdoms took.
“One thing can be said for these Dornishmen,” Olenna had conceded, Willas’ crippling conveniently forgotten, “they know the value of a woman.”
By order of the new queen, Margaery was sent with Nymeria Sand and a Tyrell and Martell escort as a peace envoy to the Queen in the North. They set out for White Harbor on a ship named The Maiden’s Spear, on which Margeary had a spacious chamber and a large, luxurious bed where she thoroughly tested the snake’s skill for bedding a rose.
“If this is how you practice politics, I can see why Myrcella insisted it be you who treated with the Red Wolf,” Nymeria said one afternoon, her eyes black and body tingling in anticipation as Margaery shrugged off her gown. She stopped her provocatively slow walk towards the bed when Nymeria’s words filtered through her lust and did not take the Dornishwoman into her bed again. For the first time in her life, she felt guilt for indulging her ever raging desires. If this was love, then she did not think she would like it.
At Maidenpool, the Greyjoys boarded the ship and escorted them up to White Harbor. From there, they travelled on horseback into The Neck where they found Kevin Lannister’s army laid to waste before the Stark host. Their column rode through the desolation of the battlefield and into the city of tents where Sansa Stark held her court. There, their Greyjoy escorts showed them to a great white tent emblazoned with the noble direwolf and inside, Margaery found a sight which would have made her grandmother smile and forget all her reservations about the northern queen.
Sansa Stark sat upon a weirwood throne, with a weirwood crown atop her blood-red hair and a weirwood sceptre in her hand. She looked not at all like the Tullys from whom it was often said that she derived her look, but like a heart tree itself - skin as pale as white wood and hair as red as their bloody leaves and sap. She was a Stark of the North and no one would ever doubt it again.
Beside the queen stood three women whose history a Greyjoy man-at-arms had told Margaery a little of during their time on sea. At Sansa’s right hand was the black-haired Asha Greyjoy who dressed all in salt-stained brown leather and a cocky grin. On Sansa’s left was the finely boyish Mya Stone, a beautiful bastard from the vale who stood with her hand on the hip of the equally beautiful blonde wildling named Val. Margaery yearned to get to know these bold women she had heard so much about, but not as much as she ached to reacquaint herself with the Queen in the North.
“My Queen,” Margeary greeted, briefly meeting Sansa’s eyes before bowing her head subserviently and going down to her knees. She clasped her shaking hands and tried to still her shaking breaths. “It is a great honour and a personal pleasure to bend my knee to you in the name of House Tyrell.”
When she raised her head, she saw that Sansa was not looking at her but at Nymeria, who had not followed Margaery’s example.
“The Dornish do not kneel,” Nymeria said defiantly.
“Unbowed. Unbent. Unbroken,” Sansa said, recalling Septa Mordane’s lessons. “My sister had a direwolf with whom you share your name.”
“Then your sister has good taste,” Nymeria countered.
Margaery saw a shadow flicker across Sansa’s face. The mention of her sister was still painful. Years had passed with no news of what had become of the youngest Stark girl.
Seemingly bored with the Dornishwoman, Sansa rose to her feet and walked gracefully over to Margaery, touching her shoulder with one snow-white hand but never looking down at her. “Leave us. I wish to treat with your envoy in private.”
The tent emptied at her command, but not before Mya Stone could whisper a few choice innuendos in her queen’s ear.
“Get up off your knees,” Sansa said when they were alone.
“But, Your Grace, we Tyrells are so good on our knees, as you would have surely found out had you married my sweet brother.” The look she gave Sansa was teasing and suggestive, exactly the sort of look she had never dared to give the sweet, innocent Sansa who had stolen her heart in King’s Landing. “Would you like me to give you a demonstration?”
Sansa’s blue eyes were like fire. Margaery wondered whether it was the crown that did it. In Margaery’s experience, they seemed to have that effect on people.
“That, I believe, would be most conducive to negotiations,” said Sansa with all the unashamed boldness of a queen.
Margaery could not hide her surprise.
Despite their coy reunion, negotiations were uneventful. Sansa was a shrewd queen and her utmost priority was securing an alliance that would put an end to the war. Her terms were reasonable. She would reign over her father’s North, her mother’s Riverlands and her cousins lands in the Vale of Arryn. Everything else would belong to King’s Landing.
“But what, Your Grace, of The Reach?” Margaery asked as they walked around the camp. She had to be mindful both of her family’s interests as well as her own desires. “Queen Myrcella has not yet laid claim to it. What are your intentions towards my beautiful homeland?”
Sansa looked thoughtful, tilting her head and gazing out at the misty, cold afternoon. “Without The Reach, Myrcella’s lands would be far inferior to my own.”
“Your lands would make up three quarters of Westeros,” Margaery agreed, “but all your current lands are feebly fertile and unable to support your people. The Reach could be your garden and vineyard, and the North would never again starve through a long winter.”
“The Westerlands would be cut off from the rest of Myrcella’s kingdom,” Sansa said. “No tenable peace could come from that.”
“Tommen, Cersei and Jaime Lannister are still live. The Westerlands still belong to the Lannisters. They will not challenge their daughter’s rule.”
“Is it true then that Jaime is acknowledging Cersei’s children as his own?” Sansa asked curiously. “I had thought it an ill-meant rumour.”
“Oh, it is quite true,” Margaery promised, smiling coyly. “He had admit to it when Cersei’s belly got too big to hide. She was in the later part of her pregnancy when she, Jaime and Tommen fled. One of Queen Myrcella’s first duties as queen was to legitimise herself, her brother and any siblings yet to come. She is the sister to kings, it does not matter that she is not a Baratheon. Her claim to the throne is as strong as Stannis’ or Renly’s ever was - stronger, even. In Dorne, it is the eldest heir who is first in line to the throne, regardless of sex. That law is now in act throughout Myrcella’s kingdom and, it would seem, in yours.”
Margaery had not begrudged or hated Cersei for the truth when it had finally and undeniably come out. Love was not something you could control, the Tyrells were more than familiar with that. As were they familiar with the rumours of how poorly Robert had treated his wife and that Lyanna Stark had gone more than willingly into Rheagar and Elia’s arms. Perhaps now Cersei could finally be happy. Margaery wondered if she would become more palatable now. She doubted it. The habit of a lifetime is hard to overcome. Especially when it had been so essential to her survival.
“What happened to the babe?” Sansa asked. She was concerned for Cersei and her children despite everything the Lannisters had done to her.
“A little girl named Joanna. She was born at Casterly Rock. The raven came just before I set sail.”
Margaery could not read Sansa’s expression, but she did not speak for a long while. Margeary had taken to watching the fur-clad Northmen busying themselves around the camp when Sansa finally spoke.
“Tywin Lannister was the cruellest man to ever live. What he did in Robert’s Rebellion and the war of The Five Kings was unspeakable, but it was his children who suffered the most. They suffered every day of their lives from what Tywin did to them. If my late Lannister husband ever did anything I am proud of, it is killing his father.”
“A sentiment I must echo,” Margaery said, eyeing Sansa curiously. She had changed, grown up. She had a perspective on the people around her that would make her queenship one that would go down in the history books. “Your Grace, what of The Reach?”
Sansa sighed and showed her into a nearby tent.
“I cannot take The Reach,” she said, letting the tent flap close behind them.
They were, Margaery realised, in Sansa’s personal chambers. It was not at all what Margaery had been expecting. When Sansa had been in King’s Landing, she had favoured beautiful pastels in silk. This place was nothing but furs in browns and shades of grey.
“Winter is coming to the neck,” Sansa said by way of explanation. “The autumn was unexpectedly long, but it finally coming to a close. Stay here a night and you will be thankful for the furs.”
Margaery could not resist dipping her head and shaking with laughter. “Did you really just say that?”
Sansa broke into a girlish smile. “Us Starks have practical words.”
“And you are so fond of reminding people of them,” Margaery countered.
“Go on then,” Sansa dared, sounding like the giggling girl that Margaery had once walked hand-n-hand with through King’s Landing’s gardens. “Put your own words into a sentence.”
“But Your Grace, I am put at such a disadvantage in your presence. My mind is not quite my own when my eyes behold your beauty, which is growing strong and has multiplied infinitely since we last met. Though, had you told me that then, I would have thought it impossible.” She had meant it to be teasingly triumphant but her voice betrayed her by coming out shaky and sincere.
Sansa’s mouth opened and froze there, absurdly recalling to Margaery’s mind her grandmother’s insistence that Sansa was a trout.
“Forgive me, your grace, it seems that my tongue is not my own in your presence either.” Margaery blushed genuinely for what was possibly the first time in her life. Sansa, for her part, had flushed cheeks of her own.
“Do you remember, Lady Margaery, the day you gave me a rose to cheer me up and then schooled me in what married life held for me?”
Margaery could feel her confidence growing. “How could I forget? To see you so distraught broke my heart. I only wish I could have done more to prevent what happened next.”
“So it was your family’s doing then?” Sansa asked, making no effort to hide her hurt.
“My grandmother employed Littlefinger to save me from my wedding night, yes, but his involving you was entirely for his own interests. We had thought to remove Tyrion also, but not by implicating him, and by extension you, in Joffrey’s death.” Margaery’s eyes fell to the floor. “It was my suggestion. I wanted to free you too. I meant to keep my promise to wed you to Highgarden.”
Sansa made a gasp that held back her tears. She had learnt no longer to cry where others could see her. “You should have known not to trust Littlefinger.”
“It seems we were not as erudite of King’s Landing politics as we thought,” Margaery said sadly, shivering at the cold. Snow was a new and unpleasant experience for the rose of Highgarden.
“No one ever is,” Sansa sighed. “I blamed you for a long time. Of anyone in King’s Landing, you were the person I would have trusted with my life. You were the one I let myself be truly honest with.”
“You should have been safe with me,” Margaery said wistfully. “If I had had any say in it, you would have been. Even my grandmother wished to keep you safe, but we do not always get what we want. I am sorry for that.”
Taking pity on her, Sansa reached for a wolf pelt and wrapped it around Margaery’s shoulders - hood coming up and over her head. She looked strangely beautiful in another’s skin. Perhaps it reminded Sansa of the North, or perhaps it touched on a need for possession that all kings and queens had inside them.
“You look good as a wolf,” Sansa told her, smoothing down the fur that framed Margaery’s face. The rose’s cheeks turned pink with a blush.
“Not half as good as you would look amongst the rosebushes of Highgarden,” Margaery countered, reaching up to take Sansa’s hand and press into it a single, thornless lavender rose.
Sansa brought it up to her nose and smelled it. It had been so long since she had smelt the sweet scent of a rose. Not since her last walk in the gardens with Margaery.
“Do you know the language of flowers, Sansa?” Margaery asked, knowing full well that she did. Sansa’s look of surprise when Margaery had long ago gifted her with a red-tipped yellow rose had assured her of that.
“Yes,” Sansa admitted, embarrassed. The young naive girl she had once been had been proud of such romantic knowledge, but the queen she was now must leave all of that behind.
“What does a lavender rose mean, Sansa? Why have I given it to you?”
“It… it means royalty,” Sansa stuttered. “And I am Queen in the North. You are here to treat with me and broker a peace.”
“Quite right, but that is not why I gave it to you. Tell me, do you know its other meaning - made double fold by its lack of thorns?”
This time, Sansa shook her head. Though Margaery was quite sure that she knew the second meaning too.
Taking a step closer to her queen, Margaery reached for the hand Sansa had curled around the rose and kissed her fine white fingers. “Lavender roses and those roses lacking thorns mean “love at first sight” - the way I have felt about you from the moment I saw you in the throne room, so sad and so beautiful.”
Sansa was trembling. “I… I can’t.”
“Why not?” Margaery whispered, drawing closer still. “You are a queen, you can do as you please.” She bowed her head and looked back up at Sansa through her thick Tyrell eyelashes. “Do I not please you, Your Grace?”
“No. I mean, yes… But the people…” Sansa began, only to have her words grown quiet when Margaery stepped back from her and began to undo the laces at the front of her gown.
“The people are not inside this tent,” Margaery argued. “I am.”
Sansa gazed, transfixed, when Margaery shrugged off her bodice, her nipples hardening in the cold winter air, whilst Sansa’s did the same from desire.
The truth was, that for all her newfound maturity, Sansa Stark was still maiden. The only person she had ever come close to being with that way was Mya, and even that had not gone beyond kisses before she had shied away - visions of Margaery’s sweet face swimming behind her eyelids.
It must have been the look in her eyes, but Margaery seemed to understand and her smile went from wicked to indulgent and loving. She drew Sansa to her and placed a chaste kiss on the corner of her mouth. When Sansa turned to deepen it, Margaery smiled and guided Sansa’s hands to her bare waist. Slowly they wandered, skimming gradually up her sides but never quite reaching where Margaery wanted them.
“Please,” she begged in a tone of submission that she knew a queen would never be able to resist.
When Sansa’s hands covered her breasts, they were as smooth and cool as the wood of a heart tree. Margaery gasped, surprising herself with its sincerity.
“That’s it,” she murmured against Sansa’s lips.
Emboldened by her response, Sansa squeezed and pinched Margaery’s nipples, swallowing her rose’s gasps and revelling in them.
Before she realised what was happening, she had Margaery on her back on the fur-strewn bed - kissing and touching as Margaery’s hands made quick work of the fastenings of Sansa’s own bodice. She sat up a little to allow Margaery to brush it off her shoulders, and immediately blushed at being revealed to her. Margaery smiled and stared at her shamelessly, not for a second trying to hide her appreciation of Sansa’s body.
“Gods, but you are beautiful,” Margaery murmured, before arching up to run kisses down from Sansa’s shoulder and take her breast into her mouth.
Sansa’s world turned white with pleasure and when her senses returned, she was on her back with Margaery atop her hips, still suckling and nipping at one breast whilst her fingers brought pleasure to the other. Unable to take it, Sansa pulled Margaery up to kiss her, her lungs screaming for lack of air but unheard over the fire that consumed her body.
“Let me see the rest of you,” Margaery begged, slipping her free hand under the material of Sansa’s skirt. “Oh sweet Sansa, let me show you what it is men go to war for, the reason they write songs of us.”
Sansa gasped, leading Margaery’s hand to where her skirt fastened over her left hip. When Margaery opened up her skirt and slipped a knee between her thighs, Sansa realised from the slickness against her thigh that somewhere along the way Margaery had lost her own skirts.
“Gods,” Sansa swore, her head arching back.
“Yes, my love,” Margaery whispered, entwining her fingers in Sansa’s blood-red hair whilst the other hand slid through the matching curls between her thighs, “I do believe they would approve.”
A long time later, after Margaery had made her see stars and Sansa had eagerly returned the favour twice over, they lay entwined among the furs - hands caressing soft, cool skin as their lips fluttered together in a never-ending kiss.
“How does it feel, my Queen in the North,” Margaery whispered, nuzzling against her lover, “to leave your maidenhood behind?”
“There are those,” Sansa countered breathily, “who would say that I am maiden still until some man has had me.”
Laughing, Margaery pressed her knee up between Sansa’s legs and watched her squirm. “All of them men with no idea of how to please a woman or how good we women are at doing just that. Tell me Sansa, do you still feel like maiden?”
Sansa’s eyes fluttered closed. “No.”
Margaery’s smile was catlike when Sansa finally opened her eyes. “I would not want to think that I had underperformed - that you were disappointed.”
“No!” Sansa exclaimed, only realising when she had said it that Margaery had been teasing her. Strangely, it did not make her feel foolish, like it once would have done, not with Margaery looking at her like that.
“Good, I would not want to think that I had disappointed my Queen.”
It was the way she said ‘my Queen’ that made Sansa shiver. She wondered what it would be like for a moment to take Margaery as her queen, but that was nonsense. That could never be. Life was not a fairytale.
“I will take The Reach,” Sansa decided. “Bran needs a wife and you need a husband. That will make The Reach mine.”
Margaery smiled like this had been her plan all along. It was a plan that sounded quite familiar to one they had once schemed up in King’s Landing.
“The Reach,” Margaery agreed, guiding Sansa’s hand back down between her thighs, “and me.”
“And you,” Sansa confirmed, surprising Margaery when she slipped powerfully inside her, pushing her onto her back and claiming her rosebud lips in a kiss.
Margaery and Bran were married a month later in Winterfell’s Godswood, but when Margaery was pushed naked into her chambers later that night, it was not Bran waiting naked for her on the bed, but her queen.