Fic: The Maiden in the Tower (2/?)
Title: The Maiden in the Tower
Chapter One: The Farmer's Tale
Rating: M
Warnings: Allusions to canon sexual abuse, suicide/suicide ideation
Word Count: 2,712
Characters and Pairings: SanSan, Jaime/Brienne, Petyr Baelish, the Elder Brother, Bran Stark, Arya Stark, Jaime Lannister, Brienne of Tarth, Lady Stonehart and co.
Summary: There's a story that the smallfolk tell about Sansa Stark and the night she threw herself from the Eyrie. Westeros is six years into winter, and two unlikely people find their way to the Vale where they find out an unlikely truth about the night that Sansa Stark was supposed to have died and the light that can be still be seen shining from the Eyrie. WIP.
---
"They call 'er the Maiden in the Tower. Turned out not be much of a maiden, but still," the man said over the rim of his tankard. "Aye, that Lady Stark. Claimed to be a virgin til the end, but then again, who would want to own to having fucked the Imp? Flung herself off the tallest tower in the Eyrie the night she was supposed to be married to Harry the Heir. Not that it matters much with 'im dead now, an' all."
The girl, once called Arya, now wearing the face of a peasant girl named Eirine, sits back in the corner of the pub, calming sipping her ale without truly drinking it. The Vale was one of the last safe places in Westeros. Six years into winter, and they have not yet been disturbed by the Others slowly making their way down the swathes of open plains stretching across the North and the Riverlands. As the other kingdoms fell, the Vale boomed, crowded with pale, emaciated refugees and fat lordlings hoping to wait out the siege until spring, hidden inside the mountains that the Others appear to be unable to cross.
Her sister is dead. Her sister is a song herself, now, the passing imprint of a story. A thing to be mocked, the ironic Maiden in the Tower. Still, she turns her ear towards the drunk tenant farmer repeating the story that, Eirine thinks, will soon become a song.
(How fitting, the eleven year old who lies in wait in the back of her mind thinks. She may not have become a queen, but Sansa will still go down in history in a song.)
He's got quite the bit of a crowd. Hungry, Eirine thinks. Not enough food to go around, even with all the supplies and stores brought in from Essos. The greasy stew she's been pushing around with her spoon cost thrice as much as it did four years ago. So instead the villagers fill their bellies with ale. Her eyes scan the room, an old habit, falling upon a large, broad-shouldered man in the robes of a Brother, his face masked in shadows.
"They still say you can see 'er at night, Lady Stark-well, Lady Lannister-in 'er tower. Sometimes, when the sky is clear, and all the lights are out, you can look up to the Eyrie as abandoned as it is, and see the light on, in the tallest room in the tallest tower. Some say you can hear 'er wailing in her shame, before the light goes out. That's when you know 'er ghost has thrown herself off again, and let the wind drop 'er down into the rocks. Or maybe let the wind bring her soul back to the Seven Heavens. No flying away into the night like she did when she murdered the Mad King Joffrey. Aye, she wanted to die. That was what, some four years ago now?"
The crowd murmurs in agreement.
"Such a waste," the farmer concludes. "She was a pretty one, they say. Even when she was playing at being Lord Baelish's bastard, not the highborn maid that she was."
The Brother rustles in his seat, one of the layers in his thick robes shifting to reveal a sword belt, the hilt of sword too nice to belong to some common begging brother. Eirine subtly cranes her neck to look at his face. Could it be? But how? (Then again, she thinks, the same could be said of herself. She may not have found Arya Stark along the road home, but she was no longer simply no one.)
The lighting shifts-a serving girl lights more candles-and the Brother does not shift into the shadows in time, the light illuminating old familiar scars.
How? Eirine thinks. The Hound is dead. Arya Stark left him for dead. Years ago. Gods, it seems like lifetimes ago. Lifetimes ago, indeed; there are several names and lives and faces between Eirine Stone and Arya Stark. The winter had made fools of them all, from Castle Back to Dorne. (Well, the girl thinks. Perhaps not Dorne. Not yet. Winter and the Others have not reached them. Yet. But all men can die.)
Except, it seems, Sandor Clegane.
---
She lives on in his dreams. Lives on to be his tormenter, his jailer. Before the Quiet Isle fell to the Others, he would spend the time the Elder Brother allotted for him to pray knelt awkwardly before the Maiden, thinking on her. Where the statue of the Maiden stood, there she was-hands outstretched, hair falling in curls to her waist. Stone. A dead thing, a girl forever a maiden, a small, gentle smile on her cold face.
No, this bloody nightmarish winter could come and go and Sansa Stark would still be the Maiden. He would kneel before her at night, and she would raise his dagger to her throat and drag it across her delicate pale skin. Or she would stumble and fall down the stairs of the Serpentine, over and under herself again, and at the bottom she would lay in a blossoming red heap, streams of red gurgling from her broken body. He has found peace, or whatever the buggering Elder Brother would have called it, in the daytime.
But never in the night.
They had fled in time; the Elder Brother was no moron or stubborn ass. He had seen the signs of impending doom and sent ravens south, asking for sanctuary for him and his simple brothers. Littlefucker had answered with a most gracious-and safest, Sandor begrudgingly admits-offer to host the brothers of the Quiet Isle with the rest of his household at the Gates of the Moon, with all the protection the Vale had to provide in these dark times.
And so here he is, Sansa Stark's ghost his most constant companion in the place where she died.
At least there's ale, here. Sandor has always found life (and Sansa Stark) much more stomachable if he's drunk, and there was a distinct wanting for Dornish sour on the Quiet Island.
The crowd is livelier, had been the past few weeks, since word came from King's Landing that Cersei, the fucking bitch queen, was dead, found face down in her pillows one morning, blue in the lips and without a breath in her body.
No one spoke of murder; there were too many directions for the finger to point for any accusation to end well for those who had decided to remain in King's Landing as winter's grip drew nearer. Instead those with the motive and intent slunk quietly into mourning, tensely going through the courtesies of a queen's funeral and moving on with quiet, tip-toed steps.
And so it is the disgraced Jaime Lannister who now serves as regent of the rather broken realm.
Politics, it seems, is a game for summer. In winter, it is only death that rules.
He wonders how Baelish's plan all fell apart, before the little Lord Arryn's miraculous recovery from his fits and trembling. It's known that the Septa who examined the girl had found no sign of her maidenhead, and instead Harry the bleeding Heir went and hitched himself to a Royce, making himself even more heirs (and bastards) in years since, waiting on the boy to up and die already while his recovery slipped away. But with the Riverlands overrun with plague and the walking dead, Littlefinger appears to be in no hurry to hasten his leave from the Vale, and is intent on making the boy live however long and painfully as it may be.
Which, of course, was the purpose of his offer to the Elder Brother.
The farmer, finished with this tale, begins another, of a Dragon Queen across the sea. Sandor, quite done with stories and people for the night, leaves his tankard and half a piece of silver on the table.
He shirks out of the inn, not noticing the slip of a girl trailing behind him.
---
It's too much of an easy thing, so slit the scullery maid's throat and take on her face. Mollye, she is now, a face much easier to wear than pretty Eirine's, who attracted far too much attention in places like dirty, crowded Inns.
She won't go back.
She killed Cersei. It was full circle. She doesn't have to go back now... but she also doesn't have anywhere else to go. A few years ago she would have searched out Jon at the Wall, but he is dead. Bran, missing. Rickon, nowhere to be found. And Robb... dead, almost longest of all. And Sansa. Perhaps she was drawn here because it was the closest grave. (Not that her sister had one, her bones coming to rest upon the battered rocks under the Eyrie.)
She is not unused to hard labor, and waits out the night to formulate a plan. She killed Cersei-would have killed Joffrey too, if the bugger hadn't already been dead. Her father is avenged. The least she can do is take care of the man most responsible for Sansa's death... she killed a queen. The Lord Baelish would be of little consequence after a queen, after a Lannister.
Mollye chatters idly with her fellow maids, tending to the fires and the kitchens, scrubbing her hands coarse and calloused. It is not until midday that she lays eyes upon Lord Baelish and the Elder Brother, sequestered together in his solar (Lord Royce's solar), and Mollye brings new coals for the fire.
They speak freely around her, a baseborn maid of dim complexion and dull mind.
"My Lord Baelish," the Elder Brother says, voice low. "I am not certain how much longer the boy will be able to... we may have to soon concede that it would be a better kindness to let him slip away peacefully, rather than to keep him alive in such a state as he is in now."
She makes it appear that she is not dragging the motions along to tend to the fire; she does not presume to think that they are paying much mind to her, but it would not be smart to dwell, no matter how much she wishes to hear the conversation.
"Brother..." Littlefinger begins. "This boy is the last son of the House of Arryn. He is the only surviving member of House Tully, and is all I have left of my dear, dead wife."
"I... understand," the Brother responds carefully. "I am afraid, though, my lord, that there is not much left that I can do for him."
"He must be kept alive. No matter the cost. I will pay it."
Oh, Mollye thinks. You will pay. I will get the full truth of it, and then you will pay. She does not easily believe the farmer's tale, but all stories begin with seeds of truths, before they are sown as lies to feed the smallfolk.
She looks to the Elder Brother. She thinks she might want the truth of it from him, too, of how the Hound came to live and breathe and walk, when Arya Stark left him for dead. She did not kill the Hound, but Arya Stark denied him the mercy of a quick death. It was something worse she did, Mollye now knows. But mercy is not a gift chastely given, the lover's breath, a quick and painless death. Ayra Stark had no love lost for Sandor Clegane.
"What we will need, to keep the young lord alive--"
Mollye stands, quietly collecting her things and moving noiselessly from the room. "It will be done," she hears Littlefinger say, dismissing the Elder Brother with assertions that men will be sent for the sought-after ingredient. The two men follow out after her, paying no heed to the mousy maid taking calculated steps a few paces ahead of them.
She chooses the path the Elder Brother will take, back to his humble chambers on the ground floor.
She does not hesitate at the hulking figure waiting outside the Elder Brother's rooms, but her measured steps, while they do not slow, become smaller. Just a fraction. Just for-
"Brother Sandor," the Elder Brother rumbles. "Thank you for waiting. Let us discuss these matters inside..."
Arya Stark had no love lost for the Hound. However, he still may be of use to her, his dying words still on her mind.
He has cause to kill Littlefinger as well.
---
"I still haven't a clue how Baelish hasn't put it together yet. He has bleeding spies all over the castle." The hood is gone, revealing the scars that would undoubtedly reveal the man who owned them. "He must know I'm here."
"Probably," the Elder Brother agrees. "But no doubt he finds it more astute to not mention it. He may come to you in time, come to bargain with the man you once were, only to find that a new one has taken his place."
"When?" Sandor rasps, back to the Elder Brother, looking determinedly out the window up to the Eyrie, obscured by clouds and the afternoon's storm of flurries. "And bugger, why?"
It is almost like King's Landing again, the Gates this winter, almost driving him back into drink. Littlefucker would be no kinder master than any Lannister, and would be must smarter.
The Elder Brother takes a drought of spiced wine. "He is running out of time. Young Sweetrobin is on his deathbed-because of Lord Baelish's doing, of course, but I believe Baelish never wanted it to progress this far, at least, not before the Lady Sansa ruined his... plans. He has not poisoned the boy in years, but the long term effects of the poison in his body has ruined it. If Robert dies, then he has no power here. The Lords of the Vale will run him out before the boy's body is cold."
"I should have gone. When I had the chance." His voice is gruff, hand working hard over the ruined muscle of his thigh. "You knew, and you told me to stay away."
"I did not know if the girl was here of her own accord or not. She seemed to be safest with Lord Baelish," he counters, voice still infuriatingly calm. Safer than with you, you lame, angry drunk, the sentence hangs, unfinished. The twisted muscle in Sandor's leg twinges, the limb flaring with pain sharper than fire. It is a much different pain than a burn, these strange rebirths he has experienced.
He reigns in his anger the best he is able; his voice is still terse, temper roiling beneath the tightly-coiled surface. "And then she died."
"Hmm..." The Elder Brother stands, joining Sandor at the window. "You've heard the song about her, the Maiden in the Tower?"
"About her ghost." He remembers the farmer's irreverent words, hooting laughter, the jeers of the common men.
"That's what the song says, yes."
"What about it?" Sandor grits, turning away from the window and the tower where Sansa Stark threw herself to her untimely death. (A mercy, he reminds himself. A mercy. Death is mercy. Death would have been a mercy for him to, rather than this penniless and useless existence.)
"The truth may not be... quite as simple."
Sandor growls. "I'll try to follow."
The Elder Brother laughs kindly, shaking his head. "If this is how your temper flares at even the mere mention of the lady... look at me." The Elder Brother grows somber, and when he speaks again, his voice is grave. "Lord Baelish has gone mad with paranoia, mad with power. He is a small man who has climbed too high, and is about to be toppled. He has gone to lengths that are beyond the realm of what most would call sane."
"And?"
A gust of wind clears the snow for a scant moment, revealing a barest glimpse of the Eyrie, miles above their heads.
"Sansa Stark may very well have never left that tower like the stories say."
It hits him in the belly like a fist, or the pommel of a sword. The snow picks up again, clouding over the high-away castle made of snow. "You mean-"
"Sansa Stark may very well be alive."
---
( prologue | masterpost | chapter two )
Chapter One: The Farmer's Tale
Rating: M
Warnings: Allusions to canon sexual abuse, suicide/suicide ideation
Word Count: 2,712
Characters and Pairings: SanSan, Jaime/Brienne, Petyr Baelish, the Elder Brother, Bran Stark, Arya Stark, Jaime Lannister, Brienne of Tarth, Lady Stonehart and co.
Summary: There's a story that the smallfolk tell about Sansa Stark and the night she threw herself from the Eyrie. Westeros is six years into winter, and two unlikely people find their way to the Vale where they find out an unlikely truth about the night that Sansa Stark was supposed to have died and the light that can be still be seen shining from the Eyrie. WIP.
---
"They call 'er the Maiden in the Tower. Turned out not be much of a maiden, but still," the man said over the rim of his tankard. "Aye, that Lady Stark. Claimed to be a virgin til the end, but then again, who would want to own to having fucked the Imp? Flung herself off the tallest tower in the Eyrie the night she was supposed to be married to Harry the Heir. Not that it matters much with 'im dead now, an' all."
The girl, once called Arya, now wearing the face of a peasant girl named Eirine, sits back in the corner of the pub, calming sipping her ale without truly drinking it. The Vale was one of the last safe places in Westeros. Six years into winter, and they have not yet been disturbed by the Others slowly making their way down the swathes of open plains stretching across the North and the Riverlands. As the other kingdoms fell, the Vale boomed, crowded with pale, emaciated refugees and fat lordlings hoping to wait out the siege until spring, hidden inside the mountains that the Others appear to be unable to cross.
Her sister is dead. Her sister is a song herself, now, the passing imprint of a story. A thing to be mocked, the ironic Maiden in the Tower. Still, she turns her ear towards the drunk tenant farmer repeating the story that, Eirine thinks, will soon become a song.
(How fitting, the eleven year old who lies in wait in the back of her mind thinks. She may not have become a queen, but Sansa will still go down in history in a song.)
He's got quite the bit of a crowd. Hungry, Eirine thinks. Not enough food to go around, even with all the supplies and stores brought in from Essos. The greasy stew she's been pushing around with her spoon cost thrice as much as it did four years ago. So instead the villagers fill their bellies with ale. Her eyes scan the room, an old habit, falling upon a large, broad-shouldered man in the robes of a Brother, his face masked in shadows.
"They still say you can see 'er at night, Lady Stark-well, Lady Lannister-in 'er tower. Sometimes, when the sky is clear, and all the lights are out, you can look up to the Eyrie as abandoned as it is, and see the light on, in the tallest room in the tallest tower. Some say you can hear 'er wailing in her shame, before the light goes out. That's when you know 'er ghost has thrown herself off again, and let the wind drop 'er down into the rocks. Or maybe let the wind bring her soul back to the Seven Heavens. No flying away into the night like she did when she murdered the Mad King Joffrey. Aye, she wanted to die. That was what, some four years ago now?"
The crowd murmurs in agreement.
"Such a waste," the farmer concludes. "She was a pretty one, they say. Even when she was playing at being Lord Baelish's bastard, not the highborn maid that she was."
The Brother rustles in his seat, one of the layers in his thick robes shifting to reveal a sword belt, the hilt of sword too nice to belong to some common begging brother. Eirine subtly cranes her neck to look at his face. Could it be? But how? (Then again, she thinks, the same could be said of herself. She may not have found Arya Stark along the road home, but she was no longer simply no one.)
The lighting shifts-a serving girl lights more candles-and the Brother does not shift into the shadows in time, the light illuminating old familiar scars.
How? Eirine thinks. The Hound is dead. Arya Stark left him for dead. Years ago. Gods, it seems like lifetimes ago. Lifetimes ago, indeed; there are several names and lives and faces between Eirine Stone and Arya Stark. The winter had made fools of them all, from Castle Back to Dorne. (Well, the girl thinks. Perhaps not Dorne. Not yet. Winter and the Others have not reached them. Yet. But all men can die.)
Except, it seems, Sandor Clegane.
---
She lives on in his dreams. Lives on to be his tormenter, his jailer. Before the Quiet Isle fell to the Others, he would spend the time the Elder Brother allotted for him to pray knelt awkwardly before the Maiden, thinking on her. Where the statue of the Maiden stood, there she was-hands outstretched, hair falling in curls to her waist. Stone. A dead thing, a girl forever a maiden, a small, gentle smile on her cold face.
No, this bloody nightmarish winter could come and go and Sansa Stark would still be the Maiden. He would kneel before her at night, and she would raise his dagger to her throat and drag it across her delicate pale skin. Or she would stumble and fall down the stairs of the Serpentine, over and under herself again, and at the bottom she would lay in a blossoming red heap, streams of red gurgling from her broken body. He has found peace, or whatever the buggering Elder Brother would have called it, in the daytime.
But never in the night.
They had fled in time; the Elder Brother was no moron or stubborn ass. He had seen the signs of impending doom and sent ravens south, asking for sanctuary for him and his simple brothers. Littlefucker had answered with a most gracious-and safest, Sandor begrudgingly admits-offer to host the brothers of the Quiet Isle with the rest of his household at the Gates of the Moon, with all the protection the Vale had to provide in these dark times.
And so here he is, Sansa Stark's ghost his most constant companion in the place where she died.
At least there's ale, here. Sandor has always found life (and Sansa Stark) much more stomachable if he's drunk, and there was a distinct wanting for Dornish sour on the Quiet Island.
The crowd is livelier, had been the past few weeks, since word came from King's Landing that Cersei, the fucking bitch queen, was dead, found face down in her pillows one morning, blue in the lips and without a breath in her body.
No one spoke of murder; there were too many directions for the finger to point for any accusation to end well for those who had decided to remain in King's Landing as winter's grip drew nearer. Instead those with the motive and intent slunk quietly into mourning, tensely going through the courtesies of a queen's funeral and moving on with quiet, tip-toed steps.
And so it is the disgraced Jaime Lannister who now serves as regent of the rather broken realm.
Politics, it seems, is a game for summer. In winter, it is only death that rules.
He wonders how Baelish's plan all fell apart, before the little Lord Arryn's miraculous recovery from his fits and trembling. It's known that the Septa who examined the girl had found no sign of her maidenhead, and instead Harry the bleeding Heir went and hitched himself to a Royce, making himself even more heirs (and bastards) in years since, waiting on the boy to up and die already while his recovery slipped away. But with the Riverlands overrun with plague and the walking dead, Littlefinger appears to be in no hurry to hasten his leave from the Vale, and is intent on making the boy live however long and painfully as it may be.
Which, of course, was the purpose of his offer to the Elder Brother.
The farmer, finished with this tale, begins another, of a Dragon Queen across the sea. Sandor, quite done with stories and people for the night, leaves his tankard and half a piece of silver on the table.
He shirks out of the inn, not noticing the slip of a girl trailing behind him.
---
It's too much of an easy thing, so slit the scullery maid's throat and take on her face. Mollye, she is now, a face much easier to wear than pretty Eirine's, who attracted far too much attention in places like dirty, crowded Inns.
She won't go back.
She killed Cersei. It was full circle. She doesn't have to go back now... but she also doesn't have anywhere else to go. A few years ago she would have searched out Jon at the Wall, but he is dead. Bran, missing. Rickon, nowhere to be found. And Robb... dead, almost longest of all. And Sansa. Perhaps she was drawn here because it was the closest grave. (Not that her sister had one, her bones coming to rest upon the battered rocks under the Eyrie.)
She is not unused to hard labor, and waits out the night to formulate a plan. She killed Cersei-would have killed Joffrey too, if the bugger hadn't already been dead. Her father is avenged. The least she can do is take care of the man most responsible for Sansa's death... she killed a queen. The Lord Baelish would be of little consequence after a queen, after a Lannister.
Mollye chatters idly with her fellow maids, tending to the fires and the kitchens, scrubbing her hands coarse and calloused. It is not until midday that she lays eyes upon Lord Baelish and the Elder Brother, sequestered together in his solar (Lord Royce's solar), and Mollye brings new coals for the fire.
They speak freely around her, a baseborn maid of dim complexion and dull mind.
"My Lord Baelish," the Elder Brother says, voice low. "I am not certain how much longer the boy will be able to... we may have to soon concede that it would be a better kindness to let him slip away peacefully, rather than to keep him alive in such a state as he is in now."
She makes it appear that she is not dragging the motions along to tend to the fire; she does not presume to think that they are paying much mind to her, but it would not be smart to dwell, no matter how much she wishes to hear the conversation.
"Brother..." Littlefinger begins. "This boy is the last son of the House of Arryn. He is the only surviving member of House Tully, and is all I have left of my dear, dead wife."
"I... understand," the Brother responds carefully. "I am afraid, though, my lord, that there is not much left that I can do for him."
"He must be kept alive. No matter the cost. I will pay it."
Oh, Mollye thinks. You will pay. I will get the full truth of it, and then you will pay. She does not easily believe the farmer's tale, but all stories begin with seeds of truths, before they are sown as lies to feed the smallfolk.
She looks to the Elder Brother. She thinks she might want the truth of it from him, too, of how the Hound came to live and breathe and walk, when Arya Stark left him for dead. She did not kill the Hound, but Arya Stark denied him the mercy of a quick death. It was something worse she did, Mollye now knows. But mercy is not a gift chastely given, the lover's breath, a quick and painless death. Ayra Stark had no love lost for Sandor Clegane.
"What we will need, to keep the young lord alive--"
Mollye stands, quietly collecting her things and moving noiselessly from the room. "It will be done," she hears Littlefinger say, dismissing the Elder Brother with assertions that men will be sent for the sought-after ingredient. The two men follow out after her, paying no heed to the mousy maid taking calculated steps a few paces ahead of them.
She chooses the path the Elder Brother will take, back to his humble chambers on the ground floor.
She does not hesitate at the hulking figure waiting outside the Elder Brother's rooms, but her measured steps, while they do not slow, become smaller. Just a fraction. Just for-
"Brother Sandor," the Elder Brother rumbles. "Thank you for waiting. Let us discuss these matters inside..."
Arya Stark had no love lost for the Hound. However, he still may be of use to her, his dying words still on her mind.
He has cause to kill Littlefinger as well.
---
"I still haven't a clue how Baelish hasn't put it together yet. He has bleeding spies all over the castle." The hood is gone, revealing the scars that would undoubtedly reveal the man who owned them. "He must know I'm here."
"Probably," the Elder Brother agrees. "But no doubt he finds it more astute to not mention it. He may come to you in time, come to bargain with the man you once were, only to find that a new one has taken his place."
"When?" Sandor rasps, back to the Elder Brother, looking determinedly out the window up to the Eyrie, obscured by clouds and the afternoon's storm of flurries. "And bugger, why?"
It is almost like King's Landing again, the Gates this winter, almost driving him back into drink. Littlefucker would be no kinder master than any Lannister, and would be must smarter.
The Elder Brother takes a drought of spiced wine. "He is running out of time. Young Sweetrobin is on his deathbed-because of Lord Baelish's doing, of course, but I believe Baelish never wanted it to progress this far, at least, not before the Lady Sansa ruined his... plans. He has not poisoned the boy in years, but the long term effects of the poison in his body has ruined it. If Robert dies, then he has no power here. The Lords of the Vale will run him out before the boy's body is cold."
"I should have gone. When I had the chance." His voice is gruff, hand working hard over the ruined muscle of his thigh. "You knew, and you told me to stay away."
"I did not know if the girl was here of her own accord or not. She seemed to be safest with Lord Baelish," he counters, voice still infuriatingly calm. Safer than with you, you lame, angry drunk, the sentence hangs, unfinished. The twisted muscle in Sandor's leg twinges, the limb flaring with pain sharper than fire. It is a much different pain than a burn, these strange rebirths he has experienced.
He reigns in his anger the best he is able; his voice is still terse, temper roiling beneath the tightly-coiled surface. "And then she died."
"Hmm..." The Elder Brother stands, joining Sandor at the window. "You've heard the song about her, the Maiden in the Tower?"
"About her ghost." He remembers the farmer's irreverent words, hooting laughter, the jeers of the common men.
"That's what the song says, yes."
"What about it?" Sandor grits, turning away from the window and the tower where Sansa Stark threw herself to her untimely death. (A mercy, he reminds himself. A mercy. Death is mercy. Death would have been a mercy for him to, rather than this penniless and useless existence.)
"The truth may not be... quite as simple."
Sandor growls. "I'll try to follow."
The Elder Brother laughs kindly, shaking his head. "If this is how your temper flares at even the mere mention of the lady... look at me." The Elder Brother grows somber, and when he speaks again, his voice is grave. "Lord Baelish has gone mad with paranoia, mad with power. He is a small man who has climbed too high, and is about to be toppled. He has gone to lengths that are beyond the realm of what most would call sane."
"And?"
A gust of wind clears the snow for a scant moment, revealing a barest glimpse of the Eyrie, miles above their heads.
"Sansa Stark may very well have never left that tower like the stories say."
It hits him in the belly like a fist, or the pommel of a sword. The snow picks up again, clouding over the high-away castle made of snow. "You mean-"
"Sansa Stark may very well be alive."
---
( prologue | masterpost | chapter two )