(Untitled)

[onceaqueen]

"Rickon, stop that!"

Rickon was crawling around as fast as he could after Eddara, who was bouncing about the rec room banging on her drum and singing at the top of her lungs. Rickon couldn't quite keep up, and after a few minutes he sat on his backside and grrrrred at her, wolf-style. "Mine!" said Eddara, and growled right back

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[lifeisnotasong]

Eddara carefully slid her drum onto the table where Sansa was futilely attempting to note the lyrics of a new song. Whatever thoughts Sansa had had regarding it were practically gone now. Drummed out of her head by Eddara's efforts. She watched Eddara toddle over to Rickon as Susan scolded him futilely. "Play nice," she told Eddara firmly.

Eddara just looked and pulled a book from above Rickon's head and sat next to him turning the pages of her clearly superior book. "Tea," she said smugly, pointing at the page. "Horse, mine. ICK."

[onceaqueen]

Susan shook her head. "I don't know what we're going to do with them," she said fondly, watching them. Rickon tried to take Eddara's book from her, because it was clearly very interesting, but Susan pulled him away and distracted him with a board-book copy of The Very Grouchy Ladybug. Rickon growled, but the bright colors caught his eye and he flipped through it, finding the ladybug on each page and smacking it, and growling at any animal that looked even vaguely like a wolf.

[queeninthenorth]

"I don't know how Reynald can sleep through that," Jeyne said, looking over her needlework at her sleeping son. It was a blessing that he was not easily disturbed by his cousins' antics, but sometimes Jeyne wondered if something was amiss with his hearing. "But when he's hungry, he'll wake right up." She knotted the thread, slid the knot under the fabric, and snipped it, threading her needle with a new colour. A dark green, for an area of the leaves; she was making an embroidered family tree.

[lifeisnotasong]

"Try harder to convince them that they aren't wolves mayhaps." Sansa suggested - though gods knew how. Reynald was another story all together and Sansa smiled at her sleeping nephew - he was remarkably hard to disturb. "Perhaps he knows if he wakes they might pay him some attention," she jested. Eddara had been a terror for poking at Rickon if she could when he had been Reynald's age, not that Rickon had been put off his cousin by this. Nor by her habit of refusing to share and calling him Ick when she could say Rickon when she really tried. Eddara made a rude noise at her mother's suggestion but fixed her blue gaze on the book Susan had denied Rickon looking innocent.

[onceaqueen]

Rickon had grown up surrounded by wolves just as Eddara had; heaven only knew if they would ever realise they weren't, Susan thought. "I'm going to have to put him on a leash, or something, once he starts walking," she said. "As it is, Shadow either spends most of the day lying in the doorway so he can't get out, or she and Ghost sort of herd him back to me if he's crawled away. I don't know what I'd do without them." She literally could not take her eyes off Rickon for a second, because if she did he would simply crawl away.

[queeninthenorth]

"It looks like all of our children will be growing up surrounded by wolves," Jeyne chimed in. "There will be no convincing them that they're not one of them."

Reynald did not howl like a wolf, but a bit later he began to stir, and Jeyne put aside her needlework to lift him from his basket. He was making soft smacking noises and Jeyne adjusted her dress and draped a light blanket over her shoulder so that she might feed him.

[lifeisnotasong]

"I wish I had thought of a leash for Eddara," Sansa said with a look for Eddara's studious attempts to pretend to read that somehow involved keeping the book just out of Rickon's reach. "Though since the island gifted her that horse, she's as like to neigh as howl." Sansa didn't refer to the baby horse by it's name because Sansa had high hopes of talking Eddara out of calling it Mine but thus far she had had no luck.

[onceaqueen]

"He's not going to like it," said Susan, "but I don't know how else to keep him from running off while I'm working round the house, if Jon's not there--other than hope that Shadow or Ghost can round him up again." It was easy enough to watch him if she could devote all her attention to him, but there were always things that needed doing: clothes to wash, food to cook, floors to sweep, and gardens to tend. And Rickon wasn't even close to being old enough to help with any of it.