Chapter VI: The Wolf of Braavos
There were five shadowy figures lurking in front of the shop one morning when Alayne and Sera came home carrying their water. Alayne couldn’t properly make them out because it was only dawn, and a foggy one at that. But there shouldn’t have been anybody there, let alone five people, and she and Sera shared a look before slowly walking on.
Alayne felt as if someone had punched her in the gut when she recognized the man standing in the middle. He was a little grayer than he had been the last time she’d seen him, and Sansa was sure his face would be more lined when she got a good look at it, but she knew the shape of his nose and the way he held himself. It was her father standing there. There was no mistaking him. Now that she was close enough, she could also see the familiar gray direwolf sigils on the tabards of the guards.
“Sansa!” a voice cried out. An unexpected, familiar voice. Next to her father stood someone she had taken for a young guard, but a closer look revealed that it was just her sister, wearing breeches as usual. She was still small for her age.
“Sansa!” Her father turned toward her, and his gaze pinned Sansa to the place where she stood. With swift steps, he walked over to her and drew her into a familiar embrace. She stood there awkwardly, the buckets of water weighing down her arms.
“Alayne? What’s going on?” Sera asked with a tremble in her voice.
“Could you go ahead? I promise I’ll explain everything,” Sansa told her, and Sera acquiesced reluctantly. She wove past the guards, giving them suspicious glances before disappearing into the shop.
“You won’t believe how happy I am to have finally found you,” Ned Stark told her when he finally released her from the hug, hands still on her shoulders. She must have grown a little, since he seemed less tall now than he did when she last saw him. “We thought you dead for so long. How did you end up here, of all places?”
Sansa simply frowned at him. It was so surreal to see him here, in a street in Braavos, with Stark guards at his back. Her two lives were never meant to meet.
“I think it might be best if we continued this conversation inside,” Sansa told him. Even she was surprised by the lack of emotion in her voice. “It’s still a little cold, and my arms can’t carry these buckets forever.”
Without asking, her father took the buckets from her. Sansa didn’t feel grateful to be relieved of the burden. Still, she now had no choice but to lead her father and sister inside, where Sera and Amorri were probably curious as to what was happening. They walked through the parlor and into the tiny kitchen in the back. Her father deposited the buckets by the hearth, where Sera was preparing breakfast.
“Are we going to have guests?” Sera asked.
Sansa simply shrugged wearily, then led her father and sister upstairs to the little sitting room.
“Don’t you have someone who could carry buckets for you?” her father asked as the made their way up the narrow stairs.
“I could hire someone to deliver them, but it costs money that could just as easily be spent elsewhere,” Sansa answered curtly. She was angry, she realized. She didn’t even know quite why. The morning’s events had unsettled her. There was her father, sitting in Sera’s chair, while Arya leaned against the wall by the door.
“Why are you here?” It came out more harshly than she’d intended.
Her father looked surprised by the question, and Arya uncrossed her arms. Sansa noticed that her hand went to a bravo’s sword at her hip. It was strange that she was allowed to dress and act as a boy so openly. She couldn’t believe their mother approved.
“Why? Sansa, you are my daughter. I thought you captive and then dead for so long. I imagined the worst things happening to you.”
“Well, they did happen,” Sansa snapped. “What do you expect of me? To still be the little girl you abandoned in King’s Landing? To be happy you’re finally here to rescue me? From what? Living a perfectly normal life? I’m happy here, finally! I don’t need you to save me any more!”
Sansa took a deep breath. Her father looked as if she had slapped him and Sansa felt a pang of regret, yet she was still so angry. He had disturbed her quiet life, but that wasn’t all. He hadn’t been there for her when she needed him the most, and Sansa had never forgiven him for it.
“Sansa, I don’t mean to hurt you,” her father tried to explain patiently. “But please understand that I couldn’t save you. I wish it had been possible, and we tried so hard to get to you, but we just couldn’t. Please, let me make it up to you. I’m here now.”
“Well, I don’t need you. I’m fine here. I have my own shop, an apprentice and friends.”
“But you don’t have your family.”
“What has family ever done for me?” Sansa asked. “You left me!”
Her father put on the mulish look that she was used to seeing on Arya’s or Jon’s face, but never on his. “I am here now and I am not leaving,” he declared.
“But I don’t want you here!”
“And yet here I am,” her father said firmly. “You are our family. We won’t just pretend you are not.”
Sansa couldn’t take it any more. She thew up her hands and stormed out of the sitting room, down the stairs and past a wide-eyed Sera. Then she ran out of the house and onto the streets, where she stomped around aimlessly until she walked down a dead end alley near the harbor. She sighed and stood still for a moment, then backtracked. When she reached a small bridge she saw Arya was standing on it, looking half like a boy with her breeches and the sword, though it was clear she had grown breasts since the last time Sansa had seen her.
“I don’t want to talk,” Sansa said.
Arya simply raised an eyebrow. “I think you have to, though.” She leaned against a banister.
Sansa snorted. “And you’re going to make me?”
Arya shrugged.
“I won’t go back.”
“Then how about we stay here?” Arya suggested. “Or we could walk through the city. I always wanted to see Braavos. My dancing master came from here, and a man I met during, well, what came after King’s Landing. He even gave me a coin if I ever needed or wanted to meet him again. Said it would pay for my passage here.”
“A single coin?” Sansa asked disbelievingly as she went over to her sister. She leaned against the gray stone next to her, staring into the murky waters of the nameless canal they were standing over. “A single coin isn’t enough to pay for a passage across the narrow sea.”
“Jaqen said this one would,” Arya told her, showing her an unremarkable iron coin. “That, and some words.”
Sansa felt a chill travel down her spine. “What words?”
“Valar morghulis,” Arya told her, and Sansa was uncomfortably sure that the stories she had heard from her friends were more than just fancy tales.
“Arya, I think you should give back that coin and forget you ever had it in the first place.”
Arya frowned at her and Sansa could see a mulish pout form. “Why? Jaqen seemed nice enough.”
Why did her sister always have to be so contrary? “‘Jaqen,’ was probably a Faceless Man, Arya. They’re dangerous assassins who can change their own faces at will. There’s tales of them all over Braavos.”
“Huh,” Arya said, and shrugged. “Sounds about right.” She stared at the coin and flipped it between her fingers. “I suppose I could give it back, though. I don’t think I’ll need it any more.”
Sansa exhaled and felt the tension leave her body. “Their temple is on the Isle of the Gods. I can come with you, if you want.”
Arya nodded, but didn’t reply. Instead, she watched curiously as a gondola passed below them, carrying a couple of crates of fruit, probably to take to one of Braavos’s many markets.
“You know Father would have saved you if he could have, right?” Arya finally asked, putting the coin pack into her pocket.
Sansa sighed and nodded. She did know, really. She always had. But that didn’t make the fact that he hadn’t hurt any less. She’d been so alone, and he was her father.
“He and Robb tried really hard, too. They tried to beat the Lannisters, but then they were allied with the Tyrells and Aunt Lysa wouldn’t help. Then fucking Theon betrayed us and ruined Winterfell, and… and then Cersei burned down the Great Sept and Queen Daenerys didn’t say anything about having you… we really thought you were dead, Sansa. Even when we finally figured out that you had left King’s Landing long before that. We just didn’t know where to look.”
Sansa sighed again. “Lord Baelish had smuggled me out of the city, but then there was a storm and pirates and he died.” Sansa hadn’t planned on telling Arya what had happened, but it spilled out of her: Captain Teryan, Mistress Sarnel, the shop. All of it. “And then, I just… I just stayed.”
Arya nodded. “Probably a good idea. It was pretty bad at the end. If it hadn’t been for Jon, we’d all be dead.”
“Jon?”
“Aye, he killed the Night King.”
“Wait, I thought the Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch killed the Night King, and that’s why the queen made him king?”
Arya’s face darkened unexpectedly when Sansa said that. “Well, Jon was the Lord Commander. But that’s not why she married him. She did it to avoid a second Dance of Dragons. You see, father lied to all of us. Jon’s not really our brother. He’s Aunt Lyanna’s son and not a bastard at all. So Daenerys had to marry him to keep her throne, especially after he saved the world and one of her dragons allowed him to ride it.”
Sansa tried to digest that piece of information and it was harder than she anticipated. Jon had been her almost-brother all her life. And while it made sense that her father would lie to save his sister’s son and never cheat on her mother, Jon was still just Jon to her. A sullen boy who sparred with Robb in the yard, not a warrior and king of legend. And her father didn’t lie, or so the little girl she once was used to believe.
“And Jon just agreed?”
Arya snorted. “Believe it or not, he likes the queen. Father isn’t all that happy about it, though. I think she reminds him of her father, only with a fire-breathing dragon the size of Balerion instead of jars of wildfire.”
“And Jon is king?”
Arya nodded. “He wanted to come too. But Father talked him out of it. He said the Braavosi probably wouldn’t take too kindly to a giant dragon suddenly appearing above their city.”
Sansa could just imagine it. Half the population would flock to the Isle of the Gods and pray, while the other half would jump into the dirty canals to avoid being burned to death. Imagining Jon on the back of such a monster was strange enough, but it was even stranger to imagine the two of them flying past the Titan.
“And I was always so horrible to him,” she mused.
“Yes, you were.”
“I wanted to apologize too, you know, before all this. I made so many mistakes when I was young.”
Arya nodded. “I did too. I shouldn’t have hated you so much, no matter how annoying you were. You were my sister, part of the pack.”
“No. I deserved it. I deserved it for lying at the ruby ford, and I deserved it for telling Cersei that Father wanted to send us away. I got so many people killed. Just because I couldn’t see Joffrey for the monster he was.” Thinking of him again made Sansa’s back hurt as if the beatings had happened yesterday, instead of being a distant memory. “You should all hate me for what I did.”
Arya snorted. “You were stupid, that’s all. A stupid little girl. But you didn’t screw up nearly as badly as Robb, who knew full well what he was doing when he married Talisa. We still love him. Personally, I think he did the right thing. Can’t imagine what it would be like if he had married the Frey girl, except we’d be drowning in her relations in Winterfell.” Arya shuddered at the thought. “He would have come too, if she wasn’t pregnant again. Oh, you’re an aunt, did you know that? His name is Torrhen and he’s the baby of the family right now. Rickon was so happy that he was no longer the youngest when he was born.”
“Rickon?!” Sansa cried. “But I thought he was dead! That’s what they told me when—”
“We thought so too, but Theon just pretended to kill them. Rickon is at home in Winterfell and he is more or less the same as he always was, only older. And Bran, well, Bran’s not okay, but maybe he will be one day. Something strange happened to him north of the Wall that I don’t really understand.”
Bran and Rickon lived, Sansa thought. She could barely believe it. She longed to see them so. Her little brothers lived, she was an aunt, and her bastard brother now ruled the Seven Kingdoms. So much had changed.
Yet she had changed so much, too. What would it be like to be back home, when nothing was the same any more?
“Are you ready to come back? To the shop, I mean.”
Sansa shot her a look, then nodded with a sigh.
“You proved me wrong there, you know. I always thought that sewing was useless. But you managed to make more of it than just a way to pass the time for noble ladies.”
“Well,” Sansa told her, “unlike you, I am actually good at it, so I wouldn’t call it useless.”
Arya laughed out loud. “Keep your needles, sister, I have my own,” she said, patting the sword at her hip.
Together, they walked back, chatting companionably. Sansa told Arya about the sights of the city that they were passing, while Arya told her some of the adventures she had missed out on back in Westeros. She told her about the size of the royal dragons, the end of the White Walkers, the Wall and the Watch, and about the family that Sansa hadn’t seen in forever. How mother started getting her first gray hairs, how Rickon seemed to be half wildling, and how Nymeria had a litter of direwolf pups. Arya’s tales were notable also for who they didn’t contain; there were no stories about Mikken, Old Nan or Hodor. Arya didn’t complain about Maester Luwin or her mother trying to force her to pray in the sept. Winterfell might still stand, but it was no longer the same.
The Stark guards still lingered in front of her shop, earning some curious glances. And inside, Amorri and Sera had finished their chores, but their confused faces told Sansa that they had not gone upstairs to talk to her father.
“I’ll stay down here, if you don’t mind,” Arya told her. “Just… try to be nice.” She turned to Sera, who was eating from a large plate with a variety of small dishes on it. “Can I have some of that?” Sera nodded dazedly.
With a deep breath, Sansa hitched up her skirts and walked back up the stairs. Her father still sat in Sera’s chair, his head in his hands. He looked up and sighed when she entered. An awkward silence lay between them.
“I don’t fault you for blaming me,” her father finally said. “I blame myself, for leaving you behind, for not saving you. You can’t possibly blame me half as much as I blame myself.”
Sansa looked at her father, who seemed still the same as she remembered, yet also different. There was a new scar on his forehead.
“I know,” Sansa said. “I know it wasn’t your fault. But I just feel angry. It was so terrible, and building a life here was hard. I didn’t think I could do it, and now you’re destroying all that. I know you don’t mean to,” Sansa quickly added, sensing he was about to disagree with her, “but you’re doing it all the same. I can no longer be Alayne Stone. And that hurts.”
“I’m sorry for that,” her father replied, even though he obviously didn’t understand, “and I’m very proud of what you achieved here. But you’re a Stark. Don’t you want to go home?”
“I’m not sure home still exists,” she sighed, and putting a name to that fear made her feel as if a weight fell off her shoulders.
“Oh, Sansa,” her father said, looking her straight in the eye. “Home is different, but homes change all the time. Winterfell still stands. You mother is there, and Robb and Rickon. We all miss you terribly.”
“I don’t want to be married off again. I’m old enough now to live on my own,” she protested, clenching her fists. She had been so eager to be married and to leave home, once upon a time.
“I promise you we will not marry you to anyone against your will. Not after what you had to go through with the Imp.” The scowl on her father’s face was thunderous.
“He wasn’t that bad. He never touched me.”
“He never should have been your husband. He’s not good enough for you, even if he is the Hand of the Queen now.”
“Tyrion is still alive?” Sansa asked, although she should have suspected. He had always been a resourceful man, or he wouldn’t have survived as long as he had when she’d met him.
Her father nodded. “And we’ll get an annulment the moment we’re back in Westeros,” he assured her. “I’ll seek your approval for any match, I promise. There aren’t that many young men left to betroth you to, anyway.”
The wars, Sansa thought. So many young men had died, fighting for a throne that was worthless, as far as she was concerned. How odd to think that it was her brother who ended up sitting on it, even though he had never competed for it.
“I don’t mind,” Sansa told him. “I don’t think I’m ready to be married.”
Ned Stark sighed, and a small, fond smile stole across his face. “You and your sister are more alike than you think. Both so much like your aunt, in different ways.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” she replied dryly.
“You should. Lyanna was quite something to behold.”
Sansa finally sat down in her chair and looked around the modest sitting room of her home. There were some little nick-knacks and two doilies—all Sera’s—but otherwise there were few personal touches to remind people that she lived here too. Maybe she had always known that it was temporary and that’s why she didn’t make herself at home like her friend did.
“I’ll need to arrange everything,” Sansa mused aloud, as much for her own benefit as her father’s. There were the accounts at the bank, the lease on the shop, the shop itself…
“Take as much time as you need. We’re staying on the ship and can leave as soon as you’re ready, but Arya will be glad to have some more time in Braavos, and I can look into taking out a loan to help with the rebuilding.”
Sansa nodded and wondered how she would explain all of this to Sera.
*
“So, you’re a noble lady,” Sera said, wringing her hands awkwardly in her apron. They were in the kitchen. Normally, they would be at work already, but it was not a normal day. “I suppose I should have known. You’ve always had perfect manners.”
Sansa snorted. “You’ve just met my sister. Do you really think being a lady gives you manners?”
Sera made a face. “Well…”
“No.”
Sera broke out into a nervous giggle and finally looked at her again, even though she averted her eyes again immediately. “I guess I have to call you ‘my lady’ now.”
Sansa had to scoff at that. “You’re my friend, Sera. You’ve seen me crawl out of bed in the morning and you’ve shared my bed on the coldest nights. Call me whatever you want to.”
Sera bit her lip. “Even Alayne?”
“Of course, why not?” She had been Alayne long enough, after all. It made sense that people would forget that it wasn’t really her name at times. She’d almost forgotten herself.
“But that’s not your name. It’s Sansa Stark. Your father is a high lord and he was Hand of the King and… oh gods, that play we watched ages ago, about the evil dwarf and the Lannister king and all that, there was this girl with the red hair and that was you!”
Sansa felt blood rush to her cheeks. She was mortified. There had been a rape scene, she recalled, and then that embarrassing death scene in the sewers beneath the city. “Well, it wasn’t a very accurate story.”
“But you really met the king—kings—and you were betrothed to one, and… I really don’t think I can not call you ‘my lady’ now,” Sera finished lamely.
“As long as I am still your friend.”
Sera shot her a look. “Of course you are—my lady.”
For a few moments, they sat together in silence as Sansa finally broke her fast. It was strange and quiet, with her father and sister gone, though they had left behind one of the guards, a man called Edric. Her mind was full of the tasks and work that she needed to wrap up. And then there were all the people she needed to say goodbye to.
“When are you going to leave?” Sera asked. When, not if.
“As soon as I’ve put my affairs in order. And I promised to go to the Isle of the Gods with my sister.”
Sera remained silent for a beat. “What’s going to happen to the shop?” She sounded strangely subdued and Sansa couldn’t fault her for it. It was her life, after all, even if it had never quite been Sansa’s.
“I thought, as a thank you for all that you’ve done for me, I could leave everything to you. My account at the bank, our shared funds, all that. I think you’ve earned it.”
Sera turned to fully face her and stared at her with huge eyes. “You would do that for me?” she whispered.
“Of course,” Sansa assured her with a smile. “You deserve it.”
But instead of smiling, as Sansa expected, Sera cast her eyes down gloomily. “But I can’t do this without you. I’m not as good as you.”
“That’s nonsense. You’re a good seamstress. All you’re lacking, really, is a little more faith in your own talents.”
“If you say so,” Sera grumbled. “I won’t ever see you again, will I?”
Sansa shrugged. Probably not, she had to admit to herself. It was sad, but that was the truth. “Who knows. Maybe I’ll visit. Or maybe you will visit me. But I will write to you. And never forget that you will always have a friend across the narrow sea.”