Chapter Text
The crypts beneath Winterfell formed a network of tunnels that was larger than even her father had known, weaving out into the earth like the roots of some vast tree. Tall shadows loomed all around her, barely held at bay by the pale torchlight. Now her father stood guard next to her mother and her Aunt Lyanna and her brother Robb. The stone did not do justice to the life they once had, although it had a soul of its own, it seemed to her. Whereas the dungeons always seemed oppressive to Sansa, the cold and the darkness of the crypts were somehow comforting. Cold preserved, and darkness protected what the light would destroy. Here, the dead were frozen in time forever, locked into never-changing stone.
Next to the memorials of her family, a small stone coffin sat. The stone box, and the bones inside it, seemed to call to her, even more than the statues. It was as if a piece of her lay in that box, as if it were her own bones that had been interred here. Atop the small coffin sat the stone visage of a wolf, sitting docile, at rest. The inscription beneath it bore one single word: Lady.
Sometimes the direwolves came down here, to grieve for their lost sister, buried beneath the earth, never again to run beneath the stars or sing to the moon. They curled their bodies around the tomb, as if trying to keep her warm. Sansa wondered sometimes if Lady was cold, wherever she was, but something told her that the direwolf was home here, in the chill and the dark.
Someday, her own statue would join her, and once again the direwolf would sit at her feet.
As the snow continued to fall and the winds blew fiercer every day, Sansa was so busy with the daily duties of keeping the castle fortified and making sure those in the Winter Town were provided for that she hardly thought of Tyrion at all.
A week and a half after his arrival, Maester Tarly came to see her to report that their prisoner had woken up, with the same nervousness that they all treated her now.
“His wounds are healing nicely, and he seems to be out of danger.”
“Very good,” she said, and smiled at Sam, which reassured him, she could tell. He smiled back at her. He was a kind friend, and was good to Bran, and spoke affectionately of Jon. And he seemed to be one of the only few in Winterfell who did not believe she had brought Tyrion to the keep as a spy for the enemy.
Even Arya seemed to attribute Tyrion’s presence in the castle to Sansa’s “soft heart”, although she had told Sansa that she trusted her to make the right decision.
Once she had heard that Tyrion had woken up, she had begun to question the servants who attended him. What did he do, in the tower room that now served as his cell? How did he keep himself occupied?
“The Imp is often awake during the night hours,” was the report. “Doing the gods know what.”
Sansa was not surprised to hear it. She remembered how fitfully Tyrion slept on those awful nights that they had shared a room in Maegor’s holdfast, what seemed so long ago now. She had slept poorly in those days as well, but Tyrion had told her that it was always his way. She recalled how he had often kept himself awake at night, pouring over some book or scroll. Many nights in King’s Landing when she had gone to their chamber to ready herself for bed, she would pass him in his solar, and find him sitting in the same position come morning.
She instructed the guards to send him books from Winterfell’s library, and candles, and parchment and ink as well, if he wished.
I know about bad dreams, he had said to her once.
What is it that haunts him at night? She wondered. They were all haunted by ghosts, and no doubt Tyrion had his. There were certainly enough ghosts surrounding him, if any of what men said about him was to be believed. There were rumors that he had murdered his brother and sister after coming back to Westeros, to finish the job after he had killed his father and nephew. Only Sansa knew the truth of that last part. Tyrion had no part in Joffrey’s death, no more than she did. And she was done blaming herself for the blood on others’ hands. Which did not mean she didn’t have nightmares of her own.
It was another week before she was brave enough to climb the stairs up to the tower room. She needed to speak with their Lannister prisoner. Reports reached Winterfell every day of the Dragon Queen and her monsters. She had to know what Tyrion knew.
Several of the men at arms suggested that there were faster ways of getting information out of the Imp, but Sansa forbid them from touching him. “We are not Boltons,” she reminded them sharply. There was a guard posted outside the tower room and Sansa had to insist that he wait outside for her; she wanted to speak to the prisoner alone.
Tyrion was sitting on a seat beside the window, a book in his hands. He looked up when she entered, fixing her with his odd mismatched gaze, and for a moment she felt as if she were a girl again, back in Maegor’s Holdfast.
He looked older, more weary, and pale from illness. His scarred face and strange eyes did not frighten her the way they had back then, and he seemed somehow smaller than he had. His left arm was wrapped in stiff bandages and he rested it carefully on one knee.
“Wife,” was all he said to her by way of greeting. He scanned her face for a reaction.
She met his gaze and did not falter. “I am not your wife.”
His scarred face broke into a wide grin. Then, after a moment, his expression grew serious. His eyes were impossible to read. “Aye, you’re not. In truth, you never were, and the woman who stands before me now is far from that frightened girl I wed.”
“You look much like your mother.” Tyrion pushed himself off the window seat - gingerly, favoring the arm - and stepped forward. “So tell me, Lady Stark, why am I here, and not down in the dungeons or my head on some spike?”
Sansa was unsure how she felt about his comment about her mother. What right did he have to speak of Lady Catelyn? Was he needling her on purpose? Was he giving her sympathy? Either way, she did not want it. She steeled herself and spoke. “I saved your life.”
“My life?” Tyrion snorted derisively. “My life is worth very little, I’m afraid. Much less to you.”
“You were kind to me, once.” She had meant it earnestly, though much that she knew of kindness in those days was only forced courtesy. He had been kind, though, or at least, he had tried to be. Kindness is not a habit with us Lannisters . But he’d stood up to Joffrey to protect her. Maybe she just wanted to clear the air between them. She was tired of feeling as if she owed anyone anything.
Tyrion gave a short, scornful laugh. “Oh, yes. I was a kind husband, wasn’t I? It was very kind of my father to wed us.”
Sansa faltered. “I know...I know your father made you. I know you didn’t want it, no more than I did. That’s what you told me. I remember. I know you didn’t want to hurt me.”
Tyrion smiled again, but there was no mirth there, just bitterness. “What I wanted?” He sneered. “Surely you are old enough to know by now, Lady Stark.” He looked up at her with his odd, mocking eyes, and for a moment she thought she saw a glimpse of something, something she remembered from King’s Landing, the way he had looked at her. She had not understood it at the time, but it had frightened her then.
He turned his face away. When he spoke again his voice was quiet, hoarse. Tyrion cradled his injured arm and did not look at her. “What I wanted was...more than you could have given me, in any case. It should not have been required of you.”
I was a child, she thought. Men had been telling me I was beautiful since before I knew what that meant, what their words meant. I was a child and my childhood was stolen and slain. She did not say that to Tyrion, though. Her thoughts turned back to Lady, lying dead in her tomb.
Tyrion turned to the sideboard and poured a glass of wine from a half-full decanter, drained it in one rude gulp, and poured another, turning towards the window. Sansa waited, but was met with only silence. He seemed to have decided to pretend she was no longer there.
When it became clear he had nothing left to say, she turned to leave him, but half a heartbeat later something tugged at her. She stopped at the door and turned to face him again. He still was not looking at her, and she spoke to his back.
“I saved your life because I didn’t think it was right. I didn’t hate you back then because I didn’t think it was right, what they did to you. But you’re trying very hard to make me hate you now. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
She thought she saw his shoulders flinch at her words, ever so slightly. He did not turn towards her, only continued to gaze out the window, as if fixated on something there, but she knew he was listening.
“Well, I don’t,” she continued. “I don’t hate you.”
With that, she turned on her heel and left the room, shutting the door behind her.
The next time she came to his room, she brought with her a rectangular wooden board, its surface painted and covered in delicate carvings to match the small wooden pieces that were carved in the shapes of animals and men, and placed it on the table in the center of the room.
“Arya has been teaching me,” she said.
Tyrion climbed up onto the chair opposite her and began placing the wooden pieces. Some of the figures were strange to Sansa, such as the big one with the serpentine snout that she had learned was called an elephant .
“If you wish to take the dragons,” Tyrion said, “first you must learn their movements.”
Sansa nodded and began placing her own pieces. So this was how the subject was to be broached, then.
“I am not stupid, Lady Stark.” Tyrion said as he moved his elephants into place. “Nothing is ever free, not even a small life such as mine. You are not here to merely play cyvasse and discuss the past. You want to know about the dragons.”
Sansa kept her eyes on the cyvasse board. “Whatever you know of them. Their habits. Their movements. How to kill them.”
He glanced at her, surprised. “The girl I wed would definitely not have spoken of killing so lightly, as if it were merely a game.”
“It is a game. The game of thrones.” She heard Petyr Baelish’s words come out of her own mouth without hesitation as she moved her pieces across the board.
She thought he would laugh at her, but he did not. Instead he fixed her with those odd eyes, and nodded slowly.
For a while they played in silence, the only sound the movement of the pieces on the board. Tyrion played almost casually, as if he were bored by the game. His moves surprised her but he always seemed to have the upper hand.
Finally there was a lull in the game, and as she was thinking of her next move, her eyes wandered to one of the books on the table from Winterfell’s library, a book of songs. It lay open between them, to a page with a stylized illustration of a maid washing her hair in a pool of water.
Tyrion saw her looking. “Florian and Jonquil. That was your favorite, wasn't it?”
Sansa stiffened and shifted her focus back to the game. “I was only a girl back then.”
“The singers often praise the story for its romance. No one ever seems to remember it's a tragedy.”
Sansa raised an eyebrow but did not move her gaze from the cyvasse board. “And you do?” She decided to let him talk, moving her dragon into position.
“I was an ugly child with nothing but books to keep me company. ‘ All men are fools, and all men are knights, where women are concerned .’” His recitation was tinged with mockery but something else, as well. “What dwarf wouldn’t know such a tale?”
Sansa did not know how to reply to that. She suddenly had an image in her head of him as a boy, short fingers tracing the beautiful illustrations in the book.
“I’ve taken your dragon,” Tyrion said, reaching across the table to palm the white piece. “Death in two. You lose.”
Their meetings became somewhat regular, each time with the cyvasse table between them. Sometimes they would not talk at all, but each time Sansa felt that she had learned something. Tyrion liked to talk and sometimes he would tell her that she should have made this or that move instead, and sometimes he would even praise her for a particularly well thought-out play.
One evening, when the sun was on its way down and night came creeping after it, she came into the room and found him sitting at the table, head bent, and realized that he was asleep. Drunk, she realized, when she saw the empty decanter of wine next to his arm.
The books she had sent him were stacked haphazardly on the table, and the remaining surface was covered in scattered parchment, Sansa noted with interest.
They were drawings, one a detailed sketch of a raven perched on a bare branch, the veins of its feathers outlined with exquisite care. There were several depictions of dragons: in flight, great wings stretched, neck snaking forward, closer sketches of cruel claws or hooked-beaked faces with glistening dark eyes, spindly arched backs...and another drawing, this one a close up of a woman’s face, bent in concentration over a cyvasse board.
It was her , the likeness so startling that she couldn’t help but stare.
Tyrion made a noise and she suddenly looked up, embarrassed, feeling like an intruder, but he did not wake up. His injured arm was curled underneath his head at an unusual angle, and she moved to try and shift him so he wouldn’t wake up sore.
“Don’t,” he growled, low and garbled, “touch me.” He tried to wave her away with his good arm.
With great effort he lifted himself from the chair, feet unsteady and eyes fixed on the floor. He pushed himself up and took a few steps, then collapsed.
She caught him and put her hands under his arms to help lift him up, and this time he did not protest. He leaned heavily on her as they made their way over to the bed, and when he was close enough he nearly fell into it. She stretched out his legs atop the bedclothes and began to gently ease off his boots. He turned his face away from her.
“The eyes,” he slurred suddenly.
“What?” Sansa asked, worried that there was something wrong with his eyes.
“That's where they're weakest.”
It was only after she had left him that she realized what he meant.