The tensing of muscles, the whitening of strained fingers: all signs to be ignored by the man who paid little attention to the sight of her. Words, though – those were taken in, chewed slowly like cud, mulled and digested carefully. There was a long, thick stretch of wood between them. Why did the Lord insist upon taking seat at opposite ends? Formalities were important. Formalities ruled. Formality would steal Sansa a crown and with some luck secure Petyr a coveted position at her side. But not as a husband. That duty would go to another. Or perhaps not. Perhaps she would freeze over and harden in the long night. Perhaps she had already done so. A lone wolf.
No, she spoke. Then some caustic quip about a life he had stolen her away from. No, sweetling, I plucked you from that garden, he might have said, but did not. Silence settled. She was displeased. If not with him then with all else, and it would not be long before she soured with naught else but the grim reality of a barren keep and grueling journey Northward to distract her. How lovely the Stark girl might have been, a Tyrell flower, sweeping her skirts on the arm of a noble cripple for the rest of her days. Wasted, but lovely. Always lovely. Happy in the simplicity of things. Is that what she yearned for? A simple existence, devoid of schemes and machinations?
Oh, but it was much, much too late for that.
Eyes of gray-green focused on the fire. The wending flames of red and orange and blue. For a long, long while the Lord remained quiet, wearing a look of impassivity, indicative of nothing.
“I suppose…if the Lady wishes, she may dismiss her callers.” It could be done, if the alternative was alienating her, forcing her hand and stirring her mistrust and resentment. A lone woman was far less likely to stand strong in the fiercely patriarchal North, but it was not impossible. If one could navigate those icy paths, it would be a Stark.
The light from the fire caught the red ruby set into the face of the ring adorning his pinky. Glinting, winking, like a crimson star in a sky of etched gold. Petyr laced his fingers together, the hue shifting to darker vermilion. “Is that what you wish? To be unfettered?” Finally, he turned to her, gazing across that stretch of table placed between them like a ravine. A smile played on his features. That same smile he plied so many others with in its perfect, sculpted geniality. Beneath it, with her practiced observations, she could see the sharpness edging every curve.
“Or we might trace the Mander all the way to Highgarden.” Still there was the ambiguous term of ‘we’. Certainly Petyr Baelish would have no rights to accompany her in a marriage to the Tyrells, though he might be fit enough to broker one. Was that Sansa’s point? That she would be rid of him? Had he already pushed the girl past breaking? Nonsense. The girl could withstand much more than that. Petyr’s smile, for an instant, veered decidedly more wry before it withered away.
“Shall I escort you to your chambers? I can but assume you are, as I am, finished with this pigslop.”
Formalities mattered only when an audience remained to take in their observance, drift away with thoughts of how properly the lord and lady conducted themselves. Sansa did not care how Petyr comported himself at such times: his solar, well past sunset; a dead, secluded godswood muffled in snow; her bath, perhaps, wreathed in steam. In those places his true demeanor showed, the mask removed and man revealed, providing clues as to how she ought navigate this new, strangely coequal partnership. What Baelish did not know — could not know, lest her tenuous agency evaporate — was that his auburn wolf had not bothered imagining a future in which he did not linger at her side.
Their sole attendant dismissed as punishment for spilt vintage, half-eaten dishes languished along the table’s expanse. Idly, Sansa hoped the leavings would be given to servants, their families, the smallfolk who already gathered closer to lordly seat as Winter encroached. A waste, poorly afforded she thought, despite sympathizing with growing dissatisfaction. Desiring a Tyrell marriage near as much as he wished to finish the meal with gusto, she had grasped only at what might prickle Baelish most. He had rescued her. At first little more than a porcelain doll, taken down from her shelf and arranged however another wished, through his forced disguise Petyr compelled Sansa to gather up tempered steel and wield it. In words, in thoughts, in the calculated endurance of one who has seen the chasm of defeat and refused to leap. While she might yearn for sweeter days, the girl knew — with some anger — they could never come again.
Sansa had witnessed too much, had too much shattered in that old life to ever truly return.
Lacking other occupation, Tully blue fell to a gemstone winking red and black some paces distant. Now revealed as true-born lady, sole remaining heir of noble house, Sansa could have worn jewels and silks unfathomable during her tenure as a bastard Stone. Her aunt’s glittering inheritance, however, still felt macabre rather than luxurious, left to molder in sealed and scented trunks. Harrold’s courtship had yielded a small number of gowns and trinkets, some given as tokens of affection, most commissioned by her dining companion to complement her newly revealed station.
If it irked the once-girlish Sansa that this supposed minor lord bested her sartorially, she gave no indication. Indeed the man’s musings were met with nothing but a frown, small and unobtrusive on delicate features, as though the ring offered some insignificant offense. "No.” Quiet, barely audible over the long, oaken distance, her voice had lost the challenging edge with which their conversation began. “I cannot.” Wisely were wants and desires denied mention, indulgences best avoided for one in her position. “I require a son,” Sansa told the middle space. Without a legitimate heir, all these months, years of machinations would amount to naught, reduced into a gaggle of squabbling lords battling one another over who would inherit a Northern seat following its ruler’s death.
Alliances, masculine support mattered not to Sansa. A child, begat from marriage, was essential.
“We shall face them together, I suppose.” Taking up his paired syntax, tacit agreement that Baelish and Stark were now irrevocably joined. But not in wedlock. It occurred to Sansa then that Petyr had never offered himself as suitor. He had kissed her, touched her, encroached upon her bedchamber mere hours after the exchange of holy vows, yet never implied he might serve as husband and father. Odd, she thought, for a man whose ambition and virility both ought paint her in desirable light. The girl turned back to her food with a twitch of lips. “Indeed.” Lemon cakes had not graced the lady’s plate in weeks, her own personal sacrifice in lean days. Chair legs scraped as Sansa pushed away from the abandoned meal, rising to a stand.
“Walk as slowly as it pleases you,” she invited, genuine. “The sound of falling snow becomes tedious entertainment after a time. What news from Winterfell?” How many men remained for their absent lady?
