In the tower room at the heart of Maegor’s
Holdfast, Sansa gave herself to the darkness.
She drew the curtains around her bed, slept, woke weeping, and
slept again. When she could not sleep she lay under her blankets
shivering with grief. Servants came and went, bringing meals, but
the sight of food was more than she could bear. The dishes piled up
on the table beneath her window, untouched and spoiling, until the
servants took them away again.
Sometimes her sleep was leaden and dreamless, and she woke from
it more tired than when she had closed her eyes. Yet those were the
best times, for when she dreamed, she dreamed of Father. Waking or
sleeping, she saw him, saw the gold cloaks fling him down, saw Ser
Ilyn striding forward, unsheathing Ice from the scabbard on his
back, saw the moment . . . the moment when . . . she had wanted to
look away, she had wanted to, her legs had gone out from under her
and she had fallen to her knees, yet somehow she could not turn her
head, and all the people were screaming and shouting, and her
prince had smiled at her, he’d smiled and she’d felt
safe, but only for a heartbeat, until he said those words, and her
father’s legs . . . that was what she remembered, his legs,
the way they’d jerked when Ser Ilyn . . . when the sword . . . Perhaps I will die too, she told herself, and the thought did
not seem so terrible to her. If she flung herself from the window,
she could put an end to her suffering, and in the years to come the
singers would write songs of her grief. Her body would lie on the
stones below, broken and innocent, shaming all those who had
betrayed her. Sansa went so far as to cross the bedchamber and
throw open the shutters . . . but then her courage left her, and
she ran back to her bed, sobbing.
The serving girls tried to talk to her when they brought her
meals, but she never answered them. Once Grand Maester Pycelle came
with a box of flasks and bottles, to ask if she was ill. He felt
her brow, made her undress, and touched her all over while her
bedmaid held her down. When he left he gave her a potion of
honeywater and herbs and told her to drink a swallow every night.
She drank it all right then and went back to sleep.
She dreamt of footsteps on the tower stair, an ominous scraping
of leather on stone as a man climbed slowly toward her bedchamber,
step by step. All she could do was huddle behind her door and
listen, trembling, as he came closer and closer. It was Ser Ilyn
Payne, she knew, coming for her with Ice in his hand, coming to
take her head. There was no place to run, no place to hide, no way
to bar the door. Finally the footsteps stopped and she knew he was
just outside, standing there silent with his dead eyes and his long
pocked face. That was when she realized she was naked. She crouched
down, trying to cover herself with her hands, as her door began to
swing open, creaking, the point of the greatsword poking through . . .
She woke murmuring, “Please, please, I’ll be good,
I’ll be good, please don’t,” but there was no one
to hear.
When they finally came for her in truth, Sansa never heard their
footsteps. It was Joffrey who opened her door, not Ser Ilyn but the
boy who had been her prince. She was in bed, curled up tight, her
curtains drawn, and she could not have said if it was noon or
midnight. The first thing she heard was the slam of the door. Then
her bed hangings were yanked back, and she threw up a hand against
the sudden light and saw them standing over her.
“You will attend me in court this afternoon,”
Joffrey said. “See that you bathe and dress as befits my
betrothed.” Sandor Clegane stood at his shoulder in a plain
brown doublet and green mantle, his burned face hideous in the
morning light. Behind them were two knights of the Kingsguard in
long white satin cloaks.
Sansa drew her blanket up to her chin to cover herself.
“No,” she whimpered, “please . . . leave me
be.”
“If you won’t rise and dress yourself, my Hound will
do it for you,” Joffrey said.
“I beg of you, my prince . . . ”
“I’m king now. Dog, get her out of bed.”
Sandor Clegane scooped her up around the waist and lifted her
off the featherbed as she struggled feebly. Her blanket fell to the
floor. Underneath she had only a thin bedgown to cover her
nakedness. “Do as you’re bid, child,” Clegane
said. “Dress.” He pushed her toward her wardrobe,
almost gently.
Sansa backed away from them. “I did as the queen asked, I
wrote the letters, I wrote what she told me. You promised
you’d be merciful. Please, let me go home. I won’t do
any treason, I’ll be good, I swear it, I don’t have
traitor’s blood, I don’t. I only want to go
home.” Remembering her courtesies, she lowered her head.
“As it please you,” she finished weakly.
“It does not please me,” Joffrey said. “Mother
says I’m still to marry you, so you’ll stay here, and
you’ll obey.”
“I don’t want to marry you,” Sansa wailed.
“You chopped off my father’s head!”
“He was a traitor. I never promised to spare him, only
that I’d be merciful, and I was. If he hadn’t been your
father, I would have had him torn or flayed, but I gave him a clean
death.”
Sansa stared at him, seeing him for the first time. He was
wearing a padded crimson doublet patterned with lions and a
cloth-of-gold cape with a high collar that framed his face. She
wondered how she could ever have thought him handsome. His lips
were as soft and red as the worms you found after a rain, and his
eyes were vain and cruel. “I hate you,” she
whispered.
King Joffrey’s face hardened. “My mother tells me
that it isn’t fitting that a king should strike his wife. Ser
Meryn.”
The knight was on her before she could think, yanking back her
hand as she tried to shield her face and backhanding her across the
ear with a gloved fist. Sansa did not remember failing, yet the
next she knew she was sprawled on one knee amongst the rushes. Her
head was ringing. Ser Meryn Trant stood over her, with blood on the
knuckles of his white silk glove.
“Will you obey now, or shall I have him chastise you
again?”
Sansa’s ear felt numb. She touched it, and her fingertips
came away wet and red. “I . . . as . . . as you command, my
lord.”
“Your Grace,” Joffrey corrected her. “I shall
look for you in court.” He turned and left.
Ser Meryn and Ser Arys followed him out, but Sandor Clegane lingered long enough to yank her roughly
to her feet. “Save yourself some pain, girl, and give him
what he wants.”
“What . . . what does he want? Please, tell me.”
“He wants you to smile and smell sweet and be his lady
love,” the Hound rasped. “He wants to hear you recite
all your pretty little words the way the septa taught you. He wants
you to love him . . . and fear him.”
After he was gone, Sansa sank back onto the rushes, staring at
the wall until two of her bedmaids crept timidly into the chamber.
“I will need hot water for my bath, please,” she told
them, “and perfume, and some powder to hide this
bruise.” The right side of her face was swollen and beginning
to ache, but she knew Joffrey would want her to be beautiful.
The hot water made her think of Winterfell, and she took
strength from that. She had not washed since the day her father
died, and she was startled at how filthy the water became. Her
maids sluiced the blood off her face, scrubbed the dirt from her
back, washed her hair and brushed it out until it sprang back in
thick auburn curls. Sansa did not speak to them, except to give
them commands; they were Lannister servants, not her own, and she
did not trust them. When the time came to dress, she chose the
green silk gown that she had worn to the tourney. She recalled how
gallant Joff had been to her that night at the feast. Perhaps it
would make him remember as well, and treat her more gently.
She drank a glass of buttermilk and nibbled at some sweet
biscuits as she waited, to settle her stomach. It was midday when
Ser Meryn returned. He had donned his white armor; a shirt of
enameled scales chased with gold, a tall helm with a golden
sunburst crest, greaves and gorget and gauntlet and boots of
gleaming plate, a heavy wool cloak clasped with a golden lion. His
visor had been removed from his helm, to better show his dour face;
pouchy bags under his eyes, a wide sour mouth, rusty hair spotted
with grey. “My lady,” he said, bowing, as if he had not
beaten her bloody only three hours past. “His Grace has
instructed me to escort you to the throne room.”
“Did he instruct you to hit me if I refused to
come?”
“Are you refusing to come, my lady?” The look he
gave her was without expression. He did not so much as glance at
the bruise he had left her.
He did not hate her, Sansa realized; neither did he love her. He
felt nothing for her at all. She was only a . . . a thing to him.
“No,” she said, rising. She wanted to rage, to hurt him
as he’d hurt her, to warn him that when she was queen she
would have him exiled if he ever dared strike her again . . . but she
remembered what the Hound had told her, so all she said was,
“I shall do whatever His Grace commands.”
“As I do,” he replied.
“Yes . . . but you are no true knight, Ser
Meryn.”
Sandor Clegane would have laughed at that, Sansa knew. Other men
might have cursed her, warned her to keep silent, even begged for
her forgiveness. Ser Meryn Trant did none of these. Ser Meryn Trant
simply did not care.
The balcony was deserted save for Sansa. She stood with her head
bowed, fighting to hold back her tears, while below Joffrey sat on
his Iron Throne and dispensed what it pleased him to call justice.
Nine cases out of ten seemed to bore him; those he allowed his
council to handle, squirming restlessly while Lord Baelish, Grand
Maester Pycelle, or Queen Cersei resolved the matter. When he did
choose to make a ruling, though, not even his queen mother could
sway him.
A thief was brought before him and he had Ser Ilyn chop his hand
off, right there in court. Two knights came to him with a dispute
about some land, and he decreed that they should duel for it on the
morrow. “To the death,” he added. A woman fell to her
knees to plead for the head of a man executed as a traitor. She had
loved him, she said, and she wanted to see him decently buried.
“If you loved a traitor, you must be a traitor too,”
Joffrey said. Two gold cloaks dragged her off to the dungeons.
Frog-faced Lord Slynt sat at the end of the council table
wearing a black velvet doublet and a shiny cloth-of-gold cape,
nodding with approval every time the king pronounced a sentence.
Sansa stared hard at his ugly face, remembering how he had thrown
down her father for Ser Ilyn to behead, wishing she could hurt him,
wishing that some hero would throw him down and cut off his head.
But a voice inside her whispered, There are no heroes, and she
remembered what Lord Petyr had said to her, here in this very hall.
“Life is not a song, sweetling,” he’d told her.
“You may learn that one day to your sorrow.” In life,
the monsters win, she told herself, and now it was the
Hound’s voice she heard, a cold rasp, metal on stone.
“Save yourself some pain, girl, and give him what he
wants.”
The last case was a plump tavern singer, accused of making a
song that ridiculed the late King Robert. Joff commanded them to
fetch his woodharp and ordered him to perform the song for the
court. The singer wept and swore he would never sing that song
again, but the king insisted. It was sort of a funny song, all
about Robert fighting with a pig. The pig was the boar who’d
killed him, Sansa knew, but in some verses it almost sounded as if
he were singing about the queen. When the song was done, Joffrey
announced that he’d decided to be merciful. The singer could
keep either his fingers or his tongue. He would have a day to make
his choice. Janos Slynt nodded.
That was the final business of the afternoon, Sansa saw with
relief, but her ordeal was not yet done. When the herald’s
voice dismissed the court, she fled the balcony, only to find
Joffrey waiting for her at the base of the curving stairs. The
Hound was with him, and Ser Meryn as well. The young king examined
her critically, top to bottom. “You look much better than you
did.”
“Thank you, Your Grace,” Sansa said. Hollow words,
but they made him nod and smile.
“Walk with me,” Joffrey commanded, offering her his
arm. She had no choice but to take it. The touch of his hand would
have thrilled her once; now it made her flesh crawl. “My name
day will be here soon,” Joffrey said as they slipped out the
rear of the throne room. “There will be a great feast, and
gifts. What are you going to give me?”
“I . . . I had not thought, my lord.”
“Your Grace,” he said sharply. “You truly are
a stupid girl, aren’t you? My mother says so.”
“She does?” After all that had happened, his words
should have lost their power to hurt her, yet somehow they had not.
The queen had always been so kind to her.
“Oh, yes. She worries about our children, whether
they’ll be stupid like you, but I told her not to trouble
herself.” The king gestured, and Ser Meryn opened a door for
them.
“Thank you, Your Grace,” she murmured. The Hound was
right, she thought, I am only a little bird, repeating the words
they taught me. The sun had fallen below the western wall, and the
stones of the Red Keep glowed dark as blood.
“I’ll get you with child as soon as you’re
able,” Joffrey said as he escorted her across the practice
yard. “If the first one is stupid, I’ll chop off your
head and find a smarter wife. When do you think you’ll be
able to have children?”
Sansa could not look at him, he shamed her so. “Septa
Mordane says most . . . most highborn girls have their flowering at
twelve or thirteen.”
Joffrey nodded. “This way.” He led her into the
gatehouse, to the base of the steps that led up to the
battlements.
Sansa jerked back away from him, trembling. Suddenly she knew
where they were going. “No,” she said, her voice a
frightened gasp. “Please, no, don’t make me, I beg you
. . . ”
Joffrey pressed his lips together. “I want to show you
what happens to traitors.”
Sansa shook her head wildly. “I won’t. I
won’t.”
“I can have Ser Meryn drag you up,” he said.
“You won’t like that. You had better do what I
say.” Joffrey reached for her, and Sansa cringed away from
him, backing into the Hound.
“Do it, girl,” Sandor Clegane told her, pushing her
back toward the king. His mouth twitched on the burned side of his
face and Sansa could almost hear the rest of it. He’ll have
you up there no matter what, so give him what he wants.
She forced herself to take King Joffrey’s hand. The climb
was something out of a nightmare; every step was a struggle, as if
she were pulling her feet out of ankle-deep mud, and there were
more steps than she would have believed, a thousand thousand steps,
and horror waiting on the ramparts.
From the high battlements of the gatehouse, the whole world
spread out below them. Sansa could see the Great Sept of Baelor on
Visenya’s hill, where her father had died. At the other end
of the Street of the Sisters stood the fire-blackened ruins of the
Dragonpit. To the west, the swollen red sun was half-hidden behind
the Gate of the Gods. The salt sea was at her back, and to the
south was the fish market and the docks and the swirling torrent of
the Blackwater Rush. And to the north . . .
She turned that way, and saw only the city, streets and alleys
and hills and bottoms and more streets and more alleys and the
stone of distant walls. Yet she knew that beyond them was open
country, farms and fields and forests, and beyond that, north and
north and north again, stood Winterfell.
“What are you looking at?” Joffrey said. “This
is what I wanted you to see, right here.”
A thick stone parapet protected the outer edge of the rampart,
reaching as high as Sansa’s chin, with crenellations cut into
it every five feet for archers. The heads were mounted between the
crenels, along the top of the wall, impaled on iron spikes so they
faced out over the city. Sansa had noted them the moment
she’d stepped out onto the wallwalk, but the river and the
bustling streets and the setting sun were ever so much prettier. He
can make me look at the heads, she told herself, but he can’t
make me see them.
“This one is your father,” he said. “This one
here. Dog, turn it around so she can see him.”
Sandor Clegane took the head by the hair and turned it. The
severed head had been dipped in tar to preserve it longer. Sansa
looked at it calmly, not seeing it at all. It did not really look
like Lord Eddard, she thought; it did not even look real. “How
long do I have to look?”
Joffrey seemed disappointed. “Do you want to see the
rest?” There was a long row of them.
“If it please Your Grace.”
Joffrey marched her down the wallwalk, past a dozen more heads
and two empty spikes. “I’m saving those for my uncle
Stannis and my uncle Renly,” he explained. The other heads
had been dead and mounted much longer than her father. Despite the
tar, most were long past being recognizable. The king pointed to
one and said, “That’s your septa there,” but
Sansa could not even have told that it was a woman. The jaw had
rotted off her face, and birds had eaten one ear and most of a
cheek.
Sansa had wondered what had happened to Septa Mordane, although
she supposed she had known all along. “Why did you kill
her?” she asked. “She was godsworn . . . ”
“She was a traitor.” Joffrey looked pouty; somehow
she was upsetting him. “You haven’t said what you mean
to give me for my name day. Maybe I should give you something
instead, would you like that?”
“If it please you, my lord,” Sansa said.
When he smiled, she knew he was mocking her. “Your brother
is a traitor too, you know.” He turned Septa Mordane’s
head back around. “I remember your brother from Winterfell.
My dog called him the lord of the wooden sword. Didn’t you,
dog?”
“Did I?” the Hound replied. “I don’t
recall.”
Joffrey gave a petulant shrug. “Your brother defeated my
uncle Jaime. My mother says it was treachery and deceit. She wept
when she heard. Women are all weak, even her, though she pretends
she isn’t. She says we need to stay in King’s Landing
in case my other uncles attack, but I don’t care. After my
name day feast, I’m going to raise a host and kill your
brother myself. That’s what I’ll give you, Lady Sansa.
Your brother’s head.”
A kind of madness took over her then, and she heard herself say,
“Maybe my brother will give me your head.”
Joffrey scowled. “You must never mock me like that. A true
wife does not mock her lord. Ser Meryn, teach her.”
This time the knight grasped her beneath the jaw and held her
head still as he struck her. He hit her twice, left to right, and
harder, right to left. Her lip split and blood ran down her chin,
to mingle with the salt of her tears.
“You shouldn’t be crying all the time,”
Joffrey told her. “You’re more pretty when you smile
and laugh.”
Sansa made herself smile, afraid that he would have Ser Meryn
hit her again if she did not, but it was no good, the king still
shook his head. “Wipe off the blood, you’re all
messy.”
The outer parapet came up to her chin, but along the inner edge
of the walk was nothing, nothing but a long plunge to the bailey
seventy or eighty feet below. All it would take was a shove, she
told herself. He was standing right there, right there, smirking at
her with those fat wormlips. You could do it, she told herself. You
could. Do it right now. It wouldn’t even matter if she went
over with him. It wouldn’t matter at all.
“Here, girl.” Sandor Clegane knelt before her,
between her and Joffrey. With a delicacy surprising in such a big
man, he dabbed at the blood welling from her broken lip.
The moment was gone. Sansa lowered her eyes. “Thank
you,” she said when he was done. She was a good girl, and
always remembered her courtesies.
In the tower room at the heart of Maegor’s
Holdfast, Sansa gave herself to the darkness.
She drew the curtains around her bed, slept, woke weeping, and
slept again. When she could not sleep she lay under her blankets
shivering with grief. Servants came and went, bringing meals, but
the sight of food was more than she could bear. The dishes piled up
on the table beneath her window, untouched and spoiling, until the
servants took them away again.
Sometimes her sleep was leaden and dreamless, and she woke from
it more tired than when she had closed her eyes. Yet those were the
best times, for when she dreamed, she dreamed of Father. Waking or
sleeping, she saw him, saw the gold cloaks fling him down, saw Ser
Ilyn striding forward, unsheathing Ice from the scabbard on his
back, saw the moment . . . the moment when . . . she had wanted to
look away, she had wanted to, her legs had gone out from under her
and she had fallen to her knees, yet somehow she could not turn her
head, and all the people were screaming and shouting, and her
prince had smiled at her, he’d smiled and she’d felt
safe, but only for a heartbeat, until he said those words, and her
father’s legs . . . that was what she remembered, his legs,
the way they’d jerked when Ser Ilyn . . . when the sword . . . Perhaps I will die too, she told herself, and the thought did
not seem so terrible to her. If she flung herself from the window,
she could put an end to her suffering, and in the years to come the
singers would write songs of her grief. Her body would lie on the
stones below, broken and innocent, shaming all those who had
betrayed her. Sansa went so far as to cross the bedchamber and
throw open the shutters . . . but then her courage left her, and
she ran back to her bed, sobbing.
The serving girls tried to talk to her when they brought her
meals, but she never answered them. Once Grand Maester Pycelle came
with a box of flasks and bottles, to ask if she was ill. He felt
her brow, made her undress, and touched her all over while her
bedmaid held her down. When he left he gave her a potion of
honeywater and herbs and told her to drink a swallow every night.
She drank it all right then and went back to sleep.
She dreamt of footsteps on the tower stair, an ominous scraping
of leather on stone as a man climbed slowly toward her bedchamber,
step by step. All she could do was huddle behind her door and
listen, trembling, as he came closer and closer. It was Ser Ilyn
Payne, she knew, coming for her with Ice in his hand, coming to
take her head. There was no place to run, no place to hide, no way
to bar the door. Finally the footsteps stopped and she knew he was
just outside, standing there silent with his dead eyes and his long
pocked face. That was when she realized she was naked. She crouched
down, trying to cover herself with her hands, as her door began to
swing open, creaking, the point of the greatsword poking through . . .
She woke murmuring, “Please, please, I’ll be good,
I’ll be good, please don’t,” but there was no one
to hear.
When they finally came for her in truth, Sansa never heard their
footsteps. It was Joffrey who opened her door, not Ser Ilyn but the
boy who had been her prince. She was in bed, curled up tight, her
curtains drawn, and she could not have said if it was noon or
midnight. The first thing she heard was the slam of the door. Then
her bed hangings were yanked back, and she threw up a hand against
the sudden light and saw them standing over her.
“You will attend me in court this afternoon,”
Joffrey said. “See that you bathe and dress as befits my
betrothed.” Sandor Clegane stood at his shoulder in a plain
brown doublet and green mantle, his burned face hideous in the
morning light. Behind them were two knights of the Kingsguard in
long white satin cloaks.
Sansa drew her blanket up to her chin to cover herself.
“No,” she whimpered, “please . . . leave me
be.”
“If you won’t rise and dress yourself, my Hound will
do it for you,” Joffrey said.
“I beg of you, my prince . . . ”
“I’m king now. Dog, get her out of bed.”
Sandor Clegane scooped her up around the waist and lifted her
off the featherbed as she struggled feebly. Her blanket fell to the
floor. Underneath she had only a thin bedgown to cover her
nakedness. “Do as you’re bid, child,” Clegane
said. “Dress.” He pushed her toward her wardrobe,
almost gently.
Sansa backed away from them. “I did as the queen asked, I
wrote the letters, I wrote what she told me. You promised
you’d be merciful. Please, let me go home. I won’t do
any treason, I’ll be good, I swear it, I don’t have
traitor’s blood, I don’t. I only want to go
home.” Remembering her courtesies, she lowered her head.
“As it please you,” she finished weakly.
“It does not please me,” Joffrey said. “Mother
says I’m still to marry you, so you’ll stay here, and
you’ll obey.”
“I don’t want to marry you,” Sansa wailed.
“You chopped off my father’s head!”
“He was a traitor. I never promised to spare him, only
that I’d be merciful, and I was. If he hadn’t been your
father, I would have had him torn or flayed, but I gave him a clean
death.”
Sansa stared at him, seeing him for the first time. He was
wearing a padded crimson doublet patterned with lions and a
cloth-of-gold cape with a high collar that framed his face. She
wondered how she could ever have thought him handsome. His lips
were as soft and red as the worms you found after a rain, and his
eyes were vain and cruel. “I hate you,” she
whispered.
King Joffrey’s face hardened. “My mother tells me
that it isn’t fitting that a king should strike his wife. Ser
Meryn.”
The knight was on her before she could think, yanking back her
hand as she tried to shield her face and backhanding her across the
ear with a gloved fist. Sansa did not remember failing, yet the
next she knew she was sprawled on one knee amongst the rushes. Her
head was ringing. Ser Meryn Trant stood over her, with blood on the
knuckles of his white silk glove.
“Will you obey now, or shall I have him chastise you
again?”
Sansa’s ear felt numb. She touched it, and her fingertips
came away wet and red. “I . . . as . . . as you command, my
lord.”
“Your Grace,” Joffrey corrected her. “I shall
look for you in court.” He turned and left.
Ser Meryn and Ser Arys followed him out, but Sandor Clegane lingered long enough to yank her roughly
to her feet. “Save yourself some pain, girl, and give him
what he wants.”
“What . . . what does he want? Please, tell me.”
“He wants you to smile and smell sweet and be his lady
love,” the Hound rasped. “He wants to hear you recite
all your pretty little words the way the septa taught you. He wants
you to love him . . . and fear him.”
After he was gone, Sansa sank back onto the rushes, staring at
the wall until two of her bedmaids crept timidly into the chamber.
“I will need hot water for my bath, please,” she told
them, “and perfume, and some powder to hide this
bruise.” The right side of her face was swollen and beginning
to ache, but she knew Joffrey would want her to be beautiful.
The hot water made her think of Winterfell, and she took
strength from that. She had not washed since the day her father
died, and she was startled at how filthy the water became. Her
maids sluiced the blood off her face, scrubbed the dirt from her
back, washed her hair and brushed it out until it sprang back in
thick auburn curls. Sansa did not speak to them, except to give
them commands; they were Lannister servants, not her own, and she
did not trust them. When the time came to dress, she chose the
green silk gown that she had worn to the tourney. She recalled how
gallant Joff had been to her that night at the feast. Perhaps it
would make him remember as well, and treat her more gently.
She drank a glass of buttermilk and nibbled at some sweet
biscuits as she waited, to settle her stomach. It was midday when
Ser Meryn returned. He had donned his white armor; a shirt of
enameled scales chased with gold, a tall helm with a golden
sunburst crest, greaves and gorget and gauntlet and boots of
gleaming plate, a heavy wool cloak clasped with a golden lion. His
visor had been removed from his helm, to better show his dour face;
pouchy bags under his eyes, a wide sour mouth, rusty hair spotted
with grey. “My lady,” he said, bowing, as if he had not
beaten her bloody only three hours past. “His Grace has
instructed me to escort you to the throne room.”
“Did he instruct you to hit me if I refused to
come?”
“Are you refusing to come, my lady?” The look he
gave her was without expression. He did not so much as glance at
the bruise he had left her.
He did not hate her, Sansa realized; neither did he love her. He
felt nothing for her at all. She was only a . . . a thing to him.
“No,” she said, rising. She wanted to rage, to hurt him
as he’d hurt her, to warn him that when she was queen she
would have him exiled if he ever dared strike her again . . . but she
remembered what the Hound had told her, so all she said was,
“I shall do whatever His Grace commands.”
“As I do,” he replied.
“Yes . . . but you are no true knight, Ser
Meryn.”
Sandor Clegane would have laughed at that, Sansa knew. Other men
might have cursed her, warned her to keep silent, even begged for
her forgiveness. Ser Meryn Trant did none of these. Ser Meryn Trant
simply did not care.
The balcony was deserted save for Sansa. She stood with her head
bowed, fighting to hold back her tears, while below Joffrey sat on
his Iron Throne and dispensed what it pleased him to call justice.
Nine cases out of ten seemed to bore him; those he allowed his
council to handle, squirming restlessly while Lord Baelish, Grand
Maester Pycelle, or Queen Cersei resolved the matter. When he did
choose to make a ruling, though, not even his queen mother could
sway him.
A thief was brought before him and he had Ser Ilyn chop his hand
off, right there in court. Two knights came to him with a dispute
about some land, and he decreed that they should duel for it on the
morrow. “To the death,” he added. A woman fell to her
knees to plead for the head of a man executed as a traitor. She had
loved him, she said, and she wanted to see him decently buried.
“If you loved a traitor, you must be a traitor too,”
Joffrey said. Two gold cloaks dragged her off to the dungeons.
Frog-faced Lord Slynt sat at the end of the council table
wearing a black velvet doublet and a shiny cloth-of-gold cape,
nodding with approval every time the king pronounced a sentence.
Sansa stared hard at his ugly face, remembering how he had thrown
down her father for Ser Ilyn to behead, wishing she could hurt him,
wishing that some hero would throw him down and cut off his head.
But a voice inside her whispered, There are no heroes, and she
remembered what Lord Petyr had said to her, here in this very hall.
“Life is not a song, sweetling,” he’d told her.
“You may learn that one day to your sorrow.” In life,
the monsters win, she told herself, and now it was the
Hound’s voice she heard, a cold rasp, metal on stone.
“Save yourself some pain, girl, and give him what he
wants.”
The last case was a plump tavern singer, accused of making a
song that ridiculed the late King Robert. Joff commanded them to
fetch his woodharp and ordered him to perform the song for the
court. The singer wept and swore he would never sing that song
again, but the king insisted. It was sort of a funny song, all
about Robert fighting with a pig. The pig was the boar who’d
killed him, Sansa knew, but in some verses it almost sounded as if
he were singing about the queen. When the song was done, Joffrey
announced that he’d decided to be merciful. The singer could
keep either his fingers or his tongue. He would have a day to make
his choice. Janos Slynt nodded.
That was the final business of the afternoon, Sansa saw with
relief, but her ordeal was not yet done. When the herald’s
voice dismissed the court, she fled the balcony, only to find
Joffrey waiting for her at the base of the curving stairs. The
Hound was with him, and Ser Meryn as well. The young king examined
her critically, top to bottom. “You look much better than you
did.”
“Thank you, Your Grace,” Sansa said. Hollow words,
but they made him nod and smile.
“Walk with me,” Joffrey commanded, offering her his
arm. She had no choice but to take it. The touch of his hand would
have thrilled her once; now it made her flesh crawl. “My name
day will be here soon,” Joffrey said as they slipped out the
rear of the throne room. “There will be a great feast, and
gifts. What are you going to give me?”
“I . . . I had not thought, my lord.”
“Your Grace,” he said sharply. “You truly are
a stupid girl, aren’t you? My mother says so.”
“She does?” After all that had happened, his words
should have lost their power to hurt her, yet somehow they had not.
The queen had always been so kind to her.
“Oh, yes. She worries about our children, whether
they’ll be stupid like you, but I told her not to trouble
herself.” The king gestured, and Ser Meryn opened a door for
them.
“Thank you, Your Grace,” she murmured. The Hound was
right, she thought, I am only a little bird, repeating the words
they taught me. The sun had fallen below the western wall, and the
stones of the Red Keep glowed dark as blood.
“I’ll get you with child as soon as you’re
able,” Joffrey said as he escorted her across the practice
yard. “If the first one is stupid, I’ll chop off your
head and find a smarter wife. When do you think you’ll be
able to have children?”
Sansa could not look at him, he shamed her so. “Septa
Mordane says most . . . most highborn girls have their flowering at
twelve or thirteen.”
Joffrey nodded. “This way.” He led her into the
gatehouse, to the base of the steps that led up to the
battlements.
Sansa jerked back away from him, trembling. Suddenly she knew
where they were going. “No,” she said, her voice a
frightened gasp. “Please, no, don’t make me, I beg you
. . . ”
Joffrey pressed his lips together. “I want to show you
what happens to traitors.”
Sansa shook her head wildly. “I won’t. I
won’t.”
“I can have Ser Meryn drag you up,” he said.
“You won’t like that. You had better do what I
say.” Joffrey reached for her, and Sansa cringed away from
him, backing into the Hound.
“Do it, girl,” Sandor Clegane told her, pushing her
back toward the king. His mouth twitched on the burned side of his
face and Sansa could almost hear the rest of it. He’ll have
you up there no matter what, so give him what he wants.
She forced herself to take King Joffrey’s hand. The climb
was something out of a nightmare; every step was a struggle, as if
she were pulling her feet out of ankle-deep mud, and there were
more steps than she would have believed, a thousand thousand steps,
and horror waiting on the ramparts.
From the high battlements of the gatehouse, the whole world
spread out below them. Sansa could see the Great Sept of Baelor on
Visenya’s hill, where her father had died. At the other end
of the Street of the Sisters stood the fire-blackened ruins of the
Dragonpit. To the west, the swollen red sun was half-hidden behind
the Gate of the Gods. The salt sea was at her back, and to the
south was the fish market and the docks and the swirling torrent of
the Blackwater Rush. And to the north . . .
She turned that way, and saw only the city, streets and alleys
and hills and bottoms and more streets and more alleys and the
stone of distant walls. Yet she knew that beyond them was open
country, farms and fields and forests, and beyond that, north and
north and north again, stood Winterfell.
“What are you looking at?” Joffrey said. “This
is what I wanted you to see, right here.”
A thick stone parapet protected the outer edge of the rampart,
reaching as high as Sansa’s chin, with crenellations cut into
it every five feet for archers. The heads were mounted between the
crenels, along the top of the wall, impaled on iron spikes so they
faced out over the city. Sansa had noted them the moment
she’d stepped out onto the wallwalk, but the river and the
bustling streets and the setting sun were ever so much prettier. He
can make me look at the heads, she told herself, but he can’t
make me see them.
“This one is your father,” he said. “This one
here. Dog, turn it around so she can see him.”
Sandor Clegane took the head by the hair and turned it. The
severed head had been dipped in tar to preserve it longer. Sansa
looked at it calmly, not seeing it at all. It did not really look
like Lord Eddard, she thought; it did not even look real. “How
long do I have to look?”
Joffrey seemed disappointed. “Do you want to see the
rest?” There was a long row of them.
“If it please Your Grace.”
Joffrey marched her down the wallwalk, past a dozen more heads
and two empty spikes. “I’m saving those for my uncle
Stannis and my uncle Renly,” he explained. The other heads
had been dead and mounted much longer than her father. Despite the
tar, most were long past being recognizable. The king pointed to
one and said, “That’s your septa there,” but
Sansa could not even have told that it was a woman. The jaw had
rotted off her face, and birds had eaten one ear and most of a
cheek.
Sansa had wondered what had happened to Septa Mordane, although
she supposed she had known all along. “Why did you kill
her?” she asked. “She was godsworn . . . ”
“She was a traitor.” Joffrey looked pouty; somehow
she was upsetting him. “You haven’t said what you mean
to give me for my name day. Maybe I should give you something
instead, would you like that?”
“If it please you, my lord,” Sansa said.
When he smiled, she knew he was mocking her. “Your brother
is a traitor too, you know.” He turned Septa Mordane’s
head back around. “I remember your brother from Winterfell.
My dog called him the lord of the wooden sword. Didn’t you,
dog?”
“Did I?” the Hound replied. “I don’t
recall.”
Joffrey gave a petulant shrug. “Your brother defeated my
uncle Jaime. My mother says it was treachery and deceit. She wept
when she heard. Women are all weak, even her, though she pretends
she isn’t. She says we need to stay in King’s Landing
in case my other uncles attack, but I don’t care. After my
name day feast, I’m going to raise a host and kill your
brother myself. That’s what I’ll give you, Lady Sansa.
Your brother’s head.”
A kind of madness took over her then, and she heard herself say,
“Maybe my brother will give me your head.”
Joffrey scowled. “You must never mock me like that. A true
wife does not mock her lord. Ser Meryn, teach her.”
This time the knight grasped her beneath the jaw and held her
head still as he struck her. He hit her twice, left to right, and
harder, right to left. Her lip split and blood ran down her chin,
to mingle with the salt of her tears.
“You shouldn’t be crying all the time,”
Joffrey told her. “You’re more pretty when you smile
and laugh.”
Sansa made herself smile, afraid that he would have Ser Meryn
hit her again if she did not, but it was no good, the king still
shook his head. “Wipe off the blood, you’re all
messy.”
The outer parapet came up to her chin, but along the inner edge
of the walk was nothing, nothing but a long plunge to the bailey
seventy or eighty feet below. All it would take was a shove, she
told herself. He was standing right there, right there, smirking at
her with those fat wormlips. You could do it, she told herself. You
could. Do it right now. It wouldn’t even matter if she went
over with him. It wouldn’t matter at all.
“Here, girl.” Sandor Clegane knelt before her,
between her and Joffrey. With a delicacy surprising in such a big
man, he dabbed at the blood welling from her broken lip.
The moment was gone. Sansa lowered her eyes. “Thank
you,” she said when he was done. She was a good girl, and
always remembered her courtesies.