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“Rider.”
The shouted call drags her from sleep in the too-early stillness of a new day. For a moment, it took the waking queen a few extra seconds to realize the word that had so rudely roused her from sleep.
Rider.
Some unknown person dared to ride right into the heart of the Northern lands.
She racks her waking brain, trying to remember any fresh ravens warning of visitors or threats in danger in the last few days, but she comes up empty, as at the end of her bed, Kari stretches out with a tired yawn of his own. Then, a fresh breeze comes through the window, latching, and Sansa notices her dire wolf is more alert as he sniffs at his next breath of early morning air.
“What is it?” Sansa questions him when Kari gives a quick stretching, shaking out the last of his tiredness from his limbs. Then he jumps from the end of the bed, padding fast towards the door. His manner is more akin to relaxation and play than seeking possible dangers.
Sansa huffs impatiently at her wolf but hurries into her clothes, catching the equally hurried movements of servants coming down the hall to fetch her.
She went for a far more dressed-down look so early in the morning. Since she’d been planning a refreshing ride through the Wolfwood after breakfast to let Kari stretch his paws in a chased gallop through the trees, she pulled out her softer riding pants. Kari decided on a heavier-styled top that the wolf proudly dragged from the pulled-out dresser drawer to drop at her feet.
“As helpful as ever, my growing prince.” Sansa smiled, dabbing away the last splashes of chilled water from the poured basin on her dressing table, then reaching out to ruffle the soft fur between her wolf’s ears as she bent to retrieve the clothes from the floor.
Kari gives her a play bow for his own amusement, padding it with added care to fish out a pair of riding boots from Sansa’s closet, carefully setting them within her reach. Once this task was finished, the growing young wolf respectfully turned his back on his mistress, letting her dress in relative peace.
His seat was unmoving, his back straight. He was tall and proud in his guarded seat a few steps from her. His ears twitched back and forth, alert to every sound, and his eyes roamed to every spot in the brightening room as he waited.
She’d never trained him to do this, Sansa reminded herself for what felt like the hundredth time since she’d noticed her growing wolf offering her this act. He'd always keep watch when she dressed, when she bathed, during meals.
Yet she was always grateful to him for the offering even when what he was protecting her from was, more times than not, an empty chamber.
“Just a moment.” The queen called out when she caught that tentative knock from the other side of the locked bed chamber door just as she finished wrapping the binder at her breasts and then pulling on her wolf-picked shirt.
“A rider from the Stormlands to see you, my Queen.” The servant outside answered back before Sansa could ask for more detail about just who this mystery ‘rider’ was to call her out of bed so early in the day.
“From the Stormlands?” Sansa repeats, shoving into her boots with Kari’s help, then stomping fast towards the door.
“Yes, my Queen.” The maid on the other side nods, then blushes when she adds, “He did ask. I send along his regrets at the early hour in waking you.” But it’s the surprised gasp the servant girl gives when her eyes catch something at the other end of the hall that has Sansa’s hand moving to the dagger belt Kari had dropped onto the picked clothes for the day.
Sansa was about to ask what had startled the girl until she noticed the light flickering in Kari’s tail the longer he nosed closer to the half-opened door before outright squeezing his lean wolfen build past the two women scrambling out into the hallway.
It takes only a glance around the doorframe for Sansa to catch Rya giving her littermate a greeting nuzzling before the two wander back towards the women.
“Why not say that it was Gendry waiting so urgently to see me?” Sansa probes, running her fingers over the head of her own gifted wolf rather than reaching for that belonging to the warden of the South.
Both of them packing a single year of growth, and still, Sansa finds herself in awe of the sheer size of the two wild ones brushing so easily along with the other in their own show of greeting acknowledgment, easily taking up the size of the hallway all on their own in their growing sizes.
“He asked me not to say, my Queen.” The blushing girl confessed, stepping aside to allow the Northern Queen to finally exit her bedroom, then giving a gasp of surprise when she looked back only to find one wolf waiting for them instead of two as there had been seconds before.
“You get used to it.” Sansa laughed, making sure to close the door and turn the lock as she stepped away from the door. “She’s like her namesake in the art of disappearing.” She adds with another roll of her eyes and a surer laugh, this time as the trio falls into an uneven step after the Stormlands wolf has already vanished.
“Lady Sansa.” Gendry greets as soon as the doors to the more formal ‘meeting chamber’ open, allowing first the Northern Queen, then a step behind her loyal direwolf entry.
“Lord Gendry.” Sansa smiles, forgoing the formalness of the meeting and instead pulling her younger sister’s favored blacksmith in for a hug.
“You haven’t eaten yet.” the Stark queen notices.
Not so hard to conclude at the wolfish rumbling of the young lord’s stomach giving him away when they separate.
By the state of his traveling clothes, she wonders if the hurried man had bothered breaking long enough to give his poor horse a rest in the journey from the south.
“No, lady Sansa.” The young lord answers respectfully, dropping his arms back to his sides and giving another careful adjustment to the closely kept pack he was carrying. “Forgive me, but this was too important an errand to bother with food or water other than for my wolf or my horse.”
Sansa finds herself smiling at the wording he used. Only once has she ever heard the term ‘my lady’ slip from his lips.
“Still pinning for my sister, I see.” Sansa points out, starting off toward the inner dining hall.
The smells of cooking breakfast food reach them, blending easily with the other aromas of castle life.
“Not the first time a Baratheon lord lost his heart to the wildness of a Stark woman, your Grace.” Gendry is quick to counter, as he always does whenever the slip is pointed out.
“Has she bothered writing you at all?” Sansa wonders aloud
“Once or twice since we last parted.” Gendry tells her, then smiles in pride when movement ahead of them catches his eye. “ah, and here my clever huntress returns equally victorious, I see.” He praises, dropping at once to a knee as his dirt-smeared, she-wolf pads closer. The rung remains of two freshly killed rabbits held between her teeth in the early morning light of the castle’s inner grounds.
With a growled chuff the two kills are dropped then the kneeling lord’s feet before Gendry’s face and neck was soon given a wet coating of wolfish kisses as blacksmith roughed finger rub with equal tenderness at the wolf’s scruff.
“I don’t think you’ve worn your horse or yourself so recklessly just for a chat about my map-expanding, world-hunting sister,” Sansa reminds me as the two take their places in the small wait for the morning meal.
Again, she catches Gendry’s hand closing tighter around the strap of his pack at his back before he meets her eyes. “You’d be right in thinking it.” He agrees. “But may I ask only for some food first before I get into my real reasons for interrupting your morning?”
“Of course.” Sansa agrees, punching down her curiosity once more at the asking.
Only once since his arrival did Gendry dare part with his satchel at all, and even then, it was into the close guarding of his own wolf, who’d even jumped onto the empty stretch of the table next to the seated nobles as they ate.
The bag carrying the carefully stitched marking of the Baratheon stag over its front and clasp quietly mocking her, Sansa concludes. The thing resting like some great puzzle between Rya’s slashing paws. The she-wolf’s muzzle curiously careful to rest only against the strap of the pack in her quiet possession of it.
“Arya designed that for me, you know.” Gendry remarked in pride, “Something about how if I was going to spend what little I have of my spare time at the forge, I’d better have a proper pack to luge my tools or something like that.” He tries to remember correctly after a draining swig of milk glass, then nudging a few mutton cuts to his watching dire wolf.
“Seems her needlework has improved almost as much as her actual sword skills.” Sansa muses between bites of her own. Kari, too, earned a bite or three of warmed pancakes and stew scraps from his sprawled spot lying against her leg under the table.
Not something she’d dream of doing with her dear Lady until she remembered how pleased her brother’s pet had been at the sneaky offerings during meals whenever their mother hadn’t been quick to catch them in the act in those so early days of bonding between the orphaned wolf pups and Stark children.
Robb and Rickon, mostly Sansa, remembered with a pained smile.
Glancing over Gendry’s shoulder allows her to see her elder and youngest brother’s shadows at the empty table opposite them.
Robb, so young and cleanly shaven as he had been the day they’d last gathered to ‘honor’ King Robert’s arrival at Winterfell.
She tries to remember him clearly, something that’s been getting harder for her to do and that terrifies her most as the days go on. Even now, she struggles to see him clearly in her attempt to picture him tucking into his morning meal as she and Gendry were.
Grey Wind ever so loyal at his side, with her elder brother ‘accidentally’ knocking off varying cuts of meat onto the ground for his young pet to just as quickly snatch up before their watching mother could catch what they were doing.
Rickon, who was a little easier to remember, bless him, had been less stealthy in his attempts to feed his direwolf from the table. Mostly trying in vain to get Shaggy Dog to eat up the greens or other veggies their mother had asked to be cooked for evening meals.
“Are you alright, Lady Sansa?” Gendry’s voice cuts in, drawing the Queen’s wondering thoughts away from simpler times.
It’s not until Sansa feels the soft brush of Kari’s nose against her cheek that the absent Northern Queen realizes she has started crying in her quiet struggle to remember what her older brother looked like. What he'd sounded like when he talked or laughed.
“I’m fine.” Sansa lies scrubbing at the tear traces under her eyes as she forces her gaze back on the living young man across from her.
Rya, now resting a light paw against the covered wrist, Sansa rested against the tabletop. The she-wolf gives a low whine as she leans in, licking the wet traces of tears from Sansa’s cheek this time.
“So why have you come here, Gen?” Sansa asks outright once it is clear her lord guest had eaten his fill without fear of overeating or eating too quickly and risking his meal coming back up after pushing away his plate.
In answer, Gendry’s hand finds the strap of his satchel even as he stands from the table, carefully lifting the sack back onto his shoulder with the greatest care. “I’m here to return what’s been so wrongly kept from you.”
“If I wanted to be answered with riddles, I’d have written to my younger brother.” Sansa sighed grudgingly, following the man’s lead and rising from the table.
“Do I no rank as kin, Lady Stark?” Gendry questions, his tone wounded in asking.
“Debatable,” Sansa answered with a smile, but she knew the young man was only teasing to break the tense air around them as they wandered much slower from the dining hall with their wolves at their sides.
It’s only the change in lighting and the striking of a match to light the candle flame when Sansa realizes where it was Gendry had been leading her.
The family crypt.
“Gen?”
The man had stopped and stood, head bowed at the statue of her fallen elder brother.
Arya had been right. The stone cutter put to the task hadn’t been right in his rendering of her brother's or her father’s faces, but she was positive.
In truth, only Robb’s stone wolf looked anything like who it was meant to commemorate.
The grunt of effort and shifting heavy stone sliding over itself drags Sansa’s wandering mind back to the matter at hand.
At first, she’d had a horrible thought the dead of the crypt were once again rising to the attack until she saw in the flickering of the lighted candle that the sounds were Gendry hefting the heavy stone slab covering her brother’s empty monument.
“What in the seven hells are you….”
“Sansa, I beg you, stop.” Gendry yelped, straining to hold the hefty rock of the stone marker open as Rya, quick as her namesake, snatched the satchel away before Sansa’s angry stomping could tramp over its mystery content.
“Gendry.”
Sansa hated the way her voice broke with every letter of the man’s name as she looked from the softly swinging satchel between the wolf’s teeth and the man who’d brought it with him.
“I only wish I’d been able to bring them back whole.” Robert’s son whispers in guilt. “As it was, I could only do my best to clean the filthy tar job off them once we’d found them in the first place.”
Only Kari’s leaning stance beside her keeps Sansa from completely collapsing on the spot.
“R---Robb? Grey Wind?” Sansa choked out. “You--- you find them?”
Gendry nods in confirmation. “I’m only sorry I couldn’t find more to return to you and your family, Lady Sansa, but I brought what I could of your brother and his wolf back where they belong as quickly as safely possible.”
Sansa sobs again into the warmed fur of her wolf as Rya slowly pads closer, offering over the bag strap between her jaws.
She knew the tale and had forced herself once to listen to the mocking song of the Timbers and Wind.
She doesn’t need to see the bones to know what, by some honest miracle, he'd found digging in the depths of some Southern keep.
The skull of a man. The body of his wolf.
The reverse parts were lost to the horror of time she already knew that. But she also knew, had foolishly prayed for night after night as she’d look without seeing at the canopy over her bed that for better or worse, the old Lord of the Twins would take his trophies as he’d see them.
And now she had them back.
“Sansa?”
Gendry’s back hit the dirt-covered floor with the force of the Queen’s tackling embrace. The hug as strong as the stone, the blacksmith turned high-lord had been attempting to open in the offering.
“Thank you.”