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Everyone thought they had done something to deliver unto them such an absurd number of children. The order and the pattern was uncanny. Six pregnancies, every babe surviving, nine whelps in all? There must be something they had done or not done.
But besides Sansa’s truly good nature and her abiding love for her northern heart trees--surely if there were gods, this was their work?--there had been no trick to it.
They certainly hadn’t meant to have Jon and Ned so soon after Clegane and Tully (she had started it that night, in any case--not his fault).
He had been delighted in her renewed interest in him, of course, but it hadn’t even gone on very long before it was time for her to again nurse one squalling infant and then the next. And then suddenly she was nursing two and growing two and it seemed like all seven hells had opened up in Winterfell itself. He wouldn’t wish that experience on his worst enemy.
And the third set? He wasn’t even sure when those two had been brought into existence because by then they were both so exhausted that the days and nights were an indistinguishable blur.
Without hardly knowing how it happened, they had six sons. Six. Ridiculous. As if Sansa Stark were some sort of absurdly fertile miller’s daughter in a song, delivering her husband of a double-dozen children and a few magical animals to boot.
And then as quickly as it had begun, it came to an end.
Truth be told, they hadn’t done anything different to stop than they had to start. They were together nearly as much now as they been in the early days, but for years and years no more babes came to them from the gods.
The boys arrived one after the other like links in a chain, and then that was that. Ten years gone without so much as a short-lived quickening.
As they approached what Sansa considered middle age and what he considered impossibly old age for himself, he settled into the idea that he had done his duty and that the boys were as like as not to be able to protect their lady mother when he was done with this world, and when the next winter came, he would happily go wherever the Stranger took him.
Sometimes he saw Sansa look at little girls in Wintertown with a touch of sad admiration in her eyes, but she never once complained that she had only a dogpile of filthy sons who nipped and bit each other from the first.
Her boys needed from her only food, beds, steel, boiled leather, ringmail and fur-draped cloaks in the Northern style. Every so often she was able to entice one of them to accept an extra lesson from Maester Wendic on the legends of the Kings of Winter or to suffer through an unnecessary courtesy call on a vassal lord, but by and large, they were his to make or ruin.
She adored them, she petted them, she gazed at them in awe. She taught them to speak properly and think properly and she taught them everything she’d ever known or hoped to know about leading the North--and then she handed them over to their father.
The truth was that they were him--only moreso. They had the name Stark, and the Northern crones who knew their forefathers said they very well had the Stark look, but they were every inch his. Their size, their temperaments, their faces--they were everything he could have been if his own early days hadn’t been so accursed.
So two by two, Sansa handed them over to him and tried ever so hard not to flinch when they began banging each other about the head with sticks before they could hardly climb stairs on their own. They all rode unusually well by age four, and ever after as he bred new lines of his Northern warhorses, he kept an eye out for animals that would complement their personalities. Rickard understood managing horseflesh in an uncanny way, all he needed in a mount was raw power, the rest he worked out for himself. Gane had to be kept away from particularly high-strung creatures lest they fuel each others’ tempers. Small Jon looked six at three, and nine at six, and so forth--he always needed an unusually large stallion. Poor Small Jon; very big was sometimes as hard as very small.
Yes, his boys were warhorses, and dire wolves, and true lords of the North, even the ones that would never rule or suffer too much war.
He himself was ready to be done. No more fighting for him. Which is not to say that he couldn’t still command his men or defend his family, but no more of the vanguard. No more single combat and tournament nonsense.
Sansa always claimed she couldn’t see a bit of difference in him but she was ever a bad liar and he felt impossibly slow compared to his youth, and the leg got worse every year. So, slowly he coaxed Sansa into accepting that he would be dead long before she passed from this world, convincing her she should at least consider settling the boys in their birthrights sooner rather than later, so there was a shadow of chance that he could help them if they needed him.
Sansa always glared at him when these talks came up and told him she thought he was being absurd and would he please consider being less fatalistic and what she really needed help with was finding respectable wives for those animals.
But her protests to the contrary, his affairs had long been in order. He’d gotten more from his life with her than he’d ever imagined possible. The boys would be all right. She wouldn’t be all right, not exactly, but it couldn’t be helped. The gods, ever cunts, had seen fit to give her only the second half of his life.
And then, just as he’d become completely certain that when his time came to rest he would be perfectly satisfied to go, the baby birds had started fluttering.
It was the damnedest thing. With all three he’d known before she did that they were coming. He woke up one morning and his ears were full of a strong rumble-sounding flutter, like bumblebee wings or a great green fruit beetle flying in a garden. When he pulled his wife closer the thrum grew louder. The hum of their hearts called to him from the first, as clearly as the little bird had sung to him those decades ago in King’s Landing.
He knew without doubt that Cat was coming and he knew she was going to be a girl and he knew she favored Sansa and fucking fuck fuck, now he knew he had to live much much longer than he had ever planned, not just to protect his daughter from the horrors of, simply, men, but because he wanted to know her.
He was sure there was some otherworldly aspect to his love of Stark women. It was a different shape for all them and yet it all had the same feeling of fire in his heart. Sansa was one thing--the thing that made him whole; Arya was another thing--she was his claws and his teeth and, yes, his will to survive. Then the girls, who came just like their brothers, one after another like so many links in a chain, were different again.
They were all Sansa reborn, but a hue darker. Copper hair, but moreso. Blue eyes, but not her calm ocean blue. They were all the wave-roughed midnight blue of the ocean under a storm front.
Cat was the primary mischief maker, always.
Lee was never anything but skin and bone, no matter what they did.
Ellie sometimes had a curl to her hair that he thought might have come from him.
He could barely remember how they’d been made, but he remembered how they’d all been delivered so effortlessly compared to their damn sons, who all came out far too early and yet unreasonably big--Little Ned was born blue, and Brandon arrived in the caul, and Sansa had labored slowly and painfully for days with them all.
No, with the girls he’d go out one morning to run the boys and the horses and the wolves and Sansa’s black dogs, running them into the ground so they wouldn’t squabble and bite and set upon what wasn’t theirs, and when he came home at night there’d be a new baby on her breast.
He felt a little set aside, actually.
With the boys he’d made himself useful by offering up his hands to clutch as she battled through the labor pains that made her scream and keen and bend. She always apologized so politely after the fact, saying she was very sorry if she’d hurt him and she’d lost herself a bit there and would he please forgive her for any pain she’d caused him?
And to preserve her dignity he had to use every bit of strength he had in him not to laugh in her face.
Dear, foolish bird.
But the girls all arrived as if their name days were any other day. And he knew right away that they would be enchantresses like their mother, and that though the gods had cursed him with a young wife--he was closer to being a grandfather to these three than a proper father!--he could do some good for them at least as a wide-branched old tree on which they might perch before they flew away.
And perch they did.
The girls rode on his shoulders and he carried one in each arm when he could and he kicked those awful sons of his out of the way--they might knock them down!--and then when the girls were big enough they ran off to the heart tree in the godswood and they climbed that instead and lived half their days out there in a little village of sisters, and as the years passed the three seemed to speak a secret language that only they understood.
The smallfolk and the servants whispered that when the girls talked amongst themselves it was the Old Tongue back in Winterfell, but Sansa laughed and said it was definitely the Common Tongue, just so full of secrets and stories that only they understood that it did sometimes seem to be a foreign language.
And Sansa bloomed anew, ever conjuring new feathers for their baby birds.
Cat was six now and Lee was five and Ellie was four, and his arms were full of Northern princess, and they were as pretty as can be in their gowns their mother made them, and the four of them together were as content and lazy as any living thing had ever been or ever would be.
Together they could sit quite happily on this indulgent padded seat on the edge of this awful royal wedding and just observe.
At court events such as this, young cunt knights often wanted to hassle the old Hound but somehow his little girls were a ridiculously effective shield against that sort of thing.
Lord Tyrion had indeed asked if the great warrior Sandor Clegane had turned nursemaid, and he and his three tiny heart-tree witches had simply leaned closer together and said nothing because what had he to do with them?
Lord Tyrion had waddled off in a huff, insulted that the Hound hadn’t been insulted.
Sansa was, of course, at war. She was sunshine bright, guiding her sons through the throngs of lords and ladies, whispering in their ears about who was reliable and whom she found suspicious and which alliance was likely to tip the balance of which regional skirmish. She extracted Tull from the clutches of a Dornish viper, and did her best to nudge Small Jon toward a tallish good-hearted Crownlands girl she had met at New Summerhall last year.
Little Ned slipped out of her clutches early and had disappeared, possibly with some pretty maid from the Reach.
Gane was the great prize for all the conspiring women in the room, and he could see Sansa preening ever so slightly as they flattered and romanced him and his mother. They had no intention to marry off any of their children to anyone in particular--they had no need for some other house's gold or soldiers--but he knew Sansa took a certain pride in how women of all ages responded to her sons.
“Father?” peeped Cat from his good side.
“Yes, my lady?”
“When can we go home? I want to see if any of my weirwood seeds have sprouted along the Kingsroad!”
“Not for some time. After all this is done, we have to say goodbye to your brothers.”
“I don’t want them to go.”
“Your mother says that Red and Black will come visit you in the godswood. Remember she promised that even if you can’t see your brothers, they will be able to hear you at night in their dreams, and you will see them in yours.”
“Yes, I remember, but...”
“I know, my little Cat. I know.”
He sighed. He’d miss the wretched bastards too. Gane was cocky beyond all reason, and Tull was a talker.
If he didn’t know better he’d say Tull was Sansa’s son by Tyrion Lannister. Those two had the same cunning and the same bewildering ability to see things from a hundred miles above and one hundred years in the future. He was proud of his first and second sons, truly, and he knew that their goodness was at least a little his doing. The thought of them going out into the world beyond his reach made him sadder than he’d expected.
“Father?” chirped Lee from his bad side.
“Yes, my lady?”
“What if I don’t want to marry?”
“Then you won’t marry, and you ought to set your mother’s dogs on anyone who tries to make you. You can sail the fourteen seas with your Aunt Arya if you like.”
“Oh no, Father, I just want to stay at Winterfell with you forever.”
He felt like someone had kicked him right in the chest and bruised his breastbone.
“Yes, you are Lyanna Stark of Winterfell, and it is your home forever if you wish it to be. I’d like that too, but you might change your mind someday and dare to fly away. I’ll miss you terribly if you go, but know that I’ll have your lady mother with me in this life and in the grave, so I’ll never really be lonely, even if you leave me forever.”
He petted her hair and tried not to imagine the son of a bitch who would indeed someday carry her away.
“Father?” yawned little Ellie in his lap.
“Yes, my lady?”
“I’m sleepy."
“Yes, my lady.”
She nuzzled into his chest just the way Sansa always did, and yawned again. It was probably bad form to let his noble daughter sleep in public, and at a royal wedding no less, and Sansa would probably raise an eyebrow at it, but he’d not wake her or move her for love or money.
“Good night, girl. Sleep well.” He still couldn’t say the “I love you” out loud, even after so many years with Sansa, but he felt sure his littlest magical daughter heard the words from his heart, just the same as if he’d spoken them into the wind. “Good night.”