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She was caked in blood, her clothes, her hands her face. The hands maids even stared at her blood dripping hair, probably wondering if its color was natural or due to blood. She wanted to fight still, to make him bathe in his own blood, but her adrenalin seamed to die as her pain picked up, so she let him to whatever he was doing, it was no point now.
This was a joke, her son’s corpse lay mutilated at the Twins and she was being treated as a queen at the home of the same man that killed him. Dreadfort was not as sinister as it’s name implied, no, the keep was far more homier than Winterfell. Its wall were covered with afrescos of pale eyes people, men and women, from babe to crone. While the Starks had their crypts, the Boltons had their family almost in flesh and blood watching their every move.
‘Leave us’ the Lord himself said, I thought he came to gloat at my pain, to admire his work, but truth was even more humiliating. All they little maids bowed to him before disappearing through the same door that he came. ‘You are to join me at dinner, Lady Stark’ was she even a Stark still, when all her links to them were served in the most brutal of ways? Yes, she was a Tully no longer, she was the mother of wolves.
But she was the mother of wolves before he made me shed my fur. I was forced to nude myself and climb into the wooden tub, it was no real comfort that he merely looked in disgust to the dirt on my skin, for it only made him task himself into cleaning me.
The cinnamon smell on the bath water brought back memories of the day I lost everything, of him sitting next to me during the feast, of how I chose to sit near him, favoring him sweet perfume. His thin fingers were warm in my scalp, almost pealing away the dried blood. How did a lord sank so low to bathe his prisoner.
No. He said something diffident on the way here, I was his claim to the North, I am his wife to be. And only his apparent paranoia against dirty could drive him to cleanse his future wife. Wash me all you want, for you’ll never wash away the blood in your hands.
Still, he made me smell like him, marking me as his already. The dresses he offered me weren’t like my usual one, no. They were dark, between grey and black with lace as pink as his cape, as the pink man in his sigil. There was no escape for me now, I was no longer the Mother of Wolves, I was no longer a Stark, no matter what he saw fit to call me before our wedding.
I looked like a Bolton, I lived like a Bolton, I even smelled like one. I was a Bolton already, and I only hoped my blade was as sharp as his.