Sansa, too, knew little respite over the course of recent months.

She had expected the comforts and grandeur extravagances of

life - or failing that, at least the bedrocks of family and safety - to be secure. Steadfast. Unchanging. The songs had not warned
her younger self of the true nature of politics. Of life. Everything, from the simplest of pleasures to the most heroic of ambitions,
instead were transient, fugacious, equivocal, if not fraudulent. Politics and its cutthroat subsidiaries were not, as she had once
naively believed, optional pursuits, able to bracketed easily from the nobler arts and vocations.

She would still, occasionally, pause, and ruminate upon her journey, how so many unwanted and unprompted lessons had been
distilled into a few traumatic turns of event. Of how even the most loving and benevolent the rug could be torn away from
beneath a young girl, of how a young Lady could be exposed without mercy to the true nature of intrigue. How cynicism could
displace idealism, how trust and friendship were elusive endeavours and foolish ones at that, how predicting any kind of
stability and quietude was a gamble unlikely to pay off.

Two lessons came into conflict. To sit back, to be passive and reactionary, was of an equivalent consequence to apathy,
ignorance, fear, laziness. But to act, one needed astute predictions and appealing intuitions, and the greatest lesson Sansa had
learnt was that those were qualities she still lacked. So she remained largely passive, to her great shame. As her new destiny
came together, she was more of a bystander than she would have hoped.

Sansa waited in the courtyard, with a small procession of courtiers and members of the fledgling Stark household. The politics
that had created this arrangement defied easy comprehension, but she was able to piece together more of the tale than she
had been told. Stannis Baratheon had negotiated some kind of detente with the northerners, and been convinced to legitimise
his brother's remaining bastards, to create a more durable House Baratheon. The man was infamously unyielding, but, it
appeared, not as bullheaded as the King's Landing gossip had once suggested.

Gendry Baratheon would likely be far more bullheaded, she realised. He had created a bull's head helmet, one of the ladies had
told her. He was like a bull, strong and cocksure and confident, another lady had told her the day after, in an unprompted act of
attempted reassurance. He was a handsome and strong man, many had repeated, who took after his father. That did not please
her.

The gates opened, slowly, and she could not see him. She had stood in this position once before that she could remember, when
her soon-to-be husband's father arrived at Winterfell. She swallowed. Hopefully he would not take after his father. The songs
sung about Robert matched little with the man he became, a man who raised Joffrey, who allowed Lady to die, who allowed the
realm to slide into the turmoil that had destroyed her life and those of many others. In a way, she was luckier than most to have
emerged alive and intact from her experiences.

She straightened her back. Hopefully her fears were ill-placed.

 Riding into Winterfell, Gendry was a bit awed by its construction and layout from he could see so far. Looking very much like a
lost traveler despite the Lord’s clothing he was in and the modest contingent of a hundred Baratheon Cavalry. It wasn’t quite his
fault he was lost and hopelessly surprised at the new world he’d found himself chucked in the deep end of.