Punishment and reward. Carrot or stick? Simple motivations for simple people. Northern people. Hulking mongrels with set eyes and square jaws, swathed in their tenets and moralities and their thousand-year notions of honor. How they bored Baelish. Baelish who sat amid a heaving crowd of them, caring about, watching, listening to, interested in only one.
She sat there with her shoulders pulled back, her chin aloft, looking every inch the queen she was not allowed to be. Cut down and usurped and denied by her half-sibling. Not even half. This thought, alone, made Baelish's mouth twitch temporarily upward, reveling privately in a secret that had the power to reduce them all to ash.
And Jon Snow cut her down again, in her cool and icy logic, to the nodding, drooling masses of the hall's audience. The North had hardened her, given her a resolve he'd never seen in her before. Before. Before his unspeakable lapse in judgement had nearly rendered her useless and laid waste to years worth of meticulous planning. Fool. Fool Baelish, worthless man, who dared to entrust his most precious rubied jewel to the bastard son of a man who delighted in flaying his enemies.
For a moment, Baelish closed his eyes.
There was a pulse in her jaw, well-concealed, and perhaps most of them did not notice – but Petyr did. Below the thick wooden table, did her fingers clench into gloved fists? Denied. Again and again by her would-be brother. The last of her family, she had said more than once, with the deepest of conviction, as though the notion of having nothing, no one, was a fate worse than death.
It was not until later, long after the hall had been cleared, bodies marching out thrilled with their own senses of self-importance and righteousness, ready to take on the frozen evil of beyond, that he spotted her, aloft, alone, staring over her would-be kingdom. Ruminating. Denied.
"My lady," he approached, his voice low, papery, furred cloak a sway of ruffled black as he settled to standing repose beside her.
Silence answered him. Silence always answered him. Unforgivable, his very presence, his very existence.
"Your brother has a way with words, does he not?" His smirk was insufferable. "Quite the shepherd," he continued, eyes sweeping down over the courtyard, the hustle and bustle of wildlings somehow even more uncouth than the broken Northern men they stood aside. "They're all rough around the edges, stalwart in their following." It wasn't tradition anymore, was it? Sansa had suggested tradition, kept in line with their savagery, and was still cruelly rebuffed; they had put their faith now in Jon Snow, with his rule-breaking and his mercy and his notions of equality. To turn back now would make fools out of the lot of them. Better to be dead than to be a fool – so believed the North.
How did it make her feel? To so poorly misjudge the wants and responses of her own people? Her father's people? To be shunted away and ignored by her brother, to whom Winterfell ought not belong, to be placated and refuted before all of the North's sworn allies, discounted like a small child?
Denied.
Petyr slanted his gaze, eying Sansa quietly.
"Is it all you imagined it would be?" He wasn't looking at it – Winterfell – anymore, but the intimation was clear all the same.
