Closed starter for @owenstark Setting: Highgarden, the Reach. King Owen asked several Northerners to join him for the Verdant Concord. Vilde was among them.
She had never traveled so far south before. The Reach was so entirely foreign to the sálþyrja in a way that intrigued and unsettled her in equal measure. The warmer air clung to her skin, and she found herself missing the crisp and wild environment of her homeland more than she thought she would. Vilde had set aside her heavy cloak and fur-lined boots days ago, albeit somewhat reluctantly. She donned lighter garments appropriate for the Reach weather, though she still refused to wear the dainty dresses of the Southron women. Proudly, she still wanted the world to see her for who she was without mistake: a Northerner of the mountains, of the clans, shaped by the cold and the forests.
Not a week had passed since the Northerners descended on the rose gardens and sculpted hallways of Highgarden, when the Harclay woman proposed a hunt. There was a need to lose herself in nature, to touch something cold and real, to grasp at some familiarity. Some agreed to the hunt, perhaps with genuine interest or only half-heartedly. What was a hunt compared to the splendors of the Concord, some thought, surely. Still, the next day at dawn, Vilde grabbed her bow and quiver, strapped a pair of knives to her belt, and set out to the forest beyond the Reach's capital.
Owen Stark showed up. And he came alone. Vilde stood beside her horse, a hand lightly resting against the beast's neck as she watched him approach. Morning was just rising from the horizon, sunrays shining from behind him, bathing him with warm light. He appeared almost a symbol more than a man. Yet Vilde never forgot that the king, like anyone else, was also just flesh and bones. “You left your crown behind, Owen Stark,” she said once he was but mere steps away. It was true he did not wear the circlet, but neither did he wear the inherent distance or superiority of kingship. He'd come on his own. No guards. No courtiers. Once more, he presented himself before her like a man and not as a king.
She met his eyes as he dismounted, pale blue meeting warm brown, unflinching. “Did the others think it a bad omen to hunt at my side?” she asked with a subtle smirk, a ghost of a smile that crossed her lips only briefly. The king's men and women ought to know better, but there had always been rumors and superstitions around women like her. Deathmaidens. Sin-eaters. Soul cleansers. She was no harbinger of death. “Or perhaps they had no taste for waking with the sunrise,” she mused, in case the answer was far simpler. Her eyes stayed locked on his. She wished to know why the wolf king had come on his own.
