eachdraidh | (second lemon cake) video ✧ locked to seelie

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(second lemon cake) video ✧ locked to seelie

Dear fellows and members of the Seelie court -- [ the voice which addresses the locket is composed and clear and perfectly conscientious. but the girl whose image accompanies the voice looks a little less than all those things. her dark-dyed hair is fastened in an uncommonly simple braid...and if one looks very closely, she can be seen to have a haggard look about her. she's somewhere outside and all her caution is bent at hiding a panic she doesn't want to share with strangers. nor with those few genuinely waiting on her return. ]

I don't want to alarm any of you. Indeed, I speak to the very opposite of that effect. It's -- [ her gaze flickers 'off-screen' for a moment ] -- it's Alayne Stone. Those of you who are acquaintances [ not friends ] ought to know that I've found myself...left behind. I'm sorry. It should not have happened. But I suspect I won't make Caer Glaem again for some time. [ the fault of the matter is a little trickier than that, but she knows better than to play with implications. so after a steadying breath, she presses onwards. ] Or we won’t -- because I'm not alone. [ i have nymeria, she thinks but doesn’t dare to say. just like how sansa wants to speak directly to those who know her for who she really is -- but instead: ] I have a knight with me.

Don't I, Ser Gendry? [ and she twists her locket, letting it capture the surly blacksmith who stands a few paces away from her with an irritated expression. his armour is dented and blooded and the man sags with an obvious exhaustion. ser gendry is a man who looks and feels beaten, but it does not stop him from standing tall. he is a talisman of sorts: a warning, to any sansa fears might prey upon what would otherwise be a journey fraught with vulnerability. ser gendry is here; she is protected, albeit not happily so. he at last looks towards her and her locket and grumbles an unhappy agreement to her statement, which is accompanied by a nod. ]

A lady needn’t despair when she’s so well accompanied. Instead, my thoughts are with the returned; I pray the High Queen’s desired prize was taken without steep costs or losses. [ following this, there is no formal farewell. no official sign-off. her attention lingers, perhaps waiting for one or two responses in particular. ]

( ooc; sansa and gendry are now officially stranded and making their long way back to caer glaem -- and it’ll take them at least two months, though they’ll be reachable by locket at their respective ic inboxes. but for now, responses to this post will receive replies from one or the other or both!)

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Should be and if. They were both of them speaking with such a dearth of optimism. It was all so different from the front she'd put on over the lockets -- speaking with lords and kings and would-be friends. Sansa caught the layers of her skirts and her apron in her fists and lifted the hem just high enough so it did not always have to trail in the dust. And Nymeria took up the rear (for now) and walked a few wolf-lengths behind.

"Roads must cross streams all the time. I would think."

"Course they do. Not like there's any point in trying to avoid them while building roads." But the map they had was not so detailed as to include streams. It gave them the location of forests and mountains, of lakes and rivers. But roads and streams? They simply had to trust that keeping the setting sun to their right would keep them heading south.

His armor rattled as they continued and if they hoped to have stealth, they would have none with the clanging noise he made in each and every step.

At first, she'd winced with every clang. It wasn't a pleasant noise. And as she teetered on the edge of such a thirst, she found it roused an awful ache in her head. Her temples thudded with pain because of just how much she now craved cool water from a crystal stream. In her mind, an idyllic outdoor setting must have a dozen babbling brooks within a few square miles.

After a short spat of walking, she piped up: "We are aiming for the Station, are we not?" Sansa sounded hopeful.

He was just as thirsty, but built for more hardship. He might have been baking in his armor, but he baked in a forge as well. But more than once, he was tempted to begin tearing off armor and discarding it on the road side. He had the notion he would have to give it up eventually. But he figured these first few days would be the most dangerous. Once they had more distance, he could discard it. He hoped, at least.

"Maybe," he answered vaguely. "I don't know. Everyone in our court will know it's where we're heading. Who's to say the Unseelie won't find out as well?"

"We ought to aim for somewhere," she insisted. And then immediately regretted owning any sort of opinion. Hadn't she told every individual on the lockets that she would trust her fate to the knight? It was disingenuous for her now to question his heading. So she looked sheepish, tucked her arms behind her back, and would not catch Gendry's eye.

"Not that I disagree," Sansa tried to mend the damage she imagined must have been dealt. "That is, you're right in that the obvious move is not necessarily the safest." -- even the humblest pieces can have wills of their own. And that was what they now were: humble pieces on their own, torn between what everyone else was telling them to do and what felt right. But her heart ached to see her sister again, and if meeting Thranduil at the Station brought her nearer to that...

"The Kingslayer will only expect us to go to the Station," she sounded heartbroken as conceded the point. They were two lost souls and their best strength, she thought, might come from refusing to make the moves others expected from them.

For a moment, he was unsure of whether to capitulate to her desire to go to Station. Her defeated tone tugged at his stubbornness and softened the edges of his patience. He was aware he'd been nothing but cruel to her since they were stuck together. But he was still angry at her. He was still upset that he was trapped here instead of back in Caer Glaem in safety. He'd never had any intention of leaving the safety of those walls, save for when he was called to. Now he was uncertain they'd ever make it back.

"If we cross the river to the south, we'll be in Seelie lands. If we can find a crossing, I think we should try it. If we can't, then Station might be all that's left for us."

He wasn't sure of this as a plan. But his sense of navigation was ill refined and he reckoned heading straight south would be the most sensible path. After all, it was just like when traveling with Arya. If they had kept going north then, they would have found the Trident. Well now, it was the same, only south. This time he would need the good sense to avoid trouble.

And Sansa -- conditioned to be perspicacious in the presence of someone else's anger -- could sense that he was upset. She hardly needed to be sensitive to do so. He wore it in every line and seemed to spit it into every word. Or he had, until this moment, where either she'd grown accustomed to his harshness or else he'd allowed it to be diluted.

Her head turned. She looked at Nymeria. At least the wolf brought no judgement. By cause-and-effect she'd once gotten that protector lost as well, the same night she'd lost her own wolf. But Nymeria was not cruel. Wild, perhaps. But not cruel.

"South is good. His Grace, King Thranduil, suggested we ought to go south. Even if we never make the Station, it seems as good a plan as any. And if you think it is as well..." She trailed off. Even she was beginning to hear how grating her constant agreement was becoming. "Is it hot in all that metal?"

Perhaps concern would serve her better.

He knocked on his chestplate in a kind of bitter salute to her question. It would be a shame to discard it. But that, he knew, was inevitable. "Like a bloody furnace."

He looked back to her and to her dress, which was such a simple thing that in her current state of dishevel, she almost looked common. "What of you?"

"I'm alright."

She was circumspect with her words, now. There was no reason to run to loquaciousness. Not when they had leagues ahead of them and whole hours that might eventually require filling. Sansa already felt exhausted with the effort she would eventually have to expend whenever silences grew too uncomfortable. Doubtless, she would feel the tug of propriety on her tongue. For now, though, she tried to be thrifty with her answers.

"I'll be fine. Whatever discomforts we suffer now...they're better than being captured, yes?"

He nodded. "Aye. I've been captured before." Indeed, he had even told her of it. But she did not like to hear it and because Arya had forgotten it all, she refused to believe it. Now, perhaps it was just as well.

"You'll not want to hear what it was like."

"You're likely right," she said. Perfectly compliant. But her heart and mind protested: I have been a captive, she thought. Perhaps not in a dungeon or a pen. But she had not been free, though fed and bathed and entertained (to a degree). And so for that reason amidst a hundred others she kept the protest to herself. He would laugh at her, she thought, if she claimed life in the Red Keep as captivity. Who was to say whether the Unseelie Court would be so gracious were they to catch her now?

She paused. Wiggled her food inside her shoe as if to miraculously find a half-inch deviation where her blisters did not smart. And then she began walking again. "I'm certain it was dreadful. Whatever went on at Harrenhal would not have happened under its rightful lord."

Petyr. The Lannisters may have given him the castle, but she still supported his claim on that seat.

"Rightful lord? And who's that? When I was there, it was the Lannisters that ruled it, with the Mountain and his ilk running it. But then Roose Bolton managed to take over and he was no better." Better, he thought, that Arya had never released Roose Bolton. Perhaps things would have been better then. "They say it's ruled by someone else now. Littlefinger, they call him. Likely he's as bad as they are."

He held no special animosity for the coin collector. He knew of Petyr Baelish from his life in King's Landing and had seen the man, though he'd never spoken to him. But he was a lord and in with the Lannisters. He reckoned that made him as bad as the rest.

"Lord Baelish is a good man," she insisted. And although she did not always believe the line, she gave it now with full sincerity. Sansa was a stricken soul, but she would not let this rough-tongued knight tear down a man he'd never met. Not when she owed so much of her survival to him.

She quickened her pace, coming even with Ser Gendry. "If he'd been at Harrenhal, everything would have been fine. I'm sure of it. He'd protect Arya, too."

Petyr would not keep her from her sister, certainly! If they had been at that castle instead of the Eyrie.

Gendry was not convinced. He glanced at her and did little to hide the skepticism in his raised eyebrows and long grimace. But a shrug of the shoulder and turn of the head and he was giving it little more thought than that.

"As you say. It don't much matter, because he wasn't there."

"You don't believe me."

Gendry was right: it didn't matter; Petyr was never there. But it stung to have him question her so openly. So flagrantly. When she was now called upon to put so much trust in him, he could barely summon a fraction of the same for her simple claims. It didn't make her angry so much as it made her doubt herself. Perhaps he was right not to believe it -- perhaps the rest of the world saw Littlefinger, not Petyr, and understood that he could not be trusted.

Except by her, she thought. And on some claims.

He shrugged. "Am I supposed to, just on account of you being high born? You don't trust me, you said as much before, so I figure your weird might well as mean the same to me."

He knew it was petty. But he reckoned that this way he would prove himself to her by action rather than shallow words."

"I suppose you've no obligation to trust a thing I say, no," she conceded. And that made her feel very sad and bereft and lonely indeed. Worse yet, she'd fought with Arya during their brief rest on the roadside. The conflict replayed itself over and over, and every time Sansa demonized herself a little more.

"But I trusted him." To a point. "And I wish he was here, now. None of this would have happened."

He wished that man was here as well, then he might be relieved a burden. He looked back at her. "And what would trusting him hey you? I've seen him before. He's a small bugger and likely don't know a sword from one of his whores. He'd do you no good out here where his coin means nothing."

He faced the road again. "You're better off in my company. I survived a road like this before when others didn't."

Better off! She would have laughed, were she not so unhappy. Sansa fully believed that if Baelish had been in these lands, her name would never have ended up on any list for any quest. And if it did, she would have already had a knight of her own -- one who might make her feel a little more stalwart in the presence of Jaime Lannister's mere name. She knew just how much damage Petyr could do, although she would not boast of it to Gendry.

"I would ask you not to speak of my friends like that. Think it all you want, but please don't say it."

He snorted. "As you say. I won't speak ill of your Baelish."

He trudged along again now gloomily staring at the path ahead. He regretted being so harsh. He'd tried to convince Arya to be nicer. But somehow Sansa had come to represent all he disliked in nobility. "... I appreciate those things you said about me. You didn't have to make me sound so decent. I know you don't like me as much you made it sound."

Edited 2014-05-25 23:46 (UTC)

Her steps faltered. No, Sansa thought, she did not like him all that much. She rather dreaded his continued company and she knew she would have nightmares when she next tried to sleep. He was angry and he was stupid and she doubted he knew enough to protect her from anything. But he was all she had -- and for that, at least, she managed to show a modicum of gratitude.

"It's important they think I'm safe," she answered as diplomatically as she dared. "The more decent you sound, the safer I seem."

In the end, it underlined one remaining truth: she needed him, either way.

"But it don't actually make you any safer. You could have told them what you really thought and had a dozen armored fools coming to rescue you."

But instead, no one was coming. This was what surprised him the most. They had an elf king, only half interested in their fate, who might meet them halfway. Ser Loras might ride out to meet them. But there was no rescue. Not even for Lady Sansa Stark. He reckoned that was jut the way of it. This was where the Starks stood now.

"Of course it did," she insisted. "This way, if word gets 'round to someone who would do me harm -- well, perhaps they'll think twice about daring a knight who has had such bright words ascribed to him."

Sansa was not comfortable with revealing the machinations behind her decisions. It felt an awful lot like stripping away protective layers: cloaks and gloves and boots and revealing the skin beneath. But she resigned herself to sharing some things with him simply because they had to survive this road together. Just like Lord Baelish had revealed some things to her on their journey from the capital.

Edited 2014-05-26 15:38 (UTC)

He grinned, almost in a mocking sort of way. "Make them fear me, eh? Ser Gendry the Bull. So vicious he fought his way from the gutter to the Riverlands. Faced the Mountain and the Kingslayer and lived to tell the tale. Just don't ask him to repeat the tales, because they won't be so impressive as they first seem."

Chuckling, he walked further along in his clanging armor. "Only, Ser Jaime knows he could kill me easily in a fight. So it's only our own allies what will be fooled."

"And I don't mind it if our allies are fooled, Ser Gendry. Most of them are strangers to me."

After all, she held even the kinder strangers at arm's length as Alayne Stone. Even allowing Gendry to know her honest name had happened in a fit of startled exuberance -- a brief flash-in-the-pan moment of delight and trust that she now suspected she ought to regret. Except...

Except would he have been bothering to protect her at all were she not a Stark? Sansa did not know.

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