munebox | Call me Out

Call me Out

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Suffer his games.

Gendry's expression betrayed what he thought of that. It didn't seem appropriate for a lady to be reproaching her liege lord in front of him. At least he knew better than to join in and get himself into trouble by agreeing with her.

"You seem to have a way with him."

"He lost his mother only recently." She could still remember the horror of watching Lysa thrown from her own Moon Door, and her complicit part in the cover-up surrounding her murder. Only now did it occur to her how dangerous it might be for Gendry to keep him here. She never feared for her own life; she felt a sly sort of power in the way Petyr provided for her. But anyone else was fair game. Robin himself was likely only still alive because Petyr did not expect him to live much longer.

"And Lord Baelish is...not his father, but his mother's second husband. He has little love for the boy."

Her implication was, of course, that it all fell to her: the lady of the house.

Gendry could hardly recall his mother's face. Indeed, only through his old master's description did he have any Idea who or what she was. But he could sympathize with such losses. He had no family now. Gendry never had any at all.

"You've become his family, though. He seems to need one."

He recalled a little girl who wanted a family after losing her old one. Perhaps if he'd been more like Alayne...

"You've a better heart than most, m'lady. High born or low."

"...Everyone needs family, even if they don't believe it."

When the snow falls and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies but the pack survives. It had been a long time since Sansa had been part of a pack. She had been cut off from her family in King's Landing, and she had to make due with a false one in the Eyrie. But only recently had she come to appreciate what being a Stark had given her. Strength; belonging; a steadiness.

He merely nodded. "I wouldn't know. I've never had family."

There were the girls at the inn. He protected them, but they weren't family. They just were. Orphans and starving children, all in need of looking after. And now I'm here, where I can't do them any good at all.

"The smith you apprenticed with -- was he not like a father to you?"

Perhaps her assumption is a crass one, but it seemed as though stern master tradesmen were always behaving like fathers to one hero or another in the romantic tales of her youth.

"Fathers don't sell their sons."

"Why not? They sell their daughters."

Her argument bordered on insolence. Worse, it painted a darker picture than she intended. Eddard Stark had not sold her, per se. But who can deny his king when he asks for your daughter's future? Robert had wanted their houses joined, and so she was the currency exchanged to make that happen. She understood that, now that all her daydreams of golden haired children had turned into nightmares.

And then Joffrey had handed her off to the imp, again for political power. Now Petyr spoke in similar terms, mentioning Harry the Heir. Promising her Winterfell.

"That's not--" Gendry caught himself before saying anymore. In truth, he knew little of lords and ladies. They lived elevated lives and he always assumed they had their happy little marriages. Who could be miserable when luxury surrounded you.

"Only lords do that." It wasn't always true. But lowborn fathers who sold their daughters didn't do it for alliances or family names. They did it for gold. "And only to other lords. How bad can it be?"

Oh, how wholly she wanted to answer him. But even the long-ago lie of being a friend of Arya Stark's sister could not properly account for the truth she could have shared, telling him how the older Stark girl had been handed over to Joffery, then a prince. Mother tells me a king should never strike his lady.

"O-of course. You're right. A daughter should feel fortunate to be favoured by any lord," she fell back upon an old habit -- trilling back the words she thought he would want to hear.

Gendry was not one to stand around for conversation. As they spoke, he'd been tending the fire. Now he was shoveling another lump of coal to feed the fire. The fire flared up again and he set the shovel into the ground, leaning his hands over the top of it.

"You don't have to tell me lies." He wasn't angry, but there was some disappointment there. He'd come to count on her for being straight with him, even if reserved. She may still be in control of his fate, but it didn't make him any more receptive to being left out. "I may not read or talk like high borns, but I'm not stupid. What's it really like?"

Conversely, Sansa was one to stand still. There may have been a number of curious items she longer to touch: tongs and bars and counters. But she kept her distance from them all. She maintained her own few cubic feet of space.

She scrambled to blend honesty and dishonesty, trying to wrap the small truths up in big lies: "We came here from King's Landing. You know that. What you don't know, perhaps, is how my father..." Saved me. "He withdrew me from a bad betrothal. A poor business decision, on his part."

But she was still just a bastard daughter, wasn't she? "H-he was the son of a minor lord. The match was meant to...advance me. My sons and daughters would hold titles. But -- he wasn't very kind."

He had little trouble accepting that. It certainly spoke volumes of Lord Baelish, that he would step away from such a marriage for the sake of his daughter. In Gendry's eyes, it made him a good man.

"This lord... did he hurt you?"

"He never did. What was it you'd said about bloody noses in Flea Bottom?"

Sansa kept her gaze averted. She might have feared most of the men in her life, but she had also grown a better sense of which men would protect her if they realized she needed protecting. It was a kind of manipulation in and of itself. It was survival.

"The knights, saying hello and goodbye. The man who would have been my Lord Husband had very friendly knights. They so often said hello." Bloodied noses. Busted lips. She would not dare go so far as to let Gendry in on the depth of emotional pain this fake-Joffrey had caused.

His hands tightened around his shovel. He imagined these knights being the same as the Goldcloaks that came after him or the knights from Harnehal. Cruel men in iron suits who made no effort to pretend to be good men. They were butchers with titles.

How he'd like a chance to show them what real justice looked like. He liked to think they met some at the end of a noose. The Lady Stoneheart would have gladly strung up knights like that.

"Were they punished for it?"

"For it? No. But some of them were punished, in the end. For other sins."

She felt no shame in the delight Joffrey's death had brought her. Sansa wondered whether Gendry would react differently if he knew the truth -- that it was a king who had ordered the blows, and that disagreeing with him was tantamount to treason. She would not blame anyone for choosing the option which saved their own neck.

She may never have loved Tyrion, but he had at least spoken up for her. He had castigated the Kingsguard for their part in harming her, saying it was tantamount to treason in and of itself.

He grunted some small satisfaction. It wasn't enough that they would die for other sins. But it was something. Saying no more, he found metal tongs and opened the furnace. From within he retrieved a stone bucket with molten metal ore inside. For half a moment, he looked back to her.

"You'll want to keep your distance, m'lady."

The molten metal was released into a mold for a simple sheet of metal. He would use this for the basis of this helmet, for which the rest could be built on top of. This was the simplest part, but also the most important.

Dutifully, she retreated a few more feet. At first, she had childishly thought herself spoiled goods. She was a wrecked soul; he would have ever right to want her far away from him. But pragmatism soon returned to her head when the bloodlust drained away, and she saw that he was about to set to work. His request for space was a kind of caring in and of itself, and so she slid back a little farther.

Even so, she watched his work with interest. She had come through a forge of her own, this past year. It was strange to watch dirty things turn to sleek liquid, and suddenly have an image which matched the way she sometimes felt. Hot rage made to obey, poured into molds.

The metal needed time to cool before his hammer could do its work. So again his attention turned back to her. The fire would deplete soon and the chill would seep into the forge. But not yet. There was only fire now.

"I made a helmet for myself, once. Shaped like a bull, with horns and a face in it. Some knight took it. I never managed to get it back. But it was good. My best work I'd ever made. A few lords wanted to buy it, but I'd never let them."

She regretted her fur-fringed dress. It was one of her warmer ones, and the forge was still so hot. She had no notion of it cooling soon, and so she fanned her face with a flattened hand. The heat wasn't like summer days in King's Landing; it was more like how the stones drank in the heat provided subterranean hot springs piped through Winterfell. Therefore, the heat felt familiar. Comfortable. And even more comforting was the fact that Gendry had diverted his attention from the matter of her once-almost-husband. Such a diversion allowed her to look at him again, and to note the light sheen of exertion on his skin. How rewarding it must feel...

"Why wouldn't you?" She asked, bewildered by a smith who wasn't looking for a profit.

"I made it for me." It was the same thing he'd told Ned Stark. And Jon Arryn.

"Though I might have a use for it someday. Don't really know why. I'd not chance of being a knight. I could be a soldier, wearing armor I made for myself. But I'd not even be able to fight in tourneys. Still. It was mine. The only thing I owned that had any kind of worth to it. When I was sold to the Watch, my master even let me take it with me."

"Is it fulfilling?" She pushed a piece hair out of her face -- it was dyed darker than it ought to have been, and the hot damp of the forge made it darker. "To make things with your hands."

"It's easy to destroy something. People are doing it every day, out there. They pay no mind to how hard we work to make things. A farmer can work a field for a year, but one knight can burn it down in a day. They don't know the work that goes into it. Or the work that goes into the sword they have in their hand."

He watched her, waiting to see if she would object. His time in the Brotherhood had bred a defiance into him and it was being nurtured again in this forge. She was high born, yes. But she seemed to see the world for what it is, even if she was careful in how she said it. But he was careful not to linger. He'd catch her eyes or the way her lips would move and he'd be taunted with forbidden temptations. She was not his to have.

"It used to be fulfilling."

She did not argue, because she had witnessed the madness at the top. She had seen the casual way in which kings and regents could dispense with whole lives. Lords who delegated their justice; princes who delegated their pain. But then, there had been her father. Her true father. Passing sentence and swinging the sword, confronting his choice, and ever-respecting Ice.

She set aside his political ideology for a moment, because she needed the time to digest it and consider her response. In the meantime, she asked a question that fulfilled a very private curiousity but also served to keep him occupied. Keep him in her sight.

"Did you ever work on Valyrian steel?" She did not know if Flea Bottom smiths were ever allowed to.

There was an odd question to be asked. He gave her a curious look before answering.

"Not many smiths can. But my master? He's one of the few who can. He knew the spells and workings for it. Never had many chances to do it. But there was a lord, once. He had a knife he'd taken when he killed his foe, but didn't like the idea of having to give back. So he had my master melt and remake it into a new blade, fit with dragonbone for the hilt. I didn't work the steel myself, but I was there for each bit of it. Don't know that I could do it myself, though. I saw the technique he did, but there's more to it than that with Valyrian steel."

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