Bringing the Dawn

LV.

Sansa Stark

The Jade Gates, 300AC

If they spent any more than another three days on this ship, she was sure she was going to be doing nothing but vomiting for hours on end. Desperately trying to hold in the little she had eaten as she stared out across the water where if the crew were correct, they would be entering into the port of the city of Qarth. They had only been back on the ship for a couple of weeks after stopping in Great Moraq to stock up on supplies and to make repairs to the ship as they had gone through a nasty storm that made even Northern storms look like child's play.

Whilst barely settled, the town they had stocked up in allowed them to get off the ship and stretch their legs, something Sansa was more than happy to do because she was beginning to get to the end of her tether on many a thing. Why were they heading for Qarth? She'd asked Rhaenys and Mychelah the question but neither seemed to know, only that they had been guided to head here and that there would be something here. Why was she with them? Rhaenys had rolled her eyes and said Aegon had wanted her. For a long time, she had struggled coming to terms with that, because everyone believed both Rhaenys and Aegon to be dead.

Yet they weren't, they were alive and well.

Over the many weeks in which they had been on the Summer Sea, there was not much to do other than to talk with one another and learn from one another too. Mychelah had been disturbed when she let slip she did not understand the ways of the capital and how sheltered she had been, something she now was not pleased with. The day after this slip up, the older woman had sat down with her and got what she could from her so she knew where to work from.

A woman may not fight on a battlefield, but a woman must know how to fight in other ways so as not to be used like a pawn.

For a long time, she had no idea what that had meant. But as the days went on and she slowly learned more, understanding fell upon her and for the first time since she had left Kings Landing, she had wanted to scream at her mother and her father. Guilt had ebbed in realisation because word had reached them of what had happened to her father and subsequently what was happening with Westeros. It unnerved her, knowing what she did now. She'd been nought but a pawn, and she still was a pawn. When Sansa had figured out the real reason she was here, she had wanted to weep and rage and scream all at the same time. With her here, it meant she was a pawn against her family.

At least her circumstances were considerably better here, because no one surrounding her sugar coated what they spoke. It was a common thing for Northerner's to not hold their tongues, but her mother had her raised like a proper Southern woman. Despite this, it was nice to hear it as is, because it reminded her of home. Of the grey walls of Winterfell, of the Godswood, of the hot springs below the castle. Feeling snow crunch under her feet and seeing her breath dance along the open air. What she would give to be there again.

She closed her eyes at the thought before opening them to look out ahead again. Gently tapping her fingers on the edge as something came into her vision but it was difficult to make out what it was due to the fog. It had taken them so long to arrive here. After leaving Volantis, they had headed south for the Summer Islands and following the coast of Sothoryos. To avoid the Doom they had said, something which was proven as even from where they had been, she could see the redness of the sky over where the Valyrian Peninsula had broke apart and everyone living there had perished with their dragons.

Jaeron's ancestors had come from here, she thought to herself. The last person who had dared to go anywhere near Valyria was Princess Aerea, but she did not live long enough to confirm what she had saw there. She'd stumbled in on Old Nan telling the story to Bran one day, of how she had come back to Westeros clinging to Balerion's back as skinny as a twig and her skin breaking open for worms with faces to exit her body. A fever so hot that she had literally been smoking like a freshly roasted pig as she had said. And the second her skin contacted the ice in the bath in a last attempt to cool the fever, she had died from shock.