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be gentle my little thunderstorm the world is just not ready.
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Robb, I write to you with a heavy heart. Our good king Robert is dead, killed from wounds he took in a boar hunt. Father has been charged with treason. He conspired with Robert's brothers against my beloved Joffrey and tried to steal his throne. The Lannisters are treating me very well and provide me with every comfort. I beg you: come to King's Landing, swear fealty to King Joffrey and prevent any strife between the great houses of Lannister and Stark.
Your fatehful sister, Sansa
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There were too many emotions swirling within Hermione as she held the letter in her trembling hands. Fear, sharp and unyielding, for Eddard, Sansa, and Arya. Anxiety, crawling like a shadow, for Joffrey now sat the Iron Throne, and it had taken only minutes in his company to see the cruelty simmering beneath his crown. But above all, there was relief. Bitter, acrid relief that Robert Baratheon—the man whose fingers she could still feel in the dead of night, whose breath still lingered on her skin—was dead at last.
"Treason?" Robb's voice cut through the quiet as his eyes scanned the letter once more before handing it to her. His brow was furrowed, mouth taut with disbelief. "Sansa wrote this?"
"That is your sister's hand, but the queen's words," Maester Luwin murmured, his old eyes watching Hermione as she read the letter again. The neat, careful script of Sansa was there, but twisted into something false, something cold.
"You are summoned to King's Landing to swear fealty to the new king," Hermione said aloud, her voice barely above a whisper. The words tasted of bile, bitter and wrong. She shifted in her seat, feeling the heat of Theon's breath just behind her, his gaze no doubt fixed on Sansa's plea for peace. It reminded her of something Lord Edward had once told her, a grim warning passed down through the years: "Starks do not fare well in the south." It was why the Starks had rarely left Winterfell, why they had never ventured far from the cold comfort of the North. The South had already claimed so many of the Stark's kin—Eddard, Brandon, even Lyanna, and now perhaps Sansa and Arya.
