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She feels the ladder shimmer up the back of her tights like a whipcrack in the cold air, and she skids on the frost-slick grass at the shock.
There are lights far behind her, bright like a candle-flame spiting the darkness of the newborn year, and lights ahead of her, flickering like an uncertain hope just beyond her reach. She has to reach that hope and make it a victory, else she'll be dragged back into spite and be sullied forever, beyond hope of return.
The cold cleanses, though. Even though this mad dash to freedom has been planned for weeks, it would have been easier to just stay trapped in the amber-hard cage of golden light and false laughter, rather than run out into the death-trap gardens that are all that keeps her from what might be. The last gilded cobwebs are frozen out of her mind by the pains shooting up her legs, the numbness seeping into her fingers and elbows and the tip of her nose chasing away memories of touches that burned with wrongness and unwantedness like the last traces of summer in a turning-to-chill October evening fading under the year's first taste of frost.
She feels herself, for the first time in too long. It's been years and months and weeks and days and even just hours and minutes and seconds, she could probably count them all out and up if she had a mind to, but that doesn't seem important. What's important now is that she can feel everywhere her bones are close to the skin because those are the places the cold bites sharpest, and those are the places she feels most alive.
Her dress is pale blue and shimmers with silver thread, the hem fluttering in scalloped layers of chiffon that float and dance with every kick of her knees as she runs and slips across the endless glistening lawns, and she feels like a fairy from a half-remembered story that she feels more than hears, with a swoop of hope and the warmth of home.
She catches sight of her own feet as she jumps the lamp-lined path from one frozen fountain to the other, on opposite sides of the lawns, and she thinks of another story she almost knows, where a girl danced in glass slippers. She wonders if glass was more comfortable than frost and ice, and wonders if it matters how comfortable the shoes are if they help bring the happy ending.
She doesn't think so.
Her own shoes were heavy things of satin and too much money, too high to dance in or walk in or run in, so she left them neatly tucked against the railing of the steps leading from the ballroom to the gardens. They looked as out of place as she did in that Midas' palace, shining platinum among all the fool's gold that was drawn to the blood-magic power that hides the ruin under the glory.
It's all behind her, insoles and all, and that's all that matters. She has no shoes at all now except what shifts to her ever-colder toes from the sharper-than-it-ought-to-be grass, and for some reason, that makes her laugh, high and bright and tiny under the deep sky that twinkles above her like a blue-black infinity just waiting to be shaped.
It could be her infinity, she thinks, if she's just strong enough to grasp it.
The warmth from inside spills out into the gardens, slipping sweetly under his coat and tempting him back inside.
He can't, though. He promised he'd wait out here, so he will. It's warm, after all, even though he can see his breath flowering in the air and can smell frost in the top of his nose. It'll be warmer still when she gets here, and that's the main thing, and nothing else matters much.
There are candles and lanterns and lamps all over the lawns, tucked inside hard-coaxed rosebushes and flourishing winter blossoms, fairy lights twisted around colonnades and stone benches and statues of nature gods with their feet in pools of star-scattered ice, waiting for spring to wake them up.
He thinks that she might be spring, if he can tease the rot of autumn out of the curls of her hair and the shadows under her eyes.
He wishes he could run across the gold-and-green-and-white of the flickering flamelit lawns to meet her at the bridge across the stream, but he hardly dares to go further than the loose regiments of sweet-smelling heathers that tumble over the edges of the otherwise perfectly manicured beds that border and chequerboard the lawns and paths and fountains and gazebos. He can see all of it, gilt shimmering there and granite glinting bright with quartz there and everywhere, there are flashes of her.
He likes the heathers. They're not as pretty as the other flowers, nor as fragrant, but they survive through sheer dogged persistence - they're tough as nails, those woody little shrubs that everyone overlooks, and he knows how that feels. He knows how it feels to be overlooked and discounted, but to thrive regardless.
The moon is bright tonight, almost bright enough to render the candles and lanterns and lights redundant, and the air seems to shimmer between the two, milky dark and amber shadowed, and the play of the light makes the whole garden seem somehow less real. He's reminded of the fairy rings he used read about in the richly illustrated books of stories his grandfather used bring home from his travels.
All it needs is a fairy princess to come forth from the hoarfrost, and the vision will be complete. He certainly feels the helpless mortal held in thrall to his fae lover, standing here with the party to his back and the winter spread out before him, between the lights of the garden and the far distant lights of their unfortunate neighbours.
Somewhere in that winter, he knows, is the fairy princess he awaits. Or at least, so he hopes.
She slips neatly down the railing on the bridge, laughing in delight because she is across the stream, and that means that she is free! Free!
On this side of the stream, where there is life instead of rot and true gold instead of fool's, they don't believe in the old magic that binds and holds and twists and burns, but she knows it exists, and she knows that it goes no further than this impossibly insignificant little ice-slick.
Usually, in spring and summer and even in the autumn, the stream runs crystal clear and sings like silver bells, but here in the depths of winter, it's like a drizzle of molten silver under the overbright moon, and just as deadly - she knows frozen water better than she'd like, and she knows that glassy ice like that is never strong enough to stand on.
The air over here is sweeter, heavy with the roses that these non-believers believe into bloom, and she laughs again as she dances across softly crunching crisping grass towards the first row of bushes, lit from within by iron-and-glass lanterns. The grass is just as frozen but not as sharp here, and the frost doesn't cling to her toes as it did back across the way.
Life. That's what it is, the new, fresh life that's so absent on the far side of the stream. What newness there is there is as false as their joy, but here, oh, there is so much here.
He is here.
She met him in the depths of summer, when the bindings were weakest and she wandered most freely. It was warm, and the sun was sweet, and her skin had been pink and freckled, and he had sat with her in the shade and talked about music and flowers and stories no one else cared about anymore.
And from there, it had been as simple as it was impossible - the year had darkened from there, and with it her bindings had grown stronger, but now she has a chance and a life and a name.
"I am Sansa of the house of Stark!" she sang, spinning in circles on thawing toes across lawns that shimmer with candles and liberty. "Sansa! That is my name! Sansa!"
The magic is so old that it has been forgotten in all but the oldest places. Casterly Rock and Winterfell are richer than the rest, in gold and silver but also in magic, but even so, it lingers elsewhere - the confluence at Riverrun, the gates of the Eyrie, the ballroom that was once the throne room at Highgarden - and Willas knows it, found it in those old stories that no one else read and in the throne carved high in the oak tree that still grows right in the heart of Highgarden, through the floors and the roof.
He told Sansa about finding the throne, in one of the letters they exchanged between two solstices. Such a short time to fall in love, and yet here they are.
The magic runs cold even in summer, and while Sansa is of Winterfell, is of old, cold blood, she was left with nothing but the power others chose to channel through her. Only tonight, on the solstice, when the world is darkest and the magic runs coldest, could she break free, and he hardly dares to believe that she's done it, even now.
He can hear laughter like silver bells ringing out from the faraway bottom of the gardens, and he once more longs to run over the glacial lawns and damn his bad leg and his crutches to hell, but he dares not. There are magicks that would allow for glamours to cross the boundary of the stream the splits Highgarden's lands from those of the Rock, glamours with flaming red hair and laughter like the first thaw of spring, and he dares not trust the flashes of rose gold and the tinkle of sunlight until they cross into the bright light beyond the first row of archways.
Sansa understands the mystery of it all better, in truth. He knows the mechanics, how to free her, when to wait, but she understands the old ways and the cold ways. She has the means to do so, after all, comes from the last place where the magic has not yet been corrupted as it is at the Rock or weakened next to nothing as it has here or at Riverrun, and has had the time to study the old ways in her captivity.
There is frost gleaming from her toes to halfways up her shins when she emerges into the light, bare-armed and wild-eyed like some strange, fae thing, and he does not recognise her as the girl he met under the lavender-and-white awning during the summer solstice celebrations at Riverrun. She had been among her mother's people there, her and her uncle the last of the Tullys, the old riverfolk She is wearing blue now, as she did then, but it is a different blue altogether. Then, it was deep, shining silk, like deep rivers, but this is like frost spreading over a windowpane, curling around her knees like whispers of winters just lately departed.
She has never looked more beautiful, or less his to so much as touch.
He still desires more than anything to marry her, but somehow, it seems impossible. How can someone so beautiful and ethereal be his?
And then she steps closer, and the frost falls away from her legs, and the fabric of her dress settles and becomes less than frost and starlight, and her hair is all tangled with twigs and soft tumbles of snow and a rose, a single golden rose with frost-edged petals, and she is human, mortal, attainable.
She is the most beautiful she has ever been.
Sansa can't quite bring herself to touch Willas when finally she reaches the edge of the terrace on which he stands.
He's something otherworldly, in his bottle-green wool coat, with his eyes warm and golden-green in the candlelight spilling out from the ballroom and in from the garden. She has never felt less worthy of him, of the summer in his veins, for she has never been more her father's daughter, more the winter-child those who remember the old stories speak of in fear.
"I just ran half a mile in the freezing cold with no shoes," she tells him, fear chilling her as the frost could not. Will he turn her away? Joffrey had wanted to, as soon as he saw what she was, and she is told Robb's wife did, too, when he proved not so normal as she had believed.
"I've never seen anything like it," he admits, holding out a hand to her, his cheeks flushed pink - she wonders if it is the cold, or the shock, or that her dress is wet through with snow she hadn't even noticed falling. She hopes it's her dress. She hopes to any gods who might be listening that it's her dress. "You never fail to astonish me, sweetheart."
She can't help but spin another circle, giddy with the cold and drunk on his slowly-blossoming smile, but then she takes his hand, and his fingers are warm, like salvation.
"I'm free," she says, surprised by how easily the words come. Words like that free love hope home were all forbidden her. "I should like to travel home, when the thaw comes."
"I should like to travel with you, if you wouldn't mind," he says in return, squeezing her fingers tight. "I've always wanted to see Winterfell. It's meant to be very beautiful."
"Says the man who will rule Highgarden," she teases, feeling so light. Winter has never seemed less dark, nor the kiss of summer so close on a winter solstice. "Am I allowed to enter? Your magic runs hot, after all, I can feel it now that I'm here."
He looks surprised by that - she is, too, she's never been able to tell such things, not as faraway Arya or Bran could (faraway is not dead, she knows that now that she is also not dead, for such was her captivity that she may as well have been gone without chance of return), but she can now, can taste the tenor in the air that now in this highest winter is sleeping - and even that feels wrong in her mind. Winter has always felt high and summer deep in her heart of hearts, but here, in this font of summer, it feels as though winter is the depth and summer the height.
"Oh," she sighs. "Your winter is so mild, Willas. Look, the frost is melting under my feet!"
He laughs, then, rich and deep and sweet like honey, and kisses her hand, his lips hot on her knuckles and his eyes closed. When he opens them, they are dark, but not dark like nothing and night as Joffrey's often were, but dark like dawn, full of promise and tomorrows.
"You will have to show me your mild Winterfell summers, then," he tells her, lifting her hand to his cheek, kissing her palm again and again, and with every kiss a thaw seems to spread through her whole self, setting loose the ice that lodged about her heart to keep it safe, the ice that begin to shift and melt under a pretty awning while the summer solstice was danced away. "I look forward to shivering in my shorts, sweetheart."
She kisses him then, right on the mouth, their first such kiss, and he tastes of the buzz of honeybees and freckles coming up on her cheeks and shoulders and the bridge of her nose.