The Dutiful Daughter
Ninth Day of the Twelfth Month 293 AC
Runestone, the Vale
Sansa Stark had not been sure what fostering would be like. She had asked her lady mother, but she had not been fostered away from Riverrun. She had been the second in line to inherit the Lordship after uncle Edmure, so Sansa's grandfather had wanted to keep her close, and though no one said it in so many words, educate her to take on the role should misfortune strike. Her father had fostered in the Vale, yet he had spoken little of it save to reassure her that all would be well.
It was natural, Sansa supposed. Her father had been a boy, and she had a vague sense from half-understood servant's gossip that the path by which a boy becomes a man and that by which a girl becomes a young lady were quite different, and in ways that would not be entirely proper to recount. But there had been something else in her Lord father's gaze and her mother's also, worry for the future, not just hers but all their futures.
The world was changing so quickly...
There was a little witch-light above Sansa's bed in Runestone. It didn't look particularly magical, there were no ancient runes upon it, no strange scents nor any odd glimmer to the polished bronze, but all you had to do was touch it with your living hand and it would shed an even light as bright as a torch but with no smoke nor smell. At first it had felt a little strange using it, maybe even impious, though she had heard that the High Septon had decided once and for all that magic was not itself evil. After a week or two, however, she hardly noticed it, save that it was better light than any candle could be for reading, and Sansa did a lot more reading here than back in Winterfell.
Really, it was a lot more reading than a child of eight should be doing, but there were no girls of her age and station in Runestone since Ysilla had died suddenly last year, and she was not so heartless as to bring up the matter to Lord and Lady Royce. It must be painful for them to even have her around. She shivered a little, remembering the perfectly kept room she had found while exploring last week. Lady Leticia hardly spoke of her daughter...
Was she blaming herself for not finding a healer in time? Sansa had heard that there were all sorts of sorcerers and miracle workers about, and if even a few of the rumors were right then maybe Ysilla could have been saved.
There were even a few... The girl burrowed a little deeper into the covers. If those were true, then you could bring the dead to life with magic. Would she wake up one day to see a dead girl looking at her from across the table at breakfast?
Now you've gone and scared yourself more than when Old Nan told stories about wildlings, she chided herself, trying to find her place in the book.
Magic is not some force external to the mage like heat or light, though both can be produced thereby, as well as effects far stranger and more wondrous, but at its heart all magic is an expression of the caster's soul, the truth of their being imposed upon the world...
Sansa could not make her parents stop worrying about the king, or the war, or anything else, not as she was now, but she would see to it that one day she would be powerful enough to matter, as powerful as Ser Halys who had carried her to Runestone by sorcery in an instant. The girl's cheeks heated with a flush of guilt at the thought, but she reminded herself she had not stolen his books, just asked Jon to copy a few of them with his magic. Surely knowledge could not be said to belong to anyone. She stared at the light a long moment, willing it to dim as she whispered an incantation in the tongue of the First Men. Maybe it did get a little dimmer, maybe it was just her imagination. Either way she would keep trying.
OOC: That was a fun set of rolls, Jon leveled for pulling that off without Halys noticing, though the Royces realized what Sansa is doing almost at once, but they see no reason to stop her. Not yet edited.
