theladyofwinterfell | a storm from the east

a storm from the east

The combined might of the Northern army and the sellswords rallied behind Daemon Storm (Baratheon now, in truth, as who is going to let a king have a bastard name?) had easily trumped the Lannister and Tyrell forces, the latter of which had turned toward the end of the battle when they knew they'd lost. The North won its independence by backing Daemon's claim and Stannis had withdrawn to Gods known where with his army and his Red Priestess. Sansa had no idea and she had the sneaking suspicion that everyone was fairly relieved about it; he would have been a poor king.

Daemon, however, seems a fine king thus far and he is enough of a swordsman and a charmer that every house rallies for him. He's what Robert had been when he was younger, the people whisper, and is popular in that regard. Sansa herself has a more or less positive opinion of him - he'd liberated her from the Lannisters and while he'd taken the Red Keep for himself, there'd been no raping of the women there and it seemed his men were sticking by that order. They weren't out to hurt the people of King's Landing and after years of Lannister rule, it seems it's turning for the better.

For Sansa's part, the alliance to make Robb King in the North had come with the price of Sansa's betrothal to Daemon. He's no Joffrey, she thinks and he's not Tyrion Lannister. The latter had been kind to her, though, and she'd been quick to vouch for him when the Lannisters were put to the sword. Still, the marriage hadn't been binding because it hadn't been consummated and Tyrion graciously hadn't pressed the issue, wanting Sansa free to make her own choices. She's not free, exactly, but the man she's betrothed to doesn't seem to be a bad one even if he's rough around the edges.

Sansa had been moved to nicer rooms since the coup and they're close to the offices where the King and the Hand work on the business of the day. She has none, really, but her curiosity does cause her to linger around when she ought to be making a wedding dress or walking in the Godswood or doing anything with her newfound freedom. She slips into the king's office and gives him a quick curtsy.

"Robb's with his men and I'm tired of sewing. Is the business of running this place harder than winning it, Your Grace?"

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"I liked that. I liked it quite a bit, actually."

That comes easily to her because it's the truth and no lie. Sansa has spent a long time lying to people who have a hold over her but no longer. She's free to express herself and Daemon's made that perfectly clear to her. She laughs softly and leans in, trying it for herself. She isn't as practiced or expert, though, and she ends up bumping his nose with hers.

"I guess I just need to practice more, don't I? Until I get the knack of it?"

It seems like it's something very fun to practice and when Sansa tries again, she finds his mouth with hers and mirrors what he'd done, drawing his lower lip between hers for a moment.

Daemon let her learn and play, giving kisses when necessary and taking a few here and there for his own. He wasn't shy about letting his hands wander, and they did; calloused fingertips ghosting over Sansa's exposed skin, over her knees, along her thighs, and even between them, but not high enough to make her shiver. Not yet.

But the ties to her dress were quickly becoming irritating, and it was with a disgruntled grunt that the Storm King gave a sharp yank to the laces, snapping one, but achieving his goal of baring her lovely torso to his eyes.

"There." Said in a tone of sheer satisfaction, and then he cupped her breasts, still hidden by her irksome shift, but she was ripe enough for him to roll the nipples between two fingers, all while he kept her mouth busy with his own lips and tongue.

Sansa gasps into his mouth when he rips the front of her dress away and her hands come up between them, trying to push at his even though what he's doing feels so good. She's torn between stopping him because she ought to as a maiden and not because he's making her feel things she's never felt before. She settles for covering his hands with her own and squeezing his wrists before pulling her mouth away for a moment.

"You can't! You'll ruin me before the wedding!"

Part of her just doesn't care but she pushes that part away for the practical one. What if he decides he doesn't want her after he's ruined her and she bears a bastard? What if he dies before they marry and she's carrying his son?

"You have to wait!"

Daemon jerked back, nonplussed, at Sansa's vehement outburst. A sharp eyebrow went up, and he stilled his hands, staring up at her, confused.

"...what are you talking about woman? I'm not ruining you, I'm just touching you." He blinked at her, a little concerned. "Do you think me such a craven bastard as to just fuck you right here and now? Now stop your shrieking. I much prefer the noises you were making a moment ago."

"I'm sorry," Sansa says. She thinks about tacking a Your Grace on the end of it but unlike Daemon's princess, she doesn't use that as a pet name, she uses it as an honorific. Perhaps Princess is her true title as Robb's sister but he's certainly not using it in deference to her position and much more to have something...fun? to call her. At least in her estimation.

Properly chastised, she lowers her hands and takes a deep breath, trying to get back to the place she'd been before he'd ripped her bodice open when everything felt so good and she wasn't worried about anything.

"Will you kiss me again? Please?"

Daemon ducked his head slightly to catch her eyes. "You can trust me, Sansa," he told her quietly. "I'm not one of those dimwitted brutes they call lords here in Westeros. When I tell you something, believe it. And I'm telling you that you're safe, you never have to fear me, you simply have to enjoy me. That's all."

And he gladly kissed her again, putting a little more heated desire into it than he had previously. Her hands he guided to his leather Dothraki jerkin, bidding her untie the laces so she could touch him herself. Still bold, Daemon cupped Sansa's breasts, pinching the tight nipples a little roughly, but from the unconscious rocking of her long body he gathered she was enjoying his attentions.

"Feel good, princess?" It was a rough rumble, given against her smooth neck, even as he began to rock beneath her in time with her own untaught movements. "You feel good to me."

Sansa's fingers are clumsy against his laces but she manages it and pushes the leather away. His skin is bare beneath her fingertips and she leaves them lightly touching his shoulders at the first, a little nervous about touching anything other than that.

His hands are doing wicked things to her breasts and by the time he asks if she feels good, she can't really verbalize much more than a "mmhmm" and another roll of her body. She shouldn't like this and she knows that but she does. She likes it far more than she ought to admit.

She dares moving her fingertips along his arms, feeling the muscles there, and draws them up from his elbows and back to his shoulders before traveling the path again and again, never taking her mouth from his.

He carried scars from the remnants of his former life; collar marks around his neck and wrists, the latter of which he customarily covered with leather cuffs, and his torso bore the marks of whips, blades, and other weapons here and there, the dusky skin decorated by a life of hardship and struggle.

But her hesitant touches were pleasant, and Daemon rumbled his satisfaction against her skin, coaxing Sansa's tongue from her mouth with broad strokes of his own, hands leaving her breasts to shove that cumbersome dress off of pale shoulders to pool at her waist, an unwanted barrier. But probably prudent, given how high his passions customarily ran.

Now that Sansa knows that this won't go past a certain point, she tries not to tremble when Daemon pushes her dress back and off her shoulders. It pools around her waist and she bites Daemon's lower lip a little on accident, nervous about what he might do next and if it will mean revealing any more skin to him. No one is around but the horse but still. No one has ever seen her before.

She tries to focus instead on the little marks on his skin, finding each one with her fingertips and touching it lightly before moving on to the next. He has the body of a warrior, full of scars, and she wonders just how many battles he's been in over the course of his life.

She presses her palms over his chest not to push him away but, instead, simply to touch.

"A Dornishman's pike," he murmured as her fingers ran over a particularly jagged mark. "We were raiding a border patrol down in Sunspear, and I let him get a little too close." A huffed laugh warmed her neck, and Daemon gently squeezed Sansa's breasts, rubbing the tight nipples with coarse palms. Then he said, "A Braavosi dagger," to her next gentle exploration. "She didn't take kindly to having her strongbox looted." Again, he chuckled. "Qotho had to pry her off of me, I thought she was going to take out my throat with her teeth."

He lifted his head, smirking up at his soon-to-be wife. "All of them have a story," he shrugged. "Some more interesting than others. I'll tell you about them as we go along, if you like." Then he turned his attention back to her clothing, quirking an eyebrow at the ridiculousness of women's garments. A twist of his wrist, and Sansa's shift vanished, leaving her beautiful breasts bare for his eyes.

"...why do you hide behind all of these layers, princess? You're a beautiful woman. You aren't a treasure to be hoarded, but a vision to enjoy." That said, Daemon didn't waste any other words, but instead leaned his head to her breasts, boldly sucking a pebbled nipple right between his lips, tongue teasing her shamelessly.

"I...!"

The words die off in Sansa's throat because she's too shocked about Daemon's mouth against her bare skin to really make much of a protest. She hadn't allowed it, he'd taken it, but she isn't going to push him away. His mouth is too clever by half and she doesn't think she's coming out of these woods a virgin.

Startled as she is, she doesn't know what to do with her hands for a moment and settles with one threaded into his hair and the other politely perched on his shoulder as she lets him kiss her. If he's expecting someone who knows what to do, she doesn't, but she guesses she can try something even if it isn't quite right.

He really wasn't worried about her reciprocation. That would come in time, and he knew he was the only one who'd ever dared touch her like this. But he wasn't one to coddle or be "genteel" about such things; at least he wasn't throwing her down in the dirt and taking what was his right to have.

Daemon finally lifted his head, after paying careful attention to the other breast, and licked his lips, cheeky. "Like that, did you?" He nuzzled his nose in between them, licking a long, wet stripe up her chest, only to slide his tongue right back into her mouth, kissing her with heated fervor and absolutely intending to make her crave him.

Sansa doesn't have a chance to respond before he's kissing her again but when she pulls away to take a breath, she decides it's her chance to speak her piece before he does something else wicked to her. She hardly trusts him not to, considering how the afternoon has gone.

"I might have liked it," she says stiffly, still indignant about being pulled out to the woods and basically ravened by a wolf. Still, it didn't matter if it was willing, did it? She could have stopped him half a hundred times and other than the one protest, she'd done nothing to stop him at all.

"You're too filthy to be a...a proper lord. No one else would have brought me out here like this, you know? They would have waited."

"Good," he told her, meaning every word. "The less I'm likened to one of those idiot, pompous-ass imbeciles, the better." But while he didn't care a whit about her stiff propriety, he wasn't going to have her accusing him of being a raping barbarian, either. So Daemon very deliberately lifted her out of his lap and put her back on her own bottom, leaving her to sort out her clothing as she liked. Or didn't like, either way.

"This is what being married to me is going to be, princess," Daemon told her, crossing his ankles and his arms. "So you may as well get used to it. You're welcome to like me, hate me, or love me, it doesn't change a thing. I am how I am, and lordship or kingship or whatever-ship isn't going to make me any different."

He quirked an eyebrow over at her. "I'd like us to at least be friendly, get along enough to at least have one child, but if you'd rather remain a marble maiden for the rest of your years, well, I'll just have to make do."

"I didn't say I didn't like you," Sansa scoffs. "And if I didn't like what you were doing, I would have screamed again. I didn't. It's just that you can't expect a highborn woman to just...know everything up front and not be a little anxious. I have no idea what you're going to do to me, of course I'm going to be anxious."

Sansa thinks that's her right, anyway. He seems to have backed off for the moment and set her to the side though and she does appreciate that. In reciprocation, she doesn't move away and she doesn't refasten her clothes.

"I was told by Queen Cersei that my husband would force himself into me until I bled and he passed out. That's it. That's my sum total of knowledge about how babies get made. I was almost attacked during the riots on King's Landing several years ago and some men had cornered me but I was rescued. They only managed to rip my dress. I didn't grow up in a pleasure house or anything so I just don't know."

"Why not?" Daemon asked, nonplussed. "Isn't that all you highborn girls are good for, bearing a lord's brats and furthering his line or some equally ridiculous horseshit?" He shrugged his sleeveless jerkin back over his shoulders, but didn't bother with its laces. "Your mother never educated you how to please your imbecilic husband so that he didn't rut you like a beast and blacken your eyes if you looked pert his way?"

If not, then no wonder the girl was so clueless. Yet a lifetime of such "hardships" didn't explain why she held herself aloof like a marble statue.

"I was a Dothraki warslave for six years, princess. Their woman took what they wanted from their male slaves, willing or not. I wasn't asked if I wanted to stud for them, I was choked until I obeyed. We've all had our roughhousing with sex and intimacy, Sansa." Daemon snorted, running a hand through his shaggy hair.

"I bloody well refuse to believe that you know nothing about men and women and what they do behind closed doors."

"Well I don't know," Sansa says, embarrassed now. She starts tugging at her own clothes since he's started pulling his back on and somehow she's botched it even though she doesn't know what it entails. "I only got told to keep a good house, to sing and to sew, and to do what my husband asked me to do. I'm sorry they made you do things while you were a slave. I don't think it's right to force anyone into things."

She slides back into her shift and touches at the laces of her gown, trying to decide if she needs to pull it back on and lace it again. "I would have done what you asked me to do. I just don't know what to do and you seem to think that I do. I really don't. All my mother ever said was that my husband would teach me how when I got married. Queen Cersei said it was ugly and painful. Lord Baelish runs a brothel, so clearly men and women like it enough to do it without wanting children. You just expect me to know things I've never even been taught and I don't know how to just..."

Sansa shrugs and looks at him. "Do I need to go to someone to learn how before we get married?"

Daemon rolled his eyes at the mention of Cersei Lannister. "And she would know, wouldn't she? Hiding in the Holdfast, fucking her own brother to keep from giving Robert any true heirs..." He quirked an eyebrow at Sansa. "Did you believe her? Would you believe anything she said, hypocrite that she was, and still is?" He shook his head. "But enough of this. We'd best be getting back. Qotho will only wait so long before he comes looking for us."

The ride back was just as smooth as the ride out, and Daemon helped Sansa down in the courtyard, pausing long enough to keep his hands on her upper arms and take a long, soft kiss from his intended before he let her go. The awkward throat-clearing of the guardsmen didn't bother him an ounce, and there was indeed a twinkle in his eye when he lifted his head and stepped back.

"I'll see you at supper, princess." Daemon winked. "Wear the blue dress. It matches those beautiful eyes."

Sansa flushes bright red because she hadn't expected him to want to kiss her after what happened in the Kingswood and certainly not in front of everyone. It had been a very good kiss though, so she's not upset about it, and when she walks away she touches her fingers to her lips and smiles a bit.

She spends the rest of the afternoon sewing, trying to finish both her wedding dress and her trousseau for afterward, and when it's close to supper she finds Shae to dress her and do her hair. Maybe Shae knows something she doesn't.

"How do you make a man want you, Shae? Does it always hurt?" Shae laughs, but not unkindly, and tells her to be open and direct. She also says to initiate things and show that she wants them, even if she's afraid, and that bedding doesn't hurt when the man is gentle and does things right. She gives her a book with illustrations that Sansa immediately drops and puts under her pillow and it's time for supper. She does choose the blue dress because it's her favorite (and he did ask) and she's glad it's private and not in front of court.

"Your Grace," Sansa says, giving a curtsy as she always does when first greeting him. First, Your Grace, then Daemon. "I have to admit, I like these private suppers. I hate eating in front of court."

No matter how many times they laid out these frilly, ridiculous clothes, there was no way Daemon was going to wear any of them. So he dug about in the wardrobe until he located his own comfortable garments; white tunic and brown breeches, and his customary boots. He did comb his hair - with his fingers - and was just sitting down with a tankard of ale when his fiancé entered the small parlor, and his own Baratheon-blue eyes lit when he saw her indeed in that lovely blue dress.

"My lady." For once, it wasn't a tease. "Come, sit." Daemon held out a chair, and then resumed his own. "Aye, me too. I don't see the point of all the utensils. If I could, I'd eat with my own dagger, and never worry which fork goes with what dish. Ridiculous, really."

He poured her a small glass of wine with his own hands; he wasn't a damned invalid that needed waiting on hand and foot, and sat back with his own stein. "Are you hungry? I'm starving, myself."

"I am hungry," Sansa says, taking the proffered chair. When she sits, she leans over and pecks a kiss against his cheek before taking the glass of wine. Shae had said to seem eager and interested instead of shy and reticent and Sansa is good enough at playing a part to push down the shy parts of her to try. It's much easier when they're alone, anyway.

"It's not hard to learn all the utensils. You work from the outside in with each course so you know how many courses there are based on how many forks you get. It's easy once you know the rules of it. Of course, you shouldn't have to do it so very often - only at a high feast or a wedding."

Sansa laughs a little and covers her mouth. "So, you know, within a fortnight. Do you want to practice?"

The kiss on his cheek had been a nice surprise, but his eyebrow went up when she started talking about forks. Daemon sat back in his chair, booted foot propped on the opposite knee, tankard in hand.

"Practice? With forks?" He couldn't help it, he had to laugh. "I appreciate the offer, my lovely, but I think I'll skip gentleman training. It's either one fork, a dagger, or my fingers, and I can manage. I think my table manners, or lack thereof, will be the least thing everyone will be gossiping about."

The kitchen staff then came in and served both the King and his betrothed, discreetly withdrawing afterwards, and Daemon took the moment to add, "But we can practice...other things, maybe. Between here and there."

"Other things?"

Sansa tries not to get nervous but she is - but it feels different this time. It's almost anticipation rather than nerves and she supposes it's because Shae has told her to approach it differently and she's come to realize she must if it's going to work. She would very much like her marriage to work, honestly, because she's had enough of being lonely.

"I suppose I'll appreciate not being stuffed full at my wedding feast. They'll have me laced so tight I won't be able to eat very much anyway. I have to fit in the gown, after all, and it won't look proper if my waist isn't small enough. I'll just eat the tiniest bites and a lot the night before."

It was a testament to his growing prudence that Daemon let all of those innuendos simply slide right on by. Sansa didn't have nearly the sense of humor that he did, and she probably wouldn't understand his filthy outlook on the world, anyway. Which was one of the things he so liked about her. Innocent, fresh. Untarnished. A rarity in this world.

"Mmm, 'other things'." Daemon refilled his tankard then leaned back again in his chair, a slice of roast venison on his fork. "Things men and women do when they're alone together." Blue eyes glinted at her over the dishes. "Like we did earlier this afternoon, in the Kingswood." He didn't outright leer at her, but his smirk tilted just the slightest.

"We had fun, didn't we, princess?"

Now Sansa is blushing fully and she finds her plate very interesting for a few moments before mumbling a quick "yes," and taking in a deep breath. She has to act interested and forward - Shae had said that - but it's proving harder than she'd expected it to be. She's a good actress, yes, but it's difficult to act about this particular thing.

She takes a quick gulp of her wine, nearly draining the goblet, and forces herself to look Daemon in the eyes. His are twinkling and mischievous as she expected them to be and somehow that makes it both better and worse.

"Yes, I had fun."

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