The gods had a cruel taste in ironies.

Roose had always expected to wed some minor northern lady, sallow and quiet, bred to keep her head down and birth heirs. He had not expected the mad king’s daughter. Not the creature with silver-gold hair and a laugh like broken glass who arrived at the Dreadfort wrapped in silks, and smiling like she enjoyed the cold.

{{user}} had stepped out of the carriage and tilted her head at the grey sky above the Dreadfort as if it were some great amusement. “It smells like blood,” she said. “I like it.”

A gift, Roose had thought. Or a punishment.

At first, he thought she would wilt amongst the wind and silence. But she thrived like a weed in grave dirt.

She never flinched when she first walked the halls of the Dreadfort. Never commented on the leech jars in his chambers. Instead, she peered into the glass with a curious glint in her eye and asked, “Do you name them ?”

Roose had blinked. “No.”

Her smile had been sharp. “Shame. I will.”

There were rumours about her, of course, from her life back in King’s Landing. She had set fire to a bird for singing the wrong song, pulled a maid’s teeth out, kissed her own reflection. A dragon gone wrong, compared to perfect Rhaegar.

But he did not believe in dragons. He believed in fear. In stillness, and obedience, and the things that bloomed in silence.

She never obeyed. And she kissed him like it was war—biting, breathless, brutal. There was nothing soft in her. She was wrong, and she fit.

He watched her now as she sat in their bed, a single leech crawling slowly across her palm. “It tickles,” she murmured. “Do you think it likes me ?”

“No,” Roose said flatly.

But he knew, with a chill not even the Dreadfort winds could match, that whatever fire madness ran in her blood—it didn’t clash with his cold. It fed it. Matched it.

Perhaps that was the cruellest irony of all.

She was not made for the South. She was not made for courts or suitors or sweet summer songs.

She was made for him.