Chapter 21: Sansa Kneels Before Queen Cersei

Sansa dressed herself that morning with the care of a woman preparing for the most important performance of her life, which is precisely what it was, and she knew it, and the knowing sat in her chest like a stone she had swallowed and could not now dislodge.

She chose the blue muslin — not the primrose, which was prettier, and not the grey, which was practical, but the blue, which was the colour of Wintermere mornings and of her mother's favourite ribbon and of nothing whatsoever that could be described as a threat. She arranged her hair herself, dismissing the lady's maid who hovered at the door with an expression of sympathetic anxiety that Sansa found, at this particular moment, entirely counterproductive. She worked the pins in with the steady hands of a woman who has discovered that emotion, if pressed firmly enough into a confined space, can be managed for several hours at a time.

In the mirror she saw: a young woman of seventeen, fair, composed, dressed in the blue of northern mornings, whose father was in Maegor's Holdfast and whose betrothed was the reason for it.