Chapter 26: Sansa in the Gilded Cage of Joffrey's Court

The court of King Joffrey Barrowmere had decided, in the quiet collective manner by which courts decide most things, that Miss Sansa Starkton was a very pretty girl who had come through a difficult season with remarkable composure and ought to be treated, therefore, with the specific warmth reserved for useful ornaments one has not yet found occasion to break.

Sansa accepted this warmth with a gratitude so perfectly calibrated that no one could have said whether it was genuine. She had been in King's Landing-upon-Thames for seven months. She had learned a great deal.

It was a Thursday morning in November — a grey, still morning of the sort that reminded her of Wintermere Park only in the abstract, the way a word in a foreign language reminds one of its translation without summoning anything of the original feeling — and she was seated in the Queen's east drawing room with four of Cersei's ladies, engaged in the collective fiction of embroidery. The fiction was collective because two of the ladies were not embroidering. Sansa was. She had learned, early in her residence at court, that the appearance of useful occupation was a considerable social asset: it furnished an object of attention that was not one's own face, allowed for the careful management of expression, and provided an excuse to keep one's eyes downward when downward was the safer direction.