Chapter 4: First Impressions of King's Landing-upon-Thames

The city announced itself before it was visible.

Sansa noticed it first — or rather, she noticed that something had changed in the quality of the air, that the clean cold that had accompanied them from Wintermere Park had quietly absented itself somewhere around the third posting inn and been replaced by something altogether more complex. She could not have named every constituent of it. She would not have wished to. But she pressed closer to the carriage window with the instinctive certainty of a young woman who understood that she was approaching something she had been waiting for her entire life, and that the approaching of it was one of the finest pleasures available to a person of sensibility, and that she intended to miss none of it.

"There," she said softly, and then said nothing else, because nothing else seemed adequate to the occasion.