Chapter 9: Lord Baelish Pays Miss Sansa an Educational Compliment

The east gallery of the palace of King's Landing-upon-Thames ran for approximately a hundred yards between two sets of doors that were rarely used, through which no one of any consequence ever passed, which was precisely why persons of considerable consequence used it so frequently for conversations they preferred to conduct without witnesses. The portraits on its walls depicted three generations of Barrowmere ancestors in various attitudes of self-congratulation, and the light in the afternoon fell through the south-facing windows at an angle calculated, whether by the original architect or by mere accident of the season, to render everything within it golden and slightly unreal, as though the gallery existed outside the ordinary hours of the palace and operated instead by its own arrangement of time.

Sansa Starkton had discovered it on her third morning at the Tower of the Hand, when the press of unfamiliar rooms had produced in her a need for space that none of the palace's public apartments, for all their magnificence, quite satisfied. She had since made it her custom to walk its length on afternoons when Cersei's musical circle did not convene, and on those occasions had encountered precisely nobody, which arrangement had continued for two weeks and which she therefore considered a reliable feature of the place.

She was looking at the third portrait from the north end — a Barrowmere great-uncle in military dress, whose expression of severe satisfaction she found both compelling and faintly comic — when she heard, from the direction of the south door, the particular sound of footsteps that were neither hurried nor aimless, but something more purposeful than either.