A/N I've known I've wanted to write a Game Of Thrones story for a while, but haven't been able to decide on the angle. Anyway, this is something a little bit different. Let me know if it works or, y'know, if it doesn't.

It is the year 1557 in Tudor England.

Queen Mary I occupies the throne and her Catholic religious policy has seen the restoration of heresy laws that condemn those who fail to accept Catholic beliefs and practices to death.

280 Protestants are burned to death in 46 months. Fifty-one were women.

CHAPTER 1: A CHANGE IN CLIMATE

Tuesday June 14th, 1557

The light falls, unbroken and pure, through the bars on Bess's window. The cell walls are iridescent, peaceful. The small wind outside the tower dies and settles with irregularity, there is a stillness to the town.

She can hear her gaolers outside, betting on the crowds that will be drawn by the burnings tonight. Large, they think, because one of the five is the richest merchant in Maidstone and his two eldest are to burn with him.

Bess does not recognise the story, though she knows the detail.

The simplicity of the words do not correspond with the emotion. The 'rich merchant' does not capture her father with justice. George Wyatt is a brilliant man, a hard man - he can weigh up wool, money, a pound of pickled fish at a glance. He raised a mob against local enclosure only eight years ago, but could just as easily break a crowd of men with a glance. Tall, lined, now running to fat in places. Her father has a talent for getting his own way. She respects him and loves him with earnest.

The other to die will be her elder sister, Jane. But that is too painful to think on.

Bess finds she is tired. She has not slept since her detainment, and tries to speak to God now as she kneels down in the sunlight on her death-day.

God guide me she thinks to herself, closing her eyes. God help me. God save me.

She almost weeps when she only sees the large scarlet presence of fire in her inner eye.

They come as night falls. The sun has gone down; she will not see the dawn.

Bess strains to look out her window as the guards take her - but the sun is a clot of blood across the horizon - an ill omen.

She is led down tight spiralling stone stairs, but not outside, as she would have expected. The guard shoves her into a room empty save for a wooden table and two rickety seats.

"Sit," he says, forcing her roughly down onto the chair. The man can only be thirty. Freckled. He has a strip of sunburn across his forehead from the days summer sun.

Bess presses her lips together tightly and knits her hands together in her lap to stop them from shaking.

The man moves behind her and she hears him clattering round the room. What she takes to be a white sheet is suddenly thrown into her lap, but when she picks it up and runs the material through her fingers, she realizes the sheet has holes for her arms and head.

"Put it on, then" the man grunts at her hesitation, back in front of Bess again. "Wouldn't want that pretty dress singed, would we?"

To her surprise, he steps out the door whilst she changes. She had feared he wouldn't - and almost wishes he had stayed. Confirming him as evil; damning his soul. The act of propriety stands in stark contrast to her death sentence.

Bess struggles to take off her dress without her lady's maid, Helen. The rich, dark blue material is stiff, the buttons that run like jewels down her spine almost impossibly small. With difficulty the fabric finally falls in a heavy spool round her feet like an anchor and she kicks out of it, left naked and shaking. Then, she lifts a hand tentatively to the back of her skull and releases her hair from where it is gathered in her mother's pearl encrusted net. The tresses fall round her face, blonde and lank and dirty from the days spent in the cell. Bess clamped the pins in her hand so tightly tiny droplets of blood oozed from her fist. The dress, she knew, would inevitably be taken by the gaolers - there was nothing she could do about that. But her mother's pins had to go to her younger sister Margery. She would find a way somehow - before the end.

Her personal guard returns when she has the sheet on, this time with a priest. Though her attire scratches horribly, and is crawling with lice, Bess meets the priest's eye coldly.

Elderly, decrepit and part of a failing order, the white haired man examines her pityingly.

"I have come to pray for your soul, Bess Wyatt."

"My soul cannot be saved by you. It is God's, and God's alone to save."

The priest sighs, but does not sound surprised. He has heard words like these before by Protestants condemned to die.

"Nobody remembers a dead girl, my dear. You may think you will die a martyr, but you will be forgotten soon enough - rest assured."

Bess falters, and then in her minds eyes sees a buzzard falling out of the sky, leaving a trail of plumage behind it - her arrow in its belly. Her father's steady hand clasps her shoulder; she hears his approving words in her ears. You are stronger than you think."I should not have to die for my religion at all. But your Queen who you so love has condemned me to death. I will not renounce my faith for her - or you - ever."

She sneers when the priest then rises to leave. Her heart rushes at the tiny victory. He cannot turn her. He knows it.

Bess's smug look of triumph slips from her face like yolk falling from a cracked egg, however, when the priest turns to her freckled gaoler after glancing at her and says, gravely. "Shave her hair from her head before you burn her. And charge the fee for the ropes, wood and oil to the family - or what is left of it." He looks back at Bess, and then at her dress still lying at her feet. "After your Cromwell sold our monasteries, we are hard pressed for money, dear. You understand...The death of people like you, the death of you, will cleanse the realm of the old injustices of the Reformation."

She spat at his feet in reply.

The night is dark. It has spread like an ink stain across the grey sky like a living thing. There is already fire, too, everywhere Bess looks as she is led to the pier. Torches lit to guide her way. Torches held up in the crowd so they can see the spectacle better. They have parted like the sea to let her past.

There are open sores on her head from where her hair has been cut away too close to the scalp - weeping wounds of blood trickle down behind her ear and down her neck and then the blood dries there, sticky and thick against her skin. The air is cool on how bald head. Her blonde locks lie in a bucket back in the detainment room with her dress. Her mother's pins are still in her hand. Like a hand, Bess clutches it for comfort.

She takes a breath in. She prays, and her voice is soft and shaking.

Someone in the crowd here's the intones of the book of Common Prayer and jeers at her. She carries on, each word strung out like pearls on a string. Her faith, which she will die for.

Amen, Bess whispers, as she is pushed up onto the pier - her hands bound behind her to the stake. Amen.

A man she does not recognise is led out with her sister, whose face can only show shocked bewilderment at the crowd gathered.

"Bess!" Jane cries out, clutching for her sister's hand as she is tied behind her. Bess can feel her fingers scratching at her own.

"Jane," she returns, her voice cracking and her eyes watering as if the smoke already lines her throat. She feels the tremor that wracks through her sister's body. "Take courage, Jane," Bess croaks. "This isn't the end...This isn't the end."

Her father is led out from a direction she cannot see - she only hears Jane cries out, hears her father's deep baritone. She can feel his presence but can only see another man's shoulder if she twists her head to seek him out.

Bess realizes she will not see his face before death and so instead looks for her mother up in the stars.

The charges of heresy are read out - merely a formality. Damning ink that forms words that Bess will never see, but spell out her death. Someone else's idea of injustice, of what is wrong.

"Gabe Hooper...Rafe Mosse...George Wyatt and his daughters, Jane Wyatt and Bess Wyatt."

Injustice, Bess thinks, not removing her eyes from the sky. Wrong.

There is the sound of the crowd jostling. Yells of 'Protestant heretics' - but most are silent, watching modestly - awed, as the powerful fall before them.

Bess sees it out of the corner of her eye - the flame that will light the pier. Her heart constricts. She fixes her gaze on one single star and clutches Jane's ring finger with one of her own - all she can manage to reach.

There is a sound like compressed gas whistling through a keyhole and the fire catches in the wood at her feet.

But the burn is cold instead of hot, and the sky is white instead of black. Bess's hand reflexively falls open in surprise and the pins fall one by one. The world tilts forwards and she is jerked onto her hands and knees, her wrists suddenly unbound. Wind whips round her - filled with snow that catches in her eye-lashes and stings her face. A different kind of fire.

Bess realizes she is knelt deep in snow. The sky is snow. Everywhere she looks. White where there should have been red. White where there should have been black.

The only colour is the cold pink of her own skin. The stained yellow of the sheet she wears.

She cries out, jumping to her feet as if the snow has physically hurt her.

The wind seems to be screaming around her - louder and louder. The screams of the dying - cries of familiar voices - sisterly, fatherly.

"Jane!" Bess screams out as she scrambles to her feet. Her voice is no match for what whips around her - penetrates her skull, fills her ears and seeps in through her pores.

"Jane!" she cries again. "Father!"

But the wind only continues until it saps her of her strength. Until the cold freezes her to her bones.

"What hell is this?" Bess chokes out to the sky. "Why have you done this to me?"

She is a believer, but she still does not expect the voice that answers.