GENERAL SPOILER GUIDE: You need to have read/watched up 'til the Purple Wedding and watched Seasons 1 and 2 of 'Vikings'. The fic takes place after Season 2 of 'Vikings'. And veers off.

Sansa is 18 in this fic.

POV Guide: there are three POVs in this fic: Sansa, Ragnar and Rollo. Rollo's in the second person.

V*V*V*V*V*V

Salt. Salt in her mouth, filling her.

A damp chill worn like a cloak, coating her shoulders, her back, her calves.

A wash of sighs in her ear. Over and over.

Sansa listened to them. Breaths, rushing, cool as crypt-stone.

This must be what death is. Sighs in your ear, grit as salty as tears under your tongue. A heart that –

Still beats. Her heart was still beating. She began to focus on it, the long, distant thump of it, like something under the earth, and slowly, her senses began to gather. Rainstorms far away, gathering.

She was lying down, on her side and on her front. Hips pressed to something cold, solid. Her torso the same. Sand. And in front of her, a long steel-coloured swathe of water. The sea.

Her thoughts, pulling together, as if being stitched with a fine needle by a trembling hand. She was – alive.

In front of her were not sea creatures, or stones, but her fingers. Yes. They were her fingers. She would move them. She would move her little fing -

Oh Gods. She began to remember. Joffrey. His face, purpling. Ser Dontos, clutching his hand as they ran. A ship. Storms -

A shout. Sansa's heart ceased beating. Please let it be help. Please let them not be enemies. She lay very still, in case it was better that she looked dead. Perhaps she would be, soon enough.

Someone was behind her, running, coming closer. A heavy tread. There was a hand on her, someone speaking. A young man's voice. Words that sounded curved, delicate, of stones and wood being rubbed together. A language she didn't understand. This could only be an enemy.

Lying, still as a stone. A cold stone. Her own gravestone.

And then – arms, coming underneath her, and the sand tilting away as she was lifted up, away from her death, away from the sea.

V*V*V*V*V*V

It has been a long day. Men coming to ask for their women to have justice seen to them, for bearing children by them, or not by them. A man married to two women – so it did happen, just as he had thought. Except here neither of them had known about the other, and both want the other dead. Offerings. A dispute over the theft of a sheep.

He is so bored. Next to him, his wife sits straight, her cat-features drawn perfectly back, her hands clasped over her belly, which is the size of an autumn pumpkin. His son. His son.

Commotion at the opening to the greatroom. His other son, the eldest, taller than him and with arms like oak trees, carrying a girl in his arms. He sighs. He thought that his son was in love with that other girl, the blonde with the warrior-eyes. Another sigh. Boys his age. He was like that once. He is still like that.

Ah no – too hasty. The girl's skirts are dripping. She is wounded, perhaps fatally. His son comes further forward. The girl might as well be a baby goat for the difficulty he has holding her.

No. It is not blood. It is seawater. She is drenched.

V*V*V*V*V*V

Sansa opened her eyes to find the bluest ones she had ever seen staring at her. It was as if the sky had opened its mouth and swallowed the sea. It was a sea-god. A sky-god. Perhaps there were nine gods, not seven.

She was lying on a bed of furs, in a large, dark room. Her dress was – not her own. It was rough-spun, brown, and rubbed softly against her arms as she shifted.

The eyes belonged to a face that terrified her. A man, younger than her father, perhaps about the same age as Tyrion, with a faint scar over his forehead and cheekbone. He wore dark clothes, a shirt with fine stitching at the collar, a jacket made of leather, and a fur cloak. His hair was so peculiar. Shaved at the sides, and long, tied back, plaited in a way that not even she had ever had done. Dark markings on one side of his head. A beard. And those eyes, two turquoise minerals.

Gods, where was she? Were these Braavosi? She thought they were dark-skinned. And a warm climate, one that surely didn't require the furs and skins that not only covered her but were wrapped over the man's shoulders too. Had she somehow ended up at Eastwatch by the Sea?

She tried to speak. 'Are you –' Sand was still in her throat. It must have been. She broke into a fit of coughing that drew her legs and head in towards each other, and the pain she felt in her stomach then almost made her faint.

The man put a hand out, and his eyes lost their dangerous flash. He shushed her, and turned his shoulder slightly. From behind him came a woman, brown hair tumbling over her shoulders, and big dark eyes. A long, thick woollen dress, a burnt red. She sat down by Sansa's shoulder and held a cup, made of some sort of polished horn, to her lips. Warm water.

She tried again. 'Littlefinger –'

The woman's eyebrows furrowed and she said something to the man, who shrugged and opened his palms. He spoke, in the same strange foreign tongue. It wasn't High Valerian.

'I don't know what you are saying,' she said in a whisper. How could she talk to them? Perhaps she was a prisoner. Perhaps they had been sent by Twyin, mercenaries from across the Narrow Sea, sent after her, after Joffrey was poisoned. Perhaps it hadn't been storms breaking the ship apart but an attack, from another ship. No, that didn't make sense.

It had all happened so fast – the pie, his awful, garbled choking, the ghastly, accusing look he gave her as he fell.

'I didn't do it,' she said. 'I didn't kill him.' And she broke out into another fit of coughing before a wave of shivers, as if she had found herself suddenly in a snowdrift, made her fall back onto the bed.

The man was standing up, smiling at her, a curious half-smirk, glints of metal in his eyes. He put his hands together, placed them at his mouth, and gestured down towards her, before disappearing.

V*V*V*V*V*V

A mysterious girl. That's all your brother had said. He hadn't said how beautiful she was.

She was asleep, breathing lightly. Hands clutched to her chest, as if holding raided treasure. The hair of a true Viking.

Once in a while, she shivered, a little earthquake running through her bones. Washed ashore. How could this be true? The sea-channel ran long up to Kattegat and there had been no sightings of ships. A boat would have to have floundered far out. No one could survive that.

The fire made her skin turn the colour of a great summer moon.

Perhaps she was the goddess Rán, Rán who tried to capture men who ventured out to sea. She had come to give her blessings, or her curses, on everyone for the next raids. On you.

You always said that your life was in the hands of the gods.