Author's Note: Any and all characters/places/situations familiar to the reader have been shamelessly borrowed from George R.R. Martin and the boys who head up the TV adaptation. Elisabetta Lannister and Beckah Stark are my own creation. Thanks for reading! :)

I.

Elisabetta Lannister arrived late to Winterfell. The invitation had been extended to Casterly Rock as a formality and a courtesy. After all, the Starks were entertaining the majority of the Lannister household tonight. Lord Tywin and his youngest daughter were not expected to appear. But Elisabetta rarely did what was expected of her.

Her twin sister, Amaria, had been the same although less original in her streak of rebellion—marrying a Northern man against the family's wishes, bearing his child, and then dying without a thought to the consequences of any of it. But it was all saccharine nonsense. Like two sides of a coin, one light and one shadowed, Elisabetta's spirit ran a little cooler, a little darker than poor, dead Amaria.

Jon Snow saw the blond-haired woman ride in, her hair braided down one side of her neck in a practical fashion, her posture on the white stallion impossibly graceful. She wore no armor, but carried herself like a battle maiden and wore a skirt split and fitted with legs for riding. She had a bow strapped to her back and iron-tipped arrows in the quiver. A medallion hung around her neck, similar to the one around his cousin Beckah's. In fact, she resembled Beckah more closely than any of the Lannisters. So this must be Amaria Lannister's twin, he thought, bitterly taking in the sight of yet another one of these lions. The Imp's stinging words were still ringing in his ears. The little man's words cut deeply and Jon Snow had certainly had his fill of Lannisters for the night.

Elisabetta noticed the boy as she dismounted. He didn't stare but she felt his eyes upon her. And she would have noticed him even if he had given her no second glance. Those eyes were not so unfamiliar to her. Ned Stark, Howland Reed and Elisabetta Lannister still kept one secret in common. The bastard, then, she concluded. She offered him a smile as she was free with her smiles, much like Jamie. And much like Jamie's, they were received with too much suspicion. The bastard boy soon turned away.

Elisabetta undid her bow and removed her riding gloves before entering the banquet hall. She was a woman with little patience for empathy and sentimentality, having lost her mother too early and taking after her father in far too many respects from the beginning. Add to that a dark-of-night errand for her father that she would need to attend to shortly and Elisabetta Lannister had no time for old secrets and lost bastards. Thus, she thought no more on the boy in the courtyard.

Ned Stark stood with his brother talking of rumors quietly. The king laughed and made merry in the middle of the revelry. His wife and Lady Stark made painful small talk at the head table. Jamie was prowling. Tyrion was absent. Elisabetta waited by the doorway, taking in the scene with that half-smile on her lips, the hungry look that had forsworn any sort of satiable appetite. If Jamie seemed eternally prowling, his younger sister was ever on the hunt. He saw her first. She waited for him to come to her.

"Little sister, I didn't think you were coming?" he commented evenly, gauging her expression.

"Father wants you back in Casterly Rock by the end of the year," she stated plainly, before answering his baited words with some of her own, "Full armor, dear brother? Are you not among friends?"

"Had our sister lived, perhaps," Jamie answered dryly, looking around the room for the girl, the blond-haired Stark. There she was, with the eldest Stark boy, embracing her father, the dark-haired ranger. He pointed her out to Elisabetta, "There she is. The resemblance is uncanny, isn't it?"

She might as well have been looking at Amaria…or in a mirror. The thin thread that connected the Lannisters to the Starks was here made flesh.