There is a ghost at Winterfell.

Or, that's what Anne assumed she was. A ghost, trapped in the body of a girl.

Lyanna Stark was born in Riverrun but she has been raised in Winterfell. Maester Luwin and her mother will tell the story still, of the pair of children conceived on the wedding night of their parents, a Tully boy and a Northern girl. A little lady, first born and frighteningly quiet, but alive, and a little lord, screaming his lungs out. Lady Catelyn will remember fondly their trip to the north, and how sweet and quiet Lyanna was, while Robb wailed at the crack of every twig.

How she had taken to the cold more quickly than her brother and mother both, and how fussy she got if ever Robb was left out of her sight.

Sometimes Anne wondered what her parents had done to deserve her. Catelyn, honorable, loyal, proud, and honest. Ned, dutiful, loving, just and fair. They were good people, kind people, people who would uphold the King's justice and do as their duty required them.

Anne was, simply put, none of those things.

She knew herself to be shrewd, cunning, and when need be cruel. She never revelled in the cruelty but she knew, to get what she wanted sometimes she had to drown her heart.

Sometimes, she thought herself more Tully than Stark, even though Robb got the red-brown hair and the blue eyes ,she follows their words closely, has had them carved into her heart for a lifetime already.

Family, duty, honor.

Family comes before duty and honor, and Anne has all of them, though perhaps not the kind her father and her brother and her mother keep inside of them. Hers is a thieves honor and the code that goes with it, as old as the sands in the desert and the snow in the mountains.

Never con an honest or an innocent.

Help your fellows.

Teach the children, but only the clever ones.

Your word only matters to your own people.

Provide and protect for your own.

Shield your tongue and watch your back.

Accept judgement only from your own.

Don't get caught.

The last one was the most important, and the one she impressed most heavily on everyone that belonged to her. River had been caught, and she had turned coat in under a year. Taro had died before he'd been caught. So, too, had her brother Jasper. Jazz had been her rock, her most loyal companion and confidant. She had found him cleaved in two in a safehouse in Maine, with blood on his knife and a vicious snarl on his face. He was always fast, always a fighter. His children, four of them, lay around him with his head cut off.

And now she stands in Winterfell, a girl of six, watching her brothers fight with sword in the yard.

She had two, Robb and Jon, and she will not see them die the same was Jazz did. It doesn't matter what she has to do, how low she has to sink, but she will see them live to be old men, she will see them survive the Night King and his armies, and she will tear apart anyone who tries to get in her way. No matter who it is, no matter how high born, how noble, how golden or silver or fireproof they might be.

But for now she watches. She watches Robb block a blow from Jon and Jon sweep around to bring his sword up to fast Robb almost gets smacked in the chin with the blunted practice weapon. She watches them. Guns had been her go too, but now she doesn't have them. So she'll need to get very, very good at blades. And she is good. But shadow boxing will only get her so far.

She's going to have to fight the boys and convince her father to let her train properly. Or else it will be all for nothing.

She has plans, great plans, but they require her gathering a select few men and women into her folds and she can't act on those plans. Not yet. Not for many years. Anne is not a patient woman but she has learned it. In the time when she could not walk, in the time when she could not talk, in the time when she can do nothing, now, but wait until she no longer a child.

Anne walks forwards, as she goes snatching a practice sword from where Ser Rodrik has them standing points in the ground nearby. He's not watching the boys as carefully as he was, distracted by Maester Luwin.

The boys are shorter than her by a good two inches, and she is all legs and arms even as such a small child. They're heavy on their feet, their boots slosh in the mud and they're small and clumsy. Anne is small and clumsy but she has dance lessons and she's been practicing on long beams and bed posts as long as she could walk. She is quiet on her toes and swift on her feet.

She steps between Jon and Robb and in one swift move she knocks the swords from both of their hand, swept Robb's leg out from under him and holds Jon at sword point.

"Better watch it," she feels her mouth spread with a grin.

"You can't do that!"

"That's cheating!"

"It's not cheating if you weren't paying attention," she snarks. She lets Jon pull Robb up, then smacks both of them on the eat with the flat side of the sword. "Come on. Show me something exciting!"

"Lady Anne!" Ser Rodrik objects. "You should be with Septa Mordane, and your sister!"

"Septa Mordane is boring and Sansa is three. I don't need to know the songs about fair maids in summer or is more useful."

"A little lady doesn't need to know how to fight at all. That's what lords are for, to protect them," Roderik tried to pacify.

Anne looks dead at him. "No lords protected my aunt. Or Elia Martell or her daughter."

"Lyanna!"

She's never heard her father raised his voice before but she won't back down. She looks at him, too, steady and unnerving, her grey eyes chips of frozen steel.

"I won't end up like them. But I need to fight to be able to do it. I'm already better than Robb and Jon."

"No," he said firmly. Fiercely. There was a storm in his eyes.

"Father-"

"No. You'll not train with these boys. Put the sword down and go back to your lessons."

"But-"

"Now, Lyanna."

Anne stares up at him hard, her eyes narrowed and defiant, but she leaves. She is a child of six. She can't exactly challenge the man to a duel over her right to learn to fight.

"There is a fire in us, Dany," Jaehaerys tells her. He can only sit at the edge of the large pool while she stays fully submerged, her long hair floating around her slim shoulders. She has always taken the heat better than him. He told her once it was the dragon in her blood.

"A fire?" she finds herself repeating. Her elder brother likes to speak in riddles. He is cryptic, if honest, and she finds the good humor in his lilac eyes a comfort.

"Yes," Jaehaerys, who insists she call him Jazz, motions her closer and Daenerys sink over until he can rub oils into her hair for her. "A fire. It can be a good thing. Fire brings change, and warmth. Fire can be love ,if you let it. But you must be weary, sweetling. Fire can just as easily consume, and if it consumes you you may never be as you once were. This fire resides in our hearts. We love fiercely, and we hate harshly. We must always be mindful that we don't vanish into the fires. Do you understand?"

Daenerys didn't think she did, not really, but she nodded anyways. Let her brother comb the scent of lavender into her hair. Their small house in Lorath, something that Jazz called a 'bolthole' served them well when the Usurpers knives got too close.

Viserys was already sleeping in the top bunk of the bed and Jazz shared, set across the wall from the cott alloted to Dany. He is sixteen, and tall. His shoulders are slim and his hands are quick. Dany has seen him lift a purse from a man without ever looking at him.

Viserys tells her that it's wrong, that they were blood of the dragon and they should not have to steal for a living. There is a throne waiting for them across the narrow sea. Jazz tells her that he will do whatever it takes to make sure she eats. Even if it means he doesn't.

Until last year, they had lived in a big house with a red door that Ser Willem Darry had owned. He kept them safe there, but he got sick. He'd been a big bear of a man and he'd roared and fought all of her servents but Dany thought that he loved her. He called her 'little princess' and she missed his house, the one with the red door. She'd had her own room and she didn't have to share with her brothers, who both smelled worse than her.

Jazz told her it was because they were men, and no matter how much their showered it would come back until they were truly full grown, but for the time being he scented himself with old spices.

After Willem Darry had died, wasting away in his bed, Jaehaerys had broken one of the servants noses and threatened to gut them before he started rounding up anything of value. Gold, silver, bronze, and jewels, he spread them between packs that he passed between each of the three of them. Then he picked eight lemons from the tree by Dany's window and sold the big house and its red door.

They had been on the move ever since. Dany didn't know how many boltholes he had across the free cities, or how much money they had but they didn't go hungry. A little cloth bag lay on her folded clothes, filled with sixteen lemon seeds from her tree. Jazz promised that one day they would stop having to run and she could plant her seeds.

Dany didn't think that it would be any time soon, but when Jazz made a promise he kept it.

Dany let him lift her out of the near-boiling water and wrap her up into a thick wool robe. Jazz brushed out her hair and sang her a song in soft, deep voice before he put her to bed. She wanted to stay up and see what he was doing at his desk in the corner. But she couldn't. Her eyes were too heavy and the blankets were warm and before she knew it she was asleep, listening to the scratching off a quill on parchment,

Strange as it might have been, Quinton Taro did not hate the girl who killed him.

To be fair, it is very difficult to hate one's own and only daughter. Blood may have been thick, yes, but their was the blood of the covenant and it was thicker than the water of the womb. Thicker than the water that bound him to Cersei Lannister.

She loved him. Loved him like no one had before, and it was strange. Unnerving, even. He was older than she was when he was born, but she was his mother, technically. And she loved him. She loved him so much he thought he might be smothered by his mother's chest as he held him there as a baby. Even as he grew and she let him walk and eat solid foods it's… strange. She wants to protect him, and that's more than his first mother ever did.

He thinks he loves her, but he would gladly give up his throne to his sister, still just a small bump in his mothers belly. Quinton knowns himself. He knows he's not the type to be a ruler, or a leader. He'd a killer, an enforcer, he can plan and strategize but he's shit at command. He's an old soldier to take his orders, and that's all.

He has no place being the king.

All that said, he's pretty fucking sure he'll be a better one than his father.

His father, who is not yet so fat he needs stairs to get on a horse, but who beats his mother and rapes her in the night.

If he gets the chance, and he will get the chance, he'll kill him. Someway. Some quiet way. A hunting accident gone wrong. Too much to drink and he chokes on his own vomit. He doesn't care.

If he was bigger than a goddamn three year old, if he had the magic he once did for murder, he would do it as he was riding off to war with the Iron islands. A fall off the house and his neck snaps. Easy. Simple. He's a fan of simple, but that is not an option he has just yet.

He can't kill any king until he can lift a knife without his mother snatching it away from him in fear.

"I hope he doesn't come back," he says quickly. Too quiet for anyone but his mother to hear as she holds him close to her, feet off the ground, watching the King ride off for another war. It's been barely six years since the last one. Quinton has never liked war, and that before the only medicine available amounted to opium and hack saws.

A firm hand on his head guids it against her shoulder. His 'uncle' Jaime stands close enough he might have heard, but no one else.

"Hush, my love. You don't mean that," his mother soothed.

"I do," he told her solemnly. "He's not a good man. The other king wasn't either."

"That's enough talk of that," she said sternly, and he fell silent. He wasn't stupid.

He looked at Jaime. All green eyes and golden hair, like his mother. Like he himself. No, Quinton is not stupid. There's no match up that says mixing Roberts pitch black hair and blue eyes, both more dominant than blond and green, will result in him. The chances are slim to none, and there's no one else in the Red Keep that disappears behind closed doors with his mother.

It's disgusting, it's wrong, and this whole world is fucked to shit.

Though if he's being honest, he could fuck his own mother some day and it still won't be the worst thing he's ever done.

Maybe, just maybe, this was some kind of karma for a lifetime of crime.

Jokes on the gods. He has no intention of being seeking redemption, or paying penance. He has one goal now, and he could deal with the rest afterwards.

Kill King Robert.