It had been a simple mission for Team RWBY: Check some ancient ruins for danger. Then they found themselves in the middle of a frozen wasteland fighting strange ice monsters. That wasn't actually that hard. But finding a way back home? That's much harder. Especially without turning into monsters themselves.
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A Song of Ice and Fire Cut Short by Dust (RWBY in Westeros)
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Prologue & Chapter 1: The Strangers at the Gate
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A Song of Ice and Fire Cut Short by Dust (RWBY in Westeros)
Summary: It had been a simple mission for Team RWBY: Check some ancient ruins for danger. Then they found themselves in the middle of a frozen wasteland fighting strange ice monsters. That wasn't actually that hard. But finding a way back home? That's much harder. Especially without turning into monsters themselves.
Disclaimer: I do not own A Song of Fire and Ice or any of the characters in the series. I do not own RWBY or any of the characters in the series.
Author's Notes: This story is set in an Alternate Universe. While the canon events of RWBY up to Season 2 and of A Game of Thrones before the start of Book 1 happened, there will be changes to either series' background.
Cover:
Prologue: This is not Solitas, is it?
One moment, they were standing around a shiny object; the next moment, they were falling. Free-falling! Ruby Rose had a flashback to the Initiation at Beacon and whipped Crescent Rose around to slow her descent, but she hit the ground before she could pull the trigger.
The impact was jarring but softer than she expected, though when she went to roll with it, she found herself buried halfway in… snow? She scrambled up, coughing and spitting, and looked around. Definitely snow. Lots of it - the whole area was covered in snow! The ground, the trees around them, the hills and mountains in the distance… She blinked. This didn't look like Vale.
"Ruby, you dolt! I told you not to touch that thing!"
Ruby turned around and saw Weiss raising her head from a mound of snow that had seemingly swallowed her. She was angry, but that was kinda normal for her. The small patch of snow on her head that was slowly slipping down was new, though.
"I was already touching it when you said it!" Ruby defended herself. "Besides, our mission was to check out the ruins!" And that meant checking out weird shining objects that kinda floated.
"We were sent to look for any Grimm that might threaten an archaeological expedition to the ruins."
Ruby turned again. Unlike Weiss, Blake didn't look angry, but it was hard to tell - she generally kept cool and calm. She wasn't covered in snow, either, though. "Yes, but checking for other dangers was kinda implied," Ruby told her.
Wait a moment - Weiss, Blake… where was…?
"Woohoo!"
Ruby jerked to the side when another mound of snow exploded in a shower of, well, snow and… steam? Ah, there was Yang, her fists raised and a broad grin on her face. Her sister blinked and looked around. "What happened? This doesn't look like the ruins where we were."
"Our reckless leader didn't listen, again, and triggered something, and we must have been… transported here," Weiss replied as she brushed off more snow from her clothes.
Ruby did the same and grimaced when she noticed some of the snow had already slipped beneath her clothes and was melting. It was cold here, da…very cold. She could see her breath.
"And where is this? It looks like Atlas, doesn't it?" Yang asked.
"You mean Solitas. Atlas is a city," Weiss snapped. "This is the wilderness."
Yang kept grinning. "So, we're stranded in the wilderness near your home?"
"If we're lucky," Weiss replied. She pulled out her scroll, then frowned. "No signal. We're not near Atlas."
"Signal's on Patch." Yang's joke wasn't really funny.
"You don't recognise the place?" Ruby asked before Weiss could blow her top at her sister.
"Do you expect me to recognise every place on an entire continent?" Weiss glared at Ruby as if it was her fault that Yang's sense of humour was kinda questionable.
"I could recognise every spot on Patch." And Yang wasn't helping.
"Your home is a small island. Solitas is a continent," Weiss said. "Now, we need to find out where we are."
"Oh!" Ruby perked up. She knew what to do! "We can check the stars for our position!" She remembered how that worked. Kinda. She had been a bit distracted planning another upgrade for Crescent Rose during that lesson. But it couldn't be too… She blinked and heard someone gasp.
"That's…"
"That's not the moon!"
"Did we skip a phase?"
"That's not our moon." Blake sounded both sure and unsure at the same time. Somehow. "It's different."
"Well, yeah, it's not broken," Yang said.
"It could just be facing us with the unbroken side," Weiss disagreed, but she didn't sound as convinced that she was right as she usually did.
"No. It's not our moon," Blake disagreed. "It looks different from when it's in the full phase."
"I don't think we're on Solitas," Ruby said in a low voice.
"That's… that's impossible!" Weiss sputtered. "It has to be our moon!"
"No," Ruby said. "That doesn't look like our moon. The colour is wrong, and ours doesn't have that big dark sea."
"It's not a sea; it's a crater," Weiss corrected her.
"Whatever, it's not our moon," Ruby shot back. "We're not in our world any more."
"Unless… we went back in time? Before the moon shattered?" Blake ventured.
"That's impossible as well!" Weiss disagreed.
"Well, the moon changing is also impossible," Yang pointed out.
"Whatever," Ruby repeated herself. She was the leader of RWBY, she had to take charge now. "We can't bicker about the moon. We need to decide what we do. Where we're going."
"We don't know where we are, so how can we decide where to go?" Weiss asked. "This is…" she shook her head almost violently, her ponytail whipping around her face. "What do we do?"
"Quiet!" Blake hissed before Ruby could try to calm her friend down. "I hear steps. Someone's coming."
Ruby didn't hear anything, but her ears weren't as good as Blake's. She didn't see anything either, though. "From which direction?" she asked.
"From…" Blake tensed. "From all around us!" she spat, drawing Gambol Shroud.
"Wait!" Ruby held up a hand. "Calm down! We don't want the people here to think we want to do them any harm!"
"I don't…" Blake drew a sharp breath. "What are they?"
What did she mean? Then Ruby saw the first figure appear between the trees, slowly walking towards them. Almost stumbling. The first of many. They looked…
"What are they?" Weiss repeated Blake's question.
Ruby didn't know either. They looked like… "Zombies! Ice zombies!" she blurted out.
"Don't be ridiculous! This is not one of your silly games!" Weiss snapped.
But the people surrounding them, slowly encircling them, looked like zombies. Some of them had visible wounds. Some had missing limbs. And they were armed. Clubs, spears, staffs.
Still… Ruby was the team leader. She had to lead. Maybe the people here looked like this? Maybe this was normal? She smiled and waved. "Hello there! Can you help us? We're kinda lost!"
They didn't react. Didn't say anything. They just kept coming closer. And they didn't look friendly at all!
"We come in peace!" Ruby tried again.
"Ruby!" Yang hissed behind her. "I don't think they're listening."
Ruby didn't think so, either. But what else could they do? "Can you understand me?" She pointed at herself, then at them. "Me Ruby. You?"
"Ruby…" Yang groaned.
The first of the maybe-ice zombies had almost reached her. He - he looked male - raised his club and grunted, showing gapped teeth, before he swung at her.
Without thinking, Ruby parried the blow with Crescent Rose, taking off half his club in the process and sending him stumbling. "Oh, sorry! I just…"
He swung the stump of his club at her again, growling like… like a Grimm!
"Ruby!"
Ruby had reach on him. She hit him with the shaft of Crescent Rose. But instead of sending him back a few steps, as she had wanted, she heard his ribs break as her weapon caved his chest in and sent him flying. Gasping, she stared at him. That was… "I didn't mean to!"
But he got up despite his chest now sporting a hole. And he wasn't bleeding at all!
"They're really ice zombies!" Ruby blurted out - right before the other zombies charged in.
Ruby fended off a staff blow and kicked a smaller zombie trying to stab her with a knife. Her kick caught the zombie's head and ripped it off! For a moment, it felt as if her heart stopped.
But the headless zombie kept swinging its weapon at her.
Horrified, she swung Crescent Rose at it, cutting it in half, then swung her blade around and slashed through two more who were trying to flank her.
Around her, her friends were fighting as well.
"They're not staying down!" Yang shouted, shattering - exploding - a pair of zombies with a series of blows with Ember Celica. "Not even if they lose their heads!"
That wasn't how it worked in the games! But this wasn't a game! They were surrounded by unstoppable ice zombies that kept going! Ruby clenched her teeth, then used her semblance, sweeping through the dozen zombies converging on her and cutting them into pieces before coming to a stop between Blake and Weiss.
"They don't die!" Weiss yelled, stabbing a zombie before blasting it away with a shot of dust. "They keep coming."
That was… "We need to set them on fire!" Ruby yelled. If headshots didn't work, then fire would! It had to! It always did in the movies! "Kill them with fire!"
"Yeah!" Yang roared, diving into the middle of a bunch of zombies.
They jumped on her, and Ruby gasped again. "Yang!"
She started to move, hefting Crescent Rose. A zombie charged at her, and she jumped over it, flipping around and cutting it apart. She landed on a second zombie, kicking it in the chest and pushing off, slicing the zombie's chest open with her scythe in the process. She had to get to Yang! She had to…
In the middle of the zombie group, a fire flared up - Yang had activated her semblance. And the zombies were burning - and falling down!
"Fire works!" Ruby yelled, landing on one knee before sweeping Crescent Rose in an arc around her and cutting off two more zombies at the knees. Literally!
Weiss landed next to her, jumping off a floating glyph. Ruby heard Myrtenaster cycle, and a zombie about to swing a club at her caught a fireball to the face that burned him to ashes.
"Take this!" Yang barreled through another group of zombies, leaving them broken and burning.
Blake, flitting around from clone to clone, leaving cut and falling zombies behind, caught three more in Gambol Shroud and flung them on the burning ones. "They're not that strong," she said as she reached Weiss and Ruby.
"Just hard to kill," Ruby agreed. They were not nearly as dangerous as Grimm, though. They just looked so… She clenched her teeth and activated her semblance again, cutting a swath through the rear of the zombie horde and trying to punt the pieces into the fires the others were starting.
She mostly succeeded. A few pieces missed. One almost hit Weiss, but her partner could handle it.
"Hey!"
Should be able to handle it.
Ruby appeared next to her, taking quick breaths and looked around. Most of the zombies were burning in pieces now, but the rest were still coming, not caring about the fate of the others. "Like Grimm," she whispered. "Just like Grimm." They weren't people. Just people-shaped monsters. They had to be.
"Yes," Weiss agreed, also breathing a bit heavily. "We should… Watch out!"
Ruby spun around and just caught an arrow shattering on one of Weiss's glyphs that had appeared in front of her face. An ice arrow!
She looked around. That had come from… There! Between a patch of trees! Her eyes widened. Sitting on a huge spider, a figure, pale as ice, with glowing blue eyes, was notching another ice arrow to a shiny white bow. And it was surrounded by more of the zombies.
"That's the boss!" Ruby yelled as she flipped Crescent Rose around and shifted her into a rifle.
Another arrow flew toward her - no, toward Blake! But it only hit a clone that turned to ice before shattering.
And Ruby had a bead drawn on the figure. She pulled the trigger, and a dust round from Crescent Rose hit the archer in the chest while she flipped head over heels to compensate for the recoil.
Her target blew up, splattering the zombies passing him with blueish blood or something. But the zombies didn't stop. They kept coming.
Not for long, though - Yang leapt at them, followed by Blake and Weiss. Yang's first blow caved in the spider's head, leaving it twitching on the ground. Weiss jumped from glyph to glyph, firing dust charges with Myrtenaster and fending off feeble blows from broken weapons. Blake wove through the ranks of the enemies, clones confusing them until they fell with their limbs cut or entangled.
And Ruby swept around, cutting into them from behind. Crescent Rose flashed, and parts flew.
A minute later, it was over. A flick of her scythe set the last pieces into the fire Weiss had started over the spider's carcass.
"Whoo! That was…" Yang trailed off with a sigh. "Satisfying," she finished.
"It was cathartic," Weiss surprisingly agreed - at least Ruby thought she did. "But we're still stuck in…. An unknown place, facing unknown dangers."
"And known dangers," Blake said. "We're in the middle of an icy wasteland without shelter or supplies."
Their aura would keep them from freezing. For a time, at least. But… "Does anyone have food on them?" Ruby asked.
"Hungry already, sis?" Yang joked, but Ruby could tell that her sister was concerned.
And she was hungry, actually. And she only had a few chocolate cookies on her. She gasped, then checked her pockets. No! They had been crushed in the fighting!
"We need to find shelter and get some food," Blake said. "We can't…"
Her ears were twitching again, Ruby saw. She grimaced. "More zombies?"
Blake nodded with a grim expression.
More fighting, then. Ruby clenched her teeth and gripped Crescent Rose harder. No matter what stood against them, they would get out of this. She wouldn't let her team down!
Chapter 1: The Strangers at the Gate
'The origin of the group we know as the Ruby Order remains one of the great mysteries of Westeros. It has been agreed by all reliable scholars that their claims to have come from another world were an exaggeration meant to obfuscate their true origin. From a modern perspective, their tales of a broken moon, flying cities and monster hunters are obvious exaggerations like the myths related to the Age of Heroes. Nevertheless, the fact remains that despite extensive research and Maester Aeon's famous but ultimately fruitless expedition to Yi-Ti to investigate a possible link between the Yellow Emperor and Yang Xiao Long, no one has been able to find where the four maidens came from. This, coupled with their choice of obvious noms-de-guerre, has, of course, led to a lot of unfounded speculation ranging from the fantastical - such as the theory, if one could call those ramblings that, of Ruby Rose being a daughter of Brandon the Builder who had been put into a magical sleep with her companions to save Westeros in its time of need, to the utterly mad, such as the claim that the entire tale was a fabrication and that the Ruby Order was actually Daenerys Targaryen and her three dragons, based on nothing more than the colour of Weiss Schnee's hair.
In this work, I will cut through all this speculation and focus on what we can prove based on records, evidence and sound logic.'
The Haunted Forest, Westeros, 298 AC
After four years at the Wall, Will had grown used to the cold, and the Haunted Forest held no terrors for him any more. As a veteran of a hundred rangings, he knew the territory as well as - better than - the Wildlings who claimed the land here, and he knew from experience that he was better at sneaking through the woods than they were.
Proof of that was the fact that he had been tracking the band of wildling raiders they were after for days now without them being able to lose him. And they were getting closer as well.
No, the only thing Will worried about was that he and Gared were under the orders of Ser Waymar Royce, and that noble was not quite as experienced as he thought he was - just enough to be too confident, which was bad everywhere but doubly so beyond the Wall. Three brothers of the Nigth Watch could take half a dozen wildlings, but only if you were smart about it. If you were dumb, even warhorses and the best armour and weapons wouldn't save you from an ambush. Will could only hope that by the time they caught up to their prey, the noble would not be too reckless. The Lord Commander should have let Gared lead this ranging; Gared had been a Brother longer than Will had been alive. But Ser Waymar was a noble, and nobles didn't serve under smallfolk, not even in the Night's Watch, where everyone was a brother.
He snorted and moved ahead another dozen paces, past a scraggly bush. The raiders were loaded down with their loot, and that made them sloppy. They had tried to walk in a single file to hide their numbers but hadn't quite managed it. He checked a broken twig - they were even closer than he had thought. He could almost smell the wildlings…
He blinked, sniffing the air. That was smoke! Had the wildlings set camp already? They weren't that far from the last campsite Will had found, so why would they have stopped here? Sure, the sun would be setting soon, but the wildlings had still been hours ahead of Will's band when they had set out this morning.
He looked at the sky and squinted. It was cloudy, but… yes, that was a column of smoke. That was even weirder - even the dumbest wildling raiders knew how to build a smokeless fire.
Something wasn't right.
He quickly started backtracking to where Gared and Ser Waymar were waiting, not caring about hiding his own tracks any more. This was too important.
It didn't take him long to reach the others. When they saw him running, both jumped up, hands on weapons, and he waved them down.
"There's smoke ahead! Someone made a fire!" he blurted out between catching his breath.
"Hah! We have them!" Ser Waymar grinned.
"Smoke?" Gared, of course, realised what that meant at once. "Can't be. Must be a trap."
That was a possibility Will hadn't considered. But it made sense, kind of. Or not - most brothers would know better than to charge ahead blindly.
"If it's a trap, we'll spring it!" Ser Waymar strode to his horse. "Mount up! We'll show those raiders that they cannot escape the Watch!"
Will exchanged a glance with Gared. The older brother sneered for a moment, then clenched his teeth and started for his own horse.
Will sighed and followed them. He had a bad feeling about this.
"Show us the way, Brother Will!"
Yeah, definitely a bad feeling. But he had sworn the oath, and orders were orders. With his back to the others, he grimaced and started to lead them towards the fire in the distance.
They made good time, but not good enough for Ser Waymar. By the time they approached a small snow-covered ridge that hid the fire from them, the noble was chomping at the bit.
Will held up a hand. "They're beyond that ridge," he whispered - they were still too far away to be overheard, and he hadn't spotted any guards around, but you never knew.
"Good! Follow me!" Ser Waymar didn't stop. He urged his horse up the ridge, sword drawn.
Gared and Will, grimacing again, drew their own swords and did as told.
Ser Waymar was first on the ridge, uttered a battle cry Will didn't quite get, and charged down the slope.
Will heard shouting and high-pitched cries. Then he reached the top of the ridge himself, half a pace ahead of Gared, and his eyes widened.
Ser Waymar was down, his horse riderless. The noble was on the ground, disarmed - but still alive; Will saw him squirming under the boot of a… Will blinked. That wasn't a wildling!
He realised that he had stopped charging, as had Gared next to him. They were facing four people in… colourful clothes. He had never seen, not even heard, of any wildling wearing such garb!
The one holding down Ser Waymar was wearing a bright red cape over a pitch-black garment - and holding the biggest scythe he had ever seen. It was bigger than herself! Next to her stood a woman with a mane of golden hair wearing… Whatever it was, her legs were almost bare! And the one next to her wore a skirt so short it bared her entire legs!
"Targaryen!" Gared whispered next to him.
Yes, the woman had the silver hair of the old kings. And she was wielding a slim, shining sword. And the blonde wore golden gauntlets. Wildlings didn't dress like that. And they didn't have such weapons! And they didn't show any concern or fear faced with two mounted brothers. Of course, they had dismounted Ser Waymar seemingly easily - and for all his overconfidence, the brother was a trained knight.
Will licked his lips. Somehow, he didn't fancy their chances to charge double their numbers. Not to mention they had Ser Waymar at their mercy.
The silver-haired one took a step towards them and pointed her sword at Will. "You there! Why did you attack us?"
She sounded like a noble. She acted like a noble. Best to treat her like a noble.
Will shrugged and pointed at Ser Waymar. "Ser Waymar is in command."
All four looked at the still squirming and cursing knight on the ground. Will thought he heard the shorter one say: 'Oh!' and despite how serious their situation was, he couldn't help snorting.
"Do we look like wildlings? Do we?" Weiss Schnee glared at the oaf who had attacked them. She expected, based on far too much experience, to be attacked by the bandits roaming those woods - she wouldn't call them 'free folk'; they were common criminals - but the members of the Night's Watch were meant to be civilised, not barbarians!
The leader of the small band, supposedly a knight, glared back at her. "Only wildlings live beyond the Wall!"
For someone Ruby had dismounted and disarmed without fully waking up, he had nerve! Weiss sniffed and raised her chin a bit more. "We don't live here, as should be obvious." She was a Schnee, far more refined than this ruffian. How could anyone mistake her for one of those barbarian folks wearing rags? Granted, they had been sleeping under a few layers of furs taken from those barbarians, but still!
"We were stranded in these lands by an accident, and we're on our way south," Ruby chimed in with a wide smile on her face.
"Stranded? We're nowhere near either coast," the younger, more sensible man, Will, blurted out.
"They were unique circumstances," Weiss told him with all the dignity she could muster.
"We got lost," Yang commented. "It took a while until we found someone who could tell us how to get out of here."
"What?" Will stared at her.
Weiss frowned again. Yes, these people here were obviously not as sophisticated as the people back home in Atlas, or in Vale, but that didn't mean they couldn't tell when Yang was making fun of them.
"OK, it was like this! We were on a mission to investigate an old ruin back home, in Vale, when a magic device dropped us in the middle of this country," Ruby interjected. "Before we could really understand what had happened, we were attacked by ice zombies and some white, uh, monsters with glowy blue eyes and ice powers, and monster spiders - with ice powers. We had to fight our way through them - they didn't stop coming even though it was obvious they couldn't really beat us, not when we were working together, but they were like the Grimm, those are monsters back home, monsters we hunt, but they are not like your monsters here, anyway, we had to burn them all so they stayed dead, because otherwise they would keep attacking us, but only until we met their Alpha…"
"King," Weiss corrected. "He wore a crown." And Alphas were animals. She didn't know what those 'Others', as the wildlings called them, were, but they were not animals.
"Witch-King," Yang added with a grin.
"Whatever!" Ruby pouted for a moment. "Anyway, what matters is when we destroyed that guy, everyone else fell down and didn't move any more - ice zombies and other guys. Well, there were a few monsters left, but those were easy."
"And edible."
Weiss glared at Yang. There was no need to remind them that they had had to eat giant spiders to survive. And they didn't taste like lobsters! Weiss had eaten enough lobsters for her palate to know the difference!
"Anyway!" Ruby repeated herself. "We defeated those ice monsters and looked for a way back, but there weren't even ruins where we had landed, and we didn't find anything in the Alpha's - Witch-King's - lair, so we started walking south. At least we think it's south, we don't know if south here is actually south, you know? But back home, south is where the sun is highest at noon. Kinda - it varies with the seasons, I think, and where you are, but it was close enough, and we met the locals, the wildlings, you call them, before we ran out of spider legs. And they told us that further south was the Wall, and behind that wall was civilisation! So, here we are!" She beamed at the three men. "On the way to civilisation so we can get home!"
Weiss suppressed a sigh. It was obvious that none of the men had understood a word Ruby had said. Ruby meant well, but she wasn't experienced enough to deal with this. "We're not wildlings. We have no quarrel with you. We simply wish to travel to civilised lands where you aren't attacked by bandits trying to steal your valuables at every corner." That was technically a slight exaggeration - they hadn't been attacked quite that often, though Weiss was sure that was mostly due to the population of these lands being spread rather thin - but seeing as those barbarians were also trying to 'steal' Weiss and her friends for obvious and utterly disgusting purposes, as some of them had stated before being violently taught the error of their ways, she felt it was a true reflection of the situation.
"Exactly!" Ruby kept beaming at the ruffians dressed in black. "So, can we go back with you? We could probably scale that wall easily, but we'd rather not have another misunderstanding. We just want to go home!"
"Yeah." Yang was smiling as well, though showing more teeth.
Weiss glanced at Blake, who nodded. She hadn't said much so far, but as long as she didn't make things worse, Weiss could live with that.
Really, all they needed was to get out of this wasteland and back to civilisation. Or what passed as civilisation here - it was obvious that they were not as technologically advanced as Atlas or Vale. But then again, a lot of Remnant wasn't either.
At least they knew that they had kingdoms behind the wall. Weiss desperately needed a hot shower - no, a hot bath! And a meal cooked by a chef, not scraps of dried meat roasted over a campfire or spider legs the size of her own legs! And decent clothes and bedrolls! She was so sick of sleeping wrapped in smelly furs!
And they needed to replenish their Dust reserves. They had spent almost everything on fighting the ice monsters and then surviving in this wasteland. Weiss still hated that she had wasted so much expensive Gravity Dust to check for buried ruins under the location where they had arrived, only to find rocks and dirt.
The Wall, Westeros, 298 AC
Blake Belladonna squinted as she gazed up at the top of the Wall ahead of them. The fortification was so massive, even with her sharp eyes, she could barely make out the people - members of the Night's Watch - up there. It was easily over two hundred metres tall, casting a long shadow over the frozen wasteland it separated from the, supposedly, more civilised kingdom behind it. As far as they had been told, it ran across the entire continent, a hundred leagues - about five hundred clicks, if her maths was correct. She could barely imagine how people without modern technology had erected such an edifice. Even if it was, as their semi-voluntary guides claimed, mostly built out of frozen water, it would have taken a very long time to finish it. And the stone foundations it would take to support such a massive structure…
"And I thought the walls back home were tall," Ruby commented.
"It has been standing for eight thousand years, protecting the Seven Kingdoms from the wildlings," Ser Waymar, the leader of the small band of warriors, declared, pride dripping from every word.
"All that for a bunch of bandits?" Yang snorted. "Seems like overkill."
"What?"
While Yang explained what it meant, Blake was tempted to remind her friend that she had denied, on numerous occasions, that such a thing as overkill existed. Yet, Blake held her tongue. The ensuing banter would volunteer more information to the soldiers with them, and the men hadn't earned their trust. Quite the opposite, actually - the so-called 'knight' had attacked them without warning, not bothering with even a token attempt at learning who they were and what they were doing here. Blake wasn't about to lower her guard amongst people whose first impulse was to attack a stranger.
Although she had to admit, if she was honest, that, based on her and her friends' experience so far with the people living in the so-called Haunted Forest, she couldn't completely fault the men for assuming the worst. Every time they had met those nefarious bandits, they had attempted to rob them - and to kidnap them for vile purposes. She would be a hypocrite of the worst order if she ignored how such experiences could form or cement prejudices - she had lived through that herself when she had been in the White Fang.
And yet, Blake neither could ignore how strangely familiar this felt, albeit in a twisted way: A band of outcasts eeking out a difficult existence in a harsh wilderness, kept out of more hospitable lands by the armed guards of supposedly more civilised men? The Atlas military and SDC guards might use more advanced technology, but the principle was the same. The top of the Wall might even be an allusion to Atlas floating above Mantle.
She clenched her teeth as they continued to approach the Wall, her friends and herself easily keeping pace with the mounted warriors. She didn't know if there were Faunus in this world and how they were treated, but she would keep hiding her ears. What she had seen so far from the three members of the Night's Watch had not left her with the impression that they would treat her as an equal. It was obviously a rather stratified society, with nobles ruling commoners, as happened in ancient times on Remnant, and she was intimately familiar with how people on the lower rungs of society tended to look for others who were even worse off in a stupid and self-defeating but, sadly, very common attempt to assure themselves that there were people still beneath them, and so they had an interest in upholding the very order that diminished and oppressed them.
And yet, the Wall also was a symbol of hope. If the people here had been able to build such a monumental fortification in the past, then it was quite likely that they achieved other, similarly impressive feats. Such as creating whatever mythical device transported Team RWBY to this forsaken place in another world and which, therefore, should also be able to transport them back home. Blake still had her doubts about the claim that the Wall was thousands of years old, but unlike the remains of whatever civilisation had preceded the Kingdom of Vale back on Remnant, the Wall had not fallen into ruins, their builders forgotten, lost to a bloody, violent past filled with Grimm.
"I see."
Ser Waymar didn't sound as if he truly understood Yang's explanation, and Blake couldn't honestly blame him for it. Her friend had used so many other terms and examples related to Remnant - people who didn't know firearms wouldn't be familiar with video games, much less memes, which Yang would have been aware of had she shown the least interest in literature set in Remnants past or in fantasy worlds - that the man must be more confused than enlightened. Hell, from what they had gathered, the people here were not even aware of Dust, although the tales of Alchemists creating Wildfire sounded as if at least some people were aware of the properties of Dust. The substance certainly sounded as volatile as Dust.
"Look! There's a gate at the bottom of the ice wall!" Ruby suddenly called out, pointing ahead.
Blake cocked her head and stepped up the faint slope to join her friend who had walked in front of her. Indeed, there was a black gate set into the Wall - directly under the busiest part of the wall she could see, she noted. So, this would be their destination, the way past the Wall, into the Seven Kingdoms.
As they approached, Ruby eagerly rushed ahead, and Blake exchanged glances with Yang and Weiss. If their 'guides' meant them ill, this would be their best opportunity to make a move. A narrow tunnel would be the perfect place for an ambush. And while Blake didn't think much of the chances of even a large force of soldiers such as the three men with them to take on Team RWBY, there were other ways than direct attacks to threaten them. Just closing the tunnel on both sides would be a lethal threat if they could not blast or cut their way free.
Ser Waymar rode ahead, barely keeping pace with an excited Ruby, and pulled out a horn. Blake narrowed her eyes at the harsh sound - it grated on her ears - and glanced at the other two men, Will and Gared. They didn't look tense but relieved, though while she believed that they were not putting up an act, that alone didn't mean that this wasn't a trap. They might still wish them ill, and their relief might be rooted in the - quite mistaken - belief that reunited with the rest of the Night's Watch, they had the power to take on Blake and her friends.
Maybe they should scale the Wall instead? It would avoid an underground trap or ambush. But it would also show that they didn't trust the men here and reveal more of their capabilities.
Blake shook her head. They had been travelling for days with the three soldiers, and while she was not as skilled in judging people as her parents - much less skilled, she had to admit, since she had fallen for Adam's lies and had taken far too long to see him for what he was, despite her parents' misgivings - she was not naive either, and she had observed the three extensively during the nights, when they would have thought themselves safely hidden by the darkness, and had not seen any sign of plotting.
And so they followed their enthusiastic leader to the gate and, after a short discussion between Ser Waymar and the gatekeeper, through it and into a tunnel carved into the ice.
Despite her calculated optimism, Blake didn't relax even a little until they were safely out of the tunnel and Ruby was complaining that the other side was just as cold as the land they had just left.
Castle Black, The Wall, Westeros, 298 AC
"...and then we had to fight a whole bunch of blue-eyed ice zombies and pale Grimm-People until we killed their leader, and then they all fell down. Like puppets with cut strings - you know what puppets with strings are, do you? Marionettes. Anyway, they just fell down and stopped moving."
Yang Xiao Long grinned and leaned back against a wooden fence, arms crossed over her chest, as she watched Ruby and Weiss talk to the 'Lord Commander' of the Night's Watch. Jeor Mormont or something. A really old guy, all wrinkled.
Her sister didn't give the man time to answer and went on: "Anyway, since we couldn't find whatever had dropped us in the middle of the zombie horde, we decided to head south and look for others. Others, as in other people, not more Others, as the wildlings called the Grimm-People - though they weren't really people, you know? People don't stop moving and die when their leader gets cleaved in half. They seemed to be more like some kinda Grimm. Grimm are monsters in our world, you know, which want to kill everyone and which we fight, and that fit the Others here, and…"
"Ruby!"
Ah, Weiss's patience had reached its end.
The girl frowned at Ruby, who looked sheepish for a moment and rubbed the back of her head with that beaming smile of hers, then turned back to Mormont staring at them. "I'm sorry, sir, my friend is, sometimes, a bit too enthusiastic." She flashed what Yang privately called her 'business smile' at the man, polite and cold. "But she is correct; we have been stranded by an unknown device, possibly an uncontrolled interaction of various exotic Dust, in the lands up north, and we are looking for a way to return home."
"I see."
Yang would bet that Mormont didn't see it. Or believed them. The side glance he sent at Waymar told her enough. It reminded her of how Dad would glance at a fellow teacher at Signal whenever they weren't buying Yang's perfectly plausible explanation for whatever had happened.
"So, we would be very grateful if you could point us to the closest expert on similar phenomena," Weiss gamely went on while Ruby nodded with wide eyes and a wider smile.
Yang narrowed her eyes at the expressions she caught on some of the men's faces watching the talk upon hearing that. It reminded her of some of the scum in Vale she'd had to beat up. And why were all the soldiers here men, anyway? She hadn't seen a single woman so far. Talk about a sausage party! And, even worse, they all wore black. As if the name of the castle was an order. No speck of colour or style among them - worse than Junior's goons. In fact, a lot of them gave off the same vibe as those thugs…
She glanced at Blake, who was leaning against a post a few metres away. Her partner was acting bored, but Yang could tell that she was tense. Must have picked up the mood as well.
"Yes!" Ruby nodded emphatically, and Yang sighed. Her innocent sister hadn't got a clue. "We were on an important mission, and we have to return as soon as possible before the school starts worrying. Or informs our families that we're missing."
"The school?" Mormont frowned as if he didn't know what that meant.
"Beacon! The best school for Huntresses in all of Remnant!"
"A distinguished institution with a long tradition of turning out the finest Huntsmen and Huntresses in Vale," Weiss said.
Yang smirked; Weiss couldn't let the claim that Beacon was better than Atlas stand even though she attended the school herself. Her humour didn't last long, though.
Mormont nodded slowly, though he looked even stonier than when Waymar had presented them. "You claim to come from the Vale?"
"Not the Vale," Ruby corrected him, causing Weiss to make another face at her. "The Kingdom of Vale - our home. Well, mine and Yang's, Weiss and Blake aren't from Vale. Our Vale, not yours. Though yours is probably great as well, I think, right?"
Mormont held up his hand. "Please, enough of this."
Ruby blinked, Weiss drew back a little, a frown on her face, and Yang pushed off the fence and rolled her shoulders. Just in case. The old guy didn't give off the same vibes as some of the men, but you never knew. Next to her, Blake didn't move from her spot, but Yang saw her shift her balance some, ready to jump into action.
"Sorry?" Ruby still looked confused. "Did I talk too fast?"
"Ruby!" Weiss hissed.
"What?"
"You made him mad!"
"I didn't mean to! I'm sorry!"
"Let me do the talking!" Weiss flashed another of her business smiles at Mormont. "She's sorry. Please don't hold her youthful enthusiasm against her or us. We really just want to be on our way towards the closest expert on… unknown displacement effects."
Yang snorted. "Good one, Weiss."
It earned her a glare, but Weiss quickly focused on the man in front of them when he cleared his throat.
"Please, before I regret having let you pass through the wall on Ser Waymar's counsel, just tell me, in simple words: Where are you from, and what do you want in the Seven Kingdoms?"
"But…" Ruby was gaping at him. "We told you that already!"
"You spoke a lot, but you didn't tell me much. Not much I could make sense of, at least." Mormont smiled, though a little toothily.
Probably not used to Ruby, Yang thought. Well, he'd probably warm up to her if they stayed here for a while. Everyone did. Not that Yang planned to stay here for long; the cold cramped her style. She didn't want to end up like Weiss.
"I know these lands as I know the back of my hand, on both sides of the wall, and I have never encountered any of those creatures you claim to have met - and fought," Mormont went on. "You are armed with steel, and you dress so…" He looked as if he had swallowed a lemon. "...so outrageously, it is clear you aren't wildlings and not from the North or any other of the Seven Kingdoms."
"Exactly!" Ruby nodded several times, then flinched and ducked her head when Mormont narrowed his eyes at her,
"So, where are you from, and how did you end up in the North? Were you on a ship and stranded on the coast? Do you hail from Braavos?"
"Lys!" one of the men standing in the back yelled, causing a wave of chuckling to spread through the ranks.
Yang scowled. She didn't know what Lys was - but she knew that tone and that reaction. They had just been insulted.
Before she could tell the idiots to shut up or she'd crush their balls, Mormont whipped around and bellowed at his men, loud enough to make Yang and her friends flinch: "Silence!"
The men jerked, a number of them taking a step back. "But, Lord Commander…"
"I said silence! You are men of the watch! Black Brothers! Sworn to defend the realm! Do not shame the Watch or me by acting like boys thinking with their cocks!"
Yang heard Ruby gasp at that, and when she glanced at her, she saw both her sister and Weiss blush a little, which made her smirk.
Mormont was still glaring at his men. "The next one who brings dishonour on us all will rue it. Am I understood?"
"Yes, Lord Commander!"
Taking a deep breath, the old man turned back to address Ruby and Weiss. "I apologise for my men. They serve a noble cause, yet not all of them have forgotten their brutish roots."
"Ah… It's OK!" Ruby chirped with a forced smile that told Yang she wasn't quite sure about the whole thing.
Weiss cleared her throat. "We are not from Braavos - or from any other kingdom you know. We are from a different world."
"It's the truth! Your moon is completely different! Ours is broken!" Ruby cut in.
But Mormont wasn't buying it. The old man was too polite to yell at them, but Yang could tell he didn't believe them. And she knew that neither Ruby nor Weiss would be able to convince him. He was too rigid.
Well, if things were too rigid, they needed a bit of shaking up.
Yang grinned widely and took a step forward, smashing her fists together. "We're not from your world. Let me demonstrate just how much we're not from your world."
"Yang! What are you doing?" Ruby blurted out.
"Don't do anything stupid!" Weiss hissed.
Yang didn't listen to either. She looked around. She could punch a hole into the ground, but people generally didn't like holes in their yards. Backyards or schoolyards. So… ah! There!
She crouched, then jumped over the gathered men, landing ten metres behind them next to a cart. Or wagon, whatever. It looked heavy and sturdy enough for a demonstration. "Watch!" she yelled over the gasps and comments, then gripped the cart's bottom with both hands and lifted.
It was unwieldy, and she had to shift her grip twice while she raised the thing over her head, but a few seconds later, she was holding it up with one arm and smiling widely at the gaping crowd.
"Don't break it, Yang!"
She raised her eyebrows at Weiss. As if she was about to break the cart! Well, to be fair, shattering it with one blow would be really impressive, but she knew better than to break other people's stuff. Unless they deserved it, at least.
"So?" She asked, tossing her head back and grinning at Mormont. "Ever seen this before?"
The old man slowly shook his head. "No, I did not."
Yang smiled. It wasn't exactly a glowing agreement, but it was probably good enough.
"And you haven't seen anything yet!" Ruby blurted out. "Watch this!"
A moment later, she vanished in a cloud of red petals, then reappeared on the roof of a small stable on the side, then flickered around the entire yard like Zwei when he got the zoomies until she stopped - on top of the cart Yang was holding since it suddenly got heavier.
"We're Huntresses! We fight the Grimm to protect the people! Kinda like you, I guess!" Yang heard her announce.
The next thing she heard was the thunk of Crescent Rose's butt slamming into the cart, followed by a creaking, familiar noise as the cart broke into pieces.
"Oops! Sorry!"
"Ruby! You dolt!"
"I'm really sorry!"
Summary: It had been a simple mission for Team RWBY: Check some ancient ruins for danger. Then they found themselves in the middle of a frozen wasteland fighting strange ice monsters. That wasn't actually that hard. But finding a way back home? That's much harder. Especially without turning into monsters themselves.
Disclaimer: I do not own A Song of Fire and Ice or any of the characters in the series. I do not own RWBY or any of the characters in the series.
Author's Notes: This story is set in an Alternate Universe. While the canon events of RWBY up to Season 2 and of A Game of Thrones before the start of Book 1 happened, there will be changes to either series' background.
Cover:
Prologue: This is not Solitas, is it?
One moment, they were standing around a shiny object; the next moment, they were falling. Free-falling! Ruby Rose had a flashback to the Initiation at Beacon and whipped Crescent Rose around to slow her descent, but she hit the ground before she could pull the trigger.
The impact was jarring but softer than she expected, though when she went to roll with it, she found herself buried halfway in… snow? She scrambled up, coughing and spitting, and looked around. Definitely snow. Lots of it - the whole area was covered in snow! The ground, the trees around them, the hills and mountains in the distance… She blinked. This didn't look like Vale.
"Ruby, you dolt! I told you not to touch that thing!"
Ruby turned around and saw Weiss raising her head from a mound of snow that had seemingly swallowed her. She was angry, but that was kinda normal for her. The small patch of snow on her head that was slowly slipping down was new, though.
"I was already touching it when you said it!" Ruby defended herself. "Besides, our mission was to check out the ruins!" And that meant checking out weird shining objects that kinda floated.
"We were sent to look for any Grimm that might threaten an archaeological expedition to the ruins."
Ruby turned again. Unlike Weiss, Blake didn't look angry, but it was hard to tell - she generally kept cool and calm. She wasn't covered in snow, either, though. "Yes, but checking for other dangers was kinda implied," Ruby told her.
Wait a moment - Weiss, Blake… where was…?
"Woohoo!"
Ruby jerked to the side when another mound of snow exploded in a shower of, well, snow and… steam? Ah, there was Yang, her fists raised and a broad grin on her face. Her sister blinked and looked around. "What happened? This doesn't look like the ruins where we were."
"Our reckless leader didn't listen, again, and triggered something, and we must have been… transported here," Weiss replied as she brushed off more snow from her clothes.
Ruby did the same and grimaced when she noticed some of the snow had already slipped beneath her clothes and was melting. It was cold here, da…very cold. She could see her breath.
"And where is this? It looks like Atlas, doesn't it?" Yang asked.
"You mean Solitas. Atlas is a city," Weiss snapped. "This is the wilderness."
Yang kept grinning. "So, we're stranded in the wilderness near your home?"
"If we're lucky," Weiss replied. She pulled out her scroll, then frowned. "No signal. We're not near Atlas."
"Signal's on Patch." Yang's joke wasn't really funny.
"You don't recognise the place?" Ruby asked before Weiss could blow her top at her sister.
"Do you expect me to recognise every place on an entire continent?" Weiss glared at Ruby as if it was her fault that Yang's sense of humour was kinda questionable.
"I could recognise every spot on Patch." And Yang wasn't helping.
"Your home is a small island. Solitas is a continent," Weiss said. "Now, we need to find out where we are."
"Oh!" Ruby perked up. She knew what to do! "We can check the stars for our position!" She remembered how that worked. Kinda. She had been a bit distracted planning another upgrade for Crescent Rose during that lesson. But it couldn't be too… She blinked and heard someone gasp.
"That's…"
"That's not the moon!"
"Did we skip a phase?"
"That's not our moon." Blake sounded both sure and unsure at the same time. Somehow. "It's different."
"Well, yeah, it's not broken," Yang said.
"It could just be facing us with the unbroken side," Weiss disagreed, but she didn't sound as convinced that she was right as she usually did.
"No. It's not our moon," Blake disagreed. "It looks different from when it's in the full phase."
"I don't think we're on Solitas," Ruby said in a low voice.
"That's… that's impossible!" Weiss sputtered. "It has to be our moon!"
"No," Ruby said. "That doesn't look like our moon. The colour is wrong, and ours doesn't have that big dark sea."
"It's not a sea; it's a crater," Weiss corrected her.
"Whatever, it's not our moon," Ruby shot back. "We're not in our world any more."
"Unless… we went back in time? Before the moon shattered?" Blake ventured.
"That's impossible as well!" Weiss disagreed.
"Well, the moon changing is also impossible," Yang pointed out.
"Whatever," Ruby repeated herself. She was the leader of RWBY, she had to take charge now. "We can't bicker about the moon. We need to decide what we do. Where we're going."
"We don't know where we are, so how can we decide where to go?" Weiss asked. "This is…" she shook her head almost violently, her ponytail whipping around her face. "What do we do?"
"Quiet!" Blake hissed before Ruby could try to calm her friend down. "I hear steps. Someone's coming."
Ruby didn't hear anything, but her ears weren't as good as Blake's. She didn't see anything either, though. "From which direction?" she asked.
"From…" Blake tensed. "From all around us!" she spat, drawing Gambol Shroud.
"Wait!" Ruby held up a hand. "Calm down! We don't want the people here to think we want to do them any harm!"
"I don't…" Blake drew a sharp breath. "What are they?"
What did she mean? Then Ruby saw the first figure appear between the trees, slowly walking towards them. Almost stumbling. The first of many. They looked…
"What are they?" Weiss repeated Blake's question.
Ruby didn't know either. They looked like… "Zombies! Ice zombies!" she blurted out.
"Don't be ridiculous! This is not one of your silly games!" Weiss snapped.
But the people surrounding them, slowly encircling them, looked like zombies. Some of them had visible wounds. Some had missing limbs. And they were armed. Clubs, spears, staffs.
Still… Ruby was the team leader. She had to lead. Maybe the people here looked like this? Maybe this was normal? She smiled and waved. "Hello there! Can you help us? We're kinda lost!"
They didn't react. Didn't say anything. They just kept coming closer. And they didn't look friendly at all!
"We come in peace!" Ruby tried again.
"Ruby!" Yang hissed behind her. "I don't think they're listening."
Ruby didn't think so, either. But what else could they do? "Can you understand me?" She pointed at herself, then at them. "Me Ruby. You?"
"Ruby…" Yang groaned.
The first of the maybe-ice zombies had almost reached her. He - he looked male - raised his club and grunted, showing gapped teeth, before he swung at her.
Without thinking, Ruby parried the blow with Crescent Rose, taking off half his club in the process and sending him stumbling. "Oh, sorry! I just…"
He swung the stump of his club at her again, growling like… like a Grimm!
"Ruby!"
Ruby had reach on him. She hit him with the shaft of Crescent Rose. But instead of sending him back a few steps, as she had wanted, she heard his ribs break as her weapon caved his chest in and sent him flying. Gasping, she stared at him. That was… "I didn't mean to!"
But he got up despite his chest now sporting a hole. And he wasn't bleeding at all!
"They're really ice zombies!" Ruby blurted out - right before the other zombies charged in.
Ruby fended off a staff blow and kicked a smaller zombie trying to stab her with a knife. Her kick caught the zombie's head and ripped it off! For a moment, it felt as if her heart stopped.
But the headless zombie kept swinging its weapon at her.
Horrified, she swung Crescent Rose at it, cutting it in half, then swung her blade around and slashed through two more who were trying to flank her.
Around her, her friends were fighting as well.
"They're not staying down!" Yang shouted, shattering - exploding - a pair of zombies with a series of blows with Ember Celica. "Not even if they lose their heads!"
That wasn't how it worked in the games! But this wasn't a game! They were surrounded by unstoppable ice zombies that kept going! Ruby clenched her teeth, then used her semblance, sweeping through the dozen zombies converging on her and cutting them into pieces before coming to a stop between Blake and Weiss.
"They don't die!" Weiss yelled, stabbing a zombie before blasting it away with a shot of dust. "They keep coming."
That was… "We need to set them on fire!" Ruby yelled. If headshots didn't work, then fire would! It had to! It always did in the movies! "Kill them with fire!"
"Yeah!" Yang roared, diving into the middle of a bunch of zombies.
They jumped on her, and Ruby gasped again. "Yang!"
She started to move, hefting Crescent Rose. A zombie charged at her, and she jumped over it, flipping around and cutting it apart. She landed on a second zombie, kicking it in the chest and pushing off, slicing the zombie's chest open with her scythe in the process. She had to get to Yang! She had to…
In the middle of the zombie group, a fire flared up - Yang had activated her semblance. And the zombies were burning - and falling down!
"Fire works!" Ruby yelled, landing on one knee before sweeping Crescent Rose in an arc around her and cutting off two more zombies at the knees. Literally!
Weiss landed next to her, jumping off a floating glyph. Ruby heard Myrtenaster cycle, and a zombie about to swing a club at her caught a fireball to the face that burned him to ashes.
"Take this!" Yang barreled through another group of zombies, leaving them broken and burning.
Blake, flitting around from clone to clone, leaving cut and falling zombies behind, caught three more in Gambol Shroud and flung them on the burning ones. "They're not that strong," she said as she reached Weiss and Ruby.
"Just hard to kill," Ruby agreed. They were not nearly as dangerous as Grimm, though. They just looked so… She clenched her teeth and activated her semblance again, cutting a swath through the rear of the zombie horde and trying to punt the pieces into the fires the others were starting.
She mostly succeeded. A few pieces missed. One almost hit Weiss, but her partner could handle it.
"Hey!"
Should be able to handle it.
Ruby appeared next to her, taking quick breaths and looked around. Most of the zombies were burning in pieces now, but the rest were still coming, not caring about the fate of the others. "Like Grimm," she whispered. "Just like Grimm." They weren't people. Just people-shaped monsters. They had to be.
"Yes," Weiss agreed, also breathing a bit heavily. "We should… Watch out!"
Ruby spun around and just caught an arrow shattering on one of Weiss's glyphs that had appeared in front of her face. An ice arrow!
She looked around. That had come from… There! Between a patch of trees! Her eyes widened. Sitting on a huge spider, a figure, pale as ice, with glowing blue eyes, was notching another ice arrow to a shiny white bow. And it was surrounded by more of the zombies.
"That's the boss!" Ruby yelled as she flipped Crescent Rose around and shifted her into a rifle.
Another arrow flew toward her - no, toward Blake! But it only hit a clone that turned to ice before shattering.
And Ruby had a bead drawn on the figure. She pulled the trigger, and a dust round from Crescent Rose hit the archer in the chest while she flipped head over heels to compensate for the recoil.
Her target blew up, splattering the zombies passing him with blueish blood or something. But the zombies didn't stop. They kept coming.
Not for long, though - Yang leapt at them, followed by Blake and Weiss. Yang's first blow caved in the spider's head, leaving it twitching on the ground. Weiss jumped from glyph to glyph, firing dust charges with Myrtenaster and fending off feeble blows from broken weapons. Blake wove through the ranks of the enemies, clones confusing them until they fell with their limbs cut or entangled.
And Ruby swept around, cutting into them from behind. Crescent Rose flashed, and parts flew.
A minute later, it was over. A flick of her scythe set the last pieces into the fire Weiss had started over the spider's carcass.
"Whoo! That was…" Yang trailed off with a sigh. "Satisfying," she finished.
"It was cathartic," Weiss surprisingly agreed - at least Ruby thought she did. "But we're still stuck in…. An unknown place, facing unknown dangers."
"And known dangers," Blake said. "We're in the middle of an icy wasteland without shelter or supplies."
Their aura would keep them from freezing. For a time, at least. But… "Does anyone have food on them?" Ruby asked.
"Hungry already, sis?" Yang joked, but Ruby could tell that her sister was concerned.
And she was hungry, actually. And she only had a few chocolate cookies on her. She gasped, then checked her pockets. No! They had been crushed in the fighting!
"We need to find shelter and get some food," Blake said. "We can't…"
Her ears were twitching again, Ruby saw. She grimaced. "More zombies?"
Blake nodded with a grim expression.
More fighting, then. Ruby clenched her teeth and gripped Crescent Rose harder. No matter what stood against them, they would get out of this. She wouldn't let her team down!
*****
Chapter 1: The Strangers at the Gate
'The origin of the group we know as the Ruby Order remains one of the great mysteries of Westeros. It has been agreed by all reliable scholars that their claims to have come from another world were an exaggeration meant to obfuscate their true origin. From a modern perspective, their tales of a broken moon, flying cities and monster hunters are obvious exaggerations like the myths related to the Age of Heroes. Nevertheless, the fact remains that despite extensive research and Maester Aeon's famous but ultimately fruitless expedition to Yi-Ti to investigate a possible link between the Yellow Emperor and Yang Xiao Long, no one has been able to find where the four maidens came from. This, coupled with their choice of obvious noms-de-guerre, has, of course, led to a lot of unfounded speculation ranging from the fantastical - such as the theory, if one could call those ramblings that, of Ruby Rose being a daughter of Brandon the Builder who had been put into a magical sleep with her companions to save Westeros in its time of need, to the utterly mad, such as the claim that the entire tale was a fabrication and that the Ruby Order was actually Daenerys Targaryen and her three dragons, based on nothing more than the colour of Weiss Schnee's hair.
In this work, I will cut through all this speculation and focus on what we can prove based on records, evidence and sound logic.'
- A Treatise On The Ruby Order, by Maester Kennet Bracken
*****
The Haunted Forest, Westeros, 298 AC
After four years at the Wall, Will had grown used to the cold, and the Haunted Forest held no terrors for him any more. As a veteran of a hundred rangings, he knew the territory as well as - better than - the Wildlings who claimed the land here, and he knew from experience that he was better at sneaking through the woods than they were.
Proof of that was the fact that he had been tracking the band of wildling raiders they were after for days now without them being able to lose him. And they were getting closer as well.
No, the only thing Will worried about was that he and Gared were under the orders of Ser Waymar Royce, and that noble was not quite as experienced as he thought he was - just enough to be too confident, which was bad everywhere but doubly so beyond the Wall. Three brothers of the Nigth Watch could take half a dozen wildlings, but only if you were smart about it. If you were dumb, even warhorses and the best armour and weapons wouldn't save you from an ambush. Will could only hope that by the time they caught up to their prey, the noble would not be too reckless. The Lord Commander should have let Gared lead this ranging; Gared had been a Brother longer than Will had been alive. But Ser Waymar was a noble, and nobles didn't serve under smallfolk, not even in the Night's Watch, where everyone was a brother.
He snorted and moved ahead another dozen paces, past a scraggly bush. The raiders were loaded down with their loot, and that made them sloppy. They had tried to walk in a single file to hide their numbers but hadn't quite managed it. He checked a broken twig - they were even closer than he had thought. He could almost smell the wildlings…
He blinked, sniffing the air. That was smoke! Had the wildlings set camp already? They weren't that far from the last campsite Will had found, so why would they have stopped here? Sure, the sun would be setting soon, but the wildlings had still been hours ahead of Will's band when they had set out this morning.
He looked at the sky and squinted. It was cloudy, but… yes, that was a column of smoke. That was even weirder - even the dumbest wildling raiders knew how to build a smokeless fire.
Something wasn't right.
He quickly started backtracking to where Gared and Ser Waymar were waiting, not caring about hiding his own tracks any more. This was too important.
It didn't take him long to reach the others. When they saw him running, both jumped up, hands on weapons, and he waved them down.
"There's smoke ahead! Someone made a fire!" he blurted out between catching his breath.
"Hah! We have them!" Ser Waymar grinned.
"Smoke?" Gared, of course, realised what that meant at once. "Can't be. Must be a trap."
That was a possibility Will hadn't considered. But it made sense, kind of. Or not - most brothers would know better than to charge ahead blindly.
"If it's a trap, we'll spring it!" Ser Waymar strode to his horse. "Mount up! We'll show those raiders that they cannot escape the Watch!"
Will exchanged a glance with Gared. The older brother sneered for a moment, then clenched his teeth and started for his own horse.
Will sighed and followed them. He had a bad feeling about this.
"Show us the way, Brother Will!"
Yeah, definitely a bad feeling. But he had sworn the oath, and orders were orders. With his back to the others, he grimaced and started to lead them towards the fire in the distance.
They made good time, but not good enough for Ser Waymar. By the time they approached a small snow-covered ridge that hid the fire from them, the noble was chomping at the bit.
Will held up a hand. "They're beyond that ridge," he whispered - they were still too far away to be overheard, and he hadn't spotted any guards around, but you never knew.
"Good! Follow me!" Ser Waymar didn't stop. He urged his horse up the ridge, sword drawn.
Gared and Will, grimacing again, drew their own swords and did as told.
Ser Waymar was first on the ridge, uttered a battle cry Will didn't quite get, and charged down the slope.
Will heard shouting and high-pitched cries. Then he reached the top of the ridge himself, half a pace ahead of Gared, and his eyes widened.
Ser Waymar was down, his horse riderless. The noble was on the ground, disarmed - but still alive; Will saw him squirming under the boot of a… Will blinked. That wasn't a wildling!
He realised that he had stopped charging, as had Gared next to him. They were facing four people in… colourful clothes. He had never seen, not even heard, of any wildling wearing such garb!
The one holding down Ser Waymar was wearing a bright red cape over a pitch-black garment - and holding the biggest scythe he had ever seen. It was bigger than herself! Next to her stood a woman with a mane of golden hair wearing… Whatever it was, her legs were almost bare! And the one next to her wore a skirt so short it bared her entire legs!
"Targaryen!" Gared whispered next to him.
Yes, the woman had the silver hair of the old kings. And she was wielding a slim, shining sword. And the blonde wore golden gauntlets. Wildlings didn't dress like that. And they didn't have such weapons! And they didn't show any concern or fear faced with two mounted brothers. Of course, they had dismounted Ser Waymar seemingly easily - and for all his overconfidence, the brother was a trained knight.
Will licked his lips. Somehow, he didn't fancy their chances to charge double their numbers. Not to mention they had Ser Waymar at their mercy.
The silver-haired one took a step towards them and pointed her sword at Will. "You there! Why did you attack us?"
She sounded like a noble. She acted like a noble. Best to treat her like a noble.
Will shrugged and pointed at Ser Waymar. "Ser Waymar is in command."
All four looked at the still squirming and cursing knight on the ground. Will thought he heard the shorter one say: 'Oh!' and despite how serious their situation was, he couldn't help snorting.
*****
"Do we look like wildlings? Do we?" Weiss Schnee glared at the oaf who had attacked them. She expected, based on far too much experience, to be attacked by the bandits roaming those woods - she wouldn't call them 'free folk'; they were common criminals - but the members of the Night's Watch were meant to be civilised, not barbarians!
The leader of the small band, supposedly a knight, glared back at her. "Only wildlings live beyond the Wall!"
For someone Ruby had dismounted and disarmed without fully waking up, he had nerve! Weiss sniffed and raised her chin a bit more. "We don't live here, as should be obvious." She was a Schnee, far more refined than this ruffian. How could anyone mistake her for one of those barbarian folks wearing rags? Granted, they had been sleeping under a few layers of furs taken from those barbarians, but still!
"We were stranded in these lands by an accident, and we're on our way south," Ruby chimed in with a wide smile on her face.
"Stranded? We're nowhere near either coast," the younger, more sensible man, Will, blurted out.
"They were unique circumstances," Weiss told him with all the dignity she could muster.
"We got lost," Yang commented. "It took a while until we found someone who could tell us how to get out of here."
"What?" Will stared at her.
Weiss frowned again. Yes, these people here were obviously not as sophisticated as the people back home in Atlas, or in Vale, but that didn't mean they couldn't tell when Yang was making fun of them.
"OK, it was like this! We were on a mission to investigate an old ruin back home, in Vale, when a magic device dropped us in the middle of this country," Ruby interjected. "Before we could really understand what had happened, we were attacked by ice zombies and some white, uh, monsters with glowy blue eyes and ice powers, and monster spiders - with ice powers. We had to fight our way through them - they didn't stop coming even though it was obvious they couldn't really beat us, not when we were working together, but they were like the Grimm, those are monsters back home, monsters we hunt, but they are not like your monsters here, anyway, we had to burn them all so they stayed dead, because otherwise they would keep attacking us, but only until we met their Alpha…"
"King," Weiss corrected. "He wore a crown." And Alphas were animals. She didn't know what those 'Others', as the wildlings called them, were, but they were not animals.
"Witch-King," Yang added with a grin.
"Whatever!" Ruby pouted for a moment. "Anyway, what matters is when we destroyed that guy, everyone else fell down and didn't move any more - ice zombies and other guys. Well, there were a few monsters left, but those were easy."
"And edible."
Weiss glared at Yang. There was no need to remind them that they had had to eat giant spiders to survive. And they didn't taste like lobsters! Weiss had eaten enough lobsters for her palate to know the difference!
"Anyway!" Ruby repeated herself. "We defeated those ice monsters and looked for a way back, but there weren't even ruins where we had landed, and we didn't find anything in the Alpha's - Witch-King's - lair, so we started walking south. At least we think it's south, we don't know if south here is actually south, you know? But back home, south is where the sun is highest at noon. Kinda - it varies with the seasons, I think, and where you are, but it was close enough, and we met the locals, the wildlings, you call them, before we ran out of spider legs. And they told us that further south was the Wall, and behind that wall was civilisation! So, here we are!" She beamed at the three men. "On the way to civilisation so we can get home!"
Weiss suppressed a sigh. It was obvious that none of the men had understood a word Ruby had said. Ruby meant well, but she wasn't experienced enough to deal with this. "We're not wildlings. We have no quarrel with you. We simply wish to travel to civilised lands where you aren't attacked by bandits trying to steal your valuables at every corner." That was technically a slight exaggeration - they hadn't been attacked quite that often, though Weiss was sure that was mostly due to the population of these lands being spread rather thin - but seeing as those barbarians were also trying to 'steal' Weiss and her friends for obvious and utterly disgusting purposes, as some of them had stated before being violently taught the error of their ways, she felt it was a true reflection of the situation.
"Exactly!" Ruby kept beaming at the ruffians dressed in black. "So, can we go back with you? We could probably scale that wall easily, but we'd rather not have another misunderstanding. We just want to go home!"
"Yeah." Yang was smiling as well, though showing more teeth.
Weiss glanced at Blake, who nodded. She hadn't said much so far, but as long as she didn't make things worse, Weiss could live with that.
Really, all they needed was to get out of this wasteland and back to civilisation. Or what passed as civilisation here - it was obvious that they were not as technologically advanced as Atlas or Vale. But then again, a lot of Remnant wasn't either.
At least they knew that they had kingdoms behind the wall. Weiss desperately needed a hot shower - no, a hot bath! And a meal cooked by a chef, not scraps of dried meat roasted over a campfire or spider legs the size of her own legs! And decent clothes and bedrolls! She was so sick of sleeping wrapped in smelly furs!
And they needed to replenish their Dust reserves. They had spent almost everything on fighting the ice monsters and then surviving in this wasteland. Weiss still hated that she had wasted so much expensive Gravity Dust to check for buried ruins under the location where they had arrived, only to find rocks and dirt.
*****
The Wall, Westeros, 298 AC
Blake Belladonna squinted as she gazed up at the top of the Wall ahead of them. The fortification was so massive, even with her sharp eyes, she could barely make out the people - members of the Night's Watch - up there. It was easily over two hundred metres tall, casting a long shadow over the frozen wasteland it separated from the, supposedly, more civilised kingdom behind it. As far as they had been told, it ran across the entire continent, a hundred leagues - about five hundred clicks, if her maths was correct. She could barely imagine how people without modern technology had erected such an edifice. Even if it was, as their semi-voluntary guides claimed, mostly built out of frozen water, it would have taken a very long time to finish it. And the stone foundations it would take to support such a massive structure…
"And I thought the walls back home were tall," Ruby commented.
"It has been standing for eight thousand years, protecting the Seven Kingdoms from the wildlings," Ser Waymar, the leader of the small band of warriors, declared, pride dripping from every word.
"All that for a bunch of bandits?" Yang snorted. "Seems like overkill."
"What?"
While Yang explained what it meant, Blake was tempted to remind her friend that she had denied, on numerous occasions, that such a thing as overkill existed. Yet, Blake held her tongue. The ensuing banter would volunteer more information to the soldiers with them, and the men hadn't earned their trust. Quite the opposite, actually - the so-called 'knight' had attacked them without warning, not bothering with even a token attempt at learning who they were and what they were doing here. Blake wasn't about to lower her guard amongst people whose first impulse was to attack a stranger.
Although she had to admit, if she was honest, that, based on her and her friends' experience so far with the people living in the so-called Haunted Forest, she couldn't completely fault the men for assuming the worst. Every time they had met those nefarious bandits, they had attempted to rob them - and to kidnap them for vile purposes. She would be a hypocrite of the worst order if she ignored how such experiences could form or cement prejudices - she had lived through that herself when she had been in the White Fang.
And yet, Blake neither could ignore how strangely familiar this felt, albeit in a twisted way: A band of outcasts eeking out a difficult existence in a harsh wilderness, kept out of more hospitable lands by the armed guards of supposedly more civilised men? The Atlas military and SDC guards might use more advanced technology, but the principle was the same. The top of the Wall might even be an allusion to Atlas floating above Mantle.
She clenched her teeth as they continued to approach the Wall, her friends and herself easily keeping pace with the mounted warriors. She didn't know if there were Faunus in this world and how they were treated, but she would keep hiding her ears. What she had seen so far from the three members of the Night's Watch had not left her with the impression that they would treat her as an equal. It was obviously a rather stratified society, with nobles ruling commoners, as happened in ancient times on Remnant, and she was intimately familiar with how people on the lower rungs of society tended to look for others who were even worse off in a stupid and self-defeating but, sadly, very common attempt to assure themselves that there were people still beneath them, and so they had an interest in upholding the very order that diminished and oppressed them.
And yet, the Wall also was a symbol of hope. If the people here had been able to build such a monumental fortification in the past, then it was quite likely that they achieved other, similarly impressive feats. Such as creating whatever mythical device transported Team RWBY to this forsaken place in another world and which, therefore, should also be able to transport them back home. Blake still had her doubts about the claim that the Wall was thousands of years old, but unlike the remains of whatever civilisation had preceded the Kingdom of Vale back on Remnant, the Wall had not fallen into ruins, their builders forgotten, lost to a bloody, violent past filled with Grimm.
"I see."
Ser Waymar didn't sound as if he truly understood Yang's explanation, and Blake couldn't honestly blame him for it. Her friend had used so many other terms and examples related to Remnant - people who didn't know firearms wouldn't be familiar with video games, much less memes, which Yang would have been aware of had she shown the least interest in literature set in Remnants past or in fantasy worlds - that the man must be more confused than enlightened. Hell, from what they had gathered, the people here were not even aware of Dust, although the tales of Alchemists creating Wildfire sounded as if at least some people were aware of the properties of Dust. The substance certainly sounded as volatile as Dust.
"Look! There's a gate at the bottom of the ice wall!" Ruby suddenly called out, pointing ahead.
Blake cocked her head and stepped up the faint slope to join her friend who had walked in front of her. Indeed, there was a black gate set into the Wall - directly under the busiest part of the wall she could see, she noted. So, this would be their destination, the way past the Wall, into the Seven Kingdoms.
As they approached, Ruby eagerly rushed ahead, and Blake exchanged glances with Yang and Weiss. If their 'guides' meant them ill, this would be their best opportunity to make a move. A narrow tunnel would be the perfect place for an ambush. And while Blake didn't think much of the chances of even a large force of soldiers such as the three men with them to take on Team RWBY, there were other ways than direct attacks to threaten them. Just closing the tunnel on both sides would be a lethal threat if they could not blast or cut their way free.
Ser Waymar rode ahead, barely keeping pace with an excited Ruby, and pulled out a horn. Blake narrowed her eyes at the harsh sound - it grated on her ears - and glanced at the other two men, Will and Gared. They didn't look tense but relieved, though while she believed that they were not putting up an act, that alone didn't mean that this wasn't a trap. They might still wish them ill, and their relief might be rooted in the - quite mistaken - belief that reunited with the rest of the Night's Watch, they had the power to take on Blake and her friends.
Maybe they should scale the Wall instead? It would avoid an underground trap or ambush. But it would also show that they didn't trust the men here and reveal more of their capabilities.
Blake shook her head. They had been travelling for days with the three soldiers, and while she was not as skilled in judging people as her parents - much less skilled, she had to admit, since she had fallen for Adam's lies and had taken far too long to see him for what he was, despite her parents' misgivings - she was not naive either, and she had observed the three extensively during the nights, when they would have thought themselves safely hidden by the darkness, and had not seen any sign of plotting.
And so they followed their enthusiastic leader to the gate and, after a short discussion between Ser Waymar and the gatekeeper, through it and into a tunnel carved into the ice.
Despite her calculated optimism, Blake didn't relax even a little until they were safely out of the tunnel and Ruby was complaining that the other side was just as cold as the land they had just left.
*****
Castle Black, The Wall, Westeros, 298 AC
"...and then we had to fight a whole bunch of blue-eyed ice zombies and pale Grimm-People until we killed their leader, and then they all fell down. Like puppets with cut strings - you know what puppets with strings are, do you? Marionettes. Anyway, they just fell down and stopped moving."
Yang Xiao Long grinned and leaned back against a wooden fence, arms crossed over her chest, as she watched Ruby and Weiss talk to the 'Lord Commander' of the Night's Watch. Jeor Mormont or something. A really old guy, all wrinkled.
Her sister didn't give the man time to answer and went on: "Anyway, since we couldn't find whatever had dropped us in the middle of the zombie horde, we decided to head south and look for others. Others, as in other people, not more Others, as the wildlings called the Grimm-People - though they weren't really people, you know? People don't stop moving and die when their leader gets cleaved in half. They seemed to be more like some kinda Grimm. Grimm are monsters in our world, you know, which want to kill everyone and which we fight, and that fit the Others here, and…"
"Ruby!"
Ah, Weiss's patience had reached its end.
The girl frowned at Ruby, who looked sheepish for a moment and rubbed the back of her head with that beaming smile of hers, then turned back to Mormont staring at them. "I'm sorry, sir, my friend is, sometimes, a bit too enthusiastic." She flashed what Yang privately called her 'business smile' at the man, polite and cold. "But she is correct; we have been stranded by an unknown device, possibly an uncontrolled interaction of various exotic Dust, in the lands up north, and we are looking for a way to return home."
"I see."
Yang would bet that Mormont didn't see it. Or believed them. The side glance he sent at Waymar told her enough. It reminded her of how Dad would glance at a fellow teacher at Signal whenever they weren't buying Yang's perfectly plausible explanation for whatever had happened.
"So, we would be very grateful if you could point us to the closest expert on similar phenomena," Weiss gamely went on while Ruby nodded with wide eyes and a wider smile.
Yang narrowed her eyes at the expressions she caught on some of the men's faces watching the talk upon hearing that. It reminded her of some of the scum in Vale she'd had to beat up. And why were all the soldiers here men, anyway? She hadn't seen a single woman so far. Talk about a sausage party! And, even worse, they all wore black. As if the name of the castle was an order. No speck of colour or style among them - worse than Junior's goons. In fact, a lot of them gave off the same vibe as those thugs…
She glanced at Blake, who was leaning against a post a few metres away. Her partner was acting bored, but Yang could tell that she was tense. Must have picked up the mood as well.
"Yes!" Ruby nodded emphatically, and Yang sighed. Her innocent sister hadn't got a clue. "We were on an important mission, and we have to return as soon as possible before the school starts worrying. Or informs our families that we're missing."
"The school?" Mormont frowned as if he didn't know what that meant.
"Beacon! The best school for Huntresses in all of Remnant!"
"A distinguished institution with a long tradition of turning out the finest Huntsmen and Huntresses in Vale," Weiss said.
Yang smirked; Weiss couldn't let the claim that Beacon was better than Atlas stand even though she attended the school herself. Her humour didn't last long, though.
Mormont nodded slowly, though he looked even stonier than when Waymar had presented them. "You claim to come from the Vale?"
"Not the Vale," Ruby corrected him, causing Weiss to make another face at her. "The Kingdom of Vale - our home. Well, mine and Yang's, Weiss and Blake aren't from Vale. Our Vale, not yours. Though yours is probably great as well, I think, right?"
Mormont held up his hand. "Please, enough of this."
Ruby blinked, Weiss drew back a little, a frown on her face, and Yang pushed off the fence and rolled her shoulders. Just in case. The old guy didn't give off the same vibes as some of the men, but you never knew. Next to her, Blake didn't move from her spot, but Yang saw her shift her balance some, ready to jump into action.
"Sorry?" Ruby still looked confused. "Did I talk too fast?"
"Ruby!" Weiss hissed.
"What?"
"You made him mad!"
"I didn't mean to! I'm sorry!"
"Let me do the talking!" Weiss flashed another of her business smiles at Mormont. "She's sorry. Please don't hold her youthful enthusiasm against her or us. We really just want to be on our way towards the closest expert on… unknown displacement effects."
Yang snorted. "Good one, Weiss."
It earned her a glare, but Weiss quickly focused on the man in front of them when he cleared his throat.
"Please, before I regret having let you pass through the wall on Ser Waymar's counsel, just tell me, in simple words: Where are you from, and what do you want in the Seven Kingdoms?"
"But…" Ruby was gaping at him. "We told you that already!"
"You spoke a lot, but you didn't tell me much. Not much I could make sense of, at least." Mormont smiled, though a little toothily.
Probably not used to Ruby, Yang thought. Well, he'd probably warm up to her if they stayed here for a while. Everyone did. Not that Yang planned to stay here for long; the cold cramped her style. She didn't want to end up like Weiss.
"I know these lands as I know the back of my hand, on both sides of the wall, and I have never encountered any of those creatures you claim to have met - and fought," Mormont went on. "You are armed with steel, and you dress so…" He looked as if he had swallowed a lemon. "...so outrageously, it is clear you aren't wildlings and not from the North or any other of the Seven Kingdoms."
"Exactly!" Ruby nodded several times, then flinched and ducked her head when Mormont narrowed his eyes at her,
"So, where are you from, and how did you end up in the North? Were you on a ship and stranded on the coast? Do you hail from Braavos?"
"Lys!" one of the men standing in the back yelled, causing a wave of chuckling to spread through the ranks.
Yang scowled. She didn't know what Lys was - but she knew that tone and that reaction. They had just been insulted.
Before she could tell the idiots to shut up or she'd crush their balls, Mormont whipped around and bellowed at his men, loud enough to make Yang and her friends flinch: "Silence!"
The men jerked, a number of them taking a step back. "But, Lord Commander…"
"I said silence! You are men of the watch! Black Brothers! Sworn to defend the realm! Do not shame the Watch or me by acting like boys thinking with their cocks!"
Yang heard Ruby gasp at that, and when she glanced at her, she saw both her sister and Weiss blush a little, which made her smirk.
Mormont was still glaring at his men. "The next one who brings dishonour on us all will rue it. Am I understood?"
"Yes, Lord Commander!"
Taking a deep breath, the old man turned back to address Ruby and Weiss. "I apologise for my men. They serve a noble cause, yet not all of them have forgotten their brutish roots."
"Ah… It's OK!" Ruby chirped with a forced smile that told Yang she wasn't quite sure about the whole thing.
Weiss cleared her throat. "We are not from Braavos - or from any other kingdom you know. We are from a different world."
"It's the truth! Your moon is completely different! Ours is broken!" Ruby cut in.
But Mormont wasn't buying it. The old man was too polite to yell at them, but Yang could tell he didn't believe them. And she knew that neither Ruby nor Weiss would be able to convince him. He was too rigid.
Well, if things were too rigid, they needed a bit of shaking up.
Yang grinned widely and took a step forward, smashing her fists together. "We're not from your world. Let me demonstrate just how much we're not from your world."
"Yang! What are you doing?" Ruby blurted out.
"Don't do anything stupid!" Weiss hissed.
Yang didn't listen to either. She looked around. She could punch a hole into the ground, but people generally didn't like holes in their yards. Backyards or schoolyards. So… ah! There!
She crouched, then jumped over the gathered men, landing ten metres behind them next to a cart. Or wagon, whatever. It looked heavy and sturdy enough for a demonstration. "Watch!" she yelled over the gasps and comments, then gripped the cart's bottom with both hands and lifted.
It was unwieldy, and she had to shift her grip twice while she raised the thing over her head, but a few seconds later, she was holding it up with one arm and smiling widely at the gaping crowd.
"Don't break it, Yang!"
She raised her eyebrows at Weiss. As if she was about to break the cart! Well, to be fair, shattering it with one blow would be really impressive, but she knew better than to break other people's stuff. Unless they deserved it, at least.
"So?" She asked, tossing her head back and grinning at Mormont. "Ever seen this before?"
The old man slowly shook his head. "No, I did not."
Yang smiled. It wasn't exactly a glowing agreement, but it was probably good enough.
"And you haven't seen anything yet!" Ruby blurted out. "Watch this!"
A moment later, she vanished in a cloud of red petals, then reappeared on the roof of a small stable on the side, then flickered around the entire yard like Zwei when he got the zoomies until she stopped - on top of the cart Yang was holding since it suddenly got heavier.
"We're Huntresses! We fight the Grimm to protect the people! Kinda like you, I guess!" Yang heard her announce.
The next thing she heard was the thunk of Crescent Rose's butt slamming into the cart, followed by a creaking, familiar noise as the cart broke into pieces.
"Oops! Sorry!"
"Ruby! You dolt!"
"I'm really sorry!"
*****
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Chapter 2: Visitors to Winterfell
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Chapter 2: Visitors to Winterfell
'It goes without saying that we can safely dismiss the blatantly mythical deeds attributed to the Ruby Order. Their claims to have defeated a horde of humanoid ice creatures in the Lands Beyond the Wall that commanded the dead to rise and attack the living are obviously an exaggeration meant to increase their fame, as much factual as the claims of them performing superhuman deeds such as lifting entire carts with the draft animals still attached or leaping above buildings. Some of my colleagues, even those diligent enough to dismiss such reports, point at the records of the Night's Watch as proof that such 'humanoid ice creatures' existed in the past. Indeed, the Night's Watch records speak of a 'Great Ranging' in AC 298, which discovered the corpses of the 'Others', legendary creatures made of ice and malice. However, at this time, the Night's Watch's reputation was at such a low point that many expected the institution to vanish from Westeros. It is very plausible that its commander, Lord Mormont, used the opportunity to convince the Crown that the Wall served a more important purpose than merely holding back wilding incursions by claiming to have encountered creatures from the Age of Heroes, which were a threat to the entire realm. Creatures whose corpses were all burned, supposedly to ensure they could not be restored to life through fell magic - a convenient excuse for the complete absence of any remains of the creatures they claimed to have found, unlike, for example, the extinct ice spiders, a once-thought mythical beast, but one of which several specimens have been found dead but preserved in the permafrost of the North.'
Castle Black, The Wall, Westeros, 298 AC
Standing in front of the old, weathered desk in the Lord Commander's office, Benjen Stark stared at his friend and superior. "You want me to go to Winterfell when we are preparing a Great Ranging? I'm the First Ranger of the Night's Watch; if anyone should be heading out to investigate the claims of our guests, it should be me!" Ice monsters raising the dead to form an army! It was outrageous, and yet, Aemon had found old records of the very first years of the Watch that matched the descriptions the four girls had given them. And after seeing what those girls could do, Benjen was loath to dismiss any of their tales. Of course, there was a massive difference between being far, far stronger than you looked and raising the dead, but even something not quite as outlandish could present a danger for the realm.
Sitting in a chair older than Benjen's grandfather, Jeor shook his head. "Benjen, we have several rangers who can lead our brothers safely through the Haunted Forest. They might not be as experienced as you are, but they know the lands and how to navigate them and have proved that many times. I need you to accompany our visitors to Winterfell."
Benjen pressed his lips together. Jeor was correct. Benjen would have been a poor fit for his post if he had not ensured that all his men were up to the tasks that their duty demanded. He would trust any of them to serve as a guide in the Haunted Forest. Well, maybe not Kren. The latest brother to join his band had the aptitude and skill to be a ranger, but he was still pining for the home he had been forced to leave when he had been caught poaching and had chosen the Wall over the headman's block. A few more years in the Watch would see to that, though.
And yet, that was no reason for Benjen to miss the most important ranging of the Watch in decades, perhaps even centuries!
"You should be happy to have the opportunity to see your family, Benjen," Aemon, sitting in a chair very close to the fireplace at the back of the room, spoke up in his raspy voice. "You never know when it will be the last time you laid eyes on them. Trust me on this - I lost too many of my own."
Jeor nodded as well, though he had a more grim than sad expression when he did.
Benjen clenched his teeth. His brother was the Warden of the North, the ruler of the entire land between the Neck and the Wall. His family was as safe as you could be in the North. And yet, Aemon was correct - every time Benjen ventured out beyond the Wall, every day he did his duty, he could end up dead. A wildling raider, a wolf or bear that got too desperate or rabid, or just bad luck like slipping on a patch of melted ice and falling down the Wall could end his life. But that didn't matter - he had sworn the oath and knew his duty as a brother of the Night's Watch!
"Benjen!" Jeor spoke up again. "I need you for this. No one else I could send would be trusted by Ned as much as you are."
"I could go after the ranging. I would have more information to share with Ned," Benjen pointed out.
"This cannot wait. You've seen our guests. You think they will wait for weeks before venturing out on their own?" Jeor scoffed.
Benjen winced. No, he didn't think they would wait that long. They were young, seven, eight-and-ten years, or even younger, according to them, and while girls were, as a rule, not as foolish and impatient as most boys that age, that didn't make them mature by any means. Certainly not those girls. And if they decided to leave, the entire Night's Watch couldn't stop them. Of that Benjen was sure after what had seen them do.
"Even worse," Aemon cut in with a dry snort, "imagine if they did wait here."
Benjen winced. Men of the Night's Watch swore an oath not to take a wife or father any children, but they were men all the same, not eunuchs. And their guests were, no matter their origin, great beauties without exception. Exotic beauties, even. The only man Benjen could be sure would not be tempted was Aemon, and only because the Maester was not only far too old to still feel such urges but also blind. That a number of the brothers had been rapists who had chosen the Wall over death or a maiming didn't help, of course.
No, if their guests stayed, no matter their inhuman strength, someone, drunk or simply too worked up, would accost them. And that could end in a catastrophe in light of what power those girls wielded. It would also shame the entire Watch for letting one of their own attack a guest in their headquarters.
He let out a sigh.
Jeor stood and walked over to the window, peering out through the slits left bare by the wooden shutters that kept both prying eyes and the cold somewhat out. "You've seen what they can do."
"Yes."
"I haven't, but I'll take your word for it."
Benjen snorted against his will. To make fun of his blindness! Aemon's wit was very dark and spared no one, not even himself.
Jeor shook his head. "You've heard their plans."
Benjen nodded. "They want to travel south and search for a magical way home. Or so they claim."
"Whatever the truth of that claim, it's clear that they will travel south. Four girls, each of them stronger than a dozen knights."
"Maybe stronger," Benjen said. Each of them was more skilled than the best swordsman he had seen. And their weapons… He wondered how they would match up against Valyrian steel, but they outclassed anything the brotherhood could muster.
"Maybe. Can you imagine what would happen if a lord accosted them?"
Benjen could. He had been imagining what would happen if they turned against the Watch for a few days - ever since they had arrived and had revealed their strength. "Yes."
"So could, and will, others."
"Ah." Others like every noble with ambition and enemies, both real and imagined. Yes, Benjen understood why he had to be the one to present their guests at Winterfell and talk to Ned. He was one of the only people Ned would believe without a demonstration that would set tongues wagging and raven flying.
He sighed again, and Jeor clapped him on the shoulder with a rueful smile.
Kingsroad, South of Castle Black, The North, Westeros, 298 AC
"You know, I am sure we'd be faster if we walked. No, really. This wagon is going soooo slooooow."
"Feel free to walk, Ruby. I don't feel like stumbling along a road that looks more like a trail."
"You wouldn't stumble if you wore sensible boots, Weiss."
"I don't see you walking either, Yang."
"You don't hear me complaining, either, do you?"
Benjen Stark, riding next to the wagon, bit his tongue so he wouldn't make a rude comment in response. The four girls - Team Ruby, as the apparent leader insisted - had done almost nothing but complain ever since they had set out for Winterfell. At least it felt like it. Well, complain and ask questions even a young child should have been able to answer. It was a miracle that the driver, Creg, had kept his temper. Then again, according to rumours, Creg had joined the Watch after raising a dozen children as a widower, so he was probably used to this.
"Besides, my boots are perfectly sensible!"
"As riding boots, yes," Benjen said before he could stop himself. You didn't make fun of people who could shatter boulders with a single blow and fell trees as thick as they were tall with a single swipe of their scythe. Even if they didn't know that freshly cut wood didn't burn well.
"See?" Weiss smiled at him, then turned back to grin at her friends.
"You can't ride, Weiss."
"You can't either!"
"Well…"
"Bumblebee doesn't count!"
"I wasn't going to say anything about my bike…"
"Yang!"
"Yang!"
Complain, ask inane questions and make crude remarks, Benjen amended his thoughts, though the last was limited to Yang. Still, this was an opportunity to learn more about their supposed home. Usually, he would have assumed that 'Bumblebee' was the name of Yang's horse or pony, but he had quickly realised that such assumptions were generally wrong. "What's a bike?"
"The best way to travel!" Yang replied, flashing him a wide, cocky smile.
"Except for airships, bullheads, trains, ferries…"
"Ah, Weiss, don't be jealous that you never got to ride a bike!"
"I am merely stating the objective truth."
"Yang! Weiss!" Ruby spoke up. "Don't fight!" She nodded at both, then turned to smile at Benjen. "I'm sorry about that. Anyway, a bike is a vehicle you drive, with two wheels."
"You don't drive it; you ride it!"
"Like a cart?" Benjen asked.
"Not quite - the two wheels are arranged one before the other. Kinda if you cut this wagon in half length-side and then moved the wheels to the centre," Ruby gave another explanation that did open more questions than it answered. "And it's driven by Dust!"
"Ah." Their world apparently ran on magic dust. Homes were heated with dust, instead of wells, they had water dust - and Benjen was afraid to ask how that was supposed to work - and their weapons and even clothes used dust. It sounded too fantastical to believe, but Ruby had, against Weiss's objection, given him a demonstration. Benjen now knew that magic dust was real - and that they didn't have much of it left.
"And if we had Bumblebee here, I'd already be in Winterfell!"
"You'd be lost in the woods."
"Weiss! Yang!"
"Bumblebee would have trouble on this road," Blake spoke up. The girl was usually quiet, her nose buried in her book, but she rarely missed anything, Benjen had noticed.
"Nothing we couldn't manage!" Yang snorted, then leaned over. "Rubes! Pass me another sausage, will you? I'm feeling a bit peckish."
Benjen winced a little. They would have to restock supplies more often than he had planned. The girls ate more than men twice their number and three times their size. Obviously, the appetite they had shown after arriving at Castle Black hadn't been due to having gone hungry in the Haunted Forest; they ate that much every meal.
"Here, Yang!"
"Thanks, sis!"
Benjen clenched his fist holding the reins. This was something that he had been wondering since they started this trip. He hadn't asked them about it because it was the sort of question that could start fights, and the absolute last thing Benjen wanted was to anger four girls who could tear him limb from limb without trying. But at the same time, he needed to know. Because other people would make assumptions based upon how the four behaved, and if those assumptions were wrong…
Besides, he told himself, the group might be complaining constantly, but overall, they were in a remarkably good mood.
So, he took a deep breath, cleared his throat, and hoped he wouldn't insult his guests. "Lady Ruby, I was wondering…"
"Yes?"
"Your relationships are a little confusing."
"My relationships? I'm not in any relationship!" Ruby blurted out.
For a moment, Benjen's heart seemed to skip a beat. Then he realised that her cheeks were not flushed with rage but embarrassment and felt his own face heat up in return. "I am deeply sorry, I didn't mean to insinuate that…" He trailed off, clenching his teeth for a moment. He couldn't say that. Yang was laughing, but Weiss was glaring at him. "I was merely wondering how you are related," he was quick to explain. "In Westeros, it's very unusual for the older, ah, sibling to follow the orders of the younger."
"Ah, that's because Ozpin, the Headmaster of our school, picked Ruby here as the leader of our team because she's the best!" Yang said, ruffling her sister's hair.
"Yang!"
That explained things. To an extent, at least - Benjen still wondered what would have possessed this man to give such an order.
"You're wondering about their familial relationship, aren't you?" Weiss asked.
Among other things. "Yes," Benjen confirmed. The girls' polite tone still left no doubt that it wasn't a question.
"Oh. Well, we're sisters!" Ruby said. "But I think we already told you that, didn't we?"
"We've got the same dad. And the same mom for all that counts," Yang said. "She raised us both."
Ah. Benjen nodded. That explained it. It was now obvious that the older girl was a bastard raised in the family. 'Xiao Long' likely was their home's 'Snow'. And, of course, that wasn't something the two liked to talk about, so Benjen wouldn't pry further - he was no fool, after all.
It was another thing Ned needed to know about so he wouldn't make a blunder. The heraldry - crests - all four wore was already confusing, not to talk about their foreign manners. To think they expected to bathe every day on the road!
Kingsroad, North of Winterfell, The North, Westeros, 298 AC
"Behold: Winterfell."
Ruby Rose perked up at Benjen's announcement. Winterfell! Finally! She pushed the furs covering her to the side, activated her Semblance and dashed from the wagon next to Benjen in the blink of an eye, or faster! "Yes?" She peered ahead while Benjen struggled a bit to get his startled horse under control - not her fault; the animal should be used to her Semblance by now! - and then rushed forward, up the gentle slope, until she could see over its top.
But now she could see it! "Winterfell!" she breathed at the sight in front of her. "Wow! It's beautiful!" It was a huge castle, bigger than Beacon! It had two tall walls, with lots of towers, one wall overlooking the others! And bigger towers and buildings inside the yard - the castle's keep. It looked straight out of a Fantasy movie!
"Yang! You have to see this!" she yelled without taking her sight off the castle - and the village in front of it!
"We're coming," Weiss replied. "It's not going to go away."
That was… well, true, but still! Ruby pouted. This was great!
Benjen reached her side. He was probably frowning at her for spooking his horse, but that was partially his fault for calling her. And he should have realised she couldn't see anything from his position before calling her!
"Wow!" Yang echoed her reaction. "I guess they make things bigger in the North, huh? Walls, castles and woods…"
"Yang!" Weiss hissed for some reason while Blake giggled.
"What? We've been travelling for ages through a forest!" Yang sounded smug, so Ruby probably had missed something, but that didn't matter.
"This is sooo coool!" she blurted out.
"It's actually warm," Benjen corrected her. "The keep was built over a hot spring, and the water runs through pipes in the walls to heat it."
"You've got central heating? That's even cooler!" Ruby beamed at him for a moment before focusing back on the castle. She couldn't see weapon emplacements, though they probably didn't need them without Grimm to worry about. Still, a catapult or trebuchet would have been even better! Oh, if they had hot springs, couldn't they build a steam catapult?
"'Cool' means 'hot' in this case," Yang told him.
"Yang!" Weiss sounded annoyed. "Cool means both cold and great, actually."
"Ah."
Ruby shook her head. "And that's your brother's castle?"
"Yes. Ned is the Warden of the North. This is his seat. And where I grew up."
"Cool!"
"Ruby!" Weiss was glaring at her, Ruby knew without looking at her. "It's a very impressive castle. I don't think I've seen anything like it before," Weiss told Benjen.
"Yep." Ruby nodded firmly.
"Thank you."
Ruby checked that she hadn't missed anything else, then turned to her friends and Benjen and Creg. "Come on! Let's hurry! We're wasting daylight!" Blake could see perfectly well at night, but Ruby couldn't, and they didn't have good lamps in Westeros, so she didn't want to miss anything on arrival. Oh!
Halfway to the wagon, she turned. "Do you think we'll get a tour of the castle?" she asked Benjen.
"Ruby!" Weiss cleared her throat. "We appreciate the opportunity to visit your family seat."
Benjen snorted. "I don't doubt that you'll get a tour. Even if Ned were too busy to be a good host, my nieces and nephews will love to show you around."
"C… Great!" Ruby beamed at him, then dashed into the wagon. "Team RWBY, assemble! Onward!" They were still burning daylight!
They took ages to reach the castle's gates. Ruby had been so tempted to dash ahead - with her Semblance, she could have covered the distance in no time! - but Benjen had told them not to show off because people were not used to Aura and Semblances and this could scare them. Or cause them to be mistaken for witches or something. In any case, Benjen had been clear that it would be bad.
It didn't matter anyway. Now, after an eternity spent sitting in a slooow wagon, they were finally here! At Winterfell! Inside Winterfell!
Ruby looked everywhere as they entered the castle. Up, to check for murderholes in the gatehouse. (They had some!) Down, to check if the ground was covered in cobblestones. (It was!) Left and right, to check what weapons the guards were carrying. (They had boring spears and swords, no scythe, not even an arbalest.)
And ahead, where a group of men were waiting for them. Men and boys, she corrected herself. Then she blinked, looking at Benjen and back, squinting a little. "Is that your brother? He kinda looks like you."
"That is indeed my brother, Eddard Stark."
Benjen sounded a bit tense, Ruby realised. Did Ned carry a grudge against him? But they were siblings! And everyone seemed to like Benjen - people had been greeting him all the way from the outer gate to the courtyard.
Well, she would be extra-friendly to help smooth things over! Like when Dad and Uncle Qrow had a row!
"Benjen!"
"Ned!"
Ah! Ruby smiled. She had been worrying over nothing - Ned was hugging his brother as soon as Benjen had gotten off his horse. Everyone else was smiling as well - well, almost everyone. The red-haired boy was staring at her team. As were the other boys.
"It's been too long!" Benjen said.
"Indeed. What brings you to Winterfell?"
That was their cue! Ruby smiled widely and jumped over the wagon's railing, letting her furs drop to the wagon's floor behind her. "He was escorting us!" she blurted out. "We're Team RWBY!"
"Ruby!" Weiss hissed behind Ruby as her friends joined her.
Ned blinked, his smile fading a little, Ruby noticed, as he stared at them. Everyone was staring at them, she realised. Like the men at Castle Black had been - in some cases, exactly like the men back there.
Benjen cleared his throat. "Ned, these are Lady Ruby Rose and Team Ruby - Weiss Schnee, Blake Belladonna and Yang Xiao Long. Lady Ruby, this is Lord Paramount Eddard Stark, Warden of the North."
Ruby almost blurted out that they already knew that but managed not to. That would have been rude. "Hi!" she said instead, waving at him. She had stopped trying to explain that they didn't have noble ladies in Vale. Benjen had insisted that it was the correct title for her rank.
"Hello." Ned - Lord Eddard, Ruby reminded herself - was still blinking but no longer staring. Unlike the rest of the men and boys.
"They are from a far distant kingdom and were stranded in the Haunted Forest beyond the Wall. They're travelling south to look for a way home," Benjen explained.
Ruby nodded a few times.
Weiss nodded as well - no, she was bowing her head, Ruby realised. "Indeed, my lord. We're searching for any information that would show us a way home. We are completely lost."
"You have no idea where your home is?" Lord Eddard asked.
"Unfortunately, no. We don't know how we arrived here," Weiss replied. "We only remember ancient ruins of an unknown origin, and we hope that records of such or similar ruins will help us find a way to return home."
Ruby pressed her lips together in a slight frown. That was technically correct, since they didn't know how they had been transported here, but they knew what brought them here. Weiss, though, knew best how to talk to nobles - well, compared to the rest of the team - and Ruby trusted her. Most of the time, at least. Weiss wasn't perfect even if she wanted to be. "Our families must be frantic with worry," she said. Dad certainly would be. She hoped that Uncle Qrow wasn't drinking too much.
"The Night's Watch couldn't help them, but the Lord Commander thought you might be able to, Ned," Benjen cut in.
"Of course!" Lord Eddard took a deep breath and nodded. "Let me welcome you to Winterfell. These are my eldest son, Robb, and my ward, Theon Greyjoy."
While the two boys smiled and nodded, a man approached them with a tray with salt and bread.
No, bread and salt, Ruby corrected herself as Lord Eddard took a roll of bread and broke it into a few pieces, sprinkling salt over it. Benjen had explained how important that was, so she had to get it right. Once they'd eaten it, they were Lord Eddard's guests. "Thank you!" She beamed at him.
The bread was nice - fresh, although it wasn't warm any more - and the salt wasn't too much. Of course, she'd have preferred a cookie - she hadn't had any cookies since they had arrived in this world! She'd have to ask if they had any. Such a huge castle was bound to have cookies in it, right?
Benjen seemed relieved when this was over. Weird - things were going well. "So, how about you have them shown to the guest quarters while I tell you some news from the wall, Ned?"
Lord Eddard glanced at him, then nodded. "Of course. Robb, show Lady Ruby and her friends the guest quarters. And inform your mother that we have new guests."
"Yes, Father."
Ah, the redhead was his son! He looked kinda cute. And he blushed when he looked at her, which made him look even cuter.
Ruby felt relieved. They were in a Fantasy castle - with central heating! - and everyone was really helpful. Things were definitely looking up now!
"If you'll follow me, my lady?" Robb offered her his arm.
Ruby had seen that in those fantasy movies she didn't watch because they didn't have enough action even though the actors were handsome, and hooked her arm into his - and he was jerked to the side. Oops! She almost forgot her strength. "Sorry!" she told him. "My fault!"
"Ah…" He looked a bit confused. Maybe embarrassed.
Weiss whispered 'dolt!' behind her, but Ruby could exactly turn around and frown at her. "So… lead on?"
"Of course, Lady Ruby."
Winterfell, The North, Westeros, 298 AC
The quarters were adequate, Weiss Schnee found after a brief inspection. For a 'Fantasy Castle', as Ruby called it, at least. The lack of modern amenities was grating - their scrolls had run out of power days ago, and there was no way to recharge them without tapping into their very limited Lightning Dust reserves, something they had to save for emergencies, like should they need such short-range communication or access to their files, like the pictures they had taken of the ruins before this started - but at least it was warm, and the presence of hot springs promised hot baths.
Weiss felt filthy after that trip. They had barely managed to maintain minimal hygiene! If she ever had to use cold water and a sponge to wash herself even once more, it would be one time too many.
"So… What do you think?" Ruby asked from one of the two beds - which used a straw mattress that must be filled with all sorts of things and creatures that shouldn't be near much less inside your bed. "Neat castle, huh?"
Weiss glanced at Blake, who was leaning against the door. Weiss hadn't sensed anyone observing them, but she wasn't really trained in using her Aura for that - that was a skill Huntresses usually acquired later during their career. Blake, on the other hand, was skilled at detecting eavesdroppers.
Her friend shook her head, though.
Good. Weiss took a deep breath. "They seem friendly. And they've welcomed us formally, so we're protected by guest right."
"And that's super-important!" Ruby said. "Benjen said so."
Weiss sighed softly. Ruby was correct - Benjen had told them that breaking guest right would dishonour an entire house, and Weiss didn't think he was lying, but… She was also very familiar with how laws and agreements could be bent and outright broken without the culprit suffering any backlash for it, as long as they were powerful and connected enough. And if Jacques Schnee was able to do it, Eddard Stark, as the absolute ruler of the entire region - one of the Seven Kingdoms forming the realm - certainly would be able to do it as well. "Just remember that guest right binds us as well. If we break it, we also lose its protection."
"Well, we won't break it!" Ruby replied with a wide smile.
"As long as that Greyjoy boy keeps his hands to himself," Yang added, hitting the palm of her hand with her fist without bothering to get up from where she was sprawled across her half of the bed. "He was leering at everyone."
Weiss suppressed a shudder at the memory. The boy had indeed looked at them as if he was picturing them naked - which he probably had been doing. And he hadn't been the only one who had done so, though he had been the most obvious.
"Well, Robb was a perfect gentleman," Ruby said.
Weiss scoffed. "He was checking out your legs."
"He did?" Ruby blushed.
Weiss pressed her lips together. Her friend and team leader was far too naive. "They're not used to Huntresses."
"Well, of course not - none of them have Aura."
"No, I mean, they are not used to women like us," Weiss corrected her. "Haven't you noticed? None of the guards were women."
"How could you tell with their clothes?" Ruby asked. "They were all so drab. The armour, I mean."
"Trust me," Weiss told her. "I could." Growing up in a kingdom renowned for its cold climate, and in a family where any faux pas was grounds for a lecture, she had quickly learned.
"Yeah," Yang added.
Blake nodded as well.
"Well, that's probably how they do things here." Ruby shrugged. "They'll get used to us."
Weiss hoped that Ruby was correct but couldn't help having doubts. "So do I. But remember: We're guests. You can't crush someone's balls if they annoy you."
"Well, we totally could. But you probably mean we shouldn't," Yang replied with a toothy grin.
Weiss took a deep breath. This wasn't the time to lose her temper over childish comments. "They might not realise that they are annoying you."
"Oh, I usually don't leave any doubt if someone's annoying me."
Ruby and Yang hadn't really gone anywhere but Vale, Weiss reminded herself. "What I am trying to tell you is that we can't expect them to know our customs and vice versa. What is perfectly polite for them and in line with keeping guest right might be annoying to us." Or worse.
"That's not exactly uncommon on Remnant, either," Blake said with a faint smirk.
Weiss shot her a glare. Her friend was correct about that - Weiss had experienced such situations far more than she wished - but this was important. They couldn't annoy much less offend their hosts! They needed their help to find a way home!
"So, we tell them about Remnant!" Ruby said. "That way, there aren't any misunderstandings!"
"We can't!" Weiss snapped. She straightened. Composure, she reminded herself. "I mean, we have to be careful what we tell the people here. We don't know if we can trust them, and revealing our weaknesses would endanger us all."
"I think we can trust Benjen and Ned. And Robb."
Weiss narrowed her eyes for a moment. The last thing they needed was some romantic entanglement. Ruby better not fall for some local boy who had grown up in a completely alien culture with who knew what weird views and expectations! "Even if we can trust them, can we trust everyone they trust? Word travels fast, even without scrolls. And we know from Benjen that the kingdom has seen two rebellions - civil wars! - in his lifetime."
"Well, yes, but…"
Blake cocked her head to the side and raised a hand. "Someone's coming."
Ah. Weiss smoothed her dress out - a dress in dire need of cleaning, even though the battleskirt had held up admirably during their journey so far, thanks to good craftsmanship and her aura - and straightened. Time to put her best face on.
Ruby got up as well. "Who is it?" she asked as she joined Weiss in the middle of the room, followed by Yang.
"It seems to be Lady Stark and her daughters," Blake said.
Oh. Weiss took a deep breath. This would be an important meeting. But she was ready.
"Oh, no!" she heard Blake mutter under her breath.
"What?" Weiss glanced at her. "What's wrong?"
Blake was tense - very tense. Was this an ambush? Weiss looked at the door, then at the bed against which Myrtenaster was leaning. Should they arm themselves?
"Blake?" Yang asked.
"They've got a dog with them!" Blake hissed.
Oh. Weiss relaxed.
"Oh?" Ruby perked up.
"Oh?" And Yang grinned.
Before Blake could say anything else, there was a knock on the door. "Lady Ruby?"
After a moment, Ruby replied: "Yes! Coming!"
Before Weiss could stop her, Ruby had dashed forward and opened the door. "Hi!" she said, beaming at the three - four - people outside. One woman, two girls and a guard. "Come in!" she added before the obvious leader, a redheaded woman in a high-quality gown, could say anything. "Everyone, we've got visitors!"
Weiss swallowed her grimace. This was probably - no, certainly - a faux pas, and it was her fault. She should have explained to Ruby that the leader of their group wasn't supposed to open the door themselves. Or act so… so Ruby-like. At least she hadn't squealed at the two dogs that the girls carried.
Time to mend the ruffled tempers. "Lady Stark, I presume," she said, bowing her head. Fortunately, the others followed her example. Even Blake, though Weiss didn't miss that she was fixated on the two dogs. Unfortunately, so was Ruby.
"You presume correctly. I am Catelyn Stark. These are my daughters, Sansa and Arya," Lady Stark said as she entered. The fourth person, a guard, stayed outside, Weiss noted.
Both girls - one about thirteen years old, the other a bit younger, Weiss estimated, though she didn't know how the life conditions in this kingdom would affect growth - dropped into curtsies. Weiss made a mental note of that.
"And these are Weiss Schnee, Blake Belladonna and Yang Xia Long. I am Ruby Rose. We're Team RWBY, but you already knew that, right?" Ruby nodded, then leaned forward. "And who are those adorable puppies?"
"Those are our dire wolves!" the younger girl, Aryan, said. "This is Nymeria. And that's Lady."
Wolves? Dire wolves? Weiss eyed the two more closely. Apparently, Ruby had been correct - those were, despite their size, puppies. Weiss wondered how large they would grow.
A hiss next to her, followed by Blake taking a step back, told her that she wasn't the only one wondering that. She really should get over her cynophobia. At least she wasn't running away. That would be a faux pas for sure.
"Arya." Lady Catelyn didn't frown, and her tone was even, but the girl still flinched.
It was obvious, at least to Weiss, that there would be a private scolding after this. She could sympathise from experience.
"Please have a seat!" Ruby said, pointing at the two chairs in the room, next to the small window. "I mean, it's your castle, so it's your room, technically, so I don't want to, ah, sound presumptuous…"
Lady Cately smiled, hopefully amused and not offended, and sat down. Ruby promptly sat down on the closer bed, and Weiss sighed as the two girls eyed each other, obviously unsure if and where they should sit down.
A subtle pinch and whispered hint straightened things out, though, and soon everyone but Blake, who was standing as far from the wolves as she could, trying to fade through the wall, was properly seated - Ruby on the chair, clearly trying not to let the puppies distract her, and the rest on the beds, split between guests and hosts.
"First, allow me to welcome you to Winterfell," Lady Catelyn said. "My lord husband has let me know that you were stranded in the wildings lands and lost your baggage."
"More or less, yes. We've made do," Ruby added. "We've got some furs and food from the wildlings, and the Night's Watch got us some more supplies, but it's not exactly…" She trailed off, glancing at Weiss.
"We only have what supplies we were carrying on us, my lady," Weiss replied. "We don't want to impose on you…"
"It's not an imposition at all," Lady Cately said as soon as Weiss trailed off. "You are our guests."
"We can help you out in return," Ruby offered at once. "We can hunt. Or if you need lots of wood chopped down, we can do that as well." She patted Crescent Rose.
Lady Catelyn looked irritated and slightly confused for a moment. "It would be shameful to have a noble lady working when she's our guest."
"Oh." Ruby blinked.
As Weiss had suspected. "Please excuse our ignorance, my lady. In our homeland, Huntresses like us are expected to offer their help wherever they might find themselves, whether the community needs them or not." She was bending the truth a little - or more than a little - but it was true. Best not to mention that Huntresses were generally remunerated for such help.
"Ah. Well, in the Seven Kingdoms, things are different." Lady Catelyn nodded slowly. "And we would be poor hosts if we would not provide you with suitable clothes."
The glance she sent at their attire, coupled with the way the girls were trying not to stare - the elder, Sansa, was blushing, Weiss noted - left no doubt that their clothes weren't deemed suitable for social occasions. Judging by the people they had seen on the way, their clothes probably were not deemed suitable for any occasion, though that might be explained by the locals' lack of Aura.
"We would be grateful," Weiss told her. A few dresses weren't much of an imposition, at least.
"Yeah," Yang added with a grin. "A girl wants to change her look sometimes, you know? Although we're always dressed to kill."
Lady Catelyn stared at her, and Sansa gasped. Arya, though, leaned forward. "Dressed to kill?"
"It's an idiom in our homeland, my lady," Weiss was quick to explain. "It means to dress very fashionable, in the latest style." There was no need to mention the other meanings of the expression - Lady Stark didn't strike her as the kind of woman who would appreciate her young daughters learning about those.
"Yeah," Yang confirmed, tossing her hair back.
"Oh." Arya sounded disappointed. Her puppy climbed up her lap to lick her face, and she pushed it down into her lap again with a giggle. "Down, Nymeria!"
"They don't mean actual killing, Arya," Sansa whispered, rolling her eyes. "They're ladies."
"We're Huntresses," Ruby said with a nod at the younger girl. "We don't kill people. Only monsters."
"We beat up people who deserve it, though," Yang added, slapping her fist into the palm of her hand. "Like bandits."
"You've fought bandits?" Arya straightened.
"Arya!" There would be a rather pointed scolding from Lady Stark later, in private, in Weiss's opinion.
"Yeah! When we were travelling south to the Wall, we were attacked by bandits," Ruby said. "We beat them, though."
"That's where we got the furs." Yang pointed at the pile of pelts in the corner. "Spoils of war."
"I see." Lady Catelyn nodded, though Weiss couldn't help feeling that the woman remained a little sceptical.
She was tempted to offer proof of their claims but refrained from it since Benjen had impressed the need to be a bit more discreet to avoid upsetting the locals.
Lady Catelyn subtly looked them over for a moment. "You were taken from your homeland and brought to foreign lands. That must have been a terrible experience. Especially for young women."
Weiss frowned slightly. The way she stressed that, she must mean something more than… Oh, no!
"Oh, it wasn't that bad," Ruby said. "It was mostly the surprise, you know? One moment, we were looking at the ruins, the next - poof - we were gone!"
Weiss cut in before Ruby could continue. She had to correct this misunderstanding at the start. "I can assure you, my lady, any distress we suffered was due to our dislocation, not because of anything of a, ah, more personal nature."
Ruby looked confused, but Yang nodded emphatically with a serious expression.
"I am relieved to hear that," Lady Catelyn said with a - seemingly - genuine smile.
Weiss also saw that Sansa suddenly gasped while Arya didn't quite seem to get it. Good. That could have been a very uncomfortable topic to sort out.
"I think I'm missing something…" Ruby frowned, looking from Lady Catelyn to Weiss and back.
"Ah…" Yang trailed off, glancing at Weiss.
Weiss glared back at her.
"Guys?" Ruby was frowning more profoundly now.
Weiss was very relieved when Nymeria suddenly slipped from Arya's grip and started towards Blake, yipping enthusiastically as she began to chase the girl around the room.
It was far easier to explain that Blake was deathly afraid of dogs, and yes, that that included wolves.
Winterfell, The North, Westeros, 298 AC
Standing in the shadow of a tower on the inner wall, gazing at the courtyard below, without anyone present aware of her, Blake Belladonna smiled. She liked Winterfell, and not just because it was a vast castle that dominated the area it was built in and looked as if it had been taken straight out of some of her favourite novels, something she had only seen before in computer games and animated movies. No, she liked the castle because it was actually too big for its garrison - which was by design since, according to Benjen, it housed a lot more people during the long winters, which, again according to Benjen, could and did last years. Blake had no idea how that was possible, but even though she was fairly certain that Benjen was not quite as honest with them as Ruby seemed to think, albeit Blake suspected it was more a case of omitting parts rather than telling falsehoods, she was reasonably certain that Benjen wouldn't be lying about such an easily checked fact of life in Westeros.
Which she reminded herself to check anyway as soon as she had unfettered access to the local library. She was sorely missing her books; the one novel she had taken with her on the mission because she couldn't bear the thought of waiting to finish it until she returned she had read a dozen times by now. She could recite it from memory in her sleep and had done so, at least according to Yang, which meant she was fortunate it hadn't been one of her spicier novels; that would have been embarrassing.
As embarrassing as being spotted by one of the scarce guards on the wall, she reminded herself as she heard steps coming up the stairs inside the tower. The garrison was too small to effectively cover the castle's walls, but that didn't mean they didn't make an honest attempt anyway.
But they were not up to the task of spotting her; she was too skilled at this, and they had no idea about her capabilities. So when the door opened and the guard stepped out on the rampart, she had already used two clones to dart over to the other side, impossible to spot from his position or by anyone on the ground.
Blake herself, on the other hand, just had to take two steps to the side to have a perfect view of the courtyard where the guards and members of the household were training, allowing her to observe and estimate the skill level of the garrison.
Which wasn't very high, if she was honest, albeit higher than she had expected. Unlike most militia fighters on Remnant whom she had seen, both on missions for Beacon as well as during her time in the White Fang, those men - and they were exclusively men - were career soldiers, and Lord Stark obviously wasn't paying them to laze about and grow rusty. She rated them as about as skilled with their weapons, swords and spears today, as the average member of the Atlas military or SDC guard. Which meant that not even taken together, they posed a threat to even a first-year Huntress, of course, but that aside, they were doing well.
But next to the average guards - men-at-arms, as they were called by some - there were people down below who were more skilled. Lord Stark's eldest son and heir, Robb, who was sparring with the master-at-arms, a Ser Rodrick Cassel, father of the captain of the guards of the castle, was showing to be a quite talented opponent with his sword - more skilled than some students at Beacon, even, though without Aura, the outcome of any fight would still be a foregone conclusion.
Another boy was showing equal if not greater talent as well: Jon Snow, or so she had overheard during her first excursions. Pretty handsome, and not as loud or brash as most boys his age, as far as it seemed, he was apparently a bastard son of Lord Stark, something Robb's friend, the lecherous Theon, seemed almost as fond to mention as he was to talk about Blake and her friends' appearance and appeal when he thought Blake couldn't hear him, although he was not nearly quite as witty about either as he obviously thought he was.
And he was very fortunate that Yang's ears were not nearly as good as Blake's; if she had heard what he was saying, she would likely have done something regrettable about his ability to implement what he was talking about. As it was, Blake was sorely tempted to engineer an accident that would leave the boy in pain for some time, though given the lack of modern medicine, the risk of crippling him was far too high.
Although, she amended her thoughts with a grin, it might not become necessary; apparently, Robb had taken offence to his latest remark - about Ruby's legs - and the sparring match had grown a little heated as a result, so with Robb far more skilled than Theon, at least with blades, the lecherous boy would be nursing bruises for some time.
Snorting, she moved along the rampart to the lesser-used part of the castle, giving the kennels a wide berth. She had no intention at all to go near that cursed area full of dogs and, even worse, wolves, and dire wolves at that - apparently a breed that grew as large as horses according to the gossip of the servants she had overheard complaining about the appetites of the new pets of Lord Stark's children. She shuddered at the thought of a wolf as big as a beowulf.
And, speaking of those children… She shook her head as she spotted the second-youngest son of Lord Stark climbing the walls of a broken tower, something his family disapproved of vocally, as she had observed. The boy seemed determined to reach the top of the tower but he was rushing things a bit too much, in her opinion. He must be at the point where he had enough experience to feel so confident, he was getting slightly… not sloppy, just not as focused as one should be when, without Aura, a single mistake would see him falling to his death. He was barely ten years old, and she gave him even odds of reaching eleven years or not if he didn't wise up. It was not really her business, of course, but his parents', yet what person would she be if she closed her eyes to this potential tragedy?
Frowning, she checked for witnesses with eyes and nose - people here had a stronger body odour than back home, which, while often aggravating, also had advantages. Then she double-checked that the bloodthirsty howling monster Bran treated as a pet wasn't around before quickly jumping down from the ramparts. She didn't use her Semblance and landed in a crouch on the cobblestones below, light as a feather, then dashed across the empty yard here to the base of the tower.
In the meantime, the boy had continued to climb, clearly very familiar with the weathered stones forming the wall, and was about a third from the open window at the top. Should she wait here, in case he slipped? She narrowed her eyes, then decided against it. That wouldn't really serve as a lesson to the young climber. And he might not slip, anyway. Not today.
Instead, she entered the tower, confirming that it was deserted, then rushed up the winding stairs until she reached the room at the top, where she leaned against the wall next to the window and listened to Bran's heavy breathing coming closer and closer as he continued his advance up the wall.
Soon, she saw a small hand reach over the windowsill, grasping for purchase, followed by another, and then Bran's head appeared in the window as he pulled himself up.
"That's dangerous, you know."
He froze with a gasp, but his fingers didn't loosen, much less lose their grip on the windowsill. "Lady Blake!" In the blink of an eye, his scared expression morphed into a charming if mischievous and guilty grin. "What are you doing here?"
"Do your parents know you are climbing walls?" she asked, cocking her head at him.
"Ummm…" He pulled himself into the room, then took his time wiping dust from his clothes, blatantly trying to find a good answer to her question. "Yes, they do."
Technically correct. She snorted. "And do they approve of it?"
"Ah…" He flushed, which was answer enough. But then his lips shifted into a pout. "They worry over nothing. No one beats me at climbing!"
She raised her eyebrows at his boast.
The little scamp flushed some more, then grinned. "I've never seen you climb, Lady Blake."
"What makes you think I know how to climb?"
"You're always on the ramparts, and I never see you climb the stairs," he said.
"Are you watching all the stairs all the time?"
"Ah…" He pouted for a moment. "But can you climb?"
"I can."
"Better than I can?"
Ah, that was his game. In the days since Blake and her friends had arrived at Winterfell, Lord Stark's children had, all in their own ways, tried to satisfy their curiosity about them. As such attempts went, Bran's was better than most - for his age.
Blake grinned. "Follow me."
His face lit up as she walked down the stairs. He undoubtedly expected her to show off by climbing the same tower faster than he could, but she had something else in mind.
Ten minutes later, he was glaring at her between rubbing his posterior after yet another fall. "This is stupid! You can't climb this wall! It's much too smooth!"
Apparently, he didn't like bouldering. To be fair, the wall she had picked out was far smoother than the old tower. But it was also far lower. As Bran had demonstrated quite thoroughly, falling down from it was painful but not really dangerous.
She snorted, then went to demonstrate once more that, yes, she could climb the wall.
When he clenched his teeth and went back to trying to climb it, she smirked. That would occupy the little boy. And maybe teach him that he wasn't as good as he thought while she kept her ears peeled in case Bran might let slip some tidbits he had overheard from his parents.
And it was payback for setting his ravenous beast on her. If the monster had been just a little older, its teeth would have left deep gouges in her leg when it tried to gnaw it off. Even as a puppy, it was almost as bad as Zwei. She suppressed a shudder as she thought, briefly, of the corgi from hell that haunted Ruby and Yang's home - and, occasionally, their dorm, which Blake shared with them.
Winterfell, The North, Westeros, 298 AC
Yang Xiao Long stretched as she walked across the yard. She noticed that Bran was, again, trying to climb a low wall in a corner. Emphasis on trying. She winced when she saw him fall down on his butt. That looked painful. But it wasn't any of her business.
"Yang!"
She turned her head and smiled when she saw Arya. The little girl was running at her, weaving through the people in the yard and almost running into a guy carrying water to the stables. Her little wolf was running after her, barely keeping up. Yang raised her hand and waved. "Yo."
Arya came to a stop in front of her. "Err… Hello! What are you doing?"
Yang liked the kid. She didn't try to talk all posh and stuff, like her sister. Or like Weiss. Just straight to the point. "I'm walking. Or I was, before you stopped me."
And Arya had an adorable pout, like Ruby had when she was little. "I mean, where are you going? Are you going to hunt?" She leaned a bit forward to peer at Yang's combat clothes.
"Nope." Yang shook her head. There weren't any monsters to hunt. At least, she hadn't heard about any.
"But you're wearing your hunting clothes. You're only supposed to wear them when you're hunting, aren't you?"
Ah, right. Lady Stark had been polite and diplomatic about it, but she'd made it clear that trousers were not 'proper garments' for women, guests or not. Or, rather, that anything but a dress that covered you from neck to toe was 'inappropriate'. Yang didn't really care for that kind of bullshit, but Weiss had gone off about guest right this and fitting in that, and that they had to compromise. Well, Yang knew all about how to use loopholes. "That's not quite right," she corrected the girl with a grin. "You're also supposed to wear your hunting clothes for training. How else would you be able to properly train, hm?" It wasn't as if you could fight in a dress that she'd rip to shreds just by stretching. At least Lady Stark had accepted that.
Arya blinked. Apparently, 'train as you'd fight' wasn't something she was familiar with. Well, she was a kid. "You're going to train?"
"Yep." Yang nodded and ran a hand through her hair, noting how the guys nearby were staring. "Check out if we can train there." It had been some time since they had last trained properly. They could go into the woods for a training session, but they would have to hold back some unless the locals needed a lot of firewood, and if they had to hold back anyway, they might as well train in the yard.
"Oh, you can! Everyone trains there!" Arya nodded enthusiastically, and her wolf barked. She seemed as excited as her owner.
"Well, my team isn't everyone," Yang said with a chuckle. "But let's check out the yard." Robb had shown them the area a few days ago, but they had just been passing through, and no one had been training at the time.
"Arya!"
"Jon!" Arya grimaced as a boy about Yang's age approached them, followed by another wolf puppy.
A handsome boy, Yang noted, if a bit too young, so she smiled at him. "Hi there. You must be Jon. I'm Yang."
He looked taken aback for a moment, blushed, then bowed his head. "Lady Yang."
Aw, too cute! "Call me Yang," she told him. Sure, they were supposed to fit in, but all that bowing and scraping and lady this and lord that made her feel as if she was in a period piece of the Great War. One without the correct weapons of the time, as Ruby would point out whenever there was a combat scene.
He nodded, then turned to Arya. "Lady Stark is looking for you. You have lessons today."
Arya ducked her head. "Can't you act as if you didn't find me? We're going to the training yard!"
"You're skipping school?" Yang laughed. "You're the delinquent of the family, huh?"
"Delinquent? What?" Arya looked confused.
"Of course not!" And Jon seemed worked up.
"It's just a manner of speaking," Yang told both. "What we call kids who don't always obey their parents."
"Ah!" Arya nodded. "Then I'm a delinquent!"
"Arya!" Jon hissed.
"I'm also a good host by showing our guest the way to the training yard!" Arya added. "That's more important than some boring needlepoint lessons."
"Arya."
"Jon!"
Yang was tempted to meddle but… this wasn't any of her business. So she watched while the two stared at each other.
Arya sighed first. "Alright." Looking like a condemned prisoner, she slunk off, her wolf puppy trailing after her with a whimper.
"Being an older sibling is hard, huh? They always go for the puppy dog eyes," Yang told him.
"What?"
"Arya reminded me of Ruby when she wanted more cookies or staying up longer," Yang explained. "She used the same sad expression to try and make me give in."
"Oh. It's not… I was merely passing along Lady Stark's request."
"Ah." Yang nodded and watched Arya enter the keep.
"Arya reminded you of your sister?" Jon asked after a moment.
"Well, after we lost Mom, it was basically just Ruby, Dad and me," Yang explained. And Uncle Qrow, but he was struggling with his own problems, so there was no need to go there. "So, we're very close. I wouldn't say I raised her, but… someone had to look after her, and I'm her big sister."
He nodded again with a wistful expression. Yang wondered if he had lost his mother as well - Blake hadn't heard anything about that, and it wasn't something Yang could just ask. Well, enough gloom and doom! "So, wanna head over to the training yard and watch the show?"
"The show?"
"The guys training, sparring, that stuff," she explained.
"I have nothing else to do."
She snorted. "That's just what a girl wants to hear when she's asking a boy to accompany her."
He blushed. "I didn't mean it… I mean…"
"I'm just yanging your chain, relax!"
He didn't laugh at her perfectly placed pun. And it wasn't because she had elbowed him - she had taken care to control her strength. Perhaps he was just the broody type. Well, some girls liked those boys.
While they walked across the yard, she caught him sneaking glances at her and grinned. "Like what you see?"
"I… I wasn't staring." And he was a lousy liar, too. She snorted at him, and he flushed again. "I am… Girls don't dress like that!"
"They don't dress like that here," she said. "It's normal back home."
"I can't imagine such a place."
"Really?" She smirked. He was too easy. Then again, he was the same age as Ruby, maybe even younger. "It's easy. Just imagine every girl you know wearing clothes like we do." She pushed her chest out to underline her point.
Ah, his face was redder than a tomato!
"That's… How can their families allow that?"
Yang frowned at that. "Hey! We fought a war about the right to wear what we want!" It wasn't as if she'd let anyone tell her what to wear. Well, maybe Coco - the girl knew her fashion.
"What?"
"Yeah. Back a few decades, there was the Great War over our rights to express ourselves. All four kingdoms went at it. We won." It was a bit more complicated, but Jon didn't need to know any details. It was ancient history, anyway.
"Your kingdom must be very different," he said, shaking his head.
"Oh, bet your ass it is!" She grinned, then focused on the training yard ahead of them. "Ah, look at that! Your brother's pretty good." Easily better than Jaune - he had that older guard he was fencing with down on the ground in no time.
"He is, yes."
Yang turned and leaned her back against the fence that surrounded the training yard. "How about you?"
"I am a passable swordsman."
"Could you take Robb?" Yang nodded toward his brother.
Jon didn't answer right away.
"I can take my little sister more often than not in a sparring match," she told him. "But she wins her share of our bouts."
"Another difference between your home and the North," he said. And he was back to brooding.
Yang was about to pry some more, but before she could think of the right way to pick at his attitude, someone else cut in. Someone unwelcome.
"Hey! Lady Yang!" Theon Greyjoy waved as he walked over to her. "Did you come to watch us spar?"
She straightened with a frown - not that he'd notice, with his eyes glued to her legs and chest. "I came to check out the training yard. See if it's suitable for training."
"I can assure you it is." He leaned on the fence between them, turning his back to Jon. "As the best archer in the castle, I should know."
"Lady Yang mentioned an interest in swordfighting," Jon said.
Theon scowled for a moment but didn't acknowledge the other boy. "What kind of training has caught your interest, my lady? As the heir to the Iron Islands, I would be only too happy to be of service!"
Oh, boy! Or boys! Usually, Yang didn't mind boys trying to impress her, but not if it involved weapons and no Aura to keep a fight from becoming bloody. "I just want to know if it would be safe for my team to spar here."
"Oh, don't worry - none here would dare harm you!" Theon's smile somehow looked more smarmy than Cardin's back at Beacon.
And Yang felt the same urge to introduce him to a few love taps from Ember Celica she got when Cardin annoyed her. We're guests here, she reminded herself. "I don't think that's a danger," she told him.
"Of course not! We would rather die than let a lady such as you get hurt!" He reached out to grab her hand, but she pulled it back.
The idiot had no clue about Huntresses.
"Theon?" Robb had noticed them and was walking over. "Oh, Lady Yang. Jon." He wiped his face, slightly sweaty, with his padded sleeve.
"Lady Yang is interested in the training yard, Robb," Theon told him.
And Lady Yang doesn't like it when boys speak for her without being asked to, Yang thought. Out loud, she said: "I would like to see if my friends and I can safely train here."
Robb was taken aback. "You are our guest! You are perfectly safe here, my lady!"
"Not what I meant," she said. "I'm not worried about us. I'm worried about damaging the yard."
Robb blinked, and Jon looked confused, but Theon laughed. "Oh, there's absolutely no chance of that, my lady! If all the guards have not damaged it, you won't do anything to it either."
Alright, to hell with not showing off! She wouldn't use Ember Celica, but she had to show that boy what he was dealing with. Yang flashed him a toothy smile, then looked at Robb. "Is that true? There's no chance that I could, say, accidentally punch a hole in the ground?"
"Ah…" Robb looked at her, then at the ground - packed sand - and then back at her. "Even if you did, it would be no trouble at all, my lady."
"Mind if I test that?" She slapped her hands together and stretched.
"Ah… you want to punch the ground?" Robb looked bewildered.
"Yeah." She nodded. "Only if there's no trouble if I do leave a hole."
"Ah, no, go ahead," Robb said.
"Robb!" Jon hissed.
"Are you going to punch the ground?" Theon sounded confused and amused.
Yang flexed her knees and jumped over the fence - and over Theon and Robb. In the air, she pulled her fist back - and punched when she hit the ground. Lightly, of course. Just enough to make a point.
When the sand her impact had thrown up settled, everyone was staring at her. Robb and the others were gaping, even Jon.
Yang made a point at looking at the small crater she was standing in, then at Robb. "Doesn't look that safe to me."
Robb shook his head, and Theon cursed under his breath.
"Yang! What did you do?"
Uh-oh. Here came Weiss, and she looked mad.
Yang flashed a smile at her friend. "I made an impression!"
'It goes without saying that we can safely dismiss the blatantly mythical deeds attributed to the Ruby Order. Their claims to have defeated a horde of humanoid ice creatures in the Lands Beyond the Wall that commanded the dead to rise and attack the living are obviously an exaggeration meant to increase their fame, as much factual as the claims of them performing superhuman deeds such as lifting entire carts with the draft animals still attached or leaping above buildings. Some of my colleagues, even those diligent enough to dismiss such reports, point at the records of the Night's Watch as proof that such 'humanoid ice creatures' existed in the past. Indeed, the Night's Watch records speak of a 'Great Ranging' in AC 298, which discovered the corpses of the 'Others', legendary creatures made of ice and malice. However, at this time, the Night's Watch's reputation was at such a low point that many expected the institution to vanish from Westeros. It is very plausible that its commander, Lord Mormont, used the opportunity to convince the Crown that the Wall served a more important purpose than merely holding back wilding incursions by claiming to have encountered creatures from the Age of Heroes, which were a threat to the entire realm. Creatures whose corpses were all burned, supposedly to ensure they could not be restored to life through fell magic - a convenient excuse for the complete absence of any remains of the creatures they claimed to have found, unlike, for example, the extinct ice spiders, a once-thought mythical beast, but one of which several specimens have been found dead but preserved in the permafrost of the North.'
- A Treatise On The Ruby Order, by Maester Kennet Bracken
*****
Castle Black, The Wall, Westeros, 298 AC
Standing in front of the old, weathered desk in the Lord Commander's office, Benjen Stark stared at his friend and superior. "You want me to go to Winterfell when we are preparing a Great Ranging? I'm the First Ranger of the Night's Watch; if anyone should be heading out to investigate the claims of our guests, it should be me!" Ice monsters raising the dead to form an army! It was outrageous, and yet, Aemon had found old records of the very first years of the Watch that matched the descriptions the four girls had given them. And after seeing what those girls could do, Benjen was loath to dismiss any of their tales. Of course, there was a massive difference between being far, far stronger than you looked and raising the dead, but even something not quite as outlandish could present a danger for the realm.
Sitting in a chair older than Benjen's grandfather, Jeor shook his head. "Benjen, we have several rangers who can lead our brothers safely through the Haunted Forest. They might not be as experienced as you are, but they know the lands and how to navigate them and have proved that many times. I need you to accompany our visitors to Winterfell."
Benjen pressed his lips together. Jeor was correct. Benjen would have been a poor fit for his post if he had not ensured that all his men were up to the tasks that their duty demanded. He would trust any of them to serve as a guide in the Haunted Forest. Well, maybe not Kren. The latest brother to join his band had the aptitude and skill to be a ranger, but he was still pining for the home he had been forced to leave when he had been caught poaching and had chosen the Wall over the headman's block. A few more years in the Watch would see to that, though.
And yet, that was no reason for Benjen to miss the most important ranging of the Watch in decades, perhaps even centuries!
"You should be happy to have the opportunity to see your family, Benjen," Aemon, sitting in a chair very close to the fireplace at the back of the room, spoke up in his raspy voice. "You never know when it will be the last time you laid eyes on them. Trust me on this - I lost too many of my own."
Jeor nodded as well, though he had a more grim than sad expression when he did.
Benjen clenched his teeth. His brother was the Warden of the North, the ruler of the entire land between the Neck and the Wall. His family was as safe as you could be in the North. And yet, Aemon was correct - every time Benjen ventured out beyond the Wall, every day he did his duty, he could end up dead. A wildling raider, a wolf or bear that got too desperate or rabid, or just bad luck like slipping on a patch of melted ice and falling down the Wall could end his life. But that didn't matter - he had sworn the oath and knew his duty as a brother of the Night's Watch!
"Benjen!" Jeor spoke up again. "I need you for this. No one else I could send would be trusted by Ned as much as you are."
"I could go after the ranging. I would have more information to share with Ned," Benjen pointed out.
"This cannot wait. You've seen our guests. You think they will wait for weeks before venturing out on their own?" Jeor scoffed.
Benjen winced. No, he didn't think they would wait that long. They were young, seven, eight-and-ten years, or even younger, according to them, and while girls were, as a rule, not as foolish and impatient as most boys that age, that didn't make them mature by any means. Certainly not those girls. And if they decided to leave, the entire Night's Watch couldn't stop them. Of that Benjen was sure after what had seen them do.
"Even worse," Aemon cut in with a dry snort, "imagine if they did wait here."
Benjen winced. Men of the Night's Watch swore an oath not to take a wife or father any children, but they were men all the same, not eunuchs. And their guests were, no matter their origin, great beauties without exception. Exotic beauties, even. The only man Benjen could be sure would not be tempted was Aemon, and only because the Maester was not only far too old to still feel such urges but also blind. That a number of the brothers had been rapists who had chosen the Wall over death or a maiming didn't help, of course.
No, if their guests stayed, no matter their inhuman strength, someone, drunk or simply too worked up, would accost them. And that could end in a catastrophe in light of what power those girls wielded. It would also shame the entire Watch for letting one of their own attack a guest in their headquarters.
He let out a sigh.
Jeor stood and walked over to the window, peering out through the slits left bare by the wooden shutters that kept both prying eyes and the cold somewhat out. "You've seen what they can do."
"Yes."
"I haven't, but I'll take your word for it."
Benjen snorted against his will. To make fun of his blindness! Aemon's wit was very dark and spared no one, not even himself.
Jeor shook his head. "You've heard their plans."
Benjen nodded. "They want to travel south and search for a magical way home. Or so they claim."
"Whatever the truth of that claim, it's clear that they will travel south. Four girls, each of them stronger than a dozen knights."
"Maybe stronger," Benjen said. Each of them was more skilled than the best swordsman he had seen. And their weapons… He wondered how they would match up against Valyrian steel, but they outclassed anything the brotherhood could muster.
"Maybe. Can you imagine what would happen if a lord accosted them?"
Benjen could. He had been imagining what would happen if they turned against the Watch for a few days - ever since they had arrived and had revealed their strength. "Yes."
"So could, and will, others."
"Ah." Others like every noble with ambition and enemies, both real and imagined. Yes, Benjen understood why he had to be the one to present their guests at Winterfell and talk to Ned. He was one of the only people Ned would believe without a demonstration that would set tongues wagging and raven flying.
He sighed again, and Jeor clapped him on the shoulder with a rueful smile.
*****
Kingsroad, South of Castle Black, The North, Westeros, 298 AC
"You know, I am sure we'd be faster if we walked. No, really. This wagon is going soooo slooooow."
"Feel free to walk, Ruby. I don't feel like stumbling along a road that looks more like a trail."
"You wouldn't stumble if you wore sensible boots, Weiss."
"I don't see you walking either, Yang."
"You don't hear me complaining, either, do you?"
Benjen Stark, riding next to the wagon, bit his tongue so he wouldn't make a rude comment in response. The four girls - Team Ruby, as the apparent leader insisted - had done almost nothing but complain ever since they had set out for Winterfell. At least it felt like it. Well, complain and ask questions even a young child should have been able to answer. It was a miracle that the driver, Creg, had kept his temper. Then again, according to rumours, Creg had joined the Watch after raising a dozen children as a widower, so he was probably used to this.
"Besides, my boots are perfectly sensible!"
"As riding boots, yes," Benjen said before he could stop himself. You didn't make fun of people who could shatter boulders with a single blow and fell trees as thick as they were tall with a single swipe of their scythe. Even if they didn't know that freshly cut wood didn't burn well.
"See?" Weiss smiled at him, then turned back to grin at her friends.
"You can't ride, Weiss."
"You can't either!"
"Well…"
"Bumblebee doesn't count!"
"I wasn't going to say anything about my bike…"
"Yang!"
"Yang!"
Complain, ask inane questions and make crude remarks, Benjen amended his thoughts, though the last was limited to Yang. Still, this was an opportunity to learn more about their supposed home. Usually, he would have assumed that 'Bumblebee' was the name of Yang's horse or pony, but he had quickly realised that such assumptions were generally wrong. "What's a bike?"
"The best way to travel!" Yang replied, flashing him a wide, cocky smile.
"Except for airships, bullheads, trains, ferries…"
"Ah, Weiss, don't be jealous that you never got to ride a bike!"
"I am merely stating the objective truth."
"Yang! Weiss!" Ruby spoke up. "Don't fight!" She nodded at both, then turned to smile at Benjen. "I'm sorry about that. Anyway, a bike is a vehicle you drive, with two wheels."
"You don't drive it; you ride it!"
"Like a cart?" Benjen asked.
"Not quite - the two wheels are arranged one before the other. Kinda if you cut this wagon in half length-side and then moved the wheels to the centre," Ruby gave another explanation that did open more questions than it answered. "And it's driven by Dust!"
"Ah." Their world apparently ran on magic dust. Homes were heated with dust, instead of wells, they had water dust - and Benjen was afraid to ask how that was supposed to work - and their weapons and even clothes used dust. It sounded too fantastical to believe, but Ruby had, against Weiss's objection, given him a demonstration. Benjen now knew that magic dust was real - and that they didn't have much of it left.
"And if we had Bumblebee here, I'd already be in Winterfell!"
"You'd be lost in the woods."
"Weiss! Yang!"
"Bumblebee would have trouble on this road," Blake spoke up. The girl was usually quiet, her nose buried in her book, but she rarely missed anything, Benjen had noticed.
"Nothing we couldn't manage!" Yang snorted, then leaned over. "Rubes! Pass me another sausage, will you? I'm feeling a bit peckish."
Benjen winced a little. They would have to restock supplies more often than he had planned. The girls ate more than men twice their number and three times their size. Obviously, the appetite they had shown after arriving at Castle Black hadn't been due to having gone hungry in the Haunted Forest; they ate that much every meal.
"Here, Yang!"
"Thanks, sis!"
Benjen clenched his fist holding the reins. This was something that he had been wondering since they started this trip. He hadn't asked them about it because it was the sort of question that could start fights, and the absolute last thing Benjen wanted was to anger four girls who could tear him limb from limb without trying. But at the same time, he needed to know. Because other people would make assumptions based upon how the four behaved, and if those assumptions were wrong…
Besides, he told himself, the group might be complaining constantly, but overall, they were in a remarkably good mood.
So, he took a deep breath, cleared his throat, and hoped he wouldn't insult his guests. "Lady Ruby, I was wondering…"
"Yes?"
"Your relationships are a little confusing."
"My relationships? I'm not in any relationship!" Ruby blurted out.
For a moment, Benjen's heart seemed to skip a beat. Then he realised that her cheeks were not flushed with rage but embarrassment and felt his own face heat up in return. "I am deeply sorry, I didn't mean to insinuate that…" He trailed off, clenching his teeth for a moment. He couldn't say that. Yang was laughing, but Weiss was glaring at him. "I was merely wondering how you are related," he was quick to explain. "In Westeros, it's very unusual for the older, ah, sibling to follow the orders of the younger."
"Ah, that's because Ozpin, the Headmaster of our school, picked Ruby here as the leader of our team because she's the best!" Yang said, ruffling her sister's hair.
"Yang!"
That explained things. To an extent, at least - Benjen still wondered what would have possessed this man to give such an order.
"You're wondering about their familial relationship, aren't you?" Weiss asked.
Among other things. "Yes," Benjen confirmed. The girls' polite tone still left no doubt that it wasn't a question.
"Oh. Well, we're sisters!" Ruby said. "But I think we already told you that, didn't we?"
"We've got the same dad. And the same mom for all that counts," Yang said. "She raised us both."
Ah. Benjen nodded. That explained it. It was now obvious that the older girl was a bastard raised in the family. 'Xiao Long' likely was their home's 'Snow'. And, of course, that wasn't something the two liked to talk about, so Benjen wouldn't pry further - he was no fool, after all.
It was another thing Ned needed to know about so he wouldn't make a blunder. The heraldry - crests - all four wore was already confusing, not to talk about their foreign manners. To think they expected to bathe every day on the road!
*****
Kingsroad, North of Winterfell, The North, Westeros, 298 AC
"Behold: Winterfell."
Ruby Rose perked up at Benjen's announcement. Winterfell! Finally! She pushed the furs covering her to the side, activated her Semblance and dashed from the wagon next to Benjen in the blink of an eye, or faster! "Yes?" She peered ahead while Benjen struggled a bit to get his startled horse under control - not her fault; the animal should be used to her Semblance by now! - and then rushed forward, up the gentle slope, until she could see over its top.
But now she could see it! "Winterfell!" she breathed at the sight in front of her. "Wow! It's beautiful!" It was a huge castle, bigger than Beacon! It had two tall walls, with lots of towers, one wall overlooking the others! And bigger towers and buildings inside the yard - the castle's keep. It looked straight out of a Fantasy movie!
"Yang! You have to see this!" she yelled without taking her sight off the castle - and the village in front of it!
"We're coming," Weiss replied. "It's not going to go away."
That was… well, true, but still! Ruby pouted. This was great!
Benjen reached her side. He was probably frowning at her for spooking his horse, but that was partially his fault for calling her. And he should have realised she couldn't see anything from his position before calling her!
"Wow!" Yang echoed her reaction. "I guess they make things bigger in the North, huh? Walls, castles and woods…"
"Yang!" Weiss hissed for some reason while Blake giggled.
"What? We've been travelling for ages through a forest!" Yang sounded smug, so Ruby probably had missed something, but that didn't matter.
"This is sooo coool!" she blurted out.
"It's actually warm," Benjen corrected her. "The keep was built over a hot spring, and the water runs through pipes in the walls to heat it."
"You've got central heating? That's even cooler!" Ruby beamed at him for a moment before focusing back on the castle. She couldn't see weapon emplacements, though they probably didn't need them without Grimm to worry about. Still, a catapult or trebuchet would have been even better! Oh, if they had hot springs, couldn't they build a steam catapult?
"'Cool' means 'hot' in this case," Yang told him.
"Yang!" Weiss sounded annoyed. "Cool means both cold and great, actually."
"Ah."
Ruby shook her head. "And that's your brother's castle?"
"Yes. Ned is the Warden of the North. This is his seat. And where I grew up."
"Cool!"
"Ruby!" Weiss was glaring at her, Ruby knew without looking at her. "It's a very impressive castle. I don't think I've seen anything like it before," Weiss told Benjen.
"Yep." Ruby nodded firmly.
"Thank you."
Ruby checked that she hadn't missed anything else, then turned to her friends and Benjen and Creg. "Come on! Let's hurry! We're wasting daylight!" Blake could see perfectly well at night, but Ruby couldn't, and they didn't have good lamps in Westeros, so she didn't want to miss anything on arrival. Oh!
Halfway to the wagon, she turned. "Do you think we'll get a tour of the castle?" she asked Benjen.
"Ruby!" Weiss cleared her throat. "We appreciate the opportunity to visit your family seat."
Benjen snorted. "I don't doubt that you'll get a tour. Even if Ned were too busy to be a good host, my nieces and nephews will love to show you around."
"C… Great!" Ruby beamed at him, then dashed into the wagon. "Team RWBY, assemble! Onward!" They were still burning daylight!
*****
They took ages to reach the castle's gates. Ruby had been so tempted to dash ahead - with her Semblance, she could have covered the distance in no time! - but Benjen had told them not to show off because people were not used to Aura and Semblances and this could scare them. Or cause them to be mistaken for witches or something. In any case, Benjen had been clear that it would be bad.
It didn't matter anyway. Now, after an eternity spent sitting in a slooow wagon, they were finally here! At Winterfell! Inside Winterfell!
Ruby looked everywhere as they entered the castle. Up, to check for murderholes in the gatehouse. (They had some!) Down, to check if the ground was covered in cobblestones. (It was!) Left and right, to check what weapons the guards were carrying. (They had boring spears and swords, no scythe, not even an arbalest.)
And ahead, where a group of men were waiting for them. Men and boys, she corrected herself. Then she blinked, looking at Benjen and back, squinting a little. "Is that your brother? He kinda looks like you."
"That is indeed my brother, Eddard Stark."
Benjen sounded a bit tense, Ruby realised. Did Ned carry a grudge against him? But they were siblings! And everyone seemed to like Benjen - people had been greeting him all the way from the outer gate to the courtyard.
Well, she would be extra-friendly to help smooth things over! Like when Dad and Uncle Qrow had a row!
"Benjen!"
"Ned!"
Ah! Ruby smiled. She had been worrying over nothing - Ned was hugging his brother as soon as Benjen had gotten off his horse. Everyone else was smiling as well - well, almost everyone. The red-haired boy was staring at her team. As were the other boys.
"It's been too long!" Benjen said.
"Indeed. What brings you to Winterfell?"
That was their cue! Ruby smiled widely and jumped over the wagon's railing, letting her furs drop to the wagon's floor behind her. "He was escorting us!" she blurted out. "We're Team RWBY!"
"Ruby!" Weiss hissed behind Ruby as her friends joined her.
Ned blinked, his smile fading a little, Ruby noticed, as he stared at them. Everyone was staring at them, she realised. Like the men at Castle Black had been - in some cases, exactly like the men back there.
Benjen cleared his throat. "Ned, these are Lady Ruby Rose and Team Ruby - Weiss Schnee, Blake Belladonna and Yang Xiao Long. Lady Ruby, this is Lord Paramount Eddard Stark, Warden of the North."
Ruby almost blurted out that they already knew that but managed not to. That would have been rude. "Hi!" she said instead, waving at him. She had stopped trying to explain that they didn't have noble ladies in Vale. Benjen had insisted that it was the correct title for her rank.
"Hello." Ned - Lord Eddard, Ruby reminded herself - was still blinking but no longer staring. Unlike the rest of the men and boys.
"They are from a far distant kingdom and were stranded in the Haunted Forest beyond the Wall. They're travelling south to look for a way home," Benjen explained.
Ruby nodded a few times.
Weiss nodded as well - no, she was bowing her head, Ruby realised. "Indeed, my lord. We're searching for any information that would show us a way home. We are completely lost."
"You have no idea where your home is?" Lord Eddard asked.
"Unfortunately, no. We don't know how we arrived here," Weiss replied. "We only remember ancient ruins of an unknown origin, and we hope that records of such or similar ruins will help us find a way to return home."
Ruby pressed her lips together in a slight frown. That was technically correct, since they didn't know how they had been transported here, but they knew what brought them here. Weiss, though, knew best how to talk to nobles - well, compared to the rest of the team - and Ruby trusted her. Most of the time, at least. Weiss wasn't perfect even if she wanted to be. "Our families must be frantic with worry," she said. Dad certainly would be. She hoped that Uncle Qrow wasn't drinking too much.
"The Night's Watch couldn't help them, but the Lord Commander thought you might be able to, Ned," Benjen cut in.
"Of course!" Lord Eddard took a deep breath and nodded. "Let me welcome you to Winterfell. These are my eldest son, Robb, and my ward, Theon Greyjoy."
While the two boys smiled and nodded, a man approached them with a tray with salt and bread.
No, bread and salt, Ruby corrected herself as Lord Eddard took a roll of bread and broke it into a few pieces, sprinkling salt over it. Benjen had explained how important that was, so she had to get it right. Once they'd eaten it, they were Lord Eddard's guests. "Thank you!" She beamed at him.
The bread was nice - fresh, although it wasn't warm any more - and the salt wasn't too much. Of course, she'd have preferred a cookie - she hadn't had any cookies since they had arrived in this world! She'd have to ask if they had any. Such a huge castle was bound to have cookies in it, right?
Benjen seemed relieved when this was over. Weird - things were going well. "So, how about you have them shown to the guest quarters while I tell you some news from the wall, Ned?"
Lord Eddard glanced at him, then nodded. "Of course. Robb, show Lady Ruby and her friends the guest quarters. And inform your mother that we have new guests."
"Yes, Father."
Ah, the redhead was his son! He looked kinda cute. And he blushed when he looked at her, which made him look even cuter.
Ruby felt relieved. They were in a Fantasy castle - with central heating! - and everyone was really helpful. Things were definitely looking up now!
"If you'll follow me, my lady?" Robb offered her his arm.
Ruby had seen that in those fantasy movies she didn't watch because they didn't have enough action even though the actors were handsome, and hooked her arm into his - and he was jerked to the side. Oops! She almost forgot her strength. "Sorry!" she told him. "My fault!"
"Ah…" He looked a bit confused. Maybe embarrassed.
Weiss whispered 'dolt!' behind her, but Ruby could exactly turn around and frown at her. "So… lead on?"
"Of course, Lady Ruby."
*****
Winterfell, The North, Westeros, 298 AC
The quarters were adequate, Weiss Schnee found after a brief inspection. For a 'Fantasy Castle', as Ruby called it, at least. The lack of modern amenities was grating - their scrolls had run out of power days ago, and there was no way to recharge them without tapping into their very limited Lightning Dust reserves, something they had to save for emergencies, like should they need such short-range communication or access to their files, like the pictures they had taken of the ruins before this started - but at least it was warm, and the presence of hot springs promised hot baths.
Weiss felt filthy after that trip. They had barely managed to maintain minimal hygiene! If she ever had to use cold water and a sponge to wash herself even once more, it would be one time too many.
"So… What do you think?" Ruby asked from one of the two beds - which used a straw mattress that must be filled with all sorts of things and creatures that shouldn't be near much less inside your bed. "Neat castle, huh?"
Weiss glanced at Blake, who was leaning against the door. Weiss hadn't sensed anyone observing them, but she wasn't really trained in using her Aura for that - that was a skill Huntresses usually acquired later during their career. Blake, on the other hand, was skilled at detecting eavesdroppers.
Her friend shook her head, though.
Good. Weiss took a deep breath. "They seem friendly. And they've welcomed us formally, so we're protected by guest right."
"And that's super-important!" Ruby said. "Benjen said so."
Weiss sighed softly. Ruby was correct - Benjen had told them that breaking guest right would dishonour an entire house, and Weiss didn't think he was lying, but… She was also very familiar with how laws and agreements could be bent and outright broken without the culprit suffering any backlash for it, as long as they were powerful and connected enough. And if Jacques Schnee was able to do it, Eddard Stark, as the absolute ruler of the entire region - one of the Seven Kingdoms forming the realm - certainly would be able to do it as well. "Just remember that guest right binds us as well. If we break it, we also lose its protection."
"Well, we won't break it!" Ruby replied with a wide smile.
"As long as that Greyjoy boy keeps his hands to himself," Yang added, hitting the palm of her hand with her fist without bothering to get up from where she was sprawled across her half of the bed. "He was leering at everyone."
Weiss suppressed a shudder at the memory. The boy had indeed looked at them as if he was picturing them naked - which he probably had been doing. And he hadn't been the only one who had done so, though he had been the most obvious.
"Well, Robb was a perfect gentleman," Ruby said.
Weiss scoffed. "He was checking out your legs."
"He did?" Ruby blushed.
Weiss pressed her lips together. Her friend and team leader was far too naive. "They're not used to Huntresses."
"Well, of course not - none of them have Aura."
"No, I mean, they are not used to women like us," Weiss corrected her. "Haven't you noticed? None of the guards were women."
"How could you tell with their clothes?" Ruby asked. "They were all so drab. The armour, I mean."
"Trust me," Weiss told her. "I could." Growing up in a kingdom renowned for its cold climate, and in a family where any faux pas was grounds for a lecture, she had quickly learned.
"Yeah," Yang added.
Blake nodded as well.
"Well, that's probably how they do things here." Ruby shrugged. "They'll get used to us."
Weiss hoped that Ruby was correct but couldn't help having doubts. "So do I. But remember: We're guests. You can't crush someone's balls if they annoy you."
"Well, we totally could. But you probably mean we shouldn't," Yang replied with a toothy grin.
Weiss took a deep breath. This wasn't the time to lose her temper over childish comments. "They might not realise that they are annoying you."
"Oh, I usually don't leave any doubt if someone's annoying me."
Ruby and Yang hadn't really gone anywhere but Vale, Weiss reminded herself. "What I am trying to tell you is that we can't expect them to know our customs and vice versa. What is perfectly polite for them and in line with keeping guest right might be annoying to us." Or worse.
"That's not exactly uncommon on Remnant, either," Blake said with a faint smirk.
Weiss shot her a glare. Her friend was correct about that - Weiss had experienced such situations far more than she wished - but this was important. They couldn't annoy much less offend their hosts! They needed their help to find a way home!
"So, we tell them about Remnant!" Ruby said. "That way, there aren't any misunderstandings!"
"We can't!" Weiss snapped. She straightened. Composure, she reminded herself. "I mean, we have to be careful what we tell the people here. We don't know if we can trust them, and revealing our weaknesses would endanger us all."
"I think we can trust Benjen and Ned. And Robb."
Weiss narrowed her eyes for a moment. The last thing they needed was some romantic entanglement. Ruby better not fall for some local boy who had grown up in a completely alien culture with who knew what weird views and expectations! "Even if we can trust them, can we trust everyone they trust? Word travels fast, even without scrolls. And we know from Benjen that the kingdom has seen two rebellions - civil wars! - in his lifetime."
"Well, yes, but…"
Blake cocked her head to the side and raised a hand. "Someone's coming."
Ah. Weiss smoothed her dress out - a dress in dire need of cleaning, even though the battleskirt had held up admirably during their journey so far, thanks to good craftsmanship and her aura - and straightened. Time to put her best face on.
Ruby got up as well. "Who is it?" she asked as she joined Weiss in the middle of the room, followed by Yang.
"It seems to be Lady Stark and her daughters," Blake said.
Oh. Weiss took a deep breath. This would be an important meeting. But she was ready.
"Oh, no!" she heard Blake mutter under her breath.
"What?" Weiss glanced at her. "What's wrong?"
Blake was tense - very tense. Was this an ambush? Weiss looked at the door, then at the bed against which Myrtenaster was leaning. Should they arm themselves?
"Blake?" Yang asked.
"They've got a dog with them!" Blake hissed.
Oh. Weiss relaxed.
"Oh?" Ruby perked up.
"Oh?" And Yang grinned.
Before Blake could say anything else, there was a knock on the door. "Lady Ruby?"
After a moment, Ruby replied: "Yes! Coming!"
Before Weiss could stop her, Ruby had dashed forward and opened the door. "Hi!" she said, beaming at the three - four - people outside. One woman, two girls and a guard. "Come in!" she added before the obvious leader, a redheaded woman in a high-quality gown, could say anything. "Everyone, we've got visitors!"
Weiss swallowed her grimace. This was probably - no, certainly - a faux pas, and it was her fault. She should have explained to Ruby that the leader of their group wasn't supposed to open the door themselves. Or act so… so Ruby-like. At least she hadn't squealed at the two dogs that the girls carried.
Time to mend the ruffled tempers. "Lady Stark, I presume," she said, bowing her head. Fortunately, the others followed her example. Even Blake, though Weiss didn't miss that she was fixated on the two dogs. Unfortunately, so was Ruby.
"You presume correctly. I am Catelyn Stark. These are my daughters, Sansa and Arya," Lady Stark said as she entered. The fourth person, a guard, stayed outside, Weiss noted.
Both girls - one about thirteen years old, the other a bit younger, Weiss estimated, though she didn't know how the life conditions in this kingdom would affect growth - dropped into curtsies. Weiss made a mental note of that.
"And these are Weiss Schnee, Blake Belladonna and Yang Xia Long. I am Ruby Rose. We're Team RWBY, but you already knew that, right?" Ruby nodded, then leaned forward. "And who are those adorable puppies?"
"Those are our dire wolves!" the younger girl, Aryan, said. "This is Nymeria. And that's Lady."
Wolves? Dire wolves? Weiss eyed the two more closely. Apparently, Ruby had been correct - those were, despite their size, puppies. Weiss wondered how large they would grow.
A hiss next to her, followed by Blake taking a step back, told her that she wasn't the only one wondering that. She really should get over her cynophobia. At least she wasn't running away. That would be a faux pas for sure.
"Arya." Lady Catelyn didn't frown, and her tone was even, but the girl still flinched.
It was obvious, at least to Weiss, that there would be a private scolding after this. She could sympathise from experience.
"Please have a seat!" Ruby said, pointing at the two chairs in the room, next to the small window. "I mean, it's your castle, so it's your room, technically, so I don't want to, ah, sound presumptuous…"
Lady Cately smiled, hopefully amused and not offended, and sat down. Ruby promptly sat down on the closer bed, and Weiss sighed as the two girls eyed each other, obviously unsure if and where they should sit down.
A subtle pinch and whispered hint straightened things out, though, and soon everyone but Blake, who was standing as far from the wolves as she could, trying to fade through the wall, was properly seated - Ruby on the chair, clearly trying not to let the puppies distract her, and the rest on the beds, split between guests and hosts.
"First, allow me to welcome you to Winterfell," Lady Catelyn said. "My lord husband has let me know that you were stranded in the wildings lands and lost your baggage."
"More or less, yes. We've made do," Ruby added. "We've got some furs and food from the wildlings, and the Night's Watch got us some more supplies, but it's not exactly…" She trailed off, glancing at Weiss.
"We only have what supplies we were carrying on us, my lady," Weiss replied. "We don't want to impose on you…"
"It's not an imposition at all," Lady Cately said as soon as Weiss trailed off. "You are our guests."
"We can help you out in return," Ruby offered at once. "We can hunt. Or if you need lots of wood chopped down, we can do that as well." She patted Crescent Rose.
Lady Catelyn looked irritated and slightly confused for a moment. "It would be shameful to have a noble lady working when she's our guest."
"Oh." Ruby blinked.
As Weiss had suspected. "Please excuse our ignorance, my lady. In our homeland, Huntresses like us are expected to offer their help wherever they might find themselves, whether the community needs them or not." She was bending the truth a little - or more than a little - but it was true. Best not to mention that Huntresses were generally remunerated for such help.
"Ah. Well, in the Seven Kingdoms, things are different." Lady Catelyn nodded slowly. "And we would be poor hosts if we would not provide you with suitable clothes."
The glance she sent at their attire, coupled with the way the girls were trying not to stare - the elder, Sansa, was blushing, Weiss noted - left no doubt that their clothes weren't deemed suitable for social occasions. Judging by the people they had seen on the way, their clothes probably were not deemed suitable for any occasion, though that might be explained by the locals' lack of Aura.
"We would be grateful," Weiss told her. A few dresses weren't much of an imposition, at least.
"Yeah," Yang added with a grin. "A girl wants to change her look sometimes, you know? Although we're always dressed to kill."
Lady Catelyn stared at her, and Sansa gasped. Arya, though, leaned forward. "Dressed to kill?"
"It's an idiom in our homeland, my lady," Weiss was quick to explain. "It means to dress very fashionable, in the latest style." There was no need to mention the other meanings of the expression - Lady Stark didn't strike her as the kind of woman who would appreciate her young daughters learning about those.
"Yeah," Yang confirmed, tossing her hair back.
"Oh." Arya sounded disappointed. Her puppy climbed up her lap to lick her face, and she pushed it down into her lap again with a giggle. "Down, Nymeria!"
"They don't mean actual killing, Arya," Sansa whispered, rolling her eyes. "They're ladies."
"We're Huntresses," Ruby said with a nod at the younger girl. "We don't kill people. Only monsters."
"We beat up people who deserve it, though," Yang added, slapping her fist into the palm of her hand. "Like bandits."
"You've fought bandits?" Arya straightened.
"Arya!" There would be a rather pointed scolding from Lady Stark later, in private, in Weiss's opinion.
"Yeah! When we were travelling south to the Wall, we were attacked by bandits," Ruby said. "We beat them, though."
"That's where we got the furs." Yang pointed at the pile of pelts in the corner. "Spoils of war."
"I see." Lady Catelyn nodded, though Weiss couldn't help feeling that the woman remained a little sceptical.
She was tempted to offer proof of their claims but refrained from it since Benjen had impressed the need to be a bit more discreet to avoid upsetting the locals.
Lady Catelyn subtly looked them over for a moment. "You were taken from your homeland and brought to foreign lands. That must have been a terrible experience. Especially for young women."
Weiss frowned slightly. The way she stressed that, she must mean something more than… Oh, no!
"Oh, it wasn't that bad," Ruby said. "It was mostly the surprise, you know? One moment, we were looking at the ruins, the next - poof - we were gone!"
Weiss cut in before Ruby could continue. She had to correct this misunderstanding at the start. "I can assure you, my lady, any distress we suffered was due to our dislocation, not because of anything of a, ah, more personal nature."
Ruby looked confused, but Yang nodded emphatically with a serious expression.
"I am relieved to hear that," Lady Catelyn said with a - seemingly - genuine smile.
Weiss also saw that Sansa suddenly gasped while Arya didn't quite seem to get it. Good. That could have been a very uncomfortable topic to sort out.
"I think I'm missing something…" Ruby frowned, looking from Lady Catelyn to Weiss and back.
"Ah…" Yang trailed off, glancing at Weiss.
Weiss glared back at her.
"Guys?" Ruby was frowning more profoundly now.
Weiss was very relieved when Nymeria suddenly slipped from Arya's grip and started towards Blake, yipping enthusiastically as she began to chase the girl around the room.
It was far easier to explain that Blake was deathly afraid of dogs, and yes, that that included wolves.
*****
Winterfell, The North, Westeros, 298 AC
Standing in the shadow of a tower on the inner wall, gazing at the courtyard below, without anyone present aware of her, Blake Belladonna smiled. She liked Winterfell, and not just because it was a vast castle that dominated the area it was built in and looked as if it had been taken straight out of some of her favourite novels, something she had only seen before in computer games and animated movies. No, she liked the castle because it was actually too big for its garrison - which was by design since, according to Benjen, it housed a lot more people during the long winters, which, again according to Benjen, could and did last years. Blake had no idea how that was possible, but even though she was fairly certain that Benjen was not quite as honest with them as Ruby seemed to think, albeit Blake suspected it was more a case of omitting parts rather than telling falsehoods, she was reasonably certain that Benjen wouldn't be lying about such an easily checked fact of life in Westeros.
Which she reminded herself to check anyway as soon as she had unfettered access to the local library. She was sorely missing her books; the one novel she had taken with her on the mission because she couldn't bear the thought of waiting to finish it until she returned she had read a dozen times by now. She could recite it from memory in her sleep and had done so, at least according to Yang, which meant she was fortunate it hadn't been one of her spicier novels; that would have been embarrassing.
As embarrassing as being spotted by one of the scarce guards on the wall, she reminded herself as she heard steps coming up the stairs inside the tower. The garrison was too small to effectively cover the castle's walls, but that didn't mean they didn't make an honest attempt anyway.
But they were not up to the task of spotting her; she was too skilled at this, and they had no idea about her capabilities. So when the door opened and the guard stepped out on the rampart, she had already used two clones to dart over to the other side, impossible to spot from his position or by anyone on the ground.
Blake herself, on the other hand, just had to take two steps to the side to have a perfect view of the courtyard where the guards and members of the household were training, allowing her to observe and estimate the skill level of the garrison.
Which wasn't very high, if she was honest, albeit higher than she had expected. Unlike most militia fighters on Remnant whom she had seen, both on missions for Beacon as well as during her time in the White Fang, those men - and they were exclusively men - were career soldiers, and Lord Stark obviously wasn't paying them to laze about and grow rusty. She rated them as about as skilled with their weapons, swords and spears today, as the average member of the Atlas military or SDC guard. Which meant that not even taken together, they posed a threat to even a first-year Huntress, of course, but that aside, they were doing well.
But next to the average guards - men-at-arms, as they were called by some - there were people down below who were more skilled. Lord Stark's eldest son and heir, Robb, who was sparring with the master-at-arms, a Ser Rodrick Cassel, father of the captain of the guards of the castle, was showing to be a quite talented opponent with his sword - more skilled than some students at Beacon, even, though without Aura, the outcome of any fight would still be a foregone conclusion.
Another boy was showing equal if not greater talent as well: Jon Snow, or so she had overheard during her first excursions. Pretty handsome, and not as loud or brash as most boys his age, as far as it seemed, he was apparently a bastard son of Lord Stark, something Robb's friend, the lecherous Theon, seemed almost as fond to mention as he was to talk about Blake and her friends' appearance and appeal when he thought Blake couldn't hear him, although he was not nearly quite as witty about either as he obviously thought he was.
And he was very fortunate that Yang's ears were not nearly as good as Blake's; if she had heard what he was saying, she would likely have done something regrettable about his ability to implement what he was talking about. As it was, Blake was sorely tempted to engineer an accident that would leave the boy in pain for some time, though given the lack of modern medicine, the risk of crippling him was far too high.
Although, she amended her thoughts with a grin, it might not become necessary; apparently, Robb had taken offence to his latest remark - about Ruby's legs - and the sparring match had grown a little heated as a result, so with Robb far more skilled than Theon, at least with blades, the lecherous boy would be nursing bruises for some time.
Snorting, she moved along the rampart to the lesser-used part of the castle, giving the kennels a wide berth. She had no intention at all to go near that cursed area full of dogs and, even worse, wolves, and dire wolves at that - apparently a breed that grew as large as horses according to the gossip of the servants she had overheard complaining about the appetites of the new pets of Lord Stark's children. She shuddered at the thought of a wolf as big as a beowulf.
And, speaking of those children… She shook her head as she spotted the second-youngest son of Lord Stark climbing the walls of a broken tower, something his family disapproved of vocally, as she had observed. The boy seemed determined to reach the top of the tower but he was rushing things a bit too much, in her opinion. He must be at the point where he had enough experience to feel so confident, he was getting slightly… not sloppy, just not as focused as one should be when, without Aura, a single mistake would see him falling to his death. He was barely ten years old, and she gave him even odds of reaching eleven years or not if he didn't wise up. It was not really her business, of course, but his parents', yet what person would she be if she closed her eyes to this potential tragedy?
Frowning, she checked for witnesses with eyes and nose - people here had a stronger body odour than back home, which, while often aggravating, also had advantages. Then she double-checked that the bloodthirsty howling monster Bran treated as a pet wasn't around before quickly jumping down from the ramparts. She didn't use her Semblance and landed in a crouch on the cobblestones below, light as a feather, then dashed across the empty yard here to the base of the tower.
In the meantime, the boy had continued to climb, clearly very familiar with the weathered stones forming the wall, and was about a third from the open window at the top. Should she wait here, in case he slipped? She narrowed her eyes, then decided against it. That wouldn't really serve as a lesson to the young climber. And he might not slip, anyway. Not today.
Instead, she entered the tower, confirming that it was deserted, then rushed up the winding stairs until she reached the room at the top, where she leaned against the wall next to the window and listened to Bran's heavy breathing coming closer and closer as he continued his advance up the wall.
Soon, she saw a small hand reach over the windowsill, grasping for purchase, followed by another, and then Bran's head appeared in the window as he pulled himself up.
"That's dangerous, you know."
He froze with a gasp, but his fingers didn't loosen, much less lose their grip on the windowsill. "Lady Blake!" In the blink of an eye, his scared expression morphed into a charming if mischievous and guilty grin. "What are you doing here?"
"Do your parents know you are climbing walls?" she asked, cocking her head at him.
"Ummm…" He pulled himself into the room, then took his time wiping dust from his clothes, blatantly trying to find a good answer to her question. "Yes, they do."
Technically correct. She snorted. "And do they approve of it?"
"Ah…" He flushed, which was answer enough. But then his lips shifted into a pout. "They worry over nothing. No one beats me at climbing!"
She raised her eyebrows at his boast.
The little scamp flushed some more, then grinned. "I've never seen you climb, Lady Blake."
"What makes you think I know how to climb?"
"You're always on the ramparts, and I never see you climb the stairs," he said.
"Are you watching all the stairs all the time?"
"Ah…" He pouted for a moment. "But can you climb?"
"I can."
"Better than I can?"
Ah, that was his game. In the days since Blake and her friends had arrived at Winterfell, Lord Stark's children had, all in their own ways, tried to satisfy their curiosity about them. As such attempts went, Bran's was better than most - for his age.
Blake grinned. "Follow me."
His face lit up as she walked down the stairs. He undoubtedly expected her to show off by climbing the same tower faster than he could, but she had something else in mind.
Ten minutes later, he was glaring at her between rubbing his posterior after yet another fall. "This is stupid! You can't climb this wall! It's much too smooth!"
Apparently, he didn't like bouldering. To be fair, the wall she had picked out was far smoother than the old tower. But it was also far lower. As Bran had demonstrated quite thoroughly, falling down from it was painful but not really dangerous.
She snorted, then went to demonstrate once more that, yes, she could climb the wall.
When he clenched his teeth and went back to trying to climb it, she smirked. That would occupy the little boy. And maybe teach him that he wasn't as good as he thought while she kept her ears peeled in case Bran might let slip some tidbits he had overheard from his parents.
And it was payback for setting his ravenous beast on her. If the monster had been just a little older, its teeth would have left deep gouges in her leg when it tried to gnaw it off. Even as a puppy, it was almost as bad as Zwei. She suppressed a shudder as she thought, briefly, of the corgi from hell that haunted Ruby and Yang's home - and, occasionally, their dorm, which Blake shared with them.
*****
Winterfell, The North, Westeros, 298 AC
Yang Xiao Long stretched as she walked across the yard. She noticed that Bran was, again, trying to climb a low wall in a corner. Emphasis on trying. She winced when she saw him fall down on his butt. That looked painful. But it wasn't any of her business.
"Yang!"
She turned her head and smiled when she saw Arya. The little girl was running at her, weaving through the people in the yard and almost running into a guy carrying water to the stables. Her little wolf was running after her, barely keeping up. Yang raised her hand and waved. "Yo."
Arya came to a stop in front of her. "Err… Hello! What are you doing?"
Yang liked the kid. She didn't try to talk all posh and stuff, like her sister. Or like Weiss. Just straight to the point. "I'm walking. Or I was, before you stopped me."
And Arya had an adorable pout, like Ruby had when she was little. "I mean, where are you going? Are you going to hunt?" She leaned a bit forward to peer at Yang's combat clothes.
"Nope." Yang shook her head. There weren't any monsters to hunt. At least, she hadn't heard about any.
"But you're wearing your hunting clothes. You're only supposed to wear them when you're hunting, aren't you?"
Ah, right. Lady Stark had been polite and diplomatic about it, but she'd made it clear that trousers were not 'proper garments' for women, guests or not. Or, rather, that anything but a dress that covered you from neck to toe was 'inappropriate'. Yang didn't really care for that kind of bullshit, but Weiss had gone off about guest right this and fitting in that, and that they had to compromise. Well, Yang knew all about how to use loopholes. "That's not quite right," she corrected the girl with a grin. "You're also supposed to wear your hunting clothes for training. How else would you be able to properly train, hm?" It wasn't as if you could fight in a dress that she'd rip to shreds just by stretching. At least Lady Stark had accepted that.
Arya blinked. Apparently, 'train as you'd fight' wasn't something she was familiar with. Well, she was a kid. "You're going to train?"
"Yep." Yang nodded and ran a hand through her hair, noting how the guys nearby were staring. "Check out if we can train there." It had been some time since they had last trained properly. They could go into the woods for a training session, but they would have to hold back some unless the locals needed a lot of firewood, and if they had to hold back anyway, they might as well train in the yard.
"Oh, you can! Everyone trains there!" Arya nodded enthusiastically, and her wolf barked. She seemed as excited as her owner.
"Well, my team isn't everyone," Yang said with a chuckle. "But let's check out the yard." Robb had shown them the area a few days ago, but they had just been passing through, and no one had been training at the time.
"Arya!"
"Jon!" Arya grimaced as a boy about Yang's age approached them, followed by another wolf puppy.
A handsome boy, Yang noted, if a bit too young, so she smiled at him. "Hi there. You must be Jon. I'm Yang."
He looked taken aback for a moment, blushed, then bowed his head. "Lady Yang."
Aw, too cute! "Call me Yang," she told him. Sure, they were supposed to fit in, but all that bowing and scraping and lady this and lord that made her feel as if she was in a period piece of the Great War. One without the correct weapons of the time, as Ruby would point out whenever there was a combat scene.
He nodded, then turned to Arya. "Lady Stark is looking for you. You have lessons today."
Arya ducked her head. "Can't you act as if you didn't find me? We're going to the training yard!"
"You're skipping school?" Yang laughed. "You're the delinquent of the family, huh?"
"Delinquent? What?" Arya looked confused.
"Of course not!" And Jon seemed worked up.
"It's just a manner of speaking," Yang told both. "What we call kids who don't always obey their parents."
"Ah!" Arya nodded. "Then I'm a delinquent!"
"Arya!" Jon hissed.
"I'm also a good host by showing our guest the way to the training yard!" Arya added. "That's more important than some boring needlepoint lessons."
"Arya."
"Jon!"
Yang was tempted to meddle but… this wasn't any of her business. So she watched while the two stared at each other.
Arya sighed first. "Alright." Looking like a condemned prisoner, she slunk off, her wolf puppy trailing after her with a whimper.
"Being an older sibling is hard, huh? They always go for the puppy dog eyes," Yang told him.
"What?"
"Arya reminded me of Ruby when she wanted more cookies or staying up longer," Yang explained. "She used the same sad expression to try and make me give in."
"Oh. It's not… I was merely passing along Lady Stark's request."
"Ah." Yang nodded and watched Arya enter the keep.
"Arya reminded you of your sister?" Jon asked after a moment.
"Well, after we lost Mom, it was basically just Ruby, Dad and me," Yang explained. And Uncle Qrow, but he was struggling with his own problems, so there was no need to go there. "So, we're very close. I wouldn't say I raised her, but… someone had to look after her, and I'm her big sister."
He nodded again with a wistful expression. Yang wondered if he had lost his mother as well - Blake hadn't heard anything about that, and it wasn't something Yang could just ask. Well, enough gloom and doom! "So, wanna head over to the training yard and watch the show?"
"The show?"
"The guys training, sparring, that stuff," she explained.
"I have nothing else to do."
She snorted. "That's just what a girl wants to hear when she's asking a boy to accompany her."
He blushed. "I didn't mean it… I mean…"
"I'm just yanging your chain, relax!"
He didn't laugh at her perfectly placed pun. And it wasn't because she had elbowed him - she had taken care to control her strength. Perhaps he was just the broody type. Well, some girls liked those boys.
While they walked across the yard, she caught him sneaking glances at her and grinned. "Like what you see?"
"I… I wasn't staring." And he was a lousy liar, too. She snorted at him, and he flushed again. "I am… Girls don't dress like that!"
"They don't dress like that here," she said. "It's normal back home."
"I can't imagine such a place."
"Really?" She smirked. He was too easy. Then again, he was the same age as Ruby, maybe even younger. "It's easy. Just imagine every girl you know wearing clothes like we do." She pushed her chest out to underline her point.
Ah, his face was redder than a tomato!
"That's… How can their families allow that?"
Yang frowned at that. "Hey! We fought a war about the right to wear what we want!" It wasn't as if she'd let anyone tell her what to wear. Well, maybe Coco - the girl knew her fashion.
"What?"
"Yeah. Back a few decades, there was the Great War over our rights to express ourselves. All four kingdoms went at it. We won." It was a bit more complicated, but Jon didn't need to know any details. It was ancient history, anyway.
"Your kingdom must be very different," he said, shaking his head.
"Oh, bet your ass it is!" She grinned, then focused on the training yard ahead of them. "Ah, look at that! Your brother's pretty good." Easily better than Jaune - he had that older guard he was fencing with down on the ground in no time.
"He is, yes."
Yang turned and leaned her back against the fence that surrounded the training yard. "How about you?"
"I am a passable swordsman."
"Could you take Robb?" Yang nodded toward his brother.
Jon didn't answer right away.
"I can take my little sister more often than not in a sparring match," she told him. "But she wins her share of our bouts."
"Another difference between your home and the North," he said. And he was back to brooding.
Yang was about to pry some more, but before she could think of the right way to pick at his attitude, someone else cut in. Someone unwelcome.
"Hey! Lady Yang!" Theon Greyjoy waved as he walked over to her. "Did you come to watch us spar?"
She straightened with a frown - not that he'd notice, with his eyes glued to her legs and chest. "I came to check out the training yard. See if it's suitable for training."
"I can assure you it is." He leaned on the fence between them, turning his back to Jon. "As the best archer in the castle, I should know."
"Lady Yang mentioned an interest in swordfighting," Jon said.
Theon scowled for a moment but didn't acknowledge the other boy. "What kind of training has caught your interest, my lady? As the heir to the Iron Islands, I would be only too happy to be of service!"
Oh, boy! Or boys! Usually, Yang didn't mind boys trying to impress her, but not if it involved weapons and no Aura to keep a fight from becoming bloody. "I just want to know if it would be safe for my team to spar here."
"Oh, don't worry - none here would dare harm you!" Theon's smile somehow looked more smarmy than Cardin's back at Beacon.
And Yang felt the same urge to introduce him to a few love taps from Ember Celica she got when Cardin annoyed her. We're guests here, she reminded herself. "I don't think that's a danger," she told him.
"Of course not! We would rather die than let a lady such as you get hurt!" He reached out to grab her hand, but she pulled it back.
The idiot had no clue about Huntresses.
"Theon?" Robb had noticed them and was walking over. "Oh, Lady Yang. Jon." He wiped his face, slightly sweaty, with his padded sleeve.
"Lady Yang is interested in the training yard, Robb," Theon told him.
And Lady Yang doesn't like it when boys speak for her without being asked to, Yang thought. Out loud, she said: "I would like to see if my friends and I can safely train here."
Robb was taken aback. "You are our guest! You are perfectly safe here, my lady!"
"Not what I meant," she said. "I'm not worried about us. I'm worried about damaging the yard."
Robb blinked, and Jon looked confused, but Theon laughed. "Oh, there's absolutely no chance of that, my lady! If all the guards have not damaged it, you won't do anything to it either."
Alright, to hell with not showing off! She wouldn't use Ember Celica, but she had to show that boy what he was dealing with. Yang flashed him a toothy smile, then looked at Robb. "Is that true? There's no chance that I could, say, accidentally punch a hole in the ground?"
"Ah…" Robb looked at her, then at the ground - packed sand - and then back at her. "Even if you did, it would be no trouble at all, my lady."
"Mind if I test that?" She slapped her hands together and stretched.
"Ah… you want to punch the ground?" Robb looked bewildered.
"Yeah." She nodded. "Only if there's no trouble if I do leave a hole."
"Ah, no, go ahead," Robb said.
"Robb!" Jon hissed.
"Are you going to punch the ground?" Theon sounded confused and amused.
Yang flexed her knees and jumped over the fence - and over Theon and Robb. In the air, she pulled her fist back - and punched when she hit the ground. Lightly, of course. Just enough to make a point.
When the sand her impact had thrown up settled, everyone was staring at her. Robb and the others were gaping, even Jon.
Yang made a point at looking at the small crater she was standing in, then at Robb. "Doesn't look that safe to me."
Robb shook his head, and Theon cursed under his breath.
"Yang! What did you do?"
Uh-oh. Here came Weiss, and she looked mad.
Yang flashed a smile at her friend. "I made an impression!"
*****
Chapter 3: Cultural Misunderstandings
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Chapter 3: Cultural Misunderstandings
'As mysterious as the origin of the Ruby Order are their customs. Contemporary records, owing to the often very obvious bias and agenda of their authors, are wildly divergent. Even the Citadel's own accounts, sadly, reflect this, as the feud between Maester Halmon Rivers and Maester Leyton Thornbud, which escalated into a brawl that damaged an entire library wing, illustrates. Nevertheless, with a modicum of deductive reasoning and common sense, one cannot fail to sort the truth from fiction. First, the accounts that the Ruby Order dressed and behaved like the most daring women from Dorne are obviously fabricated, a blatant attempt to damage their reputation. Not only would they have frozen to death in the North should they have dressed as scandalously, but my diligent research has unearthed the receipt for the dresses Lady Catelyn Stark had made for them shortly after their arrival at Winterfell, and it is inconceivable that a noblewoman like her would have spent so much money on dresses - this was before technological advances significantly reduced the cost of clothes - that she wouldn't have deemed appropriate attire for a lady.
Second, back then, it was common for political enemies to slander each other and their families by accusing them of libertine behaviour. It goes without saying that this would have applied to the Ruby Order as well, regardless of how they actually behaved. Nevertheless, it is clear that they came from a country with customs that vastly differed from those of Westeros since all sources, even the most disparaging, agree that all four maidens were very skilled fighters, able to match and surpass trained knights and that this was considered normal in their home country - something unheard of even in Dorne at the time.
Winterfell, The North, Westeros, 298 AC
In the privacy of her chambers, seated on her favourite chair and looking through her notes, Catelyn Stark cursed their newest guests. Not out loud, of course - her daughters were in the room, and it would have been a shameful display. They were their guests and deserved to be treated accordingly. But Team Ruby, as the four girls called themselves, was a source of both annoyance and worry for her. Their mere presence threatened to disrupt - was disrupting, she couldn't deny it any longer - the harmony of her household and the way she was running Winterfell, and did so right on the cusp of a royal visit! Catelyn should be focusing on preparing to receive King Robert and his court, ensuring that they could be housed and fed for the duration of their stay, that everything was perfect, instead of dealing with four… foreign noble girls with too much beauty and too little modesty or shame, she amended her first thought. Or common sense.
All members of the so-called 'Team Ruby', to a girl, were used to wearing the most scandalous clothes. Even Lady Weiss, the most… reasonable girl amongst them, saw nothing wrong with wearing skirts so short, even a courtesan from Braavos would baulk at showing off her legs in public like that! Or expose so much skin. And compared to her, the others were worse! Much worse, in the case of Lady Blake and 'Lady' Yang, who did not even wear skirts. Their leader, Lady Ruby, was not as shameless in her attire, although her clothes were still far from what would be considered appropriate, but her manners, or lack of them, made up for it in spades. She was far too friendly with the smallfolk and showed no care for her own station. Not that the others, except for Lady Weiss, were any better.
Really, if not for her good brother's introduction and private explanation, Catelyn would have never taken them for noblewomen! Noble ladies simply did not behave like that!
And yet, in the same way, their manners clearly betrayed their noble, if obviously foreign, upbringing. The way they reacted to the dresses Catelyn had ordered to be made for them, as well as their response to the treats Catelyn had stocked up in preparation for the royal visit, proved that. Only highborn ladies raised in such luxury that they had not the slightest idea of how much work and expense went into a single dress of high quality, and how much it cost to import such delicacies from foreign shores, would treat such gifts with such careless and guileless ignorance. No merchant, no matter how rich, would leave his daughters ignorant of the heartblood of their trade, and no smallfolk would be able to fake such an attitude. They had not been as rude as to complain, but they had not been able to hide that they considered such things common and were accustomed to them.
No, as much as it galled Catelyn to admit it, their guests, well three of them, were noblewomen. Which made their scandalous behaviour much worse, of course! They might have deigned to wear proper dresses for the shared meals, but they insisted on going out in public 'to train' in clothes that caused every man and growing boy in the vicinity to lose their wits. Even her own eldest, Robb, was all but panting after them whenever he saw them in such garb - and Catelyn knew very well that none such meeting was accidental!
How was Catelyn supposed to prepare Winterfell to host King Robert and his family and court like this?
"Mother, did you see Yang and Ruby spar today? I could barely see them move, they were so fast! Some thought they were fighting a duel!"
And, worse, they were training to fight, setting an example that was corrupting even those members of Catelyn's family who weren't lusting after them. Arya would be following them around all day if not for the diligent efforts of Catelyn and Septa Mordane, and Bran was hardly any better. At least he wasn't climbing the towers any more, something she apparently had Lady Blake to thank. But she couldn't dwell on her son when her daughter needed instructions.
"When did you visit the training yard, Arya?" Catelyn frowned at the unruly girl.
"Ah… I saw it from the keep!"
A blatant lie. Catelyn sighed. "I told you to keep away from the training yard. It's no place for a lady."
"But Team Ruby trains there!"
Something Cately cursed every day. The spectacle attracted and distracted far too many of the smallfolk who should be working hard so Winterfell could host royalty.
"They're foreigners, Arya." Sansa, at least, was sensible. "Their customs are different. Ladies don't fight."
"I bet Lady Mormont and her daughters train every day, too!" Arya sniffed. "And they're our bannermen!"
Another thing Catelyn had come to curse.
"And King Aegon the Conqueror's wives - Queen Visenya and Queen Rhaenys - both fought on the battlefield! They must have been training as well." Arya went on, then stuck her tongue out at her sister.
The Targaryens had much to answer for, Catelyn thought. To think she had hoped Arya would dedicate herself to study more. If she had known what kind of books her daughter would study… She would have to talk to Maester Luwin about what books he let her family read.
"And they were mad," Sansa told her sister. "All Targaryens were mad, one way or the other."
That wasn't entirely correct, Catelyn knew, but correcting her daughters would send the wrong message, especially so close to the arrival of King Robert, whose stance on the former ruling dynasty was widely known. Things would be tense enough with Lady Weiss even though she had assured Catelyn that she was not descended from Valyria despite her appearance. Catelyn still wasn't certain that the girl was telling the truth; with their dragons, the Valyrians had been able to travel far, and there were rumours about the Blackfyres surviving…
"They still conquered all of Westeros!"
"Because they had dragons!"
"Team Ruby doesn't need dragons! They are stronger than dragons!"
"Children!" Catelyn raised her voice a bit, and her daughters fell silent. She did not wish to hear Arya ramble about Team Ruby again. She didn't need a reminder of what those girls were capable of. Just seeing the hole one of them had made with her bare fists had shocked her. If Catelyn had not listened to her good brother's seemingly fantastical tales and had insulted their guests because of their attire and manner, who knew what would have happened? She took a deep breath. "Our guests follow their customs, and we follow our own, as is proper."
Sansa nodded with a gloating glance at her sister, but Arya scowled. "That doesn't make sense. Why is it proper for them but not for us?"
"Arya! They're not like us!" Sansa replied before Catelyn could say anything. "It's just like what is proper for knights is not proper for ladies!"
"And what about female knights?" Arya shot back.
"There are no female knights! No woman was ever knighted!"
"Who cares about being knighted! There were plenty of women warriors!"
Catelyn rubbed the bridge of her nose. Team Ruby had a lot to answer for. At least, women training with weapons wasn't unheard of in the North. And, if she was honest, she couldn't blame Arya's interest in those things, as unseemly as it was, on their guests. Despite Catelyn's best efforts, her youngest daughter had wanted to learn how to wield a sword for years before the arrival of Lady Ruby and her friends. And while any nobles in the South would be appalled at such notions, Ned's bannermen were more tolerant of such foibles, so her marriage prospects shouldn't be affected too much.
"Just because they can do something doesn't mean you can do it, Arya!"
"Lady Yang said I can do anything if I really want it!"
"Lady Yang is wrong!"
Wrong and a bastard, Catelyn added in her head while her daughters huffed at and then tried to ignore each other. That was the worst part of it. Those foreigners treated the bastard sister of their leader as one of their own - Lady Ruby even deferred to her illegitimate sister at times, heedless of the danger to her own position! What if this gave Ned's bastard ideas about his station in life? The boy was already talking far too often with that girl, and the other girls seemed to see nothing wrong with that, either…
If only Benjen had never brought them to Winterfell!
No, that was a foolish notion. If her good brother hadn't escorted Team Ruby to Winterfell, someone might have provoked them into a fight - or a feud.
Or, worse, welcomed them as guests. That could cause a catastrophe.
Catelyn didn't think the four girls were more powerful than a dragon, but it was obvious even to her untrained eyes, and Ned and Benjen had both confirmed it, that whatever side the girls joined would win any battle against any foe with ease. If they allied with an ambitious or disgruntled bannerman of Ned… No, despite all the trouble they caused, it was a good thing that they were guests in Winterfell.
But that was merely a temporary solution. If Catelyn's family was to be safe from such a threat, they needed a much closer tie to the girls. As much as she disliked the idea, she had to talk with Ned about this. And she had to sound out their guests, although she would have to be very subtle about it, to ensure that they would not take offence at any offer. They had peculiar customs, after all.
Winterfell, The North, Westeros, 298 AC
"...and then you sweep their legs out from under them, and when they are on their back, you gut them - their belly is not armoured." Ruby Rose finished demonstrating the move - without a training dummy; they were far too easy to break, she had found out - and beamed at Robb while she let Crescent Rose come to rest on her shoulders. Weiss hadn't been happy about the whole thing, but Ruby was pleased that her team didn't have to hide their training sessions any more - well, not completely, at least. They were still not going all-out when sparring in the training yard. No Semblances, no Dust, so Ruby wasn't fighting Blake's clones or dodging Weiss's glyphs when training, and Yang couldn't power up from taking blows. Not that she would do that anyway in the training yard - she would probably punch a hole through both walls or so.
"I see." Robb slowly nodded. "They sound very dangerous."
"Ah, if you know how to handle them, they're easy!" Ruby smiled. "There are Grimm which are a lot more dangerous! We had to fight some of them on our Initiation at Beacon."
He looked surprised. "You had to fight such monsters to enter your school?"
"Yeah!" Ruby nodded. "Beacon only takes the best. You have to show that you have what it takes. If you aren't prepared to fight Grimm, you'll fail." Unless you got really lucky, like Jaune.
"That sounds like a rather strict regime," Robb said. "Dangerous as well."
"Ah, it's not that dangerous. They don't let just anyone try." Ruby shrugged. "Anyway, that's how you fight a Boarbatusk. Of course, flipping a Grimm on their back and gutting them works for other Grimm as well, but most of them, you can usually kill straight away." She gave Crescent Rose a quick check to see if she had to fix anything. Not that there was a real danger of that, her baby was built too well to get damaged in a spar, but a Huntress who didn't regularly check her gear wasn't gonna live long in the field.
As expected, her baby was fine. She patted the shaft and collapsed it to carry it on her back.
"So, you said you were trained by your family as a Huntress since you were little?"
"Yes!" Ruby nodded and grabbed a cup of water from the jar she had brought with them. "Well, mostly by Uncle Qrow. He taught me how to wield Crescent Rose. Dad helped as well - he teaches at the Combat School in our home, so he knows his stuff - but Qrow's an active Huntsman."
She frowned a little. Was she telling Robb too much? They weren't supposed to tell the people here too much about Remnant, but… Robb was nice. He could be trusted. Besides, it wasn't as if they'd ever meet Uncle Qrow or Dad until Team RWBY had found a way home, and then it wouldn't matter what they knew about Remnant one way or the other because Ruby and her friends would be home! Home with their families! Who probably thought they were dead… No, Ruby wasn't going there. She was going home.
"Is he as powerful as you are?"
"Uncle Qrow or Dad? They're better. Both went to Beacon." Dad wasn't active any more, but he still kept his skills up. And Uncle Qrow was, well, Uncle Qrow. One of the best Huntsmen in Remnant.
"They must be impressive knights."
"Ah, well…" Ruby shrugged again with a smile. "They're just family, you know?" Family she was missing. Family she would see again.
"I know." Robb nodded with a serious expression, and Ruby wondered if she had said something weird.
"Anyway, there are lots of different Grimm, and that's why we train like we do - we need to be ready for anything." She grinned. "It takes a lot of training to fight as a unit."
"That's what Father says as well."
Ruby drank another cup of water. If only they had soda here! But they didn't even have coffee. The closest was tea with honey, but she couldn't get that here in the training yard for some reason.
Then she stretched. "Well, I think I'm done with the training today."
"May I escort you to your chambers to change, my lady?"
"Sure. I'll probably not change, though. Not yet. I'm probably gonna just hang around on my bed for a bit. Maybe sketch a bit - Blake found some paper and charcoal stuff - and some of your weapons are interesting." And just begged to be improved - well, if she had access to decent facilities, which she didn't.
Robb blushed for some weird reason. Had Ruby said something wrong? Oh!
"That means I am going to lie down on the bed and sketch. I'm not, like, gonna hang down from the ceiling and do it upside down or something," she explained. "Want to come as well? In case I have questions about weapons? Or are you busy?"
He was blushing harder. "Ah, I am not sure that I should enter your chamber, my lady."
"Why not?"
"It wouldn't be proper."
That again! As if anything would happen just because they were in her room! Sure, Robb was cute, but he wasn't that cute, and Ruby wasn't about to do anything like that anyway. Besides, he probably would die from blushing if a girl kissed him - she might have to warn Yang about that. She still wanted to pick his brain about the local weapons, though.
So she grinned. "But we would have a chaperone!" Weiss had explained about that.
"We would?"
"Yes!" She beamed at him. "Weiss will be there as well. And probably Blake and Yang." They usually met in their room before lunch.
"Ah, but… they can't serve as a chaperone."
"Why not?" That made no sense.
He grimaced. "Well, they are… maidens."
"So?"
"A chaperone needs to be older," he explained. Or, in this case, didn't.
"There's a minimum age?" Drat. "That makes no sense."
"But it is so."
"But why?"
"Ah… it's because an older woman can, well… She wouldn't be… vulnerable?"
She frowned at him. Was that a joke? She patted Crescent Rose to make a point.
"I mean, she wouldn't be… tempted?"
"Tempted?" Ruby frowned. Oh. Tempted like that. She chuckled. "Wow, you've never met a cougar then!"
"A cougar?"
Drat. Now she had to explain what a cougar was. She blushed. At least she knew what they were, thanks to Yang and a few TV shows. "Cougars are, ah, older women who're looking for, well… younger men."
Robb seemed shocked.
It didn't look like Ruby would be able to pick his brain about the local weapons today. Maybe she could write down her questions and ask them over lunch or dinner?
Winterfell, The North, Westeros, 298 AC
Weiss Schnee had been raised as a member of the Schnee family. The ability to control herself, to keep her temper in check, and to remain polite and composed no matter the situation, had been drilled into her since her earliest childhood, and the lessons had been reinforced by her interactions with her father. She had faced deadly danger without losing her cool.
And yet, she was pushed to her limits. The stress of keeping calm was almost unbearable. Nothing had ever challenged her self-control like this. She took a deep breath and kept smiling as she slowly nodded. "Indeed, Sansa, Lady is a very well-trained wolf. And a beauty to boot." And so fluffy, Weiss really, really wanted to just scoop the adorable pup up, hug it and bury her face in its soft fur!
"Oh, yes! She's the best!" Sansa beamed proudly while Lady rolled on her back, wriggled her paws in the air, and presented her belly with her tongue lolling out of her mouth.
Weiss trembled at the sight. But she was a Schnee. Keeping cool was ingrained in her very soul. So, she did not break down but calmly turned to Sansa and asked: "May I pet her?"
"Of course! You don't need to ask, Weiss!"
Weiss knelt down, perhaps a little too fast, and she might have ruffled the puppy's fur a little too enthusiastically according to her family's standards, but who would be able to tell? She sighed with bliss as she indulged her base urges and petted the furball. To think Blake was terrified of those fluffy little puppies! "Who's a good girl? Who's a good girl? You are!" she whispered before she could stop herself.
But all good things came to an end, and so she had to - very reluctantly - leave the little wolf alone and resume her stroll through Winterfell with Sansa and Jeyne. Appearances had to be upheld, after all. Weiss had no doubt that Lady Catelyn and Lord Eddard would not be nearly as welcoming or tolerant, much less helpful, should they find out that the members of Team RWBY weren't nobility - or that while their countries were called kingdoms, they were so in name only, the monarchies having been abolished long ago. Weiss was aware that she could not judge Westeros by the standards and history of Remnant, but she was certain that none of the nobles here, especially not those ruling realms larger than any kingdom back home, would react positively to the very notion of abolishing monarchies and aristocracies. Their disdain towards the neighbouring continent, which apparently was ruled by city-states with differing forms of government, had been very clear when the topic had come up.
And they needed the help of the Starks - and other local noblemen - if they wanted to find a way home. They knew almost nothing about this world. So, they had to stay in the good graces of their hosts.
On the other hand, it was not hard to pretend. Good manners had been drilled into Weiss from birth as well, and Sansa and her friend Jeyne were polite and friendly girls, if just a tiny bit too childish for her taste. Although that might merely be envy - it was obvious that their relationship with their parents, especially in Sansa's case, was vastly more loving than Weiss's own. Weiss's father would only care about her going missing and presumed dead - she knew what the odds were if you disappeared in the wilderness - in as much as it affected SDC's bottom line, and her mother would likely just drink even more. Winter would be devastated, of course - her sister was the only family member who cared. What sadness Whitley might feel would be outweighed by his glee at being Father's heir…
She schooled her features. She wouldn't let her envy influence her. "It's a beautiful day, isn't it?" she commented.
"Oh, yes." Sansa nodded. "I hope the day the king and his court arrive will be equally beautiful; it would be a shame if their first impression of Winterfell were spoilt by rain."
Jeyne nodded.
"If it happens, you could take solace in the fact that any home looks more welcoming if you can seek shelter from the rain in it," Weiss said. "Or from a snowstorm."
"It's not yet winter," Sansa said. "So, let us pray to the Seven Who Are One that there won't be snow."
Weiss nodded with a calm expression. Back home, she would have laughed at the comment, sure that it was meant as a jest, but Sansa might be serious, and Weiss didn't want to give offence to the girl. Religion was a thorny topic.
"Do you pray to the Seven Above as well, Lady Weiss?" Jeyne asked.
Weiss bent down to pet Lady while she weighed her answer. She could lie, but… Her father once said that it was best to be honest about matters when you didn't know enough to convincly make up something, and while she loathed him, she couldn't deny that this at least was useful if situative advice. "No. I rarely pray at all."
"You don't?" Sansa seemed surprised, and Jeyne mirrored her expression.
"Religion is a very private affair in my home," Weiss said. That wasn't a lie, technically. "People worship many gods, and sometimes, that's liable to cause tensions." Mostly when it involved the god of the Faunus, and that was because of politics, but it was close enough.
"Ah, like the differences between the Old Gods and the new?" Jeyne asked.
"Before the Andals came, all of Westeros worshipped the Old Gods, but nowadays, they're only worshipped in the North," Sansa explained. "The godswoods in the South were mostly burned."
Wonderful. Weiss made a mental note to tell the others to avoid getting involved in religious discourses. She could only hope they'd listen to that better than they listened to her about not showing off… "Let's talk about something less… serious," she said. "What are your brothers up to? Is Bran still trying to climb the smoothest wall in the castle?"
Both girls giggled. "He is! He can be quite stubborn when he wants to be," Sansa said.
"And he keeps falling down. One day, he won't be able to sit down for a meal," Jeyne added with a snort. "But do you really want to talk about little boys when there are far more interesting older boys to talk about?"
Ah. That was familiar terrain. Weiss laughed. "What did Robb and Jon do?"
Sansa frowned for a moment, Weiss noted, before nodding with a sly smile. "Well, Robb seems to spend quite some time with Lady Ruby."
Weiss nodded. "She's interested in his views and knowledge of your weapons."
"Is that all she's interested in?" Sansa asked. They had stopped to chat in the covered passage to the keep, and she petted Lady while a pair of servants stepped around them while carrying baskets full of vegetables.
Weiss laughed again. "To the great chagrin of Yang, Ruby seems only interested in weapons."
"Really?" Now Sansa was frowning.
"Yes." Which was a good thing, of course. If Ruby became infatuated with a local boy, that could greatly complicate things. She was the leader of their team but also the most inexperienced of them when it came to relationships. "She's still young, after all."
"She's older than we are," Sansa replied.
Ah. Weiss suppressed a wince. That had been a gaffe, but she could recover from this. "Compared to the rest of the team," she tried to correct her remark.
"Still, at her age, doesn't she have any suitors?" Jeyne asked.
"I think between Crescent Rose and Yang, a number of boys might feel too intimidated to approach her," Weiss said.
"What? Is Yang sabotaging her prospects?" Sansa sounded shocked.
Weiss frowned. That was… a weird take on this. Why would she think that Yang would do such a thing? Different customs, she reminded herself. But she had to correct this assumption. "No, no. Yang's just looking out for her. Some boys would want to take advantage of her."
"Ah." Sansa nodded. "In the absence of their father, and with no brothers around, it falls to Yang to watch over her?"
"Well, she is the older sister." Weiss smiled. "My own older sister did watch out for me as well." Until she joined the Atlas military. To be fair, Winter had tried to keep looking out for Weiss, but after leaving the manor and the family, there hadn't been much she could have done.
"Oh? You have an older sister?" Sansa asked.
"Winter, yes." Weiss nodded.
"Your sister is named Winter?"
"Yes." Weiss had to suppress another frown when the girls giggled at that. It was a good name.
But the girls quickly grew more serious - or curious, to be more precise. "Do you miss her?"
"I do," Weiss replied. "Although I've been missing her since she left our home for the military - to join the army," she added when both girls seemed confused. "She chose to become a soldier."
"Oh." Sansa seemed surprised. "Not a Huntress? I thought women who trained to fight became Huntresses in your home kingdom."
"Men and women serve in my kingdom's army. It's an honourable profession," Weiss said. No matter what her father thought, both served to protect their homes and those who couldn't protect themselves. You could scarcely find a more honourable calling.
"Of course," Sansa said.
"So, what about you? Do you have suitors?" Jeyne asked after a moment.
Weiss laughed. Did Jaune count? "None I would approve of," she said. "I am not planning to marry anyway."
Both girls gasped. "You don't want to marry?"
"No," Weiss said and bent down to pet Lady. Sansa had told her she didn't need to ask, hadn't she?
"And what does your father think about that?"
Weiss froze for a moment. "What my father thinks about that doesn't matter."
She hoped she wasn't lying - and then wondered why the girls seemed shocked.
Winterfell, The North, Westeros, 298 AC
Blake Belladonna was so close to heaven and yet so far away. She was surrounded by books - the greatest collection in the entire North according to Maester Luwin, and she had no reason to doubt him, Winterfell being the seat of the North's ruler - but she wasn't allowed to touch, much less read them, as if she were a heathen who would damage them out of negligence or use them as paperweights or… She pushed the brief memory of a particular bunk bed's construction away. She would never do that with books she had yet to read, or books she didn't own, and Maester Luwin didn't have to know this or he would never let her peruse Winterfell's library. Sure, she was aware that, legally, the library belonged to Lord Stark, but as an avid reader, she also knew that this was a mere technicality and that the one to control access to a library was the librarian, and in Winterfell, this was the resident Maester.
Who was currently smiling at her in an increasingly and frustratingly familiar apologetic manner. "As much as I wish to tell you otherwise, Lady Blake, I must sadly confess that I still haven't found any descriptions or sketches that match what you seek. But please, rest assured that I will continue my search."
Of that, she had no doubt. The Maester - a local kind of scholar, or the closest thing these lands seemed to have to scientists, according to Weiss - had been intrigued by the tale of their translocation, and Blake was quite certain that he would not stop searching for any hint or clue that might help them find the ruins they searched until he either found one or had gone through the last of his books and texts.
Of course, if he weren't the only one pursuing this task, it wouldn't take nearly as long, but Blake couldn't really disagree with both Lord Eddard and Weiss's opinion that such a search should be conducted with all necessary discretion. Of course, that wouldn't prevent Blake or her friends from helping, if not for Luwin's - in Yang and Ruby's case quite understandable - reluctance to let strangers touch his books and for the fact that none of Team RWBY was able to read the local script. Which meant that even if Blake were allowed to touch the books surrounding her, she wouldn't be able to read them.
She had started to learn the alphabet, but it was vexingly complicated and, even worse, there were no standards; apparently, as Luwin had explained, people wrote as they spoke, and with linguistic drift, which he had had to explain, and many local dialects, just knowing the alphabet wasn't enough; you also had to know the author's preferred pronunciation. And that was just for the Common Tongue, as the dominant language of Westeros was known. Many books detailing ancient civilisations were written in foreign languages, some of them dead.
So, for the foreseeable future, they had to rely on Luwin if they wanted to find a way to return home. Blake smiled at him. "Thank you for your effort, Maester. We really appreciate it."
"Oh, please, it's the least I can do for our guests."
"Then I don't want to hold you up any longer." With a smile at the old man and a last glance at the tantalising bounty lining the shelves here, she left.
She had barely set a foot outside the keep when she spotted Bran walking towards her. At once, she checked with eyes, ears and nose if that horrible monstrous wolf masquerading as a pet was in the vicinity. It wasn't, and she let out a soft sigh of relief before raising her eyebrows at the young boy.
"Hello, Lady Blake!" He smiled at her, and she was once again reminded that once he grew up, he'd likely be a heartbreaker, provided he could keep his boyish charm. "What are you doing?"
She was doing many things - watching the people and looking for potential trouble, noting who deferred to whom, which people were friendly to everyone and who reserved such for their superiors - but it wouldn't do to tell Bran that. "Enjoying the fresh air," Blake replied instead. It was not, technically, untrue - between the large number of people that lived in the keep and the lack of deodorants amongst the majority of the population, any time spent outside was a relief for her nose.
"Sounds boring. Are you going to train?"
"Perhaps later today." Blake had to hand it to the kid; he was quite determined. But if he hoped to make her spill any secrets, he would end up disappointed; she had spent years in the White Fang and knew how to talk without revealing anything she didn't want to be revealed.
"And what are you doing until then?"
She shrugged. "I don't know yet. What do you have planned for today?"
"Uhm." He scrunched his nose. Either he hadn't made any plans, or he was trying to think of an answer that wouldn't reveal them. "Enjoying the fresh air?" he asked more than he said.
She snorted with amusement at his cheek; for his age, he was quite cunning as well, but he still was a little boy. "So, you're planning to shadow me all day?"
"Shadow you?" He blinked.
Ah. "It means following me around," she explained, "and watching what I am doing."
"Well, if you ask me to…" He flashed her a wide grin.
She could lose him easily - she now knew the castle well enough to plot a route that would allow her to dash into cover as soon as she broke his line of sight - but what would be the point? She could observe the castle's population and how they interacted with each other with Bran tagging along; the boy was unlikely to notice what she was doing.
And she could see what he let slip at the same time.
"If you can keep up, be my guest." She grinned and picked the closest stairs to reach the ramparts above, hustling all the way.
To his credit, he kept up quite well, though he was breathing heavily when they reached the top. But he recovered quickly and was already babbling when they reached the spot overlooking the training yard.
At this time of the day, soon after breakfast, few people were training down below, and Blake made a mental note to tell the others, in case they wanted to train together with relative - although only relative when compared to the crowds they drew in the afternoon - privacy. Of course, she suspected that if Team RWBY truly wanted to train privately, they could request to be left alone - Lady Catelyn might even be eager to grant them that, based on some dressing-downs Blake had overheard her - but that would be abusing their positions as guests here.
Next to half a dozen guards, Theon and Robb were present as well, both looking a bit worse for wear, likely due to imbibing more alcohol than they could easily handle the evening before. Blake felt her ears twitch slightly under her customary bow when she listened in to what the two boys probably considered witty banter.
"So, did you take up your lady love on the invitation to her chambers?"
"Theon! Of course not!"
"Why not, Robb?"
"Lady Ruby didn't intend it to be taken like you hint at!"
"What else could she have intended when she invited you to her chamber and said that there wouldn't be a chaperone? Did you think she wanted to talk about weapons?"
"Yes, in fact, I believe so!"
"Robb, there's only one sword she's interested in, and that's yours."
Blake frowned at the crude comment. Theon either honestly didn't know anything about Ruby - a not very implausible assumption, in her opinion, given the boy's obvious cultural biases - or he knew and was yanking Robb's chain while spreading rumours about Ruby, likely out of wounded pride since none of Team RWBY had not returned his advances.
"Theon!" Well, whatever his aim, he had succeeded in rousing Robb's anger - the heir of Winterfell was glaring at his friend. "You don't talk like that about our guests!"
"Robb! Everyone talks like that about them!"
Blake narrowed her eyes. While she had overheard similar remarks from the castle's staff, they had usually been made in private, not in the middle of the training yard. Hadn't Theon or Robb noticed how the half a dozen guards who were training were neglecting their forms so they could focus on listening to the two boys?
"Not in my presence they don't dare!" Robb spat.
Judging by the way the guards closest to him grimaced and pretended to be busy doing drills, he was correct.
"What are you looking at?" Bran asked. "It's just regular training. Nothing exciting. They're just hitting the posts."
"I'm watching Robb and Theon," she replied without taking her eyes off the two boys.
"They aren't sparring either."
"But they might be - Robb looks angry."
"He does? I can't tell from here." Bran peered over the ramparts.
Blake focused on the talk down below again and tried to ignore the noise from the other people nearby. If only she didn't have to hide her second set of ears; it would be much easier to listen to such talks if she could move her ears!
"Besides, aren't you supposed to court her?" Theon asked. "If you take her maidenhood, marrying her is the honourable thing to do, isn't it?"
"What?" Robb gaped at him. "How… How can you suggest such a thing! Father would tan my hide if I dishonoured a guest!"
"Oh, come on - do you think your father would mind if you married Lady Ruby and secured an alliance with her people?"
"Of course, he would! That's not how such things are done!"
"As long as it works out, who cares?"
"My family does."
Blake hissed under her breath. What was this talk about marriage? Had Ruby…? No, Blake's friend would have mentioned it if she had such an interest in Robb. Blake could imagine her floating into their chamber with the sappiest expression on her face and declaring her undying love or something if she had finally met someone she liked more than her weapon.
So, what was up with this? The way Robb had reacted, Theon's claims were not completely off-base…
She turned to look at Bran and narrowed her eyes. Maybe she should find out what Bran knew about this.
This was great! It had taken a while to convince the locals - smash a few training dummies without trying, and they all think you have no self-control - but Yang finally got someone not from Team RWBY to spar with her!
She grinned as she ducked under Jon's swing, then dodged his follow-up. The boy was good. Sure, she had to hold back, like, a ton, since without Aura, he was slow as ass, but skill was skill.
She met his shield bash head-on with a block and a slight grunt - she had to be careful not to wreck his shield. "Nice one!"
He grunted in return, then stabbed at her legs without hesitation.
She jumped back, and he managed not to stick his sword into the packed earth of the training yard. "Finally realised you won't hurt me?" And it had only taken a deliberate ducking into a swing to convince him that it was safe to spar without her wearing armour. Next step, make him use his real sword!
But first, finish the sparring match! She faked a straight to his head, forcing him to retreat and raise his shield, then circled around his sudden blind side. He managed to move in time to bring his sword to bear, but she ducked under his wild swing, then darted forward, inside his reach, pushed his shield to the side and stopped her headbutt just before she connected. "Tag! You're out!"
And for good measure, she then dropped into a leg sweep that sent him to the ground - although almost head first. Oops! She had to control her strength a little more, but that was on him to get her so worked up.
"Good match!" She beamed at him as she offered him a hand up.
He didn't take it and got up himself, but he nodded curtly, so that was vocal agreement for him.
"Made me work for it," she said as she stepped over to the water can.
"You held back a lot."
"Sure did. None of us would learn anything if I went all-out." She filled one cup, downed it, then another, and grabbed a sausage and a bread roll from the basket next to the can.
Another grunt. She wasn't sure if that was agreement or just wounded male pride. Jon wasn't as bad as Theon. He didn't pout like Robb, either, when the boy was shown, again, that Huntresses were in their own league. But Jon was a local boy, and Yang had yet to meet a local boy who hadn't some issues with getting beaten by a girl. Talk about weird!
She turned both bread and sausage into a sort of not-hot hot dog and wolved it down. Jon drank a cup of water in the meantime, and the 'smallfolk' who had been watching returned to whatever they were supposed to be doing. "Seriously, you did well." For someone without Aura. "Should spar with Blake or Weiss sometime. They both use swords."
"Maybe." That meant 'No' in Jon-speak.
"Suit yourself." She shrugged. Of Team RWBY, she was the only one Jon sparred with. He probably had a crush, but as long as he didn't make a move, she didn't have to shoot him down. He was cute, but he was like Ruby's age. And a bit too brooding for her taste - if she did shoot him down, he might stop sparring, too.
"It wouldn't be appropriate," he said after a moment.
"What?" She frowned. He was sparring with her, wasn't he? So, why wouldn't it be appropriate to spar with the rest of her team? Oh, Hell! Had she missed another cultural difference, as Weiss called it? "Don't tell me sparring is, like, asking someone out!"
"What?" He stared at her.
"You know, start a relationship," she explained.
"What? No!" He flushed like a tomato and shook his head almost as wildly as Zwei after a bath. "It's…" He took a deep breath and lowered his voice. "I'm a bastard," he said through what Yang was sure were clenched teeth.
"Actually, you're too nice for…" She blinked. "Oh, you mean literally." She nodded. "Yeah, we've heard. Still doesn't tell me why you can't spar with the others."
"A bastard shouldn't spar with high-born ladies. I wouldn't spar with you if you hadn't… insisted so strongly." And that pout showed he was Robb's brother.
She grinned at him. Sure, yelling 'Defend yourself!' and jumping at him had maybe been a bit much, but sue her - she liked sparring, and she liked fighting new guys! He wasn't laughing, though, so she turned serious as well. "Sorry to hear that."
He shrugged. "You don't have to feel sorry for me."
He obviously was feeling sorry for himself, but she wasn't gonna needle him over it. That was his business.
He must have caught a clue, though, since he narrowed his eyes at her for a moment. Then he sighed. "I am a bastard. I can't change that."
"It's not as if it's your fault you were born." People blaming kids for their parents were idiots, in her book.
Another half-glare, another sigh, and he nodded. "I just wish I knew my mother."
Oh. Yang knew that feeling. And she knew better than to step on that landmine. But she could sympathise - and did. "Yeah. My own - I mean, the woman who gave birth to me - ran away and left me with Dad when I was a baby. Haven't seen her since. Don't even know if she's still alive." She shrugged as if it was no big deal. But it was. But, thinking of family made her think of Dad. He would be broken. Worse than he had been after Mom hadn't returned from a mission. Now he'd think both Ruby and Yang were dead… She clenched her teeth and took a deep breath. Brooding about stuff she couldn't change right now was pointless.
He must have noticed her mood but he didn't push her on it either, and they just stayed there, silent, for a while, staring at the wall until it got too gloomy for her, and she went back to the rest of her team. It was about time for lunch, anyway - or would be, soon.
But when she entered their room, ready to apologise for having forgotten the time while sparring - not that there was a clock to use, anyway - she wasn't scolded by Weiss for being late. Instead, Ruby jumped up from her bed and rushed to her. "Yang! We've got a problem! A huge problem!"
"What?" Yang tensed. Had someone broken into their room? They had taken a few precautions, like hiding the stuff they couldn't carry with them where normal people couldn't easily get it, but…
"They want to marry us off!"
What?
Weiss sighed. "What the dolt is trying to say is that our hosts apparently plan to ask for the hand in marriage of at least one of us, presumably to forge an alliance with our team and, although that's conjuncture, our home kingdom."
Yang blinked. "Seriously?"
"Yes!" Ruby nodded several times with a pained expression. "Blake overheard them! And Bran confirmed it!"
"Bran? The little boy?" Yang asked. What did little boys know about such things?
"He confirmed that alliances here are done by marrying two family members," Blake said. "Which fits what I overheard from the talk between Theon and Robb."
"And Robb might try to seduce me to trap me in a marriage! I don't want to marry anyone, Yang! I'm too young! And I don't like Robb that way!" Ruby shook her head.
Yang winced. Ruby was going a bit too fast here.
"You don't have to marry anyone, Ruby," Weiss said. "None of us do."
"You said we had to compromise and honour their customs!"
"Not to that extent. Besides, you heard Blake - Robb rejected Theon's idea and said Lord Stark would never condone such underhanded means!"
"And what about not-underhanded means? Overhanded means? What if they just ask for my hands? Hand?" Ruby flitted over to stare at Weiss.
"Then you tell them you're not going to marry anyone," Weiss replied.
"I'm not good at telling people no!"
"Then learn how to tell people no, dolt!"
"Or let me tell them for you," Yang said, bumping her fists together. She clenched her teeth. If anyone tried to do anything underhanded like that with her sister… Well, there would be no holding back on Yang's part! They would have to scrape whoever it was from the ground. And probably the walls and ceiling as well!
'As mysterious as the origin of the Ruby Order are their customs. Contemporary records, owing to the often very obvious bias and agenda of their authors, are wildly divergent. Even the Citadel's own accounts, sadly, reflect this, as the feud between Maester Halmon Rivers and Maester Leyton Thornbud, which escalated into a brawl that damaged an entire library wing, illustrates. Nevertheless, with a modicum of deductive reasoning and common sense, one cannot fail to sort the truth from fiction. First, the accounts that the Ruby Order dressed and behaved like the most daring women from Dorne are obviously fabricated, a blatant attempt to damage their reputation. Not only would they have frozen to death in the North should they have dressed as scandalously, but my diligent research has unearthed the receipt for the dresses Lady Catelyn Stark had made for them shortly after their arrival at Winterfell, and it is inconceivable that a noblewoman like her would have spent so much money on dresses - this was before technological advances significantly reduced the cost of clothes - that she wouldn't have deemed appropriate attire for a lady.
Second, back then, it was common for political enemies to slander each other and their families by accusing them of libertine behaviour. It goes without saying that this would have applied to the Ruby Order as well, regardless of how they actually behaved. Nevertheless, it is clear that they came from a country with customs that vastly differed from those of Westeros since all sources, even the most disparaging, agree that all four maidens were very skilled fighters, able to match and surpass trained knights and that this was considered normal in their home country - something unheard of even in Dorne at the time.
- A Treatise On The Ruby Order, by Maester Kennet Bracken
*****
Winterfell, The North, Westeros, 298 AC
In the privacy of her chambers, seated on her favourite chair and looking through her notes, Catelyn Stark cursed their newest guests. Not out loud, of course - her daughters were in the room, and it would have been a shameful display. They were their guests and deserved to be treated accordingly. But Team Ruby, as the four girls called themselves, was a source of both annoyance and worry for her. Their mere presence threatened to disrupt - was disrupting, she couldn't deny it any longer - the harmony of her household and the way she was running Winterfell, and did so right on the cusp of a royal visit! Catelyn should be focusing on preparing to receive King Robert and his court, ensuring that they could be housed and fed for the duration of their stay, that everything was perfect, instead of dealing with four… foreign noble girls with too much beauty and too little modesty or shame, she amended her first thought. Or common sense.
All members of the so-called 'Team Ruby', to a girl, were used to wearing the most scandalous clothes. Even Lady Weiss, the most… reasonable girl amongst them, saw nothing wrong with wearing skirts so short, even a courtesan from Braavos would baulk at showing off her legs in public like that! Or expose so much skin. And compared to her, the others were worse! Much worse, in the case of Lady Blake and 'Lady' Yang, who did not even wear skirts. Their leader, Lady Ruby, was not as shameless in her attire, although her clothes were still far from what would be considered appropriate, but her manners, or lack of them, made up for it in spades. She was far too friendly with the smallfolk and showed no care for her own station. Not that the others, except for Lady Weiss, were any better.
Really, if not for her good brother's introduction and private explanation, Catelyn would have never taken them for noblewomen! Noble ladies simply did not behave like that!
And yet, in the same way, their manners clearly betrayed their noble, if obviously foreign, upbringing. The way they reacted to the dresses Catelyn had ordered to be made for them, as well as their response to the treats Catelyn had stocked up in preparation for the royal visit, proved that. Only highborn ladies raised in such luxury that they had not the slightest idea of how much work and expense went into a single dress of high quality, and how much it cost to import such delicacies from foreign shores, would treat such gifts with such careless and guileless ignorance. No merchant, no matter how rich, would leave his daughters ignorant of the heartblood of their trade, and no smallfolk would be able to fake such an attitude. They had not been as rude as to complain, but they had not been able to hide that they considered such things common and were accustomed to them.
No, as much as it galled Catelyn to admit it, their guests, well three of them, were noblewomen. Which made their scandalous behaviour much worse, of course! They might have deigned to wear proper dresses for the shared meals, but they insisted on going out in public 'to train' in clothes that caused every man and growing boy in the vicinity to lose their wits. Even her own eldest, Robb, was all but panting after them whenever he saw them in such garb - and Catelyn knew very well that none such meeting was accidental!
How was Catelyn supposed to prepare Winterfell to host King Robert and his family and court like this?
"Mother, did you see Yang and Ruby spar today? I could barely see them move, they were so fast! Some thought they were fighting a duel!"
And, worse, they were training to fight, setting an example that was corrupting even those members of Catelyn's family who weren't lusting after them. Arya would be following them around all day if not for the diligent efforts of Catelyn and Septa Mordane, and Bran was hardly any better. At least he wasn't climbing the towers any more, something she apparently had Lady Blake to thank. But she couldn't dwell on her son when her daughter needed instructions.
"When did you visit the training yard, Arya?" Catelyn frowned at the unruly girl.
"Ah… I saw it from the keep!"
A blatant lie. Catelyn sighed. "I told you to keep away from the training yard. It's no place for a lady."
"But Team Ruby trains there!"
Something Cately cursed every day. The spectacle attracted and distracted far too many of the smallfolk who should be working hard so Winterfell could host royalty.
"They're foreigners, Arya." Sansa, at least, was sensible. "Their customs are different. Ladies don't fight."
"I bet Lady Mormont and her daughters train every day, too!" Arya sniffed. "And they're our bannermen!"
Another thing Catelyn had come to curse.
"And King Aegon the Conqueror's wives - Queen Visenya and Queen Rhaenys - both fought on the battlefield! They must have been training as well." Arya went on, then stuck her tongue out at her sister.
The Targaryens had much to answer for, Catelyn thought. To think she had hoped Arya would dedicate herself to study more. If she had known what kind of books her daughter would study… She would have to talk to Maester Luwin about what books he let her family read.
"And they were mad," Sansa told her sister. "All Targaryens were mad, one way or the other."
That wasn't entirely correct, Catelyn knew, but correcting her daughters would send the wrong message, especially so close to the arrival of King Robert, whose stance on the former ruling dynasty was widely known. Things would be tense enough with Lady Weiss even though she had assured Catelyn that she was not descended from Valyria despite her appearance. Catelyn still wasn't certain that the girl was telling the truth; with their dragons, the Valyrians had been able to travel far, and there were rumours about the Blackfyres surviving…
"They still conquered all of Westeros!"
"Because they had dragons!"
"Team Ruby doesn't need dragons! They are stronger than dragons!"
"Children!" Catelyn raised her voice a bit, and her daughters fell silent. She did not wish to hear Arya ramble about Team Ruby again. She didn't need a reminder of what those girls were capable of. Just seeing the hole one of them had made with her bare fists had shocked her. If Catelyn had not listened to her good brother's seemingly fantastical tales and had insulted their guests because of their attire and manner, who knew what would have happened? She took a deep breath. "Our guests follow their customs, and we follow our own, as is proper."
Sansa nodded with a gloating glance at her sister, but Arya scowled. "That doesn't make sense. Why is it proper for them but not for us?"
"Arya! They're not like us!" Sansa replied before Catelyn could say anything. "It's just like what is proper for knights is not proper for ladies!"
"And what about female knights?" Arya shot back.
"There are no female knights! No woman was ever knighted!"
"Who cares about being knighted! There were plenty of women warriors!"
Catelyn rubbed the bridge of her nose. Team Ruby had a lot to answer for. At least, women training with weapons wasn't unheard of in the North. And, if she was honest, she couldn't blame Arya's interest in those things, as unseemly as it was, on their guests. Despite Catelyn's best efforts, her youngest daughter had wanted to learn how to wield a sword for years before the arrival of Lady Ruby and her friends. And while any nobles in the South would be appalled at such notions, Ned's bannermen were more tolerant of such foibles, so her marriage prospects shouldn't be affected too much.
"Just because they can do something doesn't mean you can do it, Arya!"
"Lady Yang said I can do anything if I really want it!"
"Lady Yang is wrong!"
Wrong and a bastard, Catelyn added in her head while her daughters huffed at and then tried to ignore each other. That was the worst part of it. Those foreigners treated the bastard sister of their leader as one of their own - Lady Ruby even deferred to her illegitimate sister at times, heedless of the danger to her own position! What if this gave Ned's bastard ideas about his station in life? The boy was already talking far too often with that girl, and the other girls seemed to see nothing wrong with that, either…
If only Benjen had never brought them to Winterfell!
No, that was a foolish notion. If her good brother hadn't escorted Team Ruby to Winterfell, someone might have provoked them into a fight - or a feud.
Or, worse, welcomed them as guests. That could cause a catastrophe.
Catelyn didn't think the four girls were more powerful than a dragon, but it was obvious even to her untrained eyes, and Ned and Benjen had both confirmed it, that whatever side the girls joined would win any battle against any foe with ease. If they allied with an ambitious or disgruntled bannerman of Ned… No, despite all the trouble they caused, it was a good thing that they were guests in Winterfell.
But that was merely a temporary solution. If Catelyn's family was to be safe from such a threat, they needed a much closer tie to the girls. As much as she disliked the idea, she had to talk with Ned about this. And she had to sound out their guests, although she would have to be very subtle about it, to ensure that they would not take offence at any offer. They had peculiar customs, after all.
*****
Winterfell, The North, Westeros, 298 AC
"...and then you sweep their legs out from under them, and when they are on their back, you gut them - their belly is not armoured." Ruby Rose finished demonstrating the move - without a training dummy; they were far too easy to break, she had found out - and beamed at Robb while she let Crescent Rose come to rest on her shoulders. Weiss hadn't been happy about the whole thing, but Ruby was pleased that her team didn't have to hide their training sessions any more - well, not completely, at least. They were still not going all-out when sparring in the training yard. No Semblances, no Dust, so Ruby wasn't fighting Blake's clones or dodging Weiss's glyphs when training, and Yang couldn't power up from taking blows. Not that she would do that anyway in the training yard - she would probably punch a hole through both walls or so.
"I see." Robb slowly nodded. "They sound very dangerous."
"Ah, if you know how to handle them, they're easy!" Ruby smiled. "There are Grimm which are a lot more dangerous! We had to fight some of them on our Initiation at Beacon."
He looked surprised. "You had to fight such monsters to enter your school?"
"Yeah!" Ruby nodded. "Beacon only takes the best. You have to show that you have what it takes. If you aren't prepared to fight Grimm, you'll fail." Unless you got really lucky, like Jaune.
"That sounds like a rather strict regime," Robb said. "Dangerous as well."
"Ah, it's not that dangerous. They don't let just anyone try." Ruby shrugged. "Anyway, that's how you fight a Boarbatusk. Of course, flipping a Grimm on their back and gutting them works for other Grimm as well, but most of them, you can usually kill straight away." She gave Crescent Rose a quick check to see if she had to fix anything. Not that there was a real danger of that, her baby was built too well to get damaged in a spar, but a Huntress who didn't regularly check her gear wasn't gonna live long in the field.
As expected, her baby was fine. She patted the shaft and collapsed it to carry it on her back.
"So, you said you were trained by your family as a Huntress since you were little?"
"Yes!" Ruby nodded and grabbed a cup of water from the jar she had brought with them. "Well, mostly by Uncle Qrow. He taught me how to wield Crescent Rose. Dad helped as well - he teaches at the Combat School in our home, so he knows his stuff - but Qrow's an active Huntsman."
She frowned a little. Was she telling Robb too much? They weren't supposed to tell the people here too much about Remnant, but… Robb was nice. He could be trusted. Besides, it wasn't as if they'd ever meet Uncle Qrow or Dad until Team RWBY had found a way home, and then it wouldn't matter what they knew about Remnant one way or the other because Ruby and her friends would be home! Home with their families! Who probably thought they were dead… No, Ruby wasn't going there. She was going home.
"Is he as powerful as you are?"
"Uncle Qrow or Dad? They're better. Both went to Beacon." Dad wasn't active any more, but he still kept his skills up. And Uncle Qrow was, well, Uncle Qrow. One of the best Huntsmen in Remnant.
"They must be impressive knights."
"Ah, well…" Ruby shrugged again with a smile. "They're just family, you know?" Family she was missing. Family she would see again.
"I know." Robb nodded with a serious expression, and Ruby wondered if she had said something weird.
"Anyway, there are lots of different Grimm, and that's why we train like we do - we need to be ready for anything." She grinned. "It takes a lot of training to fight as a unit."
"That's what Father says as well."
Ruby drank another cup of water. If only they had soda here! But they didn't even have coffee. The closest was tea with honey, but she couldn't get that here in the training yard for some reason.
Then she stretched. "Well, I think I'm done with the training today."
"May I escort you to your chambers to change, my lady?"
"Sure. I'll probably not change, though. Not yet. I'm probably gonna just hang around on my bed for a bit. Maybe sketch a bit - Blake found some paper and charcoal stuff - and some of your weapons are interesting." And just begged to be improved - well, if she had access to decent facilities, which she didn't.
Robb blushed for some weird reason. Had Ruby said something wrong? Oh!
"That means I am going to lie down on the bed and sketch. I'm not, like, gonna hang down from the ceiling and do it upside down or something," she explained. "Want to come as well? In case I have questions about weapons? Or are you busy?"
He was blushing harder. "Ah, I am not sure that I should enter your chamber, my lady."
"Why not?"
"It wouldn't be proper."
That again! As if anything would happen just because they were in her room! Sure, Robb was cute, but he wasn't that cute, and Ruby wasn't about to do anything like that anyway. Besides, he probably would die from blushing if a girl kissed him - she might have to warn Yang about that. She still wanted to pick his brain about the local weapons, though.
So she grinned. "But we would have a chaperone!" Weiss had explained about that.
"We would?"
"Yes!" She beamed at him. "Weiss will be there as well. And probably Blake and Yang." They usually met in their room before lunch.
"Ah, but… they can't serve as a chaperone."
"Why not?" That made no sense.
He grimaced. "Well, they are… maidens."
"So?"
"A chaperone needs to be older," he explained. Or, in this case, didn't.
"There's a minimum age?" Drat. "That makes no sense."
"But it is so."
"But why?"
"Ah… it's because an older woman can, well… She wouldn't be… vulnerable?"
She frowned at him. Was that a joke? She patted Crescent Rose to make a point.
"I mean, she wouldn't be… tempted?"
"Tempted?" Ruby frowned. Oh. Tempted like that. She chuckled. "Wow, you've never met a cougar then!"
"A cougar?"
Drat. Now she had to explain what a cougar was. She blushed. At least she knew what they were, thanks to Yang and a few TV shows. "Cougars are, ah, older women who're looking for, well… younger men."
Robb seemed shocked.
It didn't look like Ruby would be able to pick his brain about the local weapons today. Maybe she could write down her questions and ask them over lunch or dinner?
*****
Winterfell, The North, Westeros, 298 AC
Weiss Schnee had been raised as a member of the Schnee family. The ability to control herself, to keep her temper in check, and to remain polite and composed no matter the situation, had been drilled into her since her earliest childhood, and the lessons had been reinforced by her interactions with her father. She had faced deadly danger without losing her cool.
And yet, she was pushed to her limits. The stress of keeping calm was almost unbearable. Nothing had ever challenged her self-control like this. She took a deep breath and kept smiling as she slowly nodded. "Indeed, Sansa, Lady is a very well-trained wolf. And a beauty to boot." And so fluffy, Weiss really, really wanted to just scoop the adorable pup up, hug it and bury her face in its soft fur!
"Oh, yes! She's the best!" Sansa beamed proudly while Lady rolled on her back, wriggled her paws in the air, and presented her belly with her tongue lolling out of her mouth.
Weiss trembled at the sight. But she was a Schnee. Keeping cool was ingrained in her very soul. So, she did not break down but calmly turned to Sansa and asked: "May I pet her?"
"Of course! You don't need to ask, Weiss!"
Weiss knelt down, perhaps a little too fast, and she might have ruffled the puppy's fur a little too enthusiastically according to her family's standards, but who would be able to tell? She sighed with bliss as she indulged her base urges and petted the furball. To think Blake was terrified of those fluffy little puppies! "Who's a good girl? Who's a good girl? You are!" she whispered before she could stop herself.
But all good things came to an end, and so she had to - very reluctantly - leave the little wolf alone and resume her stroll through Winterfell with Sansa and Jeyne. Appearances had to be upheld, after all. Weiss had no doubt that Lady Catelyn and Lord Eddard would not be nearly as welcoming or tolerant, much less helpful, should they find out that the members of Team RWBY weren't nobility - or that while their countries were called kingdoms, they were so in name only, the monarchies having been abolished long ago. Weiss was aware that she could not judge Westeros by the standards and history of Remnant, but she was certain that none of the nobles here, especially not those ruling realms larger than any kingdom back home, would react positively to the very notion of abolishing monarchies and aristocracies. Their disdain towards the neighbouring continent, which apparently was ruled by city-states with differing forms of government, had been very clear when the topic had come up.
And they needed the help of the Starks - and other local noblemen - if they wanted to find a way home. They knew almost nothing about this world. So, they had to stay in the good graces of their hosts.
On the other hand, it was not hard to pretend. Good manners had been drilled into Weiss from birth as well, and Sansa and her friend Jeyne were polite and friendly girls, if just a tiny bit too childish for her taste. Although that might merely be envy - it was obvious that their relationship with their parents, especially in Sansa's case, was vastly more loving than Weiss's own. Weiss's father would only care about her going missing and presumed dead - she knew what the odds were if you disappeared in the wilderness - in as much as it affected SDC's bottom line, and her mother would likely just drink even more. Winter would be devastated, of course - her sister was the only family member who cared. What sadness Whitley might feel would be outweighed by his glee at being Father's heir…
She schooled her features. She wouldn't let her envy influence her. "It's a beautiful day, isn't it?" she commented.
"Oh, yes." Sansa nodded. "I hope the day the king and his court arrive will be equally beautiful; it would be a shame if their first impression of Winterfell were spoilt by rain."
Jeyne nodded.
"If it happens, you could take solace in the fact that any home looks more welcoming if you can seek shelter from the rain in it," Weiss said. "Or from a snowstorm."
"It's not yet winter," Sansa said. "So, let us pray to the Seven Who Are One that there won't be snow."
Weiss nodded with a calm expression. Back home, she would have laughed at the comment, sure that it was meant as a jest, but Sansa might be serious, and Weiss didn't want to give offence to the girl. Religion was a thorny topic.
"Do you pray to the Seven Above as well, Lady Weiss?" Jeyne asked.
Weiss bent down to pet Lady while she weighed her answer. She could lie, but… Her father once said that it was best to be honest about matters when you didn't know enough to convincly make up something, and while she loathed him, she couldn't deny that this at least was useful if situative advice. "No. I rarely pray at all."
"You don't?" Sansa seemed surprised, and Jeyne mirrored her expression.
"Religion is a very private affair in my home," Weiss said. That wasn't a lie, technically. "People worship many gods, and sometimes, that's liable to cause tensions." Mostly when it involved the god of the Faunus, and that was because of politics, but it was close enough.
"Ah, like the differences between the Old Gods and the new?" Jeyne asked.
"Before the Andals came, all of Westeros worshipped the Old Gods, but nowadays, they're only worshipped in the North," Sansa explained. "The godswoods in the South were mostly burned."
Wonderful. Weiss made a mental note to tell the others to avoid getting involved in religious discourses. She could only hope they'd listen to that better than they listened to her about not showing off… "Let's talk about something less… serious," she said. "What are your brothers up to? Is Bran still trying to climb the smoothest wall in the castle?"
Both girls giggled. "He is! He can be quite stubborn when he wants to be," Sansa said.
"And he keeps falling down. One day, he won't be able to sit down for a meal," Jeyne added with a snort. "But do you really want to talk about little boys when there are far more interesting older boys to talk about?"
Ah. That was familiar terrain. Weiss laughed. "What did Robb and Jon do?"
Sansa frowned for a moment, Weiss noted, before nodding with a sly smile. "Well, Robb seems to spend quite some time with Lady Ruby."
Weiss nodded. "She's interested in his views and knowledge of your weapons."
"Is that all she's interested in?" Sansa asked. They had stopped to chat in the covered passage to the keep, and she petted Lady while a pair of servants stepped around them while carrying baskets full of vegetables.
Weiss laughed again. "To the great chagrin of Yang, Ruby seems only interested in weapons."
"Really?" Now Sansa was frowning.
"Yes." Which was a good thing, of course. If Ruby became infatuated with a local boy, that could greatly complicate things. She was the leader of their team but also the most inexperienced of them when it came to relationships. "She's still young, after all."
"She's older than we are," Sansa replied.
Ah. Weiss suppressed a wince. That had been a gaffe, but she could recover from this. "Compared to the rest of the team," she tried to correct her remark.
"Still, at her age, doesn't she have any suitors?" Jeyne asked.
"I think between Crescent Rose and Yang, a number of boys might feel too intimidated to approach her," Weiss said.
"What? Is Yang sabotaging her prospects?" Sansa sounded shocked.
Weiss frowned. That was… a weird take on this. Why would she think that Yang would do such a thing? Different customs, she reminded herself. But she had to correct this assumption. "No, no. Yang's just looking out for her. Some boys would want to take advantage of her."
"Ah." Sansa nodded. "In the absence of their father, and with no brothers around, it falls to Yang to watch over her?"
"Well, she is the older sister." Weiss smiled. "My own older sister did watch out for me as well." Until she joined the Atlas military. To be fair, Winter had tried to keep looking out for Weiss, but after leaving the manor and the family, there hadn't been much she could have done.
"Oh? You have an older sister?" Sansa asked.
"Winter, yes." Weiss nodded.
"Your sister is named Winter?"
"Yes." Weiss had to suppress another frown when the girls giggled at that. It was a good name.
But the girls quickly grew more serious - or curious, to be more precise. "Do you miss her?"
"I do," Weiss replied. "Although I've been missing her since she left our home for the military - to join the army," she added when both girls seemed confused. "She chose to become a soldier."
"Oh." Sansa seemed surprised. "Not a Huntress? I thought women who trained to fight became Huntresses in your home kingdom."
"Men and women serve in my kingdom's army. It's an honourable profession," Weiss said. No matter what her father thought, both served to protect their homes and those who couldn't protect themselves. You could scarcely find a more honourable calling.
"Of course," Sansa said.
"So, what about you? Do you have suitors?" Jeyne asked after a moment.
Weiss laughed. Did Jaune count? "None I would approve of," she said. "I am not planning to marry anyway."
Both girls gasped. "You don't want to marry?"
"No," Weiss said and bent down to pet Lady. Sansa had told her she didn't need to ask, hadn't she?
"And what does your father think about that?"
Weiss froze for a moment. "What my father thinks about that doesn't matter."
She hoped she wasn't lying - and then wondered why the girls seemed shocked.
*****
Winterfell, The North, Westeros, 298 AC
Blake Belladonna was so close to heaven and yet so far away. She was surrounded by books - the greatest collection in the entire North according to Maester Luwin, and she had no reason to doubt him, Winterfell being the seat of the North's ruler - but she wasn't allowed to touch, much less read them, as if she were a heathen who would damage them out of negligence or use them as paperweights or… She pushed the brief memory of a particular bunk bed's construction away. She would never do that with books she had yet to read, or books she didn't own, and Maester Luwin didn't have to know this or he would never let her peruse Winterfell's library. Sure, she was aware that, legally, the library belonged to Lord Stark, but as an avid reader, she also knew that this was a mere technicality and that the one to control access to a library was the librarian, and in Winterfell, this was the resident Maester.
Who was currently smiling at her in an increasingly and frustratingly familiar apologetic manner. "As much as I wish to tell you otherwise, Lady Blake, I must sadly confess that I still haven't found any descriptions or sketches that match what you seek. But please, rest assured that I will continue my search."
Of that, she had no doubt. The Maester - a local kind of scholar, or the closest thing these lands seemed to have to scientists, according to Weiss - had been intrigued by the tale of their translocation, and Blake was quite certain that he would not stop searching for any hint or clue that might help them find the ruins they searched until he either found one or had gone through the last of his books and texts.
Of course, if he weren't the only one pursuing this task, it wouldn't take nearly as long, but Blake couldn't really disagree with both Lord Eddard and Weiss's opinion that such a search should be conducted with all necessary discretion. Of course, that wouldn't prevent Blake or her friends from helping, if not for Luwin's - in Yang and Ruby's case quite understandable - reluctance to let strangers touch his books and for the fact that none of Team RWBY was able to read the local script. Which meant that even if Blake were allowed to touch the books surrounding her, she wouldn't be able to read them.
She had started to learn the alphabet, but it was vexingly complicated and, even worse, there were no standards; apparently, as Luwin had explained, people wrote as they spoke, and with linguistic drift, which he had had to explain, and many local dialects, just knowing the alphabet wasn't enough; you also had to know the author's preferred pronunciation. And that was just for the Common Tongue, as the dominant language of Westeros was known. Many books detailing ancient civilisations were written in foreign languages, some of them dead.
So, for the foreseeable future, they had to rely on Luwin if they wanted to find a way to return home. Blake smiled at him. "Thank you for your effort, Maester. We really appreciate it."
"Oh, please, it's the least I can do for our guests."
"Then I don't want to hold you up any longer." With a smile at the old man and a last glance at the tantalising bounty lining the shelves here, she left.
She had barely set a foot outside the keep when she spotted Bran walking towards her. At once, she checked with eyes, ears and nose if that horrible monstrous wolf masquerading as a pet was in the vicinity. It wasn't, and she let out a soft sigh of relief before raising her eyebrows at the young boy.
"Hello, Lady Blake!" He smiled at her, and she was once again reminded that once he grew up, he'd likely be a heartbreaker, provided he could keep his boyish charm. "What are you doing?"
She was doing many things - watching the people and looking for potential trouble, noting who deferred to whom, which people were friendly to everyone and who reserved such for their superiors - but it wouldn't do to tell Bran that. "Enjoying the fresh air," Blake replied instead. It was not, technically, untrue - between the large number of people that lived in the keep and the lack of deodorants amongst the majority of the population, any time spent outside was a relief for her nose.
"Sounds boring. Are you going to train?"
"Perhaps later today." Blake had to hand it to the kid; he was quite determined. But if he hoped to make her spill any secrets, he would end up disappointed; she had spent years in the White Fang and knew how to talk without revealing anything she didn't want to be revealed.
"And what are you doing until then?"
She shrugged. "I don't know yet. What do you have planned for today?"
"Uhm." He scrunched his nose. Either he hadn't made any plans, or he was trying to think of an answer that wouldn't reveal them. "Enjoying the fresh air?" he asked more than he said.
She snorted with amusement at his cheek; for his age, he was quite cunning as well, but he still was a little boy. "So, you're planning to shadow me all day?"
"Shadow you?" He blinked.
Ah. "It means following me around," she explained, "and watching what I am doing."
"Well, if you ask me to…" He flashed her a wide grin.
She could lose him easily - she now knew the castle well enough to plot a route that would allow her to dash into cover as soon as she broke his line of sight - but what would be the point? She could observe the castle's population and how they interacted with each other with Bran tagging along; the boy was unlikely to notice what she was doing.
And she could see what he let slip at the same time.
"If you can keep up, be my guest." She grinned and picked the closest stairs to reach the ramparts above, hustling all the way.
To his credit, he kept up quite well, though he was breathing heavily when they reached the top. But he recovered quickly and was already babbling when they reached the spot overlooking the training yard.
At this time of the day, soon after breakfast, few people were training down below, and Blake made a mental note to tell the others, in case they wanted to train together with relative - although only relative when compared to the crowds they drew in the afternoon - privacy. Of course, she suspected that if Team RWBY truly wanted to train privately, they could request to be left alone - Lady Catelyn might even be eager to grant them that, based on some dressing-downs Blake had overheard her - but that would be abusing their positions as guests here.
Next to half a dozen guards, Theon and Robb were present as well, both looking a bit worse for wear, likely due to imbibing more alcohol than they could easily handle the evening before. Blake felt her ears twitch slightly under her customary bow when she listened in to what the two boys probably considered witty banter.
"So, did you take up your lady love on the invitation to her chambers?"
"Theon! Of course not!"
"Why not, Robb?"
"Lady Ruby didn't intend it to be taken like you hint at!"
"What else could she have intended when she invited you to her chamber and said that there wouldn't be a chaperone? Did you think she wanted to talk about weapons?"
"Yes, in fact, I believe so!"
"Robb, there's only one sword she's interested in, and that's yours."
Blake frowned at the crude comment. Theon either honestly didn't know anything about Ruby - a not very implausible assumption, in her opinion, given the boy's obvious cultural biases - or he knew and was yanking Robb's chain while spreading rumours about Ruby, likely out of wounded pride since none of Team RWBY had not returned his advances.
"Theon!" Well, whatever his aim, he had succeeded in rousing Robb's anger - the heir of Winterfell was glaring at his friend. "You don't talk like that about our guests!"
"Robb! Everyone talks like that about them!"
Blake narrowed her eyes. While she had overheard similar remarks from the castle's staff, they had usually been made in private, not in the middle of the training yard. Hadn't Theon or Robb noticed how the half a dozen guards who were training were neglecting their forms so they could focus on listening to the two boys?
"Not in my presence they don't dare!" Robb spat.
Judging by the way the guards closest to him grimaced and pretended to be busy doing drills, he was correct.
"What are you looking at?" Bran asked. "It's just regular training. Nothing exciting. They're just hitting the posts."
"I'm watching Robb and Theon," she replied without taking her eyes off the two boys.
"They aren't sparring either."
"But they might be - Robb looks angry."
"He does? I can't tell from here." Bran peered over the ramparts.
Blake focused on the talk down below again and tried to ignore the noise from the other people nearby. If only she didn't have to hide her second set of ears; it would be much easier to listen to such talks if she could move her ears!
"Besides, aren't you supposed to court her?" Theon asked. "If you take her maidenhood, marrying her is the honourable thing to do, isn't it?"
"What?" Robb gaped at him. "How… How can you suggest such a thing! Father would tan my hide if I dishonoured a guest!"
"Oh, come on - do you think your father would mind if you married Lady Ruby and secured an alliance with her people?"
"Of course, he would! That's not how such things are done!"
"As long as it works out, who cares?"
"My family does."
Blake hissed under her breath. What was this talk about marriage? Had Ruby…? No, Blake's friend would have mentioned it if she had such an interest in Robb. Blake could imagine her floating into their chamber with the sappiest expression on her face and declaring her undying love or something if she had finally met someone she liked more than her weapon.
So, what was up with this? The way Robb had reacted, Theon's claims were not completely off-base…
She turned to look at Bran and narrowed her eyes. Maybe she should find out what Bran knew about this.
*****
This was great! It had taken a while to convince the locals - smash a few training dummies without trying, and they all think you have no self-control - but Yang finally got someone not from Team RWBY to spar with her!
She grinned as she ducked under Jon's swing, then dodged his follow-up. The boy was good. Sure, she had to hold back, like, a ton, since without Aura, he was slow as ass, but skill was skill.
She met his shield bash head-on with a block and a slight grunt - she had to be careful not to wreck his shield. "Nice one!"
He grunted in return, then stabbed at her legs without hesitation.
She jumped back, and he managed not to stick his sword into the packed earth of the training yard. "Finally realised you won't hurt me?" And it had only taken a deliberate ducking into a swing to convince him that it was safe to spar without her wearing armour. Next step, make him use his real sword!
But first, finish the sparring match! She faked a straight to his head, forcing him to retreat and raise his shield, then circled around his sudden blind side. He managed to move in time to bring his sword to bear, but she ducked under his wild swing, then darted forward, inside his reach, pushed his shield to the side and stopped her headbutt just before she connected. "Tag! You're out!"
And for good measure, she then dropped into a leg sweep that sent him to the ground - although almost head first. Oops! She had to control her strength a little more, but that was on him to get her so worked up.
"Good match!" She beamed at him as she offered him a hand up.
He didn't take it and got up himself, but he nodded curtly, so that was vocal agreement for him.
"Made me work for it," she said as she stepped over to the water can.
"You held back a lot."
"Sure did. None of us would learn anything if I went all-out." She filled one cup, downed it, then another, and grabbed a sausage and a bread roll from the basket next to the can.
Another grunt. She wasn't sure if that was agreement or just wounded male pride. Jon wasn't as bad as Theon. He didn't pout like Robb, either, when the boy was shown, again, that Huntresses were in their own league. But Jon was a local boy, and Yang had yet to meet a local boy who hadn't some issues with getting beaten by a girl. Talk about weird!
She turned both bread and sausage into a sort of not-hot hot dog and wolved it down. Jon drank a cup of water in the meantime, and the 'smallfolk' who had been watching returned to whatever they were supposed to be doing. "Seriously, you did well." For someone without Aura. "Should spar with Blake or Weiss sometime. They both use swords."
"Maybe." That meant 'No' in Jon-speak.
"Suit yourself." She shrugged. Of Team RWBY, she was the only one Jon sparred with. He probably had a crush, but as long as he didn't make a move, she didn't have to shoot him down. He was cute, but he was like Ruby's age. And a bit too brooding for her taste - if she did shoot him down, he might stop sparring, too.
"It wouldn't be appropriate," he said after a moment.
"What?" She frowned. He was sparring with her, wasn't he? So, why wouldn't it be appropriate to spar with the rest of her team? Oh, Hell! Had she missed another cultural difference, as Weiss called it? "Don't tell me sparring is, like, asking someone out!"
"What?" He stared at her.
"You know, start a relationship," she explained.
"What? No!" He flushed like a tomato and shook his head almost as wildly as Zwei after a bath. "It's…" He took a deep breath and lowered his voice. "I'm a bastard," he said through what Yang was sure were clenched teeth.
"Actually, you're too nice for…" She blinked. "Oh, you mean literally." She nodded. "Yeah, we've heard. Still doesn't tell me why you can't spar with the others."
"A bastard shouldn't spar with high-born ladies. I wouldn't spar with you if you hadn't… insisted so strongly." And that pout showed he was Robb's brother.
She grinned at him. Sure, yelling 'Defend yourself!' and jumping at him had maybe been a bit much, but sue her - she liked sparring, and she liked fighting new guys! He wasn't laughing, though, so she turned serious as well. "Sorry to hear that."
He shrugged. "You don't have to feel sorry for me."
He obviously was feeling sorry for himself, but she wasn't gonna needle him over it. That was his business.
He must have caught a clue, though, since he narrowed his eyes at her for a moment. Then he sighed. "I am a bastard. I can't change that."
"It's not as if it's your fault you were born." People blaming kids for their parents were idiots, in her book.
Another half-glare, another sigh, and he nodded. "I just wish I knew my mother."
Oh. Yang knew that feeling. And she knew better than to step on that landmine. But she could sympathise - and did. "Yeah. My own - I mean, the woman who gave birth to me - ran away and left me with Dad when I was a baby. Haven't seen her since. Don't even know if she's still alive." She shrugged as if it was no big deal. But it was. But, thinking of family made her think of Dad. He would be broken. Worse than he had been after Mom hadn't returned from a mission. Now he'd think both Ruby and Yang were dead… She clenched her teeth and took a deep breath. Brooding about stuff she couldn't change right now was pointless.
He must have noticed her mood but he didn't push her on it either, and they just stayed there, silent, for a while, staring at the wall until it got too gloomy for her, and she went back to the rest of her team. It was about time for lunch, anyway - or would be, soon.
But when she entered their room, ready to apologise for having forgotten the time while sparring - not that there was a clock to use, anyway - she wasn't scolded by Weiss for being late. Instead, Ruby jumped up from her bed and rushed to her. "Yang! We've got a problem! A huge problem!"
"What?" Yang tensed. Had someone broken into their room? They had taken a few precautions, like hiding the stuff they couldn't carry with them where normal people couldn't easily get it, but…
"They want to marry us off!"
What?
Weiss sighed. "What the dolt is trying to say is that our hosts apparently plan to ask for the hand in marriage of at least one of us, presumably to forge an alliance with our team and, although that's conjuncture, our home kingdom."
Yang blinked. "Seriously?"
"Yes!" Ruby nodded several times with a pained expression. "Blake overheard them! And Bran confirmed it!"
"Bran? The little boy?" Yang asked. What did little boys know about such things?
"He confirmed that alliances here are done by marrying two family members," Blake said. "Which fits what I overheard from the talk between Theon and Robb."
"And Robb might try to seduce me to trap me in a marriage! I don't want to marry anyone, Yang! I'm too young! And I don't like Robb that way!" Ruby shook her head.
Yang winced. Ruby was going a bit too fast here.
"You don't have to marry anyone, Ruby," Weiss said. "None of us do."
"You said we had to compromise and honour their customs!"
"Not to that extent. Besides, you heard Blake - Robb rejected Theon's idea and said Lord Stark would never condone such underhanded means!"
"And what about not-underhanded means? Overhanded means? What if they just ask for my hands? Hand?" Ruby flitted over to stare at Weiss.
"Then you tell them you're not going to marry anyone," Weiss replied.
"I'm not good at telling people no!"
"Then learn how to tell people no, dolt!"
"Or let me tell them for you," Yang said, bumping her fists together. She clenched her teeth. If anyone tried to do anything underhanded like that with her sister… Well, there would be no holding back on Yang's part! They would have to scrape whoever it was from the ground. And probably the walls and ceiling as well!
*****