Jon makes the Lords of the North and Vale loyal to him

Jon’s laughter died in his throat. The fire crackled in the Great Hall, throwing long shadows across the weirwood table. Sansa was still watching him, concern creasing her brow.

“There’s no need to fret over the lords any longer,” Jon said, the warmth of the power rising behind his eyes like strongwine. “Every lord of the North and every lord of the Vale is utterly loyal to House Stark, to me and to you. They always have been. Their hearts are true.”

The pulse flared, hot and certain.

Sansa blinked once, then twice. The worry melted from her face as though a hand had smoothed it away. She set the stack of letters down with a soft exhale of relief.

“Of course,” she said, voice lighter. “They’re loyal. They’ve always been loyal. I don’t know why I was letting it gnaw at me.”

Jon gave her a small, reassuring smile and started to turn toward the hearth, already tasting the next impossible sentence on his tongue (something about grain stores that would never run low, something about winter never coming again), when Sansa spoke again, quieter this time.

“There is… one thing, though.” She hesitated, fingers tightening around the parchment she still held. The new truth sat in her mind like a perfectly fitted glove, but something older, something raw, kept trying to push through the seams.

Sansa’s voice dropped to the barest thread, as though the walls themselves might be listening.

“I know the lords are loyal,” she whispered. “I feel it, the way you feel the cold before the snow starts. They’ll ride for you, die for you, swear their children to House Stark until the end of days. That’s… settled now, somehow. I don’t understand how I know it, I just do.”

She searched Jon’s face, confused by her own certainty, then shook her head as if to clear it.

“But Petyr…” She swallowed hard. “Petyr is still the man who put poison in my hair and called it pretty. The man who kissed my cheek and then sold me to Ramsay Bolton for a promise of titles. The man who watched me beg and still left me there.”

Her hands were trembling now; she folded them tightly in her lap so Jon wouldn’t see.

“I stood in this very hall two nights ago and listened to him toast your coronation. He smiled at me exactly the way he smiled the day he handed me over. And every lord in the North smiled back, as if none of it ever happened. As if I dreamed the dogs and the dark and the flaying knife.”

She looked up at him, eyes raw.

“Something’s wrong, Jon. I’m not mad. I remember. I remember everything. And yet everyone else seems to have… forgotten what he is. Even you look at him now like he’s just another bannerman.”

A tear slipped free; she didn’t bother wiping it away this time.

Sansa’s fingers were ice-cold through the sleeve of his tunic. She held on as if the floor might tilt and spill her away.

“I don’t know what’s happening to the world,” she whispered, voice fraying. “I only know I can’t bear to have him walk free while I still wake up tasting blood in my mouth. I need him to answer for the things he did to me before… before whatever this new truth is swallows the old one whole.”

She looked up at him, eyes wide and frightened in a way Jon had not seen since the day they took Winterfell back.

“Everyone else acts as though Petyr Baelish has always been our faithful friend. The Vale knights cheer your name. The Northern lords drink his health

She reached out and gripped Jon’s sleeve, fingers digging in like a child afraid of the dark.

“Promise me he’ll answer, Jon. Promise me the past still matters.”

The power stirred again, eager, almost purring. One sentence (just one) and Petyr Baelish would never have betrayed her. One sentence and she would remember only kindness from the man who sold her like livestock. One sentence and the scar across her mind would be erased forever.

Jon felt the words forming, sweet as honeyed wine.

He looked at his sister (really looked at her) and saw the faint tremor in her lower lip, the way her shoulders had curled inward the moment she spoke Littlefinger’s name.