And there stood the most feared existence present on the ship, with her hair in disarray as if she had stormed all the way from her room to here, looking at them with a murderous look in her eyes.
"Where is that rat!!" Catelyn Stark hissed each word through her teeth, all while glaring at her two daughters, who were standing there in awkward positions, having been caught red-handed in the middle of their usual roughhousing.
"Er, what happened, Mother?" Sansa asked nervously as she straightened up and smoothed her clothes, acting as if she wasn't just about to strangle her sister, "Why are you looking for Gan?"
"This! This is what happened!" Catelyn snapped as she thrust a beautiful purple gown in front of their faces with a pained expression.
It was a luxurious piece of clothing with a lot of beautiful golden threads running through it creating intricate designs, but their eyes skipped all of it and focused in on the big hole located right in the middle, looking as if an animal like a dog or a wolf had torn it open with a large vicious bite, "I want you to hand me that cursed mouse right this instant, so that I can throw it into the ocean where it belongs!"
"What?!" came the shocked exclamation of three girls, one looking horrified, one looking anxious, and the last one looking enraged and defensive as if she was ready to fight her mother to defend her friend.
"B-But Mother, there must be some misunderstanding here, right?" Sansa hurriedly said with a worried look on her face as she came close to her mother, "Why would Gan do something like that? He is a smart rat and knows to come to us whenever he is hungry, so there is little chance that he would wander into your room to search for something to eat and mistakenly do that to your dress."
"There is no mistake here," Catelyn said in a cold voice as she surveyed the room as if she were a jailer searching for an escaped convict, "That rat has had it out for me from day one, since I forced you to lock him in a cage when around me. I don't know how it is possible, but I always had a feeling that there was a lot of anger in those beady little eyes whenever he looked at me. And now... I have proof of his madness, so he needs to go!"
"That's no proof!" Arya jumped up with an indignant expression on her face, "How do you know that Gan was the one who did it, huh? Why can't it be any other rat? There are a lot of them on the ship, aren't there?" she retorted with a proud look on her face, as if very pleased with the argument she had come up with.
"Because any other rat would not have been smart enough to leave all my other dresses untouched, and go straight for this, my favourite, which was placed in the very middle of the stack, and ruin only this," she rebutted fiercely, undeterred by her daughter's aggressiveness, "Only that cunning critter is capable of this. He must have seen how happy I was with the dress when we brought it to the last city, and decided to take revenge in this way."
"I—This..." Arya stuttered as she tried to come up with an good response to that, but her mind turned up blank like usual, so she did not even try, and just went with her usual tactic, "Anyway, no matter what you say. Gan is innocent, and I am not going to give him to you," she shot back as she crossed her arms with a stubborn look on her face, as if she would not give in even if she were to be tortured.
"Well, then if he is so innocent, then maybe I should buy myself a similarly 'innocent' cat at the next port," Catelyn bent her head and whispered with a ominous gleam in her eyes, "Then we can happily see those innocent creatures get 'along' with each other, and if one of them accidentally disappears one night for some reason... well, then that's just too bad,"
"Y-You can't do that," Arya gasped with a horrified look, staring at her mother as if she were a monster, "You wouldn't!"
"Try me!" she snapped at her little girl, making her flinch back in terror, reminding her once again of all those times during her childhood when her mischief had caused her bum to be repeatedly slapped until it was red like a monkey's.
After sufficiently cowing her second daughter, Catelyn turned to the other two girls in the room, who were trying to stay as silent as possible, hoping that by acting invisible they would be spared her wrath.
"I know he must be with one of you right now," she said in a calm but dangerous voice, making them gulp and quickly shake their heads, "Don't worry, I also understand now that you will not willingly give him over to me, so I will not ask anymore, but I hope for his sake, you hold on to him very tightly because if I were to ever see him again..." she did not need to finish her words for them understand the threat hanging in the air, and then after finishing her piece she sent one last glare at the trio, left the room while slamming the door behind her.
Almost instantly, there was an imperceptible sense of relief in the room as if they had all just survived a natural disaster.
"Your mother is... a scary woman, Sansa," Daenerys commented with a forced smile on her face.
As someone who had grown up an orphan, the girl had always wondered what it would have been like to have a mother to care for her, but now, after seeing the usually gentle woman who always looked so refined and beautiful when they were out and about, suddenly transform into this... this dreadful person when angered, she was no longer so sure that it was such a good thing.
"Ah, tell me about it," Sansa sighed with a tried look on her face, as if the weight of the whole world was on her shoulder, "This was nothing, you should have seen her when she caught us—" the girl was just about to go on a rant about her unjust mother when she caught sight of her little sister sister from the corner of her eye, "What happened, Arya? Why do you look so worried?"
"That—she just... she said she is going to buy a cat to kill Gan!" Arya said in a frightened voice as she rushed through her words, while wildly waving her hands in panic. "We need to stop her! W-We should tell Jon, and maybe he will—"
"Calm down, Arya, she is not actually going to do it. I am sure she was just trying to scare you." Sansa consoled in a soothing voice as she lightly hugged her little sister's head, "She won't really do anything to hurt, Gan; after all, she knows that he is Jon's pet and how much we all love him."
"Really?" Arya asked with an innocent hope in her voice.
"Of course." She replied with a smile on her face, and the little girl finally breathed a sigh of relief, but out of the corner of her eye, Sansa caught Daenerys looking at her sceptically and mouthing the words, "Are you really sure?"
"...I think," Sansa whispered silently with a uncertain look on her face, as honestly she did not know the lengths her mother could go to when she got in one of her fits, so she decided to be on the safe side, "I think we should keep Gan hidden for a little while until Mother's anger calms down, just in case. Speaking of which, where even is he?" she asked aloud while looking at Arya and Daenerys.
"Oh, I hid him behind my bed when I caught him sneaking into the room this morning," Arya replied with a sheepish look on her face, as she ran towards her bed.
"And... why did you feel the need to hide him?" Sansa asked slowly with a suspicious look in her eyes.
"Oh, that, well, I don't know... just because," Arya replied with a shifty look in her eyes as she evaded her sister's gaze and bent down to bring the rat out from behind her bed, with the small critter looking as if it had just been woken up from a very peaceful sleep, "Anyway, here he is."
"So, do you really think he is the one who did it?" Daenerys asked in a low voice, as the three of them stared down at the mouse, who looked back at them with its curious little beady eyes.
"Jon wouldn't let him do something like that... right?" Sansa asked with an uneasy look on her face, but then she recalled all those times when she was very little, during that phase where the two had been so antagonistic towards each other, always pulling those irritating pranks and schemes to get back at the other.
"Don't you remember, Jon isn't always here with him. He only ever comes when we call for him, and other times there is just little Gan here, a normal rat," Daenerys reminded with a frown on her face.
"That's the thing, I don't think he is so normal anymore," Sansa said as she looked down at the rat with a strange look on her face, "Mother was right, Gan is just too smart for a regular rat, and sometimes I feel he can even understand our words... probably a result of Jon warging into him so many times."
"If that is so, then I guess we can easily get the answer to the problem of your mother's dress," Daenerys said before taking Gan from Arya into her own palm and raising it in front of her eyes, "Tell me, Gan, did you or did you not go ruin Lady Stark's dress?" she asked slowly.
There was almost an immediate reaction as the rat sheepishly looked away from her gaze as if he were ashamed, if it was even possible for a small creature to show emotions such as that.
"Ha! I knew it!" Arya suddenly bounced with a satisfied look on her face.
"What do you mean you knew it?" Sansa asked with narrowed eyes.
"I mean, I was not sure, but... when I saw him in the morning I found something like a fabric in his fur, so I thought..." she stammered with a guilty look on her face, "I thought that he must have pulled something, and decided to hide him just to be safe," she said it all in one breath, as the other two exchanged exasperated glances with each other, never having suspected that the little girl could lie so well, and act perfectly indignant in front of her mother, even when she had known the culprit all along, "But you are so amazing Gan, how did you even pull off something like—"
"Don't encourage him, Arya!" Sansa rebuked with a small slap on her little sister's head, before she turned back to the rat with a stern look on her face, "Gan! Why would you do something like that?"
The rat immediately began wildly waving his tiny claws and making a lot of squeaking noise, and while none of them was able to exactly understand him, they got the gist that he was feeling very wronged.
"I bet it must have been because of last night's dinner when Mother called him, 'A dirty little rat that no normal human would keep around as a pet, and that he should always be kept locked inside a cage," Arya mimicked her mother's voice while scrunching up her nose, "Anyone would be angry after hearing something like that, right?" she asked, and suprisingly the small critter actually nodded its head as if to agree with her, "Ha! See, I told you so."
"He still shouldn't have done it, regardless," Sansa said with an exasperated look on her face, as she turned back towards the rat, "Promise me, Gan, that you will not pull anything like this ever again, no matter how mean Mother gets, or else we really wouldn't be able to keep you here any longer and would have to send you back to Jon. And you don't want to fly all the way to King's Landing, do you?" she threatened while trying to look scary.
The rat immediately shook its tiny head with a horrified look as if it was remembering the trauma it had suffered through the last time it had been given a lift by that giant blue bird named Frost.
"Perfect! Now, we just need to—"
A sudden knock on their door interrupted Sansa, and all three of them turned towards the door with startled looks on their face, and then, as if they had decided it beforehand, they immediately jumped up clustered together in a straight line on the bed while Sansa hid Gan behind her, before calling out, "C-Come in," in as calm a voice as she could manage.
The door immediately opened, and the moment they saw that the one to enter was not Lady Stark but her husband, the girls almost all simultaneously breathed sighs of relief.
"What are you three up to?" Eddard asked with a raised eyebrow as he saw the three of them huddled together on the bed as if they were conspiring something, "You know what, I do not want to know," he interrupted just as Sansa opened her mouth probably to come up with some kind of excuse, "I just wanted to let you know that the port is already visible, and that we should reach Volantis in at most an hour, so you better get ready," he finished and then as if running away from them, he immediately went away while closing the door behind him.
"It's here," Daenerys exclaimed as she forgot all about Gan, and immediately bounced up from her seat to run towards her luggage. And the other two were not far behind her as all of them excitedly began pulling out the clothes they would change into with excitement on their faces.
Even after they had already been to more than three cities in Essos by now, the novelty of placing their first steps into a new foreign city, seeing strange people with diverse cultures and languages, strange buildings, and bright markets, had not lost its appeal to them, and they were just too eager to enter the next one.
"Arya! Why are you taking out the knife?!"
"It's not a knife. It's my sword," she retorted with an indignant look on her face, "And of course I am taking it with me for our protection; what if we come across a fearsome enemy out there. I need to be able to defeat him, don't I?" she snorted pridefully as she pulled the tiny 'sword' out of its sheath and waved it masterfully through the air.
"Yes, right. I am sure we will definitely come across a fat evil man who is just about to commit a horrendous act of atrocity, and then we will need you and your 'sword' to save the day," she murmured sarcastically while rolling her eyes as Daenerys giggled beside her.
...
..
.
Unfortunately, what Sansa did not know was that just a few hours later, she would deeply come to regret saying those ominous words, while wondering in her mind if it was at this moment that she had planted one of those flags that Jon was always talking about...
///
Now, a few of you would make guesses on what the truth behind this foreshadowing is, and maybe even do it correctly, but the cunning ones know exactly where to go to find why Sansa would come to regret planting this death flag...
But here's the address if you don't know where: patreon.com/lazywizard