Prologue
Winterfell…
He was a rough man, by birth and by choice. So he did not understand why he could not stop looking at her. The day was crisp and clear, and the courtyard was teeming with life. She had flowers braided in her hair today. Little blue flowers in hair the color of fire. Though she had never truly looked at him, he knew the flowers matched her eyes.
"I see you watching my betrothed, Hound," Joffrey said, leaning on the wooden railing beside him. "Isn't she a beauty beyond compare? The future king of the Seven Kingdoms deserves such a wife by his side."
The Hound looked to her again. She had caught them watching her and now her cheeks were stained pink with excitement. She leaned in to whisper something in her friend's ear and they both began giggling.
He snorted. "Aye, she is fair enough," he said. "But she looks like she hasn't a thought in that pretty head of hers."
Joffrey thought to look affronted. "When she is my queen you will be careful not to call her stupid, Hound. But then I don't need my woman always talking back and questioning me. She must be sweet and obedient. I mean to be a different ruler from my father."
But Sandor was no longer listening to him. The pretty little girl with flowers in her hair was walking away. The sun at that moment disappeared behind the clouds, but it seemed to him it was her absence that made the day darker.
Kings Landing…
He was a brutal man, but he had to admit even he would not have demanded this of anyone.
"This one is your father," Joffrey said. "This one here. Dog, turn it around so she can see him."
He walked forward to do what was asked of him. Her blue eyes followed him, shinning with shed and unshed tears, and pleading. He took hold of the head of that which had been Eddard Stark and turned it around.
Her body trembled and he thought she would break then. That she would rave and wail or, worse yet, that she would faint. But slowly she seemed to gather something inside her. She looked at it now, finally, her eyes blank. "How long do I have to look?" she asked.
Sandor watched her gravely. If truth be told he was always watching her. Since the very first time he caught sight of the red of her hair from the corner of his eye upon arriving at Winterfell. And he was watching now when something changed in her. A shifting of features, a hardening of her eyes. When Joffrey asked her how she would like her brother's head for a gift she actually snapped back. "Maybe my brother will give me your head," she hissed.
Before her father's death she had always seemed a pretty, flighty, empty thing. Nowadays she was not half as pretty as she once had been. Her skin was pale and dry, her hair dull and brittle, and her lips chapped. She had lost so much weight that her dresses looked ill-fitting, like they were made for some other girl. But today, just for that brief moment, just before Merryn's gauntleted fist struck her, she was the most fiercely beautiful thing he had seen in his life.
And Sandor Clegane, rough and brutal as he was, had an eye for beautiful things. Though they would all laugh at him if they knew it, though he would not admit so even to himself.