"a bloody sad scrap of foolery"
6th Day of the 12th Month, 303
Sansa,
I promised myself I'd write to you every chance I had, so here I am again. Buried one of my men today. His name was Rickard, one of the Mollens. Did you know him? Good fighter, sound instincts and strong as oak. During the wildling raid on the supply line, his nose was cut off by one of those buggering savages and then he was trampled by a horse that broke three of his ribs. The ribs healed but the nose wound became infected and he went out like candlelight two days ago.
We wrapped him up in a grey wool blanket and buried him far from the Dreadfort. Found a bit of dirt that was as good a resting place as any common soldier could expect. The ground was blanketed with jonquil and daisies and some whitish weed that looked like cow parsley or baby's breath but wasn't. I've lost a tenth of my men since the siege started from one thing or another. I see them sometimes, standing at attention before my bloodshot eyes. Bugger death. Bugger grief. Bugger it all. Maester Theomore asked me to write something to Mollen's woman—he left her and two children, one born, one on the way. Well, I just don't feel like it and I think it would be better if I didn't. When I think about them, I feel so obscurely angry, I don't know what to do. Seven bloody hells, that the gods can fell a man with little worse than a scratched face. Such is life and luck.
Other things happened here besides that but I don't want to talk about the siege or any more bloody business tonight. You know what I'm eating right now? Honey fungus mushrooms fried with salt pork, so you can envy me for once, brat. On the way back to camp from the burial, I found a place that was would have made your mouth water. Damp fields abound with those mushrooms—I never saw so many packed so tight. And at the center of the field, a great oak tree carved with the face of an old bearded man. Some forest god of long-dead men, I suppose. He didn't look like the kind of god that would have begrudged me what he had in plenty and I was able to pick a couple of pounds in just a few minutes.
Do you remember that time I made you breakfast? Fry bread and eggs and sausages and heaps of mushrooms, as my lady commanded. How bloody stupid that when you're worn out from campaigning without rest, dirty and unshaven, the smallest things can cause a lump in your throat. Little bird, do you want to know many times I've written this letter? Four. I can't seem to control my quill, or might be I don't want to. I've begun four times and have torn it up three times and now I'm resolved to continue no matter.
Sansa, why do I keep seeing you as you were that day I left Winterfell? The image is so clear to me in memory: your boots muddy and your expression blank as the wind and the rain lashed your cheeks. You said nothing then. Not with your lips and not with your eyes, though I searched them hard for meaning.
I wondered at your mysterious silence then and I wonder at it now. Don't mistake me, this is not another surly complaint about the oftenest of your letters. You always write promptly. And prettily—all those little stories, polished as fine as silver plate, flowing from your quill to touch my senses. They make me laugh, I'll give you that. How do you manage that trick of sounding both intimate and aloof at the same time? Is either one wholly true? I ask myself why do you keep writing, the same elusive letter, day after day? Or did you write different letters in your head?
Meanwhile, I write and write and hardly know what I've written, save that I've already told you things on paper that I would never have said as free and as plain as if I had spoken them aloud. I said in my prior letter that you ought to be honest when writing to me, that you should face facts and not run away from them. So I'm going to just write down whatever needs to come out. Might be writing to you is the only time I can get these things out of me. It's tough as hell here and the clank and clatter of steel and wood and barking dogs and whinnying horses and the laughter and curses of drunken oafs all seem to crowd into my tent and crush against me. I try to remind myself that my moods will darken your hours when my letters reach you, days after the I have slain whatever miserable beast that is currently squatting inside my head. Yet there's a choking in my chest and I can't cover up that I feel things, things a man shouldn't admit to: being lonely or frustrated or fearful or just bloody aching for a woman's comfort beyond the use of her cunt.
Might be I'll embarrass you. If it pleases you, politely use this paper to wipe that arse of yours that never shits. BUT DON'T LET ANYONE READ MY LETTERS. EVER.
Where the bloody hell was I? Breakfast. Mushrooms. Please respect my right to certain stupidities, foremost of which is the desire to dwell in the past. Mayhap the lack of sleep has softened my brain, I can't think of the bloody future anymore, and the present just exists as the breath puffing out from my nostrils. Sansa, do you remember that day—it was almost ten months ago? You had gone hawking with Willas Tyrell and didn't come back until three hours past the time you were supposed to return. The cripple stammered some apology about a horse losing a shoe, while you stared at him with a shy half smile playing across your mouth. Old Nan kissed and fussed over you, while I, as is my nature, backhanded you with insults out of fear for your lostness that had been eating at my guts the entire time. You weren't at supper that evening and I knew by the tiny touch of daggers your maids' eyes threw at my back that my sharp words were the cause.
I tell you now, though it does me no honor: I was sorry but mostly glad. I ate my food picturing you in your maiden's bedchamber whose threshold I've never crossed, staining those little flower-patterned pillows I imagine all noble girls have with your tears. I laughed out loud thinking of your face buried in them so your sobs couldn't be heard and snarled at the fool next to me who had the damned impertinence as to inquire what was so funny.
You see, I am so very jealous of you.
And sometimes I want to punish you a little for making me half-crazed and wretched. I'm jealous of everyone you spare a smile for, even Maester Colemon who has too little hair and too much neck and wears every conceivable stripe of blatant buggery. Girls, old nurses, even brothers, because your love for them is so bloody paramount. There is no jealousy, though, as vengeful as … Sansa, Sansa… damn you, you spoiled creature, that I have to say what you should bloody already know full well. I can only be friends with you as long you weren't anybody else's. Believe that. Because I love you, little bird. And I don't know if I've ever loved anyone, save maybe my father who I didn't much respect or my sister who I find it hard to recall what she even looked like beyond a pair of sad cow eyes.
Might be that's why I'm so needy and why it would torture me with the fires of the damned to see you belong someone else. A man's heart is not nice: it's aggressive and pushy and a greedy bottomless pit. I'd be friends, just for the chance to be near you. But the moment you get into something with some other man, I'm out. I'm not going to kill him. I'd just disappear. No violent outbursts. Just gone. Those were my thoughts when I saw you making sheep's eyes at that smugly, pompous, crippled little bore and nothing about how I feel has changed since or ever will.
As for that miserable supper—whatever spiteful triumph I felt disappeared after the soup course and afterwards I felt so low I wanted to die. I forced three skins of wine between my clenched teeth that night so I could sleep but kept waking up with the kind of fitful alertness of a man afraid of his heart stopping while he slumbered. I finally gave up on getting any rest and got up to fetch another skin of wine and there you were. In the kitchens. Nibbling on some bread and looking fine in your fur bedrobe with the smocking of your white nightgown peeking out and your pretty hair flying loose naked.
Seeing you like that—extremely cuddly and extraordinarily beautiful—bloody hell, I almost laughed out loud. Many a night I would lie awake imagining that I was in your bedchamber, undressing you for bed like I was one your bedmaids. Have I shocked you? Might be you think my love is a filthy thing. It is, at some moments. I've dreamt of you in filthy poses. Do you ever want me like that? You always do in my dreams… all hapless giggles and squirming, scooting arse as my fingers schemed through the mysteries of silk and laces to reach the sweetest body that ever set a man's blood on fire. You'd stretch your arms high above your head as I shed you of your undershift, moan like a dreaming puppy as I searched out the pins in your hair to pull them free. I'd hook my arms underneath your legs and you'd clutch at my shoulders, holding onto me as if I had cut through fire and spears just to save you. Then I'd lay you down your bed and fan your hair out across your pillows. And you'd look at me, always. Without fear. Without cunning. Your eyes as guileless as the tender yearling of the woods just before I slew her in the hunt. I think you can guess what would happen after that. I'd be real gentle, though. Promise.
I'm not sure what I actually said to you–too concerned with trying to hide the tent of my breeches as you now understand. I remember you pouring two cups of wine. I remember, probably under the benevolent influence of that wine, mellowing out a bit. I offered to make you breakfast because you said it would have been unkind to wake up a kitchen slattern an hour before dawn. I wanted to be alone with you so bad that I was glad to be put to service. We ate from the same bowl like two pups. I gave you most of my mushrooms. You said some things and I grinned, but I'm not sure what you said, save that every word seemed to come out of your mouth rolled in spices before honey, so they were sweet and provocative at once.
Did I ask you to sing for me? I can't recall it but I must have. Because suddenly you were humming and then your voice, sweet and pure and unaffected, drifted on the air like an invisible mist. Can you remember? It was that song, the one you promised me all those years ago. About a fool and his cunt. About a hero and the lady he had a bounden duty to protect above all others. I stopped eating and I stopped drinking only to listen. And somehow the years fell away and the past and present all became jumbled together in some unseen tumbleweed of baby's breath. Gods, what a bloody sad scrap of foolery I just wrote. Don't scoff, I know you felt it too, didn't you? It was one of those moments, so painfully sweet, that you want to repeat even while you're still living inside of them.
After your voice died away, you leaned towards me, lips parted, your eyes—Gods, your eyes, fresh firecoal—as you lowered your dark lashes. I'd have killed then and there just to know how your lips tasted and I damn well know you wanted me to do it. But the morning bells chimed and we could already hear footsteps and whatever spell we were under was broken.
That crippled bugger left shortly thereafter with no contract signed and my heart swelled so much I thought it would spread my ribs wide. Yet you never came again to the kitchens, though I spent many a pre-dawn morning waiting there. And I never said anything to you about it. I didn't know if you gave me the right, though in the loneliness of the moment, I'd often pretend in my letters that you had. Soggy-brained idiocies. Only young girls and children and fools think that those of great estate marry as they will and not as they ought to. I shouldn't need you to tell me different. I was there when you arranged your seven year old brother's betrothal to restore Winterfell's exhausted coffers. And I was also there to see Tyrell's lavish gifts of birds of prey and gems the size of fists arriving at Winterfell as regular as the swing of the tides. Yet where am I today? Sitting in this muddy tent, that's where. Seeking favor. Can one traitor's head be worth eighty thousand bannermen or however many you counted in your ledger books for Highgarden? Who's the bloody fool with the head full of songs now? Sometimes I want to smash my skull against a wall for relief.
Little bird, I don't know quite what happened to us. We've never truly touched and yet I feel the weight of our past as if you had once been mine—intensely, intimately—and now you're not. You sobbed the very moment I showed up at the Gates of the Moon. You kissed my hands like I was your lord after I used them to strangle that monstrous whoreson. I could have had you then, I'd warrant. All those nights we slept side by side on the cold ground during the journey North. I'd lie beside you and feel your body heat and I tell you, it would ignite me like a coal hidden beneath ashes. Ofttimes I'd find myself mouthing the words after I heard your breath come in slow and heavy and knew you were asleep. Not because I meant them then, I didn't know you all that well. I just knew that "love" was what girls like you needed to hear before they let a man spread their thighs apart.
But I never said them or asked you for anything, though you were so bloody grateful. Don't mistake me, girl, it wasn't because I was a good man: it was because I was a guilty one.
The Quiet Isle messed with my head a little. I needed to be there for as long as I was but I tell you, it was another kind of kennel. Seven bloody buggering hells, I've been crowded into one kennel after another since the day I left my father's house. Some nicer than others but in cages, all animals begin to fester. I'm indebted to the Elder Brother but damn him if he didn't infect me with his own peculiar breed of madness. He made me believe that I was worse than other men of my kind. Believe that the desire to kill my brother was a sin so terrible that it made the gods shudder, rather than a natural response to a hurt so grievous that only blood could atone. Yes, I've done some real bad things but I'm better than they raised me to be and that's got to be rare.
With you, with you … I'm thumbing your miniature now and laughing. That bloody artist could have used his cunning to paint you as beguiling as the Black Pearl of Braavos. It would have been better bait for the Arryn heir from what I know about that coddled cuntstruck fool boy. Instead, he painted you like that—a barely nubile girl in a delicate white gown wearing the Seven Pointed Star around her neck and an expression of innocence that wrung the heart. It's your gift, I suppose, some trick of the bone-work, that your beauty can be so changeable in a way no painter could ever capture the truth of. Did you mean to send it to me as a jape? I know you didn't, but it feels like it, a reminder of my former folly. All those silent dusks I spent on the Quiet Isle, lying flat on my back in the autumn grass looking up at the sky with my hands clasped beneath my head, thinking about you. Always, you'd be on your knees, praying for my soul in some cold sept, blue eyes and auburn hair and a face too lovely for any woman on this earth.
That first year we were together…forgive me for how I contributed to your unhappiness. When you weren't perfect and sweet and didn't fit into the mold of a proper lady, I'd get real cross and said things that made you cry. I just couldn't see you clearly, not as a real person. Instead you were this immaculate white handkerchief that I could use to wipe away the badness from myself. And I didn't want to dirty you with a man's needs because you were as pure as the Maiden, you had to be, in order to fix all my sins. It took me some time to get over those gnarled, twisted ways of thinking. Somehow as I began to throw them away, you picked them up. Might be I infected you in turn.
Oh, I'm not saying I don't have things to answer for. It causes me many regrets and much sorrow when I remember that you met me in a such a shitty place, full of mostly shitty people, and I made so many stupid violent mistakes with you. I wish I could go back and not make those mistakes, could have protected you when you were hurting so bad. I hope that my conduct since then will make you realize that—notwithstanding my shortcomings—I'm not the man I was back then. Sansa—when I say this, don't think that I ever forgot one kind word or gesture from you—but I'm sure I've paid you back by now. And I want to spend my life paying you back, filling in those gaps, fighting all those battles that you can't. But I'm not simply your sword, I'm a man. One who wants to feel needed by someone who deserves—and doesn't take for granted—what he has to offer. When you were fourteen, I was your hero, and that was the best feeling in the world and its hard not to grow attached to someone, to love someone, when they can make you feel that good. Now who am? The stray dog you adopted out of the kindness of your tender dumb heart.
Well, the sun's almost rising. I've been moaning all night and must catch an hour's sleep for tomorrow's labor. I suppose you are accustomed to men making bloody fools of themselves over you and writing this letter full of nothing but my complaints probably isn't going to make you love me any better. You only have yourself to blame, for sending me your miniature and planting expectations in my head.
There's something between us, isn't there? I know it. And I'm going to do what it's asking of me. As for you, my pretty bird, it will always be there whether you like it or not.
Sandor