ARYA
It had been days since they'd encountered anyone else on the road. Arya rode in a kind of sullen trance that was well matched to the weather; unrelenting soggy grayness that muffled the sun and left the night without stars. The Hound spoke little, and she even less.
He'd had to smash her with the flat of his axe to get her away from the Twins, squirmy and unpredictable little thing that she was. Arya tried to escape every now and then, but never with very much gusto. It was plain to see there was nowhere for either of them to go.
"You complete butt wrinkle," Arya complained loudly one morning when the Hound flung his dagger at a squirrel and missed.
"Shut up, bitch."
"It's a free country. I'll say what I want."
"It's not a free country at all," the Hound muttered.
"Tonight. When you go to sleep?"
He looked blankly up at her. "Yeah?"
"I'm gonna shove Needle all the way up your peehole."
The Hound's hands instinctively went to guard his privates. "You shut up!" he cried. "Stop saying things like that!"
"I'll put bugs in your eyes," Arya said vengefully.
"Why do you hate me so much," the Hound wailed, lurching to his feet and going off to look for the knife.
She waited until he was out of sight and said under her breath, "Because you're a nasty butt wrinkle."
Arya was restless. Her whole family was dead, except Jon Snow, who'd taken the black, which included an awkward vow of celibacy. It seemed unlikely she'd see him again. The Hound was her family now, and she hated the Hound.
"Go start a fire," the Hound said when he returned. He had found the knife, but one of his hands was squirting blood.
"What did you do," Arya said scornfully.
"Nothing. I'm fine. I picked it up by the wrong part. Don't look at me. Go start a goddamn fire, She-wolf. Need to boil some wine."
Arya belched. "I drank all the wine."
The Hound looked at her. "Then I guess we're boiling river mud."
"That won't sanitize your wound."
"Sanitize?" Sandor looked lost.
"That means clean, you dumbass. Wine sanitizes because it has alcohol in it. Alcohol kills germs."
"Keep spewing that witchy horse shit and I'll pull your legs off."
"I'll bite your balls," Arya snapped.
He sprang furiously to his feet. "Stop it!" he shrieked.
"I'll geld you with a wooden mixing spoon," Arya informed him, rolling and dodging as Sandor lunged for her. She picked up Needle and got into the water dancer's stance that Syrio had taught her in King's Landing. "I'll give you rabies."
"Shut the fuck UP!" he roared, drawing his double-handed longsword and swinging a furious upward cut aimed at Arya's jaw. His blade went high, and Arya sprang in to karate chop his dick. But her aim was off too, and her attack glanced off his thigh.
"Little Stark bitch," the Hound panted as he stepped back and back, loosing wild, swooping cuts, trying everything to keep Arya at bay. Her Needle shrieked off his plate again and again, and finally she scored a shallow cut across the back of the hand he had injured before, while he'd been recovering his throwing knife. The Hound screamed in fatal agony and threw himself onto his back, letting his sword cartwheel out of his hands and clatter uselessly to the ground. He writhed, hooting and kicking in the dust, snot boiling from his nostrils and his teeth on the burned side bared in an inhuman snarl.
"Muh-MUH-MUH-MY HAAAAND," the Hound whisper-screamed.
"Dumb little baby. If you don't get up I'll pee on your armor."
The Hound screamed soundlessly, twisting about in the dirt as if he were on fire.
Arya began to unlace her jerkin.
"NO!" Sandor screamed. He began crawling frantically away. "PLEASE!"
Suddenly Arya stopped. "Be quiet," she said, and the Hound fell silent at once. They both opened their mouths to hear better were as still as death among the trees.
"Riders," Sandor said. His hand was one hundred percent healed. He got to his feet, sheathed his longsword, and tossed Arya a bag of their supplies. "Get the horses. And our weapons."
Arya stared at him with huge eyes and said nothing. Then she turned and vanished into the woods, back toward where they'd camped.
They tried until nightfall to outdistance their pursuers, but it was just no use. The men came on healthy, well-fed destriers and chargers that were accoutered for war. They carried a banner that Sandor was able to glimpse once from the top of a hill, when they were still nearly half a mile back—a field of red and gold checks, Lannister colors, with a device that looked like a crown with smoke rising from it.
"Who?" Arya said when Sandor seemed to be finished deciding who they were.
"No clue," he said gruffly. "Shut up. Doesn't matter who they are. If they catch us we're dead."
They were caught an hour later.
Arya's Craven was nearly crawling, and the Hound's Stranger faring only slightly better, when the riders came exploding up the path behind them, singing at the tops of their merry lungs and readying nets. Arya screamed and dug her heels into Craven's sides, but the horse only gave back a bored grunt, as if to say: "Listen, why don't you carry me for a while."
Sandor roared as he was brought crashing to the ground. His horse squealed in tandem, shooting its legs out and rolling a crazed white eye. Arya was netted cleanly and pulled off the back of Craven, who just kept plodding along down the path and was soon gone from sight. I wish people would stop catching me in traps, Arya thought angrily.
"Ho, ho, hello!" cried the leader of the horsemen as he brought his destrier around the two bound captives squirming in the road. The nets had tangled the Hound so badly that one of his feet was somehow sticking out from under an armpit. He shouted wordlessly, so great was his frustration and annoyance.
"We bring you good tidings, friendly travelers of the realm!" the riders' leader went on. "From good King Joffrey we come, yes, from King's Landing!"
"Let the kid go," Sandor grunted. "She's no one, a bastard's bastard. I'm the one you want."
"We want you both!" the man replied happily. "We want everybody. We're on a quest to apologize to everyone in the realm."
The Hound breathed furiously through his nostrils. "What?" he said.
"Good King Joffrey has had a shift in his spirit and declared the service of the gold cloaks at an end. We are now about a grand new work to bring his apology to every man, woman, and child who lives."
"What the shit are you talking about," Arya demanded from inside her net.
"He is sorry!"
"SORRY!" two dozen men at arms sang in a single great voice.
"For being!"
"BEING!"
"A little!"
"LITTLE!"
"SHIT!"
"FORBEINGALITTLESHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT!" the men sang victoriously.
The woods were silent for several long moments.
"Get the fuggoutta my face," the Hound said tiredly, rolling over and beginning to detangle the mildest of the knots that had formed.
"Can you write your names in our little book?" said someone else. The man climbed down off his horse and helped Arya with her net. "King Joff has ordered us to collect the signatures of everyone in Westeros, after we've apologized to them."
Arya wrote "Mary Katherine Longfellow" in the book. She passed it to Sandor, who scrawled "HUGH JASS" in a childlike hand. When the men had ridden off to find someone else to apologize to, Arya and the Hound appraised their inventory.
"We left everything but our weapons back in the woods a half day's ride from here," the Hound said, balancing on his palm the bent copper knife he'd stolen off a dead man six or seven towns back. "Your horse got away. We don't have any food or wine, and—"
Arya drove a hellacious karate chop into the side of his neck. The Hound coughed woundedly, turned, and sprayed vomit into the woods. Then he simply collapsed and began to cry. The bullshit had worn him down to a nub.
"Valar morghulis, bitch," said Arya, standing over him.
