THE LONG GAME

as the sweetapple reddens on a high branch

high on the highest branch and the applepickers forgot—

no, not forgot: were unable to reach

Sappho, Fragment 105A

They entered the common room of an inn, like any of those that she had stayed in as she traveled south along the Kingsroad with her father. Arched stones, wooden beams, roasting meat on a spit and a smoke from the roaring fire so heavy she knew it would flavor the ale. The blazing red of the hearth vied in intensity with the deep blush that was on her cheeks. For the inn was not empty: it was filled with the voices and laughter of the men drinking there. Sansa recognized them—Ser Waymar Royce and Ser Loras Tyrell and Lord Beric Dondarrion and a dozen others more dimly remembered. They were men or boys that at some point in her life she had fancied and could look back on those fancies without recrimination or rancor.

The Hound carried her to the stool where Lord Beric was sitting. "My lady," he greeted her with gentle reverence as if she was a vision of the Maiden, innocent and chaste.

The Lord of Blackhaven had come to King's Landing to fight in the Hand's Tourney. He was no great warrior and no great tourney combatant but by chance, her father had appointed him to lead an expedition to put down Gregor Clegane, a giant notorious for his cruelty and battle prowess. No one could withstand The Mountain but Beric Dondarrion had tried, over and over. Seeing him in this smoky rustic inn wearing the golden halo of his heroism near blinded her. All she could do was smile shamefacedly before she quickly turned to hide her countenance in the muscled arms of the man who held her.

That same man unceremoniously kicked the stool out from under Lord Beric, the marcher lord falling to the ground with a hard thud. The Hound then picked up the stool and brought it over to one of the inn's pillars. He placed her on the stool and bound her hands to the pillar. Her knees he pushed wide apart, taking each leg and tying it to a stool leg. She squirmed and struggled, a fish caught on a hook, until he took out a wide ribbon. If there was a draft in the inn, she could not feel it, yet the striking anomaly fluttered in the firelight, a red as dark as arterial blood. The Hound covered her eyes with it. "Stay," he said, while roughly kneading her breasts. He stopped his fondling and she heard him walk away, his mean, mocking laughter trailing him, the sound like the snarling of dogs in a pit.

Sansa began to tremble as she tested the snugness of her bonds and found there was no give. She wanted to call for him but was at a loss for the words. She never knew quite how to greet him: he had rebuked her for calling him lord and for calling him Ser.

Her stoppered throat opened at last with "Sandor?" How easy the name was to say, now that she had actually voiced it at last. Like a song to which everyone knew the words.

From the corner of the inn, she heard the run of a woodharp and the night seemed to fall abruptly into a swell of music, the bars of a smallfolk song. At first, it was slightly disturbing before becoming out and out terrible as the music grew louder, a riot of laughter and deep male voices singing in ever deafening heights, building to some unknown climax. Was Butterbumps here too? The horrifying thought gripped her, throwing her into hysteria. She struggled harder, twisting, a wild feminine force possessing her as she strained to close her thighs.

But she felt huge male hands holding them apart. A moment later, there was a kiss from a warm mouth against her, a large tongue painting a long broad stroke against her slit before delving inside of her. With a little mew, a kittenish whimper, she began to cry, a sob threatening to break from her chest. Then she felt the nuzzle of a face against her inner thigh. On her right thigh, the skin was like hard leather, like scar tissue. The face then turned and nuzzled her left thigh and she felt the rough scraping of a man's stubble. "My hands are falling asleep," Sansa whimpered, though it was the least of her objections.

"Arch your lower spine, like a bow," he rasped. "Believe me, you're in the most comfortable position possible."

And how many women have you tied up? She would have said the words if her tongue hadn't grown fat in her mouth. She wasn't sure if she wanted this and only the knowledge that it was a silly dream kept her governable. She swallowed, took a breath, then another. Breathing seemed to be something she had to will herself to do. He took her silence for encouragement.

Behind her blindfold, she pinched her eyes closed, her head dropping to her chin, her muscles coiling around the Hound's head, her mind shrinking from the exposure of her position even as her body responded. It felt wrong. An ethereal, otherworldly sensation from a foreign place where people made a religion out of sexual pleasure. Myranda Royce had told her of this act—it was a ritual practice between supplicants and the high priestess in the temple of the Lysene goddess of love.

Lady Myranda had once shown Alayne a small painting of the goddess, depicted as a beautiful naked young woman with auburn colored hair, rising from the waves on a seashell. The older girl had laughed uproariously at her mortification as the painting, save for the hair color, bore an uncanny resemblance to the shy and prim Alayne. The naked goddess was also stamped on Lysene coins and visitors from beyond the Narrow Sea coming to see Lord Petyr would sometimes raise their eyebrows waggishly upon taking note of his baseborn daughter. It was all very embarrassing. And secretly tantalizing. Sansa did not know if the Hound was aware of the cult of the Lysene goddess but he was certainly an enthusiastic practitioner of its rituals.

Hands slid beneath her buttocks, pulling her closer, raising her higher as if she were a wineskin that would slake his thirst. He buried his face in her curls, breathing deeply through the dark auburn hair. Then he began to lap at her with his tongue, licking slowly upwards from the mouth of her womb to where the skin was folded. He sucked at that hard little button of flesh, over and over, making Sansa gasp at the sensation. He stimulated her so persistently it was mildly unpleasant, while also being overpoweringly irresistible.

She pressed herself harder against his mouth. His tongue stabbed into her, dipping in deep, warm, wet, before he replaced his tongue with his fingers, cool and mailed, first one and then two. He moved them inside of her in a deliberate mockery of the sexual act, while his tongue flicked her in firm quick motions. Her whole body lit up, a prickling heat that had its source between her legs but whose coiled intensity was felt everywhere … from her toes, up her spine, out to the clenching of her bound hands.

Even her eyes felt hot. Sansa imagined what this depraved tableau would look like to an observer. She was naked, squatting on a stool, her thighs spread wide open, her buttocks imprisoned within a pair of strong hands. She was a blind captive, her feet and her hands tethered, her auburn hair falling about her, eyes bound with red silk while a hideous hulking man crouched below her, laving at her womanhood. All around them a rowdy crowd of drunken men watched her; watched her moan in paroxysms of longing that sounded pathetically grateful to her own ears as the Hound's devouring mouth supped at her.

"Oh, oh—I'm going to pass out." The feeling of physical strain was enormous, like holding back a heavy wagon on the steep incline of a mountain.

"That's not what it's called, little bird," he chuckled. How was he even able to speak as his mouth was doing that? Her skin prickled; she had a baffling sense of nothing being where she had put it.

Her confusion was forgotten as the crowd rose to full burst with the raucous singing of the song's chorus. The maid so fair, but he licked the honey, from her hair! Her hair! Her hair! The song seemed to whip the Hound into a frenzy, his mouth clamping down on her, his lips wrapped around just that vulnerable, vincible button.

An orgy of sucking that made her muscles contract and contract, tighter and tighter. She gasped as the good feeling rolled over her, sending quivers of contractions radiated outwards from between her legs. It made her nipples pucker into hard pebbles, her skin break out into gooseprickles. Behind the blindfold, her eyelids fluttered uncontrollably like the wings of a butterfly.

The crowd cheered the Hound as loudly as the day he won the Hand's Tourney. And off they went, the bear! The bear! And the maiden fair! The chorus came to rousing conclusion, the noises of the crowd rose and fell, wine jugs smashed together and broken in drunken exultation.

She cried out when a stranger touched her, brushing her legs with what felt like a flagon. The Hound grabbed at it as it passed her knees and she heard him gulping it down. She could almost picture it. Thickened wine, stored in a dark bottle. Dornish sour. She heard him laugh, a long raspy laugh that echoed through the inn as he smacked his lips with the sound of quenched thirst before he emptied the contents of the flagon below her tummy. He licked her one last time, lapping up the wine, making a playful noise against her mound like a dog with its bone, grrrr. She heard him rise from his crouched position with a grunt of achievement, victorious.

She was left sitting on her stool testing her bonds, her face so hot she knew she must be as deeply flushed as if she was heavily intoxicated. It was if the strongwine he had doused her with had somehow worked itself into her bloodstream. Her pelvic muscles continued to quiver and convulse, nerve endings twitching like mad. A warmth suffused her entire body but was most concentrated below her tummy, between her legs, a wonderful liquidy languor that smelled of Dornish sour.

As the good feeling dimmed, the noise of the inn became harder for Sansa to ignore. There were broken fragments of conversation that she strained to listen to but could not understand, voices speaking in sounds that mimicked the cadence of the Common Tongue but used no words of which she knew the meaning. Tavern songs like Bessa the Barmaid and The Dornishman's Wife would rise and fall like the ebb and flow of the tide along with peals of boisterous male laughter. A harsh, low laugh floated out with these, a laugh she would have known anywhere.

Her ears perked up when she caught it, moving her head to decipher the direction from whence it came. It sounded distant but genuine for once, though she definitely did not care for his sense of humor should this be an example of it. Her lower lip trembled. The fear of being abandoned eclipsed even her shame. She could hear the scraping of many pairs of boots on the rushes near her.

Dark bodies gathered closely so that their smell encroached, an odor of horses and rawhide and ale. She felt their eyes upon her, their heat finding an answering heat in the blush that covered her body. She knew where they looked the hardest: at the apex of her thighs so obscenely open, the hair covered in droplets of wine, her opening slick from her excitement. The stares, her supreme immodesty, his absence … the apprehension became as palpable as the smoke from the firepit.

"Sandor … Sandor?" she cried quietly, then louder and more angrily. "Ser Sandor!"

She heard the sound of a stool scraping on the floor, pulling up close to her. Large hands dug into the flesh at the base of her head, massaging with gentle fingertips, arranging then re-arranging her hair until it fell like a curtain in front of her, her nakedness concealed like a bride on her wedding night. The hands moved underneath the curtain of her hair, encircling her neck, feeling the gooseprickles on her upper arms, fondling her breasts.

"I love your teats. Makes a man wish he had never been weaned." He started bouncing her breasts as if they were balls he was trying to juggle, up and down, with the smooth worn pads of his fingertips. What a silly boy, she thought. A boy of four and ten. No… she recanted, thinking of the maturity of her brothers Robb and Jon. Those were the boys of four and ten she had known. This one was like a boy of eight, like Sweetrobin.

There were yells for meat and drink from across the room, making Sansa realize she was hungry and thirsty too. She blew a tuft of hair from her cheek in exasperation as the hands continued to fondle her breasts, clutching at them greedily before kneading them. "You have no shame, Lady Sansa. Only imagination."

She felt his thumb move to trace the bottom ridge of her lower lip, rolling it down. He held it still for a moment before releasing it with a wet pop. "I like to play too." A light male chuckle. "Open your mouth …"

Sansa made an odd frown, half of her lips moving up, half moving down.

"No dirty tricks," he chortled, slapping his hands on his knees.

She opened her mouth and Arbor Gold, cool and tart, was squirted from a wineskin into it. She drank it down then felt a piece of the roasting meat, a herbed lamb, touch her tongue. One after the other she ate, the pieces of meat always tender and juicy, the best of morsels. They continued to eat together in tandem as she heard Sandor chewing and gulping down wine between his feedings of her. It was a bizarre mockery of courtly table manners where the lord would feed his lady from his own plate. Where the lovers would drink from the same cup and kiss between their bites and sips.

She heard him bite into a crisp apple before it was pressed against her lips. He gave her the side that he had just bitten into and she took a crunch out of the half-eaten apple, wet from his mouth. A shudder of excitement ran through her. How strange this act seemed to be, so dark and forbidden. It was all too close to her real life where sharing an apple with a man held both erotic allure and the threat of her own downfall.

The feverish, fleeting encounter came fluttering up, like a winged beetle escaping from the closed cage of memory. A hedge knight who had visited the Gates of the Moon, honest and kind-looking with the face of a Northman. Take this and know that I've shared a sweet with a kind and gracious lady, he had said as he brushed the golden smooth skin of an apple against her hot cheeks. She knew his particular variety by taste, by name. White Winter Pearmain; the name spilled out of her at once, the way when upon seeing a childhood friend—unmet for years—one pulls out a name along with a gangling thread of forgotten history.

Alayne had helped Maester Colemon torture apple trees to grow, grafting the Southron varieties—the Costard, the Nonpareil, the White Joaneting, the Royal Russet—she could recite those names off like heraldry. But the knight's apple had been different. The taste of windfall from the orchards of Winterfell. Melt-in-the-mouth made sweet only by the virtue of Northern honey bees. Sansa had felt a foolish desire to fold, to tell the knight all and beg for his aid but Lord Petyr had called him away. She looked for him later that evening but the hedge knight was nowhere to be found, another would-be savior disappearing into the mist.

Alayne had eaten the apple, alone, in her bedchamber. As if it was a secret and forbidden thing. The girl's body bending over the apple, savoring the sight, the smell, the taste, all the while exhorting herself to go slowly, to hold on to the moment that once consumed would be gone forever.

That girl moved now in a different sort of motion. She straightened, throwing herself at Sandor Clegane.

Kissing him.

His lips were a little rough, chapped but sticky with flavor. Wholly marvelous. The enchanted taste of White Winter Pearmain, the best wine and memories as sweet and as sad as music.

Their teeth bumped gently together, making them both smile. He sucked on her lower lip briefly, wiping with his thumb at the wetness he'd left. His kisses were so light, the kisses of a boy, gentle and sincere. Sansa hadn't expected that—his first kiss, that night of the battle, had been angry and brutal. Sometimes, she had lain awake at night indulging in that dirty habit of biting her lips until they bruised, trying to recall the cruel press of his mouth against hers. The left side burned away, the right side plump and sensual as if it were sensitive enough to tell the differences between grains of salt …

"Kiss me. Like you did the first time," she said. How funny was the lilt of her voice, she thought. Coy. Doeish. As if she wanted to invite more roughness, more dominion.

Nothing happened for the length of several heartbeats. She could feel the weight of his stare; he could look at her in a way that would make her go suddenly cold. Then she heard him snort, "As you wish, my lady."

One hand slid up to the back of her neck under her hair. He tipped her head. When he kissed her, he held her cheek, stroking it with his thumb even as he planted his tongue deep. They kissed for what seemed like hours, greedy, wallowing kisses, until the noise of the inn died down, leaving them lost in their own world.

Sansa squirmed like mad, she couldn't keep still. It was as if he was touching her all over, even though they were just kissing. Her nipples tightened, the sensation challenging her to ask him to lower his mouth, to kiss them with those peculiar lips. Her muscles clenched, swelled, folds growing thickly together, welcoming, wishing that whatever he did to her before, he should please do so again. Images of taking him down on top of her, his massive thick manhood moving inside of her, flickered through her brain. She wanted to lay down with him so very badly. Yet how she also wanted the luscious kisses to go on and on, that they would drink from each other trapped in eternal time.

What a doomed tragic rivalry. Her mind acknowledging that what she really wanted were more kisses. Sweet kisses from a tender boy because kisses were anchored to her reality, to what she was ready for in the waking world. While her body beguiled her to rush headlong, the heat between her legs hissed, whispered, oh how painfully she yearned for this hulking brute to bring her to her knees. On the ground. In the dirt …

"Ah, ah …" she planted little hard pants into his mouth when she felt his calloused fingerpads drift along her knees then up her thighs. He quickly dropped his hands away in response. The retreat made her audibly groan and she pressed her lips against his neck where she felt his pulse, felt it beating fast and hard.

"You're shaking," she said. He seemed to understand the tension inside of her, to feel it in kind.

"An excess of enjoyment," he replied, his voice quiet and rough. "This feels good. Too good." That he wasn't pressing her for more surprised her.

"Do you want to … ?"

"The word is come, you're asking me if I want to come. No. Not yet."

He then spoke with a great breath of relief as if he was unburdening thoughts chewed over for hours. "Look, you're pretending now that this is real, not a game anymore. You're a girl of four and ten who is titillated by sharing an apple with a man. If it was real, I'd wait … well, I'd try to wait. Until you were ready for it, until you were older."

"Why?" she said, astonishment making her speech blunt. She found it hard to fathom that he had any morals to restrain himself. He had always disabused her of her faith in his goodness, in his honor. Sandor Clegane, in his own opinion, was no true knight.

"Because if I took you, fucked you like I want to, you might come to regret it almost immediately, even if your body likes it at first. You'd look at me, despise me as a lowly brute. But if I gave you time to think it over, to come into your desire slowly and on your own, the weight of the blame would rest squarely on your shoulders. Once you bore that weight, you might never want to throw it off. Anything could happen that way. I wouldn't get to fuck you once, I'd get to fuck you for my lifetime. You want to play games, so do I. I want to play the long game with you."

Sansa had to snort, even if it was unladylike. Yet she understood the source of his restraint, a mixture of great want and great terror, combined with the newborn wisdom of an untried seducer. The man had demonstrated a keen understanding of her before: when he had knelt between her and the long plunge, eighty feet to the bailey, that she had wanted to take with Joffrey the day Wormlips had made her look at her father's tarred head.

"I'm older here," Sansa whispered in his good ear. "Older than my years, and you, you're younger than yours. There's no inequality between us in dreams."

He kissed her, feasting dreamily on her mouth, then fed her more Arbor Gold. She wanted it, swallowed the wine eagerly, giggling and stroking his tongue with hers. Alayne never permitted herself to drink with a greater purpose than to quench thirst in real life where the world was eager to teach sharp lessons to girls, especially baseborn girls, who lost control. There was no fear of that here. She did not believe Sandor Clegane would let any harm come to her or make her do anything she would regret—his little speech had assured her of that.

"More wine, sweet plumwine," she murmured. She heard him squirt wine into his mouth and then felt him do the same into hers. They kissed with the very sweet and very strong flavor of plumwine on their lips. She wanted the golden warm, tingly freedom of intoxication, the slackening of her inhibitions. Why, anything could happen that way.