Seven

The Hound woke to the chattering sound of rain.

The bedroll was wet and so was his head and his scars. Stranger was neighing, nervous to depart. He was… alone.

So everything was just a dream… He searched for a pool of his vomit to convince himself that only one battle had been real, the one in which he assaulted Sansa and left her to whoever came after him. That would be very much like the Hound he knew. Not the madman with forsaken dreams he had turned into.

But the grass was clean and dewy, smelling on sage. The reek of death was gone.

This place isn't burning.

He stood up and readied to leave. When he went to tie his bedroll to Stranger, the second one was already there. Yes, fool, because you never used it.

I never packed bedrolls that first night.

He was about to mount when he heard branches cracking. A very good looking boy in a too long tunic and breeches strolled out of the bushes, blushing. His head was fully covered by an odd scarf, resembling Sansa's dress from the day before.

"I hated that gown," Sansa said calmly. "It was a garment for a child, meant to humiliate me. They say I am a woman since I bled and they all treat me like the stupid child I was before they killed my father." She was wearing his clothing.

"You brought two changes for you. Do you mind?" she asked, and her voice never trembled as in the Red Keep.

He shook his head. "It becomes you," he said with caution.

"The freedom does," he clarified, making an empty gesture with his hand at their surroundings.

"You as well," she said.

He remained at loss of what to say. As an afterthought, he bent to help her roll up the sleeves and the legs of the breeches. The teats were not visible now, but her legs had grown impossibly long. I could never see that in a gown, could I?

He hoped he would get to wear the clothes she had on further down the road and enjoy the smell. He would give her the second clean set then. The dog was often content with scraps.

Sandor was finding out it was one thing to kiss Sansa at night, with the heat of the battle still in his veins, and quite another to face her in the morning. It had also always been much easier to talk to her when drunk. She was not just any girl to him.

Not just any woman.

"It is the morning of the seventh day," she whispered fervently, "there must be gods, both old and new."

"There are only people, bad and less bad," he retorted swiftly, as he would parry a blow from a sword, before her meaning became clear to him.

He should have known. She didn't bar the door the night before. It was the only time she didn't do it. She knew he would be coming.

"You… you… you knew!" the anger was never far away from him, drunk or sober. "Why haven't you said anything?"

"Why didn't you?" she matched his rage in her intent; yelling back at him melodiously, as far as her much softer voice allowed.

A voice soft as a kiss.

"I thought I was the only one," he admitted and it dawned on him. "You must have thought the same," he ventured a guess. "You didn't trust me. You were right. I wouldn't trust myself if I were you."

He remembered himself holding a dagger to her throat and pondering whether to kill her or not; disenthralled with the world as he always had been.

"You must be braver than anyone I've ever met or stark mad to go with me after that first night," he said bitterly.

"That's what I've been telling myself," she concurred. "Am I?"

"What?"

"Mad for going with you?"

"I can't answer that, or not honestly," he said in a rough voice. He came closer to her, looking down on her, as he had so many times in the past seven days.

"I am mad, I must be… " she whispered and her own voice sounded deeper than before the battle.

"Why?" he needed to know.

"Since that first night… you were too strong to fight… you pinned me down to my bed… you reeked of blood… I've never been more afraid of anyone or anything in my life… you wanted to kill me…or worse… And if I didn't chance to sing the Mother's hymn to you, you would have done it, wouldn't you? …"

"I wish to think I wouldn't, no matter what, but the truth is I don't know." He would never embellish for her what she needed to know.

"Be that as it may," Sansa continued, very nervous, "all I could think about the next day, and the day after, and all these days, during the endless supper with the queen in the ballroom of Maegor's Holdfast, was that one moment between us when you should have kissed me. I could almost feel it, as if you'd done it. After three nights I believed you did it."

"And I yearned for you to do it again every night when you came to see me."

"Yet now I know you've never done it before…." Sansa was mortified. "Now that you did kiss me. What does that make me if not mad?"

A woman, he thought, hopeful, but didn't dare say it. My woman, should you so wish.

"Why didn't you kiss me, that first night?" Her question struck him as a well-aimed lance-blow which instantly kicks a man out of the saddle in a joust.

"You closed your eyes," he answered in a small voice of a child.

"Oh," Sansa laughed. The sound of her laughter fell to the ground like a waterfall of crystal clean water. "I thought I ought to close them for being kissed. Is it not so?"

"I wouldn't know. And at that moment, I don't think I would have stopped at kissing." There. He said it. She was alone with him in the wilderness and she knew now how she had made a mistake. Her septa must have told her something about the marriage bed and making babies.

She frowned as she did when she searched for proper pretty words to chirp at Joffrey and maybe save herself a beating. And as she did when she touched his shoulder and said Gregor was no true knight.

"A different man wouldn't have heard my song," she concluded after a while, her voice almost emotionless. "Most men would have taken me and killed me if they came to my room during the battle. Cersei farted herself to educate me every evening in the past week about the rape and a bit of murder should a city be sacked. She complained about a dearth of good sacking songs. She's been telling me the truth about the condition of women since she no longer needed to lie to me."

"Yet there I was, waiting for my raper and murderer night after night; imagining your cruel lips on mine... You were so drunk that you could barely stand the second night, when you saved me from Ser Ilyn..."

"I didn't save you," he protested. "You died that night."

"But not under the headman's sword, my father's stolen sword... I died in your arms," she said in amazement, as if that had changed everything.

Her dreamy expression was gone soon, replaced by her courtly coldness. "Yet had you been faster than Ser Ilyn, you might have taken me for yourself and then ripped my heart out..."

It was true enough. But not yet entirely.

"It's just that… I can't stand it when you are being hurt, I was never able to stand it…" he dared a half-confession of his own. He could not admit his love for her, and have her giggle at him, for as much as he'd just enjoyed the fresh sound of her laughter.

"Before… I sometimes thought I could just take you, no matter what you wanted. I thought I would find joy in it. And I had to come this close to having my way with you to know for certain I would only regret it… Best believe it. I would regret it. I'm regretting already what I did that first night. It's eating me alive. I might very well let myself die from it some day." He spoke with the grimness of the Stranger.

Her eyes widened and she seemed pleased by his words so he must have said something right.

She stood on her tiptoes and reached for his shoulders. It was the most natural thing to lift her pretty behind so that he could kiss her again. Or, rather, so that she could kiss him. He felt wetness on her face, but her mouth was stretched thin, and she smiled through her tears, visiting every inch of his ugly face and mouth with her lips.

"You love me," she judged him, incredulous, with that infallible justness of her courtesy. "You must... to speak of me so... with your hatred of everything gallant and splendid..."

Her voice wavered and dwindled. "Or is it just another lie I wish to believe in, a stupid dream that you love me?"

"With all my heart," his rasp was less than a whisper, but he could not deny it.

"I think I may also pronounce myself in love with you on this instant," she murmured. "Mad as that may be."

Twenty years later, he would still not be able to understand how she knew his best kept secret.

Then, taken by her words and on an instinct, he finally allowed his hands to roam her body as he'd wanted them to do for so long. He didn't hold his strength back in their embrace, needing to know if she could take it. Yet he never tried to undress her.

There will be time for that, he thought, wishfully, thankful for the invention of armour.

Sansa was a maid; she didn't need to know what he might do in his breeches.

She gasped against his lips, and he gave himself over to a changed kiss. He was... It wasn't pity... It weren't scraps what she gave him. He was...wanted... Beyond his wildest expectations in the matter. He would savour the discovery slowly as the very best red wine from Arbor he could drink only rarely; cup by cup. Treasures had to be preserved.

"The North is far away," he voiced very carefully after a while.

His face was still buried between her hands, and Sansa seemed to be done with crying and kissing him for the time being. She began fidgeting with his hair.

She looked as he felt. Thoroughly kissed... And wanting more. Perhaps she didn't know what she wanted. He hoped she did or would know, one day.

She replied carelessly, with unbound longing. "I can't wait to show my home to you. The flowers in the Neck and the summer snows."

He decided not to tell her how unlikely it was they would reach it alive.

"Best if we go then, my lady." By habit, he reverted to scorn, but she didn't seem to mind.

Now, she was his lady. In his heart, she would always be his little bird.