FIRST SONG
] among mortal woman, know this
] from every care
] you could release me
]
] dewy riverbanks
] to last all night long
Sappho, Fragment 23
Sansa's eyes lit upon the image reflected in the pool of water. She was lying on her tummy on the forest floor, sniffing at the earth and peering at her reflection like a young puppy. The dappled sunlight of the forest wavered over her likeness, casting itself like a net over the girl. Her reflection struggled, shifted, girlishness flipping inexplicably to womanhood and back again. One moment she appeared a woman whose graces circumvented her youth; her long thick lashes rimming her eyes like kohl, her breasts advancing and straining the stretch of her gauzy white bedgown. The next she was a child, cute in the way little girls were cute, with rounded cheeks as pink as apples and a little chin with the hint of a second one underneath it.
So this is what fourteen looks like, she thought as she idly twisted the necklace of Myranda's dangling pearls between her fingers.
Sansa lifted up her chin, trying to make her face more severe, regal, strong. I'm bastard-brave, I am not weak, Alayne threw back. The girl's pouty lower lip came out, calling attention to her vague resemblance to her cousin Sweetrobin.
But Alayne's strength wasn't the kind of strength Sansa admired the most, the strength that would protect those who could not protect themselves. She strummed her fingers in the pool, scratching at the image of Alayne, until the girl's face could no longer be seen in the vibrations of the water.
"Why is your hair brown?" a familiar voice rasped.
Sansa turned around. He was seated near her on a moss covered stone, clad in the brown-and-dun robes of a male penitent. The Quiet Isle, she thought. His tantalizing physical proximity in the real world made her chuckle softly—that the twisting and coiling pathways of their lives had brought them but a few leagues from each other.
"My Aunt Lysa thought my hair made me resemble my lady mother too much and made me darken it. Littlefinger brought me to her. I live in the Vale, under the guise of his natural daughter. I'm only a few leagues from the Quiet Isle, from you."
Her eyes grew wide, both their attentions focused on the sword that lay across his lap. "It's beautiful," she said, watching Sandor unsheathe it.
The scabbard was made from black lacquer with the lower length banded by golden openwork of blades of grass, inlaid with three dogs made out of dragonglass. The blade was breathtaking, resplendent—Valyrian—the steel rippled with red and black streaks, so dark that it put Sansa in mind of Ice, her father's greatsword. The sight evoked her intensely, her childhood clinging to the motion of Sandor's hands wiping the blade as her father had once done.
"My father's sword—" she was about to describe it but then remembered that the Hound would have seen it up close. He was there the day Ser Ilyn had unsheathed Ice from the scabbard on his back … the sword falling at the sound of her prince's words… her father's legs, jerking …
From the corner of her eye, she saw Sandor's smirk go slack. With a wriggle, she drew up her knees and pulled herself into a sitting position. She pulled on the hem of her bedgown so that her legs were bare.
Her father's sword was lost, broken in two—the steel reforged to be put into the service of the Lannisters. The same fate that had befallen his daughter. I will not be sad, she commanded as her toes curled in sensuous contact with the earth. It was her nature, bent on its own survival, not to allow her brain to dwell on loss. She wet her lips, quietly dousing her fury, and looked up, smiling at him brightly.
Behind him, she saw the grove of ancient oaks. The great heart tree, its bark as white as cream, its leaves like red rose petals, the merciless beauty of its carved face. The air was spicy with the scent of flowers and the sound of insects humming in the heat above their heads. The water of the pool where her father once sat cleaning his sword was so dazzling in the radiance of the sunlight that it made her mind ache.
"We're in the godswood at Winterfell. The place where you long to be most," he rasped. Sandor tilted his head and closed his eyes. The gentle warmth of the sun kissed his face. He held his eyes closed for a moment before he opened them and resumed his polishing.
"I've been away for so long. How unreal it seems…" she said at last. In her fancy, she began to imagine that she heard music. It seemed as if the wind carried a melody to a song that she knew or thought she knew. Sweet and sad and beguiling. Sansa strained to catch it but it seemed to be always receding from her recognition, never nearer yet ever farther.
"Do you hear that tune, Sandor?" Even he seemed a part of the song, cleaning his sword in time to the rhythm. Sandor raised one eyebrow and to her dismay idly began to whistle the melody of Florian and Jonquil.
That made her mouth purse. She picked up a plait of her hair. With sudden vehemence she unbraided, then smoothed the wayward brown locks with her fingers. "I hate it. My father always loved the color of my hair," she said, though whether by father she meant Eddard Stark or Petyr Baelish was muddled in her mind.
Sandor snorted. "You're as distracting as ever, Sansa. Pretty as a prayer book, no matter your hair color."
"It's not even ugly. Color of roasted nuts."
"Or … tortoiseshell," he routed at the sight of her face.
Or the fur of a bagged rabbit. Or a bastard beggar-girl. The brief memory of Aunt Lysa's words flitted through her mind. You are well born and the Starks of Winterfell were always proud but Winterfell has fallen and you are really just a beggar now.
"Lady Lysa was unkind to you?" he barked suddenly. "Fat stinking cow," he rasped without waiting for her response.
"She said I was wanton," Sansa replied tonelessly. I shouldn't feel sad for her at all. She was a monster, like the envious, murderous stepmother from the stories.
His face narrowed and his silence seemed to be one of pure incredulity. "Right … You were a bruisable, fatherless child. Her sister's daughter. She ought to have protected you. Damn crazy cunt," he spat. "There's a special place in the Seventh Hell reserved for betrayers of kin. She ought to be there, lodged head up in blocks of ice with frost freezing her eyes so that she can't cry."
Sansa's stomach rolled at thought of it. Aunt Lysa's tears. Tears, tears, tears. No need for tears but that's not what you said in King's Landing. You told me to put the tears in Jon's wine and I did. I wrote to Cateyln and told her the Lannisters had killed my lord husband, just as you said.
"She dragged me to the Moon Door while her singer drowned out my screams by playing 'The False and The Fair.' I didn't want to kiss her husband. She wouldn't believe me. She would have murdered me if it hadn't been for Petyr. He saved me and then that singer—then Petyr—"
Sansa forced a sob back down into her chest. She refused to let it come out and the effort made her throat convulse as if she was drowning. And so she was—Alayne's father was the sea, smiling surface and treacherous depths and the smoothly savage creatures dwelling beneath that haunted her dreams.
"It was Petyr. He murdered them all. Aunt Lysa, Jon Arryn, my father. He tainted the very air of the Seven Kingdoms with bloodshed."
Her vision blurred. Something in her, a part of her spirit, bayed and howled over the truth of Alayne's situation, over the horror of it. In it. As dark as any of Old Nan's tales. The giant's song from the tale of Princess Daeryssa began to play in Sansa's head. Be she alive or be she dead, I'll grind her bones to make my bread.
The Hound's face became blood-darkened, his expression, his whole posture taking on a ferocious edge. "What has he done to you? Made you his whore?"
"No. A septon must find Alayne Stone to be satisfyingly virgin or else all of Littlefinger's plans will be for nothing. And…"
Every man had one blindness. Petyr had taught her this himself, no matter how clever the man might be. "He wants me to love him. He imagines himself the huntsman coming along to cut the maiden free from the belly of the beast. Trusting she's too stupid to notice that it was him who fed her to the creature in the first place."
Sandor waited for her to continue but she only shook her head. It was difficult to explain, even to herself. She was bored with Alayne's situation on one level and incapacitated by it on another.
"Scheming, poxy whoreson. I'm going to cut out his bloody lying tongue after I shove a sword up his delicate arse. Bugger him to the seven hells." He stood up and began to swing his sword. Sansa's heart drummed wildly, a feeling of pleasant awe washing over her. The sword was alive in his hands, the gestures so adept that her brothers would have given up their eyeteeth in a sack for a quarter of his skill.
"A great sword—ah—" her chin pointed in the direction of the longsword, "a great sword must have a great name."
"Marvelous, isn't she? Do you see the way she glints in the sun? I imagine Just Maid might have looked like this."
Just Maid was an enchanted sword that belonged to the legendary knight Ser Galladon. His valor was so great that it was said that the Maiden fell in love with him and gave him Just Maid as a lover's token.
"I squired for Gerion Lannister. He said that there was a dark charm about Valyrian steel that makes it unspeakably desirable. Soggy-brained fool set sail in search of the Lannister ancestral sword Brightroar. He never returned. They say he traveled into the Smoking Sea itself. He was fond of Dornish Sour. Sometimes when I'm drinking, I think of him and lost causes, hopeless dreams."
Sandor's look hardened at her, focused in a way that made no sense. "I was one and twenty the last time I saw him. In a brothel in Lannisport. All I knew of the sweetness of desire then was that it meant fucking or could be discharged that way."
He laughed. "Only in my dreams did I think to possess a Valyrian steel sword. I suppose that's what this is: my wildest fantasy. I have my little bird and I have Black Dog, everything I want, right at my feet."
"A black dog is a portent of death in the North. Is it the same in the Westerlands?" Sansa thought of his huge warhorse. Whom he had so ominously named Stranger. "Your obsession with being dark is adorable," she said, covering her giggling mouth with the palm of her hand.
The Hound gave her a forbearing look, a roll of his eyes and she became afraid that he had taken her teasing too seriously. But then a grin appeared, "The name suits him. Other men have said that horse was whelped in hell. Bit off the ear of a monk who tried to geld him." The grin broadened, a sudden odd boyishness on his hard features.
How staggeringly young he looks, she thought. For a brief moment, he felt more like her son than a man fifteen years her senior. Out of context and out of the grave, her mind turned to Bran. He was her favorite sibling—quick to smile, easy to love, as enamored with the stories and songs as she was once upon a time. She would lie beside him on his bed, holding his hand and watching the dust motes dance in the sunlight of his chamber as they spun together tales of the knight's quests he would go on once he was a man grown. What daring deeds he would perform: monsters slain, imperiled maidens rescued.
"What were you like as a boy?" She realized she wanted him to have a hidden idealistic side.
"Half as ugly, twice as stupid. Head full of high-flown claptrap about knights and their buggering tales."
"What was your favorite tale?" She leaned towards him, whispering loudly, "Ser Serwyn's my favorite." Oh how she ardently longed to have more things in common with him, rather than less.
He bent his heavy eyebrows at her. Embarrassment invaded her expression. She thought of Alayne in her bath, staring at that tapestry. The girl biting her lip, fruitlessly stroking, dimly aware that there was a cryptic incantation for pleasure that she could never quite dare name.
The Hound broke into an abrupt bark of laughter, "What happened to that fool and his cunt?"
Sansa wrinkled her face. "Why that was a thousand years ago. When I was still a little girl."
That wasn't quite the whole of it. There was something else too. "Ser Dontos, he … he would call me his sweet Jonquil." The words came out haltingly, she mumbled them, consciously lowering her gaze. "And now I always think of him whenever I hear that song. Petyr said Ser Dontos would have betrayed me. I believed it once; now I'm not so sure. I think Ser Dontos wanted to be my true knight. He insisted on wearing his surcoat with the arms of House Hollard instead of his fool's motley when we fled the Red Keep after Joffrey's murder. How he wept when I called him my savior."
The sniffle that she had held back caught her by surprise. Ser Dontos had been the first to help her that day Joffrey had his knights beat and strip her in the lower bailey. He had tried to transform Joffrey's violent fury into laughter by hitting her on the head with a melon. She had not thought of Ser Dontos in years and her pity for her poor drunken Florian was like the rediscovery of a sensation in a numb limb.
Sansa risked a sideways glance at Sandor. He stared back at her, his face blank. Not a clue as to why she should feel sorrow for someone like Ser Dontos, his life worth less than the toad's. I wonder if he's ever felt something for someone besides me, she thought. She did not think so. The sadness, the sorrow had been for her and her alone.
"Yes, my favorite tale was of Ser Serwyn of the Mirror Shield. After I was burned, my father bought a tapestry of his exploits. It hung in my chamber as a consolation. I would spend hours in my sickbed daydreaming that I was Ser Serwyn and Gregor was the evil dragon Urrax."
"Did you also dream of rescuing Princess Daeryssa from the giants?" she asked with a tiny quiver in her voice.
Sandor laughed miserably. "Now that was a fantasy as old as memory. I was cunt-struck since I could walk, sniffing round the skirts of every pretty girl who looked at me …"
"I'd wander through the dark forests on my black horse Stranger, with my Valyrian steel sword Black Dog at my side. It was a perilous quest. Lost princesses are never planted in comfortable inns alongside the Kingsroad. I'd climb unscalable cliffs, fight off monsters—dragons in the sky, krakens from the depths of the sea, firewyrms in the bowels of the earth. I knew that she was out there somewhere but she was not to be seen."
"What did you do when you found her?" she said breathlessly. The wish she made in the lonely wilderness came back to her. He'll slay my enemies and win my love. He'll take me back to Winterfell and we'll be ever so happy for ever and ever …
She wanted to hear him say the words, to end the story as they all ended. The gallant knight on horseback coming to release the princess with a kiss.
"The standard dogshit. Big, swooping heroics," Sandor said, with a wry pull of his mouth. "I'd kill the giants that held her captive. Gather her up in my arms, feel the beat of her little ivory heart, and lean down to press a gentle kiss to those rosebud lips."
"Then I'd lead her back to the safety of her kingdom where I would end my days receiving her bottomless gratitude," the Hound sniggered, making a perplexing gesture using his tongue in his cheek and the fist of his right hand.
"After I was burned, I put that fantasy aside. The only game girls wanted to play with me was monsters-and-maidens." His voice took on a dangerous edge, "It would make any man furious—no wife, no sons, no daughters, no lands, no claim on anything but a steel sword."
He looked at her accusingly, with that sullen, hateful stare that he could command. "Princess Daeryssa would have forsaken me. Spurned my sword. Shunned my kisses. Closed her eyes because—"
"She wouldn't have forsaken you—" Sansa's face went brutally still. The commotion rose up inside her, fury, outrage, "if only you—" Like a tantrum she couldn't control, would not control, the words welled up, overflowed, "if you had been gallant, if you had been gentle. Instead of a rotten man who made nasty, mean threats to a 'bruisable, fatherless child'. The girls in the songs and stories were always merciful, good, impossibly kind."
As quickly as his anger came, it vanished in the face of her righteous indignation. "As you say, little bird. My apologies, my lady," he muttered, his face downcast.
"Don't look here for absolution, my lord." She ruined the gravity of the moment by laughing—his grey eyes had peeked up at her with the look of a wretched dog, starved for a kind word.
Sandor smirked a little then his mouth twisted into a grimace. "Sansa … you're too old for this shit. It's nothing but a bunch of consolatory nonsense. We tell them to children and idiots to obscure the real conditions of life. I threw all that shit away when I was twelve, when I became a man. You should have too. Put them aside when you put aside dolls and skipping."
He had been rough-tongued with her before, yet these words, gently delivered, wounded her in a sharper and deeper manner than he could have intended. Everyone mocked her for her love of songs and stories. She knew they were silly, she wasn't childish about them. Not anymore. They were powerful, of the same substance and logic as dreams, a private realm where all her anxieties played out. Where things happened for no reason, great trials, accidental gifts, sudden twists of fortunes. She took comfort in them, their innocent and honorable heroines whispering to her of the secret of spinning straw into gold, fear into courage, misery into joy.
She gazed at him moist-eyed but in perfect control. Softly she said, "If I threw all them away, I'd be throwing away more than songs and stories. I'd be throwing away myself."
In a barely perceptible tone, she added, "As you had."
Sandor held her look for a long time, his expression strange and indecipherable. Then his gaze drifted away. "Do you remember when I came to your bedchamber after your father's death?"
Sansa nodded and frowned. She had lain in her bed for days in the deep lethargy of first grief. Desperately tired of being alive, yet terrified at the prospect of death. She imagined every footstep near her chamber door belonged to Ser Ilyn but the mute headsman never appeared. Instead, it was Joffrey and his dog. Her odious prince had commanded the Hound to get her out of bed. How terrified she had been at the sight of him, his burned face even more hideous in the unkind morning light. Sandor had scooped her up, his arms hooking underneath her knees, lifting her off the featherbed. As she struggled feebly under his iron hold, her blanket had fallen to the floor so that only a thin white bedgown covered her nakedness.
"All those stupid boyhood daydreams came rushing back to me as I held you. A pristine bundle of child-woman in her little white dress. Barefoot with the scent of lemons in her hair. It was as if you had been called forth from out my mother's prayer book—The Maid brought him forth a girl as supple as a willow with eyes like deep blue pools— to rejuvenate me with a vengeance."
The Hound took a deep breath and let it out in a heave of frustration. "Extremely beautiful and extremely young and so fucking helpless. Like every birdbrained cunt from the stories. Princess Daeryssa. Lady Shella. Jenny of Oldstones. Jonquil. Those nameless ladies too, the maiden in the tower, the sleeping beauty, the cinder-smudged orphan. Your bare arms prickling with gooseflesh, your little ivory heart beating so hard I could see it pulsing in your throat."
"That twice-damned bright early light shone through the threadbare fabric. I saw you, underneath your fluttering white bedgown, the ripening teats with their pink tips, the dark flame of your …"
The Hound's eyes grew flat, vacant, like a man possessed. "I would have slit the throat of the High Septon himself to see but a half-glimpse of the pink. Seven bloody hells, every inch of my skin felt twitchy. What dog could resist?" His pupils dilated as they did when he was entering her. "Morning milk, fresh, wholesome, still warm in the pail."
He laughed suddenly, his tongue darting out to lick the edge of his front teeth. "The cream at the top so thick and rich you want to eat it up with your the tip of your tongue."
"I went to a winesink that night and got so blindingly drunk that I fell asleep in a wet ditch. Where I dreamt I kissed your eyes and cheeks and mouth and neck and—" with the point of his longsword, he hooked the hem of her bedgown and lifted it until it pooled just below the area where her thighs started "—hair."
"Until you laid down with me. Weren't you just the gentlest creature? Sweet as spun sugar. No sharp edges. And I kept you against me all night while I licked you like a—"
"Dirty dog …" she saw Sandor's hands clenching tighter around the hilt of sword, white-knuckled. "A filthy man near thirty sniffing around the flounce of a young girl's skirts, looking for the missed opportunities of boyhood. Bloody pathetic."
He made a sound of disgust but his eyes remained transfixed at the area between her thighs, his nostrils flaring. "What a monstrous lust," he released in an agonized breath. "I hadn't known I had been so empty until you filled me. To bursting."
She could smell it, the scent of the loneliness that dogged him in King's Landing, as if it was a perfume that could be distilled. The acrid odor of broken jugs of wine, the faint sourness of soiled clothing, the withered pride of a greasy oilcloth lying next to the immaculate gleam of sharpened steel, all compounded with the sawtooth edge of semen and the honey sweet fragrance of the beeswax candles lit at the Maiden's altar.
She thought of Alayne eating the mystery knight's apple in the privacy of her dark bedchamber. The girl was so crushingly alone and friendless that the burden and the incapacity to communicate its heavy weight to anyone made her quietly shake as her teeth pierced the skin of the apple. How lonesome the body became after sunset. How often the mind would turn to the thought of the act. A boy like Harrold Hardyng could not steal her sleep or break her reserve. She hungered to flirt, to kiss, to know a man who was brave, gentle, strong.
"Maybe I am a lady from the songs and stories. I'm the bespelled princess who slept for a thousand years. How else to explain how I found you in my sleep?" She smiled, her nerves set alight. She lifted her bedgown higher and higher until it bunched around her waist, astonished by her own explicitness.
Time to smile and smell sweet and be his lady love.
Sandor approached her. "Little bird," he murmured. His hands petted her tummy, the coarse wool of the sleeve of his brown and dun robes scratching her skin. His hands moved lower. She lay there softly panting. "Brother Sandor, give me something to repent," she said with a nervous giggle.
She felt him curl his hand tightly around the hem of her bedgown before smoothing it down so that it fell well past her knees. Sansa inwardly cringed, her tongue testing to find the right courtesies but her throat choked back every clumsy one. He rolled on top of her, kissing away her mortification, then settled himself against her back. They held each other for a long time like two children, uncovering their friendship, conceding their closeness.
He had a way of leaving long, interested silences that made her want to fill them with honest, meaningful words. It was so very nice, as nice—no, even nicer—as laying with him. What an impossible luxury to be able to put aside her armor of courtesy. Sansa always wore it, slept and lived in it, as a soldier on the march.
Time swayed to a slow lulling rhythm.
Finally, she stretched and sat up, her knees tucked to her chin, gazing down at her feet as they peeked out from the hem of her gown. Sandor sat up beside her, putting one arm around her shoulder, patting her arm. It was a special gesture, affection between equals, between men, reserved for brothers-in-arms who had fought battles side by side. How sweetly thrilling. It filled her with the sense that she was his equal in courage.
She swung her arm around him. They sat like that, arms around each other's shoulders, each admiring the other's reflection in the bright pool. She leaned down and caressed his big toe with the tip of her finger. He had hairy toes, like an animal, like a dog. She thought of the First Men who had bred dogs from wolves to keep them safe as they slept by their fires.
Get her a dog, she'll be happier for it, King Robert had told her father. She chortled, thinking that perhaps southron King Robert possessed a mustard seed of greensight.
Her eyes widened and she let out a small chagrined breath. "Did you … did you follow me? At night, around the Red Keep?" she asked. Sandor Clegane had always seemed to be skulking around in some dark corner whenever she found herself alone.
"I liked your company. I liked the way we talked," he confessed. She turned to face him, her mouth hanging open. She shook her head.
"How could I have felt anything different?" he challenged. He started to say something else before sucking in his breath then looked down.
"You have the prettiest toes" — his fingers caressed the skin — "as pink and as soft as a babe's. I'd like to clean between my teeth with one of your dirty silken stockings."
She wrinkled her face. "You're nasty." Her laugh bubbled up from surprise, pleasure, a silly giggle she tried to contain then gave up. "You have a way with words. You could have been a poet." She wondered if she could inspire him to do such a thing. Not those mean-tempered verses about being stronger than her, of course. The kind of songs that Bael the Bard must have sung to win the love of a daughter of Winterfell.
"You have a head as full of pigeons as an empty turret, girl," Sandor replied with a roll of his eyes.
Sansa laughed and sighed both. "I used to do that—compose poems and songs—as a girl in Winterfell. I would play them for my family after supper. I even had a little lute to accompany me." I thought I could summon a prince with my songs, she thought with great pity and no small affection for her younger self.
"Perhaps I'll compose a poem about you. You're one to make the maidens faint," she said quietly, placing her hand on his muscled thigh. Why, any true lady of discernment could see that he bordered on the magnificent, the way his massive black courser was magnificent. From the wide jaw to the broad back, well-muscled loins, long legs with their dense, heavy bones. Perfectly made. A beast bred from foalhood for the needs of war. In peacetime … a perverse image flooded her brain. The Hound harnessed like a draft horse, his face blood-red from the strain of pulling a heavy wagon, its wheels moaning and creaking, from a deep muddy ditch.
Sandor snorted, withheld a laugh, then became serious. "I'd like to see you try, little bird."
She gave him a sidelong look, holding his gaze for a longish pause. Then she mimicked strumming her fingers as if she was playing the lute to the melody of 'Let Me Drink Your Beauty.'
As the poets have mournfully sung,
Death takes the innocent young,
The high lords with old names,
Knights puffed up on their fame,
And those who are very well hung …
Sansa ended the song with a slide up his thigh. Sandor let his head fall back, laughing, his laughter rattling itself out from somewhere deep inside his chest, so violent that it dislodged her fumbling hands. She smiled with pleasurable embarrassment and then laughed too, noisily. The knuckle of one hand went to her mouth, while the other wrapped around her ribcage, containing the tremors of her breasts.
His eyes immediately gave full attention to that region and his laugh became dirty, irresistible, moving across empty space to insinuate itself around her.
Sansa pushed him on his back suddenly, all of her weight falling against his chest. He cocked an eyebrow and grinned at her. But instead of kissing him, she shoved his brown and dun robes aside and put her ear to his bare belly. She tickled his sides lightly with her fingertips. His laughter came out in raspy burbles, belly-deep, as free as a child's uninhibited laughter. Her cheek pressed even harder against his warm abdomen, so that her face should fall and rise with the vibrating swells. She wanted this, to perform for him, sing songs, tell jokes, tease. Anything to exert this power she had discovered she had over him: to make him laugh, to make him happy for a moment.
She sighed deeply, feeling the profound shift of her spirit, like the calving of a glacier. The sound of it stirred ever so slightly the hairs on his bare belly.
"What." It wasn't a question, just a blunt expression of disbelief. "What," he repeated.
"I love you, Sandor."
Her muscles went lax and the very blood in her veins seemed to be coursing in a freer way. She lifted her head from his stomach and saw him giving her one of his attentive stares.
The moment he met her eyes, he started cackling uncontrollably. It sounded dreadful, the laughter of a villain from a mummer's farce, the man who possessed what he did not deserve. "Bloody confounding. I can't believe I caught you. You're too beautiful. Too clean. Too soft. Too willing."
She blinked, "It's not confounding. Young girls are not so very different from dogs. We're both such biddable creatures. The one who respects our intrinsic nature and makes no threats gets what they want out of us soon enough."
He looked at her, his eyes growing solemn, his mouth twisting into a strange smile, sweetness tinged with melancholy. She closed her eyelids as she laid her head back down on his abdomen. Her love for him did not deny harsh truths—rather it transcended them.
The palms of his hands began stroking her hair, broad strokes, as if she was a soft, small creature sniffing and mousing around him.
"Girls and dogs … that's the meat of it isn't it? Couldn't have bloody well felt anything different, could I? No girl ever expended that level of intensity of awareness on me as you did. I wanted to be close to you so badly. Hold you tenderly and overpower you at the time." He drew a heaving breath. "Seven Hells …" A breath again. "There aren't words. Just the memory of so much—frustration—I felt as though it would cleave me in two," he laughed, that crazy, frantic sound of his, half-chuckle, half-sob.
She growled at him playfully, rubbing her face in his chest as Lady used to do with her. Even as she was performing her silly antics, his words worked away in her brain: to cleave was the only word she knew that meant both one thing and its opposite. To tear apart and to join together.
Sandor yanked her up by her waist until her face was directly in front of his. "I love you, Sandor," she said. He kissed her ferociously. Lips, tongue, teeth, gums, the inside of her cheeks, the tip of her throat, entering her mouth more thoroughly than she would ever have imagined a man might want to.
She placed her hand on his chest and felt the tha-tha-thump of his heartbeat, so startlingly violent that it surely could break ribs. Happiness, she recognized it intuitively. It only lasted in its purest, richest form for the length of heartbeats.
I want to live in this moment forever, Sansa thought. Impossibly, his kiss deepened. He stole her breath, as if he would live off the air in her lungs. Gasping for air, the weight of her hand had not yet began to push back with any degree of firmness when Sandor abruptly ended the kiss, flipping her over onto her back. Then he stood up, walking towards the pool.
"Sandor," she panted after him.
He didn't turn around, lapping up the water held in the cup of his hands. "Oh, shit," she heard him mutter. His fingers rippled the still water of the pool.
The music had stopped for a count of three.
Sansa's eyes whitened, widened. Her reflection emerged from the pool. Arms raised as if she was a Lysene dancer.
A beam of sunlight was directly shining on the creature. She was lovely beyond imagining: elegant, lean haunches, delicately boned, her body covered in wolfish hairs so fine they were invisible. When the creature glided across the water, the sunlight followed. In her wake, Sansa could see dust motes, swirling ecstatically around her like a retinue of millions of tiny little sparrows, hopelessly attracted to her, wanting only to follow her.
Sansa watched as her reflection approached Sandor's reflection. How odd it was for them to witness their reflections move of their own free will, yet Sandor did not appear much surprised by it, the extent of his consternation no more than knitted brows.
The creature came face to face with Sandor's reflection. The sight of those brown and dun robes made her irritable—they seemed like a costume—and the creature angrily tore them away. After she had done so, she turned that perfect face and looked directly at Sansa.
She smiled.
A smile so magnificent and devastating that it both warmed and hurt. It was a smile straight from the canvases of old Valyrian paintings. Straight from a prayer book. The Maid brought him forth a girl as supple as a willow with eyes like deep blue pools …
Old Nan had told Sansa tales of wargs and skinchangers, humans that could wear the skins of animals. Was there an inverse? She could feel the creature inside of her, walking the hairs on her arms, sending the shiver that travelled down her spine to inhabit all of her tightening muscles. The melty feeling possessed her. Sansa licked the edge of her front teeth just as she spied the creature's tongue coming out, long and deep-rose pink, to suck him swollen.
Sandor's voice drifted low, "You said you never wanted to live in the world again. You meant it?"
She looked at him as if the question itself was incomprehensible. "Why do you ask?"
Sandor didn't bother to respond. He closed his eyes, his head rolling back, his teeth bared like a man wounded.
Maester Luwin said there is nothing in dreams I need fear, Sansa told herself. She turned to examine the heart tree, its carved face smiling when it should have been melancholy. The air was fragrant, spicy with the scent of flowers when it should have smelled of mushroom-moist soil and sweet rot.
And that heretical noise. A song playing in a sacred place where there should be no sound at all, lest it disturb the brooding ghosts of her oath-bound forefathers.
Oh, how long would she lie to herself?
"Do you know what that noise is, Sandor?" He seemed a part of this place, adding his own tremendous force to the pull of its mysterious life and will.
"Insects humming." He huffed a low breath. "What of it?"
"They're singing. The song of summer cicadas," she replied with unshakable certainty, though she had never heard the sound before. Lord Petyr had insisted that Alayne's education include the masculine subjects her parents and her Septa had neglected: law and accounting, warfare, politics and religion, commerce and agriculture.
"They don't live in the Seven Kingdoms. Only in the lands across the Narrow Sea. I ate one once on a dare. It had been rolled in honey and spices. Petyr said they were a delicacy from Meereen." Her alarm became tangible, a declension of voice, an acceleration of breathing. "In Lys, the people consider them sacred. Their coins are stamped with their love goddess on one side and the cicada on the obverse."
That old book of Valyrian tales she kept by her bedside appeared so vividly in her mind that it seemed as if she could smell the sweet mustiness of the antique paper, see that specific page: the one whose edge was thinned by her licked thumb moving over it a hundred times.
"There's a story about these insects that dates back to Old Valyria. Once upon a time, before the birth of song, cicadas were ordinary humans. When song entered the world, some men and women were so struck by the pleasure of it that they sang continuously, forgetting to eat and drink until they perished. From these men and women, the race of cicadas arose. From birth they require no nourishment, singing, always singing, in a perpetual state of intoxicated ecstasy until they wither and die."
Sansa couldn't see the cicadas but she could feel their eyes. They were staring down at her and Sandor from their great height, singing in chorus. "They were deformed by their desire until they became ignobly bound to it. Men and women who declined humanity and were cursed for it."
"Cursed?" the Hound's mouth held a derisive curl. His burned mouth twitched; it exposed her worst suspicions.
"They were smart buggers."
His jaw set moodily. "The world's a little dark cage and outside of it is this. Where the true sun shines, where one's lady love—" He brushed her lips with his thumb, still wet from the water. She paused, then let it slide into her mouth. The wetness trickled down her throat. The flavor was clean, biting, as bracing to her taste buds as meltwater. Wildly, extravagantly delicious. Like his spit but more potent, infinitely more potent. She felt the heat of it behind her eyes. It was otherworldly.
A lifetime of sweetness, the waters of their out-of-time marriage bed, thousands upon thousands of fevered beads of sweat, distilled and collected into the pure and clean pool before her. Sansa tensed her fists. Gods be good. She was going to cry. The intensity of it was daunting and she pinched her eyes shut to stop the welling of tears. Her body hummed to the point of near severance—reaching towards a pleasure so far outside her knowledge and experience, it threatened a break.
"All I wanted to do after I left King's Landing was drink until I was dead to the world. Those wine-soaked dreams—such damnable sweetness. Your wet cunny. Your thankful tongue." An edge crept into his voice. "What the fuck are you looking for? What has your life been, girl? What else is in store for you, pretty little bird?"
Sandor's hands seized her neck as if she was an intransigent child he had caught by the scruff. "Look," he ordered.
She opened her eyes to slits. Sandor's reflection had his mouth buried between her reflection's legs, kissing the creature so that she was —"Wet enough to fuck?" he supplied.
The Hound's reflection had the creature pinned on all fours, his hands gripping her waist in an iron grasp. He pulled her onto his cock, a thick, burning pain. Fuck, it was a fitting word to describe what he was doing. Sansa silently mouthed the word, the roughness of the sound of c in her throat matching the slam of his cock. He pulled out slowly, the tendons in his arms straining, his face an ugly snarl.
"I want to be inside of you so bad," the Hound rasped as his reflection spread the creature's buttocks wide with his fingers, bringing her even closer to him. Sandor's eyes darkened until they were all pupil.
"I want to wear the fur of your cunt like a wolf-lined coat, sleep curled up in the marrow of your bones, our blood indistinguishable, two dark rivers mingling together. One flesh, one heart, one soul, now and forever, and cursed be the one who comes between them." He had recited a passage from The Seven-Pointed Star, the last lines the septon would say when sanctifying a marriage.
Another thrust. Like the one before. The slow withdraw then the deep plunge, his pelvis thudding against her reflection's buttocks. Another thrust, then another and another, faster, faster, faster, all attempts to be gentle abandoned. He fucked her reflection as if he had no volition, driving into her as if he could not get deep enough with brutal paroxysms of muscles. The creature trembled like a half-broken horse. Blunt pain but a brilliant pleasure hiding behind it. She stole a climax from him, the good feeling coming like a sudden slap, hard enough that it left Sansa's nerves twitching in raw discomfort. Immediately the creature went lax, her cheek and belly brushing the floor, relieved to let him do with her as he pleased. The Hound's reflection used her roughly, as a common soldier would use his slut.
Sansa watched them. She found the tableau both abominable and mindlessly pleasurable at the same time. The sight of his cock moving in and out of her. Delicate and shining wet, partially seen, partially concealed by a light tuft of copper curls. Impossible to believe that I could contain something like that, someone like him, within so small a space, she thought.
"Little bird, little bird …" Sandor keened, the roar of a poor dumb beast howling in rage and pain.
She turned to look at him. He had his hands locked over his head and his terrible burnt face tilted to the sky. The sun cast shadows over it, painting him with stripes of light and darkness.
"Water after a fucking eternity in the desert—" He sucked in a harsh breath of air between his teeth and then he began anew. "I'm happy. I feel happy. You make me happy. You have to hold on to that feeling. Lose it and it leaves a killing wound for having existed in the first place."
Grey eyes locked on every part of her face, waiting for a tic of emotion. The fixed stare of a serpent, Sansa thought, her nails digging into her hand. One day I'll have a song from you, whether you will it or no. He wasn't her friend any longer but rather her enemy, a monster from whom she must run.
The Hound threw back his head and roared. His laughter sounded like it always did. It's my perception that changes, not him, she realized, profoundly disillusioned. Now it sounded like a rusty iron gate that refused to open all the way. The kind that would catch her silks and tear them if she tried to squeeze through it.
"Go on, run, you won't get very far," he said.
As quick as a wild hare, she scrambled from the ground, putting several paces between them. She hid behind the weirwood tree as if it she could claim sanctuary from it.
He stood up, swaying slightly like a battle-dazed knight behind his visor. He seemed to grow even taller, grotesquely tall, looming over her like a basilisk, ready to strike. Sansa stumbled backward with a little cry. Her chest hurt, the very blood in her heart felt like it was turning to lead. This dream, one exquisite pleasure after another, was taking on the proportion of a nightmare.
Her brain mapped the quickest path from the godswood to the crypts where she could lose him in the twisting passageways that no stranger to Winterfell would be able to decipher.
"Stay," the Hound ordered. He shifted forward an inch. That predatory smile began to pull harder at his mouth, though he tried to keep it back, out of sight.
In her agitation, she glared at him with real savagery. Black Dog's hilt was agleam in the faint sunlight.
"Easy, easy, I won't take another step," Sandor said. His eyes told her she could not get to it even if she wished. She understood that he knew to a fine degree just how far she was away from it, foresaw every possibility of her movements. She gave a faint dry sob. She wanted to weep and she wanted to wound him at the same time.
Sansa clamped her hand over her mouth to stop the wailing.
"Gentle Mother," Sandor breathed. "Pick up the blade, girl, and I'll let you kill me with it."
He turned his eyes downwards, gouging the soil with his feet. Underneath the upturned earth, bugs wriggled on their back, twitching, their pale, segmented bellies up.
He spoke to the ground, his rasp rougher than usual. "Here's a story for you, little bird. Two children sleeping in their lonely beds far apart from one another. They share the same dream night after night, their fantasies bridging the distance that the day imposes. But come dawn, a fire moves along the rope of memory that binds them together. When they awake, they remember nothing. They know nothing. Changing back from the people they wish they were, into the people they used to be."
As he spoke, a memory that had been previously too indistinct to catch suddenly stood out clearly. An invisible red skein that billowed between them. The skein became solid in the dream realm, so solid that their dreaming selves could see it, move their hands along its length until they found each other in the heart of the wilderness within.
"Are the gods so cruel? Will I never see you again?" Sansa squeezed her eyes shut but no tears came to relieve the awful tension. The wound ran too deep and all her tears were internal, like blood.
As if by witchy magic, a sudden gust of wind was born. The lithe arms of the heart tree swayed, autumn leaves spiraling on the breeze, the very air itself transforming into song.
The First Song. Music to set a thousand hearts abloom.
The singsong of the cicadas grew ever louder, a delirious, enthralling crooning that she could somehow understand.
Once upon a time, there was a little girl. She was the princess of a savage country where it snowed even in the middle of summer and the winters were so cold a child's laughter would freeze in her throat and choke her to death. The children of this land grew up unimaginably fast for their lives were grim and they lived close to the hard-packed earth. But the girl was very pretty, honey sweet, and sheltered by her father and mother as a rare rose is sheltered from the frost by being kept in a glass house.
As was the way of these stories, the girl found herself alone, a babe lost in the woods. A path led her to a crossroads and it was here where she stood as still as a post buried in the ground. She was to be given the choice between reality and dreams. One path was a bridge of knives, their handles human bones, their pommels the skulls of wolves whose bleeding eye sockets cried out for justice. The other path was a bower of roses where her lover's song would build a bed for her to slumber in the twilight life-in-death of an animal form.
"This is our true life upon this earth," the girl's beloved rasped.
The world grew low-lit, a golden pleasure garden where beautiful music played endlessly. The girl was both dancing light and sinking into the receptive earth, licking, sucking … midnight, summer, collapsing into the immensity of time … no self, only the prickling heat that began in her sex and vibrated until her entire body was the organ—
"I'm the Princess of Winterfell, I'm the Princess of Winterfell, I'm the Princess of Winterfell …" the girl plaintively cried the chaining repetition of her name.
The heart tree dropped its bright leaves to make a crimson carpet at her feet. They were all horribly wrong: they should have been dark red, like a thousand bloodstained hands. The hands of her family. Lady, her father, Bran, Rickon, Robb, her mother, Arya, murdered or lost to the wind. Until Jon Snow, the last drop of blood in her heart and a thousand leagues from her, was all that she could claim.
A leaf brushed her cheek, as light as the scratch of an insect's legs. Yet the weight of it shot through her with such emotional force that she felt dizzy and light-headed; the very earth seemed to move, pulling her back in time to a luminescent moment, as unblurred to her as if it had happened only yesterday.
Aren't you just a little afraid of the terrible evil beasts, Bran?
Father says that the only time a man can be brave is when he's afraid.
So I will be the bravest of all. I've been shaking in my boots since I could walk.
You have courage, Sansa. Mother's courage. The courage of the ladies in the songs.
What is courage?
The wise endurance of the soul.
You didn't make that up.
An ancient dragonlord famous for his wisdom. Maester Luwin is making me read his writings.
The wise endurance of the soul … what does that even mean?
"I'm going to kill Littlefinger," she said, her heart pounding frantically.
"Do you think dragons get smaller up close, girl? They don't." Sandor lifted his face from the ground. "They get fucking bigger!" The roar of his voice was loud enough to reverberate the waters of the pool.
Afterwards, he stood still, the muscles in his shoulders and neck stiffening. "Why?" he asked sharply, his hands flexing with a motion that showed all throughout his body, as if he was pressing against a great weight. "Gods' pity, why?"
The girl had been given a choice and the act of choosing was the transformation. Her thump of her heartbeat slowed. "Family. Duty. Honor."
There was none of the disgust or rage she had expected. Only a mystified look. As if she had spoken in riddles that made no sense.
"Eddard Stark was my sire, the Young Wolf my brother. I am the blood and seed of Winterfell."
The Hound laughed as if she was a backward child who had just said something very stupid. "Spare me," he laughed again.
Even to her own ears it sounded like a silly boast. How could she make him understand? The clear waters she drank as a thirsty child still ran in her veins and no other waters could make her forget.
"Your brother didn't have the wits the gods gave a toad," he heaved, having laughed himself to tears. "The mighty Eddard Stark, fuck his bloody heroics! What a feeble legacy. No wonder Starks are so scarce on the ground. Harebrained fools, you lot." Sandor's eyes glistened and he wiped his face, then wiped it again, and again, before he gave up. "What's going to happen to you?"
The tears rose, filling his mouth and he swallowed them. His mouth moved but no sound came out. Speaking was beyond him. For a long dreadful moment, the silence between them was filled with the giant's song, twisting and permuting in their aching minds. Be she alive or be she dead, I'll grind her bones to make my bread. Meaningless words learned as a child, repeated mindlessly now as a portent of her epitaph.
"Stay," he begged, his voice a guttural hoarseness while she stared at him dry-eyed. He lifted his hand toward her, palm open.
Sandor held his hand out until it began to shake.
She made a small step towards him and he covered their distance in a couple of strides. She took his hand but before he could move to embrace her, she knelt on the ground.
Sansa bussed his knuckles as if he was her liege lord. "I'm sorry, Sandor. I'm sorry. I cannot. I know you can't understand."
She turned his wrists and kissed his hard-closed fingers. When she looked up at him, his mouth was set in a grimace. With each breath he took, the muscle in his cheeks drew taut—whether in pain or fury, she couldn't tell.
"I love you," she whispered.
He swallowed, staring at the empty space before him. The fingers of his hand grew lax, opening to let her kiss them. He turned to face her again and his expression was mournful: the sort of look reserved for lost causes, hopeless dreams, last chances used up and gone.
Then he moved his hand and held her chin between his iron fingertips, rubbing the skin there. He surveyed her for a long moment.
"Look at you. Bloody green," he rasped. "The Maid brought him forth a girl as supple as a willow … That's what you are—a branch snapped off a willow tree. Flexible, full of buds. As likely to break as to season and harden."
His words did not unsettle her. The moment in which she had become intelligible to herself had passed, leaving her in a strange state of ghostly calm that no one could revoke.
It did not seem impossible. She had courage. Like a lady in a song, she would use her wits and her nerve to find the opportunities that would come at the edge of the moment. Littlefinger had shown her his besetting weakness. It was herself. She was the sword that he had tempered and the instrument of his destruction. An inhuman intensity lit her from within. Beyond this place, the true world was calling her. To answer it would absolve all. Her fingers caught the neck of her bedgown, pulling until it fell off her shoulders, baring her breasts.
"Do you know where the heart is?" she whispered as she caressed his sword hand.
He gave a faint sob, almost a laugh, his face twisting into an ugly sneer. "Bugger that. I hate that fucking stupid story. Azor Ahai should have never killed Nissa Nissa. Heroes were meant to die for beauty, not the other way around."
With the careful slowness of a wounded animal sinking down to rest, he knelt on the ground. "I'm going to crush the cage, reach across the distance and find you."
Sandor's hands cupped her elbows and he drew her forward with a groan. The Hound's fingers dug deep into her arms, holding her tight as he breathed against her ear. "Make you feel my flesh and blood on you. Inside of you."
His head fell deeply back, baring his throat to her in submission. "My lonely wolf," he gulped a sobbing breath.
Sansa leaned towards him, consuming the scent of him, his very essence in a deep breath. Her teeth gently closed over the curve of his great bull neck.
He made a low growl. He put his right palm at her throat, his thumb pressing into her vein. The sound of her own pulse throbbed in her ear as she pressed her sharp kisses to his neck. Her lips were warm, wet, sucking, strong, so strong that she would leave marks.
"Born to serve," he laughed. She could feel the tremor inside of him, bone-deep.
Snowflakes melted on her eyelids, like a curtain descending. A drop of sweat trailed from behind Sandor's ear to salt her lips.
She felt a sharp tug on the back of her neck. The blood drained out of her face. Pearls popping, bouncing on the ground, tap-tap-tap.
Then she was vanishing, a mist that rose to the dark trees, to the dissolving woods, leaving behind the winged insects that kept on singing each day of the shortening summer.