Sandor

"Brother Sandor, I would be honoured if you would sit by me this evening."

Seven bloody hells, Sandor thought, glancing down at Sansa as they filed into the Great Hall for the evening meal.

"If it please my lady," he said tersely. She smiled prettily for him. He looked away, scowling.

She had asked the same thing of him these last five nights, since he had left the hall in the middle of her song. He could not decide if her actions were related to his own, but the result was as good a punishment as she could have dreamt up.

He seated himself opposite her instead of beside her as requested, but she did not pass comment, only smiled at Rickon, seated to Sandor's right, and started asking him how his sword practise had gone that day.

The little boy glanced warily up at Sandor before poking moodily at his spoon and muttering something that none of them could hear.

"I'm sorry, sweetling, I did not hear you," Sansa said.

"I said I want Arya back!" the boy all but growled. "Brother Sandor's mean, and he won't even let me have a real sword." Sandor's mouth twitched in amusement.

"You think your sister will let you, boy? Even she's not that stupid."

"She's better than you."

"Rickon, that was extremely unkind," Sansa chided. "Brother Sandor has been good enough to dedicate much of his time to your training." When she looked up at Sandor, she was smiling faintly, eyes sparkling as though they were sharing a jape.

"Don't see why I can't say it true," Rickon said.

"A noble lord should always show impeccable manners, especially in front of guests."

Sandor snorted. "He's too old to try filling his head with such lies."

"See?" Rickon said to his sister, turning his cloak faster than a Frey.

"Lies, Brother Sandor?" she said, turning to him. "Surely all men must have aspirations, even if on occasion they fall short of the ideal." Her tone was playful. Sandor bristled.

It had been the same way the previous nights, smiling and playing with him as though he were some great knight come to grace her table. He knew her to be aware of the truth, that was not what unsettled him. No, it was the change in her manner towards him. She wants something, he thought, not for the first time, but he could not yet see what.

"Have you learned nothing, girl? More men fall short than succeed, and most never make the effort in the first place. All men are beasts, inside, even your gallant knights and great lords."

Infuriatingly, she laughed. "It would be sad indeed if that were true. But who am I to doubt your word? You have seen a great deal more of the world than me, I am sure." Before he could respond she had turned back to her brother. "Rickon, you needs must apologise to Brother Sandor," she said, but the boy's reluctant and ungracious words were cut short by the arrival of the trenchers, brimming with watery stew, the odd chunk of vegetable from the glass gardens bobbing on the surface.

After the meal, the boy lord told the tale of how the Wall was won. Sandor waited and watched the little bird, and when the story was done he followed her out and up the stairs as she climbed the Great Keep to her Bower.

"Brother Sandor," she said, smiling when she saw him, "may I be of some service to you?"

"Yes," he said, and dragged her roughly into a disused bedchamber. There were no tapestries in there, the shutters half-burned and hanging off their hinges, and several of the diamond-shaped panes were sitting empty in the window. The wind whistled through them, vicious and icy cold. Sansa pulled her shawl more tightly around her shoulders.

"What game are you playing?" Sandor demanded angrily.

"Game, Brother? I do not understand."

"Do you take me for a fool, girl?"

"No, Brother, pardons. Have I given some offence?"

Her eyes had always been so wide and innocent that seeing the lie in them was no difficult thing. Now, he looked at her face, her expression of polite enquiry, and realised he could see nothing but a wall of courtesy, impenetrable as armour.

"What happened to you?" he growled. A look of confusion flickered across her face. Genuine, he thought. "What, no pretty words for me, little bird? "

"I... I do not understand. Nothing has happened to me."

Sandor snorted and turned away, pacing across the empty room, still angry but for another reason now. Ashes swirled around his boots, rising like smoke. Everything has happened to you! he wanted to snarl. She was not the same girl he had known in King's Landing, but some strange, shuttered, calculating creature that would have fit in at Cersei's court far better than Sansa Stark ever had. When he'd first come north he had expected her to be cold to him – it was no less than he deserved – but her reserve was difficult to know how to take. In time, Sandor had come to understand that she was now a woman who showed little on her face that she did not wish to put there. Hadn't he once encouraged her to become so? But then why, now, show him such warmth?

"Do you know the stories they tell about you in the riverlands?" he asked.

"Yes, some of them."

"They say you and that dwarf husband of yours poisoned Joffrey. That you escaped through sorcery."

"Queen Daenerys annulled my marriage to Tyrion," she said, and that only infuriated him further.

"That's not an answer."

"Forgive me, but you did not ask me a question."

"Where did you go?" His hands itched to shake her until the words fell out.

She looked at him for several heartbeats before lowering her eyes. The words, when she spoke, sounded reluctant. "It is true that I left King's Landing the night of Joffrey's wedding, but I did not do it through sorcery, and I did not have a hand in his death. Petyr Baelish took me to the Vale of Arryn, by boat. I resided there with him for over a year until I... left. After that, I was sheltered by the sisters of a septry north of Duskendale, until Brienne of Tarth found me and brought me home to Winterfell."

"Littlefinger?" Sandor sneered. "That would explain it."

"My lord?"

"I am no lord," he growled, "and whatever game this is, I want no part of it." He would have left then if she had not stopped him with a hand on his arm.

"Please, Brother Sandor. When you first arrived I did not act as graciously as was fitting. I hope you will forgive me. I wish only that we might be friends."

He listened to her words in silence, and when she had finished he did not turn around, but continued through the door as though she hadn't spoken. She wants something, he thought, not for the first time.

He went back to his room above the armoury and sat broodingly by the fire, scowling into the flames. What I wouldn't give for a wineskin, he thought, fist bunched.

"Littlefinger!" he said aloud, spitting the word out like venom. He barked a laugh, short and bitter. Looked like that slippery bastard had found the most unlikely of apprentices in the naïve little bird. Now there was a new one for the singers. More than a year at the mercy of Lord Baelish. I should have taken her with me, kicking and screaming if I had to. I should never have left her for the likes of him. Whatever innocence the girl might have kept hold of in King's Landing – and that depended on whether you believed the dwarf's version of events with regards to his marriage – would most certainly have been taken by that whoreson. Might be he hadn't even had to force her, might be he'd simply manipulated her until she thought that was what she wanted. Might be she did want it.

He got up and paced angrily around the room. He had tried to take the she-wolf to the Vale and ended up stuck in that nowhere holdfast building a palisade wall for those ungrateful shits. He'd been that close, though. Had he even been and checked on the pass himself? Might be he could've got through it, instead of trusting the word of a bunch of piss scared villagers.

And then what? he asked himself.

And then I would've shown her what it was to have a real man.

He stopped by the window, threw the shutters open, breathed in air so cold it felt like a knife in the chest. Seven hells, he thought. I am not my brother. She was better off in the Vale than with the likes of me. At least the war never made it there.

He suddenly felt confined, his generous room suffocatingly small. Donning his cloak he stormed out, down the steps through the armoury, and out into the yard.

This deep in winter the castle was never free of snow, the drifts piling up against the walls, some of them higher than his head. Walkways had been dug clear and gravelled between the Great Keep and its surrounding buildings, and torches sat in sconces to light the way once the sun was set. No one but him used the sept, as far as he could tell, and the snow was knee deep at best. Sandor grabbed a torch from the end of the stable block and made his way over to the tiny building. Once inside, he knelt before the statue of the Maiden and tried to pray for forgiveness, but the words would not come. He remembered a girl singing the Mother's hymn while he held a dagger to her throat, pale and terrified. What game are you playing?

When the torch began to burn low he made his way back to his room. He had not even removed his boots when Sansa Stark came running up the steps and caromed straight into him there in the corridor. He put a hand out to steady her, instinctive, though he was in no mood to continue their earlier conversation.

"Please, Brother Sandor, forgive the intrusion but is Rickon with you?" She was breathless and her cheeks were pink from the cold, he saw.

"No," he said, taking his hand from her arm. It was somehow difficult, each finger resisting the motion.

"Damn it," she cursed, and Sandor raised his eyebrows in surprise. "I was sure he would be here." She made to run off again.

"Wait," Sandor called before he could stop himself. "Where are you going?"

"To the stables. Bors is taking a party out to look for him."

"And you intend to go with them?"

"It's snowing," she said desperately, and Sandor understood her. If the boy had been so heedless as to leave the shelter of the castle without proper provision, a snowstorm was more than like to kill him. He looked at her face, her distress making her more open than he had seen her since she came to him in the stables, some weeks ago now.

"Wait there," he said, opening his door. When he came back out he threw the bundle to her and she shook it out, her expression questioning. "You'll need that, if it's snowing," he told her.

She wrapped his cloak around her shoulders, fingers fumbling with the clasp in her haste. "Thank you," she said, and when she turned to go back down the stairs, Sandor followed.

The boy lord sent his grey beast with them. Even Sandor was impressed with its ability to sniff out its brother through the snow, and an hour had not yet passed when they found the youngest Stark huddled with his direwolf in a hollow tree south and west of the Winter Town, not far from the road to Torrhen's Square.

"You're lucky it's Lady Sansa who's found you, and not Lady Arya," Bors Greenleaf muttered darkly as he hauled the feebly protesting boy out of his hole.

Sansa crouched before him, her hands like claws around his arms. "Where were you going?" she said through teeth chattering with cold and rage and fear, shaking the boy with each word. "Where did you think you were going?"

Rickon looked at her blearily, exhausted from the cold, his direwolf whining at his heels. "I didn't know I wasn't allowed," he said, and started to sob piteously.

Sansa looked torn between beating him bloody and smothering him in an embrace and so Sandor saved her the decision and hoisted the boy up into her saddle. A moment later, he lifted her up behind him, hands around her waist, when it became apparent she was too shaky to mount the horse herself. The cloak he had given her, which she had drowned in by herself, fit around the two of them comfortably.

The snow was coming down heavily now and it took them longer to make their journey back to the castle. They had been forced to slow to a walk by the time they finally straggled back through Winterfell's tall oaken gate, snow settling on their shoulders and the horses' flanks. Arya and Maester Jennion were waiting in the stables with blankets and hot wine. They took the boy straight to the kitchens to warm him.

As the household guard saw to the other horses, Sansa walked her palfrey into an empty stall, but otherwise made no move to dismount. Sandor went to her side, took one look at her face, and gently pulled her down.

She was shaking from cold, her body trembling as she tried to hold herself rigid against great convulsive shivers.

"Stupid girl, should have worn proper riding clothes," Sandor said roughly as she fell limply against him. She was not even wearing gloves. Pulling his own off he took her hands in his and tried to warm them. They felt like ice, the skin white and bloodless.

"At l-least you g-gave me your cloak," she stuttered, and then laughed, hysterical and trembly. Sandor did not know what she meant but it was clear the boy was not the only one in need of the maester's attentions. Scooping her up he held her close, hoping the heat of his body would warm her some, and took her straight to the kitchen block.

Winterfell's kitchens stood separate from the Great Keep, so that the family did not have to suffer the noise and smells such a place engendered. It was one of the few parts of the castle not heated by the hot springs, as the ovens ran all day and most of the night.

"My mother always said a mouthful of raw bread dough would see you right for a chill," the cook was saying as Sandor entered. He went over to the iron range that lined near half the circular building, where Maester Jennion was pressing hot wine on Rickon. The boy himself was sitting in his smallclothes in a small copper tub filled with water, just beginning to steam from the hot coals arranged around the base.

"Oh dear, another one?" the maester said, as Sandor deposited his charge on a wooden stool.

"I'm fine, Maester Jennion, really," Sansa said faintly.

"This one didn't dress properly for the cold, in her haste to be after the boy," he said. Rickon looked up at him white-faced, his eyes rimmed with pink.

"I d-didn't think anyone-"

"No, you didn't think, idiot boy," Sandor snapped. "Winter kills more people than war, did you know that? You think your family spent two years looking for you, just for you to get yourself frozen to death?"

"He doesn't understand," the maester said as he wrapped a steaming cloth around his lady's fingers. "The boy has not been used to seeking permission for his actions."

"The next time-"

"Brother Sandor, please," a soft voice interrupted. Sansa was looking up at him, shivering still and wincing at the maester's attentions, but otherwise looking her more usual self – calm, utterly closed off. "There is no sense in scaring the boy. He has done that quite well enough for himself, I think."

What game are you playing?

Sandor suddenly felt very tired. "As you say, my lady." He turned to leave.

"Wait, Brother Sandor, your cloak," she called after him.

"Keep it," he rasped, and walked out.