This week marks the 7th anniversary of when I started posting this fic. I remember how the idea came to me after I finished A Storm of Swords many years ago. It feels great to be on track to finish it! I never want to take such a long break from writing ever again.

CHAPTER 31

SANDOR

Sandor paced inside a cluster of dead trees that broke up the white expanse of the North. The snow covered the rolling landscape like a thick blanket. The sun above beat down with the strength of a summer day, filtering through the trees' dead fingers and leaving spots of hot and cold air against the frozen landscape. He rubbed his face in his hands.

Taking Sansa north was hard. Being with Sansa was harder. The girl took turns at thinking only of others, then thinking only of herself. She could surprise him with her intelligence, and yet be oblivious to the most obvious things. She was strong in heart and weak in sense. Worse, he knew, was that he spent any time at all trying to understand her. She had got under his skin somehow, and he scratched at thoughts of her in the agitated way he might try to remove a splinter, succeeding only in pushing it deeper.

It was not Sansa whose nature he needed to wrestle with. It was his own. Why was he angry? Why was he helping her? Was he changing, or had she woken some dormant part of his nature? While her naïveté infuriated him, Sansa was not bothered by it. She thought it a strength. He felt weak. Only a weak man would become angry at the idiocy of a young girl. Worse, her naiveté aroused such a protective spirit in him that she became impossibly erotic.

Sandor was painfully aware that he was in love, and not in the honorable and selfless way a knight loved and served his lady. He was in love in the way of a young man who discovers that the most beautiful girl in his village returns his affections, and, finding a moment for the two of them to steal away to a hay loft, holds her naked breasts in his hands for the first time. His love for her was clumsy, messy, devoted, and fearful. To be with Sansa, he felt in turns strong and loyal and good, but then agitated, brutish, and incompetent. Sansa was soft where he was rough. She was pure, generous, and beautiful. Every coin had two sides. He could not be angry at Sansa for the things he loved her for, even if she sometimes vexed him.

Feeling considerably calmer, and relieved that he had walked off his anger instead of taking it out on her, Sandor crunched through the snow back to camp. He decided this was not a bad strategy. He would do well to control himself better, and not so much to try and control Sansa. He could deal with his anger this way.

He came within sight of the camp, the felled tree, the thrown axe, and Sansa, crouched in the snow with her back to him and surrounded by a variety of birds. He could overhear her talking to them.

"I need to send a letter to my brother Jon. He's at the Wall." The animals nodded. There was no other way to describe it. They bobbed their heads up and down as she spoke. Sandor was not a superstitious man, or a believer in witchcraft, but this was weird. "I'm so honored that you'll go to him. Coming from an impressive figure like yourself, he'll know it's important. Oh, hehe, don't peck me. Now, the thing is I haven't got a parchment to write on. Oh . . ."

Sansa fainted. She fell backwards and Sandor saw the whites of her eyes as they rolled back in her head. "Sansa!" he yelled, running to her, and the birds flew away. He fell to his knees and gathered her up in his arms. "Sansa!"

Her white eyes closed—and opened immediately, blue orbs staring back at him as part of a placid expression, as though she were perfectly fine and he was the one who needed consoling.

"Oh, Sandor," Sansa pressed herself against him in a tight hug. "I'm sorry. You're right. I shouldn't be so sensitive. I should be strong and grateful. If I get lost in a depression, I betray the memory of everyone who died for me. And I betray you who are still here for me now."

The thought of losing her scared him. There were battles, murder, the possibility of starvation, the cold—external elements he could protect her from. What was he going to do if her weak body developed fits? His heart was pounding in his chest. He looked up to where some of the birds were flying, and others had landed in the trees. She was just feeding them, he decided, and playing games.

He pulled her away to look at her face. Her eyes were narrowed, fox-like and smiling, and a healthy color that matched her hair and lips tinged her cheeks. She didn't look like a woman who had just had a fit. It was nothing. "Come on," he told her, "Let's get the dogs tied and go."

"Not yet," she said, her hands pulling at his clothes, her mouth angled up to meet his.

Over the course of his life, Sandor had killed many people. Most of them were done in in a gruesome way. Worse than animals, who were stunned before slaughter, Sandor had cut into them while they were still alive, breathing, and conscious. Even when he was not in battle he often thought of bodies as meat, the images of death flashing up in the present to give him a violent imagination. What a person would look like if they lost a leg, how they would fall if he chopped them in half, what the organs of a living girl looked like inside her body.

When Sandor was intimate with Sansa, he could admit that he felt an enormous psychic pain. He was not the kind of man who believed in spirits, or who thought anything about killing beyond the plain fact that he had done it. But he had to admit it had affected him in some way. He was carrying something around—the fact that he had hurt others irreparably, that he was damaging to people, that his very nature was destructive, evil. With flashes and thoughts of killing in his mind so often, his body so heavy and strong from all he'd done in his life, how could he ever be involved in something as pure as love.

Sansa healed him. She took everything he gave her and begged for more. Like a vessel that could never be filled, Sandor poured every emotion he felt into her and she devoured them, lovingly, wanting more. Her total acceptance deepened his love for her in a way he hadn't thought possible.

He had never imagined his choice of profession would make him a good lover, but he paid attention to her. He couldn't help but imagine it, see what her body was physically doing, how she reacted, the same way men reacted to the cut of a blade here or there. When she cried out, whimpered, or moaned, he tried to remember what he'd done for that. It was a lot like killing, but controlled. And so, so much gentler. He could hold her just so, thinking melancholy thoughts about how thin her arms were, how easy it would be to break them, and instead be so careful not to hurt her, and all the while churn her insides, too.

It was the sweetest feeling he had ever known. It was even sweeter than killing. Killing could be done again and again, by him, but for the dead person, it was over. Sansa took all the horror of killing and transformed it. Here was another use for his body. As strong as he felt killing, he felt just as strong fucking. After a lifetime of loneliness, he didn't feel evil. He didn't feel like death. He felt alive.

The strangest thing was Sansa seemed to like it the rougher he was. She would get hot and incoherent, and then he would make a game of bringing her to the point of madness. He would toss her around and take her just to the edge, he felt, of where his brutal nature might overcome him, where he might lose control of his body and hurt her, where a savage stray thought might turn itself real, and she would shudder and cry out that she loved him.

Sandor raised himself up on his arms and looked down at her, determined to keep the image of Sansa splayed out against the snow burned into his mind. He would call it up again when they were alone in the dark. And in the future, whenever he felt like it, for the rest of his life. Her eyes were closed and he couldn't blame her—he was sure he looked a fright, his deformed face twisted above her. But Sansa opened her pretty blue eyes and her delicate hands danced around his face and wrapped around his head.

"Kiss me," she begged. "Sandor, please, please kiss me."

He kissed her and buried his face in her neck. The faint, almost-forgotten smell of wildflowers rose from her tangled hair.

Later, Sansa tied the dogs in their traces while Sandor readied the sled. He packed up their camp, including the chopped firewood. He told Sansa to get on the top rail and ride in the sled.

She made a big show of getting comfortable as she settled in. At that moment he watched a mouse push its way out of the snow, take a flying leap into Sansa's lap, and snuggle into a pocket of her clothes.

Sansa laughed. "Aww! Wasn't that cute? This little mouse wants to come with us!"

Sandor did not think it was cute. Sansa had a weird relationship with animals. He hiked the dogs and they made good time, not slowing down for hours.

The North in winter was surprisingly alive. He saw elk nibbling tender branches, a distant herd of reindeer, and a gyrfalcon flying overhead. It got dark early, but the night was clear, and they ran by starlight as often as day. When the trail was too soft, Sansa put on her showshoes and walked in front of the dogs to break a trail through the powdery snow. They made time like they never could have if traveling on horses, resting in snow caves on the cloudy and coldest of nights. Though they subsisted mostly on what food they brought with them, Sansa tied rabbit snares and Sandor set them in the branches of tall pines that poked up through the snow. He left them for the white hares that populated the landscape, but he often spotted a shadowcat watching him quietly among the pines.

One of these times, Sandor returned and burrowed into the snow cave, where he found Sansa already cuddled up with the pretty red husky.

"Don't get attached," he said, squeezing himself up onto the snow-packed shelf. The snow cave was formed much like a beaver's lodge, where sleeping on an area elevated from the entrance trapped the heat better. Sansa and the dog scooted over to make room for him on the bed insulated by furs and skins. "We might have to eat her later."

The dog gave Sandor a comically pitiful look and Sansa hugged it closer, peeking over its plush fur. "Too late . . ."

"Let me guess," Sandor asked, scratching the red husky under its chin. "You already named her?"

Sansa nodded. "Lady."

Sandor had to laugh as he pushed the dog out of his way. "All right, Little Bird. We'll eat that one last."

He slept deep and peaceful next to her. In the morning he woke up from her staring at him with big doe eyes. "Sandor, do you remember how you said that if we have to, we would eat Lady last?"

"Uh, yeah." Sandor was still groggy, his morning erection the only stiff thing about him, while Sansa was awake and vibrant.

"I know which dog I'm going to eat first."

For the rest of his trip, his mornings were occupied like this. Sansa would wake him up gently from a deep sleep, and then she would tease him. She would ask him pointed questions, make fun of his answers, and even directly insult him. Then she would feint, submissive, with some compliment or erotic gesture, disarming him in the game. Sandor found himself engaged in a childlike playfulness he hadn't experienced since he was a little boy. He knew he often had a big, dumb, goofy grin on his face, but he couldn't help it. He felt very happy.

They would never have time alone to themselves like this again, so he enjoyed it. He thought it was the same for her—she had been very sad for many years, they both had. But now she was delighted and he was overjoyed about it. Even when they were working together it felt like playing. And he had never had a lover as good as Sansa. He couldn't imagine that such a powerful coming-of-age experience as being intimate with a man could have been ruined for her had she been given away in marriage like so many other girls of her status.

He would go mad with rage if she were with anyone else, but they saw no people on their entire journey so the thought rarely bothered him. He made love to her well and often, wanting to awaken in her the same deep passion that he felt. He was content in the knowledge that she was bonded to him, and obviously loved him.

The morning sky before the sun came up a hot pink band on the eastern horizon. They weather was surprisingly good. After ten days they saw the forest outside Winterfell and were inside it the same day. Sandor kept to the outskirts, telling himself the forest was too slow-going for the dogs.

Dutifully, he brought her closer to her goal, every step pained by the knowledge that it took her further away from him. Sandor knew what would happen, even if Sansa wasn't conscious of it yet. She would start to pull away after they got to Winterfell. She would have no more use of him then. All the pressures of ruling a kingdom and its people would be placed on Sansa. The time they enjoyed now, when they were the two only people in a frozen wilderness, would be a distant memory.

Sandor was practiced at cognitive dissonance from being a swordsman who served his masters but stopped short of taking vows as a knight. It was the same now. He brought Sansa closer to Winterfell even when every fiber of his heart didn't want to. The same feeling he had when he left her at King's Landing, and then again at the Eyrie, when his heartstrings pulled painfully as distance came between them, again now filled his heart even though she was close enough to touch. He knew that he was taking her to where she would eventually leave him.