Lenna LXII

"I had wondered when our paths would cross."

Lenna stopped midstride. King's Landing was still comfortably warm despite the turning of the season from autumn to winter, and she was taking full advantage of the afternoon sunshine to meander through the passageways of the Keep. Sandor was in the training yards and Addy was toddling along beside her, chubby legs seeming to grow longer by the day. Lenna greedily lapped up the time she had to spend with her daughter outside the small council room. The breaks were short and infrequent, but she felt lighter with the little hand in hers. Now, as the familiar voice broke over her ears, her grip on Addy's hand tightened instinctively and her hard-won ease again became nearly debilitating tension.

With a quick shake of her head, she steeled herself and turned to look at Cersei.

The dowager queen was flanked by two guards, but as soon as Lenna faced her she dismissed them with the familiar flick of her hand. Lenna could not read her face, not entirely, but it wasn't as cold as she had feared it would be. Or as cruel. Lenna wondered for a moment if she had lost the ability to read her, but the marks of grief that Cersei didn't bother to hide assuaged Lenna's worry.

Always beautiful, but always hard, like she was carved from some golden stone. Lenna had marveled at it so many years ago, how Cersei had seemed to glow with the same strange luminescence as Casterly Rock, the impenetrable fortress unbelievably beautiful in the kind light of the Westerlands. She had that gleam to her now, but Lenna saw it for what it was.

Hurt. A fair bit of fear. The sharp lines of her face set carefully as she looked back at Lenna, everything about her so carefully controlled that someone else might have missed the strange, delicate tremor that seemed to radiate from her.

Lenna did not miss it, and against her will, her heart clenched.

Pain. Lenna knew something of it herself, that deliberate calm that overtook her when she felt she was about to shatter outward. Of course Cersei would be nervous. She wasn't as powerful as she had once been, stripped of authority, reduced to almost nothing. She had fallen even in the time between Lenna's last trip to King's Landing when she had still held the reins of the monarchy. No more. Cersei had not been invited to any of the negotiations, a fact that had surprised Lenna at first. She'd almost asked, but a gruff shake of Jaime Lannister's head had stopped her.

Tommen, it seemed, had distanced himself from his mother's influence after the North gained its independence and the various lords bought him out of penury.

"He blames her," Jaime said quietly as he held the door open for Lenna after the first meeting. "You very well may not see her. She keeps largely to her quarters these days."

Lenna had frowned at that, too aware of how such would be devastating to Cersei. Joffrey dead, Myrcella in Dorne, and Tommen, the only one of her children still near her, turned away from her.

Cersei looked much the same as she had when Lenna last saw her. She was dressed in a gown of rich green and silver, her hair still falling like a shimmering waterfall over her narrow shoulders. She looked thinner than Lenna remembered, her cheekbones sharp as cut crystal, her eyes hard as the beryls they resembled.

"You've seen Myrcella, I take it? Cersei asked flatly, taking a step toward Lenna. A hot thread of panic flared in her blood. Cersei noted it with a wry tendril of a smile. "I mean you no harm, Lenna."

Lenna took a steadying breath, her grip tightening on Addy's little hand in hers.

"Aye," she replied. "I saw her yesterday when we arrived."

"She's much grown," Cersei said, her gaze resting on Addy in unconcealed examination. "Your little beauty is growing, too."

To Lenna's discomfort, Cersei crouched on the flagstones to peer in Addy's dear face. There was pain in Cersei's expression, but there was also admiration. Addy, innocent as she was, looked back fearlessly into her face with her gray eyes wide and trusting.

"What's your name, little one?" Cersei asked sweetly, tapping the tip of one long finger against Addy's chubby cheek.

"Addy," she replied stolidly. For all she was Lenna's child as much as she was Sandor's, she had a double-share of their earnestness.

"How old are you, sweetling?" Cersei asked, and Lenna took a breath.

"Two," she answered, holding up the correct number of fat fingers awkwardly.

"You're a fine girl," Cersei said, standing up and turning her eyes on Lenna again. "Smart, just like your mother."

Lenna managed a weak smile at that

"I won't keep you," Cersei said lowly, her brows knitted together. "Times like these are precious, especially to the likes of us."

Lenna felt a cool rush of realization trickle down her spine and through her limbs. Standing and looking at Cersei, erect and fragile in the center of the passageway with her hands folded demurely at her stomach, felt like looking at her own reflection.

"Yes," Lenna managed to choke. "They are, aren't they?"

Cersei nodded once, then unexpectedly reached out and touched Lenna's elbow, her eyes averted, before she turned away and walked back the way she had come, her slim fingers resting against her lips.

The encounter shook Lenna, and she again thought of being a child and caught in the undertow on the sea-strand. It had felt like an eternity spent drowning though it couldn't possible have been more than seconds, but as her little body struck the sand again and again time stood stretched on to the infinite, and each time she thought her head was going to break the water's surface only to be pulled down again. It had felt like forever.

She could almost taste the seawater in her mouth and feel it stinging her eyes as she went about the rest of the day, her limbs moving as if through a sucking tide, her body heavy as if weighed down by the weight of water. She thought she would perish as she lay in bed that night, Sandor's familiar bulk beside her, and she compulsively reached for his hand as if he could haul her out of the abyss.

"Mm?" he uttered sleepily, rolling an inch in her direction. He was tired, too, these days. It was odd to think of Sandor and Jaime Lannister working together, but that was the reality. It was even stranger thinking of Brienne of Tarth there along with them, the three of them tackling the task of welding together an army from the remnants of warring houses. It was a monumental job to bring together fighting men that were used to seeing each other as adversaries rather than allies, but at least the three of them were modeling that foreign and difficult civility. She knew that Sandor could barely stand the sight of Jaime Lannister, but he kept his mouth shut and did his work. There were frequent fights that Lenna knew of, and more than once Sandor had come back to their rooms with his knuckles wrapped from some fisticuffs he'd broken up with his own hands, but never was he the aggressor.

"Am I like her?" Lenna asked suddenly, feeling only faintly guilty at waking him. Her voice cracked like ice in the darkness and she felt cold all over, turning into his side for warmth. His eyes were closed, but she knew he wasn't asleep anymore, his nostrils were flared and his jaw tense. She wondered if he pretended to rest as often as she did, but she doubted it. He'd always had the talent for sleeping like a rock, born of so many years of hard living. Now, he was sprawled on his stomach, face buried in the pillow so that she could only see the unscarred half of his face. He lifted his head and heaved himself onto his side to look at her in the dim light from the dying fire.

"No," he said lowly. His face was smooth with practiced patience, the gray eyes glinting silver like pools of still water. "You could never be like her."

Lenna took in a deep breath, her lungs burning as if filled with brine. "I saw her today."

She had kept it from him, though it bothered her. There hadn't been a good opportunity to tell him, to talk through it in his hearing and listen to his reaction. She honestly had no idea how he would respond to it.

He propped himself up on his elbow abruptly, concern and anger transforming his face into a snarled mess of flesh and shadow.

"Why?" he barked, the muscles across his shoulders rippling beneath his skin as he leaned toward her.

Lenna shook her head, not afraid of him or his sudden anger. She could feel the concern radiating from him, the desperation. If he was anything like her, he was thinking of all the years in the Red Keep that he'd spent watching for her, counseling her through every tense interaction with the Lannister queen. She bit her lip. "I didn't go looking for her. It was accidental."

"Nothing she does is accidental," he said fiercely. "She does nothing without purpose."

"She was walking, Sandor," Lenna said quietly. She truly did not believe that Cersei had been looking for her, could not fathom why she would be. "Just as I was."

"What did she say?" he demanded. They could have been standing in an alcove ten years earlier, the tone was so familiar and yet almost forgotten. So, Lenna told him simply, recounting what in any other circumstances would have been an ordinary exchange between two old acquaintances.

He fell back against the pillows when she was finished, staring up at the ceiling, the scar taut and shadowed.

"You are not like her, Lenna," he said at last, a tightness in his voice that made her shudder. Control, she thought, iron control tempered with rage. "You never have been. You never could be."

"How am I any different?" she asked breathlessly, anguish welling up beneath her breast and making her breath come faster. "I wheedle and manipulate- how did I get here? How did we even come to be here?"

She could feel herself growing light-headed, unable to control the rapid rise and fall of her breast, the great gasps of air simply not enough to keep her from feeling as if she was drowning. She felt as if her bones had been invaded with locusts, gnawing and buzzing and tapping their sharp feet, the flutter of their wings as metallic and sharp as the retort of clashing swords and thrusting pikes.

"Stop it," he said lowly in a voice like gravel and silk, and then he was above her. He slid his hands into both of hers, resting them on either side of her head. She shook her head and bit her lip, tears leaking from the corners of her eyes. "Stop it, Lenna. Just breath for fuck's sake."

His gaze held hers tight and she clung to it like a line tossed into a stormy sea. His fingers tightened in hers and she focused on the feeling of his palms against hers, the weight of his body above her, the warm that radiated from him. He had regained most of his former breadth, a few months of good food and ample rest filling out the enormous frame that had been so diminished when he had stumbled into Winterfell's courtyard. He'd found his old brash ways, too, the gruff and vulgar manner. In short, he was more or less himself, even as she felt her own self slipping further and further away, a ghost fading into the past.

Nevertheless, she calmed. As she found her breath, he released her, drawing a hand down the side of her face, through her hair where it was spread beneath them on the pillows.

"You do not wheedle," he said quietly. "At least, not in the way you think you mean. You have done nothing dishonest. You have nothing to be ashamed of. You have done nothing wrong."

She wanted to believe him, and when he leaned down to press his mouth against hers she leaned into him forcefully, her eyes clenched shut. He murmured to her, nothing of consequence, just snippets of comfort, of love, as his hands did most of his work. He ran his fingers through the hair at her temple, brushed his lips along the line of her neck, laying them against her pulse and clavicles with a touch so light it had her arching into him.

He was relentless, just as he always was, hands and mouth and growling voice in her ears. He made her to forget, just as he had so many years earlier, and he was still stroking her hair when she finally fell asleep, the steady thump of his heart beneath her ear a comforting, steady rhythm.

She sent the raven to Dragonstone the next morning, writing quickly and rolling the parchment with deliberation so she didn't have time to change her mind. She was still disquieted by the whole ordeal, Sandor's words the night before only barely successful in calming her.

It shouldn't have surprised her to follow her feet and discover the familiar red doors of the Keep's library before her, but it did. She reached out a hand to push open the door, taking a deep breath as she stepped into the cool shadows that had been her friends for so long.

She might have been there an hour, perhaps more, simply walking the shelves in the shafts of chill winter sunlight that flowed like mead, shimmering with swirling dust like snow, when she heard the latch at the door open and then close again.

She tensed as she listened to the soft footsteps on the stone floors. They were light, a lady's slippers, but too quick to be Cersei. Lenna straightened her shoulders, preparing to meet whoever was in her sanctuary, and a slim figure came around the shelves, hooded and clutching a book.

A red book.

"Lenna," the figure breathed, and the hood came down to reveal the summer-bright hair and fair features of Myrcella Baratheon. "I had hoped you might be here."

Lenna felt her throat close and took a few steps closer to her old charge. "Yes, your grace."

"They told me that you hadn't been seen since breakfast, and Clegane was in the yards. I was hoping that we could talk."

"Of course, your grace," she managed. Myrcella's brilliant expression dimmer a little and she looked askance at the floor, her fingers going white against the red leather binding.

"I brought this back," Myrcella said quietly. "For your daughter to have."

Lenna looked at her in shock. "My daughter-"

"Father told me," Myrcella said shortly. Lenna narrowed her eyes in confusion.

"Father?"

"Yes," Myrcella replied earnestly. "My father, Lenna. Jaime Lannister."

Lenna reached out blindly for something to hold onto lest she end up in a heap on the library's floors. She leaned heavily against the reading table behind her, the very same where the two of them had spent so many happy hours, Sandor rigid-backed with on foot resting against the wall, his head thrown back and eyes glittering, watching as she and the little princess studied and spun tales.

"I see that you know, too," Myrcella said, licking her lips quickly, the golden brow creased.

"Aye," Lenna replied, suddenly afraid that this was some sort of confrontation, that the girl thought she had been lying to her, had kept such a thing from her. "But I didn't know, not for years." Not a lie, she thought wildly. She hadn't truly known, though she had suspected long before the child left the capital.

"It's alright," Myrcella said, green eyes shimmering as she placed her hand on Lenna's. She had come very near, and Lenna was not at all surprised to discover that they were nearly the same height. Cersei and Jaime were tall. It followed that their daughter would be, as well. "I mean that, truly. And it's not why I've come besides."

Myrcella smiled, a sad thing, and took Lenna's hand in hers, drawing her toward the window ledge and its piles of dusty pillows. Everything was just as she'd left it.

"It doesn't look like anyone has been here in ages," Myrcella said lightly, folding her hands in her lap. "It looks exactly the same. It certainly smells the same."

Lenna smiled at that. "Aye, but much has changed."

Myrcella must have sensed that Lenna was speaking of her as she tightened her fingers around Lenna's. Her fingers were slim and small, but it was a woman's hand that Lenna held, not a child's.

"Yes," Myrcella said seriously. "It has."

"Dorne," Lenna said abruptly, casting about for something to talk about. She was wary of talking to Myrcella about the state of affairs, and she wondered how much Myrcella knew of it to begin with. "How do you find it?"

"I like it very much," Myrcella replied with a bright smile. "It is beautiful and my hosts have been very kind."

"Your prince," Lenna said quietly with a weak smile, remembering the girl she had been before she left and her dreams of a handsome husband.

"Everything that a prince should be," Myrcella said with a silvery peal of laughter and Lenna felt the bloom of genuine joy. "I actually look forward to our wedding, though I fear it shall be some time before that happens."

"You are what, sixteen?" Lenna asked. "Surely-"

"It will wait," Myrcella said with a rueful shake of her head. "Until...after."

Lenna froze.

"Trystane is a good man," Myrcella continued shyly, affection putting blooms in her cheeks. "And I will be happy to be a princess of Dorne, I think. All the sunshine and the lemon trees."

"And the Martells-" Lenna prompted.

"Are kind," she replied readily, guilelessly. "I am glad that Prince Oberyn was open to my accompanying him." She lifted a brow archly, a conspiratorial smirk on her lips. "My betrothed was not particularly pleased, let me tell you."

"The timing-" Lenna said, but Myrcella interrupted her before she could finish the thought.

"It had been so long since I'd been home," Myrcella said, and Lenna heard the deep sorrow in her voice. "I missed my family. I had no idea that the day I sailed away would be the last I saw of grandfather, or of Uncle Tyrion. Or even of Joffrey."

Her face tightened and her throat worked, and Lenna wondered at her.

"And I missed you so desperately, Lenna," she said, her voice choked. "And when you didn't respond to my letters-"

"Letters?" Lenna asked in disbelief. Myrcella looked up at her surprise, then shook her head with a hollow laugh.

"Of course," she said, dashing the tears from her eyes with pale fingers. "Of course she would keep my letters from you."

Lenna felt that ancient, cold anger beating against her ribs.

"I did not receive your letters, your grace," she managed to say, "else I would have answered them."

"I know," Myrcella said, sniffing loudly. "I know that. Which is why I am not angry, and have not been in some time."

It hurt Lenna deeply to think that Myrcella had even once believed that she had been forgotten by her old teacher. The idea of the young girl so far away, so alone, and feeling as if she was abandoned made her want to cry in earnest.

"It was one of the first clues," Myrcella continued. "Clues to what I am. What she is."

Lenna cocked her head.

"My mother," Myrcella continued. "My father. She was jealous of you, always."

"Yes," Lenna said.

"Uncle Tyrion wanted to send you to Dorne with me," Myrcella said hotly, a child again. "If she had let him-"

"No," Lenna interrupted, wondering why she would leap to Cersei's defense even in this matter. "No, your grace. Your mother did many wrongs, but she did not keep me from going to Dorne with you. That was my choice."

"Clegane," Myrcella said with a small smile, cutting her eyes at her old teacher. "I was young then, but do you know, I always fancied that you were in love with each other. Even when I was a little girl." It was Lenna's turn to blush, and she kept her eyes on the floor. Myrcella noted it and laughed, continuing on in girlish glee. "I made up stories about you both in my head, cast him in the role of the silently devoted lover, you as the virtuous lady. A paragon of courtly love. Doomed, star-crossed. There's a picture, here in this book," she said, opening the red cover. The binding was coming apart at the seams from long use, and Myrcella found the illustration she was looking for with long practiced ease. The corners were worn and shiny with handling, the vellum flaking. "This one," she said with a hard, tight smile. "I would look at it when I was missing you, both of you. Because that's what you looked like to me."

It was an illustration Lenna knew well, one that she had thought of herself many times in the years since. The knight looking at his lady as they both pretended to be other than what they were.

Lenna traced her finger over the familiar figure of the knight, then raised her hand to cup the princess' cheek.

"And we missed you," Lenna said. In a way, it was Myrcella that had brought them together, thrown into that queer friendship as they watched her grow, though the pull between them had been there since the beginning. She remembered suggesting the princess' name for a bairn of their own, how even his craggy face had gone soft. "We both did, very much. But I am happy, so fiercely happy, that you were safe and away."

Myrcella nodded and her face took on a maturity that left Lenna breathless. "It was for the best. I understand that nothing has been easy since, and I can't help but be glad that I was away. I wish you could come back with me, though, especially now."

The girl fell silent, a long, curling lock of her hair falling over her shoulder. The book was still spread wide in her lap. With a sudden snap, Myrcella closed the book's covers and held it out to Lenna with her green eyes bright with purpose.

"Take it," she said with the same false brightness that had been Lenna's shield for so long. It made her want to weep to see the same pleasing and manufactured smile overtake the younger woman's face. "I wanted you to have it back. Just in case."

Just in case we never meet again.

Lenna looked at her sadly, but she took the book. It seemed heavier in her hands than it had all those years ago. It had been almost a part of her, that damned volume, and now it was foreign and weighty in her hands.

"I must go," Myrcella said quickly, wiping her eyes again. "When you read it to your little girl, think of me."

She kissed Lenna's cheek briefly, and then she was gone in a flash of bright silk and even brighter hair, leaving Lenna with the red leather soft and smooth under hands, feeling as if she'd been drained dry again, a shore left barren by the fleeing tide.

Sandor LXII

"I never wanted to see you again, but here you fucking are."

Sandor smirked into the ale, and if he had been another man he might have gotten to his feet and clapped the smaller, wiry fellow to him like a brother.

Instead he scowled.

"Not keen to see your smug face again, either."

Bronn laughed lustily and took the bench opposite, catching his foot sending him flailing and pulling a roar of malicious laughter from Sandor's gut. He was already drunk, the cunt.

Sandor didn't know why he'd followed his feet into Flea Bottom, but when Lenna and Addy had drifted off to sleep, he'd found his way down to his old haunts. The eerie sensation of walking backward through time had dulled his senses at first, Sandor wondering if he had dreamed the last four years and if was still some hulking guard at the palace with a soft spot for a highborn maid that necessitated regular bouts of drunken brawling. The houses all looked the same, and the barkeeps barely registered surprise at seeing him after such a long absence. The long face of the man seated across from him was likewise unperturbed, as if they had just had a drink the week prior rather than last meeting years earlier.

"Where the fuck you been?" Sandor growled. He hated to admit it, but he often wondered what it was he'd gotten up to after the Blackwater. He half imagined him whoring his way through King's Landing a hero, but the other thoughts were darker. There had been no news of Tyrion's sellsword, of course. Sandor had imagined him dead in the sand, to be quite honest, a smug smile dully dancing on his roguish face. It wasn't a happy thought, but it was a fitting end for men like them. Sandor hadn't envied him, though.

"Sent on an errand," the other man said with a quick clearing of his throat, reminding Sandor that he was, in fact, still alive. "Been around."

"Going North." It wasn't a question, but a statement of fact. If Bronn of the Blackwater was still in fighting shape, he'd be joining the fray against the strange creatures beyond the Wall and hungering for the battle.

"That's fucking obvious, isn't it?" Bronn said with a quirk of the brow. "Of course, I am. That's where the fun will be."

Sandor grunted at him. He didn't know how much fun he thought they'd be having. It was a great triumph, the agreement of the lords and the alliance they'd built with Daenerys Targaryen- that Lenna had built- but it meant another long war ahead.

All he wanted to do was retreat to White Harbor and watch his wife grow round with his babe.

"And you, Clegane? Still panting after your Northern maid?"

Bronn was lucky Sandor was feeling forgiving. He'd left Lenna asleep in their room, Addy curled up in the bed beside her. The child slept in the nursery, but when both of them had fallen asleep after dinner, the red book spread between them as Addy leaned against her mother's breast, he couldn't bear to wake them. He liked looking at them like that, together, the two dark heads bent together, the child reflected in the mother, the hardness in him softening like heated iron, growing malleable as something in him shifted and changed into something better and stronger. He'd never been a man for religion, but he thought he understood some of Lenna's piety when he saw them snuggled up together, some innate and shining care radiating from Lenna into their girl like heat from a hearthfire. For some reason beyond his ken, his throat thickened and he had to fight against weeping when he saw them like that, both humbled to witness it and made an outsider by the intimacy he could not name or share in.

"Fuck you, sellsword," he growled and pushed the image away from him, and the other man laughed.

"Sailing with the company then?" Bronn continued, draining his tankard and clunking it down on the table to signal for another. A barmaid obliged, and Bronn leered at her, the deep dimples in his cheeks giving him such a lascivious look that Sandor was certain the girl's blush was not from flattery but discomfort.

"Aye," Sandor replied. "Lenna will go as far as Winterfell, then I'll go North with the armies."

And icy silence spilled across the table like a spilled mug of beer. It was so thick that Sandor could almost feel it, cold anger radiating back at him from the smaller man across the table with such ferocity that his sword-hand twitched.

"Winterfell," Bronn said flatly, with such lack of expression that it pulled Sandor's gaze to his face. The sellsword's rough features were long and stringy with disapprobation, so suddenly and uncharacteristically that Sandor felt unmoored.

"Aye," he replied, his tone even and low. It was galling to be discussing his private business with the blackguard to begin with, but he didn't know what to do with the other man's anger. None of his fucking business. "She's advisor to Sansa Stark."

"No," Bronn said lowly, the finality in his tone like an executioner's blade. "You will not send her there. Not she and the babe."

His head went up at that. "What do you-"

"Saw her when last she was here," Bronn said, his voice shaking. Sandor sat back on the bench and laid his tankard down. "Held that girl of yours in my own arms. Assured your wife that you weren't dead. Me, of all people, offering your woman pretty lies. Where the fuck were you anyway?" He didn't pause long enough for Sandor to make an answer even though his tongue and pride were ready. "And here you are talking about sending her to fucking Winterfell?"

Never outspoken or one to mince words, Sandor felt peculiarly bereft of epithets to hurl at his old comrade. There was fire in the other man's eyes that Sandor wasn't used to facing.

Bronn of the Blackwater was not afraid of him, and never had been.

"She has responsibilities," he replied through clenched teeth, and it sounded mealy-mouthed in his own ears. Like something a cunt lordling would say.

"Fuck responsibilities," Bronn said in return. "What of your responsibility to her? To that child?"

Sandor mulled on that for a handful of awkward, long minutes while Bronn swilled the rest of his lukewarm ale. With a sharp clatter, the sellsword threw the tankard down and pushed back from the table, the bench scraping unpleasantly against the stone floor.

"I've said it once, and I'll say it again, you great fucking idiot," Bronn snarled, looking down his crooked nose. "I wish I'd stolen the lady myself. At least then she'd be safe, and you can bet your shit-arsed hide that she'd be far and away from whatever evil we're walking into. I have half a mind to steal her now. You sure as fuck don't deserve her if this is what you're-"

"Shut the fuck up," Sandor said quietly, anger leeching the marrow from his bones. He felt the battle-rage rising. "Shut your fucking mouth, sellsword."

"I knew you were a dumb cunt, but I didn't think you were a fucking idiot," Bronn continued, his tone taunting and full of disdainful laughter. Sandor slowly got to his feet. The sellsword's neck was tight and extended, tendons straining red against his rough, tanned skin. His face was twisted up in anger, but his eyes were blazing, never leaving Sandor's own.

"I'm warning you-" Sandor said, and he felt the threat warming his blood to a boil.

"Warn me all the fuck you like," Bronn nearly shouted, "but damned if I'm not going to give you what you deserved all those years ago."

"I'd like to see you try," Sandor replied, hands finding the underside of the table, fingers tensed at the ready.

"Better than you've done," Bronn said. "You failed her then, and you'll fail her now. All you've ever done."

Flipping the table took very little effort for a man of his size and strength. He had wagered it would be enough to offset the sellsword so that he could land a good punch into that smug face, but he underestimated how agile the other man was. Bronn sidestepped the careening table and the clattering benches as deftly as a cat, circling to keep the obstacle between them.

"I didn't fail her," Sandor rasped, his throat tight in pain. Except you did.

"You didn't save her," Bronne returned, whole body tense. "You kept letting her go back to them. Kept letting them sink their fucking claws into her back, pull her down again. Too much of a coward to do what needed to be done, to take her away and keep her away. And then you fucking left her. You walked away."

It hurt more than he thought possible, to hear it from another man's throat. It was one thing to have it circling endlessly through his head all of this time, the guilt and the shame and the slippery, oily cowardice. He had convinced himself that he'd done what he had to do, had believed her when she encouraged him to ride out with Robb Stark's men, had believed the old monk on the Quiet Isle, had believed her again when she said he was forgiven, that he'd done as he needed.

Except that he hadn't. He hadn't done what he'd needed, he'd followed his own damn pride. Her sworn shield, he should have stayed with her, even if it meant his own punishment, but he'd been too desperate to prove himself that he'd ridden away and almost not ridden back.

And now he was going to do it again, only this time, the threat to Helenna Manderly and their children was very real and much more unpredictable than some grasping lions in the South. The contrast between the two situations was almost comical. Human men he could kill, but the sellsword was right. Whatever evil they were marching to meet was not human, and if they fell to him, which they probably would, Winterfell would meet swift destruction along with all of its inhabitants.

Despite hearing the sellsword, Sandor's rage was up, and he managed to seize the other man by the throat, lifting him on to his tiptoes. He had no words to hurl into the man's face, but he stood there looking at him as his face went red and purple, hard hands scrabbling Sandor's grip. He almost felt as if it wasn't his hand on the man's neck at all, that he was outside of himself.

"Let him go."

Sandor's grip relaxed immediately and he turned slightly to see Jaime Lannister and Brienne of Tarth standing in the alehouse. The barkeeper was cowering behind the bar, his black head slowly peeping over his shelter to see if the altercation was over. Sandor looked about him and took stock of the upended table and benches, the spilled tankards, the pools of ale darkening the old flagstones like blood.

"He damn near killed me," Bronn rasped, rubbing his neck and looking between the other two in annoyance. "You were almost too late."

It was Sandor's turn to be annoyed. He narrowed his eyes as he regarded the three somber faces before him. They each met his eye unflinchingly.

"Did you succeed?" Jaime asked, turning his attention back to Bronn. The sellsword spat on the ground.

"I don't know. Did I, Clegane?"

"What the fuck-" he began.

"You listen," Brienne said harshly, taking a step toward him. She was nearly his height, and Sandor wasn't used to having to look someone in the eye like that. He took a half-step back. "You are not going to bring your wife and child with you back to Winterfell. She must stay here."

"I'm not leaving her with the damn Lannisters-" he snarled, gesturing wildly and indistinctly with an arm that still didn't feel as if it belonged to him.

"Somewhere else, then. Somewhere safe. Clegane, she is carrying your child." Sandor took another step back but could not look away from Tarth's blue eyes. The woman's homely face softened and her tone changed from accusatory to cajoling. "Clegane. Please. She cannot go to Winterfell."

"Lady Sansa," he said weakly, the argument unravelling like old rope.

"There must always be a Stark in Winterfell," Brienne replied lowly. "It is her family's duty, not Lady Helenna's. Not yours."

Jaime Lannister glanced at him, handsome face drawn in pain. "I have made arrangements for Lenna. She can go to Dorne with Myrcella. Prince Oberyn readily agreed."

Sandor knew his wife better than any and he shook his head. "She will not consent, she would never go." Lemon trees and sunshine.

"Then you must convince her," Jaime said urgently. "Where we are going is no place for her, for Addy. For the babe."

"How?" he asked the air.

"She told me," Brienne replied. "Jaime and I had already been discussing it, how to keep her out of it, but when she told me that she was with child again, I knew we had to do something, and quickly."

Sandor looked down at his hands. They were curled up into fists and he wanted to pummel something. Doing your bloody job for you, old dog.

"Dorne," he said flatly. It could be worse. She could be dead.

"She can be of use there," Jaime continued placatingly. "She can continue to serve as emissary. Keep up the ruse that she's brokering an alliance between Daenerys Targaryen and the Martells. She can help with the preparations for what comes after."

"If there is an after," Bronn said darkly, and Sandor took in a deep breath through his nostrils. You will never see her round with your babe, he thought forlornly, but then brushed the protest away with impatience. Better to never see that than see her and the children dead. Or worse, to die before them and be able to do nothing to help them. At least in sending them away he would be, in some way, protecting her.

Only vows you ever took were to keep her safe, he thought, and it was true. That first, unwilling oath in Cersei's solar. The pledge in the wood to be her sworn shield. His marriage vows. All to her, and all to safeguard her protection.

Sandor grunted, spent and weary. "I'll try."

"You had better fucking succeed," Bronn replied, pushing his finger into the center of Sandor's chest. He was lucky the fight had fled from his bones. "And one more thing, Clegane."

He had opened his mouth to demand what more he wanted when Bronn's fist collided with his right cheek. Pain bloomed like a rose through his face and he pulled his hand away scarlet with blood. From the way his bones were still vibrating, he thought it likely to bruise. Instead of retaliating, he looked back at the sellsword dispassionately. Jaime Lannister and the Tarth woman were looking between the two of them warily, as if waiting to step in again to keep them apart.

"I have wanted to do that for fucking years," Bronn said with a hint of his old smirk, shaking out his hand, knuckles purple from the impact.

Sandor didn't reply, just turned on his heel and stalked back through the dark streets of Flea Bottom toward the Keep, his mind burning like a wildfire as he unwillfully listened to the words the vows he had once made ringing through his head, one after another, like the tolling of the bells in Sept before a siege began.

A/N: So, best laid plans and all that...the direction I had originally planned on going just didn't feel right, so we'll see what happens along this path instead. Flying by the seat of my pants, but that's the fun bit about writing in installments. 3-4 more chapters should do it, I think, but who am I to say. Never thought I'd be sitting at 62 chapters and almost 450k words.

Thank you to everyone who still reads and comments. Your words keep me ambling toward the finish line. I do believe in happy endings. After all, the whole reason I started this thing was to give one of my favorite characters the ending I felt he deserved but was most certainly not going to get.

Hope everyone is well! I'll be casting about for ideas for new projects here soon, so if you've something you'd like to see, let me know. I take suggestions to heart. Be well.