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"The boy is a long time dying. I wish he would be quicker about it." Sandor Clegane the Hound, ASOIAF

Four

Sparks flickered in the sky, so very high up above him.

He wouldn't go farther than the first keep tonight, with its lights like orange eyes staring down the mountain. The first range of stairs, low for a man of his stature, passed through the dark tunnel made by the boughs of the trees.

New snow sloshed under his heavy boots, looted from a long dead, rotting soldier on his way to the Vale. The crows had eaten his eyes and the wolves the sigil on his chest, but the shoes were still better than those the monks had been using on the Quiet Isle. Fortunately, the dead man had large feet. Only the Hound's big toes were somewhat squeezed on the inside. He was able to march without much discomfort through the dark-green wood, from which all the light of the day was running out now; running out fast.

Sandor Clegane was always fond of green and he'd wear it gladly when he didn't need armour. Green was quiet like the wood he was now passing and quiet was good. No constant chattering and false pretenses to make him angry.

Twilight merged the stones and trees and looming mass of the mountain into a single black shadow, in which the stairs leading up the mountain were cut. Slowly, they became steeper and he could not very well see the way forward in the deepening darkness.

Sandor Clegane sat on a large, rounded stone and waited for moonrise. No horse could go up those steps. Only a mule could and the Stranger was nobody's mule. He was nonetheless missing his horse, remembering how he found it.

If she still lived, the mare he took with him when he ran away from home as a boy was now enjoying her old age in the green grass fields near the stone fortress of the Rock. In the past, the queen and the crown prince often visited there.

A year or so after the Greyjoy rebellion, the Hound understood he would need a new horse. Horses grew older faster than men. The mare would not be able to support his growing weight and strength on interminable hard rides between the capital and the West forever. He would never know for sure if it was one of Gregor's stallions who did for his mare on one of those visits.

Be as it may, a year later, the mare foaled. Without Sandor being any wiser for it, occupied as he was serving as the wet nurse of the crown prince, the foal grew into a huge black colt. At the age of three, the animal became a terror of grooms and lesser retainers in the king's stables when they tried to break him to saddle.

Too early, boy, Sandor thought, remembering young Stranger, You were no more a horse fit for riding than I was a man-at-arms at the age of ten. Just freakish big.

One summer day, Sandor Clegane heard talk in the yard that the king would make a gift of a wild, ear-biting, bone-breaking young horse to Lord Gregor Clegane, or the animal would be put down if Gregor didn't want him. He ran to the stables with fury and beat bloody the groom who thought of advising the master of horse to ever suggest such a stupid notion to the king. Gregor would choose the most spirited young stallions, let them become ill-tempered, use them, and kill them when he had no more need of them. Just as he did with his men and wives.

The horse nearly bit Sandor's hand off when he first approached him. The Hound laughed at will, mightily pleased with the spine the beast was showing.

About the same time, King Robert gave the Hound a gift; a snarling dog's helm, the work of a master armourer from the capital. His Grace occasionally suffered from attacks of generosity towards his servants, with an added joy that the queen always disapproved. And it must have amused Robert, who used to wear a great antlered-helm, to make his heir's sworn shield look more fearsome than he already was with his terrible burned face.

Sandor Clegane never bothered to find out if Gregor received another gift from the king to make up for the lack of a new stallion his beloved brother could slaughter one day. He wore the helm and trained the horse, happy for the fear on the faces of men he passed riding it, a monster of a man in dark armour on a black steed.

This is it, he thought, pleased with himself beyond measure, fear your death when you see it. There was only one name his new horse could have.

Stranger.

The name made the horse and his rider even more notorious than before. And it made the lying septons frown with false indignation, to the Hound's growing satisfaction. The Hound found out long ago that the servants of the Seven were no different than knights and lords. While preaching honour and good deeds, they cared only for political gains and gold or, perhaps to a lesser extent or depending on the man in question, to have their fill of food and drink, and empty their cocks in any way it pleased them.

(He would not admit, not ever, not out loud, not even to himself, except in the rare hours of extreme sobriety following drunken hazes that swallowed his scarce time off duty, that the yearning to call his horse by the name of the god of death may have come from the sight of small village septs in the westerlands and crownlands. In them, the face of the Stranger was ofttimes scrawled with charcoal in a few simple, honestly shocking lines that showed him either as a monster, or as a terrifying man with half a face.

Had there ever had been one among the seven faces of one god that the young man like Sandor Clegane could embrace as his, it would have been that one.

The Hound already had a name, though he rarely used it, and his new horse needed one so it was as good a notion as any.)

Another year of wet-nursing went by without being allowed to kill Gregor, who surprisingly limited himself to only talk of cruelty and not acts when seated on Lord Tywin's councils with his bannermen. Tywin never revealed what he thought of Gregor's cruellest proposals, if anything at all.

Boredom and hatred of the deceitful world grew heavy on his younger brother, as a piece of armour that had become too tight and needed to be shed for something bigger. Beating bloody any commoners who were unreasonable enough to step in the way of the crown prince, an occasional small tourney or melée here and there, and the everyday morning song of steel in the yard were not enough to keep him going.

He found himself drinking more and more when he wasn't guarding Joffrey. Yet, on duty and in training, his self-mastery and strength never betrayed him. They remained steadfast and secure, stronger than steel in his arms. The Hound had a flaring temper but he never lost it more than he wanted to on any occasion.

One thought sometimes haunted him, that also in that he was Gregor's brother, and not only resembling him slightly in looks and stature, for which men still called him pup. But not even Gregor's men dared call him that within his hearing. His masters' permission was not needed to kill Gregor's pets and even his brother would most likely only laugh at their death.

One fine summer day the Hand of the King died in his bed from some illness. Sandor would rather not know if Jon Arryn left this world from natural or less natural causes, faithful to his devise to keep his head on his shoulders until the day he finally killed his brother.

Less than a week after, a curious order came, setting the court to turmoil. The king would travel North, to get a new Hand, they said. The queen tightened her pretty, pouting lips, fortifying Robert's decision to go. The children were to come as well, with a party three hundred men strong; the best that could be found.

The long, interminable ride north was a welcome distraction in the Hound's mounting tedium. The Stranger and his rider finally enjoyed the exercise they badly needed. The Hound's body sang a song of pure joy whenever he galloped swiftly as the god of death himself up the kingsroad, always among the first and foremost of riders in the king's retinue.

The spoiled crown prince stayed in the wheelhouse with his mother and younger siblings most of the time. By the looks of it, he would very soon be knighted; sweet lies dripped from his mouth as honey from a hive. Joff only mounted a horse beside his sworn shield when they visited some castle on their way, to make a good impression on the lord or the lady that held it.

The Hound turned six and twenty on a moonlit night in the woods, just before the king's party arrived to Winterfell. The fresh, clean smell of needles had been deep in his nose and throat, rising sharp and pungent from the low-lying summer snows, just as he was smelling it now on top of the deep and dense white mantle the snow knitted over the woods of the Vale, brought forward by winter.

Three years have passed and I am still that same man, and a changed one, at the same time.

I have to keep going.

As if on command, the moon finally rose among the high trees polluting the stony foot of the Giant's Lance; half-full, it illuminated the stairs leading to the Eyrie, and the man with the face of the Stranger. Very few stars peeked through the dark clouds sailing through the moonlight.

I'm my own mule now, he thought, chewing on some food gained from the six too-friendly guards whose fire he had shared behind the Bloody Gate.

The stairs were dark as pitch. They twisted and turned as he climbed from one to another, following the carpet of snow and fallen needles through the tunnel built by the trees, careful not to stand in the line of faint moonlight coming through the canopies with his great body.

He carried no torch. Surely, he was cold, but walking helped and the light of the torch would have only blinded him. Besides, while he could light a torch and snuff it, and he did so many times in his life, he still didn't cherish holding fire in his arms.

The moon and the stars were more than enough for a man who had no light.

Orange eyes, orange eyes above him, so far above that it seemed his tiring leg would never ever reach them. He ignored the pain and climbed up two more stairs. And two more.

He walked and twisted and turned. The keep was farther than it had looked from the foot of the mountain. One more stair. He nearly slipped on a crust of ice and stumbled down, thrown off balance.

One more step...

He fell into the rhythm of watching his boots, bending only so slightly forward as he advanced on his way up, not to stagger again.

In his mind's eye, he rode into Winterfell again, right after the king and Ser Jaime. Joffrey was riding beside him, and the Imp behind. Inside, he lifted the visor on his helm and showed his terrible burned face. The only reaction was from the dour long-faced lord studying the king and his retinue with cold, grey eyes, counting the enemies in his castle, the Hound supposed. The knowledge was widespread: Lord Stark was no friend to the Lannisters.

The courtiers whispered he had disapproved publicly of the killing of Rhaegar's children and retired back north to his vast domain, determined never to set foot south again. The Hound didn't put much credit in gossip, though he heard it all. If those rumours held any truth, Stark might not have been a very bad man. Yet he rode with Robert in the same company as Gregor when the walls of Pyke were stormed. The Hound hardened his heart and told himself that Stark surely had somewhere a bannerman just like Gregor, to do his lord's bidding in Gregor's way. The good dog remained on guard, in case his royal snotty charge would come to trouble in case Stark was not truly beyond harming the children of his enemies, despite piously bleating against their slaughter where people could hear him.

Stark's wife and a company of snotty children of his own had also waited in the yard to welcome the king. The family was mostly red-haired, in contrast with the greyness of the lord and his castle. Only one child, small and rat-like, looked sharp and grey like the father. The Hound approved. Just like green, grey was good. His own soot-dark armour was a testimony to it.

The Hound had further thought nothing of any of the Stark children in person. (Years later he remembered in a completely different light the bunch of auburn-coloured curls dancing against the dullness of the castle walls in the northern wind.) Back then he only noted with mild amusement how that auburn hue had been a different red colour than the festive Lannister one; more strident, wild and free.

His thoughts, as always of late, returned to Sansa, with grievance and with hope of seeing her again.

I first saw you and I thought nothing of you. What does that make me? A heartless bastard or an average man who lays with whores and not with children?

Winterfell was as large as Casterly Rock, and yet so very different. Less dungeon-like. Much, much colder in the yard, and yet much, much warmer on the inside. There were freakish smoking pools here and there on the grounds, the likes of which he had never seen in Westeros despite travelling far and wide with the king. And the walls of his room near Joff's were so warm that he had to sleep tunicless, and that without even starting a fire. The wine was piss poor, but the food was decent, served in generous quantity for a giant like himself.

The odd differences did not end with the accommodations and the weather. Little lordlings of the castle did not have the escort of men-at-arms as Joff did, no, their wet nurses were different. The direwolf was not only a dead sigil on the Stark banner; Stark's children had wolves for pets.

Wolves were very much like the wild dogs, his brothers…

The red-haired lordlings crossed wooden swords in the yard with little princes and Sandor was forced to observe them as a part of his duties, bored to death as he usually was in the last years. He was now strong enough to kill his brother yet the opportunity always eluded him. There hadn't been proper war or trouble in the capital for years. The Hound purposefully sought the strongest opponents in the yard and yet they could never satisfy his desire for victory. None of them was Gregor. He never quite understood why some other men-at-arms looked for weaker sparring partners to be sure that others saw them as strong. Much weaker men were gnats, not worthy of the Hound arming himself to face them, unless commanded to do so by his masters.

He needed to be the last man standing, the best man, for only then he'd be stronger than his brother. Beating the weak served no purpose of his; pretty knights were welcome to it.

Then, the boy fell. Or rather, was pushed. One of those auburn-haired wolflings who ran around so bravely and wanted to be a knight in the conversation of children that the Hound had overheard… Just as he himself once wanted before he was burned and Gregor knighted. The Hound would bet on his life that whoever helped the boy down the keep's rough masonry walls was a ser…

Why, the little wolf's fall must have been as natural as Jon Arryn's death with so many lions in their castle, despite some lions being masked as stags. The wolf and the lion will go at each other's throat. The lord looked suspicious of everyone and everything, as the Hound would be in his place, and the lady mother closed herself with the dying boy.

Sandor Clegane fortified his resolve and closed himself to the pain of others. Why should he feel for them? No one had ever felt for his pain. He kept his sword close and looked after his charge, waiting as always for the day when he would finally be called upon to kill his brother.

But the dying boy's wolf just had to keep howling, drawing attention to itself, while his young master lay on deathbed in a lonely tower. The Hound found he could not abide the sound. It meant that the boy still lived and suffered, and to know he was suffering took the Hound back in time when his face was full of ointments and bandages, and he had been dying, dying, dying, in excruciating pain.

The howling of the wolf was gut-wrenching. It reminded the Hound that he still had a heart. He could not want a boy to be dying in pain, any boy… He could not.. Rather a battle wound, a sword wound, a clean wound… The wolf kept howling, driving him mad. On an impulse, the Hound offered Joff to silence the animal, wishing for the boy to be quicker about his dying. Mercy, it would be mercy.

He hadn't quite finished speaking about silencing the wolf before he regretted it. I have lived.. Where they all thought I would die and maybe it would have been better if I did.

No it wouldn't, he scorned himself, reminding himself he was only ugly. He was still able of body and at the age of six and twenty bloody able to kill his brother. Who is to say what is to become of the boy if the Stranger doesn't take him?

Both his weakness and his regret were soon forgotten by the arrival of the twisted Lannister gargoyle and his barbed tongue. "Spirits of the air!" Sandor Clegane mocked the dwarf, feigning not to see him when he spoke, to Joff's great amusement. The Imp gave as good as he got, sparing no offence for the Hound, all the while acting the righteous bastard with his nephew where he was no better than him. Maybe he was worse.

The Imp married a whore and when he was fed up with her, he gave her to the Lannister guards before having her for the last time himself. Truth be told, it was unnecessary to marry a whore to fuck her, much less to humiliate her as if she had done something wrong by being what she was. Gregor himself could take lessons in amusement from the little man! When the Hound heard about the occurrence from fellow guards on one of the interminable visits between the capital and the Rock, Sandor Clegane seriously pondered killing the dwarf. He was so very small and Lord Tywin seemed to be overlooking his existence anyway.

However, abomination or not in looks and in deed, the dwarf was still a Lannister, and Gregor was Lannister's bannerman. The Hound pitied the whore and did nothing. Not that there was much he could do. By the time he heard about the happy occasion she had already been taken to Lannisport where she further worked her profession. Or perhaps she took a ship and left Westeros, or maybe she just died, no one knew or cared. The Hound simmered with useless anger and Sandor Clegane remained safely hidden behind the Hound's mask.

The wolfling boy did not heed Sandor's wishes. He was not quick to die. He didn't die at all, and the wolf remained howling. His vivid yellow eyes haunted Sandor Clegane for days after, on the kingsroad, returning south.

Now, the Hound thought he heard another wolf howling from afar, somewhere behind and below, not yet quite at the Gates of the Moon, with the same voice of the yellow-eyed wolf of Winterfell, but with much greater strength… They would have grown by now… the direwolves…

I am not looking for a wolf. I am looking for a lady.

I am looking for you, Sansa.

Sandor Clegane remembered the rest of the ride south from Winterfell to King's Landing and as he did that, all efforts to maintain the balance were lost. He staggered on the next slippery stair and fell backward into the darkness, rolling some twenty or thirty steps back on the way he came from. When he stopped moving, his bad leg hurt like seven hells. Slowly, he stretched all his limbs and found he had use of them. He would have thanked the gods for it if he believed in them, but since he didn't, he saved his thanks for himself.

I'll not fall again.

He scrambled back up on his feet, and struggled to keep his heart and soul in check as he continued to remember.

Cersei ordered Joff to leave a good impression on his betrothed and it was hard to do that from the wheelhouse. As a result, the boy rode next to Sandor Clegane more often than not, trying to please his mother. The days of joyful free riding on the kingsroad were over. The Hound had to keep pace with his charge and a mask of impassiveness on his face.

It turned out that Joff's betrothed, Stark's elder daughter, did not need to be impressed. It was only for the good, Sandor supposed, as the golden brat he was guarding did a piss poor job in wooing her. Joff found courting boring; he put more of his heart into torturing Tommen's cats than in heeding his mother's counsels. Yet from the beginning of the ride the Stark girl seemed wet with love for the boy. Not that she knew what wet meant, being a child. She must have loved so well some image she made of him in her head because he was a prince and yellow of hair. The Hound vaguely remembered that handsome princes in stories and songs of chivalry often had golden hair.

The girl would steal sweet and shy glances at her prince every moment she had a chance. Unwillingly, her looks frequently ended upon the Hound, who simply found himself next to him as he well should. And every time her eyes landed on Sandor Clegane, she would avert them, as if he had greyscale and not merely a damn ugly face. And every time she shunned him, the Hound felt stung by it and his anger was growing...

What did it matter if a stupid girl could not look at him? Wasn't that what he always wanted? To be feared?

Yet no one had ever averted the gaze from him so many times a day, nor with such high airs, mingled with true innocence and fear. The ladies in court would do it a few times and then looked at something else, more interesting. The girl feared him, and was repulsed by him, and he who basked in other people's fear, he… he was not pleased about it, and that new mood of his made him terribly angry with himself, for showing weakness again. He wished she looked somewhere else and let him be.

(Yet every morning he combed his lank black hair over his scars more assiduously than ever before, in vain attempt to hide himself or to spare her the look, he never knew the truth. His scars could not be hidden, and it was most rare for the Hound not to know what the truth was.)

Near the ruby ford, Ser Barristan Selmy, Lord Renly Baratheon and Ser Ilyn Payne rode forward, sent by the council as the guard of honour to welcome the king. Robert was hunting when they arrived. It was one of the longer lasting halts on their journey south.

Sandor Clegane was happy to leave Joff's company for a little while. As if they had a will of their own, the Hound's long legs took him toward a tender, soft-furred wolf Joff's betrothed walked through the camp, calling her Lady. Lady was the best behaved and kindest dog Sandor had ever seen, and that without being a dog at all. He wondered if her child mistress was like that as well and hoped that she wasn't. Kindness had no place at court. Insipidness she so clearly possessed would serve her better.

The girl didn't even see him approach, staring with admiration at the old Selmy's shiny white armour and snow white cloak of the kingsguard, and at Renly's pretty face. But the stars in her eyes died when she gazed at Payne's pockmarked face and the greatsword with stained hilt over his back, the testimony to his profession of the king's headsman.

Staggering backward, the girl stumbled into his arms. He grasped her by the shoulders. She was shaking. The ladies are always panicking, he remembered with contempt and grinned mockingly when she turned her head to see who it was, forgetting how much uglier it made him.

And for the first time he noticed, from nearby, how tall she was, almost as much as Joffrey who was tall for a boy and was going to grow taller still, as his father. The Hound avoided thinking about Joff's father. It would not do to remember who it was and speak of it by mistake in some tavern.

The Hound surprised himself by asking the Stark girl if he frightened her so much and wondered to himself if he had stalked her on purpose to do just that.

She had no answer for him, no pretty words. She just wrenched herself away. Her wolf stepped between them and rumbled. The Hound laughed profusely, light of heart before that little display of spine of them both. His laughter must have confused or offended the girl because she went to her knees and wrapped her arms around her pet.

In camp there were always people watching. Voices started questioning the presence of the wolf and Sandor Clegane thought he could see the very beginning of tears in Sansa's bright blue eyes.

Suddenly, he needed to say something and he heard himself rasping to the curious crowd that the Starks had direwolves for wet nurses… When have I ever spoken in favour of anyone?

The answer was never.

Cersei urged her son to go to the girl, and Joffrey immediately chased his dog away for scaring his lady. The well-trained dog in the manners of the court bowed deeply and obeyed quietly, never looking back to see how the scene unfolded.

Why didn't you look at Joff at once with your blue eyes and not only with the eyes of your hopes and dreams? You would have seen him for what he was just as you have seen through me. Not that I had known it back then. For a long while I despised you, determined to think of you as shallow and stupid as any other lady in the court.

Then again, Sansa, you could have looked all you wanted. More like than not, it wouldn't have made what came after any different nor any better. They would still kill your father when he found out the truth and kept you as a hostage before you could fly away… And I would still be the guard dog, escorting you to your cage at my master's bidding.

Not any longer.

I have no master now, and I would be yours if you would have me.

The shadow of the wood was now pierced by orange lights, which became larger than the crescent moon in the sky. True to his resolve, the Hound didn't fall and he had come to the end of that night's journey.

Yellow and orange fires burned on the formidable wall of stones, with huge studs set on its top, and defended by two fat round tours. The massive ironbound gate barred the way forward.

"Is Lord Protector sending a septon to retrieve the boy?" asked a motherly sounding manly voice from behind. "Didn't someone say that the bastard girl got him down the mountain before they staged a tourney in his honour?

Which boy? Which bastard girl? the Hound wondered. Boys often believed there was good in the world. Sandor Clegane didn't. He didn't know what bastard girls believed in.

"I come in the name of the Seven," he limited himself to saying. It worked on the Bloody Gate so why not here? "I lived in solitude and one night I had a dream where the Seven sent me to the Eyrie to do their bidding."

Pious lies opened many doors which were previously closed. The gate swung open. Behind, there was a man who spoke gently as the Mother above, with jowls for cheeks and soft skin on his chin.

"Enter, brother," the motherly man said, baring his chest in a grand gesture. A large healing wound blossomed there, a knife wound, cut out in the shape of the seven-pointed star. "May the Crone hold her lamp high for you, on your way."

They were indeed every inch as mad about the Faith in the Vale as the Elder Brother said they might be.

The Hound passed smoothly through one more set of gates, accomplished.

I have made it, Sansa. Can you tell? Are you cold up there with no smoking pools to be piped into the walls, to warm the ivory towers of the falcon's nest? Or are you warm in someone's bed, with your pretty head resting on his chest…?

The last thought should have made him angry, but it didn't. He was too tired to care, and he slept well and sound. And in his dreams the chest of the man where Sansa's head was resting swiftly became his own.

The Hound arrived safely at the first of the three keeps guarding the ascent to the Eyrie.

His heart was made of it and the keep was named for it.

Stone.