Thank you, TopShelfCrazy, for beta reading this story.
Any mistakes left, as well as any choices regarding the content of this story that you may or may not like are my own.
Thank you to all who reviewed this slow progressing story.
Any feedback is welcome.
With this chapter, I had a choice between Sansa's POV (which would explain to you what the hell is happening in the Vale so you would not have to wonder in case you are interested in the political part) or to show how this type of Sandor reacts to this type of the situation. The first one was coming as too introspective and it would also leave you with doubts about what is in Sandor's head (as the books leave us) so I deleted it and wrote this instead.
Next part will be Sansa though and then you will know what is going on, and also, some sort of SanSan will continue, olifantically.
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"He took a song and a kiss, and left me nothing but a bloody cloak," Sansa Stark, ASOIAF
Nine
The Hound had never paid much attention to the songs, yet he had heard them nonetheless. Gregor did not burn his hearing; only his voice and one of his ears.
In the songs, great, highborn ladies blushed when the handsome, true knights confessed their love for them. Then the knights kissed them; a pretty word to say they fucked them, and the songs mostly ended. The singers never said if the ladies kissed or fucked their knights back.
That would be improper, wouldn't it? the Hound sneered in his head.
The pretty verses were often changed into far less gallant ones when red-blooded men sang them in taverns, leaving no doubt as to the knights' true intentions.
Sandor Clegane was not handsome. And he was most certainly not a knight, true or otherwise. Yet his only love had been a great lady, and she did colour prettily at his confession; a heroine from songs she'd once loved so well made flesh and blood.
Do you love them still?
And that after all this time, wedded and bedded, Sandor thought in disbelief, seeing Sansa becoming all rosy and flustered, but he did not attempt to kiss her. He just drank in the incredibly wild and insistent stare she was giving him and he was about to laugh at her as he so often did before…
If only Sansa had not fainted, freezing him in place.
"Sansa!" he cried out hoarsely and leapt forward. His delayed gesture did nothing to prevent her fall. She collapsed more silently than the grass was growing. Her pretty head hit the dirty floor of the cellar just before he scooped her into his arms. In a fight, he might have died or suffered a grievous wound in that instant it took him to respond.
Sandor had never expected this. Truth be told, he had never imagined what she would do or say. He'd never thought that far. He only needed to see her and unburden his soul. What came after did not matter.
Except that now, it did, terribly so. He was… weakened. He was starving. He needed her to look at him again, with that avid, shaken expression she'd just given him; a source of unexpected, pure joy for the dog's wicked heart.
"Sansa!" he rasped, almost softly.
She was pliable in his arms, a bundle of soft wool and fur with the unmistakable body of a woman.
Is it so unimaginable, my lady, that I would love you so? I suppose this truth has never crossed your mind. Guess what, it didn't cross mine either until all I had was good and done for.
See, another lie, just there.
I never had anything.
Though that was perhaps true for anyone, and at any time, in the world ruled by the strong. The strong of today were the corpses of tomorrow.
The Stranger takes us all.
His anger at Sansa flared up suddenly, killing all his joy. To think she would love him… Did he truly think of that? He had to admit to himself that he did and had... Knowing that she would never love him. And he… he… He didn't want her gratitude. He didn't want scraps… He had had enough of that from the Lannisters.
In his truth-fuelled fury he remembered the only other time he had seen Sansa faint; when they cut off her father's head, and only after the brave deed had been done. His rage dampened instantly. To know that she didn't pass out on just any occasion, like some ladies from the court, lifted his spirit again. Have I shocked you as much as Joffrey did with his notion of justice?
Do you hate me, Sansa?
Do I frighten you still?
He would stay with her until he found out. Or longer, if she wanted him. Forever and ever. Wasn't that the ending of some songs? He didn't recall nor did he wish to.
He was in the Eyrie with Sansa and that was all that mattered.
"You have to turn the winch again," the boy commanded him in a shrill, high-pitched tone. His voice was changing to a man's voice, a year or two too early, perhaps. "The servants also have to return up here with us. The Lord Royce said so. I didn't even break my fast before he said Alayne and I were to leave. Who will cook and clean?"
"I won't, to be sure," the Hound told Robert Arryn, remembering the boy's existence and presence with great difficulty. "Go, die of hunger and dipped in your own shit, if it please you. At least I won't have to listen to your ugly croaking. You call yourself a falcon? You are a lowly sparrow at best."
The boy's hands began shaking. His deranged, childish anger, matched the Hound's dangerous one in his shrieking madness. "And you are no Winged Knight!" the boy bleated pitifully in his siffling, breaking voice. "You are uglier than me! And you made Alayne ill!"
His lordship had the right of it, all of it, but the Hound would never admit to any of it.
"Boy," Sandor said dryly, decided to be much clearer than before. He was apparently not well understood from the beginning.
"Shut up!" he bellowed.
Intimidation did not work.
Nothing ever worked in his life, or not as it did for anyone else.
Jon Arryn's son kept prattling, undeterred. "It is cold here," the boy said petulantly, gesturing at the dead oxen and other unliving contents of his own cellar; wooden crates and jars with stuff the Hound had never bothered to check. "I want fire. I want Alayne awake. I want Maester Colemon to prepare warm milk for me."
Sansa's brown hair tickled the beardless portion of the Hound's puckered chin and the protruding jaw bone, reminding him he should do something to help her. He instinctively turned her so that her head was now resting under the unburnt part of his face. She had always walked on my good side, he remembered. She had never given me her arm when I accompanied her. And she did give it to Arys Oakheart.
Yet with Sansa in his arms, his memory lacked its usual bitterness, appearing like an old forgotten squabble from his youth or childhood.
He looked out, through the window of the cellar. It began to snow. The flakes were pretty; pure, white crystals descending on the white castle from the light blue sky.
The world was less awful today than the day before.
"I even want Lord Petyr, Mother's husband," the boy drooled on. "But the white knight has just murdered him."
So Littlefinger is dead.
"Why do you call Sansa Alayne?" the Hound asked in all seriousness, deciding to learn what he could, since the boy would probably not stop talking unless he killed him, and Sansa might not like this when she woke.
"That is her name. She is Lord Petyr's natural daughter."
"Natural my arse," the Hound said flatly. "And this white knight, how did he look?" Meryn? Boros? One of those Kettleblacks? Some new bugger they named after I left? But why would any of them kill Littlefinger as a side business? This did not sound like something Cersei would order. Last thing the Hound had heard, she was Queen Regent and Tommen played at being king.
"He had a snow white armour and a snow white horse," the sickly boy exhaled prettily, putting his long brown hair behind his ears, dreaming he was that knight, more like than not. "He rode to the Gates of the Moon with a small army and demanded my cousin be delivered to him, Sansa Stark. Alayne was very afraid. But Lord Baelish reassured her that he would make the army leave for Saltpans or for Riverrun looking for my cousin. He said Alayne had nothing to fear."
"I guess Lord Baelish was wrong for once," the Hound assumed aloud.
"The white knight sent him back to Lord Royce in a bag. My bannermen wouldn't let me see his remains! Me, their lord!" The boy seethed with indignation from being left out of something a child should rather not see from the sound of it. On this, the Hound could understand the lordling's anger. He never saw a point in hiding death from children. Most would see it soon enough.
"No one has seen the white knight's face. But he was taller than you, I think," Lord Arryn observed thoughtfully as his final opinion on the matter, after eyeing the Hound up and down with a mixture of childlike curiosity, irritating haughtiness and open contempt.
Taller than me.
Unless the extinct giants had suddenly appeared in the Vale, there was only one man in Westeros taller than Sandor and he was supposed to be dead.
His right arm itched to hold a greatsword and his guts wished this to be true. He would finally kill Gregor if it was.
But there was a woman in his arms instead of cold steel. She needed a featherbed and a fire, not his smouldering thoughts of vengeance.
"Do you have a bed, boy? A good one, a lordly one," he rasped, almost calm, forcing himself to address his miserable host as sweetly as he could. "Let us lay Alayne in your bed, shall we? Your lordship will surely have the best bed in this castle?"
"Of course," the boy agreed. "I have all the best. I'll show you."
Or that is what everyone tells you, the Hound thought. They said the same to Joff and see how he ended. Choked on his wedding pie.
He imagined himself choking at his own wedding and he could not. Unwillingly, what he could see clearly was Sansa, brown-haired and grown as she was now in his embrace, covered in his cloak.
As if she could ever marry me even if she so wanted. His treacherous thoughts of wanting Sansa to love him back had never gone as far as marriage yet. The world would not change. He was born a second son of a minor house. He could not take a daughter of any of the great houses to wife.
The Hound followed the petulant lordling to the courtyard. The boy's castle was being devoured softly by snow. By the evening, maybe, and by the next morning for certain, it would be impossible to walk from one tower to another if it kept falling.
We will be buried alive.
They climbed into a tower the Hound hadn't visited before, belonging to the falcon lords of old and their spouses.
Their bedchamber was a very spacious, cold room. The four poster bed in it was so large that four normal-sized men could easily fit in it, and there would still be place left. The Hound lay Sansa under the blankets and the furs, which were fortunately left in place, unlike in some other rooms he had seen emptied and covered for winter. He turned to leave.
The little lord had seemingly ran out of words. He was presently shaking at the door of his own bedchamber which dwarfed him. He gave Sandor a look that pleaded for some purpose.
"If you are a real lord and a future knight like the buggering Winged one," the Hound told him very seriously, "you will stay here and guard the lady's rest. You will not climb into her bed and sleep like a little baby. If she wakes, you will cry out and call for me as hard as you can."
Sandor went to make some use of the day. Sansa might be awake soon, but he would not wait at her bedside for that. He needed to exert his body. The eternal hours of standing guard in the past only served to make him more observant and angry than he already was by nature. Fighting was good for him; he remained strong and thought less from it. In the absence of arms on the Quiet Isle, he found that digging graves or just about any labour was better than sitting idle.
There should be a shovel in any cellar and he was not wrong in that. He cleaned the path from the tower of the lords to the cellars, and as an afterthought also to the tower where he had cried; the one looking at the waterfall.
After, he found some horrible dried flakes for porridge he recognised from his time in a septry without remembering their name. A pot, three bowls and spoons, a broken piece of a frozen oxen carcass, flint and steel and some firewood, completed the hoard he carried back in a large wicker basket to where his shocked love slept.
Robert Arryn, named for the fat and vigorous King Robert, First of His Name, was the skinniest and the weakest highborn boy the Hound had ever seen. Presently he was shivering worse than before, but he remained a true little would-be knight. He didn't move from his place. The bedding was perfectly smoothed on the empty half of the great bed and Sansa had not stirred. The Hound was pleased with the sickly boy. He hit him on the shoulder in sign of recognition.
"Good boy," he said, "you will make a fine killer one day. Maybe I will take you to squire. Would you like that?" It was an empty offer since the future Warden of the East would never squire for Sandor Clegane, but the boy beamed at it.
Every boy dreams of being a knight in this bloody land. Sandor remembered himself; a stupid child who'd wanted the wooden knight, and immediately made himself forget all about it. He was a man now.
Making fire was an easy task as was preparing porridge with warmed up water from melted snow. The boy refused to eat at first, calling the result disgusting, but he swallowed everything after the Hound did, hunger munching on his lordly pride.
Sandor let the frozen meat in the pot near the fire. They would cook it or roast it on the morrow.
"You are a good servant," Robert Arryn said earnestly.
The Hound chuckled at the observation. "A good dog," he agreed and finally allowed himself to return all his attention to Sansa. His day was done now.
She breathed peacefully in her sleep. Seeing her like this made him feel as though he was never going to be angry again. Maybe he could lay down now for a while, the bed was large enough.
On a second thought, it might not be prudent if the first thing Sansa saw when she woke was him sleeping in her bed. He didn't want her to remain shocked forever.
A noble knight would lay his sword between himself and his lady to preserve her honour, but that would be even less appropriate in the case at hand, Sandor estimated, viewing the truth from all angles.
I did put my blade on her throat.
Twice.
That left only one possibility.
"Boy!" he growled, "Take off all your winter clothes and lay in bed."
Miraculously, it was the first command the said boy obeyed without any questioning and complaining on the side. Doubtlessly, Lord Arryn would make a terrible fosterling and an even worse squire.
The Hound added more wood to the fire, not too little, not too much.
It wouldn't do for the fire to go out during the cold winter night, nor for the bedding to catch fire as his dead father had said, justifying the amusement of his eldest son and heir. When Sandor was satisfied with the build-up of the flames in the hearth, he left the wet rags he'd been wearing near it, stretching them on the floor to dry. Very silently, he crept into the bed next to the little lord…. who was snuggled up next to Sansa's teat, as a babe ready to suck on his mother's breast.
Sandor pulled the boy back by the shoulders, forcing him away from the lady. "She is not your mother," he said. "Your mother is dead." The boy collapsed wordlessly back to sleep, curled up in himself.
Sansa exhaled evenly, resting. Breathing, breathing, breathing. She must wake soon, the Hound told himself. There is no other way.
What if she... died?
Great ladies could die of broken heart, in the songs. Just like old men could die while bedding a woman, the Hound had heard nasty jokes about the latter.
I only scared her again, he told himself. I never broke her heart.
Content about that truth, Sandor closed his eyes. He would keep them so only for a little while, he decided. Behind closed eyelids, scents invaded him. He hadn't shared a bed with anyone for a lifetime. His mother took him to her bed once when he was very little and cried at night, from wetting his sheets, but the memory was so old now that it was almost unreal. He was warmer than he had been in days, warmer than on the Quiet Isle; it could well be he was warmer than ever...
In what seemed as only moments later, the Hound blinked the sleep away and felt cold metal on his throat.
"I can take the knife from your hands and twist it into your witless guts, boy," he threatened with unseeing eyes and cold hatred in his voice. "Best believe it."
But in the next instant, when he wanted to do good on his threat, if only to scare the boy properly as he should have done from the beginning, he found that he could not.
He was tied to the bed, very thoroughly so by the feel of it; arms and legs spread in a shape of a four-pointed star. If he trashed left and right with all his strength, he might be able to turn the bed over on his attacker, and possibly slice his own throat open in the course of that action.
He stilled.
Next, he chuckled madly, with care not to move his head and neck overmuch. His eyes almost teared from all-pervasive mirth. His laughter was convulsive and his head jerked involuntarily. His throat immediately pricked from skin being peeled, dripping blood, more like than not.
He became very still.
He slowly began opening his eyes. As soon as they were wide-open and wild, a fear he had never known seized his guts. And not of his own death, never that. Stranger was his oldest, most trusted friend. Maybe his only friend.
Sansa held a knife at his throat with two firm hands. Her face was a cold, white mask she would wear to the court and to another beating on Joffrey's orders.
Have you heard about Saltpans, Sansa? About that girl of eleven or twelve whose breasts I supposedly ate because raping her wasn't enough for a beast like me?
Do you believe it?
That would surely explain her actions. He didn't care if the entire Westeros thought he was the butcher of Saltpans. Well, maybe a little. Just as he never liked the bloody Imp to call him dog, not truly, for all his love of dogs. But to think that Sansa believed him guilty of torturing and burning Saltpans irked him beyond measure. Do you not know better?
You've always known me better than most.
Better than anyone.
But you don't know that, do you? How can you?
How could you possibly know...
Because the only girl of eleven or twelve the Hound ever came close to hurting was Sansa herself. That knowledge irked him even more.
"Go ahead," he said with resignation. "Kill me. You wanted to kill us both before, when I caught you on the serpentine stair. Might be you'll succeed today."
"What did the queen promise you? Gold? A royal pardon? Me?" Sansa's angry voice echoed shrilly from the cold, white walls of the bedchamber, quivering only at the last word.
You wouldn't want that, would you? That they give you to me?
As if they would ever do that.
Lord Tywin believed in feeding his dogs bones under the table, not in seating them beside him. It was perhaps the only lesson his grandson Joffrey had ever learned for him. Servants were servants and dogs were dogs. For as much as it amused Joff to order his men to beat and undress Sansa, he would have never given her to any of them. Not even with continuous torture on his mind. She was only Joffrey's, to do with her as it pleased him, day after day.
"The queen means to kill me this time," Sansa informed Sandor. "To cut my head off."
"I haven't seen Cersei since the last time I saw you. You must know that as well as I," he said in a rasp as firm and steady as her two little hands holding the knife on him.
"A dog will die for you, but never lie to you," Sansa continued in pure, unfeigned rage. "Wasn't that a lie like everything else since I left Winterfell? You show up in the Eyrie on the same day as the queen's men, claiming you love me and you expect me to believe you? To jump into your arms and go back down with you? I am not that stupid. What you love is killing! And no one crosses the Mountains of the Moon on his own these days. The clans would have killed you if you came by yourself."
Yet her eyes never left his throat where a few drops of his blood must have been drawn from by her knife when he had laughed, and he could swear she was not completely at ease with her own doing, thorough as it was.
No one had ever caught him off guard quite this way. Never when he was sober.
I must be drunk on you, Sansa.
"Dogs can lie as anyone else," he answered her question truthfully. "And I always knew I would die for someone. Why not for you? You are much prettier than Joff."
The blade on his throat hesitated, but it did not depart. He could move his head left and right, and up and down, very little. In a corner of an eye, he saw the boy skulking next to the hearth, sidling to hide from the Hound, looking all clever and lordly.
"You knew," the Hound realised.
"You were the sworn shield to the crown prince," the boy recited. "Everyone was afraid of you. I sometimes thought of you when I imagined my famous ancestor, the Winged Knight. He was a giant. You were the only one I thought tall enough at court."
The Hound could not believe his ears. He had never looked twice at Lord Arryn's boy back then. Yes, he knew of his existence and that was all. To hear he was an example of anything in his eyes was unthinkable. Another question surged in his mind, first time ever.
What did Joff all see in me? Was I an example to him when he thought of humiliating Sansa? And not only for killing her father and calling it mercy...
Anger saved him from further thinking. Sansa never fainted, did she? She was lying to him to save herself. She must have been.
"And you were only pretending to be sleeping," he growled wholeheartedly at Sansa and against the knife on his throat.
"For a while, yes," Sansa said simply, unafraid. "I woke when you carried me in here. Sweetrobin helped me when you left us."
Sandor let his eyes sink downwards as much as he could without the free movement of the head that should have followed his gaze, suddenly aware of the undress of his body, stripped to ragged smallclothes and a colourless tunic he left on for sleeping in winter. Sansa's eyes wandered over his naked legs, and returned to his face, unwavering. He suddenly wished he wore armour and thus escaped her prying eyes.
"You couldn't have come up here by yourself," she judged him firmly, stiffly, honourably, just as her late father once sentenced Gregor to die.
Lord Hand, dead Hand, the Hound thought with indifference.
So many dead since the murder of Jon Arryn.
Sansa spoke more to convince herself than him, it seemed. "It is impossible. The tunnel leading from the Sky to the Eyrie is blocked. The winch can't be turned from downside, just as Lord Royce first thought. It must be a trap. You must have a company of men hidden somewhere here, who helped you clean out the passage to arrive here from the Sky and then fill it with rubble again."
"What you say is ridiculous," he spat at her. "Besides, didn't you send the boy to take a look around? This castle is not so large."
She didn't. The boy ran out now to take that look, unbidden. The Hound laughed when he was left alone with Sansa. It was beyond him how she and her cousin were still alive. Servants, he forgot. That is the way of it. The highborns always had dogs, bigger and smaller ones; more and less rabid. He sank into stubborn silence.
"Sansa, there isn't anyone," the boy said when he returned, face red from the cold.
It was the first time he didn't call Sansa Alayne, Sandor noticed.
"But how did you do it then?" her pretty blue eyes were at a loss now, demanding the truth from Sandor.
"The chain," he said, wishing every trace of mockery out of his burnt voice.
"You… you climbed up the chain," Sansa said with something akin to awe. "Like my little brother Bran might have done… when he could still walk… when he was still alive…" Her pretty blue eyes became all watery and she looked away.
She looked north, he realised, completely forgetting him.
"Aren't you… aren't you too heavy for that?" she remembered he was there after a long while, regaining her breath and her composure.
Maybe he was. He had never thought about it before attempting the climb.
"It would seem not," he said curtly.
Her gaze roamed all over him now, measuring, comparing; in a detailed, dispassionate appraisal he had seen in seamstresses on a few occasions he'd been forced to visit those at court. He could almost feel the vividness of her look on his skin, or under it, just as in that last ungodly dream of her he had when they were naked together. His body reacted the way he didn't want it to. Not now. Not like this. It shamed him and yet why not? Why shouldn't she see it? She was no innocent. She knew by now love was more than just words. Perhaps that was all it ever was. Her eyes stopped just there before returning to his face again. Her cheeks were rosy again, from youth and health or… Gratification? He couldn't help thinking his body was maybe more to her taste than the Imp's.
Aye, dog. Or simply uglier and much more dangerous.
She withdrew her left hand from the hilt of the knife to her lap and he could see she had forced herself not to wring it. She sat stiffly at the edge of the bed, upright as a long tourney lance leaned on the wall.
"Will you keep me like this forever?" he asked, feigning boredom.
That did it.
She released the knife she had been steadily holding in her right hand against his throat; a kitchen one, rather than a proper weapon, designed to slice onion into rings, rather than flesh and bone into shreds. Fortunately for Sandor, the blade was not half as sharp as it could have been.
He remained tied to the bed and Sansa began crying.
He looked at his ankles, now that it was safe to move his head, because he couldn't see his wrists. He was tied with long leather straps that had a stable looks to them. Except that the work done on them was a finery, with little moons and falcons here and there. From the boy's pony then. Or some pitiful horse he can ride in his courtyard and think himself a knight. The leather was of best quality; he could not tear it apart.
Sansa has put reins on me.
He laughed again. He was in the Eyrie with Sansa and what she did to him was meticulous and clever.
None of this was a lie. It was what she thought she ought to do.
"Stop your bloody crying," he said, rougher than he intended to.
She wept more and more noisily, sniffing in the sleeve of her brown gown.
He had to think of something witty or very ugly to say, to pierce through the haze of her teary mood; something she would hear.
"The boy says that this knight Cersei sent to get you is taller than me," he rasped, almost snarling.
She may have looked at him through her tears, but they still kept falling. She turned to look at the boy, who nodded briefly.
"Do you seriously believe I would ever ride as a good dog in any party led by my brother? I have run away from it as a child. I swore myself to the Lannisters for two reasons. The first one was, their servants serve only the Lannisters and not their bannermen. I would never serve under Gregor. Not then, not now. I'd rather die."
"But… Ser Gregor is dead."
It was unbelievable how after everything Sansa had seen in her young years, she still didn't omit calling Gregor ser. Her rotting septa would have been proud of her. He felt the need to mock her and decided against it. Gregor was a ser, no doubt. That was Rhaegar Targaryen's fault, not Sansa's. There was no reason to scorn her for it.
"Or do you know another knight in the realm who is taller than me?" he asked instead.
"No, but-"
"They just lied Gregor died from the poison. And sent Prince Doran Martell a big, ugly head of somebody else's brother. Doesn't that sound to you like something the Lannisters could do? Old Tywin, his lovely daughter and the Imp?"
"And what other sworn brother of the Kingsguard would spit on all titles and kill an illustrious overlord of the riverlands and the Vale, and a former member of the small council, because he tried to, what, talk him out of doing Cersei's killing? Meryn? Boros? Cersei's latest lover? What was his name, Blackkettle? I don't think so."
"You," Sansa said with conviction.
"True," the Hound was forced to agree, "but I am done with that."
"Why have you come after me then?" she asked.
"I think I told you," he reminded her brusquely. "Don't make me say it again."
I do love you.
But the moment when he could say it was gone and he was loath to repeat it.
She gave him that bewildered look, a very short one and smiled.
He hadn't seen her smile for so long. She had stopped smiling freely when they murdered her father.
He tried to yank his arms free but the knots and the leather finery were holding. He remembered the sewing basket on the little table in Sansa's room in King's Landing. He always assumed she had it just for the looks of it, but maybe the girl could effectively do something with her hands. The thought sent his dog mind spiralling through the sinuous passages of desire, fuelled as never before by being helpless. He had no choice but to wait. He imagined she would use him, just as he was now, restrained and at her mercy, to get her pleasure from his body. It was almost too much to consider. That way she wouldn't have to go near his scars. But she would still have to look at him if she kept her eyes open while bedding a man and he… He would see all of her. It would be too damn good, he knew. He'd never done it that way before. A woman tried something like this once, but he thought nothing of it and changed position to one he knew. But now, now...
He closed his eyes.
In the safety and simmering anger of his mind, he forced his arousal to disappear before he truly embarrassed himself, by thinking about the swiftest way a full body armour could be fastened. There was nothing more mind-dulling than that.
Slowly, he reopened his eyes and began studying the girl in front of him; calm of body, but hungry in his soul. He felt ridiculous once more. And in place of becoming angry with her or with the world, he just loved her more.
"Do you know," she said, stuttering. "All this... Me... You," she gestured at the darkness, outside. "Winter. The castle hung in the sky… Your words to me. I thought this existed only in the tales."
"So did I," he answered without thinking. "So did I, Sansa, best believe it."
"Yet you are here. You. You left me nothing but a bloody cloak!"
It was the strangest accusation he had heard in his life. And contrary to his habit of letting all believe whatever in seven hells they wanted of him, Sandor felt the need to defend himself.
Just that, he didn't know from what or how.
"Sansa!" the boy hurled, saving the Hound the pain of thinking what he should say. They had somehow forgotten all about him. His body was shaking in uncontrolled spasms near the hearth, a hundred times worse than before. Sansa left the Hound's side to take him in her arms while the lordling tried to grope her and feed from her breasts again. Sandor could not miss the wrinkled look of disgust on her face.
Which was missing when she looked at him, moments earlier.
"Sweetsleep, I need sweetsleep," she muttered to herself nervously, as though she were alone. As if Sandor wasn't there.
"Are you mad?" he protested vehemently. Gregor was drinking milk of the poppy. To be stronger, he said. It only made him madder, Sandor thought. Once he asked Grand Maester Pycelle about it and the old man agreed. Since then, the Hound only drank wine or strongwine when he was wounded and needed to sleep it over, never poppy.
"He can die," Sansa whimpered.
"He will die from sweetsleep as well," Sandor said. "You will be the first one to blame now that Littlefinger is not here. They know or they think they know how you poisoned Joffrey. Why not him?"
"I did not poison Joffrey," Sansa said sternly.
"I never said you did, did I?"
Lord Arryn was slight but still too heavy for Sansa to hold him in her arms as a newborn babe. His spasms subsided from the warmth of her body, it seemed.
"Untie me, woman!" he commanded. "Now!" She never made a move to help him.
"Please," he said, remembering his courtesies. Once, long ago, he had to learn them as well. He had never bothered to use them. Much.
The Hound ended up holding a shaking body of the boy for at least an hour, maybe more, until the erratic movement had completely stopped. And despite Sansa's fears, he didn't die. He just fell asleep. Sandor placed the little lordling bugger in the middle of the bed.
"There," he said, empty of hands and of heart.
He moved to leave the room.
"Where are you going?" she asked.
"You don't want me in your bedchamber. Or do you?"
"This is the bedchamber of the Arryns," she said, avoiding both his avid eyes and the answer to his question. She had been eating cold porridge he had made before and the realisation made him... Proud...
The sickly boy in bed was old enough to be his son. In the warm red light coming from the hearth, his brown hair looked black enough. It was rather dark in the chamber now, and Sandor's latest delusion was almost complete; he, his wife and their son.
Except that Sansa was far too young to be little lord's mother and he never considered fathering a child. Or marrying. Or living long enough to do either.
And though he had never moved to touch her since she had released him, for the first time since he'd found her, Sandor noticed Sansa was afraid of him.
"What? I won't-" he began his defense
"-Kill you-you won't kill me," they said together.
He wondered how many times he had threatened to kill her before. They fell silent for a while, looking at the sparkling embers of the fire.
"Would you.. would you just…" her voice was tremulous now, invoking the precious memories he had of her frightened innocence in the Red Keep. "Would you lay down and fall asleep first?"
He thought of something… helpful?
"Do you want to tie me again?" he offered.
Speechless, she shook her head and stared at his throat. He pressed his own finger to it and wiped away the last traces of blood. He looked at the fingertip to confirm his assumption; he had made worse while shaving. He thought Sansa might ask for his pardons for cutting him there, but she never did. And if the sight of his blood disgusted her, she never showed it. She wasn't sorry. Yet it was clear she didn't like what she did, she merely believed it had to be done.
She is truly her father's daughter, the Hound realised, just as Robert's councillors said about her on the kingsroad. Dead councillors of the dead king, all of them, more like than not. The Starks killed if they thought they had to, like anyone else, yet it didn't mean they liked it. It was just as she had told him about her father, years ago.
She would have killed him if she thought she ought to, he understood, considering her with newfound respect. He could always understand death.
Yet she might cry after she killed him, his brain suggested further, and that, that was beyond him. Maybe it was something only women understood.
He bared both his palms and walked very slowly past Sansa, hoping his gesture was reassuring and not frightening. He shivered in his smallclothes. It had become cold in the room. The dawn would not tardy. He occupied one half of the bed next to the boy in the middle and pulled furs over his ugly head. He wanted to stay awake until the second half of the bed sagged with Sansa's bird weight, compared to his own.
Tall for a girl, he mused. His being was full of new memories of Sansa while he waited for her to lay in bed next to him.
Yet just like every night since he had set on his journey to find her, the gods were cruel and they mocked him. They never gave him what he wanted, sending him only dreamless sleep.