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"He don't care and we've got no spade. Leave him for the wolves and wild dogs. Your brothers and mine." Sandor Clegane the Hound, ASOIAF
Twenty-two
The sun shone differently when he was with Sansa.
Strong and pretty, it made the Giant's Lance glow, in splendour of snow and ice.
The mule's step was cautious, used to the treacherous stairs carved in stone on the long descent from the Eyrie.
Sansa's spine was very straight, her riding posture perfect, balanced from all directions.
Admirable.
She interrupted his studious glare by an insecure glance. "Should I be acting differently?" she wondered.
"You're riding better than the girl I remember," he explained himself.
"I still don't like it," she murmured, "it stinks." She patted the mule affectionately after offending her, probably regretting her discourteous sentiment.
Sandor had chosen to walk.
Stranger was dead, and the mules didn't look as if they could handle his weight.
In his mind, the Hound recalled his entire journey to the Eyrie.
Up and down.
And up and down again...
How many more times?
He looked down the mountain, brooding.
When he inevitably returned his attention to Sansa, he caught her stealing a good long look at him.
All of him, his figure, ending up on his face.
Decidedly not seeing only his scars, like years ago, when she averted her eyes from an accidental encounter with the ruin of his cheek, longing to meet Joff's pretty gaze on the kingsroad…
Clearly seeing the scars as well, not pretending or imagining they weren't there...
She realised she was discovered and blushed, lowering her gaze.
It was unsettling to be the target of her blue stare in the vast whiteness of the mountain; in bright, stark sunlight.
It had been easier in enclosed, smaller spaces and candlelight; he'd felt less exposed.
Sansa looked at him, all of him…
He had gotten his greatest wish and still he longed for more.
He was her lover…
It was a wonder, and yet, and yet!
He wanted to be more; he yearned to be her husband…
But he still had to find the courage to ask her.
For if she said no, how could he continue breathing?
And if she said yes... How could he shorten her wings by tying her to him?
She was very young, and he'd always be himself.
"What?" he barked angrily, giving voice to his restlessness. "You can tell me if there's something wrong."
"The descent is monotonous. And if I look down, I may be afraid," Sansa sounded apologetic without excusing herself; sensitive to his changing mood, wishing to appease him, perhaps.
She'd probably be attentive to the whims of any other gnat she wanted to please, and who didn't deserve her.
He shrugged, better off after his outburst. "It's not you," he rasped. "It's me. It has always been me, I think."
The anger was in him, stirred but not caused by the world.
She tilted her hooded head sideways, pondering his statement. "Yes," she concluded, smiling brighter than the sun above. "It was you from the beginning. Isn't that… magical?"
It was just like Sansa to see his infamous temper as something good for being related to him… because… because she loved him...
Unfairly, he couldn't see much of her figure to return the favour of measuring her up.
She was wrapped from head to toe in a thick cloak, hiding her shape. Only the long waves of her hair were visible, and that disturbing blue gaze, wandering freely between him and the bloody mountain.
Stone and Snow were small black dots on the snowy slope below them.
Sky was left behind, under the eagle's nest; deserted and frozen.
The sun melted the top layer of ice and snow drifts on the Giant's Lance. They'd make it to the Gates of the Moon in one day if the weather stayed good.
They didn't discuss where they would go from there, or if anywhere at all... waiting to see what they would find…
If anything at all.
Sansa gripped harder the reins of her mule and staggered in saddle.
"What now?" the Hound asked warily, alert to her discomfort.
"Nothing," she said weakly, redressing herself. "I'm weary from the past days I think. It was much more exertion than I'm used to. I wish I could sleep for a sennight."
Sandor was as good as new.
Despite his bad leg, the strenuous climbing up and down from the Eyrie, a wound to his arm, falling ill in the Vale, and the effort of body and soul he had to muster for killing Gregor, he didn't suffer from it.
Not from any of it.
If anything, he was in a better shape than when he'd left the Quiet Isle, and strangely optimistic about his future.
It would include Sansa.
"You can sleep in the Gates of the Moon," he encouraged her to go on, for he didn't trust the weather.
The Giant slept now, but he could always turn his Lance against travellers.
"Chances are the little lord left orders that we are to be treated royally in his absence, just like he did in the Eyrie," the Hound assumed.
"I'd rather be treated less royally than left all alone in the Vale," Sansa complained.
Alone? What am I?
"Sandor," she said his name with incredible, stunning softness, taming the wild dog in him. "How could they all have left?"
"It's not the little lord's fault that the dragon prince didn't return for you as he promised. Robin's free to do as he pleases," he rasped flatly.
"But what will he do? What if he's doing something… imprudent and harmful?"
The Hound shrugged again. "Children don't stay children forever. I know it, you know it. It's his life, his choices. He's got to do something."
"Wouldn't you be concerned if he were your son?"
My son.
No wife and no lands…
The truth was, the Hound already worried about Robert Arryn killing himself needlessly in some ravine in the Vale, or wherever he rode to with his pitiful bannermen on a quest for glory. Despite that the boy wasn't his son nor his kin. He just wouldn't discuss it.
Not even with Sansa.
A single grey cloud formed surreptitiously in the sky, enhancing the Hound's reticence towards the bloody weather.
The Giant was waking.
"We should hurry," he said decisively, avoiding the answer to Sansa's question.
They made it to Snow under darkening, menacing sky.
But just before they reached Stone, the tempest came. Of ice, and snow, and sleet… The worst squall the Hound had ever seen.
"Beautiful," Sansa whispered through the frozen rain that came last, becoming soaked and smelly like her mule.
The Hound wouldn't let her know the latter. She would feel unladylike, wouldn't she? And it wasn't as if he minded the scent. If anything, it was delightful in a fashion, for being hers and so unlike her at the same time.
They had to spend the night in Stone, on a straw mat too small for the two of them, in a humble tower room near the fire. Guards were as helpful as in the Eyrie, obeying the little lord's orders. Yet there wasn't much they could provide; an empty room for the lord and the lady, they said, some broth and some firewood.
Sansa's and Sandor's clothes dried near the fire as they warmed each other under a stinky blanket. It was a foretaste of travel that might lie before them if she decided they should leave the Vale; they would be poorly fed, wet, cold and weary.
Too tired for a fuck.
He considered it, or his cock did, briefly.
But faced with Sansa dozing off on his shoulder after placing tiny, clumsy kisses on his neck, just where his scars ended, he became content to follow the same route. Giving himself to sleep, he didn't even need to take care of himself.
The idle closeness and the fine satisfaction it brought was new and different.
He wished it would continue.
The morning after, they found the Gates of the Moon almost as empty as the Eyrie; left in the hands of a moderately sized garrison to defend it. The commander readily answered Lady Sansa's questions.
Yes, Lord Arryn had ridden forth to battle with the best knights of the Vale.
No, no one knew where to.
It was a secret strategy revealed by the Seven to the little falcon.
Sansa looked sad as a dying flower.
"You want to leave," the Hound grumbled.
"I want to go home," she murmured, "see it again... See what it has become… If I can. If you were to choose, would you want to spend winter here?"
I'd spend the winter with you.
And not only winter…
"I'll make a little tour to see what can be done," he grunted, and asked more questions of the commander, about the state of the roads and the mountain clans. Then he went to speak with the soldiers, one by one, all over the castle, hoping that Sansa was using the time to rest…
To Sandor's surprise, it didn't take much to convince them that the orders of their lord to extend every courtesy to his honoured guests, Lady Sansa Stark of Winterfell, and Sandor Clegane, the Winged Knight who liberated the Vale from a monstrous foe, could be interpreted to include a feat of quite some magnitude. Before the day was done, half of the garrison agreed to accompany the Hound on a noble quest of bringing the Lady Sansa to her home in the North.
And at the end of the empty, snowy field where he killed Gregor, two men prepared to murder his brother's horse gone wild.
"Here, friend," the thinner of the two diligent soldiers waved with an apple, putting it on the ground and standing aside, sword in hand. He and his friend would attempt to cut the horse's legs if he went for the fruit.
The horse snorted, skittish, reticent, halting in place like a stubborn mule.
"You!" the Hound hollered to the would-be horseslayers. "Let me do this," he said.
He joined the party in several giant leaps, picking up the apple and holding it out to the black destrier.
The horse whined, studying the Hound, comparing him to Gregor, perhaps.
The two soldiers held their swords at ready.
"Don't," the Hound threatened them, "or you'll share the fate of his late master."
"But he's been biting people's noses off!" The thin man complained.
Aye. He surely has. You'd do it as well if you were Gregor's.
"Let him try with mine," the Hound rasped calmly.
Gregor's horse readily snatched the apple, nearly grazing his hand.
"Good boy," the Hound said, grabbing the end of the reins. "Give me another apple will you?" he ordered the soldiers. "For the Winged Knight."
He held the reins firmly, but calmly, and the horse at some distance, until he got a new fruit. Feeding it to the animal, he was able to come closer without being bitten.
For now.
Never losing hold of the reins, he took his new horse to the stables and tied him in an empty stall.
"Don't touch him," he ordered the stable boys. "Just leave some food where he can reach it. I'll come for him myself when we ride out."
Chance was Gregor's horse hadn't eaten much lately, wandering in the frozen wood since his master's death. No wonder he'd like to bite someone's head off. Especially if it stood between him and food.
Sandor hurried back to Sansa.
"We're going North," he announced to her immediately, proud of himself.
"Thank you," she said sincerely, but she also wrung her hands, as restless as he'd been on the mountain. She seemed truly happy about getting her wish, but lacked the profuse, youthful enthusiasm the Hound had expected.
What more do you want? That I bring down the stars for you?
"Could we leave now?" she asked timidly, after a while.
"Didn't you want to rest?" he inquired wildly. "What difference does it make?"
"All the difference," she said fervently, without explaining herself further, pale like a white water lily.
Sandor longed for another night in bed with her, not in the saddle, nor in the wood.
A place where she would be comfortable, rested and desirous to take further what they started.
He nevertheless did as she wanted, just like she often tried to accommodate his moods.
They headed out after midday meal, exiting the Bloody Gate in the early afternoon.
The Mountains of the Moon were as desolate as he remembered them.
But not as empty…
The Burned Men attacked at nightfall.
It didn't matter that the men left to Sandor weren't knights. Their steel was shinier than the knives and clubs of the clan.
And Sandor wore gladly the face of the Stranger that evening, leading them.
No one could withstand him.
Had Sandor and Sansa been alone, it would have been different…
They would have been killed.
The certainty of that outcome had kept at bay his regrets over leaving her in King's Landing in the past, on his solitary journey through the riverlands.
The unglorified end of his travel with her little sister proved him right… Even if he had avoided being wounded by Gregor's pets, by not drinking himself to death because of the news of Sansa's marriage to the Imp, sooner or later, a man alone, or two people on the road, no matter how strong and capable, would have fallen victims to attack or calamity.
Sansa had obediently remained in saddle during the confrontation with the Burned Men, surrounded by four guards who didn't take part in the skirmish.
Good girl.
Good girl.
My love.
His heart took its time to slow down after successful bloodshed.
The company left the battleground and rode on.
When they stopped to make camp, Sansa whispered to the dark, "I have to make water."
She began dismounting hastily and her gaze lost all its brightness under the stars. Her foot was caught in a stirrup, and she slid off the horse, falling rapidly…
Sandor was there to soften her fall, but her head still hit a rock on the ground, though not very hard…
Or so Sandor hoped...
She was hot to touch.
"You're ill!" he yelled. "Why didn't you tell me?"
Sansa withdrew in silence, hiding behind a tree. Maybe she was too tired for chirping, or being offended by his awfulness.
Or just busy pissing.
When she was done with that, her eyes were very big and very serious; their gaze almost grey instead of blue in starlight.
"Do you remember when Father had to kill Lady to please the queen?" she murmured melodiously while laying down on the pallet he'd prepared for her, eyes raking his face, as though she wanted to commit it to her memory.
The Hound nodded mutely. He had glimpsed Lord Stark dealing with the dead wolf when he was returning from the hunt of children with a dead boy.
Michael.
Mycah.
"Father sent Lady back to Winterfell, to be buried in the lichyard of the faithful servants of the House Stark, just like, years ago, he had brought home his only sister's remains from the South... To lay her to rest in the crypts of our forefathers."
Having spoken, Sansa closed her eyes.
In the morning, she was feverish and non-responsive, in a peculiar state; neither awake, nor fully asleep. He gave her some water and she drank, he put crumbs of bread and cheese in her mouth and she swallowed.
She couldn't sit straight nor on her own, and much less ride a horse, and he hadn't thought of finding a wheelhouse in the Vale for the long trip North. He knew bloody well now that he should have done it… Cersei needed one and Sansa was a greater lady than her. How could he ever have thought that she could just ride to Winterfell like him?
So he took her in the saddle with him, and Gregor's horse carried them both westward, out of the Mountains of the Moon and towards the fords of the Trident.
Together they were as heavy as his brother.
Sansa lived on water and tiny morsels of solid food he dared push into her mouth when she accidentally opened it, always attentive to help if she began choking...
He soon realised he'd have to help her to make water and empty her bowels, and was successful in the unlikely endeavour… He kept her clean because it was what she would have wanted for herself.
One night, she peed like a little baby in her sleep…
So he changed her in the darkness when no one was watching, finding lady's smallclothes, clean shift and dress in her saddlebag, washing the dirty garments in snow and drying them near the fire… For next time.
He couldn't go back. There was no maester in the Vale. There would probably be none in the riverlands, ravaged by the successive wars. He was on his own.
"The lady's just a little unwell," he told the other men. "She'll be better soon."
No one questioned his lead or his wisdom for three days and three nights, until they reached the fords.
Men found it it easier if someone thought for them.
Even if that someone was the Hound, now honoured as the Winged Knight of Lord Robert Arryn's guard…
He didn't care about the new name they gave him, only that it helped him achieve his goals. (The fear of his person when he guarded Cersei gave him a semblance of peace. People stared less and didn't dare show pity.)
It's different now.
His presence and manners still scared and repulsed his soldiers, but he also received their gratitude for killing Gregor, expressed by friendly taps on his huge back and even brazen curiosity about how he'd executed this or that move. He could almost drink with some of them instead of alone.
If he could drink.
If he didn't have to mother Sansa.
At the fords, his men finally faced up to his dogged stubbornness.
"The lady needs help," they claimed, and they were right.
"The lady also wants to go home," he persisted.
He'd carry her north.
To her lichyard. To the crypts of her fathers. Like her wolf.
It was what she wanted, what she'd told him.
She must have sensed she was turning very ill… she'd made her last wish to him... without being very clear… not wanting to hurt him by the extreme discourtesy of… of dying…
Is that the way of it, Sansa?
What about us?
Us…
It was too good to be true.
Wasn't it, Sansa?
Soon all he would have left would be memory.
He refused it.
Yet his men deserved the truth.
And the fords of the great river, imposing like the pain in his chest, demanded he decide on a direction. If he crossed, the long journey North would be unavoidable. If new rains fell, and they would, in winter, the fords could be flooded; the passage back south closed.
"She's dying," the Hound admitted without further ado.
Whining would serve no purpose.
Sansa would die and there was nothing he could do.
In her state, she wouldn't even know if she was taken back to Winterfell.
He wasn't Lord Stark with his cold grey eyes. He was from the warm, inflammable south. It had never been his intention to carry north only her remains…
Like an empty-headed bugger from a pitiful song believing in noble lies, Sandor had set out a different, more ambitious goal for himself: to bring Sansa home before she died, clinging to the false hope that he could…
Let her see it once more...
He should stop being a fool.
He ought to find a place to stay; not to wait for her recovery, but to ease her passing…
A place to bury her when she was gone…
But he'd never be able to leave Sansa's body for the wolves and wild dogs, for as much as he had preached to her little sister that they were her brothers and his...
So he led his company forward alongside the river, until they found a village, and a deathbed in a peasant hut for Sansa.
In the evening, the Hound's men turned to building the palisade for their hosts, in payment of their hospitality.
All settlements of the poor and the weak had the same needs, the Hound mused, remembering himself as an unwilling builder, when he'd been hiding in a similar rat hole with Sansa's little sister.
Now he had the luxury of remaining idle; closed, tight, bent upon himself.
He sat at Sansa's deathbed, resisting the temptation to caress her cheek or hold her hand.
She couldn't say yes or no. Touching her seemed very undone.
In the village, smallfolk talked of the handsome, silver prince who had flown north on a golden dragon a sennight ago.
In the Hound's reckoning, this could be right after Aegon promised he'd return for Sansa and take her North.
He never meant it.
Sansa wouldn't hear of another treason against her, dying in her sleep...
And the Hound's grief grew great like his anger; black and useless.
The army of the Vale had also passed, the villagers said, some days later, but where it went was a matter of discord. Any side of Westeros was a possibility, except back East - for then Sandor and his party would have met them.
Armies came and went.
There was a sept in the village with the faces of the gods drawn poorly in charcoal… Father was as ugly as the disfigured Stranger; the Maiden as serious as the Crone.
Since he saw it, Sandor couldn't stop thinking that he and Sansa should marry before she died... just in case the buggering septons had the right of it when they preached about the sins of flesh… So that Sansa wouldn't suffer for having bedded him outside the bonds of marriage, when she followed the Stranger.
But she couldn't say her vows in her state… She couldn't speak or sit or move; only sweat and swallow and give him an empty, glassy stare…
The Sansa he knew was gone, only her shell was left.
And he was the Hound, loathing lies, even when he had to abide by a large number of them as Joffrey's dog. He wasn't Tyrek Lannister, who'd gladly played along in a mummer's farce of marrying a babe in her wetnurse's arm to inherit her lands.
The riot in King's Landing had put an end to Tyrek's hopes for riches; his body had never been found. The Hound strongly believed that Tygett's boy had found his end in a bowl of brown, and that the little Lady Ermesande was happily widowed.
If the septons were right about the sins, then they weren't wrong about marriage; a man and a woman had to be grown and enter it freely.
If he carried Sansa to the sept and said some words, his late attempt wouldn't please the gods; it might even anger them more.
His strong hands couldn't save her...
Everything he did had been in vain.
The village healer, or witch, depending on the perspective, brought some tea that should ease pain and fever. Sandor made Sansa drink it, but it did her as much good as water.
No good at all.
Her condition remained unchanged.
To see her thus felt like having a stone in his stomach and a bigger one in his throat.
He could neither swallow nor choke on it.
On an instinct, he checked her heartbeat. It was very weak, but present.
He wondered how long it would be before she died.
The witch couldn't tell.
A day, a sennight, a month?
It was a special case of winter wasting sickness. Or a consequence of hitting her head. Or both. She'd be able to take less and less food; less and less water. She would dwindle, like fire in the hearth without firewood.
Sansa had a gentle soul and a fragile body.
How could he have thought she could withstand the world?
She needed a golden cage, and he was wrong in wanting to please her, fulfilling her wish to go home.
He as good as killed her.
"Sansa," he said hoarsely, "I'll tell you a story, alright."
"Not a song," he paused.
"You'd probably like a poem, but I don't know how to write it, so it'll have to be a story… A long story made short."
The Hound's voice lowered into an almost inaudible rasp.
"See, there was this little burned boy whose sister was murdered first, and then his father.
He had to run away or he would suffer the same fate.
He found a new home.
There, he became a soldier, a killer, and he never questioned what he was or what he did. Everyone did it, everyone was the same.
And if perchance the boy had some doubts, he drank wine until they disappeared.
Then, many years later, Sansa, this boy, who looked and fought like a man since he was one and ten, he became a man grown like all boys do if they're not killed.
And he met a pretty girl who asked the questions for him.
Why did he do this or that?
Why did he let everyone call him a dog?
He called her stupid, dismissing her.
But since then he couldn't stop asking himself what he was and what he should be.
In the end he left his masters… Left you too… Thinking it for the better.
I… I left before becoming Gregor. And now I'll never become him!" he exclaimed, approvingly.
"I don't know what I'll do when you're gone...
In your songs… I suppose I should take my own life out of irreparable heartache and follow you into the grave…
If I was a pretty knight, I suppose I'd join you in seven heavens.
But we both know where I'll go if heavens and hells exist.
Don't we, Sansa?
And it's not to the same place as you."
He sniffed.
His eyes were parched and dry like the tissue of his scars. His chest hurt. The stone in his throat throbbed.
"You guessed by now, didn't you, that I won't act like those stupid knights who die of broken heart.
I'll keep going.
It's what I do.
And I'll remember your chirping."
Until my dying day.
"So that wherever I go, whatever I do... and it won't be much I think, I think that…
I'll just soldier for someone, somewhere, right… what else?"
What else, Sansa? There has never been anything else.
"But I'll do it as a man, not a dog," he vowed. "I'll ask myself questions and live by the answers."
"So that if you… if you can see me from… from above... you can be as proud of me as you were of your late father."
She couldn't hear him, but she was still there, breathing.
Tears should come but they didn't, not now when he needed them most.
His pain stayed in him, endless, shapeless, blunt, burning behind his eyelids.
There was no way to ease or diminish it.
His love couldn't save her, couldn't save him.
All they had was their time together in the Vale, on the roof of the world.
There was no justice.
There wasn't any reward for good deeds to be reaped in the future.
No wife.
No lands.
No sons or daughters.
There was only the end.