Sansa
Cars like this one should not be used for spying, Sansa considered, uncomfortable, as they were being driven in a very old model of Fiat Cinquecento in the direction of Padua. And not only because of its inelegant colour.
The small bright yellow car was kind of cute in itself, but the closeness of Mr Clegane was barely supportable. He stank of strong liquor, much more than he did of wine during dinner, and his mood was getting more sour than his smell with every passing mile. Sansa has never heard so many curses in so short a time. They have been driving for less than an hour. His too long legs were squeezed between Sansa, the driver's seat and the door, one of them stinking worse than his mouth did. She wondered how that happened.
Sansa had to lean to the door on her side to avoid touching any more of his body than was absolutely necessary. And even the unavoidable part of it was already way too much for her liking. He was invading her personal space and she hoped that they would arrive soon.
Father Lancel was driving.
"They are getting married, and I will act both as her father and as the best man," Joffrey informed him from a passenger seat as if he told a good joke. "Isn't that so, my dear?" he asked Sansa, squashed in the back.
"It's true, Father," Sansa forced a reply, pressing her cheek harder into the cold glass.
"No doubt, it is the will of the Lord," Father Lancel said meekly. A few wisps of sand coloured hair hovered disobediently over his head. That was the only vivid part of him. He drove as he spoke, as an old man, slow and unbearably calm. It was a welcome change from Joffrey's style of driving. At least, Sansa was able to stick to her window without falling on Mr Clegane.
She remembered the unthinkable exit they made from the highway restaurant. They all climbed out through the window of the men's room in the back and headed to Father Lancel's car. The priest saw fit to offer a piece of advice to the serving guy, Luwin, before they left. "If I were you, son," he said with an aged voice that didn't belong to his young handsome face, "I would send all the guests away and hide under the counter for the next few hours. You will know when it is safe to go out."
"Aren't they so sweet, Father?" Joffrey continued. "Made for each other."
Every word was an open wound in Sansa's pride. She didn't want to be mistaken for Mr Clegane's girlfriend when they were not strictly working, and a car ride from Venice to Padua did not look like a professional occasion at all. The expression she wore must have been horrible because Mr Clegane snapped.
"Stop!"he bellowed.
"We're almost there," Father Lancel objected, and, to Sansa's surprise, addressed Mr Clegane by his first name. "Sandor, you told me we were in a hurry when you told me to warn Mr Luwin-"
"Five minutes won't kill any of us, I hope," Mr Clegane said curtly, and the priest obeyed.
They were on the normal road now. The highway was left behind and they were approaching the city of Padua, cruising among lines and lines of low concrete buildings of companies and shops on the outskirts of the town. It was too early and everything was still closed. They stopped on a patch of clay coloured soil between a business selling car parts and another one advertising kitchens and bathrooms. Between those two plain commercial establishments loomed a tiny portion of a green field meeting the very light grey blue of the sky in a distance. Two birches still grew on the small plot of unused grounds. Sansa tried to focus on the surviving nature, and not on the ugliness of the urban landscape around them, or on the huge man glaring at her. Joffrey and Lancel stayed in the car. There was no technology, not even a radio, in the Cinquecento, and outside, where Sansa faced Sandor even less so.
It was a piece of no one's land where nobody could hear them.
"I spoke to Lady Nym," he said without any introduction or manners. "We should be looking for some flora and fauna at the coming party if she wasn't feeding me bullshit. Fruit or eggs she said. It sounded stupid to me, like a food menu, but I think it's best you know."
"What do you think we're looking for in general?" Sansa dared a question. The paperwork said nothing about their goal and she wondered what he thought.
"Missiles, new weapons or weapons systems," Mr Clegane said after a while. "Or Vayrs wouldn't send me. Firepower is everything."
"Why not a computer virus or a Trojan? Everything is digital today. And digital can be vulnerable," she had to contradict him. "If Jon asked me, I mean. He could have gone himself if it were about weapons."
"I doubt Jon would look like a very convincing wife of mine to the Martells," Mr Clegane snorted, dismissing her argument as men mostly did.
"The palace has a garden full of rare plants," Sansa said. "Some of them will bear fruit."
"And Prince Doran traditionally stages an exhibition of ancient weaponry and of wild life for his guests, which could include stuffed birds for all I know," he said. "I can read too," he added as if she must have doubted this capacity of his.
"Birds lay eggs," she completed his initial thought.
Sansa didn't understand why Sandor dragged her out of the car
so that the others would not witness their conversation. What he told her, seemed innocent enough to be known in public. And surely Joffrey, the top agent, knew all about it anyway.
"Shouldn't we... somehow compensate, I mean, pay Father Lancel for abusing his good will and his vehicle?" she asked about another thing that was heavy on her mind. Sansa was always fair to people. She learned it from her father.
"Lancel Lannister is not here by chance, Miss Stark," Mr Clegane explained. "Varys must have sent him over. I can assure you that Kevan Lannister, brother of Tywin Lannister, would never allow his eldest son to become a priest. The family made a fortune in dog food industry and someone has to inherit it."
"Does he also work for the-" Sansa stopped in the middle of the next question she wanted to ask. She didn't know the name of the service she herself was now working for. Or if it had one at all. Spook organisations could be nameless for all she knew.
"Not as far as I know," Mr Clegane said, trying to be patient, she noticed. "But two of his cousins are. Cousin Jaime, and well, Joffrey here, who is actually more of a nephew if I understand the family tree correctly. So it was not too difficult to recruit Lancel for this simple task of performing a false marriage. It has to be someone Prince Doran doesn't know, and he looks silly enough to me to be a real priest."
"Why are we talking here, like this, in the middle of nowhere?" she asked in the end, pointing at the car equipment shop and the slender birches behind.
"Look," he said, and he looked shy for a moment. It fitted him. "I don't want this any more than you do. Could you just stop looking at me as if I murdered your mother? I didn't, you know. Let's just get over with this bloody marriage arrangement, shall we? Than we can get this job done and you can go home, right?"
"Right," Sansa said, wondering why he didn't say "we can go home". Wasn't he going home too when the job was done? Did he have a home? Suddenly, she became aware she had been giving him ugly stares since they got in the Cinquecento and she noticed the stench. She must have been the cause of his worsening mood. "I'm sor-"
"-Stop apologising!" he said. "Please," he added as an afterthought, to her surprise. Mr Clegane must have had a mother too, and she has taught him some manners, at least. "I don't beat women," he stated. "And I won't beat you. No matter how charming I might look."
Sansa stared at his mouth and sniffed.
"Not even in my cups," he added for good measure.
"Okay," she said. "Deal." She gave him a hand.
He shook it way milder than he did on Piazza San Marco. And surprised her again with a gentlemanly gesture she would rather expect from Joffrey, if she didn't scare him away with her knowledge. Sandor Clegane kept her hand in his, brought her to his peculiar semi-ruined lips and kissed it. Devoured it, a thought came unbidden to Sansa.
Sansa was about to open her mouth to ask why, when she noticed the false Father Lancel standing behind them, watching them.
She didn't quite understand why they had to put up a show for the false priest. Better safe than sorry, she concluded, supposing what he did was better than kissing her on her mouth again.
Yet, a part of her regretted that he did not. In the open air, he smelled better.
You are so pathetic, Sansa, she told herself. When you can't have a normal good looking guy, you get attracted to an ugly monster.
Being single certainly took its toll, Sansa thought. Maybe she should have taken Jon's second call and allowed him to present her to this friend of his, Theon. Maybe that would have worked.
Father Lancel coughed. "Could we please go now?" he said. "I have a morning mass at 6 am and some people waiting for me."
"I always wanted to marry early in the morning," Sansa accepted the game and gave Mr Clegane a genuine smile. Purposefully, she walked into him, and gently placed her head on his broad chest, placing both arms around his neck. The top of her head came a bit above to where the knot of his tie should have been if he still wore one. He was not the man she would marry, but maybe he was a person she could work with, she realized. Two hands caught her carefully on the lower part of her back, clumsily responding to her own attempt of embrace.
Back in Cinquecento, the space seemed less cramped. Joffrey fell asleep, so he was not making any more comments.
They trotted through the greyness of the morning for another fifteen minutes, until they arrived in front of the building which looked like a small family house in the suburbs of Padua. Foundations of another larger building stood behind it. amidst new blocks of flats. They were actually more of a deep hole in the ground, when Sansa took a better look.
"It takes time," Lancel Lannister complained. "We build exclusively from the gifts of the faithful. The times are difficult so money doesn't come easy if you know what I mean. Penitence doesn't generate funds."
No, Sansa thought, dog food industry does.
"I thought there were enough churches around here," Mr Clegane said flatly.
Sansa thought Varys was really thorough in his actions, what with a semblance of a church being built just to maintain their cover! It must have cost lots of money to simulate a thing like that. Jon told her the man was like a wizard who worked miracles but until now she thought he was only joking.
"Never mind, never mind, come in!" Lancel said. "I have all we need inside, an altar, a cross, and the light of the Lord shining above it. Even two witnesses if I'm not wrong!"
Sandor gave Joffrey a manly push. "Wake up, James," he said. "Time to bring me my bride."
It was exactly as Sansa never imagined her wedding to be, true or false.
They were in a small living room devoid of furniture. A wooden table was placed as an altar in the back, covered with a plain white tablecloth. Four wobbly legs protruded under the pale fabric, betraying the table for what it was. A book, the Bible, she presumed, lay on top of it. Or maybe it was a cookbook as they weren't in a real church. A wooden cross hung on the wall behind the altar, and a simple metal holder with a red light within hung above the middle of the room, on the place where a lamp would normally be. There was a vase with three orange lilies on one side. Semi-withered, the flowers have seen better days. There were three wooden benches, four windows and nothing else.
Two ladies were the only persons seated in the improvised church.
"Aunt Selyse, what a surprise!" Joffrey approached the older one in his most charming way, stifling a deep yawn. "And Shireen, lovely as always!" he greeted the younger woman who could have been Selyse's daughter, and a few years younger than Sansa.
Shireen was not lovely, Sansa noticed. She must have suffered an accident or a disease. A large part of her face and neck was covered in bandages.
"We are on the pilgrimage to Rome," aunt Selyse said. "Prayers are the only thing that can help Shireen now. We came to visit Lancel when your father, my brother-in-law Robert informed us of his whereabouts. We hoped Lancel would join us in our prayers."
"As I most certainly will," Lancel said. "I regret that you had to take the taxi all the way here. I was about to pick you up at the airport but my car broke down. I was lucky to find a mechanic last night, Mr Luwin, on the road... Or I wouldn't be here on time."
"Mechanic?" Mr Clegane asked, sounding murderous. He gave a glance at one of his legs and tried to move it around. No one answered his question.
Shireen kept quiet, her hands folded. She gazed at the cross with something like hope in her eyes.
"Give my love to uncle Stannis when you talk to him, will you?" Joffrey said, and remembered Sansa. "If you would excuse me..."
Sansa was still standing at the house door, and Mr Clegane already waited in front where a bridegroom should stand. The altar table could barely be seen from behind now because of Mr Clegane's large body, and a huge shadow it cast. There were no candles, or lights of any kind, only diffuse grey and bluish daylight pouring in through the dusty windows and the still open door. Like the light in the old paintings from Tuscany, Sansa dreamed, finding beauty where there was none. It made things easier for her.
"Come on, Miss Stark," Joffrey said. "Aren't you delighted to marry Mr Clegane here? Isn't he a young girl's fantasy?" He chuckled and he looked terribly handsome in his indifference.
"Of course I am," she said and tried to look happy.
It was all so unattractive, and she was with unknown people. Her family was away and she was alone. There was only Joffrey, his aunt with big ears, and her poor sick daughter. At least cousin Lancel seemed kind enough. For a second she imagined her marriage was real. The idea gave her shivers.
This is pretence, she told herself, it has to happen if Prince Doran asks about the ceremony. Or if he has spies on his own which have followed us.
In TV shows spies were everywhere and somehow they knew everything. Sansa was only starting to learn how it was in real life.
She didn't listen to Lancel Lannister as he spoke. She barely registered the last words of what he was saying. "Therefore, what god has joined together, let no one separate..."
Sansa almost turned to leave, eager to be done with the humiliating experience.
"You forgot the most important part, cousin," Joffrey had to say. Ever since Sansa unplugged the TomTom in the fire brigade van he was unpleasant to her. Or maybe he was horrible by nature all the time but she was too late in noticing it.
"Of course, of course," Father Lancel was purple as if the suggestion reminded him of his own sins. "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak," he muttered. "But it's meant to be so in a marriage, isn't it? If they are married, then the weakness of the flesh is not a bad thing, no... Sandor, you may kiss the bride..."
Mr Clegane placed his huge hands on her shoulders. She expected a chaste kiss, but it was not to be. Very fast, as if he were afraid of the eyes watching them, her partner gave her a real kiss, tasting her mouth inside out in one rapid go. No one had kissed her quite like that. It was most disturbing. Then, he looked at her, expecting something from her, dark eyes inscrutable.
He had to do it, she told herself. He didn't want to do it, he didn't want to do it, he had to do it, she had to repeat it many times in her head to believe it.
I wanted him to do it, her own thought caught her by surprise. She wished the ground to open under her feet and swallow her. Maybe you are a slut. She scorned herself. Only yesterday morning you liked Joffrey. It was not like Sansa Stark to give her affection that easily. It must be the lack of sleep, she concluded. And the shock of having been kidnapped, the veiled threat to her father's life...
She looked at her feet. An awful pair of cheap gas station quality flip-flops stared at her. Bare legs showed goose pimples under navy blue shorts. She thought she heard Mr Clegane sigh. One leg of his trousers was caked in mud, she noticed. She looked up in his eyes and all expectation was gone.
Only cold grey colour remained as though someone had extinguished the light.
Somehow, she wronged him. And all her education was not enough to know how. We should now be heading to Prince Doran's party, she guessed.
She would have five days to find out.
xx
A/N Big thanks for the reviews. They help the author's motivation.