He stirred and opened his eyes as she was wiping the blood off with a wet cloth dipped in cold water. She wrung it out in the pot beside them, dabbed again. 'Don't move,' she said, submerging the cloth back in the water and then squeezing it over the cut so that water flushed down his face.

'It's fine,' he said, flinching away from her.

'I said don't move, fool,' she snapped. 'I have to clean it out. Horse's hooves are full of germs.'

He sighed heavily and sat still. She glanced at his expression and was pleased to see he looked remorseful. Or, just pissed off. Or a bit of both.

'Are you alright?' he asked.

She pointed at her lip, which felt puffed up like a sponge.

He winced in sympathy. 'Ouch.'

She continued cleaning his cut, which he didn't react to at all.

I'm sorry,' he said. 'If that means anything.'

'I don't know,' she replied acidly. 'Does it?'

'I actually am sorry. Not for running off, but for hurting you. I didn't mean to hurt you... you were just in the way.'

'Sooty doesn't take kindly to people hurting me.'

'So I noticed.'

'I mean, I'm sorry too. For siccing her onto you like that, after. I should've just let you fuck off. But...' the girl shrugged. 'I was mad you tricked me. And I needed my knife. My mother gave me that knife.'

'Yeah. Sorry I took that. Thought I might need it.'

'You need more than a knife out here. The locals will cut you into pieces and play noughts and crosses with your guts.'

'Really? Is that a common past-time amongst your people? I guess the quality of tavern entertainment around here is quite low.'

She screwed up her face. 'Don't be patronising. 'My people' just have a healthy suspicion of strangers, is all.' She smiled sweetly. 'Unless... they think there's profit to be made from them. An escaped prisoner wandering around? With maybe a reward on his head? That might pique their interest. Maybe you should go try your luck with them. I'm sure they'll escort you safely all the way back to the prison cell you recently escaped from.'

'No need to be mordacious.'

'No need to use big fucking words no-one understands.'

'I believe you just said 'Pique.'

'That's not a big word, it's a small word -'

'No-one understands it -'

'I understand it.'

'I don't think you even - '

'Oh please just stop talking!'

Jaime stopped talking, for a few seconds. She squeezed more water over his eyebrow. 'I'm just trying to say -' he said.

'Shhh -'

'That I'm sorry.'

The girl sighed, exasperated, and gave him a look. He shut up. She dropped the pink stained cloth into the pot and stood. 'Does that hurt?' she asked, pointing at the cut on his head.

'No.'

'Good,' she said with a wicked smile. 'Because I'm going to have to stitch it.'

He looked satisfyingly aghast at the idea. The girl gestured to Sooty to come along, and helped Jaime up by hooking one of her arms under his. He dragged his feet as they headed down to the river. 'How bad is it anyway?' he wanted to know.

'You're losing a lot of blood, head wounds are like that. And it's gaping open. Probably best to not let it keep bleeding out. I don't know if you know this, but our bodies' blood supply is actually quite limited.'

'Can't you just... stick a bandage on it?'

'I'm going to stitch it.' He looked about to protest again and she repeated firmly, 'I'm going to stitch it, so stop sooking! When I was seven I was racing my horse through the forest and ran into a tree, and a branch went right through my arm. Here,' she indicated a spot just above her elbow. 'Right the way through. I was stuck on that tree until my horse galloped home and they came looking for me. They lifted me off, and my mother stitched up my arm. I didn't cry and neither should you.'

'One: like hells a seven year old girl didn't cry over that,' Jaime said, 'and Two: I'm not bloody sooking over getting stitches. Let's not start with war stories, alright, because your branch-skewering tale would be truly, a non-event compared to what... well, let's just not start. I'm merely a tad concerned about your qualifications in the... medical area. And the hygiene of your equipment. I don't want a raging infection in my face.'

She didn't reply, kept walking towards the river. In truth she couldn't remember a thing about the incident with her mother and the stitches. She only knew the story because her mother had told it to her and others, often, as an example of her bravery. She had two scars on her arm where stitches had obviously been, but she may have been in shock or numbed by other means when they were done. Who cares, it was a good story. She loved that story.

'Infection? Hygiene?' she said, after a while. 'Why would you suddenly start caring? Only, your face don't look too professionally tended to, to me. It looks like it's been attacked by a huge cheese grater and rolled in sewerage.'

He clicked his fingers. 'That's uncanny. That's pretty much exactly what they did to it.'

She allowed a smile to creep onto her face. 'Who is this they? Where did you come from, anyway?'

'Uh-uh. No questions, remember.'

'Alright, I remember.'

They had reached the river. She filled a smaller pot with clean running water, then set about making a fire. Jaime watched her as she boiled the water and got out of the saddle bag all the things she was going to need: scissors, a needle, salt, a pot of foul-smelling ointment. She unwrapped thread and a bandage, arranged all her implements near a large dead tree trunk lying on its side, then turned to him.

'Sit down.'

He reluctantly sat on the other end of the trunk. 'Do you know what you're doing?' He eyed the thick needle she was threading.

'How hard can it be?' she said. 'I've made clothes.'

'Dear gods,' he muttered.

She moved close to him, her side touching his. She leant an arm against his shoulder to steady him, then dipped the clean cloth in the boiled water, wrung it out and held it firmly on his cut for a moment. The blood had slowed to a steady pulse. She swirled the tip of the needle back in the hot water and pressed her free hand to his forehead. 'Hold still,' she said.

'I sincerely hope you know what you're doing.'

'I'm a delivery person, trust me.'

'I feel so reassured.'

She pinched his broken skin together in the fingers of her left hand, then pushed the sharp point of the needle into the section underneath; it made a tiny but distinct cracking sound as the point went it. His skin must be thick. She gripped the length of metal as it slid out from the flap of skin on the top, and pulled the thread through. To Jaime's credit, he didn't even twitch. She repeated the action, and then paused to wipe some blood away with the cloth.

'I guess I deserve this,' he conceded.

'Shush.' She put the cloth down, picked up the needle again. Concentrating, she put another two evenly spaced stitches through his eyebrow. Jaime's eyes didn't even water, which surprised her. Maybe he wasn't kidding about his war stories.

'There, done,' she said, snipping the end of thread off with her scissors. 'I told you it wasn't so bad.'

'It kind of hurt.'

She snorted. 'Well you should pick your fights better.'

'I thought I had. I just forgot to factor in your killer horse, I don't know how that could've escaped my notice.'

'I did warn you.'

'Did you? "Why don't you try something and see...?" ' he quoted her earlier comment. 'I thought that was a dare, not a warning. Maybe you should be more specific with your next fellow travellers...'Hey everyone, just for future reference? The horse is a fucking lunatic.''

'Don't let her hear you say that.'

Jaime turned and held his hands up in appeasement in Sooty's direction. 'Sorry. I was being facetious.' He looked back at the girl. 'I should have known it was a lunatic. Yesterday?'

'Yeah. What of it.'

'I tried to get on your horse then, while you were dead to the world... I thought I could ride on back to the road, make it to KingsLanding by myself. That was always my plan, as soon as I saw you. Steal your horse, leave. But, yeah. Ha.' He lifted his cuffed wrists and felt his stitches gingerly with his fingertips. 'The horse had other ideas. So, I should have known.'

The girl got up and gathered her things. Well, at least he's confessing to it. That's something. 'I don't know what you were thinking, then. Seriously. Are you suffering from delusions? We're more than a week's ride from KingsLanding, not that you'd know how to get there on the back roads by yourself. If you ran into a local Tribesman out here you'd be in big trouble, especially on my horse, who pretty much everyone around here knows. If you headed off along the King's Road, in handcuffs, you might not fare any better. But yeah, good planning. Smart.' She tapped her temple sarcastically. 'And that stunt before, pretending to be drunk and then stealing my keys, because I decided I couldn't trust you? You didn't even take any supplies. You'd've been sitting on the road again in a day or two like how I first found you, except someone else a lot less nice than me would've found you.' She shook her head at his inexplicable behaviour. For once, he didn't say anything,

She sighed. 'Maybe if we eat something, we'll feel better.' Her mouth was throbbing, and it hurt to swallow. But Jaime had got the worst of it. Being struck in the head by a horse's hoof was no joke. He's lucky it didn't fracture his skull. He deserved it of course, for hurting her and being stupid. But she still felt bad for him.

She stood up, took the keys to the lock out of her pocket, and walked over to Sooty. She unclicked the lock and let the chain drop onto the ground. Jaime watched her in silence. She put the lock back in one of the bags, then unharnessed Sooty and told her to go.

The horse trotted a little distance away, circled, then, buckling at the knees, she thumped onto a sandy patch of ground and rolled. After two complete flips with her legs in the air she staggered back to her feet and shook herself, spraying dust in a cloud. The girl smiled inwardly, she loved watching Sooty roll off the day's work and become a free horse again for a few hours. She watched the horse until she'd disappeared into the bush, then turned back to the fire. Jaime hadn't moved.

'You're free to go, if you want,' she said. 'For whatever reason you've decided you're better off on your own... it's fine. Go, if you want.'

Jaime still didn't move off the log. He looked tired, and his forehead was swelling up.

'I mean, you could've talked to me about it. You didn't have to smack me in the mouth and strangle me.'

He gave a weary grin. 'When I decided we'd be better off going our separate ways, I didn't think you'd take too kindly to not being paid 500 gold coins.'

'I'm guessing the subtext here is... you don't actually have 500 gold coins.'

'Hey, I've got them. I don't know if you'll want them from me though when...' he trailed off.

'When what?' she asked.

'Nothing.'

She stared at him. 'So.'

'So.'

'Will you be heading off, then?'

He twisted his mouth up in a wry expression and looked away. 'I don't feel my normal robust self right now, to be honest. For some reason, I have a splitting headache.'

They looked at each other for a long moment. She smiled. 'I'll get us some food.'