THE WILDERNESS WITHIN
Eros shook my
mind like a mountain wind falling on oak trees
Sappho, Fragment 47
Sandor Clegane barked with laughter as if he could understand her, the passions she suppressed, the drifting half-thoughts of which she was not yet wholly aware. The blood rose in her face. She was too precariously close to him. She took one, two, three premeditated steps back.
"Stay," he ordered. It was in vain—he was her Hound but she was not his lapdog. As quick as a hare, she turned and ran.
She moved swiftly but the trees grew thick and tall around her, their branches whipping her skin, the wind hissing through them like a thousand vipers. She glanced back and saw him giving chase, now bewilderingly dressed in full plate. Oh, he was so unbelievably fast! Yet that should have been no surprise to her. She had seen him fight his monstrous brother in the Hand's Tourney and he had been quicker and more agile than any man his size had a right to be.
Despite the weight of his armor, he was outpacing her. "Little bird, little bird …" his shouts echoing louder and louder.
They sounded strangely plaintive to her ears: long and raspy, full of a terrible sweetness, like the growls of her direwolf grown gruff with yearning whenever she had found Sansa's bedchamber door barred.
She was becoming winded, her breath hitching painfully in her chest. Gauntlets brushed against her waist …
Then the land began to roll. She found herself on horseback. She was riding a white mare, riding harder and with greater skill than she had ever shown in the waking world. Before her, as far as the eye could see in any direction, was yellow grass and the blue of the sky in brilliant contrast. The Dothraki sea, Sansa gasped, while at the same moment the sound of the thunder of hooves came ever closer …
She glanced again behind her shoulder and saw him in pursuit, mounted on his giant black courser and wearing that fearsome snarling dog's head helm. The helm shielded his eyes but she could feel their predatory gaze.
It filled her with dangerous excitement, a sexual thrill that she felt but could hardly name. The very wind seemed to bow before her in obeisance, a breeze combing the fields in waves, parting it into deeper shades that caught the sunlight and shone like gold. She rode into it, a daring exhilaration blossoming inside of her. As if from the roof of the sky to the roots of the grass, the black earth was traveling through her, instead than her through it. As if she was not running away from the black rider but rather in pursuit of him.
Sansa dug her heels into her mare's sides. "Faster, faster," she cried but the mare was at her limits.
Suddenly, the man and his horse were right beside her. She shrieked like a rabbit caught in a snare as he snatched her from her horse with one mailed hand. A chill shot through her spine even as her blood felt too hot for her veins.
"You're mine, girl," the Hound snarled then burst into laughter, the bark of a pack of wild dogs unleashed upon her.
Her body went slack, compliant as a concubine.