SKINCHANGER
Eros the melter of limbs (now again) stirs me-
sweetbitter unmanageable creature who steals in
Sappho, Fragment 130
She felt Sandor's mouth just under her ear where the skin was soft and tender. They had her trapped between them, the Hound's lips on her shoulders, Sandor's on her neck. She tensed for a moment, anticipating the feel of the sharpness of his teeth. He had a peculiar delight for abusing that area of flesh. He had once held a longsword against it, not hard enough to break the skin but with just enough pressure so she could feel the sharpness of the steel. And during the act, he had used his teeth to score the skin around her neck and around her shoulders. Yet he made no gesture that he wanted to frighten or dominate her—nothing but the soft press of his burned lips, a quiet possession.
Sansa scowled, renewing her resistance, twisting her body, her nails digging into Sandor's chest. He needed to be taught a lesson, a lesson on inviolability. Guilt gave her a moment's fight but she brushed it aside. She ought to demonstrate how wrong it was to trespass into places, uninvited.
What the fuck are you doing? he roared inwardly when he felt her slip inside his skin. She could feel his pure, blind panic. Tasted the fear at the back of his mouth.
At the edges of her mind, she felt the opportunity and she reached for it. The Hound thought he was so dangerous. This was her dream. The natural shift of power moved to her. It's not as if he was fragile ... I wouldn't do it if he was. He could take it. He had said he was her dog, so she had slipped him a collar.
Whatever it was, she knew it was something akin to sex, the whole experience so foreign and bizarre. She was inside of him, seeing through the Hound's eyes, wearing his skin like it was a cloak.
She saw herself, perfectly still, blindfolded and bound. She lifted her body up, cradling it in the Hound's arms. Peeking through the windows of his eyes, the girl's vulnerability appeared enormous. She touched the girl, stroking her like a little dove, until the girl's cunt began to open, aching to be filled. She had never known what the flesh felt like on the inside. Alayne safeguarded that veil of skin fiercely—her life depended on its preservation. It was as good as an iron bar on her bedchamber door. The surety that she was not Lady Lannister.
An inquisitive finger, large and and calloused, slipped inside. One finger became two, sliding in and out as the movement became frictionless. The strange walls inside were so very soft but corrugated. Rather like the roof of my mouth, she thought wryly. One hand remained inside the cunt while the other moved to cradle the girl's face.
Slender. Delicate.
Stupid. Weak.
The life of a small bird, its fragile pulse beating against the Hound's hand. Pretty little talking girl, you're as empty-headed as a bird for true.
If the girl should die in a dream …
Someone was whimpering loudly like a dog who had been viciously kicked.
Enough, Sansa. She loosened the Hound's grip, setting the girl aside.
She turned to look at Sandor. His eyes were half-dilated but retained an odd expression. He had the look of an orphaned animal, a slinking stray, left to scrounge for itself in the wilderness with no one to care for it.
A surge of protectiveness came but the feeling was mingled with a ferocious sense of possession and power. She blinked hard as if blinking away mental tears and suddenly found that she was seeing through those same grey eyes. Eyelids that fluttered rapidly. Back and forth, back and forth, she slipped into him as easily as slipping into an old leather shoe.
Sansa lay Sandor's flat palm against the Hound's jaw and she knew that he couldn't have moved even if he'd tried. She toured the Hound's body with Sandor's fingers, avoiding the horrifyingly raw looking burned skin of his left arm. The man was muscular to the point of being massive but lean with no fat; his bulk was sinewy, spare and hard. Her fingers ran along his back, with the spine deeply indented between thick layers of muscle. With the balls of the Sandor's knuckles, she caressed the Hound's spine. He was so strong, as if each sturdy disk was encased in Valyrian steel. She pinched his nipple before her fingers followed a path all the way down, through the spur of black hairs that ran from the neat navel to a grove of hair where his member lay inert.
Fingers drifted … swerved, retreated then advanced as they approached his cock, as nervous as a poacher. Carefully, she touched the hair and then the warm flesh. At first it was wrinkly, relaxed, then with a sudden jerk it began to expand by great leaps, rushing to its full size. It was certainly nicer looking than Tyrion's, perhaps even nicer looking than the common variety. It was healthy and vital and she could admit there was a certain grandeur to its size.
She bunched Sandor's fingers around the crown and squeezed it, stroking the length from top to bottom. The skin there was so soft and thin, moving up and down with the strokes. She forced Sandor to lick his palms and then she forced him to stroke the Hound faster. The spit-slicked palms increased his agitation. She felt the blood pumping through his body, his legs widening their stance.
She tightened her grip.
Am I too rough?
I wouldn't want to break it.
Excitement possessed her, sharp as black polished dragonglass, driving off all reason. She had never in her life wanted to hurt any creature but she looked at him and felt her blood run in a tangle.
She pinched the foreskin between her fingers then drew it down and scored the tender crown with nails. It hurt, hurt and burned and she did not stop. His body, her mind, jerked in a bright pain that drew every nerve as taut as a bowstring. The Hound made a brutal sound but he thrust into Sandor's palm, muscles arching towards the pain.
Hurt me if it pleases you, little bird. His eyes looked off in the distance at the girl, as delicate and vulnerable in her passivity as a porcelain doll with a hairline crack. The emotion rippled through him, through her. He wanted to fling the girl onto the floor and ram himself in. He wanted to crawl to her and kiss her toes as if he was the lowest of curs.
Nails scored fire across his testicles. She felt the pain humming through his veins. Behind it was some fierce emotion she couldn't unsnarl—his desire to fight and overpower, inexplicably twisting and twining in his mind with the way he wanted to submit to her rule. I'm your dog, I'm Sansa's dog.
It was a strange and sweet confusion, hardly bearable. Sansa reached even farther, not waiting for his permission. Instead of gaining greater control of his body, she found herself further sinking inside his head.
Oh, he's real, as real as I am.
The belated realization struck her like a hard slap. There was too much here for him to merely be a part of her own imagination. He was a pathless wilderness, the horizon of his mind stretching out for thousands of leagues. She wanted to burst into foolish tears. How terrifyingly sweet was her discovery. He would be the answer to a thousand prayers. Help me, send me a friend, a true knight, she had prayed to whatever gods should deign to listen. He wanted to protect her: a devotion that was almost physical, a tangible wound in his mind. It would be so easy to bind him to her service, to transform him into the sword that she would wield. She relished the united power she had over him—herself and his own hidden dreams to protect her, a combined force greater than one mere girl of four and ten.
It was her last distinct thought. What's happening to me? Where am I going? she cried.
She felt as if she was falling, tumbling unbelievably fast down a long drop to nowhere. Memories and inchoate thoughts overwhelmed her and she wanted to shout and cry and babble fears. She heard herself and another voice, deep and raspy, make sounds of distress as she spun down the murky and terrifying well. Suddenly, her fall ended and she was painfully jerked upright like a wooden toy knight pulled by strings.
Her mind couldn't comprehend the change. Her head hurt; she was wine-sick, she was always wine-sick, she had a chronic need for oblivion that only wine remedied. She despised herself, she had lost everything, she struggled to put the disintegrating pieces of her person together but failed every time, wailing at her endless defeats. She wanted to cry and she wanted to kill. She wanted someone to attack her, so she could fight them. She would feel better if she could hurt someone. Maybe they would kill her. That would be better … that would be good. Murder me, take my life, be done with it.
The Red Priest intoned the catechism, the night is dark and full of terrors.
That bloody truth was all around her, plain to behold: the knight is dark and full of terrors.
Knights were dark, knights were for killing. Were they children or half-wits that she must school them? A knight's a sword with a horse. The rest, the vows and the sacred oils and the lady's favors, they're silk ribbons tied round the sword. Maybe the sword's prettier with ribbons hanging off it but it will kill you just as dead. Well, bugger your ribbons and shove your swords up your arses. I'm the same as you. The only difference is, I don't lie about what I am. So kill me but don't call me a murderer while you stand there telling each other that your shit don't stink. You hear me?
Why she gave a rat's arse of their opinion, why she bothered to defend herself at such length she could not fathom. Knights were sworn to defend the weak, protect women and fight for the right but none of them did a fucking thing. That it should needle her so, that she should care … stupid, so fucking stupid. That was the sordid truth: she had cared, did care. If she hated herself for any one single fatal flaw in her character, it was that.
She sucked in her breath as Dondarrion removed his breastplate. His ribs were starkly outlined beneath his pale skin; an ugly puckered crater scarred his breast and when he turned, she saw that he wore a matching scar upon his back. The lance should have killed him. Blood magic, her eyes whitened, widened: there was no other explanation.
She should have been scared. There was nothing as disturbing as the Lightning Lord, a creature who looked human but was not human at all. Instead, she felt only that familiar ghostly calm settling inside of her. No fear, no disgust, no reason, only the cold flame of destruction; a burning darkness that filled her with excitement. Killing was the sweetest thing there is. Her mouth curved, almost a smile.
The knight is dark and full of terrors. The cave was dark too but she was the terror there.
Her smile died when Dondarrion set fire to his sword, using his own blood to ignite it. Burn in seven hells, she cursed. Dondarrion became every knight she had ever known, butchers like Boros Blount and Meryn Trant, hapless fools like Dontos Hollard, cowards like the Redwyne twins who couldn't even look at her and, looming above them all, the malevolent shadow of Gregor, gigantic in proportion.
She hammered at her opponent while the twisted jape of the knighting ceremony pounded in her brain.
In the name of the Warrior, I charge you to be brave,
Hard and fast her cuts came—
In the name of the Father, I charge you to be just,
— from low and high
In the name of the Mother, I charge you to defend the young and innocent.
—from right and left
In the name of the Maid, I charge you to protect all women.
—and each one the knight blocked.
The flames swirled around the knight's sword and he fanned them, made them burn brighter, so it seemed as if he stood within in a cage of fire. She edged back, frightened and furious. Bugger him, only cowards fought with fire. The sight of the flames momentarily paralyzed her. The fear of fire and the fear of Gregor were intertwined, the darkest terror that lived in the deepest layer of her being. Two decades later and a mountain of muscle could not dislodge them.
The knight attacked, filling the air with ropes of fire, driving her back on her heels like a chastened mongrel. She caught one blow high on her shield and a painted dog lost its head. She parried another cut, grunting and cursing and reeling away but the knight would her give no respite. Bloody bastard, she screamed as the knight forced her closer to the firepit, the flames licking the back of her thighs.
She fought on, recklessly counterattacking. She charged, swinging her sword harder and harder, trying to smash the knight down with brute force. Her shield caught fire and the panic clutched her. She hacked off her shield but it only fanned the flames even more. The fire caught and her left arm was ablaze. She smelled burning flesh; the ghastly sweet scent filled her brain and nostrils with black fear.
Finish him, she heard. Other voices picked up the chant.
For some reason that made perfect sense, Arya was there too, a judge without mercy. Guilty, guilty, kill her, guilty.
Her anger moved like a living thing inside of her. The creature inside of her refused to let her die, kept her panic from blossoming into terror. The Hound gave a rasping scream and she raised her sword in both hands. Brought it crashing down with all her strength. The knight blocked the cut easily but his burning sword snapped in two. Her cold steel plowed into his flesh and clove him clean down to the breastbone. Blood rushed out in a hot black gush.
She jerked backwards, her arm still burning. Pain on top of pain, layers of it, so excruciating that she couldn't think or breathe or see. Someone whimpered, the sound of a child crying as Gregor loomed over it, his mouth filled with darkness and black blood.
Please. Help me. Someone. Help me.
Please, she rasped. The one word was an ache in the cave. An echo of torment, of petition, its roots reaching far back in time. A boy knelt in the sept of a modest keep, reciting devotions to the Mother with only anger and desolation in his heart, knowing from the start that none of his pleas would be heard. A girl whispering prayers to the rustling leaves in the forlorn godswood of the Eyrie, the sound of her voice like a drum in her mind: please and please and please …
She was crying hard now, crying like a baby. The sobs didn't help, they didn't relieve the tension, they only made it worse. The sobs tore at her throat, bruising her, making her voice raspy as if thorns were lodged there. That was fitting, that was her life. All briars. No roses.
Through the blur of her tears, she saw two eyes stare back at her. They were the yellow eyes of death. It was Nymeria, it was Arya. You want me dead that bad? Then do it, wolf girl.
She was dead already, living and dying blending into each other. Why she fought so hard to live was beyond her.
You killed Mycah, Arya said, daring her to deny it. Tell them. You did. You did.
Arya's words, sharp as any knife, ruthlessly wounding her with the truth. I did. Her whole face twisted.
You go to hell, Arya's curse echoed in her brain.
Hurt gripped her, tearing and twisting her. Her world splintered and for the barest second, she lingered on the knife's edge between two realms. The veil between the dream world and the waking world was parted and all was revealed.
"Oh, you'll break my heart," she sobbed.
She tried to hold on the knowledge but it slipped through her fingers like rain. Don't you know that dreams are written on memory's walls with water, innocent one?
She plunged back down, her misery burning like an inferno, until she collapsed into one white-hot point of agony. The hurt held for an interminable period.
Someone was humming off-key, a quiet hymn that was unmistakable. She was being swayed softly, a forehead pressed against hers. Her chin was gently lifted, the last hushed hum of the song dying away as a kiss, soft and frail and tentative, was laid against her lips. She slumbered, suspended from consciousness for an indefinite amount of time. It seemed like a hundred years.
When she awoke, it was all at once. She sat up abruptly, all her nerves atingle.
Where am I?
It was the richest chamber she had ever seen. The ceilings were not blackened by decades of smoke but adorned with bright frescoes and carvings that were fit for a queen.
At first, they seemed like pastoral scenes of gentle parties of ladies. A second glance revealed that the strange small animals lolling at the ladies' feet were not lapdogs but magical creatures. Direwolves, she recognized, and unicorns and dragons and things she could not name that resembled nothing so much as spiders made out of snowflakes.
The tall bed frame in which she lay was weirwood, swathed in bed hangings of grey velvet embroidered with the sigil of House Stark. Scrolls and books lay piled on a velvet-draped table. Sansa could read the title on the spine of one, covered in beautiful blue calf-hide: A History of the War of the Five Kings.
Out of the corner of her eye, she spied a pillow that had once sat on her father's chair in his solar. It was shabby and almost worn through, with an imperfect embroidery of a direwolf. It was one of her very earliest efforts and though she produced pillows with more ornate, elegant needlework in later years, this first one remained dearly cherished by him. Her vision blurred as all of the pieces suddenly came together.
"I am stronger in the walls of Winterfell," she said aloud, choking back tears. The chamber's architecture was the same as her mother's bedchamber in Winterfell, though this room seemed not as vast and the ceiling beams were not so high. I was so much smaller then, she thought, holding the embroidered coverlet close about her shoulders. She sniffed at it and it carried to her the scent of strawberry leaves and rose petals. The front was unadorned grey damask silk but the interior design—unseen unless one was beneath it—was not so plain. The interior silk was exquisitely embroidered with an emblem of a black dog and a small bird in silver and indigo thread. She ran her fingers across the neat stitches and knew with absolute certainty that this was her own handiwork.
"Sandor?" she called out. She felt strangely exposed, her surroundings now discomforting her.
She climbed from her bed and walked around the chamber. Her toes sunk into soft eastern rugs. Pentoshi, she suspected. She warmed her frigid fingers against the familiar silken tapestries that hung near her wardrobe. The tapestries were of the Kings of Winter and the Lords of Winterfell that once decorated her parent's chambers.
Overwhelmed, she pressed her cheek against their coolness. "Sandor?" she cried again, her voice sounding uncharacteristically infantile and petulant, as if her peace had been pulled away from her as one pulls away a blanket from a sleeping child. She wished she could have him here with her. She longed to lie beside him, to be held by him, to touch him whenever she wanted.
Sansa walked around the room again. The room was darkening but there were no candlesticks or torches. Instead, she illuminated the chamber by lighting marvelous enameled oil lamps that burned without smoke. The last lamp to be lit was near her mirror …
She was dressed in a thin white bedgown, a string of pearls around her neck, her auburn hair loose. She touched her lips—they were shell-pink and soft, a little reddened and swollen as if from violent kisses. Other than that, she could not easily pinpoint what was different about herself.
The longer Sansa stared at her own reflection, the more oddly threatened she felt. Her face. Foreign. Perplexingly enigmatic. She looked upon it as she would an exquisite work of art. There was mystery in it of the kind she had seen in the goddesses carved above the altarpieces of Valyrian relics. She recalled one that had awed her with the immensity of its cunning: The Goddess of Carnal Desire. The Lady who dwelt in rivers and freshwater springs and whose kiss was the doom of men.
At the pit of her tummy, there was a blossoming tension. There was nothing as disturbing than the sight of someone who looked human but was not human at all.
"Who are you?" she whispered to her other self.
She kept her face perfectly still.
Her mirrored reflection smiled back at her.
It was a smile straight from the canvases of old Valyrian paintings.
Innocent one, the embrace of a god is never fruitless, a voice not her own answered in return.