FLINT AND STEEL

sweet mother I cannot work the loom

I am broken with longing for a boy by slender Aphrodite

Sappho, Fragment 102

Sansa squeezed her eyes shut tight. She knew instinctively that she could no more stare long at the Lady than she could stare long at the sun. To do so would mean more than temporary blindness: she would have completely forgotten that she had ever possessed, or even known, what sight was. In the darkness, a calming magic worked itself upon her as two acts occurred in tandem. Her human brain wiped away what it could never comprehend, while at the same time she felt a man's hand around her arms. Her knees bent and his arms hooked behind them, scooping her up.

Sansa's eyes flung open the moment her back felt the softness of her featherbed. Sandor laid beside her, his face stony. She leaned towards him, kissing his lips. He did not reject her embraces but neither did he return them. His coolness made her stomach jump nervously.

She turned away from him and curled into a ball, putting her forehead in her hands. She had often slept in this manner since the death of her mother. It was oddly comforting, reminding her of what it must have been like cradled in the womb.

A man's hand moved down, a gentle pass from her shoulders to her arms, to the slope of her hips and thighs, then back up again. "That feels nice. Thank you," she said softly.

It was soothing but she sighed from relief more than anything else. Sandor further pressed his bulk up against her, hip to hip, thigh to thigh. He was a foot taller yet his body fit perfectly with hers, as if they had been cut from wax and meant to mold together in this manner.

A long silence spread itself over them. He asked for nothing, seemingly content to lie in the simple stillness of her bedchamber in Winterfell, that inviolably private place inside of her imagination.

Eventually, his massaging hands stilled and he turned around. She followed after him, nestling close, pressing her lips to find that place on his body that he so loved on hers. The area between her shoulder blades that he would score with his teeth. She giggled as she bit him playfully. His square, strong face remained grave in the lamplight.

She lifted her head and followed his line of sight.

He must have seen this before, she realized. Perhaps he had even owned it. She knew the tapestry he was entranced by intimately. It hung in Alayne's bedchamber.

The tapestry depicted the tale of the legendary member of the Kingsguard, Ser Serwyn of the Mirror Shield. He was well-loved by the smallfolk and this tapestry of his heroic deeds was widely fabricated by the weavers of Oldtown. She had seen it often in the modest keeps of minor houses, upjumped nobles who had no illustrious ancestors to valorize in warp and woof.

The tales of Ser Serwyn had sweetly thrilled Sansa, even as her mind would often turn over and over the contradictions of his origins. He had rescued Princess Daeryssa from giants. He had slayed the terrible dragon Urrax. He had killed many men but he never relished killing, ending his days haunted by the ghosts of all the knights he had honorably slain. That such a man had walked the earth—how she desperately wanted to believe that he had been real.

The tapestries would always depict him as blonde, lithe; a handsome man with even features that bore a faint resemblance to Loras Tyrell. That was all wrong. Ser Serwyn could have never looked like that nor could he have been a knight. He was of the time of the Age of Heroes, a period that began in the mists of the past, as old as the lakes and mountains. It was long before the Kingsguard, long before the Andals came to Westeros bringing with them their Gods and their mounted men in steel armament.

The real Ser Serwyn would have been dark haired, the blood of the First Men carved on his honest face. Alayne had half entertained the notion of sending a raven to the guildhalls in Oldtown to tell them of all the ways in which they were mistaken.

Alayne loved to look at the tapestry while alone in her bath … and sometimes her thoughts would turn in a less than scholarly direction. Ser Serwyn was one of them. The old old stories, the kind of lore Sansa drank as a child from Old Nan's lips. The unknown man who waited on his black horse on a darkened hill, his hand outstretched. I could keep you safe, no one would hurt you again. In the stories, if a girl believed him, if she went to him, she would not have returned. Yet how that girl wanted to go … How she wanted …

The button of flesh would strain from its hood, her folds growing thickly together. The sweet tension would curl in her tummy until it was hardly bearable. Hands drifted before sliding between her legs. They caressed the princess' body … the girl's legs were so shy but they always opened wide for him.

Yet the good feeling never came to her in these daydreams. Her nerves would flutter then go out, Ser Serwyn's gentle stroke-stroke not quite the right key to open the hidden locks inside of her. She would emerge from her bath light-headed, her teeth-chattering from the now cold water, pressing her face into her towel to stifle the loneliness that welled up inside of her.

"You should have come with me when I gave you the chance," the Hound's voice rumbled from a distance, pulling her to sharp attention, like a dog pulled on a chain. "Bugger that, I should have taken you, kept you for myself."

She propped herself up on her elbows and saw him sitting on the chair with her father's worn pillow pressed against his back. He was dressed as Sandor was, ready for bed, wearing nothing but a thin pair of linen breeches, his clean bare feet peeking out from the hems. Are you angry at me? she thought.

"Are you angry at me?" she asked fretfully. He had every right to be angry with her; she had reached too far, she had trespassed against him. For those moments, they had bridged the gulf between two separate beings, personally attached in thought and sympathy. She had lived his life as his memories had run through his head.

The Hound bared his teeth. "I've told you already … Fuck!" he cursed viciously. "I wanted to keep you safe. I protected Arya, didn't I? Who did you think I did that for, stupid bitch? How could you even think that I would want to hurt you?"

"I … I didn't think it. I only wanted to know if you're angry at me. You can be angry at someone without wanting to hurt and kill them. They're not the same thing," she stammered. Then her voice took on a firmer edge. "Don't call me ugly names like that."

She looked into his blood-darkened face. Whether it was harder to wear masks in dreams or whether the dreamers had no desire to summon them, she did not know.

He did want to hurt her, in the same manner that he had hurt himself. He wanted to compress himself inside of her, squeezing into her flesh, feeding her all of his anger until she was as hateful as he was. He would broaden her education by bashing her head in with all of his scorn so that she no longer saw any beauty in the world, so that every noble sentiment was distrusted and debased. Heroes and villains, good and evil, interchangeable with no inequalities between them: the Brotherhood without Banners and the Brave Companions, Starks and Lannisters, sheep and their butchers. He said he saw the world as it was, an awful place, where the strong ruled the weak, where failure was the end of life and all effort was dust.

What were the rewards of his wisdom? Sandor Clegane was the most miserable person she had ever met. She had lived his life as flashes of frenzied futile struggles in which anger and conflict and the will to fight were all that meant anything; the only solace to be found at the bottom of a wine jug. She had been him, as pathetic as the village drunk, in a stupor beside the trunk of a willow tree where his captors' dogs had sniffed him out. And she had been him again, a wounded animal in agony beside the trunk of a different willow tree where Arya abandoned him to die. He had said he would keep her safe but had taken few protective measures to save himself, all of his roads leading to the bleak parapet of death.

Sandor pulled at her shoulder, causing her to fall back onto the bed. He twisted himself so that he loomed large above her, shaking his head vigorously. "It wouldn't have gone down that way, I tell you. I would have kept myself safe if I had you to keep safe. You would have been glad to have a dog." He squeezed her hand hard, the extra pressure meant to make an impression on her.

Not if he forced me to bed, she thought.

The Hound began to laugh. It had a crazy, frantic sound, half-chuckle, half-sob. It was a queer, unsettling noise. The room picked up the sound and echoed with his smothered mirth. "The little bird would have been glad to have a dog," he repeated again and again. As if he was trying to convince himself as much as her.

Sandor hung over her, his eyes brimming with the absence of unkindness, even as the Hound's eyes had been full of cruelty. One was the master and one was the servant but both were from the same source, indivisible, and to love one meant to live close to the other.

She sighed wearily as she slid her palms over his chest. He bent to kiss her. He kissed her eyelids and her cheeks, open wet kisses retreating to shy pecks and little nibbles before surging again to the long and deep union of mouths. They kissed many kisses, his long-simmering sexual fantasies so clearly revealing themselves to her. Sandor wanted to linger in kisses, shy and joyful kisses that no one had ever bestowed on him, as their bodies burned together with an anticipation that they would refuse to outrun.

As they kissed, she kept her eyes open, sometimes concentrating on Sandor, sometimes peeping surreptitiously at the Hound. She could hear the sound of the roughness of the fabric of his breeches as it brushed against the motion of his stroking hands. He was touching himself while watching her kiss Sandor, with no more shame than a dog has when it licks its own genitals.

She could not look away. His harsh sun-browned face. That body muscled like a bull—his belly segmented by tendons inscribed so distinctly that he could have served as an anatomy model for one of Maester Colemon's lessons. How she wanted to lick him all over, her mind picturing the path her tongue would trace along those ridges and grooves. The curved lines that ran along his sides—linea semilunaris— the three lines that that ran across the abdomen—linea transversae—the line that ran down the middle, dividing the grooves into six regions—linea alba—and all along the hundreds of silvery scars that ran through his body like thin streams of water.

She turned away when the Hound caught her peeping at him. Sandor laughed against her mouth and she blushed. She stroked his tongue with hers before again daring to take a sidelong glance at the Hound. His mouth had settled into a predatory smile so wicked that her throat shrank.

It was a smile that cornered, that hissed come here, come eat and be eaten. The Hound placed both of his hands on himself. Twisting his wrists, pumping, but the foreskin was lightly stuck in one spot. The sight of it made her shake from the strain it took to keep still. She wanted was to go to him, to free the stuck spot with her lips. "Ah—ah," she moaned—desperately hungry—like a baby who had been crying for hours for milk.

Sandor pushed her back onto the bed. His weight on her, crushing her sweetly, as he curled his fists in the fabric of her bedgown. She opened her legs, cradling him against her body, her hands reaching around and feeling the warm skin of his back then dipping into the rumpled cloth of his breeches to caress his buttocks.

He held her face in the palms of his hands.

She didn't flinch or look away from him, her dark deeply open eyes taking him in. His hair had fallen over his forehead. His face was somber. But his eyes were lit: I love you.

Then his begging dog eyes asked a question, one that he didn't have the courage to voice.

Her legs began to firm, her breath no longer a catch in her throat. Her heartbeat slowed until it seemed to her she became blessed with detached reason. As if she were two people, two hearts, one who burned and one who was ice.

One heart was lodged in the body of a girl who was caressing her lover's cheek, her hungry face insane with happiness. The other heart was lodged in the body of a woman, who peered at this tableau as if from a great height, in melancholy resignation.

She would not be deceived about him. As sure as there were troubles and plagues in the world, Sandor Clegane was no true knight. He was the smudged reflection of a masculine ideal that was powerful and ennobling.

He was far from perfect but her body thought his body was perfect. Their bodies were like two dolls, female and male, that the gods would bang together at the hips, as if trying to strike a spark off flint and steel.