Tragedy strikes the Clegane household, and Sandor must comfort his daughter, teaching her a life lesson in the process.
Warning: This is not a happy chapter!
The room was quiet. The only sound was the fire crackling in the brazier. Sandor had ordered the maester and septa to leave so that he and Sansa could grieve for their stillborn child alone.
Sansa cried silently in her bed as Sandor stood by the fire, the tiny baby boy held in his arms. The baby was silent. He'd never taken a single breath, never let out a scream, never suckled at his mother's teat. He'd been born lifeless and gray.
The maester had told them the baby came early; at least a moon's turn, if not more. This babe was the third they'd lost since Mareena was born. The other pregnancies had failed early on and ended in bloodstained furs and little lumps of tissue that should have been babies but would never get the chance. This time they'd been sure that they would finally have another addition to their little family.
"I would like to hold him," Sansa said weakly, throat thick with tears. Sandor gently laid the small body in the circle of her arms and watched as she tucked his little blanket around him more tightly and smoothed a hand over his dark hair. "He looks like you," she told him with a sad smile. "He has your face and even your hair."
A strangled cry came from the door, which had been left ajar, followed by the sound of feet scurrying away down the hall.
"That sounded like Mareena," Sansa murmured.
"I'll go see to her." Sandor placed a gentle kiss on her forehead before leaving.
He found Mareena in her room. She'd buried herself under her furs and was sobbing uncontrollably. Her dolls were scattered about the room, along with many of her dresses and even her wooden sword. Clearly everything she could get her hands on had been thrown in grief.
Sandor worked to extract her from her furs, and when she was uncovered she threw her arms around him and sobbed into his chest. He hugged her tightly to him and dropped a kiss atop her head.
"It's all my fault!" Mareena wailed. "It's all my fault he's dead. If I hadn't made mother fall over he wouldn't be dead!"
It took Sandor a moment to realize what the girl meant. He vaguely recalled Sansa telling him that she'd taken a fall down a step or two and landed on her rump. The children, she told him, had been playing a game and ran past her, causing her to lose her balance and fall. She assured him that she properly chastised them, had gotten the maester to check that all was well with their unborn child, and had laughed off the experience entirely.
Sandor set Mareena down on her feet and kneeled in front of her. She was grasping her favorite wolf doll in her hand. He could see she had tried to stitch closed a little tear in the wolf's side, but stuffing was still poking through the uneven seem.
"I was going to give my baby brother or sister my wolf to protect them," she cried, rubbing one eye with the back of her hand, "but now I killed him!"
"Little bird, stop your crying," Sandor demanded, albeit gently. "I'm going to teach you a lesson I learned when I was about your age. Sometimes things happen. Bad things. And they happen for no reason and at no fault of your own. They may make you sad or angry for a very long time. But there is nothing you can do to change what has happened, no matter how badly you may want to. You do the best with what you're given and you move on. This is one of those things. You did not cause this. It is just one of those terrible things that happen that make you sad. We'll all grieve together for a while, and in the future maybe you'll have a new little brother or sister you can cherish all the more for knowing the death of this one."
Mareena and stopped crying and was looking up at him with a trembling lower lip and ruddy, tear-stained cheeks. Her eyes were red and puffy from all her crying.
"Can I still give him my wolf? So he can be protected in the crypt?"
Sandor stood and scooped Mareena up in his arms, hugging her to his chest. "If that's what you want, little bird, then that's what we'll do."
By the time they made it back to Sansa's chambers, Mareena was asleep in his arms. Her wolf was dangling from one hand, in danger of falling. He set her down on the bed beside Sansa, where she immediately nestled into her side. Sansa wrapped her free arm around her daughter's shoulder, the other still cradling their infant son.
"Is the poor thing alright?" Sansa asked. Sandor shook his head as he sank into the septa's vacated chair beside the bed.
"No. But she will be."