Many thanks to my honest reviewer who immediately pointed out that in previous chapter as initially published I let Baelish's arm regrow – while it's kind of important for the plot to keep him armless...

Thank you for reading.

Gore!

xxxx

Chapter 8

The Noble Art of Stitching

Where needlework is an important art

Sansa

"Hello, Driftwood," Sansa said bluntly as there was no proper way to address a horse.

The big black beast stomped restless under a large nearly leafless oak tree and would not join the company of men and animals ready to depart. A few families of peasants decided to join them with their livestock. The singer cursed them by the old gods, until the Elder Brother pointed out peacefully that cattle could be eaten in case of dire need.

Not a singer, Sansa reminded herself, Mance, Jon's friend. Would that I could believe what he said. For maybe he is Jon's friend as much as Marillion was a friend of aunt Lysa and then wanted to rape me.

It didn't please her to remember how Marillion died later on for a crime he didn't commit because she, Sansa, repeated the lies Petyr taught her, so she spoke louder, "Driftwood, we have to go. Your master will have need of you when he wakes up."

The horse didn't move, it just neighed aggressively towards her. She regretted convincing the singer she could ride well, just to avoid any further conversation about Jon and her family.

"His name is Stranger," whispered the boy behind her, startling her.

"Sweetrobin, what are you saying?"

"The big monk called him Stranger. I heard him argue with the Elder Brother about that name."

"It is not proper to listen to the conversations of others," Sansa said in a tone of an elderly septa, grateful that young Robert Arryn brought the blind dog from the wagon. He helped me talk to Nymeria, she thought. At least I think he did. Maybe he could help with... Stranger.

It was a fitting name for the Hound's companion. A man who believed in killing must have felt at ease in the company of the god of death.

There were no hymns to sing to the Stranger. The only appropriate offer when lighting a candle was the utmost silence of the mind and heart, or so her mother explained her. So Sansa nuzzled the dog's head and gently pushed him to walk towards the strong black horse. She closed her eyes and willed complete silence in her mind, willed her heart to stop beating freely as it did so often since she left the Vale.

"Come, Robin," she said, taking the boy's hand.

As soon as they turned their backs on the horse to go back to the camp, the horse and the dog followed behind them, and Stranger approached Sansa. He looked as if he wanted something from her. He almost bent slightly on one side.

"He will let you up," said Sweetrobin, in awe.

Sansa hated riding and the idea to ride the Hound's horse was terrifying in truth. She tried to steady herself remembering how that horse carried her to safety, when the mob caught her and pinned her to the ground in King's Landing. She bit her tongue and pulled herself up in a saddle.

It was bumpy but she had had worse with more tame animals in Winterfell.

Sweetrobin ran behind them, whistling and singing joyfully. It was lucky he stayed prudently away from the evil hooves of Sansa's new acquaintance.

Petyr ran toward her from the holdfast but he stopped dead when the horse snorted and readied his front leg for a strike.

"Alayne, sweet daughter, this is not a horse fit for a lady," he slurred with false concern.

Are you afraid to lose the influence you think to buy with my maidenhead or are you afraid to lose me? Sansa wanted to ask him, but she suddenly had a better idea.

"Of course not, father," she said with fear and colour in her cheeks. Petyr always made her so uncomfortable that her chirping, as the Hound would call it, would soon become the only thing she was capable of, whenever she was in his presence for long. "I thought you should ride it, because you now feel so much better and there's no place on the wagon any more with the wounded monk, Sweetrobin and myself."

"Alayne, I..." started Baelish...

"A splendid idea!" said the singer, intruding from behind. "Or do you want to be left in Pennytree? Last thing I heard was that your surviving knights turned to my command because your leadership was getting too many of them killed. Only your ugly red-haired sellsword remains loyal to your cause, but his fat friend had been murdered last night."

"I want to play Florian in your show," said Petyr, and Sansa's guts twisted. "I don't want unknown men to kiss my daughter, for as much as they serve the Faith."

"As you wanted to kiss her in the holdfast?" said Mance. "Like she was a common whore? Are you a Targaryen by birth, my lord, that you take close kin to wife? There, I didn't think you were. Or is she not your daughter?"

"Listen to me with great care!" the northerner went on. "There's only one role for you in my show if you want it. No, better, you have to play that role if you want me to order the others to protect your pitiful life, Lord Protector, until we reach King's Landing and part our ways for good."

"An evil king?" inquired Petyr dramatically.

"No," said Mance. "You're too smart for that. I could use you as a prompter."

"Prompter? You mean the ugly little man hidden in a house under the stage in the middle reminding the players of what they should say?" Baelish asked in disbelief.

"Yes," was the only reply he got.

"Never!" said Petyr.

"It's that or nothing," the voice of the King-beyond-the-Wall sounded threatening and Petyr looked outnumbered. For a while, thought Sansa. Petyr will always find a way to turn the things around. She got off Stranger and offered his reins to Petyr with as much humbleness as she could muster.

The former master of coin needed the help of two unharmed knights to get on the infernal horse, which puffed happily towards Sansa before it trotted to the beginning of the caravan, carrying Baelish away. The dog came back to Sansa and she felt as if the horse had just told her to get on the buggering wagon and see to it that his master lived while he was going to keep the nasty old man entertained and away from her.

Smiling, she took the dog in her arms and overheard the Elder Brother talking to the singer at the gates.

Mance

"It was a talisman given to me by my second wife, I think," said the monk, scratching his apparently hurting head under the warm cowl. "Brother Gravedigger killed one creature of the cold with it. I lost it in the previous camping site and he must have found it."

"Heed my call, you good people of Pennytree," yelled Mance to all curious onlookers, waving with the tiny black stone in the air. "If anyone in your families has luck charms that look like this one, keep them close to you at night, and stab anyone who is not your spouse, your lover or your child. Stay in during darkness and keep your fires burning! Winter has come..."

Empty of feelings he returned the stone to the Elder Brother and said: "An obsidian talisman and a stolen dagger of Valyrian steel. What else are you hiding, brother? A high harp?"

The King-beyond-the-Wall laughed at his own jest and the Elder Brother just stated calmly: "There is something, Mance. The corpse riding the horse which took me. It sounds unseemly but I felt it wanted to protect me. Not harm me in any way. It felt almost as if he knew me when he'd been alive. But he couldn't do much when the snow began to fall because those other beings, they have a heart of ice. Nothing can stop their hatred for the creatures with warm blood."

"It is unheard of," said Mance after a while, "that a wight would care for a human, but then, so are many other things in our time. It's good that you shared this with me, brother."

Sansa

Sansa sat inside the wagon with Sweetrobin while the Hound was peacefully sleeping. The Elder Brother had removed his cowl for easier breathing, after four men had placed him inside, and made a sign of the Seven above his chest.

The Elder Brother now held the reins of four horses pulling the wagon in front. They were moving through a slowly changing land, becoming markedly different from the desert fields where the swamps of the Trident joined the mountain passes of the Vale. They went further south and further east, where no touch of winter could be seen as yet.

"He is very strong," Sweetrobin admired the sleeper, "he should be a knight and not a monk. He must have been very brave to survive those burns."

"He is who he is," said Sansa. "The War of the Five Kings had hurt many people. And you will be a knight one day too, if you keep practising with Ser Shadrich."

"You think so?"

"I know so," Sansa smiled. "Please, go and sit outside with the Elder Brother. He can teach you the names of the places we will be passing. A future Lord of the Vale has to know all he can about the Seven Kingdoms."

The boy took a deep breath, made and important face and crawled forward to the Elder Brother's coachman seat, full of fresh questions. The sickly lad was left in the Vale with the concoctions of Master Colemon, and Sansa was glad for that, even knowing that another seizure of the boy's illness was going to come upon them one day without the sweetsleep. At least until that happened it was easier to guide his steps; having left the Vale suited him as much as it did Sansa.

Sansa was left alone with Sandor Clegane, immobile, laying like a giant carved of stone. His fever abated, but not completely, and he didn't wake up yet since they talked to him after the night's raid. The space in the wagon was crumped so she sat next to him and put her hands on his chest.

His heart beats too fast for one asleep, she thought but he looked so much at ease she didn't 'have a slightest doubt that he had been sleeping.

"I don't know what to think of you," she told him. "I never did. Ever since you accidentally took me in your arms when I was scared of Ser Ilyn Payne on the kingsroad. I thought that you were my father then."

"But you were not," she continued. "In truth I don't know what you are to me."

She combed the hair away from his face with her fingers. It had a silky structure, unusual for a man who lived a harsh life. It was almost softer than her mother's, the smell and the feel of her mother now but a fading memory. A sob appeared on Sansa's lips but she swallowed it before it could come out. Crying never helped me, she thought. It is time to stop it.

He slept so that his scars were pressed in the rough cloth of the bedding, the good side of his face was turned towards her.

Maybe it is not comfortable that way, she thought.

With more strength than necessary she turned his head on the other side, so that his good cheek was on the cloth and she could look at the ruin of his face. She looked for a while and then she looked away. Through the open side of the wagon, she could see the land they were passing through, more fertile with every leap of the horses' hooves. The leaves were in rich yellow and autumn red, some crops could still be seen in the almost empty fields.

Maybe we will be safe here, she thought. All of us. But Sansa was now older and she knew better than to hope for that.

She looked at him again. His shoulders raised steadily in the rhythm of his breathing. She touched his good shoulder. It felt smouldering like the pyre that had just been put out in Pennytree. She leaned towards his face and touched his forehead with hers, as he did to her in the play. It was burning.

Mance

When they made a short break for the evening meal, before travelling all through the night as was their habit now, Sansa had to go out to make water, and Mance replaced her holding vigil, next to the sick man's bed.

"You don't have to pretend you're sleeping now," he said. "I can tell."

Clegane's grey eyes were immediately open and clear, with no trace or fever or haziness in them.

"You know, Brother Gravedigger," Mance said, amused. "I could teach you a few things other than songs if your faith allowed it. See, where I am from, you need to steal a woman."

"Bugger off, singer," the Hound thundered as a healthy man, rising from his bed and betraying further the ruse of being asleep.

"As you wish," the singer said and turned back once more to finish a loose thought before exiting the wagon. "Just think of what you can do, brother. You've just killed a white walker in cold blood. Few people ever did it, no matter the weapon at their disposal. And almost no one managed in their first encounter. Most of those who lived to tell about it, ran."

"Did you?"

"What?"

"Run."

"No," said Mance curtly and exited the wagon, where many voices started calling for him and for the Elder Brother in great distress.

Sandor

It had not been pretty at all.

If he didn't know that Oberyn Martell, the Red Viper, had killed his brother with a poisoned spear, and that his head was now adorning the palace of the Prince of Dorne (if one was to believe the ravens the Elder Brother had received from the High Septon on the Quiet Isle), Sandor Clegane would have sworn that they were facing another Gregor's doing. He and his pets had been the terror the riverlands, unleashed like wild dogs by the order of the old lion, Tywin Lannister, may he burn in seven hells.

The girl had died first and the boy was going to die next, but he stubbornly held on to his innards, visible through a deep gash in his stomach, trying to close the deadly wound with his bare hands, unwilling or unable to let go, despite being gagged and tied to a tree, his face caked with blood. The girl was hanging from a branch above him, a noose around her neck, long black hair tangled in the rope by the merciless autumn wind. With some luck her death had not been painful, but she had been hung or left hanging, it was hard to say, so that the boy could have a very good look at her.

Sandor moved to the coachman's seat when Mance stormed out to see what was going on. He mutely witnessed how the Elder Brother ran to the boy, followed by a little bird treading carefully behind, avoiding to step in dirt. The bloody boy squire clung to Sandor as a frightened child and he had to shove him away. I am a dog, he thought, not a wet nurse.

"I let them go," the gutted boy was conscious and he could talk, worse, he couldn't stop talking, seeing death from close by. The Hound had seen it happen before to the wounded on the battlefield.

"I let them go and Jeyne just approved of what I did. She didn't even help. She just told them I was right to do what I did. She told it to the Lady Stoneheart too! And then our lady gave the order to the others. So my brothers left me here to die as I deserved. Cut me a bit first to make sure I died, they did. Let her watch as I bled before they hanged her..."

"Save your breath, son" said the Elder Brother. "My lady," he continued, piercing Sansa with the darkness of his gaze, "his predicament requires a noble ability I have not been trained in. I've never forged a chain of a maester of a Citadel, where one of the rings stands for the skill of sewing the wounds. But I understand that the noble art of stitching is taught to every lady in Westeros and that you excel in it."

Sansa nodded silently despite that she could not look at the wounded boy who continued talking despite being told not to. The Hound had been pleased that, at least, he was not the only thing repulsive she could not stand to look at.

"I let them go so that my Lady Brienne would find them and never come back. But she didn't find them, she didn't... And she came back... She even brought him, the Kingslayer, as she gave her word!"

"Shut up," tried the singer, who finally joined the dying party, while all the others kept their distance.

"They're going to burn them in the caves tomorrow night!" the boy's voice could be heard all over the woods as if he were a battle commander leading the men, and not simply a lad too stubborn to die. "Hanging's not good enough for them, says our lady with her heart of stone..."

The Hound jumped of the seat, ignoring the searing pain in his shoulder and walked towards the atrocity they discovered.

"Lady Brienne and the Kingslayer, they'll burn them. Kingslayer's whore, they call her…" the boy still spoke when the singer gagged him again by force.

"Give me a shovel, " the Hound then said to the skinny monk who played the younger brother in the mummers' show. "There's no help for the girl and we don't want to leave her for the crows."

"We have to burn her," said Mance, stern like the stone Kings in the North in the crypts of Winterfell: the Hound had seen them once and mocked them, for no man alive could be as honourable as they were chiselled to appear.

"My lady," said the Elder Brother ignoring the proper burial discussion, "imagine you are working with white thread on a white and red surface. The red must remain hidden behind the white as a distant pattern of flowers, and the white surface has to be equally joined in all parts. Please! Would you try?"

The little bird was nervous behind the Elder Brother but she didn't make a single step back. She has spine, thought the Hound. Hidden, but unbending. Always had it.

Sansa walked back to the wagon and returned with her sewing gear.

"You have to open his mouth," said the Elder Brother to Mance, "we have to hear if he screams to know what to touch and what not to.

"I have an idea," said the bloody singer. "Boy, can you read?"

The boy nodded and Mance cleaned the blood from his face with fresh water from his drinking skin.

Does he sleep with parchments? thought the Hound when a large piece was unrolled in front of the boy's eyes, barring from him entirely the sight of his own wound. The Elder Brother made a small fire and heated the needle above it, holding it way too close to the fire for Sandor's liking.

"Boy, read," Mance said gently, but his words rang harsh. "If you ever met a wisp of a girl who turned over your heart, think of her and the words will come easier. And if you have to die, you will die with something good on your mind."

Sansa was now eyeing the wound, a needle and a thread ready in her elongated hand like a woman's weapon. The Elder Brother removed the boy's hands slightly to the side, pressing the wound together himself so that Sansa could see better the line that had to be sewn.

The boy swallowed and started reading, his voice still unnaturally powerful for the condition he was in.

"I've seen it all, the best taverns and the best whores, all that coin can buy. I had wenches and noble women silly enough to be enamoured of the lord's firstborn son. And why would I ever want to be a lord? Get married, have noble heirs, why? If I can just drink it and eat it all away!"

Enthralled, the Hound watched Sansa make one perfect stitch after another, tying the boy's guts back to their usual place, her fingers dipped in his blood. Her once rosy cheeks looked pale like snow, but her hands remained steady. She worked with calm precision, as if she were embroidering a lavish border of a handkerchief in the company of the queen.

Might well be it was more sickening to sew in Cersei's company and keep her face even," thought Sandor, recalling their life in the Red Keep.

The boy kept reading from the parchment, his eyes becoming hazy, "Until a day came when they brought me my betrothed. I was told she was wild, unkempt, not worthy of a second look, she made water like a boy, held a sword, wielded the lance better than most men. I was determined to respect her only for the love I bore her brother, my brother in all but blood."

"Get away, you bloody idiots!" shouted Mance to chase away the gathering crowd of knighthood, peasantry and Faith. "This is not for you to watch, the boy may be dying!"

Blackwood and Corbray seemed to have settled their initial differences of two lesser lords fighting for precedence, because they worked together to send everyone else away. An encampment was being erected spontaneously at the order of no one in particular as men found other things to do then staring at the face of the misery of others.

Sandor felt a shovel being pushed in his hands, and he started digging, mindlessly. It is not right to burn the girl, he thought.

The boy continued, his voice finally surrendered to weakness and loss of blood, coming out thin and unnatural. "Only an hour has passed since she's gone and I am lost, m'lords. She's all that I've been told, wild, and rude and stubborn. Yet she's so much more! She has courage, innocence, love! A rare flower, grown in the wilderness, that I wish to see in blossom for all the days of my life. And for the first time I bless the Seven that I was born a lord's firstborn son, for no lesser man could dream of winning the hand of lovely Lyanna, of the House Stark."

"Enough!" Mance tried to stop him, shooting a glance at Sansa. "This part has to be rewritten for the play, it still resembles too much my initial song."

But it was too late. The name Stark was spoken in the forest and would be repeated among men who were close enough to have heard it. The Hound noticed how Littlefinger immediately raised his head as a Dornish viper, from where he was resting on a pallet full of perfumed silks after a painful ride.

Sansa didn't flinch at the mention of her last name, her next stitch as straight as her previous one, the corners of her lips tight and determined, but the word Stark delved into recent memories of Sandor Clegane. He finally recognised the boy with eyes blue like steel for who he was, the lad following the little bird's sister. The Hound's frozen blood turned to boiling. Cold rage rose to unprecedented heights and he didn't feel his shoulder injury any more. He remembered the caves, the undead Beric Dondarrion and the trial of fire. They robbed him of his only earnings and treated him like a rabid dog. They did it in the name of king's justice for the smallfolk, which seemed to include of late hanging a young girl innkeep (judging by her dress), and gutting the lad stupid enough to be knighted by the bastard Dondarrion.

And the girl probably did nothing wrong except fancying the handsome boy, if Sandor's gut feeling was not wrong.

It rarely was.

The boy continued rambling because no one thought to gag him again, "Lem wore the helm, so they'll say to the smallfolk we're protecting and to Jeyne's little sister it was the Hound. And they'll never catch him because the Hound, he's dead. Buried on some isle, said the lady knight who will burn because of me... She will burn! Do you hear me? Burn..."

The boy's scream turned to a long wail when Sandor dropped the shovel and looked around for Stranger, who was not too far from Baelish to his surprise. He checked that his greatsword was over his back, not caring that the weapon was visible to others, not giving shit about his wound, keeping the presence of mind only so much not to show his infamous face to all from under the cowl.

"This Lem, where did he go?" he rasped. In his mind the black hair of the dead innkeep mixed with another dead girl's hair and the Hound became a boy again. "It was an accident," spoke an old maester from another time and Sandor Clegane covered his ears with his hands to shut up the voices in his head. Not losing another second, he rode out hard in the direction where the wounded boy looked instead of answering the question.

xxxxx

It was not hard at all. There were two of them and the archer rode forward. The Hound let him, his rage centred on the yellow-cloaked bastard, his wrath as destructive as Gregor's. He cut both legs of his victim under the knee as if they were made of wool and took off his snarling dog's helm from the man's head. Before he would slice Lem's head off he removed his cowl and made sure that the lying scum could see his face very well from the correct angle.

"This is, at least, something that the Hound did," he said and swung the sword without mercy.

It was too easy. Two years ago when he was a drunk wreck, it would have been more difficult. Peasants caught him then and almost put him to die in a cage for crows. The conclusion was simple. A goal he could not reach living as a sworn shield, he achieved when he didn't seek it any more, living as a hermit, digging graves. Even with his bad leg that he could still sometimes feel, he had become stronger than he'd ever been, as strong as Gregor, maybe more, it was hard to say. Yet he wouldn't have prevailed against the creature of the ice in the woods, more powerful than seven hells, not with force alone. Perhaps I should have been afraid as the singer expected, he thought, in awe of the new enemy he now understood better.

He rode back to the camp, clutching his old helm close to his heart. His shoulder felt lifeless, as if it were made of cold wood, not flesh, and a few new bruises flowered here and there. He noticed they took down the girl and made a shallow grave instead of a pyre. The boy was nowhere to be seen. So he must have made it, the Hound thought. If I lay with my guts in the open, would you have patched me as well, Lady Stark?"

The cold was making his body shake. He had to seek the covers in the wagon and sweat it out if he wanted to fight any more bastards in his life. And he just might want to. For the dead girl and for myself. For all the dead children. He was grateful that no one in the camp paid attention to him and his craven thoughts.

Sansa

The wounded boy was brought to rest under the open sky, next to the fire. Listening to the wolves howling in the distance finally made him stop talking of his own accord. To Sansa their voices sounded like a sign of the old gods that it would be safe to sleep that night.

"I know whom he will be playing," offered Sansa to Mance. "If he lives..." she added as an afterthought to the Elder Brother.

"Have faith, my lady," said the leader of the monks. "Your hands have not betrayed you. Wasn't this more important than sewing a sigil of a noble husband on a piece of fabric?"

Sansa moved a clean cloth soaked in previously boiled water over the wound to finish cleaning it, and felt a surge of pride. The stitch on the boy's stomach was straighter than if her septa had made it.

"You know his character in my play?" inquired the singer.

"Isn't it obvious?" she said coldly, feeling empty at the thought of the fat drunk king who had her wolf killed. But I brought it upon myself by not telling the truth, she rectified. Maybe Robert Baratheon would have been a different man if my Aunt Lyanna wasn't kidnapped. "Allow me to retire for the night, good sers. I could not get much sleep in the holdfast," she told them and left, not waiting for their permission.

A realization struck her while walking, and she nearly stumbled on the way back to the wagon. I am playing my aunt! She had three brothers! And she met a man who was not her betrothed... A wolf girl and a dragon prince... How many were there in the history of Westeros? What happened? Does the singer know? Probably he doesn't and I am just a foolish girl who lives by the song...

When Sansa returned to the wagon, it was pitch-dark on the outside and on the inside even more so.

Her head full of thoughts about the days long gone and people she had never met in life, Sansa staggered over her little cousin's feet. Sweetrobin moved almost to the middle of the wagon, tossing and turning in his sleep. He ended up carelessly spread on the floor, as if he dreamt of true knights (who may have been able to fly, Sansa thought) and maidens fair. Sansa caressed his forehead and moved him to his side, waiting until he relaxed again in his sleep, grateful he'd not had a fit of his illness, that time at least.

There was little enough place in the wagon when Petyr slept in it and she blushed when she realized who else was rolled in the blankets on the other side.

Sansa stretched out her bedding between her cousin and the Hound, and wished both that the he would speak about her in his fever again and that he would not, since Robin might hear it and repeat it to anyone willing to listen. She heard the wolves in the distance once more. Trying to discern Nymeria's voice among them caused her eyes to turn heavy from sleep. She finally allowed herself to be weak, to be a coward, and to feel repulsed remembering the blood and the mangled body she'd been forced to touch. She found that if she remembered it all correctly, perhaps she could get over it and move on.

As she had done so many times before.

Much later, half-conscious, but with a mind clear of the day's terrors, she whispered so that only the Hound could have heard her, had he been awake, "You know, I thought of you on my wedding night."

In the next moment she was fast asleep and she could not see a pair of grey eyes shining in the dark, or feel their smothering gaze. A pair of long arms fought an invisible battle against a mighty foe to stay right where they were, holding hard to the rough blankets, careful not to offend the only sacred thing in their life by unwanted attention.