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Chapter 9
The Prompter
Where a trial by fire is thwarted
Sandor
The caverns are dark and full of terrors, the Hound thought as they approached the clearing, crawling through a sinuous tunnel, and hated himself for it. Next I will write songs myself, it will go nicely with a bowl of raspberries the Imp offered me for turning craven.
A hooded figure of a woman sat immobile, lost in her thoughts, in the heart of the giant weirwood whose branches and roots grew in all directions from the centre of the caves, spreading unevenly along many narrow passages used to go in and out, like tentacles of an oversized kraken, lost and ossified in the riverlands, too far away from its home on the high seas.
A blond man and a blond woman were tied in the middle of a large black pit, back to back, their bodies a perfect match, mirroring each other in size and strength. They both wore only a brown peasant tunic and a pair of dirty smallclothes clearly sewn for men. The woman's cheek was bandaged and the man was a sword hand short. A pretty, there, for the little bird, the Hound thought, observing Sansa advancing in front of him. She showed no reaction to the spectacle before their eyes and just did her best to keep her balance and move forward, in heavy monk winter robes she wore over her dress.
The pit was encircled with weirwood branches cracking from dryness, almost bidding to be lit.
The space around the pit was crowded with smallfolk and outlaws at arms, who came to see the sentencing to death of Ser Jaime Lannister, the Kingslayer, and his whore, Lady Brienne of Tarth. The list of crimes was long and confirmed by R'hllor, the Lord of Light, or so read the false priest, Thoros of Myr.
The veiled woman started talking slowly, from her seat of white wood, in a gurgling inhuman language Thoros had to interpret for the other outlaws and the smallfolk alike. All bowed to the ground and listened to her every word as if she was some kind of deity herself.
She told them all how the Kingslayer sent his regards to Lady Catelyn Stark, in form of Roose Bolton killing her eldest son Robb Stark at the Red Wedding, before most of other guests from the north were murdered in cold blood, in violation of every right sacred in the eyes of gods and men. Only a precious few were kept as hostages but that was no matter, for the Kingslayer was finally going to pay for all the evils done and ordered in the name of the House Lannister.
Awe descended on the crowd when Lady Stoneheart finished talking, and looks of implacable hatred were the reward of the prisoners, who for their part looked as if they would both wish to talk, if only their mouths were not stuffed with rags so that they could barely breathe.
And breathe they would not for long, thought Sandor Clegane, because Thoros approached the pit carrying a burning torch. The Hound felt nameless rage taking hold of his heart while the mob cheered the false priest on, their hearts coming to a joint stop in expectation to see the prisoners suffer.
Someone shouted gleefully: "Save yourself now if you can, Lannister!"
"Try shitting gold for all the good it'll do to you," bellowed another.
The flames rose high around the pit.
The smoke, together with the breathing of so many living beings, sucked all air out of the caves. Many coughed but they remained where they were to watch their enemy die. The fire came close to Jaime, who tried to wiggle and turn, in order to face the ordeal himself, and keep the woman as far away from it, for as long as he could. Always a true knight, Sandor mused, and an insufferable bastard. His golden mane gleamed and his green eyes looked strangely alive when the Hound could glimpse them through the flames.
Here we are, thought Sandor Clegane, on with the buggering show.
The Priest of R'hllor
"Hear me, oh hear me, you good people of the Seven!" roared a voice in the middle of the crowd. A tall thin man in the attire of the holy brother of the Seven pushed his way through the tangle of warm bodies and threw a thick blanket for horse over the first line of flames. He stomped on it unafraid of getting burnt, repeating the process frantically until all the fire was put out. Then he stood firmly next to the prisoners as if he was one of them. Holding a scorched blanket in his hands, he faced a never anointed queen on her weirwood throne.
"I, the Elder Brother of the Quiet Isle by the grace of the High Septon, beg you to stop this folly! In the name of the Seven, the prisoners have to be brought to justice of the lawful king!"
Thoros of Myr saw how the eyes of the Kingslayer's whore were filled with sudden hope, and she squeezed the stump on the right arm of her companion with reassurance, while his leaf-coloured eyes only flickered, amused, as if he paused to consider the latest turn of his own uncertain destiny.
"There is no lawful king in this land! The boy ruling in King's Landing is the Kingslayer's bastard son, an abomination born of incest with his sister, Queen Cersei!" Thoros of Myr hurried to proclaim the belief of the crowd.
"You spoke truly," replied the monk. "There may be no lawful king. So why are you taking justice in your own hands? Queen Cersei will be judged for her treasons and fornications! I for one was invited to attend her trial, as are all the high servants of the Faith in all of the Seven Kingdoms."
"R'hll…" Thoros started but he was stopped in the middle of the word.
"-R'hllor, you said?" the man of the Seven admonished further. "Did your mothers burn the candles to R'hllor or to the Maiden, the Mother and the Crone? Did your fathers burn people in the name of the faceless god from across the narrow sea or did they come to the Father, the Warrior and the Smith for help? Won't the Stranger take us all in the end? People of the Seven, why have you abandoned the faith of your forefathers and embraced foreign lies? Will R'hllor regrow your ruined crops?"
The gathered spectators moved away slightly, to let forward three more hooded monks, a huge one with a bandaged shoulder, and two more men of more modest size clinging to his shadow.
"Why have you come here, brother? There are shorter ways from the Trident to King's Landing," said Lady Stoneheart, and Thoros conveyed the remarks of his lady in a calm, steady voice.
"I bring a message for you, my lady," said the Elder Brother.
"Show yourself!" Thoros did his duty, and repeated her words again.
The Elder Brother lowered his hood and discarded his travelling cloak. A thin tall man in his middle forties showed no concern, or fear for his life, only the humbleness proper for a man of the Faith. His eyes were narrow and darker than the caves, his head bold and scarred, with some grey looking stubble starting to break its way through the thick skin above his ears.
"I don't know you," was spoken quietly from a weirwood throne, and echoed, in the pit.
Lady Stoneheart mirrored the gesture of the Elder Brother and revealed herself. Her dark cloak was left on the throne, and a face of a dead woman, with her throat cut and her cheeks terribly disfigured by deep gashes in her grey flesh, walked towards the newcomers, receiving respectful mute courtesies mingled with fear from her people. Thoros of Myr followed his lady closely, setting his sword aflame in righteous anger, and so did Anguy, the archer, and at least ten men armed with swords and axes. All the newcomers and the prisoners alike were soon completely surrounded and targeted by a deadly weapon, ready to be launched at the command of their lady.
"My lady," said one of the smaller monks in a hushed voice, fighting shyness and his own fears, "the message is not plain, and only you can understand it. Let us relay it and be gone. Our brother's opinion of your justice is his own."
Thoros noted how the Elder Brother seemed surprised with the statement, as if he didn't expect it at all.
Lady Stoneheart motioned to Thoros, who obeyed and lowered the cowls of the monk speaking and of the huge one, who would not leave his side. Both of their faces were hidden with white masks showing only their mouth and the eyes, lined with crimson colour of blood. Thoros tried to peel off the masks but they wouldn't come off, and when he showed his unsuccessful hands to Lady Stonehart, he noticed that his fingers got burnt from touching the material. Both monks had long dark hair and the smaller one spoke flatly: "The old gods have no mercy for R'hllor. The masks we wear are a token of friendship given to the Seven by the First Men, in the times when there was peace in the Seven Kingdoms."
"I know you," said Lady Stoneheart through Thoros' mouth, walking toward the last covered newcomer. "You wed and then buried a woman, have you not? After swearing your undying love to her married sister for years?"
Undead hands rose to clutch the man's face, but before she could reach him, the man defended himself by pulling a long string of parchment from under his cloak with his left hand, revealing as he did it that his right arm had been cut in the shoulder.
"Who are you?" asked Lady Stoneheart. Her gurgle had sounded uncertain.
"A prompter," squeaked the man trying hard to sound as if he were very lowborn, "y' know, m'lady, a poor bastard who trots the Seven Kingdoms serving the mummer companies. I make my coin whispering the correct words to them players 'cause no one'll cheer to the maimed man on the stage."
Thoros noticed how the masked couple observed the prompter with genuine interest and the small masked monk said, mercifully, "He is right, my lady. The message we carry is but a part of a mummers' show on its way to King's Landing. It will be played entirely after the trial of the queen. He came with us to help us give the message to you. For we're not mummers as you can see, just humble servants of the Faith. If you ever believed in seven faces of one god, I beg you, let us play it and be gone."
R'hllor's servant felt the cold rage mounting inside his lady, and his own blood shivered when he transmitted her next words, which made him wonder if Beric made a right decision when he gave his life for hers. "If your message is a deceit, you will all burn! The death of my son shall be avenged!
The crowd observed speechless, the spectacle before them promising more screams of dying than they expected to see when that day began. Lady Stoneheart ordered the Elder Brother to be tied together with the two prisoners before the other two monks would be allowed to play the message.
The prompter hurried to hide himself behind the tied prisoners and unrolled his parchment, ready to do his job. The small masked monk stood next to the huge one and waited.
Sandor
The Hound couldn't rest in Sansa's presence the night before, reckless but also profoundly content on the levels of his being he didn't know existed, or tried his best to ignore them. You really are a dog, he cursed himself, happy with the scraps from your master's table.
The sleep must have tricked him only at first light and thus he overslept the early morning discussion Sansa and the singer must have had with Gendry - Sandor finally bothered to learn the name of the boy too stubborn to die. As a consequence of the talk he missed, a new scene was written for the bloody show, so fast that the Hound didn't even have time to read it before they set out with this Gendry, who would guide them to one of the entrances to the caves. With haste and some luck, they would reach them before anybody would burn. Fire is for the wights, thought Sandor, not for the living.
The wagon was pulled by six strongest horses to move faster, and Littlefinger complained from it all the way, claiming he was not going to take part in that madness. But Sansa stubbornly joined the vanguard of the rescue party, so Baelish also went, unable to let his investment go.
Sandor Clegane and the Elder Brother rode next to the wagon in silence and the Hound noticed that the monk was not as bad in the saddle any longer as he had been when they left the Quiet Isle. With the brown cloak of the Faith billowing behind him, the Hound could almost imagine him as a hedge knight, wielding the wooden lance in village tourneys to the delight of the peasant wenches.
The little bird graced the Hound with a single furtive look of her bright blue eyes before she had stepped on the wagon and said when no one was listening, "Please, trust me. There is only one way to reach my mother's heart if she has any left, and it is this one."
Perplexed, the Hound wondered what the brave companions of Beric Dondarrion had to do with the late Lady Catelyn Stark, in full knowledge that he, Sandor Clegane, would be capable of killing his own mother if Sansa asked it of him in that voice.
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"Ned, what did father tell you?" asked Sansa and the Hound was back in the firepit with all his sharpened senses, turning his good ear to hear the reply Baelish was whispering.
"He said you were prowling the battlements at night, more than usually. And in Raventree your septa saw you flushed late in the evening. You told her you went training but no one trained that night," the Hound rasped slowly. He had to repeat the buggering words correctly to give the singer a little more time to play his part.
"And?" asked Sansa mildly.
"Lyanna," the Hound stressed, remembering the singer's remark that mentioning names was important for the plan to work. "They think you took a lover."
"Me, Ned?" replied Sansa carelessly, "I'm not like our older brother Brandon!"
"I know, Lya", replied the Hound and paused waiting for the Littlefinger to tell him the rest of what the singer and Sansa wrote together before they embarked on a crazy errand to rescue the Kingslayer and his lady knight from fire, and not in a peace loving way the Elder Brother imagined it would happen.
Sandor Clegane retained the whispered phrase immediately. To the ignorance of many, he was good in his letters, but when he set out to repeat it, the meaning escaped from his tongue.
All he saw was Sansa.
He forgot he stood in a quenched firepit where once he had nearly lost his life to Beric Dondarrion, who then declared that the Lord of Light had other purposes for the Hound. Such as miserably failing to die under the tree, thought the man in question.
He saw Sansa and he heard her whisper it again. She repeated it in his head many times over, "I thought of you on my wedding night."
He saw her through the mask as she truly was, and found that there was so much more he wanted to tell her from his own heart, the singer and his verses be damned to seven hells. The white mask was hiding his burns, and being able to say it as if he was talking about her, and not to her, made it a lot easier to tell it true.
No one will know I meant this, he thought. Words are less then wind, fickle, passing, false.
"No, Lya, you're not Brandon Stark who shared the bed of Ashara Dayne, and then received in his own all the wenches he could find willing in her household.
But I am not him either.
For if I was betrothed to a woman as beautiful as Catelyn Tully, I would never even dream to look upon another. But I am only the second son of a noble house, and a soldier with a cold heart, unworthy of a great lady."
"What would you do, Ned, if your betrothal to her would still come to pass?" asked Sansa of the Hound, in a tremulous voice.
She knows I'm inventing this and she's afraid, thought the Hound numbering the opponents and their weapons directed at them from outside the pit. He ignored Littlefinger's frantic attempts to make him say the correct words from behind Jaime, and spoke his mind freely once again.
To Sansa. To the only woman ever who unwillingly dug out a piece of his human soul even Gregor could not kill, and not for the lack of trying.
"I would keep faith with her and worship her forever. Her auburn hair shining like the sun setting in the West, her eyes more blue than the skies I've seen in the North, and her soul too kind for the world of mortal men."
"That is so beautiful, Ned," offered Sansa, her eyes suddenly red as the slits of the mask.
Why does she always have to be crying? thought the Hound.
"And I would throw myself at her feet and beg her to have me," Sandor Clegane spoke solemnly and yet somehow managed to hear Littlefinger's nervous whisper warning him to at least swear that he would be faithful to his betrothed only by the old gods and not the new, and forget he was a bloody septon, because that was what Ned Stark would have done.
"Lyanna, I swear to you, I swear it by the old gods for all time to come," the Hound made his vow to Sansa, and to Sansa alone, "I would die for my betrothed if needs be."
Sansa
"The rest of this story, my lady, you can hear if you come and see the show in King's Landing," said Sansa evenly to a creature whom she refused to think of as her mother, awaiting its judgement. "The singer who devised it came from the north. He was given bread and mead in the Greywater Watch and found great inspiration for his tale in the words of Lord Howland Reed, or so he told us."
This cannot be my mother, Sansa thought. Lady Catelyn would never had Jeyne Heddle hanged or Gendry's guts spilled out, not even after the Freys had killed all her hopes.
The creature croaked in broken voice and cloaked itself, staggering backwards to the centre of the weirwood. The heretic priest followed it, his sword still on fire, unable to translate the shrieks of his mistress in coherent human speech. The other members of the Brotherhood without Banners, as Gendry called the fellowship Sansa was facing, took it as a sign to cut down the monks and the prisoners alike. Sansa stood close to the Hound and felt how every inch of his body got tense. The Elder Brother who remained silent during their mummery bellowed from the top of his lungs:
"Your lady did not order our death! She's leaving with your priest! Stop this madness!"
But his words were in vain because the archer, Anguy, as Sansa had heard the others called him, yelled back:
"You lying bastard! I saw you, you killed Lem! I know it's you by your height and your brown cloak. You killed him in cold blood! Just like the Hound killed Gendry and Jeyne.
Sansa watched in shock how a black shaft of an arrow spun towards the middle of the Elder Brother's chest, when the Hound jumped forward like a shadowcat to push the monk out of harm's way, succeeding only partially because the dark feathered death must have pierced his ribs despite missing his heart. The Elder Brother fell with eyes wide open and Sansa ran to his side. She heard the Hound rasp, "Jaime! Here!", giving to Ser Jaime Lannister the hiltless dagger the Elder Brother carried on his hip. Petyr's sharp mind made him relinquish his weapon to the lady knight who had already cut her bonds and stood ready to fight.
The steel clashed to steel until the world burst in flames from behind the pit. A cloud of black smoke, a smell of burnt wood, and twenty armed men rode in from the forcefully widened weirwood tunnel, attacking the smallfolk and the outlaws, led by Lord Tytos Blackwood and Ser Lyn Corbray.
Last came Mance Rayder in his cloak of white, black and red, swaying a sword left and right. All cowered before him, from the harbinger of certain death. And he was followed by a flock of ravens, an omen of adverse fate.
"My lord," said Lord Blackwood to Jaime Lannister when the battle was over. "We were almost too late. The word is the Lannister always pays his debts. I want my son Hos back in exchange for saving your ass. If the Others didn't take him." Ser Jaime looked unscathed, he observed a bloody dagger in his left hand, and did not deign Lord Blackwood with a reply.
Corbray took Baelish under his wing, and Sansa decided to stay with the Elder Brother. She tried to feel the beating of his heart, but she could not. The Hound didn't leave their side during the fight and as far as she could see he didn't even kill anybody, he just caught the archer with his bare hands before that man could have shot anybody else, and held him firmly by his throat.
"Pray, tell us all now," the Hound rasped, "who killed Gendry and Jeyne?"
"The Houn..." Anguy tried to say but the air was choked from his lungs and a blade of a greatsword poised on his belly.
"Tell us truth if you don't want to die like Gendry did!"
"L… L… Lem and I did. Her ladyship commanded it! Because he let Podrick Payne and Ser Hyle go."
"And what did Jeyne do, brave archer of the brave companions?" if the Hound's rasp could kill, it would, Sansa was certain.
"She just said Gendry was r… r… right to do so… because they were innocent even if the Kingslayer was guilty."
"Did she now?" the Hound made a tiny tickling cut on the archer's tummy. Red blood trickled and Sansa couldn't stop herself.
She jerked forward, grabbed the Hound's sword hand and said: "No! He is not worth it. Let Gendry tell the good folk the rest himself. Let them judge him by their law."
Sansa noticed with satisfaction how her words that Gendry was alive made the archer even paler than the threats of death.
When she looked around, the blond lady knight dropped to one knee in front of her in a proper courtesy, the dignity and honour of her gesture not diminished by the funny sight she made dressed up only in male tunic and smallclothes.
"My lady Stark," she said. "We have finally found you. Surely, Lady Catelyn, your mother, she must realise that now."
"Her name is Alayne, Alayne Stone, she's my natural daughter," Petyr tried to suggest from behind.
His courage is back now that the evil that my mother has become is gone, thought Sansa bitterly, discovering that her weirwood mask and the dead monk's cowl she wore in disguise have both dropped down, revealing a cascade of brown coloured curls falling to the small of her back. The auburn in her hair shone above her forehead and ears despite the dimness of the caves. She used the last die Petyr gave her on the Quiet Isle, and as the Elder Brother had pointed out, the herbs it was made of could not be picked easily in winter.
Sansa bore her Tully blue eyes to the sapphire blue ones of the kneeling woman, but when she finally spoke, it was with the coldness of the North. "I am Sansa Stark. But that creature killing innocents is not my mother. Lady Catelyn Stark is dead."