She cried for a time, and when the last few squalls were done he squatted and hoisted both her and her pallet and dumped them over by his own. He groped around in the dark, found her bag, pushed it to her, and she moved behind him to get back into her old dress. The bloodsoaked wool was clammy against her face as she stripped it off, but she was numb. She tossed it away from her into the encircling brush. She breathed shuddering breaths there, for a minute, and then she pushed the panic back. When she sat down beside him, the Hound stirred and spoke.
"You'll sleep beside me now, it'll not happen again. What I said earlier by the fire– all of that, I'd told you, and I'd known." She felt him shift, turn to her. "In the morning when I wake you, you'll look at him. I know you'd thought I'd drag him off, but I won't, and you'll look at him in the light." He cut off her sound of protest. "You want to add him to your list of terrors? You have a long list, girl, I've been there for all of them. Look at him in the light and you'll see him for the shit he is." He snorted to himself. "Was." He took a deep breath. "Go to sleep."
She couldn't speak, or hardly listen to him; her head was swirling still with the moment she had put her palm against the stranger's face and known. She felt a great injustice had been done her, starting as a child and culminating in that clutching hold of the stranger. How was it, how could it be, that she had been taught such a careful set of rules, such a careful way of things, when all around her the teachers had known the truth: that the rules were like the gilt on the dented breastplate of the man she'd trod over, no defense at all. A sad glint left on a battlefield, a charming idea that had occurred before the great wave of black riders swarmed over it. She was unarmoured in the wake of those black riders, in the wake of all the roiling world outside the walls of her home.
Intense disillusionment tasted much like bile; perhaps it was. Sansa swallowed twice and turned to the man beside her. She wanted her mother, she wanted to be carried, she wanted, with desperation, her father. It was cold, the knowledge that all she had was this man beside her, and his well of rage. She said it then in her heart and felt the truth of it, and was too angry to look away from it. I've nowhere else to go.
He was lying on his side beside her, facing away from her, angry as well. She could feel it as she often had before. Most likely at her; she didn't care. She wasn't the black world that had crawled through the brush to take her, that was the rest of it, everything else. If he was angry with her, then he was angry with the wrong one. She laid back on her pallet, her fists under her chin.
It was then, at that moment, that she made the leap in her mind, unbidden, and lost another layer of her childishness. The Hound, who had once come to her room in the dark, was himself a black rider, himself a thing in the night, crawling. It was too large to put her thoughts to. She let herself wander away from it, let herself relax, but it came back. It sung, it hummed; it couldn't be ignored, and she lay very still for some time. Then, unbeknownst to her, the cold scales that were her mother's greatest gift to her rose up in her mind and took it over, performed their silent calculation. She felt something, a curious finality, and without meaning to she chose.
When it happened, she thought it weakness, but she was wrong. Later in her life she would name it instinct, and still be wrong.
She chose, and turned, and leaned until her back rested against his.
It was hard but warm, and the great bellows that were his lungs and ribs rocked her slightly. She could feel the heavy double thump of his heartbeat, far slower than hers, and so loud.
Once, at home, they'd butchered an old bull, and the kennelmaster had taken the bull's heart. The boys had clamored to watch the dogs be fed. She'd not watched, but she'd seen the heart as it was being carried away, brown with clotted blood, an enormous, knotted thing. So big the kennelmaster had needed both hands to carry it. That must be what his heart is like, she thought, how terrible. But still the bellows rocked her, and much later, without knowing it, she fell asleep.
In the morning he woke her late and told her not to eat, and did as he'd said he would. A crow flew cackling from the body as they walked over to it in the bush, and Sansa looked at it in the light of day.
The thing on the ground that had been so strong, so grasping, was just a pile of rags. A memory flashed to her of their little stable dog, trampled by her mother's pregnant mare and later found by Jory. The children had all cried, burying it. The ruffled ribs had been the worst, flat like a paper doll. That is how a body looks without a head; flat. She knew already, in a way, because of her father, but that had been her father, who was never fully a body, even in death. This was a stranger. She looked closer. He'd been a big man but lean, very lean, much older than the Hound. The clothes were muddy, the boots mismatched, one black and the other, brown and bigger. There were scabs on the arms and hands. She felt the Hound watching her, and she looked up. He was standing next to the head and he knocked it with his boot til it spun on its temple to face her.
It was dreadful, dark red and grizzled with its red mouth wide open, eyes starting from their sockets all blotched like quail's eggs. A dreadful, leaky thing, disgusting in the morning light, but somehow there was a small thread of triumph inside her disgust, a small thread of satisfaction. It's fair. He got what's fair. She remembered suddenly her night's revelation and looked up guiltily at the Hound. He misread her look for timidity, and it was just as well.
"Second time I've shown you a head, now. You'll think I'm making a job of it." With that, he booted the head away, and she turned as he patted through the pockets. Oddly, that was the part she felt she couldn't bear to see.
She was glad to ride away from there. The great black horse had turned to her when she approached, eyeballs rolling when he'd smelled the blood on her; his nostrils flared and he blew against her neck, excited. Later, they'd passed a small creek in a dell, and the Hound lifted her off the horse and walked off. "Your face," he'd said, over his shoulder. Her throat, too, she could feel it, dried stiff and itchy, and her collarbone, her bust. She thought she wouldn't look, but she did, and for a bright instant she'd seen her face reflected in the clear water before she'd leaned down and washed the blood away.