A strangeness had fallen between her companion and herself.
She'd felt it on the morning's ride; his breath in her hair was irregular. She watched the bright woods jolt by but the anger rode behind her on the horse, solid and unyielding. When she asked him to stop, his grip setting her down was painful and he held her arm tight in his fist for a moment when she'd come back out of the underbrush. The grip was to punish, not to comfort; her cold scale ticked again, toggled, the balance swaying to and fro.
A small child survives only by dint of its own helplessness: its protectors, seeing the pathetic thing, cannot help but be swayed. As it grows, it learns to exploit what it can of that helplessness until the exploited and the child both become weary with indignities of childhood. She was caught in the first snare of a woman's life, the moment when awareness had pulled away only half the veil. She knew, and didn't; she was both wary and incautious. Childhood rankled her, was no longer fitting; still, she was too young to exploit the ways that life would later bind her protectors to her. The scale ticked and ticked, but her consciousness was unaware of it, and so when she finally leaned back against the man, it was a simple act that was at once calculated and innocent, innocent and cruel.
When they stopped again, it was midday and the wood was beautiful and sharp, sun slanting through the trees, the horse's picking steps trailing a glowing swirl of loamy dust. The deep-woods smell, the sharp alcoholic pine-needle smell was strong now. He dismounted, pulled her down, and walked wordless off into the brush, and so she roamed in aimless widening circles around the horse and waited for him. She found late-summer blackberries in the low briars and ate them crouching in the bramble. When he returned her mouth was stained red and he glanced at her for a narrow-eyed second, set his hand on a tree, high up on the bark.
"If you're in the wood, and you can't tell where you are," patting the bark, "find a tree that's not leaning, that's straight up and down. Look up here. No, not there. Up. See how moss is only on this side?" It was the first he'd spoken; she stared at him. "That side's north, the moss side. Usually." The Hound breathed through his mouth at her, and sat her back on the horse. She fretted as they rode. Why did he bother with that? Of course I knew that, everyone knows that. Does he mean to leave, have me go from tree to tree all the way home. She felt the unflagging anger behind her as they mounted again, understood dimly that she could not know his mind, and so she dipped into the reserves of her character, and rode silently.
That was when they began to see men in the woods. At first, just a pace in the underbrush stopping short as they picked by; then, glints of metal lit by the setting sun, voices cut and hushed, dissolute camps with the ash still smouldering. An untethered horse, half-packed, standing in a creek. Sansa watched all of this and felt the pressure build.
It happened, finally, as the sun was beginning to set. The tall man behind her had exhaled and slumped against her, his collarbone pressing against the back of her head, brought the horse to its halt. "Here's as good a place as any. Help me unpack." And she did, taking the bags from him, pulling knots apart. He had commanded her attention as he set the spit, built the fire; she watched him as she'd once watched her father show her, so long before. He took up his quiver then as the mossy fire smoked between them, and looked at her, one tooth on his lip, calculating.
"You'll stay by the horse while I'm gone. Don't touch him, just stand by him. No one will come; he is what he is." She nodded, squinting, and he stepped over the fire to squat beside her. The pressure that had been growing all through the long day was at its head. He leaned, held her chin between a dirty thumb and forefinger, and looked closely at her. She looked in kind and waited. The dust in the cracks of his scar, the blue hollows in his jaw, but all over, all in all, it was the well she was looking at.
"What do you think about that man in the night, little bird? What did you learn, did you learn anything at all? Tell me the truth, or I'll tell it to you." But of course she couldn't say. She opened her mouth in the grip, but nothing came out–not you, and he and I have ridden together on the black wave, we rode over the bodies of the knights and went into the wood, I am with the black riders now, I have gone away with the black rider; and so, like any young girl, she said nothing, and she looked away from him. She felt the thick plate of scar scrape against her cheek, he was sliding his cheek against hers to put his words to her ear, then, still holding her, and the words came hot and close. "All you can learn from that is to expect it," and then he was up and walking away with the quiver, out into the wood again.
She went and stood by the horse, and she didn't touch it.