This chapter contains a nonconsensual act. -W.G.
It was a glorious room to come in from, after the chill dark of the wood; warm and steaming with the smells of breads baking and wines and stews, low plank tables filled, no, packed with men and their bowls and plates full and steaming as well and she couldn't help but think how all the raggy boys must sigh when they looked inside. It was all yellow inside, all gold. The rafters were black with smoke but the gold came from the great fire in the hearth and from the unspoken thing an inn of the wood always has, which is the glow of the hunters home from the hunt. She looked around her and saw, for a second's glimpse, a secret of men: the raw simplicity at the core of them, their hands grateful for their cups, their voices shouting over one another so that others might hear and approve of the stories of their exploits.
There was a girl bustling with a platter of cups that the men were barking after. Sansa looked at her; she had a straight back and a high bust and a purpled split at her lower lip. The girl looked at Sansa, narrowed her eyes, and Sansa, cowed, stepped behind the Hound. When she looked up again she saw the avid gazes of the men rolling from the bustling girl to herself, and she was glad when the Hound's gaze forced a hunch-shouldered man into abandoning his seat at one of the benches. She sat, and the tall man sat beside her, and he raised his hand to the cut-lip girl.
Her plate came and it was a sea of food, enormous, like a fever dream after the lean hares of her wood. The stares made her eat delicately at first, but then she forgot herself; the mash was runny and the beef tough, but the bread. It had soft chunks of late-summer fig inside, was laced with thick strings of burnt honey all crackled on the top. She hunched over it with unfocused eyes and ate, simple as an animal. Honey was in her hair, on her wrists; her companion didn't notice. He, too, was hungry. It was nauseating, how much he could eat, and how quickly. She wondered briefly if she was embarrassed; it wasn't that, though, it was something else. He ate four of his own plates and then ate what she hadn't, and he drank. He leaned back after, saw her watching the girl with the cut lip, and he bent down to her ear. "Now's the time, if you wanted. You know I'll drink; you could get away later. Serve mash here, and later, serve all the road." He tapped the back of her hand with his spoon. She saw it clearly as he tapped, the handle black with use, hundreds of black nicks in the wood, toothmarks, all in the bowl of it. She squinted at him, remembered the net. "Is that how my pretty song ends?" And he laughed, leaned his arm against hers, raised his hand again for the cut-lip girl.
He gave her some of his wine, watching her as she drank it. It burnt in her throat and made her tired, and suddenly she wanted the wood again. The pressure of the stares encircling her was great; it was too loud in the room, and the Hound was somehow frightening to her, in some way different, not contained. He looked down at her for a while and then rose, slow and scraping hauberk against the table plank, and walked to the kitchen. She looked after him and saw the stares all at her, bright hungry glances. One big man her father's age grinned right through the dirt on her cheek, right through the cloak; he licked slowly at his lower lip, and she put her eyes to the spoon and kept them there. Then the Hound was walking back and the stares turned away like doors closing, a wave of doors closing quick as he passed, and she was sad, then, for the cut-lip girl.
He pulled her up, not ungentle, and they went outside to where the raggy boys were circling the packed black horse. The Hound waved at them again and they scattered like little arrows back to the brush. He unpacked the horse, pulled down the bucket of feed from the ledge and dumped some in the trough, and looked at the girl. She nodded, acquiescing, and took her bag from him and rubbed at the dirt on her cheek with her sticky palm. She was full, she was tired. They walked back in. The cut-lip girl frowned at their bags and then motioned to the kitchen.
The kitchen was a bustle of steams and smells and shouting girls whipping at eggs; they all gazed at Sansa with a greedy curiosity. It felt much the same as the stares of the men, and with the same fierce hunger, but Sansa didn't mind it at all. It was for her pretty dress and cloak.
In the center of the kitchen stood the innkeeper's wife, and the bustle revolved around her. She was a tiny creature with a dried-apple face and heavy skirts, and she clicked her mouth at the coin the Hound had passed over with a worldliness. The Hound laughed at that, shrugged the bags higher on his shoulder, tapped his wrist against Sansa's arm. The little wife squinted and swayed, looking up at the Hound in the kitchen firelight, tall against the rafters, then dropped her head and looked at Sansa, a bright glare coming from the puckered face. Her pupils blew, taking in the girl, and Sansa felt a gust of nakedness before them. They're looking for us and she's heard; she knows, can't be helped, it's already over. There was nothing but recognition in those old eyes, recognition and terrible pity. Sansa's mouth trembled and the little wife sucked in her own lower lip, a mirror image, and turned abrupt, fumbling in the oversmock for keys.
She walked back through the crooked sill and they followed her through a maze of stooped halls and doors, Sansa's step dwarfed by the clanking of the man behind her, the clanking dwarfed by the pounding in her ears. The halls were narrow, the doorway dark that the apple-woman's key opened. The Hound walked in before them and was kicking over the straw in the corner of the room when Sansa felt a claw grip on her wrist and looked down at the little dry hand with its copper ring– she was pulling Sansa down so she could hear the whisper. "If you can't abide it, I've work here. Come to the kitchen'n the night and Geof'll hide you proper til th' big man's gone." Sansa stared into the tiny face in the half-dark, saw the expression in the eyes. The whisper hoarsened. "I've been a girl once, 'tis a sorry thing, what men does t'us." Then the claw relinquished its hold and she was hobbling away in her smocked skirts back down the hall to the kitchen.
As she watched after her, Sansa saw that the recognition had been merely empathy, merely memory. She was relieved, but quick behind that relief was a vast gratitude: the apple-woman and her brisk assurance, her misplaced pity, was nothing if not the Nan of her childhood and of home. She thought on the bravery of the offer for a while, then turned to her companion.
"What a shit this is," he said, surveying the sloping room, grey rugs on a pile of what was more hay than rush. There was one bubbled glass, two hands-breadths wide, in a sill that afforded a view of the kitchen's back walls and the dark sty beyond. A little hearth blew low and smoky in the corner, but in the other corner there was a short wooden tub, beyond all expectation, steaming heavily, a gift of the gods. He noted her. "I'm going to drink, I'll come back late. You'll not go out to the hall, they've seen enough of you to last them." She nodded absently, her attention consumed, and he grinned lopsided sharp at her. "Lady of the North, and her castle," a brush of hand indicated the straw bed, "and her guard–" then himself, the grin deepening, and then to the window, out to the sty, "and all the court." She shook her head, dismissing it, and he locked her in and left.
The bath was what it was, a bath, the simplest and best thing in the world. She dozed in it for a while, sang to herself, examined her wet hair in the low light. He didn't return. She washed her dresses in it, after, and the soapy water went black. She put her wet dresses by the fire and then lay by the fire herself with her hair splayed to dry, comfortable and alone, listening to the shouts and clatters from the hall. When she woke and dragged herself to the bed she was dry and warm, the hay grassy-sweet; she slept so deep he had to shake her to bring her back.
"Up, up now," pulling at her shoulders, "get up, get your bag. Up." He had his fingers deep in her arm; hot wine smell. He was weaving, slurring, his hair falling over her, and she felt as if a great toy had been wound again and she was back in her keep on the green night, before all of the wood. She protested but he kept shaking her, was cursing, and she crawled out of the bed, scooped her damp dresses into her bag, tied her slippers on and followed him down the hall. She kept her eyes on his back through the empty hall, did not look down at herself, did not see the bloodstains on her sleeves where he'd held them; and then they were through the door and back into the night again.
It was late night with only a pale moon and so the Hound packed in the dark, hurriedly and clumsily, pulling the bag from her hand rough, speaking to the horse rough. He set her on the horse, fingers pinching, and then stumbled as he tried for the stirrup, stumbled against the horse; the horse tossed its great head back at him, snapping at the air, eyes rolling in rage. Sansa's heart caught, but he laughed, smacked the flank hard with a palm and tried again, was heavily behind her then, and kicked. They flew back up the road, bags rolling, her ribs clacking together.
The Road was wide and deserted, looked a long river before them in the watery moonlight. She felt as though eyes were watching them from the gutters and shuddered when she realized it was likely true. They rode far, slowed after a time; the thighs behind hers tensed the horse off the road and to the gutter and they picked back into the wood.
How different it is to ride in the wood at late night: the slow step of the horse, the silence passing through the blue stands. One feels as a ghost at first, unworldly and removed, and then a synchronicity takes place between the rider and the wood itself. If they are unwary and allow it to enter, the rider will then feel the brush of exultation that it is to be a hunter in the night, and they will feel against their throat the breath of the oldest god; it is beautiful, and it is so, so cold.
It is a very dark thing that men pray to, when they pray in the wood. Sansa felt the breath without understanding it and thought, mistakenly, that it was the wood that had changed.
The Hound was swaying in the saddle behind her; she feared the horse and so she reached up the arm under the hauberk and pinched at him to keep him awake. He laughed and rested his chin at the back of her head for a moment, slurred, "I'm drunk, not dying, little bird; I've fallen off this horse a hundred times. He'll come back." She kept pinching him every time she felt him begin to dip, and he laughed every time.
And then they were far enough in the dense wood again, and the moon was beginning to fade. There was a tiny clearing, more just a break in the underbrush, and the Hound had had enough and so he stalled the horse, and to her shock nearly fell from it as he'd said, and unpacked it, throwing the bags down. He laid on the bare ground like an animal, laughing raspy when she gave him his pallet, but then he rolled onto it anyway and put his arm over his eyes. She was left in the dark, uncertain, the horse looming by her like a black ship, the man at her feet. She had very little choice; she laid her pallet out beside his and curled into it and listened to the soft sounds of the wood.
She lay and worried on why they'd had to leave; if they'd been seen for who they were or simply that he was drunk and was tired of the inn. She sighed in the dark and turned on her side away from him and then she heard him shifting, felt him rise back out of his cesspool. He moved, rose on his arm. The warm breath crossing above her told her that he was leaning half over her. He lay that way for a long minute and then shifted, pulling her hair back from her neck; she felt it caught, tangled, in his fingers. His knuckles dropped against her, clumsy with drunkenness. She felt him lean close, his breath laced with wine. Her heartbeat rose in her chest; she pressed her eyes shut and prepared herself for the kiss that childhood tales dole out as reward for beauty and good behavior.
He rested his face on the back of her neck, heavy, opened his mouth wide. She felt his lips slide back from his teeth, felt him lying openmouthed, teeth against her neck, behind her, and she waited, shivering.
Then he bit her. A good bite, solid and meaning it, jaw tensing like he was biting into an apple. He hung there a few seconds with her throat in his mouth, her eyes open wide in the dark, and then pulled away slow, his teeth dragging her. Her heart had stopped; there was nothing in her chest, no beat, nothing at all. He hung over her, drew the back of his hand over the place he'd bit and wiped away the wetness. A thousand years passed. She felt him roll back over, felt him settle. His breathing slowed. The arm against her back twitched as he dropped into sleep.
She didn't know anything, couldn't know anything; eventually, she slept; the woods around them crackled and hummed with early morning, as they do.