She woke in the early blue dawn to the sound of him gagging in his sleep.
He sat up quick, retching, and she rolled hurriedly from him. He laughed at her, coughing, patting her shoulder with one hand and holding his chest with the other, and rose to walk shaking out into the brush. She heard him coughing up what he could of the wine, heard him walking back spitting and snorting, and then he sat beside her again and she looked at him in the early light. He was pale, grey eyes tearing, and grinning. He had a spray of dried rust up his tunic, up his throat, up his good cheek. She couldn't think of a thing to say to him, and it was just as well. He gave her another pat, rough, stretched out with his arms above his head and was asleep again, quick as that.
She sat and watched the rise and fall of his chest and bit at her knuckle and thought on what had been done to her– the bite, and the breath she had felt in the wood. The bite had shown her something interesting, but it was the breath that had turned her. Her septa's crackly voice came from far in memory. "Don't ever–Sansa, listen to me now, please, put that down. Sansa, you must never go to the wood alone. I know that, dear, but listen. If you did ever disobey–you are a good girl, I know that. If you ever did, and saw some men, I want you to promise me that you would run and hide from them. Thank you. Because, dear, that's why." And then the memory trickled away, and then to replace it a dark flash of a tarred head on a pole, pushed away fast. And she looked through the break in the treetops above her to the pale unclouded sky. I know, now, about the wood, and what it does. Her sister had loved it, Robb, he too; Bran, always climbing, never keeping his promise, obeying only the wood, called away into it–but she, no, and then… Had not she felt that breath, last night; hadn't she felt the wood, whispering cold and sweet?
She looked over at the man and saw the blood, and saw the beast; the thing turned in her again. This great black rider, sick now and pale in the dawn, had hidden in her bed once to overpower and then to chew away. That's why the dagger. That was for the song, and she knew the song now; she'd heard it singing itself in the stranger as he'd ground himself against her. And yet– and here was the thing, biting her knuckle, squinting at him; somehow, she'd won and the Hound had broken apart and had given a vow instead of what he'd meant to give, and had wept. So, then, may the rider and the man exist together. Not just in him, perhaps in all men, perhaps all–perhaps herself, at one time, in one way. And then she was running again down the steps and telling Cersei in gasps what her father meant to do.
The changeling blinking in the sun with tears all down her face was nothing, at that moment, if not a woman.
The man woke late in the warm sun, coughing and rubbing his throat, but she was not there; she was picking her way through the wood around him in a wide circle, looking at things. She heard his cough and came back, walking slowly, saw the naked relief in his eye as she stepped into the clearing. He beckoned and held a bag out to her. It was filled heavy with lumps wrapped in cheesecloth. She pulled one apart and smiled at it and then sat next to him and ate the sticky fig-honey bread and felt the warm sun on her shoulders. It was some time before they spoke.
"Whose blood was it? Did they die?" She thought of the big man who had licked his lips at her and felt a childish vengeance.
"I don't know who he was but he knew me, all the same. Yes, he did die, of course." The Hound turned his face away from the sweet smell of her bread, swallowing rapidly.
"How are you sure that he knew you? Did he accuse you? What did he say?" She moved away from him to finish her meal, a small pity.
"He didn't say a thing. He didn't have to. He wouldn't look at me."
"Don't most people not look at you?"
He laughed, a bark cut short by the threat of a gag. "No." His red eye at her was appreciative. "No, little bird. Most people stare, and long, too. Only people with something to hide don't look." His mouth twitched. Is it from the burn that he does that? Maybe it's the effort of not saying all that he's thinking.
"I didn't look, at first. Until you yelled."
"Perhaps you have something to hide." He was grinning his lopsided grin at her, his jaw all sharp and wolfish. She thought of her many sins: they were nothing, a droplet, compared to his. It came to her then, to her discomfiture, that he most likely thought none of his sins as sins, merely as actions. Clearly they are sins, she thought piously, poor man.
"Do you think the word will get back, even though that man died?" She'd finished her bread and was licking the honey from her knuckles.
The Hound sighed, rubbed his hands over his eyes and then pressed them at his temples. "Could be. But it doesn't matter. We've already gone and the price was a small one. Did you enjoy your bath?"
She was stunned then at the gift, and at its price. And at his scales, which although far different from hers, were yet as cold.
He rose with difficulty and walked into the brush. When he returned he had a straight pole in his hand that he'd hacked down, and he sat next to her to whittle down the end, and she found herself too shy of him to speak of the bite. And so then eventually he rose, looking down at her with the crude spear in his hand, and she looked up at him and saw his very black outline in the nimbus of sun, and he said, "I feel like shit and I don't want to ride. I'm going to the creek; you can come with me or you can stay by the horse." And he walked away, then, leaving the bright sun still in her eye.
When a boy first engages in hunting, he will at one point find himself stumbling against prey that has been standing silent before him and watching him expectantly. He will look at the thing, shocked, and then the prey will step back into the woods and be gone. It is a frustrating, if elegant, thing to happen, and it happens constantly when one hunts. Later, as he ages, the hunter will understand that the prey is seduced a bit by its fear and its curiosity, and that it will dog the hunter simply because it must. And the hunter will use this to his benefit; he will let his steps carry, he will wave his hand before he fires, he will let himself show. How it is that the hunter is pleased by the fear is obvious; how it is that the prey, too, loves the fear, and is lured slow to its destruction, is unknown. The weakness in the well was a bright and glittering thing, wasn't it? How terribly interesting, that glitter; it was certain to be more interesting, the closer one got. She found herself rising to follow the Hound as he walked through the brush with his spear.
It is in this way that the beast is allowed the company of man: by simply wearing his clothes, but always keeping the furred coat bristling underneath, and occasionally letting it show.