She pried after him a bit, but he chewed at his bone and frowned into the wood and was unwilling to speak. It was late, and cooling steadily; he beckoned to her, kicked out the fire. They went to their pallets with the night birds fluting all above them and soft steps and crackles about them. He laid heavily beside her, a solid black outline in the dark, and she lay and fingered through her hair and calculated the time. Twelve days, it had taken to cross the Neck, before with her father and sister– twelve, for only that. They were deep in the wood now and rode slow. She put her fists under her warm chin and thought.
The huntsman rose again in her mind before she slept. Those wide brown eyes had held an odd deference; to her young mind it was simple: she was beautiful, and good. The complexity of her power and of the world itself was as yet unknown to her, and so she rolled to her side and curled, and listened to the ragged breathing of the tall man and his horse, and soon dreamed.
A roaring sea woke her; there was, above her, a great howling– she blinked up into the sky and saw the wind whipping the treetops in circles, every leaf whistling, a great roar altogether, and she was cold. Never had she, after an argument with their implacable mother, stolen outside at night to sleep in a rage under a tree, as her brothers and sister had done; never had she run away, never had she heard the swoop of ice wind swing down from the high North, pushing at trees, scattering the loam and bramble, littering branches in waves to the ground. So she pressed her cold hands against the hard back beside her and shivered, and listened to the rushing roar, harsher than a flooding river.
The man snorted himself half-awake, muttered through his sleep. He rolled to his back and reached a hand into her pallet. She froze, felt him grab at her and then catch her thin cold hand, which he pulled into his pallet and stuffed unceremoniously into the warm pocket of his underarm. He grunted at the cold of it, and then rolled back into sleep.
She put her other hand under her own arm; the roar continued, but she slept through it.
He woke her before dawn. It was chill and sharp but the sky was calm. Sansa yawned and shivered crosslegged in her cloak in the near-dark, and he handed her bread and a cut of cheese and sat across from her to eat his. Steam shot in pennants down at them from the looming horse, a small fog. The sun rose. The early dawn showed the clearing awash in shrapnel from the storm. There was a ragged nest on its side by the ashes of their fire, peppered with down. "Hawk," the Hound said, toeing at it with interest, his head to the side. She saw, for a moment, his eyes glossed with engrossment, a shadow of immaturity as he inspected the thing. It was disconcerting; she looked away. In his absorption the gaunt face had smoothed and the scar that still held half his face tight seemed even more a mask.
They rode out as the morning blued into glow, and the cold burrowed sharp and stung at the place inside where her ears met her jaw. It was an echo of her home, and she was glad of it. The sun was higher and the chill dissipated somewhat when their yawning, rambling talk turned to her sister.
"You could have run, as she did. Wretched little wolf; I shouldn't worry about her, if I were you. Threw that sword right in the river, and no doubt it weighed more than she did." The raspy laugh behind her shook her shoulderblades.
"She ruined everything," the girl said, looking up, "it all started just then. She always–"
He snorted into her hair. "Ruined everything? Heavy burden to put on a girl no bigger than a weasel. No, little bird, it was all well ruined before."
"You killed her friend, that boy. You hunted him down and cut him up, they told me. My father even told me." The tall man above her nodded against her crown, equanimous, and she was quiet for a while, digesting this polarity. When she spoke again she was ripe with the haughtiness of youth. "That you would kill someone, especially someone that you don't know, just because Joffrey might want you to, or the Queen…" In her mind, as she spoke to him, grew a difficulty. Was it the Hound, really, who had killed the butcher's boy; was it Sansa, herself, by lying, was it the Queen? Perhaps it was all of their hands, slicing together. If Cersei hadn't asked, if he had denied– The tangling knot of human hands that is the true reality of tyranny was slowly becoming clearer; she faltered into silence.
"And you'll take flowers from a knight just the same, and be charmed. Let me tell you– let me tell you what those flowers are." The Hound was laughing, angry, shaking her with the bellows. The wood was dense and close, and they were occupied in their small argument; it was with this inattention that they stepped into a wide break in the brush and the pack of men, half-armoured and circled by gaunt horses, leapt up silent from around the ashes of the fire.