She looked up at him from the moss and, smiling, took her gift, and then sat up and swung her feet and ate her blackberries. He fished a round of hard cheese from the bag and came to sit beside her, and, between bites, handed over slices of it from the flat of his knife. She alternated the berries with it, and blinked in the sun. It was brighter than usual, somehow, and the light was going straight through her eyes and sitting behind them.
"Do you have a headache, too?"
He answered her with his mouth full. "Every morning. Now you know." She nodded with solemnity at this adult tribulation, and he choked himself laughing. "Don't shake your head at me. You're as bad, you wouldn't wake and I gave up trying. It's later than I wanted." He shrugged, and chewed. "We can get half the day, maybe, if we stay the creek. We'll start earlier tomorrow. The days are getting shorter, can you tell?"
"No, the nights are longer, that's what happens. Because of winter." She frowned at him for being wrong, but he only laughed harder, and tearily agreed, and handed her another slice. She took it and ate and looked him over. His hair was damp and so was his tunic; it was the tunic he'd worn the morning before, but the slit had been crudely laced back together and the stain washed out somewhat. He was chewing and grinning at nothing, and squinting in the sun. She touched his shoulder.
"Where did you go, that you washed?"
He pointed with the knife to the slope of rushes to their left. "Past there, it's a spring, not much. And it's like ice, but should you want it," he stopped, and looked at her, frowning, "go now, and I'll wait." So she did, and while she was squatting in the icy trickle and shivering, she looked down in the clear sun at her thin body covered in prickles, and her skinny legs with their bruises and bites, and her pale halfway-grown chest with its bumps and its ribs and wondered at herself, that she should be alone and naked in the woods like this, and be not particularly afraid. Like any animal. How has this happened to me? She peered at her face in the water. There was sunburn across the bridge of her nose, and her hair was wild even in its braid. Her tummy felt hard; she pressed at it and tried to count how long it had been since she had bled from there. Like an animal, that, too, she thought, pressing; it's like the gods made us most of the way into people, and then forgot to finish some things. Such indignity. She rose and gingerly stepped out, shivering, and dried herself. There was a moment after she stepped onto the dry sand and before she had her dress on again, when, had there been anyone to see her standing there pale and wild-haired and feral, they would've ducked away, frightened by the wood-queen. But there was no one, only birds, and then her dress was on and she was humming her way back up the slope, glad that her headache was going, and glad that she'd had a bath.
In her absence the Hound had woken the horse from his doze and packed him, and he nodded at her clean, sun-reddened face and lifted her up, and they began again through the tunnel.
Beautiful, beautiful in the creekbed. Wetter now; there were more birds, and ferns. The horse walked slowly, taking his time through the reeds. She felt warmer towards him after her dream, and the rhythm of his steps comforted her. How odd, that this ambling creature was also the beast that had crushed men as it carried her through the Iron Gate. Her dream–how is it that she had ridden with Them, when she was not one? And she wasn't one, she was certain of that. The men in the clearing had tried to scratch away the gilt arms from their shields, from their plate, and now she knew why. She'd thought hard about that glint, and the bitterness she'd felt before had melted away. The gilt– All the courtesies I was taught, all the songs of chivalry-so brittle, but not worthless, I was wrong. They stand for the best part of men, even though men fail them. The gilt is important and needs to be fought for, even if you lose. She'd seen the black riders so clearly in her dreams. Black armour, black mounts, and when she'd looked behind each helm–black beyond black, darkness and unfathomable void. Not a single glimmer, not one brushstroke of light, just nothing at all. No cause, no hope; they ride endlessly with no banners, with empty shields. The gilt- how brave to wear it in spite of the black wave advancing, in spite of the horses roaring in on their sea; to stand and wear the gilt anyway, as you were being crushed. Perhaps the only thing that keeps you from becoming a rider is the gilt.
With these thoughts she had forged herself a dagger, very rare and very very sharp, but she was unaware of it; later on, she would kill with it, equally unaware.
Hours passed, and the sun was in its full slanting glow, a hundred thousand spears of dusty gold shooting through the trees at them. They talked lazily, and the Hound, yawning behind her, scratched at his scarred throat. The little rasp-rasp was close in her ear. Does it itch? She only had one; it was on her knee from when she'd fallen on the stair because of Arya, and she hated it, but he was a man. Lots of men have scars; it shows that they've been brave. It's not really the scar he's so angry about. If it came from war, he'd brag about it the way he brags about being strong. No, not the scar–he's angry because his brother is a monster and no one cares. She thought about how he'd knelt before her in the field, and how naked his eyes had been when he told her about the toy knight. It was clear in her mind; scared all the while, he'd said. Why did he want to tell me about it? Was it so that I would understand about Joff? She shook her head to herself, and she felt the Hound's chin brush against her hair as he looked down. "What?"
"Nothing, nothing," she said, distracted. No, it was because he had no one else to tell. She couldn't admit yet, out loud, how she'd run down the steps to Cersei; but the memory crawled in circles in the very bottom of her mind, scraped around with its claws. Saying it will let it out and I'll feel better, but I can't say it, because then I will hear it aloud and Father might too, wherever he is. She sighed. The Hound told me for comfort, so that it'd stop scraping him. I wonder if it worked. She leaned and stroked the horse, absently, and watched the wood slide by. The bed had shallowed out and they were higher, now, only a little lower than the forest floor.
She felt the Hound's breath catch and looked over, followed his gaze. Parallel to them and up the slope rose an old stone wall, overgrown with vine, and behind it in the distance jutted a great wheel, also overgrown, its rotting planks stilled and wreathed in moss and vine. She felt him breathe out hard, the bellows jolting her, and tense, and then the horse was scrambling up quick out of the bed, and they looked past the wall..
The creek had forked at one point in the past, and here lay a second bed, parallel, just as deep, but now dried and crowded full with waving rushes and ferns, and at its side was a dark, hulking stone building. It was conical and the thatch, long fallen away, made it open at the top; it looked to her a sunken castle so long in the mud that only the tower could be seen, but it was a watermill, and it was very, very old.
The Hound, unspeaking, tied the horse and lifted her down; glowing in his eyes was the same faraway boyishness as he'd had with the nest. He picked up a stick and beckoned to her, and together they went to the mill.
Rabbits bounded from their steps; jays, glossy blue and angry, followed them shouting. He walked in front to part the way, swinging the stick, and she dawdled behind with her skirts and hummed. The trees fencing each side of the bed were tall and lovely and ancient, a double row with their sky canopy blooming in late-summer deep green. She looked at the coats of velvet moss reaching high up the bark and stopped for a moment, staring at the moss, and dropped her skirts, and clasped her hands behind her back. The Hound heard the pause and turned around. She looked at him standing tall and dark against the reeds, and she chose again, and picked up her skirts and followed.
Seen close, it was a mountain of vine and beautiful, and quiet as a hidden tomb. She followed the Hound up the steps. The door was gone, had fallen ages ago to a mound of pulpy shards in the sill. She passed the archway; it was lovely. The open roof let in an enormous dazzling column of gold that shot all way down through the circular hole that had rotted out in the center of the planking floor that they were standing on, and to the very bottom of the mill, a story below. She peered down through the hole; she could see a dirt floor at the bottom, and a smaller room with things–sacks, it looked like, piles of old sacking. Birds and dust were swirling in the column of gold. Stone steps, hugging the wall, led down; they looked crumbly, and were heaped with rotted thatch. The Hound tested them gingerly, and then nodded at her, and she followed him down.
Then they were in the bottom of the wheelhouse and he was climbing around the scraps of oak scaffold that had once worked the wheel and was talking to himself, and was oblivious to her, and so she left him to himself and wandered through a small archway to where she had glimpsed the sacking. It was darker there; the column of gold glow that came from the open roof only barely touched the room. She stood in the center and waited for her eyes to clear in the dim. One circular window, long glassless, gave on the waving reeds outside; they were a few steps below ground level. The floor was ancient damp packed clay, shiny in the middle, but mossy in the corners with the fine grey velvet moss of an undercroft, and there were the musty bags piled up against the wall in a great heap, and on the floor near them, a yellow bowl with crumbs in it. How odd; here, like a child's bowl, but no one lives here, and yet it has crumbs, breadcrumbs. Little yellow bowl, bright spot against the grey, like a festival prize. She looked at the bowl and stepped forward, bent to it.
She had just picked it up when, leaning forward, she saw from the corner of her eye the hand extending from the largest bag. A boy's hand, fresh and young like hers, but with the fingernails all torn and broken back. She dropped the bowl, but her empty hand hung there, hung there–because she could see clearly now in the dim, and the hand in the bag hung still as well, and the arm, and down below the arm, there in the dark of the bag, was the face–and the face…
Then there were hard hands around her ribs. The Hound was pulling her against him and she was choking, pointing, trying to tell him, but the words wouldn't come. And then he was bending against her, and she was caught in the curl of his body; his hand went behind her knees and he lifted her up, muttering something, and held her against his chest. She put her arms around his neck and hid her eyes tight against the scarred throat, and he carried her back up the stairs, two at a time.