When they had come through the doorway of the mill and were again in the tall ferns of the creekbed, the Hound bent to set her on her feet, but instead she clenched her arm tight around his neck. He sighed and carried her back down the slope through the reeds to where the horse waited.
He walked slowly and lowered her down slowly, and let her test her legs. By then the loud roar in her ears had faded and her vision was whole again instead of the small dim circle it had been, and she could stand. And she stood, wavering, with her hand on his shoulder.
She didn't want to cry; she'd seen a terrible, desperately unfair trap with a terrible poor thing caught in it, and it was not crying she felt like. She stood and looked at the mill. It hadn't been sad, it had been…
Once a short, quiet man with no teeth had come and her father had bought two new dogs from him. Hunting dogs, red ones, and they were sleek, with wet brown eyes and had licked her hands. But when they'd been let into the kennel, they'd fought wildly with the others, and she'd watched as the crazed, roaring ball of snarls and limbs had rolled around the kennelyard. That was what she felt like doing. She could feel the ball of snarls tumbling up her throat. They had a metallic taste and a strength behind them and she knew, suddenly and perfectly, why the Hound had been shaking when he'd walked up to the men in the clearing. Anger gave her vision an odd clarity. She stared wordlessly at the grey eyes, and he stared back, and an understanding hummed between them.
"A bad thing, that," he said, simply, and brushed his knuckle against her trembling jaw.
She leaned against the knuckle. There had been something wrong with the face in the mill, something beyond her experience. The boy was dead, but it was not simply death that she'd seen; the boy was of the wood, but his face had been nothing natural. Something had touched him, something unlike a beast, something unlike the men in the clearing; something that lives on pain. In the boy's torn mouth had been a tunnel, deepest black, and far in the tunnel was another face looking back at her.
"Who did it?"
He shook his head. "Someone that… well, someone that had left when they heard us. How much of that thing did you see?"
She looked at him, looked away for a moment while she decided, and then took his eyes again and said, "His hand."
The man sighed, and nodded, and turned his gaze back towards the mill, watching, squinting. She breathed. A monster hiding with a bowl of bread, everywhere; the world is full of traps. When will they stop hunting me, when will I stop being sold back and forth? How cruel, to be sold for only a bowl of bread… Sansa felt, alongside the anger, a fierce wave of gratitude, standing there in the reeds beside the man and his horse; there was the world, and she was still alive. How easy it'd have been to fall into the trap–take the bowl, hungry for the boon, never see the creature in the corner, not even know to look. Instead she was alive, and standing in the sun. She went on her toes and, stretching, pecked the cheek that was turned away from her; a peck delivered with all the clumsy solemnity of a child's kiss. The man, laughing at the kiss, patted at her; patting her shoulder he also turned it, and pushed her gently to face away from the mill.
He'd seen the ferns moving, over by the old wheel; something being dragged. He put her on the horse and led them away.
They rode. The sun slanted down. They stayed in silence 'til the creekbed, fed from underground, went to mud and the horse sunk in the silt and refused to walk. As she sat there, she felt them sinking down, all three of them, inch after inch, and it was the opposite of her dream, a black mirror; terrifying. She leaned forward to put her arms around the horse again and pushed her cheek into his warm dusty neck. The Hound snorted at her panic and dismounted, led the horse out to the solid ground at the bank. He looked up to her eyes then and saw the disquiet, and pulled her down, and sat beside her on the bank.
"Are you hungry?"
"No. Is this how the whole world is?"
He shrugged. "Most of it. Not all. Sometimes it only depends on where you stand."
That bothered her as much as when he'd said things make themselves about the painted rock; it was impossible. There was good, and bad; no matter where she stood, the boy in the bag was a bad thing, a thing so bad that she was surprised the world hadn't fallen down. The face, how it glowed in her mind. The mouth had been open; he had died with words still in his mouth, he had died calling out and nothing had come for him but a bag. Not only that–not only that; hadn't there been, as her eyes focused, for just a breath, another face? Like a dream, like a memory. She had been pulled back before she had seen it in full. There was a nagging feeling in her that, had she looked a moment longer, she would've heard a whisper in her ear–the Stranger, come to tell her the truth. She shuddered.
The man, with slow deliberation, moved to lean his arm against her, just enough that she was aware of it; she let him lean, and she looked at the line of mud where it had crept up the fetlocks of the horse. A sinking ship.
No, no, don't think that; Robb's fighting a war. I can fight, too, I can be as brave. I won't sink. The monster is back there, I'm here, I've gone so far. I'm too old now to be afraid. Still, the fear stayed fluttering in the core of her, and she was grateful for the solidity of his arm, and she pressed against it. They sat for a while, leaning, and let the horse graze away his balkiness, and then he lifted her back up and they rode in the gold afternoon, keeping to the dry side of the bank.
She wanted to keep riding and knew the want to be irrational. It stays in the mill, it's not following us. But there were so many more, all wearing different masks, and she felt safe up on her horse. Some time later, the Hound pulled to a stop in a break, she laid her hand on his arm and said, "Not here." He nodded against her crown. It was drawing into darkness, cobalt in the west, when he stopped again; she hadn't needed to explain herself.
He left her by the horse and went out to hunt, and she watched the stars. How beautiful, the way they slid out into the sky as it grew darker; first the brightest ones, now the wide blanket of glitter spreading out over her, dull ones, flickering ones, glowing fires. Her father, as clear and sharp as if he was beside her again with his beloved careworn face, telling her about them. She'd loved them because they were beautiful, she'd loved her father's voice, all the old stories that explained why they moved up there, so far away. They chase each other up there, just like people do, down here.
The Hound came back with one hare, rueful, and said, "Too dark," by way of apology. She'd not minded; her stomach was unsteady and she was more grateful for the fire and the man's rambling talk than for her small dinner. She watched his hooded eyelids as he turned the spit. His coughing in the smoke, his hand dropping into hers the greater portion, his slow crooked smile–it was all as familiar now as her home had been. She listened to the wind rolling through the high canopy.
It was after they ate and they were sitting across from the fire in their usual way that she put her chin on her knee, and looked at him. There was something that needed to be said; time was getting short.
"You killed a boy, too."
He looked up at her from his polishing and, mirroring her without thinking, sat his chin in his hand.
"Arya's friend. You know."
He nodded. "And you're thinking to yourself, now, that it may not be any different."
She stared at him. He nodded again and leaned back, crossed his arms over his chest; looked at her from the shadows made by the hollows of his eyes and gaunt cheek. He cleared his throat.
"When I was your age, I went out to war, I think I told you that. Fought, in a way, aside your own father, although I didn't give a shit about that. I was no older than you, I was a boy killing men. Then I became a man, and killed boys, and other men. Hundreds of them, probably; you know whose company you're in. I've not lied." He shifted. "But what was in the mill–what that is… Don't you see the difference?"
She nodded; she did see. Yes, yes, but do you? A monster hides in that mill, and he put the boy in the bag. A monster did that because that is all it loves, because it eats pain. You don't eat pain, you eat nothing at all, really, and I'm sorry for that. You're not a monster–but the boys die; how is that? She looked at the man across from her, really looked, and picked away at the knot. His brother eats pain. The Hound… he kills, but not for pain; for some other reason, to cover over some other thing, some helplessness. He decided he would fight it and he never stopped. She understood, dimly; she, too, felt the helplessness inside herself, and the urge to run away from it. The boy in the bag; she had seen inside his open mouth and knew it was a tunnel into a world below, and it was dark, dark, dark. Would her eyes someday get so tired of it all that they would fail to see the difference? Somewhere back there, slinking around the mill, was the thing that had done that to the boy, and it walked on two feet like a man, but it wasn't one. And no one had made the monster, it made itself–a mistake, godless; it was true: evil is real. She clenched her jaw. It didn't matter; she would grip hard on the gilt; if she had to she would put it in her mouth and swallow it. She would keep it.
She turned her eyes away from the tunnel and back to the Hound. He'd frightened her before, when she was young, but now she thought she saw how simple it all was. He had half of a face, and he was half a rider. He'd hidden in her bed, but he'd pulled the Stranger from her body; he'd had her make a net but then he'd let her open it. Too much ash had covered his armour, made it black; the problem was that he'd forgotten that it was only ash.
Sansa looked at him in his shadow. "You like killing. You told me."
"I do." He shrugged. "And I like being alive."
Confusing. But it's true. She made a decision then, because of the blackberries, and the bite, and her feeling for him, which was nameless but strong.
"You can't," she paused, girded herself; "be both, though."
"Be both of what? Alive, and kill others? That's the wheel the world turns on, and nowhere more than here," he spread a hand out to the wood, "and you know that. Piety's for shit."
"No," she shook her head at him. I know that. I don't mean about the killing, it's the hating; the wrong is in the hate. She sighed, and told him. "No. I meant–you can't be on both sides at once. You have to choose."
He laughed short and sharp; he opened his mouth and she knew he was going to mock her simplicity, but it was simple, and so she interrupted him. "You can't be yourself, and also–" it was awful, but couldn't be softened, "be like your brother."
His face went wooden and he turned it away, and he was silent for some time. When he turned back he was wretched. "I burned," he said, and his voice was unlike she'd ever heard it, the gravel bottoming out, shaking with it, raw. She looked in him and through him to the well, saw the shadow of the boy he'd once been and the desperate burden that it was. Yes, you burned, and you never knew how to put it out. Things make themselves, you said, but then somehow that scar made you. Oddly, this hurt her. He was done speaking after that; she didn't press. She rose and went to sit beside him, and leaned against him, and watched, through the small pocket in the canopy, the great and terrible wheel of stars.