The morning was as hazy silver and serene as the one before, but it had brought with it a change: as he woke, the girl still leaned against him.
He packed quietly and brushed away the evidence of their fire. Far in the corner of his eye was the peasant in the ferns, half-covered by a bustling black quilt of crows. Behind him was the sleeping girl lying on her side in her mound of blankets. Only a slice of her small face was visible, her mouth and chin, and they were glossy with dew. He could see the peasant's mouth as well; it was open and had a crow in it.
The war had, in the night, crept from its turmoil outside the wood and had come in cold and solleret-shod to find them. The peasant was part of it, wretched and inexorable. Soldiering in the service of the Lannisters had worn into him the lesson that atrocity must be expected and nothing can be saved. In time, he had agreed. Now, looking down at himself in the low mist, he saw the ripple in the weave of his tunic that the girl's fingers had left.
Care holds open a door for terrible pain, terrible fallibility. Understanding this, he had long ago passed over all care for himself to the chilled hands of the Stranger. He had asked nothing in return. Pulling taut the snag in the tunic, he recognized in himself a great dissension and the forgotten ache of care. This would not have so troubled a sound man; as it stood, he was deeply shaken.
He waved away the crows and woke the girl.
She lagged a bit, walking behind him over to the corpse in the bush, and when it was before her she stood with her hands clasped at her chest and looked at it with solemnity. Dried rivulets laced her neckline. Her lashes were clumped and her lids rosy and swollen; she did not blink.
"There. Now you know." Does she? It was not she that had asked anything of him. He'd asked only of himself, and there it lay, given freely. His vow and the sum of him; a man's head lying in the dirt, a loud circle of crows.
A small and absent nod, to the peasant rather than to him. She cut a glance at the head and he toed it to face her, and saw her eyes widen, and then in them a flash as he'd seen with Joffrey on the parapet, her jaw setting, the fine bow of her shoulders pulling back. He felt, disconcertingly, both satisfaction and a spear of shame at himself; her eyes met his and the thunderous gravity of her youth and all the weight of his actions were there in them. She turned away, back to the horse.
In the worn pouch at the dead man's hip were two coins, a length of twine, a poor dagger with a patchy hide sheath, a carrot; and, tucked with affection into a twist of woven hemp, a minuscule bit of bone. He shook it out into his palm and looked at it closely in the sun; it took some moments before he realized it was a babe's tooth.
The morning had run late. She ate her bread and an apple on the horse. He stalled at a stream so she could scrub away the blood. Her face shone pink with cold and her hairline was slick as she walked back up to him. Her eyes were watering. A missed smudge of rust capped one wet ear; he took his rag from his belt and wiped at it, his movements as slow and deliberate as one extending a hand to a wild creature chance-met. She allowed him, and kept her eyes at his, and when he was done said, "Thank you," in her soft composed voice.
In the saddle she was tense and silent. A discomfort hung between them. The line of her shoulders tapped occasionally at the spread of his ribs, and in them he felt her restiveness. After a long hour of it, nettled, he finally broke.
"You may as well have it out, whatever it is."
She tilted up and he saw the restiveness sitting plain in her eyes. "No one will know what that man did. No one will even see his body."
"That's true enough," he replied, thinking of the crows.
"I shouldn't be so glad that he's dead. I shouldn't be glad that anyone's dead, but sometimes I find that I am." Her voice had deepened with the weight of her emotion. "The gods know what he did, and that should be enough, shouldn't it?"
"I know what he did. And you saw what I did in return. What do the gods think of that?" He waved an overhanging strand of vine from his brow.
"I couldn't know," she said, distantly.
"Well spoken. Tell me, what would you have had me do?" The nettle brought more bite to the words than he intended.
Her eyes tilted up again and her lips parted, but she said nothing.
"Again well spoken, little bird. But there are no halfway killers."
They rode in silence for some time, the wood brightening into the full-gold halo of late morning and the high chattering chorus above them solidifying into a single dense song. The horse slowed in the narrow trail. The Hound, lost in the angry tangle of his thoughts, started when the girl sighed and leaned her shoulders back against him.
"I know that, and I know what I'd have you do." Her voice was even and calm, picking up the thread of their talk as though only moments had passed. "It's not that I'd prefer him alive. It's only that I don't want to find myself… rejoicing death. Anyone's death. Don't you see?"
For a bleak instant he did see; not only her character but the void separating them. The peasant's death had been a necessity and did not sting him, nor did the poignant bit of tooth in its hempen knot. He was stung instead in the dark of his core. Once, he had knelt before her and told her of the single death in which he would rejoice, and it was a truth that he could not rescind.
Nor, most bitterly, could he rescind his vow to her; with it he had ensured she watch him at his kills. They rode on. She leaned against him in silence, and the overwhelming quiet of the void lay in it.
Bright hours passed. The sunlight, now at a slant, was hot on his shoulders and because he was sore he was grateful for it, not minding the sweat at his nape. The girl had kept silent except for an occasional request for the water, but now, looking up from the nest of his curled arm, she patted at his hand on the rein. This was her chosen method of halting the horse and the informal grace of it, stacked alongside all of her other little dignities, continued to amuse him.
After setting her down, he walked out some depth into the bramble. The air at the ground was damp and cool and loam-scented. He pulled his wet hair to a knot and stretched, yawning; then, standing there shivering with his fingers laced high above his head and the last of the yawn hollowing out his chest, he felt the singular prickle of observation. He turned around. The bramble before him was a low unbroken grey-green wall, blank and empty. He looked up. The pines, too, were empty. He breathed shallowly for some moments, to only faraway birdcall. The prickle kept at his spine; he turned back through the bramble towards the girl.
A shard of crisp goose feather jutting up incongruously from the bracken at his feet caught his eye. He toed it from its soil bed. It was not a feather but fletching, still bound gummily to the cracked shaft of its arrow. He knelt to it. The shaft had been soaked black from the crack nearly to the fletching; the old blood crackled off in his palm. The missing length of shaft and the bodkin had crawled away with the body. He looked about him again to the dense wall of green. I'd not have heard it coming either. A faint rankness wafted up from the broken end. Where, then, would she go? He tossed away the arrow and made for the horse.
The girl was trailing around the grazing horse with her skirts in her hands, and turned at his approach. Her gleaming heart-shaped face, tilted to the side, seemed to him to show a flicker of relief, but he could think only of the arrow.