The flock of crows and the arrow had cast a pall over him that lasted through his evening and now through his quiet hunt. Afterward he set his prize just outside the circle of clearing. He sat by himself in the dark wood, watching the tall shadows of the girl through the low-lit cracks in the palisade, and chewed on the tumult that had spat up from the well of him since he had taken her. She stood by the horse, hugging herself, looking at the sky. At the sight of her, he regretted his parting words and the impulse which had pressed his scar against her cheek. It was unnecessary, clumsy. She knew well what to expect and that was evident in her fierce courtesy, itself a refusal. He scooped up the velvety pile of doves and went to her.
She ducked at the crack of a branch, eyes wide at him, startled by his approach. He was brought back to the first time she'd looked up at him. She was beside her sister, standing gowned for reception before the severe stonework of her home. The blue, arrested, had been swallowed up for a breath, pupils blowing in her shock; then she'd remembered herself, looked away, dipped gravely to the riders behind them each in turn. Later, he had watched her be presented to the crown prince.
She had held herself poised and had lowered her eyes before Joffrey's, but her back had straightened, dropping deep the hollows of her collarbone. She was perfect in her expectation. He could see clearly that moment in memory, the girl's tremendous innocence, the prince's half-smile, all lazy appraisal; the flutter of her lowering eyes.
Her eyes had lowered at himself as well, in avoidance. He had taken advantage of the demurral and spent some time looking at her; at her bearing, at the smooth haughty line of her throat. Now he again inspected her, contoured as she was by the small fire, undiminished by the raw wild of her backdrop. Shadow pooled in those hollows at her collarbone.
He rubbed his brow with the back of his hand and began twisting at wings. Clumps of soot-grey feathers blew out from the splitting birds and, whipped up by the low breeze, swirled around them. The girl watched for a moment with distaste and turned her back on him, and he laughed into his work. Her steps crackled out into the wood and he looked up to see her in the leaves, facing away, small and patient and disapproving. "Hide, then, and I'll eat them myself," he called. She turned her head slightly and, seeing the doves tucked in their bark nests, came slowly back to him out of the brush.
They talked of her mother, then of the war raging outside the wood. He found in the girl a reluctance to speak of Stannis, and he recognized in that reluctance a struggling hope for her brother. He listened to her scattered thoughts as they slowly warmed into confidences. She drew closer to him, but her gaze stayed at the fire. The tousled crown of her head caught the light in glowing filaments; her unwashed hair had reclaimed its wave there in a roughed halo. The warm musky smell of it carried to him. Her voice softened. "I did think about what it would be like, myself as Queen. I thought about what I'd do... how my days would be, what I'd do and say." She snaked a look at him under her lashes. "I had supposed you'd laugh."
He shook his head slightly. The girl frowned at a fray in her wrist. "I made up a song for myself and Joffrey. Really I made it up only partway; it went much like the song of Queen Naerys and the Dragonknight, in truth." This last came tempered with a rueful smile. He looked at the girl sharply, but the smile was only at herself and for the child she'd been. And still was; he knew the song well himself. Cersei had called often for it after dinners, and her lovely wine-blushed lips would whisper along through certain lines. Her twin had only laughed and Robert had only drunk, and she had clapped with wry glee at the end every time. "I never told Joff, of course. But I made up others, too." Again a darting glance. Her voice lowered, confessional. "About my reign. I thought out how I'd behave, how they'd all love me, receive me gladly."
He inclined his head and tapped at a bark pocket with a twig. A small thread of steam escaped. There was a tinge of desolation in her voice; he steered her from it. "Tell me what you heard in Maegor's."
"Only that they were ramming King's Gate, and the Mud Gate had fallen. When I left the ballroom, Joffrey was at the castle gatehouse, but the Queen had sent for him. She walked out and left all the women just standing there, and Moon Boy was singing." Her eyes were straight at him, glowing their peculiar early-morning blue. "I wonder what songs they've since made of Cersei. Don't you wonder, too? I might hear them when I get to Winterfell. Do you think time," she was tugging a thread from the sleeve and her top lip dragged up a bit from her teeth with the word, "could make those songs sweeter?" The lip, a little curled, tipped the grin to wolfish. He grinned back at her, and thought of Queen Naerys.
The skirmish which left his lowly ancestor hobbling and cursing his slow way over the grounds also left him a towerhouse, the boon which raised the Cleganes to prosperity. This sudden respectability did nothing to diminish the acerbic wit common to the line; the Hound had his share and made little effort to tamp it. What he did hide was that source from which it sprung, a streak of inventiveness which slipped out occasionally in his speech. Now, sitting across from her in the glowing near-dark, the streak asserted itself.
"Some men have this said of them, that they were born to wear a crown. I know I heard that of Lord Tywin often enough. But Cersei was born with a crown. Not so anyone could see, mind, but I'd wager if you shook her hard enough you'd hear it rattle."
The girl had stopped pulling at the fray and was staring at him, the slant of her lip puckering the way it did when she found something to be amusing which her politeness disallowed. He felt his own grin pulling tight the numbed side of his mouth.
"Did you ever try?" And she was laughing at him, her soft inoffensive laugh. "I don't suppose you did. You do have your head." She fanned out her skirt. "How beastly it was that I still would have been wed to Joff. I was very nearly a Lannister. It made me sick to think on, but the queen assured it, even at the end."
"Nearly so. She would've, or else Lord Tywin. Gratification's like a flame in the Lannisters. In most of them it's a candle, and you see it flicker when they've almost got their hand on what they want." A shadow ran across his mind: the little lord's sharp mismatched gaze needling up at him. He brushed it away. "In Cersei it was never only a candle, or even a torch." He looked away from the girl's face, remembering. "It was her whole self afire." The girl looked up at him, tapping her finger on the toe of her slipper.
"Can you guess the last words I heard her say?" He shook his head. She drew her shoulders back and tilted down her chin, dropped her voice into the low tone of the Queen's, and now it was the shadow of Cersei that appeared before his eyes. "'Get out of my way'."
The Hound laughed, leaning back on his palms. She took this tribute with a half-smile, but her brow had darkened. "She'd told me, just before, that she'd not suffer Stannis' judgment. Nor, I suppose, mine. So she had Ser Ilyn waiting in the corner for us both... But when the news came, she never even looked at me, she just walked out." Her fingers dropped back to the fray. "At first, I thought she'd decided to spare me, then I realized she'd just forgotten me." A sliver of batting fell to the loam. "When I first saw her, she looked so lovely, like what I'd always thought a queen to be."
He rubbed the smoke from his eye with the heel of his hand. "Might be you didn't look hard enough. And maybe you'd not heard, up there in the North, that the throne is only for the ruthless. As is power."
She frowned. He turned to the fire and the doves in their pockets of bark. He licked a thumb and pulled them out, waved the steam away and broke apart the fragile husks. She extended a doubtful hand for hers.
"Don't make that face. Here, hold it like this. Try it." She did, and he laughed, watching her as she tasted it and forgot herself. They ate in happy single-mindedness, the wood creaking and chattering away around them.
In the quiet at the end of their meal, he could feel the girl's eye lingering on him. His scars faced her. He waited through the long moment, but her gaze hung, and he was discomfited.
In a certain way, the years of averted eyes had formed him. That spark of primal disfavor the scar brought out in his fellow man had both salted his wound and bound it, for he had also found its use. Men feared him. Considered flawed by first glance, he had stopped trying to prove himself as otherwise, and his armour had held up well through the years. What unsettled him now was the girl's artless stare, clattering as it did at his breastplate and resounding through the hollow beneath.
He had demanded often that she look at him, he recalled; demanded her attention, all of it; extracted an unnameable thrill from it. This was different. Unasked, she was casually looking at him, same as she might anyone. It was at once disconcerting and gratifying.
"Get used to anything if you look enough. Don't mind it much, then?"
She shook her head as she finished chewing and said with nonchalance, "I did mind, before, but it went away." She wiped daintily at her chin and looked steadily at him. He held her eye as long as he was able; then, wholly agitated, he rose and left the small source of his vexation sitting there quietly by the fire.