Chapter 34
He woke to her touch. She had pushed her way through the layers of blankets to curl around him and settled herself, warm and torpid, sharp knees pressing the backs of his thighs. He thought for a moment that he dreamt it, that his sleeping mind had winnowed out of itself a poultice for its solitude, and he was lying with his eyes open in the dark thinking this when he became aware of her humid breath seeping through the weave of his tunic. It was real. Her hands moved, grabbing it up in fistfuls, and her forehead was pressed between his shoulderblades. She twitched against him; she was dreaming. As she clung there he felt her breathing grow calm. Her fists relaxed, but his tunic was still balled in her hands and her forehead still rested against him. He allowed himself to feel her grip and to drop for a moment into its boundless intimacy, and then he laughed at himself and drew himself out again. She was not holding him but his heart; she had pressed herself between his shoulders for the comfort of its beat sounding in her dreams.
He pulled the blankets tighter around them. The wind sounding high in the trees was as soothing as it had been in his early childhood. For a time he listened to his own heart, as she was, then slept deep. His dreams were pleasant, scattered, weightless; his dog barking behind the gate, the armourer laying a knotted string across his shoulders, the bright rutted path in the field that led down to the mill, with tall dry stalks waving on either side.
Footsteps jerked him awake. A heavy fog sat over the clearing, and when he opened his eyes he had for a startled moment the sensation of being underwater; he was standing with sword in hand before he saw clearly. It was a boy, spindly, about the girl's age, raking through the ash. The boy had a cast in one eye and stood shaking before him, the eye flickering. The Hound sighed and waved him away and the boy crashed back to the wood, bounding like a hare. He looked down. The girl was sitting up in her pile of bedding, her hand at his ankle.
"What was he doing in the fire?" She was looking at the empty break the boy had run through. There was bewilderment and compassion in her voice.
"I doubt he knows. Looking for anything he could find. Probably thought there'd be scraps left. More than not, he'd been watching us through the night."
"Where are the rest of his people?" Her voice tapered away as she asked, and her face became solemn. He lay back. The girl looked down at him for a moment, then back to the ashes of the fire. In the blue fog she looked small and ghostly sitting there, shoulders hunched, her hair damp and sleek against her head. He watched her through half-closed eyes and thought about the boy, who, if he managed to live, would become part of that silent clan of men that roam the wood and bear allegiance to no other. The late king's rebellion had birthed hundreds; this new war had birthed hundreds more. On the outskirts of every village, the poorest families had their menfolk swept away to war and their women dissolved by sickness and strain. Overburdened neighbors closed their doors against the boys left behind, but the wood offered out its dark hand. Soon in the dense edges of the Kingsroad were boys too young for men's war, yet made old by the wood, by hunger; wilder and more treacherous than any beast.
The girl shifted and turned to lie down beside him. She rubbed her wet hair in her blanket and, thinking him asleep, leaned to press her damp cold face into his arm, for its heat. He was reminded for a moment of those girl children whose lives had been blown over by the Rebellion. While their brothers had crept away to the dark, these had been held tight by the villages; far too precious, there was no quiet wood for them. Only kitchens and sculleries and fields, and later in life the beds of their grasping benefactors, or of the sad and ruthless rustic brothels. War ate them as relentlessly as it did the young men left in stripped heaps in the battlefield, just slower. He had not thought much about it before. The girl shuddered against him and yawned. He felt her teeth brush his arm.
They slept late and woke, and ate and rode. It was late morning when the fog warmed and fell and broke into rain.
They took refuge in the lee of an overhang, and he taught the girl how to make a net. Her thin fingers wove the cord deftly through the knots. He listened to the rain beat down the ridge and the thin outraged cries of birds, the crash of falling branches, and the girl's soft breathing. He put his arm over his eyes and dozed. When the rain stopped, he sat up and found the girl sitting crosslegged at the edge of the outcropping, braiding her hair. She half-turned at the sound.
"I saw a fox run by, just now."
He nodded, handed her bag to her, and they crawled from their shelter.
The horse, wet and testy, knocked at him with his muzzle as he packed. He stopped and rubbed the cold silky face. The ears flattened, and he sighed, turning to the girl.
"Are you much wet?"
"No, my hair's dried. But my dress is, a little." She held her hands out to accept her cloak and stood beside him, frowning, small and composed, wrapped in the brown cloak. Her bang, tousled by drying, swept back towards her braid like a bright wispy coxcomb. He frowned back at her, mocking, pleased.
The leaves before them rustled; he reached down to grasp her wrist and said, "Hold still, now." She did, but her eyes went to his and then followed his gaze to her feet where a shining cord, patterned in black diamond spots, wound past. She jerked and he felt her pulse start up fast in his palm. "Don't mind it. It'll pass by."
She recoiled, squeezing shut her eyes, and he grinned at her and stepped forward to lay his toe gently behind the sleek diamond-shaped head. Her hand jumped in his; he let go and stooped to pick up the stilled cord. Its gleaming mouth was open, bright as a leaf, gaping impotently. He held the whipping body from him and turned to the girl.
"No, no." She shuddered back from his outstretched hand.
"He's caught, he can't hurt you. Have you ever looked at one this close?" The fangs, thin as hairs, were glazed with fluid. "See those drops? Look; this pattern means he's poisonous. Most aren't."
"Oh." He watched her face. She studied the snake with a mix of revulsion and curiosity. The curiosity won out; she leaned in to stare. "It's just like the book. Don't let it bite you. Oh, it smells awful, do you smell that?"
Her eyes were wide. He, still grinning, bent and loosed the viper towards the brush.
"I'd thought you were going to kill it..." Her voice, aimed to where the snake had disappeared, was uneven.
"No, they're shy, they don't often harm. Unless you step on them." He stopped, rubbing his hands across a dry clump of fern to rid them of the smell. "What book?"
"An old one in the library, at home. It tells all about the crannogmen, and has some paintings. It scared me when I was little." She went on in her soft voice while he packed, about the little wild crannogmen and their poisoned arrows, about Howland Reed and her father's fierce mutual loyalty. He noticed she kept half an eye at the brush. When she finished, he cut an apple and handed her half, and lifted her to the horse. She ate with relish. He settled behind her.
"They do the same in Dorne."
She tilted back to look up at him, chewing, grinning. "Eat frogs?"
He laughed. "Maybe so. But Dornishmen, too, catch snakes, and Dorne snakes are far deadlier. They milk the venom into little bottles to poison their spears. Seems the spears themselves aren't enough. A long and wretched way to die." He leaned to take the uneaten bit of core from her hand.
"I wonder why the gods made such creatures as snakes." Her voice had gentle disdain. "They're awful and they've no purpose, really."
He snorted, chewing. "Oh, they've a purpose. Everything here does; doesn't mean it's always a good one."
Drops rained from leaves and the wet bristles of the pines swept across them as they passed. It was quiet but for these. Ferns sprang back from the horse's legs and spattered droplets up at them, and the heavy after-storm smell poured up from the wet bracken. The girl leaned back against him, and the wide green tangle opened up below them down the ridge. In the low hazy distance, he could see the dozens of cut trails dark as tunnels, reaching out from the wood towards the Road.