Chapter 36
The thread between them repaired itself by necessity over three quiet, clear days of riding. She hummed sleepily in the early mornings, breaking into fragments of song while she picked leaves from her braid. The bright childishness of her voice was dissolving to a lower timbre and her singing trailed to him as he revolved through his morning work, candid, unmodulated, entirely private. In its way, this was an acceptance. In another way, it was an assertion. He looked over occasionally through the fog to catch her face unguarded, consumed with song. Her armour was left aside and he believed that he had succeeded. They talked to each other through the evenings while he baked fish and afterward through the fires, and into the night.
A windstorm came on the night of the third day, a breath of autumn not cold but strong, and he watched the little bird see for the first time in her life a northern storm hit a southern forest. It shocked her, he realized; not the ferocity, as her childhood must have been one constant scouring wind, but the impact. He'd seen for himself the spare and elegant North wood bend without complaint to the high ice winds, the needles letting a storm weave through them as they had for a hundred thousand cold years. But here in the South the wood was lush and the canopy a lace of broad flat green jostling for sun. Now the canopy screamed as the wind lifted it; yellowing leaves and branches pattered down to the litter in waves. Down at the scrubby floor nothing touched them but acorns and a few whistling gusts, and they watched the struggling sky. The curling leaves above them rattled as pennants, all their branches thrown up like skirts, and grew louder as dusk came.
The fire whipped away in scattering coals once, twice, and finally he let it go and sat with her in the dark. Clouds raced over the moon, showing flashes of her face in pale blue.
She looked up at him. "Under us, do you feel that? The ground is moving."
"It's not the ground that's moving, little bird." But it did feel so, heaving under his calves. He swept the crusted plate of leaves between them to the side and took her wrist to put her palm to the ground, pressing his flat over it, hard to the soil. Above them, the branches creaked like a waterwheel over the fast-river rushing of the wind; the trunk they leaned against strained in the gust, trembling on its way back.
"It's the roots," she said, looking down at his hand and then, squinting, up to the leaves. "How far can it be pushed before it falls?" Her hand pulled gently out from under his.
He stared at her, then looked ahead and guessed. This Northern storm, diluted by distance, was nothing compared to Winterfell's, but she would have watched those from her bed inside its walls. Now she lay in a strange wood, her family torn, disbanded, the walls uncountable nights away, and at her side a companion she had not asked for. She had put careful nonchalance over the question, but her hand crumpling the hem of her dress to her fist betrayed her. The nonchalance was pride; the tense fists were the truth.
"Farther than you'd ever think. Like most things," he said, with a sudden harsh laugh, and watched her struggle from the corner of his eye.
"Our trees in the North just let the storms through. They're so different." She tilted her head away from him; he could see her eyes shining glassy. "It's so beautiful here, like a dream. I'd never imagined anything like it, so much green, and the flowers... you simply forget that there could be anything else. But storms do come. And what doesn't bend breaks, isn't that so?"
He winced in the dark, but there was nothing to say to this, so he handed over her blankets. She coiled up her braid and set to her small scrubby bed and the quiet shuffling gave him a twinge. 'How do you like your new cage, bird? Good deal bigger.' It had been a halfway jest, but the enormity of it hit him now. I will be left carrying an empty cage, if the bird dies away. He turned to her, frowning.
"It's all right. It's just the storm." Behind the wry denial was a formidable courage, and he grimaced at it and shook his head. A pale glint of teeth showed as her smile fell. "Only… how can we know this one won't fall while we're sleeping?" Her voice had lost its despair and was hers again. He breathed, relieved, and leaned toward her blue-lit face.
"See those?" He pointed up where the leaves whipped against the flashing sky. "Those tall ones catch the most of it. They'd fall first, if any; this one's young, not as strong, it can bend further." She nodded crisply to herself and lay back, and he realized how well-proven she must have found his words.
He settled then and closed his eyes. The first scraps of dreams were intruding in his thoughts when her voice came again, clear and low behind his shoulder.
"I bent to the Lannisters."
The admission was easier for her, perhaps, because it was to him she made it. He'd bent so far in his short rough life as to become the dregs of himself. Eyes still shut, he pushed back an elbow to rest against hers for a moment, then drew it back.
"I had to." Her explanation was bare, neither plaintive nor regretful. He grunted in response, an acknowledgment and concurrence both. The dreams seeped in again; he slept.
In the roaring dark, he woke to an odd presentiment, a constriction in his chest. Then, to his rear left, not far, he heard a high tearing whine, a great sigh, a low thrum shaking the air like a harp; the rushing sounds of branches, and a hollow concussion so loud he jerked upright in the blankets.
The shudder of the impact poured through the ground and through them before it was absorbed. She put her hand at his elbow. Behind them, the horse paced and blew. It was some time before he slept again.
The next morning he woke late to the sound of his stomach and, packing, looked at his horse, lean under his black coat, shuffling and blowing bursts of steam. Coming back from the brush, he stretched and scratched at his nape and thought it over. The Road was certain recognition; an inn certain entrapment. He couldn't be certain of who'd won the Blackwater, but he remembered vividly how it had stood when he'd left. The girl blinked up at him from her pallet. Standing, his stomach was much louder, and she laughed at it drowsily.
"Cakes with butter and a new egg," she said softly into the folds of her blanket. He nodded and looked out before him.
The storm had swept away all the litter from the bramble and left behind its gift, a perfect biting freshness. He breathed in deeply; it was sharp and stung pleasantly. Behind him came small sounds. He looked back at her, sitting small and regal on her folded blanket, bright in the morning sun, watching him.
"All right," he agreed, "we'll go."
It was less than a day's ride before the chimneys of the inn, ancient and sooty and sprawling, rose smoking before them.