It was deep night now and the inn had quieted. The hearth had gone low and orange. Two of the kitchen girls had snuck to the benches with a tart of prunes and marrow for the favorite, a tall spare quiet youth with a quiver and wide-spaced brown eyes, and, once kissed, ran laughing back. Men left in loud slurring clumps and the serving girl had long since sighed her way to the kitchen to undo her laces. The room, cooling, smelt of smoking duck and the fresh split pine the pot-boys had carried in for the morning. A cat wound through the empty benches, and the man in the goatskin shirt, made safe by the warm calm and by the Hound's half-closed lids, rose quietly, shuffled into a shabby cloak, and left.
When the man heard the inn door creak again behind him and the shaft of light appeared before him on the ground, his pace slowed; he opened his mouth to listen. Behind him, there was a patter of gravel slipping out from a heavy step, shifting metal, a great and labored heave of breath. He sucked in air and began to run, knees high, silent on the sandy path, not looking back in the dark, straight to the wood. The way was even and he sprinted on the wings of his good fortune, the lucky recognition–the scar had made it simple–and the unclaimed reward now, so astonishingly, his. It had been almost tangible, the sour wreath of his poverty about him; now he could feel just as clearly the weight of that poverty slipping from his shoulders. He ran breathing evenly through his smile, light-footed in the dark.
The impact of the Hound, knocking into his back like a boulder, shot from him a grunt not of pain but of surprise. Then he was lying on the dirt of the Road with a black panting shape standing over him and liquid pulsing from his neck. He needed to cough, but there was far too much air.
The Hound shook his dagger clean and with his heel rolled the gurgling body into the gutter at the side of the pathway, then turned heavily and made for the inn, blood from his wet sleeve trailing after him for the first steps. The moon opened up through the clouds and the Road, shining wide and pale before him, reminded him of the high-grassed field of his father's keep, and no further thought was given to the piteous body left hidden in the gutter.
His legs were heavy and his heart too fast for his slow lungs. The edges of his vision were blacker than the night was; black and blurry, shifting with his breath. Keys. In the fold of his boot was the key to the bird's room. Was there another? There had been a dozen of them clanking in the apron-pocket at the little crone's hip. The bird was asleep in her room, but jangling through the inn could be a second key. Behind the inn, the safe silent wood waited for them. He pushed ahead, his legs heavier with each step. The blur jostled with his movement, crept further up his vision; he could hear his own hollow breathing low in his ears.
His horse blew softly at the trough, a reassuring mountain in the dark, and he ran his palm along the silky neck as he passed.
The hall was empty, but the kitchen was starting up again with voices, the clattering of the early bread. A pot-boy, hearing the door, looked out at him from the steaming archway of the kitchen and then turned yawning back to his handful of figs, indifferent to the blood if he saw it at all.
In the room the fire had dwindled, but the little bird was very warm in her straw bed, covered in cloaks, breathing heavily. She pushed away his hands with her soft ones and it took him a long time to wake her... He sat on the rumpled bed in the warm crescent her small weight had made, and forced away the blur while she rolled her dresses into her bag. Her face was flushed with sleep as she pulled on her slippers with one eye half-open, her temple resting on her upper arm, her bright sheet of hair swinging over it shining like water. She allowed the heel of his hand on the plane of her shoulder, pushing her gently through the doorway; allowed the press of his thumb along her spine, allowed him to lean against her, and steady himself against her. Outside, standing beside the horse, she grimaced at him, handing up her bag.
"What happened? Did they find us? Why are we leaving so soon?" Her lids were swollen from sleep and her loose bang, threaded with a tuft of straw, hung at the side of her face. Her voice was thick with drowsiness, but unnerved, and her hand stayed at his sleeve after the bag had been passed. He looked down into her small face and could say nothing, and lifted her instead. She leaned forward and, with her eyes on him, patted at the mane, anxious.
The horse, the wood and the wild flashing of the moonlight shattering through the trees rushed, pale-blue then dark-blue, in thunderous bursts. The brush whipping away from them was like brittle silver water. His eyes shut helplessly against the flashing. Up under his sleeve her fingers plucked at him and he laughed and laughed, but the sound rang faint to his own ears. Far louder was the voice of the Northern deserter: no point going back North again, now.
Between plucks, her warm palm rested on his wrist. He leaned forward and the crown of her head knocked against his mouth. He bent in to it: tallow and rosemary from the milky soap, and under that, the familiar scent of her hair. Weaker, he rested against it. How to tell her? There was now no home to bring her to. In the North, the boy raised alongside her had taken their home for his own, had ensured his conquest with the murder of her brothers. Should she ever return, he could guess at what she'd find: rooms thick with old brutality, unlivable. Nor would there ever be anything resembling that lost home. Every hand extended would also hide in its pocket a key, a cage, a means with which to avail itself of her value. At the bottom of every offered cup would lie a silt. She was safest in the wood on the horse, and he imagined in his blurry daze the wilderness stretching out without end, impervious, secure. He imagined riding endlessly through the dark with her palm as it was and her heart beating against his ribs.
It was then, jolting through the trees, that he saw the depth of her hazard. It was also then, with her hand holding his wrist in the dark, that he acknowledged his own part in it; he too had no home and he recognized his own grasping want, to carve a life for himself beside hers.
Finally, the inn was far enough behind and the rushing wood stopped. He rolled to the ground, and few things had ever been so welcome as that solidity cold against his back. She passed to and fro above his head, and dropped his blanket over him. He closed his eyes to the blur, briefly surrendering to the void that claimed him, and when he opened them she had, just in that rapid blink, lain beside him and was asleep.
Sansa… your home… He'd meant to tell her before closing his eyes, but it was too late now; the opportunity had gone with her even intakes of breath. He felt debilitated, enormously so, and in his mouth the acid half-formed words sunk back down his throat. He swallowed and looked at her.
In the moonlight, her clean skin had the fragility of a petal. Behind her ear a plane of translucent down swept up and out into auburn, and her pulse beat quick there. Quietly, he leaned over her, his shadow covering her, the point of his nose brushing past the curve of her cheek, strands of her cold hair in his warm hand.
Against his scar he could feel only the pressure of her heartbeat, but against his lips she was soft. With her caught like this, in his mouth, he felt he could tell her even of his furtive want, that in the vast wilderness was a safe place and that he would ride with her tirelessly, if she so chose; stay with her if she so chose. Sansa... But his tongue was made of stone and she was asleep. He slid his teeth down her throat, warm silk and salt, the taste colored with the smell of her, close and secret, unbearable. Above, the wind swept a grey cape of clouds over the moon and the wood disappeared; he was falling down and down into the dark. With his lips against her pulse he said her name, but it became a kiss.