Across the smoke of their fire it was mostly the glisten of her eyes and her little white teeth biting into her dinner that reflected back to him. He thought of the grey wolf leaping across her family's arms, leaping across their bannered hall, stitched up in tarnished silver thread. That one had pearls for teeth too.
"When do you think the fighting will end?"
"I don't know," he said, rubbing his eyes. "Don't even know when it started."
She unwrapped the last fish. "Well, you should, as you were there."
"Was I. You don't mind blaming me for things; I've marked that in you."
"You were there when Joff cut off his head."
He snorted. "I was there when your father and Robert stole the throne, as well. Probably it started before that, but we never kept much in the way of books."
She opened her mouth, narrowed her eyes at him, and took a bite instead.
He laughed. The fish were falling apart in creamy flakes, running with juice, and his stomach ached as he chewed. He wouldn't mind another dozen, or a river full; wouldn't mind a week's sleep in a goosefeather bed, wouldn't mind a place to put his boots at night, a home to return to. But it was all right. He'd traded some things for others and he couldn't, now, regret the balance. Could not now even see the scales.
Over them clouds raced in tatters over the moon. Their small pocket in the trees lit up silver and darkened again, lit and darkened. They sat, quiet in the strange companionship they had built, seeing each other in flashes. She wiped her hands in the moss and thanked him and he nodded, with a shrug. There was no need to thank him but she would; now her manners had her hide her face with her sleeve as she pulled bones from her teeth. The sleeve was filthy and besides, they sat in dirt in the dark. He grimaced at her. It was laughable to think he'd meant to pass her off her as anything other than what she was.
"Back home, the fishes are pink inside. I like these little ones better."
"I don't give a shit what color they are inside, as long as they're bigger than- " and he coughed on the smoke gusting up from the fire.
"Here." She waved the skirt of her cloak at him, a ruffling in the haze. "Oh, that's worse. It does always go to you."
"I'm bigger." He squinted at her through the cleared space. "You're harder to find."
He saw the troubled glance before she pulled it away and couldn't read it. Which one was her fear- to be found, or to remain hidden? He thought he knew, and it was a weight on him. But now she was fanning smoke back at him, eyebrows raised, grinning. Her little grin was a star in the dark, shell-white.
What will you do, when you know the truth? What will you say to me then? The world was shit and struggle. She knew it. Still- as he held the words in his mouth that he couldn't bring out- there is no safe place, there never was; your home is gone, your family broken- he felt his teeth locking around them. He looked up at her and the fire leapt in the low wind and for a moment he saw her face framed bright, white heart vivid as an owl's caught in moonlight. -and if we go back, you will see how much you've lost.
His choice was made. He'd already lied by evasion, as he had a hundred thousand times; now he would stand and lie outright. His twenty years of obedience had been cruel in its way, but also simple. This new autonomy came with a different cruelty. He wondered what she would see when she looked at him, afterward.
He wondered what she saw now. He remembered the thundering ride from the inn, he remembered falling from his horse- spinning and spinning from the horse to the ground in flashes, a firefly; the ground coming up to catch him, the enormous glowing disc of the moon pressing him down flat in the loam. The girl, sleeping. Suddenly and strangely he thought of the old story, the fable from his boyhood, of the hunter's dogs who lived in the heavens, who carried the stars around in their jaws for the gods. He thought of her whole life in his mouth. His jaw tensing around her star.
And he remembered her level gaze afterward, the bright blue cutting him cleanly apart.
They were quiet for a long while. She combed her hair. He imagined the branches of the trees bending down to them, weaving themselves while the two of them slept; he imagined waking in a cradle in the treetops. Climbing north from spire to spire while the war raged beneath them. Hawks and doves whipping past them. The voices of men from below like hounds calling from a far hill. His chin hit his chest and he realized he'd been dreaming.
Standing over her, he put down a hand to help her up and she took it without looking at it, thoughtlessly, as if inevitably a hand, anyone's hand, would come down out of the dark to lift her. And it will, if I die. Don't take it. Take the horse instead and go far as you can, fast as you can.
They went to their beds and the sound of her skirts rustling in the dark was like wings brushing the ground.
Now in the silence, against her soft breathing, he could hear frogs at the creek, a faraway song. Somewhere also down there was that old woman hidden in some brackish hole and likely singing along. He shivered, grinned at himself for his childishness, stretched in his cold blanket.
It was twenty years since he'd first seen one. It had been sowing-time, and almost to the last man the village was out to field. From his gate he could hear the rattle and shout of the children as they scared away the crows. Of course he wanted to go running with his drum as well- it was new, it was wooden, it was painted in bright stripes and had horsehair tassels. The other boys had pans for drums. He stayed by the window instead, festering with the thought that kept him back: if he went to the fields, the boys might run from him too; the boys might say he didn't need a drum to scare birds.
So, festering, he'd disobeyed. Alone, he'd made his way to the river that marked the far border of their holding. And it was there, as he was bending sticks for the clumsy raft he'd need to cross it- I could leave if I like; I'm big enough, I can go where I like, I can leave whenever I choose- something terrible had come crackling up at him from the bank. A sprawling thing on all fours- a goblin. He was so frightened that he couldn't scream. The thing before him, crawling upwards, unbound breasts hanging in a man's torn tunic, shoeless, bundles of hedgenettles on her back. Pulling herself up the bank with bent little hands. White hair cropped short like his own. Robin's-egg eyes, cloudy in the centers. He shut his own so that she couldn't make a spell on him and lost his balance into the mud and she laughed. He'd shouted from where he fell- This is our wood!This is Clegane wood! -and she laughed again, and passed by him, shambling, indifferent.
It wasn't till that night, watching his father slice the mutton, fidgeting in his seat, that he realized what a chance he'd lost: he'd had two coins in his pocket; he'd met a witch. A real witch, who lived nowhere and knew everything- and he'd had coins. But he'd run home frightened instead of handing over the money and telling her to look into the future for him: Who punishes my brother? Is it me? When? When?
He'd snuck away three times over that next fortnight, long miles even longer on the way home, and couldn't find her again. The loss stung. Now, a man, he'd lost again. Could've given the witch their supper and its price: Who keeps her safe? Is it me? How? How?
He smiled at himself again in the dark. Of all the shit. He wasn't a boy any longer. His path was his own.
Still… Is it me? How?
The frogs, steady in their faraway water song.
He slept, and dreamed. In the jumble of his dreams- now he is at Casterly Rock in the field beside the mews, watching a coiled creance spin up from the palm of Gerion's glove, squinting at the shadow of the falcon sliding out into the sun; Gerion's soft voice saying remember, let go at the very end, don't try to hold on and Gerion's lean shadow falling over half of him-
-and now, inside the sept, watching from the candled doorway as the clerks pull up tiles from the floor- what is underneath? he sees now: old bronze coins grass-green with corrosion, hoarded, oddly, under those fine painted tiles- help us, Ser Gregor, they call to him, smashing the beautiful tiles, cracking open the faces of gilt lions, latticework of leaves, scraping crumbling coins from the black dirt beneath and shoving them into pockets, as he, shaking his head, backs out of the doorway- Ser, help, please, as many as we can, we must pay, they call after him, and the horses are screaming in the stables, rearing at their doors, he can hear them over the clinking of the coins, he steps backward from the dark sept into a darker room, he is dark pushing into dark-
And now he is young. He is here at the far edge of his mother's walled garden where the old roses roll over the crenellation in heaps, fantastically overgrown because she is gone, trembling with bees, and it is sun-dappled and hot and he is small again, running along the tall heaped walls. He sees movement near the gate, roses wavering, and leaps to it, heart jumping- his father, alive? his mother? -but instead it is a strange man, spare and pale, in a fine fur cloak crusted with snow. The man turns to him and he sees that the mouth and hands are bleeding, ribboned with scratches. The man ducks, shifts away, snow dropping from his hair, but not before the boy realizes what he has been doing: eating the roses from the vine. Revulsion rises in the boy's throat. Stop, he shouts, but the man only smiles back at him over his shoulder, red-mouthed and chewing roughly, teeth glossy with blood and pink flesh, both fists packed full of torn blooms-
His hand dove blindly from his blanket and onto hers and her small curled body was just there, safe, sleeping. The rose-eater dissolved.
She was cold. He pulled her bed closer, pulled one chilled hand from it and to his chest, felt his heart tapping at it. Felt it uncurl in the pocket between his chest and arm, fingers like ice, warming now. With effort he broke his thoughts away from the dream and pointed them toward his mind's image of the map, its greens and grays, its tangle of roads and castles and painted names. He imagined their course from far above, a tiny painted line winding slowly through the green, the painter's brush dragging along behind them….. then, the roadless place, the blank and unmarked place. The brush stopping, ink pooling. Their line swallowed up in the wash of nameless space.
He slept.