Even as they continued on the evidence of disturbance multiplied. Footprints in the dry washes, little mounds of ash smouldering in the hollows, cleared brush; only as they veered further west from the road into the dark creekbeds did the wood become unmarked. He worried the rolled scar that served as his upper lip with his teeth and wished he knew how the wind was blowing. All these men scattered about. Hosts marching the Kingsroad, that's why. But whose? Suppose her brother had defied the odds. Suppose, instead, he'd already fallen. And suppose the war is over and by the time we ever find it out, we've been forgotten. Imagine that. He did, and sighed. And then suppose that the clouds rain wine on us, that's near as likely.
As the brilliant green swept by them he wasted his time cursing himself and the whole world around them. He was still a young man, more tough than crafty, and mistook his own jadedness for experience. In truth he was inexperienced in many ways that mattered. His tactics had always hinged on his own endurance; he was vigilant and perceptive, but his was the perceptivity of a victim, defensive rather than cunning. So instead of spending the quiet green hours in strategy, he railed in his thoughts against the injustices that plagued him, and used the resulting wrath for fuel. It had never occurred to the Hound to do otherwise, just as it did not occur to him to spend these last days simply existing.
Below him the girl, recovered from the shock of the encounter, lulled by the afternoon warmth and by the rocking of the horse, had decided it would be charitable of her to forgive him for his faults of character and was now amenable and prepared, once again, to bring him into her confidences. She half-turned her head.
"What would you do if you had to go and live in the forest like a wild beast?"
"What else have we been doing, of late?"
She laughed. "No, I meant a proper beast. Wild. Without boots on."
He snorted. "That's what the mark of civilization has come down to, for you? Boots? All right. You may have something, there." He rolled his tongue in his cheek. "Walk about and eat anything that came too close, most like. What else?"
"Would you be frightened?"
I'm only frightened now, he thought, because of you. "Don't think so. Probably it'd suit me. And that's the point you've been meaning to make, isn't it?"
"Of course not. But- you wouldn't be afraid in the forest, even in the nights? I suppose, because you're so strong and tall, you've never found yourself in the habit of being afraid." She exhaled so heavily he felt her body lighten against his chest.
"There's- " The words nearly came out. He twitched his mouth shut just in time. Always someone stronger. No reason to think something like that, let alone say it aloud.
"If I was afraid," he said instead, heavily, as the trap of her deliberately ingenuous question caught him, "I would look around and tell myself... " The words went dry. He was lost, he could think of no platitude. None of his own private stock would be of use to her.
"That the gods made sheep, so that the wolves could eat mutton," she finished, a hint of taunt in her voice.
He frowned. "What?"
"Give me something better, then."
He sighed into her hair and reluctantly dug. What came out, violently and against his wishes, was no bromide but a memory; one single moment of one single night during his flight to Casterly Rock. He was starving and it had rained and there was no moon to light his way in the forest and his eyes had swollen nearly shut, crying.
"I would look around and tell myself to keep going." It came out hoarse and baldly and even as he said it his mouth spasmed into a wince but below him the girl murmured something softly, in assent, that he did not hear.
.
That night their camp made itself. Just as the fading light pressed all the shadows together into a solid, luminescent plum-grey, and the horse was starting to stumble, he saw before them in the creekbed a turreted wall higher than his head, and startled. A few steps closer, his heart pounding, he realized he was looking at the overturned roots of an enormous tree, bricked up with limestone and red clay, the casualty of an ancient flood and now immobile as stone. To his right, the hollow the tree had created when it fell: a perfect bowl, mossed, filled with soft fog, surrounded by clay walls nine feet high and glossed with a fairytale pearlescence. He grunted, lifting her down, and stretched, and, because he was sore, took his time unpacking.
When she went off into the brush he listened to the frogs stop singing in her wake and then start up again just as he also heard her returning step. He would recall that moment, the sight of her face as she came into the arc of firelight, a porcelain heart. He would recall listening to the fox cries in the distance as they sat at the fire; the sea-salt in the air and the heavy peace which rolled over him in a wave as they ate their small dinner. But what moments saved itself within him that night, what he would remember when all the other layers of his life had been peeled away, were those last images of her face framed by the dark sparkling wood and through the threads of smoke her eyes on his and her mouth red-lipped from the wine speaking slowly, saying to him, very clearly, very quietly, But you stopped him, didn't you?
And he had. It was true. He fell asleep with the echo of it in his ears.
The orange-eyelid glow of late morning light woke him. He raised himself on one elbow. Nothing stirred anywhere but the starlings in the trees and the rhythmic cropping of the horse.
From behind him and to his left he could hear moving water. The Green Fork, narrowing to its end, draining itself out in a web of creeks. He stretched in his blankets. Legs shaking with the tremor of his stretch, snapping back the yawn between his teeth, he rolled onto his side where she lay curled. She was deep asleep and dreaming, her brow slightly knit as though listening to a story. He recalled his own ferocious dreams, and was glad they kept themselves private, and got up out of the warm blankets, quietly, to go tend to himself at the creek.
.
Only a few hours later they climbed their way out of the dissolving creekbed. As the horse pulled them up out of the broken clay rift, the Hound was struck by a memory of climbing up from the cellar staircase to peer through the strip of light under the cellar door, so that in that half-inch of hearthlight he might see whose boots strode through the hall.
Out of the creekbed they emerged into a yellow dusty meadow as if from a bunker, and the Hound lowered his head, scanned it, silent and thorough. Empty. Silent. They passed a phalanx of tall feathery reeds and climbed into another clearing. The girl saw it before he did: in of the meadow before them, a strange ruined tower-house rose from the sea of foxglove and sedge.
"Whose is that," the girl breathed, beneath his ear. "Where are we?"
He pressed the horse forward up the slope.
Closer, he understood. The miniature castle- a mill, in actuality- was a dark tower of rough-hewn and massive stone block, stacked into a strange, squatty conical spiral reminiscent of a beehive; the unmistakeable craft of the First Men. Of course, he thought. The swamps are near.
In the dappled sunlight, with the swallows spinning in and out of the open roof and the blue dragonflies swirling crazily around the vines that covered it, it was beautiful. The two of them might as well have been under a spell. Without thinking, under compulsion, he lifted her from the saddle, tied the horse.
The mill was larger seen close than he'd realized, as it was dug down into the earth so one side of it could dip into its vanished river. The skeleton of the wheel still existed, somehow, black stubs of massive planking that the fires of a dozen invasions had missed. Entering the domed doorway he paused, rested his right hand at the worn spot on the edge where centuries of hands had darkened the stone. He had to crouch nearly to his knees to enter. In the dark he let his eyes adjust to the shadows, listened; its emptiness reassured him and he turned back to the tiny, glowing archway and her silhouette there.
"All right," he called.
The open roof let in a precise beam of pure and dazzling gold, straight from the sky to the stone floor like a vein in coal. She walked into it, stood in its direct center, looked up, and lifted her arms to the glittering dust swirling around her. He watched her and grinned. Her eyes ran blankly over him as she turned; she couldn't see him there in the dark. A feeling rose in him. He did not name it.
.
His palms flat on the horizontal beam above him, he breathed in, levered his arms, lifted himself gently into the air. A rift of dust fell across him but nothing else happened. The scaffolding held. He climbed. Peering up into the circle of sunlight he surveyed the neat stonework holding up its heap of rotted thatch. At some point centuries ago the creek changed course and the millpond run dry; the mill, useless, had been abandoned. It was still sound. Two weeks' work would roof it. Another week would render it about as safe from intrusion as he could hope.
Climbing down, he explained all of this over his shoulder to the girl, but when he looked over she was at the far side in the arched window niche, her back to him, using a stick to take down a spider's web and humming to herself. He snorted.
Strange it's empty. The waste at the edges of the Kingsroad, ostensibly the Crown's, was in reality no one's land and everyone's. Here was a perfect foxhole, hidden away... He let the idea roll around his mind as he stepped into the hollow where the bedstone had once lain. You're a fool. Nowhere is safe. Beside him an opening to the race, boarded up, mossy with age. Board up the wheelhouse then. Cover it over in bramble. He swung himself up onto the platform. It held him without a creak. Sleep here. Hunt at dusk. Let her rest herself in the daytime. Keep the horse in the hollow. Wait for the worst to blow over.
Even as his heart grabbed at these thoughts- peace, and safety, and thick stone walls around them- the part of his mind which had kept him alive thus far laughed at him from its murky pool. The worst was not blowing over, it told him calmly from the pit. Unless you can convince the Stranger to run your hours backward and take that sword from Ilyn's hand yourself, there will be no blowing over.
The Hound accepted that this counsel was often correct, but he bristled at how the voice it used sounded so like Gerion's. He sat on the platform, considering, elbows on his knees, leaning against the remaining wall of the hopper, and watched a white wisp float towards him through the golden column of light. An owl feather, fluffy with down, falling slowly. No stink of rats, though. No stink of anything. Odd. He looked down past his boots, past the platform's edge, down to the stamped clay floor below. Clean. Inside of himself the simmering complaint, the demand for security, heated into a teakettle scream. You've hung your last hope on a rumor. You'd probably both live longer just staying here. Long enough that she might outlast them all, maybe.
But the same breeze coming through the open roof that had dislodged the owl feather began moving something in the corner of his vision, just very slightly, and as he turned his head towards the motion in the dark of the hopper it continued, the little chalky sticks tied to the string kept on with their slow spin, moving in turn all the little curved sticks tied up beneath it, and as he opened his mouth for no reason and watched the delicate mobile tinkling in the breeze the voice of his protector spoke up and said to him, Do you recognize that?
And he did, he knew what it was. Even in the dim dark, even though someone had taken it apart and knotted it with colored string and little bells and hung it up, he recognized it. This is why no one stays here, the voice told him needlessly, but his boots had already landed hard against the clay floor below; he had already spun around and found the wheelhouse empty.