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Sandor pays little to no mind to the bastard girl until he kills the butcher’s boy. But he is not kept paid and clothed and fed by the Lannisters to stand there blindly, so it is not the first time he sees her. Sandor sees most of what passes in front of him, and a good deal of what goes behind him as well. He learned that trick when he was a boy of six dodging Gregor’s fists, learning to obey the leap of fear stuttering in his chest whenever he saw something out of the corner of his eye or heard boots stomping down the stairs.
At the feast, Ned Stark sits his bastard daughter in some dark corner, away from both the high table and the drunken squires. Sandor notes her, a long, pale face wedged in between a toothless old crone and two chattering girls. He thinks one of them is the steward’s daughter. The girl is clearly upset; she sits rigidly, chin raised with bristled pride, her dark brown hair neatly braided back from her face. Sandor wonders why a man like Ned Stark might buy his bastard a new dress but hide her away from the festivities.
Later, he watches Robert pull yet another serving girl into his broad lap, this one as pale and dark-haired and lean as Jonelle Snow, and understands.
But he does not understand why Stark brings the girl south, nor does he even really think much on her presence until the cloak is pulled back.
“You rode him down,” says Ned Stark, with the sort of flat loathing that Sandor is used to. He grins through the darkness of his helm, although in this light he doubts Stark can even see his smile. No matter. They both know it’s there.
“He ran.” And then the laugh bubbles up like spit, easy enough. Sandor has ridden down a hundred men, boys, women, girls. A few of them almost got away. Some were fast, strong, darting through the trees, and others tripped over their shoes or skirts and fell to the ground crying or screaming or begging. Doesn’t matter much. What they all had in common was that a Lannister wanted them dead. “But not very fast.”
Stark stares at him, and Sandor knows he is thinking about taking that greatsword from his back and dealing him the same sort of blow that Sandor gave the dead boy. But Sandor’s the one in the saddle and armored, not Stark. He’s been in the habit of evaluating every man (and a few women) he encounters who carry steel since he was a boy. Most of them wouldn’t pose much of a threat. Ned Stark might. For a little bit. Sandor is taller, heavier, younger, and angrier. Always angrier. He learned that a long time ago, when he was a child grinding his dirty, ragged nails into his skinned knees and bloody palms, because the pain made him angry, and the anger made him fight harder, faster, stronger, and that often made him win.
Pain is an old friend to Sandor, and anger has been his ally for as long as he can recall. Stark’s not nearly angry enough. And he’ll never know half of the pain Sandor has. The new Hand takes the boy’s wrapped corpse in his arms, and goes, hunched slightly by the weight of it. He was tall for his age, the butcher’s boy. Fast, too. Sandor heard he was playing at swords when Joffrey came upon them. He might have made a halfway decent knight. Or not. After all, he wasn’t fast enough. He takes off his helm, dismisses his men, and as he rides back towards the stables, he sees her. The bastard girl is watching him, her hands in tight fists at her sides, face wet with tears. And her mouth contorts in a hateful snarl as she watches him go. Most girls of fourteen don’t look at him like that. They don’t look at him at all; they study the ground, avert their eyes, or grimace and duck their heads.
This one is just an older image of the youngest, the wolf girl whose bitch started all of this. Now the little bird’s lost her own pup, and the Snow looks close to baying for his blood. Sandor smiles at her mockingly as he passes, and to his surprise she doesn’t look away or even stay where she is. She stalks after him, almost breaking into a run to catch up to Stranger’s trot, and spits up at him, “A fine knight you’d make,” she snaps, “butchering little boys. Are you proud of yourself, then? He was a child.” She’s so angry, he realizes after a moment, she’s got no room for fear.
“So are you, bastard,” he says, without so much as glancing down at her. “And I’ll ride you down just the same. Run back to your father and your sisters, Snow. I’m no knight. No more than you’re a lady,” he jeers, swinging at whatever’s the most likely to get her on her way, but she doesn’t stop. A stable boy comes out to take his reins, and he dismounts, with ease, drawing his sword. That does give the girl pause. She doesn’t flinch or cringe away, only looks from it to him with the same expression of furious disgust.
“Here’s his blood,” says Sandor, laughing again, loud and hard. “Come and kiss the blade if you care so much about it.”
“A man like you shouldn’t be permitted a blade,” she says in the same low, repulsed tone as her fool of a father. “You disgrace it every day.”
“My sword doesn’t seem to care,” he sneers back. “Nor do I. Men don’t carry steel because they’re permitted. They carry it to kill each other. Or is your head as full of songs as your little bird of a sister, girl?”
“Don’t ever speak of my sisters,” she retorts, then adds, “They should have put you to death, not Lady! You were supposed to be guarding the prince, weren’t you?”
“Had I been guarding the prince, I would have killed your sister’s bitch then and there,” he rejoins with another twisting, painful smile, and she stares at him for a moment, nostrils flaring, before she turns and stalks away. He does not watch her go; Stranger’s just kicked the stable boy, who is curled up on the ground sobbing in pain. Sandor plucks him up by the back of his tunic, shoves him out of the way, and leads his mount in himself.
When Joffrey calls for his Dog at the Hand’s tourney feast, Sandor strides forward out of the shadows, despite his reluctance to escort the Stark girls anywhere. At least it’s just the two of them. At least only the one is grey-eyed and dark-haired. He’s also drunk. But not drunk enough, by his reckoning, to tolerate the bastard’s glowers and the little bird’s nervous glances. Joffrey leaves them, and Sansa looks at Jonelle beseechingly, who tries to shake awake the snoring septa, then gives up in disgust. Sandor ignores them both, ignoring the jolt of terror twisting in his gut when he picks up a torch to light their path.
Snow wraps an arm around her younger sister’s shoulder protectively, which only irritates him all the more, as though she thinks he’s half a mind to rape and brutalize them both on their way back to the Red Keep. Who does she take him for? Gregor, he answers himself. Always Gregor. He wants to drop the torch and walk off into the dark, where it’s safer, familiar, but he’s a good dog, and he obeys his prince’s commands. The girls step lightly, carefully, and he kicks rocks and debris out of his path like a sullen child.
Finally Sansa dares to speak up, voice wavering slightly in the dark and the cool night air. “Ser Sandor rode well today, didn’t he, Jonelle?” she asks her sister with forced levity.
He opens his mouth to spit out that he is no knight, he is no Gregor, no Mountain, he’s just a Hound who does a few things and does them well, but Snow says coldly, “Master Clegane is no knight, sister. He rode as well as one might expect of a dog in the saddle.”
“Nell,” the little one hisses under her breath in a mixture of shock and fear, sparing him a look of wide-eyed apprehension. “You should not be so rude to my betrothed’s sworn shield.”
“His sworn butcher, you mean,” Jonelle does not even look at him.
“Aye,” he replies at last. “A butcher, that’s me, girl. I’ve drunk my fill tonight, but I’m still hungry, so might be you ought to hold your tongue before I find my cleaver,” he mocks, and Sansa flinches into her sister’s arms, but when Jonelle Snow looks at him, it is only the familiar hatred and revulsion.
“You’re scaring her,” she says. “Stop it. We both know you wouldn’t dare hurt us.”
“Wouldn’t I?” he curls his lip. “You’ve a bold mouth for a bastard. Your sister’s a talking bird from the Summer Isles, and you’re a barking grey bitch, is that it?”
Sansa gapes at him now, but Jonelle only grabs her hand and tugs her along, ahead of him. “Come on. We don’t need him to find our way back.”
But now, of course, he can’t let them go. Sandor follows, incensed. He knows the older one is just as terrified as the younger, she’s just too stubborn and too stupid to show it. Fear is the price they all pay him, in return for their stares, their whispers, their gossip and insults. Never laughter, though. They never dare laugh. He doesn’t care how grey her eyes or how she wears her hair, if Snow laughed at him he’d wring her skinny neck one-handed and make the little bird watch.
“A butcher,” he repeats himself. “You think you’re the first to call me that, girl? Think you’re the first to waste your breath on a dead boy and a dead dog? Might be that your sister’s the clever one- you don’t see her crying over him, do you?”
They both stop walking. Sansa’s shoulders are trembling. Jonelle turns back, and the moonlight catches her long face, and her mouth as she says, “My sister is not at fault for your crimes.” She hesitates, and then adds bravely, “Or the queen’s cruelty. She told you to kill him, didn’t she? To hurt Arya. To hurt us.”
“Jonelle!” Sansa wrenches away from her, but doesn’t go far, too frightened of being in his reach. “Don’t say such things! The queen isn’t cruel, she was just- she was only worried for Joffrey, because Arya hurt him-,”
“There you have it,” Sandor grins at them both. “The queen’s sweet as honey and Joff’s a maid’s fair dream. And I’m the finest butcher in all the land. Do you see now, bastard? They don’t care,” he grits it out between his teeth. “No one cares about the butcher’s boy. Not me, not your sister, not your father-,”
“Don’t insult my father!”
“Don’t insult my father,” he mocks. “Do you hear yourself, girl? Bleating like a little lamb all the way home. Mayhaps you’re too northern for us sweet southerners. Stark has no business bringing his bastard to court.” He widens his smile again, and adds, “You’ll know cruelty when your sister flits around at Joffrey’s side and you’re an old maid cooking for your father.”
That much is a lie, at least. She may not be a pretty thing like Sansa, but Snow’s not an ugly girl. Stark will find some weak-willed husband for her, a jumped-up lordling willing to tolerate a bastard wife for the sake of ties to a Great House, and Jonelle Snow will live out her days in some shithole of a castle, praying to her tree gods and whelping pups as proud and foolish as her.
“Don’t call her a bastard,” Sansa at last speaks up, shaking and unable to meet his eyes, but speaking all the same, as her elder sister falls silent and furious. “She is a noble lady of House Stark. She is my sister.”
“Then your father should have wed her mother before he fucked her,” Sandor rasps, feeling his head start to pound. Enough. He is standing here in an empty field arguing with two little girls over butchers and cruelty and bastards. He should knock both their heads together, sling one over each shoulder, and carry them home like that. It would be less of a fuss than this. “Walk,” he barks, deep and guttural, and finally they do, scurrying ahead of him like mice in the wake of a mean tomcat.
The next time he bothers to look at them, he is dragging the steward’s girl into their room. The girl is screaming and sobbing, Sansa is sitting white-faced on the bed, and Snow is standing by the window, although she whirls around when the door bangs open. “Jeyne!” she cries out, as Sandor deposits the wailing girl at their feet, turns around, and strides back out, slamming the door shut behind him. “Wait!” one of them yells after him, but it’s quickly drowned out by the screams and shouts echoing up and down the rest of the Hand’s Tower.
Trant loses the youngest girl, Arya, in the confusion, and Sandor comes across the white carcass of Jonelle’s wolf later, with half a dozen crossbow bolts buried in its back after it tore out Janos Slynt’s and two of his men’s throats. It seems the bastard had set it to guard her father. The girl has some wits to her, then. A pity that counted for very little, in the end.
He doesn’t like to think much about what comes next. He doesn’t regret the men he’s killed or lose much sleep over the look of horror on Ned Stark’s face as they cut his men down. But when Joffrey calls for his head, Sansa sinks to her knees and wails, and Jonelle Snow surges forward with a scream, only to be dragged back by Blount, kicking and spitting and shouting for her father all the while.
Afterwards, when they are up on the battlements looking at the heads, when Sansa tells Joff Robb might bring her his, he has Trant hit her just the once, to ‘teach her’, and then deliver the rest of the beating to her sister. Jonelle Snow is not screaming now. She is silent, taking each blow with no more than a pained gasp, and when Trant is done, her long, narrow face is swelling, her lips are split open, and her ears are mottled cauliflower peeking out from behind her dark hair.
Sandor remembers another grey-eyed, dark-haired girl, who sometimes refused to cry out when she was struck. That only made the blows come harder and faster.
He wipes the blood off Sansa, but Joffrey doesn’t care if his betrothed’s sister stays ugly. Sandor suspects he prefers it that way, a warning to the younger one. Obey me, love me, fear me, or I’ll give you what your sister’s having for supper: a split lip, a swollen cheek, a broken rib, a sprained arm. But Jonelle Snow will not cry out in pain, and that only enrages Joffrey further. The queen does not let the Stark girls share a bedchamber, citing the proven treachery of bastards.
“I’ll not have her twisting Sansa with thoughts of treason and disobedience,” Cersei says. “The bastard has her father’s look. Insolent. But they say the brother is fond of her, if not Catelyn. Else she’d be sent off to Littlefinger with the Poole girl.”
Sandor is passingly aware of what Littlefinger does with the little girls who wind up at his brothels. He sells them to the highest bidder. And knowing what Baelish thought of Stark, he does not think Jonelle Snow, with her father’s look, would go to anything approaching a kindly or even tolerable owner. But how much would one ransom a bastard girl for? Little and less. She will not survive the year, he thinks. They have Sansa. They do not need her. Joffrey will tire of this game eventually, although he may insist on taking her maidenhead first, to prove himself a man before he weds his little bird.
Then comes the news that Robb Stark has proclaimed himself King in the North, and he knows Jonelle Snow will never see sixteen at all. He has a brief flash of relief, for having refused the Kingsguard position, although he is still Joffrey’s shield. He may not be the one ordered to kill her. He would do it, but it would stay with him the way some things still do. He does not want to remember those grey eyes staring up at him coldly while he cuts her down.
But Joffrey has other ideas, which is how Sandor Clegane comes to stand in the Red Keep’s sept in front of a half-drunk septon, across from a bruised and bloodied girl of fifteen, who refuses to say her vows until the King threatens to drag Sansa from her bed and make her watch. Then she does, and her eyes never leave his ruined face. Sandor tries to summon up a familiar scowl, or snarl, or leer, anything to make her look away, but he cannot, and his tongue is thick in his mouth as he mutters his own. Don’t think about it. Don’t consider it.
It was a command, and he’ll do as he’s commanded, and he’ll drink this all away when it’s over and done with. Joffrey’s audience of drunkards and lechers and squealing, sniggering squires breaks into raucous applause when the septon pronounces them wed in the eyes of the Seven. Sandor knows no gods except the one that bears his horse’s name, and Jonelle Snow had never set foot in a sept before today. It is just a game, he reminds himself. Just one of their games. Give the Hound a little bitch to break in for the king’s amusement.
He just won’t think. It’s always been easy enough. Were Sandor a man inclined to brooding in the moment, he would never have made it this far. He tries to laugh along with them, but cannot. Snow- Clegane- his wife- the girl stands beside him, her head raised high as though she were a princess or a queen crafted out of marble or better yet, iron. She does not give them the satisfaction of her humiliation, her fear, although he knows she is afraid, because after their farce of a kiss, his half-lips brushing against hers, she does not look at him again. Only straight ahead. Good girl. He doubts she is thinking of much either, other than surviving.
But Joffrey is not satisfied, and calls for a bedding. Then Sandor draws his sword, knocks one eager youth back into another, forces Blount away with a snarl, and growls, “I’ll see my wife to my bed myself, or I’ll see men dead under these bloody crystals, Your Grace.”
The septon begins to protest, and Joffrey is too delighted by the threat of violence to care much, but waves Sandor off. “Then take her. I want the sheet in the morning. Make sure it’s bloody. I want to show it to Sansa, then send it to their traitor brother.” He watches Jonelle with gleaming, hungry green eyes, but she impassively stares past him, as if he were translucent, see-through, a ghost and not a boy of flesh and bone with the power to see her dead or worse at any moment, if it pleased him. When Sandor picks her up, she does not shout or fight him. Somehow that is worse. Somehow he would prefer it if she fought, if she tried to kick him, hit him, claw him. Then he might get angry enough to go through with it, to teach her a lesson, as Joffrey wants.
His rooms are small, and dim, but the bed is large. It would have to be, to support a man of his size. He deposits the girl on the floor, and waits for the screaming, the fighting, the pleading to begin. He is not Gregor. He has never raped a woman. He paid for his first whore at fifteen, and made sure other Lannister men saw him in the brothel, to put to rests any whispers about a beast so ugly no woman would even take coin for his cock. The whore took his money gladly, but wasted no time at all in putting out the lights before she rode him. He has a woman a few times a year, when he can’t bear it any more, when he needs to pretend, even if only for a little while, that he is any other man, ugly but not horrifying, big but not grotesque. A soldier but not a monster.
He knows the truth of it, though. As does she. She knew it when he killed her sister’s friend, when he helped slaughter her father’s men, when Joffrey commanded him to give her her wolf’s pelt. There are rumors that she wears it to bed, like a second skin. She does not have it now. He turns away from her, unbuckles his sword belt, runs a hand through his hair, damp with sweat, and tries to decide what would be easier. To make it quick, or to try to ease the girl into it. Better him than Trant or Blount, he could tell her. Better him than Littlefinger, or Joffrey, or any of them. He might hurt her, but not on purpose. He wouldn’t mean it. And now that she’s his wife, he’d never let them touch her again.
He turns back around, and she has a knife. She’s quick, too, even in her ragged gown, but he’s faster, and has a much longer reach than her, and it’s a matter of moments to grab her wrist and neatly twist it as she makes to slide it between his ribes. The knife, really no more than a blunted kitchen utensil, clatters to the dusty floor, and she grits her teeth and sucks in a pained breath from the pressure he is putting on her wrist. Sandor laughs aloud, more in shock than anything else, and lets go of her. She stumbles to her hands and knees, snatches up the knife, and he wonders if they’ll spend the rest of the night like this, him disarming her and her trying again, until he breaks her wrist or she finally scores a slash on him. That’s all she’d get. Does she want him to kill her?
But now that she has the knife again, she scuttles backwards, like a crab, then gets to her feet, panting and trembling, and lifts the knife up under her own chin. Sandor stares, then realizes. “Don’t,” he rasps, as a thin red line begins to trickle down her long neck. Jonelle Snow stares stubbornly back at him, and he sees the silent question in her eyes- why not? She’d rather be dead. She’d rather bleed herself out on the floor than let him bleed her in bed. “Don’t,” he echoes himself, and to his shock and rage his voice cracks like a boy’s.
She doesn’t cut any deeper. “Why not?” she asks, and then, almost wonderingly, “How old are you, truly?”
“Twenty eight,” he says, without thinking.
“You would rape me,” she smiles, and there is nothing but black bitterness and bloody teeth to it, where she bit her tongue during the ceremony, to keep herself from screaming. “You are a murderer and a bully and a craven, and now you will rape me, and call it a kindness.”
“I’d be kinder to you than the rest of them.” He wishes he’d had the chance to drink more before this. Might be he should get her a drink. Might be the only way this doesn’t end with one of them dead. “I’d protect you. You and your sister.”
“You won’t,” she says, and for the first time that he has known her, her voice squeaks and pitches like the child she still is. “You won’t, you’re a liar. You won’t protect me, or her. No one can protect us. You’ll let them beat her and you’ll rape me and tell me I’m lucky for it. I know you. I know what you are.”
“A dog,” he says. “Might be a Hound and a bitch, more well-matched than most.” But his words are hollow. He wants this no more than she does. She’s flowered, aye, and taller than most girls her age, and has seen more death than woman twice that, but- He thinks of another girl, with her grey eyes, her dark hair, weeping, curled up on the floor, calling out for him.
Sandor, don’t let him- Don’t let him hurt me please don’t let him I’ll be good get Father I’ll be good don’t let him- Sandor stay promise you’ll stay will you stay? I love you, don’t go, I love you, brother, don’t let him-
“I won’t,” he says. “Won’t force you.”
“You will,” she scoffs hoarsely. “Maybe not tonight. But you will. I’d rather be dead,” she whispers. “So let me end it, or come take this knife and force me and have the mercy to kill me quick afterwards. Because I’ll do it for you if you don’t.”
“No,” he growls, because he won’t let, can’t lose another one, can’t- he won’t, not again- “Think about your sister, girl. You can’t leave her like this. She needs you.”
She only shakes her head. “No. No one needs me. No one ever needed me.”
I need you, he thinks, and he knows it then. He needs something to protect, because he stopped being able to call what he does for the King protection years ago. He needs something, otherwise he might as well let her slit her own throat, then use that dirty knife of hers on himself. She’s going to do it. He cannot convince her. He’s never been eloquent and she has no cause to believe a word he says. He can either let her kill herself now, or take the knife from her and come back to her corpse in the bath, or at the bottom of a high window, or hanging from the rafters, in a few nights or a week or a month from now.
He does not know what else to do, so he goes to his knees. Sandor cannot recall the last time he knelt. “Tell me how to swear it.”
“What?” she croaks.
“How do I swear to your gods, girl? I’m no knight. But I’ll pledge myself all the same.”
“You already did,” she says, suspiciously. “In the sept-,”
“Not that,” he snaps. “I meant those words no more than you, girl. They’re not my gods. Neither are yours. But at least this way one of us believes. Tell me how to swear it.”
“Swear what?” she demands, but she’s lowered the knife. “What could you swear-,”
“I swear I’ll do you nor your sister no harm. That I’ll take you from here. That I’ll see you returned safe to your brother.”
Jonelle says nothing, and then it comes, high and incredulous. “You can’t. You could never-,”
“Not now,” he says. “But soon. Whenever an army comes here. They will. Your brother or Stannis or Renly. Doesn’t matter much. I’ll take you both out then, when there’s panic, when they’re pissing themselves with fear. I could do it. They’re all afraid of me.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“I would,” he insists.
“Why?” she presses. “You hate us.”
He doesn’t. He hates, of course he does, but not them. He hates what he sees reflected back in his burnished armor, he hates what they call him, he hates drinking, he hates fucking, he hates killing, he hates every labored breath. He’s hated it all for so long he doesn’t know what he’d do if he didn’t. But he doesn’t hate the Stark girls, the she-wolves who've spent these past two months clinging to each other like they were adrift at sea. “I never struck you or her.”
“He never asked you to!”
“No one asked me to do this.” He does not get up. He refuses. “I swear to you, and if I’m a liar, I’ll let you kill me in my sleep. I swear it. I’ll never force you. Never hurt you. I’ll bring you back to your kin, girl. So tell me the words.”
“This is a trick,” she insists.
“No trick.” He shuffles forward on his knees, and raises his chin, exposing his scarred neck. “Tell me.”
He waits for her to slash the knife across his throat, or try to run for the door, or lift it to her own neck again. But instead she just looks at him, and then says, composed and clear once more, “No man could stop what will come for you if you break an oath to the old gods, Sandor Clegane.” Then she says, “Is your sword mine to command?”
“Yes,” it comes easily enough, compared to everything else he has committed himself to.
“Will you grant mercy to the weak?”
“Yes.”
“Help to the helpless?” She straightens a little, brushing her lank and matted hair out of her face. In the half-light from the fire and the shadows of the bedchamber, her bruises and scars fade and she could be almost regal. A noble lady of House Stark, her sister once called her. “Justice to all? Will you pledge your faith to me, a Snow of Winterfell, daughter of Eddard Stark?”
“Aye,” he says. “I do.”
“Swear it by earth and water,” she says, voice steely as Tywin Lannister’s ever was.
“I swear it by earth and water.”
“Swear it by bronze and iron.”
“I swear it by bronze and iron.”
She takes a step forward, the knife still in her her hand. “Swear it by ice and fire.”
Sandor hesitates, and can almost feel flames licking at his feet, but the chill down his spine that he tells himself is only sweat and exhaustion is stronger. “I swear it by ice and fire.”
She moves to lay the knife on his right shoulder, but he says, “Take my sword,” surprising even himself. No one, not even a squire, has ever handled that blade but him. He remembers what she said to him once, that he was not worthy of it. Jonelle moves over to the table, lifts it, although she staggers under the weight and must use both hands. Slowly, she manages to carry it over to him. She lays the flat of the blade on his right shoulder. If she wanted, she could slide it into his neck, heavy as it is. She raises it again, then places it on his left.
“Rise,” she commands, and he does, almost grateful for the order. Then the queer spell of it is over, and she lets his sword’s point rest on the floor. He takes it from her, and she watches him, waiting, he realizes, for him to disappoint her, for him to reveal the jape is over, to laugh in her face, to hurt her, violate her trust, then the rest of her. But Sandor only sheathes his sword once more, and when he turns back to her she has finally set down the knife.
“Joffrey wants a bloody bed,” she says quietly. Sandor holds out his hand, and she gives him the blunted blade.
“Then we’ll make one.” He scores lines up and down his legs, thin but bloody, and smears it in what he approximates as the right spot. Then he hands it to her, and watches her reopen old scab and cuts, hitching up her skirt, rolling up her sleeves. When they are done she looks slightly unsteady on her feet, but the bed is bloody. He picks up a thin pillow and his cloak, and makes for the opposite side of the room. “The door’s barred. Don’t let anyone in before I’m up. Rip your dress some, and leave it on the floor. There’s some clothes in the wardrobe.”
In the morning Joffrey delights over the blood-stained sheet and the dark circles under Jonelle’s eyes, her gaunt countenance, the way she flinches when Sandor’s hand rests heavy and possessive on her sharp shoulder. Sandor laughs and japes with the rest, makes reference to a she-wolf in bed, how hard he had to work to tame her, what a gift the king has given him, and when a wan Sansa is brought in, her face crumples at the sight of the sheet, but Sandor lets go of Jonelle, who runs to her, and hides her smiles and her whispered reassurances in her sister’s thick auburn curls.
When the little bird looks at him again, the tears in her eyes, for the first time, he thinks, are not all grief or horror. There is some astonishment there too. He is not used to the feeling coiling up warmly in his chest. It may be something like contentment. Or satisfaction. Or pride.