Chapter Text
283 AC
PROLOGUE
The little soldier boy’s thirteenth nameday was in just a few short months, and he had yet to make his first kill. He was hungry for it, hungry to sink his rusty blade into something—anything. Time on the road, albeit only a few months, had already hardened him. He felt as though he were soon to be all well and grown, but, still, he had yet to pay the cost of his manhood with blood. Taken in under the wing of an elderly smallfolk soldier, the boy dared not tell the man his true name and to reveal his family's allegiances, privileges, and ties, lest he betray his father’s wishes for him to toughen up as a footsoldier, as his father had done. No, there was no straight and narrow path to knighthood during times of war, though the boy thought them utterly foolish. The stuff of ballads and fantasy paled in comparison to the gritty horrors he’d witnessed of late. Still, he wanted a proper taste.
The soldiers had marched past a small farm in the village of Ovindon, situated between Cornfield and Silverhill, where the mines were of decent quality and the farmland remained arable. The boy’s nose soured and twisted at the smell of the destruction– blood, smoke, and burning flesh were still fresh and ripe in the air. The rolling, green mountainous hills seemed to stretch on forever, just as they did back home. He was keen to march away from the Westerlands, despite them being evidently employed as a sort of preventative defence against the dragon’s forces.
“Word was that the family here were alleged Targaryen loyalists,” the older soldier laughed. “Refused to give their sons and daughters up to the last wave of knights and Lannister bannermen who passed through.”
“Daughters? Whadya mean?” the boy asked, his accent thick and rolling.
The older man cast a sharp, dark look at the deformed little foot soldier. “You’re still too young for all that, boy. Don’t concern you.” Despite treating him like a little kid, the footsoldier had grown quite fond of the old man, once a Westerlandic miner, who had taken him under his wing. He reminded him of his own gruff, dark-haired, and bearded father, in some sort of way.
The smallfolk soldier hardly seemed to mind all his scarring, like other people. Though the dogs his family raised back home didn’t see his face like others did, he had no choice but to leave them behind. It had broken his heart, and he had even shed a single tear, met with a swift, invariably hard slap from his elder brother, who so often told him he was being an idiot.
Up ahead, the boy could hear the murmurings of shouting mixed with cruel laughter. He and the elder soldier approached the clearing behind a thicket of encircling, dense pinewood trees, where a farmer, perhaps barely twenty years of age, was held at knifepoint; the whites of his eyes resembled those of a panicked ewe more than a proper man of flesh and blood with a name and past of his own.
“Caught this one trying to smuggle away the weak and injured,” barked the drooling, capped soldier who held the fellow by the throat while two others kept their grips on his arm firm. “Jumped from his fleeing wagon to try to fend us off, with nothing more than a flimsy shepherding rod.”
The soldier boy and the other men approached the young shepherd, his face reddened by an evidently broken nose, his lip split, a mixture of blood and drool pooling down his chin. His eyes were a bright blue, his hair an ordinary light brown. His build was tall, but thin, like most of the smallfolk who had to withstand long, tedious seasons, particularly that of winter, which only seemed to be coming to a semi-ceremonious end that very year.
“Ought to lob off his head,” the man restraining the farmer’s right arm huffed. “But mayhaps we can have a little fun with the bloke, can’t we?” His cruel eyes settled on the little scarred soldier boy. “Hey, you, the scarred ugly boy, ever gutted a man right and proper before?”
“No,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. He felt another soldier press the hilt of a sword into his hands.
“Well, you’re certainly big enough, boy,” another one barked. “Aye, you may be your brother’s runt, but there’s good muscle on you, yet. Get over here.” The boy approached the gathered men, still restrained. He dared not look over his shoulder at the old man who had taken him under his wing, whose name he still did not know. He felt someone press the hilt of a sword into his still-smooth palm. “You ought to gut him, see his entrails fall from his fuckin’ belly.” The other soldiers broke out in a uproarious cacophony of gritty laughter. “Oh, aye, that’d be a feast for our sore eyes.”
“Mercy,” the lowly man sobbed, his wild eyes closing shut, and opening again, bearing down at the boy’s face with a terror the soldier boy had not yet seen up close. “Please, mercy.” His eyes were the same as everyone else’s, the soldier boy thought. He thinks I am hideous, too– a monster.
Instead, the old man stepped forward, resting a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “He asks for mercy, you ought to give him it. You remember where the heart is, boy?” He nodded, taking a few steps toward the restrained man. “Slip the blade between the ribs. No need to get all messy.”
He nodded a second time, taking another few steps forward, pressing the steel tip of the blade in the man’s side. Even wielding the sword, he could parse out and feel the man’s protruding ribs– the smallfolk had grown weak , his father had told him, as their hunger admonished their better senses. Labor had been slow, and Tywin Lannister often complained of his dwindling profits in the wake of the war.
He looked into the eyes of the peasant, then to the frenzied, manic whites alone. It was easier to think of him as an animal, as a sheep for slaughter, than a real and proper man. Leaning forward, he ignored the old man’s advice, aiming the sharpened tip of the blade deep into the man’s gut, and twisting, just as his father had taught him to do with poultry, lamb, beef, and the like. The peasant let out a gasp and then a piercing scream, and the boy only leaned his full weight into the steel, leaning and pressing deeper and deeper into the creature’s abdomen, his intestines promptly spilling to the misty grass at their feet.
The soldiers erupted into a litany of cheers. He felt several slap him proudly on the shoulder as he turned to the old man, whose face looked like a stoic, unchanging mask. Cold .
“How’d it feel, boy?” the gruff voice of the squadron’s commander rang in his ears. Glancing downward, he saw that some of the man’s blood had trickled down the blade, coating his tanned hands a brilliant, slippery red. “ Sweet , isn’t it?”
He balked, considering the commander’s words as he was pulled away from the peasant, who slumped to the ground atop his own spilled entrails, landing in a despoiled, ravaged heap on the grass below. “Aye,” he hissed. “It’s sweet.” He dared not then turn back to the old man, who would die within the next fortnight, lest he see his sorrowful, tired eyes.
295 AC
MARIYA I
Her arrival in King’s Landing was well anticipated by her soon-to-be employer. The young woman of ten and nine years of age had been spotted weaving and darting through the filthy, use-worn cobblestone streets, desperate to find the alehouse where her great-uncle had sent a courier, requesting his great-niece’s immediate employment there, as he was an acquaintance of the owner. As soon as she arrived, the alehouse owner showed her to the shabby little derelict cupboard where she would be staying. Unfortunately, her small room in the back was closest to the shared latrine, which made her living situation all the more grating (and noxiously smelly) .
It was something of a hereditary favor— he had been the uncle of her beloved deceased mother, after all. Mariya, who preferred to be called Mari by those who knew her, had known that she desired to kill the beastly knight known only then as the Mountain That Rides, ever since he, upon the orders of Ser Tywin Lannister, had laid siege upon her parents’ humble peasant town, comprised primarily of miners and shepherds, to the southeast and beyond the immediate claim of Casterly Rock, raping her young mother, maiming, and dismembering them both en route to the Sack of King’s Landing twelve years earlier. Somehow, unbeknownst to her, she had managed to survive as a child of seven. However, her early memories were practically nonexistent (although a trace of a Westerlandic accent persisted throughout her life, oddly enough). Despite her best efforts to spend sleepless nights trying to remember, Mari could not even recall the faces of her parents.
Her great-uncle, Botyl, was significantly younger than her maternal grandmother, his older sister, and he had made something of a name for himself, quite literally. Since he had been a successful merchant and trader in his time in Essos, trading perhaps somewhat dubiously (hence their swift and semi-permanent departure from the North), he had elected to give himself a House name the more coin he amassed— Midmarr . He had offered the name to her, but she had more or less refused, resigning herself only to use the last name when it would most benefit her. He was, of course, her maternal grandmother’s brother, and Mari had absolutely zero claim to much of anything of his.
No real title, no living parents, no land as a mere woman, nothing .
In her free time, however, Mari knew she wanted to be something and someone . She had sat in on her cousins’ lessons, covering topics such as letters, the basics of mathematics, financial management, and religion and faith, as her family had converted to following the Seven several generations earlier. She would avoid all men fastidiously and resolutely, quietly petrified at the idea that she would be trapped in the constraints of marriage (thankfully, her great-uncle had no plans whatsoever to try to help his great-niece in that department), nor was she particularly keen on being bound to a mediocre plot of land like her extended family. It did not take much convincing for him to send her away and to negotiate a working contract at an alehouse in King’s Landing, the capital city of Westeros, a place of rich history she had long read about. She was glad to be away from her great-uncle’s marshy lands, where she lived a smiling ghost for all those years.
Instead, she quickly developed a rather complicated web of resentment for any fine lords and ladies after spending a mere week in an alehouse located on the periphery of Flea Bottom, the most destitute neighborhood in the Westerosi capital city of King’s Landing. She would wander through the streets, dressed in the one beige linen shift and brown wool kirtle she owned, copying the walking styles and postures of those from all classes, feeling out of place, her eyes wandering with curious interest. She had made sure to keep herself as clean as possible, investing heavily in replacement soaps, brushes, and combs of all sorts. Mari had always been something of a hypochondriac, absolutely terrified of illness, wounds, or infections. Living on the poorer side of King’s Landing meant that this paranoia was increased tenfold.
That being said, it was no secret that the other barmaids in the establishment Midmarr had sent her to did seem willing to shag the customers for a few copper stars, sometimes a single silver stag, depending on the age. It was leagues more affordable than Lord Petyr Baelish’s more upscale establishment, of which talk was aplenty. Naturally, the alehouse’s humble visitors tended not to be Lords. They leaned more towards other smallfolk, soldiers, and sellswords, with the occasional (often lost) drunken Ser or member of the Kingsguard.
Mari had brought very few personal items— one extra shift, one lighter kirtle for the warmer climates of the Crownlands, a piece of lard soap, a comb for her lengthy hair, a chewing stick for her teeth, and an engraved dagger that had belonged to her grandfather, who had been the first of her family to leave the Riverlands in search of work (an unusual act for most smallfolk). The dagger had been something of a thoughtless token from the late Tytos Lannister. Years ago, long before she was born, her grandfather had provided the means for a bountiful celebratory feast after a hunt in which he had nearly lost his life to an enraged lioness. Her great-uncle had told her that much of the story, time and time again, before requesting— no, pleading — for her to take her grandfather’s dagger with her as she left his home. The damn steel was rusted, in poor shape, and more decorative than practical, but it gave her comfort, nonetheless.
Mari had been insistent on making her way out in the world, much to her family’s chagrin. She had already attempted to run away several times, to her great-uncle and great-aunt’s total and complete exhaustion. Mari had first tried to run away from the Riverlands five years earlier, when she was merely ten and four years of age, hitching a ride with a crippled trader taking dried fish south. She was swiftly caught by a second cousin who happened to be riding by within the hour. Two years later, she had just barely made it to Seagard, the seat of House Mallister, before another extended family member– a bloody fisherman– caught her.
She was a whimsical, loud-mouthed, belligerent child who wanted nothing more than to train with a sword like her cousins. However, her great-uncle’s wife had insisted she learn to sew, embroider, mend, repair, cook, and do all other things Mari found painfully boring. Worst of all, she had grown quite adept at them and was more than effective at such womanly errands, making her, at least superficially, an ideal marriage candidate for some local idiot. In King’s Landing, the only marriage prospect for fifty kilometers or more was her own awkward, lanky third-cousin-once-removed who scrubbed outhouses in the barracks she’d never met in person before, and that was never going to bloody happen. So, she was safe from marriage, at least for now.
The alehouse owner, a stern woman of eight and forty years named Gloria Waters, was a local bastard whose father was allegedly an old Lord of House Rosby who had long since been deceased. She had been the wife of a close business partner of her great-uncle during his time in Essos, and, according to him, it was quite the rarity for a woman to own a business, albeit of a particularly grimy variety. He supposed it would be, at the very least, marginally safer.
The first few weeks working in the alehouse were uneventful. However, she could not deny being somewhat scared at the vulgarities which would come from the mouths of the various members of the Kingsguard who would frequent the establishment, and who would often openly grope and molest any of the other serving ladies or barmaids. Hence, Mari kept her eyes down, her face concealed in candlelit shadow, and focused mainly on sweeping (perhaps somewhat over diligently) and restocking shelves.
Until, of course, she first heard the dastardly name “Clegane” mumbled on the lips of an excruciatingly drunk, fat, bald, and short Ser during her third month of employment, who kept speaking in explicit and excessive detail about various whores he had been intimately acquainted with on the Street of Silk, just a few short streets over. That had definitely caught her attention. She had known the stories her great-uncle had told her about her parents’ demise. He had not withheld from her every gory detail. Her uncle was a truthful man, almost obstinately.
Glancing over the bar, Mari surveyed the unassuming crowd until they fell onto a man sitting in the back corner of the establishment, only one half of his face visible in the low light. He was rugged-looking and somewhat half-decent to look at, at least from the side, but seemed tensely sorrowful. It surprised her how she hadn’t noticed him before. Like his brother, the man was a giant , taller than any other man she had ever seen. “Is that Ser Gregor?” she had asked the other lone working barmaid that night, fighting to keep her rage and fury contained within her. “Why is he away from the Westerlands, from his keep?”
“No, that’s the Hound, his gnarly little brother. The litter’s runt,” the barmaid had replied immediately. “Lannister’s guard and servant. Comes here maybe twice, three times a week, I’d say. Sometimes pays for a woman, though it’s been a while.” Mari raised her brows. “I’d stay away from him. He’s a right dangerous fellow. A real killer of hundreds, that one. Burned , too. Hideous creature. Glad he never asked for me.”
“Who did he ask for, then?”
“Whoever. Didn’t matter. Anyone who would take him. I’d have refused.”
Then, the lesser Clegane turned his head one evening to bark an order at another barmaid, allowing her first glance at the right side of his face, which appeared to be severely burned, the skin red and raw, almost melted and sinewy. It was admittedly difficult to make out the details from across the room. She couldn’t imagine how one could acquire such a painful, brutal injury and survive it.
So, naturally, Mari would watch the man every night with rapt attention. He hardly spoke to anyone and sat, drinking alone. And heavily . The Hound would spend quite a fair bit of coin on drink, and every beverage, be it ale, beer, summer wine, or otherwise, disappeared seemingly instantaneously. From where he would sit, tucked away in the back corner of the alehouse, his ‘good’ side faced outwards, his disfigurement to the wall. Mari hated to admit it— be it naive or childish curiosity — but she wanted so badly to inspect the burned half of his face, so often partially covered with and obscured by his tangled dark brown waves of shoulder-length hair.
In response to her subtle queries, she had learned from local word of mouth that he served as something of a babysitter for King Robert Baratheon and Queen Cersei Lannister’s three blonde-haired brats (a terrible job served him right; the Cleganes were an evil bunch!) . Naturally, as she would expect, he seemed constantly, unbearingly, excruciatingly, inconsolably miserable. The eldest, called Joffrey, had just turned nine years old; the middle child, called Myrcella, was only five; and the youngest, Tommen, was four. It seemed that every smallfolk in King’s Landing virulently despised the princes and princess because of their birth and association with the crown by default. Robert Baratheon, on all accounts, was a slovenly shell of his former valorous self and an inept ruler over the starving masses. But what else could they expect?
The Hound’s apparent misery at his position served him right, then, she thought.
Her great-uncle swore—oft and loudly—that it had been a Clegane-bred warhound that set its teeth upon her, in the black hour when her mother and father were slain. Perhaps one of Ser Gregor’s brutes, he would say, as if the name itself might salt the wound. Mari had never put much stock in the tale. She had her suspicions and more than a few doubts, but she let him speak it as he pleased. The truth, as she knew it, was only this: she had been found by the ragged remnant of smallfolk from the next village over.
The story went as follows: other unnamed, forgotten survivors had come picking through the ashes and corpses, and there she was, crouched beneath a splintered bedframe, face wet with blood, her lip torn wide, the roots of her milk teeth cracked and broken. It was her great-uncle’s wife who had stitched her face once she was delivered back to the North, and she had done well enough, for a farmer’s bone needle and undyed cotton thread. The scar lay plain across her mouth, chin, and philtrum even now, but her lips were full, her cheekbones sharp, and her jaw soft and delicate as any well-bred lady’s.
Mari did not think of herself as some sort of easily scandalized prude, although she was pretty religious, albeit in private. Her female cousins, her great-uncle’s direct descendants, had taught her the rudimentary things to know about sex and about protecting oneself as a young woman, especially during travel or when living more or less alone. Hence, when she saw that not merely some, but most of the barmaids working alongside her in Gloria’s service would accept additional coin to sit on the lap of a guard, soldier, or smallfolk (if he had the means) and peck a few kisses on their cheek, she could not hear to do so herself. Gloria seemed fine with this, at first, although somewhat irritated when Mari would staunchly refuse to take a pitcher to a crowd of men on certain evenings.
“They won't pay any mind to your face, dear,” Gloria had told her. “You cut a fine enough figure. And, if it pleases you to hear, your face isn’t half-bad either. Is it that you don’t have a liking for men at all? Is that it? I knew a few girls like that, back in my day…”
“No, I mean, I just don’t wish to be touched,” Mari had replied. “I didn’t come here to whore. I came here to work and save money. On my own. I don’t need my uncle’s help.”
Gloria chuckled, somewhat sardonically, her icy eyes suddenly turning harsh and cruel, taking Mari somewhat aback. “Save money ? What are you planning to do with your ‘saved money,’ then, eh, girl? From what your uncle tells me, you’ve been refusing to wed for years. Kept running away. Been a lot of trouble for 'em.”
“Aye, I know I’ve been trouble.” Mari could feel herself bristling as she avoided the owner’s unrelenting gaze. “And I have sought my dear family’s forgiveness. By being here. By working.”
“And, I’ll have you know, tending to customers is work,” Gloria hissed. “You may have some distant relatives who think they’re suddenly highborn because of some lucky business dealings, but you’re in the lion’s den here in King’s Landing, girl. And you need to grow up. You’re lucky I don’t beat you for your constant insolence. I should start by decking your pay—”
“Ma’am, please, I promise, I’ll… I’ll do better.”
“Good. Now, muster up some bloody courage and tend to your godsdamn customers. You’ve already stocked pickles, radish, and imported ale a hundred times over.”
“I’m… sorry.”
Gloria had already bustled away, and Mari felt her cheeks sting with a reddish heat, her eyes cast down. Then, the sensation of prickling of tears in her eyes caused her to wipe at her face with a fisted hand, like a foolish child. Looking up, finally, after taking a few deep breaths and composing herself, she met his dark, full-facing gaze; the Hound’s eyes locked firmly on her as though she were his prey. Oddly enough, a strange, tickling, and warm feeling flooded her body as adrenaline coursed through her blood.
Then, Mari had a somewhat insane thought.
Her great-uncle had insisted she bring her grandfather’s dagger with her to King’s Landing, for her protection against thieves and rapers. So far, she had not yet needed to use it. Perhaps killing his kin would be a form of retribution? What if I were to kill a Clegane myself? It was an odd, undeniably deranged, sinful, manic thought, but Mari had always been an impulsive and forthright little girl, and little had changed since she had grown into an adult woman. So, she scurried back to her rooms, rummaging through her belongings until she found the dagger, tucking it into her high wool stockings, where the cool press of the gift from Tytos Lannister to her smallfolk grandfather gave her a sudden sense of sweeping, gallant, almost knightly courage.
SANDOR I
Sandor had known that the strange, veiled little sweeping woman who cowered behind the barkeep had been watching him for weeks and weeks. It had become something of a game—one that he never mentioned aloud, of course— for him, at least. He would always be sure to come to this particular alehouse during his jaunts after training or duty, to sit in the same spot, to face away from her, and, as expected, there her wide sea glass eyes would be, looking at him with an utterly unreadable expression plastered across her pretty little face. Perhaps she was keen to fuck for coin.
He knew she was watching him, not out of intrigue or morbid curiosity, as most women did. He was also well aware that her gaze was watchful and observant, yet he still got the sense that he was being hunted by her, for whatever reason. Even now, after she had been scolded by the old wench who ran the place, and a single tear fell down her flushed cheek, her eyes immediately returned to his. Most interestingly, he noted that she had a rather odd scarring up and down her pouty little pink mouth, as though a knife had cut her. He was sure of it. He could recognize that type of cruel knife wound anywhere. Perhaps she had endured some past womanly scuffle with another one of the tavern wenches— she was quite bonny, and very shapely, he also duly observed. Sandor wondered if he had ever met her before, as something about her seemed intimately familiar. Perhaps she had been working at a brothel he had once visited. It had been almost a year since he had stopped any kind of proper whoring, and he had only been able to bed a few women who could tolerate the sight of his horrendous face (and worse attitude) , most of them either older, more experienced, and more willing to put up with him.
However, in the past, he had budgeted his earnings as a second-born deformed son of a cursed line of minor nobility and brutish Lannister sellsword half-decent enough to afford a girl closer to his age, though they typically insisted on having him take them exclusively from behind and, if he ever wanted them to suck his cock, they never looked up into his eyes, to his face. He did not push the matter or make the direct request, but he knew they found him repulsive, which made the whole endeavor to go to such places more humiliating than pleasurable.
The little tavern wench ( who was always fucking sweeping! ) tended to wear a plain linen coif, which more or less covered all of her hair, and dressed borderline prudishly— as though she didn’t know exactly where she was, and how strange it was for her to cower and balk in such a slimy little establishment.
On one unassuming night, Sandor had finished his drink, fighting the urge to get into a brawl with a particularly oafish and stupid gang of golden cloaks, who were, naturally, bragging about beating and raping some young orphan girl in the annals of Flea Bottom. Although he hated the seemingly never-ending banalities of evil he encountered in this damn place, he still knew he needed to be wary with how he picked his battles, lest he ruin his well-maintained and very scurrilous reputation as an unapproachable brute. What would picking a fight do for the little orphan girl? Bloody lot of nothing.
It served Sandor well to be feared. He had learned this when he killed his first man at the age of twelve in the service of Tywin’s army, wearing Lannister-gold plated armor for the very first time. He was already an inch over six feet back then, and looked the part of a full-grown man. The look in the man’s eyes— it was incomparable to any other sensation he had felt. It was power , it was what Gregor had tried to take from him five years prior.
Sandor eventually made his way out of the alehouse, feeling somewhat dizzy from drink, though he wasn’t properly drunk yet. It took a lot of spirits to cause any sort of real drunkenness in his near-seven-foot build, and most of the time it wasn’t worth the coin or time he had to spend in the presence of irritating, loudmouthed fellow patrons (cunts!) to get it. His plans for the evening were to retire to his room and to have a dark, dreamless sleep, which was what he tended to prefer.
Then, suddenly, something jumped on him from behind, little arms wrapping around his neck and chest, the reverberating sound of metal clashing against his dark armor, which he had the mind not to take off whenever he went into the city proper. It was easy enough to flip the attacker off of him, the individual in question landing with a scream of pain and discomfort into the muddy streets below. What met his gaze was an indignant, almost mad, contorted, enraged face of the little barmaid who had been watching him. Bloody hell, so it wasn’t so much of a twisted crush as it was boldly murderous intent?
Sandor quickly grasped the woman's small, delicate wrist in his hand, watching as she squirmed against him in a wholly futile act. Her eyes, however, mossy and cold, bore into his; her split, scarred lip twisted into a pained grimace. Despite her disfigurement, she remained quite pleasing to the eyes. If she had not been born with the deformity or, perhaps, obtained an injury later on in life, she would have been quite stunningly beautiful.
“Ser, you’re hurting me,” she hissed in his direction, her voice deeper than he had expected, her eyes filled with single-minded hate, the kind Sandor was only accustomed to seeing from soldiers and from himself. She tried to squirm again, but it was all in vain. He was far stronger than she.
“I’m no fucking Ser,” he replied instantly, his voice gruffer and louder than he intended. It seemed he was, in fact, ever so slightly drunk. “And I’d watch where you try to stick a dagger like that. Where’d you get it? Steal it from some drunken cunt one night?” His eyes promptly wandered to the blade, and he was immediately taken aback, balking slightly as he recognized the well-worn carvings of a golden lion on the hilt. “Well, well, well, hear me fucking roar, indeed.”
Taking advantage of his momentary confusion, the woman gathered up the available spit in her dry mouth. She attempted to shoot a loogie in his general direction. Still, the Hound was surprisingly agile, immediately dodging her attempts, squeezing her wrist so that she dropped the dagger to the soup-like piss, shite, and rainwater puddles on the debauched cobblestones beneath their feet.
“I don’t steal,” she spat back. “I’m no thief. The blade is mine, Hound.”
Sandor laughed incredulously, pausing to take in the woman before him. “You’re bloody insane, you know that? Not even full-grown men are stupid enough to try to kill me.” She did not answer him, but stared deep into his eyes, her face still angry, her scarred mouth working to gather up more spit to try to shoot a wad of phlegm in his direction again.
Sandor suddenly felt more tired and irritated than he had in years, even after being assigned to stand around a bunch of bratty children for the past several years. “I’ve seen you watching me,” he rasped. “Months and months of this shite, you sitting there, moping around all night, watching me. What is it, then? Want a close inspection? Something to gawk and laugh at? Am I so fucking funny to you? Is that it? Funny enough that you thought to kill me with your stolen Lannister-fucking-bread knife?”
“No,” the wench choked out, Sandor’s eyes wandering upward, as the coif she always wore gradually began to slide off her head, revealing a rather unusual expanse of curly, unruly auburn-red hair, a color similar to what he recalled of his late mother, marked by an odd streak of dark brown in the front. “You’re brothers with the Mountain, aren’t you? You’re the second son of the dishonorable house Clegane.”
At the mention of his loathed brother, Sandor practically let out a snarl. “Have some business with my House, then, girl? Well, I’ll have you know I’m not my fucking brother, and I’ll have nothing to do with him and whatever shite you’ve been put through. You’ve got the wrong fucking Clegane.” It was disappointing. He could already feel his heart dropping— this seemed to be the ultimate scope of his goddamn miserable life, forever cowering like a wet runt in the shadow of his mad dog of a brother. “You’re still in one fucking piece, so I’m sure he hasn’t…” Sandor’s shadowed eyes settled on her lip, wondering. They remained in silence for a few moments, Sandor’s grip on her wrist and shoulder softening, gradually, until both her slippered feet had returned to the cobblestone below.
“I would appreciate it if you let me go,” she finally said, her voice barely rising above a whisper, her eyes suddenly red and brimming with tears. “I’m no whore, by the way, if you think I’ll fuck you. I don’t do that sort of thing. I just sweep the fucking floors.”
“You’re a tavern wench. Do you know what they do, little lamb?”
One eyebrow raised in response to Sandor’s impromptu nickname. “You could say I’m a bad one. Now, let me go, you… arse! ” Her coif had finally completely fallen into the dirt below, into a particularly nasty patch of what appeared to be a grotesque mixture of sick, shit, piss, rainwater, and other unidentifiable types of human filth. Her godsdamn loogies now, too.
They were silent for a minute more before Sandor finally released her. However, she did not move to run away, one hand rubbing the wrist he had grasped tightly while still wearing his armored gauntlets, as it was always too much of a goddamn pain to take his armor on and off when he went out drinking every night once he was dismissed from duty.
“Goodnight, Ser— Hound .”
“I told you, girl, I’m no fucking knight.”
“Just… goodnight, then.”
“And take your bread knife with you. You’re lucky I let you live, girl.” Sandor quietly prayed, for the first time in years, as he did not think himself typically pious, much less worthy, that he had not unintentionally bruised her pale, soft flesh.