Chapter Text
I shouldn’t be here, she thought when she saw the first handprint of blood on the rocks. I should run.
But she didn’t run. She shouldered on, her cloak drawn tightly around her small frame and her hood up. The smear of blood on the first rock she’d passed had been a handprint, then she found more dripped into the path of the small game trail. Someone had staggered through here recently, and that someone was likely going to die. At least, they were going to die if the amount of blood they were losing was any indicator of their condition.
If they’re going to die, they won’t need their coin purse, she told herself. There was the possibility that whoever it was would not, in fact, be dead, or that there would be more than one of them and she was walking into trouble. She was light on her feet and quiet, though, and she told herself that at the first sign of trouble she could be gone before they knew she was there.
She found the man who had bled sprawled out in the grass further down the trail. He was much too dead to have heard her coming. At first she thought he might be unconscious, all stretched out in the evening sun. She sidled closer inch by careful inch until she could see that his eyes were open and unblinking and staring back at her. Open, empty eyes. Dead eyes, and dead eyes meant he could not hurt her. She nudged at him softly with her boot for good measure, then much less softly just to be sure. He did not stir, even when kicked. The dead soldier was hers for the taking.
In her big black cloak and black dress of mourning, she was sure she must have looked like a vulture every bit as much as she felt like one. How did my life come to this? she wondered as she turned the pockets in the man’s cloak inside out. Within she found a paltry lot: one silver stag and six copper pennies, and a small iron chain of no great value.
His armor could be worth something, she thought. A dead man has no use for armor. She hated thinking it, but it was true. Looters had been flocking to battlefields as of late, stripping the dead soldiers of the armor they no longer needed. They’d load it into wagons and take it to the nearest market, where it could be sold at market for a few stags or handfuls of pennies. It wouldn’t be much, but it wouldn’t be nothing, either. She’d sold a dead man’s helmet at Maidenpool a few turns of the moon ago. True as it may be that she wouldn’t dare double back to Maidenpool, there may be someone along the road willing to buy it from her, or somewhere she could set up a stall and sell it.
There was a hole in his breastplate where some sort of weapon—maybe a halberd or an iron spear—had punctured right through it and into the once-living man’s chest. In its current state, the breastplate was worthless. She didn’t feel like carrying an armful of greaves and gauntlets with her everywhere she went, so she left him. She took his wine skin and his helmet, though, and cursed him for having nothing further of use to her on him. Stupid dead man.
Down the game trail she continued. It was as good as any road, she supposed. If it was good enough for the deer and the rabbits and the wolves and the many unseen creatures that called the wildlands of Westeros home, then it was good enough for her.
It was a matter of moments before she found more blood. Had the first man come this way and then doubled back to die? That wasn’t very likely, as it made little to no sense. That man had staggered from the road, collapsed, and never stood again. This was different blood from a different man. Warily, and with her dagger in her hand, she continued down the game trail. The trail disappeared into a thicket of trees, the waist-high grass giving way to elm trees with their great thick branches and leaves of gold and orange and red. The forests of Westeros were beautiful in the autumn, making it all the sadder that winter was coming to choke out the beauty and replace it with cold, white death instead.
It was not uncommon to find a stream in a forest, but what was unusual were the markedly massive bootprints in the soft mud on either side of the bank. The sheer size stopped the vulture in her tracks. What kind of monster did this belong to? She compared the size of her own foot to the ones in the mud, brow furrowed. Frightened, and morbidly curious, she crossed the stream by passing from one stone to another. When she climbed the embankment, she saw the man who had left the massive prints in his wake.
The dead soldier was slumped against the base of a tree. He was a giant of a man, monstrous to behold, with a tangle of dark hair and a cropped beard. The soldier was easily double her size, and the helmet that laid at his side was fashioned in the shape of either a wolf or a snarling dog. A helmet of that level of detail would fetch a pretty penny. The horse—a magnificent black courser—hitched to a branch nearby would, too. The vulture inched forward slowly as she had with the last man. With gentle, lithe hands, she reached forward and pulled the helmet from beneath his arms.
When she moved the helmet, he groaned.
When he groaned, she screamed.
Startled and screeching, she reeled backwards and onto her haunches. Dead bodies made noises sometimes, but they don’t open their eyes and watch you. Well, maybe they did in stories, but this was no story. This was a living man.
He wasn’t just looking at her, he was seeing her, watching her. He was awake and conscious, though his face was pale and sunken and the bags beneath his eyes were black. Half of his face was badly burned, a gnarled ruin of scars that had never healed properly. He blinked slowly, then closed his eyes and leaned his head back again. The wound that was doing him in was between his neck and his shoulder, perfectly on his collarbone. Rotten blood, black and brown rather than red, was crusted around shards of the armor that had been shattered into his skin. It was festering and killing him.
She turned her dagger in her hands, a nervous sort of uncertain fiddling. “Can you hear me?” she asked. He did not speak in response, but instead just opened his eyes again. The knight looked up at the sky rather than at her. “I can help you,” she offered, though where the kindness was coming from, she could not say. “I can clean the wound and hope for the best, or I can give you the gift of mercy. Do you have a preference?”
The soldier’s eyes closed. She wasn’t sure if they were like to open again. Mercy, she decided, is the kindest thing I can give him. Again she crept forward, less fearful than the first time. She would do it, she would give him the Mother’s Mercy. Yet, when she brought the blade forth to give him the relief he needed, she couldn’t do it. Instead, she stood. “I’ll be back,” she promised.
She gathered dried sticks and heaped them into a small but neat pile, and she struck her flint and steel until she had a fire. The vulture had learned how to survive if nothing else. She placed the dead man’s helmet in the flames and poured half of his wineskin into it. The plating of the helmet was thick, and by the time the wine boiled the sky above was as orange as the trees below. She wrapped her hands in her cloak and lifted the helmet away from the flames.
“This will hurt,” she warned him. “This will hurt like a bitch, but try not to scream. Screaming calls the wolves, of four legs and of two.”
He screamed when she poured the boiling wine onto the wound. He threw his head back against the tree with such force that she feared he’d killed himself then and there, but a second wave of screaming let her know he was not, in fact, dead. Not yet. When she dabbed at the wound with a rag of the dead man’s cloak the huge man did not scream; he whimpered like a babe, so pitifully that she couldn’t help but whisper words of comfort to him. She cooed and hushed him and made promises that the pain would go away soon. He did not answer. When she poured the wine the third time, he did not scream. He blacked out from the pain instead.
The burned man was much easier to deal with once he was unconscious. She wasn’t entirely sure he would wake up again, and the odds weren’t in his favor, but if he didn’t, at least she could say she’d tried. It was dark and this man was strange, and she needed to leave him before wolves came along. She needed to find some place better to hide, she needed to…
“No one would fuck with you, would they?” she asked of his sleeping form. In the black of the night, in the dim light of the fire, you could scarce see the wound. If bandits and robbers and rapers came along, the sheer size and obvious strength of the knight might deter them. I may be safer sleeping by this dead body than beneath a ramshackle roof, she considered. So she laid at his side, curled up beneath her cloak, and hoped the mountain of a man would be enough to protect her.
For the most part she slept through the night, save for one time when wolves howled just a little too close to their small camp—if one could call it a camp. She fed the fire and laid back down, near pressed up against the sleeping giant for warmth and safety. Even unconscious, he somehow made her feel safer than she’d felt in…in a long, long time.
When she woke the second time, the sky was pink with the rising sun. The man’s eyes were open, and they were staring at her. Alarmed, she bolted up right and backed away from him. He said nothing.
“You made it through the night,” she observed. “Are you okay?”
For the first time since she’d found him, the giant knight spoke. “It fucking burns,” he told her through gritted teeth. His voice was intensely deep and gravely, so powerful and commanding. A strong voice, and it sent a shiver through her. Had he not looked like he was dying…maybe she would have…
“Better burning than dead.” She refused to be distracted by her own thoughts.
“Is it? Fuck off.”
The vulture shrugged. “I can kill you, if you’d prefer.” She had to pretend she wasn’t afraid of him, even if it was only to try and convince herself. Not sure of what else to do, she stood up and brushed herself off. “You need to drink,” she told him. She pulled the wineskin from where she’d placed it on the opposite side of the tree and brought it to him. “It’s wine, not water, but it’ll do.”
“That we can agree on.” His hands were shaking too badly to take the wineskin himself. All of him was shaking, she realized, likely from the fever.
“Here,” she offered, lifting the wineskin to his mouth, “I’ve got you.” When she went to steady his face with her free hand, he jerked away.
“Fuck off,” he said.
“You fuck off. You want wine or not?” He must have wanted the wine, because he didn’t object when she helped him the second time, and he managed several swallows. When she pulled the wineskin away, he closed his eyes again.
It was a long time before either of them spoke. The warrior drifted in and out of consciousness; sometimes sweating, sometimes shaking, sometimes snoring. The vulture didn’t wander too far, but boredom bested her and she ventured around a bit. She found plenty of ripe blackberries and a handful of morel mushrooms nearby, and again she ventured to the stream. She filled the helmet with water so they could boil and drink it, as she’d heard the maesters do.
The sun was going down before they spoke again. “Can you eat?” she asked, offering him a handful of berries. He didn’t answer, but he did accept the berries and ate them slowly, one by one by one until there were no more.
As they sat in the creeping dusk, the small woman asked, “What is your name, if you’ll share it?”
The knight just shook his head. It was a mutual sentiment; she didn’t want to share hers, anyway. So they sat there in silence, the dying man and the woman who’d intended to loot his corpse. If she had a horse or a mule or a cart or maybe even an oversized sack, she would have knocked him unconscious and taken everything he and the other dead man had. She didn’t have those things, though, and she didn’t have anywhere else to go, either. Though she considered stealing his helmet and his horse, she was a looter, not a robber. Dead men held no grudges.
Even out in the farmlands where she grew up, she heard talk. Travelers on the road talked, and merchants, and storytellers passing through. They’d talked a lifetime ago about the king’s dog; a great beast with a scarred face, the meanest dog in all the Seven Kingdoms. The Hound, they’d called him. He was cruel and vicious as they came, with a reputation preceded only by his brother’s. She didn’t know the name of the man beside her. She just knew he had a hound’s head helmet and that he was a great mean beast with a scarred face. The vulture sat beside the hound. If he dies, I will have that horse and that helmet. Don’t tell me your name, dog. I already know it.
It was another full day before he had strength enough to stand. It fell on the vulture to keep the hound’s wound clean and to find food enough for the two of them. He had no appetite for blackberries and she was miserable at catching fish, so they ate little enough. They ate little and talked less, and by the time a day and half had passed she gave up on trying to talk to him. The thought of stealing his horse, though, was becoming ever more tempting.
She woke on the morning of their third full day together to the sound of armor jostling about. Cold and confused and barely awake, it took her a moment to realize what he was doing.
“You’re leaving?” Her bewilderment was outmatched only by his audacity. He was sitting ahorse, and he would have ridden right off without her had the sound of him mounting not woken her. He said nothing as he reined up. “I’m coming with you!”
“Fuck you are,” he grunted. “You’re dead weight, that’s all you are.”
“Dead weight!?” The woman was aghast. “You’d be the dead one if I hadn’t found you!” His shadow passed over her as the big gray horse sauntered past. “Don’t leave me here! Please!”
He never responded, and he was getting further and further out of reach. With no rocks nearby, she grabbed a chunk of charred wood from the evening’s fire and hurled it at him. She missed, mostly, as it just struck the horse in the haunch. Neither rider nor steed looked back, and then they were gone around the corner.
Cold, and poor, and terribly alone, her frustration mounted and all she could do was sit down on the ground and cry. She wasn’t sure how long she’d sat by the blackened remains of the fire and wept, but by the time she was done the sun was up and her face was sore, all puffy and swollen from the tears.
It was not in vain, though. It was through the tears that she’d sorted out a plan. He’s a wanted man, she realized. Someone will pay for him, and they will pay with gold. He will pay, too, for leaving, and he will pay with blood. She followed the game trail and the horse’s prints back out to the road from which she’d came nearly four days prior. The hooves turned left—which was north—and followed the road. It was perfect; the same direction she’d been going. The Hound, which she’d decided he indeed was, had a brother. It was the brother who had given him the kiss of fire, the brother they called The Mountain. The Mountain worked for the Lannisters, and those lions were made of gold. The gold was the fire that kept her burning.
The skies were grown grey by midday, and the vulture was tired and sore regardless of her spite-fueled path of war. She oft sang to keep herself alert and steady on the road, even at the cost of being seen, but today the songs would not come. Not even The Bear and the Maiden Fair or Seasons of My Love.
The Rains of Castamere, though…that one crept into her seething mind. She hummed as she drove forward, hoofprints of the Hound’s steed never out of sight. In a coat of gold or a coat of red, a lion still has claws. And mine are long and sharp, my lord, as long and sharp as yours.
The rain came when the day was nearly halfway over. It beat down hard and relentless with no end in sight, a cold autumn rain that soaked the vulture to her core. Worse, it washed away the hoofprints she’d been so diligently following when the road turned to mud. It sucked at her boots and slowed her pace by nearly half, but still she carried on. I know what direction he’s headed, and that’s enough. At least, it had better be enough, or she was like to throw herself into the Green Fork.
When riders came around the corner, there was little she could do to hide herself. They were too close and she was too slow to run from four—no, five—mounted men. They reined up around her in a sort of circle.
“What have we here?” said one rider. The rain had slicked his oily ginger hair to his face and dripped into his matted beard.
“A little lady, it seems,” said another. He was bald save for a few whisps of hair left clinging miserably to his scalp.
“Just passing through, sers,” answered the vulture, though it was plain these were no knights and did not deserve to be addressed as such.
The first rider dismounted. He was barrel-bodied with bandy legs, and a neck too thick for his shoulders. She backed away, but found she was trapped between horses. “Miserable looking thing, ain’t you?” He laughed. “Why don’t you sing us a song and might be we’ll let you go?”
She held open her hands. “Not much of a singer, tragically. My father told me once I had the voice of jackass.” The men laughed, but they were laughing at her in a cruel fashion that did little to assuage her growing unease. “I can sing you a different sort of song, though. For coin, that is.”
“And what sort of song might that be?” The red-haired man inched closer.
“One of a runaway hound,” she said. “A big beast. No doubt its master is looking for it.”
She hadn’t noticed the rider behind her had dismounted until it was too late. Suddenly he had her by the arms, and all of the men were talking at once, talking and laughing and jeering, and everything was happening so fast. She was being pulled away from the road, away from any hope of anyone else finding her. The trees were closing in around them. “Help! Help me!” she screamed to no one in particular. She screamed it again and again, until the man dragging her clapped one hand over her mouth and put an end to it. And when she couldn’t speak, she prayed it. Help me, Warrior, she thought. Help me Mother, Maiden, Crone, Smith, Father, Stranger. Help me whoever can hear. Help me Lord of Light, Black Goat. Someone, anyone, help me.
With no warning, the ground rose up to meet her. It was soft with mud and slick with fallen leaves, and she hit the forest floor with a wet thud. The men were laughing still. One of them knelt over her and attempted to tear at her dress.
And mine are long and sharp, my lord, as long and sharp as yours. She raked at his face with such fury that it left her hand aching. She dealt one swift hit, but it was as hard as she could manage and her untrimmed nails caught the skin of his face, leaving long, red ribbons in their wake. He did not expect the second blow from her other arm. She dropped her weight off of the elbow she was propped up on and shoved her hand upward at his face. In hindsight, she wasn’t sure what she had been hoping to accomplish, but she went for his eye. Maybe she’d meant to hit him, or maybe to scratch him. She did not intend to hit him so sharply that her nails and fingers punctured his eye.
The man howled, the woman screamed. He reeled backwards, clutching his bloodied eye. It was now or never; she shoved him off of her and scrambled to her feet. She had to go, she had to run, she had to…
The forest floor was slick with rain, the same rain that was pounding all around her and drowning out the cries of the men who chased her. The same rain that muddied the embankment; the same mud her boots kicked at helplessly, slipping and sliding as she tried her hardest to climb away from them. But the world was wet with rain and there was no escape. Halfway up she came down on her hands and knees, and try as she might to claw her way up, she was not fast enough. No sooner had she grabbed hold of a root than a man’s hands were fisted in her skirts, pulling her down again.
“No, no!” Her hands and feet left the ground entirely as she was lifted away. “Help me!” she screamed, moments before the wind was knocked from her. Her assailant tossed her haphazardly to the ground as if she were a child’s doll. Then there was a man holding down her arms, then another on top of her, then one was laughing. They were all laughing. The rain was in her eyes and the world was blurry.
Time slowed, then it crawled. She thought of her stupid dead husband. She thought of the first man whose body she’d found discarded along the Kingsroad and the coin purse she’d taken from him. She’d said a prayer to the Stranger for him. The second body she’d found a day later, and she’d taken his cloak of black, the same cloak she wore now in the mud. After that they all blended together, all bloated in the sun and from the rain, with their eyes pecked out by crows. She thought of the fact she’d found the wanted man they called The Hound, and that she’d spent three days at his side. For some reason she’d nursed him back to health; maybe it was the same reason he’d left her there. I felt so safe at his side, she thought bitterly. Even when he was dying, even when he couldn’t stand. She thought of the nights she’d spent pressed at his side listening to wolves. I wanted to be safe with him.
The man on top of her looked away suddenly. “What the fu—”
Blood sprayed over her, red and hot and thick. Inches from her face, horse hooves thundered past in the mud, then they were gone just as quick as they’d come. The men were shouting. The one on top of her was up and standing before he ever had a chance to defile her. The vulture wasn’t sure what was happening. The man who had been holding her down lay in the mud, blood pouring from his now-cracked skull, his eyes open but unseeing. It wasn’t until she turned and saw the great black courser rearing in the rain that she realized. The Hound.
One of the men ran at him, slashing wildly. He’s still hurt, she realized, remembering the black wound on his neck. Another man grabbed at the courser’s reins, just out of the Hound’s reach. They’ll overtake him.
The same instinct that had taken the first man’s eye found her again. It seized her and made her grab hold of the dead man’s discarded dagger. Women did not often pray to the Warrior for strength for themselves; just for their sons and husbands and men who went off to war and were like to never return. Warrior give me strength, she thought nonetheless, and if the Warrior cannot, then I hope the Stranger does, so that I may send this man to you. She grabbed the redheaded man by the hair. Her fingers fisted in his oily red curls, and when she pulled back with all her might, the pale white flesh of his neck was there for the taking. The steel of the blade—the glittering, beautiful steel—found his throat in what would have been one clean sweep had her hands not been shaking so badly. Instead it cut him sideways, puncturing deep into his skin. She pulled it out and pushed it in again, then again, then again.
Then she was not sure what had happened. It was still raining, and none of the five men were living. The Hound was not on his horse, he was standing over one of the still-warm bodies. The vulture was standing at the edge of the embankment. Perhaps she’d hoped to climb away with better luck than she’d had the first time.
The Hound kicked at the body with his boot and grunted. The woman watched. When he turned to face her, it was plain he was in pain, that his wound was still raw and burning. The new wound on his leg wasn’t helping, either. “Are you alright?”
His words took her by surprise. “I’m fine,” she said, though she hadn’t realized until then that she was crying. “Are you?”
The Hound half-nodded in response. When the vulture looked around, she noticed one of the dead riders had a wineskin at his hip. She knelt and took it. Old habits die hard, she thought when she pulled it from his belt. “You’ll need this,” she started.
She never got to finish. The Hound took the wineskin from her hands mid-sentence. “Damn right I will.” He took a long pull from it, wine dripping from his mouth and into his beard. Had he not been so large, she might have tried to stop him. Instead she just stood and watched the spectacle.
When he was done, she told him, “You could have boiled it for your wounds.”
“Piss on the wounds,” he told her. “Find more wine.”
By the time they’d stripped the bodies of anything of value, they had eighteen silver stags, a handful of coppers, and two more wineskins. One of them was empty, to the Hound’s disdain, but the other had enough for him to take a Hound-sized swig with some left over to boil.
Two of the riders’ horses who had not bolted from the fray remained. The vulture approached one, cooing and shushing and making all matter of silly noises to soothe it. It was a pretty, young thing, piebald and bright-eyed.
“Can you ride?” the Hound asked.
“I can.” She balled the reins in her hand and gently edged towards the other horse, a chestnut mare with a mane of black. Though it whickered and pawed at the mud, it otherwise put up little fight. She stood between the two horses, securing them to one another.
“The fuck are you doing?” The Hound watched her with a furrowed brow.
“They’re both young and in good health,” she said, checking her knots. They were nice and secure. “This one here might fetch a pretty penny in the next town.”
The Hound considered that a moment. “It’ll slow us down.”
“Us?” The vulture looked at him. “I wasn’t aware there’s an us.”
“Bugger that. I’m leaving you at the first hole of a village we find. You want to get left to the rapers and raiders again?”
She smiled. “Weren’t you the one that left me in the first place?”
They rode until they found a barn that could at least halfway pass as a shelter. Neither knew whose land the barn was on, or whether or not anyone would care that they were there. Judging by the weeds that grew up around it, though, no one had been there in a while. And if they do care, the Hound will kill them, she thought to herself.
She dabbed at his wounds with strips of cloth boiled in wine. The whole damn thing was shades of purple and black and fierce reds, but it seemed somewhat improved at the very least. “If we can keep it up like this, you might not die,” said the woman.
“I wasn’t aware there’s a we,” was his answer. Could it be? Was he joking with her? Though she laughed, he did not. It didn’t matter. It felt good to laugh, so she laughed and laughed and laughed until surely he thought she’d lost her mind.
They supped on strips of salted pork they’d rummaged up from one of the rider’s bags, and they boiled rainwater to drink. “Why bother collecting it in the helmet?” As the sun went down the Hound sat with his back to the wall, looking sodden and sick and miserable but pretending he was none of those things.
“How else should we drink it?” she asked. “Do you propose I go stand out in the rain with my head to the sky and my mouth open like a turkey?”
That marked the first time she saw him smile. His mouth twitched up at the corners for the briefest of seconds and his eyebrows raised. “I don’t know, why don’t you go try?”
“Piss on that,” the vulture told him, and sat down to boil their water.
The fire was warm, but the night was cold. Bitter cold. Even when she laid down to sleep, the rain had not let up. The rain was making the air damp and heavy til the chill settled into their very bones. She wished she was a proper lady, then, safe and sound on a featherbed with furs all around her, with a fire in the hearth and fresh rushes on the floor. She was the one on the floor, though, and it was a floor of straw and dirt. There were no furs, and instead she laid beneath a sodden cloak that didn’t seem to dry no matter how much she held it by the flames or how close she laid to the small fire. It would go out soon, and then they’d be utterly, miserably cold.
She awoke shivering in the middle of the night. The fire had mostly burned down to embers, so she fed it and stirred at it until the flames took. Not even the wolves howled into the wretched, rainy darkness. Fuck the north. She rubbed her hands over the fire as a chill took hold of her. Why’d I go north? Why not to Dorne? Her cloak would be dry in Dorne, no doubt, and she could be eating oranges and swimming in the Greenblood river.
“Are you that fucking cold?” The Hound’s voice startled the vulture so badly that she near instinctively went for her knife.
“Aren’t you?” Her heart rate steadied again.
The Hound scoffed. “It’s only going to get colder.”
All she could do was shrug. He was right. “It’s not so bad without the rain,” she said at last.
“It could rain for fuckin’ weeks. Has before. You gonna sit by that fire for weeks?”
The big man was irritating her. She began to wonder again exactly how much of a reward was offered for him. Maybe the king would marry me to a knight, she dreamed dramatically. Instead, she just said, “No. But it’s tempting.” Whether it was tempting to sit by the fire for a week’s time or sell him back to the king, the vulture could not say.
The Hound stirred, moving closer to the fire. With a theatric huff, he stretched out. “Get over here,” he growled in that gruff, raspy voice of his.
The woman was caught off guard. “For what?”
“What do you mean ‘for what?’ What the fuck do you think?” When she just stared at him, confused, he said, “Do you want to warm up or not?”
The act of kindness was startling. She went to him, though, and curled up at his side, close enough for warmth but barely touching. Almost begrudgingly, he tossed half of his cloak over her. He didn’t speak again, so they laid there in a silence that was somehow neither awkward nor entirely comfortable. He smells like a man that’s been dying for a week, she thought, and the thought made her smile to herself.
“The fuck are you smiling at?”
“You smell like a man who’s been dying for a week, maybe longer.”
“Fuck off.”