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The pain was a dull sword in his chest, both nagging and dormant.
Milk of the poppy, he knew.
It wouldn’t take long.
Another night.
He opened his eyes at the sound of a bird hooting in a nearby tree.
A nighthawk, perhaps, not minding the winter cold.
A wolf howled in response.
Not hers.
Hers was dead, slain by her own father. A killer, like all men.
There were bats in his chamber, circling madly under the low wooden ceiling, or maybe that was poppy too, just like the pleasant sensation of only mildly throbbing ache around his mortal heart wound.
Would she come?
The lady always took the trouble to see the wounded and the dying.
She might make an exception for him.
Why waste time on a stray dog who came searching for a new kennel?
The first and the only time he saw her after the battle for King’s Landing…
The first and the only time he saw her after joining the latest war that the gnats around him pompously called the battle for dawn, he told her...
She called him my lord and he snarled at her with scorn... He gave a rat’s arse for her courtesies, it was what he said.
Then he left.
More like it, he ran away.
The girl had still not learned a thing. Always kind and smiling. In some ugly, dark dress befitting the preached dignity of the latest northmen’s war.
Clearly, dawn had yet to arrive to their women’s wardrobes.
But she always came to see the dying.
A proper lady.
There wasn’t enough food, but there was poppy for all.
Possibly because people died soon from the wounds inflicted by the snarks. One cut and one cup of the poppy. All very ordered and scarce, life and death.
It would be easy to close his eyes.
Not yet.
How often did she pass in this wing?
When he used to spy on her from afar, he thought it was at least twice a day.
Why, there is no day.
The buggering Long NIght.
He laughed madly, staring at the bats dancing on the ceiling. If their wings grew, maybe they would turn into dragons.
Men talked there was one or two on the Wall. A third one was maybe killed or enslaved by the ice monsters, depending on who did the talking. One story was more fantastic than the other.
(He never chose to fight on the positions where the beasts were sighted. No need to see the burning. If dragons returned, they were welcome to see to that on their own.)
His chest was a ruin like his face, like his leg used to be, dressed in dry sweet-smelling herb. It was a fat maester or a woods witch who had wrapped him up, to die quietly.
Not her.
She wouldn’t know how, would she?
He might die sooner if she took upon her lady self to do the woods witch work.
He might die pleased.
Happy.
He closed his eyes and imagined her in all her glory.
Beautiful like the missing sun in her dark dress, her hair ablaze in candlelight.
He squeezed his eyes tight and dreamed of her voice.
Of that other night when even the water burned green. He’d left her, and he could still not give an honest answer to himself if it was the bravest or the most cowardly deed he’d ever done.
Both, he rambled behind his eyelids.
A hand touched his chest, tiny, bony, wrinkled.
The woods witch changing the dressing.
“Stop it,” he rasped with rebellion, “there is no need.”
Just like the ointments had been pointless on his face.
The hand continued its work.
His shield hand caught it, freezing it in place. He felt his bare wound and the shrivelled hand. Gloved , he realised.
He wanted to open his eyes but his eyelids were too heavy, wanting to sleep. Needing to die. Having a mind on their own.
The poppy.
The hawk.
The wolf.
Why wouldn’t she come?
He grabbed the woods witch hand with both of his; huge paws on a tiny, gloved claw.
“I’ll be going soon,” he rambled, “I’ll free a cot for the next dead hero of your damned battle for dawn.”
The hand tried to squirm out of his grip and continue its stupid work.
He wouldn’t let it. To seven hells, he thought.
He was dying.
Who would care if he just asked for her to be brought to him, since she was obviously stupid enough to not show on her own?
“Could you call the lady of the castle for me?” he rasped.
“The red-haired one,” he clarified, in case that there were more wearing the title. He never paid too much attention to the latest court in the making, belonging to some future king or queen. He didn’t have to guard any of them.
The hand calmed in his grasp, unnaturally so.
He was possessed by a terrible doubt.
Was it her?
He had to open his eyes to see if he had just made a fool of himself in her presence.
Had she heard him, she must know what was in his heart. She ought to. She was not so little anymore.
His eyelids remained inseparable.
Buggering milk of the poppy.
His anger became exhaustion, slid into stoned sleep.
He could still speak.
“You’ll wonder why,” he said, “ she’ ll wonder why,” he emphasised, ‘when you tell her it’s the Hound asking. They thought me dead on the Trident, and it’s not the first time. When I was six, they also left me for dead. When they figured their mistake, the maester put ointments on my pretty face.”
The hand wriggled out of his grip and returned to the dressing, changing it with levity and skill.
The woods witch.
Emboldened by the notion that it was not her, it could never be her, taking care of his awful wound in such practised manner, he continued speaking.
“You know,” he began rudely, “I give the rat’s arse about dawn and the war for it. None of the battles I had were ever mine. They were just there to be fought. It’s she I was looking for. And then she had to be in this shitty war. Where else? Always in the thick of things. Stupid girl. I should have known.”
The hand landed gently on his shoulder.
Quite needlessly for it had never been wounded.
Was it that shoulder?
The one she’d touched the night of the Hand’s Tourney? He had fought almost like a true knight on that occasion. For King Robert or for himself. He never knew.
It was so long ago that he couldn’t remember if she anointed his right or his left shoulder when he kneeled in the dark.
His hand ran to the little intruder on the quite exceptionally never harmed part of his body.
Trying to open his eyes once more, he----
----failed
----sighed
----growled quietly.
With resignation.
The wrinkles were gone. The glove. The skin was smooth and cold. Any hand would be, in the unearthly chill on the bloody Wall, he guessed stupidly.
The woods witch was very old, the maester very fat.
This could not be their hand.
Some servant perhaps, fancying a big man. If he lived, she could earn favours and good meals if she closed her eyes in the dark.
“Look, I’m dying,” he tried to be honest. “Go get the lady and I’ll see if I have some coin left for your trouble.”
He felt for his pockets with his free hand, but there were none. He was underdressed and wrapped in furs.
“Never mind,” he gave up.
He would sleep now.
It was the dumbest battle strategy he’d ever employed. To get himself mortally wounded so that she would visit him! Something only silly knights in insipid stories would do. And then they would obviously die in the throes of sheer joy, only from the sight of their one true love, as soon as she arrived to their bedside.
From the touch of her bare hand on his whole shoulder.
His heart swelled. In his imagination, it had been her hand all along, ever since he was brought here to die. She had striven to nurse him to health he could not get back. And she was here with him now, again, once more, gazing at him with love in beautifully blue eyes.
He couldn’t see them...
But even dogs had the right to die in peace.
In blessed silence.
With a master who cared.
“His mind is not his own,” the woods witch said above him, in her old, familiar voice, a saw on fresh wood. “It’s the fever. It is not abating.”
The tiny hand squeezed his shoulder. He was compelled to stroke the fingers, caressing them as gently as he was able to. They were warmer now, from his feverish skin.
Still smooth.
“Right, they gave me poppy,” he said stubbornly. “Whoever the two of you are, go get the lady of the castle. I don’t have much time.”
Silence reigned in the cold, heavy and cutting.
His thoughts began to fade.
He had come here looking for a lady, but he could no longer remember who she was or why she was important to him.
And all that time an elegant hand stayed on his shoulder, becoming nervous, turning sweaty.
He was no longer capable of thought.
When the silence was eternal and the cold biting, the lady of the castle spoke.
“If you go,” she said through tears , “my heart will break.”
He never wanted to leave her side. Not back then, not now.
He forced himself to speak and surprised himself by succeeding.
“Little bird.”
After that, he could no longer form words.
He could not tell her that no one could die from love, except in stories, not even her with her useless beliefs in goodness and true knights.
But what if she could ?
What if she was still stupid like her songs?
That thought was more frightening than fire, so utterly terrible that his eyes snapped open in shock.
There she was, just as he thought, the pretty lady of the castle, looking at him with her eyes shiny from crying.
Is this love?
It surely gave him the illusion.
(The woods witch was not far, chasing the bats out of the window and cursing the beasts for their stupid perseverance. Then she began tending to the other dying. The chamber used to be a stable for garrons, now with more beds than places to tie a horse.)
The lady’s eyes filled with fresh tears. Her other hand wandered to his cheek, cupping it so gently.
He coughed out blood and stared into her eyes.
Unable to speak or think, he listened to the nighthawk hooting. Maybe it was an owl after all.
A wolf pack howled in the distance, closing in. Returning.
He spat the last clots from his throat and let the air fill his lungs instead.
As long as he drew breath, he could not die, he would not die.
Doggedly, he kept breathing.