A Clash of Kings — Sansa VI

The Hound comes to Sansa's chamber out of the burning night with a bloody cloak and a song at knifepoint — then goes north alone, a deserter.

The chapter retold

The Hound comes to Sansa’s chamber out of the burning night, half out of his mind, his cloak stained with the day’s violence, and offers her something between a rescue and a demand — he means to take her north, away from the city and the king she’s bound to, if she’ll go with him. He asks her, almost at knifepoint, to sing for him, and Sansa, frightened but oddly steady, gives him a fragment of a song instead of the refusal he half expects.

He leaves without her, alone, a deserter now with nothing left to lose and nowhere obvious to go. It’s one of the book’s strangest, most charged scenes — an offer of freedom that Sansa, for reasons the chapter leaves genuinely ambiguous, declines to take, and a violent man’s last act inside King’s Landing turning out to be walking away rather than taking what he could have. The white cloak he leaves behind marks the end of his service to a king he’s finally decided he can’t stomach protecting any longer.

This movement: The Battle of the Blackwater

• The bay goes up in green fire; Stannis's fleet burns between a chain and a trap.
• Tyrion leads the sortie when Joffrey is pulled from the walls — and a Kingsguard's sword opens his face to the bone.
• Sansa keeps the highborn women singing while Cersei drinks and plans their deaths.
• Tywin and the knights of Highgarden take Stannis in the flank; ghost-Renly's shadow rides in the vanguard of gossip.