Chapter Text
Thwack!
The shot was perfect, solidly in the center of the straw-filled target. Theon smiled to himself, well-pleased that he had turned a few heads with that arrow. Walder Frey’s grandsons, whom Ramsay had apparently saved from the siege of Winterfell and whom Theon could not tell apart, stared, dumb and slack-jawed. He nocked another arrow, brushing his thumb over the point of the neatly-pointed goose feathers.
It was good to catch the eyes of Bolton men with his skill instead of the hand-shaped bruises around his neck, which had only just faded. There were new bruises in other places, of course, but they were easier to hide. It felt less like walking around branded like a thrall. Only the girls who helped him dress saw his shame. They looked at him piteously, but not with too much sorrow; they were, after all, no doubt glad it was him in their place.
What was worse was the gifts Ramsay kept bringing him. Those, he could not hide. Soft, doeskin gloves, a pair of silver spurs, a single gold earring, even a pretty dappled gelding whose grey coat resembled the sealskin on his wedding-cloak. He gave him a new trinket every morning after he spent the night fucking and clawing at him. The source of these treasures was no doubt a gory one. He could not simply shut them away in a drawer, because Ramsay so ardently protested.
“If you’re so embarrassed to be mine,” he would say, with a wicked expression on his face, “I’d be happy to lock you in the dungeons. No one would see you there, would they?”
He pulled the arrow back, the bowstring grazing his cheek.
“A man isn’t going to sit still and wait for you to shoot him.”
He let fly another shaft. Despite the interruption, the quivering head embedded itself a hairsbreadth away from the first, neatly within the tiny painted circle. It took him a moment to notice the sting in his forearm, unfettered by any sort of guard.
“I believe I have fought more battles than you, you know.”
“Have you?”
Theon set his bow down, turning to look at the interloper. Ramsay was leaning against a rack of swords, his arms crossed.
“I nearly killed Jaime Lannister at the Whispering Wood.”
“How do you nearly kill a man?” Ramsay drawled, cocking his head. “You either kill him, or you don’t. ‘Nearly dead’ is fully alive.”
“I could have killed him, but I didn’t,” Theon asserted. “I knew he’d have made a valuable hostage.”
“Fat lot of good that hostage did you.”
Theon only glared, and went to pick up his quiver. Ramsay stepped forward.
“Don’t put that away just yet. We’re going hunting, you and I. And the girls, of course.”
It had been a long time since Theon had been hunting. There had been no time for sport whilst on campaign with Robb, and the days before seemed as hazy and distant as his childhood amidst the salt and stone of Pyke.
“What are we hunting?” Winter was fast settling upon the North, throwing down her snowy cloak. The rabbits had run into their burrows, the bears lumbering down in their caves.
“Stag.”
“Is there any to be had, this time of year?” Theon asked. He did not particularly wish to traipse about in the cold for a day, only to come back empty-handed. Northmen loved hunting regardless of what they got, thinking it good sport. In the summer, he’d agree. But not with the days this short and the snow falling all around them.
“Some Ryswell lads spotted one not far to the north-east. If we’re lucky, we’ll get to it before the wolves do.”
“How far?”
“Not much. We’ll be there and back within the day.” Ramsay grinned. “We couldn’t want the princess sleeping rough, would we?”
Theon huffed, but there was no sense in retorting.
“Fine.”
“Good boy!” Ramsay intoned. He fought the urge to cringe. His Marked-cum-husband sharply turned and barked orders at the nearest squire.
“Have the horses saddled!” he shouted at one of the Frey boys, “and someone get the gods-damned dogs!”
“I’m sore,” Theon complained, “and it’s all your fault.”
“What a shame,” Ramsay drawled from in front of him. The old game-trail wasn’t wide enough for two horses side-by-side, so Ramsay rode ahead, right behind his pack of dogs. Two of the hounds, though, had formed a sort of rear-guard, keeping pace with Theon and his silvery gelding. He was a rouncey, light and swift with a higher gait than Ramsay’s oxblood mare, and Theon had taken to calling him Smiler in honor of his late warhorse. Well, he might have still been alive, somewhere. Perhaps he’d escaped the burning ruins of Winterfell and went to wherever horses go.
“You’re a beast,” he accused, rather weakly. “The way you treat me is abominable. You don’t speak to me except to insult me, you don’t touch me except to take me on my back like a Lysenni whore.”
Ramsay shot a glaring look over his shoulder.
“And you take it like a good bitch,” he said, “don’t you?”
Theon’s face flushed.
Ramsay, ahead of him, pulled something out of his pocket and leaned to the side, holding it out for the dogs to smell. It was a little scrap of fabric.
"What is that?" Theon asked.
"Hush," Ramsay scolded, as the dogs ran ahead, snuffling around the roots of trees and the packed snow of the game-trail, and holding their long, black snouts high above them to scent the air. One seemed to catch a scent, barking suddenly, and ran forward, deeper into the crowded, snowy wood. She was a feathery black silhouette against the white ground and dense trees, like a shadow dancing across a wall. The rest of the pack followed her, and Ramsay spurred his horse.
He sighed, clicking his tongue so that Smiler would pick up his casual pace. He never tells me anything. For a man like Ramsay, not knowing what went on in his head was a dangerous thing.
(One of the pithy sayings Greenlanders were fond of went: ‘Marks keep no secrets.’ Obviously, that was a bold-faced lie. Or at least, no one had ever had a Marked as abnormal as Theon’s.)
The dogs ran far faster than the horses could keep pace with on the thin, winding trail, their paws pounding on the ground and leaving a flurry of prints, tails whipping and stirring the powdery snowfall where it had settled on the ground and on the low-hanging branches of green pine. If he squinted he could just barely see the bitch in the back of the line, bounding off onto a fork in the trail where green pine changed to the white-and-red of a Weirwood grove, a bloody wound in the vast expanse of forest.
He readied the bow hung at his side in anticipation-- surely the hind was close, if the dogs were this excited. Ramsay, he noticed, was doing the same, taking an arrow from his quiver and holding it loosely in his black-gloved hand.
Theon had been in hunts like these a hundred times. He had even been the one to make the lucky shot in a few dozen of them. He had far better aim than Robb, let alone Jon, and it was one of the only times he could expect a nod of silent praise from Lord Stark, as the dogs drove the quarry up against the flanks of the horses, and Theon leashed the killing blow to the lung, the eye, the heart. He remembered how his heart had soared the first time he had made it, how Robb had cheered, how the dying scream of the hind had seemed the best sound in the world. Even so, a little voice in his head that sounded like his father told him that it was nothing to be proud of. An animal was not a man, and it was a far different thing to shoot a bow than swing a sword.
This time, it was not the howling whine of a four-legged beast that echoed through the Weirwood grove, but a frighteningly human scream, guttural and masculine. No one had yet loosed an arrow, but the dogs could have pounced, and Theon suspected they did. A sinking feeling sprung up in his gut, fear building as to what he would see when he caught up. A wolf? A boar, this far north, would seem improbable, but their squeals could sound like screams on occasion.
He dug his heels into Smiler's grey flank as the trail widened, until he was side-by-side with Ramsay.
"We'll see how well that bow shoots!" said, half-shouting over the wind that whipped against them from their rapid pace.
"Unless your dogs have already killed it!" Theon snapped.
Ramsay barked a laugh, not unlike his precious hounds.
"They never finish the job– I've trained them too well! It would spoil all the fun, wouldn't it?”
On the trail ahead, red splattered the snow in a hypnotic, irregular pattern. At first, Theon thought it was fallen Weirwood leaves, but when he rode over them he knew them to be puddles of blood. The dogs were barking in an awful, discordant choir, coming together to form a roiling black mass at the base of one tree. They were so loud it was hard to hear the groans and screams from their prey as they tore into him.
One dog broke away from the pack, loping towards Ramsay with a wagging tail. In her mouth was the bloody, ragged stump of a torn-off hand.
“Off!” Ramsay shouted. The obedient dogs split from their circle with an echo of dull whines. Theon was unable to look away from the grey lump in the snow that had been the object of their frenzy. What was once a man was now something unrecognizable, more like a ragged pile of fabric with a smattering of flesh. But the heap was breathing, groaning, bleeding. Alive, just barely.
Ramsay dismounted, holding the mare’s bridle loosely in one hand.
“Shame there’s only one,” he said. “I was hoping for a herd… oh well.” He glanced back at Theon. “Here is your stag, my prince. Shall I tie him to a tree for you to shoot at? I’m told that’s how you lords hunt.”
A wave of revulsion crashed over him, lip curling in disgust at the grotesque scene in front of him: the blood that pooled in the hollows left in the snow by a flurry of paws, the pitiful heap of grey and brown and red. The man raised his quivering head. One of the dogs had gotten to his nose, and his left ear, leaving behind ragged patches of flesh crusted with frost.
Without even thinking, he quickly drew an arrow. It flew true to the course Theon had set, through the victim’s eye and into his brain. He gasped, but without much voice left, he simply twitched, and died.
“Who was that?”
When he asked, he did not expect to see the emotions written on Ramsay’s face. He expected anger, maybe annoyance, for fouling whatever game he had intended to play, but instead he found only a glint of something unreadable in his eyes and a restrained expression.
“A scout,” he said. “They have been ranging further and further south. Stannis Baratheon has taken his army to the Wall.”
“What? Why?”
Ramsay shrugged. “Who knows? Perhaps the snarks and grumpkins challenge his claim to the Iron Throne.”
Theon shook his head, pacing so that the snow crunched under his boots.
The dogs bayed. They were wagging their tails, glancing between Ramsay and the freezing corpse with huge black eyes like pools of night. They both ignored them, but it spooked Smiler, who flinched away, jerking the reins in Theon’s hand.
“What does your father intend to do about it, then?”
A spark of anger lit in his eyes, and he kicked the torn-off hand, sending it flying into a snow drift. The dogs chased after it, tails wagging, whining and barking.
“He hasn’t seen fit to tell me,” he said through gritted teeth, “only to make me run his errands.”
“And you obey,” Theon said, “like a good little hound.”
“Bitch!”
He saw the backhand coming from miles away, but that didn’t alleviate the pain, or the blood beginning to run from his nose. He staunched it with one hand, eyes screwed shut.
“I’m not his dog, or anyone’s,” Ramsay argued, sounding very much like he was trying to convince himself of his own words. “And I won’t fetch when he tells me to.” He spat in the direction of the cooling corpse. “He was going to be dead with or without you. The only thing you did was ruin half the fun.”
“Well,” he said, muffled and nasally as blood clumped between the fingers of his gloves, “don’t blame me when he finally gets rid of you.”
“Don’t get cute with me. We’ve been playing this game for years before you limped into my life. I’m his son.”
“--Until a better, more legitimate option comes around. Don’t be stupid, Ramsay. In a matter of months, that plump little wife of his is going to push out a bouncing baby boy, and he’ll kill you before the coming dawn.” Like he killed Robb.
“You know nothing.”
Theon wiped away the last of the blood. It was smeared all over his face, no doubt, but he didn’t care.
“I know enough about men like Roose Bolton. Kill him, or let yourself be killed. That’s your only choice.”
He didn’t wait for a response, shooting a glowering Ramsay one last glare before he mounted his horse and rode back the way he came.