[SPOILERS FOR A STORM OF SWORDS]
A dog can smell a lie, you know, the Hound had told her once. She could almost hear the rough rasp of his voice. Look around you, and take a good whiff. They’re all liars here, and every one better than you. She wondered what had become of Sandor Clegane. Did he know that they’d killed Joffrey? Would he care? He had been the prince’s sworn shield for years.
— A Storm of Swords, Sansa VI
This chapter of ASOS is so fascinating for so many reasons. (It’s the one with Lysa and Petyr’s wedding, and the old blind dog, and Sansa’s dream, and so on.) But I find this line in particular to be interesting in that:
- Sandor’s words keep coming back to Sansa, to keep her wary
- She wonders where he is, and how he’d react to Joffrey’s death.
And it’s interesting that she is the only character who thinks this way about him. Both Jaime and Cersei have thoughts about Sandor in AFFC, but note that’s after they hear word of the Saltpans massacre and their thoughts are mostly in reaction to that. And Arya also thinks of Sandor briefly in AFFC, but only about the situation in which she left him.
But Sansa thinks of him as a person, by name, and wonders about his feelings regarding someone he’d been close to for years. It’s certainly because of her empathetic nature, and the way she builds stories around people… but it’s interesting nevertheless. Especially because he is the only one of her King’s Landing connections that she thinks this way about, IIRC.
(Now, what’s really interesting is that when Sandor does hear about Joffrey’s death he doesn’t seem to give a shit… it’s the news of Sansa’s wedding to Tyrion that makes him sit down and get very drunk very quickly. But that’s a different post…)
