Snippet #1500838

The arrow whistled through the air and hit its intended target square between the eyes. Crackling of bone. Sick squelching noise of arrowhead piercing into brain-matter and squish-squish-squishing-squelching inside. Somehow she heard it even above the din of the battle, above Jans’ shrieking, above the clang of steel against steel.

Draw another arrow and string it in the bow. Fingers know what they’re doing. Let go. Bowstring goes twang. Sharp slice of arrow. Strike and squelch. Almost like a melody for the dead.

A man is like a deer. Deer are there to be hunted. A man is there to be hunted. How is a man like a deer? A deer has four limbs. A man has four limbs. They both have heads and mouths and eyes and teeth and ears…and…and blood…and entrails too! – see how good I am at this!. A man and a deer are the same because they both die when hit with an arrow between the eyes.

It made so much sense. Leliana could not believe that she had ever doubted this before in her mind. How could she ever have been so foolish as to not see all those simple similarities? Why, if men were like deer then it was her right to fell them! Those were the rules of the hunt. She had the bow, the one strung with yet another arrow, and they were the deer.

Twang –twang –twang! Squelch – squelch – squish!

This was more fun than she had ever known hunting to be. The freedom and the thrill, intermingling in one concoction of pure ecstatic feeling that drove her to waxing poetic.

You’re horrible. You’re so wicked!

Oh, love, I know. But a man is like a deer, and thus there is nothing wrong.

She pushed those thoughts away – the ones that rang so clearly. She had to focus on the hunt, lest she lose sight of the deer and her arrows miss – and what sort of hunter would they call her then if she could not even hit a deer?

She breathed in deeply of the night air – the night which was black like ink…as if one of the Gods had been writing and tipped an inkwell over the page of the sky. She could imagine it – the ink-bottle tumbling onto its side and beginning to vomit ink across the sky. She could smell burning wood in the air and for some reason she really liked it – somehow it smelled right. The hunting of deer and a campfire in the background. Oh, she would roast herself a good leg of venison tonight.

“I should ask Richard if he wants any of the meat,” she said more to herself than to anyone around her, as they were busy doing other things, too busy to pay attention to a young woman taking out her skinning knife and rounding on a body.

First kill, then skin and gut. It was how hunting went. Why should she waste a perfectly good deer carcass? She whistled to herself as she slid the skinning knife under the hide and began to slice. First up along the belly and right to the middle of the torso to open the sternum – the skin will come off much better that way. Then to the sides of the cut so as to get to the entrails and scoop them out. She stuck her hand inside of the warmth and grabbed a handful of deer innards. They were slimy in her hand and just as she knew they should be.

Leliana gave a sharp tug and brought part of them outside and then set herself and her skinning knife on scraping out the inside of the bodily cavity of the deer. She continued to gently hum and then glanced up at the deer’s head – right into its glassy, accusing, dead eyes.

There was something wrong here. Leliana stood up, the knife slipping from her hand and clattering down to the grass. Clumps of the innards were still stuck to her hand and she wiped them off on her pant leg. There was definitely something wrong – something that told her there were no deer around.

Men are like deer.

“Just deer…” she swallowed hard the lump that had formed in her throat, but it would not go down. Leliana took in another deep breath of ink-black night and felt something gurgling up her gullet. She was unable to stop herself from being sick right then and there. She doubled over and emptied the contents of her stomach all over the carcass of the deer.

A man and a deer are similar because…

You know the answer. Because they have eyes and those eyes stare right back up at you! See how smart I am!

Leliana took her bow again and ran away from the body of the deer. She did not want to look into its man’s eyes. Why did they have to be so similar again? It wasn’t fair. It just wasn’t fair. She wasn’t sure even where she was heading. All that mattered was that her feet pounded hard on the ground and she was suddenly the deer that was running so, so fast away. Towards Winterfell. Following through carnage left behind by the Mummers and catching up to them.

Like a deer.