The Song Of Ice and Fire (483 page)

“Yes,” she said, and from that moment she was a novice in the House of Black and White. Her servant’s garb was taken away, and she was given a robe to wear, a robe of black and white as buttery soft as the old red blanket she’d once had at Winterfell. Beneath it she wore smallclothes of fine white linen, and a black undertunic that hung down past her knees.

Thereafter she and the waif spent their time together touching things and pointing, as each tried to teach the other a few words of her own tongue. Simple words at first, cup and candle and shoe; then harder words; then sentences. Once Syrio Forel used to make Arya stand on one leg until she was trembling. Later he sent her chasing after cats. She had danced the water dance on the limbs of trees, a stick sword in her hand. Those things had all been hard, but this was harder.

Even sewing was more fun than tongues,
she told herself, after a night when she had forgotten half the words she thought she knew, and pronounced the other half so badly that the waif had laughed at her.
My sentences are as crooked as my stitches used to be.
If the girl had not been so small and starved, Arya would have smashed her stupid face. Instead she gnawed her lip.
Too stupid to learn and too stupid to give up.

The Common Tongue came to the waif more quickly. One day at supper she turned to Arya, and asked, “Who are you?”

“No one,” Arya answered, in Braavosi.

“You lie,” said the waif. “You must lie gooder.”

Arya laughed. “Gooder? You mean
better,
stupid.”

“Better stupid. I will show you.”

The next day they began the lying game, asking questions of one another, taking turns. Sometimes they would answer truly, sometimes they would lie. The questioner had to try and tell what was true and what was false. The waif always seemed to know. Arya had to guess. Most of the time she guessed wrong.

“How many years have you?” the waif asked her once, in the Common Tongue. “Ten,” said Arya, and raised ten fingers. She
thought
she was still ten, though it was hard to know for certain. The Braavosi counted days differently than they did in Westeros. For all she knew her name day had come and gone.

The waif nodded. Arya nodded back, and in her best Braavosi said, “How many years have
you?
”

The waif showed ten fingers. Then ten again, and yet again. Then six. Her face remained as smooth as still water.
She can’t be six-and-thirty,
Arya thought.
She’s a little girl.
“You’re lying,” she said. The waif shook her head and showed her once again: ten and ten and ten and six. She said the words for six-and-thirty, and made Arya say them too.

The next day she told the kindly man what the waif had claimed. “She did not lie,” the priest said, chuckling. “The one you call
waif
is a woman grown who has spent her life serving Him of Many Faces. She gave Him all she was, all she ever might have been, all the lives that were within her.”

Arya bit her lip. “Will I be like her?”

“No,” he said, “not unless you wish it. It is the poisons that have made her as you see her.”

Poisons.
She understood then. Every evening after prayer the waif emptied a stone flagon into the waters of the black pool.

The waif and kindly man were not the only servants of the Many-Faced God. From time to time others would visit the House of Black and White. The fat fellow had fierce black eyes, a hook nose, and a wide mouth full of yellow teeth. The stern face never smiled; his eyes were pale, his lips full and dark. The handsome man had a beard of a different color every time she saw him, and a different nose, but he was never less than comely. Those three came most often, but there were others: the squinter, the lordling, the starved man. One time the fat fellow and the squinter came together. Umma sent Arya to pour for them. “When you are not pouring, you must stand as still as if you had been carved of stone,” the kindly man told her. “Can you do that?”

“Yes.”
Before you can learn to move you must learn to be still,
Syrio Forel had taught her long ago at King’s Landing, and she had. She had served as Roose Bolton’s cupbearer at Harrenhal, and he would flay you if you spilled his wine.

“Good,” the kindly man said. “It would be best if you were blind and deaf as well. You may hear things, but you must let them pass in one ear and out the other. Do not listen.”

Arya heard much and more that night, but almost all of it was in the tongue of Braavos, and she hardly understood one word in ten.
Still as stone,
she told herself. The hardest part was struggling not to yawn. Before the night was done, her wits were wandering. Standing there with the flagon in her hands, she dreamed she was a wolf, running free through a moonlit forest with a great pack howling at her heels.

“Are the other men all priests?” she asked the kindly man the next morning. “Were those their real faces?”

“What do you think, child?”

She thought
no.
“Is Jaqen H’ghar a priest too? Do you know if Jaqen will be coming back to Braavos?”

“Who?” he said, all innocence.

“Jaqen
H’ghar.
He gave me the iron coin.”

“I know no one by this name, child.”

“I asked him how he changed his face, and he said it was no harder than taking a new name, if you knew the way.”

“Did he?”

“Will you show me how to change my face?”

“If you wish.” He cupped her chin in his hand and turned her head. “Puff up your cheeks and stick out your tongue.”

Arya puffed up her cheeks and stuck out her tongue.

“There. Your face is changed.”

“That’s not how I meant. Jaqen used magic.”

“All sorcery comes at a cost, child. Years of prayer and sacrifice and study are required to work a proper glamor.”

“
Years?
” she said, dismayed.

“If it were easy all men would do it. You must walk before you run. Why use a spell, where mummer’s tricks will serve?”

“I don’t know any mummer’s tricks either.”

“Then practice making faces. Beneath your skin are muscles. Learn to use them. It is your face. Your cheeks, your lips, your ears. Smiles and scowls should not come upon you like sudden squalls. A smile should be a servant, and come only when you call it. Learn to
rule
your face.”

“Show me how.”

“Puff up your cheeks.” She did. “Lift your eyebrows. No, higher.” She did that too. “Good. See how long you can hold that. It will not be long. Try it again on the morrow. You will find a Myrish mirror in the vaults. Train before it for an hour every day. Eyes, nostrils, cheeks, ears, lips, learn to rule them all.” He cupped her chin. “Who are you?”

“No one.”

“A lie. A sad little lie, child.”

She found the Myrish mirror the next day, and every morn and every night she sat before it with a candle on each side of her, making faces.
Rule your face,
she told herself,
and you can lie.

Soon thereafter the kindly man commanded her to help the other acolytes prepare the corpses. The work was not near as hard as scrubbing steps for Weese. Sometimes if the corpse was big or fat she would struggle with the weight, but most of the dead were old dry bones in wrinkled skins. Arya would look at them as she washed them, wondering what brought them to the black pool. She remembered a tale she had heard from Old Nan, about how sometimes during a long winter men who’d lived beyond their years would announce that they were going hunting.
And their daughters would weep and their sons would turn their faces to the fire,
she could hear Old Nan saying,
but no one would stop them, or ask what game they meant to hunt, with the snows so deep and the cold wind howling.
She wondered what the old Braavosi told their sons and daughters, before they set off for the House of Black and White.

The moon turned and turned again, though Arya never saw it. She served, washed the dead, made faces at the mirrors, learned the Braavosi tongue, and tried to remember that she was no one.

One day the kindly man sent for her. “Your accent is a horror,” he said, “but you have enough words to make your wants understood after a fashion. It is time that you left us for a while. The only way you will ever truly master our tongue is if you speak it every day from dawn to dusk. You must go.”

“When?” she asked him. “Where?”

“Now,” he answered. “Beyond these walls you will find the hundred isles of Braavos in the sea. You have been taught the words for mussels, cockles, and clams, have you not?”

“Yes.” She repeated them, in her best Braavosi.

Her best Braavosi made him smile. “It will serve. Along the wharves below the Drowned Town you will find a fishmonger named Brusco, a good man with a bad back. He has need of a girl to push his barrow and sell his cockles, clams, and mussels to the sailors off the ships. You shall be that girl. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“And when Brusco asks, who are you?”

“No one.”

“No. That will not serve, outside this House.”

She hesitated. “I could be Salty, from Saltpans.”

“Salty is known to Ternesio Terys and the men of the
Titan’s Daughter.
You are marked by the way you speak, so you must be some girl of Westeros … but a different girl, I think.”

She bit her lip. “Could I be Cat?”

“Cat.” He considered. “Yes. Braavos is full of cats. One more will not be noticed. You are Cat, an orphan of …”

“King’s Landing.” She had visited White Harbor with her father twice, but she knew King’s Landing better.

“Just so. Your father was oarmaster on a galley. When your mother died, he took you off to sea with him. Then he died as well, and his captain had no use for you, so he put you off the ship in Braavos. And what was the name of the ship?”

“
Nymeria,
” she said at once.

That night she left the House of Black and White. A long iron knife rode on her right hip, hidden by her cloak, a patched and faded thing of the sort an orphan might wear. Her shoes pinched her toes and her tunic was so threadbare that the wind cut right through it. But Braavos lay before her. The night air smelled of smoke and salt and fish. The canals were crooked, the alleys crookeder. Men gave her curious looks as she went past, and beggar children called out words she could not understand. Before long she was completely lost.

“Ser Gregor,” she chanted, as she crossed a stone bridge supported by four arches. From the center of its span she could see the masts of ships in the Ragman’s Harbor. “Dunsen, Raff the Sweetling, Ser Ilyn, Ser Meryn, Queen Cersei.” Rain began to fall. Arya turned her face up to let the raindrops wash her cheeks, so happy she could dance. “
Valar morghulis,
” she said, “
valar morghulis, valar morghulis.
”

ALAYNE

A
s the rising sun came streaming through the windows, Alayne sat up in bed and stretched. Gretchel heard her stir and rose at once to fetch her bedrobe. The rooms had grown chilly during the night.
It will be worse when winter has us in its grip,
she thought.
Winter will make this place as cold as any tomb.
Alayne slipped into the robe and belted it about her waist. “The fire’s almost out,” she observed. “Put another log on, if you would.”

“As my lady wishes,” the old woman said.

Alayne’s apartments in the Maiden’s Tower were larger and more lavish than the little bedchamber where she’d been kept when Lady Lysa was alive. She had a dressing room and a privy of her own now, and a balcony of carved white stone that looked off across the Vale. While Gretchel was tending to the fire, Alayne padded barefoot across the room and slipped outside. The stone was cold beneath her feet, and the wind was blowing fiercely, as it always did up here, but the view made her forget all that for half a heartbeat. Maiden’s was the easternmost of the Eyrie’s seven slender towers, so she had the Vale before her, its forests and rivers and fields all hazy in the morning light. The way the sun was hitting the mountains made them look like solid gold.

So lovely.
The snow-clad summit of the Giant’s Lance loomed above her, an immensity of stone and ice that dwarfed the castle perched upon its shoulder. Icicles twenty feet long draped the lip of the precipice where Alyssa’s Tears fell in summer. A falcon soared above the frozen waterfall, blue wings spread wide against the morning sky.
Would that I had wings as well.

She rested her hands on the carved stone balustrade and made herself peer over the edge. She could see Sky six hundred feet below, and the stone steps carved into the mountain, the winding way that led past Snow and Stone all the way down to the valley floor. She could see the towers and keeps of the Gates of the Moon, as small as a child’s toys. Around the walls the hosts of Lords Declarant were stirring, emerging from their tents like ants from an anthill.
If only they were truly ants,
she thought,
we could step on them and crush them.