Fear cuts deeper than swords, Arya would tell herself, but that
did not make the fear go away. It was as much a part of her days as
stale bread and the blisters on her toes after a long day of
walking the hard, rutted road.
She had thought she had known what it meant to be afraid, but
she learned better in that storehouse beside the Gods Eye. Eight
days she had lingered there before the Mountain gave the command to
march, and every day she had seen someone die.
The Mountain would come into the storehouse after he had broken
his fast and pick one of the prisoners for questioning. The village
folk would never look at him. Maybe they thought that if they did
not notice him, he would not notice
them . . . but he saw them anyway and picked
whom he liked. There was no place to hide, no tricks to play, no
way to be safe.
One girl shared a soldier’s bed three nights running; the
Mountain picked her on the fourth day, and the soldier said
nothing.
A smiley old man mended their clothing and babbled about his
son, off serving in the gold cloaks at King’s Landing.
“A king’s man, he is,” he would say, “a
good king’s man like me, all for Joffrey.” He said it
so often the other captives began to call him All-for-Joffrey
whenever the guards weren’t listening. All-for-Joffrey was
picked on the fifth day.
A young mother with a pox-scarred face offered to freely tell
them all she knew if they’d promise not to hurt her daughter.
The Mountain heard her out; the next morning he picked her
daughter, to be certain she’d held nothing back.
The ones chosen were questioned in full view of the other
captives, so they could see the fate of rebels and traitors. A man
the others called the Tickler asked the questions. His face was so
ordinary and his garb so plain that Arya might have thought him one
of the villagers before she had seen him at his work.
“Tickler makes them howl so hard they piss themselves,”
old stoop-shoulder Chiswyck told them. He was the man she’d
tried to bite, who’d called her a fierce little thing and
smashed her head with a mailed fist. Sometimes he helped the
Tickler. Sometimes others did that. Ser Gregor Clegane himself
would stand motionless, watching and listening, until the victim
died.
The questions were always the same. Was there gold hidden in the
village? Silver, gems? Was there more food? Where was Lord Beric
Dondarrion? Which of the village folk had aided him? When he rode
off, where did he go? How many men were with them? How many
knights, how many bowmen, how many men-at-arms? How were they
armed? How many were horsed? How many were wounded? What other
enemy had they seen? How many? When? What banners did they fly?
Where did they go? Was there gold hidden in the village? Silver,
gems? Where was Lord Beric Dondarrion? How many men were with him?
By the third day, Arya could have asked the questions herself.
They found a little gold, a little silver, a great sack of
copper pennies, and a dented goblet set with garnets that two
soldiers almost came to blows over. They learned that Lord Beric
had ten starvelings with him, or else a hundred mounted knights;
that he had ridden west, or north, or south; that he had crossed
the lake in a boat; that he was strong as an aurochs or weak from
the bloody flux. No one ever survived the Tickler’s
questioning; no man, no woman, no child. The strongest lasted past
evenfall. Their bodies were hung beyond the fires for the
wolves.
By the time they marched, Arya knew she was no water dancer.
Syrio Forel would never have let them knock him down and take his
sword away, nor stood by when they killed Lommy Greenhands. Syrio
would never have sat silent in that storehouse nor shuffled along
meekly among the other captives. The direwolf was the sigil of the
Starks, but Arya felt more a lamb, surrounded by a herd of other
sheep. She hated the villagers for their sheepishness, almost as
much as she hated herself.
The Lannisters had taken everything: father, friends, home,
hope, courage. One had taken Needle, while another had broken her
wooden stick sword over his knee. They had even taken her stupid
secret. The storehouse had been big enough for her to creep off and
make her water in some corner when no one was looking, but it was
different on the road. She held it as long as she could, but
finally she had to squat by a bush and skin down her breeches in
front of all of them. It was that or wet herself. Hot Pie gaped at
her with big moon eyes, but no one else even troubled to look. Girl
sheep or boy sheep, Ser Gregor and his men did not seem to
care.
Their captors permitted no chatter. A broken lip taught Arya to
hold her tongue. Others never learned at all. One boy of three
would not stop calling for his father, so they smashed his face in
with a spiked mace. Then the boy’s mother started screaming
and Raff the Sweetling killed her as well.
Arya watched them die and did nothing. What good did it do you
to be brave? One of the women picked for questioning had tried to
be brave, but she had died screaming like all the rest. There were
no brave people on that march, only scared and hungry ones. Most
were women and children. The few men were very old or very young;
the rest had been chained to that gibbet and left for the wolves
and the crows. Gendry was only spared because he’d admitted
to forging the horned helm himself; smiths, even apprentice smiths,
were too valuable to kill.
They were being taken to serve Lord Tywin Lannister at
Harrenhal, the Mountain told them. “You’re traitors and
rebels, so thank your gods that Lord Tywin’s giving you this
chance. It’s more than you’d get from the outlaws.
Obey, serve, and live.”
“It’s not just, it’s not,” she heard one
wizened old woman complain to another when they had bedded down for
the night. “We never did no treason, the others come in and
took what they wanted, same as this bunch.”
“Lord Beric did us no hurt, though,” her friend
whispered. “And that red priest with him, he paid for all
they took.”
“Paid? He took two of my chickens and gave me a bit of
paper with a mark on it. Can I eat a bit of raggy old paper, I ask
you? Will it give me eggs?” She looked about to see that no
guards were near, and spat three times. “There’s for
the Tullys and there’s for the Lannisters and there’s
for the Starks.”
“It’s a sin and a shame,” an old man hissed.
“When the old king was still alive, he’d not have stood
for this.”
“King Robert?” Arya asked, forgetting herself.
“King Aerys, gods grace him,” the old man said, too
loudly. A guard came sauntering over to shut them up. The old man
lost both his teeth, and there was no more talk that night.
Besides his captives, Ser Gregor was bringing back a dozen pigs,
a cage of chickens, a scrawny milk cow, and nine wagons of salt
fish. The Mountain and his men had horses, but the captives were
all afoot, and those too weak to keep up were killed out of hand,
along with anyone foolish enough to flee. The guards took women off
into the bushes at night, and most seemed to expect it and went
along meekly enough. One girl, prettier than the others, was made
to go with four or five different men every night, until finally
she hit one with a rock. Ser Gregor made everyone watch while he
took off her head with a sweep of his massive two-handed
greatsword. “Leave the body for the wolves,” he
commanded when the deed was done, handing the sword to his squire
to be cleaned.
Arya glanced sidelong at Needle, sheathed at the hip of a
black-bearded, balding man-at-arms called Polliver. It’s good
that they took it away, she thought. Otherwise she would have tried
to stab Ser Gregor, and he would have cut her right in half, and
the wolves would eat her too.
Polliver was not so bad as some of the others, even though
he’d stolen Needle. The night she was caught, the Lannister
men had been nameless strangers with faces as alike as their nasal
helms, but she’d come to know them all. You had to know who
was lazy and who was cruel, who was smart and who was stupid. You
had to learn that even though the one they called Shitmouth had the
foulest tongue she’d ever heard, he’d give you an extra
piece of bread if you asked, while jolly old Chiswyck and
soft-spoken Raff would just give you the back of their hand.
Arya watched and listened and polished her hates the way Gendry
had once polished his horned helm. Dunsen wore those bull’s
horns now, and she hated him for it. She hated Polliver for Needle,
and she hated old Chiswyck who thought he was funny. And Raff the
Sweetling, who’d driven his spear through Lommy’s
throat, she hated even more. She hated Ser Amory Lorch for Yoren,
and she hated Ser Meryn Trant for Syrio, the Hound for killing the
butcher’s boy Mycah, and Ser Ilyn and Prince Joffrey and the
queen for the sake of her father and Fat Tom and Desmond and the
rest, and even for Lady, Sansa’s wolf. The Tickler was almost
too scary to hate. At times she could almost forget he was still
with them; when he was not asking questions, he was just another
soldier, quieter than most, with a face like a thousand other
men.
Every night Arya would say their names. “Ser
Gregor,” she’d whisper to her stone pillow.
“Dunsen, Polliver, Chiswyck, Raff the Sweetling. The Tickler
and the Hound. Ser Amory, Ser Ilyn, Ser Meryn, King Joffrey, Queen
Cersei.” Back in Winterfell, Arya had prayed with her mother
in the sept and with her father in the godswood, but there were no
gods on the road to Harrenhal, and her names were the only prayer
she cared to remember.
Every day they marched, and every night she said her names,
until finally the trees thinned and gave way to a patchwork
landscape of rolling hills, meandering streams, and sunlit fields,
where the husks of burnt holdfasts thrust up black as rotten teeth.
It was another long day’s march before they glimpsed the
towers of Harrenhal in the distance, hard beside the blue waters of
the lake.
It would be better once they got to Harrenhal, the captives told
each other, but Arya was not so certain. She remembered Old
Nan’s stories of the castle built on fear. Harren the Black
had mixed human blood in the mortar, Nan used to say, dropping her
voice so the children would need to lean close to hear, but
Aegon’s dragons had roasted Harren and all his sons within
their great walls of stone. Arya chewed her lip as she walked along
on feet grown hard with callus. It would not be much longer, she
told herself; those towers could not be more than a few miles
off.
Yet they walked all that day and most of the next before at last
they reached the fringes of Lord Tywin’s army, encamped west
of the castle amidst the scorched remains of a town. Harrenhal was
deceptive from afar, because it was so huge. Its colossal curtain
walls rose beside the lake, sheer and sudden as mountain cliffs,
while atop their battlements the rows of wood-and-iron scorpions
looked as small as the bugs for which they were named.
The stink of the Lannister host reached Arya well before she
could make out the devices on the banners that sprouted along the
lakeshore, atop the pavilions of the westermen. From the smell,
Arya could tell that Lord Tywin had been here some time. The
latrines that ringed the encampment were overflowing and swarming
with flies, and she saw faint greenish fuzz on many of the
sharpened stakes that protected the perimeters.
Harrenhal’s gatehouse, itself as large as
Winterfell’s Great Keep, was as scarred as it was massive,
its stones fissured and discolored. From outside, only the tops of
five immense towers could be seen beyond the walls. The shortest of
them was half again as tall as the highest tower in Winterfell, but
they did not soar the way a proper tower did. Arya thought they
looked like some old man’s gnarled, knuckly fingers groping
after a passing cloud. She remembered Nan telling how the stone had
melted and flowed like candlewax down the steps and in the windows,
glowing a sullen searing red as it sought out Harren where he hid.
Arya could believe every word; each tower was more grotesque and
misshapen than the last, lumpy and runneled and cracked.
“I don’t want to go there,” Hot Pie squeaked
as Harrenhal opened its gates to them. “There’s ghosts
in there.”
Chiswyck heard him, but for once he only smiled. “Baker
boy, here’s your choice. Come join the ghosts, or be
one.”
Hot Pie went in with the rest of them.
In the echoing stone-and-timber bathhouse, the captives were
stripped and made to scrub and scrape themselves raw in tubs of
scalding hot water. Two fierce old women supervised the process,
discussing them as bluntly as if they were newly acquired donkeys.
When Arya’s turn came round, Goodwife Amabel clucked in
dismay at the sight of her feet, while Goodwife Harra felt the
callus on her fingers that long hours of practice with Needle had
earned her. “Got those churning butter, I’ll
wager,” she said. “Some farmer’s whelp, are you?
Well, never you mind, girl, you have a chance to win a higher place
in this world if you work hard. If you won’t work hard,
you’ll be beaten. And what do they call you?”
Arya dared not say her true name, but Arry was no good either,
it was a boy’s name and they could see she was no boy.
“Weasel,” she said, naming the first girl she could
think of. “Lommy called me Weasel.”
“I can see why,” sniffed Goodwife Amabel.
“That hair is a fright and a nest for lice as well.
We’ll have it off, and then you’re for the
kitchens.”
“I’d sooner tend the horses.” Arya liked
horses, and maybe if she was in the stables she’d be able to
steal one and escape.
Goodwife Harra slapped her so hard that her swollen lip broke
open all over again. “And keep that tongue to yourself or
you’ll get worse. No one asked your views.”
The blood in her mouth had a salty metal tang to it. Arya
dropped her gaze and said nothing. If I still had Needle, she
wouldn’t dare hit me, she thought sullenly.
“Lord Tywin and his knights have grooms and squires to
tend their horses, they don’t need the likes of you,”
Goodwife Amabel said. “The kitchens are snug and clean, and
there’s always a warm fire to sleep by and plenty to eat. You
might have done well there, but I can see you’re not a clever
girl. Harra, I believe we should give this one to Weese.”
“If you think so, Amabel.” They gave her a shift of
grey roughspun wool and a pair of ill-fitting shoes, and sent her
off.
Weese was understeward for the Wailing Tower, a squat man with a
fleshy carbuncle of a nose and a nest of angry red boils near one
corner of his plump lips. Arya was one of six sent to him. He
looked them all over with a gimlet eye. “The Lannisters are
generous to those as serve them well, an honor none of your sort
deserve, but in war a man makes do with what’s to hand. Work
hard and mind your place and might be one day you’ll rise as
high as me. If you think to presume on his lordship’s
kindness, though, you’ll find me waiting after m’lord
has gone, y’see.” He strutted up and down before them,
telling them how they must never look the highborn in the eye, nor
speak until spoken to, nor get in his lordship’s way.
“My nose never lies,” he boasted. “I can smell
defiance, I can smell pride, I can smell disobedience. I catch a
whiff of any such stinks, you’ll answer for it. When I sniff
you, all I want to smell is fear.”
Fear cuts deeper than swords, Arya would tell herself, but that
did not make the fear go away. It was as much a part of her days as
stale bread and the blisters on her toes after a long day of
walking the hard, rutted road.
She had thought she had known what it meant to be afraid, but
she learned better in that storehouse beside the Gods Eye. Eight
days she had lingered there before the Mountain gave the command to
march, and every day she had seen someone die.
The Mountain would come into the storehouse after he had broken
his fast and pick one of the prisoners for questioning. The village
folk would never look at him. Maybe they thought that if they did
not notice him, he would not notice
them . . . but he saw them anyway and picked
whom he liked. There was no place to hide, no tricks to play, no
way to be safe.
One girl shared a soldier’s bed three nights running; the
Mountain picked her on the fourth day, and the soldier said
nothing.
A smiley old man mended their clothing and babbled about his
son, off serving in the gold cloaks at King’s Landing.
“A king’s man, he is,” he would say, “a
good king’s man like me, all for Joffrey.” He said it
so often the other captives began to call him All-for-Joffrey
whenever the guards weren’t listening. All-for-Joffrey was
picked on the fifth day.
A young mother with a pox-scarred face offered to freely tell
them all she knew if they’d promise not to hurt her daughter.
The Mountain heard her out; the next morning he picked her
daughter, to be certain she’d held nothing back.
The ones chosen were questioned in full view of the other
captives, so they could see the fate of rebels and traitors. A man
the others called the Tickler asked the questions. His face was so
ordinary and his garb so plain that Arya might have thought him one
of the villagers before she had seen him at his work.
“Tickler makes them howl so hard they piss themselves,”
old stoop-shoulder Chiswyck told them. He was the man she’d
tried to bite, who’d called her a fierce little thing and
smashed her head with a mailed fist. Sometimes he helped the
Tickler. Sometimes others did that. Ser Gregor Clegane himself
would stand motionless, watching and listening, until the victim
died.
The questions were always the same. Was there gold hidden in the
village? Silver, gems? Was there more food? Where was Lord Beric
Dondarrion? Which of the village folk had aided him? When he rode
off, where did he go? How many men were with them? How many
knights, how many bowmen, how many men-at-arms? How were they
armed? How many were horsed? How many were wounded? What other
enemy had they seen? How many? When? What banners did they fly?
Where did they go? Was there gold hidden in the village? Silver,
gems? Where was Lord Beric Dondarrion? How many men were with him?
By the third day, Arya could have asked the questions herself.
They found a little gold, a little silver, a great sack of
copper pennies, and a dented goblet set with garnets that two
soldiers almost came to blows over. They learned that Lord Beric
had ten starvelings with him, or else a hundred mounted knights;
that he had ridden west, or north, or south; that he had crossed
the lake in a boat; that he was strong as an aurochs or weak from
the bloody flux. No one ever survived the Tickler’s
questioning; no man, no woman, no child. The strongest lasted past
evenfall. Their bodies were hung beyond the fires for the
wolves.
By the time they marched, Arya knew she was no water dancer.
Syrio Forel would never have let them knock him down and take his
sword away, nor stood by when they killed Lommy Greenhands. Syrio
would never have sat silent in that storehouse nor shuffled along
meekly among the other captives. The direwolf was the sigil of the
Starks, but Arya felt more a lamb, surrounded by a herd of other
sheep. She hated the villagers for their sheepishness, almost as
much as she hated herself.
The Lannisters had taken everything: father, friends, home,
hope, courage. One had taken Needle, while another had broken her
wooden stick sword over his knee. They had even taken her stupid
secret. The storehouse had been big enough for her to creep off and
make her water in some corner when no one was looking, but it was
different on the road. She held it as long as she could, but
finally she had to squat by a bush and skin down her breeches in
front of all of them. It was that or wet herself. Hot Pie gaped at
her with big moon eyes, but no one else even troubled to look. Girl
sheep or boy sheep, Ser Gregor and his men did not seem to
care.
Their captors permitted no chatter. A broken lip taught Arya to
hold her tongue. Others never learned at all. One boy of three
would not stop calling for his father, so they smashed his face in
with a spiked mace. Then the boy’s mother started screaming
and Raff the Sweetling killed her as well.
Arya watched them die and did nothing. What good did it do you
to be brave? One of the women picked for questioning had tried to
be brave, but she had died screaming like all the rest. There were
no brave people on that march, only scared and hungry ones. Most
were women and children. The few men were very old or very young;
the rest had been chained to that gibbet and left for the wolves
and the crows. Gendry was only spared because he’d admitted
to forging the horned helm himself; smiths, even apprentice smiths,
were too valuable to kill.
They were being taken to serve Lord Tywin Lannister at
Harrenhal, the Mountain told them. “You’re traitors and
rebels, so thank your gods that Lord Tywin’s giving you this
chance. It’s more than you’d get from the outlaws.
Obey, serve, and live.”
“It’s not just, it’s not,” she heard one
wizened old woman complain to another when they had bedded down for
the night. “We never did no treason, the others come in and
took what they wanted, same as this bunch.”
“Lord Beric did us no hurt, though,” her friend
whispered. “And that red priest with him, he paid for all
they took.”
“Paid? He took two of my chickens and gave me a bit of
paper with a mark on it. Can I eat a bit of raggy old paper, I ask
you? Will it give me eggs?” She looked about to see that no
guards were near, and spat three times. “There’s for
the Tullys and there’s for the Lannisters and there’s
for the Starks.”
“It’s a sin and a shame,” an old man hissed.
“When the old king was still alive, he’d not have stood
for this.”
“King Robert?” Arya asked, forgetting herself.
“King Aerys, gods grace him,” the old man said, too
loudly. A guard came sauntering over to shut them up. The old man
lost both his teeth, and there was no more talk that night.
Besides his captives, Ser Gregor was bringing back a dozen pigs,
a cage of chickens, a scrawny milk cow, and nine wagons of salt
fish. The Mountain and his men had horses, but the captives were
all afoot, and those too weak to keep up were killed out of hand,
along with anyone foolish enough to flee. The guards took women off
into the bushes at night, and most seemed to expect it and went
along meekly enough. One girl, prettier than the others, was made
to go with four or five different men every night, until finally
she hit one with a rock. Ser Gregor made everyone watch while he
took off her head with a sweep of his massive two-handed
greatsword. “Leave the body for the wolves,” he
commanded when the deed was done, handing the sword to his squire
to be cleaned.
Arya glanced sidelong at Needle, sheathed at the hip of a
black-bearded, balding man-at-arms called Polliver. It’s good
that they took it away, she thought. Otherwise she would have tried
to stab Ser Gregor, and he would have cut her right in half, and
the wolves would eat her too.
Polliver was not so bad as some of the others, even though
he’d stolen Needle. The night she was caught, the Lannister
men had been nameless strangers with faces as alike as their nasal
helms, but she’d come to know them all. You had to know who
was lazy and who was cruel, who was smart and who was stupid. You
had to learn that even though the one they called Shitmouth had the
foulest tongue she’d ever heard, he’d give you an extra
piece of bread if you asked, while jolly old Chiswyck and
soft-spoken Raff would just give you the back of their hand.
Arya watched and listened and polished her hates the way Gendry
had once polished his horned helm. Dunsen wore those bull’s
horns now, and she hated him for it. She hated Polliver for Needle,
and she hated old Chiswyck who thought he was funny. And Raff the
Sweetling, who’d driven his spear through Lommy’s
throat, she hated even more. She hated Ser Amory Lorch for Yoren,
and she hated Ser Meryn Trant for Syrio, the Hound for killing the
butcher’s boy Mycah, and Ser Ilyn and Prince Joffrey and the
queen for the sake of her father and Fat Tom and Desmond and the
rest, and even for Lady, Sansa’s wolf. The Tickler was almost
too scary to hate. At times she could almost forget he was still
with them; when he was not asking questions, he was just another
soldier, quieter than most, with a face like a thousand other
men.
Every night Arya would say their names. “Ser
Gregor,” she’d whisper to her stone pillow.
“Dunsen, Polliver, Chiswyck, Raff the Sweetling. The Tickler
and the Hound. Ser Amory, Ser Ilyn, Ser Meryn, King Joffrey, Queen
Cersei.” Back in Winterfell, Arya had prayed with her mother
in the sept and with her father in the godswood, but there were no
gods on the road to Harrenhal, and her names were the only prayer
she cared to remember.
Every day they marched, and every night she said her names,
until finally the trees thinned and gave way to a patchwork
landscape of rolling hills, meandering streams, and sunlit fields,
where the husks of burnt holdfasts thrust up black as rotten teeth.
It was another long day’s march before they glimpsed the
towers of Harrenhal in the distance, hard beside the blue waters of
the lake.
It would be better once they got to Harrenhal, the captives told
each other, but Arya was not so certain. She remembered Old
Nan’s stories of the castle built on fear. Harren the Black
had mixed human blood in the mortar, Nan used to say, dropping her
voice so the children would need to lean close to hear, but
Aegon’s dragons had roasted Harren and all his sons within
their great walls of stone. Arya chewed her lip as she walked along
on feet grown hard with callus. It would not be much longer, she
told herself; those towers could not be more than a few miles
off.
Yet they walked all that day and most of the next before at last
they reached the fringes of Lord Tywin’s army, encamped west
of the castle amidst the scorched remains of a town. Harrenhal was
deceptive from afar, because it was so huge. Its colossal curtain
walls rose beside the lake, sheer and sudden as mountain cliffs,
while atop their battlements the rows of wood-and-iron scorpions
looked as small as the bugs for which they were named.
The stink of the Lannister host reached Arya well before she
could make out the devices on the banners that sprouted along the
lakeshore, atop the pavilions of the westermen. From the smell,
Arya could tell that Lord Tywin had been here some time. The
latrines that ringed the encampment were overflowing and swarming
with flies, and she saw faint greenish fuzz on many of the
sharpened stakes that protected the perimeters.
Harrenhal’s gatehouse, itself as large as
Winterfell’s Great Keep, was as scarred as it was massive,
its stones fissured and discolored. From outside, only the tops of
five immense towers could be seen beyond the walls. The shortest of
them was half again as tall as the highest tower in Winterfell, but
they did not soar the way a proper tower did. Arya thought they
looked like some old man’s gnarled, knuckly fingers groping
after a passing cloud. She remembered Nan telling how the stone had
melted and flowed like candlewax down the steps and in the windows,
glowing a sullen searing red as it sought out Harren where he hid.
Arya could believe every word; each tower was more grotesque and
misshapen than the last, lumpy and runneled and cracked.
“I don’t want to go there,” Hot Pie squeaked
as Harrenhal opened its gates to them. “There’s ghosts
in there.”
Chiswyck heard him, but for once he only smiled. “Baker
boy, here’s your choice. Come join the ghosts, or be
one.”
Hot Pie went in with the rest of them.
In the echoing stone-and-timber bathhouse, the captives were
stripped and made to scrub and scrape themselves raw in tubs of
scalding hot water. Two fierce old women supervised the process,
discussing them as bluntly as if they were newly acquired donkeys.
When Arya’s turn came round, Goodwife Amabel clucked in
dismay at the sight of her feet, while Goodwife Harra felt the
callus on her fingers that long hours of practice with Needle had
earned her. “Got those churning butter, I’ll
wager,” she said. “Some farmer’s whelp, are you?
Well, never you mind, girl, you have a chance to win a higher place
in this world if you work hard. If you won’t work hard,
you’ll be beaten. And what do they call you?”
Arya dared not say her true name, but Arry was no good either,
it was a boy’s name and they could see she was no boy.
“Weasel,” she said, naming the first girl she could
think of. “Lommy called me Weasel.”
“I can see why,” sniffed Goodwife Amabel.
“That hair is a fright and a nest for lice as well.
We’ll have it off, and then you’re for the
kitchens.”
“I’d sooner tend the horses.” Arya liked
horses, and maybe if she was in the stables she’d be able to
steal one and escape.
Goodwife Harra slapped her so hard that her swollen lip broke
open all over again. “And keep that tongue to yourself or
you’ll get worse. No one asked your views.”
The blood in her mouth had a salty metal tang to it. Arya
dropped her gaze and said nothing. If I still had Needle, she
wouldn’t dare hit me, she thought sullenly.
“Lord Tywin and his knights have grooms and squires to
tend their horses, they don’t need the likes of you,”
Goodwife Amabel said. “The kitchens are snug and clean, and
there’s always a warm fire to sleep by and plenty to eat. You
might have done well there, but I can see you’re not a clever
girl. Harra, I believe we should give this one to Weese.”
“If you think so, Amabel.” They gave her a shift of
grey roughspun wool and a pair of ill-fitting shoes, and sent her
off.
Weese was understeward for the Wailing Tower, a squat man with a
fleshy carbuncle of a nose and a nest of angry red boils near one
corner of his plump lips. Arya was one of six sent to him. He
looked them all over with a gimlet eye. “The Lannisters are
generous to those as serve them well, an honor none of your sort
deserve, but in war a man makes do with what’s to hand. Work
hard and mind your place and might be one day you’ll rise as
high as me. If you think to presume on his lordship’s
kindness, though, you’ll find me waiting after m’lord
has gone, y’see.” He strutted up and down before them,
telling them how they must never look the highborn in the eye, nor
speak until spoken to, nor get in his lordship’s way.
“My nose never lies,” he boasted. “I can smell
defiance, I can smell pride, I can smell disobedience. I catch a
whiff of any such stinks, you’ll answer for it. When I sniff
you, all I want to smell is fear.”