At Winterfell they had called her “Arya Horseface”
and she’d thought nothing could be worse, but that was before
the orphan boy Lommy Greenhands had named her
“Lumpyhead.”
Her head felt lumpy when she touched it. When Yoren had dragged
her into that alley she’d thought he meant to kill her, but
the sour old man had only held her tight, sawing through her mats
and tangles with his dagger. She remembered how the breeze sent the
fistfuls of dirty brown hair skittering across the paving stones,
toward the sept where her father had died. “I’m taking
men and boys from the city,” Yoren growled as the sharp steel
scraped at her head. “Now you hold still, boy.” By the
time he had finished, her scalp was nothing but tufts and
stubble.
Afterward he told her that from there to Winterfell she’d
be Arry the orphan boy. “Gate shouldn’t be hard, but
the road’s another matter. You got a long way to go in bad
company. I got thirty this time, men and boys all bound for the
Wall, and don’t be thinking they’re like that bastard
brother o’ yours.” He shook her. “Lord Eddard
gave me pick o’ the dungeons, and I didn’t find no
little lordlings down there. This lot, half o’ them would
turn you over to the queen quick as spit for a pardon and maybe a
few silvers. The other half’d do the same, only they’d
rape you first. So you keep to yourself and make your water in the
woods, alone. That’ll be the hardest part, the pissing, so
don’t drink no more’n you need.”
Leaving King’s Landing was easy, just like he’d
said. The Lannister guardsmen on the gate were stopping everyone,
but Yoren called one by name and their wagons were waved through.
No one spared Arya a glance. They were looking for a highborn girl,
daughter of the King’s Hand, not for a skinny boy with his
hair chopped off. Arya never looked back. She wished the Rush would
rise and wash the whole city away, Flea Bottom and the Red Keep and
the Great Sept and everything, and everyone too, especially Prince
Joffrey and his mother. But she knew it wouldn’t, and anyhow
Sansa was still in the city and would wash away too. When she
remembered that, Arya decided to wish for Winterfell instead.
Yoren was wrong about the pissing, though. That wasn’t the
hardest part at all; Lommy Greenhands and Hot Pie were the hardest
part. Orphan boys. Yoren had plucked some from the streets with
promises of food for their bellies and shoes for their feet. The
rest he’d found in chains. “The Watch needs good
men,” he told them as they set out, “but you lot will
have to do.”
Yoren had taken grown men from the dungeons as well, thieves and
poachers and rapers and the like. The worst were the three
he’d found in the black cells who must have scared even him,
because he kept them fettered hand and foot in the back of a wagon,
and vowed they’d stay in irons all the way to the Wall. One
had no nose, only the hole in his face where it had been cut off,
and the gross fat bald one with the pointed teeth and the weeping
sores on his cheeks had eyes like nothing human.
They took five wagons out of King’s Landing, laden with
supplies for the Wall: hides and bolts of cloth, bars of pig iron,
a cage of ravens, books and paper and ink, a bale of sourleaf, jars
of oil, and chests of medicine and spices. Teams of plow horses
pulled the wagons, and Yoren had bought two coursers and a
half-dozen donkeys for the boys. Arya would have preferred a real
horse, but the donkey was better than riding on a wagon.
The men paid her no mind, but she was not so lucky with the
boys. She was two years younger than the youngest orphan, not to
mention smaller and skinnier, and Lommy and Hot Pie took her
silence to mean she was scared, or stupid, or deaf. “Look at
that sword Lumpyhead’s got there,” Lommy said one
morning as they made their plodding way past orchards and wheat
fields. He’d been a dyer’s apprentice before he was
caught stealing, and his arms were mottled green to the elbow. When
he laughed he brayed like the donkeys they were riding.
“Where’s a gutter rat like Lumpyhead get him a
sword?”
Arya chewed her lip sullenly. She could see the back of
Yoren’s faded black cloak up ahead of the wagons, but she was
determined not to go crying to him for help.
“Maybe he’s a little squire,” Hot Pie put in.
His mother had been a baker before she died, and he’d pushed
her cart through the streets all day, shouting “Hot pies! Hot
pies!” “Some lordy lord’s little squire boy,
that’s it.”
“He ain’t no squire, look at him. I bet that’s
not even a real sword. I bet it’s just some play sword made
of tin.”
Arya hated them making fun of Needle. “It’s
castle-forged steel, you stupid,” she snapped, turning in the
saddle to glare at them, “and you better shut your
mouth.”
The orphan boys hooted. “Where’d you get a blade
like that, Lumpyface?” Hot Pie wanted to know.
“Lumpyhead,” corrected Lommy. “He
prob’ly stole it.”
“I did not!” she shouted. Jon Snow had given her
Needle. Maybe she had to let them call her Lumpyhead, but she
wasn’t going to let them call Jon a thief.
“If he stole it, we could take it off him,” said Hot
Pie. “It’s not his anyhow. I could use me a sword like
that.”
Lommy egged him on. “Go on, take it off him, I dare
you.”
Hot Pie kicked his donkey, riding closer. “Hey, Lumpyface,
you gimme that sword.” His hair was the color of straw, his
fat face all sunburnt and peeling. “You don’t know how
to use it.” Yes I do, Arya could have said. I killed a boy, a fat boy like
you, I stabbed him in the belly and he died, and I’ll kill
you too if you don’t let me alone. Only she did not dare.
Yoren didn’t know about the stableboy, but she was afraid of
what he might do if he found out. Arya was pretty sure that some of
the other men were killers too, the three in the manacles for sure,
but the queen wasn’t looking for them, so it wasn’t the
same.
“Look at him,” brayed Lommy Greenhands. “I bet
he’s going to cry now. You want to cry, Lumpyhead?”
She had cried in her sleep the night before, dreaming of her
father. Come morning, she’d woken red-eyed and dry, and could
not have shed another tear if her life had hung on it.
“He’s going to wet his pants,” Hot Pie
suggested.
“Leave him be,” said the boy with the shaggy black
hair who rode behind them. Lommy had named him the Bull, on account
of this horned helm he had that he polished all the time but never
wore. Lommy didn’t dare mock the Bull. He was older, and big
for his age, with a broad chest and strong-looking arms.
“You better give Hot Pie the sword, Arry,” Lommy
said. “Hot Pie wants it bad. He kicked a boy to death.
He’ll do the same to you, I bet.”
“I knocked him down and I kicked him in the balls, and I
kept kicking him there until he was dead,” Hot Pie boasted.
“I kicked him all to pieces. His balls were broke open and
bloody and his cock turned black. You better gimme the
sword.”
Arya slid her practice sword from her belt. “You can have
this one,” she told Hot Pie, not wanting to fight.
“That’s just some stick.” He rode nearer and
tried to reach over for Needle’s hilt.
Arya made the stick whistle as she laid the wood across his
donkey’s hindquarters. The animal hawed and bucked, dumping
Hot Pie on the ground. She vaulted off her own donkey and poked him
in the gut as he tried to get up and he sat back down with a grunt.
Then she whacked him across the face and his nose made a crack like
a branch breaking. Blood dribbled from his nostrils. When Hot Pie
began to wail, Arya whirled toward Lommy Greenhands, who was
sitting on his donkey openmouthed. “You want some sword
too?” she yelled, but he didn’t. He raised dyed green
hands in front of his face and squealed at her to get away.
The Bull shouted, “Behind you,” and Arya spun. Hot
Pie was on his knees, his fist closing around a big jagged rock.
She let him throw it, ducking her head as it sailed past. Then she
flew at him. He raised a hand and she hit it, and then his cheek,
and then his knee. He grabbed for her, and she danced aside and
bounced the wood off the back of his head. He fell down and got up
and stumbled after her, his red face all smeared with dirt and
blood. Arya slid into a water dancer’s stance and waited.
When he came close enough, she lunged, right between his legs, so
hard that if her wooden sword had had a point it would have come
out between his butt cheeks.
By the time Yoren pulled her off him, Hot Pie was sprawled out
on the ground with his breeches brown and smelly, crying as Arya
whapped him over and over and over. “Enough,” the black
brother roared, prying the stick sword from her fingers, “you
want to kill the fool?” When Lommy and some others started to
squeal, the old man turned on them too. “Shut your mouths, or
I’ll be shutting them for you. Any more o’ this,
I’ll tie you lot behind the wagons and drag you to the
Wall.” He spat. “And that goes twice for you, Arry. You
come with me, boy. Now.”
They were all looking at her, even the three chained and
manacled in the back of the wagon. The fat one snapped his pointy
teeth together and hissed, but Arya ignored him.
The old man dragged her well off the road into a tangle of
trees, cursing and muttering all the while. “If I had a
thimble o’ sense, I would’ve left you in King’s
Landing. You hear me, boy?” He always snarled that word,
putting a bite in it so she would be certain to hear. “Unlace
your breeches and pull ‘em down. Go on, there’s no one
here to see. Do it.”
Sullenly, Arya did as he said. “Over there, against the
oak. Yes, like that.” She wrapped her arms around the trunk
and pressed her face to the rough wood. “You scream now. You
scream loud.” I won’t, Arya thought stubbornly, but when Yoren laid the
wood against the back of her bare thighs, the shriek burst out of
her anyway. “Think that hurt?” he said. “Try this
one.” The stick came whistling. Arya shrieked again,
clutching the tree to keep from falling. “One more.”
She held on tight, chewing her lip, flinching when she heard it
coming. The stroke made her jump and howl. I won’t cry, she
thought, I won’t do that. I’m a Stark of Winterfell,
our sigil is the direwolf, direwolves don’t cry. She could
feel a thin trickle of blood running down her left leg. Her thighs
and cheeks were ablaze with pain. “Might be I got your
attention now,” Yoren said. “Next time you take that
stick to one of your brothers, you’ll get twice what you
give, you hear me? Now cover yourself.” They’re not my brothers, Arya thought as she bent to yank
up her breeches, but she knew better than to say so. Her hands
fumbled with her belt and laces.
Yoren was looking at her. “You hurt?” Calm as still water, she told herself, the way Syrio Forel had
taught her. “Some.”
He spat. “That pie boy’s hurting worse. It
wasn’t him as killed your father, girl, nor that thieving
Lommy neither. Hitting them won’t bring him back.”
“I know,” Arya muttered sullenly.
“Here’s something you don’t know. It
wasn’t supposed to happen like it did. I was set to leave,
wagons bought and loaded, and a man comes with a boy for me, and a
purse of coin, and a message, never mind who it’s from. Lord
Eddard’s to take the black, he says to me, wait, he’ll
be going with you. Why d’you think I was there? Only
something went queer.”
“Joffrey,” Arya breathed. “Someone should kill
him!”
“Someone will, but it won’t be me, nor you
neither.” Yoren tossed back her stick sword. “Got
sourleaf back at the wagons,” he said as they made their way
back to the road. “You’ll chew some, it’ll help
with the sting.”
It did help, some, though the taste of it was foul and it made
her spit look like blood. Even so, she walked for the rest of that
day, and the day after, and the day after that, too raw to sit a
donkey. Hot Pie was worse off; Yoren had to shift some barrels
around so he could lie in the back of a wagon on some sacks of
barley, and he whimpered every time the wheels hit a rock. Lommy
Greenhands wasn’t even hurt, yet he stayed as far away from
Arya as he could get. “Every time you look at him, he
twitches,” the Bull told her as she walked beside his donkey.
She did not answer. It seemed safer not to talk to anyone.
That night she lay upon her thin blanket on the hard ground,
staring up at the great red comet. The comet was splendid and scary
all at once. “The Red Sword,” the Bull named it; he
claimed it looked like a sword, the blade still red-hot from the
forge. When Arya squinted the right way she could see the sword
too, only it wasn’t a new sword, it was Ice, her
father’s greatsword, all ripply Valyrian steel, and the red
was Lord Eddard’s blood on the blade after Ser Ilyn the
King’s Justice had cut off his head. Yoren had made her look
away when it happened, yet it seemed to her that the comet looked
like Ice must have, after.
When at last she slept, she dreamed of home. The kingsroad wound
its way past Winterfell on its way to the Wall, and Yoren had
promised he’d leave her there with no one any wiser about who
she’d been. She yearned to see her mother again, and Robb and
Bran and Rickon . . . but it was Jon Snow she
thought of most. She wished somehow they could come to the Wall
before Winterfell, so Jon might muss up her hair and call her
“little sister.” She’d tell him, “I missed
you,” and he’d say it too at the very same moment, the
way they always used to say things together. She would have liked
that. She would have liked that better than anything.
At Winterfell they had called her “Arya Horseface”
and she’d thought nothing could be worse, but that was before
the orphan boy Lommy Greenhands had named her
“Lumpyhead.”
Her head felt lumpy when she touched it. When Yoren had dragged
her into that alley she’d thought he meant to kill her, but
the sour old man had only held her tight, sawing through her mats
and tangles with his dagger. She remembered how the breeze sent the
fistfuls of dirty brown hair skittering across the paving stones,
toward the sept where her father had died. “I’m taking
men and boys from the city,” Yoren growled as the sharp steel
scraped at her head. “Now you hold still, boy.” By the
time he had finished, her scalp was nothing but tufts and
stubble.
Afterward he told her that from there to Winterfell she’d
be Arry the orphan boy. “Gate shouldn’t be hard, but
the road’s another matter. You got a long way to go in bad
company. I got thirty this time, men and boys all bound for the
Wall, and don’t be thinking they’re like that bastard
brother o’ yours.” He shook her. “Lord Eddard
gave me pick o’ the dungeons, and I didn’t find no
little lordlings down there. This lot, half o’ them would
turn you over to the queen quick as spit for a pardon and maybe a
few silvers. The other half’d do the same, only they’d
rape you first. So you keep to yourself and make your water in the
woods, alone. That’ll be the hardest part, the pissing, so
don’t drink no more’n you need.”
Leaving King’s Landing was easy, just like he’d
said. The Lannister guardsmen on the gate were stopping everyone,
but Yoren called one by name and their wagons were waved through.
No one spared Arya a glance. They were looking for a highborn girl,
daughter of the King’s Hand, not for a skinny boy with his
hair chopped off. Arya never looked back. She wished the Rush would
rise and wash the whole city away, Flea Bottom and the Red Keep and
the Great Sept and everything, and everyone too, especially Prince
Joffrey and his mother. But she knew it wouldn’t, and anyhow
Sansa was still in the city and would wash away too. When she
remembered that, Arya decided to wish for Winterfell instead.
Yoren was wrong about the pissing, though. That wasn’t the
hardest part at all; Lommy Greenhands and Hot Pie were the hardest
part. Orphan boys. Yoren had plucked some from the streets with
promises of food for their bellies and shoes for their feet. The
rest he’d found in chains. “The Watch needs good
men,” he told them as they set out, “but you lot will
have to do.”
Yoren had taken grown men from the dungeons as well, thieves and
poachers and rapers and the like. The worst were the three
he’d found in the black cells who must have scared even him,
because he kept them fettered hand and foot in the back of a wagon,
and vowed they’d stay in irons all the way to the Wall. One
had no nose, only the hole in his face where it had been cut off,
and the gross fat bald one with the pointed teeth and the weeping
sores on his cheeks had eyes like nothing human.
They took five wagons out of King’s Landing, laden with
supplies for the Wall: hides and bolts of cloth, bars of pig iron,
a cage of ravens, books and paper and ink, a bale of sourleaf, jars
of oil, and chests of medicine and spices. Teams of plow horses
pulled the wagons, and Yoren had bought two coursers and a
half-dozen donkeys for the boys. Arya would have preferred a real
horse, but the donkey was better than riding on a wagon.
The men paid her no mind, but she was not so lucky with the
boys. She was two years younger than the youngest orphan, not to
mention smaller and skinnier, and Lommy and Hot Pie took her
silence to mean she was scared, or stupid, or deaf. “Look at
that sword Lumpyhead’s got there,” Lommy said one
morning as they made their plodding way past orchards and wheat
fields. He’d been a dyer’s apprentice before he was
caught stealing, and his arms were mottled green to the elbow. When
he laughed he brayed like the donkeys they were riding.
“Where’s a gutter rat like Lumpyhead get him a
sword?”
Arya chewed her lip sullenly. She could see the back of
Yoren’s faded black cloak up ahead of the wagons, but she was
determined not to go crying to him for help.
“Maybe he’s a little squire,” Hot Pie put in.
His mother had been a baker before she died, and he’d pushed
her cart through the streets all day, shouting “Hot pies! Hot
pies!” “Some lordy lord’s little squire boy,
that’s it.”
“He ain’t no squire, look at him. I bet that’s
not even a real sword. I bet it’s just some play sword made
of tin.”
Arya hated them making fun of Needle. “It’s
castle-forged steel, you stupid,” she snapped, turning in the
saddle to glare at them, “and you better shut your
mouth.”
The orphan boys hooted. “Where’d you get a blade
like that, Lumpyface?” Hot Pie wanted to know.
“Lumpyhead,” corrected Lommy. “He
prob’ly stole it.”
“I did not!” she shouted. Jon Snow had given her
Needle. Maybe she had to let them call her Lumpyhead, but she
wasn’t going to let them call Jon a thief.
“If he stole it, we could take it off him,” said Hot
Pie. “It’s not his anyhow. I could use me a sword like
that.”
Lommy egged him on. “Go on, take it off him, I dare
you.”
Hot Pie kicked his donkey, riding closer. “Hey, Lumpyface,
you gimme that sword.” His hair was the color of straw, his
fat face all sunburnt and peeling. “You don’t know how
to use it.” Yes I do, Arya could have said. I killed a boy, a fat boy like
you, I stabbed him in the belly and he died, and I’ll kill
you too if you don’t let me alone. Only she did not dare.
Yoren didn’t know about the stableboy, but she was afraid of
what he might do if he found out. Arya was pretty sure that some of
the other men were killers too, the three in the manacles for sure,
but the queen wasn’t looking for them, so it wasn’t the
same.
“Look at him,” brayed Lommy Greenhands. “I bet
he’s going to cry now. You want to cry, Lumpyhead?”
She had cried in her sleep the night before, dreaming of her
father. Come morning, she’d woken red-eyed and dry, and could
not have shed another tear if her life had hung on it.
“He’s going to wet his pants,” Hot Pie
suggested.
“Leave him be,” said the boy with the shaggy black
hair who rode behind them. Lommy had named him the Bull, on account
of this horned helm he had that he polished all the time but never
wore. Lommy didn’t dare mock the Bull. He was older, and big
for his age, with a broad chest and strong-looking arms.
“You better give Hot Pie the sword, Arry,” Lommy
said. “Hot Pie wants it bad. He kicked a boy to death.
He’ll do the same to you, I bet.”
“I knocked him down and I kicked him in the balls, and I
kept kicking him there until he was dead,” Hot Pie boasted.
“I kicked him all to pieces. His balls were broke open and
bloody and his cock turned black. You better gimme the
sword.”
Arya slid her practice sword from her belt. “You can have
this one,” she told Hot Pie, not wanting to fight.
“That’s just some stick.” He rode nearer and
tried to reach over for Needle’s hilt.
Arya made the stick whistle as she laid the wood across his
donkey’s hindquarters. The animal hawed and bucked, dumping
Hot Pie on the ground. She vaulted off her own donkey and poked him
in the gut as he tried to get up and he sat back down with a grunt.
Then she whacked him across the face and his nose made a crack like
a branch breaking. Blood dribbled from his nostrils. When Hot Pie
began to wail, Arya whirled toward Lommy Greenhands, who was
sitting on his donkey openmouthed. “You want some sword
too?” she yelled, but he didn’t. He raised dyed green
hands in front of his face and squealed at her to get away.
The Bull shouted, “Behind you,” and Arya spun. Hot
Pie was on his knees, his fist closing around a big jagged rock.
She let him throw it, ducking her head as it sailed past. Then she
flew at him. He raised a hand and she hit it, and then his cheek,
and then his knee. He grabbed for her, and she danced aside and
bounced the wood off the back of his head. He fell down and got up
and stumbled after her, his red face all smeared with dirt and
blood. Arya slid into a water dancer’s stance and waited.
When he came close enough, she lunged, right between his legs, so
hard that if her wooden sword had had a point it would have come
out between his butt cheeks.
By the time Yoren pulled her off him, Hot Pie was sprawled out
on the ground with his breeches brown and smelly, crying as Arya
whapped him over and over and over. “Enough,” the black
brother roared, prying the stick sword from her fingers, “you
want to kill the fool?” When Lommy and some others started to
squeal, the old man turned on them too. “Shut your mouths, or
I’ll be shutting them for you. Any more o’ this,
I’ll tie you lot behind the wagons and drag you to the
Wall.” He spat. “And that goes twice for you, Arry. You
come with me, boy. Now.”
They were all looking at her, even the three chained and
manacled in the back of the wagon. The fat one snapped his pointy
teeth together and hissed, but Arya ignored him.
The old man dragged her well off the road into a tangle of
trees, cursing and muttering all the while. “If I had a
thimble o’ sense, I would’ve left you in King’s
Landing. You hear me, boy?” He always snarled that word,
putting a bite in it so she would be certain to hear. “Unlace
your breeches and pull ‘em down. Go on, there’s no one
here to see. Do it.”
Sullenly, Arya did as he said. “Over there, against the
oak. Yes, like that.” She wrapped her arms around the trunk
and pressed her face to the rough wood. “You scream now. You
scream loud.” I won’t, Arya thought stubbornly, but when Yoren laid the
wood against the back of her bare thighs, the shriek burst out of
her anyway. “Think that hurt?” he said. “Try this
one.” The stick came whistling. Arya shrieked again,
clutching the tree to keep from falling. “One more.”
She held on tight, chewing her lip, flinching when she heard it
coming. The stroke made her jump and howl. I won’t cry, she
thought, I won’t do that. I’m a Stark of Winterfell,
our sigil is the direwolf, direwolves don’t cry. She could
feel a thin trickle of blood running down her left leg. Her thighs
and cheeks were ablaze with pain. “Might be I got your
attention now,” Yoren said. “Next time you take that
stick to one of your brothers, you’ll get twice what you
give, you hear me? Now cover yourself.” They’re not my brothers, Arya thought as she bent to yank
up her breeches, but she knew better than to say so. Her hands
fumbled with her belt and laces.
Yoren was looking at her. “You hurt?” Calm as still water, she told herself, the way Syrio Forel had
taught her. “Some.”
He spat. “That pie boy’s hurting worse. It
wasn’t him as killed your father, girl, nor that thieving
Lommy neither. Hitting them won’t bring him back.”
“I know,” Arya muttered sullenly.
“Here’s something you don’t know. It
wasn’t supposed to happen like it did. I was set to leave,
wagons bought and loaded, and a man comes with a boy for me, and a
purse of coin, and a message, never mind who it’s from. Lord
Eddard’s to take the black, he says to me, wait, he’ll
be going with you. Why d’you think I was there? Only
something went queer.”
“Joffrey,” Arya breathed. “Someone should kill
him!”
“Someone will, but it won’t be me, nor you
neither.” Yoren tossed back her stick sword. “Got
sourleaf back at the wagons,” he said as they made their way
back to the road. “You’ll chew some, it’ll help
with the sting.”
It did help, some, though the taste of it was foul and it made
her spit look like blood. Even so, she walked for the rest of that
day, and the day after, and the day after that, too raw to sit a
donkey. Hot Pie was worse off; Yoren had to shift some barrels
around so he could lie in the back of a wagon on some sacks of
barley, and he whimpered every time the wheels hit a rock. Lommy
Greenhands wasn’t even hurt, yet he stayed as far away from
Arya as he could get. “Every time you look at him, he
twitches,” the Bull told her as she walked beside his donkey.
She did not answer. It seemed safer not to talk to anyone.
That night she lay upon her thin blanket on the hard ground,
staring up at the great red comet. The comet was splendid and scary
all at once. “The Red Sword,” the Bull named it; he
claimed it looked like a sword, the blade still red-hot from the
forge. When Arya squinted the right way she could see the sword
too, only it wasn’t a new sword, it was Ice, her
father’s greatsword, all ripply Valyrian steel, and the red
was Lord Eddard’s blood on the blade after Ser Ilyn the
King’s Justice had cut off his head. Yoren had made her look
away when it happened, yet it seemed to her that the comet looked
like Ice must have, after.
When at last she slept, she dreamed of home. The kingsroad wound
its way past Winterfell on its way to the Wall, and Yoren had
promised he’d leave her there with no one any wiser about who
she’d been. She yearned to see her mother again, and Robb and
Bran and Rickon . . . but it was Jon Snow she
thought of most. She wished somehow they could come to the Wall
before Winterfell, so Jon might muss up her hair and call her
“little sister.” She’d tell him, “I missed
you,” and he’d say it too at the very same moment, the
way they always used to say things together. She would have liked
that. She would have liked that better than anything.