Whatever names Harren the Black had meant to give his towers
were long forgotten. They were called the Tower of Dread, the
Widow’s Tower, the Wailing Tower, the Tower of Ghosts, and
Kingspyre Tower. Arya slept in a shallow niche in the cavernous
vaults beneath the Wailing Tower, on a bed of straw. She had water
to wash in whenever she liked, a chunk of soap. The work was hard,
but no harder than walking miles every day. Weasel did not need to
find worms and bugs to eat, as Arry had; there was bread every day,
and barley stews with bits of carrot and turnip, and once a
fortnight even a bite of meat.
Hot Pie ate even better; he was where he belonged, in the
kitchens, a round stone building with a domed roof that was a world
unto itself. Arya took her meals at a trestle table in the
undercroft with Weese and his other charges, but sometimes she
would be chosen to help fetch their food, and she and Hot Pie could
steal a moment to talk. He could never remember that she was now
Weasel and kept calling her Arry, even though he knew she was a
girl. Once he tried to slip her a hot apple tart, but he made such
a clumsy job of it that two of the cooks saw. They took the tart
away and beat him with a big wooden spoon.
Gendry had been sent to the forge; Arya seldom saw him. As for
those she served with, she did not even want to know their names.
That only made it hurt worse when they died. Most of them were
older than she was and content to let her alone.
Harrenhal was vast, much of it far gone in decay. Lady Whent had
held the castle as bannerman to House Tully, but she’d used
only the lower thirds of two of the five towers, and let the rest
go to ruin. Now she was fled, and the small household she’d
left could not begin to tend the needs of all the knights, lords,
and highborn prisoners Lord Tywin had brought, so the Lannisters
must forage for servants as well as for plunder and provender. The
talk was that Lord Tywin planned to restore Harrenhal to glory, and
make it his new seat once the war was done.
Weese used Arya to run messages, draw water, and fetch food, and
sometimes to serve at table in the Barracks Hall above the armory,
where the men-at-arms took their meals. But most of her work was
cleaning. The ground floor of the Wailing Tower was given over to
storerooms and granaries, and two floors above housed part of the
garrison, but the upper stories had not been occupied for eighty
years. Now Lord Tywin had commanded that they be made fit for
habitation again. There were floors to be scrubbed, grime to be
washed off windows, broken chairs and rotted beds to be carried
off. The topmost story was infested with nests of the huge black
bats that House Whent had used for its sigil, and there were rats
in the cellars as well . . . and ghosts, some
said, the spirits of Harren the Black and his sons.
Arya thought that was stupid. Harren and his sons had died in
Kingspyre Tower, that was why it had that name, so why should they
cross the yard to haunt her? The Wailing Tower only wailed when the
wind blew from the north, and that was just the sound the air made
blowing through the cracks in the stones where they had fissured
from the heat. if there were ghosts in Harrenhal, they never
troubled her. It was the living men she feared, Weese and Ser
Gregor Clegane and Lord Tywin Lannister himself, who kept his
apartments in Kingspyre Tower, still the tallest and mightiest of
all, though lopsided beneath the weight of the slagged stone that
made it look like some giant half-melted black candle.
She wondered what Lord Tywin would do if she marched up to him
and confessed to being Arya Stark, but she knew she’d never
get near enough to talk to him, and anyhow he’d never believe
her if she did, and afterward Weese would beat her bloody.
In his own small strutting way, Weese was nearly as scary as Ser
Gregor. The Mountain swatted men like flies, but most of the time
he did not even seem to know the fly was there. Weese always knew
you were there, and what you were doing, and sometimes what you
were thinking. He would hit at the slightest provocation, and he
had a dog who was near as bad as he was, an ugly spotted bitch that
smelled worse than any dog Arya had ever known. Once she saw him
set the dog on a latrine boy who’d annoyed him. She tore a
big chunk out of the boy’s calf while Weese laughed.
It took him only three days to earn the place of honor in her
nightly prayers. “Weese,” she would whisper, first of
all. “Dunsen, Chiswyck, Polliver, Raff the Sweetling. The
Tickler and the Hound. Ser Gregor, Ser Amory, Ser Ilyn, Ser Meryn,
King Joffrey, Queen Cersei.” If she let herself forget even
one of them, how would she ever find him again to kill him?
On the road Arya had felt like a sheep, but Harrenbal turned her
into a mouse. She was grey as a mouse in her scratchy wool shift,
and like a mouse she kept to the crannies and crevices and dark
holes of the castle, scurrying out of the way of the mighty.
Sometimes she thought they were all mice within those thick
walls, even the knights and the great lords. The size of the castle
made even Gregor Clegane seem small. Harrenhal covered thrice as
much ground as Winterfell, and its buildings were so much larger
they could scarcely be compared. Its stables housed a thousand
horses, its godswood covered twenty acres, its kitchens were as
large as Winterfell’s Great Hall, and its own great hall,
grandly named the Hall of a Hundred Hearths even though it only had
thirty and some (Arya had tried to count them, twice, but she came
up with thirty-three once and thirty-five the other time) was so
cavernous that Lord Tywin could have feasted his entire host,
though he never did. Walls, doors, halls, steps, everything was
built to an inhuman scale that made Arya remember the stories Old
Nan used to tell of the giants who lived beyond the Wall.
And as lords and ladies never notice the little grey mice under
their feet, Arya heard all sorts of secrets just by keeping her
ears open as she went about her duties. Pretty Pia from the buttery
was a slut who was working her way through every knight in the
castle. The wife of the gaoler was with child, but the real father
was either Ser Alyn Stackspear or a singer called Whitesmile Wat.
Lord Lefford made mock of ghosts at table, but always kept a candle
burning by his bed. Ser Dunaver’s squire Jodge could not hold
his water when he slept. The cooks despised Ser Harys Swyft and
spit in all his food. once she even overheard Maester
Tothmure’s serving girl confiding to her brother about some
message that said Joffrey was a bastard and not the rightful king
at all. “Lord Tywin told him to burn the letter and never
speak such filth again,” the girl whispered.
King Robert’s brothers Stannis and Renly had joined the
fighting, she heard. “And both of them kings now,”
Weese said. “Realm’s got more kings than a
castle’s got rats.” Even Lannister men questioned how
long Joffrey would hold the Iron Throne. “The lad’s got
no army but them gold cloaks, and he’s ruled by a eunuch, a
dwarf, and a woman,” she heard a lordling mutter in his cups.
“What good will the likes of them be if it comes to
battle?” There was always talk of Beric Dondarrion. A fat
archer once said the Bloody Mummers had slain him, but the others
only laughed. “Lorch killed the man at Rushing Falls, and the
Mountain’s slain him twice. Got me a silver stag says he
don’t stay dead this time neither.”
Arya did not know who Bloody Mummers were until a fortnight
later, when the queerest company of men she’d ever seen
arrived at Harrenhal. Beneath the standard of a black goat with
bloody horns rode copper men with bells in their braids; lancers
astride striped black-and-white horses; bowmen with powdered
cheeks; squat hairy men with shaggy shields; brown-skinned men in
feathered cloaks; a wispy fool in green-and-pink motley; swordsmen
with fantastic forked beards dyed green and purple and silver;
spearmen with colored scars that covered their cheeks; a slender
man in septon’s robes, a fatherly one in maester’s
grey, and a sickly one whose leather cloak was fringed with long
blond hair.
At their head was a man stick-thin and very tall, with a drawn
emaciated face made even longer by the ropy black beard that grew
from his pointed chin nearly to his waist. The helm that hung from
his saddle horn was black steel, fashioned in the shape of a
goat’s head. About his neck he wore a chain made of linked
coins of many different sizes, shapes, and metals, and his horse
was one of the strange black-and-white ones.
“You don’t want to know that lot, Weasel,”
Weese said when he saw her looking at the goat-helmed man. Two of
his drinking friends were with him, men-at-arms in service to Lord
Lefford.
“Who are they?” she asked.
One of the soldiers laughed. “The Footmen, girl. Toes of
the Goat. Lord Tywin’s Bloody Mummers.”
“Pease for wits. You get her flayed, you can scrub the
bloody steps,” said Weese. “They’re sellswords,
Weasel girl. Call themselves the Brave Companions. Don’t use
them other names where they can hear, or they’ll hurt you
bad. The goat-helm’s their captain, Lord Vargo
Hoat.”
“He’s no fucking lord,” said the second
soldier. “I heard Ser Amory say so. He’s just some
sellsword with a mouth full of slobber and a high opinion of
hisself.”
“Aye,” said Weese, “but she better call him
lord if she wants to keep all her parts.”
Arya looked at Vargo Hoat again. How many monsters does Lord
Tywin have?
The Brave Companions were housed in the Widow’s Tower, so
Arya need not serve them. She was glad of that; on the very night
they arrived, fighting broke out between the sellswords and some
Lannister men. Ser Harys Swyft’s squire was stabbed to death
and two of the Bloody Mummers were wounded. The next morning Lord Tywin hanged them
both from the gatehouse walls, along with one of Lord
Lydden’s archers. Weese said the archer had started all the
trouble by taunting the sellswords over Beric Dondarrion. After the
hanged men had stopped kicking, Vargo Hoat and Ser Harys embraced
and kissed and swore to love each other always as Lord Tywin looked
on. Arya thought it was funny the way Vargo Hoat lisped and
slobbered, but she knew better than to laugh.
The Bloody Mummers did not linger long at Harrenhal, but before
they rode out again, Arya heard one of them saying how a northern
army under Roose Bolton had occupied the ruby ford of the Trident.
“If he crosses, Lord Tywin will smash him again like he did
on the Green Fork,” a Lannister bowmen said, but his fellows
jeered him down. “Bolton’ll never cross, not till the
Young Wolf marches from Riverrun with his wild northmen and all
them wolves.”
Arya had not known her brother was so near. Riverrun was much
closer than Winterfell, though she was not certain where it lay in
relation to Harrenhal. I could find out somehow, I know I could, if
only I could get away. When she thought of seeing Robb’s face
again Arya had to bite her lip. And I want to see Jon too, and Bran
and Rickon, and Mother. Even
Sansa . . . I’ll kiss her and beg her
pardons like a proper lady, she’ll like that.
From the courtyard talk she’d learned that the upper
chambers of the Tower of Dread housed three dozen captives taken
during some battle on the Green Fork of the Trident. Most had been
given freedom of the castle in return for their pledge not to
attempt escape. They vowed not to escape, Arya told herself, but
they never swore not to help me escape.
The captives ate at their own table in the Hall of a Hundred
Hearths, and could often be seen about the grounds. Four brothers
took their exercise together every day, fighting with staves and
wooden shields in the Flowstone Yard. Three of them were Freys of
the Crossing, the fourth their bastard brother. They were only
there a short time, though; one morning two other brothers arrived
under a peace banner with a chest of gold, and ransomed them from
the knights who’d captured them. The six Freys all left
together.
No one ransomed the northmen, though. One fat lordling haunted
the kitchens, Hot Pie told her, always looking for a morsel. His
mustache was so bushy that it covered his mouth, and the clasp that
held his cloak was a silver-and-sapphire trident. He belonged to
Lord Tywin, but the fierce, bearded young man who liked to walk the
battlements alone in a black cloak patterned with white suns had
been taken by some hedge knight who meant to get rich off him.
Sansa would have known who he was, and the fat one too, but Arya
had never taken much interest in titles and sigils. Whenever Septa
Mordane had gone on about the history of this house and that house,
she was inclined to drift and dream and wonder when the lesson
would be done.
She did remember Lord Cerwyn, though. His lands had been close
to Winterfell, so he and his son Cley had often visited. Yet as
fate would have it, he was the only captive who was never seen; he
was abed in a tower cell, recovering from a wound. For days and
days Arya tried to work out how she might steal past the door
guards to see him. If he knew her, he would be honor bound to help
her. A lord would have gold for a certainty, they all did; perhaps
he would pay some of Lord Tywin’s own sellswords to take her
to Riverrun. Father had always said that most sellswords would
betray anyone for enough gold.
Then one morning she spied three women in the cowled grey robes
of the silent sisters loading a corpse into their wagon. The body
was sewn into a cloak of the finest silk, decorated with a
battle-axe sigil. When Arya asked who it was, one of the guards
told her that Lord Cerwyn had died. The words felt like a kick in
the belly. He could never have helped you anyway, she thought as
the sisters drove the wagon through the gate. He couldn’t
even help himself, you stupid mouse.
After that it was back to scrubbing and scurrying and listening
at doors. Lord Tywin would soon march on Riverrun, she heard. or he
would drive south to Highgarden, no one would ever expect that. No,
he must defend King’s Landing, Stannis was the greatest
threat. He’d sent Gregor Clegane and Vargo Hoat to destroy
Roose Bolton and remove the dagger from his back. He’d sent
ravens to the Eyrie, he meant to wed the Lady Lysa Arryn and win
the Vale. He’d bought a ton of silver to forge magic swords
that would slay the Stark wargs. He was writing Lady Stark to make
a peace, the Kingslayer would soon be freed.
Though ravens came and went every day, Lord Tywin himself spent
most of his days behind closed doors with his war council. Arya
caught glimpses of him, but always from afar—once walking the walls
in the company of three maesters and the fat captive with the bushy
mustache, once riding out with his lords bannermen to visit the
encampments, but most often standing in an arch of the covered
gallery watching men at practice in the yard below. He stood with
his hands locked together on the gold pommel of his longsword. They
said Lord Tywin loved gold most of all; he even shit gold, she
heard one squire jest. The Lannister lord was strong-looking for an
old man, with stiff golden whiskers and a bald head. There was
something in his face that reminded Arya of her own father, even
though they looked nothing alike. He has a lord’s face,
that’s all, she told herself. She remembered hearing her lady
mother tell Father to put on his lord’s face and go deal with
some matter. Father had laughed at that. She could not imagine Lord
Tywin ever laughing at anything.
One afternoon, while she was
waiting her turn to draw a pail of water from the well, she heard
the hinges of the east gate groaning. A party of men rode under the
portcullis at a walk. When she spied the manticore crawling across
the shield of their leader, a stab of hate shot through her.
In the light of day, Ser Amory Lorch looked less frightening
than he had by torchlight, but he still had the pig’s eyes
she recalled. One of the women said that his men had ridden all the
way around the lake chasing Beric Dondarrion and slaying rebels. We
weren’t rebels, Arya thought. We were the Night’s
Watch; the Night’s Watch takes no side. Ser Amory had fewer
men than she remembered, though, and many wounded. I hope their
wounds fester. I hope they all die.
Then she saw the three near the end of the column.
Rorge had donned a black halfhelm with a broad iron nasal that
made it hard to see that he did not have a nose. Biter rode
ponderously beside him on a destrier that looked ready to collapse
under his weight. Half-healed burns covered his body, making him
even more hideous than before.
But Jaqen H’ghar still smiled. His garb was still ragged
and filthy, but he had found time to wash and brush his hair. It
streamed down across his shoulders, red and white and shiny, and
Arya heard the girls giggling to each other in admiration.
I should have let the fire have them. Gendry said to, I should
have listened. If she hadn’t thrown them that axe
they’d all be dead. For a moment she was afraid, but they
rode past her without a flicker of interest. Only Jaqen
H’ghar so much as glanced in her direction, and his eyes
passed right over her. He does not know me, she thought. Arry was a
fierce little boy with a sword, and I’m just a grey mouse
girl with a pail.
She spent the rest of that day scrubbing steps inside the
Wailing Tower. By evenfall her hands were raw and bleeding and her
arms so sore they trembled when she lugged the pail back to the
cellar. Too tired even for food, Arya begged Weese’s pardons
and crawled into her straw to sleep. “Weese,” she
yawned. “Dunsen, Chiswyck, Polliver, Raff the Sweetling. The
Tickler and the Hound. Ser Gregor, Ser Amory, Ser Ilyn, Ser Meryn,
King Joffrey, Queen Cersei.” She thought she might add three
more names to her prayer, but she was too tired to decide
tonight.
Arya was dreaming of wolves running wild through the wood when a
strong hand clamped down over her mouth like smooth warm stone,
solid and unyielding. She woke at once, squirming and struggling.
“A girl says nothing,” a voice whispered close behind
her ear. “A girl keeps her lips closed, no one hears, and
friends may talk in secret. Yes?”
Heart pounding, Arya managed the tiniest of nods.
Jaqen H’ghar took his hand away. The cellar was black as
pitch and she could not see his face, even inches away. She could
smell him, though; his skin smelled clean and soapy, and he had
scented his hair. “A boy becomes a girl,” he
murmured.
“I was always a girl. I didn’t think you saw
me.”
“A man sees. A man knows.”
She remembered that she hated him. “You scared me.
You’re one of them now, I should have let you burn. What are
you doing here? Go away or I’ll yell for Weese.”
“A man pays his debts. A man owes three.”
“Three?”
“The Red God has his due, sweet girl, and only death may
pay for life. This girl took three that were his. This girl must
give three in their places. Speak the names, and a man will do the
rest.” He wants to help me, Arya realized with a rush of hope that made
her dizzy. “Take me to Riverrun, it’s not far, if we
stole some horses we could—”
He laid a finger on her lips. “Three lives you shall have
of me. No more, no less. Three and we are done. So a girl must
ponder.” He kissed her hair softly. “But not too
long.”
By the time Arya lit her stub of a candle, only a faint smell
remained of him, a whiff of ginger and cloves lingering in the air.
The woman in the next niche rolled over on her straw and complained
of the light, so Arya blew it out. When she closed her eyes, she
saw faces swimming before her. Joffrey and his mother, Ilyn Payne
and Meryn Trant and Sandor Clegane . . . but
they were in King’s Landing hundreds of miles away, and Ser
Gregor had lingered only a few nights before departing again for
more foraging, taking Raff and Chiswyck and the Tickler with him.
Ser Amory Lorch was here, though, and she hated him almost as much.
Didn’t she? She wasn’t certain. And there was always
Weese.
She thought of him again the next morning, when lack of sleep
made her yawn. “Weasel,” Weese purred, “next time
I see that mouth droop open, I’ll pull out your tongue and
feed it to my bitch.” He twisted her ear between his fingers
to make certain she’d heard, and told her to get back to
those steps, he wanted them clean down to the third landing by
nightfall.
As she worked, Arya thought about the people she wanted dead.
She pretended she could see their faces on the steps, and scrubbed
harder to wipe them away. The Starks were at war with the
Lannisters and she was a Stark, so she should kill as many
Lannisters as she could, that was what you did in wars. But she
didn’t think she should trust Jaqen. I should kill them
myself. Whenever her father had condemned a man to death, he did
the deed himself with Ice, his greatsword. “If you would take
a man’s life, you owe it to him to look him in the face and
hear his last words,” she’d heard him tell Robb and Jon
once.
The next day she avoided Jaqen H’ghar, and the day after
that. It was not hard. She was very small and Harrenhal was very
large, full of places where a mouse could hide.
And then Ser Gregor returned, earlier than expected, driving a
herd of goats this time in place of a herd of prisoners. She heard
he’d lost four men in one of Lord Beric’s night raids,
but those Arya hated returned unscathed and took up residence on
the second floor of the Wailing Tower. Weese saw that they were
well supplied with drink. “They always have a good thirst,
that lot,” he grumbled. “Weasel, go up and ask if
they’ve got any clothes that need mending, I’ll have
the women see to it.”
Arya ran up her well-scrubbed steps. No one paid her any mind
when she entered. Chiswyck was seated by the fire with a horn of
ale to hand, telling one of his funny stories. She dared not
interrupt, unless she wanted a bloody lip.
“After the Hand’s tourney, it were, before the war
come,” Chiswyck was saying. “We were on our ways back
west, seven of us with Ser Gregor. Raff was with me, and young Joss
Stilwood, he’d squired for Ser in the lists. Well, we come on
this pisswater river, running high on account there’d been
rains. No way to ford, but there’s an alehouse near, so there
we repair. Ser rousts the brewer and tells him to keep our horns
full till the waters fall, and you should see the man’s pig
eyes shine at the sight o’ silver. So he’s fetching us
ale, him and his daughter, and poor thin stuff it is, no
more’n brown piss, which don’t make me any happier, nor
Ser neither. And all the time this brewer’s saying how glad
he is to have us, custom being slow on account o’ them rains.
The fool won’t shut his yap, not him, though Ser is saying
not a word, just brooding on the Knight o’ Pansies and that
bugger’s trick he played. You can see how tight his mouth
sits, so me and the other lads we know better’n to say a
squeak to him, but this brewer he’s got to talk, he even asks
how m’lord fared in the jousting. Ser just gave him this
look.” Chiswyck cackled, quaffed his ale, and wiped the foam
away with the back of his hand. “Meanwhile, this daughter of
his has been fetching and pouring, a fat little thing, eighteen or
so—”
“Thirteen, more like,” Raff the Sweetling
drawled.
“Well, be that as it may, she’s not much to look at,
but Eggon’s been drinking and gets to touching her, and might
be I did a little touching meself, and Raff’s telling young
Stilwood that he ought t’ drag the girl upstairs and make
hisself a man, giving the lad courage as it were. Finally Joss
reaches up under her skirt, and she shrieks and drops her flagon
and goes running off to the kitchen. Well, it would have ended
right there, only what does the old fool do but he goes to Ser and
asks him to make us leave the girl alone, him being an anointed
knight and all such.
“Ser Gregor, he wasn’t paying no mind to none of our
fun, but now he looks, you know how he does, and he commands that
the girl be brought before him. Now the old man has to drag her out
of the kitchen, and no one to blame but hisself. Ser looks her over
and says, ‘So this is the whore you’re so concerned
for’ and this besotted old fool says, ‘My Layna’s
no whore, ser’ right to Gregor’s face. Ser, he never
blinks, just says, ‘She is now’ tosses the old man
another silver, rips the dress off the wench, and takes her right
there on the table in front of her da, her flopping and wiggling
like a rabbit and making these noises. The look on the old
man’s face, I laughed so hard ale was coming out me nose.
Then this boy hears the noise, the son I figure, and comes rushing
up from the cellar, so Raff has to stick a dirk in his belly. By
then Ser’s done, so he goes back to his drinking and we all
have a turn. Tobbot, you know how he is, he flops her over and goes
in the back way. The girl was done fighting by the time I had her,
maybe she’d decided she liked it after all, though to tell
the truth I wouldn’t have minded a little wiggling. And now
here’s the best bit . . . when it’s
all done, Ser tells the old man that he wants his change. The girl
wasn’t worth a silver, he says . . . and
damned if that old man didn’t fetch a fistful of coppers, beg
m’lord’s pardon, and thank him for the custom!”
The men all roared, none louder than Chiswyck himself, who
laughed so hard at his own story that snot dribbled from his nose
down into his scraggy grey beard. Arya stood in the shadows of the
stairwell and watched him. She crept back down to the cellars
without saying a word. When Weese found that she hadn’t asked
about the clothes, he yanked down her breeches and caned her until
blood ran down her thighs, but Arya closed her eyes and thought of
all the sayings Syrio had taught her, so she scarcely felt it.
Two nights later, he sent her to the Barracks Hall to serve at
table. She was carrying a flagon of wine and pouring when she
glimpsed Jaqen H’ghar at his trencher across the aisle.
Chewing her lip, Arya glanced around warily to make certain Weese
was not in sight. Fear cuts deeper than swords, she told
herself.
She took a step, and another, and with each she felt less a
mouse. She worked her way down the bench, filling wine cups. Rorge
sat to Jaqen’s right, deep drunk, but he took no note of her.
Arya leaned close and whispered, “Chiswyck,” right in
Jaqen’s ear. The Lorathi gave no sign that he had heard.
When her flagon was empty, Arya hurried down to the cellars to
refill it from the cask, and quickly returned to her pouring. No
one had died of thirst while she was gone, nor even noted her brief
absence.
Nothing happened the next day, nor the day after, but on the
third day Arya went to the kitchens with Weese to fetch their
dinner. “One of the Mountain’s men fell off a wallwalk
last night and broke his fool neck,” she heard Weese tell a
cook.
“Drunk?” the woman asked.
“No more’n usual. Some are saying it was
Harren’s ghost flung him down.” He snorted to show what
he thought of such notions. It wasn’t Harren, Arya wanted to say, it was me. She had
killed Chiswyck with a whisper, and she would kill two more before
she was through. I’m the ghost in Harrenhal, she thought. And
that night, there was one less name to hate.
Whatever names Harren the Black had meant to give his towers
were long forgotten. They were called the Tower of Dread, the
Widow’s Tower, the Wailing Tower, the Tower of Ghosts, and
Kingspyre Tower. Arya slept in a shallow niche in the cavernous
vaults beneath the Wailing Tower, on a bed of straw. She had water
to wash in whenever she liked, a chunk of soap. The work was hard,
but no harder than walking miles every day. Weasel did not need to
find worms and bugs to eat, as Arry had; there was bread every day,
and barley stews with bits of carrot and turnip, and once a
fortnight even a bite of meat.
Hot Pie ate even better; he was where he belonged, in the
kitchens, a round stone building with a domed roof that was a world
unto itself. Arya took her meals at a trestle table in the
undercroft with Weese and his other charges, but sometimes she
would be chosen to help fetch their food, and she and Hot Pie could
steal a moment to talk. He could never remember that she was now
Weasel and kept calling her Arry, even though he knew she was a
girl. Once he tried to slip her a hot apple tart, but he made such
a clumsy job of it that two of the cooks saw. They took the tart
away and beat him with a big wooden spoon.
Gendry had been sent to the forge; Arya seldom saw him. As for
those she served with, she did not even want to know their names.
That only made it hurt worse when they died. Most of them were
older than she was and content to let her alone.
Harrenhal was vast, much of it far gone in decay. Lady Whent had
held the castle as bannerman to House Tully, but she’d used
only the lower thirds of two of the five towers, and let the rest
go to ruin. Now she was fled, and the small household she’d
left could not begin to tend the needs of all the knights, lords,
and highborn prisoners Lord Tywin had brought, so the Lannisters
must forage for servants as well as for plunder and provender. The
talk was that Lord Tywin planned to restore Harrenhal to glory, and
make it his new seat once the war was done.
Weese used Arya to run messages, draw water, and fetch food, and
sometimes to serve at table in the Barracks Hall above the armory,
where the men-at-arms took their meals. But most of her work was
cleaning. The ground floor of the Wailing Tower was given over to
storerooms and granaries, and two floors above housed part of the
garrison, but the upper stories had not been occupied for eighty
years. Now Lord Tywin had commanded that they be made fit for
habitation again. There were floors to be scrubbed, grime to be
washed off windows, broken chairs and rotted beds to be carried
off. The topmost story was infested with nests of the huge black
bats that House Whent had used for its sigil, and there were rats
in the cellars as well . . . and ghosts, some
said, the spirits of Harren the Black and his sons.
Arya thought that was stupid. Harren and his sons had died in
Kingspyre Tower, that was why it had that name, so why should they
cross the yard to haunt her? The Wailing Tower only wailed when the
wind blew from the north, and that was just the sound the air made
blowing through the cracks in the stones where they had fissured
from the heat. if there were ghosts in Harrenhal, they never
troubled her. It was the living men she feared, Weese and Ser
Gregor Clegane and Lord Tywin Lannister himself, who kept his
apartments in Kingspyre Tower, still the tallest and mightiest of
all, though lopsided beneath the weight of the slagged stone that
made it look like some giant half-melted black candle.
She wondered what Lord Tywin would do if she marched up to him
and confessed to being Arya Stark, but she knew she’d never
get near enough to talk to him, and anyhow he’d never believe
her if she did, and afterward Weese would beat her bloody.
In his own small strutting way, Weese was nearly as scary as Ser
Gregor. The Mountain swatted men like flies, but most of the time
he did not even seem to know the fly was there. Weese always knew
you were there, and what you were doing, and sometimes what you
were thinking. He would hit at the slightest provocation, and he
had a dog who was near as bad as he was, an ugly spotted bitch that
smelled worse than any dog Arya had ever known. Once she saw him
set the dog on a latrine boy who’d annoyed him. She tore a
big chunk out of the boy’s calf while Weese laughed.
It took him only three days to earn the place of honor in her
nightly prayers. “Weese,” she would whisper, first of
all. “Dunsen, Chiswyck, Polliver, Raff the Sweetling. The
Tickler and the Hound. Ser Gregor, Ser Amory, Ser Ilyn, Ser Meryn,
King Joffrey, Queen Cersei.” If she let herself forget even
one of them, how would she ever find him again to kill him?
On the road Arya had felt like a sheep, but Harrenbal turned her
into a mouse. She was grey as a mouse in her scratchy wool shift,
and like a mouse she kept to the crannies and crevices and dark
holes of the castle, scurrying out of the way of the mighty.
Sometimes she thought they were all mice within those thick
walls, even the knights and the great lords. The size of the castle
made even Gregor Clegane seem small. Harrenhal covered thrice as
much ground as Winterfell, and its buildings were so much larger
they could scarcely be compared. Its stables housed a thousand
horses, its godswood covered twenty acres, its kitchens were as
large as Winterfell’s Great Hall, and its own great hall,
grandly named the Hall of a Hundred Hearths even though it only had
thirty and some (Arya had tried to count them, twice, but she came
up with thirty-three once and thirty-five the other time) was so
cavernous that Lord Tywin could have feasted his entire host,
though he never did. Walls, doors, halls, steps, everything was
built to an inhuman scale that made Arya remember the stories Old
Nan used to tell of the giants who lived beyond the Wall.
And as lords and ladies never notice the little grey mice under
their feet, Arya heard all sorts of secrets just by keeping her
ears open as she went about her duties. Pretty Pia from the buttery
was a slut who was working her way through every knight in the
castle. The wife of the gaoler was with child, but the real father
was either Ser Alyn Stackspear or a singer called Whitesmile Wat.
Lord Lefford made mock of ghosts at table, but always kept a candle
burning by his bed. Ser Dunaver’s squire Jodge could not hold
his water when he slept. The cooks despised Ser Harys Swyft and
spit in all his food. once she even overheard Maester
Tothmure’s serving girl confiding to her brother about some
message that said Joffrey was a bastard and not the rightful king
at all. “Lord Tywin told him to burn the letter and never
speak such filth again,” the girl whispered.
King Robert’s brothers Stannis and Renly had joined the
fighting, she heard. “And both of them kings now,”
Weese said. “Realm’s got more kings than a
castle’s got rats.” Even Lannister men questioned how
long Joffrey would hold the Iron Throne. “The lad’s got
no army but them gold cloaks, and he’s ruled by a eunuch, a
dwarf, and a woman,” she heard a lordling mutter in his cups.
“What good will the likes of them be if it comes to
battle?” There was always talk of Beric Dondarrion. A fat
archer once said the Bloody Mummers had slain him, but the others
only laughed. “Lorch killed the man at Rushing Falls, and the
Mountain’s slain him twice. Got me a silver stag says he
don’t stay dead this time neither.”
Arya did not know who Bloody Mummers were until a fortnight
later, when the queerest company of men she’d ever seen
arrived at Harrenhal. Beneath the standard of a black goat with
bloody horns rode copper men with bells in their braids; lancers
astride striped black-and-white horses; bowmen with powdered
cheeks; squat hairy men with shaggy shields; brown-skinned men in
feathered cloaks; a wispy fool in green-and-pink motley; swordsmen
with fantastic forked beards dyed green and purple and silver;
spearmen with colored scars that covered their cheeks; a slender
man in septon’s robes, a fatherly one in maester’s
grey, and a sickly one whose leather cloak was fringed with long
blond hair.
At their head was a man stick-thin and very tall, with a drawn
emaciated face made even longer by the ropy black beard that grew
from his pointed chin nearly to his waist. The helm that hung from
his saddle horn was black steel, fashioned in the shape of a
goat’s head. About his neck he wore a chain made of linked
coins of many different sizes, shapes, and metals, and his horse
was one of the strange black-and-white ones.
“You don’t want to know that lot, Weasel,”
Weese said when he saw her looking at the goat-helmed man. Two of
his drinking friends were with him, men-at-arms in service to Lord
Lefford.
“Who are they?” she asked.
One of the soldiers laughed. “The Footmen, girl. Toes of
the Goat. Lord Tywin’s Bloody Mummers.”
“Pease for wits. You get her flayed, you can scrub the
bloody steps,” said Weese. “They’re sellswords,
Weasel girl. Call themselves the Brave Companions. Don’t use
them other names where they can hear, or they’ll hurt you
bad. The goat-helm’s their captain, Lord Vargo
Hoat.”
“He’s no fucking lord,” said the second
soldier. “I heard Ser Amory say so. He’s just some
sellsword with a mouth full of slobber and a high opinion of
hisself.”
“Aye,” said Weese, “but she better call him
lord if she wants to keep all her parts.”
Arya looked at Vargo Hoat again. How many monsters does Lord
Tywin have?
The Brave Companions were housed in the Widow’s Tower, so
Arya need not serve them. She was glad of that; on the very night
they arrived, fighting broke out between the sellswords and some
Lannister men. Ser Harys Swyft’s squire was stabbed to death
and two of the Bloody Mummers were wounded. The next morning Lord Tywin hanged them
both from the gatehouse walls, along with one of Lord
Lydden’s archers. Weese said the archer had started all the
trouble by taunting the sellswords over Beric Dondarrion. After the
hanged men had stopped kicking, Vargo Hoat and Ser Harys embraced
and kissed and swore to love each other always as Lord Tywin looked
on. Arya thought it was funny the way Vargo Hoat lisped and
slobbered, but she knew better than to laugh.
The Bloody Mummers did not linger long at Harrenhal, but before
they rode out again, Arya heard one of them saying how a northern
army under Roose Bolton had occupied the ruby ford of the Trident.
“If he crosses, Lord Tywin will smash him again like he did
on the Green Fork,” a Lannister bowmen said, but his fellows
jeered him down. “Bolton’ll never cross, not till the
Young Wolf marches from Riverrun with his wild northmen and all
them wolves.”
Arya had not known her brother was so near. Riverrun was much
closer than Winterfell, though she was not certain where it lay in
relation to Harrenhal. I could find out somehow, I know I could, if
only I could get away. When she thought of seeing Robb’s face
again Arya had to bite her lip. And I want to see Jon too, and Bran
and Rickon, and Mother. Even
Sansa . . . I’ll kiss her and beg her
pardons like a proper lady, she’ll like that.
From the courtyard talk she’d learned that the upper
chambers of the Tower of Dread housed three dozen captives taken
during some battle on the Green Fork of the Trident. Most had been
given freedom of the castle in return for their pledge not to
attempt escape. They vowed not to escape, Arya told herself, but
they never swore not to help me escape.
The captives ate at their own table in the Hall of a Hundred
Hearths, and could often be seen about the grounds. Four brothers
took their exercise together every day, fighting with staves and
wooden shields in the Flowstone Yard. Three of them were Freys of
the Crossing, the fourth their bastard brother. They were only
there a short time, though; one morning two other brothers arrived
under a peace banner with a chest of gold, and ransomed them from
the knights who’d captured them. The six Freys all left
together.
No one ransomed the northmen, though. One fat lordling haunted
the kitchens, Hot Pie told her, always looking for a morsel. His
mustache was so bushy that it covered his mouth, and the clasp that
held his cloak was a silver-and-sapphire trident. He belonged to
Lord Tywin, but the fierce, bearded young man who liked to walk the
battlements alone in a black cloak patterned with white suns had
been taken by some hedge knight who meant to get rich off him.
Sansa would have known who he was, and the fat one too, but Arya
had never taken much interest in titles and sigils. Whenever Septa
Mordane had gone on about the history of this house and that house,
she was inclined to drift and dream and wonder when the lesson
would be done.
She did remember Lord Cerwyn, though. His lands had been close
to Winterfell, so he and his son Cley had often visited. Yet as
fate would have it, he was the only captive who was never seen; he
was abed in a tower cell, recovering from a wound. For days and
days Arya tried to work out how she might steal past the door
guards to see him. If he knew her, he would be honor bound to help
her. A lord would have gold for a certainty, they all did; perhaps
he would pay some of Lord Tywin’s own sellswords to take her
to Riverrun. Father had always said that most sellswords would
betray anyone for enough gold.
Then one morning she spied three women in the cowled grey robes
of the silent sisters loading a corpse into their wagon. The body
was sewn into a cloak of the finest silk, decorated with a
battle-axe sigil. When Arya asked who it was, one of the guards
told her that Lord Cerwyn had died. The words felt like a kick in
the belly. He could never have helped you anyway, she thought as
the sisters drove the wagon through the gate. He couldn’t
even help himself, you stupid mouse.
After that it was back to scrubbing and scurrying and listening
at doors. Lord Tywin would soon march on Riverrun, she heard. or he
would drive south to Highgarden, no one would ever expect that. No,
he must defend King’s Landing, Stannis was the greatest
threat. He’d sent Gregor Clegane and Vargo Hoat to destroy
Roose Bolton and remove the dagger from his back. He’d sent
ravens to the Eyrie, he meant to wed the Lady Lysa Arryn and win
the Vale. He’d bought a ton of silver to forge magic swords
that would slay the Stark wargs. He was writing Lady Stark to make
a peace, the Kingslayer would soon be freed.
Though ravens came and went every day, Lord Tywin himself spent
most of his days behind closed doors with his war council. Arya
caught glimpses of him, but always from afar—once walking the walls
in the company of three maesters and the fat captive with the bushy
mustache, once riding out with his lords bannermen to visit the
encampments, but most often standing in an arch of the covered
gallery watching men at practice in the yard below. He stood with
his hands locked together on the gold pommel of his longsword. They
said Lord Tywin loved gold most of all; he even shit gold, she
heard one squire jest. The Lannister lord was strong-looking for an
old man, with stiff golden whiskers and a bald head. There was
something in his face that reminded Arya of her own father, even
though they looked nothing alike. He has a lord’s face,
that’s all, she told herself. She remembered hearing her lady
mother tell Father to put on his lord’s face and go deal with
some matter. Father had laughed at that. She could not imagine Lord
Tywin ever laughing at anything.
One afternoon, while she was
waiting her turn to draw a pail of water from the well, she heard
the hinges of the east gate groaning. A party of men rode under the
portcullis at a walk. When she spied the manticore crawling across
the shield of their leader, a stab of hate shot through her.
In the light of day, Ser Amory Lorch looked less frightening
than he had by torchlight, but he still had the pig’s eyes
she recalled. One of the women said that his men had ridden all the
way around the lake chasing Beric Dondarrion and slaying rebels. We
weren’t rebels, Arya thought. We were the Night’s
Watch; the Night’s Watch takes no side. Ser Amory had fewer
men than she remembered, though, and many wounded. I hope their
wounds fester. I hope they all die.
Then she saw the three near the end of the column.
Rorge had donned a black halfhelm with a broad iron nasal that
made it hard to see that he did not have a nose. Biter rode
ponderously beside him on a destrier that looked ready to collapse
under his weight. Half-healed burns covered his body, making him
even more hideous than before.
But Jaqen H’ghar still smiled. His garb was still ragged
and filthy, but he had found time to wash and brush his hair. It
streamed down across his shoulders, red and white and shiny, and
Arya heard the girls giggling to each other in admiration. I should have let the fire have them. Gendry said to, I should
have listened. If she hadn’t thrown them that axe
they’d all be dead. For a moment she was afraid, but they
rode past her without a flicker of interest. Only Jaqen
H’ghar so much as glanced in her direction, and his eyes
passed right over her. He does not know me, she thought. Arry was a
fierce little boy with a sword, and I’m just a grey mouse
girl with a pail.
She spent the rest of that day scrubbing steps inside the
Wailing Tower. By evenfall her hands were raw and bleeding and her
arms so sore they trembled when she lugged the pail back to the
cellar. Too tired even for food, Arya begged Weese’s pardons
and crawled into her straw to sleep. “Weese,” she
yawned. “Dunsen, Chiswyck, Polliver, Raff the Sweetling. The
Tickler and the Hound. Ser Gregor, Ser Amory, Ser Ilyn, Ser Meryn,
King Joffrey, Queen Cersei.” She thought she might add three
more names to her prayer, but she was too tired to decide
tonight.
Arya was dreaming of wolves running wild through the wood when a
strong hand clamped down over her mouth like smooth warm stone,
solid and unyielding. She woke at once, squirming and struggling.
“A girl says nothing,” a voice whispered close behind
her ear. “A girl keeps her lips closed, no one hears, and
friends may talk in secret. Yes?”
Heart pounding, Arya managed the tiniest of nods.
Jaqen H’ghar took his hand away. The cellar was black as
pitch and she could not see his face, even inches away. She could
smell him, though; his skin smelled clean and soapy, and he had
scented his hair. “A boy becomes a girl,” he
murmured.
“I was always a girl. I didn’t think you saw
me.”
“A man sees. A man knows.”
She remembered that she hated him. “You scared me.
You’re one of them now, I should have let you burn. What are
you doing here? Go away or I’ll yell for Weese.”
“A man pays his debts. A man owes three.”
“Three?”
“The Red God has his due, sweet girl, and only death may
pay for life. This girl took three that were his. This girl must
give three in their places. Speak the names, and a man will do the
rest.” He wants to help me, Arya realized with a rush of hope that made
her dizzy. “Take me to Riverrun, it’s not far, if we
stole some horses we could—”
He laid a finger on her lips. “Three lives you shall have
of me. No more, no less. Three and we are done. So a girl must
ponder.” He kissed her hair softly. “But not too
long.”
By the time Arya lit her stub of a candle, only a faint smell
remained of him, a whiff of ginger and cloves lingering in the air.
The woman in the next niche rolled over on her straw and complained
of the light, so Arya blew it out. When she closed her eyes, she
saw faces swimming before her. Joffrey and his mother, Ilyn Payne
and Meryn Trant and Sandor Clegane . . . but
they were in King’s Landing hundreds of miles away, and Ser
Gregor had lingered only a few nights before departing again for
more foraging, taking Raff and Chiswyck and the Tickler with him.
Ser Amory Lorch was here, though, and she hated him almost as much.
Didn’t she? She wasn’t certain. And there was always
Weese.
She thought of him again the next morning, when lack of sleep
made her yawn. “Weasel,” Weese purred, “next time
I see that mouth droop open, I’ll pull out your tongue and
feed it to my bitch.” He twisted her ear between his fingers
to make certain she’d heard, and told her to get back to
those steps, he wanted them clean down to the third landing by
nightfall.
As she worked, Arya thought about the people she wanted dead.
She pretended she could see their faces on the steps, and scrubbed
harder to wipe them away. The Starks were at war with the
Lannisters and she was a Stark, so she should kill as many
Lannisters as she could, that was what you did in wars. But she
didn’t think she should trust Jaqen. I should kill them
myself. Whenever her father had condemned a man to death, he did
the deed himself with Ice, his greatsword. “If you would take
a man’s life, you owe it to him to look him in the face and
hear his last words,” she’d heard him tell Robb and Jon
once.
The next day she avoided Jaqen H’ghar, and the day after
that. It was not hard. She was very small and Harrenhal was very
large, full of places where a mouse could hide.
And then Ser Gregor returned, earlier than expected, driving a
herd of goats this time in place of a herd of prisoners. She heard
he’d lost four men in one of Lord Beric’s night raids,
but those Arya hated returned unscathed and took up residence on
the second floor of the Wailing Tower. Weese saw that they were
well supplied with drink. “They always have a good thirst,
that lot,” he grumbled. “Weasel, go up and ask if
they’ve got any clothes that need mending, I’ll have
the women see to it.”
Arya ran up her well-scrubbed steps. No one paid her any mind
when she entered. Chiswyck was seated by the fire with a horn of
ale to hand, telling one of his funny stories. She dared not
interrupt, unless she wanted a bloody lip.
“After the Hand’s tourney, it were, before the war
come,” Chiswyck was saying. “We were on our ways back
west, seven of us with Ser Gregor. Raff was with me, and young Joss
Stilwood, he’d squired for Ser in the lists. Well, we come on
this pisswater river, running high on account there’d been
rains. No way to ford, but there’s an alehouse near, so there
we repair. Ser rousts the brewer and tells him to keep our horns
full till the waters fall, and you should see the man’s pig
eyes shine at the sight o’ silver. So he’s fetching us
ale, him and his daughter, and poor thin stuff it is, no
more’n brown piss, which don’t make me any happier, nor
Ser neither. And all the time this brewer’s saying how glad
he is to have us, custom being slow on account o’ them rains.
The fool won’t shut his yap, not him, though Ser is saying
not a word, just brooding on the Knight o’ Pansies and that
bugger’s trick he played. You can see how tight his mouth
sits, so me and the other lads we know better’n to say a
squeak to him, but this brewer he’s got to talk, he even asks
how m’lord fared in the jousting. Ser just gave him this
look.” Chiswyck cackled, quaffed his ale, and wiped the foam
away with the back of his hand. “Meanwhile, this daughter of
his has been fetching and pouring, a fat little thing, eighteen or
so—”
“Thirteen, more like,” Raff the Sweetling
drawled.
“Well, be that as it may, she’s not much to look at,
but Eggon’s been drinking and gets to touching her, and might
be I did a little touching meself, and Raff’s telling young
Stilwood that he ought t’ drag the girl upstairs and make
hisself a man, giving the lad courage as it were. Finally Joss
reaches up under her skirt, and she shrieks and drops her flagon
and goes running off to the kitchen. Well, it would have ended
right there, only what does the old fool do but he goes to Ser and
asks him to make us leave the girl alone, him being an anointed
knight and all such.
“Ser Gregor, he wasn’t paying no mind to none of our
fun, but now he looks, you know how he does, and he commands that
the girl be brought before him. Now the old man has to drag her out
of the kitchen, and no one to blame but hisself. Ser looks her over
and says, ‘So this is the whore you’re so concerned
for’ and this besotted old fool says, ‘My Layna’s
no whore, ser’ right to Gregor’s face. Ser, he never
blinks, just says, ‘She is now’ tosses the old man
another silver, rips the dress off the wench, and takes her right
there on the table in front of her da, her flopping and wiggling
like a rabbit and making these noises. The look on the old
man’s face, I laughed so hard ale was coming out me nose.
Then this boy hears the noise, the son I figure, and comes rushing
up from the cellar, so Raff has to stick a dirk in his belly. By
then Ser’s done, so he goes back to his drinking and we all
have a turn. Tobbot, you know how he is, he flops her over and goes
in the back way. The girl was done fighting by the time I had her,
maybe she’d decided she liked it after all, though to tell
the truth I wouldn’t have minded a little wiggling. And now
here’s the best bit . . . when it’s
all done, Ser tells the old man that he wants his change. The girl
wasn’t worth a silver, he says . . . and
damned if that old man didn’t fetch a fistful of coppers, beg
m’lord’s pardon, and thank him for the custom!”
The men all roared, none louder than Chiswyck himself, who
laughed so hard at his own story that snot dribbled from his nose
down into his scraggy grey beard. Arya stood in the shadows of the
stairwell and watched him. She crept back down to the cellars
without saying a word. When Weese found that she hadn’t asked
about the clothes, he yanked down her breeches and caned her until
blood ran down her thighs, but Arya closed her eyes and thought of
all the sayings Syrio had taught her, so she scarcely felt it.
Two nights later, he sent her to the Barracks Hall to serve at
table. She was carrying a flagon of wine and pouring when she
glimpsed Jaqen H’ghar at his trencher across the aisle.
Chewing her lip, Arya glanced around warily to make certain Weese
was not in sight. Fear cuts deeper than swords, she told
herself.
She took a step, and another, and with each she felt less a
mouse. She worked her way down the bench, filling wine cups. Rorge
sat to Jaqen’s right, deep drunk, but he took no note of her.
Arya leaned close and whispered, “Chiswyck,” right in
Jaqen’s ear. The Lorathi gave no sign that he had heard.
When her flagon was empty, Arya hurried down to the cellars to
refill it from the cask, and quickly returned to her pouring. No
one had died of thirst while she was gone, nor even noted her brief
absence.
Nothing happened the next day, nor the day after, but on the
third day Arya went to the kitchens with Weese to fetch their
dinner. “One of the Mountain’s men fell off a wallwalk
last night and broke his fool neck,” she heard Weese tell a
cook.
“Drunk?” the woman asked.
“No more’n usual. Some are saying it was
Harren’s ghost flung him down.” He snorted to show what
he thought of such notions. It wasn’t Harren, Arya wanted to say, it was me. She had
killed Chiswyck with a whisper, and she would kill two more before
she was through. I’m the ghost in Harrenhal, she thought. And
that night, there was one less name to hate.