Black Wolf

A/N: My entry in the most recent GOT Exchange on LiveJournal. First time writing Arya XD.

She is standing in the godswood when he comes. Years, lifetimes ago, he could have approached unheard until his hands were around her throat, or his arms around her waist. No longer.

The other man's throat still gouts blood at her feet, steaming in the night-chilled air. It's coppery on her tongue, sweet and drunken in her nose. The ground is hard, cold to its bones, but snow stays well away. He should not have followed her into the godswood, leaving his kith like a fool. Speaking not a word, she coaxed him to his death.

It is enough the man was a Frey, a dark-haired leering one. Then he spoke of her brother, and that name alone earned him his end.

Her senses prickle when he slips from darker shadows. Though he moves as soft as snowfall, she can feel the air he displaces, unlike the stupid shades that take form on the edges of her sight. The shadows never leave entirely. Not since she awoke on the floor of the House of Black and White, shivery from poison, frenzied from dreams. The prowling lion, the hooded wayfarer…she knows their faces from the temple. And some from other places.

Just as she knows his. Red and white hair, too-knowing smile…for a man who has died, Jaqen H'ghar looks the same as she remembers. How many years ago? Years are hazy in her mind, once she began counting time by lessons and stolen senses. No less than four, no more than six. What's so important about years anyway? Then he smiles and holds up both hands.

Arya bares her teeth, mouth sluiced in red. Watching him as he strolls in no hurry, his breath scarcely steaming. He wears a cloak so dark carmine it would be black to weaker eyes. The hood is down, no matter the chill. Beneath is cloth and leather, but Arya only looks enough to know he wears little armor.

Why has he come now of all times? The last assassin she saw ended with a knife buried in his throat before he could bury a quarrel in hers. She took their training and ran—not that she feels it is betrayal on her part.

Two cat-soft paces away and she warns him with a growl. He only smiles a trace wider, sinking to one knee, throat unguarded against fangs and daggers. Hands empty, for the moment. Not that she trusts them to stay that way. They are far from alone in this godswood, and their company cares more for meat and food than a dangerous look.

Slow as seeping blood, he rests a hand on her neck. She scarce feels his warmth. With the same hands he used in Harrenhal to avenge her childish hurts, he runs a palm along her throat, down her neck, and settles it between her shoulders. He knows. Of course he knows! she hisses, but the recognition in his eyes makes her feel hollow and anxious at once. He doesn't know everything.

"A girl has many lives," he says at last, tone murmuring. "Girl, ghost, weasel, cat, wolf, acolyte…" His teeth flash, the slightest bit sharper than most men. "…Traitor. Apostate. But which has a girl chosen?"

Arya blinks hard and the world shifts. Stepping from behind the trunk of the bone-white weirwood, onto a thick branch well above the small clearing, she lets her weight sink into her heels, anchoring against the wind. It catches her stupid blue skirts. Usually she won't go within a dozen paces of a dress, but there were things she needed to learn tonight that she could not find in a squawking tavern.

There is little a lord won't bleat at a dinnertable, never more so than after several cups of wine. A skirt and some lies and she became the maid at their side anytime their cups ran low. The dead Frey had grinned at her, hand sliding down her thigh. She'd twisted away, smiling once she imagined taking the wine-filled carafe and smashing all his teeth.

The wolf's growl comes from deep in her throat. Wisely, Jaqen withdraws his hand before the Nymeria makes it her first course. A warm feast sprawls across the hard ground, neck torn and dripping. Her pack bays and yips through the godswood, but Nymeria holds sway and they keep their distance. Your wolf, once…Nymeria knows her, but Arya admits the she-wolf allows her to stay close, and chooses to follow. The gangly pup is gone, banished by thick forests and fast prey. The wild bitch in her place has a dark scar across her muzzle, silver fur shot through with black, and teeth like the dragon skulls in King's Landing. She's killed as Nymeria before, but this is the first time she's lured a man on two legs and torn his throat out on four.

"Why now?"

Though her teeth are smaller now, she bares them just the same. Why now when you left before? He all but ushered her to assassins who consider him a traitor. Who consider us traitors.

Jaqen tilts his head, ignoring the wolf whose fangs crunch through wet neck bones. "A man cares not for which a girl chooses. Rather, what has chosen a girl." He rises, no stiffness from kneeling, and steps around the feasting she-wolf.

He knows. And part of her wants to hit him, while another part wants to scramble back into Nymeria and forget about men and shadows. She can almost smell the sweet marrow the wolf cracks from soft bones, but she only glances. When she last looked too long at the she-wolf, the Lion of Night stood at her side, flicking a long tail. It's only a moment she remembers her last days in the temple. Her last test—their gentlest poison forced down her throat. She still remembers clawing for life and finding it wanting. Sleep dragging her down, the ground soft as feathers as her knees buckled and her cheek nestled against the stone. Her thrashing heart had lulled to a murmur, then a whisper, then nothing. In the chasm between life and death, something shared her abyss. Something false, obviously. A figment of her mind.

The knife in her hand is some small comfort, though her sword remains with her real clothes. Arya has not lived so long by trusting men to say what the mean or do what they say. Below, he steps closer to the bony roots of the weirwood. I'll punch him in the mouth for finding me at all. She savors her anger, banking a fire and fanning the coals. Fury burns, does it not? Not as bright as she wants though. Something muddles it in her guts and throat.

He stands almost beneath her now, looking up with green-blue eyes that smile too much.

Arya rocks onto her toes and leaps. A sword would've cored him shoulder to heart, like the Pentoshi pirate who barely glanced up. Jaqen does nothing until her knees slide along his ribs. He's only able to grab her waist when she knocks him over, breathing hard when she lands on his chest. Her knife presses against his windpipe.

"Would you have looked for me if I used your stupid coin to buy a horse?"

Fool, saying the first thing that jaunts into her head. The Kindly Man once said she will always want to make rash decisions, and must look to her better sense to muzzle her. Since leaving Braavos, her better sense and true sense finally get along. Mostly.

Jaqen looks her in the eye. "A man would hope their paths crossed again."

No lies, whatever his profession, whatever she might want to hear. Arya feels a small trill, a tiny smile that doesn't reach her face, knowing he won't lie even when she could kill him with another fraction of pressure. But it also makes her rankle like an angry cat. Knowing, by his earlier admission, that whatever in seven hells she saw after the temple's poison was poured down her throat—what she sees, unless she's in Nymeria—is real to someone other than her.

The red glimmers along her blade, a thin line on his pale Lorathi throat. Not enough to bleed long. You can't hold a blade to someone's flesh and expect it not to scratch. If anything, she's always had to lighten her touch just so the fool doesn't slice his own throat open in a panic.

Not him. His eyes are narrow but he looks at her like he did when he first gave her three lives—amused curiosity. More curious how deep she will cut than concerned for his life's blood.

Huffing, scoffing, she drops the blade beside her calf. She could have it back at his throat in half a heartbeat. Jaqen shifts beneath her and Arya almost does grab for the knife, expecting to roll to her feet after he throws her off. But he stops then, his small, sharp smile still tempting her to remove it.

"A girl has grown heavier."

Arya scowls. "A man should shut up."

So she makes him. It's a wild thought, hardly more girl than wolf, and half a bite at first. Her lips press to his, swallowing his smile, bracing her hands on his shoulders. He could throw her off with a knee to the ribs. She doesn't know what he does, when her eyes close without her noticing.

She's breathing harder when she pulls away, but she bares her teeth in a small grin when she sees his breath steaming more on the air. The clearing is empty but for the wolf, the girl, and the Lorathi. Lies, there's always something at the edges.

"Do you see them?"

"Somewhat." His mouth smiles less than his eyes now. "Enough to know a girl should not fear them."

"I'm not scared."

A red eyebrow arches higher. He raises a hand, slow as when she wore her wolfskin, and takes a lock of her hair between his thumb and forefinger. When last he saw her it was dagger-shorn and far shorter. It hangs to her shoulders now, as it puts something between her neck and the wind's icy teeth.

Out of the corner of her eye she sees the horse. Blacker than a nighttime sea, almost as big as a destrier, scowling as much as a horse can scowl. Stranger. The Stranger. She hates this shade most of all. The others she saw in the temple, when they were stone more than shadow. This one comes from the past. Either her memory was plundered, or she sees what her traitorous mind wants her to see. It forces her remember.

Death should be quick—the temple's gentle poison was terrifying enough. Arya may feel a thrill of satisfaction every time someone's blood coats her blades, but she ends her games at first blood. Except for the time, before Braavos, when she denied mercy to the only one who ever asked it. The courser's shadow dredges up more memories—his muzzle huffing at her shoulder the moment before the side of an axe cracked against her skull, the damned stallion's teeth closing a finger-width from her nose…at least they make her more certain her life before was not a dream.

She kisses him again before her mind can travel back too far. Arya never closes her eyes except to blink or sleep, but she does when their faces are this close. The hand holding her hair rests against her cheek, and it takes Arya too long to think how he could strangle her or snap her neck. He won't. He's kissing her back instead.

A moment later and she shoves away, as far as she can while still pinning him, which means she only sits with a straight back.

"Is this only because you're—" Whatever you're doing. Guarding me? Following me? "—swearing your sword?" Stupid, stop thinking like Sansa.

"No—"

Her mouth silences him. She doesn't care why else, only that there is one.

It was a very small part of her training in Braavos, but the Daughter of the Dusk told her you could read a person's thoughts with a kiss. Arya was never skilled at that. All of those lessons were rather boring, though only one was ever painful. Boring, except when she forgot to be no one and thought back to Septa Mordane explaining chastity to Sansa, and it earned her the courtesan's puzzled smile when Arya fell apart laughing.

She can't taste Jaqen's thoughts or however she's supposed to know his mind. Not that she knows much of anything beyond all the ways a person can die, and how a forest feels at night when you're racing with your pack after a fleeing stag. And also a feeling, a brush on the wind or a chill in her dreams, that she should go north. Should. Arya has never been skilled at should.

Mayhaps she should curse him, cut him, for giving her that stupid coin and making her want to be like him, like the Faceless Men. Only after she got there did she find Jaqen was not like any of them. Instead, she feels warmer. It comes as a vague, odd feeling low in her belly—a warmth she's only felt after too much wine, only it spreads further than just her belly. Lower. She rolls her hips instinctively, unable to bite back a small hum.

That is when Jaqen finally throws her off. At least, he jerks up to sit, holding onto her waist instead of letting her fall. He sets her down in front of him. For a moment she thinks he'll avenge the cut across his throat, and wondering how makes her grin in challenge. His face is tilted, once more curious.

"A girl has grown strange."

"You say that?" I'm not a girl! Her cheeks have warmed far too much and damn it she wants this stupid dress burned and her breeches back. "You're the one who sent me to the order you left."

It wasn't until she was blind she learned that. The same day she learned even people in the temple mistake blindness for deafness. He'd vanished in Westeros while hunting for death's due. No one thought he was dead.

Jaqen H'ghar offers only a low chuckle. Likely he can guess how she knows. They're both sitting, legs crossed, but he leans closer, breath fogging.

"The temple serves the Many-Faced God. Not the contrary. And not all service is ordained by the temple. Most understand, some less so." His eyes turn canny. "Has a girl seen any since she left Braavos?"

"I…"

The last Faceless Man she saw before she threatened her way onto a ship leaving port had snarled traitor. Others had tried to cut her, catch her. Since her ship docked, she has kept herself soft and subtle, wondering when they will find her again. But she needs only stare into the dim places to see the shadows shift and change. No killers, only death, if anything at all.

And while thoughts of death and blood and black dreams have rattled through her head since she woke from the temple's poison…since she saw her mother dead in the river, and her father limp to his murder…they've gone quieter now. Never gone, but distracted. Jaqen remains in front of her, while her wolf cleans her paws a dozen paces away.

She slips onto his lap, knees on his thighs, and hooks her arms over his shoulders. He still looks more curious than anything, but she can't seem to be as annoyed.

"Only one," she finally answers. "I don't want you following me because you should. Only because you want to."

When he smiles, it's not a smirk or a mocking grin. Like he's not enjoying some secret jape. "Sometimes they coincide."

This time he does not push her away. He straightens when she kisses him, brushes his fingers across her jaw. It's heat and ache and at that moment Arya knows she wants something almost as much as she wants Freys and Lannisters torn from neck to liver.

She can still make out the blood glistening on his throat. Arya ducks her head, curious if she nicked him more than she thought.

Pah, it's hardly more than a paper cut. But he twitches when her mouth goes there, tasting sweat and copper, and it takes little to make him shiver from something other than the night's chill.

A spark thrums up her hips, making her shove away with a hiss. One of his hands is beneath her skirts, pushing against that spot between her legs. She's learned these things, but she hadn't realized…

She halfway bites back a yip when he does it again, and that selfsame smirk returns to his face. Arya refuses to ask when she knows her voice would come out unsteady, but she twines her legs around his sides to keep him there. Her arms slip off his shoulders, one hand bracing behind her. It should be cold but she's too warm—and distracted—to notice. Her other hand ducks under her skirt, the stupid dress useful for once. Her fingers make short work of the ties near his hips. Not that it was hard to find, pressing against her thigh. When her teeth replace her lips against his neck, he's dragging her closer with a curse.

Since she first entered the House of Black and White, Arya has memorized every word she hears, every face that she sees alive in the street or dead in the temple, and every way a person looks when telling a lie. That she cannot remember everything, pick apart every detail is…calming, almost.

But she will always remember his nails at her back and their hitching breaths. The way his forehead drops to her shoulder near the end, and that shivery, unexpected moment when everything goes taut as a harp string, leaving her boneless. If there is any small pain, she welcomes it. For once there is no lesson.

When he draws back from the crook of her neck, mouth soft and eyes unguarded, Arya thinks she is not the only one who didn't quite become no one.

Her sweat-speckled nape prickles from the chill, though the air feels sweet to her flushed cheeks. She's not entirely sure how she wound up sprawled in his lap. Soon she feels him straighten. Intrigued wariness, for the dozens of glowing orbs just beyond the clearing.

Nymeria has climbed to her feet, bristling fur making her look twice the hell beast. The growl, sharp and snarling, commands her wolves to hang back. Arya still feels their collective tension. Branches snap and dead leaves rustle as they pace and bark. She can't be mad or frightened though. They're not her pack, not really, but sometimes it feels like it.

Arya sits up, still too comfortable. She compromises by resting against his chest, just for a moment. Her wolf settles back to her belly, ears twitching at things Arya cannot hear unless she shrugs on her wolfskin. And I would rather stay here.

Something shifts in the shadows, not a wolf. Her fingers tighten on his jerkin, near his belly and her nerves begin to coil. It's the lion this time, black and glowering, far more ominous than the golden cats that scratch at their remaining power. Shoulders ripple as it steps closer. Its teeth flash in a warning, irritated growl.

"Arya."

Whispered, almost mistaken for wind. Arya swears she's heard her name when she's wandered through godswoods. But no wind is so warm this time of year, or massages her neck with two callused fingers. She snaps away. Not just with her eyes, but everything. If it was a real anything, Nymeria would be at its throat. She takes the small gift, a moment to rest, nothing pushing or pulling, a muted desire for justice.

North—where else would Arya Stark go? That death tries to hurry her on matters not. She's never liked shoulds, why start now?

He helps her to her feet, though it is she who pulls him behind the weirwood, where she stowed her real clothes and Needle. A wet coldness trails down her thighs, but the dress is useful for one last thing.

Jaqen leans against the ivory bark, silent but watching as she wriggles into her breeches. Mayhaps he has to lean, she thinks with an inward grin, caring not if he sees her pale arse.

Twigs and dirt shift under her toes as she balances easily on one leg to pull her boot back on. Let bravos and soldiers leave themselves open to a sword in the heart as they hop around trying to wedge a foot into a stiff boot. Dressed as herself once more, she turns back to Jaqen.

"You're coming with me because you want to, not because you should." She meant to ask it, without real care. Meant to.

A flash of teeth. "Must a man say it in five languages?"

With a sudden yip, Nymeria has bounded off into the trees, rejoining her pack. As good a time as any. Arya hopes the wolf will still follow. She's well-fed on horses and sheep in the south, but above the Neck there are still plenty of people for supping.

The Many-Faced God—or whatever thing lurks around the temple—wants her to go north. The Lion of Night, Moon-Pale Maiden, hooded and hoofed Strangers all seem annoyed she tarries. Well, the God of Death can fuss all it damn wants, it chose her in the first place.

"I hardly know the North anymore. Only memories." Winterfell wasn't a dream, she's told herself a hundred times. It was there before any of this. The Frey she killed spoke of war in the North, of a cousin who thought himself lucky to have survived a battle, only to crush his leg when his horse slipped on frozen blood. It sounds stupid to her. Even so. "I don't know what's up there." Just Boltons and Freys, a self-crowned stormlord trapped in her castle, and that's plenty enough.

"A girl has surely realized she is being summoned, not pushed." The smirk returns, but Arya is more herself again.

She turns on her heels, snakes an arm around his neck, and buffets him with a rough kiss. The tang of blood is seeping through the godswood. Frey blood. She has heard there are more Freys in the North. Boltons too. She will go for them, and if Death mewls for her attention, mayhaps she'll answer. Jon is there too. Just on the wrong side of the North.

When Jaqen's lips brush her forehead, she decides it is time to go. She has a horse at the inn near the castle, and surely he can steal one. And yet, as she walks, she finds her arm crooking around his. A pleasant languor has settled in her limbs. Warm, like when wine loosens her shoulders. An hour earlier her head was full of dead Freys, faces chewed off by Nymeria, throats cored by Needle. Now, though it seems stupid, she's wondering if the inn has an empty room, one with a warm hearth or braziers. If she sleeps, it would be deep enough she doesn't dream of shades or shadows, and if she does, she will only scoff at them. Or wake up and find another distraction.

Mayhaps they can continue north tomorrow. Together.

Death can wait. But not too long.