The House of Black and White is as much home as Winterfell is, which is to say it is not a home at all. It is a shrine, it is an academy. It is where she must learn her trade and nothing more. She cannot begin to think of it as home, because she is No One, and No One has no home.
But even No One has memories.
So when the Kindly Man finds her in the room with thousands of faces on the wall, he asks her, "What are you looking for?"
And without thinking, bluntly and impatiently, she answers, "Someone from home."
He slaps her across the face, hard. She feels her skin burn and heat collect on that cheek. There will be a handprint when she checks her reflection later. The wolf inside her wants to snarl and tear his head off, but the girl bites her lower lip and tries not to wince.
"Who are you?" the Kindly Man asks her.
"No one."
"And where is home?"
"Nowhere."
"So what are you looking for?"
"Nothing."
He nods and leaves her there. She stays only until she is sure the mark from her cheek would have faded before joining him in the morgue, where he instructs her to empty skins of their guts and save their faces. She tries not to search for familiar faces. She has no familiar faces. She is No One.
"These are not the only faces you can be," the Waif whispers later to the girl.
The girl looks up, eyes wide. The Waif's childish face raises an eyebrow.
"You can be any face you want. He will not teach you that; he will not allow anyone else to teach you that. Faces bring back memories and he doesn't want that. If you want to be faceless, you must be memoryless, he says."
"I am," the girl lies, and the Waif only smiles.
"You are Arya Stark of Winterfell," the Waif taps her nose lightly and says, "I create poisons, I breathe toxins, I smell herbs. And I have smelled the wet dog in you from the moment you arrived."
"Wolf," Arya automatically corrects, and cringes instantly.
The Waif only laughs.
That night, the girl stares into the mirror and tries to change her face, but all she can see are grey eyes and chopped brown hair.
She does not try again, not that night, only falls asleep and dreams of running on four legs.
She asks the Waif the next day, "How do you do it? Stay looking like a child?"
The Waif says, "I was not given a choice. This is how the Many-Faced God prefers me."
"Says who?" the girl retorts, her voice rising an octave.
The Waif glances back suspiciously to ensure no one was listening or watching. "Calm that wolf, pup, or we'll both be in trouble."
She lowers her voice and whispers furiously, "You told me yesterday the Kindly Man lies! Then how can you believe him when he says you cannot change?"
"I never learned," the Waif admits, and the girl knows it is the truth, reads it in her face.
"Then how am I supposed to?" she asks in anguish.
"I will help you," replies the Waif.
"Why?"
The Waif peers at her. "Because the Kindly Man does not realize you do not belong here, but I do, Cat of the Canals. Or should I call you Cat of Riverrun?"
The girl flinches as though she'd been slapped by a ghost from the past. "How…?"
"I can smell the fish in you, too," the Waif says kindly.
The girl has no words.
A week later, the Handsome Man finds her outside one of the famed brothels in the city. She is a beggar today, a beggar with no hands and only one ear and unseemly sores covering half of her face. No one looks at her twice, though she reads all of them as they go by.
"Hello, wolfling," he says, kneeling down.
The beggar recognizes him at once (it is hard to miss eyes of a peculiar shade- thinking later, she will not be able to name that color). She nudges her beggar's bowl closer with one knee and says, "Fuck off."
"Oh, now that is harsh coming from someone who needs my help."
"I don't need your help," the beggar says.
"Everyone needs my help," the Man winks and stands. As he walks away, he tosses over his shoulders, "Especially the ones who want a different face."
Recognizing 'help' that the Waif had spoken of, the beggar abandons her post and runs after him, calling, "Wait!"
He does not wait and he does not slow until they reach an alley and he grabs her by the waist and pulls her into it, pinning her against the wall. Without hands, she finds it difficult to resist and she struggles for a moment before suddenly realizing how close his face was to hers. She ceases her flailing and stares at him hypnotized.
For a moment, his face shimmers. It turns into another face: intense blue eyes and shaggy locks of black hair. The arms holding her bulge with muscles, and she smells charred metal and hope. The beggar leans into him, lips angled to catch his.
"Stop," the Handsome Man commands, and she suddenly inhales, realizing she had been holding her breath while his gaze had been upon her. His face is back, the one he had approached her with.
"What did you do to me?" she demands breathlessly, angry. She wants to slash at his irresistible face until it is hanging by shreds, but all she can manage are meager thrashes of the nubs of her missing arms.
"It doesn't matter what I did because I stopped. I don't want to fuck you. I want to teach you."
He is telling the truth. Still, the beggar kicks him between his legs with her knee and watches him fall to the ground with a groan.
"You can teach me, but never again play these games with me."
"You stupid wolfling," the Handsome man spits, regaining his composure and getting back on his feet. "I was testing you."
"Testing me? For what?"
"To see if you are truly faceless. You are not. You are a girl who has yet to let go of the past. No One does not want to kiss a stag bastard smith; a girl does. Understand?"
The beggar nods dumbly.
The Handsome Man grins impishly. "The Waif told me you were a wolf. I didn't think wolves could be dangerous without any claws."
"Then you haven't seen a wolf's fangs yet," Arya says, baring her own.
It is not difficult to get away from the Kindly Man for her lessons in changing face, no more than it was difficult for Arya to get away from her entourage to learn 'dancing' from Syro Forrel.
The Handsome Man prepares her, tells her it is incredibly challenging to conjure faces that don't exist yet, or exist only in memories. It is an art, it is poetry. One needs to pay attention or they would change the very fiber of their being.
"Then why do you do it? Create your own faces instead of using the ones in the room?" Arya questions him.
"Those faces wouldn't get a woman to return a smile, let alone get one to come," the Man tells her.
"Come where?"
The Handsome Man howls with laughter. He doesn't answer her and she doesn't ask again.
"How did you know he was a bastard and a smith?" she asks him as they're finishing their lessons one evening.
The Handsome Man's face is lit by the setting sun, glowing with fire, warm. "That's what your face told me. Thoughts are like lying; they show on your face if you know how to read them. Your thoughts, wolfling, show on your face more often than you'd like. Reading them is something I was born with and I gave it in service to the Many-Faced God."
Arya considers. "Why did you say he was a stag?"
He shrugs. "He is."
"No, he's not."
"You do not know what he is and what he is not," he sneers, almost in mockery.
She becomes defensive at his tone. "I knew he was a bastard. I knew he was a smith."
"You did not know he was a stag."
"Then how did you?" she demands.
"That's what his face told me."
"With his thoughts?"
The Handsome Man shakes his head. "With his features, wolfling."
Arya thinks about that for hours after. She thinks of the stags, of Robert Baratheon and Renly Baratheon and Stannis Baratheon. She thinks of Cersei and the rumors of her brother Jaime, and of the three golden-haired children Cersei sired, of what Cersei had ordered to be done to the Baratheon bastards in Kings Landing after her husband king had died.
She thinks of Gendry. She misses Gendry. She thinks until she knows, until she cannot bear to think any more.
She does not think when she is asleep, she dreams of Nymeria.
He eventually refuses to teach her. "You know all that I can tell you," the Handsome Man says, his beard the color of straw, nearly transparent on a face that still manages to be beautiful. Can men be beautiful? Arya does not know, only that he is.
"I still cannot change my face," she complains.
"You will, someday. When you want to."
"I want to now."
The Handsome Man reaches down and touches her hair. "A wolfling can only shed her coat when she knows what color she wants."
She knows what she wants. She wants her family back. She wants playful Rickon and wise Bran and stupid Sansa. She wants Robb and Jon training out in the yard. She wants her lady mother to run soothing fingers through her hair and her lord father to compliment her skills with Needle.
Arya stares at herself in the mirror until she knows what she wants.
The reflection in the mirror shimmers and another face emerges in the silvery-red light filtering in through the bars of the window: a face that is delicate and lovely. Pale skin, red slashes of lips, shiny auburn hair. Watery blue eyes peered back at her. In another lifetime, she had been her sister. Not a sister she had loved, not even admired, but a member of her pack nonetheless. She knows there is no way Sansa's face would remain beautiful and innocent, not after all that had happened to it. She would become beautiful and fierce instead, and strong. Yes, strong like Lady was until the lions had killed her.
She changes her face again, one as light as snow, as his name. Curly hair and dark eyes, a face not Tully but certainly Stark. The bastard brother. Another face she does not expect to see again. Jon had given her Needle; surely that is worth keeping in her memory more than the paltry chance of seeing him alive. She is less likely to be disappointed by steel than by hope.
She thinks on what the Handsome Man had said and tries to read his features. There is Stark undoubtedly in his face, but there was another winged creature lurking in its long cheekbones and dark gray eyes. Eyes like Arya.
Lyanna's eyes, her father had once laughed when she complained her eyes were not like the sky in sunshine but more like the sky in a storm.
Swiftly, Arya leaves his face before her mind can put the pieces together; she does not want to know. Only see.
One after another, Arya tries on the faces of all her siblings.
She tries to smooth the tangles of Rickon's hair, thinking how wild Shaggydog must be if Rickon kept up his insolence.
She runs a hand over the stubble on Robb's hollowed cheekbones. His is the wolf Nymeria can no longer find the scent of when she runs. He was the one the Hound had prevented Arya from dying with. Arya feels strange to look over his face, knowing it no longer existed, her eyes pricking until tears spill over Robb's cheeks.
After her siblings, she wears the faces of her parents. She looks at her father's face through the gaze of a woman and not a girl, the dark circles under his eyes and the laugh lines on his forehead. She forgives him, for becoming Hand and for bringing her to King's Landing, for being a loyal and honest man.
(If she closes her eyes, she can almost imagine him chuckling and his gravelly voice telling her to behave with her sister, congratulating her for doing well with swords, thanking her for bringing him flowers. She does not close her eyes).
She stares at her mother, who was aging with visible grace and beauty, the wrinkles only accentuating her features. A kind face. She knew her mother was dead now. Once, as Nymeria, she had gotten a scent that she recognized as her mother, but it was clouded and masked under a metallic taste, blood and death and melancholy. The wolf ran in the opposite direction and the girl did not argue. Now, she wants more than anything to get a whiff of it.
Satisfied and crestfallen, Arya returns to her own face.
The next time she sees the Handsome Man with the other priests, she smiles at him and nods, trying to convey how successfully she had changed faces. He does not react, simply looks away.
She tries not to be hurt.
Arya would be hurt, she knew. But she was not Arya, not here in view of the Kindly Man and in the light of the temple. A wolf could only shed her coat in the privacy of her room.
So she tries not to be hurt. She tries to be No One.