She had barely stepped forward to push past the people in front of her before she felt Jaqen's quick fingers seize the back of her tunic, his arms locking around her waist. The crowd roared on, chanting for Lord Tywin's death.
'Let me go!' she screamed, struggling to escape his grasp as she'd been taught to do, her youth no match for his experience, 'Let me go!'
'A girl is mad,' Jaqen hissed, his lips brushing her ear.
Her thin fingers clawed into his arm, making him wince, but Jaqen did not relinquish his hold on her, even when she stopped struggling.
Arya looked up at the lion she once knew as he refused to bow his head, his scowl so poisonous it could have wilted a legion of roses. Even on his knees, he seemed to tower over them all.
She remembered glaring intently at the tender skin beneath his ear, a knife clutched in her fist; remembered whipping a raven scroll off the council table with an elegance that still made her proud. She remembered the weight of the History of the Greater and the Lesser Houses in her hands as Lord Tywin retorted 'Maybe you should devise our next battle plan while you're at it,' and hating herself for the smile of contentment that appeared on her lips at the compliment. She recalled the rush she had felt as she steadily met Lord Tywin's gaze, his eyes blazing with enjoyment at how well she lied.
'You're far too smart for your own good. Has anyone ever told you that?'
She had talked about her father, and he had talked about his children. She had favoured Visenya Targaryen rather than the stupid princesses and weeping maidens of the songs, and he hadn't laughed at her. He had listened to her, and she to him, and when he had left, she had wanted Jaqen to kill him, not out of loyalty to her brother, but out of anger at the sadness his departure had made her feel.
I should have let Jaqen kill him. It would have been a nobler death than this.
Arya felt her heart harden in her chest. He's a Lannister. He killed your brother and mother; murdered and tortured thousands of your brother Northerners; spilled so much blood into the soil of the Riverlands that nobody will dare till it for a generation. He deserves to die.
Ser Barristan had to strike the back of the condemned man's head with the pommel of his greatsword before he bowed it. Blood drenched Lord Tywin's hair and stained his face, but there was no extinguishing the violent, glacial beauty of the man as he raised his head yet again. Once more Ser Barristan raised his sword, but was hindered by a quiet word from the Targaryen Queen. Arya decided that she did not like her.
She waited eagerly for Tywin Lannister's crimes to be proclaimed out loud to the entire city, wishing they could be heard on the Wall, in Dorne, in Asshai. She waited for the Grand Maester to speak of forgiveness and mercy. But above all, she waited for the Queen's voice to ring out in response: 'Ser Barristan! Bring me his head!' But no maester or septon was present, and there were no pleas for mercy, or cries for blood. Ser Barristan began to take up his position, and Lord Tywin surveyed the crowd with barely-concealed disgust at the notion that this screaming mob of illiterates would be the last thing he saw in this world. He did not so much as look at the son who stood not two feet away from him.
As Lord Tywin scanned the crowd, his eyes found Arya's. The penetrating power of their gaze had not changed, and neither had the expression in them when he smiled at her.
'You remind me of my daughter.'
As the blade sliced through his neck, Arya screamed.
There was pandemonium. The cheers and yells of the crowd as Lord Tywin's head rolled down the steps of the Great Sept of Baelor seemed to come together in one deafening, blinding roar that went on for hours. Arya could no longer hear herself shouting at Jaqen to let her go, nor his refusals to do any such thing. He blocked and repelled every attempt she made to get away from him, his arms crushing the wind from her. At the top of the steps, Tyrion Lannister was on his knees vomiting, and the Queen was kneeling at his side, blood staining her gown, holding him as he wept. Ser Barristan led a detachment of guards to retrieve the head before the mob tore it to pieces, his sword dripping blood.
Arya screamed and cried along with the child she had been, her sobs raking her throat.
'Let me go! Let me go!'
When she regained consciousness, she was at the far end of the square; Jaqen sitting nonchalantly on the cobblestones, holding her to his chest. Commoners bustled about their business, soldiers shouted insults at one other and highborn ladies on their way to pray climbed the stairs of the Sept, its seven towers casting colossal shadows across the square. The small boy working at the bloodstains with pail and brush was the only indication that an execution had just taken place.
Jaqen held Arya closer.
'Valar Morghulis, lovely girl,' he whispered against her hair.
A rasping sob escaped her lips, because he spoke the truth. He always spoke the truth.
Two passing goldcloaks interrupted a drunken rendition of The Bear and the Maiden Fair to stare at them, one of them proposing to fuck the little girl into consciousness if Jaqen couldn't do it himself, the other howling with laughter and asking if he could also have a go. When their guffaws ceased abruptly, Arya knew that Jaqen was glaring at them with the same menacing grin that had terrified Rorge and Biter on the road to Harrenhal. The goldcloaks stomped hastily away, but did not resume their song.
She allowed herself to stay nestled in Jaqen's lap for a little while longer before sitting up and shifting over to sit beside him. Jaqen looked at her, waiting, knowing that she would eventually speak. She would tell him even if she told no one else. She always did.
'He was kind to me.' Arya said, eventually, 'He was… kind to me.'
She said nothing after that, and as Jaqen watched her face don the serene, impenetrable armour that the events of that day had briefly stripped away, he realised for the first time that he could never know all of her. However much he might love this strange Westerosi child, there were some things she would always keep for herself alone.
Sitting shoulder to shoulder, they watched the small boy at work, Arya's eyes ghosting again and again to the statue of Baelor the Blessed, the place where the child in Arya Stark had died. As her eyes returned to the small boy, she felt Jaqen stiffen beside her.
'A girl does nothing,' he whispered fiercely.
Following Jaqen's gaze, Arya saw a figure stride gracefully down the stairs of the Sept and begin to cross the square with such an obvious intention to approach them that she flushed in embarrassment at not having noticed it too.
The woman, for it was indeed a woman, wore garb cut almost identically to the Queen's, her shorter gown of black brocade slashed with red silk; black leather trousers and boots visible at her calves.
'She belongs to the Queen,' Arya murmured, her lips barely moving.
'A girl states the obvious,' Jaqen scowled, keeping his eyes fixed on the woman.
Arya's hand strayed to where Needle hung at her hip, but Jaqen's voice stopped her before her hand had even reached the hilt.
'A girl does nothing,' he growled. Arya looked helplessly back at the square.
The woman was almost upon them now, her skirts billowing in the breeze, her footsteps ringing out against the cobblestones. Something glinted at her hip. It was a dagger.
'Jaqen –' Arya began.
But then the midday sun fell on the woman's hair, lighting it up like a ribbon of burnished copper. She wore her dagger like a limb, hardly seeming to notice its presence, let alone to be thinking of using it. Large, sad, Tully-blue eyes looked down on the striking, sinister Lorathi, and on the girl at his side who gazed up at her with grey eyes that sang of winter, summer snows and the Children of the Forest; of the Wall, the wolfswood and the blood of the First Men. Stark eyes.
Sansa's eyes filled with tears.
'Arya?'
...
