"There is only one god and his name is Death. And there is only one thing we say to Death: Not today."
- A Game of Thrones
"In Braavos, the best of the bravos attempt the water dance. The water dance demands the most exquisite balance, quickness, and grace and to the water dancers, the man is the sword. They appear to dance on water as they glide across the Moon Pool. Only one bravo in a hundred is good enough to attempt the water dance, and those who master it are even fewer."
The ladies of the court sit in the gallery with their sewing. There is very little stitching done today though - some listen listlessly to the reader, some look down to the courtyard to see the king at his sport, most whisper to each other, their eyes darting over the fans that screen their faces and muffle their words. Arya sits enthroned in state, listening as though captivated by the reader ploughing dutifully through a tract detailing Braavosi customs. There is a cushion at her feet, a crown on her head and in her heart, the daggers.
Light as a feather, swift as a snake, she thinks. I know all this. Syrio told me.
It has been years since her last lessons but a true water dancer never forgets. One day I will see Braavos, she tells herself as she has been telling herself since she was a child of nine, ever since her father first brought the Braavosi maestro to Winterfell and told her mother that he was to teach her to dance. The ruse had worked on Lady Catelyn for perhaps a year - on Sansa and the septa, forever. They were good for her, those lessons, even her mother had to grudgingly admit later. They taught her a lady's grace, which pleased her mother, but more than that they taught her to wait for the right moment.
One day I will dance on the Moon Pool. But today will not be that day, nor tomorrow. Someday though, that she has promised herself. It is good to make promises to yourself.
Her sister sits at the edge of the balcony, looking down as though entranced by the king. He is shooting at hares with a new-fangled crossbow, a gift from his little uncle, a palpable bribe for favor from his prison cell. Joffrey likes the present well enough but for all that he has sworn that he will lope off his uncle's head with his own sword. Death by a thousand cuts then, Arya thinks, amused at the notion. Joffrey's joy will have to be curtailed though, the execution will never take place.
"So far the hares seem to be winning," Arya observes mildly.
Sansa, who has been trying to squirm into Joffrey's bed for years now, gives her a cold look. She drips sapphires but day by day she looks more and more like their Aunt Lysa - or at least to Arya's eye she does. Men still call her beautiful. Her small rosebud mouth is pouty and petulant. "His Grace is practicing," she observes coldly. "He intends to execute the traitor, Tyrion, by means of this gift from his own hand. A rich irony, to be sure."
"Surely his uncle will die of old age before that," Arya says sweetly. Lady Margaery covers her mouth with her hand, laughter brimming in her eyes. She is heavy with her fourth child, in her sixth month now.
"Mind your tongue. Or else," Sansa says but they both know it for an idle threat. With the war on them Joffrey has been quite neglectful of his old playthings. He has new ones at hand to destroy.
Lady Margaery begins to hum a tune, an old one that was popular at court a few weeks ago. The words of the song are of her own devising though. "As quiet as a shadow, as swift as a deer, as calm as stillwater, as strong as a bear... I say, Arya, Sansa, wouldn't that make a wonderful song? I had a idea just as I was listening to that passage about those water dancers. Robb and I held an exhibition of their talents at Winterfell a few years back, we invited them from the Free Cities."
"You are very mindful of your comforts, sister," Sansa says, somewhat sourly. "You have made quite a fairy garden of Winterfell, it seems."
"I am a southron girl," Margaery says, laughing as gaily as though Sansa is only making polite conversation. She has such a gift of lightness of spirit, a blessing really. Arya envies her that. We are both northern girls, Sansa and I, she thinks, we never really learnt to laugh at ourselves. "Laughter is my sword and shield. And I cannot wait to go home to Winterfell, I miss my little ones most dearly."
"That might be a long while yet," Sansa says tightly. "I am sure that we cannot spare you now, sweet sister."
"Of course. I would not think of going back without Robb's permission - and being in the field with our gallant soldiers he can hardly spare a thought for me now. I am a most obedient wife, you see." Robb is the spiting image of a northern berserker, tall and burly and broad-shouldered, and Margaery is a flower of a woman, dainty and doe-eyed. But for all that, it is she who wears the breeches in the marriage. An obedient wife indeed. Their marriage is little like Arya's parents' marriage - save for the great love and trust evident in both marriages. Where Lady Catelyn was deferential to a fault, Margaery is... not.
Gods bless her, Arya thinks. Gods bless the old shrew who reared her.
There is a commotion in the courtyard. The Queen sweeps in with her train and reluctantly Joffrey drops his crossbow when she beckons him over imperiously. They disappear under the arches, arm-in-arm, Sansa craning her neck inelegantly as she tries to see what they are up to now. Margaery lowers her eyes demurely to her sewing, she is making a baby's linen smock, stitched lovingly with butterflies. She does not need to have to try to spy on them. She already knows. So does Arya.
A water dancer learns to bide her time.
The mood that night, at dinner, is ugly. Joffrey has a great thirst it seems, he drinks like a fish. Not the heavy, sweet wines that his mother favors but the coarse yet potent ales that his father used to like. He is sullen tonight, his prize has escaped him - Tyrion Lannister, who had once sworn to hack his cock off with a kitchen knife and his eyeballs with a spoon, is at large. Even his mother is petulant, she has grown very plump and even by soft, forgiving candlelight she is not the beauty that she fancies herself to be.
Cersei might say that Margaery is only pretty insofar as untouched peasant girls are pretty, that Sansa is only passable and Daenerys Targaryen an inbred bitch but nothing, except her own monstrous vanity, can hide the fact that she herself is a woman far past her prime. But Joffrey is not as blind as her. He still beds her half-heartedly sometimes, Arya knows - mostly to give in to her insistence. But not so often as he did in the first days of his rule, when his mother was a treat to be savored. Now his eyes feast hungrily on his sister.
After dinner Cersei excuses herself to attend to what she self-importantly calls "matters of state". Joffrey dismisses Arya with a flick of his fingers. In his way, he has a sort of low cunning, as a beast might. He stalks his prey carefully tonight. Resentment and drink have driven away caution, he will have his satisfaction.
Arya waits in her own chamber, locked and barred tightly. She goes through the steps of the bravo's dance, without a sword of course, but she does them mechanically tonight. Her heart is not in it. She has just decided that perhaps she will go to sleep, she has already unpinned her hair from the jeweled net and let it unravel from its tight braids and down her shoulders when the waif slips in. As quiet as a shadow.
The little bird is mute, as all of Varys' creatures are. This one is a tiny girl, not more than six years old, her tongue a stump in her mouth, her face very sweet and pale as chalk. She takes the scrap of paper and the quill from Arya and begins to write.
So Joffrey has had his sister, in her own bedchamber with her husband wailing fractiously and then rushing off to be comforted at his mother's teat. He was as blunt as an animal in his need, he did it without any thought of secrecy and soon the whole castle will know for certainly there were eyewitnesses enough. Sweetrobin. Her handmaids. A White Knight. Two ladies-in-waiting. Joffrey has run mad.
Arya wonders what Cersei will do. The thought of the mother feuding with her daughter, over the son, sends a most delightful shiver of anticipation down her spine. She has no pity to spare for Myrcella. If she feels anything for the girl it is pleasure for her suffering. I am a monster, she thinks, sliding her rings off her fingers and slipping them into her coffer. And I like it.
Cersei slaps her daughter in open court on the morrow, calling her a whore and a seductress and ordering that she be confined to her chambers for her lewdness and sacrilegious lusts. Joffrey, sickly, nursing a raging headache and quite cowed by his mother's ferocious rage, offers no rebuttal. He agrees that he has been led astray by his sister's vile acts, he is the victim, she is the temptress. He has had his fun for a night, he will not care to cross swords with his mother for a while now. Until the next time...
And Myrcella, not being a fool, knows well enough that there will be a next time. Arya visits her in her confinement, to offer comfort and solace. She brings a dish of candied violets and sugared roses, spiced with the promise of revenge.
"Don't you want to be free, sister?" she asks Myrcella softly. She remembers the girl asking her the same thing in years gone by, soon after she became Joffrey's queen.
But where Arya had only replied mechanically that her duty was to her husband whom she loved more than anything, Myrcella seizes on the words greedily. As though they are honestly offered, out of sympathy. "Yes," she whispers, "a thousand times yes. If I had a dagger-"
You would plant it through your own heart, Arya thinks dismissively. You poor, spiritless little thing.
"-I would drive it straight through Joffrey's throat," Myrcella hisses, her eyes burning like wildfire. She has her mother's eyes and deep beneath the sweetness of her nature, her mother's ferocity. Lion's blood from both sides of the blanket. "And I would make my mother watch. Joffrey does not deserve to be king, if anyone should be, it should be Tommen."
Arya places a hand gently on her good-sister's arm, pushing her back against the cushions of her couch. Easy, my sweet. She thinks of the Eunuch, gentling her, leading her to the bait, drawing forwards and then back, tempting her like a coquette with a young man. Of his promises which are to be fulfilled. "You will," Arya says, "You must bide your time now, Myrcella." As I have, all these years.
The girl does not have her mother's impatience. She nods grimly. "I would do anything to be free," she says quietly, "I cannot live in this hell much longer."
Oh you'd be surprised, Arya thinks. You'd be surprised how long you could stew in it, if you had to. From the frying pan and into the fire, Myrcella, if that's your wish. She kisses her good sister's cheek, betrayal on her lips as she says, "And I will help you."
Snowflakes melt on her cheeks and in her long hair, soft as feathers, as chaste as her brothers' kisses.
She stands in the circular courtyard and thinks that by now the snow in the training yard at Winterfell must be knee-deep. Her younger brothers might even now be practicing their strokes in the cavernous halls - when she last saw Rickon he had just been started on a training staff, now perhaps he will have held live steel. She wears a summer gown, a flimsy robe of gauze and muslin though the snow is up to her ankles. She likes the feel of the cold, of standing still and near naked like an old pagan goddess, a savage goddess of iron and ice. Of waiting, watching until the blood freezes in her veins and her flesh, so warm, so frail, crystallizes into ice.
"Grieving, Your Grace?"
Theon was once a comely youth, but the years have changed his lean, dark face into something vulpine, angles sharp and edges ragged. Often you can see a feverish glitter in his eyes, like a madman's.
She does not even turn, not even when he drapes his arm loosely over her shoulder. "Your brother," he prompts her, when she says nothing, "The bastard."
"Valar morghulis. All men must die."
He gives a rasping little laugh. "Did no one bother to tell you, little queen? He's not dead. Captured, about three days ride north of the Wall, on a most ill-advised ranging."
"Wildlings?"
"Presumably," Theon says. "Though the letters tell their own tale. And what a long one it is, to be sure!"
She shrugs. "Men will say anything when their bellies are half-empty and the frost's in their blood."
"You don't want to hear?" he says temptingly.
She shrugs. "It makes no difference," she says simply and really it does not. "If he is not dead he will be soon. I'd rather pray for his death than hope he's still alive and suffering." His warm breath fans against her ear as he leans closer to her. Once he had stirred her desire, he still thinks to play upon it as though he is still a young man with nothing to lose and she a girl ready for anything. Now the scales are tipped. I will be free, she thinks calmly, and you will die and be forgotten, Theon Greyjoy.
He feasts on grief, she has come to understand. Something poisoned him when he was a boy, a young man with his hopes dashed and shamed - who can say what?
"Aren't you cold?" he asks, his voice warm and intimate. The tired voice of a man with one foot in the grave - and who knows it as well. She wonders if he prays for an easy death, if he wonders if she will pray for him. If he will even ask it of her, on the night when they come for him.
"No," she says absently and really all she feels is a tingling warmth, she has stood in the snow for so long. Beyond the Wall the snows must be waist-deep. Beyond the Wall where she hopes her brother is dead and that they have burnt the body. She has heard too many stories these past few years of the dead that walk, fairy stories perhaps but all the same... "No, I've never been cold enough."
Sansa wears white, like a bride on her wedding day, to her husband's execution.
Joffrey and Cersei stand together on the dais, under the royal canopy, with Ser Jaime just behind them. Cersei wears an expression of faint distaste, as at a spectacle that though mildly repugnant is necessary - like a sermon at a sept. Joffrey is plainly bored, a beheading is too tame but his mother has promised him an entertaining bloodbath after Theon Greyjoy is dispatched of. So he waits patiently, like a fractious child being good in expectation of a treat - after the beheading there are other traitors to be dealt with, more summarily. Quartering and drawing, burning and boiling - and as a special treat - being exploded into in the air from the mouth of a new cannon.
Arya, Sansa, Prince Tommen and Margaery stand just below them - Myrcella still confined to her rooms. Tommen looks faintly queasy, it is never easy to believe that he is Cersei's spawn. Sansa stands with her hands clasped on her stomach, eyes demurely cast down, the tiniest of smiles curling on her lips despite of herself. Satisfaction is delicious, Arya can sympathize with her sister's emotions at this point.
"I'll miss that boy," Margaery says idly. Out of all of them, she is the most soberly dressed - the others are all as gaily clad as though en route to a picnic. She wears a high-necked black gown, the sleeves and hems fluted with pale Myrish lace. "He had the most dashing smile. And he always made me laugh."
"He used up his smiles too quickly," Sansa says steadily. "If he had smiled less he would have lived longer."
"Mercy, you sound like a banker," Margaery says. "As though we have only a sum of smiles that we might use in this life! No, I believe in smiling and laughing as much as I can. I like to enjoy life." She smiles heartily, though it is not quite the occasion for it. In that, if in nothing else, Margaery and Theon were uncannily alike - their frequent smiles and laughter often masks for the fiercest desperation.
Sansa lets her ice-chip eyes bore into Margaery's for a moment before turning away in silent dignity. Loath as she is to agree with her sister in anything, Arya thinks that she, and not Margaery, has the right of it. We are not a people for laughter, she remembers her father saying, they say that in the heart of winter a man's laugh is like to form ice in his throat and choke him.
He dies cleanly, with more dignity in death than he ever had in life.
After it is done, Cersei crooks her arm so that her brother might take it. In a sigh of silk skirts she leaves, Sansa and many of the other ladies of the court accompanying her. In truth, Cersei has never made much of a stomach for blood. Arya waits though.
"Why are you still here?" Joffrey asks.
"I thought you would prefer my presence, Your Grace," she says composedly. "You used to say that it pleased you to have me stay at executions." At butcherings.
"Oh... that." He waves a hand indifferently. "Stay. Go. I don't care."
She steps up to stand beside him on the dais, she is his queen after all. In words. In law. "I think I will. I rather enjoy it. It must be your good taste rubbing off on me, sire." And it is not a lie any more now, not really.
As always, after watching a death - or a hundred -, she cleanses herself. The bath is scalding hot and time after time, her bathmaids haul up tubs straight from the kitchen fire to her room. She scours herself till her skin is raw and red and wrinkled, like fresh meat, till her fingers and toes are numb. Afterwards, dismissing her women, she sits before the fire wrapped in a scented sheet. For a long while she sits and thinks of nothing, disciplining her mind as a water dancer should, until the last pearly drops of water drip off her pink and crinkled skin and her long brown hair is dry enough to run a brush through.
Her maids help her dress in a gown of rose-pink with grey Myrish lace. Maidenly colours, fresh and clean. But all she can think of are stretched innards, grey-pink intestines looped out of a living body. Even the pearls on the bodice remind her of beads of fat dripping down flesh in agony, sizzling in the flame.
Margaery is in the sept, burning incense at the Stranger's altar. Her handmaids trail all over the sept, lighting candles, singing hymns noisily and in general being as conspicuous as possible so as to draw attention to their lady's piety. Margaery has a way of parading her holy zeal that frustrates women to no end. Her visits to the sept must always be attended with great ceremony - just like Cersei's, Arya thinks, with contempt.
Sansa is at her devotions in the sept as well but she makes no fuss of it. She is devout in the way their lady mother was - quietly, seriously, the rituals of sept and godswood a part of her core. She is kneeling before the Mother, as still as a mouse, lips moving soundlessly in her prayers.
Margaery smiles at Arya and says, a little too loudly, a little too clearly, "Our sister must be praying for her daughter, Your Grace. A child not yet four, a traitor's get and fatherless now, far from her mother's care and friendless... I would be in utter terror if she were mine." Sansa has only one child - Jonquil. As the daughter of an attainted traitor, by the laws of the Crownlands, she cannot inherit Pyke after her father but that has never mattered less than now. On paper the Iron Islands have been passed to a cadet branch of the Lannisters. In truth Arya doubts that the Lannisters will live long enough to see their prize - or that Jonquil will live to see her fifth nameday for that matter.
Sansa does not rise to the bait. Margaery smirks. "Poor dear little Jonquil," she continues in a stage whisper, "I hear she is to be wed to a Lannister kinsman to tie the Greyjoy bloodline to the Lannisters. Quite right of course but if I were her mother..."
They step out into the gardens bordering the castle sept, Margaery bored of sharpening her claws on her sister-in-law. "He died fulfilled," Margaery tells Arya, as though she needs consoling. When Arya only shrugs, Margaery pretends to be shocked. "Mercy can you not show a little more feeling? You're as cold as your sister now."
Yes. "He was nothing to me."
"You've known him all your life, ever since you were a babe in swaddling cloths. You might spare a little trouble to grieve for his memory."
"I might," Arya says calmly. "But then I'm not a filthy hypocrite like you." Margaery's smile fades quickly. They are not sisters, they are not friends, not like Margaery would like to pretend they are. They are hardly even allies. Carrion crows picking together at a carcass, working to finish it as quickly as possible - that is what they are. But she thinks that he did die fulfilled. There was nothing left for him to make of the ruin of his life.
"Cersei is a fool," Margaery says. "Tywin Lannister will not be appeased by the show she put up. She thinks to bring him back to be Joffrey's Hand but nothing will make him forget the insults she dealt him. He has quite washed his hands of his children - I wouldn't be surprised if he stayed coiled in his den until he knew which side the tide was turning. Just like during Robert's Rebellion."
With Robert Baratheon's death, Tywin Lannister had expected to be appointed his grandson's Hand - it was no less than he merited, in his opinion. Cersei, determined to be both king and queen, had put an end to that by placing Theon the puppet in his stead. Over the years she had delivered blow after blow to his pride, she was nothing if not consistently scatterbrained. Lord Tywin had never actively risen against his daughter and his grandson but he had been biding his time. And now when Cersei needed him most he would never turn to her.
"Unless she steps down most humbly and grovels for forgiveness. Unless she agrees to let herself be wedded and bedded to the man of his choice, unless Ser Jaime casts off his White Cloak and marries and fathers heirs for Casterly Rock," Arya says. "Unless Tommen is made king in Joffrey's place - I once heard him tell her, when he was in a fit of temper, that the boy ought to be put to death. She struck him for it and then he walked out. Forever." She smirks, relishing the memory. "I cannot imagine Cersei or Jaime or Joffrey ever agreeing to those demands, not even if they had their heads on the block."
"I pray that it will not come to that," Margaery says sweetly.
"No," Arya agrees. "It never should. Beheading's too kind a fate for the likes of them."
Maiden, mother and crone, Arya thinks and knows that she must be the crone. She does not mind. The maiden may be fair and the mother fruitful, but it is the crone who holds the Lamp of Wisdom in her hand.
One by one, the three women slip into the waiting barge. A man helps Margaery, gravid with child, totter in. Myrcella, innocent as a kitten falling in a trap, is next and then, without a backwards glance, Arya. The cabin is small and rude, the three are quite cramped inside. It will not be for long but it is certainly uncomfortable enough.
"Gods above, I hate sea crossings," Margaery mutters, trying to make herself comfortable on the narrow wooden benches. Myrcella, who has thought to slip a book and a pack of playing cards under her cloak, settles down and begins to read. She feigns a calmness that she does not possess, she is jittery and when the boat starts she jumps as though she has been pinched.
"So it is happening after all," she says, half to herself. "I've dreamed of this, oh for years..." Arya knows she is thinking of her girlhood, ever since she was thirteen or thereabouts when Joffrey had first began to lust for her body. Of her mother, resentful and fiercely concerned by turns, slapping and shouting at her sometimes, at other times sending her away, as far from her brother as possible.
In the dead of the night when they are deep at sea and far from the mouth of Blackwater Bay, they disembark from the skiff and board a real ship. Margaery, green to the gills, collapses on the steady deck in gratitude - Arya half expects her to kiss it. She lets herself be escorted by a handsome young sailor to the quarters prepared for them. Arya and Myrcella linger a moment on the deck to catch their breath. There is a little girl and a boy in his teens on board, watching them curiously. A young woman with raggedy black hair and wearing boiled leathers watches over the girl.
The girl is a pretty thing, blue-eyed and black-haired, perhaps around ten years old. The boy... "Edric?" Myrcella says in astonishment. "Is that you? What are you doing here?"
Edric Storm ducks his head and looks away, painfully embarrassed. The little girl tugs on his sleeve and whispers something to him. Barra Waters, Arya remembers, her mother named her Barra. And the older one is Mya Stone. He sighs heavily and taking her hand pulls her away. The young woman does not follow them, she watches Arya and Myrcella keenly. Her eyes, as Myrcella belatedly realizes, are a startling blue - just like her father's, she must be thinking now.
"I don't understand," Myrcella begins petulantly. Her hands are trembling, though ever the princess she tries to mask her expression. "Arya..."
A man steps forward and bows to her - he must be the captain Arya thinks, drifting languidly away from her good-sister's side. "My Lady Princess," he begins in a flat and well-rehearsed voice, "I am honoured to serve you. Will you come with me so that I might escort you to your quarters?"
"Thank you, but no. I intend to go with my good-sister," Myrcella says stiffly, as imperious as though she is a princess still. The title is only for courtesy - as she will soon be made to understand. It was never hers to begin with, really. Arya tries to control her face but she cannot help smiling - a savage sort of smile, she thinks, a smile like the one Sansa had worn when she had come to see her after her wedding night.
"I am afraid that it is not your choice to make, Your Highness. I have my orders." The captain nods and four men step forwards. They are big and burly and they too have their orders. No golden-haired chit of a girl, no matter how small and dainty, will stop them from carrying those orders out. Built like knights, Arya thinks, leaning against the rails and watching as Myrcella begins to scream and struggle. They silence her with a hard blow to the head and carry her crumpled body down. Like white knights.
They call her the Mother of Dragons, the Bride of Fire and the Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea. And yet she is a slight, girlish thing, she stands little taller than her copper-skinned, silver-haired son who is only ten. Her stola, draped in the Pentoshi fashion, is a soft, watery blue, like a sky after the rains, painted with purple-lipped irises. Her waist-length hair is braided in the fashion of the Dothraki, tipped with bells. At her brow she wears a circlet crowned with three rearing dragons - jade, onyx and mother-of-pearl.
You would think her to have a high, thin little voice - a girl's soft whisper, sweet certainly, perhaps melodious. She does not. Her voice is strong and clear, when she speaks she does so with more confidence than her boy-husband and nephew, Prince Aegon.
"Queen Arya," she greets them from her makeshift throne in the pavilion pitched on the Dornish sands. "Lady Stark. Be welcome."
She is not the Dothraki savage Arya had imagined her to be, she has all the grace and charm of the manor-born. Her sweetness, her dainty prettiness is almost overpowering - on first impression, Arya finds her just as sugary and insipid as Myrcella. More to Margaery's taste, or Sansa's even, than her own.
She insists that Margaery and Arya help her learn the Westerosi fashions - she does not want to look like a foreigner, an usurper from across the sea, when she comes to her rightful throne. Margaery, as gigglesome as though she is back at Highgarden with her cousins, helps the khaleesi twist her hair into the fearsomely complicated southron styles. She offers her one of her own gowns, lilac embroidered with silver and gold flowers. The result seems to please Daenerys Targaryen mightily for she claps her hands and insists that she has something to show the two of them.
Margaery gracefully declines. "It has been too long since I have last been with my husband," she says. "By your leave, Your Grace. And Arya, you must be tired, must you not?"
"No," Arya says flatly.
"Then you shall come with me," the small woman says imperiously.
They walk down the beach, attended by two of the Queen's Dothraki handmaids and by her sworn knight, Jorah Mormont. "I am told that the Dragonpit on Rhaenys's Hill stands no more," she tells Arya.
"It collapsed more than a century ago," Arya says.
"I will never have another built," the Queen says decidedly. "The hatchlings confined to the pit never reached the great size and magnificence of their predecessors. They died sickly and stunted and far too early. Dragons are not meant to be confined. My children will have the freedom of the skies, it is only right."
And the freedom to taste human flesh perhaps? Arya thinks but forbears to say. She knows the stories they say of the Queen and her reptilian children. They say she bathes in the blood of little children to keep her beauty and that afterwards her dragons feast on the charred carcasses. But there will always be stories, she dismisses it from her mind.
Her dragons are ten years old, the age of her boy and heir, Prince Rhaego. They were born on the very same night, on the night that the khal died, hatched by fire and bloodmagic.
"Balerion is out hunting," Daenerys tells her. "These are Rhaegal and Viserion."
Rhaegal's scales are the green of moss in the deep woods before dusk, they have the gleam of jade. His - hers? Dragons are sexless - eyes are the bronze of polished shields and though half-open, drowsy with sleep, they are still menacing enough. He is the young prince's mount. Viserion is asleep, his scales have the creamy sheen of pearl and he is smaller than his hatch-mate, given to Prince Aegon to be his own in war. "You keep them free," Arya says blankly. They are coiled around each other on the sand, ringed in by a stone palisade the height of a man. It is no barrier at all, only a demarcation of their territory. She had expected chains at the very least.
The Queen's eyes flash. "You would have me bind my own children?"
"Are they not a danger?" Arya ventures, her mouth suddenly quite dry.
"They are," the Queen says sweetly. "To their enemies and mine own." She picks up the hem of her gown daintily and steps through the gate. Without a thought Arya instinctively makes the sign of her mother's faith, her fingers fumbling to draw the Seven Pointed Star at her breast. The handmaids regard their mistress calmly. Arya turns to Mormont.
"Is she immune to dragonfire, as they say?" she asks.
The bear knight wrenches his eyes quite slowly away from his Queen. He is in love with her, she thinks. He has loved her for ten years, through two marriages. "Yes," he says simply. "She is more than a mortal woman, Your Grace."
"A goddess?" Arya asks acidly.
Mormont thinks this over. "Yes," he says slowly, seriously. "Yes, I think she is." And Arya knows that he is not the only one who thinks it of the slight girl, crooning to her dragons, petting them as though they are her little lapdogs. This is more goddess than queen and every goddess must have her cult, her fanatics. And I have never yet heard of a merciful goddess, Arya thinks. Or even one quite sane.
They hold a service for Sansa in the castle sept at Sunspear. Margaery insists upon it and Robb, out of a sense of misplaced duty or guilt, agrees. "She was our own sister after all," Margaery says virtuously, "however much she erred. We must honor her."
She must already have her coronation planned out, Arya thinks wryly, and her legacy for the next hundred years. Margaery the Generous, Margaery the Wise. The Good Queen. Arya does not attend, no one presses her to either. Instead, while the septon raises his censer and the choristers sing clear and sweet for her dead sister and Margaery looks particularly fetching and saintlike in a new gown, she walks round the battlements.
Queen Daenerys joins her. "It was very sad, how your sister died," she says. "I am told that she was a very beautiful woman."
"Joffrey used to call her the loveliest lady at court," Arya agrees. Though, in truth, that was half to spite his mother. "Perhaps that's why he spared her face. He would have thought that it would look very well on the ramparts at the Red Keep."
Daenerys raises her eyebrows. "We hear that he had her body flayed from the neck downwards and exhibited in the market square, after he heard of how your brother had deserted him for us. She lingered nigh on three days. A painful and long-drawn death, and yet you speak so calmly of it."
"Your brother died cruelly as well, Your Grace. By your own husband's hand - and as it happens so did my sister. Yet I have never heard you make any lament of it."
"He deserved it," Daenerys says flatly. "He would have killed my son in my womb. The fool."
"And so did my sister," Arya says wryly and wonders if the silver queen has ever considered that her cause is not righteous, that she herself is not the very fount of wisdom and purity. No, never. She thinks of herself as The Mother and a mother can never be wrong. "Though she was not a fool."
At supper, Margaery is sleek and elegant in black velvet, with a translucent veil of cloth-of-gold covering her hair. She looks very pretty and very pious. Everyday is a show for her. "It is sad how things went so wrong between you two," she says gently. "When I first came to Winterfell you were distant, I never had the impression that you very much cared for each other but you were sisters. What happened to that bond?"
"Pyke," Arya says shortly. "King's Landing. Her jealousy and wronging festered in her."
Margaery nods thoughtfully. "Oh yes, she changed after Theon took her to Pyke just after her wedding. And then when she came back you were betrothed to the prince she adored, her mother seemed to prefer you to her and she was still married. And then there was the pride between you two. She never spoke against you though, she never touched you."
"She never needed to," Arya says dryly.
But Margaery shakes her head. "Even though she knew that you met Theon in the godswood. Even though she knew that you spoke with Varys. She never told anyone, though she relished what was done to you. I thought she looked upon it as a guilty pleasure. Or perhaps she thought you only deserved it, in the face of what was done to her. Something between the two."
Arya leans her elbows on the table and looks at her good-sister thoughtfully. "I want to go to the Wall," she says dreamily, though she does not, not really. "I want to hear about what happened to Jon."
Margaery sighs heavily. "You know that he is dead, most likely, though it must cause you great grief to accept it."
I prayed for his death, you fool, Arya thinks but she nods. "And I would like to see Winterfell too," she says sweetly.
At once Margaery's eyes slide away, like a skittish mare's. "Winterfell?" she says faintly. "Do you plan to live with us, sweet sister?"
"Of course," Arya says serenely, playing with her. "It is my home too."
"Yes, indeed," Margaery agrees, too quickly. "You will always be welcome there."
Arya smirks. "Yes, I'm sure. I wouldn't be a canker, foul and festering, would I, sweet Margaery? I wouldn't poison the happiness of your home, the innocence of your children, as you fear? You're as glad as I am that Sansa's dead, you'll never have to take her in your home, out of charity, now. You can say the prayers over her body and show the world that you've done your duty by her. If you weren't such a mealy-mouthed thing you'd wash your hands of me too - you'd like to see me dead because I'll never fit into your tidy world."
Margaery flushes faintly but does not deny it.
"Don't worry," Arya says flatly. "I won't go back. Ever. There's nothing for me there but happy memories and I'd lief as not poison those."
"You have been useful, a leal and faithful servant even though for only a short time. Without your help, we might never have cracked open the Rock so easily." The Queen smiles gently at the dwarf. She holds court today from Sunspear. They have brought the throne that sits at the palace out in the market square for her today, so that all might see her. Hundreds flock to see the Queen and her son - her lord is in the Westerlands where he has won a mighty victory. "For that you should be rewarded, Tyrion Lannister."
She sits under a silken awning in a russet gown, worn in the Westerosi style. She wears a delicate flowering crown of rose-gold, with her fair hair unbound and flowing down her shoulders. She waits for the Imp to make his obeisance before her and thank her. Then she continues. "But you have also committed the most heinous of all crimes. You have slain your own father. A kinslayer is accursed in the sight of gods and men."
"Your Grace, all I did I did for your service-"
"No. I think not." Daenerys shakes her head. All her movements are light, graceful but there is an oddly detached look on her face. "You did so for the sake of revenge and in hopes of advancement. You turned to me in desperation, your nephew had you condemned to death for high treason - I have made use of you, as I was advised to, but I can never trust you. Once a traitor, always a traitor. My son," she says, turning to Rhaego, seated on a throne next to her, "what do we do to traitors?"
The boy's eyes are dark, like two pits of stone in his small, copper face. Unreadable. "We burn them, lady mother," he says.
The Queen smiles and puts her hand gently on his head, as though blessing him. "Quite right, my son. Will you give the command?"
The boy's eyes never leave his prey. There is something almost akin to lust in his face, something that Arya has often seen in Joffrey's face. "Rhaegal. Dracarys."
Margaery grips Arya's hand as the flames burn the man into ash and charred bone. Arya is almost surprised to find herself gripping her sister-in-law's hand back. "They say she killed her khal," Margaery mouths to Arya. "Blood for bloodmagic."
Arya presses a finger to her lips. I wouldn't be surprised, she thinks, she calls him her sun-and-stars even now but then I used to call Joffrey my king.
Cersei and Jaime Lannister go out of the world as they came into it - together. He came clutching her heel and in the end he follows her, his hands wrapped around her throat. They say he strangled the life out from her in the White Tower, before driving the dagger through his own heart. She was all in white silk, like a maiden, but he named her a whore. It is all hearsay - tower and keep and city burned alike, consumed by wildfire, after the last battle was done. Thousands die in the flames, so the lovers can have the tragic beauty of a perfect ending.
"Minstrels will sing of them forever," Margaery observes dryly. "Cersei would have loved it."
When the new Queen hears, she shrugs and says she will have another capital, a city of marble and gold. She has never seen King's Landing, she is queen to a country that she has never known. She is more a tyrant, more an usurper than Robert Baratheon ever was.
They capture Joffrey in the last battle. He is in mortal agony, an arrow through one beautiful eye and screaming for the pain of the burns on his back. And Daenerys smiles at Arya, standing by her side and says, "This is your right, my lady. This is your privilege." She steps back decorously. She still looks as dainty as a doll, even in her boiled leathers and painted vest, her arms painted with Dothraki charms for luck in battle.
He is moaning in pain, eyes rolled up in the back of his head. Streaked with mud and blood he is not golden anymore but he still has his beauty. It seems too kind to put him out of his misery. Like putting a child to bed. There is no sense of closure. It does not seem fair that he should die so quickly, almost so easily (it is a cruel death, she knows, but somehow not cruel enough for him), while she has suffered for years. She knows she will resent the tenderness of his last hours for the rest of her life. She would like to flay him alive, rip out his bowels with a blunted knife, scoop out his eyeballs with a pin... she can almost taste the blood, it tastes like lust. But then when has life ever been fair?
They fill a shallow cup of his blood for her and she makes him watch as she drains it. That much at least she can do. She licks her lips and smiles at him with red teeth but his stare is half-glazed, his face blank as if he does not recognize her.
Arya has practiced this one word with Balerion - with the Queen looking on, of course. "Dracarys," she says quietly and Daenerys gives a delighted gurgle of laughter as she would at a clever child who had learned her lesson well.
Myrcella mounts the block the next day and with one clean stroke, the swordsman takes her head, with her beautiful golden hair, off. Arya sees to it that she has this one kindness.
Robb and Margaery will leave on the morrow. They have a fourth child now, a beautiful daughter - Daena, named for the Queen. A princess. The Lords of Winterfell now hold the right to call themselves the Kings of the North - subject of course to the High King and Queen of Westeros. It is as much of a compromise as Daenerys Targaryen will ever agree to - but then she loves Margaery. Some say she has a tender heart, that circumstances have always forced her hand so that she must appear harsher, sterner than she would be. Certainly Jorah Mormont thinks her as mild as dove. Arya thinks it is simply a stroke of luck in Margaery's favor, Daenerys' tender mercies are as indiscriminate as the rain - good in some years, terrible in others.
Someday her wrath will fall, she thinks. Someday she will see traitors where she now sees beloved friends. Or if she does not, her son will. It is said that every time a Targaryen is born the world holds its breath to see if it will be touched by greatness - or by madness. Both are equally likely. Perhaps she will bear Aegon a child, a better one. It is not likely though, it is whispered that the Queen is barren.
But Arya will not be here to see that day.
Daenerys kisses her on the cheek, as she would a sister, on her last day. She says that she is sorry that Arya will not be there to see the new capital - unnamed as of yet, though Arya expects she will try to insert "Queen" somewhere in the title - being built. She insists that she visit from time to time. Arya smiles and pretends to agree.
"I wish you would take more guards with you," Daenerys sighs. "One is scarcely enough."
"I do not need them, Your Grace," Arya tells her politely. "I mean to live as a private person. Where I am going no one will know me."
"Yes but..." Daenerys sighs. "But I'm sure Ser Gendry will take good care of you. He's quite dashing isn't he?" She winks at Arya. She is in quite a kittenish mood and there is no other mood that Arya so mistrusts her in. "He reminds me most strongly of Edric Storm, you know." That one has been made the Lord of Storm's End. It is said that he has fallen in love with his cousin, Shireen, the Lady of Dragonstone.
Arya shrugs. Black hair and blue eyes are not uncommon - surely not ever man or woman with those looks could be one of Robert Baratheon's bastards.
The next day they take ship. Arya wears a tunic and breeches, her hair cut as short as it was when she was a child and bundled under a cap. Slim as she is, with her face half-hidden, you might take her for a young lad, a squire of good birth. You would take the knight accompanying her to be the master. Arya stands on the deck, watching the makeshift city grow smaller and smaller in the distance. Someday she might even come back. Life is too long to predict. And yet, too short to waste. She is twenty years old today.
"Do you like to travel, Ser Gendry?" she asks him. "You offered yourself up for this post. Do you have no mother or sweetheart who will miss you?"
He is a gruff young man, his gruffness only a mask for shyness she senses. Pure as a child and stupid, she thinks, with a glance at him. Good. She prefers stupid.
He bows and says that he has not. She shrugs and leaves him to himself. She has never been a one to waste words either. After a while though he says, with something of an effort, "I've never made anything of myself here, Your Grace, me just a Fleabottom bastard. I was hoping I'd do better in a different place. And I've no one here who'd miss me either."
"To Braavos then," she says aloud. He bows to her as though she has made a toast and suddenly she cannot help laughing. "We will dance on the Moon Pool, you and I," she tells him, feigning a lightness of spirit. And someday I will be as light as I feign to be, she promises to herself. She will hold herself to that promise as well. Someday she will be happy. She owes that much to herself. "And if you cannot, I will teach you."
A/N: So I actually managed to finish this! When I started it I honestly thought I never would - most of my stories seem to be WIPs on near-infinite hold. I've changed the first chapter so that Theon is less OOC - do check it out. I agree Arya is really OOC but oh well. I'm going to update the end of this chapter - seems a little too rushed to me - soon. Thanks for reading this, everyone who's managed to stick with this for so long! And please, please review if you liked it :)