ARYA

It was dark in the cellars of Kingspyre when the taskmaster came. There were no windows here, and only a few stubs of candles. Even most of those had been put out for the night.

Pinkeye did not usually arrive so late. Pinkeye was not usually awake so late. He had not been here for dinner. When he entered, Arya noticed that he had no cup of ale in his hand. What all of this meant, she could not say, but it made her uneasy.

"Up, layabouts! Up! I don't have all day!"

Most of the servants were slow to rouse themselves, as they usually were with Pinkeye. That was until he rushed to one woman, much older than Arya, and threw her out of her rough straw bed; she fell upon unforgiving stone with a cry of pain. After that, Arya sprang up and out of the cavity in the wall where she slept. She had never seen Pinkeye move so fast before.

"I been speakin' with Ser Amory, told me his orders hisself," Pinkeye announced, as if speaking with a landed knight whom a high lord had chosen to serve as a castellan was the absolute height of authority. Perhaps it was supposed to win him their fear or respect. All that his self-importance got from Arya was contempt. "The west has a new lord. Lord Tyrion Lannister has returned, him what killed all those rebels with ships and wildfire on the Blackwater—a hard lord for a hard time, so don't you go about makin' trouble—an' 'e wants all us goin' west, all together. His lordship's with his army, camped where the kingsroad crosses the high road, north of here. He summoned Ser Amory, so we're comin' to join him. The word came by raven. An' all of you are goin' to work hard, mark my words, I'll flog your hide off elsewise, 'cause Ser Amory sent a raven back, tellin' his lordship we'll march in three days. Three days." His chins quivered. "An' if we make Ser Amory look like a liar to his lordship… well. Well. You're all goin' work hard as you ever worked, I promise you."

Pinkeye was pacing as he spoke. Arya watched his face. She did not need to remember any of Syrio's words to see the fear.

She tried to sleep that night, knowing she would need it, but it was hard, so hard. Her thoughts were clamouring. She had never paid much attention to Septa Mordane's lessons, but she knew that, of the Seven Kingdoms, the west was the kingdom that belonged to House Lannister. The Lannisters were going home. They were running away. In order to do that, they were gathering at Lord Tyrion's camp like sheep thinking they would be safer from the wolves if they got together in numbers. And yet… and yet… were they going to lose? She hoped so, and if it had been Robb whom they were going to face, she would have thought so too. However, she had heard nothing about Robb for a while, not even the complaints about him despoiling the lands of one lord or another in the westerlands, which had been a regular occurrence before. She had no idea where he was. It was her uncle who was marching against them, and Arya recalled everything that she had overheard about her uncle in all of her time in Harrenhal. Little of it had been flattering. She wanted to believe it was just lies, desperately, but she knew her uncle had lost the big battles that granted the Lannisters their conquest of the lands of the Trident in the first place. That had been long ago; everyone agreed it now; it was not shrouded in rumour like more recent tidings. Ser Jaime Lannister had beaten her uncle Edmure with contemptuous ease. If his lord brother was half as capable…

He won't. He can't be. Arya had to believe that.

Nonetheless, when she spoke her nightly prayer, whispering so soft she could scarcely hear it, she led it with "Lord Tyrion…"

Pinkeye woke up early the next day, for a messenger boy had come to fetch him before dawn. "Compliments of Ser Amory to Goodman Mebble," the boy said. "He wishes you the gods' speed."

"Why, you little runt," Pinkeye began, bleary-eyed and grabbing, but the boy was already out of the door.

He was in a foul mood thenceforth, and he had not lied about the work. Arya still waited at table and fetched water and sent messages, sometimes, but the newest part of her labour was in the vaults beneath Kingspyre Tower. There was a near endless amount of things to count and classify, most of them foodstuffs: oats and wine bottles and sacks of flour and grain and many more. There had been an even greater amount before most of it was taken away to the camp that Lord Tywin had made near the Trident, but the amount that was left was still difficult to conceive of. She had not really understood that before. The vaults were not dark as they had been when she had used them as a way to creep around Harrenhal in nights past, trying and failing to find an unguarded gate. They were brightly lit with the gods alone knew how many candles, as uncounted men and women, girls and boys laboured within. As she could occasionally see when she snatched glances out of windows while working, other servants were building wagons outside, rough quick-built things of freshly hewn timber, and others still, mainly grown men, were carrying heavy things to the yard to load them. The soldiers oversaw them all, and even they were put to work sometimes, for Ser Amory set a harsh pace.

She would have had no time to do all that she had to do, if not for the lack of cleaning. Nobody was dusting floors and steps any more, nor were they fixing broken windows, nor getting rid of cobwebs, nor making new chairs and beds to replace rotted old ones. It frustrated Arya to think that all of her work putting Harrenhal to rights and making it a place fit for living in was a waste, until it occurred to her that King Renly would arrive and take Harrenhal once Ser Amory had gone. Her long toil and that of the other servants would not help the cruel Lannisters who had commanded it but, rather, the Lannisters' bitterest enemy. That pleased her indeed. When she fell asleep that night, she dreamt of King Renly putting Joffrey's golden-haired head on a spike as the steps of Harrenhal shone beneath his feet.

After that, she dreamt of wolves, and her fur was slick with rainwater. She was surrounded by her pack, and she was biggest and strongest of them all; they all went where she led. They crept through a forest, mousy quiet, taking care to avoid stepping on any twigs, and the heavy raindrops masked the noise of her feet on the leaves of red and gold and brown. They ambushed a horse, and some of the others chased it, driving it towards her, and she leapt and put her weight upon it, took it down, bit its throat… and her brothers and sisters joined her for the banquet.

But there was no banquet for Arya when she awoke. There was only an ungenerous helping of a soup that was thin as a blade of grass and a crust of bread that looked like most of the loaf had been eaten by someone else. Somebody else, a girl older and bigger than Arya, snatched the coveted crust of bread, the best part of the meal. Arya, outraged, raised a cry, and Pinkeye saw, and he dragged the other girl out and whipped her. She felt a little bad about it, but not very. The girl was hungry, yes, undoubtedly, but she was hungry too.

It occurred to her that they had been serving together for gods only knew how long and yet she did not know the girl's name. Arya had been careful not to pay attention to the names of the other people who had been serving Weese, then Pinkeye. Most of them were older than her and paid her little heed, so it was easy for her to stay away, and it was better that way. Keep her distance and it would hurt less when they died.

As the sun rose and fell, the pace that was demanded of them grew. Pinkeye was drinking more and more, surpassing his usual prodigious quantities, and his temper was shorter every hour than the last. The times he allotted for each task were ever briefer, and he was infuriated whenever anyone did not adhere to them. Plenty of servants like Arya found themselves neglecting messages. The kitchen folk, she judged, were making the food rather less carefully, except the meals of Ser Amory and the men who stood highest in his service. But there was no escape for the poor men who had to drag things from the vaults of Kingspyre—not, thankfully, the vaults of the other towers too—and load them onto the wagons. It was an immense task, and could not be pretended to be complete when it was not. There was no recourse but honest labour. By the third day after the evening when Pinkeye had told them all about the decision, his wrath was at its height. All of the servants under Pinkeye were tired. None were given respite. By then, he had them running, not walking, whenever they needed to get between one part of Harrenhal and another, and every task was completed in a rush, for fear of a beating.

All of the screaming and shouting and threatening did not suffice. The three days passed, and then another, then another. Only then were they ready to depart.

Arya and a cluster of other servants were led out of the castle's main gate, joining a sprawling train of wagons. Armed westermen wearing Lorch and Brax colours, the garrison that Lord Tywin had left here, stood all around them, brandishing spears and swords, their eyes everywhere as if to expect an attack this very moment. Nonetheless, she waited for another few hours until the last of Ser Amory's men left Harrenhal, having searched the castle for any lost supplies or any servants who might have disappeared. They had opened all of the doors to help vermin get through, she heard them tell the castellan, and they had laid waste to the kitchen, cut up the beds and broken the shelves and furniture. As little as possible was to be left for Renly Baratheon to take.

As she waited, Arya gazed up at the thick, gigantically high walls above her. Old Nan had said that Harren the Black, the evil king of the ironmen in a past age, had spent dozens of years to build those walls. He had beggared the iron islands and the riverlands, brought about the death of thousands of toiling thralls, and even mixed the blood of children like Arya (Old Nan's voice rose to sudden loudness when she said this) into the mortar, in order to build the greatest castle in the world. Men said that Harrenhal was cursed, haunted by the ghosts of King Harren and his sons, destined to bring about the doom of whoever held it. Arya hoped that it was true. If there is a curse, she thought, no-one deserves it as much as Ser Amory…

No. Not no-one. Some do.

Lord Tyrion and King Joffrey. Ser Amory, Ser Gregor, Ser Ilyn, Ser Meryn. Pinkeye. Dunsen, Polliver, Raff the Sweetling. The Tickler and the Hound.

I have to remember their names.

How much of her life had she spent here, under the colossal shadow of these walls? Weeks? Moons? Years? Arya did not know. Her time in Harrenhal had been governed by commands and repetitive labour. Sometimes that meant all the days blended into one, and sometimes it meant that they seemed to be simply the way the world was and had forever been. Sometimes it felt recent that she, Gendry and Hot Pie had been brought here by Ser Gregor and his men, Chiswyck who had raped Layna and Raff who had murdered Lommy and all the others. Sometimes it felt that she had lived here as long as she had lived at Winterfell.

She was glad to leave. Life in the wild had been difficult and dangerous, trying to hide that she was a girl and to avoid Lannister men and to survive off little bugs she had to find, and at Harrenhal, at least, she had been safe, but somehow Harrenhal was worse. When travelling with Yoren or with Lommy Greenhands, Hot Pie and Gendry, she had not had to endure seeing Ser Amory do whatever he wanted and have to keep her head down and obey anyway. The Braavosi man who did not truly have a name had helped, but she had used up all her wishes from him now, and that left her powerless. In the wild she had been a wolf, albeit a weak and starving one. Now she was a mouse. The wolf had packmates, like the wolf in her dreams. The mouse had none. Lommy was dead and Hot Pie hated her and Gendry had betrayed her. The mouse just had to scurry along, alone, and do whatever people who were not mice told her to.

She did not think she had ever hated any place as much as this. Mayhaps the Great Sept of Baelor, where Ser Ilyn Payne had cut off Father's head.

The last of Ser Amory's men came to the yard, and the castellan gave a shout. Arya looked up at and over the top of a huge gatehouse the size of the keep at Winterfell. High loomed the walls, and above the walls rose the eerie twisted shapes of the Tower of Dread, the Tower of Ghosts, the Widow's Tower, the Wailing Tower and Kingspyre Tower, Kingspyre above them all, Kingspyre highest and most terrible. She looked at it for a long while. It was hard to imagine being gone. She had no illusions that the Lannisters would take her somewhere she wanted to be, but it could not be worse than Harrenhal. Wherever she ended up, it could not be vaster or more inescapable.

Gigantic hinges creaked. The main gate of Harrenhal opened. Arya passed through it and did not look back again.

The northward march was long and bitter, for Ser Amory set a hard pace. There were long days and short nights, and not just because of summer. He was desperate not to be the last of House Lannister's men in the riverlands to reach the camp of his liegelord's army, and for those whose slowness hindered him he had little mercy. One of the servants from Harrenhal, a white-haired man who Arya had heard had served House Whent for many years ere Lord Tywin came, fell over one day and did not get up. A man-at-arms badged with the manticore of Lorch helped him to his feet, and he went on. He fell over again later, and it took half an hour to get him walking again. When, on the next day, he fell over again and could not be made to keep walking no matter how much they tried, they did not bear his weight. They simply left him there, in the dirt, unable to rouse himself to stand, and moved on.

The former garrison of Harrenhal were not the only folk here. Smallfolk of the southern riverlands watched them from afar with resentful eyes. Ser Amory had too many armed men with him to dare an attack, so the people from Harrenhal were left mostly unmolested, but some did try. The servants ate in the mornings and evenings, for they had more than enough food on their wagons, and walked for all the time in between. That was enough to attract greedy eyes. Small bands of men came sometimes, day or night, not to throw the Lannisters out of the riverlands, as Arya had hoped, but simply to steal their food. Ser Amory's men were more numerous, though, and always drove them off.

At first, Ser Amory had two or three hundred soldiers, by Arya's reckoning—it was too many to count—but that number soon grew. For it was not only outlaws whom they saw. There were also other bands of westermen, making for the same place as themselves. They gathered together for security, and Ser Amory's group was larger than any other that Arya saw come near, so Ser Amory took precedence and the other groups of westermen joined his. By the time they were near the camp, many days after they left—days or weeks? Arya could not be sure—there were at least twice as many as there had been before, and banners from plenty of other Houses joined the purple unicorn and black manticore.

Before the soldiers taking her to Lord Tyrion's camp had grown so numerous, Arya espied a red-haired woman of near her lady mother's age sitting with a group of other women as they played dice one night, much older and bigger and stronger than her. She could not say for sure why it was that woman whom she chose to approach with her hopes, and not any of the other servants. Perhaps it was just the resemblance to Mother.

"So what's this about, lass?" said the tall woman, not unkindly, after Arya crept over and woke her up for a late-night conversation.

"You saw how that old man died," said Arya.

"Aye," the woman said with a sigh. "Poor Rick, he deserved better."

Arya affected uncertainty. "Ser Amory is a knight, I know, knights do what's just, but the septon always said… what he did… that… was that really just?"

"It wasn't," the tall woman said solemnly. "The Father will judge Ser Amory for that, and not kindly, I'll warrant."

"Does that mean he's bad?"

"Aye. Take care, don't you come too close to the likes o' him, don't you let him notice you."

She wants me safe. Encouraged by the tall woman's sympathy, Arya went on. "Well, we don't have to stay here with the bad people."

"What do you mean? Someone been fillin' up your head with ideas? Old Steff, I'd reckon, that vagabond…" She knelt down to be level with Arya, and spoke gently. "Pay them no heed. That's dangerous, girl. All it'll do is get you killed. The lions will take your head."

"Not if they can't," said Arya fiercely. At the evident doubt on the tall woman's face, she pressed on: "Nobody's been giving me ideas, I thought of it. There are lots more servants here than soldiers, and most of the soldiers are sleeping now, anyway. If we planned it, and woke up all the other servants sometime in a night, we could escape."

"S'pose we could," the woman said, "though doubtless some of us die, even if we win. Where will we go?"

Arya wanted to say, "Winterfell," but dared not. Instead she said, "Home."

"That can't be done," said the tall woman in a voice that held a note of pity. "The wolves came to my home, moons past. They started off polite-like. They said they was friends, they wanted food for their lord's host, we in Hamsworth got none to spare. Old granddad Jaime says, we need all we've got for winter. It's been a long summer, winter'll be long too. Well, they didn't like that answer none, so they stuck a spear in Jaime's gut and burnt our crops for sayin' no to them, and stole and slaughtered our cattle anyway. Later the lions came… It's shit here, but it's shitter everywhere else. At least a Lannister servant gets food. A farmer got nothin' to farm, she ain't gettin' nothin'. I can't live off ash. If I could make everything be the way things were, before the lions and wolves came, aye, that'd be a dream come true, but I can't, child. No-one can do that." She placed a consoling hand on Arya's shoulder. "No-one can make yesterday come after today. We can't go back home."

Arya could not believe it. She had thought she was so close, and now she would be denied? "I still want to go home, please," she said. "No-one burnt my home."

The warmth in the tall woman's voice disappeared abruptly. "Nice for some. Why does that mean we should fight and die for you?"

Arya just looked at her for a moment, then turned on her heel and ran away, not wanting the tall woman to see the tears in her eyes.

What the tall woman had said was bothering Arya. She had said that wolves had burnt down her home, wolves, House Stark, not lions… but surely that could not be right. It must have been the Lannisters. She knew plenty of northmen, like the scullery maids who would clean her clothes and the stableboys who would smile and saddle ponies for her. They were good people. Northmen, her family's men, would never do a thing like that.

It occurred to her that this same woman had wanted to stay with the Lannisters. She's just a Lannister pawn, Arya decided. She was lying, of course she was lying, Lannisters always lie.

There seemed to be an awful lot of Lannister pawns, though. She dared not approach anyone else, lest she be reported to Ser Amory, so she had no other conversations like she had had with the tall woman, but she did know that no large group of people had tried to escape.

They marched on, and at last they drew near to the camp of a great host. There were tents as far as the eye could see, and a dazzling array of standards of every hue flapped above them. Arya recognised many of them from the army that Lord Tywin had led out of Harrenhal: stars, unicorns, badgers, boars, jugglers, ferrets, oxen, beetles, hoods… Sansa would have known which Houses they were. To Arya, it sufficed to know that they were foes. Beyond doubt it was the host of the westerlands, the heart of the enemy, the host that would shortly be marching to confront her uncle Edmure and try to kill him.

I hope Uncle Edmure kills them instead, she thought.

Dozens of mounted knights and lords in fine surcoats and shining armour were waiting to greet them outside that sprawling hive of men, guarded by hundreds of lowborn men in scarlet cloaks and helmets shaped like lions. The escort alone outnumbered all of the soldiers with Ser Amory. At their centre, deferred to by all of the others—who waited and let him be the first to speak—rode a man who was not wearing armour. Arya was watching from afar, but from the stunted frame and the now-widely-rumoured maiming it was easy to recognise Tyrion Onearm of House Lannister, the Lord of Casterly Rock.

It was strange to imagine the ugly little man whom she had seen in Winterfell as a powerful enemy leader. But that was what he was. The Lannisters were enemies, Arya knew, and the dwarf who had seemed harmless at Winterfell was not just any Lannister but the head of their House. He was the master of her family's enemies, she must never forget.

Ser Amory and his liegelord spoke. Arya could see the latter's mouth moving, though Ser Amory was facing away from her and she was too distant to make out the words. After a while Lord Tyrion's eyes flicked down the column, and for a dreadful moment Arya thought that she would be seen, but the Lord of Casterly Rock's gaze passed over her without recognition. He had seen her before, but, thankfully, Arya Stark the daughter of the Lord of Winterfell looked little like Weasel the roughspun-clad maid.

Something happened in that far-off conversation, and Lord Tyrion and his vassals rode off together, doubtless to discuss the war. Arya did not get to see where they went. A detachment of Ser Amory's soldiers took them into the nest of tents, led by some men who had come from within. There was another quarter-hour of walking—it's just a camp, how big can a camp be?—before they reached a group of tents with lots of men and women, most of them older than her father, all of them unarmed.

"Queue up," the soldiers barked, gesturing threateningly with spears and swords, pushing Arya and the others into a line. There they awaited judgement. She saw Gendry, ahead of her, taken to a man with sooty hands, and Hot Pie taken to a severe-looking older woman.

She did not expect that she would see either of them ever again.

Eventually it was Arya's turn. She came to be judged and a wrinkly white-haired woman asked, "What does this one do?"

"She's one of mine," said Pinkeye. He, like all the other heads of servants at Harrenhal, was standing near the front of the queue, helping to sort the servants. "Lots o' things. Draw water from the wells, fetch food, serve at table for the men, clean, carry messages… I didn't have lots at Harrenhal, y'know, I couldn't get too picky. She ain't much use, though, mark my words. She keeps on slackin'."

"Mebble says that 'bout every man, woman and child what ever served 'im," a short bearded man observed, and ignored Pinkeye's outraged response as if he were an ant beneath his heel. "Well, Marge, what d'you reckon?"

The severe-looking woman pronounced, "Too skinny and short to labour much. She'd be shit at cleanin' or bearin' water." Arya felt indignant, but stopped herself from protesting that description. She did not want 'Marge' to change her mind. "Messengers or waiters, I say."

"Could be either," said a man with blond hair and bushy eyebrows. "What say you, child? Speak swift, mind. We've no time to waste playin' coy."

It was the decision of an instant. Last time she had been like this, with Goodwife Harra and Goodwife Amabel at Harrenhal, she had made a mistake. She would not repeat it. "Waiters, please."

She would stay close to the food.

"You're Jeyne's, then," said the blond man, jerking a thumb. "Run along."

Arya followed the direction that he pointed, and she found that 'Jeyne' was a short round woman with greying hair. "Now who might you be, dear?"

The thought of changing names again flashed across her mind, for Arya did not much like the name she had blindly adopted in a moment of sudden shock and fear, but she decided reluctantly not to. There were too many people who had been in Harrenhal here, who would know her face. "Weasel."

Jeyne's eyebrows rose, but she said nothing, no pointed remark. "Well, I'm glad to have you here, Weasel. We'll wait for any others, then I'll show you the way to your new home."

There were a few others, and a dozen who had come before Arya. Jeyne led the huddle of servants on another walk, to a plain white tent near some stores of food where she could see a butcher working. Arya's mouth watered. Absently she noticed that none of the servants working under Jeyne were much older than herself. Things seemed so neat and organised in this army camp, much more than they had been in the great decaying expanse of Harrenhal.

"You hungry, dears?" said Jeyne. "Can't have that. Folk don't go hungry here, not when we don't lack for food. If no-one feeds a waiter, no man else will se-e his meal!" She chuckled, as if it were a matter fit to make jests of. Perhaps to her it was.

It was no such matter to Arya, who tore into the bread and trout and ate it in big gulps. She did not know how long it had been since she received such a good meal. Weeks? Moons? Weese had promised her a treat once at Harrenhal, she vaguely remembered, which would have been better than this, but Weese had lied. The plump capon supper had never come.

"Now then," said Jeyne, once they had all finished, "you ought know your way around 'ere."

Some of the other servants under her were sent to show Arya and her fellows their way around the camp. She tried to remember all the different banners and all the different sorts of soldiers, though she doubted she would manage to do so now. Still, as the days passed, she learnt quickly, and soon she was bringing the food that authority had allotted to various groups of men and serving them at table. She got into the habit easily enough. One thing she noticed was that there was much less work in this camp than there had been at Harrenhal. There was much less to clean and maintain, and the soldiers could do much more for themselves… which made her curious as to why she was here. The Lannisters had more servants than they needed, and Jeyne did not seem cruel.

It was four days after she had come that Arya worked up the courage to visit her taskmaster and ask about it openly. "Goodwife Jeyne, does his lordship have more servants here than he needs?" She had been corrected in the past—firmly, though without any hint of anger or condemnation—for calling him 'Lord Tyrion'.

Jeyne smiled at her. "You are a clever lass, aren't you, dear? Aye, there's fewer needed here than when we were all at Harrenhal, ere the Battle of the Banks. Takin' care of armies, it ain't like for castles."

"Then what'll happen to us when his lordship marches? Will we be sent away?" It took iron will to keep her hope out of her voice.

"Heard about that, have you?" Jeyne looked rueful. "I s'pose it's the talk of every man now. Can't be 'elped. Well, Weasel, don't you worry the likes o' that. Servants take time to train, and no-one ever got as rich as the Lannisters by being wasteful. You're a good hard worker. With others it's 'chatter, chatter, chatter' or 'complain, complain, complain', but you just stay quiet and get things done. Keep at it, and that'll raise you high, might be even higher than meself. The Lannisters are good to those as serves them well." She gave Arya a hug. "You've nowt to fear, Weasel, I promise. You'll do well at Casterly Rock."