ARYA
The alleys turned to piers, green algae crawling up the black posts and the creaking boards slick from salt and mist. When she looked to the west, she could just make out pinpricks of fires in the black mountains and the bottom great legs of the Titan. Braavos, a girl's memory called, a city of islands within a brackish lagoon; a city of mists and whispers and the briny scent of fish. She stole a long-sleeved tunic from a balcony, and an oiled cloak out of a rickety old pole boat moored in a canal. Both were damp and cold, but it was better than nothing. She reached Ragman's Harbor before first light, still clutching her stolen tome as heavy as a brick against her breast. The stalls and stands were filling slowly with the night's catch, and the air was ripe with the stench of fish and salt sea.
"Where are today's ships headed?" she asked a boy loading clams onto the stall, as brightly as she could.
"Cat!" he smiled. "I haven't seen you in an age!"
Cat, thought the girl. They call me Cat. They know me.
"Just so." She smiled tightly, hoping it was passably charming. "A girl gets jobs where she can."
"You look like death," he said disapprovingly. From his pocket he drew out a heel of bread and tossed it to her. She caught it deftly with thin fingers. "You were always too skinny. Canal cleaning? You can always get better jobs on the docks. Brusco didn't kick you out did he?"
"There are worse jobs," she said around a mouthful of warm, crusty bread. Nothing had ever tasted better. "Thank you."
"Anything for the cat of the canals," he smiled again. "The usual traders are in. Dorne, Lorath, Volantis. A ship for Gulltown is leaving once the Captain returns with his silks."
"Gulltown?" She chewed her lip.
"Westeros," said the boy, shrugging. "And after likely King's Landing and Tyrosh."
"So few cities?"
"Trade is hard on a winter sea," said the boy, and inclined his head to a gray trading ship with a splintering hull, creaking as the bay water ebbed and lapped around it.
"The cold winds are rising," said a girl, looking west beyond the mountain, beyond the pines and the legs of the great Titan of Braavos. The bitter salt wind howled against her face. She curled further into her cloak.
"Just so," said the boy. "Father says this winter is setting in to be the coldest yet. Go on. Your ship's the one with the gray sails."
"It's night, Pip," she said, the name coming easily. "They're all gray."
He chuckled and wiped snot from his nose. "Just so. The one with three mermaids on her prow, fish in their teeth. Good luck, Cat."
"And you," she returned, pressing her fingers to her temple in farewell. She realized too late that blood spattered her face in dry dark specks. Only mud to him. He could not know any better, he could not be afraid.
Cold, she padded on frozen feet down the pier. The purple prow of her ship, with the three mermaids on her prow, was near black against the brackish water of the harbor. There would be no sun today to glint off the rich color, only mist and cold and fog. Pip had worked on the water, scraping snails from rock and cracking them open for their violet innards. She remembered him giving her a snail of her own to crack, but she'd cracked it wrong and ink had splattered her hands and face.
A couple of rangy boys skittered about the loading ramp, carry crates upon their backs onto the ship. Silks, lemons, oils, Asshai glass. The captain stood tall on the pier, counting every crate with a painted abacus in his hand.
"What ship is this?" She pulled her cloak tighter against her and gripped the hilt of her blade. The familiar pommel under her hand made her feel braver.
"This is the Sea Witch of the Free City of Braavos," said the captain, scratching tan, leathery skin beneath his patchy beard.
"Where is she going?"
"Gulltown, but passage will cost you."
She shifted the tome under her arm and pulled from her pocket the comb of ebon wood, veined in gold. The two gold coins she would need in Westeros, to buy a horse, or passage, or an inn. The captain peered at her, eyeing her slight frame, her blood-spattered face.
"This is not enough," he lied.
"It's more than enough for passage and your silence," said the girl. "I can work, if ebon and gold will not tempt you."
He laughed at her. "A tiny thing like you?"
"I'm not so young, twenty years now." She bit her lip. For true, she didn't know how old she was. "I've been on a ship before. I can fix nets and climb, and I'm good with a blade."
The captain peered at her for a moment.
"The passage is difficult. You see my men and boys with their wools and sheepskins. You may die on the winter crossing."
The girl lifted her chin, unsmiling. "Valar morghulis."
He watched her for a heartbeat, the lifting light no doubt illuminating the blood on her face.
"Valar dohaeris," he said, pressing his fingers to his silver temple, then stretching out his hand for her comb.
Cat smiled. "I may die on the winter crossing," she said.
"Just so," said the captain. He flashed an incomplete set of graying teeth. "Talar will show you a place," he said, waving over a figure busy untangling a net.
A boy, curly haired and slight, paused his work and strode over. His sharp nose was the only other feature she could make out through the mist. She clutched the book tighter.
"Come," said the boy.
With only a skinny little sword at her side and a heavy tome under her back, she boarded. He led her down below deck and showed her a small hammock tucked into a corner of the hull. Mist and drizzle, as well as a strong, briny, vein of cold air seeped through the boards above it.
"All this for a rotting hammock and a draft," said Cat sourly.
"It is silence that costs you."
The boy left without another word. Alone, Cat tied her book in her musty blanket, secured in her high hammock. It was no matter if it was found, no one could read it. Not even she could. Surely it was not worthless. She had paid for the book with life, but no common sailor would know that.
Talar returned silently to bring her a coat of sheepskin and woolen clothes. The woolens were short in leg and arm, likely for a boy of twelve more than a girl of her age. A small voice in her head nudged, and what age would that be? Cat made her way to an upper deck, slinking between caskets of wine and food. Hidden under an oilskin, she watched the boat pull silently out of the Purple Harbor before the sun rose.
Past the legs of the Titan, the fog thinned enough to see the sky. Cat crawled from her hiding spot, her neck and legs cramped and looked over the prow. Black water rocked the boat forward and back, the wind driving her forward. The sky was still blue as a Tyroshi beard in the west. In the east the horizon was pink, tender as the inside of an oyster. Hope bubbled in her as she watched the bright eye of the Ice Dragon still hanging in the sky guide them across the sea.
By midday, dark clouds swallowed the low hanging sun. A black drizzle began to fall as she sat in the netting high above the deck, tying yet another knot in a mildewed rope. Would that she had wings the breadth of the Sea Witch, oar to oar. If I were a dragon, I wouldn't need a boat. I could have flown across the Narrow Sea on my own wings. The rain grew heavier and ran through her oilskin hat, plastering the musty cloth to her neck and face. Rivets trailed into her tunic and even her cloak grew too damp to keep out the wind. She was a wolf, she reminded herself, and rain would not hurt her.
"Come girl," said the cook as she slid shivering from the netting at nightfall. "You can clean fish, yes?"
She'd barely nodded when the old grizzled man, heavy-set with the fattest ankles she'd ever seen, shoved her into the kitchen and put a paring knife in her hand. One of the boys tossed her a dry rag and she wiped the salt water from her face and hair. Practiced and easy, she cleaned as fast as the cook's sons. It made her smile. Her fingers tingled and swelled red from the heat, but her clothes were drying, and she was warm again.
"You smile like that more and someone will mistake you for a pretty girl," laughed Talar, bumping elbows with her. She flicked a fish head at him. He laughed harder. "Though no man would ever marry you. He'd have to be stubborn like a toro."
"I'm no one's wife," said Cat, "I'm a wolf."
When she fell asleep that night, the ship rocking her hammock, she was.
Sister, called the three eyed crow who followed her in her dreams. Sister, he quorked again, but she didn't understand.
I'm a wolf, how can I be your sister?
Sister, sister, sister, screeched the crow, flapping madly about her head.
What do you want, crow?
"North," he said. "You have to go North. Follow the cold, follow the snow. You have to come home."
But what of the rivers? How can I follow the snow when the rivers cut through them?
"The rivers are low and dry. The bogs are frozen. Are you not a wolf? You said you had the wolf blood in you. You said you could be brave."
I have a pack.
"Yes. But you've another pack. Your brothers and sister. You remember us?"
The boy crouched and rose a great gray wolf. Summer, thought the wolf. Bran, remembered the dead girl inside her, but it was impossible. The pack was scattered and slain. Summer vanished into the dark, the godswood crumbling into dust behind them.
She woke with a snarl at the pain in her shoulder and the taste of her blood in her mouth. There was a man beside the bars of her cage. She growled, leaning into her chains. Her jaws could not reach him. He smelled like fear. He smelled like soot. He smelled like food.
"Damn poison arrows. Wake up you wolf."
Nymeria growled weakly in return but shifted and stretched in her fetters. She registered the scrape of metal, shrill to her ears — the sound of a door creaking open.
"I won't hurt you none," he whispered. "I know you. You were Arya's wolf."
Arya. She knew that name. The smell of blood, beating warm beneath the skin of his neck turned her stomach with hunger.
"I'll be hanged for this," he said, looking the wolf in her eyes. She blinked and lay her head upon the ground again. He poured oil on her bloody and matted fur and with shaking hands, began to pull the fetters off her legs. After a few nips at his shoulder, a few swears, a few long moments in which the links refused to budge, the burden was gone and she was free.
"Go," said the man, "Go and find her."
The still guard outside her cage had a bloody face, but she smelled more prowling the burnt village. Without sparing a last glance to her liberator, she took off towards the forest. There was a shout as she reached the edge of the village, and then there were more.
She smelled the dead woman and fresh, familiar blood on the wind. Nymeria reeled, barely missing a flying arrow. They flew like starved crows and sung through the burned fields and even when the last one could not reach her, she ran on.
The wood swallowed her whole, and still she ran. North, whispered a voice like a dream. The crows were squawking above her but there was blood and lather running from her mouth and she was too tired to even snap her teeth. Follow the cold. Take your pack, take them north. You need them north. Nymeria raised her head to the sky and howled.
Arya. She woke with the name on her tongue. Arya, it came, in the voice of a black-haired man who'd freed her, rang in her head like bells. Arya, she thought. Bells had rung the day they killed her father. Her hand trembled against the post of her high hammock, desperate for a grip to steady her. Arya.
"Arya," she whispered aloud. Her tongue felt thick and clumsy in her mouth, as if she'd spoken for the first time in years.
"Arakh?" grumbled Talar below her.
"Go back to sleep," Cat said.
He cursed in Braavosi and said, "With your mumbling? I think not."
"Stuff wool in your ears then, or I'll stuff them for you," she hissed back.
"You have nightmares," Talar said.
"You don't know anything," said Cat.
"You have nightmares and yet you remember nothing of who you are. I know a liar when I see one," said Talar.
Talar wouldn't know a brick if it smacked him in the face, thought Cat sourly, but she knew he wasn't stupid.
"I remember some things," she said. "Horrible things. I remember screaming and killing and death. I remember having to watch it with my mouth shut because I didn't want to die like that too." Cat sighed, biting her lip, "All my memories are poison."
The ship's hull creaked and groaned, wind whipping the sails and masts above their heads. Across the cabin, one of the sailors snored in time with each rocking wave. Talar shifted in his hammock.
"Living is poison," he said finally, "but in the morning there are still fish to clean."
She stayed awake listening to the sounds of the ship. Talar's breathing evened into the steady, slow lull of sleep. She was cold, worn, sore. She had been colder, more worn, sorer. Moths had eaten through most of her blanket. In the morning she would wake, no matter what poison. She would wake and there would be fish to clean. There would be decks to mop and nets to climb and knots to make, but perhaps tonight she would dream again of wolves.
She dreamed of wolves every night, and by day she climbed nets nimbly, imagining she had wings the breadth of a war galley, oars and all, on the creaking merchant ship. The crew, grim-faced, bawdy, and crusted with salt called her girl or Cat. The captain gave her a sealskin cloak. She scrubbed the deck wet and tied knots wet and ate bread wet and played tiles with the other sailors wet. She forgot what warm and dry ever really felt like. The cold was bitter upon the decks when she scrubbed them and the wind terrible up in the ropes and nests above when she was sent to fix them. It never stopped howling; screaming in her ears, salt spray soaking her as she mended the sails and nets.
By nightfall her ears ached so badly she could cry, and no twisted piece of cloth could get the water out. The blisters on her hands bled through the linen she wound about her palms, and in the mornings, after a night in a hammock of rotting rope that left bruises on her back and arms, welts on her knees and elbows, she would still have to get up. She still had work to do.
The mornings came again and again, but the rain did not stop. The days had been shortening, but she could see now that the sun rose for no more than a quarter of the day, no higher than Nymeria's star. She was damp more often than dry and soaked to the bone more often than damp. Nothing good ever came out of rains like these, though the captain told her that if the wind held steady she didn't have to be afraid. She wasn't afraid of rain. Rain was all she had known for years.
The week went on and the rain turned to sleet. Storms buffeted their little trader day and night, but the Sea Witch held her course to Gulltown as faithfully as the captain willed. When the first snow fell over the water, she caught the flakes on her tongue, fresher than any rainwater collected on the ship. The air smelled clean and crisp, masking the brine of the ship and musky sweat of the men aboard it. Though she froze up in the netting, she could not remember feeling closer to home, and the closer they got, the more she dreamed of wolves.
In her dream, the air was thick with the smell of pines, of man and horse. By moonlight she saw the pair, beyond the reach of the trees as they trudged up the Kingsroad. The great castle was only a little while away. One of her smaller cousins, gray and russet like she, shifted anxiously beside her. The wind was north, and the horse would not smell them so long as they were sheltered in pines. A flat stretch of snow lay between her and her meal. It was nothing compared to the week they had eaten nothing but mice and tubers.
She trotted through her pack, nipping at heels and rumps, gathering the few hunting that night with her together. There was the silent command to lie in wait, and when she sprang, they followed her without a hesitation. Her russet cousin with her sable mate flanked north to round off the pair, and two small silver cousins took the south. It was she who ran straight and true. They cleared the trees and the horse and rider saw them. He switched to a gallop slowly, clumsy in the heavy snow. Nymeria raised her head and split the sky. Her hunting cousins joined her with glee, loping through brush and snow with heads raised high. There was a hollow ache in her belly, empty and cold, and it drove her legs faster, faster, faster, until the thrill of speed consumed her.
Cat woke to the banging of pans.
"Up you sods!" the second mate shouted.
No light filtered down on the stairs, so there was no shadow of the second mate. Only the sound of his bellow, and the scream of two pots clanging cut through the darkness.
"Up! Everyone! Land!" he shouted in Braavosi.
A great groan arose from the cabin, the sound of half a crew untangling from their hammocks, tired, sore. Cat blinked the sleep from her eyes, her heart still hammering from the sudden wake. Land. She shifted in her hammock and slid down onto the floor.
"Talar!" Cat shook his hammock where he lay sleeping still. "Talar!"
His eyelids fluttered. He did not wake. Cat grabbed his shoulder to shake him and recoiled. Talar's skin was cold through his linen shirt — cold and hard as stone.
"Talar!"
"Quit shoutin'," growled a crewman in Braavosi.
Cat whirled, "He will not wake. Call the cook and tell him his son is ill."
The man grumbled but hurried up the ladder. Only a few moments later the great mass of the cook descended the ladder.
Cat stopped him as he reached the cabin floor.
"He has the scale," said Cat. She peeled back his shirt at the collar. "His skin is gray stone."
The cook's face was impassive. He patted Talar's brow, checking the pulse at his throat.
"He needs a maester," said Cat.
"A maester? For a fisherman's boy?" the cook almost laughed.
"We cannot take him back to Braavos," said another sailor.
Cat shivered.
"You don't mean to leave him to die?" she asked.
"Leave him? No," said the cook, a hard look on his face.
The cook placed his hand over the hilt of the dagger in his boot.
"I will take him with me," Cat said.
"Then you are a fool," said the cook.
Cat did not answer. Talar stirred but did not wake.
"There is a place," said voice at the stairs. "I've left sailors at their shores and had them return."
The captain stepped down into the quarters. He looked over Talar, then the cook, then Cat.
"Unload the ship, pack what we need. We leave the boy and girl at the Isle," he said.
Cat watched him leave, her heart hammering.
"The Isle?" she asked the Cook.
"Where men do not speak. There is a septon," he replied.
Cat did not leave Talar's side as the crew unloaded and reloaded the trader. They sailed out of Bay of Crabs and towards the town of Saltpans. She packed her skinny sword and rotting tome and boarded the ferry that would take them to the Isle while the tide was in. The cook left them alone on the frozen bank. He only turned once to look back at his son. The ferry grew smaller and smaller, until it disappeared into the mist. Talar stood beside her with glazed eyes, watching his father leave. Cat watched the storks pace through the icy water. A drizzle had started, and she urged Talar along up broken stones at the base of the Isle. Three men in robes the color of the mud flats awaited them, all tall and broad. Only one brother spoke, the one without wools hiding his face.
"What brings you to the isle?" he said.
"My friend is ill. It's the grey plague," said Cat. "We have only a case of Braavosi snails to give, and a bag of fruits from the Summer Isles."
The Brother nodded and asked, "Can he climb?"
"I don't know," she said. "Talar, can you climb?" she asked him in Braavosi. He nodded, weakly.
"I am Brother Narbert. I will take you to the Elder Brother," said the Brother.
"This is Talar," she said, and bit her lip. What name she should give him, she did not know. Not Arya, she thought, remembering her dream. Cat did not seem right either. "I'm Nan," she said finally.
Brother Narbert nodded and beckoned the men to carry their offerings. They started the climb up the wooden stairway, winding around frozen fishponds and grazing sheep on the terraced hillside. A brother milked a sway-backed cow in a mud-and thatch shed. Another carried stones for fencing. Frost had touched the black, boggy soil, and the gorse that grew out of it. Through the drizzle, she made out walls of stacked stone and the blades of a windmill churning lazily at the crest of the high hill.
Halfway to the Sept, Talar scould walk no further. One of the silent Brothers scooped him up gently and carried him the rest of the way. From the cold fields, wool-clad men labored in the fishponds, in the terraced gardens and arbor, as silent as the two men before her.
"They have taken a vow of silence?" she asked Brother Narbert, who walked only a few paces behind her.
"Yes," he said. "We all have, except for the Elder Brother. I am his proctor, and today is my day to speak."
"So tomorrow you will be silent?"
"And the day after," said Brother Narbert.
"How many are here?" asked Nan.
"We have almost two dozen brothers of the order. We have had some visitors this winter. Women, children. We even had a knight once, and her squire."
"A lady knight?" she asked, taken aback.
"Yes," said Brother Narbert. He did not say any more and walked forward without her. Nan stepped quickly to catch up. Did the stairs ever end?
They wound past a lichyard, sheep grazing between the cracked stones. A tall man, taller than the brothers she had seen, sat hunched on the far wall. A rusted shovel was propped beside him. There was a fresh grave at his feet. He chewed solemnly on a heel of black bread, a hood pulled low over his eyes. Nan glanced behind her, and found black eyes staring back at her, a cruel, ruined mouth crooked in a smile. When they reached the top of the hill, Brother Narbert turned to her again.
"We will take your friend to Elder Brother. Brother Pate will show you to the cloister, where the women stay. He will find you in an hour's time for supper."
Nan nodded. She followed Brother Pate across the courtyard. Inside the cloister, which was little more than a long room burrowed in the earth, Nan found a row of empty cots. She took one near the end, closest to the hearth. Nan hid her book under a few empty crates. There was a small washbasin, and a few threadbare linens in a splintering trunk.
She hauled a few pails of frigid water to sit upon the hearth to warm. With the remaining cold bucket, she scrubbed the worst of the mud from her face, her neck, her arms. Her hair was stringy with seawater, and when she dunked her head in, the water clouded with grime. She shuddered. Every inch of her skin was salty. The pails by the hearth were passably warm, and Nan dragged the washbasin in front of the fire.
The water was not quite hot, but warm enough to sit in the basin submerged. She scrubbed her scabbed knees, her underarms, and between her legs with a small cake of soap she'd found. She could not remember her last real bath. After her bath, she dried herself with the old linens. Nan rifled through the dresses, aprons, and tunics to find a pair of boy's woolen trousers, a woolen undershirt, and a heavy doublet. For a moment, she closed her eyes and let herself feel the warmth of the fire, her toes and fingers no longer frigid. Instead they burned and itched from the blood returning. She could almost reach out and feel warm stone, smell smoke, snow, and pine trees.
A knock stirred her, and the memory left as quick as it had come. She followed the silent bother to the Hermit Hole for a crab stew. Nothing had tasted so good in years.
"Will he live?" Nan asked the Elder Brother when he joined her table.
"It is hard to say," the Elder Brother replied. "We can hope to contain it here."
"Can I see him?" said Nan.
"I'm afraid he is in a delicate state," said Elder Brother.
"He is my friend," Nan insisted.
Behind her, someone chuckled. The sound, raspy and choked, prickled her skin. Nan whirled around to find the towering brother in the field sitting at the bench behind her. He dwarfed the men with whom he ate. Beneath his hood, she could make out where his teeth shone through the twisted skin of his face. Mercy, she thought. I gave him mercy.
She stood and tore off the tall man's hood. It settled around his neck like a cowl. Men of religion must have found faith and god in the folds of a cowl. Even servants of the Many-Faced God wore them, in a temple with no services, no hymns, where mercy was found at the end of a cold cup. Above, his mouth was pulled into a mockery of a smile.
"Girl!" Elder Brother stood, but the tall brother put a hand up to stop him.
Sandor Clegane turned his ruined face to her. His eyes glittered in the dim light of the Hermit Hole.
"The little sister, Arya Stark," he rasped.
She felt every eye in the room turn to her. Arya. No one had called her that in years. She had heard the name, of course, muttered in taverns. Bolton's wife. The Northern Girl, a prize bride. Arya. A black-haired man said the name in her dreams. I am Arya Stark, of Winterfell. I am the northman's daughter. I am a wolf. Somewhere in her heart, she had always known. Even after the poison cup had taken her memory, Arya had known. Every dream, every step brought her closer home. Arya thought of snow, and smoke, and pine trees. She had crossed the sea both knowing and not knowing, landed on this shore knowing and not knowing. Wolves do not cry, she reminded herself. Arya bit her lip.
"I thought the Hound was dead," said Arya.
"He is," said Sandor. "You gave him a gift of mercy."
"You should have stayed dead," she said.
"You too, wolf-girl," said Sandor. "Will you take your place in Winterfell?"
"Yes," said Arya, biting her lip.
"Then I will come with you," Sandor rasped.
"Brother, your time is not yet up," said Elder Brother.
Sandor ignored him.
"I'm not your ransom," Arya said fiercely. "You won't raise a hand to me, or I'll cut it off. You will not drag me around nor sell me. If I wish it, I can run away from you and you will not stop me."
"I swear," he rasped, and kneeled in front of her.
