Chapter Fifty-One: Goodbyes
Prince Tommen's Chambers
Arya Stark
Two nights had passed since Arya had taken the potion, despite her every instinct telling her not to.
"Drink this," he'd told her. And, when she had refused, he nodded to Gendry, and said, "Your friend will watch you through the night, I'm sure." A lie, she knew. A lie. A lie that made her think of Lady Crane, offering her poppy milk and smiling all the while. Pain, and pain, and death would come with that milk. The way it always did.
She'd drank it anyway.
And now, Gendry had paid the price for it. There were bandages wrapped around his skull – almost as many as were on his arms, his legs, his chest. Wounds from the battle, and now the fighting after. All because she'd been too preoccupied with her own troubles to worry about him.
He could have died, she knew. The thought made her sick.
She felt stronger now than she had before. That thought made her sicker.
He was asleep now, head on the pillow beside her. Arya had given him her own, despite his protests. She hadn't cared. This was her fault anyway. The maester would never have attacked him, if not on account of her.
She might have slept herself, but she couldn't bring herself to sleep any more than she could bring herself to speak. It would come in scattered fits, each more painful than the last. She could do both if she needed to now – with a fitful hour's rest that would help craft some choked phrase – but she preferred to stay awake and silent through the long nights. The long night that hadn't ended. Not really.
For when she dreamt, the nightmares came like wights in the dark. Occasionally, she would slip Nymeria's skin and prowl the castle, growling at guards and guarding her charge. Those were the good nights. Most times, she would find herself wrapped tight by the Night King's grasping hand, or watching as a knife sunk deep into her gut, or screaming as Robb charged across the Twins, a man with a wolf's head on his shoulders, while a wolf with a man's head savaged the corpses at his side. The first two hadn't woken her. The last always did.
That was the true reason she was awake in the hour of the bat. While the castle had begun to repair its shattered sleeping schedules, with most of the men settling within a few hours of dusk, and rising shortly before dawn, Arya's had not. So while the light rays settled into another lonely night, she stayed awake and alone with Gendry at her side.
So it was, as the door creeped open. So it was that she glanced up at the sound of footsteps. Familiar steps, yet foreign all the same. The pace was the unchanged and the clatter, but the balance was different. Too far to the left. Too far.
A long time ago, she would never have noticed that. But she had been a blind girl once, and she knew footsteps like most lords knew their letters.
When the door opened, it was Jon Snow stood in the doorway, peeking his head into the room to study the two of them. His hair was pinned back behind his ears, and his eyes – grey as stone – were much the same as they always were. Even his dress was the same, though Arya could not say where he had stolen the cloak from. So far as she knew, Jon never took it off.
He shut the door behind him, and the guards in the hall did not say a word. Jon was one of the safe ones. The ones permitted to see the great Bringer of Dawn, Savior of Westeros, Hero of King's Landing, and whatever other stupid names they'd given her. Like she was some sort of a hero. She wasn't. The only heroes were the ones in the songs, and they were long gone.
He approached her with a smile on her face. Arya did not even try to match it. All she did, as he crept closer, was rub her bandaged left hand over the few parts of her face that hadn't frozen. Even without words, the man understood, and, when he did the same, his face rippled beneath his palm, and the face of Jon Snow faded away. Not a face, she thought. A glamour. In its place, an almost-friend. A man who'd damned her, saved her, and now seemed poised to damn her again.
"A girl has learned well since the stabbings," Jaqen observed, quietly. He did not look to Gendry, but she knew he had no need to. They would hear it if he stirred from sleep, and they would deal with that problem if it came.
She said nothing. No need wasting the few words she had.
"A girl should not be so tense," he told her. "A man means her no harm."
When he spoke, it was in the tongue of Braavos, and so, she answered in kind. "Stab," she wheezed. The word came easier than it would have before. Her hand fell to the scars on her stomach, and traced the puckered places where wounds had sprouted and refused to fade.
Jaqen only shrugged. "All men must die."
She gave no greeting in answer. The only response she offered was a glare that might have leveled mountains, if only she could bare her teeth.
He frowned. "To be truly faceless, one must leave behind their wants and whims, their loves and hates, their past and future. They must give themselves to the God, name and face, and only then will they be rewarded." He stepped forward, graceful as a water dancer. "A girl had a choice. A girl chose badly."
"Stab," she said, again.
"Killed," he answered.
Her breath came shorter, and she drew out the next. There was no good in letting this man know he had shaken her. No benefit to showing weakness in front of the man who had sentenced her to death, and then dragged her back, kicking and screaming. He and Beric and Gendry and the red priests. All of them.
Well, maybe not Gendry. Gendry didn't count.
"A girl died in Braavos," he told her, "It is a wonder a girl breathes at all, when the God has claimed her twice."
She wanted to wake Gendry, but she couldn't. There was no telling what Jaqen would do, and she could not put him in danger. Not again.
"How?" she asked, aloud. Beyond her control, a tiny cough burst through her throat. She smothered it before it left her lips. Still, Gendry's finger twitched, and Arya Stark had not been so afraid since the fingers had been wrapped, and I can't breathe-
"A man had hoped that the death of Arya Stark would help a girl become no one. A man was not wrong." He smiled, with the same charming smile he'd offered her on the Kingsroad, when he had been bound with a false face, and she had been bound with a name that was not her own. He still wore the face, while Arry was dead and gone.
"How?" she mouthed.
This time, he understood. "It is only death that may pay for life. A girl needed the gift to become a prince. A price needed to be paid. Just so. It was."
"Waif?" It hurt to move her lips this much, but she bore the pain well. She had long since learned to bear pain. From this man and others. Many others.
He shook his head. The waif had been no price then. She had been nothing. No, nothing was nothing. She'd been a person. She deserved it.
Only then did the dread settle deep in her gut, like a chain ready to drag her beneath the depths. Lady Crane, she thought.
"A man knew a girl would not kill a friend." She said nothing to that, and so he went on, "The death was paid for. Not the gifter, sweet girl."
"Waif," she mouthed, more decisively this time.
He nodded. "The one called 'waif' served well. To bear a prince and kill a lady is no easy thing."
Why, she wanted to ask, but there was no need. He answered her anyway. "A girl was ice. A girl needed fire. The Red God shares His gift in strange ways, but He is a Face as any other, and He has one gift to give."
"She hated me."
"She acted," Jaqen corrected, gently. "A girl toyed with mummers. Did she not think they could toy with her?"
It felt like her arm was freezing again, for all that her many wounds were burning. "D-dead."
"Dead," he agreed. "A choice. A woman and a man always knew the God had chosen Arya Stark for a reason. They would be remiss to say they understood which, but the God has made clear." He cocked his head again and smiled. A false smile. They all were. "A girl did not truly think she killed a Faceless Man by skill?" He laughed, a light little laugh. "The woman trained for tens of years and was healthy. The girl trained for five and was not."
For once, she was pleased with the burns on her cheeks. They hid the flush well.
Jaqen leaned forward, until he was no more than a foot from Gendry, and closer to her. Even in the dark of a room lit by one dying candle and the distant stars, she could see the madness in his eyes, the same as had been when Amory Lorch and the Mountain had come to turn her from a wolf to a mouse. Beneath his gaze, she almost felt that same way again. A mouse, creeping beneath the claws of bigger, stronger predators.
But Arya was a water dancer and a wolf, and she would not be afraid again.
"A man must admit, he doubted the God when He chose a girl. But the God knows better than lords and butchers and Faceless Men," Jaqen said. "A girl was His champion, from the day she took His coin."
"How?"
"Does Arya Stark recall how she met a man?"
She nodded.
"Then a girl will remember the Red God's gifts."
She did. The gifts, three names. The Tickler, Weese, Amory Lorch, Chiswyck – it had been too long to remember which had been by her whispers, and which by the wind – but the last had never left her. Jaqen H'ghar. Three named, many dead. All except him.
"Most lovely girls who save unlovely men do not get gifts from gods," he told her, gently.
A good thing she had never been lovely then, she wanted to snap. Instead, she shook her head, and mouthed, "Why?"
"What is death?" Jaqen asked her, patiently, like the kindly teacher he had never been.
"Gift," she mouthed. "Mercy," she whispered.
"Just so. Is it mercy to drag the dead from their place of peace?"
No, she thought. She had never been so sure.
"At the god sept, a girl freed millions from bondage. The God is pleased."
She frowned, and he smiled. Neither meant anything.
He twirled his fingers around Kingslayer's hilt, where it sat atop her legs. She could have stopped him, she knew. If she said the word, he would have retreated. If she took the sword, he would have pulled back with his hands high and his lips pulled into that smarmy smirk. She did not move. If Jaqen wanted her dead, she would have been already. This was not his game – even if every bone in her body was screaming at her to move, move, move!
"A man has heard that a maester wanted a girl. A man has heard that a girl did not fight him." A girl was asleep, she thought, but did not say. He went on, "He will not be the last. The servants of the Red God will want their champion, the sparrows of the seven gods will want their savior, the Starks, the Crownlands, the maesters of the Citadel, and all the fine lords and kings of these seven crowns."
He pulled Kingslayer away, inch by inch. Before long, the sword was completely in his hands. Still sheathed in the gratuitous bindings, made with the finest of leathers, the brightest of golds, and the reddest of rubies. He held the sword out, perpendicular to himself, and studied the balance, just as she had when she had taken it on the Gold Road. It had been light to her, a girl who had never used a sword any heavier than a child's toy (a sword she had taken back, and a sword that was worth everything in the world, and a sword that the gods wanted her to have, and Arya had broken it, like it was nothing at all-). To him, it must have weighed no more than a feather. He drew it, and the red sword shone in the light of a dying sun.
"Arya Stark will never know peace so long as she remains in Westeros," he told her. He lifted the sword to his eye-level, and swung it over her legs. She was not stupid enough to flinch.
"But?"
He nodded, pleased. "A girl does not have to stay in Westeros." Her heart might have stopped there, had he not gone on. "The Many-Faced God is good to His servants, and one has served Him best. If a girl ever wishes to return far across the Narrow Sea, the door is always open. If you know the way."
In spite of herself, a hint of a smile broke beneath her scars. A real smile, not one of faceless games. It hurt to pull at her cheeks, but it didn't matter. Somehow, that one sentence was enough to drag her back to a girl that had lived a lifetime ago. Two lifetimes, if he'd spoken it true.
I died twice, she thought. Not just once.
Fear cuts deeper than swords, Syrio told her once, but that had been a lie. Knives cut deeper than fear, and death cut deeper than either. Fear was nothing.
She grit her teeth against it. Some things were harder to think on than others, but she faced it all the same. She had to.
The scars on her stomach hadn't healed right, and she knew that as well as any. Gendry had seen it, and Jorah Mormont – the one who'd taken slaves and died. He had seen it too. Everyone who'd seen those marks had known it. Hells, she had. How else had she survived the waif, if not for magic? How else had she bested her trainer, a warrior, while she had wounds sprawled across her insides?
No, it made sense she'd died. What didn't make sense was this.
"Tried… kill me." Somehow, miraculously, she didn't cough. It might have made her smile, if not for the fact that her cheeks were screaming like wolves in the night.
"A man did not try," he told her, happily. A man succeeded. "But a girl has repaid her debt. Only death can pay for life, and many have returned to their deaths. It seems a high price needs paying."
For some reason she would never know, his words made her heart ache. She had to force the words through her teeth, but they came all the same. "You'll stay?"
Jaqen smiled. The same soft smile he'd given her when she'd killed the thin man, after her eyes had been returned to her. She'd been desperate to please him, desperate to hold onto color and light and the sight of candles waving in the wind. For a year after, he could have asked her to kill anyone in the world, and she'd have done it.
Not Jon, she told herself, but she knew it was a lie. She'd killed the Night King, and he was a Stark. What made Jon any different? What made anyone any different?
Kinslayer. Monster.
Jaqen inched away, leaving Kingslayer's sheath laying over her legs as he gazed over the blade. "A man has duties," he told her. Talking to Jaqen always made her feel like a child, but never more than now. He'd said the same thing to her, before the Hound, before the Wedding, before even the Brotherhood. She should have gone with him then. At least then she could have skipped the horror and gone to her death with open arms. Maybe they wouldn't have dragged her back if she had.
But if she'd died then, the world would have died with her.
Valar morghulis, she thought, and she had never hated herself more.
He must have seen something on her face, for he cocked his head and said, "There is always a place for you in the House of Black and White."
And it seemed little had changed for her. Just as she had then, she wanted to go with him. Wanted to hide behind the faces, beneath the earth. Wanted to cower in her cell, where the light did not reach, and she wanted to be no one again. She should never have left. It was easier when she was no one. Edmure Tully wouldn't look at her like a hero, wouldn't lie about her mother and her brother and how proud they would be. Jon wouldn't have been so sad if he didn't know she'd survived, didn't know that she was hurting. Sansa wouldn't have to worry about Arya getting in the way like she always did. Gendry wouldn't have been hurt over her.
But that was then. Those prices had been paid, and now they knew. They had seen her alive. They knew she'd lived. And if they lost her, it would be another missing Stark, and she could not do that to them again. Jon would miss her, and Gendry, and all the rest. She couldn't just disappear.
And besides…
"Done..." she told him. Done hurting people. Done killing people. Done dishonoring herself in the eyes of her father. Done ruining other people's lives just so she could make it through another day. She'd said the same with Lady Crane, but she'd gone back on her word within the hour. She'd gone on with her List, and Winterfell had fallen, and the Eyrie, and the Riverlands, and so many more. Because of her. Her stupid choices, her stupid vengeance, her stupid stupid!
She did not say a single word of it, but Jaqen always knew. "Not every servant need be a Faceless Man."
"What?"
He smiled again, and somehow, she knew that he would not answer. Not unless she went with him. He set Kingslayer back in her sheath with a movement so quick and so quiet, she nearly missed it. "If a girl ever needs a favor from the Many-Faced God, His servants will always serve His champion. Especially one with more courage than sense."
In spite of herself, she smiled. A small smile, but it was more true than she had worn in weeks. "You'll let me go?"
He tilted his head, like Bran did sometimes, whenever he flew into her room to roost on her knee. "Will a girl speak our secrets?" She shook her head, and he smiled in turn. "Then a man sees no trouble. Farewell, Arya Stark, Bringer of Dawn and Stealer of Faces."
"Goodbye, Jaqen." She had to force the words through her aching throat. It would kill her come morning's light, but somehow, that didn't matter. This was their goodbye, and this time, she didn't think she would ever see him again. He deserved a real one.
For all the pain he'd brought her, he'd saved her too. She'd been a sheep in Harrenhal, and he had given her shears. It was a gift she could never repay, and one she would never forget.
He smiled at her again, one final time. And then, he waved a hand over his face, and he was Jon again, and it was Jon's smile, and it was Jon saying goodbye.
She watched the door for a long while after he was gone.
When he returned, his hair was not pinned, his shoulders were bare, and his eyes did not glint with the same cruel humor. Instead, they were wild, flicking between her, Gendry, and the guards beyond the door. They never settled on a single one. His teeth were bared; his hand was on his sword. For a moment, it struck Arya as another memory from another life, when she had been fierce and strong as a wolf in the wood. She had not been so strong in a long while.
She let herself slip – if only for a moment – into a world where she really was a wolf, on four legs, instead of two. She padded through city streets, digging through mounds of snow and ice to feast on manflesh and snap at wounded cousins, as they came to lap at the bloody tears in her throat. Most of the marks had scabbed, and many healed altogether, but others still itched as they had on the day she had gotten them. They burned deeper than fur, deeper than flesh, deeper than bone. No matter how she bit at the ones on her paw, and no matter how much she scratched at the ones at her neck, it never stopped. Eventually, it drove her away, back into the flesh where the burns were fire instead of scratches, and the fire was numbed by creams and potions and poisons.
"Are you alright?" Jon asked her in the common tongue.
She could not bear to answer him, but with a nod.
Sansa came into the room next, and the Dragon Queen after her. Both seemed to sigh when they noticed her, and she could not, for the life of her, say why.
At her side, Gendry startled awake. That made sense. It had been hours since Jaqen had left and she found the thin metal rod at his throat. It had been no longer than her fingernail and no thicker than a few scattered pages, and the poison inside would have only kept him asleep for as long as Jaqen willed it. He lunged for his hammer as Arya sat unmoving and unyielding. That, it seemed, was all that kept him from throwing himself at Jon as he settled his tired eyes.
"Arry?" he asked her, as careful as he always was now. Soft like a featherbed and stupid as a bull. It had been days since the maester, and still, he had not left her side for a moment. If she had a voice and just a bit of her willfulness left in her, she would have sent him off to bathe. Instead, she hung her head and pretended she was young and stupid and whole again.
It was getting easier to pretend, she thought. Everything was.
"The guards said I was here," Jon said, frantic. His hand had not left his sword. Valryian steel. Arya didn't much like Valyrian steel. "Hours ago," he went on, though she had already forgotten what he'd said. "Arya, who- what did they tell you?"
Even if she could speak, she wouldn't have said. Some things were meant for her alone, and Jaqen was one. The whole of the House of Black and White was one. Gendry knew some of it, but not the rest, not the important parts. Not the killings and the poisons, the faces and the names, the blindness and the promises, the stabbings and the waif, and everything else that had happened to her since she'd boarded The Titan's Daughter.
It was hers. Her story. Her life. If Jon learned a second of it, it would hurt him more than she could bear. Worse, he would know her truly then. He would know her for a killer, a monster, an assassin. He would see her the way Daenerys Targaryen did, and Jorah Mormont had when he lay dying on his bed, and the way the maester must have.
Yet, if she meant to keep her secret from her brother, her hopes died a moment later. "We know it was a Faceless Man, Arya," her lady sister told her, angrily. Angrily.
Don't tell Sansa, she thought, idly. It would have made her laugh, if she hadn't spoken so much earlier. Now, if she tried, it would have felt like swallowing glass.
Calm as still water, she told herself, and so her face shaped. There would be no answer for Jon, for Sansa, for the Dragon Queen. No answer for any of them. Ever.
This was hers. None of them needed to know.
She looked to Jon then, and he must have seen something on her face, because he sent them all out. Sansa, and the Dragon Queen, and even Gendry, though he fought Jon with all he had. It might have made her wroth, but Jon sent him to find a bath, and Arya had never been quite so thankful.
When the door shut and the curtains ceased their swaying, Jon made his way to her bedside. This time, he did not move to muss her hair or cling to her neck, and she did not move to kill him. That can change, she thought, as she went to chew on her lip. Before she could bite down, she felt the burning, like the sting of the waif's hand against her frozen cheek. She pulled her teeth back and stared.
"There was a Faceless Man at the meeting," Jon told her, after a pause. That explained the red cuts on his throat. The thought made her uncomfortable. Who was it? The Kindly Man? The Handsome Man? The Starved? She took care not to stiffen, but she thought she might have done it anyway. "He said one was here." His gaze hardened, and she pulled back as far as the blankets would let her. "The guards said I was here."
He leaned forward, no more than an inch. Too close. It was hard to breathe when people got too close. And it was too hot and too cold and too much. Gendry could sleep on her pillow, but Gendry was Gendry. He'd been there, and he'd never gone. He'd wanted to, but he'd still fought to stay with her. He'd still followed her from the Night's Watch and Harrenhal and he'd even followed her when the Hound called her Arya Stark and damned them to capture. He could have gone at any time, but he'd stayed. Him and Hot Pie. She'd always thought Jon would have too.
But Hot Pie was dead, and Jon… Jon left.
She pushed back, and it was only then that he stopped. Despair was lined in every inch of his stupid face. "Arya," he said, softly, "you're safe here, little sister. You know that, right?"
She scoffed. Then, she coughed.
He went to beat at her back, the way Gendry did whenever she choked. She wasn't sure why he bothered.
When she was done, he put his head in his hands and sighed long and hard. His hair was getting longer, she noticed, and his arms smaller. Soon, he would be as skinny as she'd been, when she was a girl.
You should eat more, she wanted to tell him, but it hardly seemed like a thing he wanted to hear, and she hardly had the air to say more than a word.
"I don't know what to do," Jon told her, after a long pause. "I don't know what you need, Arya."
Nothing, she thought. Valar morghulis.
"I knew what to do with the Night King." Stick 'em with the pointy end. And die for your troubles. "I knew what to do with the Watch, and the wildlings, and, seven hells, I knew what to do with Sansa." He didn't finish, but he didn't have to. She knew what he meant. I don't know what to do with you.
Her lady mother hadn't either. Nor Father, or Septa Mordane, or Maester Lewin, or all the rest. Arya was hard to love, and harder to care for. Even the gods hadn't been enough to keep her alive.
Twice, she thought. It made her feel sick.
"I want to help you," Jon told her. She checked his eyes, his cheeks, his shaking hands. He wasn't lying. "Gods, Arya, we all do." He ran his fingers through his hair. They caught in the strands, and she could imagine him as a boy of six and ten, cursing and laughing as he tried to free his fingers so desperately. Now, she could only see him pulling free without care, solemn as a soldier. "They said-" He choked, the way she did whenever she opened her mouth to speak. "He said you had a choice, little sister. What did you-" He cut himself off.
She'd had a lot of choices in her life. She had a choice to go to Braavos. A choice to hide herself among the Night's Watch. A choice to run from Syrio. A choice to not go back, when Robb was dying, and Mother, and all the Stark men. A choice to go South, instead of North. A choice to run from Beric and Thoros and all of them. A choice to leave Harrenhal, and leave everyone else there to suffer and rot.
She'd had a lot of choices. She never chose right.
"No," she told him. It hurt to speak, but it seemed he needed to hear her more than she needed her throat. "Said… no."
It was good that she did, because it made him smile like she hadn't seen in years. Like he was a boy again, and she was a little girl who hadn't died at all, let alone twice.
She wanted to be that girl again. She wanted lots of things.
He might have hugged her, but Jon was too considerate for that. He didn't muss her hair, either. He only smiled at her, that great beaming smile that nearly warmed the parts of her that had frozen over. Almost.
They sat for a while, Jon cheerful and Arya not, while the others waited outside the door for some sign that they could enter. If they waited at all. In truth, they had probably left the first chance they'd gotten. It's what they should have done.
She could not say how long they sat there. The sheets on the windows were too dark to trace the path of the moon in the sky, or the angle of the stars. For all she knew, they might have sat there for a minute or an hour. For all she knew, they sat until Jaqen returned to Braavos, patiently waiting for her to change her mind.
Arya didn't mind. Jon was happy. If she had to suffer death a thousand times, she would, if only to make him smile.
And perhaps it was a fit of madness that drove her. Some smothered mercy sheltered beneath all the death and pain and ice that fought its way to the surface, if only for a moment. Just long enough that she set her left hand over his right. Just long enough that she did not flinch.
"Home," she told him, though the word sent a fresh flare of agony through her flesh.
It was worth it. His smile made her smile, and, just for a moment, all the pain was gone.
"Home," he agreed, eager. "We'll go home. Sansa used to say we're stronger there. Maybe…"
He touched her arm, right above where the burns sat blue against her flesh. She had torn away the bandages one night in a fit of fury, and no one had bothered to replace them. The maester called it good. The maester was dead now. Because of her.
For once, the touch didn't hurt. Just the thought of Winterfell kept the fire ebbed.
That night, Arya slept better than she had since the battle. That night, Arya dreamed. That night, Arya healed.
A/N: And a solemn farewell to Jaqen H'ghar, the mysterious friend that's definitely not a friend in the show, but absolutely cool in the books (if any of you are under the assumption I'm not waiting for Winds solely to learn more about Jaqen and the other Faceless, you are mistaken). It's a complicated friendship, but it's still sad for Arya to see him go, and I clearly have absolutely no pity or remorse in any way.
Jon's also incredibly concerned about his little sister, so it's nice to give him a bit of a moment with her. Even if she's not really all there and largely disassociating the whole way through. Fun!
Anyway, slight bit of a time skip before we check in on the Queen Who Knelt. Everyone's getting some extra sleep between steps as we finish off Arya's main arc. After next chapter, there will probably be one or two more Arya-centric scene in the series, as we begin to focus in on Jon and Dany.