2
A girl breathes deeply, lungs expanding. Muscles shift, sinew stretches. The world is dark, but she walks confidently through the marketplace. Her wooden walking stick is held out slightly ahead of her, gently parting the crowd, allowing her to guide smoothly through the throng of people shouting and eating and sweating in the morning.
A girl's eyes are dark, but she sees. She remembers just weeks before, when the darkness first took her in the crypt of the Many-Faced God. She had heard stories of the blind experiencing heightened senses of hearing, of smell, of touch. But she had felt nothing but terror, a heavy fog that settled over her until there was no one else in her world, just her. Alone.
Things had changed in the weeks since. The Waif had made a special point of visiting her every day, to mock or fight or humiliate her, but no visitor had been more attentive than the fog. Centuries had passed until the fog had rolled back, and the scent of strong spices from earthenware jars had assaulted her, the ebb and flow of the traffic had pushed and pulled at her, the whores called out to from the balconies above her to passersby in the cool of the evening. Her eyes were still dark, but now she could see. And it had started with a boy.
She didn't know his name; she didn't care to. She had never even spoken to him. But she could feel the light tread of his sturdy leather boots on the cobblestones as he made his way to the blacksmith's pavilion every morning. Some mornings, she could smell the tang of the sea on his skin, and hear the rattle of his cart full of wares as he navigated the uneven alleyways. He was a blacksmith's boy, apprenticed to a Braavosian armorer. Trying to make a living off travelers who fancied themselves a warrior. Plying his trade in the hot sun, a thousand miles away and a thousand years apart from another boy just like him.
So when her eyes came back to her, when a girl was once again Arya Stark of Winterfell, she went to the market one last time. And the boy was there, standing under an awning of palm fronds, haggling coppers from a customer for a knife worth silvers.