Superbia
As she pushed her barrow along the canals, Cat would sometimes glimpse one of them floating by, on her way to an evening with some lover. Every courtesan had her own barge, and servants to pole her to her trysts.
- A Feast for Crows
She must be fair indeed, to have been worth a kingdom.
- A Feast for Crows
There are as many names for her as there are tongues spoken in the Ragman's Harbor. The Wolf's Bride. The Young Queen. The Whore o' the Westerlands. The Northern Bitch.
"They say she never takes off the crown her boy-king gave her, not even when she fucks a man."
"The say the Bitch Queen in King's Landing is the fairest woman alive, but the Bitch Queen from the North, she has the sweetest cunt in all the world, and that's why the Young Wolf ne'er gave her up."
"She has a boy by Robb Stark, squirreled in Volantis. She's waiting for him to grow into a man and while she waits, she's fucking him an army to take over the Sunset Kingdoms."
She takes lovers indiscriminately, both men and women, but she fucks them veiled, the gossipy innkeeper at the Purple tells Nym, just as the Veiled Lady was wont to. Only to her highest bidders does she ever show her face.
"Why? Is she ashamed of her face?" Nym asks.
"Could be. Or mayhap she's afraid she won't measure up to the tales."
He bangs a tankard before her. "Here's your ale, miss, just the way it's brewed up north. You're lucky I still have some left from them fur trappers that came by last moon."
Jeyne Stark's palazzo sits by the Purple Harbor, where the Braavosi ships lie moored, a hop and skip away from the Sealord's Palace. The other courtesans' palaces shimmer with fairy lights in the dusk, beckoning sore eyes and hefty purses, but hers is cold and uninviting. The undressed grey stone is as welcoming as a witch's teat, the boatman tells Nym obligingly, but then what can you except from a savage northerner?
But she's not, Nym thinks. She's never been a northerner. And her fingers curl lightly over the iron coin in her pocket.
In the antechamber, the woman's eunuch frisks Nym as a matter of course and checks her name off a list. A handmaid ushers her to the upper floor and to the lady's boudoir. It has been designed with an eye to detail - wolfskin rugs and panels of polished weirwood, a harp fashioned in the manner of those Nym remembers from her childhood and a great fire blazing in the hearth though firewood is dear in Braavos and it is spring now.
Nym brushes her fingertips against the walls, half-expecting them to be warm to the touch, like the walls of the castle she grew up in as a child. She pads over the flagstones into the next room, the bedroom itself. The walls are cased all in glass, mirrors that reflect her into infinity. This is a room that is worth its weight in gold, Nym thinks, marveling at the clarity of the glass. They show a long, thin face, a loose plait of brown hair and tired grey eyes. A woman, not young, not old, in breeches and a tunic, well-cut but not of the showiest fabrics. Well-worn boots, a well-worn face.
And in the center of the room sits the woman, the spangles in her gauze veil glittering like a firestorm when they catch the lights and the mirrors. She wears a slim band of iron about her forehead, a crown of metal thorns. She says nothing and so Nym takes the initiative and sits down, cross-legged, before her.
"Will you have something to drink?" She is not a young woman, Nym knows, but her voice is oddly girlish. Light, with a studied youthfulness, just as the manner of everything in her palace is studied. And it is her voice that sets Nym on edge, the way her slender fingers flutter nervously over the crystal goblet.
She forgets the courtly manner she has been bred to, all of the niceties that are expected in such a tete-a-tete, and says abruptly, "Your veil. We had a bargain."
"Ah. Yes." The woman's fingers flit over her veil, sliding out the pins that hold it in place as delicately as a queen at her dressing table. There are a great many of them, it seems, but finally she has it off and then she turns her face to Nym. Waves of chestnut hair, brown eyes as soft as a doe's, a pale, pretty face. There is a faint bloom on her cheek, but that might be rouge, under her eyes the delicate skin is smudged and there is the edge of strain in her face that Nym knows very well. Pretty enough for a woman past her first bloom but Nym has seen a thousand women who are fairer.
"They call you the most beautiful woman in the world."
Jeyne Stark smiles faintly, tilting her face just enough that she can see it in a mirror. "They do."
"Do you believe them?"
"How can I not?" There is no edge of mockery in Jeyne's voice as there is in Nym's, only a terrible earnestness, "I see the curse of it everyday." "The curse?" Jeyne bows her head. "It was my beauty that led to my husband's death. He could not resist me, no man can. It is why I have taken up this veil." If she was still a child, Nym would have bitten her lip in astonishment. Jeyne rises, her pale gown floating around her like a cloud of snow. "My guilt is a terrible burden to carry but I carry it with me every day of my life. Why do you think I have so many mirrors all about me? For vanity? No. Every day I look into them and the face that looks back at me is not the most beautiful one in the world to me then, but the most terrible. I see all the sins I have committed, all the deaths I have caused. It is my penance - I shame myself with my own beauty."
"Under the Green Fork, I'm sure Catelyn Stark will be happy to know that."
"She hated me." Jeyne's face twists, her pale hands pick nervously at each other. "She was the one who haggled at us to ally with the Freys when all men knew well of their treachery. My sweet love should have stayed back - she could have gone and married off her brother well enough without him." She strains her face into a semblance of normalcy but her eyes are hard and dead. Nym is reminded irresistibly of her old dreams, the wolf dream where she looked out into the twilit woods and met the eyes of the hooded woman.
"What did Robb Stark have you do with him?" Nym asks softly. "When you two were in bed together?"
Her eyes mist over and she giggles like the silly girl she used to be. That she still is, perhaps. A silly girl after all, not a monster. Perhaps even Cersei Lannister was once a silly girl. "He would play with my hair," she whispers, "when he first saw me at the Crag, when he was still sickly in bed... he liked to stroke the ends of my braid, while I spooned him gruel. Said it was the softest thing in the world. Once, as I sang for him when he was a little better, I unbound it for him though my mother would have been driven wild had she seen. And after they were all asleep, I slipped into his chamber. He held me in his arms all the night long." Her eyes shine with pride.
No, not my hair. Ned loves my hair. They tell her those were her mother's last words. Like fire, her dead mother's lovely hair, her dead sister's lovely hair. Jeyne Westerling's hair does not come close.
"Can I touch your hair?"
"If you like," Jeyne says. "It is beautiful, isn't it?"
It is a moment's work, to plait the long skein of it into a rope, to twist that rope around the woman's pale white throat and then to hold it tightly. It is a kinder death than she deserves and within a few moments, Nym is dragging the woman's light body to the bed, piled high with wolfskins. She closes the glassy eyes and over the cooling lips, she places the coin.
"My last queen," Arya, and not Nym, says and touches the woman's cheek, almost tenderly. And when your tears have drowned you, the valonqar shall wrap his hands about your pale white throat and choke the life from you. "Sleep well, Jeyne Westerling."