The false Aegon had demanded that every person presently attending court wait upon him in the throne room of the Red Keep; and from her customary position before the stairs, the place seemed to Arya to veritably simmer with people; their brightly-coloured silks, velvets and brocades melting brilliantly into the red limestone; the grey and black austerity brought by Sansa and her Northerners swirling into the cracks between them like mortar.

More than an hour before the appointed time, when Queen Daenerys and Tyrion had been the only small council members already seated, people had already begun to flood into the throne room to await the king's arrival; and Arya had stood at guard two feet behind the pair of them, not even trying to avoid listening to their conversation. A Faceless Man could not tell himself to stop his ears, not even when he had been commanded to un-become what he was.

'They're not going to be happy about this,' Tyrion had said.

'If you'd held your tongue and not tried to be clever, this wouldn't even be necessary,' Queen Daenerys had snapped.

Tyrion had shaken his head at that.

'The strategy adopted by you and Aegon was a weak one. I told both of you as much before I left. This strife has been coming for a long time; for long before I returned to Westeros, if I have judged the situation correctly – '

The Queen had coloured, and had not replied.

'– and I can assure you that if last night's brawl had not been caused by me, it would almost certainly have been caused by somebody else. Somebody far less tactful, probably, and then we might have been in real trouble.'

'Forgive me if I remain unimpressed by the timing of your wit, Tyrion. You should be thanking the gods that no one died.'

Tyrion had smiled at that, and his reply had been made with genuine affection.

'Then you are forgiven, my queen.'

Queen Daenerys had continued to scold him, then, though something in her eyes seemed lighter.

Soon after this exchange, a large contingent of gold cloaks and black cloaks had entered the hall, and had positioned themselves in a thoroughly intimidating fashion, around the entire perimeter of the room. They, like the Kingsguard, were to wait for the signal from Ser Barristan, just as the king had commanded earlier that morning, and were to allow nobody to leave the hall until such time as the thing was done. Arya thought that wonderfully practical, but expected that the sight of all those guards would have the effect of making people less inclined to attend court than they would normally be, even if the king had commanded it.

The courtiers, however, had continued to flock to the hall and to chatter away regardless; their eyes consigning soldiers of the lower orders to the same status as cheap carpets beneath their feet. Only those nobles who had fought in the war seemed to show the slightest concern at the heavy military presence, and it was only when Aegon entered and took up his place on the Iron Throne that silence truly fell, and anything resembling anticipation began to truly permeate the air.

Arya took up her place at the foot of the stairs before the throne; her eyes slowly and systematically scanning the hall, before coming to rest on Jaime Lannister; the man who had looked inside her.

She glanced briefly and bitterly over her shoulder at Queen Daenerys.

This is all her fault, she thought, this confusion and this effort and this being and not being. All her fault. All her mercy.

Being either Arya or No one thanks to Daenerys' efforts: that, she might have called mercy. Fluctuating between the two like a lunar eclipse half-frozen in the sky so that Her Grace might feel better about herself…Arya had no idea what one might call that, but as she turned away from the throne, her eyes flickered once again to the place where they should not be.

Jaime was standing in the first gallery reserved always for members of the Great Houses; his eyes bright, but bored; his presence almost violently powerful despite how he had changed, and why. Arya had never cared much for beauty, it having been impressed upon her at an early age that it was something she would never possess, but even as a little barbarian of eleven concerned with nothing but the prospect of future glory, she had (grudgingly) been forced to acknowledge that Jaime Lannister was a very handsome man (though apparently incapable of getting a haircut); tall, golden, jewel-like and almost hauntingly beautiful; like the knights in the songs that fought in battles and lived for hundreds of years. Now, his beard did little to conceal the fact that thin scars traversed his entire face like lines on a map. His hair was a tangled mop of premature silver and grey, his eyes were wide and sleepless, and he had lost a tremendous amount of weight; as though his torturers had deliberately (and vainly) set out to destroy the lightning strike and flame of what his presence did each time he walked into a room.

Arya almost snorted aloud. Using knives and instruments to torture a man was so primitive.

Jaime sensed her gaze, and met her eyes with his. She kept her face cold as stone. But there was a hurricane in her blood that her will could not quiet, and that made her chest feel too living; the hurricane that had come to her when she had seen the mirror image of her own grief inside him, after years of imagining herself to be completely alone. The rush in her blood as the realisation had gripped her had been its own kind of ecstatic, extraordinary, enthralling relief. Until the moment that he had looked as deeply into her as she had looked into him, and her relief had been replaced by terror.

It had been her masters' solemn command that she tell no one of it, and she had certainly preferred it that way…though sometimes, with Tyrion, or the queen…and last night, with Jaime, she had thought…

No. She had not thought. She did not want to think. She could not. She would purge the entire episode from her own memory if such a thing were possible; not because she was ashamed of it – she would never be ashamed of it – but because the things it did to her mind and her body were…

The threat of it was everywhere, hidden in the mundane and the everyday. Her blood would freeze in her veins if she heard a voice with the same illuminations and darknesses that his had had; the same awkwardness around certain syllables; the same glorious voluptuousness around others that characterised the speech of all Lorathi who spoke the Common Tongue. Sometimes in the dark, she had felt enveloped by his voice; as though it were a thing of flesh and blood. But the worst thing of all was the way that she could no longer endure the sight of hazel eyes; a common torture; a frequent one; because all that she would see in the colour that she had once loved were Jaqen's eyes: wide open, lightless, lifeless.

The memory of him was her weakness and her vulnerability; the one thing, the only thing, that could paralyse her where she stood, and neither Arya Stark nor No one could afford to be paralysed, not even for an instant.

The fear of Jaime, and of what he had seen, had kept her awake all night; and for several hours, she had toyed with the idea of simply going to his chambers and killing him. It would be an easy execution. She had fifty different poisons in her brown leather case; half of which could easily get it done before morning.

Then her heart had slowed, and her breath had levelled, and she had realised that protection lay in the place that Queen Daenerys had wished out of existence. She would simply have to become No one, entirely and completely, if the need ever arose to speak to him again. Forgetting about Arya would be to forget the thing that he had seen inside her. Forgetting about Arya would ensure that he would never see it again.

The herald was calling for silence, the courtiers were eagerly obeying, and in her mind's eye Arya saw Aegon sitting upright on the Iron Throne behind her; staring his lords down like the three-headed dragon that decorated his doublet; the gold of his crown glinting impressively against his silver hair; the royal brows furrowed in power and wrath.

There must be something wrong with me, Arya thought, most women in the kingdoms would kill to have such a man inappropriately propositioning them.

'House Targaryen did not win the Seven Kingdoms back from the line of the Usurper so that chaos and division should continue to reign – so that North and South should continue to be at each other's throats until the end of time,' Aegon declared, his tone formidable and his displeasure evident, 'we won these kingdoms back to create a Golden Age the likes of which this world has never seen; a Golden Age won in the currency of peace, in which all men might be brothers. When my queen and I first began to move together across Westeros, we saw a realm so torn up by war that it resembled the carcass of a living thing. The land breathed still, and so did its people, but only barely. We undertook to bring relief, and to bring peace; to bring tolerance and understanding; and in all our dealings, to obliterate hatred, and the desire for vengeance.'

There was complete silence in the hall; expectant and discomforted.

'We named equal numbers of Northerners and Southerners to prominent positions in government, in the name of learning to work together,' Aegon promptly continued, 'we did the same with relief efforts sent out to those areas worst affected by the war. We encouraged fostership between North and South so that we might learn to understand one another through our children. We welcomed this effort and this noble goal.'

Feet had begun to shuffle throughout the hall, and faces to turn red with anger, and still Aegon continued, the force of his voice growing greater, and enraged:

'We welcomed this effort, and this noble goal,' Aegon half-spoke, half-spat, 'this attempt to bring peace to our land, and it was assumed that the lords and ladies of Westeros; being sensible, educated beings capable of appreciating the general undesirability of war, would undertake to welcome it too; to listen to each other in the spirit of goodwill and reconciliation despite the horrors and injustices of the past; and to settle their grievances in council before the Iron Throne, as civilised human beings, rather than on some muddy field already so saturated in blood that it would hardly bear any more of it. And yet what have we found, over the past year? Northerners slaughtered in the Westerlands for no better reason than their origins; Southerners stoned to death at White Harbour for similar reasons. We have seen farms burned, women raped and men killed on both sides for the most tragic and ludicrous reasons; we have seen maesters killed for treating the wounded; we have seen half the orchards in the Reach set on fire and the defacement of almost every weirwood tree from the Red Fork to the Wall. We have not seen a sovereign realm, my lords and ladies. We have seen a realm in anarchy. And too many times in court – far too many times – I have heard 'low birth' blamed for this: the peasantry, the poor…even 'the minor nobility,' from the more obnoxious of you. I have seen the guilty laying responsibility for these atrocities at the doors of the guilty and the innocent alike, and I answer you, my lords and ladies, that none are responsible for this but you yourselves. These are your people, and your lands, and you are answerable both for your people's behaviour and for their welfare. This division, this chaos, this willingness to draw both swords and blood in retribution for the pettiest of insults or imagined slanders, that last night saw a common brawl at a welcoming feast, in the great hall of the Red Keep, the seat of all power in our kingdoms – this strife, this lunacy, has to stop. By all the gods, have you no shame at all? Have you no notion of self-control? I declare that you have made my queen and I feel quite foolish. In the past year, we have expected you and trusted you to embrace goodwill and reconciliation, thinking it to be the dearest wish of all thinking and feeling human beings after a decade of bloodshed and slaughter…but last night, when we saw swords drawn in the presence of the king and queen; fighting in the hall and surrounds; the threatening of ladies of gentle birth and of old men and women incapable of defending themselves; the injury of fifteen black cloaks, three Kingsguard and a half-complement of gold cloaks, all because of some ridiculous jape uttered by an unusually verbose person, now near me…when my queen and I observed this last night, we realised, once and for all, that none of you can be trusted to keep the peace at court, leave alone in your own lands. We have therefore determined that we shall have to stand over you and hold your hands like children, since you have all proven to be children in mind. This realm desires peace. This realm demands peace, and by all the gods, it will have peace, one way or another. Ser Jaime Lannister and Lady Sansa Baratheon, step forward.'

The crowd was terrifyingly and deathly silent now, and remained so under the threat of Aegon's glare as Jaime and Sansa made their way to the foot of the stairs; mutual hatred; North and South; history; glimmering like a sheet of ruddy metal between them. Aegon regally stared them down. Arya simply looked at them; Sansa, whom she no longer knew, standing directly and unseeingly in front of her; Jaime, whom she could no longer know, slightly further away; his presence making her uncomfortable.

'Together,' the false king said, 'the pair of you control a more sizeable portion of my kingdom that I am comfortable with. I congratulate you on it.'

The courtiers, relieved to have something to chortle about after the stern severity of Aegon's lengthy discourse, dutifully roared with laughter.

'In that light,' Aegon frostily declared, 'I am delighted to announce that you are to be joined together as husband and wife in the sight of gods and men, in the hope that your union, and your progeny, will bridge the gap between North and South, and usher in the peace that we have craved so desperately.'

There was a brief silence; then an equally brief realisation; then pandemonium as the full implications of Aegon's words crashed into the mind and voice of the crowd and drove it into chaos.

The colour in each high individual pane of glass seemed suddenly to become too much for it; squirming and writhing in agony, and screaming out in the voices of the undead. A wall of sound thundered in the very stones as roars of protest from every part of the hall made the slabs beneath their feet quake, and fires normally kept dead in court reignite with both spontaneity and arson. Fathers restrained sons from seeking out old enemies and attacking them where they stood; mothers held their daughters to them and tried to stop their ears, even as septas did the same with their charges. In the cacophony Arya heard pleas, threats, tears, prayers, and memories; every person that had lost his or her life during the war seeming to rise like a ghost from mass graves; sepulchres; ditches on the side of the road; rivers; oceans and vast deserts full of ashes to scream into the ears of the living and to rip their hearing from them. Scuffles began to break out, and small charges made towards the doors. Arya and her brothers turned their heads towards Ser Barristan; their hands on their weapons. He nodded grimly. And across the hall, innumerable swords were drawn from the belts and scabbards of gold cloaks, black cloaks and Kingsguard alike; murdering pandemonium and muzzling its voice.

The silence was instantaneous. Swords wedded to their bodies were like a glowing wall of knives. And Arya heard Aegon leaning back in his ugly iron chair; triumph heavy in his voice as he spoke.

'Does anyone wish to protest?'

Arya gripped her sword too hard to wield it. She heard the still births of a thousand words in the air; a thousand utterances retracted before they became sounds.

Is this what peace sounds like? Arya thought.

Her sister was glaring upwards at the throne; her face beautiful and pale in its fury. And Ser Jaime was glaring into his own past; paying no attention to the woman beside him.

Since Jaime's dismissal from the Kingsguard, he had been strictly forbidden from ever setting foot inside the white sword tower again. At the time, he had found this hugely funny in an excruciatingly bitter sort of way: 'they think dismissal from a building is enough to unmake a fucking Kingsguard?' he had thought, 'What are they going to do? Change the locks? Put a sign on the door?'

Intriguing as the notion had been, he had never attempted to see what measures might have been put in place to keep him out. He had always imagined that they would have done something: he was, after all, the madman who had led thousands of men into battle against three bloody dragons. And yet tonight, when the fingers of his left hand fastened around the door handle, the white door opened easily and noiselessly, and he felt his heart sinking at the sight of the moonlight that flooded the white rooms and turned the view of the sea silver.

I'm not a threat anymore, he realised bitterly, I'm a fucking pawn.

I've become smaller.

I've waned.

Twenty years ago, nobody would have dared drag him before the Iron Throne and command him, as though he were a child, to marry, and sacrifice, and do his duty. Twenty years ago, people had still been fucking terrified of him, and the name of Lannister had still commanded respect.

Not that he hadn't given it a reasonably good fight, under the circumstances. Lady Sansa too, for that matter. Once King Aegon had grown tired of his own theatrics, he had sent directly for the marriage contract, which was duly brought before him along with a writing table and ink, and shoved beneath their noses with the entire court still in attendance. Lady Sansa and Jaime had stood facing each other and hating each other along with the lords of both their realms; refusing to comply, refusing to listen, and refusing to do so much as speak. King Aegon had shrugged courteously in the face of their disobedience and had commanded his Kingsguard to cut both their heads off, and to bring forward the next in line to their respective titles, to be betrothed in their stead.

'Though do try not to get blood on the marriage contract,' Aegon had said, 'the parchment is from Volantis.'

Jaime had taken one look at the blatant eagerness on Ser Barristan's face, and Lady Sansa at the appalling pallour of her sister's, and they had both acquiesced in simultaneous compliance and fury; Jaime's signature an untidy scrawl; Lady Sansa's tearing a hole in the paper.

The world had erupted into colourful, screeching noise around him, and he had thought of Brienne, and felt sick.

But tonight, the world around him was white and blue; the colours of familiarity, and of a glorious past that made his future seem all the more terrible.

He passed the council table and climbed the stairs to the sleeping cells; the white stones familiar beneath his feet and the darkness thick with the snores of whichever lowborns and ingrates and overconfident little tulips were not on duty tonight. But there was a light burning in the gap beneath the door of the cell that had once been his, and he knew, instinctively, that that was the one he had come here to knock on.

The door opened slowly, but immediately, and Arya blinked composedly at him with wide grey eyes; her face calm as the surface of a lake. She was dressed in plain woollen breeches and a shirt of foreign design cut rather lower than conventional Westerosi modesty dictated; and though her hair looked like she hadn't put a comb to it in weeks, his presence did not inspire her to try to fix it.

A freak among women.

'You're still up,' Jaime ventured.

'I've woken up,' Arya quietly responded, 'I'm going to the dragon pit.'

It took a moment for that to sink in.

'The dragon pit?' Jaime repeated.

'The dragons are fed every night at the hour of the owl,' she told him, 'they can't get through the night without eating.'

The conversation petered abruptly away, and the girl leaned awkwardly against the doorframe, waiting for him to speak further.

He said nothing.

'What is it?' Arya asked.

'I wish to speak to you,' Jaime replied.

'Why?'

When he answered the question with a nonchalant shrug; she sighed deeply, stepped out of the room and pulled the door closed behind her; not looking at him.

'You'll have to walk down with me,' she said, 'I can't stop now.'

Jaime had no desire to go within a hundred miles of those monsters again, but he wasn't about to tell her that. So they walked down to the dragon pit in silence; every step seeming to scream at him like thousands of men, and women, and children as they slowly burned alive. The further they walked, the louder the screams became, and as Jaime's mind and body frantically urged him to retreat rather than to go forward; he ground his teeth, cursed himself and kept walking; glancing intermittently at the girl beside him in the hope that she might give him something else to think about.

No assistance was forthcoming. Her face was grim, impenetrable and lifeless; locked in perpetual indifference.

They walked down staircase upon staircase, they passed through guarded doors and gates and arches, and when they finally reached the great doors of the dragon pit, Arya placed her hand firmly over the keyhole and stepped back as the doors rasped open with a rattle of chains and a harsh groaning of stone on stone.

The dragon pit was a dark, crude, cavernous, arena-like hole in the ground that Lord Varys had 'discovered' shortly after the conquest. It was possible to walk sideways for a hundred feet or more, and impossible to walk forwards for more than ten; thus providing plenty of room for running for one's life and as little room as possible for unwittingly falling into the pit itself. It was a primitive, but very effective resting place for Queen Daenerys' monsters while their true home, the great dome on Rhaenys' hill that had lain ruined and vaultless and empty to the sky for centuries, was rebuilt to be greater than its predecessor had ever been. 'Once completed,' King Aegon had apparently declared, 'its bronze doors will stand open again for the first time in a century, so that all the world may flock to this city and see the might of House Targaryen for themselves.'

Jaime shuddered at the thought as he approached the edge of the pit and peered into it. The dragons looked upwards at him in eerie unison, and as Arya greeted them in High Valyrian from a place beyond his vision, all three began to growl; their eyes glowing in the half dark.

'Come away from the edge!' Arya barked.

Jaime didn't need to be told twice (why the fuck did I come here?), and retreated as far back as was possible without actually leaving the room. A faint light was shining from a large, rectangular gap in the floor some five feet to the left of him, and it was in this direction that Arya moved; continuing to jabber away in High Valyrian as though the bloody beasts were human beings. As she reached the gap in the floor, her fingers touched the wall above it, and fumbled slightly in the dark before closing around a chain that was almost invisible to the naked eye. She gave it a casual pull, a shrieking racket ensued, and Jaime watched the weak light before her feet dwindle, then die completely as a stone slab bearing what looked like the entire contents of a butcher's shop was brought up from the level below.

Arya removed a pair of thick leather gloves from her belt, donned them, and began the apparently-normal process of picking up dead animals, walking to the edge, and heaving them into the pit one by one. A cacophony of snarls, growls and blood-chilling screeches began to emerge from the pit, but still she continued to speak to the dragons and more than once seemed to be scolding them, without fear of death or retribution.

Still, she did not look at him.

'Why does a Kingsguard get up every night to do a servant's job?' Jaime asked.

'I'm good with animals,' Arya replied; saying nothing else.

Jaime smirked, leaned back against the wall and silently watched her work as she moved back and forth, back and forth, from the stone slab to the edge of the pit; flinging, tossing and sometimes dropping an increasingly great variety of corpses, some of them very heavy, down to the dragons in their pit below. She continued her one-sided High Valyrian conversation without the slightest trace of embarrassment, and frowned, or occasionally smiled, as the more expressive-sounding of her phrases were greeted with equally expressive snorts, shrieks and purrs that could have signified anything from grumpiness to appreciation to wrath. More than once, Jaime found himself on the point of leaping forward and pulling her away from the edge, but regardless of whatever sound the dragons made, she did not seem to share his concern. Once, he might have called it bravery. Today, he called it stupidity.

Brienne might have lived, had she only known the difference.

When she had finished, Arya removed her gloves, replaced them and sent the empty stone slab crashing back down to the level below. Only then did she favour him with her best blank stare.

'What did you want to speak to me about?' she asked.

'Your sister,' Jaime replied, in as measured a manner as he could.

'Yes, of course,' Arya acknowledged, nodding curtly and coming to stand in front of him, 'my sister. I must congratulate you.'

'Fuck your congratulations, Lady Stark,' Jaime spat, irrationally infuriated by her tone.

'Is there some point to this conversation,' Arya ventured impassively, 'or do you mean to stand here insulting me all night?'

'I'll stop insulting you the moment you start making sense!' Jaime exclaimed.

What has happened to her?

'It is traditional to offer congratulations upon the announcement of betrothals,' Arya replied, 'I thought that I was making sense.'

'So you approve of this lunacy?'

'It's not my place to approve or disapprove of it.'

'You are the lady's sister. It is usual to presume that you know her enough to approve or disapprove.'

Arya's eyes seemed to turn inward then; as though seeing herself rather than him.

'I know little of anything at all, save taking life,' she murmured, her face shifting and changing as she thought of the sister that she hardly knew at all. It made Jaime think of himself, and Tyrion; his brother who had steadfastly refused to see him since his return from Braavos.

I should have told him the truth about the girl from the beginning, Jaime thought, I should have told Father to fuck himself and stood by my brother. I was a man grown at the time. I could easily have done it.

Jaime looked at Arya again. She had remained eerily silent during his brief introspection; standing opposite him like a speechless, motionless slab of ice, and Jaime was seized by a sudden impulse to take her by the shoulders and shake some bloody life into her.

What is the matter with the girl? he thought.

Then he realised that the person that he had met the previous evening – that wild-blooded, hot and cold, easily irritated and inexplicably compassionate entity – had been a rarity; a gift; something that only emerged by accident, and very rarely by will. Most of the time, she was this. A brick wall.

No.

'You need to marry Sansa,' Arya said, confirming his suspicions.

When he did not reply, she looked frankly at him: cold, firm, lifeless.

'I can see that's not what you wanted to hear, Ser Jaime,' she observed.

'Can't I be free for once in my life?' Jaime replied, with some heat, 'haven't I earned it?'

'No living creature is ever truly free, no matter what he's 'earned," the girl smiled bitterly, 'anyone who thinks otherwise, particularly at your age, is an idiot.'

'Now you sound like my father,' Jaime snapped.

Her jaw tightened – slightly.

'You have no choice in this,' Arya continued, 'there is too much at stake. If you go back on your word now, the kingdoms will descend into anarchy, and worse. The Northerners will be relieved, but will convince themselves that they have been insulted; the South will rush to defend its honour, and we'll all be at war before the week's out.'

Wake up. I want to talk to you. Please.

'Don't be so bloody dramatic!' Jaime sneered, in as irritating a tone as he could muster.

'I'd rather be dramatic than selfish,' Arya responded, remaining aloof, 'you ought to be ashamed of yourself.'

'Ashamed of myself?' Jaime repeated in disbelief, 'selfish? Come and see what your bitch sister's ambition has done to my homeland and then we'll talk about selfish!'

The girl's lips parted. Her cheeks flushed momentarily, and for a moment, the War of Five Kings seemed to nestle ominously in every particle of her skin; threatening to explode into shards of wildfire and stone, and bring her mask crashing down.

Jaime saw the threat, and found himself holding onto it like hope.

I want to speak to the person beneath the fall of stone and wildfire. I want to speak to the person who, without having to ask me why, will understand why I cannot do this thing. Wake up. Please.

But Arya's mouth was slowly closing again; the threat was fleeing from her face; her eyes were dying; and she was looking at him disinterestedly and silently; as though his last words had not been a grievous insult to herself and to her family; as though the Arya Stark that he had spoken to last night would not have tried to slit his throat for saying such a thing.

He reached out and touched her face in the same way that she had touched his the night before: searchingly, intimately, and without embarrassment. Her expression did not change, and neither did her eyes; the mask did not crumble and the wall did not break. But the skin beneath his fingertips was scalding hot, and he could feel the shadow of her blood as it thundered in her veins.

'Wake up,' he said.

She cocked an eyebrow at him.

'I am awake.'

And I'm a fool.

He dropped his hand. A thousand insults plunged into his mind and nestled painfully on his tongue.

And yet in the end, he said nothing; stepping back from her, turning on his heel and hating himself as he walked quickly away.

Chapter notes

The first part of this chapter was inspired by a particularly badass moment in Rome season 2: can't remember which episode, though L