A forest of tents had been set up in the heart of the Kingswood; another detail on the seemingly endless list of details in which this marriage between North and South was to have every particular of the gravity, pomp and ritual of a royal wedding short of putting crowns on the couple's heads. The false Aegon believed that this would convince every man in the realm, from the richest lord to the lowliest serf, that this alliance between Stark and Lannister was a serious matter.

Arya did not quite see how spending five days killing things would convince the realm of anything of the kind, but she was certainly not going to complain about it. At the very moment that she had heard of the hunt (she had been practising at the quintain and pretending it was Ser Jaime's head when the others in the yard had begun to shout about it), she had immediately torn off to Queen Daenerys to ask her permission to participate before Aegon thought to put her on duty again.

Though Arya had found the dragon queen in the clutches of one of the foul moods that inevitably took her each time she had a disagreement with Tyrion about the link between Aegon's longevity and the instability of the political situation, Daenerys' annoyance had turned out to work in favour of Arya's suit rather than against it; and the queen had gladly given her consent on the condition that Arya remove Aegon's head from his 'boneheaded Blackfyre shoulders' and present it to her on her return.

'Do you really mean it, Your Grace?' Arya had eagerly enquired.

Daenerys had smiled at that, and had affectionately touched Arya's cheek with one tiny hand.

'Would that I did.'

That had been disappointing, as had the later announcement that the entire week's killing was to be confined to the area around an impractical kingdom of black and red tents because of Ser Jaime's distaste for hunting hard across country. But neither drawback was sufficient to make Arya take back her request to participate, and Aegon, surprisingly, made no effort to change that; not even on the first morning of the hunt, when Arya, mounted and dressed in brown leather, encountered him and a small army of lords and retainers shortly after entering the woods.

'Lady Arya,' Aegon greeted.

'Your Grace,' Arya replied, making a reverence.

'I had no idea that you were joining us,' the king observed pleasantly, 'do you hunt with us today?'

'No, Your Grace,' Arya remarked, 'I hunt alone today. I am new to the sport, and a lowly woman to boot. I would hate to burden the gentlemen of the court with my inexperience; not to mention my general unsuitability for anything much except shutting up and having babies.'

Aegon laughed in amazement, which naturally compelled his retainers to laugh too.

'Have I said something funny, Your Grace?' Arya demanded; her face turning redder than the king's preposterous crimson riding leathers.

Aegon's face fell.

'Not at all,' he stammered; looking down in embarrassment, then up again as the return of his kingly confidence caused his face to break into a courteously baffled smile, 'you have merely…there is some change in you.'

'Is there?' Arya asked blandly; 'if whatever it is offends Your Grace, I will stop it at once.'

'There is no need at all for that,' Aegon told her, 'you should keep to this new outspokenness. It's most becoming.'

Arya stared at him, and only just remembered to bow her head in acknowledgment as Aegon wished her good hunting and rode off into the woods with his men. She briefly considered what he had said, decided that she did not want to think about it, and cantered off in the opposite direction; to a part of the wood that she sincerely hoped would remain idiot-free for the rest of the day.

The Kingswood reminded her of the surface of a lake during a rainstorm. The air was grey, and without sun, and if she half-closed her eyes and let that half-vision consume her, she might have believed herself in the wolfswood during the long summer; the trees above her mightier than the vault of the greatest sept, and the Northern sky above that like iron: hard and everlasting.

Her memories of the North were beginning to fade now. She had only been a child when she had left it, and a child who had not yet learnt how to see. Every time that she saw a sky of iron grey, the North would be reflected in it for fewer and fewer seconds, before the mist and the greyness would become the suffocating humidity and rain of Braavos; of the hundred islands that had been her home for far longer than the place of her people; her true people. No self-respecting Northerner – or Westerosi, for that matter – would dream of going hunting without a spear. And yet here she was, a daughter of Eddard Stark, mounted and armed with nothing but a bow, a quiver of arrows and two daggers, like some lily-livered Lyseni on a parade ground.

A crunching and crackling of leaves and earth from the depths of the trees before her chased the North from her thoughts, and she drew her bow with a rustle of nothingness; the wind that sent sound in her direction leading the absence of sound back to whatever was thrashing around in the bushes and making a spectacle of itself. It was almost disappointing; finding game so early in the day.

A wild boar piglet emerged from the undergrowth some twenty feet ahead of her; its snout, and all its attention, kept low to the ground as it tottered jauntily about in search of nuts.

As Arya slowly nocked her arrow to the drawstring, she felt something rising in her blood and her heart; something that was her, and that was not her, and that she had scarcely felt at all since the day that the queen had commanded her to become Someone; but that she would always recognise, and that she would always obey whenever she felt the beginnings of its howling within her. It was the feeling of soil, and moisture, and leaves beneath her feet. It was creating life in taking life. It was hunting in a pack with her brothers and her sisters. It was the chase. It was wolf blood.

Quick as a cat, Arya lowered her bow, and whistled.

The boar gave a hair-raising squeal of surprise and charged off into the trees as though all seven hells were at its heels; Arya spurred her horse into a gallop, and charged after it; and somewhere in a corner of her thinking self, she knew that she was being an idiot; that she should probably have waited, and stayed quiet, and killed the thrice-damned thing and gotten out of the way. But a good half of the feeling part of her didn't care if she caught up to her prey or not, because the chase was more important than any of that.

But no boar in existence could outrun a horse, and she caught up to her prey far too soon for the chase to feel like much at all; dispatching the boar with three arrows that pierced its flesh; sending wide, crimson strips of gore splattering onto the animal's hide like mud as it keeled over and lay still like a log rolling down a river bank. Arya dismounted, sat on her haunches beside the boar, and yanked each of her arrows out one by one; her senses prickling as more blood spilled onto the ground and the toes of her boots.

The piercing shriek and the powerful blow to her back that followed came bellowing out of nowhere, and no sooner had she rolled to face her attacker; ripping both her daggers from their sheaths at her waist, that the world capsized in a commotion of green leaves, grey sky and brute strength as she was knocked hard onto her back by an enormous sow, easily five times the size of the small boar she had killed. The beast was heavy, but far faster than its size suggested. It seemed to dance through the arc of her daggers as she tried to thrust them into its flesh; its open mouth revealing large tusks that fastened tightly around Arya's right arm and punctured her skin like carving knives piercing a pin cushion; even as she plunged one dagger into the boar's mouth and used the other to cut its throat; drenching her clothing in its blood and hers.

The screaming, volcanic pain that erupted in her arm as she shoved the corpse away from her almost made her retch. Tears of pain defaced her view of the wood around her, and a boiling, nauseating mist silently and brutally invaded her mind as she sat up, stripped off her doublet and found her shirt drenched in crimson blood that streamed in aching rivers and smoked gruesomely in the cold air. The wound, when she found it beneath the (miraculously intact) sleeve of her shirt, was so utterly inundated by strips of lacerated and rapidly bleeding skin that she could not find the exact place where the boar's tusks had pierced her flesh at all, and her blood once again clouded her vision; turning her skin cold and making her tremble so badly that she was overtaken by the desire to simply fall over and go to sleep.

Get up, she told herself, stand up.

Her eyes closed, and opened again, and time might have passed, or perhaps it hadn't, and she was wandering alone in the wood without her horse; her belt knotted, with an excruciating tightness, above what she thought was the wound; and she'd somehow managed to put her doublet back on again; the clasps done up to her chin. She screwed up her eyes and tried to remember why, and when, but the pain only seemed to grow worse each time she tried; her blood turning to wine in her veins – wine, there was a wineskin, a wineskin on my saddle, I tried to drink wine so I wouldn't…but I didn't – and she began to cast about her in panic, and she knew that she was looking in the wrong places, the ground, the trees, but she couldn't stop herself – where's my quiver; my daggers – the trees were rearing up around her and turning to people like the pain that was rearing up inside her like a glacier and slowly killing her; she was facing her father from the top of a flight of stairs and trying to stand on one toe – Syrio says every hurt is a lesson and every lesson makes you better…watching is not seeing, dead girl; the seeing, the true seeing, that is the true heart of swordplay… Arya child, we are done with dancing for the day…what do we say to the god of death…

She could feel the earth beneath her hands now; one hand curling into it; the other spasming and shrieking and bellowing out in pain, and more blood coming as she continued to put her weight on it when she crawled. She closed her eyes, she could barely see, and closing her eyes seemed somehow to make it better…

'Arya?'

She opened her eyes and looked up; her right arm propping her up; her left twitching and flailing from the pain, and the trees were disappearing, and the people and the voices who had come out of them, the tree voices.

Jaime was standing not five feet away from her with his squire; leaning against his horse and enthusiastically drinking the contents of a wineskin, which he now dropped in astonishment as he took in her appearance.

'Seven hells, Arya!'

'It's not my blood, most of it,' Arya mumbled, 'it's some…fucking…'

Jaime darted forward and caught her as she collapsed.

'Don't just stand there, boy!' he barked at his squire, 'take hold of her other arm!'

The pain in her body struck her blind once more as the squire hurriedly obeyed and helped his master to ease her into a sitting position; her head drooping and lolling gracelessly, and eventually coming to rest against Jaime's chest as he shouted for wine; the leather of his doublet feeling cool against her cheek and the blood flow from the wound increasing severely and beautifully when she felt Jaime's body encircling hers like a suit of protective flesh and blood. She felt his fingers put the wineskin to her lips and force her mouth open, and the liquid choked her as she swallowed it and took hold of the skin with her left hand and choked some more; the wine like life in her mouth and her body; clearing her mind; dulling it.

'Let me see,' she heard Jaime snap at her as he prised the wineskin from her hands.

A subsequent yelp of surprise from somewhere to her left told her that he'd thrown it at his squire, and the blood rushed out of her in another great wave as the fingers of Jaime's hand began to deftly undo the clasps of her doublet.

'Do you intend on helping me with this, boy?' Arya heard him ask his squire.

'My lord, I cannot –' the boy stammered, 'it hardly seems proper to –'

'Oh for fuck's sake, have you never seen a woman's throat before?'

'No, my lord.'

That made Arya want to laugh. But her strength was bleeding from her like water bubbling from a spring, and when Jaime slowly peeled the leather of her doublet and the sleeve of her shirt away from her skin; his hands working with a gentleness that she would not have expected from him; the sudden shock of cold air seemed to wed seamlessly to the boiling pain; making it so deep that she could hardly move. She opened her eyes.

'A boar?' Jaime asked.

'Yes,' Arya replied.

'Pain?'

'Minimal.'

'Gods, but you're a stubborn little idiot.'

'Fuck yourself, Jaime.'

'Boy!'

The squire jumped about a foot in the air as Jaime's fingers fastened firmly around the wound.

'Yes, my lord?'

'Ride back to camp and fetch a maester for the Lady Arya.'

'Yes, my lord.'

'Quick about it!'

The squire disappeared from Arya's vision, and with the sound of departing horse hooves, the pain returned; a searing agony caused by nothing more than a few stupid, bleeding lacerations on her arm. She closed her eyes and tried to breathe evenly; to concentrate on the heart of the pain; to be present in it and so defeat it; as she had been taught to do. But she could feel her mouth twitching, and her fingers, and her toes; and she felt weak; so utterly weak and helpless; like the little girl who had been a runaway, and a hostage, and a prisoner; until namelessness and facelessness had freed her. She called out to both of them, and summoned her mask to protect her; to stop her from being that person again. But some parts of her face opened up as others closed; No one fragmenting and dying like a smashed mosaic under the weight of the pain that throbbed appallingly in every part of her body and made her squirm unconsciously in Jaime's arms; as though she were lying on a bed of needles.

'Stop that,' Jaime told her.

'Stop what?' she murmured in response.

'Whatever it is you're trying to do with your face. Stop it.'

Arya glared up at him; fully intending to tell him that she'd do whatever she pleased with her own face. But Jaime's own, when it met her eyes, was so pale that he might have passed for a Northerner, and his voice, when he spoke, was hollow and unsettled; as though he were afraid to speak, but incapable of remaining silent.

'What has happened to you?' Jaime asked softly, 'how did you end up this way?'

She looked away from him, and tried to answer blandly.

'My training –'

'I'm not talking about your training.'

She knew that, and she feared knowing it.

Tell no one, her masters had said, tell no one, or it will be the worse for you.

But she could feel it there: in him, and in her; the thing that had gone away; and she could feel herself as she was now: half Faceless Man, half human, trapped by Daenerys' mercy. And he seemed to understand both of them; even though she had never spoken to him about either. And knowing that didn't hurt.

'When I first became…when I…when I first…when I entered the queen's service,' Arya began – tried to begin, 'it was as a Faceless Man. As No one. My masters sent me to her as a gift –'

'As a gift?' Jaime repeated; the concept seeming to horrify him.

'A – a token, if you will,' Arya corrected, 'a sign of support for her cause. She accepted me, but…but that wasn't enough for… she told me that if I was to enter her service, I would have to remember who I was, because her… her sensibilities would not permit her to be guarded by somebody called No one. I agreed, but…I just didn't know that she would devote the next few months to making me remember everything about myself. She thought she could change me back just by talking to me. She wanted to 'save' me.'

Jaime grunted in impatience.

'She got it half-right,' Arya went on, 'and it was an amateurish job to say the least.' "Remember who you are, Arya."

She paused, and remembered.

'I love Daenerys,' she said, 'truly, I do, but…she had no idea that remembering is the single cruellest thing you can ask a Faceless Man to do.'

She looked up at Jaime. His face was asking her why. She felt the sound of his pulse. She felt the grief within it. And she knew that he would understand.

'Shedding every last inch of yourself isn't something you do out of a desire to serve God. Neither is devoting your life to the service of death. Nobody willingly comes to the House of Black and White. We all stumble through its doors…by chance, by accident…and we stay, because we have nowhere else to go. Because we're scared. Because we're all running. From hunger, from heartbreak, from death.…from ourselves if we can't find anything else. When we finally lose ourselves – and we're devastatingly well-trained in losing ourselves – it's almost a relief. A rebirth. Everything that makes you who you are…pain, memory, anger….gone. Nothing exists anymore but you, and the lives you take. It's the most exquisite nothingness; the best escape that exists. And Daenerys, well…her actions took that away. Not completely, but…enough.'

Arya's breath caught in her throat, and her eyes screwed up tightly as another wave of pain took her; her own body so perfectly trained to obey that it rebelled against the desire of her own mouth to open up and speak. She forced herself to continue; the pain blinding her as she felt Jaime's arms tighten around her.

'When I was ten,' she mumbled; her head nestling against his chest, 'I met a Faceless Man…on the road North, and then while I was serving as your father's cupbearer, at Harrenhal.'

'At Harrenhal?' Jaime exclaimed.

'Yes,' Arya replied, 'but he didn't know who I was, he…he saved…I wanted to kill him, but I –'

'You served my father at Harrenhal?' Jaime repeated in disbelief.

'Yes,' Arya repeated back at him, 'terrifying old bastard, too; though I wasn't scared of him.'

'Is that…is that why you –'

'What?'

Jaime paused.

'Is that why you touched my cheek?' he asked eventually, 'on the night that we met?'

'Yes,' Arya stammered, blushing, 'you have the same jaw. But that's besides the point. When I was your father's cupbearer at Harrenhal, this Faceless Man – his name was Jaqen – he offered me… it doesn't matter… but…but he helped me to settle…certain debts –'

'He killed people for you,' Jaime chuckled.

'He killed them for the Red God,' Arya corrected; grateful for the lack of condemnation in his voice, 'I merely had the honour of choosing whom he should offer up in sacrifice.'

'Why you?' Jaime asked.

'I threw an axe at him.'

'And he offered to kill people for you? I like him already.'

'To save his life, stupid. He was locked up in the back of a burning wagon with two other hooligans that it would have been far better to leave to the flames. Three lives – three deaths.'

'I don't understand.'

'Like I said, it doesn't matter. But when our killing was done, and we eventually parted; I to look for my family, he to return to Braavos, he gave me an iron coin, and told me to –'

'Once again, I don't understand.'

'It's our order's universal way of saying 'don't fuck with me.' I never leave my chambers without at least ten of them in my pocket.'

'I can well believe it. Why did you never give one to me?'

'I didn't know what they meant then, of course,' Arya mumbled, ignoring him, 'he just gave it to me, and said that if I ever wanted to find him again, and learn to do what he could do, I should give the coin to any man from Braavos and say 'Valar morghulis,' and the coin would lead me to him.'

'And it did?' Jaime asked; the humour gone from his voice.

'And it did,' Arya told him, 'eventually. When I reached the House of Black and White, they told me they had no idea who he was. I entered the guild anyway, of course. I had no choice, and I didn't want one. I knew what I wanted to do, and I knew that it had to be done, even though his not being there when he had said that he would be was…can I have some more wine?'

Jaime passed her the skin. She drank till there was nothing left in it.

'I was eighteen when he came back,' she continued, 'on the point of taking my vows, and of forgetting the few, tiny, insignificant pieces of Arya Stark that still remained to me. For some acolytes, this final stage of the process is easy. For others, it's the hardest thing that they will ever do. Either way, each one of us is guided through it by a member of one of the guild's higher orders. My masters assigned Jaqen to me. The fact that we'd met before wouldn't matter if I planned on taking my vows seriously.'

She swallowed her own words. She tried to fold her arms and hug herself and hide, but the pain shot through her each time she moved; nailing her to herself, and in her mind she began to see the fountain again, the fountain and the half-light of the temple, and the dead around it; the symbol of the Red God's mercy; his mercy to the living who no longer wished to live.

'You don't need to continue,' Jaime whispered; his breath stirring the hair on the top of her head.

'Having met before…it turned out to matter more than anything' she stammered, 'from…from the first second that we saw each other again, we…'

'Arya, you don't have to –'

'We were fucked…we couldn't stop it…not even if we tried…and we didn't try. I sometimes think that was the worst part. He was everything. He showed me everything. He… taught me things. Things about facelessness that no junior guild member should know. The beauty of killing like a ghost; a wraith; a saviour. He told me things about himself that he should have forgotten about years ago. I did the same thing…I told him things that I thought had died.'

She was walking to the fountain in the temple; not even knowing why she was there; only that she had to be. There hadn't been a ripple on the water, and there had been no corpses beside it that day. Just the one. The only one that mattered.

'It's oddly exhilarating, being fucked and out of your mind,' Arya remarked, beginning to talk faster as the memory caught up with her tongue, 'it makes you feel alive, but it also makes you reckless and stupid. I don't know what we were thinking, or hoping, or imagining, or even what we were doing; fighting all day; fucking all night; playing at being human –'

'You are human,' Jaime interrupted.

'I don't know what I thought would happen once I had taken my vows,' Arya continued; her voice growing hoarse, 'I don't know what he thought; I don't know. I don't know.'

'You're distressed; you don't need to tell me this –' Jaime whispered.

'There is a fountain at the centre of our temple,' she rushed on, 'one taste of the water guarantees a quick and painless death. People come to us there to pray and to die. One day, I went to see it. I hadn't been there since I was a child novice; there was no reason for me to be there; it wasn't my work anymore; but I knew that I should go; something told me that I should go –'

Her words were scattering like leaves in a hurricane now, and in her mind she was approaching the corpse on the floor; her footsteps agonisingly slow; as though slowness would change the fact; would make it less real for a little bit longer, and Jaime was telling her not to continue and angering her; but her words and the need to say them were smiting his and turning them to nothing.

'I found him on the floor next to the fountain, lying dead on his back with his eyes wide open. His lips were still wet. I sat down next to him. He had hazel eyes. I looked hard at them. Once or twice I thought I saw them moving…or looking at me.'

Her voice sounded like ice in her own ears.

'Our masters had given him a choice, or something that they pretended was a choice. Deny what we had done, and both of us would be executed. Admit it, and they would spare me, and let him kill himself to appease the Faceless God for the violation of the vows he had taken.'

A heat was rising in her eyes, and she fought against it with all of herself; forcing herself to continue; to finish even if the words made her choke to death.

'It was all a lie, of course,' she spat fiercely; her voice breaking as the ice exploded out of it and blinded her, 'it was just some stupid example being made out of him: they were only protecting the politics that had made them accept me as an acolyte in the first place. Because our masters wouldn't have executed me if I'd fucked a hundred men in the inner sanctum. They'd been intending to send me to Daenerys, under my true name, for years. They just didn't bother to tell me that – they didn't even tell Jaqen that – before they murdered him, and me –'

The heat in her eyes was becoming moisture now, and transforming into hot, salty drops of summer rain; and she gritted her teeth like a wolf and growled to herself; trying to make them flee from her in fear.

'I didn't take vows,' Arya growled through clenched teeth, 'because they wouldn't let me. They sent me to Daenerys and ordered me not to tell a soul. I didn't. And I didn't take revenge; I didn't make a single one of them pay for what they had done; because I was a Faceless Man in all but fucking name and oath by then. I became No one the moment Jaqen…'

The humiliation of the tears in her eyes was crushing her to death. It thrust knives into each individual pore of her body; twisting her wound, and wringing it out as though it were a wet cloth rather than blood and torn skin. She squeezed her eyes closed until they hurt her; the darkness behind her eyelids turning red from the pain; and a single, horrifying, humiliating tear choked out of her. It felt like wildfire burning her skin.

A whisper of cool air brushed it from her cheek. She opened her eyes. Jaime's fingers were still touching her face. And he was looking silently and unconcernedly at her, as though she hadn't humiliated herself in the worst way possible; as though that single tear hadn't revealed a weakness that she couldn't afford to possess. He did not say a word and he did not let her go; remaining where he was and holding her miserable, aching sack of a body together; his silence more consoling than anything he could have said. He knew about silence, of course. He knew everything that it concealed and everything that it expressed.

She stared up at him through her tears as the fire in her arm surged once more. He stared back at her; and she could see the missing-ness inside him as well; in his pallour and in his eyes that were green and damp and that knew loss instead of presuming to know it. She could see it roaring in him, and hurting him. She saw Jaqen, dead; the hazel eyes that she had loved staring at her; maiming her; and she could see Jaime looking inside her with the same silent, desolate companionship that had both moved and frightened her at that infernal welcoming feast. The vision – the fountain, the eyes, the darkness – was brushed breathlessly away, thread by ghastly thread, as Jaime's fingertips softly combed stray strands of hair away from her face, and he leaned forward and kissed her forehead as though she were some stupid child who had had a nightmare.

He did not move away from her once his lips had touched her forehead. They remained there, frozen against the skin; warming her up and giving her his breath to breathe with. She could feel her hand reaching out, and touching his cheek. Her eyes closed as she listened to him breathing. Then the sound grew louder, and warmer; and her blood blazed within her, and she couldn't breathe, or see, or think; and when she opened her mouth for air, she found his lips instead; by accident; it must have been by accident; and she had no idea whose fault it was, or who had started it, but she did not pull away from him. She couldn't. She didn't want to.

The knowledge, and Jaime's lips, almost burned her alive. He kissed her with an agonising softness; with something that she might have called innocence had she not known better. Her hands travelled slowly through his hair and traced the scars on his face, even as his body grew warmer and harder against her, and when she opened her mouth for his tongue, and tasted it, all thoughts of innocence disappeared.

He tasted of wine, and blood; and the way that he rolled his tongue against hers, and enfolded her, and sent his fingertips gliding up her spine to linger feverishly in the nape of her neck, made her moan aloud, and gasp, and forget the pain in her body. His lips were the sweetest kind of sorcery, and his smell, and the pulse of his blood in his chest, and she could not summon up the slightest trace of the guilt that she was sure she should be feeling, because her mouth being with his mouth, and her body being with his body, did not feel wrong.

They pulled away from each other slowly when the crack of leaves and voices announced that help was nearby. Jaime's fingers locked tightly with Arya's as his squire appeared with the maester and his assistants; the latter grumbling sulkily at the weight of the stretcher that they had had to carry from the camp.

'This idiot squire of yours,' the maester cried, clouting the boy soundly over the head, 'has led us on a merry chase across the whole of Westeros, the silly young –'

Arya stopped listening. She felt hands grip her arms and legs and lay her on her back; making her feel cold and sore again. She saw an open medicine case beside her, and more hands plucking milk of the poppy, wormwood, needle and thread from within it. The maester was cutting off her shirt sleeve and tittering about a hunt being no place for a woman. And still Jaime's fingers were laced firmly through hers; gripping her hand; not letting her go.