ARYA
Whatever names Harren the Black had meant to give his towers were long forgotten. They were called the Tower of Dread, the Widow's Tower, the Wailing Tower, the Tower of Ghosts, and Kingspyre Tower. Arya slept in a shallow niche in the cavernous vaults beneath the Wailing Tower, on a bed of straw. She had water to wash in whenever she liked, a chunk of soap. The work was hard, but no harder than walking miles every day. Weasel did not need to find worms and bugs to eat, as Arry had; there was bread every day, and barley stews with bits of carrot and turnip and once a fortnight even a bite of meat.
Hot Pie ate even better; he was where he belonged, in the kitchens, a round stone building with a domed roof that was a world unto itself. Arya took her meals at a trestle table in the undercroft with Weese and his other charges, but sometimes she would be chosen to help fetch their food, and she and Hot Pie could steal a moment to talk. He could never remember that she was now Weasel and kept calling her Arry, even though he knew she was a girl. Once he tried to slip her a hot apple tart, but he made such a clumsy job of it that two of the cooks saw. They took the tart away and beat him with a big wooden spoon.
Gendry had been sent to the forge; Arya seldom saw him. As for those she served with, she did not even want to know their names. That only made it hurt worse when they died. Most of them were older than she was and content to let her alone.
Harrenhal was vast, much of it far gone in decay. Lady Whent had held the castle as bannerman to House Tully, but she'd used only the lower thirds of two of the five towers, and let the rest go to ruin. Now she was fled, and the small household she'd left could not begin to tend the needs of all the knights, lords, and highborn prisoners Lord Tywin had brought, so the Lannisters must forage for servants as well as for plunder and provender. The talk was that Lord Tywin planned to restore Harrenhal to glory, and make it his new seat once the war was done.
Weese used Arya to run messages, draw water, and fetch food, and sometimes to serve at table in the Barracks Hall above the armoury, where the men-at-arms took their meals. But most of her work was cleaning. The ground floor of the Wailing Tower was given over to storerooms and granaries, and two floors above housed part of the garrison, but the upper storeys had not been occupied for eighty years. Now Lord Tywin had commanded that they be made fit for habitation again. There were floors to be scrubbed, grime to be washed off windows, broken chairs and rotted beds to be carried off. The topmost storey was infested with nests of the huge black bats that House Whent had used for its sigil, and there were rats in the cellars as well… and ghosts, some said, the spirits of Harren the Black and his sons.
Arya thought that was stupid. Harren and his sons had died in Kingspyre Tower, that was why it had that name, so why should they cross the yard to haunt her? The Wailing Tower only wailed when wind blew from the north, and that was just the sound the air made blowing through the cracks in the stones where they had fissured from the heat. If there were ghosts in Harrenhal, they never troubled her. It was the living men she feared, Weese and Ser Gregor Clegane and Lord Tywin Lannister himself, who kept his apartments in Kingspyre Tower, still the tallest and mightiest of all, though lopsided beneath the weight of the slagged stone that made it look like some giant half-melted black candle.
She wondered what Lord Tywin would do if she marched up to him and confessed to being Arya Stark, but she knew she'd never get near enough to talk to him, and anyhow he'd never believe her if she did, and afterward Weese would beat her bloody.
In his own small strutting way, Weese was nearly as scary as Ser Gregor. The Mountain swatted men like flies, but most of the time he did not seem to know the fly was there. Weese always knew you were there, and what you were doing, and sometimes what you were thinking. He would hit at the slightest provocation, and he had a dog who was near as bad as he was, an ugly spotted bitch that smelt worse than any dog Arya had ever known. Once she saw him set the dog on a latrine boy who'd annoyed him. She tore a big chunk out of the boy's calf while Weese laughed.
It took him only three days to earn the place of honour in her nightly prayers. "Weese," she would whisper, first of all. "Dunsen, Chiswyck, Polliver, Raff the Sweetling. The Tickler and the Hound. Ser Gregor, Ser Amory, Ser Ilyn, Ser Meryn, King Joffrey, Queen Cersei." If she let herself forget even one of them, how would she ever find him again to kill him?
On the road, Arya had felt like a sheep, but Harrenhal turned her into a mouse. She was grey as a mouse in her scratchy wool shift, and like a mouse she kept to the crannies and crevices and dark holes of the castle, scurrying out of the way of the mighty.
Sometimes she thought they were all mice within those thick walls, even the knights and great lords. The size of the castle made even Gregor Clegane seem small. Harrenhal covered thrice as much ground as Winterfell, and its buildings were so much larger they could scarcely be compared. Its stables housed a thousand horses, its godswood covered twenty acres, its kitchens were as large as Winterfell's Great Hall, and its own great hall, grandly named the Hall of a Hundred Hearths even though it only had thirty and some (Arya had tried to count them, twice, but she came up with thirty-three once and thirty-five the other time) was so cavernous that Lord Tywin could have feasted his entire host (he never did, though). Walls, doors, halls, steps, everything was built to an inhuman scale that made Arya remember the stories Old Nan used to tell of the giants who lived beyond the Wall.
Lords and ladies never notice the little grey mice under their feet, so Arya heard all sorts of secrets just by keeping her ears open as she went about her duties. Pretty Pia from the buttery was a slut who was working her way through every knight in the castle. The wife of the gaoler was with child, but the real father was either Ser Alyn Stackspear or a singer called Whitesmile Wat. Lord Lefford made mock of ghosts at table, but always kept a candle burning by his bed. Ser Dunaver's squire Jodge could not hold his water when he slept. The cooks despised Ser Harys Swyft and spat in all his food. Once she even overheard Maester Tothmure's serving girl confiding to her brother about some message that said Joffrey was a bastard and not the rightful king at all. "Lord Tywin told him to burn the letter and never speak such filth again," the girl whispered.
She thought it was about a fortnight after she reached Harrenhal, though she couldn't be sure, that the castle burst into whispers. There were strange names she heard, like Velaryon, Lynderly, Grafton and Celtigar, though she had no idea as to their meaning. All the knights were discussing it, and things like defensive lines, fording of rivers, the difference between alliance and co-belligerence, and great banquets and receptions. The problem was that none of them said exactly what had happened, because all of them knew.
It took several days before she had any clue about what it meant. "Lord Tywin got a raven from the queen and the Imp in King's Landing and they heard it from a highborn knight who fled the Eyrie," a Lannister man-at-arms was explaining to his fellow, who had returned from foraging. "Selyse Baratheon, calling herself a queen, was feasted by Lord Grafton in Gulltown, then arrived in the Eyrie and was feasted by Lady Arryn too. Word is, the Vale will follow Dragonstone. If they are, some say the Young Wolf will join in too, but Lord Tywin thinks he'll want to stay as a king so they might not be proper allies; but they'll still be fighting on the same side against us."
Even Lannister soldiers were no longer confident of victory. "Lord Renly's marching to King's Landing," she heard one pikeman murmur to another, "and Stark, Tully and Arryn all coming down on us from the other side. Lord Tywin's a tough man, but those don't look like betting odds to me."
Arya still did not know wholly what was happening, and there were still references to Lord Renly, whose face she remembered, and who she had heard was marching towards King's Landing with a mighty host. But it was Queen Selyse who had caught her imagination. Arya had never heard of Selyse Baratheon—probably King Robert's sister, as Lord Renly was his brother—but she did know Lady Arryn was her aunt, and Lady Arryn liked Selyse, and the Lannisters were scared of her, so she couldn't be too bad. She hoped Queen Selyse—whom she pictured as a warrior-queen, like Nymeria from the songs—would come to Harrenhal with a vast army and kill Weese, Ser Gregor, Lord Tywin and all of the others, and then her aunt would recognise her, smile at her and take her home.
She tried not to think of it too hard, though. Once, she was, then Weese touched her lightly on the shoulder, then, when she turned, hit her hard around the face and told her to fetch dinner for Ser Donnel.
Whatever was happening, with Renly and Queen Selyse and her aunt Lady Arryn and whoever else, when Lord Tywin received Queen Cersei's raven it was ill news for the small grey mice in Harrenhal. Suddenly the men grown were going outside, chopping trees and moving food and building wagons. Meantime, the people left inside the castle were left to do far more of the work. She had to get up early in the morning, before the crack of dawn, and keep rushing about to bring food and drink and messages and clean things all across the castle till the sun had long since set outside. Weese took pleasure in the new pace, whereas for Arya it was exhausting. But she did have time to look outside the window in the upper-storey room whose floor she was scrubbing two days after she overheard about her aunt, when she knew it was the afternoon for the army to leave the castle.
The great courtyard was full of men-at-arms. The sunlight was coming in the wrong way; it was flung everywhere by the fresh wood and gleaming metal, so it was hard for her to see them. Armoured knights on their great horses, countless men on foot with their pikes and bows and swords and more, great wagons full of food drawn by packhorses and mules, and of course the banners, beautiful and brightly coloured. Chief among them was the lion of cloth-of-gold that stood for House Lannister, vast, enormous, sprawling across an ocean of red cloth big enough for a smallfolk family to live on. It towered over the others, flying in the air. It must have been most of the Lannister army, arrayed before her all at once.
Lord Tywin Lannister, dressed magnificently in gilded armour and a great scarlet cape, was speaking with the other old man on a horse at the head of the column, who also wore Lannister colours. For a moment she thought that Lord Tywin himself was leading his army away, but then he and the other knight clasped hands for a few seconds and he wheeled his destrier around to return to the castle. The other knight said some words to his gathered men-at-arms, much too far away for her to hear, then the great glittering host left Harrenhal, heading southward by the light of the mid-afternoon sun.