As they drew nearer to the Kingswood and the dawn began to rise in the sky; the tiny, grey, relentlessly untouching smallness in the saddle behind Jaime grew quieter and quieter; and by the time they reached the first trees of the Kingswood, the dampness of the air falling like rain on his skin, Arya had fallen asleep.

In her sleep she didn't care about loyalty or the wishes of the dead, and she nestled her head against his back and gently slid her arms around his waist; the opposite and the same of when she was awake.

She did not stir till nightfall, and as he sat facing her in the half-darkness, a tiny wisp of a fire glowing weakly between them for warmth, he watched her beautiful grey eyes move intently from the bread she was refusing to eat, to his face, and quickly away again; and he was once again seized by the absolute certainty that she was the one that had murdered Joffrey. There was a kind of relief in her that had not been there before; a relief that was also a tautness and a new emptiness; and he thought about her idiocy in leaving the Red Keep with no food or water or protection, and how utterly unlike her it was; how impulsive, how unthinking…and it frightened him. Arya was neither of those things when it came to a good plan. She was Father's fucking child.

'After the Battle of the Blackwater,' she said softly, not waiting for him to ask, 'Olenna Tyrell made me an offer. She had a weapon – she just needed someone to use it.'

Jaime was surprised.

'Why didn't she –'

'Nobody would know it was me,' Arya continued emotionlessly, disregarding his words as an uncharacteristic anxiety tainted her voice, 'nobody would even know he had been poisoned. It would be construed as an accident, and Margaery could then raise Tommen to do her will without the risk of being beaten or brutalised should the dog decide to bite its master. But if anything went wrong – if it was recognised as the murder that it was and a Tyrell stood accused, which would be extremely likely, knowing Cersei – I would confess my guilt immediately and take the fall alone.'

Anger incinerated the pit of Jaime's stomach, and horror tightened around his throat with fingers of blood and bile.

'You allowed her to risk your life like that,' he repeated, 'just to get her granddaughter out of a marriage?'

'I allowed myself to risk my life for a chance at seeing that little shit Joffrey die by the hand of a Stark,' she replied, a little too nonchalantly.

'She used you!' Jaime insisted.

Arya shrugged.

'I used her too.'

Jaime stared openly at her. Her fearlessness was glorious, and her voice, and her horrendous stupidity and her brilliance; and he had no idea if he should reach out across the space between them and clout her on the head for being such a reckless, irrational little fool, or kiss her till she moaned for being so fucking beautiful.

And he wondered, once again, what the matter was with him; what had been the matter with him when he had stood up, in silence and indifference, and had left Cersei screaming alone over their son's body while he felt nothing at all…nothing.

'How did you do it?' Jaime asked, 'how did you kill him?'

'One of the black amethysts in Sansa's hairnet wasn't really a black amethyst,' Arya answered simply, and Jaime remembered Joffrey's clawing fingers, and his eyes threatening to pop out of his skull, and Uncle Kevan pounding on his back, and Cersei screaming as her son's face turned black and his last breath twisting out of him as he choked he choked on nothing.

Ah.

'The Strangler?' Jaime ventured.

Arya smiled bitterly in a way that he did not like.

'I popped it into good King Joff's drink while I was helping my sister to the door. You were all too busy shouting to notice, and the rest of the hall was too busy watching you to pay much attention to a damsel in distress. The whole scheme would have been a giant success if my stupid sister hadn't decided to run away with stupid Lord Baelish. It would have been called a tragic accident and no one would have known.'

The question of Sansa's having both the guts to run away with Littlefinger and the coldness of heart to leave her last living sibling behind had been bothering Jaime all day, and he said so. Arya's reply was both immediate and dismissive.

'She's been planning something with that silver-tongued shit for months –'

'You knew about this?' Jaime interrupted, shocked and a little angry.

'It slipped out when Bran and Rickon died,' she growled in reply, 'and all I could get out of her was that he'd promised to take her somewhere because he'd been so very kind to her.'

Jaime did not care to interpret that previous phrase too profoundly.

'Ever since then,' Arya went on, 'she's been so bloody buttoned-up I haven't been able to get a word out of her.'

'That still doesn't mean she went willingly, Stark,' Jaime insisted, gentleness slipping into his voice despite his best intentions.

'Stop trying to protect me from the truth,' Arya snapped, and her reaction hurt him, even though he had expected it.

'So when you told me that you didn't know where Sansa and Littlefinger were going,' he remarked, glaring intently at her and daring her to glare back at him, 'you weren't lying?'

To his surprise, she smiled at him, and even coloured a little.

'I was lying through my teeth, Lannister,' she admitted, wincing theatrically.

'You didn't trust me,' he stated accusingly.

'I didn't want you following me,' she corrected, and he remembered how little – or how much – it had taken to get her to change her mind about that. He smiled back at her, and she looked away from him.

You want me here, you strange little wolf, he thought, you can avoid my eyes all you like, and you can talk to me like you hate me, but you want me here.

And yet she was angrier and more on edge than he had ever seen her. True, she was always angry about something (him, usually), but this wasn't her usual, endearing anger. This was something else.

'Do you think your sister's at the Eyrie?' Jaime enquired with mock indifference, not lowering his gaze.

'I can't see where else he would take her,' Arya replied, steadfastly avoiding his eyes, 'he's still trying to convince my aunt Lysa to marry him. I've heard she haggles worse than half the fishwives in Lannisport.'

That made him laugh.

'Do not speak disrespectfully of the fishwives of Lannisport, Stark,' Jaime insisted playfully, 'I can't guarantee that they won't hunt you down wherever you are and demand an apology.'

Arya ignored him completely and continued to speak as dully as a Hand at a small council meeting.

'Aunt Lysa seems to think that drawing the process out like this makes her very flirtatious. And I imagine that trapping Littlefinger at the Eyrie makes doing it a lot easier.'

'If they are at the Eyrie,' Jaime said, 'then tomorrow we'll need to turn around.'

'Why?' Arya demanded in a worryingly irrational way.

'We're going the wrong way,' Jaime replied.

'We are not,' Arya insisted.

'We'll end up in the Reach at this rate, Stark!'

'We're just taking a detour.'

'A detour?'

Arya angrily threw a stick onto their pitiful excuse for a fire, where it erupted into flames.

'Lannister,' she stated testily, seeming less and less sure of herself by the minute, 'you can't hide an ant in the country around King's Landing; it's too flat. Everywhere except the Kingswood. Heading here was just…a good idea till the fuss died down.'

'You think the fuss will only last one day?' Jaime scoffed, incredulous of her stupidity, 'are you mad?'

She was standing up in a fury.

'I don't think anything; I didn't think anything! I was in a hurry, and I needed a plan!'

'Of course, a plan! And now that you've had a chance to think, what do you want to do next? Just pop our heads out of the woods tomorrow, head east and hope no one sees us?'

'I don't know!' she screamed.

Jaime backed down immediately as Arya buried her face in her hands and turned her back, shadows licking at the edges of her body like flames as she took a few steps away from him, and did not look in his direction again.

This must be because of Joffrey, he thought, because of what she's done. She's killed another human being and she can't handle it.

He knew full well that a first kill had the potential to completely discombobulate a person; however brilliant and however well-trained. He'd seen it a hundred times with squires.

Of course I can't be entirely sure that this is her first kill, he thought, the gods only know what she had to do to survive before Father found her.

Before Father found her and ruined her life.

She was still standing with her back to him, and the sound of her breathing was like a symphony of stained glass in the darkness. Her hands had moved to her hips, and she was gazing at the forest roof as though calling to the air above the canopy of the trees, willing it to fill her lungs up with something pure and good.

He understood why the Kingswood was the first thing that would occur to a desperately emotional young girl who was regretting a rash decision (however little she might like to admit it), but they couldn't stay here. They would need to come out eventually, and accept that they were now the hunted. But she was right about the country around King's Landing. It'd be like fighting their way through an army, even if they did stay off the Kingsroad. They needed another way.

'We can go through the Westerlands,' he said.

Arya turned around at once.

'The Westerlands?' she repeated, the disdain in her voice not quite masking her distress.

He tried to overcome his natural instinct to fight with her as he began to speak again.

'It will take longer –'

'A lot longer!'

'– but it is Lannister territory –'

'Is that meant to reassure me?'

'– and unlike the bloody Crownlands, it's actually possible to hide there with some measure of success. Lots of hills, mountains, interesting nooks and crannies with mines in them. It's where all the gold in my father's shit came from.'

Arya was still glaring at him, probably for mentioning Father, but she generously refrained from interrupting him again.

'And,' Jaime continued, taking her silence as an invitation to continue, 'I can guarantee you that most of the smallfolk are still so terrified of the old bastard that they won't breathe a word of our existence to anyone, and that's only if they see us.'

'Not even to red cloaks?' Arya asked.

Jaime smiled sadly. She really was discombobulated.

'Tywin Lannister,' he said, 'frightens them more than red cloaks.'

'Even dead?'

'Especially dead.'

He watched her think about it as the night grew darker around them; her skin a shock of snowfall in the nighttime of her hair.

'Alright,' she agreed quietly, 'we'll go through the Westerlands. Though could we…'

Arya's words dissolved into the silver mist that poured from her mouth and she wrapped her arms tighter around herself.

'What?' Jaime pressed, 'could we what?'

'Could we try and avoid going past Riverrun?' she murmured.

Of course. He hadn't even thought of that. Approaching the Vale from that direction would put Riverrun right in their path…a reminder in stone and water that she did not want to see or feel or touch.

Oh, my love.

'Please?' Arya pleaded softly; her eyes a torment, and Jaime rushed to reply, dismayed that she had interpreted his silence as an objection.

'Of course we can, I didn't mean – '

'Good, that's fine, then, thank you.'

'Arya –'

'Did you follow me? Last night?' she questioned with baffling and disconcerting abruptness, rapidly returning to the fire and sitting down with a great deal of noise and unnecessary fiddling with the firewood and her still-untouched bread, 'did you? How did you know where I would go?'

She doesn't want to talk about it.

Of course she doesn't, you bloody fool. Why would she?

'I…I just did,' he stammered; his haste to appear unaffected making him ineloquent, 'know where you would go, I mean.'

'Does everyone know about that passage?' Arya rushed to ask, clearly with similar intentions in mind, 'when I was a child, I liked to think I was the only one, and there weren't any guards – '

Her hands were shaking.

'No,' Jaime replied, wanting to reach out and take them, knowing she would hit him if he did, 'it isn't common knowledge; I only know about it because once I was…I was…I was in rather a hurry to get rid of some bodies.'

That seemed to interest her, and she took a bite of bread for the first time; the very mention of death seeming to bring her back to life.

How can she seem to live on death like a leaf lives on sunlight, Jaime thought, and yet fall apart like some green boy when she finally kills the one person in the world that she's wanted dead with all her soul?

'You needed to get rid of some bodies?' Arya was repeating with disarming interest, 'really? Do tell.'

She was looking him in the eye for the first time that day, but suddenly, unexpectedly, he found that he could not hold her gaze.

'Not today, Stark' Jaime murmured, the screams of Aerys' remaining pyromancers still ringing in his ears, even after all this time, 'not today.'