POV- Aemon Targaryen
The face came away in the stranger's hand like wet parchment, and there was another underneath it.
It was a plain, common face. Thinning brown hair, a nose that had been broken once and badly set, the kind of face that could be seen anywhere on the road from Sunspear to the Wall and everywhere in between.
"Tell me, King Aemon," he said. "How is it that you never die?"
Behind Aemon, Meleys shifted her weight. He felt her movements in his boots, and a long breath rolled out of her, hot and sulfurous, that flattened the grass around the stranger's feet. The man did not step back.
Aemon knew what the question meant. Snow and torchlight in the yard at Castle Black. Alliser Thorne's face, and Olly, who had been a boy. For the Watch, each of them saying it as the knife went in, as if the words turned murder into duty. And the second time, years after and a world away, grey-bearded northmen leaning close in the snow beyond the Wall with their daggers and swords already under Aemon's ribs. From Winterfell, the killer had said. From your kin.
Two murders in two cold places, and yet both times he had opened his eyes again.
"Who sent you?"
"No one sends a man to look." The stranger's voice was mild, though the man let enough of his Essosi accent through for Aemon to recognize it. "A lion of Casterly Rock came to the House of Black and White with a great deal of gold. He spoke a name, but the god would not take it." He tilted his head and studied Aemon's face, the white hair and the red eyes. "The god never refuses a name. A man wondered why, so a man came a long way to see."
"And now you've seen."
"Now a man has seen."
Meleys lowered her head until her jaw hung level with Aemon's shoulder. He could hear the fire in her, a low rumble behind her teeth like a pot left on the boil. Her nostrils flared at the air around the stranger. They flared again. Aemon felt the skin crawl along the back of his neck when he understood what she was doing. She was hunting for the man's scent and not finding it. She could smell the lake and the reeds and the carcass she had eaten at noon. She could smell Aemon, but where the stranger stood, there was nothing for her at all.
He laid his hand flat on her neck. The scales were hot enough to pass the warmth through the glove.
"Easy, girl," he calmed her.
The stranger watched the hand. "The dragon does not know what to make of a man."
"She's not alone in that."
That seemed to please him, and he waited for an answer.
Aemon found it easier to answer the dragon than to look at the Faceless Man, who was looking at him as if he were some gem the man had never seen before. He turned his head and looked at Meleys instead, at the jagged horns on her head, the eye bigger than his palm rolling slowly to look back at him.
"I don't know," he said. "That's the truth of it. I don't know why they sent me back. Maybe they wanted peace for a kingdom that every war has trampled it into the mud. Maybe it's a game to them, and I'm the piece they liked the most. Or maybe it was for the war against the dead that they wanted me." He still remembered the meeting held in the hall and those voices ringing in his head. "I don't know. What I do know is they asked me to save the world. So I will."
When he looked back, the stranger was watching him with the stillness of a hunter. He was quiet a long time. Out on the God's Eye the wind raised the water into small grey ridges that ran in and broke among the reeds. Somewhere on Harrenhal's walls a sentry called the change of the watch, and another called back.
At last the stranger nodded once, and then he turned away. "Try not to come alive next time after your death, Prince Aemon." He said it over his shoulder, pleasantly. "We do not look well on those who cheat death. And we look worse still on one who does it thrice."
Prince, Aemon thought. Not king.
"Valar morghulis," the stranger said. The man's hand went to his face again as he walked. Aemon saw the face come away but not what replaced it. He saw only the back of a figure going toward the woods that crowded the lakeshore to the west. The trees took the stranger as branches swayed and settled. Then there was only the wind.
Meleys rumbled, a long rattle, and swung her head toward the woods with smoke curling up between her teeth.
"No," Aemon said. "Leave him."
He stood longer with his palm on her neck, feeling the heat soak through the leather and the pump of her heart beneath it. Thrice. He had never counted it that way.
He had one boot on her foreleg when he heard voices on the path. Beric Dondarrion came down the path with the lake wind dragging at his cloak, his black breastplate and its purple lightning dulled by wear and war, the leather eyepiece strapped over his ruined socket. A woman walked on his arm, dark-haired and quick on her feet, holding her skirts clear of the wet grass. Half a step behind them came a boy in a purple doublet, walking as he had walked the halls of Starfall.
Lady Allyria Dayne looked at him and gave a soft smile. Aemon had met her at Starfall only briefly, a woman with her family's violet eyes and none of its solemnity.
They stopped near him. "Your Grace."
He stepped down. "Lord Beric, Lady Allyria." And then, because the boy had stopped where he was and gone very straight, "Lord Edric."
Edric bowed. His eyes went to Meleys and stuck there.
"I'm told of your intended, and I wish you joy, Lord Beric," Aemon said, looking at them both.
"You may wish it, your grace." The corner of Beric's mouth tipped up, which was as far as Beric's mouth ever went. "Whether the lady grants it is her own affair."
"The lady has granted it," Allyria said. "He went on and on in the lemon orchard at Starfall with a speech he'd clearly rehearsed on his horse the whole way from Blackhaven. It was a very fine speech. I only wish I'd heard the end of it."
"You agreed before I reached the end."
"I was afraid that if you reached the end, you'd start it over."
Beric looked at Aemon like a man who had lost this argument before and expected to go on losing it for the rest of his life, and meant to enjoy every time.
"I'm glad for you both," Aemon said.
Allyria's hand came to rest on her nephew's shoulder. "We won't keep you from your duty, your grace. But Lord Edric has a request."
The boy went stiff as a fence post hearing his aunt's words. He turned his head and looked up at his aunt with a face of such pure, naked betrayal that Beric had to find something to look at out on the lake. Allyria only smiled down at him and squeezed his shoulder. It was a small cruelty, and a fond one.
Edric looked at Aemon and back to Meleys and at Aemon again. The dragon's great eye had rolled toward him and rested on him with idle interest, and a thread of smoke rose from her nostril and bent away on the wind. Aemon watched the boy swallow.
"You can ask me anything, Lord Dayne," he said.
Edric drew in a breath. He clasped his hands in front of him, and Aemon remembered him in the solar at Starfall, holding Larra Blackmont's parchment in both hands as if it might try to get away. "Your grace." His voice came out very small. He tried again and managed only a little louder. "I wish to be your squire and gain my knighthood by your sword, if you judge me worthy."
Meleys huffed, and the boy flinched but did not step back.
Aemon smiled. He reached out, put his hand on top of Edric's head, and mussed the dark hair until it stood up in tufts. The boy's mouth fell open and shut again, and his ears went red.
"You'll have it," Aemon said. "After the war."
"After," Edric said, as though he were trying to find the far end of the word.
"A squire goes where his knight goes, though I'm no knight, only a king," Aemon said.
"Wylla will tell you you're milk brothers," Allyria said. "She tells everyone. By Starfall's reckoning, a man can't refuse his milk brother anything."
"Is that the law of Starfall?"
"It is now."
"Then tell Wylla that Edric's milk brother has granted his request, but only after the war." Aemon took his hand away. Edric's hair stayed where he had left it, sticking up on one side, and the boy made no move to flatten it. "Lord Beric. Keep them behind the walls until I'm back. All of them."
"Harrenhal is a large castle, your grace, and my betrothed is a small woman with a large number of opinions." Beric's hand rested easy on his sword hilt. "But I'll do what can be done."
Aemon went up Meleys' foreleg in three steps and swung himself onto her neck between the spikes, and looked down at the three of them in the flattened grass. The one-eyed lord with his lady on his arm. The boy between them, staring up, his hair still wild.
"Stand back," he said. "Further than that."
They went back. Edric went back slowest.
He leaned forward and laid his palm against the base of her neck, where the scales were thinnest and warmest. He didn't need a word. She had been waiting for this for almost a week now.
Meleys gathered herself, and the ground shifted under her claws. Her wings came open with a crack like a sail filling in a gale. She drove them down once, and the whole shore went white with blown spray and torn grass, and they were climbing.
The lake fell away. Harrenhal's black towers leaned beneath him, cracked and slumped and melted, and they grew smaller with every wingbeat. Down on the shore three figures held up their hands against the wind. The smallest of them was waving.
*****
POV- Arya Stark
Arya was at the treeline when the dragon went up, and the wind of it reached her before the roar did.
It came across the grass in a wave, flattening everything in its path, and it smelled of smoke and something like the inside of Mikken's forge. It blew her hair into her eyes. She didn't push it away. She stood with her back to a crooked alder and watched the red shape climb out over the lake until her neck ached from looking up, until it was a bird, until it was a speck, until it vanished.
She'd seen all of it.
She had been there before any of them, before the lord and the lady and the boy came down from the castle. She came to the edge of the woods most afternoons now. No one stopped her. No one had told her she couldn't, and no one had told her she could, and in five days at Harrenhal that was mostly how things went for her. No one said anything to her at all.
She'd seen Jon, Aemon, talking with some man down by the dragon, too, though she'd been too far off to hear what passed between them. Afterward the man had walked right by her, and Arya had pressed herself flat against the alder and held her breath, and he never once looked her way.
Then the others had come: the man she had once seen in King's Landing, a lady who seemed to be laughing at something, and that boy.
And Jon had put his hand on the boy's head.
Arya's own hand had gone up to her hair without her telling it to. She'd hacked it off in King's Landing with a stolen knife, and it had grown back since into a ragged mess that fell over her ears and stuck up at the back no matter what anyone did to it with a comb. She had stood in the trees with her fingers in her own hair and watched Jon's fingers in the Dornish boy's, and something had gone tight in her chest, and her eyes had gone teary, and she hated it.
He used to do that to her. In the yard at Winterfell when she beat Bran at something, or when Septa Mordane sent her out of lessons in disgrace and she went looking for him because he was the only one who ever laughed instead of scolding. He'd done it the day he gave her Needle. She remembered the rough planks of the door at her back and the thin weight of the sword in her hands and his palm on top of her head. Stick them with the pointy end. And her telling him she knew which end to stick them with, and him laughing so hard he had to lean on the wall.
He hadn't done it once since she came to Harrenhal. The day they brought her in with the rest of her family, filthy and sore from the road out of Riverrun, he had looked at her across the yard for the space of a breath. "Lady Arya," he'd said. The way you'd say it to some lord's daughter at a feast whose face you'd forget by morning. Then he'd turned to speak with someone else.
Lady Arya, from him.
She'd told herself she didn't care. She'd told herself every night since. And now some boy with purple eyes and a lord's doublet got his hair mussed and went red to the ears, and Arya had wanted to march down the slope and shove that idiot in the lake.
That was stupid. She knew it was. He was small, almost her age, and frightened of the dragon, and he'd waved at the end like a baby. None of it was his fault.
It was Jon's fault. Aemon's. She ground her teeth in frustration. Whatever he was calling himself.
Because under the tight thing in her chest there was another thing, one she did not want to look at when she could help it. The day of war outside Riverrun, the wolves coming out of the trees. Sansa's scream, Your Grace, Your Grace, forgive me. A dragon had been turning slow circles above that road, and men in Tarly green had lowered their spears at any Riverrun man who reached for a bow. No one had needed to tell Arya who wanted it done. He hadn't even come to watch.
And under that was something smaller and colder. She had heard Father say it once at Riverrun to her mother, through a door that wasn't quite shut. Sansa broke guest right. Arya hadn't believed him. She hadn't asked anyone, either, but she knew Father wouldn't lie about something like this. And she hadn't wanted to know anything more.
She pushed off from the alder and came back up to the castle, where Rickon was riding his wolf in the Flowstone Yard.
Shaggydog was trotting in slow, lopsided circles over the uneven stones with Rickon on his back, both of Rickon's fist sunk deep in the black fur at the wolf's neck and his heels drumming at its ribs. Shaggydog didn't seem to mind. His green eyes found Arya the moment she came through the arch and followed her across the yard.
Ghost lay against the far wall in a patch of weak sun with his head on his paws. He didn't look at her at all. Osha sat on an upturned bucket beside the well with a knife and a length of pale wood, shaving curls off it into her lap. She glanced up. "He's gone, then."
"He's gone."
"Heard it from here. Probably the whole castle heard it." The knife went back to work. "Horses near kicked their stalls down."
"Arya!" Rickon had spotted her. He hauled on Shaggydog's scruff, and the wolf stopped so short that Rickon almost went over his head. "Arya, did you see? Jawn went on the dragon. He's going to burn our enemies."
"I saw."
"I wanted to go and he said no." Rickon slid down off the wolf's back, landed on his bottom, and bounced up again without seeming to notice. "He said I can come when I'm bigger. He said that before. He always says that."
"You're four."
"I'm nearly five." He was such a brat sometimes, Arya thought, because she knew his nameday was moons away.
She sat on the lip of the well, not too close to Osha, and Rickon came and leaned his whole weight against her knees the way he used to at Winterfell when he was tired, and just like that her throat hurt. He smelled of wolf and of the honeycake someone had given him. There was a crust of it on his chin.
"Rickon," she said. "At Winterfell, when Jon came on the dragon." She didn't know how to ask it. "What happened with Sansa?"
He went still against her knees. She felt it. "She was bad," he said.
"I know. But what did she do?"
Osha's knife had stopped.
"She put bad stuff in the food, in all of ours." Rickon's voice had gone hard, so unlike his age. "At supper, there was bread and salt first and then stew. Jawn was holding me and he had his spoon up, like this." He held up his own hand, a small fist stopped halfway to his mouth. "And he smelled it and he put it down." The fist came down slow onto Arya's knee.
"Then he said, Sansa, do you think you're clever. And Lady Barbrey's men brought in the kitchen woman and she was crying. She said Queen Sansa, please. And Sansa tried to run away." He frowned at the word, then thought hard. "The lady with the mask hit her on the face then, and she fell down on the floor with a loud sound."
Arya knew who that was. Everyone at Harrenhal knew the woman in the red mask who sat in corners and never seemed to leave the King's shadow.
"Then Sansa got up and she screamed. She screamed she was the queen. She said Jawn was a bastard and Mother wanted him killed and Joffrey was going to cut all our heads off." It came out of him in one breath. "Mine too, she said mine too. And Bran's too."
Arya didn't say anything. She couldn't find anything to say.
"I was going to eat it," Rickon said. "The stew, I was hungry. Jawn didn't let me." He picked at the edge of his wolfskin sleeve. "Bran cried after, but I didn't."
He had. She could tell by how fast he said it.
She thought of Sansa at the window of their bedchamber at Winterfell, brushing out her hair and dreaming of princes and knights, and scolding Arya about the tangles in her hair. Sansa weeping for days after Lady's death, so hard she made herself sick. Sansa humming the song about Florian and Jonquil to herself on the kingsroad when she thought no one could hear.
"Did she look at you?" Arya heard herself ask. "When she said it. About your head."
Rickon thought about it. "No," he said. "She was looking at Jawn."
Shaggydog had padded over, silent on the stones, and pushed his great black head up under Rickon's arm. Rickon wrapped both arms around the wolf's neck and buried his face in the fur.
"Mother went away," he said into it. The words came out muffled. "She went to Robb."
"I know."
"She said she'd come back. Old Nan said so." He lifted his head, and his face was red and furious. "She didn't. She didn't ever come back. Bran couldn't walk and she went away, and she didn't come back. Jawn came back. Jawn came on a dragon."
"She couldn't come back, Rickon. There was a war." Arya tried to reason with him.
"She didn't want to." Rickon was angry; she could see it in Shaggy's face.
"That's not true."
"It is." He kicked at the stones. "It is, it is, it is."
Osha said, without looking up from her wood, "Let him be angry, girl. He's earned a bit of it."
Arya ignored her. She was looking at Rickon, at the honeycake on his chin and the stubborn line of his mouth. "They told you that you could go and see her," she said. "Before the Silent Sisters took her. Ser Barristan came himself and told you. He said Jon said you could."
Rickon's face shut like a door.
"You could have gone. I went." It came out harder than she meant. "She asked for you, asked where you were."
She hadn't meant to tell him that. She had meant to keep that one. The sept had smelled of damp stone. Mother had sat on a plain bench in undyed grey wool with her hair unbound down her back, more grey in it than Arya remembered, and two women in grey had stood by the door with their faces hidden in their cowls. Mother had held Arya's hands so hard her fingers went numb. She hadn't cried. She had looked past Arya toward the door, and then back at her, and said only, "Rickon?" Arya had told her he was sleeping. Her mother had known it for a lie, and nodded anyway.
"I didn't want to," Rickon said.
"Why not?"
"Don't want to."
"She's your mother."
"She left first!" He shouted it. Shaggydog's hackles came up at the sound, and a growl rolled out of him, low and wet, and those green eyes fixed on Arya and nothing else. Arya kept very still. "She left me first. So I don't want her. I don't."
Osha set down her knife. "Shaggy," she said quietly, and the growl stopped, but the wolf's eyes didn't move away from Arya.
Rickon was crying now, the angry kind of crying that she herself had always been ashamed of. He scrubbed his face with his wolfskin sleeve and smeared honeycake across his cheek.
"I'm staying with Jawn," he said thickly. "He said. I'm his ward. That's what it's called. It means I stay where he stays. Me and Shaggy." He looked across the yard at the white shape by the wall. "And Ghost. Shaggy likes Ghost. They sleep together sometimes, when Jawn lets them in."
"His name is Aemon," Arya said in anger. Jon was leaving her behind. She knew it.
Rickon stared at her as if she'd told him the sky was green. "It's Jawn."
Arya looked away. Across the yard Ghost had lifted his head at last. He was watching her with his red eyes, steady and deep as the eyes of the heart tree in the godswood at home.
"And the grey one," Rickon said, calmer now, sniffling. "She comes at night. For Jawn and Ghost."
Arya's stomach dropped out from under her. "She doesn't come inside," Rickon went on. "She stays by the trees. Osha says she's got a whole pack out there, like forty wolves. Maybe a hundred. But she comes to the lake where the dragon sleeps, and Ghost goes out to her, and they run." He wiped his nose on his other sleeve. "Is she yours? Can I take her? Then I will have two wolves, and then Shaggy will be able to defeat Ghost."
The yard had gone very quiet. Up on the walls a man laughed at something another man said. Arya could hear the lake. "She was," she said.
Every afternoon for five days she had gone down to the treeline. She'd stood there until the light went and the cold came up off the water into her boots. Twice she had seen eyes in the dark between the trunks, yellow and low to the ground. Once she'd seen the grey shape itself, standing in a clearing, her ears out, looking straight at Arya. Arya had said her name, but the wolf had looked at her a moment longer and then turned and trotted off.
And at night she went to Ghost. To the shore where Jon's dragon slept.
Arya remembered the Trident. The mud on the riverbank and the stones in her fists, and Nymeria not understanding, and coming back, until Arya hit her in the side hard enough to make her yelp and she finally ran. Go away. Go, I don't want you. She had screamed it until her voice cracked. She'd done it to save her. The queen would have had her killed, the same as she did with Lady.
She'd done it to save her. And Nymeria had gone, the way Arya told her to.
The muzzle had been red on the road outside Riverrun. Arya had seen that much before her mother pulled her close. Red to the eyes.
"Arya?" Rickon was tugging at her sleeve. "Are you crying?"
"No."
"You are."
"It's the wind," she said. There wasn't any wind in the yard. Osha made a sound that might have been a snort, and went back to her whittling.
Arya stayed with him until the light began to fail. She helped him find the wooden horse he'd lost under the steps of the Wailing Tower. She let him show her how Shaggydog would lie down flat if you pressed on his back just so. When Osha finally took him off to the kitchens for his supper, he went without looking back, one hand wound in Shaggydog's fur, chattering about men on fire. Ghost rose and went after them. At the arch he stopped, and turned his head, and looked at Arya once.
Then he went too.
That night she didn't go to the treeline. She climbed the Widow's Tower instead, where no one ever bothered her, and sat in a window slit with her knees pulled up and her back against the cold stone, and watched the black line of the woods along the lake.
Near midnight two shapes came out of the trees and trotted along the shore to the place where the dragon had lain that afternoon, where the grass was still crushed and scorched in a wide, ragged ring. One was white. One was grey. They circled the burned place with their noses to the ground. The white one lifted his head and looked back toward the castle, toward her window, for a long moment. The grey one never looked up at all.
Arya watched them until the woods took them back, but she stayed a while longer, watching the empty place where they had been.
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