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He had to go away in the rainy season.
No—she reminded herself, as she kicked each tire of Robb’s old Ford, pretending to check it for air—He hadn’t chosen to go away. He had to do what they told him to do, or else he wouldn’t be helpful, and he might as well be dead. He wasn’t even in charge. Jaqen took orders from someone without a name. They called this someone the Kindly Man.
Arya hated the Kindly Man. When she made her second go-round of the truck, she imagined it was his unknown face she was kicking. Go to hell. She imagined him to be fat and pink and balding like the General, wearing some uniform as if his lard ass could do anything military other than sit and command his troops to shoot. To shoot people like Robb. To shoot people like Jaqen. To shoot people like herself…if the Kindly Man would let her do anything. Even getting to drive Jaqen to the checkpoint these past six months, Jaqen had said, was generous of the Kindly Man.
“A girl will look strange, kicking her tires a third time,” Jaqen commented through the rolled-down window. He was watching her closely. The rain had soaked the sleeve of his jacket all the way through. “Come wait in the truck.”
Arya kicked the passenger door. She wondered if she could dent the metal if she kept kicking the same spot over and over. Robb wasn’t even around to see or care. A new wave of something she’d rather call anger than sadness rushed through her as Jaqen spoke. She could hear everything in his voice, all the things he’d never say out loud. She understood.
But she was too young to be his real partner. The Revolution had no room for teenage girls. Maybe the Kindly Man didn’t trust her because Sansa had married one of the General’s ugly, snotty sons. She didn’t even know who the Kindly Man was so she couldn’t tell him that Sansa, even Sansa, regretted what she’d done. Even Sansa had learned, now that Robb was dead.
“A girl will get sick,” Jaqen said. “If a girl spends a month in bed with the flu, she will miss many things. She’ll miss driving Pate. Someone else will do it instead of a girl, and the Kindly Man--”
“Who said I wanted to drive him? He’s barely older than me. How come he gets to work for the Kindly Man for real, and I can’t?”
Her boots squelched as she lifted them out of the mud. He had to go away in the rainy season. If he had gone in the dry season, she could run in the park, she could drive out here and run, she could burn how awful it was to miss someone out of her muscles till it was gone.
Jaqen sighed. “A man has said.” He stuck his head out the window to get closer. When she’d first met him, his hair had been long, but he’d cut it short and dyed it lighter when he found out he was going underground. She watched drops of rain run through the short hair and leave shiny stripes on the side of his face. “A girl must trust. If a girl wants to do these things she has to train herself not to feel too much.”
“I just want to go with you and learn what you do so I can help for real. I don’t feel anything, okay? I’m just angry!” The lie hovered between them heavier than the stormclouds overhead.
“Soon a car will come, and a man will have to leave.” Jaqen’s pale eyes stared into hers. She could read those, too. “A girl should come back inside.”
And Arya did, hoisting herself up into the driver’s seat, slamming the door softer than she wished she could. The world seemed quieter and more far-away now that she was in the car, hearing only the pound of rain on metal and her own heartbeat. Even the Brotherhood’s radio broadcasts didn’t reach out here. There was nothing, nothing but—
“A man will be honest with a lovely girl,” Jaqen said, carefully brushing her wet hair away from her face. “It is hard to begin not feeling.”
Arya nodded. She’d tried not feeling a lot now that Robb was dead. She knew more than Jaqen thought she knew.
“A man knows a girl knows this, too.”
Oh.
“But if a girl practices, she might have something to tell a man when he gets back. She might have something to say to the Kindly Man, too.”
“You can’t say when for sure.” Arya’s throat was starting to clench up, and she blinked her eyes what felt like half a million times so that no tears came. “I’m not stupid. I know it could be an if. If you come back.”
“And a girl thinks there are no ifs for her? She thinks the General does not have men on the roads, watching, stopping cars? This could be a girl’s last day in this world, Arya Stark. She is not too young to die.”
She nodded. This would have made Sansa’s friends feel worse. But it made her feel better, somehow. Everything had changed. Dying wasn’t the worst thing in the world, anymore.
“A girl should come here,” Jaqen said, holding his arms out. Arya crawled across the seat, accidentally kneeing him in the stomach as she crawled onto his lap.
“A man has endured much, yet a girl’s knees somehow hurt him the most. Why is that?”
“Shut up,” Arya breathed, “this could be the last time we—”
She’d never kissed anyone for maybe the last time before, and she didn’t know how she’d ever learn how to stop feeling, not now that she’d have this seared into her memory. He held her soaked chest so tight against his she thought she might just stop breathing. He had no more hair to pull, so she dug her broken nails into his neck as they kissed harder and longer than they ever had. Arya felt one of his hands pull away from her and slip up the back of her wet shirt. His nails dug into the skin there, just as she was doing to him.
He wants me to remember him.
Arya heard the sound of a motor in the distance. Jaqen slid his lips from hers and looked in the rearview mirror. He held Arya’s face in his slender, rough fingers and kissed her once more on the lips. Softly. His lower lip was a little red where she’d bitten it.
“A girl must remember. It could be an if, but it could be a when,” Jaqen said as a familiar white car pulled up on the driver’s side of the truck. “That is the nature of what we do.”
Arya nodded.
“Goodbye, Arya Stark,” he said, and swung his long legs out the passenger door. Arya watched through her open window as he walked around to the white car and asked the code questions she’d heard before.
He reached for the door handle, but stopped, and looked back at Arya.
Their hands moved at once, reaching toward each other till they met in mid-air and stayed there, together, the rain beating down so hard on Arya’s wrists she felt cold. But she felt warm, too, she felt too warm.
He squeezed her hand and then he was gone, into the white car, turning down the dirt road that went through the field where the safe-house was and where things Arya couldn’t even imagine waited.
She watched the red streaks of taillights until the fields swallowed them and they were gone, too.