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She is in the House of Black and White, but she can see only blackness. The same darkness that had surrounded the carved wooden icon of the Stranger, back in the small chapel of the Faith in Winterfell, obscuring whether the Stranger’s form was that of a man or a woman.
The girl once named
Arya Stark
has always liked the shadowy darkness: it has been a comfort to her, a place to hide from lions with bloodthirsty claws and dogs scarred and burned heavily along one side that can still bite her. More than comfort, though, she has always felt a kinship with the figure of the Stranger that lurked within the shadows: a calling from the Stranger to her, a similarity that went beyond her dark features and her tendency to remain hidden in the shadows.
Now, swamped by the weight of her blindness and the loss of the light,
Arya
a girl retreats into the shadows again. She takes up her wooden stick, and rests like a bat within the darkness, quietly learning and becoming better at her skill.
The waif may think that she has bested her, for the time being, but
Arya
a girl has learned patience. Though she is blind, she has always been able to see, even in the dark.
*
The winds change, and she spills blood under many different names and faces. Always she is someone new: a beaten and broken girl, a mummer wearing disguises over disguises, a strong-willed young boy grimy with street dirt.
Yet even as
Arya Stark
disappears beneath masks and faces, beneath names and new people who take over her faceless body for their own, then depart, leaving her empty and waiting for a new soul to fill her, a new mask to slip over her molten, misshapen face. If Ned saw her now, he would not see his daughter.
Perhaps she ought to be scared of the emptiness, the slate wiped blank that she has become. But it simply feels right, for her to be free of any identity. She is not man or woman, not boy or girl: she is the Stranger, almost nameless, and the names she is given are all forgeries.
Until one day she hears a name that she once owned, a name that she has almost (but not quite) forgotten. It comes from the loose lips and tongue of a Westerosi man, free of any sigils of the Great Houses yet his mouth still full of a recognisable accent, the Riverlands influence overtaking the Casterly Rock lilt.
The Faceless learns one more new thing that night: Arya Stark has escaped from a marriage to Ramsay Bolton,
but Arya Stark does not exist
.
*
When the Westerosi man leaves into the streets of Braavos, the nights colder these days than when the Faceless had first come to Braavos and it was rusty-hot even when the skies were dark with familiar inky-blue blackness, there is a shadow on his heels.
Hummingbird-nimble, the shadow evades his every glance with ease and follows him into the depths of Braavos, each step silent and near-invisible. The shadow keeps following him, even through the most muddling and crowded of streets, until he is finally, blessedly alone, and the shadow can strike.
In the blink of a violet-tinged eyelid, dark lashes falling onto a cheek, the shadow has shifted across the lonely street and now presses the man into the brickwork, a dagger withdrawn and pressed against the stubbled, desperately gulping line of his throat.
“Tell me more about Arya Stark,” the Faceless says, and the mask seems to loosen on her face. She starts to see through the eye holes in a mask again.
He yelps as she presses the blade into his throat further. “Please,” he gasps, “please, I don’t know, just let me go—Oh!”
Without warning, a strong hand grabs her shoulder and tugs her away. She cries out, weak and cub-like, as she feels her back hit bare brick and crumples in on herself. Forcing her lips to still and hoping for the burning pain to subside, she tries to stumble to her feet, but ends up stumbling.
The person who flung her away from the man now turns to her, and Arya promises herself that she will be a wolf and fight when cornered. They reach out to grab her, and she closes her hand around the leather grip of her dagger, determined that she won’t go down without a battle.
Their hand fists in her shirt, tugging her upwards and out of the dirt and dust of the street. She keeps hold of the dagger as they drag her off, into streets that she has travelled down a thousand times yet seem different now, unfamiliar.
*
Arya had expected a punishment, but they take her to an inn and order her a steaming bath to wash away the dust and rusted sun-heat of Braavos from her skin, until Arya’s arms are the forgotten dark-brown they had been in her youth and her hair is untangled into straight lines of brown-black strands.
“Who are you?” She asks, shivering a little from the cool darkness of the night and the wet hair hanging down her back. Somewhere along the streets, her mask had slipped away, and when she now looks into the silvered glass her eyes are grey and stormy again, her face almost the same as it used to be, apart from the lines marking the war that streak beneath her eyes with grey death-lines.
“Sarella, or Alleras,” they say, lifting a pair of gold-bladed scissors to their dense mass of curls and nipping some of them away. “A snake, or a sphinx, depending on who you ask. And you are?”
“Faceless,” she replies. “Or, at least I was. Now… Now I’m probably Arya Stark again, but I’m not sure.” Who is she, apart from a string of new faces on an empty stone statue, the only lasting thing its hands full of blood?
“Oh.” They put down the scissors and turn to face her, reaching over to cup her bare, unmasked cheek in their hand. “Did you like being Faceless? I’ve never spoken to someone who was once a Faceless Man before,” they admit, the bronze planes of their cheekbones flashing bright underneath the torches that burn against the night in brass braziers.
Arya shrugs, feeling uncomfortable under their darkly, thickly lined, searching gaze. “Being Faceless doesn’t—didn’t feel much like anything at all. It’s still all so bright and new and strange. Like I’m seeing the world with new eyes.” Bright as the flame on Sarella-Alleras’s cheek, dripping liquid and golden over brown skin.
Sarella-Alleras looks out of the window, to where the dark blue-black sea laps at Braavos’s shores, and Arya bursts out, not wanting them to look away from her just yet, “I liked not being able to feel like myself, though. In a way. I liked being free of—” she points at her hair, desperately trying to explain something that pulls harshly at her heartstrings and tugs her between faces, names, without mercy. “I liked not being a boy or a girl, I guess.”
Arya’s lips press closed, and she feels horrified as the weight of her words sink fully in. What she has said is freakish, unholy, a disgrace of the worst kind—what kind of face could she wear, that would be neither boy nor girl, neither man nor woman?
Her gaze lifts to meet Sarella-Alleras’s, and she knows her answer.
She half-expects to be chased from the room, yet instead she feels warm, bronzed arms surrounding her, the rusted smell of salt, sea and ground burnished by the sun mixing with sweet courtier’s perfume. Womanly, flowery, sugar-sweetness and the manly sweat and brass courage of heroes. A contradiction, but a glorious one.
“I promise you,” Sarella-Alleras tells her them, “you do not have to lose yourself to become something other than boy or girl, man or woman. But I am so glad I found you.”
Arya smiles into Sarella-Alleras’s embrace, and closes her eyes into understanding and kinship, at last.
Sarella-Alleras is not a dire wolf like her Nymeria, but all the same, they are like Arya, and so they are pack now. Arya’s loyalty takes root, strong and unwavering, and she hugs them back.
“I’m so glad you found me,” they answer in return, and the sea sweeps heavy and dark-navy-blue against the coast of Braavos as if to remind her that home is awaiting her, somewhere across the waves. But she has another home, now, with someone whose blood runs sun-hot yet who is made up of the same star-stuff as Arya is, the same sky and the same feelings that thrum deep in the cords of their hearts and muscles.
Perhaps Arya is yet to return to Winterfell, but this still feels like home, albeit a different kind than with their family. Though they have only met Sarella-Alleras in the sun-warmed haze of the evening, Arya already feels safe in their company.
Arya will go home with them.