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There’s a new scent in the woods.
The wolf’s ears prick. The wolf has a name. Nymeria. Nymeria’s ears prick.
The woods are too cold for what she smells. She should smell ice, snow, water, stillness. Pine needles. The faint dusty scent of dead leaves, some trapped long ago under the firm snow, some still clinging to bare branches.
There’s a new scent in the woods.
“—Arya? Arya?”
Shit. Arya’s head jerked up, the soles of her boots slapping the scratched floor as she pulled herself upright. It was happening again.
“Umm…skip me,” she sighed, feeling, for once in her life, weird about making eye contact with the group around her. “I don’t have anything to add.”
The counselor raised an eyebrow at her, but moved on to speak to the woman on Arya’s left. Arya huddled into her sweatshirt.
Maybe it was just the stress, she thought. Losing Dad. Losing Robb. Losing Mom. That would be enough to make any teenager go crazy. And when you went crazy, you could start seeing things that weren’t there, right? Hearing things that weren’t there. Feeling like you were someone else. Something else.
Fuck this bereavement group. She fiddled with her buzzing phone in her pocket. Her group text with Gendry and Lommy and Hot Pie had been blowing up this whole time while she was sitting here listening to people talk about sadness. Aunt Lysa should be taking me to a shrink.
But there was something about these wolf dreams that Arya wanted to keep private. There was something about the realness of that smell.
Each night when the meeting finally ended and Arya booked it out of the old church basement to freedom, the creaky wooden staircase smelled like Nymeria’s woods.
*
It is the scent of warmth, of autumn. Ginger. Cloves. Cinnamon. Something else the wolf cannot yet identify, and Nymeria’s fur bristles, her back arching as the scent wafts faintly through the woods. She listens for a cracking branch, the crunch of footfalls over ice crystals; she hears nothing but the rush of wind through branches. Yet, she smells it as she arches her back and tilts her snout up into the wind. The scent should be cloying, but it is not; it is sweet.
The sweetness before death.
“I think that basement is haunted,” Arya said to Gendry. He’d met her after tonight’s meeting with two cups of hot coffee in his hands, and as she’d walked across the grimy snow to him the sound of her old footsteps made her shiver. Crunch, crunch. Nymeria was waiting.
“Why would a church be haunted?” Gendry said. “That’s where you go to have your soulsaved. If you believe in that.” Gendry didn’t believe in that. Neither did Arya, not really; church was Aunt Lysa’s thing.
“I dunno.” Arya took a sip of her coffee. It was black and bitter, just the way she liked. She’d half expected it to taste like ginger and cloves, like cinnamon and pine. “I just don’t feel right when I’m in there.”
“How do you feel in there?” Gendry asked. They stopped at a crosswalk and he looked down at her, his breath coming out in little clouds. “I mean, it’s a support group, it’s not like you’re there to have fun.”
“I just keep spacing out. It feels like I’m falling asleep and having weird dreams, but at the same time it feels like I’m not asleep. I dunno.”
“Well, you’re probably not sleeping right,” Gendry said. They crossed the street. His gloved hand squeezed hers. “You’re going through more shit than anyone should have to go through. You should come stay over at my place. Get away from Aunt Lysa.”
“Yeah, maybe I will,” Arya said, and for a second she felt warm, until she smelled it. They were walking by a dark alleyway between two stores, both closed for the night, and there it was. Ginger and cloves, wafting through the air, waiting for her.
*
The sky is a faint blue, fading to a weak white on the horizon. Soon it will be dusk. A crow caws and underneath the sound Nymeria hears what she has been waiting for. A branch cracks, and her fur stands on end as she feels a warmth she has not felt for months. It feels, for a moment, like winter is coming to an end.
Something red flashes at the edge of her vision. When she turns her head, it is gone. There is nothing.
But there had been something.
“Arya, can I speak to you for a moment?”
The counselor had trapped her, waiting by the door to the staircase. Arya looked around. The metal folding chairs still sat in their half-circle, empty. The overhead lights buzzed. The walls were painted blue and they felt too blue, too blue, the blue of a washed-out winter sky, the blue of water trapped under a sheet of ice.
“Sure,” said Arya. “If it’s about me falling asleep, I’m sorry. I’m having a really hard time sleeping at night, I guess, and—”
“You’re not asleep,” the woman said. For the first time, Arya saw concern on her face, and she hated it. She hated how it made her feel. Panicked. Arya Stark rarely panicked. “Your eyes are open. You just seem…elsewhere. I was wondering if you feel like our meetings are working for you. You’ve suffered a tremendous loss for a teenager.”
“They’re not,” Arya said, and the lights hummed and her ears tingled and then the scent was coming down the stairs. Ginger and cloves and leather, she smelled leather.
Do you smell that? she almost asked.
“I figured. Well, that’s understandable. Would you like to talk about some other options for healing?”
“I don’t know,” she said, truthfully.
Arya realized she liked the smell. It made her feel tipsy. It made her feel warm. It was rich and mysterious. It was almost comforting.
*
Nymeria has grown accustomed to it. She sleeps and wakes and hunts and howls with ginger and cloves cradling her, lulling her, following her but never pursuing her. She has seen flashes of the red, heard branches rustling and crackling, but no more than that. Yet she knows it is a man—she can smell it now, underneath the sweet warm spice of the ginger and cloves—and she knows from the way she hears him moving that he is a careful man who does not mean harm. But what he wants is not something Nymeria knows, and so she is ready, sleeping fitfully, ready to pounce.
Until one bright morning when she sees a set of footprints in the blanket of fresh snow that has fallen in the night.
The sun glinting off snow and ice is almost blinding. She squints her eyes and follows the footprints, nose down. The scent is stronger than ever.
She follows them deep into the woods.
He sits on a log, still yet alert. His limbs are long, his face long. There is a sharpness to him. Nymeria thinks of foxes. His hair is red. His hair is red and white. He smells like many men, though he is alone.
Slowly, he extends one hand.
Arya was not in a rush to leave her last meeting. Her boots felt heavy on the stairs, which felt heavy with the scent of ginger and cloves. There was something in the air tonight that hadn’t been there before. She felt it the way Nymeria would, with her ears pricking and the hair on her arms tingling. There was something.
She wasn’t surprised to see the man there. She wasn’t scared. He leaned against a parked car outside the church in black, black boots black pants black leather jacket black gloved hands, all black but his hair. One half was red, the other white.
“Who are you?” she asked, her hands on her hips. She wasn’t afraid. There were people passing by on the street. She could run fast, even over the snow. He smelled like ginger and cloves.
“A man who needs a girl named Arya. A man who sees a girl named Arya needs a man. A man who feels the loss that a girl must feel.”
“You didn’t answer my question.” Arya took a step towards his warmth. “How do you know my name?”
“A man has been waiting.” He held out his hand.
“I keep dreaming about you,” she said.
He squeezed her hand and kissed it. “A man knows,” he said. “A wolf is majestic, but a girl is even more so.”
Arya blinked. “What’s your name?”
“A man is called Jaqen H’ghar.” Arya watched his lips form the strange name. “And a man knows loss well. A man can teach a girl. A man can help a girl.”
He winked when she took his hand.