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She hadn't expected him to stay with her once the ship docked in King's Landing. "Don't you have work to do, faceless man?" she asked him once she had turned around in the woods to find his horse not far behind hers. She would not take the Kingsroad. Too many strange and familiar faces on the Kingsroad.
"A man has a different sort of work to be doing in the North."
Arya Stark smiled a grim smile. "If a man even so much as looks at any of a girl's family in a way she doesn't like - "
"A different sort of work," he interrupted. "A man has said."
Arya paused and turned to look at him. "What sort of work?"
He looked at her with the face of a man who was not Jaqen H'ghar. He was still beautiful, she thought, with his violet eyes and long white hair, but he was not Jaqen. He brought his horse up alongside hers. "Bringing a Northern princess home, of course." And he smiled with the mouth of a man who was not Jaqen H'ghar, and his teeth were whiter than his hair against his nut brown skin.
Arya scoffed. "A girl is bringing herself home." She turned away and continued North. A moment later, she asked, "Whose face do you wear now?"
The man who was not Jaqen let out a soft chuckle. "A pointless question."
Arya frowned at him. "Why?"
"Jaqen H'ghar is the only name a girl will know this one by. A man has said."
"And who is 'this one'?" she snapped.
"No-one."
Arya Stark bit her tongue in frustration. "And whose face does no-one wear? And I know, Jaqen H'ghar is the only name I'll know you by, but it's not the only name I can know, is it?"
His lips twisted in a thin parody of a smile. "A girl has grown clever."
"A girl has grown impatient."
"Six years in the Free Cities have done little to change a girl."
She did not reply because he was wrong, so wrong. When she had stepped onto that ship in Bravos, she had been cool, poised, calm, collected. She had been deadly. She had been Cat of the Canals, playing at being no-one. (But she had never been no-one.) Then the man who was not Jaqen came, and he reminded her of who she was, who she had been, who she would always be. (How dare he remind her.) Arya had thought to remain nameless and faceless until she reached Winterfell, but she had worn her true face from the start of her voyage and had her true name ripped from her only days into the trip.
She didn't want to admit that it was better this way, easier for both her family and herself, but it was. Now she had days, weeks, months to get used to being Arya Stark again, and perhaps this way the shock would not hit her family or herself too hard.
"Rhaego."
"What?"
"This one wears the face of a man unborn. A man who would have been the Stallion Who Mounts the World, but now never will. A man who has done nothing and will do nothing because he is dead, because he has never lived.
Arya whipped her head around to stare at him, grey eyes wide. "You can do that? Wear the face of whom the unborn would become?"
"This one can."
"Would he have been a Targaryen, Rhaego?"
"He would have been borne to one."
Arya narrowed her eyes, chewing on her lower lip. "There are only two Targaryens left in the world, as of now. You may have gotten away with it in Essos, but here, more than a few will think it odd to see a third walking around."
Jaqen-with-Rhaego's-face shrugged. "A man grows bored."
Arya felt a smile come to her lips unbidden. He smiled back with Rhaego's mouth, and Arya found she did not mind the white gleam of his teeth so much. She turned away.
"A girl need not worry. A man will change his face before Winterfell."
"And which face will a man don next?" she asked, biting her lip and glancing at him out of the corner of her eye.
"Does a girl have a preference?" His smile grew wider, and Arya Stark trained her eyes on the road ahead.
"No," she lied.
"Ah. A pity." He didn't say why it was a pity, and she didn't ask.
Arya Stark nudged her horse into a trot and kept riding north.