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Chapter Text

The din was deafening as the throng crowded into the square before the Great Sept of Baelor, the banners bearing the three-headed dragon of House Targaryen towering higher than the statues that reared out of the clamour below.
Arya felt Jaqen’s fingers lace through her own and hold her hand tightly. He answered her resulting stare with a shrug.
‘A man does not wish to be lost in the crowd.’
She smiled weakly at him. He was lying.
They had arrived on a boat from Braavos merely an hour ago, and had barely passed through the Mud Gate before being swept up in a billowing wave of so many men, women and children that removing themselves from the crowd would have been impossible. On and on it went, like a massive serpent through the streets, chanting ‘the Hand, the Hand, his head, the Hand’ until it had reached the square; Arya and Jaqen caught in the middle of so many people jostling to the front that they acquired an excellent view of what was happening on the steps without so much as an elbow to the ribs. Arya didn’t have the dimmest notion of who the Hand of the King was or what he had done to deserve beheading, nor did she have time to think of either as she felt bile rising in her throat and her eyes beginning to fade. Clinging to Jaqen’s sleeve with one hand, she saw birds flying across a sun-scorched sky; saw Sansa’s face change from relief to horror; saw Joffrey with his stupid pouty lips declaim ‘Ser Ilyn! Bring me his head!’ and shake off his mother’s hands; saw only the shoulders and the feet of people in front of her, the crowd fighting her smallness and pulling her back as though she were walking through mud; Yoren’s face, the smell of his jerkin, her own screams, and Sansa’s, and the birds the birds as the blade came down.
The appearance of Ser Barristan Selmy on the steps of the Sept sent the visions scattering into exile as he took up the executioner’s sword and began to polish it. He wore handsome white armour and no mask, his movements as swift and fluid as those of a young knight despite his white hair. Arya grimaced. Playing to the crowd was stupid.
It had been a short and bloody war. Across the Narrow Sea, tales were told of entire Westerosi cities destroyed in the fiery breath of the Targaryen Queen’s dragons, and of armies defeated in a similar way, half their number decimated by fire, the other by her soldiers, who did not fear the flames. Arya had asked many times to be sent there despite such requests being forbidden, her elders despairing of her and quarrelling amongst themselves as to which fool among them had been responsible for allowing her to finish her training. When the news had come that Queen Daenerys had captured King’s Landing and that Sansa rode with her, Arya had left the House of Black and White in the middle of the night without asking permission, boarding the first ship to King’s Landing that she could find. It was only when the ship was already out to sea that she found that Jaqen had deserted too, rising from where he’d been lounging in her cabin chair, his eyes twinkling ironically at her as though she were the intruder.
She crossed her arms and glared at him.
‘They’ll kill you,’ she snapped, ‘I can take care of m – ’
Jaqen laid a finger on her lips before softly kissing them.
‘A girl says nothing,’ he had murmured. And she hadn’t.
A roar from the crowd showed that the Queen had arrived, her braided silver hair shining in the morning light. Arya was close enough to see that the rumours of the Queen’s unearthly beauty were far from untrue, and that the magnificent white and blue gown she wore ended at her calves, revealing Dothraki riding leathers and boots. Jaqen smiled drily at her as she unconsciously nodded her approval.
Daenerys was surrounded by fierce-looking Dothraki, and warriors, and advisors who bore the colouring of the Free Cities, but Arya saw no one else she recognised apart from Tyrion Lannister, who stood at the Queen’s side dressed in a magnificent doublet that displayed the colours of his House. He looked sombre, his face so pale that it might have been grey. Daenerys moved to the bottom of the steps to speak with the first few lines of people, and mothers began to pass their babies to the front so that the Queen might bless them. Arya looked about for her sister, but Sansa was nowhere to be seen.
The blessings the crowd were showering on their new Queen soon turned to curses as a line began to be cleared from the back. They were bringing out the Hand.
Arya looked about her in disgust as he was led through the crowd, all but invisible behind the guards that were clearly determined to get him to the block alive. Ten years, and nothing in this shithole of a capital had changed, its inhabitants still screaming in delight for the death of someone most of them had never seen before.
The Hand was dragged to the top of the stairs and forced to his knees, his guards taking up positions on either side of the Queen. The Hand glanced up at the crowd, scorn pouring from every line in his face, his pale blue eyes like ice.
Arya’s heart lurched. It was Tywin Lannister.

Chapter Text

She had barely stepped forward to push past the people in front of her before she felt Jaqen’s quick fingers seize the back of her tunic, his arms locking around her waist. The crowd roared on, chanting for Lord Tywin’s death.
‘Let me go!’ she screamed, struggling to escape his grasp as she’d been taught to do, her youth no match for his experience, ‘Let me go!’
‘A girl is mad,’ Jaqen hissed, his lips brushing her ear.
Her thin fingers clawed into his arm, making him wince, but Jaqen did not relinquish his hold on her, even when she stopped struggling.
Arya looked up at the lion she once knew as he refused to bow his head, his scowl so poisonous it could have wilted a legion of roses. Even on his knees, he seemed to tower over them all.
She remembered glaring intently at the tender skin beneath his ear, a knife clutched in her fist; remembered whipping a raven scroll off the council table with an elegance that still made her proud. She remembered the weight of the History of the Greater and the Lesser Houses in her hands as Lord Tywin retorted ‘Maybe you should devise our next battle plan while you’re at it,’ and hating herself for the smile of contentment that appeared on her lips at the compliment. She recalled the rush she had felt as she steadily met Lord Tywin’s gaze, his eyes blazing with enjoyment at how well she lied.
‘You’re far too smart for your own good. Has anyone ever told you that?’
She had talked about her father, and he had talked about his children. She had favoured Visenya Targaryen rather than the stupid princesses and weeping maidens of the songs, and he hadn’t laughed at her. He had listened to her, and she to him, and when he had left, she had wanted Jaqen to kill him, not out of loyalty to her brother, but out of anger at the sadness his departure had made her feel.
I should have let Jaqen kill him. It would have been a nobler death than this.
Arya felt her heart harden in her chest. He’s a Lannister. He killed your brother and mother; murdered and tortured thousands of your brother Northerners; spilled so much blood into the soil of the Riverlands that nobody will dare till it for a generation. He deserves to die.
Ser Barristan had to strike the back of the condemned man’s head with the pommel of his greatsword before he bowed it. Blood drenched Lord Tywin’s hair and stained his face, but there was no extinguishing the violent, glacial beauty of the man as he raised his head yet again. Once more Ser Barristan raised his sword, but was hindered by a quiet word from the Targaryen Queen. Arya decided that she did not like her.
She waited eagerly for Tywin Lannister’s crimes to be proclaimed out loud to the entire city, wishing they could be heard on the Wall, in Dorne, in Asshai. She waited for the Grand Maester to speak of forgiveness and mercy. But above all, she waited for the Queen’s voice to ring out in response: ‘Ser Barristan! Bring me his head!’ But no maester or septon was present, and there were no pleas for mercy, or cries for blood. Ser Barristan began to take up his position, and Lord Tywin surveyed the crowd with barely-concealed disgust at the notion that this screaming mob of illiterates would be the last thing he saw in this world. He did not so much as look at the son who stood not two feet away from him.
As Lord Tywin scanned the crowd, his eyes found Arya’s. The penetrating power of their gaze had not changed, and neither had the expression in them when he smiled at her.
‘You remind me of my daughter.’
As the blade sliced through his neck, Arya screamed.
There was pandemonium. The cheers and yells of the crowd as Lord Tywin’s head rolled down the steps of the Great Sept of Baelor seemed to come together in one deafening, blinding roar that went on for hours. Arya could no longer hear herself shouting at Jaqen to let her go, nor his refusals to do any such thing. He blocked and repelled every attempt she made to get away from him, his arms crushing the wind from her. At the top of the steps, Tyrion Lannister was on his knees vomiting, and the Queen was kneeling at his side, blood staining her gown, holding him as he wept. Ser Barristan led a detachment of guards to retrieve the head before the mob tore it to pieces, his sword dripping blood.
Arya screamed and cried along with the child she had been, her sobs raking her throat.
‘Let me go! Let me go!’

When she regained consciousness, she was at the far end of the square; Jaqen sitting nonchalantly on the cobblestones, holding her to his chest. Commoners bustled about their business, soldiers shouted insults at one other and highborn ladies on their way to pray climbed the stairs of the Sept, its seven towers casting colossal shadows across the square. The small boy working at the bloodstains with pail and brush was the only indication that an execution had just taken place.
Jaqen held Arya closer.
‘Valar Morghulis, lovely girl,’ he whispered against her hair.
A rasping sob escaped her lips, because he spoke the truth. He always spoke the truth.
Two passing goldcloaks interrupted a drunken rendition of The Bear and the Maiden Fair to stare at them, one of them proposing to fuck the little girl into consciousness if Jaqen couldn’t do it himself, the other howling with laughter and asking if he could also have a go. When their guffaws ceased abruptly, Arya knew that Jaqen was glaring at them with the same menacing grin that had terrified Rorge and Biter on the road to Harrenhal. The goldcloaks stomped hastily away, but did not resume their song.
She allowed herself to stay nestled in Jaqen’s lap for a little while longer before sitting up and shifting over to sit beside him. Jaqen looked at her, waiting, knowing that she would eventually speak. She would tell him even if she told no one else. She always did.
‘He was kind to me.’ Arya said, eventually, ‘He was… kind to me.’
She said nothing after that, and as Jaqen watched her face don the serene, impenetrable armour that the events of that day had briefly stripped away, he realised for the first time that he could never know all of her. However much he might love this strange Westerosi child, there were some things she would always keep for herself alone.
Sitting shoulder to shoulder, they watched the small boy at work, Arya’s eyes ghosting again and again to the statue of Baelor the Blessed, the place where the child in Arya Stark had died. As her eyes returned to the small boy, she felt Jaqen stiffen beside her.
‘A girl does nothing,’ he whispered fiercely.
Following Jaqen’s gaze, Arya saw a figure stride gracefully down the stairs of the Sept and begin to cross the square with such an obvious intention to approach them that she flushed in embarrassment at not having noticed it too.
The woman, for it was indeed a woman, wore garb cut almost identically to the Queen’s, her shorter gown of black brocade slashed with red silk; black leather trousers and boots visible at her calves.
‘She belongs to the Queen,’ Arya murmured, her lips barely moving.
‘A girl states the obvious,’ Jaqen scowled, keeping his eyes fixed on the woman.
Arya’s hand strayed to where Needle hung at her hip, but Jaqen’s voice stopped her before her hand had even reached the hilt.
‘A girl does nothing,’ he growled. Arya looked helplessly back at the square.
The woman was almost upon them now, her skirts billowing in the breeze, her footsteps ringing out against the cobblestones. Something glinted at her hip. It was a dagger.
‘Jaqen –’ Arya began.
But then the midday sun fell on the woman’s hair, lighting it up like a ribbon of burnished copper. She wore her dagger like a limb, hardly seeming to notice its presence, let alone to be thinking of using it. Large, sad, Tully-blue eyes looked down on the striking, sinister Lorathi, and on the girl at his side who gazed up at her with grey eyes that sang of winter, summer snows and the Children of the Forest; of the Wall, the wolfswood and the blood of the First Men. Stark eyes.
Sansa’s eyes filled with tears.
‘Arya?’