Chapter Text
“She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.” – Beloved, Toni Morrison
A young, broken girl comes for the gift.
No one arrives that same hour with three secrets to share and a death to announce.
Going into the House of Black and White is like moving through water. Thick, humid enough for the air to have a weight. It has always reminded her of an ocean, the blackest, deepest pit of the ocean where only strange, beautiful creatures swim. Their faces are ever-changing, like a rippling pool that never settles on a single reflection.
Darkness tints everything, shadows grown and tended by the dim red candles that never burn beyond a vague, gauzy brightness. Noises arise disembodied from corners, echoing off walls, displacing sound. Someone crying. Someone praying. Someone breathing, long, heavy breaths that slow and slow and slow until…
The rough stone floor is like grains of sand, eroding her away, flesh by flesh, bone by bone, so there is nothing left. She is no one.
That is who walks up to the young, broken girl. She does not make a sound beyond her shallow breathing as she stares into the black pool. Her palms brace along the mouth of the pool as she looms over its edge.
No one sits beside her, silent. She does this for those who have come for the gift.
She does not say anything to them, does not offer words of comfort or condolences. There are no questions to ask. It does not matter who they were before they stepped into the House of Black and White and what has made them seek the gift, just as it does not matter who she ever was.
They have come here of their own volition. No one will not deprive them of the gift.
Still, she lingers. It’s like holding a vigil while there is still life there. She thinks of the Stranger, guiding a soul from life into death. The gods of a different girl’s mother, but not the gods of her father.
The Many-Faced God stares all around them, different eyes, if any eyes at all.
Once, a different girl did not grant the gift of mercy though a beast of a man begged for it. This is how no one atones for that mistake. Death is a gift. Death is a mercy.
She does not speak to those she watches over in their final moments, so she will never know this young girl’s name. A name is too important. It means too much.
A face is also important. No one dares a look at the girl’s.
The broken girl is missing her nose, and there are long strands of gray in her hair now, far too many than there should be for a girl of her age. Her shoulders hunch with a burden brought on by both the world and by memory, crushing her and darkening her under eyes into purple shadows. No one once walked like that, her pack slaughtered, except for one lone wolf too far for her to reach.
But no one knows this face, even beyond its changes of force and time. Her breath catches, like someone swiped a knife at her gut, and she only just miss bloodshed. It’s panic in place of pain, her heart missing a beat.
She shouldn’t speak.
“Jeyne.” There is no question to who she is. They grew up together. She called me Arya Horseface, thought no one. That’s a name she always hated, but she held onto it all the same. She’s remembered every name she ever had. Horseface, Underfoot, Arry, Nan, Squab—dreams within nightmares within dreams.
Always, the story starts with a girl named Stark. A girl who is no more.
Jeyne’s eyes blink up. They are ringed red and filled with tears. “How do you—” Those eyes widen, so black overtakes brown. She stares at no one for a long, unbelieving moment. A blink spills fresh tears down her face. “Arya?”
No one doesn’t answer to this name. She shouldn’t answer to this name, because it cannot be hers. She has no name. Instead, she asks a question. “What happened to you?”
Jeyne Poole shakes her head, pushing back against the floor to scurry away from no one and the pool. It upsets the collar of her shirt, revealing the scars going high up her chest. They look like bite marks. A human’s bite marks.
“No. No, no, no,” she whimpers. “It cannot be you. You’re dead. You’re a ghost. You—” She laughs to herself, a braying, desperate sound, without humor or hope. Goosepimples run up no one’s arms. “But this is what I deserve, isn’t it? I try to be you, so the Stranger shows me your face. The girl I could never be. The girl whose name ended my life. Arya Stark.”
It will be easier if no one allows herself to be a phantom. Let Jeyne Poole drink from the pool and be no more. But the terror in her voice, the scars on her body…
“I am not a ghost.” I was once the ghost of Harrenhal, but now I am… “Jeyne, it’s okay. I will not hurt you.”
“What is your sister’s name?” Jeyne asks suddenly. It’s a test.
No one won’t answer her. She is not Arya Stark. That girl’s memories belong to someone else. A ghost, just like Jeyne said.
Except.
“Sansa,” she whispers. “My sister’s name is Sansa. You were her best friend when we were children. Your father was the steward at Winterfell. Your stitches were always neat but Septa Mordane said you weren’t creative with your designs. You called me Arya Horseface.”
Jeyne reels back as if struck. Arya keeps herself from reaching for her, afraid she’ll scare her off further.
“It’s really you?” Jeyne asks after a pause.
“Yes. Now let me help you.”
Jeyne’s breaths are coming harder now. Faster and shorter. “I told them I was you. I pretended to be you. I was Arya Stark. It was the only way—they were going to—Littlefinger—I’m sorry.” Her sobs shake through her. She covers her face with a bony hand. “I’m sorry.”
Arya gathers her into her arms. She holds her so tight that Jeyne’s thudding heartbeat becomes her own, every wracking sob that shakes through splintered ribs jolting through Arya’s body. Jeyne clings to her, and something ferocious howls through Arya.
She never considered Jeyne Poole part of her pack. She never even liked her, childhood tormentor that she was. But to see her like this, to catch glimpses of her scars, pale skin turned red under the candlelight—Arya wants to have claws and fangs. She wants to shield Jeyne and protect her from whatever creature comes for her.
But it’s not just bloodlust she feels. There is grief, and also guilt.
The worst thing is knowing that what has brought Jeyne to this moment—to the harrowing desperation of seeking the gift when she is still young—is Arya. Her name. Her existence.
If she truly was no one, then Jeyne wouldn’t be here. She wouldn’t be hurt and scared.
“Littlefinger did this to you?” she asks. Arya can’t recall much about Petyr Baelish. King’s Landing seems a world away and a life time ago, even when she lets herself remember her name at last.
“No. The bastard of Bolton.” Jeyne’s voice is a gasp between desperate breaths. “Ramsay. He was a Snow but he hated being called a Snow. No one was supposed to call him a bastard, but that’s what he is. An evil, twisted bastard.” Her fingers claw tighter into Arya dress, ripping at the fabric. She hasn’t been able to change into her acolyte robes. “His father is Warden of the North. He had Ramsay marry me—you—so they could hold Winterfell.”
Roose Bolton. Nan the cupbearer.
“Winterfell,” Arya gasps. “But it was burnt by Theon.”
His name catches Jeyne’s breath. “Theon saved me.”
“He’s here?”
“No. He’s a prisoner on the Wall.”
Arya loosens. She isn’t sure what she would do if Theon Turncloak ended up being in Braavos. His is a name that never went on her list, but to think of Winterfell overrun with ironmen, of Bran and Rickon slaughtered by someone they considered part of their family…
But Theon isn’t here, and neither are her younger brothers.
Jeyne tells her in gasping intervals what happened. She cannot speak the gruesome details. Whenever she gets close, she breaks down all over again, and Arya can do nothing but hold on and tell her she doesn’t have to say anything more. She already knows enough.
Across the Narrow Sea, Arya Stark is not no one. She is someone very important. A girl with that name handed Winterfell over to the Boltons through marriage—the very Boltons who helped in the massacre of the Red Wedding.
To the rest of Westeros, the Boltons don’t only kill Starks. They marry them, too.
Men who killed her mother and brother and Stark bannermen now sleep in their beds. They drink their ale. They walk their halls. They’re warmed by the hot springs during long, dark nights.
Arya has thought all this time that the girl, the youngest daughter of Eddard and Catelyn Stark, was forgotten—that she was a dream, much like the wolf dreams. Bloody but gone by dawn.
Jeyne kept her alive, and for that, she suffered.
Somehow, this is just like Mycah, all those years ago. It is Arya’s fault. Her name was a weapon that Jeyne had gauged herself on. Her name bled over Winterfell, coloring it pink like the Bolton’s house colors. If Arya had stayed, kept her name, if she had not run, Jeyne would not be leaping for the chance to die.
There is more than one way to be a killer.
Suddenly there are tears in her eyes, too. She turns her head to bury it into Jeyne’s neck. She needs this as much as Jeyne. A shoulder to cry on. A body to hold. How long has it been since Arya touched someone without being a different person or no one at all? Raff the Sweetling’s tongue like an eel in Mercy’s mouth, the coaching hands of a whore showing the Silk Wolf the right arch to her spine; her body caressed and bruised, bound in service to the Many-Face Gods. Not her face, but her body, each and every time.
Jeyne leans back when she feels the hot trickle of tears sliding down her neck. She stares at Arya in awe for a moment before returning to their embrace. They do not say anything more. Words are wind, and they both need something solid.
Minutes or hours later, Arya hears steps approaching. She turns.
The kindly man is there. He always is, waiting, watching. But only she can see through eyes that are not her own. The Faceless Men have many powers, but not one like hers. There are cats in the House of Black and White who watch over her.
But she’s not sleeping now. The only eyes she has are her own. The only one who can protect her and Jeyne is herself.
She is not asked about the secrets she knows or the gift she has given.
“This is what happens when we take a name that is not our own without ever trying to understand the weight of such a thing,” says the kindly man, indicating to Jeyne. His cowl rises high enough to hide his face in shadows. Good. The last thing Jeyne needs to see is a withering skull in a temple devoted to death.
“She didn’t deserve this. I don’t even think she had much of a choice.” Arya swallows. “It should have been me.”
“But it was not.”
He is right, but Arya can’t stop imagining it. It’s too easy, to swap them out. Roose Bolton had her in his grasp without knowing it. She poured his wine and tended to his requests in Harrenhal. If he’d only paid closer attention, if he could’ve looked past Nan the cupbearer, she could have been the bastard’s bride in truth.
She would have fought him. She would have bit and clawed and screamed. The Boltons would have captured a wolf; let them see what would happen if they tried to put a wolf in a cage.
Still, it might not have been enough.
Every one of Jeyne’s scars should be Arya’s. Every mark was left for a Stark, not a Poole.
“The North was stolen in my name.”
“Your name? I thought a girl did not have a name.”
Arya bites her lip, and for the first time in long while, the gesture does not earn her a slap. Her cheek is unmarred, her lip trapped between her teeth, when the kindly man asks, “Who are you?”
She eases Jeyne from her arms with a gentle word and gets onto her feet. She has grown, but the kindly man is taller.
Fear cuts deeper than swords.
“Arya Stark,” she says, with pride. “I was born Arya Stark. Some people in Winterfell called me Horseface or Underfoot, but those were all nicknames for a girl named Arya. Then I was Arry, and Weasel, and Nan. Salty and Squab. I was a ghost and a squirrel.
“You wanted me to be no one and everyone, but I was always Arya. Mercy was Arya, Cat was Arya, the Silk Wolf was Arya. I am Arya Stark.”
“This is true.” He pauses. The air gets heavier around them. It dampens the small of her spine and the back of her neck, a hot, warm apprehension. “So what do you plan to do now, Arya of House Stark?”
The answer is out her lips, an answer she wasn’t aware she already had. “I’m going home.”
“To do what?”
“Take back everything that was stolen under my name. They had Arya Stark and used her.” She holds her arms up to display herself. “Now they will get her back, whether they want her or not.”
He nods. “Then you may go.”
She blinks. She waits for the knife. For the shove to put her into the pool. But the kindly man simple stands there.
“Just like that?” she asks, the suspicion sharpening her voice.
“You have not yet been initiated,” he reminds her. “You have not completed the rites, and you have not made the sacrifice. For all you have learned, there are mysteries beyond your comprehension we have not shared. However…”
He steps close. Arya forces herself to not move back, but she does angle her body so Jeyne’s form is hidden behind her. Arya will die for her, she knows it. Jeyne almost died being her; Arya owes it to her to protect the girl that remains.
Jeyne Poole does not deserve to die, afraid and abandoned in the dark.
“If you ever speak of our secrets here,” says the kindly man in a low voice, “we must demand recompense.”
“I will not say a word,” she swears.
“You may say words. It is almost certain that you will have words. There will be questions when you return, after all. Arya Stark has not been seen for several years. She has been believed to be dead, and missing, and alive. People will want to know what she has done to survive.”
Is there anyone left for her to tell her secrets to, she wonders. But of course there is.
Jon.
He has been just as hard to forget as the girl Arya Stark, because so much of who that was, was dictated by him. They were the outsiders, the only two children who looked the same in a crowd of auburn, gazes returned in blue, except for their father’s. They completed each other’s thoughts, finished their sentences as one. They were halves of a whole, and they’ve been apart for too long.
Jeyne recognized Arya, even after all this time. Jon will, too. Her hair is longer now, grown to her to the edge of her shoulder blades, and she learned from one of the courtesans during her apprenticeship how to style her waves into an even flow that wouldn’t tangle. Jon can still muss it.
“What am I allowed to say?” she asks.
“Nothing that your friend can hear.” He turns and walks off. Arya knows she is supposed to follow, but when she takes a step, Jeyne’s hand comes around her ankle.
“No,” she begs. “Don’t leave me.”
Arya drops to one knee. She doesn’t know what makes her do it, but she leans over and presses a gentle kiss to Jeyne’s brow. Her fingers comb through her hair. It’s almost the same shade of brown as Arya’s, where it has not begun to go gray.
Arya hums a song, only for a couple of seconds, and in terrible pitch. It is something her mother once did to her. Hold her and sing.
“I won’t leave,” she says. “It will only be a moment, then I’ll come back for you.” Arya fishes in her pocket and turns out a Westerosi penny. She holds it out to Jeyne. “Keep this. I’ve had it with me since King’s Landing. It is my most prized possession. I am trusting you with it.”
It’s a lie—the coin only just so happens to be in her pocket—but she needs Jeyne to believe. Words are wind, though Arya means it; she’ll come back. But Jeyne has been told and taught that words are false. She has lived the whisper of a lie.
She needs proof. She needs something to hold without making it hurt.
Jeyne takes the coin. She covers it with her fist, gripping tight. When Arya goes, Jeyne does not reach for her again.
The kindly man stops out of earshot, and Arya joins him. They do not turn to face one another.
Master and acolyte, side by side for the last time.
“We knew your heart was too soft to be one of us.”
She snaps her head to look at him. “I am not weak.”
“You are not, and I never said you were. Softness is not weakness.”
“Can a soft girl kill?”
“She might. I do know that a girl with a soft heart shows kindness and love. She holds a crying girl, kisses her with a mother’s promise of protection. A heart of stone is not something to wish for,” he says. “You will learn that in due time.”
She has no interest in speaking to him of her heart. “I will honor whatever secrets you ask of me, on my life, but you need to tell me what I may speak of.”
“Your time in Braavos must be told as half-truths, partial lies. The world that Arya Stark returns to cannot know of our inner workings and teachings. They cannot know the true teachings of the Faceless Men. There will be one always listening, always waiting for you to divulge our ways. You know what must happen if this comes to be.”
She nods slowly.
“You were never our acolyte,” he says. “You never carried out the gift.”
She sets her jaw. Dareon and Raff the Sweetling were her own kills, made of her own free will. She can speak of them. But the others, the names that were given to her, the wishes she granted—they are names that belong only to the Many-Faced God. No one else will know them.
There are other complications, though. She can speak half a dozen languages. She’s even adopted a Braavosi accent, faint but enough to suggest her foreignness. A third of her life has been spent in Essos. Five years to have developed a preference for seafood over dark meats, excel in cyvasse, haggle like a peddler. She has been to Pentos and Lys.
Never mind her reflexes and her cunning. She has been whittled into a weapon. A decorous, swift weapon that has studied under courtesans and fishmongers and bankers. Her arithmetic is as quick and sure as her finger knives. She has learned to see with no eyes and listen with no ears.
A weapon like her can be sheathed and hidden, but once it comes out into the light, it cannot be forgotten. She will give herself away, one way or another. She isn’t going home to stay tucked away in shadows.
Arya Stark from Westeros was the seedling of all these talents. She has bloomed into a foreign flower, pretty petals and thorns alike.
“I will make a good story.” She has the whole boat ride to do it. Even before she stepped inside the House of Black and White, she spun tales about who she was. Now, at least, she does not have to hide her name.
“You must,” he says. “You must also remember your lessons here.”
Her brow furrows. “But you just told me—”
“The Many-Faced God serves all, and he has passed some knowledge onto you for a cause. You will want to remember them for the nights to come.”
Something about his words makes her blood run ice cold.
“Farewell, Arya Stark,” imparts the kindly man. “I hope to never see you again.”
There is nothing else for her to say but, “Valar morghulis.”
“Valar dohaeris.”
The last look she gets of the kindly man is of him being swallowed by shadows.
Arya goes back to Jeyne. The other girl is on her feet, standing further away from the pool. She no longer wants the gift, Arya realizes with relief.
Jeyne doesn’t hear her approach. She has not had to train her ears to the slightest sound. She has lost much, but not her vision, as Arya once had.
“I’m back.” Arya keeps her voice low, so not to frighten her.
Jeyne offers back the coin, but Arya shakes her head. “Keep it. I’ll be by your side, anyways.”
Jeyne squeezes it in her grasp. “Can we leave this place?”
“Yes,” Arya breathes.
She guides Jeyne through the dark. She doesn’t look up to the statues as they pass under them.
It is the last time Arya Stark wades through the dark of the House of Black and White. When the doors close behind them, shut by an unseen hand, it is with a thud she can feel in her bones. It does not fracture her, but sets everything back into place.
She goes down the steps, holding in a delirious laugh. She returns to the spot she remembers. She memorized each scratch in the stone, a pattern she sees behind her eyes.
Her hands overturn the stone, and she pulls Needle out. It’s even smaller than she remembered, when she lifts the blade. Light and nimble. She has grown; for some reason, she half-expected Needle to grow with her, as if it too was a living thing.
Winterfell’s walls. Jon Snow’s smile.
Soon.
“Did you mean it?” Jeyne asks as they walk down by the water. They have not declared a destination, but Arya is too happy to leave behind the House, and she loves the crooked city of Braavos too well to worry about the where as long as it’s away.
“That I’ll protect you? Yes.”
“Not that.” Jeyne stops walking, faces Arya. “Are you truly going back to Winterfell?”
“That is my plan, even if I go alone.”
Jeyne shakes her head. “You aren’t alone. The North was rallying in your name. The Manderlys, the Glovers, the Mormonts, even the Mountain Clans. Valiant Ned’s little girl, they called me—you. King Stannis was about to join battle with the Boltons—”
“Stannis Baratheon?”
Last Arya heard on the docks, Stannis was on the Wall with his army, dying and dwindling as it was. His cause has seemed too lost to reach victory ever since the Battle of the Blackwater. He must be as stubborn as Arya.
“Was he victorious?” she asks, not sure what she wants to hear. Winterfell does not belong to a Baratheon anymore than it belongs to a Bolton, but Stannis was allowed at the Wall, where Jon ruled as Lord Commander. If Jon trusted him, Arya would, too.
She isn’t going to let him hold Winterfell, though.
“I’m not sure,” Jeyne says. “By the time I got to Castle Black, there had been no word, or if there was, I did not hear. They were focused on…other things.” Her lip quivers. “Arya, I don’t think I can go back there.”
Arya stares deep into her eyes. She moves her hands slowly, so there is time for Jeyne to flinch or move away. But she is still as stone when Arya’s hands come around her shoulders.
“You can.”
“What if King Stannis lost? Ramsay could still be alive. And his hounds—gods, his hounds.”
Do you know what dogs do to wolves?
Arya is a wolf, and the Hound is dead. That’s what dogs do.
Die.
“Ramsay will die,” Arya says, sweet and tender as a lover’s whisper. “Littlefinger will die. Anyone who forced you to be me, changed you to be me; anyone who took a piece of you thinking you were me will die. This I swear to you.”
Jeyne is silent for a breath. Another. Then she says, “Why?”
Because this is my fault. If I hadn’t escaped the Red Keep when they butchered Father’s men and took him captive, some Lannister would have sold me off in your place. If Roose Bolton had discovered me at Harrenhal, I would have been hidden until the wedding day, when they would have to drag me kicking and screaming through the godswood.
She knows it is not as simple as that. Nothing ever is. Still.
If, if, if.
“A girl has a name,” she ends up saying. For so long, she hated hearing those words, reminded by the kindly man and the waif that she was failing. She tried to be no one, but with the wolf dreams in the night, with Needle under the ground, Arya Stark always nestled at the surface, like thickened blood showing through the skin.
Jeyne is the blade that lets Arya flow free.
“My name,” she goes on. “The name of Arya Stark has been used to steal and to hurt, it has made men and girls bleed, and you were made to carry that burden. If anyone should feel the pain of that name, it should be me. Not you.
“I will free you from that name. It will belong only to me. And to take it away from you, I must reclaim everything they picked and peeled from you. That means Winterfell. That means each scar and mark, they will feel in return.”
Because it could have been me. If the gods were as just as they were cruel, my name would be my own, and it would have been me.
Jeyne looks at her like she has just made sense of a constellation. The stars disparate and disconnected, lost between darkness, until they’re not. They join together, one by one, into an image that guides the night. Everything makes sense, and the way ahead is shown and safe.
They carry on.
“Who is with you?” Arya asks after some time of wandering.
“Some of King Stannis’s men. They still think I’m, well, you. They planned to put me up with a rich family in Braavos, but getting here to this strange place, I couldn’t pretend anymore. The cook at the manse caught me stealing one of her knives. She knew what I intended to do with it, and she told me there was a nicer way to do it. Cleaner, sweeter.”
“She led you to the House of Black and White,” Arya finishes. Her gut clenches with malaise. What if Arya had not returned when she did—before Jeyne took the gift?
If, if, if.
“What were you doing there?” Jeyne asks. “How did you know that man?”
“I can’t tell you.”
Jeyne allows Arya her secrets, graciously jumping back to Arya’s initial question. “How do we tell King Stannis’s men who you are? That you’re you and I’m just Jeyne Poole. They won’t be happy with me. I snuck off, and I lied all this time.”
That is true. Knights do not like being played fool, more so than most men. They may not harm Jeyne, but they will not be keen to remain in her service, stuck across the Narrow Sea from everything they’ve ever known.
How quick would they abandon her to return home to the place they’ve always known, the people they may love across the waters?
Would they even believe Arya if she claimed to be the true Stark? They may think Jeyne’s mind has been broken, and she grabbed the first Northern girl in Braavos to exchange identities.
No, it’ll cause more complications if they rely on Stannis’s men to get them home. They are too many things that could go wrong. The may not help. They may restrict them. They may force them both to stay.
This is Arya’s mission. She must be the one to see it through.
“We don’t need them to get us back.”
Jeyne gapes. “But I don’t have any coin for passage.”
“Neither do I.” Arya grins. “But I do have an idea.” Before Jeyne can ask, Arya says, “Let me worry about it. I have a place for us to stay tonight and for however much longer we’re here, which I hope will not be more than a couple days.”
“So soon?”
“I make quick work.”
Arya has friends in many corners of Braavos. Shady hovels and gilded homes. Both serve their purposes. Jeyne needs somewhere hidden and safe, comfortable and warm.
Arya has just the place in mind. Her steps turn more certain. The path is more clear.
She already knows what she will do next, once Jeyne is settled. Whether she allowed herself to realize it or not, she has been making this plan all along. It has shifted and changed, with circumstances, with new arrivals to the city, with friendships she has forged. She tried to tell herself she would never go back, because she was no longer Arya Stark.
But she is, and there has always been a way back home.
Her hand goes around Needle’s pommel. It feels like a hug. How sweet will it be to see Jon again. She’ll kiss his face and hold him, and they will say it together. “I missed you.” I always thought of you. Those words may only belong to her, but they are true. I could never forget you.
Jeyne suddenly grasps Arya’s hand. Arya tenses, her eyes flashing to every corner surrounding them, but there is nothing hiding there. Still, something in Jeyne’s eyes, in the slight gasp caught around her lips, stops Arya’s heart.
“There is something else you must know before you go back,” Jeyne says, her voice heavy, and Arya can tell she does not want to go on. This is a secret she wants to keep but is obligated to share.
Fresh tears spring into Jeyne’s brown eyes. “It’s about Jon.”