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The air is thick with smoke and the bitter taste of metal, the clang of a hammer beating an anvil ringing through the forge. Arya twists her mouth at the heat, and tugs the string of the doorbell sharply.
The hammering stops. “Who is it?”
She actually isn’t sure how to answer that. Who is she now? She’s not Cat anymore, she can’t call herself that while the gloves she wears are embroidered with a direwolf head. She is Arya of House Stark again and it’s been so long that she doesn’t know what that means.
She settles on the truth. “Someone who wants a sword.”
The blacksmith emerges, wiping his hands on a rag. They are large, calloused hands, hands of a man who has practiced his art and knows it well. The rag is tossed over his shoulder into a bin. “What kind of sword are you looking for? I’m a better armourer, so if you want something fancy –“ He stops midsentence and cocks his head, eying her carefully. “You’ve never been ‘round here before.”
Arya’s lips quirk into a smile. She likes that he doesn’t show surprise at her being a woman in armour. “I have, before you were the smith.”
He lifts an eyebrow. “I’ve been the smith here three years.” His eyes study the dark braid thrown over one shoulder, the litheness of her frame. “You’re not any older than me, don’t believe you’re even as old. What do you need a sword for?”
Because I have outgrown needlework, she thinks, because a Bravos sword is for those still trying to prove themselves, because the head of a Queensguard must wield a blade.
“I just do,” she tells him. “Can you make me a sword or not?”
“I can’t make a tool if I don’t know what you’re using it for.”
A child might have said to ‘protect’, but she does know one thing; Arya Stark is not a child anymore. “To kill. A sword is meant for killing.” She’d kill the people who tried to kill her sister, her queen, because someone had to do it. There was little point in making it sound any nobler than it was.
“…Honest answer.” He sounds surprised for the first time, but somehow in that moment he stops looking down at her and starts looking in her eyes. She meets his gaze calmly.
Eyes, unlike hands or feet, do not grow with you. A woman has the same eyes she did before she was one, and just because they’ve never met in this forge doesn’t mean they’ve never met at all.
His jaw drops a little, chapped lips parting; he licks them slowly and swallows hard. “I know you. I know you, don’t I? You’re Arry. Arya.”
She tilts her head to one side, thinks. She’s allowed to say this – allowed to be this, now. “Yes, I’m Arya. And you are Gendry.”
“You – you knew? You knew who I was when you came here?” He steps forward and then jerks back, unsure if the approach is welcome. He’d idly hoped that she might come back to her home when he took the job. Waited as Arya’s siblings arrived, one at a time and not always to stay, but she did not – wondered if she was choosing not to return or simply couldn’t.
She shrugged. “Jon said I’d want to go see the smith; that you’d told them you’d known me for awhile during the War. I don’t know any other smiths.” Not anymore. A lot of the people she’d known were dead and gone, and she was responsible for more than she’d let the world know.
“Where did you go? Your brother – Lord Snow asked everywhere, nobody knew a thing.” I looked too, he doesn’t say.
“Arya Stark never left Westeros,” she tells him, and doesn’t know how to explain – she tells herself she’s too tired, and that a member of the Queensgaurd who can become Faceless will be more useful if nobody knows she can. “I need a sword. Will you make me one?”
Gendry thinks about Needle, thinks about the first time he watched Arya kill a man so they could escape, thinks about how many years have passed since then. She doesn’t need him, not anymore (and he’s not sure she ever really did.)
She is not staying in Winterfell. He knows that much, and he knows that when she leaves he won’t be following her.
If something he makes can keep her safe a while longer –
“I’ll do it. Come back in a few days.”