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Chapter Text

Daenerys Targaryen met Arya Stark in the sands of Astapor, playing games with snakes. The future queen had no knowledge of Arya’s identity—she couldn’t even tell that the girl was, in fact, a girl—all Daenerys saw was a dirty boy with a fringe of dark hair that hung over his eyes, so rich and grey they must have been the same color as valyrian steel. He lay on his stomach in the sand, palms flat, his eyes affixed to those that opposed him; the unblinking eyes of a beautiful cobra. Cream scales wove and blended with green and silver. They shifted, broadening and flattening with the hypnotic movements of the snake’s body as it examined the boy from all angles. Together their heads weaved, always opposing, their eyes forever locked.

Jorah and Ser Barristan stood before each of Daenerys’ shoulders, her defense against the snake. Daenerys passed them with ease, and ignored how they tensed. She stopped to stand at the boy’s hip.

“What are you doing?”

The boy didn’t appear to have heard her, and continued to trade gazes with the snake. ‘Perhaps he is deaf?’ Daenerys thought. Though she could see few white scars against the tan skin of the boy’s back, she knew that scars could be hidden, and a spike to the ear would render a slave deaf without anyone the wiser—a good practice for a Master with many secrets, though it seemed simpler to rid a slave of their tongue. It was disheartening, how much she’d learned about the horrors of the practice. The boy had removed his collar of black leather, and he bore the same paleness around his throat that every other slave did; a reminder set into his flesh. 

“I found him interesting.”

‘Not deaf then,’ Daenerys noted. Her lips perked in the smallest of smiles. ‘Only focused.’

“And what secrets have you uncovered in the eyes of your friend?”

“Nothing, really.” The boy spoke with an accent similar to Jorah’s and Ser Barristan’s, only with a higher pitch and breathy vowels. Young. Scrawny and young like nearly every boy who would march with her and her Unsullied. “But it’s not about learning secrets.”

“What is it about, then?”

“Fear.”

Daenerys quirked a brow. “Fear?”

“Fear cuts deeper than swords,” the boy remarked, rising with the power of his thin arms to lift his chest from the sand. The snake rose with him, mirroring his every waver. “If I can master my fear, I could be more dangerous than your Unsullied.”

Daenerys’ smile bloomed and became full. She gazed down at the boy with an infantile sense of fondness. “That’s your plan then? To charm snakes and master your fear?”

The boy didn’t respond, and Daenerys found herself staring into the cloudy eyes of the cobra. It was not focused on her in kind. It slithered forward, head high, going straight for the boy who seemed frozen. The queen advanced instinctively, and so did her loyal guards, but all the cobra did was curl itself many times around the boy’s neck.

“Yes.” The boy rose to stand and faced Daenerys. His grey eyes were dark, beautiful steel, and the snake’s own were no longer cloudy. “I’ll try.”

Chapter Text

Daenerys found Arry to be many things: sweet when he was determined to scowl as Missandei wiped dirt from his cheek; awkward with his penchant for spending more time conversing with horses and other beasts than he did his own kind; loyal when he sneered at Razdal mo Eraz, turning up his nose when the Wise Master dared to suggest that Daenerys was forcing him to grow in a foreign land and fight unnecessary foreign wars; and brave, when he snuck into her tent to press a dagger between Daario Naharis’ legs. The man himself had snuck into her camp, posed as one of her Unsullied, held a knife to Missandei’s neck, and tiny, watchful Arry had slithered between the tent posts with all the efficiency of his snake to hold the mercenary hostage for her. Any slip of the hand, purposeful or not, and there would be little anyone could do to save Daario’s life—and he knew it.

“That sack there,” Daenerys tilted her head in it’s direction, “it’s red with blood. Have you killed my Unsullied, Daario Naharis? Did you think their heads would make me afraid?”

“I assure you, I never harmed a single one of your Unsullied.” Daario dropped his precious dagger in the sand and, with slow movements, lifted the sack from his belt and emptied the heads of his fellow commanders onto the floor. “Only those that would harm you.”

Unfazed, Daenerys quirked a brow, expression expectant but otherwise neutral. She was naked, submerged in water that frothed white with expensive soap and scented oils, and yet she behaved as though she were a knight in full plate; a queen in the finest gown upon the finest throne. 

Was she not a queen? Was she not protected? Did she not hold all the power?

“And what do you hope to earn from this… display?” Daenerys kept her expression neutral, even as Arry’s serpentine companion wound its way up Daario’s leg, hissing lowly. Her confidence would be belied only by her stoicism, if it was at all. “Do be careful, Daario Naharis. Cobras have a tendency to spit a truly awful venom, and it wouldn’t do to have you die in such a way. How would I send your Second Sons a message if they could not watch you die in person?”

“You would kill me, when I should be rewarded?”

The hissing grew louder. The cobra’s eyes were cloudy. ‘Curious.’

Daenerys lifted her arms to rest on the sides of the tub, stretching her spine and rolling her shoulders. She was intrigued. “What reward would you ask of me?”

Daario smiled, wide and smug and eager. “Let me serve you.”

Arry’s snake had climbed up to glare at Daario’s profile. It’s mouth parted, long fangs horrifying. At Daenerys’ command, “keligon,” its mouth closed and it fell away, long body extending from Daario’s to Arry’s without ever touching the floor.

Such a clever serpent. 

Daenerys made brief eye contact with Arry, who hadn’t wavered an inch. One word, and the mercenary would fall to the sand with his most precious parts gored beyond repair. Such loyalty made her breath deepen and her nostrils flare. The Queen focused again on Daario.

He had saved her a great deal of trouble. Killing him would only invite more. 

“Make your oath, Daario Naharis, and then leave my presence.”

-

“What do you think of him? Of Daario?” 

Daenerys examined Arry’s profile, lit by the early morning sun. He was dirty again, but the queen wouldn’t push him away by trying to clean the filth on his cheek. The boy fought with anyone who tried to do anything for him in the vein of mothering. 

Arry huffed faintly upwards, disrupting the lengthy bangs that had begun to hang over his eyes. “I’ve never met a man who fought for beauty, Your Grace.”

”Daenerys,” the Queen corrected gently. Sometimes it was a relief to hear her own name outside of the jumble of her titles. 

”I’ve never met a man who fought for beauty, Daenerys. But he’s made your mission easier: Yunkai is yours, and Meereen isn’t far.” Arry tilted his head, thoughtful and quiet as his snake, Qiro, rose to settle the uppermost part of her body on top of his head. “Though I wonder, what happens after Meereen?”

Daenerys accepted the reins to her gelding from Ser Barristan in silence. She cast Arry a look of indecisiveness before swinging up into the saddle. In truth, she had no idea. 

’What will happen after Meereen?’

Chapter Text

The moment Daario emerged from the dust cloud, horse blood on his precious dagger and champion’s blood on his arakh, Daenerys knew he had won Arry’s good favor. She could see the awe in the boy’s eyes and the faint part of his lips. Soon perhaps it would morph into a form of hero worship, but at the very least, Arry had a role model other than Grey Worm.

Daenerys was unsure if that was a good thing.

-

Over the course of a single night, Meereen was hers. Dragon banners hung from every pyramid, but none were greater than the one that shrouded the golden harpy atop the Great Pyramid, concealing all but it’s crown from view with black cloth and red stitching.

Slave collars were replaced by cheap bronze torcs to hold up the clothes of freedmen. They had worn them so long and hardly removed them at all before that day, and Daenerys could see evidence of this in the discoloration of their necks. It reminded her of Arry, so long ago in Astapor, and all of her children that marched with them from city to city, chanting Mhysa and searching for joy in the world. 

Tables were set inside and outside, ornate tablecloths discarded, all of them laden with the food the Masters had once hoarded for themselves. Persimmon wine and honeyed mead were available in tankers as big around as Daenerys’ torso, and the freedmen dunked their cups inside instead of laboring to pour it. A thousand lambs and four thousand chickens had been slain and set to roast as the sun rose, basted with honey and milk infused with a dozen expensive spices. From noon onward the freedmen celebrated, feasting and drinking and roaming the markets they had once only entered as porters. 

As the merriment carried on, the malnourished feasting and singing and dancing with one another on streets and in homes where they once toiled without end, the Unsullied were hard at work. 

“I’d kill everyone everywhere that ever hurt anyone I’d ever loved. I want to. But that’s different then stabbing in the dark at random people, hoping for the criminals who did this crime.” Arry had looked terribly conflicted, rage and grief and a lack of surity making him look older and younger all at once. “My father was a just man, the greatest man to ever live. He believed in the law, and in proof. Where’s the proof that one did it?” He pointed to a master cowering behind six guards. “Or that one?” A master with tall, wiry hair sculpted into the shape of dark, sweeping wings. He stared defiantly at the sand before Daenerys’ feet. “Or was it one man? Who knows?”

”They will never confess,” Daenerys replied. Daenerys sought the eyes of the master with the tall hair, but he would not meet her gaze. The master cowering behind guards choked on air when she met his hazel with her fiery amethyst. “They will shield one another in sweet lies and defy me, hoping to evict me by clutching their power and pushing for an advance as the days pass us by. I cannot show weakness.” 

“An investigation—”

”Will yield nothing. A hundred and sixty-three deaths will yield me justice and fear. Justice for a hundred and sixty-three children selected at random for immense suffering. Fear from the masters, who will know what it means to face consequences.” Daenerys turned to Arry. “I will not have my Unsullied discriminate. The poorest of the masters will be as vulnerable as the richest. The oldest and the youngest, should they be of adulthood and capable of meaningful autonomy. I will select a hundred and sixty-three masters at random for this punishment. That is justice.” 

Softly, Arry said, “That is madness.” 

Daenerys’ chin rose. “Madness would be letting them all live, and allowing them to think they achieved a victory over me and all the freedmen who lost their children.” 

Arry looked at the skyline, dotted with the points of lavish pyramids, old and new, white and teak and one capped by sapphire-colored rock that blazed like the sea in the rising sun. 

With patience, Daenerys asked, “Would you not kill a man who tried to kill you?”

“Are all of the masters trying to kill you?”

”They may have begun their plans. They may begin their planning tomorrow. The timeframe matters not; there will be plots set in motion, and I must quash as many as I am able.” 

So the Unsullied gathered a hundred and sixty-three masters from their pyramids, seizing the heads of houses or the eldest sons for punishment. 

-

“Missandei, where is Arry? And Daario?”

The Queen walked between the dozens of tables that interrupted Meereen’s streets, declining wine and mead and rum and a whole assortment of foods that her subjects offered her eagerly as she passed. Ser Barristan and Jorah walked just behind each of her shoulders, their hands tense on their swords.

“It is my understanding that Daario took Arry to the markets. They were talking about a smith who sells white daggers and a tavern that brews a special spiced rum.”

Daenerys sighed. Daario was effective, but his influence could not serve to be the most positive where Arry was concerned. ‘The boy will be no sellsword.’ “Of course.”

-

Months later...

-

“You want to what?”

“Arry needs be out in the field, hacking and slashing with the rest of the Second Sons so he knows what it’s like to be at war.” 

Daenerys would not see Arry in pearl grey armor like her Unsullied, or in layers of leather and horsehair like Daario and the Dothraki. 

“He is well aware of what it is like at war.” 

“He has never fought in a war.” Daario sighed, looking out of the glassless windows that lined the uppermost part of the walls in the throne room. The Great Pyramid was vast and lavish with chiseled designs, all squares within squares; some hollow, all stacked and bulging from every surface except the floor. “My Queen, what do you expect him to become? Your scribe? Shall he be your cupbearer, or are you teaching him High Valyrian so that he can read you poetry at supper?” 

‘He has become too familiar.’ Daenerys tilted her chin up just a fraction. Daario wasn’t far below, having advanced up the steps to be closer to her. He was always trying to get close. 

“Arry will not travel with the Second Sons to retake Yunkai, and that is final.” 

Daario’s nostrils flared as he inhaled deeply, but he nodded in understanding all the same. 

The Queen had not seen Arry peeking his head out from the hall behind her stone throne, or how he made burning eye contact with Daario before ducking away and into the darkness. 

-

Long past nightfall...

-

“I told you that you were to remain in Meereen, yet there you were, creeping through the streets like a wanted man in the dead of night.” 

Daenerys’ tone was forcefully even, but tremors of her anger broke through at every vowel and honed every consonant to a sharp edge. Arry was determined to keep a straight face. 

“I swore no oaths—”

Daenerys rounded on Arry, hands clenched into fists. Her amethyst eyes were dark with her upset. “You should not be speaking at all, and you should never play that game with me. You might as well have sworn a thousand oaths because you are one of my people and you will obey my commands.” 

Outwardly Arry was stone, unmoving. Inwardly, he was a mess of anger and defiance. While a part of him knew, rationally, that he was the Queen’s vassal and subject to her command, the larger rest of him reared its ugly head in a fit of rage at the thought of anyone telling him what to do. Missandei ordering him to wash behind his ears was one thing, but the Queen was interfering with his training. 

It was maddening. How could the Queen expect him to stay behind, crouched behind her silken skirts like a frightened boy? He’d killed men multiple times in the past, but battle—raiding and close quarter combat in the midst of a sea of enemies—was something he had yet to experience, and he wanted to badly. 

Further still, who was she to deny him a chance to hone his violence, when she dished out her own so readily? She crucified her enemies, random as she had selected them from the sea of the unhappy and the scorned, and Arry had his own to take care of someday. 

It bothered him still—the randomness of her selection. They may have been slave masters, but Jorah had tried to sell men himself, and he still lived and breathed—by the Queen’s side no less. There was room for mercy, and room for decent men. 

He shoved away the thought. 

When Arry thought the Queen would continue, she seemed to deflate. She straightened, breathing even, and stared at Arry with a look that brokered no argument. “I will not continue this tonight. Rest. We will talk in the morning, after breakfast.” 

‘I won’t be here for breakfast.’

“Yes, my Queen.” 

Once Daenerys had departed, Arry made for the balcony. 

As smooth as the stones were, there were still gaps between every row of marble and sandstone. Arry wedged the bare ends of his sandals and the tips of his fingers into them, climbing higher and higher until he made it to the tall, golden harpy statue that rested at the Great Pyramid’s tip. The war room was directly beneath it, and beneath that the Queen’s chambers. With luck Arry would get away without being seen nor heard. 

Drogon would obey none but Daenerys, and Rhaegal was an ornery bastard, but Viserion… Viserion was sweet—at least to Arry. The cream colored creature had taken a liking to sitting on Arry’s shoulders, but now that he was larger, perhaps their roles could switch. The dragon turned to him whenever he whistled, and on a rare occasion would take hunks of steak from Arry’s hand with a careful snap of his teeth. They were friends, or as much as a young man and a dragon could manage to be. 

Arry scaled the harpy and stood within the circle of its crown, sandals in dried and wet bird shit mixed with dirt and leaves. She waved her arms, praying that none on the ground caught sight of her. 

In the distance, Viserion took notice. His silhouette looked bulky that night, but with the moon hidden away and the sky so dark, nothing was exact, least of all the silhouette of a dragon. 

‘Wait… that’s not—’ Arry bit clean through his tongue when Rhaegal swooped down, a foot bearing sharp ivory talons swatting at his body and knocking him from the harpy’s crown. It was either fall to his death or cling to the dragon’s ankle, and Arry wasn’t keen on dying just yet. 

Mouth full of blood, fresh cuts on his sides from Rhaegal’s talons, Arry had one thought. 

‘She’s going to be furious.’

Chapter Text

A great green beast was seen flying over Qohor come sunrise, and every spear and arrow Unsullied slave-soldiers sent its way always fell short by a thousand feet. The people screamed and stumbled over one another, ducking into their homes and shops in the market. A mother, in her fear, pulled herself and her  children into a brothel out of sheer desperation. No one in Qohor had seen a dragon in centuries. 

Learned boys, privileged and skilled, ran along the outskirts of the city, their tutors frantic behind them with spy-glasses in hand. They had spotted the beast from their vantage point in one of their father’s palace gardens, and quickly abandoned their studies in favor of excited pursuit. 

“It’s carrying something!” one boy howled.

“A person!” another cried.

“They’re dead now,” one tutor, out of breath, assured their pupil. Large hands fell to the boy’s thin shoulders, slowly muscling him around towards the city. “Poor boy will be the monster’s meal. If you study, and listen when I speak, the same will not happen to you.”

-

Arry had lost consciousness within the first hour of travel. He returned to the realm of the living just as a massive, horrifying horn blared far too close to his ear. 

His eyes opened, and he screamed.

A thousand feet below, where the air wasn’t freezing, the Arsenal of Braavos had congregated on the seas before the Secret City. Ships cut through the lagoons and deeper water like a blade through soft fat, sailing into a formation that was blurry to Arry. He could tell that it was Braavos by the great Titan that stood atop two long stretches of land thick with pine trees. He’d seen drawings of it in history books and heard tales of its massive size and broken longsword back when he was a girl and his name was Arya.

He fell towards it soon enough, like a seagull diving for fish, when Rhaegal dropped him.

“YOU RAT BASTARD!” Arry howled, legs kicking and arms spinning as he descended in a horrifying free fall. The world became a blur of powder blue and green-grey stone as he flipped head over heels over and over again. His heart and stomach both fled his torso and climbed into his throat, acting as a stopper for his lungs, leaving him breathless and panicking.

There was no way to prepare for a fall like that.

There was no way to prepare for the cruelty of a mad dragon.

‘Curse you, you winged bastard.’

With a helpless croak and a loud boom! of a splash, Arry slammed into the water. As he stared at the fading light of the noon sun, blurred by the brackish water, his eyes closed against his will once more.

-

Three days later…

-

Someone was slapping at her face. It was a gentle, irritating sort of slap, meant to rouse and not to punish. 

“Oi, girl!” More slapping. The accented voice was thick and vaguely familiar. Arya could feel something old and strong reviving in her chest, and a smile, small and weak, came unbidden. She swore Syrio was with her; she could smell his cologne, his cured leathers, his billowing silk shirts and the scent of their combined sweat as they sparred for hours on end in the Red Keep. The thought of him made her feel strong—strong enough to try and sit up.

A large hand slapped against her collarbone, pushing her flat on the bed.

“You bind your breasts too tight for too long, you fall from dragon claws and you crack your ribs and yet you try and sit? Foolish girl. Be still, before I tie you to this bed and let my wife coddle you. She is worse than I, you must know, like all mothers are with children—any children at all. So be still, or Yaesara will come and torture you.”

Somewhere far away, Arya heard a woman with a rich voice order the man to be quiet.

Some of their speech was foreign to her, but the Braavosi was a bastard dialect born from High Valyrian. Arya could extrapolate based on her knowledge of that language and the little she had gleaned from Missandei during her studies. 

Some of it had been language studies, the rest cultural and political. 

“The Braavosi could be a fearsome enemy to our Queen. They despise dragons and Targaryens as if they were the same in all ways, and may seek to kill Daenerys with the same tenacity they might Drogon, Viserion and Rhaegal.”

Arry had tightened his grip on his Braavosi blade. “I’d—”

“Though I’m sure you grew up listening to poetic tales of bloody battles, grand victories and gluttonous celebrations, diplomacy can be superior to swordplay—especially when we are outnumbered and outmatched. Learn to speak instead of strike, and you might serve our Queen better than Daario or Jorah could ever dream of.” 

Arya remained calm. She didn’t flinch when the man clasped one of her hands between his own. His were rough and thick with callouses, just like her father’s—and Jon’s. The cologne he wore was nothing but the salt of the sea and his own sweat, but there was something deeper there that kept the memory of Syrio alive in her senses.

“Rest and heal. Nysir Ronal will let no harm come to you.” He patted the back of her hand. “Welcome to Braavos, child. Nowhere else will you be safer.”

‘You’re wrong,’ Arya thought, stomach tight as the pain of her ribs began to increase. ‘I slept in a den of dragons and freedmen, and none could have harmed me.’

Nysir fed her water from a stout clay mug, without handles and riddled with the smudged fingerprints of its maker. She drank slowly, every swallow a sting on her healing tongue and a stabbing pain in her wounded torso. 

‘But coddled girls don’t make warriors. They make princesses.’

‘I will not be a princess. Princesses die.’

Chapter Text

Nysir Ronal was a healer, as was his wife Yaesara, and they tended to Arya for weeks. Her ribs were a source of agony and the cause of her immobility, though much of her body was splotched with black, blue, yellow and green bruises from her terrible impact with the sea. They did not bind them, rather they laid stretches of cloth, soaked in a mixture Arya didn’t know, to ease her pain and lighten her bruises. They made her breathe deeply so her lungs wouldn’t fill with sickness, breathing in time with her for encouragement and comfort. 

‘Every hurt is a lesson,’ she thought, breathing deeply as Yaesara murmured soothingly in the Braavosi tongue. Sometimes the healer’s words would be random collections of things, other times stories: an alleycat that won the heart of a Sealord of Braavos, immortalized now in granite by the feet of his statue on the Canal of Heroes; the Titan of Braavos wading into the sea to defend the city; runaway slaves—freedmen then—discovering the unmolested hundred islands and lagoons that they would make into the Secret City, a haven from cruel masters and dragons. 

It took a frustrating amount of time, but Arya was able to breathe without pain and walk without it too, so Yaesara allowed her to move about the Ronal home. 

“Girl, you do not need to wash dishes!” 

“But Yaesara I—”

Yaesara swatted at Arya with a wooden spoon, gently thwacking her on the arm where a bruise once bloomed so black it looked rotten. Now she was pristine, no blemishes save her scars, whose only pain came from memories, if she had any of them at all. 

“Nysir will take you out tomorrow and show you the city. You will learn where to go and where to not go.” The woman’s voice was stiff, but there no overbearing sensation washed over Arya’s nerves. This was a mother—if she had true children, Arya didn’t know—but a mother nonetheless. 

She hadn’t had a mother in a long time. She wasn’t sure if she wanted this one, but she nodded all the same. 

Braavos was the city in which she would forge herself anew. Maybe she would have Yaesara in her life for years, or maybe even the next two days, if her and her husband’s interference was too strong. Arya was so close; she could afford listen to Yaesara for now.

-

An early morning stroll...

-

“See that?” Nysir pointed to a long stone structure suspended by pillars in the sky, casting a broad shadow over tightly packed homes and boats in the canals. It ran for an impressive length—Arya was not sure where it began or where it ended, but it lead far away from the city. “That is the sweetwater river, where all of Braavos gets their water. Without it, we would boil this brine in the canals endlessly to drink. This is where I get our buckets, see?” 

He pointed to a fountain, where several men, women and children labored to fill tall buckets with fresh water to carry back to their homes. 

“Come, Yaesara will have her apprentice bring water to our home. Today I will take you across the city, but first, we must eat.”

-

Days after Arya ended up in the Ronal home, she came down with a terrible fever that left her muttering like a madman, sweating and vomiting out past her cage of broken and bruised ribs. Once her fever had broken, Nysir told her that he had thought she would die, no little amount of stress pulling at the corners of his weathered face as he dabbed sweat from her brow. 

He had called her Arya.

So now, even as it felt like a foreign moniker after so long, Nysir continued to call her by her trueborn name. 

“Come, Arya. I will take you to the Spotted Cellar, and you may view the Drowned Town beyond it. I have business to attend to.” 

Business was an eel fight and a meal on the house. Nysir was a popular man, greeting a dozen shabby-looking patrons as he moved throughout the alehouse. They eyed Arya curiously, but there was not a single leer or rude remark. Only the barkeeper said a word. 

“You had a daughter tucked away, Nysir?”

Nysir’s laugh was hearty, but too loud to remind Arya of Syrio’s. “No no, this is the girl from the dragon scare.” 

The barkeeper’s smile fell, and Nysir sobered at his words. “You will bring her to the Sealord, yes?”

”What?” Arya asked sharply, looking between Nysir and the barkeeper. 

“In time. She has finally healed, and now I show her our world. I will find her a job at my side or with the tailors, and the Sealord may summon her like he may summon any citizen of Braavos.”

The barkeeper smiled at Arya. “You are a brave girl, young one. It is a blessing that you survived such a terrible creature, or perhaps that he dropped you at our doorstep. Destiny is fickle thing, and greatness always awaits.” 

‘Fancy words for a barkeep and an eel peddler.’ 

For all his wisdom, the barkeeper descended into madness when two savage-looking eels, as long as Arya and twice as thick in the skull, began to tear into one another in a pit in the middle of the ground floor. They thrashed, making no noise save the slap of their bodies against each other and their stone prison, snapping their jaws hungrily. They were starved before they fought. 

One eel was smaller by a foot or so, and quicker for it, but it was no match for the behemoth it was trapped with. 

Arya didn’t want to watch, so she closed her eyes. 

They opened a moment later, and suddenly she was submerged in briny water, without her arms or legs, and a creature with massive jaws and slick green skin was trying to bite her face. 

She reacted, fiercer then the frantic eel who once occupied this body alone, snapping her jaws with all the savagery of a wolf in the tundra, leagues smarter in the throes of hunger then the creature curled up in the back of her mind. She took damage—a lost tooth, a cut to the lip and a painful score of teeth on her side—but it was her opponent that lost, immobile with its lower jaw torn loose, hanging by mottled skin, and much of its face otherwise disfigured. 

As the eel crept forward with slight movements of its tail, the hunger overwhelming, Arya fled its mind, opening her eyes to a solid body with arms and legs, out of water. 

Nysir’s face was shadowed by storm clouds, his scowl fierce. 

“Ronal, that’s thirty honors!” 

Absent of any feeling of guilt, Arya watched her injured eel consume its opponent. The hunger that clawed at her belly subsided, and she fought a smile with success. 

Focused on her eel, Arya failed to see the man shadowed by the darkness of a back table, who watched her beneath a salt-stained hood. He was ugly, with a pug nose and a lip puffy from injury, infection and poor healing, but his eyes were a cold, clear blue.

Chapter Text

“And the fighting pits, Hizdahr?” Daenerys was tired, and the day had just begun; the sun bled into the sky from its place barely atop the horizon, brightening grey and navy into pink and cerulean. “How have these qualifying rounds gone?” 

In truth, she did not care and did not want to care, but as a Queen, it was her duty to. She met Hizdahr’s gaze, her expression carefully schooled into one of positive interest. 

“Ah, yes—yes Your Grace.” For all his confidence in approaching her as the eldest son of his family, and for all his financial exploits made with a seeming mountain of confidence and cunning, he lacked these traits now. Daenerys found regret bore into her chest. She wondered how different her affairs would be if Hizdahr’s father served as one of her advisors. “It is tradition for the ruler of Meereen to observe many of the initial fights around the city, gracing the lowest of fighters with her presence to honor their dedication and sacrifice. The events that have occurred so far have been very successful, and many fighters with prior fame in the pits have entered for the grandest of spectacles to come in the following weeks.” 

Daenerys could already hear the clang and clatter of steel, and the cries of aggressive men, of frightened men, of dying men. These were the sounds that played in her dreams. 

She found her neck and back stiff with the displeasure she could not let show. “Missandei, Ser Jorah and Grey Worm will coordinate with you as to my schedule and security.”

”Yes, Your Grace.” 

To Daenerys then, it felt as though life had been better, simpler, when she was but a girl in a house with a red door. Its walls had been old stone, tinted green near the cool floors, and there had been a window in her room, before Viserys ordered it shuttered forever after another assassination attempt. Or perhaps life hadn’t been better—the window had been closed after all, and cutthroats had chased them from one end of Braavos to the other, and then from the city entirely. In the Great Grass Sea? No. Too much savagery, too many helpless victims, and a dead husband charred to rubble with her unborn son and a witch. Tragedy had borne her three children, but that did not mean she wished to go back. 

There had been so much pain and loss, but there was pain and loss in her life still. Did it end? Was there a time upcoming in her life where the push and pull of strife and victory would cease, or would she have to wait for death?

As her advisors waited patiently in silence for her next words, Daenerys looked to Grey Worm. As the commander of her Unsullied, he would hold the information she did not need to pretend to care for. 

“What news of Arry?” 

Grey Worm’s expression belied nothing. He spoke to her in High Valyrian. “Scouts from Qohor have found nothing new—Rhaegal was seen carrying the body of a person in his claws two months ago, only now there are boys who claim he was carrying cattle, others a statue of a harpy made of gold, some a host of bodies. Scouts from Pentos, Myr, Tyrosh and Volantis have gathered nothing.” 

“Where else might we search?” Daenerys asked. 

The brief clatter of a sheathe against wood and stone brought attention to Ser Barristan, who sat taller in preparation to speak. “Your Grace, if I might interject in this matter—”

Ser Barristan was interrupted by Jorah. “Your Grace, it’s been two months. The boy is likely not—”

“We do not know how fast Rhaegal can fly, or what direction he went after being spotted in Qohor.” Ser Barristan did not look at Jorah, even as the knight stared at him openly. “We also do not know if Rhaegal cared to drop Arry anywhere within reason. He could have abandoned the boy in the middle of the narrow sea, or he could have taken him halfway to Yi Ti before coming home to his mother. If he is beyond the Free Cities, there is little we can do.” 

Jorah sat forward in his chair, elbows on the table. “Your Grace, every time you send Unsullied from Meereen to search for Arry—”

”I also send Unsullied to the Lhazareen, and to Yunkai and Astapor. All very dangerous places for my people, given the state of both cities. They move about in plain clothes and do as instructed with little upset. So every time I send Unsullied past these gates, I do so with an express purpose—a purpose important to my rule.”

Jorah would never ask her why finding Arry was important to her rule. He would not question her so personally in front of so many. In these he had some sense.

The discussion moved to brokering deals with the Lhazareen for meat, milk and wool, and then to the dispersal of wealth acquired from the fighting pits. That money would be funneled towards city repairs and the education and housing of freedmen with valuable skills. This meeting did not cover the thousands of freedmen trying to sell themselves to passing ships, hoping for safety in servitude—the only life they had ever known and felt capable of living. A tax had been placed upon such transactions, and for all that it made Daenerys’ heart ache, that was largely the end of it. 

-

When the hour after the small council meeting was through, Daenerys would make her way down to the throne room to meet with supplicants. Until that time, she chose to exist quietly in her chambers, all candles extinguished, with a plate of untouched fruit and a decanter of untouched wine beside her empty bed. 

Empty. 

She had shared that bed with Daario Naharis weeks ago, during the first few days where she sent officers charging towards far-off cities in search of Arry. He had filled it beautifully, if a tad obnoxiously, with a solid, warm body decorated with scars and a mane of garish sapphire hair. 

Daenerys remembered their night together with a mixture of faint positivity and a heavy dose of unfortunate regret. His body was nice, his attentions pleasurable, but the men of Tyrosh were perhaps not for her—or, at least, one man of Tyrosh, though she was not interested in trying any other. 

Now her bed was normally occupied by only herself. Her room was normally occupied only by herself as well. She rarely hosted Missandei save the time it took to prepare each others’ hair together in the morning. 

Her back was stiff. 

As she glanced out past the silk curtains that framed her balcony, Daenerys found herself missing a house with a red door, and a boy who charmed snakes. 

-

Two days later... 

-

Rhaegal had returned long ago, spotted in the skies above Meereen. Today marked the first time he had greeted his mother since fleeing with Arry. 

“Hello,” Daenerys murmured. She leaned back against the balustrade of her balcony, hands planted at her sides. Rhaegal had clawed into the Great Pyramid, finding purchase deep in slabs of sandstone. 

He chittered, baring black teeth. In the pale reach of the moon he glittered like a dark emerald forest where the orange light of braziers and torches did not lighten his scales. Bronze eyes bore holes into his mother’s face. Daenerys wondered if he would look guilty, if he were capable of such an expression. Could her children even feel guilt? 

“I wish you hadn’t taken him,” Daenerys professed. She watched the natural sway of Rhaegal’s head, back and forth; rhythmic. “I wish he hadn’t been available to take.” 

Rhaegal said nothing. 

“Would you tell me where he was, if you could?” 

Rhaegal chittered gently again; wordless consolation, or nothing at all. 

A bout of hopelessness made Daenerys’ body feel heavy. Her arms went slack at her sides. 

‘Perhaps there is nothing after Meereen. Perhaps Meereen is the end.’

How terrible would that be? She had planned to remain in Meereen long enough to stabilize the city and usher her children into a new world of freedom and prosperity. She had not set a timeframe—perhaps it would take her the rest of her life. 

The thought made her heart feel like a weight. 

Chapter Text

-

The Crabsteppe Tailor, a small shop in the shadow of the sweetwater river...

-

“I’m no good with a needle.” 

Corune Crabsteppe, a lean man with sallow skin and callused fingertips, looked down at Arya with amusement. He was nearly seven feet tall. “You will learn.” 

Arya wanted to shout. Instead, she spoke with only mild frustration clouding her tone. She was months past her thirteenth nameday now, and yelling had never gotten her anything. “The Sep—my mother tried to teach me. All I did was make knots a knife couldn’t cut through and prick myself.” 

“I will teach you better. You must see my work, listen to my voice, and mimic me to adapt my skill as your own. You will learn.” 

Arya didn’t want to learn. ‘I did not travel by dragon claws to sew tunics.’ 

But Corune could not be denied. He stared at Arya with pale hazel eyes, expectant, before looking down at the cloth-of-gold shirt he had begun to mend. With a huff, she took a seat beside him, and made to grab a needle. 

He slapped her hand away without looking up from the shirt, a thin bone needle held gently between his teeth. He plucked it from his maw deftly, and went back to work. 

“Watch.” 

So Arya watched, a heavy scowl pulling her brows down and wrinkling her forehead. 

As Corune mended the golden shirt, Arya began to dream of a forgotten room at the end of a forgotten hall in a keep with bloodsoaked stones; she dreamt of a wooden sword, then too long and heavy for her weakness and inexperience; she dreamt of a steel sword, skinny and sharp; it was leagues better than the grubby chickenbone needle being used five feet from her face. ’I should be learning to use a different kind of needle.’

-

For days Arya watched Corune mend shirts and sew new ones; she observed him lay templates for breeches and simple yellow dresses; elegant suits of drab brown and grey, and fine gowns of layered, dull black and dark purple.

The wealthy of Braavos wore muted colors, dulling their appearance while their coffers gleamed metallic heaven. The lower classes strived to purchase green leather vests and yellow or blue dresses, clawing for color with the last dredges of their weekly pay. A select few, of mediocre to average station, put all their wealth into outfits of silver and gold cloth, tiny sapphires and fat pearls at their throats and sewn into their feathered caps, to strut as bravos when the sun set over the Secret City. 

Many bravos did business with Corune, expending some wealth for the privilege of his sheer talent and skill. He would embroider whole vests in a handful of days, all with his little bone needles, shaping krakens and titans and great silver and blue fish with long noses that looked like Braavosi blades. Arya watched him do this for hours on end when not running errands. 

It was all quite dull until a man who was clearly a bravo would enter in a colored vest, a drab brown bag over his shoulder, soft with expensive clothes. They wore blades so similar to Arya’s, save for their embellishments. Some were encrusted with jewels, others were fine colored steel, with ornate braided metal to guard the hand. One young man, perhaps four years Arya’s senior, boasted to Corune that the leather of his sword was made from tigerskin. 

The absence of Needle was a weight on her left hip; she was out of balance without its few ounces on her right side when she looked at the bravos.

Arya wanted to be one of them. They had grace and skill, and bodies defined with hard muscles she could not see upon her skinny frame. They did not have self-appointed parents, or superiors save their Sealord to poke and prod at their lives. They had the opportunity to fight, and they were good at it. They had the opportunity to kill, and they were good at it. Arya had people to kill. 

She’d heard the stories. The Secret City was the Sealord’s domain only so long as the sun lived in the sky. At night, it became the stomping ground of the bravos, who would challenge each other without pause, defeat one another without mercy, in duels defined by the Water Dance. 

She thought of Jaqen. 

The Sealord never handed over the city to the Faceless Men.

She missed Syrio. 

What would he think?

-

Several years before, in Westeros, then Essos...

-

Arya had met a man who claimed to have  no true face—a Faceless Man, from the Secret City of Braavos. He’d killed three men at her request, to pay a debt for saving his life and the life of two other prisoners. These three kills were done with grace and cunning, masked by carefully orchestrated events to look like accidents until time constraints made the Faceless Man sloppy. 

For a short time, he’d called himself Jaqen H’ghar, and he’d given her an iron coin. 

An iron coin she’d lost.

Months later the coin had earned her passage and a cabin on The Titan’s Daughter. But when the ship left the shores of Westeros, her hull loaded with salt and pelts and wine, she was knocked off course during the first night by a sudden storm. They were sent far south and a little ways eastward, into the claws of beady-eyed slavers. The captain of the slave ship, tall and tan with hair dyed rust-orange, had throttled her with a single hand around her throat when she’d tried to fight back. It was at this point that her iron coin was lost to her, rolling across the deck of the ship to vanish between the floorboards. Then the captain took Needle, and then he took her freedom. 

The journey to Astapor was a hazy collection of memories. Being beaten by a fat man with a silver beak covering his nose; being tended to by enslaved healers; those same healers shaving most of her hair and showing her how to bind her breasts, speaking in a language she would not understand for another year, gesticulating with urgency; hauling grain with young boys in a march along a road that had no end for days; brief whippings that made her eyes burn as much as her back when she moved too slowly. Finally, a marketplace in Astapor, where she remained for a month, waiting to be sold, until the Dragon Queen brought fire and blood to every master in the city. 

Arya had never forgotten Jaqen, but the memory of her lost iron coin lived at the forefront of her consciousness. How would she get to Braavos? Would the Faceless Men even agree to teach her now? How would she complete her list?

-

Present time. The path from the Ronal home to the Crabsteppe Tailor...

-

The night before, Arya had been late getting home to Nysir and Yaesara. During the first hour where the moon dominated the sky, she’d spotted bravos in silver, emerald and ruby shirts bearing golden Water Dancing blades, and her usual impatience burned the hottest it ever had, making her throat close up. 

All she needed was a blade and some time to prowl; time to train. She would be fine. She didn’t have time for Faceless Men and their iron coins and glamours. Fear cut deeper than swords, but curse it all, she wanted a blade, she wanted action—to do something that wasn’t watching Corune sew thrice-damned shirts. Maybe becoming a bravo was the best way to cross the names from her list.

But she still went home. She had breakfast with Nysir and Yaesara—a small meal of fried fish and buttery bread —but on the path that lead her to the Crabsteppe Tailor, she diverged into a neighborhood she had never explored before. It didn’t matter. She just needed to get away. 

-

Braavos was a city that had little variation in its weather conditions. There was fog, and then there was rain, and then there was heavier rain and fog thicker than molasses, with an occasional sunny day that seemed to come three or four times every summer. 

Since Arya had run away six days ago, there had been nothing but heavy rain during the day, and chilly fog at night. 

Tonight, she shivered at the top of an empty, leaning tower close to Drowned Town, a canvas sack pulled tight around her freezing skin. The stars were bright, so many constellations unknown to her, and she glared at them to the chorus of her chattering teeth. 

What would Syrio think?

He would think she was a blind fool.

-

Shivering and weak, Arya skulked through the alleyways of Braavos, stealing scraps and stale bread, looking out for angry merchants and cooks with eyes that were not her own. Alleycats and stray hounds were good to her, so long as she shared their mind, otherwise they needed to be chased off, lest they snare her meal as their own. 

This living was not good to her. She dropped weight, suffered an ache in her joints and a pressure behind her nose from the cold, and her scrapes and bruises took too long to heal. 

An older man in a blue tunic took pity on her thirty-five days into her self-created suffering. 

“Do you need help reaching the House of Black and White, child?” 

Arya looked up at him with cloudy eyes. She licked her dry lips with her equally dry tongue, and nodded. 

“Peace will come soon. Give me your hand.” 

Chapter Text

-

The throne room in the Great Pyramid...

-

“Next,” Daenerys commanded softly, only so loud as to capture the attention of the guard near the throne room entrance. A single clack of his spear striking the stone floor was a signal to an Unsullied in the hall, who admitted the next supplicant. 

The Queen had little energy this morning. One of her Unsullied, who called himself Stalwart Shield, had been found with his throat cut two streets from the Great Pyramid. Four freedmen were also dead, each in different corners of the city. 

At Missandei’s behest, Daenerys had begun to cut back on her meetings with supplicants. Her hours were reduced, as were her days, and she delegated these responsibilities to her handmaiden and advisor, who would speak with the freedmen and the free working class a day out of the week, and to Hizdahr, who would meet with nobles in the presence of her most trusted and cunning Unsullied. But for a day every week, Daenerys would dedicate six hours of her time to meet with the people of Meereen, of any station, and hear their plights. 

A boy, perhaps a year older than Arry, walked into the room with no hidden measure of awe. ‘He’s likely never seen this place before,’ Daenerys thought. She took notice of his leather sandals, dusty and worn, yet of high quality. His clothes bore no noticeable patches or mending. ‘His mother dressed him well for this meeting.’ 

She wished the boy’s eyes were grey, not brown.

Traditionally Missandei would read off her titles, but Daenerys did not feel that she needed to remind this boy of anything. A raised hand called for silence. 

“Hello, young man.” Daenerys kept her tone gentle with no expenditure of energy. Children deserved the greatest mercy and kindness. “I am Queen Daenerys Stormborn. Who are you?” 

There was a great distance between them in the audience chamber; two dozen long, stone steps, and half a dozen Unsullied between. It was for her safety, and her image, but it made her ache for the boy who would lounge on the steps or live in her shadow, scowling at supplicants from the hall behind her stone throne. 

“Koroho mo Zigan,” the boy replied, bowing his head before lifting it with a shy, eager smile. “It is an honor to meet you, Your Grace. Your dragons are amazing.” 

Daenerys smiled. He’d perhaps only seen them circle above the Great Pyramid, heard their bellows reverbate through the streets, or seen them the size of hawks, so high in the heated Meereenese sky. But that was enough for the imagination to take hold. 

A different boy had been a perch for her dragons once, suffering the accidental prick of their black claws in gentle silence.

”They are stunning in the Meereenese sun,” Daenerys agreed. “What brings you here, Koroho?” 

The boy subtly wiped his hands on the sides of his breeches. “I’m here to extend an invitation from my father. He suffers from pain in his legs, so he could not make it all the way here. We—We do not live in a pyramid, Your Grace, but in a two-floor home many streets from here to the east. My father is a well-known glassmaker and potter. He was hoping you would join our family—my father, mother, sister and I—for dinner in seven days time.

”My father says that he knows his request is unusual, but he’s an old man with older hands, and he fears for his business. He was hoping you would eat with us, and speak of the state of trade.” 

“I shall consider it,” Daenerys replied. “I am not one to turn away from good food and drink, but my days are long.” The boy did not hide his emotions; his hope was a beacon shining out through his face. “You may show one of my men the best route to your home, so that I might travel there swiftly.” 

The boy bowed his head again, grinning and looking so painfully his age. “Thank you, Your Grace. My mother is an amazing cook, you won’t be disappointed.” 

“As you say, Koroho mo Zigan. Perhaps I will see you in four days time.” 

The boy bowed low at the hip, and exited with another animated ‘Your Grace.’

Two Unsullied followed him; her men were never to roam the city alone. 

-

The next day, close after dawn...

-

In the small council chamber, above Daenerys’ rooms, her advisors moved to do all they could to prevent her from leaving the safety of the Great Pyramid. 

“Your Grace,” Ser Barristan said, his gravelly voice thick with the early hour of the morning. “To explore the city is one thing; the Unsullied, Ser Jorah and myself can defend you in the wide streets. But to dine with strangers in a city you’ve conquered and ruled for less than a year—”

”It’s madness, Khaleesi.” Jorah never learned to mind his tongue properly, but Daenerys would not reprimand him this time. The hour was early, and she would rather get her way quickly than discipline her oldest friend. “To go to these people and sit at their table, you—you risk poison. You risk the knife you use to cut your meat ending up in your throat.”

Harpies clawed at her skirts, hoping to score flesh with their talons; nobles cursed her name by candlelight; freedmen cried with joy at the mere sight of her, blinded by eternal devotion; and the free working class glared at their own toes when she passed by. Daenerys could do little about the Sons of the Harpy beyond sending the Unsullied and Second Sons around to patrol the city, keeping guard, and bolstering her numbers with freedmen who wanted to learn the way of the sword and spear, and be known as the Brazen Beasts. The nobles would never love her. The freedmen would love her forever. The free working class... Daenerys had never interacted with them intimately before. It was time she changed that.

“Ser Barristan, you once told me that my brother would walk through the streets of Kings Landing to be among the people; that he would sing to them and interact with joy.” Daenerys could see Ser Barristan’s resolve crumbling before her eyes, all of his fond memories of Rhaegar armed and attacking for her side. “I cannot do these things here, not yet. I must know these people, and they must know me. Meeting with this man, Gihazan mo Zigan, is the first step of many.”

The knight had no rebuttals, and inclined his head in agreement. He was smart enough to know she could not be swayed, only accompanied. “You have convinced me, Your Grace. There is good to be found in this meeting with Gihazan. But we still must take every precaution.” 

“Of course,” Daenerys agreed, readily ignoring Jorah’s pursed lips. “Grey Worm will see to the organization of the Unsullied in the area. I am confident that together, you will keep me tethered to this world.” Daenerys turned to Grey Worm. “How fare the patrols?” 

“This man, Gihazan mo Zigan, walks with bent legs and knows everyone who lives around his home,” Grey Worm said. “He wears a dagger, as most do, and spends his days making glassware and pottery. This one sees no threat, and neither do the Unsullied on patrol.” 

Daenerys pushed her shoulders back, confidence building. She remained in Meereen to rule—Westeros was a far-off dream, near fantasy—and she would not fail. This was a step in the right direction. “Good. Do as you see fit in order to prepare. We will meet at noon the day of the dinner to finalize all plans before it commences.” 

“Yes, Your Grace.” 

Chapter Text

-

The House of Black and White...

-

Sat atop a tall rocky knoll, the House of Black and White was a fortress of grey stone. It lacked windows and fine ornamentation—an apprentice stonemason could accomplish the simple pillars at its front doors. The doors themselves were another story; they were examples of immense skill in carpentry. Twenty feet tall and solid, one was weirwood, the other ebony. Each had been dug into, endless carved squares within squares, and a great dish on each to make an obvious home for massive iron knockers. 

Never had intimidation been so subtly laid before the eyes. Faith was inspired in the most godless of men at these doors, for the unknown was a blank canvas every soul hungered to fill with a painting of the idealicized hereafter. 

Arya was too miserable to hunger for such things. 

Her eyes did her a disservice—she was so weak and disoriented that the House of Black and White looked like the Temple of the Moonsingers for a brief instant: snow-white and silver-capped, with expensive milk-glass and tall maidens of pink stone. It was a more inviting place, on the surface, but there was no power to be had in the Temple of the Moonsingers. 

The false image faded, but Arya was still too weak and disoriented to feel intimidated by stone and white and black wood. The promises inside might as well have been an oasis in the desert beyond the Free Cities; they teased her tired mind. Inside she would find solace; inside she would find power, and a return to her true purpose: she would kill all the people in the world who needed killing. 

‘Joffrey, Cersei, Ilyn Payne, Meryn Trant, Raff the—’

Half-conscious, mad with hunger and exhausted, Arya lurched forward toward the doors, gurgling nonsense. Towering maidens of pink stone flickered in and out of her vision, on either side of death’s doors. 

“Easy, child. Peace will cradle your soul in mere moments.” The stranger hefted her up against his side, fingers stiff with age grasping the side of her ragged breeches. “We are close. Move with me up the steps.” 

Arya obeyed. She was cold. Her last dredges of energy were channeled into making her skin prickle at the temperature, and lifting her feet enough to move up the steps with her kind stranger.

The doors opened by unseen strongmen, or so their size would have one believe. Behind them, young acolytes in black and white robes, of meager size and unimpressive strength, pulled open the doors. 

Another acolyte, short and old and skinny with droopy jowls, approached with his hands held behind his back in the typical posture of the Braavosi. 

Before the acolyte could speak, the stranger in blue that held Arya upright spoke. “This girl is suffering. When I offered, she bid me to take her here to find peace.” 

“A girl will tell me herself,” the man said. 

Arya leant her head against the shoulder of her good samaritan, her kindly stranger. The world came into better focus. The man’s eyes were an unwelcoming shade of brown, if brown could have ever been described as unwelcoming; they were cold.

Her tongue was a heavy slab of marble in her mouth; she dragged it slowly over her cracked lips, finding no relief. “I...”  

The kindly stranger slowly moved her beside a large pool, ten feet across and perfectly circular. It was in the middle of the large hall, surrounded by towering statues of stone and sunbleached twists wood. It did not look like it had an end. 

Arya looked up at her kindly stranger, and spoke to him rather then the acolyte with the unwelcoming eyes. “I... I do not want this—this peace. I want... I want to learn.” 

“To learn what, child?” the kindly stranger asked. He crouched, and took hold of one of her hands between both of his own; they were rough from a long, working life; despite her familiarity with callused hands, Arya did not like their feel, and suddenly he was not as welcoming to her as before. 

“Jaqen,” she murmured. “What Jaqen said—I want to learn. I want to learn.”

She continued to murmur, spiraling into incoherency, until her eyes closed and she went still. 

-

She was big. Bigger than her weak, naked human body. She was tall and long and heavy, with a developing winter coat that grew thicker every day; rain slid from her muscled shoulders like they were the marble sides of some fresh new pyramid. Her paws were dinner plates, swift and agile. She’d pinned a man down with them while she tore out his throat just hours ago. Her jowls were still stained with his blood, her belly warm from it, too.

And yet, she was still hungry.

A howl carried over the plains, following the wind that ruffled fur and grass in the silver moonlight. She turned her massive head, sniffing the air. More men.

-

Arya woke with a start, turning on her side when trying to sit up made her stomach muscles seize. She looked out into the space she’d been set in, taking note of the rectangular holes carved perfectly into stone walls. Thin blankets  and little brown pillows were carefully set in each bed. In Arya’s own, her pillow was on the floor, her thin blanket tangled around her legs. 

She groaned lowly under breath, and moved to sit up. Nearly cracking her head against the stone ceiling, she hunched forward, legs dangling, hands planted on her stone mattress. 

The wooden door to the room creaked open. A woman, maybe five and ten years older than Arya, entered with a blank face. 

“Come.”

The woman, waifish and looking older in the candlelight of the halls than she had in the shadows of the stone barracks, lead Arya to a great room lined with fat stone posts. Upon each stone post, covering each of their six angled walls, were mantels for faces; human faces. Peeled from skulls, these skin faces lacked eyes, so cold stone met Arya’s grey eyes when she looked into each of them. No soul remained, as no soul should, without the rest of the body, but there was a lingering sensation of misery and fear and melancholy in this great room. If the death of a thousand and one people could be summarized by their emotions in their final moments, that would be what hung in the air, drifting into Arya’s lungs, making her far less comfortable in her own skin than any humiliating sewing lesson ever had. 

A man was waiting for them, his face concealed by a black and white hood. When Arya stopped before him, he dropped his hood. She did not recognize his face—she could barely recall her time beside the pool, and she struggled to remember her kindly stranger. He was tall and old and skinny with droopy jowls. His eyes were gaunt and yellow around rings of bright blue, their lids so wrinkled and drooping that Arya could have sworn his yellow skull was peaking through. 

Arya was not disillusioned by ugliness or age. The King had been a fat man, the Queen a cruel, beautiful woman, and then the next King a cruel boy with a craven’s soul. Image was not everything. A face did not hold all truths. 

This was a man of power. He smiled, and some of Arya’s discomfort ebbed away. It was replaced with the urge to hold and grow her own power; the power to enact her vengeance, so long awaited and impatient this close to one of many victories. 

Arya thought she heard someone moaning in pain, and her skin prickled with gooseflesh. The feeling returned, but this time she ignored it. ‘Fear cuts deeper than swords. I won’t let it cut me.’

“I was told a girl wished to train. Does she wish to study poison, for a price? Does she wish to peruse our library, for a price? Does she wish to clean the alters of the Many-Faced God, and desire to learn the best way to oil stone to please Him?” 

Courage ate at her fear like maggots on a corpse, born from a hatred that had enscribed itself upon her very bones. Fear would not derail her from avenging her family. A Queen hadn’t been able to, so how could fear?

“No. I want to be a Faceless Man.”

Chapter Text

-

The home of Gihazan mo Zigan...

-

A man of elder stature, bent forward in the back and to the sides in the legs, was in the midst of rising from his chair when Daenerys entered a sizeable home on the eastern side of the city. He was a stout man, with proud shoulders that were curled inward with a lifetime of poor posture and time-intensive labor. Short wiry hair, once solid black, was now a sea of white and grey, sculpted back in a sleek, efficient style. There were wrinkles extending out from his almond eyes; this was a man that had never been short on smiles. 

The man bowed low, lips pulled back in a smile of elation. “It is my pleasure to welcome you into my family home, Your Grace. I am Gihazan.”

One of the Unsullied sent inside before her emerged from the kitchen, separated by a half-wall of wood and stone. He nodded to Daenerys—there was no threat to be found—before taking up his post at the door opposite a fellow soldier. Past the door, in mirrored positions, were two more Unsullied. Groups of two stood at the street corners, and patrols of six marched throughout the neighborhood, a block apart. 

”The pleasure is mine, Gihazan. Thank you for inviting me into your home.” 

Gihazan’s wife entered the dining space, a little girl at her heels with a wooden horse clutched in her small hands. 

The woman bowed abruptly, wiping her hands with a short rag she tucked into the thin leather belt that went around her waist. “Welcome, Your Grace. I am Irrania.” She swept a hand outward towards the dining table and the many chairs tucked into it. “Would you care for a seat at the head of the table?” 

Gihazan was already pulling out the seat for her. Daenerys wore her best smile, and found that it cost her no effort to bear it. She nodded. “Thank you both for your hospitality.” 

“Of course, Your Grace.” Irrania seemed to conjure glasses from thin air. They lacked filigree or encrusted jewels, and there were no dragon decorations hammered out in thin iron. “And your friend? Would he care to sit beside you?”

Ser Jorah nodded stiffly. He wore a slight, permanent scowl; Daenerys thought it made him look oafish. She wished she had brought Ser Barristan. 

”Can I sit next to her momma?” 

Daenerys looked down at the little girl, then briefly to Irrania before looking back. She had her mother’s cheekbones, high and beautiful, but her father’s hazel eyes. 

“And who might you be?” Daenerys asked, hands on the knees of her sandsilk dress. 

“Kihaza,” the little girl replied, big eyes boring holes into Daenerys’ heart.

“You have a lovely horse, Kihaza.” 

The brightest smile Daenerys had ever seen on anyone lit Kihaza’s face. “Thank you. His name is Boqqorro, and he’s the fastest horse in Meereen!” 

Daenerys found herself missing her silver. ‘How many years has it been?’ “I wouldn’t dare race against you and Boqqoro.” She could not remember the last time she pulled out a chair for anyone besides herself, but Daenerys did so then. “Come, we can sit and you can tell me stories of you an Boqqoro.” 

Ser Jorah leaned forward in his seat, the side of his right forearm against the edge of the table, to get a better view of the little girl with the wooden horse. With his left hand, he held the pommel of his sword. Daenerys ignored him.

Kihaza began to speak, waving Boqqorro around in this sky with a giggle. 

-

When she was done with her small bowl, Kihaza was gently tucked into bed by Koroho, who tucked himself in soon after. This left Irrania and Gihazan at the table with Daenerys and Ser Jorah. They had kept talk light for the better part of a half-hour, focusing on the children, the weather, and the food, but that time had past; they would talk business now. 

“When Koroho extended your invitation, he said you desired to talk of your business, and those of your fellows, with me.” Daenerys leaned back in her chair, even as she wished to lean forward. She couldn’t look too eager, too interested. 

“Many of the young men in my neighborhood—this is the block of craftsmen, you see—fear that the slaves you have made free will take their jobs. They fear you will elevate these freedmen and in exchange leave the long-standing free working class to rot at the base of the pyramids,” Gihazan said. He took a swig of his wine and sat forward, elbows on the wooden table. “I do not fear such things; I am good at my trade, and my son will be as good as I in a short handful of years. But the sons of other craftsmen grow nervous with this large, inactive workforce. What if the Queen takes their shop and hands it to a group of liberated slave carpenters that come from Lokeem lo Hazorfa’s pyramid?”

Daenerys did not know this man whose name Gihazan tossed out so casually, and it made her shift in her seat. To the right of her spine, just before her shoulder blade, a knot formed in her muscles. She knew so few of Meereen’s nobility. What was she doing? ‘Who is Lokeem lo Hazorfa?’ 

“I have been tasked with elevating those previously left to toil and die without any hope of choice for their own bodies and minds, without disrupting those who already enjoyed freedom without risk of its loss.” Daenerys could feel her pride swell like a fire in a stone corridor, eating at the walls of her throat and charring her tongue. She took a sip of wine. “As one of the people I must protect, Gihazan, what is your opinion on the matter? How might I aid you in securing your son’s livelihood, while aiding the sons of slaves who currently need employment?” 

“Koroho will have my shop. These freedmen boys have no shop to inherit. There are many jobs to be had in Meereen—teach them. Have free boys teach freed sons. Invest in our businesses and I will vouch for the hiring of freedmen into our service.” Gihazan reached for the ladle to serve himself more lamb stew, but his wife beat him to it, and served him a healthy portion with a look of such quiet, longstanding adoration that Daenerys had to look into her wine cup. “It will be easier to swallow if they emerge as errand boys and servants and scribe apprentices. Jobs they did for free once, they do for pay now. The masons need stone, and the stonecutters and haulers will work for coin instead of bread and a cot.”

Gihazan continued to speak, but Daenerys had stopped listening. Who was Lokeem lo Hazorfa? 

After a time, Gihazan ceased to speak. Daenerys noticed, and cleared her throat.

“I thank you for your council, Gihazan. To know the needs of the people, I must speak to the people—of every class and group.” Daenerys inhaled deeply, and pulled the fingers that clutched her wine glass away to rest on her lap. Who was Lokeem lo Hazorfa? She did not know. But Gihazan did. “This is a tall order, even for a Queen. I cannot rule alone, but with a council of city members and personal advisors, I will guide Meereen to greater glory.

“My council is small, and I must take steps to integrate people of all kinds, so that all voices may be heard. Would you serve as one of my advisors, Gihazan mo Zigan?”

Shocked silence, Daenerys thought, was a decent enough reaction. 

But then Gihazan pushed against the table, his chair skittering backwards and nearly falling out from behind him in his pursuit to kneel with bad legs.

Daenerys was up in an instant, as was Ser Jorah, who gripped the hilt of his sword with his right hand now, ready to draw it. Daenerys had no such weapons, and weaved around the table in her flat sandals to bid Gihazan to rise with a hand on his shoulder. 

“Your Grace, it is an honor—”

“The honor is mine, to do right by the Meereenese people.” Daenerys offered Gihazan a hand, and she was met with more shocked silence. She did not take offense when Irrania helped her husband to stand, and stepped back.

”Do you accept?” Daenerys asked. 

Gihazan bent at the waist awkwardly, an arm around his wife’s shoulders, in an attempt to bow respectfully. “I—of course, Your Grace.”

-

The Great Pyramid...

-

In the small council chamber, Ser Jorah was losing his patience. 

“Where is Daenerys?” he asked for the eighth time, hands flexing and twitching atop the small stone meeting table. “You know as well as I that we must discuss this—this random man she has hired into a most-trusted and important position without warning or explanation.” 

Only Ser Barristan and Grey Worm were present. Missandei would no doubt be by the Queen’s side when she arrived. 

Ser Jorah did not realize that Daenerys would never arrive; not to such a small room with such little protection from him.

The sound of boots, rough against the stone steps, had Ser Jorah perk up visibly. He deflated with a look of contempt when Daario Naharis showed his face. 

“The Queen will come when the Queen is ready,” Ser Barristan finally replied. With his face of coarse white hair, he looked like an unhappy blizzard. Ser Jorah admired him, but he was not a fan of the man beyond his noble exploits. 

“The Queen is ready,” Daario said, one hand on his arakh, the other on his dagger. 

From his belt, Ser Barristan produced a scroll. The wax seal, emblazoned with sigil of the Hand of the King, was broken. 

“You’ll not find a pardon coming from our Queen in exchange for greater treachery,” Ser Barristan said. There was no disappointment in his tone, only disgust. “She has so much strength as to meet with you, and so much mercy as to not cut your head from your neck immediately. When she is done with you, I imagine you will take this pardon and return to Westeros.” 

While Ser Jorah had guarded the queen, Ser Barristan had received a letter from a young mute boy. The message within bore knowledge of the Bear’s longstanding betrayal: he’d sold Daenerys’ secrets to Robert Baratheon in the hopes of a pardon for his past crimes in Westeros.

Grey Worm advanced, pulling shackles from the small of his back. Numb with disbelief, and weak from guilt and love, Ser Jorah did not fight him. There was no fight remaining in his body now. She knew, and it didn’t matter that he loved her, that he had kissed any notions and dreams of returning to Westeros goodbye happily, or that he was utterly loyal to her; she knew, and she would not forgive him for this.

His crimes would cost him her love. 

Chapter Text

-

The Company of the Foreign

-

They dined in the great hall of a pyramid belonging to one of Daenerys’ newest allies. His coffers were laden with lofty stipends, and his ships and personal cut of dock space were busy with laboring, Crown-secured freedmen that swelled his workforce and increased his profit. As such, he rather liked Daenerys now, and was overjoyed to host a celebration in honor of her nameday. 

In truth, it was designed to be a trigger for jealousy among the less devoted lords, whose standing became fragile in the face of such blatant trust and favoritism. A celebration in the Great Pyramid would have been neutral, just firewood on the ash of old, dead flames; Daenerys needed to light fire beneath the beds of the lords who scrapped with each other and with her still. 

The wine flowed like the Rhoyne through Essos, generous with a population hugging at glass bottles and jewel-encrusted goblets like the shores of a life-giving floodplain. The less important sniffled anxiously in their seats, hyper aware with only a single glass or three in their bellies, while the men who lounged in the uppermost floors of Meereen's pyramids gorged themselves as their attendants and advisors hid their embarrassment. All of them made Daenerys long for her room. 

A fleet of servants, their arms heavy with iron platters plated with silver, swept along the sides of the long table that sat Daenerys and her most esteemed lords. One servant stopped directly beside Daenerys, unbothered by the Unsullied that hovered behind her chair, to present her with a platter of unborn puppies coated in an egg batter and fried in spicy oil. She could make out the natural curl of their little bodies, and spotted tiny, underdeveloped paws from the golden brown mass of their cooked flesh, and her throat became tight. A memory came unbidden to the forefront of her mind; stray dogs in Braavos, snapping up scraps at the feet of the generous or the drunk. 'Perhaps it is a memory, perhaps it is a dream. I do not know which I hold onto more now.'

Gihazan plucked a fried puppy from the platter and cut into it without sparing Daenerys a look. She looked away from him, eyes on the bright blue sky. 

-

The Small Council Room

-

'If you had not betrayed me, you would be by my side, advising me as I wish you would.' Daenerys fought the urge to close her eyes as Hizdahr raved about his plans for an expansion of one of his fighting pits to allow for the performance of plays. He wanted her entirely unnecessary approval and he seemed to chase it with increasing volume and exaggerated enunciation. Was she deaf, or simple? 'It is as though without the shadow of a bear across my shoulder, I somehow need others opinions spoken even more loudly to me.'

Perhaps her patience with her advisors was lessened in Ser Jorah's absence, or perhaps now that she was short a man from her homeland, she was more vulnerable. 'Of course I am more vulnerable. My greatest supporter abandoned his post. One of the pillars of my power crumbled into sand.' Something like fire flickered in Daenerys' stomach; if she opened her lips, she imagined flame and smoke would flicker and billow out, coating her teeth in ash. She wished she were a dragon in the greatest sense. Where was Drogon? Flying free, absent of chains, absent of a crown of hammered gold.

"This expansion will certainly benefit the Crown," Daenerys said suddenly, vision refocused on Hizdahr's tense, eager form. Ever since he had gotten his way and ceased fighting her, he had been desperate for her approval and validation. It was perhaps more entertaining when he was against her rule, instead of being so supportive and therefore irritatingly invested, but Daenerys could not let her personal feelings conflict with her duty to her people in this regard. Hizdahr was important. "What plays will be performed here?"

"Flight of the Harpy is a rather popular tale, as well as the Slaughter of Chossam. Both will contain live fights and animals I've sent for from the forest of Qohor."

Daenerys did not recognize these stories by name, and she knew she would not recognize them by plot or dialogue or character design. She imagined that there would be no brightly clothed bravos, not fair maidens dancing in the moonlight, as she imagined the plays of Braavos would contain. There would be no Sealord laughing at a mockery of himself onstage, secure in his seat by his peculiar election; it was necessary to treat disrespect, even as silly as the words of a comedian, as a slight worthy of punishment in Meereen. The actors would likely speak a variant of Low Valyrian so densely colored by the Old Ghiscari tongue that Daenerys would understand only half the words ever spoken. It was this, knowing that she was again left to catch up with the culture of her people, not the promised future spent sitting beside Hizdahr watching these foreign plays itself, that made a heaviness descend upon Daenerys' shoulders. Her dread was a weight that would drown her if she did not rid herself of it. She smiled. 

"I predict that it will be lovely. The people will enjoy your efforts as much as I will, Hizdahr." Daenerys looked to Gihazan and then to Ser Barristan, who seemed to be visibly melancholic with the droop of his face and the cloudiness of his eyes. It was as though he had seen a ghost and been left wanting for the person it had once been. 

Daenerys longed for those occasional evenings where a boy would stumble over her mother tongue as they snacked on grapes and thin, crispy bread. He had made her laugh, made her think, and he had reminded her of home. 

'And he is dead. So many dead. So many ghosts.'

Hizdahr seemed to swell with all the words he did not have the right or the power to say.

'What kind of man would you be now, Arry?'

Ser Barristan spoke up, and Daenerys mimed the act of shifting her focus and listening intently. 

'Nothing like Ser Jorah, I hope.' Daenerys disregarded the qualities Ser Jorah had possessed that she had cherished. 'I would not survive such treachery twice.'

-

The Queen's Chambers

-

"Missandei, what books do I have about Westeros?" Daenerys asked. They were tucked into an adjoining room, and as of late Missandei had made more use of them than the Queen. 

"Quite a few, Your Grace." Missandei hesitated. "Ser Jorah made a consistent effort to acquire new volumes for your consumption. Ser Barristan has informed me that he will be continuing the effort."

'This may be the only way in which he will compete with my bear,' Daenerys thought.

"That is—That is good to hear," Daenerys replied. "What of the North?"

Arry and Ser Barristan hardly interacted when the boy was living, and Daenerys would be hard-pressed to discover them both in the same room, but her knight had seen Arry enough to draw conclusions. "He looks like a boy from the North," Ser Barristan had said. "It's like I'm seeing an old friend from before he and I were old, Your Grace."

The Queen could not explain why the boy was on her mind, but he was, and it would be nice to learn about what was once his home. She lacked the heart to fill her mind with any thoughts of Bear Island, but she wanted to be far away.

Chapter Text

-

Several years forward, at the end of summer. 

-

If the date was to be believed, the letter from Jon Snow, Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, had taken nearly six months to reach Daenerys. It was not a large letter, but a slim, tightly rolled scroll sealed with pale green wax and frayed, dirty twine. The messenger who had passed it to Missandei beneath the shadow of the Unsullied had marched with his iron direwolf brooch hidden by a dirty, cheap cowl that clung to his sweaty skin. 

Daenerys sat upon her uncomfortable stone throne and opted to read the letter aloud. The shadow of the Northman failed to crawl up even half of the steps that lead to her perch. "'To Her Grace, the Queen of Meereen, and Rightful Queen of the Seven Kingdoms, Lady Protector of the Realm, 

"'This land we bicker over will be coated in frost and dead bodies if you do not aid me in saving it, Your Grace. The myth of the White Walkers and the Night's King is not a myth, but truth. They have killed my friends and they threaten my people, all people, your people. Your three dragons breathe fire, and your armies are reported to have swollen in size since you brought Meereen to heel. The kingdoms your brother once sought to reclaim are at risk of complete destruction. You possess the means to save us.

"'I beg you to read our Northern myths. Turn to you advisors for their knowledge of the Other and the Children of the Forest. Should they come up lacking, which is no fault of their own, I have sent a small book with my man for you to read at your will. 

"'Fire kills them. You are fire incarnate. I would not sound the call across the narrow sea if I could save my people alone. But they are not just my people, they are yours as well.' " The Queen paused, and looked up from the small scroll to look down upon the Northman. "This is rather generous, coming from the bastard son of a man who lost many loved ones to my father's mad tirade."

"'This is war, Your Grace. The enemy of my Lord's enemy is my kin, as he asks of me for them to be."

"Asks?" Daenerys had not heard of a Lord who asked instead of demanded. 

The Northman was resolute. "I volunteered to deliver his message."

Daenerys dipped her head. Missandei had told her the man's name a moment before when she passed along the scroll, but the Queen had already forgotten it. This man had grey eyes, but they were the wrong shade; too pale; lackluster. Arry would have been a much finer Northman. 

'I will soar in the skies of your home, set foot in the woods you doubtless ran from your mother in when you needed a bath, and you will not be by my side. So few will be by my side that I dreamed of having close.' Something sharp struck Daenerys' heart, but quickly became a dull, crushing weight. She longed for her room. The scent of fried, unborn puppies was perhaps not entirely different from fried hunks of lamb or fish, but it carried with it a unique, bone-deep discomfort and misery that Daenerys felt acutely once more. She pictured little bodies, pulled from stray or bred mothers with a complete lack of gentleness or sanity, and the Seven Kingdoms called to her strongly. The world was large, and there were better places for her. 

And there were people in need of her growing might. Drogon could not black out the sun like Balerion just yet, but the stars were quenched and stolen from Daenerys' view when his shadow passed by her window. He would be a horror in combat for her enemies. 

'The enemy of my enemy is my kin.'

-

The Great Pyramid of Meereen

-

His mother was in pain. Not the pain of the silver claws and blood, but the pain of the mind. It was difficult to understand, but easy to feel when he was so close with his mother, no matter if he flew away to find food. It was an added weight to his body, but it didn't truly make him any heavier. His response to this was irritation. He chittered angrily at the bright little fires in the sky as he circled above the stone mountain his mother lived within. He glided down until his black claws dug into the stone as though it were clay between his mother's soft fingers, and chittered more softly when his little mother rushed out onto the balcony to see him. 

He had been gone for weeks, killing sheep and deer and avoiding men while she ordered his kin with new fire in her veins. Things were changing. He could feel it the same as he felt the passenger in his mind, though neither bothered him. 

His mother looked up at him with an expression that always matched the familiar warmth he felt rush over his being whenever they were in close proximity, and he chittered again.

"Oh Drogon," his mother gasped. Something heavy left her body and all that remained was the warmth and the feeling of flight in the air. "I've missed you."

The passenger in his mind responded with the same feeling as his mother, and Drogon chittered again, the urge coming from his passenger's desire to speak. He knew his mother's first tongue, but he did not speak it in kind. 

"Things are changing, and I need your strength."

Again his passenger seemed to lunge forward in his mind, effort fleeting and and frail because of their weak connection. She would not be with him much longer. 

Drogon descended carefully until his long neck allowed him to nuzzle gently against his mother. The scales of his snout did not frill like those of his neck, around his horns and jaw, and they ran smoothly along his mother's cheek and hands. There was the warmth of fire-forged blood between them, and the warmth his mother passed along to him and his passenger through their connection. Love was different for beasts, but Drogon felt its equivalent with the same fervor a soft, fleshy human might. It  kept his mother alive and safe in the world, along with the ancient magic in her blood.  

"We have a long journey ahead; don't stray far anymore, please."

Once he sat upon her shoulder, now his mother would sit upon his. This was as it should be. 

Drogon's passenger was ripped away from his mind, and he chittered at his mother again. 

-

The Purple Harbor of Braavos

-

The sun had barely risen, but the dock was already alive. 

Arya watched sailors and dock-hands unload the wares and tools from Braavosi vessels with a blank look that made her appear simple. The bottle clasped between the fingers of her left hand suggested she was drunk, but the blue glass was only missing two swallows of fine wine that should have been in the cellar of a city keyholder. He wouldn't miss it, and the House of Black and White wouldn't know. Playing the part of a drunken, miserable sailor was the first part of her job that day, and it was easier done with better wine than the piss-in-a-bottle she had been provided by the kindly man. 

'She looks the same, if more tired than before,' Arya thought, her mind numb not with alcohol, but shock. She shook her head like a sick dog shaking its mangy pelt; off-balance, sloppy, and pathetic. Her free hand clenched into a fist. 'I shouldn't know her. I'm supposed to be no one.'

A hand clapped down on her shoulder and No One didn't react how Arya Stark would. No One swayed, and looked up with eyes that were glassy from deep thought and a melancholy that had been building for years. It fit No One's role well. 

So many identities, once cover stories, some more than a cover, now crushed beneath the boot of the House of Black and White; crushed beneath the boot of the most difficult identity of all: no one. This, however, was inconsequential to the assignment, and so No One steeled herself and swallowed thickly.

"What ails you, friend?" a man asked, his kind smile a fine lie upon his charming face. A drunken sailor, gloomy with loss and misfortune, would crawl into this man's service without fail and end up a member of his slaver feet, but No One was not a drunken sailor. No One was a servant of Him of Many Faces, and Death had called for this man by name. 

'Kirn Forsae will receive the gift,' No One thought. 

"M'ship... m'ship was sold and m'wife's in the dirt with our boy." No One gestured at the Titan and the horizon beyond with her blue glass bottle. "Spent every last honor on this here booze. I hear a whole bottle'll stop m'heart."

"Now come on there friend," Kirn said. He gently pried the bottle from No One's fingers. "Don't toss your life into the darkness. We'll find you something, I swear it."

"A job? On a ship?" No One slurred. "I wanna go s'meplace." 

"The Free Cities are ripe with ships and places to sail them, friend. Come with me, and I'll have you on a ship before noon."

No One recoiled at the ceaseless thoughts of the woman who had not seemed to age in their memories, and then No One became Arry, who was quickly and cruelly killed by Arya Stark. 'I've spent too long living as a mummer.'

Kirn Forsae grinned like a prized viper. "Let's go."

-

Late in the night, upon a ship with a hidden hull segment full of crying men, women, and children, No One died a silent death. The death of misguided faith should perhaps be violent, but Arya Stark was not without purpose to keep her afloat. 

Daenerys Targaryen was alive and well, and she had set her amethyst eyes on Westeros. And at Jon Snow and Sansa Stark's urging, no less. Her wolf dreams, and the few moments where she found herself trapped within wild ravens, had seen to her reconnaissance.

Everyone she had missed would be in one place. Set the stars aside; Arya's gut was forced forward; northward. 

The sudden, savage urge to head for King's Landing was quelled by the thought of seeing Jon and Sansa. It was then gently fanned at the thought of Daenerys taking the capitol. Arya would fight the Other that crawled from the Land of Always Winter and then she would slaughter Cersei upon her ill-gotten throne.  

The first step towards realizing these longstanding dreams? The death of Kirn Forsae and his men. 

Arya slinked from her hammock below deck and gently slit the throats of the few who had not eaten the poisoned stew the crew had enjoyed a few hours before. She would slaughter Kirn Forsae in his room. Perhaps she would be cruel; there were quite a few children hidden beneath the false hull with a handful of battered parents, and that made Arya particularly upset. It would be a simple thing. Sever the fingers at the first knuckle, then the second. How many times had No One done such things? Arya Stark had done worse even before then.

'A man who eats with his men dies with his men, instead of alone. You should have eaten with your men.'