THE DEAD GIRL
She woke to the strident ruckus of seagulls overhead. For endless moments she merely lay there listening to them, the sound passing through her head and departing without leaving the ghost of meaning behind. She could smell salt and sea breeze, hear the babel of traders' argot, feel the slickness of damp stone and tangled weed, and some part of her whispered harbor. Once the words began to resolve into meaning, and not merely a stream of distant noise, she could understand some of it.
The Sealord's dead, one said. Killed in the night in his own palace, with all his swords about him, how bloody queer is that? And another replied, In these times of war and woe, a man is not safe even within his own walls – but I'd not look far for the culprit. It was that smiling knight, sure as winter. My niece, she's a maid there, she tells me the Sealord turned him down flat. Small wonder he was maddened to murder.
Braavos, the dead girl thought. Even that came hard, echoing back to her as if through the constant crash of waves. She was slowly beginning to realize that she still had a body, and a black bitter taste burned in her throat and stomach. But that was not the one she remembered – this rickety hairless two-legged thing. She had been in a cage in a little village square, bound front paw and rear, with a hundred jeering men and cubs surrounding her to point and laugh and throw things. Wolf bitch. Man-killer. Freak. And it had grown dark, and the snow came down harder, and she'd tried with all her might to gnaw her chains off, for she knew that if she stayed in here much longer, she would die. But it was useless. She couldn't.
And then he was there. It bedeviled the dead girl beyond belief that here, in her waking body, she could not remember who he was. The wolf had known him when she'd seen him, and the recognition had not been pleasant. But somehow she'd not truly thought he'd meant to hurt her, and she watched as he labored and cursed in the cold night, breaking apart the bars of her cage and using some sort of oil to slip the cuffs off her paws. He stepped back, and she waited for the catch, but none came. Then in acknowledgement, she licked his hand and galloped away into the night.
Dogs and wolves. Something, something about it pried at her, but the memory, like the rest of them, had been blown past recall. He saved me. The dead girl could not entirely explain her certainty, but she knew that she never would have woken here if the wolf remained in her cage. That's why I survived when I drank from the fountain, she realized. It had been an awful gamble, not even made consciously. But since so much of her was preserved in the wolf, she had been saved – and so when the wolf was freed, so was she.
Groggily she reached for her face, fearing what she might find. She had drunk while still wearing her borrowed guise, she recalled, and that was another reason she had risked it – she was not inviting the gift of the Many-Faced God on her true self, but rather on the face and form that she had called Lyanna Snow. Everything had now been stripped from her but who she had always been. But who is that?
There was skin beneath her hand, not blood. She touched it fumblingly, finding the nose and the eyes and the mouth. She must have passed as dead convincingly enough for even them, the impresarios of death, to believe it. But why am I here? Why didn't they take me down into the depths of the House of Black and White, and skin my face off and add it to their legions? That must be what happened to all the other acolytes who failed their initiation. You cannot be faceless, and you know too much of our art to leave. Do you understand what that means?
Only then did it occur to the girl that they very well might have. That they might have taken something much more important – that perhaps that was why she could not remember her own name, or what her real face should look like, or why she was in Braavos to begin with. All she remembered were those last frantic moments, knowing there was only one escape, and the burning of the black water as it went down.
She shifted position, painfully. The sounds of the harbor continued above her. Nobody was paying her especial attention; bodies in the canals were not an uncommon sight after a night of bravos challenging each other, and if the Sealord really was dead, the opposing factions would be scheming and throat-cutting to line up their candidate for the succession. It was odd that someone had actually bothered to kill sick old Ferrego Antaryon. He would have died soon enough in his turn, and –
No. No, there was something about that which she had to remember. Everything about her had not been erased – it was only just out of her reach, still inside her wolf, running free in Westeros. I have to try to slip into her again, I have to.
She clutched, struggled. It was as painful as if she'd tried to tear herself in half for true, thick and clumsy as clawing into heavy wet wool. For a moment a hazy sensation came to her: running through heavy trees, paws gouging out half a foot of new snow, while the blue eye of the Ice Dragon sparkled coldly overhead. North. I am going north. Then the vision disappeared, and she sagged back. After some time spent recuperating, she opened her eyes. Her real eyes.
Sunlight stung them like a spear, and she clapped them shut again at once, only opening them in small increments until she could stand the pain. She was lying on the lower docks of the Ragman's Harbor, where she'd traded often before, and how and whence she had come there was a mystery that would have to wait for later. At least she seemed to be mostly intact, but there was no telling if Jaqen would –
Jaqen. The girl froze as a sudden burst of memory ripped through her. He'd been the one hunting her in the House, the one she'd been trying to escape from when she drank from the fountain. The one who had told her that she had no choice but to die. He was my friend, I thought he was my friend. But he had been no one. Really no one. The most dangerous of all. Thinking of it made her glance nervously around, but no malevolent magical assassins of nonexistent identity were to be conveniently spotted. Shaky as a newborn foal, she pushed herself to her feet. Then, thinking of something, she knelt back down and peered at her reflection in the grimy green water.
A long, solemn, vaguely horsey face looked back at her. Grey eyes, shaggy unkempt brown hair, a few pimples on the underside of her skinny jaw. Irritated, she popped them. It wasn't a pretty face, really, and it looked more like a boy's than a girl's, but there was something comforting and familiar about it. It would do, until she remembered.
It was even harder to get back up, but she did. She wasn't dressed in the fine garb that Lyanna Snow had worn to the theater at the Orb, but rather a few scraps that looked like a burlap sack. When she stepped on a seam, it tore, and then it dawned on her. A shroud. I was sewn into a shroud. Wincing as her bare feet hit the sun-baked cobbles, she began to hobble as fast as she could. She wondered how long she had been dead. It could be the next morning, or a week hence, or months. But she did not think it had been quite that much, if they were still discussing the Sealord's assassination with no mention of a replacement.
She wished she knew where she was going. The House of Black and White was out of the question, as was the Sealord's Palace, and she had no other permanent lodging in Braavos. Captain Terys and his sons were unlikely to be in port, and her only remaining option was to seek out Brusco the mussel-seller and his daughters. But if the Faceless Men discovered her survival and were angered by it. . .
They wouldn't, the dead girl told herself. Whatever else the Faceless Men might be, they were ruthless about only killing those whose deaths had been prayed for, and their devotion to their calling was absolute. Since she had lived, they might well see it as proof that the Many-Faced God had not accepted her as a servant. And how could she tell their secrets, when she remembered none of them? Try as she might, the entirety of her time there was naught more than a blur. It would have to be one of the inns where she had plied her trade as Blind Beth, the girl decided. There was nothing else.
Nonetheless, even with this decision made, it was no small ordeal to accomplish it. She had no money to pay for passage, and since as much of Braavos was water as it was stone, she had to creep from quay to bridge to covered walkway, sometimes dipping into the canals and swimming when that was the only way. Her relative lack of clothes was an advantage in that case, even though she had to look sharp in the crowded thoroughfares; the gondoliers swore at her in gutter Braavosi as they poled around her. Yet by and large the folk were kindly, and one or two of them even allowed her to ride on their boats for a spell. Sometimes they would ask if she had been hurt, but she could only shake her head and hold her silence. She had no name to give them, not even a false one.
At last, limping and hopping with every step, she reached Pynto's inn and ducked inside. On an ordinary workday evening, it would have been doing only sparse custom, but the shocking news of the Sealord's murder had packed it full to bursting. Pynto and his daughters were overwhelmed trying to pour ale and serve supper, and as she wove through the crowds of gossipers, the dead girl saw her opportunity. "A few coppers," she said, "if I work the night?"
The proprietor looked at her and snorted. "You won't be working in Pynto's tavern in those rags, no. This is a reputable establishment – but it so happens, we could use an extra pair of hands or three. Carella! Run upstairs and grab the waif here one of your frocks, she'll be helping us tonight."
He does not know me. Then again, he would not have – she had come here as Blind Beth, wearing Blind Beth's face, and she did not know herself either. There was something he had said, something about a waif – she should remember, she should. It came in flashes, like beacons from a lighthouse, but she still remained far offshore, in the darkness of the waves.
Carella returned with the dress, and the dead girl hastily shed her rags in the back room, then pulled it on and waded into the thick of things. She poured and carried and cleaned, avoided pinches from a few of the drunker ones, and vaguely recalled that she might have been something similar, a cupbearer perhaps, a long time ago. The work was hard but straightforward, and she got to keep whatever coin the patrons left – and listen to their talk.
"It was the Sealord's visitor," one man insisted. "The Westerosi. Had to be."
"No, it was Fregar. Everyone knows he's tipped to succeed Antaryon, he just decided to hasten it. Wouldn't be the first time, or the dozenth."
"Be that as it well may," a third voice interrupted, "they've taken Antaryon's courtesan in for questioning. The Summer Wench, something like that."
"Summer Maid, fool."
"Someone female, that's the point. Rumor has it – " the man glanced around and lowered his voice – "rumor has it she sicced a Faceless Man on the poor old duffer."
"Volentin, the First Sword, he swears he didn't let no man near the Sealord."
No man, the dead girl thought. Somehow that seemed significant.
"I'd wonder what that would do to the courtesan trade, I would," said another. "No man wants to spend his life's savings to bed a woman, even one such as that, then fear that she'd turn around and send one of those demons after him."
"Please, friend. Not so loudly."
"What else would you call them? They steal souls so well as faces, they only worship death, and they know a dozen different ways to do you in without breaking a sweat. They've long been part of Braavos, it's true, and no sane man would risk going after them, but with this evil festering in our midst for gods' time. . . there's only one way to bring it out."
"And that is what, Isaveus?"
"The same it's been, for all of man's days." The speaker paused pregnantly. "Fire. Fire and blood."
"Oh, don't tell me you're in with those mad fables – "
"They're not mad, and they're far from fables – "
Voices were being raised. Other patrons were looking around, and Pynto, the old pirate who relished a good dust-up, put down his tray and rolled up his sleeves. But then, just as everyone was preparing to choose up sides and get into it in earnest, the door banged open, bringing with it a gust of the rainy evening and a tall fair-haired stranger who, the dead girl knew at once but could not pin down how or where, was no stranger at all.
"At your ease, goodfolk," the newcomer said, in accented Braavosi. This was not uncommon; Braavos, a port city and center of trade, was richly diverse, and the low register of the language, which he spoke, had acquired a whole mongrel host of inflections, conjugations, and vocabulary. But from his coloring and his pronunciation, he could only be from the Seven Kingdoms. He looked no different from any of them – in fact, more disreputable if anything. His cloth was shabby, his long hair windblown, and the horn on his belt old, dirty, and broken. But he held up a coin and twirled it, and one of Pynto's daughters moved to pour him a tankard.
"Thank you." He flashed her a dazzling smile, and she giggled; he clearly considered himself to possess a soft touch with the women. An awkward silence ensued for several moments, nobody quite clear where to pick up after the aborted brawl, until the man finally put down his drink and glanced around at them. "I was told," he said, "a man could find anything he needed in the Ragman's Harbor, if he looked long enough. I've paid call on several taverns already tonight, but I heard as well that Pynto would be of particular use in my project. Would this be true?"
"What project?" said Pynto, looking startled to be called upon.
"Hiring sellswords." The man gave another, drier smile. "You used to be a pirate, or at least that's what the hearsay makes you out as. I'll be very disappointed if you only had a boat and an eye patch."
"I did my fair share of hell-raising in my day," Pynto admitted. "I'm a law-abiding man now, run a business and I'm raising my girls. Why's it you ask?"
"Just so I can answer." Looking around again, the man raised his voice. "I am Ser Justin of House Massey, in service to His Grace Stannis Baratheon, true king of Westeros, and I will not return to him without twenty thousand swords at my back. Swords for which – " he turned another coin between his fingers, this one stamped with the distinctive sigil of the Iron Bank – "good gold will be paid, and in plenty."
"Strange way to go about it, ser," a voice remarked from the crowd. "If you're trawling the taverns of Ragman's, by night's end you'll have perhaps two dozen decent men, and more drunkards believing themselves heroes than you know what to do with."
Ser Justin grinned. "It's a way to kill some time whilst I wait for Tormo Fregar to win out as Sealord. I have reason to believe he'll be a particular boon to me."
A pause, and then the penny dropped. "You," one of the men said, and it was echoed at large. "You must be the one who came to visit Antaryon just before he died. You must have – "
"I did not," Ser Justin interrupted, apparently sensing where the conversation would be speedily headed otherwise. "And I have an excellent alibi, elsewise can you truly think I'd still be walking the streets as a free man? The old man was already dead by the time I knew anything had happened at all. The Sealord's guards asked me all the questions they could think of, but they had nothing to charge me with."
"The woman. The Summer Maid. Did she do it?"
"Bloody unlikely," Massey answered crisply. "But she is, after all, a woman, and a courtesan to boot. She'll have a deal more difficulty clearing her name."
"So nobody knows who it was?"
"Does it even matter at this point?" Massey leaned back in his chair. "Antaryon was going to die soon as it was. Conveniently, someone slashed his throat to make sure. The matter will be all the rage for a few days before the attention turns to Fregar. You're lucky, goodfolk of Braavos. When King Robert died, Westeros went up in flames."
"Which leads you back to your point."
"Which leads me back to my point, yes," Massey agreed. "I need swords and men, and I have no intention of ending up as a corpse in a gutter, whether from a bravo or anyone else. If anyone believes they may be qualified, I invite them to speak to me on the morrow. I've taken lodgings by the Purple Harbor, in the villa once owned by the Darrys. The one with the red door. I'll see you there."
With that, he polished off the last of his ale, gave another smile to Pynto's daughters, and turned to leave. And the dead girl, knowing only somehow she must remember who she was, who he was, ran after him.
She caught up with him in the street outside, in between the shadows cast by the lamps lining the canals. He jumped when she tugged his cloak, and his hand flashed to the blade he must have hidden carefully beneath it, so as to avoid being challenged by a bravo. Then he caught sight of her and scowled, though he quickly tried to change it to a more pleasant expression. "What is it, girl? It's late."
"You. . ." She fumbled for the words. "Back there. In Pynto's. You. . ." She could not ask if he knew her. Even if he did, it was not likely to be in this face. "You're from Westeros. In service of Lord Stannis."
"King Stannis," Massey corrected her. "I need swords, girl, not skinny serving wenches like you. Hurry back, your father will be missing you."
"Pynto's not my father." She wondered if anyone was her father, or if she had been born anew there, on the docks. "I – I'm from Westeros too." That was all she knew.
"So you are." Ser Justin looked surprised. "You speak the Common Tongue with that accent. What, are you here to tell me that you're actually the daughter of some lord who's intended to pledge for Stannis all this time, but has merely been awaiting the opportune moment?"
"I don't know." She could swear that she'd met him somewhere before. She needed to go back there somehow, she needed to find her wolf and regain her memories, and so long as she remained in Braavos, she was vulnerable to whatever revenge the Faceless Men might decide to exact. I am not safe in Westeros either, she reminded herself, but that was a difficulty to be dealt with later. She took a step closer, into one of the pools of amber light. "I can't remember."
Ser Justin squinted at her. "Can't remember? How on earth would that have happened?"
I drank at the fountain of forgetfulness, the girl wanted to say. I am no one now. "I don't know."
"Stranger things have happened," the knight allowed. Clearly he wanted to move on, but innate curiosity prompted him to take one last gander at her. "You do have the look of a northerner about you. A Stark, almost. But that wouldn't be, they'll all dead. Or half-wolf, if the tales be true."
Half-wolf. Desperate to grasp onto anything that made even the slightest bit of sense, the girl hastened into the opportunity. "I had a wolf once," she said. "I still do."
"A wolf?"
"Aye. She was in a cage, but she's not anymore. Her name was Nymeria." Where the last part had come from the girl could not be sure, but as soon as she said it, she knew that it was true.
"What are you even. . ." Ser Justin's words trailed off. A completely dumbstruck expression began to dawn on his face in its place. "Seven hells," he said. "Seven bloody hells, it can't possibly be."
"What?"
"It can't be. I took the girl to the Wall myself, on King Stannis' orders. There's no way they'd have risked so much if they had even the slightest reason to believe. . . but it was so convenient, and nobody to say otherwise. . ." Ser Justin's mind was galloping far ahead of his mouth as the shocking truth unreeled before him. If only she knew what it was. "Girl," he said. "Come with me."
She hesitated. "Why?"
"Why? Because I think I know who you are, and if I'm right, it blows to pieces everything we thought we knew about the fate of the north, and the battles of my king." Ser Justin took her by the arm. "Don't worry, I won't hurt you. You'll be safe with me. Come on."
Seeing no alternative, she allowed him to steer her down toward a waiting gondola, ready to snatch out his dagger and bury it in his belly at the first sign of unseemliness. He paid the man, and they moved out into the dark swift current of the canal, the lights gliding by. Braavos at night is beautiful, she thought, and then, I have done this before. Recently. But when?
It did not seem to be that long later when they fetched up at a private pier. She wondered if Pynto had noticed she had fled, had suspected the worst of her, that she was some spy or sneak. I never collected my wages. But she still had that faint, disturbing sense of circularity. There was one other person she needed to speak with, at once, though she could not for the life of her have explained why.
"Where's the Summer Maid?" she insisted, as Ser Justin offered her a hand out.
"Safe," he said. "For now. Why do you care, my lady?"
"My lady?" She frowned.
"Believe me, it's true. Come on." He made to lead her up toward the villa, but she dug in her heels.
"Come, girl," he said, somewhat less patiently. "I'm not going to let you see her, be sensible. The woman is accused of arranging murder."
"Back in Pynto's, you said it didn't matter."
"Not to me. And it shouldn't to you. You're safe now, you're safe with me. Don't throw it away."
She crossed her arms. "You have to tell me who I am."
Ser Justin stared at her, then his mouth twitched. She had time to hear the sheer ludicrousness of her request echoing back at her, but was determined not to give in so quickly to this stranger. "You're someone very important," he said, "and for the life of me I can't understand what you're doing here, but you're stubborn enough that you must indeed be who I think. Now – "
"Where's the Summer Maid?"
"If I tell you, will you leave off this folly and come along like a good girl?"
"I'm not a good girl." That was another truth that had become clear in the speaking. "But you can tell me."
Ser Justin sighed, sounding aggravated. "She's here," he said. "In the house. I managed to talk the Sealord's guards into releasing her to me, said I'd keep her under polite confinement until they'd turfed up a few more details. It will be hard to press a case against her one way or the other – they'll not risk public outrage for hurting a courtesan, especially on such scant evidence. I don't think the woman murdered Antaryon by her own hand, but she certainly didn't mind it much. All the better for me, I won't complain. And see if there's any way to help her get off. She's done me a great favor."
"Why?"
"You're asking too many questions." He took her by the arm again.
The dead girl squirreled free. Fast as a snake, some distant shred of her murmured, and it was so. She twisted away from his lunge. Then she was running, pelting away through the immaculately kept grounds, jumping a low stone wall and hurtling down a maze of airy corridors, thinking again that she must have run like this somewhere else. But this was just a villa with lemon trees and a red door and it was something and it was everything and she had to run faster.
Behind her, she could hear Ser Justin vainly attempting to give pursuit, but he was a big man, strong and broad but not fleet of foot, and she was a shadow one among many. He was swearing and shouting at her to stop being a little fool, but his voice grew fainter and fainter as she kept running. Yet he would catch up to her eventually; the villa was walled in. I must find the Summer Maid before that happens.
Panting, the girl finally skidded to a halt in one of the corridors. Old memory told her to pay close attention, to look with her eyes and listen with her ears. And before her, she saw a door, another red door, and briefly wondered if she had woken at all, or if this was all a dream and she still lay crumpled on the docks, a soulless and abandoned shell.
She put a hand on the door latch. It opened.
Inside, the room was cool and mint-scented. Moonlight speared through a latticed window, and it was very dark in the spaces between. Briefly she thought she might be blind again; she remembered another bitter taste on her tongue, and the vision it had taken from her. Everything I drank there was meant to steal me away from myself. But she stretched out her hands and kept moving forward. Someone is here.
"Girl," a soft voice said, very nearby. "What have you done?"
Once more she screamed to a halt, heart starting to race, knowing those words, knowing that question. But after the panicked jolt, she realized that it was not Jaqen who had spoken, but a woman.
"I don't know," she said. "What have I done?"
There was a long sigh, slow and fraught with pain. Then an elegant hand struck a light, and as a flame blossomed out, the girl looked onto the face of the captive courtesan.
It had to be the Summer Maid, her dark hair undone and coming down around her shoulders. There were lines under her eyes and she wore no cosmetics or jewelry; the mask of ravishing, mysterious enchantment that hung around all the courtesans had cracked, dropped on the floor like a broken porcelain plate. She wore a gown of rich dark blue silk, but it was torn and stained.
"You are the one, are you not?" the Summer Maid said. "Your face is different, true, but their foul taste still clings to you, and I greatly doubt there is more than one stripling girl in service at the House of Black and White. Well, you have done what I bid you, and now we will both be the ones to suffer for it. That is the lot of women in this life. To be used and discarded and torn apart, whenever they should presume to rise above their station."
The dead girl blinked. All it once it made her wonder if the Summer Maid had thought that becoming a courtesan was the only way to gain power on whoever it was that had hurt her. A woman who men will give their life's savings to bed, who can bewitch them with her beauty, and then send a Faceless Man after them, if she should so desire. It must be a raw and carnal and beautiful and terrible revenge indeed. And the only question on the girl's lips, bursting, overflowing out of her, was not who she was, but –
"Who?" she whispered. "My lady. . . who are you?"
The silence was living, breathing, all-consuming, and in the far distance she thought she heard glass breaking. Somewhere in this city men dream of glory, and another one still hunts for me. And in Westeros, near and yet so far, a wolf still ran north.
Then at last, the Summer Maid spoke. Her voice sounded quiet, rusty, almost disused, as if she was reaching into the depths of grief and shame and pain. The word fell into the silence like a stone. Just one word, just a name, just a simple name.
"Tysha," the courtesan breathed. "Tysha."