Chapter 1
Ninety-three days west of Westeros, Arya Stark caught herself saying Cersei's name into the dark, and stopped.
She was lying in her hammock in the captain's cabin with the lantern out and the ship creaking around her like an old man's knees. She had been saying the names for years, the way other girls said prayers. Somewhere back in Westeros, she couldn't say exactly when, the list had ended. There was no one left on it. Joffrey, poisoned. Tywin, on a privy. Walder Frey, by her own hand, in his own hall. Cersei, under the stones of the Red Keep, and Arya had not even been the one to do it. The list had no names left, and her mouth kept saying them anyway, out of habit, like a tongue going back to the hole where a tooth used to be.
She got up and went on deck.
The night watch was a Braavosi named Esso who sang under his breath and never asked questions, which was why she'd hired him. He nodded to her from the wheel. The sea was black and smooth, and the stars were wrong. Not entirely wrong; some she still knew, the Ice Dragon low in the north, the blue eye of its rider. But there were new ones rising out of the west each night, clusters she had no names for, and she had begun to think of them as hers.
She leaned on the rail and let the wind push her hair back. Her hands found the place on the wood where she'd been cutting notches with Needle's point, one for every day out of sight of land. Ninety-three. The crew had stopped making bets about when they'd reach the edge of the world. Now they made bets about whether there was an edge at all.
"Couldn't sleep, Captain?" Esso said.
"I was talking to dead people."
He considered this. "Did they answer?"
"No," Arya said. "That's sort of the point of them."
He laughed and went back to his song.
Land came four days later, at dawn. The lookout screamed it from the masthead in three languages, and every man on the ship came running, half of them still in their smallclothes, and stood at the rail staring. A long green shore, low and steaming in the early light. Beyond it, hills. Above the hills, a thread of smoke going straight up, which meant there was no wind there, and which meant something else, too.
"People," said Esso.
"Or a fire," said the cook, who was a pessimist.
"Fires don't light themselves," Arya said, and went to get her boots.
She took six men in the boat and left the rest with orders to sail away if they weren't back in two days. The ship's master, an old Lysene with gold rings in his ears, told her that was a very poor plan. Arya told him she had been making very poor plans since she was nine years old, and here she was.
The beach was black sand, warm under her boots even this early. The trees came down nearly to the water, and they were like no trees she had ever seen: thick grey trunks that split near the ground into a dozen twisting legs, as if each tree were trying to walk into the sea. Birds she didn't know shrieked overhead, blue and red and yellow like a tourney field gone mad. The air smelled of salt and rot and flowers, all at once.
There was a path. It wasn't much of one, but someone had cut back the branches.
They followed it uphill for an hour. Arya walked in front with Needle in her hand, not because she expected to need it but because she always walked with Needle in her hand when she didn't know where she was. The men behind her muttered and slapped at insects. Arya listened past them. She had learned to listen in the House of Black and White, blind, with the waif's stick cracking against her shins every time she failed. She could hear water, somewhere to the left. She could hear the birds. And she could hear, very faintly, something rhythmic and dull, a thud and a thud and a thud.
She held up her hand. The men stopped.
At the top of the path was a clearing, and in the clearing was a girl.
She was perhaps ten years old, brown-skinned and barefoot, with her black hair cropped short as a boy's, and she was beating a tree with a stick. She did it with great seriousness, feet planted, both hands on the stick, swinging at the trunk over and over until bits of bark flew. There was a scar on the trunk from where she'd been doing it, Arya thought, for a long time.
Arya watched her for a while. The girl's stance was terrible. Her feet were too close together and she swung from the shoulders, so that every strike jarred all the way up her arms and she had to stop and shake them out.
Arya sheathed Needle and stepped into the clearing.
The girl spun around with the stick raised. Her eyes went wide, taking in the pale strangers, the boots, the swords. She did not run. Arya liked her immediately for that.
"Your feet are wrong," Arya said.
The girl said something sharp and quick in a language Arya didn't know. It had a lot of vowels in it, and it went up at the end like a question, or a threat.
Arya pointed at the girl's feet and then at her own. She turned sideways, the way Syrio had shown her on the floor of a small room in the Red Keep, a lifetime ago, with the cats watching from the rafters. Left foot forward. Weight on the balls of the feet. Knees soft. She held out a hand, empty, as though it held a sword.
The girl stared at her. Then, slowly, she shifted her own feet.
"Sideways," Arya said, tapping her own hip. "Make yourself thin. Like this. You're giving them too much to hit."
The girl copied her. She was quick. She was much quicker than Arya had been, at her age, and Arya felt something odd move in her chest, something that was not quite grief and not quite pride. The men behind her had started to laugh, and she turned and gave them a look that shut them up.
She spent the rest of the morning in that clearing. The girl, whose name sounded something like Tahi, did not understand a word she said and did not need to. Arya showed her how to hold the stick in one hand instead of two, so it became a point and not a club. She showed her how to step back instead of forward, how to let the other person come to you. She broke off a branch for herself, and they danced around the clearing while the strange birds screamed, and twice Tahi cracked her across the knuckles hard enough to sting, and both times Arya laughed out loud.
It was afternoon when the village found them. A dozen grown men and women came out of the trees with spears, and for one moment it could have gone the way such things usually went. Then Tahi ran to a tall woman at the front, chattering and pointing and showing off her new stance, sideways, thin, and the woman looked at Arya over her daughter's head for a long, long time.
Then she lowered her spear.
They stayed nine days. They traded Braavosi steel for fruit and fresh water and a kind of bread made from roots. Arya learned eleven words of the language, three of which turned out to be rude. On the last morning, Tahi walked her to the beach and stood in the black sand in a perfect water-dancer's stance and would not let her go until Arya had crossed sticks with her one final time.
"You'll be better than me," Arya told her, and Tahi, not understanding, grinned.
That night, back on the ship, with the green shore sinking behind them into a red sunset, Arya went to the rail and found the notches she'd cut. Ninety-seven of them, and a gap of nine days she had spent ashore and hadn't cut at all. She looked at them for a long time.
Then she drew Needle and started cutting something else, below the notches, small and careful, in the letters Septa Mordane had beaten into her with a ruler.
Walking trees. Black sand. Birds like banners. Tahi.
It was a list. She'd always been good at lists.
Esso watched her from the wheel and did not ask. Arya sheathed Needle and went to bed, and in the dark of the cabin, with the ship creaking and the new stars wheeling outside, she said the names over to herself, one by one, until she fell asleep.