Chapter Text
It had been a beautiful day; then, everything began to go wrong.
Stupid Sansa, why’d she have to bring Joffrey along? At first Arya had been happy to see Lady, so Nymeria could play while she and Mycah did, but then the prince started being awful, and then he was toying with Mycah, pressing his blade to her friend’s cheek; Arya quivered with rage, snatching up her fallen stick.
“Stop it!” she yelled.
“Arya, you stay out of this,” bossy-Sansa said, and Arya couldn’t take much more. Joffrey kept his gaze on Mycah, a teasing little smile twitching at his lips.
“I won’t hurt him… much.”
And that was the last straw.
Silent, but awash with rage, Arya leapt forward and swung with two hands, her stick splitting with a crack against the prince’s head that echoed around the clearing.
“Mycah! Hold Needle!”
The butcher’s boy scooped up the sword nervously and backed toward the southern edge of the clearing, looking like he wanted to run, which wasn’t a bad idea, but Arya was too angry to consider it yet. She swung again at the prince, who was now cursing her, but he caught the stick with his sword and spun it out of her hands and into the grass. Sansa was screaming something, arms wrapped tight around Lady, but Arya ignored it, seizing a rock and throwing it with a wordless yell, smacking Joffrey in the head. He rocked back, then began screaming at her, lunging forward with his sword while the other hand held his scalp, backing her toward a tree. Arya began to grow panicked, and was just about to call for Needle when Nymeria appeared, bowling him over in a grey blur, her jaws snapping onto his sword arm and her claws digging into his skin.
“Get it off! Get it off!” he screamed.
“Nymeria!”
The direwolf released him, and she and Arya both backed toward the edge of the trees where Mycah still stood terrified. Joffrey struggled to push himself to his elbows.
“I’ll have its pelt!” he snarled. “All their pelts! And your head!”
No. No! He’d try for it, too, and Queen Cersei already didn’t like her. Mycah’s plan was best, then. Arya snatched up the prince’s sword with the stupid name, hurled it toward the river, and whirled while Joffrey and Sansa were distracted.
“Run! Run, Mycah!” Arya took Needle from the boy in one smooth motion, glad she’d brought it to show off, and slung the belt across her back as she drove Nymeria before her.
“All of us?”
“We must! He’s the prince, he’ll have all our heads for hurting him!” she cried.
He made a long moan, then looked back at the prince, swallowed, and followed after her. They dove through the woods, the sound of shouting behind them growing fainter.
“We’ll be okay!” she said, as much to reassure herself as him. “The woods are full of game, we’ll have rabbits and deer to hunt.”
“You c’n hunt?” he asked after another glance behind them.
“Well, no, but, but how hard can it be?”
###
They ate nothing but berries for the first two days, pausing only to rest in tree-branches or to sleep. A stone dug into Arya’s right foot, and try as she might she could not find it in her boot to dig out. She suggested setting watch, like people did in the stories, but it made no difference, except to give them time each night to gaze up at the stars.
The evening of the second day, however, they had nestled themselves against a tree in a crook of its roots, and were deciding who would take the first watch, when Arya paused and looked around.
“Wait. Where’s Nymeria?”
“She’s not no fool,” Mycah said with a shake of his head. “Like as not, gone t’ scout about.”
Indeed, it was no more than ten minutes later when the direwolf walked proudly back to them, head held high and a large rabbit dangling from her mouth. Arya gave a glad cry at the sight of her, and Mycah gave a glad cry at the sight of the rabbit. Nymeria dropped it in front of them, then licked each of them on the cheek and sat. Arya could have sworn she was smiling.
Mycah ruffled the wolf’s fur. “Canny lady you are!” he told her. “T’ hunt for us wi’out bein’ ast!”
He quickly set to building a fire, and Arya watched intently as the sparks caught, then just as intently as he taught her how to skin and butcher a rabbit. The three of them fell asleep that night with full bellies, and Arya began to think that maybe they could make it to a town, and back to Winterfell where they’d be safe, and perhaps life on the run wouldn’t be too bad.
That thought lasted until the sixth day.
Nymeria had been uneasy as she loped beside them, glancing behind them periodically as the day grew long, until she split off into the woods as they entered a clearing. She did that now and then, likely scouting ahead or looking for food, so Arya thought little of it until they heard the sound of hoofbeats in the open woods. Boy and girl both whirled, and Arya leapt at Mycah to shove both of them out of the way of a horse, her rider’s blade extended. The horse came about at the edge of the clearing. The rider’s eyes narrowed.
“Found you. Now, which one’s the girl, again?”
Arya looked up into his face in confusion and fear. She knew that face – Jaime Lannister. The Kingslayer.
“Oh, well. I suppose it doesn’t matter,” Lannister said. He readied his horse for another charge. “Such a shame that you both died to some beast in the woods.”
Before Arya could process that, Nymeria leapt from the bushes, her jaws tearing into the horse’s throat, and Arya shuddered at the sound of the beast’s watery scream. Lannister was forced to dismount, cursing, as the horse collapsed and Nymeria leapt back to the children’s side. Mycah stepped slightly in front of Arya, shaking, but trying to stare the man down.
The Kingslayer sighed, readying his blade. “The things I do for my sister.”
“Arya, run!”
Mycah jumped at the man; he cut through the boy’s throat with a single swipe of his sword. Arya heard herself screaming, trying to make sense of it. Wasn’t he a knight? Knights were meant to be heroes, and brave and honorable! They didn’t ki-
Her breathing sped up, everything else slowing around her, colors and sounds warped and flat and muted except for the deep crimson spray. It didn’t make sense.
Nymeria took her shoulder in her mouth and yanked, and Arya spun and ran beside her from the blood-soaked clearing, ran until she could no longer hear the man behind her over the pounding of her heart, ran longer and harder than she ever had until her lungs grew ragged and her legs were sore. She stopped for breath, propping herself up by one hand against a tree.
Nymeria whined and nudged her.
“I, I can’t,” she panted, rubbing at the tears that still streamed down her face. “I can’t go any farther.”
The direwolf pressed herself against Arya’s legs and whined again, casting a glance back along their path. She turned her head back to Arya and yipped over her shoulder, and looked for a moment like Hodor offering a piggyback ride.
“You… you want me to climb on?”
The direwolf yipped again, and Arya nodded.
“Alright…”
She draped herself over Nymeria’s back, digging her hands deep into the fur at the nape of her neck. Her feet dangled off her sides – the direwolf wasn’t yet all that tall – and Nymeria sprang into action, loping onward as fast as or faster than they had been moving before. Needle’s hilt pressed awkwardly into Arya’s hip. She gritted her teeth and pushed her face into Nymeria’s fur.
I will see the Kingslayer dead, she swore. Him, and Joffrey, and the Queen.
Nymeria’s loping stride lulled Arya into a dazed half-sleep for some time, even when she slowed after a while from her sprint, until the direwolf finally sagged and the girl slipped off onto the forest floor. Nymeria followed her to the ground, panting, and Arya rolled onto her back to gaze into her golden eyes. The direwolf licked her forehead, then nosed her shoulder.
“Thank you, girl. Thank you.” Arya wished she could return the favor, but even if she were strong enough to carry an animal taller on two legs than she was, her own legs were still burning too much to walk much farther.
She sat up, looking back along their path and then scanning around them; they lay in soft springy moss, and it would soon hide their tracks. Above them, the sky darkened with dusk; she guessed they’d been running for some hours. To her left, the ground dropped a little, and she half-dragged herself that way to see a low hollow, with an overhang formed of soil atop arching roots. It would perfectly serve her impulse to hide. She dropped down and leaned back against the soft earth beneath the roots.
“Nymeria, come!” she called quietly. A few moments later, the direwolf appeared above her, then jumped down, sniffed the area, and laid beside her on the moss, between her and the outside world. Arya rested her head against her grey fur, and sobbed into it until she slept.
###
“Mycah!”
Arya shot up with a cry, ramming her head into the roots above her, and then remembered what had happened.
From there, days passed in a blur.
She finally caught the pebble in her shoe; it was water-worn, but glittered crimson in her hand, a bright ruby as red as blood and twice the size of her thumbnail. She huffed a mirthless laugh of disbelief, and stared at the gem unthinking for the better part of an hour. What good is it now, that I have no-one to celebrate with? thought one part of her; but the other part clutched her hand tight around it as a memory of her friend.
The first time she cleaned a rabbit like Mycah had shown her, she cried until Nymeria licked the salt from her cheeks. She spent a good hour attempting to start a fire before it caught, but then she and the direwolf supped on half a rabbit each, seasoned with wild air and washed down with cold streamwater. She had berries for dessert, plump and dripping down her chin and staining her fingers purple. They traveled in this way for a week further, until they heard the soft lapping of water on a shore, and came to the edge of a great lake, its waters green and blue and glimmering in the sunlight. They stood on a promontory of sorts; to the northeast, off to her right, the lake curved and the smoke of the fires of some great lakeside town were evident, but the town itself was beyond her sight. However, her gaze was drawn west and south, to a great island in the lake’s center.
“The God’s Eye,” she whispered in realization. The greens and browns that covered the island danced in a soft wind, and Arya’s breath caught as she saw, though the green of the island, the sharp bone-white and red leaves of a weirwood tree. Something seized her heart then; a longing for familiarity, or a wash of religious fervor, or some pull older and deeper, she couldn’t say, but she scrambled down the bluff to the shore, and began moving southeast along it, her feet moving almost of their own volition until in a flash she understood what she was looking for.
A small boat lay discarded along the shore, seemingly unmarred if worn and lichened by time, and she flipped it over with unexplainable haste.
“Nymeria, come!” she said, pushing the boat into the waters. The direwolf leapt in, and Arya paused only to take up a long branch in order to pole out into the lake. Almost immediately, a current caught them, tugging the boat to and fro, but the winds at their back drove them forward, south, unerringly, straight to the shore of the island. Nymeria’s ears pressed back against her skull as the boat approached, and she shot Arya a worried glance. She rubbed the wolf’s pelt to comfort her, as well as herself, for now that the boat was adrift, she had realized her lack of actual paddles, and begun to worry about what precisely had caused her actions.
The boat ran up onto the pebbled shore of the island.
Wolf and girl stared at each other for a long while. Arya gulped.
“I… suppose we may as well move forward?” She glanced behind her once more and realized even her poling-stick was nowhere to be found. “Unless you have a better idea?”
Nymeria whined, but carefully stepped one paw onto the beach; when nothing happened, another followed, and Arya followed her, right hand tight on Needle’s strap over her shoulder, and left dug deep into the direwolf’s fur.
Ravens watched them from the trees as they disembarked, just as the trees themselves watched, from the faces carved in every one. She could feel it, the prickle on the back of her neck, an anger - not directed at her, but thick and old, buried beneath a tired acceptance, something she herself had not yet managed. Moments later the clattering of pebbles ceased as they left the beach behind; their steps became silent, swallowed by the loam and the surrounding trees. Nymeria clung tightly to Arya’s legs, ears pricked up to note any sounds. But there were none, save the soft rustling of leaves above them; even the ravens were utterly silent, remaining along the shore to watch rather than follow them. The two moved further south, further inward, to the center.
There were weirwood trees on the island, more than one, with faces just like the rest, but none of them felt right, and they were too far off from the island’s center to be the heart tree. They kept walking, until as the light turned to dusk they came upon a ring of weirwoods, a grove that held the largest and greatest of the Isle’s trees. It was as great as the heart tree in Winterfell, ancient and gnarled and so wide she could not hope to encircle it if there were five of her. Its pale roots tumbled through the grove, and curved about a round pool.
Arya fell to her knees beside the pool, the waters a green so deep they were almost black, and her fingers dipped into the cold, cold water as she clenched her hands. Even this was wrong, so close to the godswood at home, but the other trees all full of leaves instead of needles, the pool not quite the deep cold black of Winterfell, the twilight speckling through the shifting leaves too bright and green compared to what reached through the tangled limbs of the godswood at home.
Nymeria rested beside her, and Arya leaned against her, half-curled around her, a bone-deep exhaustion taking root in her soul.
“Why is this happening to us?” she cried, slumping further into the direwolf. “Everything was perfect, until the King came. Isn’t nobility supposed to be good? I just want somewhere we’ll be safe!”
As hot tears spattered on her hands and dripped into the pool, she gave in; consciousness fled, and she knew no more.