32. A Dance With Dragons, by George R.R. Martin, pp. 835-859

The Ugly Little Girl

Arya is serving at a meeting of the priests of the Many-Faced God, after which the kindly man tells her that the priest whose face is disfigured by sores and other signs of the plague wants to speak with her. He goes through the familiar routine, asking her, "Who are you?" and when she answers "No one," calling her a liar. "You are Arya of House Stark, who bites her lip and cannot tell a lie." She insists that she was Arya once, but that she isn't anymore.

Then he tells her, "You would kill for your own purposes, for your own pleasures. Do you deny it?" When she hesitates in her answer, he slaps her. Silently, she repeats her mantra, her list of the people she wants to see dead. He tells her that she is "too proud to serve," but sets her a task to prove her humility: "Give a man a certain gift.... No one you love, no one you hate, no one you have ever known. Will you kill him?" She says yes, and the next day she returns to the house of the fishmonger Brusco.

She soon sees the man she is supposed to kill. He is past fifty: "He has lived too long, she tried to tell herself. Why should he have so many years when my father had so few?" Then she remembers that she is Cat of the Canals, not Arya Stark, and has no father. She decides that the man is evil, but when she says that to the kindly man at the House of Black and White, he tells her, "He is a man like any other, with light in him and darkness." She dislikes his hands in particular, which look to her like white spiders.

She watches him for several days and decides that he is some kind of merchant, but he turns out to be an insurance broker. The kindly man explains that if a merchant's "ships are lost in a storm or taken by pirates, he promises to pay them for the value of the vessel and all its contents." She decides that he must have failed to pay someone's claim and that they have prayed for the man's death. But the kindly man won't tell her who has such a grudge.

She notices that the man has two guards, who keep people from getting too close and who taste his food before he eats. She suggests that she should wait until one of the guards leaves to urinate, stab the old man in the eye, and kill the other guard too. But the kindly man insists, "You are a servant of the Many-Faced God, and we who serve Him of Many faces give his gift only to those who have been marked and chosen." She realizes that she is not to kill anyone else in the process of killing the old man.

When she thinks she is ready to act, the kindly man says that she needs a different face: If Cat of the Canals kills him, that will cause trouble for Brusco and his family. She follows the kindly man down to a place in the temple she has never been: "the secret chambers where only the priests were permitted." They go down so far that she realizes she must be beneath the canals. Finally they reach a chamber, and by the light of the kindly man's lantern she sees a thousand faces hanging on the walls. She tells herself they are masks, but she realizes that they are in fact skins.

He tells her to sit and not to move. "This will hurt, ... but pain is the price of power." She closes her eyes and feels the knife, and then the blood flowing down her face. She is given a cup of something very tart to drink, and then the face is pulled over her own. "The leather scraped across her brow, dry and stiff, but as her blood soaked into it, it softened and turned supple." She feels hands choking her and hears "a noise, a hideous, crunching noise, accompanied by blinding pain. A face floated in front of her, fat, bearded, brutal, his mouth twisted in rage."

But then the priest speaks to her and tells her to breathe. When she does, the pain and the sensation of choking passes. She raises her hand to her face, but it feels unchanged. But the waif tells her that to others it looks different: "To others, your nose and jaw are broken.... One side of your face is caved in where your cheekbone shattered, and half your teeth are missing." The kindly man tells Arya that the person whose face she wears was beaten brutally by her father, and that she came to them asking for death. Arya thinks, "You should have killed him."

The next morning she makes her way through Braavos to the Purple Harbor where the old man does his business. She waits there until she sees a shipowner who has done business with the old man before. She follows him till she sees her opportunity to cut her way into the man's purse and steal his gold. He calls out "Thief!" as she dodges away, tripping him up in the process. Gold coins spill as she runs off into the alleys she knows well. She waits for an hour until until she knows the shipowner will have picked up all the coins and made his way to the insurance broker. Then she goes back to the House of Black and White.

The kindly man is waiting, and she gives him a gold coin. "I took one of his," she tells him, "but I left him one of ours." She has seen the old man bite into coins to test them. The kindly man realizes what she has done: The shipowner had paid the old man with the coin she had given him. "Soon after that the man's heart gave out. Is that the way of it? Very sad."

She is given back the face of Arya Stark and made an acolyte. The kindly man tells her, "On the morrow you will go to Izembaro to begin your first apprenticeship." He asks again who she is, and she replies, "No one."

Cersei

Cersei is pacing her cell, trying to steel herself for the ordeal she faces, telling herself, "A little walk and I'll be home, I'll be back with Tommen, in my own chambers inside Maegor's Holdfast." Then the septas come with shears and a straight razor. "When her locks and curls were piled up around her feet, one of the novices soaped her head and the silent sister scraped away the stubble with a razor." Then she is told to remove her shift, and her body and pubic hair are shaved too.

She is given a robe to cover her as they move through the sept, but she is denied sandals and walks barefoot through the crowd of worshipers who have gathered in the Great Sept of Baelor. A member of the Warrior's Sons kneels before her and introduces himself as Ser Theodan the True; he tells her that he is in command of her escort. She looks at the men in the escort and notices her former lover, Lancel Lannister.

The door opens and she steps outside, welcoming the stench of the city because it signals the end of her captivity in the sept. "It came to her suddenly that she had stood in this very spot before, on the day Lord Eddard Stark had lost his head." There seem to be as many people gathered in the plaza as there were on that day. Then Septa Unella steps forward and announces that Cersei "has committed grievous falsehoods and fornications." She is followed by Septa Moelle, who says that the queen has been ordered "to demonstrate her repentance by putting aside all pride and artifice and presenting herself as the gods made her before the good people of the city." Septa Scolera finishes by proclaiming Cersei's "walk of atonement."

Cersei recalls how, after her grandfather's death, Tywin Lannister had humiliated his own father's mistress by forcing her to walk naked through the streets of Lannisport. Cersei hadn't witnessed it herself, but she remembers mocking stories about how the woman had begged and pleaded and tried to cover her nakedness. She resolves not to have such stories told about her. "I am a lioness. I will not cringe for them," she thinks, and removes her robe.

She holds her head high as she descends the steps, though the wind is cold. The escort fans out around her, and a woman in the crowd cries out, "Whore!" She is flanked by Unella and Moelle, but Septa Scolera walks behind, ringing a bell and calling out, "shame upon the sinner, shame, shame." She hears street vendors selling meat pies, people yelling out things, and sees a rotten vegetable fly through the air, though it misses her. She steps in something slick, but Unella keeps her from falling and warns her to watch where she's going.

A man is eating some meat on a skewer and offers it to her. She turns away in disgust, but he flings it at her, striking her on the thigh and leaving a smear down her leg. As she leaves the plaza and begins the descent of Visenya's hill, the road becomes steeper and dirtier and she has to walk through puddles that she tells herself are rainwater but are probably horse piss. Obscenities are shouted, and more things are being thrown from the windows and balconies along the way. A dead cat is thrown and bursts open on the cobblestones, "spattering her lower legs with entrails and maggots."

She slips and falls halfway down the hill, and scrapes her knee. The captain of the escort tells her to move faster because the crowd is getting out of hand, then grabs her arm and pulls her after him. She steps on something sharp and begins to leave a trail of bloody footprints. People mock her sagging breasts, and she begins seeing familiar faces in the crowd: Tywin, Ned Stark, Sansa, Tyrion, and Joffrey. When she falls again she begs Septa Moelle for mercy, but Septa Unella says it's not much farther, and she realizes that she is at the foot of Aegon's High Hill, at the top of which is the castle.

The jeers and obscenities grow worse as she climbs, but she tells herself they are just words and she is "beautiful, the most beautiful woman in all Westeros."

She did not feel beautiful, though. She felt old, used, filthy, ugly. There were stretch marks on her belly from the children she had borne, and her breasts were not as firm as they had been when she was younger. Without a gown to hold them up, they sagged against her chest. I should not have done this. I was their queen, but now they've seen, they've seen, they've seen. I should never have let them see. Gowned and crowned, she was a queen. Naked, bloody, limping, she was only a woman, not so very different from their wives, more like their mothers than their pretty little maiden daughters. What have I done?

Then she has a vision of the hag who had predicted that she will be cast down by someone "younger and more beautiful." She begins to cry, and to try to cover her nakedness with her hands, and breaks into a run. She stumbles, falls, and begins to crawl, "scrambling uphill on all fours like a dog as the good folks of King's Landing made way for her, laughing and jeering and applauding her."

Finally she is there, at the gates, where Ser Boros Blount and Ser Meryn Trant are moving toward her. Ser Kevan is there, too, and she begs to see Tommen. But Kevan harshly says, "Not here. No son should have to bear witness to his mother's shame," and orders her covered up. A giant of a man picks her up in his arms and carries her. She realizes that he is wearing a white cloak. Then Qyburn appears and tells her that the man is Ser Robert Strong, the latest member of the Kingsguard. But when Cersei addresses him, he remains silent. Qyburn explains that "Ser Robert has taken a holy vow of silence.... He has sworn that he will not speak until all of His Grace's enemies are dead and evil has been driven from the realm."

18. A Feast for Crows, by George R.R. Martin, pp. 504-528

Cat of the Canals

Arya has fully adapted to her new life selling fish, though she still dreams of being a wolf. "The wolf dreams belonged to Arya of House Stark. Try as she might, though, she could not rid herself of Arya." But in any case the wolf dreams were better the ones in which "she was always looking for her mother, stumbling through a wasted land of mud and blood and fire."

She still returns to the temple and to the kindly man, who instructs her, "Learn three new things before you come back to us." She reports to him on the doings of the city, and during the dark of the moon spends three days serving in the temple, washing the dead or helping the cook. She usually sells her shellfish at the Ragman's Harbor, where ships from all over the world dock. She gets to know sailors and thieves, whores and courtesans, and she sometimes hears news from home, such as the death of Lysa Arryn. Then she has to tell herself, "It's nought to me. Cat of the Canals never had an aunt."

In one of the brothels she find Dareon, playing and singing love songs. This makes her angry, because he has broken his vows to the Night's Watch. She has heard from the whores about the time Sam confronted Dareon and wound up being thrown into the canal. When she finishes selling her shellfish at the brothel, Dareon leaves with her, on his way to an inn where he has promised to sing. She asks about Sam and whether he ever found passage to Oldtown, but Dareon doesn't know.

She goes home and gives Brusco the money she has made, as well as a pair of boots that he says are too small for him. She reminds him that it's the dark of the moon, so he sends her off to the House of Black and White. There she bathes away the fish smell and ceases being Cat for a while. She helps the waif preparing the potions she uses, learning that sweetsleep is a gentle poison and that the tears of Lys is crueler. She chews on her lip while asking a question, and the waif slaps her: "It is Arya of House Stark who chews on her lip whenever she is thinking. Are you Arya of House Stark?" She replies, "I am no one." But then she asks, "Who are you?" and the waif replies with a story in which Arya detects some lies.

The kindly man appears and asks for the three new things she has learned. She tells him two of them about waterfront people she knows, and when he asks for the third replies without hesitation:

"Dareon is dead. The black singer who was sleeping at the Happy Port. He was really a deserter from the Night's Watch. Someone slit his throat and pushed him into a canal, but they kept his boots."

The kindly man asks, "Who could have done this thing, I wonder?" She replies, "Arya of House Stark." He observes that he thought she had left Braavos, then sends the waif for "a cup of wine for me and warm milk for our friend Arya, who has returned to us so unexpectedly."

She drinks the warm milk. "It smelled a little burnt and had a bitter aftertaste." Then she goes to bed and dreams that she is a wolf without a pack, prowling the canals. When she wakes in the morning, she is blind.

Samwell

Maester Aemon is dead aboard the Cinnamon Wind, which is off the coast of Dorne. The ship is becalmed. Sam had hoped that he might make it to Oldtown where the archmaesters could save him, for Aemon's recovery when he heard Xhondo's talk of dragons had seemed remarkable. He longed to go see Daenerys for himself, but the stormy passage had taken its toll, and he began giving Sam instructions on what to tell the archmaesters at the Citadel.

Sam must tell them about "the wights and the white walkers, the creeping cold," and that Melisandre is mistaken: "Daenerys is our hope. Tell them that at the Citadel. Make them listen. They must send her a maester. Daenerys must be counseled, taught, protected." Otherwise, his talk was confused: "He spoke of dreams and never named the dreamer, of a glass candle that could not be lit and eggs that would not hatch. He said the sphinx was the riddle, not the riddler, whatever that meant."

Sam tells Gilly that Jon shouldn't have sent Aemon on the voyage. "If he had stayed at Castle Black, he might have lived another ten years." But Gilly says that Melisandre "might have burned him.... She wanted king's blood for her fires. Val knew she did. Lord Snow too. That was why they made me take Dalla's babe away and leave my own behind in his place." Sam thinks that Aemon will still have to be burned, according to the funeral traditions of the Targaryens, but that he will be the one to do it. But the captain won't allow it to be done on board, so the body has been preserved in a cask of rum until it reaches Oldtown.

Gilly suggests that Dalla's child should be named for Maester Aemon. "Dalla brought him forth during battle, as the swords sang all around her. That should be his name. Aemon Battleborn. Aemon Steelsong." Sam agrees, though Gilly reminds him that he can't be named officially until he's two. She has left the baby with the captain's daughter, Kojja Mo, and she and Sam have been drinking rum as part of a Summer Islander celebration of the dead. She leans close to Sam and kisses him, and he returns the kiss.

Suddenly, he finds himself making love to Gilly, though his mind keeps telling him that he's breaking his vows. They are in the women's cabin. "Others came in, men and women both, and his listened to them kissing and laughing and mating with one another. Summer Islanders. That's how they mourn. They answer life with death." When he wakes the next morning he is in his own hammock and has a splitting headache. But the wind has arisen, and the ship is under way.

Sam is helping pay for their passage by working, and he spends the day miserably going through his chores and trying to avoid encountering Gilly, telling himself he should have jumped overboard. "I have always been a craven, but I was never an oathbreaker till now." Finally, at the end of his watch, Xhondo grabs him and takes him to Kojja Mo. She points at the land visible in the distance:

"There is the coast of Dorne. Sand and rocks and scorpions, and no good anchorage for hundreds of leagues. You can swim there if you like, and walk to Oldtown. You will need to cross the deep desert and climb some mountains and swim the Torentine. Or else you could go to Gilly."

He protests, but she is unmoved. "All you Westerosi make a shame of loving. There is no shame in loving." He protests that he took a vow, but she says Gilly knows that. "She knows why you wear the black, why you go to Oldtown. She knows she cannot keep you. She wants you for a little while, is all." He has a choice: Go to her, or swim for it.

He goes to her.

12. A Feast for Crows, by George R.R. Martin, pp. 312-343

Arya

Each night she repeats her list of people she wants dead, and one night the "kindly man" overhears it and asks her about it. After hedging for a bit she admits that it's the names of the people she would like to kill, and he asks her if that's why she came to the House of Black and White. If so, he tells her, she has "come to the wrong place."

She hasn't learned the kindly man's name, or that of the waif who, like her, lives underneath the temple. There is a cook named Umma, for whom Arya works, but Arya can't understand her when she speaks, and three acolytes and two serving men, but they're not given to communication. The kindly man is the only one who speaks the Common Tongue, and each day he asks her, "Who are you?"

"No one," she would answer, she who had been Arya of House Stark, Arya Underfoot, Arya Horseface. She had been Arry and Weasel too, and Squab and Salty, Nan the cupbearer, a grey mouse, a sheep, the ghost of Harrenhal ... but not for true, not in her heart of hearts. In there she was Arya of Winterfell, the daughter of Lord Eddard Stark and Lady Catelyn, who had once had brothers named Robb and Bran and Rickon, a sister named Sansa, a direwolf called Nymeria, a half brother named Jon Snow. In there she was someone ... but that was not the answer he wanted.

There are no services in the temple, but visitors come every day, and very occasionally someone would ask to see a priest and would be shown to either the kindly man or the waif. She is allowed free run of the building, except for the lowest level, which only the priests could enter. She works for the cook, and for the first time in a long while goes to sleep with a full stomach. In her conversations with the kindly man she is constantly reminded that she is being evasive, but he allows her to keep her secrets if she wishes. But if she stays in the temple, she must serve: "Valar dohaeris is how we say it here" -- all men must serve. And she must obey: "If you cannot obey, you must depart."

People come to the House of Black and White who are ready to die. They pray for however long they wish and then drink from the pool and lie down behind the effigy of whichever god they choose, never to wake. Their bodies are taken to the lowest level, but Arya doesn't know what happens to them there. Once while she was eating, she had a frightening thought and looked closely at the piece of meat on her for. "The kingly man saw the horror on her face. 'It is pork, child,' he told her, 'only pork.'"

She has kept a few things with her: a silver fork, a hat, and a pair of fingerless gloves the sailors on the Titan's Daughter had given her, her dagger and boots and belt and the clothes she had been wearing when she arrived at the temple, and Needle. She is practicing with the sword one day when the kindly man walks by her cell and tells her that she must get rid of her things. They belong to Arya of House Stark, he tells her. "There is no place for them here. There is no place for her. Hers is too proud a name, and we have no room for pride. We are servants here." If she can't become a servant of Him of Many Faces, she must leave. He tells her there is a ship sailing for Westeros tomorrow, and if she wishes she can get on it. But she replies, "I'll go if you don't want me, but I won't go there."

Challenged to renounce things, she can't sleep, and in the middle of the night she gathers them up, puts on her old clothes and slips outside for the first time since she came to the temple. At the edge of the canal she looks at the silver fork and thinks, "It's not my fork. It was salty that he gave it to." She tosses it into the water, and then throws the floppy hat and the gloves in after it. She looks at the handful of coins in her pouch and tosses them in, too. Then she throws in her boots and her dagger and swordbelt and takes off the rest of her clothes and tosses them in.

All she has left is Needle, and she tries to persuade herself to throw it in, too. But "Needle was Robb and Bran and Rickon, her mother and her father, even Sansa.... Needle was Jon Snow's smile." She had lost it and regained it. "The gods wanted me to have it." As she climbs the steps from the canal, she feels a loose stone underfoot. She works it loose and places the sword and its sheath behind the stone, then puts the stone back in place. She counts the steps so she'll know how to find it if she ever needs it again.

The next night the kindly man tells her the story of the founding of the temple, and arranges for the waif to tutor her in the language of Braavos. She becomes a novice in the House of Black and White. But she finds learning the language as tedious as she found sewing. They also play "the lying game," in which one asks questions of the other and tries to tell which answers are false and which are true. "The waif always seemed to know. Arya had to guess. Most of the time she guessed wrong." When, in response to Arya's question, the waif tells her that she is thirty-six years old, Arya pronounces this a lie, but the kindly man tells her otherwise: "The one you call waif is a woman grown who has spent her life serving Him of Many Faces." When Arya asks if she will come to look like her, he tells her "not unless you wish it. It is the poisons that have made her as you see her." Arya realizes that every evening the waif pours a flask into the black pool in the center of the temple.

Other men who are servants of the Many-Faced God visit the temple from time to time, and one evening Umma sends Arya to serve at the table for the visitors. The kindly man says she must stand very still at the table and "It would be best if you were blind and deaf as well. You may hear things, but you must let them pass in one ear and out the other. Do not listen." Arya obeys, but the talk is in the language of Braavos and she understood very little of it anyway.

The next day she asks the kindly man if the men were priests and if those were their real faces, but he replies only "What do you think, child?" She thinks that they weren't, and then asks if Jaqen H'ghar is a priest and if he will be coming back. But the kindly man professes not to know the name. She says she asked him "how he changed his face, and he said it was no harder than taking a new name, if you knew the way." She asks the kindly man if he will show her how to change her face, and he tells her to stick out her tongue and puff up her cheeks. "There. Your face is changed." But she tells him she meant by using magic. He replies, "All sorcery comes at a cost, child. Years of prayer and sacrifice and study are required to work a perfect glamor." He tells her to "practice making faces" and learn to "rule" her face. The next day she finds a mirror and begins to practice.

Soon she joins the acolytes in washing corpses. And for several months, "She served, washed the dead, made faces at the mirrors, learned the Braavosi tongue, and tried to remember that she was no one." But one day the kindly man sends for her and says that her accent is terrible, and that the only way she will learn to speak the language is by living among the people and speaking it "every day from dawn to dusk." She is to leave the temple and "find a fishmonger named Brusco" who needs "a girl to push his barrow and sell his cockles, clams, and mussels to the sailors off the ships." She will need a name, and they decide she will be Cat, the daughter of an oarmaster on a galley named Nymeria.

Alayne

Sansa, too, has changed identities, and has begun to think of herself as Alayne Stone, the illegitimate daughter of Lord Petyr Baelish, the better to keep up the life-saving masquerade. But now the Lords Declarant of the Vale have gathered to challenge Littlefinger's role as Lord Protector, and she is called on to maintain the role before a hostile group. Her hair has been died brown to hide Sansa Stark's distinctive auburn.

She goes in to breakfast with Lord Robert, who is whining because he has porridge and not the eggs and bacon he wants. But the presence of the Lords Declarant at the foot of the mountain has made it difficult for Mya Stone to bring them up from below. He also complains that he has heard Marillion singing in the night, and she tries to persuade him that it's impossible. She tells him that Marillion had felt so sorry for killing Lysa that "he walked into the sky. Alayne had not seen the body, no more than Robert had, but she did not doubt the fact of the singer's death." But Robert is having none of it, and he flings a spoon of porridge across the room, saying, "The lord wants eggs!"

Littlefinger enters at that point and proclaims, "The lord shall eat porridge and be thankful for it." Maester Colemon is with him and tells Robert that he needs to eat to build up his strength for the meeting with the bannermen. But Robert doesn't want to see them: "If they come, I'll make them fly." Littlefinger agrees that he would like for that to happen, but he "promised them safe conduct." There will be eight in all: the six Lords Declarant plus Lord Nestor Royce and Ser Lyn Corbray. Alayne is startled at the last, having heard from the guards that "Lyn Corbray was more dangerous than all six of the Lords Declarant put together."

Littlefinger admits that Corbray is not particularly well-disposed toward him: "He wanted Lysa's hand for himself." And Robert chimes in by saying he doesn't like Ser Lyn and to "send him back down." Littlefinger will not give in, and asks a serving woman to bring Robert another spoon so he can eat his porridge. Robert says, "Let my porridge fly!" and flings the whole bowl of it, hitting Maester Colemon and covering him with the contents. And then Robert falls into one of his fits, kicking Alayne in the stomach and knocking the wind out of her. Littlefinger orders a guardsman to take Robert away and leech him.

When Robert and the maester have gone, Littlefinger asks Alayne for a kiss, so she gives him "a quick dry peck upon the cheek" that he pronounces "dutiful." He gives her some instruction to relay to the cook, and tells her to change her clothes: "The Lords Declarant will not be pleased by the sight of my bastard daughter prancing about in my dead wife's clothes." She expresses her concern about the presence at the meeting of Bronze Yohn Royce, who had visited Winterfell and had also seen "Sansa Stark again at King's Landing, during the Hand's tourney." He assures her that Royce would have seen her as only one face in a thousand and won't remember her.

Alayne tends to her duties and after bathing and changing clothes is ready to meet the guests. When she meets Bronze Yohn Royce, he asks, "Do I know you, girl?" but Lord Nestor identifies her as "the Lord Protector's natural daughter." Lyn Corbray says, "Littlefinger's little finger has been busy." Lady Waynwood asks how old she is, and Alayne stammers "Four-fourteen," having decided to make Alayne a year older than Sansa. She adds that she is "no child, but a maiden flowered," which occasions a risqué reference to being "deflowered" from Lord Hunter and a "ripe for plucking" from Corbray. Lady Wynwood rebukes him: "The girl is young and gently bred, and has suffered enough horrors. Mind your tongue, ser." Corbray bristles at this, and Lady Wynwood suggests that Alayne take them to her father. "The sooner we are done with this, the better."

Littlefinger meets with them in his solar, where he says he has read their document and wishes they had asked him to sign it too. They are surprised by this, but he goes on, "As for these false friends and evil counselors, by all means let us root them out." The document has been designed as an attack on Littlefinger, but he has turned the tables on them. Symond Templeton speaks up: "We will have you gone," and Bronze Yohn says that Lord Robert will remain in the Vale, and he will "raise him up to be a knight that Jon Arryn would be proud of." Lady Waynwood says, "We speak with one voice here."

Littlefinger counters by saying that Robert loves Alayne and that he has asked two lords to send their sons to be raised with Robert. "My late wife seemed to think this was my proper seat," and that she had named him Lord Protector. Nestor Royce speaks up to say that Lysa Arryn "chose Lord Littlefinger, and entrusted her son to his care." And Littlefinger presses the point that Robert "is not a robust child, as all of you know well. The journey would tax him sorely. As his stepfather and Lord Protector, I cannot permit it."

But Bronze Yohn will not give in, and proclaims, "We shall have Lord Robert." And then Lyn Corbray says, "All this talk makes me ill. Littlefinger will talk you out of your smallclothes if you listen long enough. The only way to settle his sort is with steel," and he draws his sword. But Bronze Yohn bellows, "Put up your steel, ser! Are you a Corbray or a Frey? We are guests here." Lady Wynwood pronounces it "unseemly," and the others align themselves against Corbray. He storms out, saying they should have called themselves "the Six Old Women."

The others begin to express their apologies to Littlefinger, but he coldly says, "You brought him here. I would be well within my rights to call my guards and have all of you arrested."

Petyr sounded as angry as she had ever heard him. "I have read your declaration and heard your demands. Now hear mine. Remove your armies from this mountain. Go home and leave my son in peace. Misrule there has been, I will not deny it, but that was Lysa's work, not mine. Grant me but a year, and with Lord Nestor's help I promise that none of you shall have any cause for grievance.... It was not me who bared steel at a parley. You write of defending Lord Robert even as you deny him food. That must end." 

Alayne watches as the Lords Declarant begin to back down. Finally, Bronze Yohn says, "I like it not, but it would seem you have your year. Best use it well, my lord. Not all of us are fooled." A feast follows at which Lord Robert makes an appearance and behaves himself well, though Bronze Yohn and Lyn Corbray have already left.

Alayne lies awake in bed, wondering how Littlefinger had managed to make them turn such an about-face. Finally, she gets up and goes to his solar, where he is writing a letter. She asks, "What will happen in a year?"

He tells her that one or both of the oldest lords may die, and Lord Hunter will be murdered by his brothers. Lord Belmore can be bought off, and he can make friends with Templeton. Bronze Yohn by himself is not a real threat. As for Lyn Corbray, he will remain an enemy.

Then she realizes that Corbray is actually a part of Littlefinger's plot and asks how he will reward him for playing the role of enemy. He laughs at her acuteness: "With gold and boys and promises, of course. Ser Lyn is a man of simple tastes, my sweetling. All he likes is gold and boys and killing.