Chapter Text
He is probably thinking he shouldn’t let m’lady go stealing food. Arya just knew he was going to be stupid now. She wondered why, he would only get himself captured or killed or worse. Tortured maybe. The Queen already wanted him dead, he was lucky to even still be alive. Maybe he’s just too stubborn to die. Stupid bullheaded bastard boy, that’s what he is, she’d told herself that countless times since they’d left King’s Landing.
Yet somehow, she found herself doubting that now. He figured out that I’m a girl. How stupid can he possibly be? Still, she knew it didn’t matter. When Gendry had that look on his face it meant he was thinking. And Gendry just was not very good at thinking. She sighed, then turned back towards him.
Why is it always me who has to stop him from getting killed?
“You’re about to do something stupid, aren’t you?” He seemed startled by her voice, not expecting it. And there was this pained look at his face again. Arya wondered how much he could possibly think about her. Quite a bit, obviously.
“I just thought you shouldn’t - ”, he started, but she cut him of.
“Just shut up.”
“But you - ”
“I’m a lady and ladies shouldn’t go stealing food, is that what you think?”
“I - ”
“Is it?”
“I – er – yes.”
She had already known it, of course. It was always that way. No matter how she looked or what she did, they always took her as a lady. How could they all be that stupid and blind? Even Mikken and Harwin and Jory had always treated me as if I was a lady, even when they called me Arya Underfoot, and they all knew how I hated it. Except Jon. And Syrio. She remembered what Syrio had told her, the trick about looking and seeing what was really there. Can’t they look at me and know that I’m no lady?
Well, none of them had ever been taught by him, it seemed.
“Look at me! Someone once told me you should look with my eyes. So when you look at me, what do you see?”
He looked pained.
Maybe he just noticed how ridiculous he is.
After a short hesitation, Gendry said, sounding doubtful of his own words:
“I see a highborn lady in dirty boy’s clothes on the road, fleeing from the queen?”
“What makes you think I’m highborn and a lady, and not just some bastard orphan girl raised in some whorehouse?”
“You just told me. And you’re much too rude to be raised by whores.”
“I told you to look with your eyes, not with that thick bull’s head of yours, stupid. And since when exactly are ladies supposed to be rude?”
He sighed, and she knew she had won. Even someone as bullheaded like him just had to see how she looked no different than any other orphan girl smart enough to disguise herself as a boy as to not to get raped.
“But it doesn’t matter how you look, you’re still highborn, m’lady”
Stupid bastard. Can’t he be less stubborn?
It took her a moment to come up with something different to just make him see.
“Maybe you’re right. I’m no bastard like you. I could never be as blind and stupid as you”
“I - ”
“Oh, just shut up. If we talk any longer, we’ll never see who’s living in that village. But we’ll go together now. You’re too stupid to go alone.”
At least he did not argue any further.
As they got closer to the village, the awful smell grew stronger. Not like the smell of the rotten fish lying near the lake they’d noticed before. It was something ranker, fouler. She rankled her nose, and when she looked beside her, she saw Gendry doing the same.
Soon the woods began to clear out, and they started to use the undergrowth, slipping from bush to bush. She did it as Syrio had taught her, as quiet as a shadow, but with Gendry it was a different matter. It was as if every time he moved, he stepped on fallen branches or leaves or whatever else one could find on the ground that made an awful amount of noise.
“Can’t you be quiet?”, she hissed to him after some time, and even though he softened his steps a bit, Arya still feared every time that someone would hear them, especially after she heard horses, and a man’s voice.
The smell did not get any better, either, and she recognised it she’d known before, with Yoren and the others. “Dead men”, she whispered to Gendry, and he nodded.
A dense thicket of brambles grew just south of the village, where she could see the thatched roofs behind it. Gendry might have seen more, but he would not dare to stand up and look beyond it, least they be noticed. So instead they crept along it until Arya spotted a hole wide enough for her to creep through, and she could see what caused the smell.
The bodies hung right there, beside the peaceful-looking waters of the Gods Eye, the things that had once been men, their feet such as they still had them, still in chains, with crows pecking at their bare flesh flapping from corpse to corpse. And for every crow, there seemingly were a hundred flies swarming all around the dead. When the wind blew from the lake, she could see the corpses swinging, heard the chains that bound them to the wood rattle.
The one closest was missing an arm, and the crows had eaten most of his face, and Arya could see the bone beneath it. Its throat and chest had been ripped open, and she could see the entrails and ragged flesh dangling out from where it had been opened.
She made herself look at the one beside him, and the one beside him, and the one beside that one as well, telling herself she was as hard as stone. The corpses were all so savaged and torn apart, she had not even realized they had been stripped before now. They did not look like naked people, they did not even look like men at all. Their eyes, and sometimes the whole of their faces were missing, eaten by the crows, and many of them lacked arms or legs. One had been ripped apart entirely, and all that remained for Arya to see was a single leg, still chained and dangling slightly in the wind.
Fear cuts deeper then swords.
The corpses could not hurt them, but whoever had put them there could. Well beyond the gibbets were two men leaning on their spears in front of a long house beside the lake. A pair of tall poles had been driven into the mud there, with two banners drooping from them, both of them so pale that it was hard to make out what colour they had been, but it looked to Arya as if one was supposed to be red, and the other maybe yellow or orange.
I don’t need to see their banners to know they’re Lannisters, she thought, Robb would never do this, who else slaughters peasants but the Lannisters?
She crawled back through the hedge, ignoring the thorns that bit into her skin.
“And?”, Gendry whispered, “What did you see?”
“Lannisters”, was all she said.
Thankfully, for once he was not too stupid and knew what she meant.
They would have to be as far away from here before sunrise as they could manage.