A Dance With Dragons

down with a cup of watered wine, savoring the tastes and the smells, the rough feel of the crust beneath her fingers, the slickness of the oil, the sting of the hot pepper when it got into the half-healed scrape on the back of the hand. Hear, smell, taste, feel, she reminded herself. There are many ways to know the world for those who cannot see.
    Someone had entered the room behind her, moving on soft padded slippers quiet as a mouse. Her nostrils flared. The kindly man. Men had a different smell than women, and there was a hint of orange in the air as well. The priest was fond of chewing orange rinds to sweeten his breath, whenever he could get them.
    “And who are you this morning?” she heard him ask, as he took his seat at the head of the table. Tap, tap, she heard, then a tiny crackling sound. Breaking his first egg.
    “No one,” she replied. “A lie. I know you. You are that blind beggar girl.”
    “Beth.” She had known a Beth once, back at Winterfell when she was Arya Stark. Maybe that was why she’d picked the name. Or maybe it was just because it went so well with blind.
    “Poor child,” said the kindly man. “Would you like to have your eyes back? Ask, and you shall see.”
    He asked the same question every morning. “I may want them on the morrow. Not today.” Her face was still water, hiding all, revealing nothing.
    “As you will.” She could hear him peeling the egg, then a faint silvery clink as he picked up the salt spoon. He liked his eggs well salted. “Where did my poor blind girl go begging last night?”
    “The Inn of the Green Eel.”
    “And what three new things do you know that you did not know when last you left us?”
    “The Sealord is still sick.”
    “This is no new thing. The Sealord was sick yesterday, and he will still be sick upon the morrow.”
    “Or dead.”
    “When he is dead, that will be a new thing.”
    When he is dead, there will be a choosing, and the knives will come out. That was the way of it in Braavos. In Westeros, a dead king was followed by his eldest son, but the Braavosi had no kings. “Tormo Fregar will be the new sealord.”
    “Is that what they are saying at the Inn of the Green Eel?”
    “Yes.”
    The kindly man took a bite of his egg. The girl heard him chewing. He never spoke with his mouth full. He swallowed, and said, “Some men say there is wisdom in wine. Such men are fools. At other inns other names are being bruited about, never doubt.” He took another bite of egg, chewed, swallowed. “What three new things do you know, that you did not know before?”
    “I know that some men are saying that Tormo Fregar will surely be the new sealord,” she answered. “Some drunken men.”
    “Better. And what else do you know?”
    It is snowing in the riverlands, in Westeros, she almost said. But he would have asked her how she knew that, and she did not think that he would like her answer. She chewed her lip, thinking back to last night. “The whore S’vrone is with child. She is not certain of the father, but thinks it might have been that Tyroshi sellsword that she killed.”
    “This is good to know. What else?”
    “The Merling Queen has chosen a new Mermaid to take the place of the one that drowned. She is the daughter of a Prestayn serving maid, thirteen and penniless, but lovely.”
    “So are they all, at the beginning,” said the priest, “but you cannot know that she is lovely unless you have seen her with your own eyes, and you have none. Who are you, child?”
    “No one.”
    “Blind Beth the beggar girl is who I see. She is a wretched liar, that one. See to your duties. Valar morghulis. ”
    “Valar dohaeris.” She gathered up her bowl and cup, knife and spoon, and pushed to her feet. Last of all she grasped her stick. It was five feet long, slender and supple, thick as her thumb, with leather wrapped around the shaft a foot from the top. Better than eyes, once you learn how to use it, the waif had told her.
    That was a lie. They often lied to her, to test her. No stick was better than a pair of eyes. It was good to have, though, so she always kept it close. Umma had taken to calling her Stick, but names did not matter. She was her. No one. I am no one. Just a blind girl, just a servant of Him of Many Faces.
    Each night at supper the waif brought her a cup of milk and told her to drink it down. The drink had a queer, bitter taste that the blind girl soon learned to loathe. Even the faint smell that warned her what it