A Dance With Dragons

mother. Your name will be a lie, and the very face you wear will not be your own.”
    She almost bit her lip again, but this time she caught herself and stopped. My face is a dark pool, hiding everything, showing nothing. She thought of all the names that she had worn: Arry, Weasel, Squab, Cat of the Canals. She thought of that stupid girl from Winterfell called Arya Horseface. Names did not matter. “I can pay the price. Give me a face.”
    “Faces must be earned.”
    “Tell me how.”
    “Give a certain man a certain gift. Can you do that?”
    “What man?”
    “No one that you know.”
    “I don’t know a lot of people.”
    “He is one of them. A stranger. No one you love, no one you hate, no one you have ever known. Will you kill him?”
    “Yes.”
    “Then on the morrow, you shall be Cat of the Canals again. Wear that face, watch, obey. And we will see if you are truly worthy to serve Him of Many Faces.”
    So the next day she returned to Brusco and his daughters in the house on the canal. Brusco’s eyes widened when he saw her, and Brea gave a little gasp. “ Valar morghulis, ” Cat said, by way of greeting. “ Valar dohaeris, ” Brusco replied.
    After that it was as if she had never been away.
    She got her first look at the man she must kill later that morning as she wheeled her barrow through the cobbled streets that fronted on the Purple Harbor. He was an old man, well 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? But Cat of the Canals had no father, so she kept that thought to herself.
    “ Cockles and mussels and clams, ” Cat cried as he went past, “ oysters and prawns and fat green mussels. ” She even smiled at him. Sometimes a smile was all you needed to make them stop and buy. The old man did not smile back. He scowled at her and went on past, sloshing through a puddle. The splash wet her feet.
    He has no courtesy, she thought, watching him go. His face is hard and mean. The old man’s nose was pinched and sharp, his lips thin, his eyes small and close-set. His hair had gone to grey, but the little pointed beard at the end of his chin was still black. Cat thought it must be dyed and wondered why he had not dyed his hair as well. One of his shoulders was higher than the other, giving him a crooked cast.
    “He is an evil man,” she announced that evening when she returned to the House of Black and White. “His lips are cruel, his eyes are mean, and he has a villain’s beard.”
    The kindly man chuckled. “He is a man like any other, with light in him and darkness. It is not for you to judge him.”
    That gave her pause. “Have the gods judged him?”
    “Some gods, mayhaps. What are gods for if not to sit in judgment over men? The Many-Faced God does not weigh men’s souls, however. He gives his gift to the best of men as he gives it to the worst. Elsewise the good would live forever.”
    The old man’s hands were the worst thing about him, Cat decided the next day, as she watched him from behind her barrow. His fingers were long and bony, always moving, scratching at his beard, tugging at an ear, drumming on a table, twitching, twitching, twitching. He has hands like two white spiders. The more she watched his hands, the more she came to hate them.
    “He moves his hands too much,” she told them at the temple. “He must be full of fear. The gift will bring him peace.”
    “The gift brings all men peace.”
    “When I kill him he will look in my eyes and thank me.”
    “If he does, you will have failed. It would be best if he takes no note of you at all.”
    The old man was some sort of merchant, Cat concluded after watching him for a few days. His trade had to do with the sea, though she never saw him set foot upon a ship. He spent his days sitting in a soup shop near the Purple Harbor, a cup of onion broth cooling at his elbow as he shuffled papers and sealing wax and spoke in sharp tones to a parade of captains, shipowners, and other merchants, none of whom seemed to like him very much.
    Yet they brought him money: leather purses plump with gold and silver and the square iron coins of Braavos. The old man would count it out carefully, sorting the coins and stacking them up neatly, like with like. He never looked at the coins. Instead he bit them, always on the left side of his mouth, where he still had all his teeth. From time to time he’d spin one on the table and listen to the sound it made