A Feast for Dragons

her tongue soon made her feel like retching, but she drained
the cup all the same.
    “How long must I be blind?” she would ask.
    “Until darkness is as sweet to you as light,” the waif would
say, “or until you ask us for your eyes. Ask and you shall see.”
    And then you will send me away
. Better blind
than that. They would not make her yield.
    On the day she had woken blind, the waif took her by the
hand and led her through the vaults and tunnels of the rock on which the House
of Black and White was built, up the steep stone steps into the temple proper.
“Count the steps as you climb,” she had said. “Let your fingers brush the wall.
There are markings there, invisible to the eye, plain to the touch.”
    That was her first lesson. There had been many more.
    Poisons and potions were for the afternoons. She had smell
and touch and taste to help her, but touch and taste could be perilous when
grinding poisons, and with some of the waif’s more toxic concoctions even smell
was less than safe. Burned pinky tips and blistered lips became familiar to
her, and once she made herself so sick she could not keep down any food for
days.
    Supper was for language lessons. The blind girl understood
Braavosi and could speak it passably, she had even lost most of her barbaric
accent, but the kindly man was not content. He was insisting that she improve
her High Valyrian and learn the tongues of Lys and Pentos too.
    In the evening she played the lying game with the waif, but
without eyes to see the game was very different. Sometimes all she had to go on
was tone and choice of words; other times the waif allowed her to lay hands
upon her face. At first the game was much, much harder, the next thing to
impossible … but just when she was near the point of screaming with
frustration, it all became much easier. She learned to
hear
the
lies, to feel them in the play of the muscles around the mouth and eyes.
    Many of her other duties had remained the same, but as she
went about them she stumbled over furnishings, walked into walls, dropped
trays, got hopelessly helplessly lost inside the temple. Once she almost fell
headlong down the steps, but Syrio Forel had taught her balance in another
lifetime, when she was the girl called Arya, and somehow she recovered and
caught herself in time.
    Some nights she might have cried herself to sleep if she had
still been Arry or Weasel or Cat, or even Arya of House Stark … but
no one had no tears. Without eyes, even the simplest task was perilous. She
burned herself a dozen times as she worked with Umma in the kitchens. Once,
chopping onions, she cut her finger down to the bone. Twice she could not even
find her own room in the cellar and had to sleep on the floor at the base of
the steps. All the nooks and alcoves made the temple treacherous, even after
the blind girl had learned to use her ears; the way her footsteps bounced off
the ceiling and echoed round the legs of the thirty tall stone gods made the
walls themselves seem to move, and the pool of still black water did strange
things to sound as well.
    “You have five senses,” the kindly man said. “Learn to use
the other four, you will have fewer cuts and scrapes and scabs.”
    She could feel air currents on her skin now. She could find
the kitchens by their smell, tell men from women by their scents. She knew Umma
and the servants and the acolytes by the pattern of their footfalls, could tell
one from the other before they got close enough to smell (but not the waif or
the kindly man, who hardly made a sound at all unless they wanted to). The
candles burning in the temple had scents as well; even the unscented ones gave
off faint wisps of smoke from their wicks. They had as well been shouting, once
she had learned to use her nose.
    The dead men had their own smell too. One of her duties was
to find them in the temple every morning, wherever they had chosen to lie down
and close their eyes after drinking from the pool.
    This morning she found two.
    One man had died at the feet of the Stranger, a single
candle flickering above him. She could feel its heat, and the scent that it
gave off tickled her nose. The candle burned with a dark red flame, she knew;
for those with eyes, the corpse would have seemed awash in a ruddy glow. Before
summoning the serving men to carry him away, she knelt and felt his face,
tracing the line of his jaw, brushing her fingers across his cheeks and nose,
touching his hair.
Curly hair, and thick.