A Feast for Dragons

A handsome face, unlined. He was
young
. She wondered what had brought him here to seek the gift of
death. Dying bravos oft found their way to the House of Black and White, to
hasten their ends, but this man had no wounds that she could find.
    The second body was that of an old woman. She had gone to
sleep upon a dreaming couch, in one of the hidden alcoves where special candles
conjured visions of things loved and lost. A sweet death and a gentle one, the
kindly man was fond of saying. Her fingers told her that the old woman had died
with a smile on her face. She had not been dead long. Her body was still warm
to the touch.
Her skin is so soft, like old thin leather that’s been
folded and wrinkled a thousand times
.
    When the serving men arrived to bear the corpse away, the
blind girl followed them. She let their footsteps be her guide, but when they
made their descent she counted. She knew the counts of all the steps by heart.
Under the temple was a maze of vaults and tunnels where even men with two good
eyes were often lost, but the blind girl had learned every inch of it, and she
had her stick to help her find her way should her memory falter.
    The corpses were laid out in the vault. The blind girl went
to work in the dark, stripping the dead of boots and clothes and other
possessions, emptying their purses and counting out their coins. Telling one
coin from another by touch alone was one of the first things the waif had
taught her, after they took away her eyes. The Braavosi coins were old friends;
she need only brush her fingertips across their faces to recognize them. Coins
from other lands and cities were harder, especially those from far away.
Volantene honors were most common, little coins no bigger than a penny with a
crown on one side and a skull on the other. Lysene coins were oval and showed a
naked woman. Other coins had ships stamped onto them, or elephants, or goats.
The Westerosi coins showed a king’s head on the front and a dragon on the back.
    The old woman had no purse, no wealth at all but for a ring
on one thin finger. On the handsome man she found four golden dragons out of
Westeros. She was running the ball of her thumb across the most worn of them,
trying to decide which king it showed, when she heard the door opening softly
behind her.
    “Who is there?” she asked.
    “No one.” The voice was deep, harsh, cold.
    And moving. She stepped to one side, grabbed for her stick,
snapped it up to protect her face. Wood
clacked
against wood.
The force of the blow almost knocked the stick from her hand. She held on,
slashed back … and found only empty air where he should have been.
“Not there,” the voice said. “Are you blind?”
    She did not answer. Talking would only muddle any sounds he
might be making. He would be moving, she knew.
Left or right?
She jumped left, swung right, hit nothing. A stinging cut from behind her
caught her in the back of the legs. “Are you deaf?” She spun, the stick in her
left hand, whirling, missing. From the left she heard the sound of laughter.
She slashed right.
    This time she connected. Her stick smacked off his own. The
impact sent a jolt up her arm. “Good,” the voice said.
    The blind girl did not know whom the voice belonged to. One
of the acolytes, she supposed. She did not remember ever hearing his voice
before, but what was there to say that the servants of the Many-Faced God could
not change their voices as easily as they did their faces? Besides her, the
House of Black and White was home to two serving men, three acolytes, Umma the
cook, and the two priests that she called the waif and the kindly man. Others came
and went, sometimes by secret ways, but those were the only ones who lived
here. Her nemesis could be any of them.
    The girl darted sideways, her stick spinning, heard a sound
behind her, whirled in that direction, struck at air. And all at once his own stick
was between her legs, tangling them as she tried to turn again, scraping down
her shin. She stumbled and went down to one knee, so hard she bit her tongue.
    There she stopped.
Still as stone. Where is he?
    Behind her, he laughed. He rapped her smartly on one ear,
then cracked her knuckles as she was scrambling to her feet. Her stick fell
clattering to the stone. She hissed in fury.
    “Go on. Pick it up. I am done beating you for today.”
    “No one beat me.” The girl crawled on all fours until she
found her stick, then sprang back to her feet, bruised and dirty. The