A Feast for Dragons

her.
Leather hoods, that’s all they are, they cannot
hurt me
. “Do it,” she blurted out.
    He led her across the chamber, past a row of tunnels leading
off into side passages. The light of his lantern illuminated each in turn. One
tunnel was walled with human bones, its roof supported by columns of skulls.
Another opened on winding steps that descended farther still.
How many
cellars are there?
she wondered.
Do they just go down forever?
    “Sit,” the priest commanded. She sat. “Now close your eyes,
child.” She closed her eyes. “This will hurt,” he warned her, “but pain is the
price of power. Do not move.”
    Still as stone
, she thought. She sat
unmoving. The cut was quick, the blade sharp. By rights the metal should have
been cold against her flesh, but it felt warm instead. She could feel the blood
washing down her face, a rippling red curtain falling across her brow and
cheeks and chin, and she understood why the priest had made her close her eyes.
When it reached her lips the taste was salt and copper. She licked at it and
shivered.
    “Bring me the face,” said the kindly man. The waif made no
answer, but she could hear her slippers whispering over the stone floor. To the
girl he said, “Drink this,” and pressed a cup into her hand. She drank it down
at once. It was very tart, like biting into a lemon. A thousand years ago, she
had known a girl who loved lemon cakes.
No, that was not me, that was
only Arya
.
    “Mummers change their faces with artifice,” the kindly man
was saying, “and sorcerers use glamors, weaving light and shadow and desire to
make illusions that trick the eye. These arts you shall learn, but what we do
here goes deeper. Wise men can see through artifice, and glamors dissolve
before sharp eyes, but the face you are about to don will be as true and solid
as that face you were born with. Keep your eyes closed.” She felt his fingers
brushing back her hair. “Stay still. This will feel queer. You may be dizzy,
but you must not move.”
    Then came a tug and a soft rustling as the new face was
pulled down over the old. The leather scraped across her brow, dry and stiff,
but as her blood soaked into it, it softened and turned supple. Her cheeks grew
warm, flushed. She could feel her heart fluttering beneath her breast, and for
one long moment she could not catch her breath. Hands closed around her throat,
hard as stone, choking her. Her own hands shot up to claw at the arms of her
attacker, but there was no one there. A terrible sense of fear filled her, and
she heard a noise, a hideous
crunching
noise, accompanied by
blinding pain. A face floated in front of her, fat, bearded, brutal, his mouth
twisted with rage. She heard the priest say, “Breathe, child. Breathe out the
fear. Shake off the shadows. He is dead. She is dead. Her pain is gone.
Breathe
.”
    The girl took a deep shuddering breath, and realized it was
true. No one was choking her, no one was hitting her. Even so, her hand was
shaking as she raised it to her face. Flakes of dried blood crumbled at the
touch of her fingertips, black in the lantern light. She felt her cheeks,
touched her eyes, traced the line of her jaw. “My face is still the same.”
    “Is it? Are you certain?”
    Was
she certain? She had not felt any
change, but maybe it was not something you could feel. She swept a hand down across
her face from top to bottom, as she had once seen Jaqen H’ghar do, back at
Harrenhal. When he did it, his whole face had rippled and changed. When she did
it, nothing happened. “It feels the same.”
    “To you,” said the priest. “It does not look the same.”
    “To other eyes, your nose and jaw are broken,” said the
waif. “One side of your face is caved in where your cheekbone shattered, and
half your teeth are missing.”
    She probed around inside her mouth with her tongue, but
found no holes or broken teeth.
Sorcery
, she thought.
I
have a new face. An ugly, broken face
.
    “You may have bad dreams for a time,” warned the kindly man.
“Her father beat her so often and so brutally that she was never truly free of
pain or fear until she came to us.”
    “Did you kill him?”
    “She asked the gift for herself, not for her father.”
    You should have killed him
.
    He must have read her thoughts. “Death came for him in the
end, as it comes for all men. As it must come for a certain man upon the
morrow.” He lifted up the lamp. “We are done here.”
    For now
. As they made their way back