A Game of Thrones 4-Book Bundle

through a wide expanse of reeds, tidal pools, and mudflats. Clams and cockles abounded hereabouts; mussels and muskfish, frogs and turtles, mud crabs and leopard crabs and climber crabs, red eels, black eels, striped eels, lampreys, and oysters; all made frequent appearances on the carved wooden table where the servants of the Many-Faced God took their meals. Some nights Umma spiced the fish with sea salt and cracked peppercorns, or cooked the eels with chopped garlic. Once in a great while the cook would even use some saffron.
Hot Pie would have liked it here,
Arya thought.
    Supper was her favorite time. It had been a long while since Arya had gone to sleep every night with a full belly. Some nights the kindly man would allow her to ask him questions. Once she asked him why the people who came to the temple always seemed so peaceful; back home, people were scared to die. She remembered how that pimply squire had wept when she stabbed him in the belly, and the way Ser Amory Lorch had begged when the Goat had him thrown in the bear pit. She remembered the village by the God’s Eye, and the way the villagers shrieked and screamed and whimpered whenever the Tickler started asking after gold.
    â€œDeath is not the worst thing,” the kindly man replied. “It is His gift to us, an end to want and pain. On the day that we are born the Many-Faced God sends each of us a dark angel to walk through life beside us. When our sins and our sufferings grow too great to be borne, the angel takes us by the hand to lead us to the nightlands, where the stars burn ever bright. Those who come to drink from the black cup are looking for their angels. If they are afraid, the candles soothe them. When you smell our candles burning, what does it make you think of, my child?”
    Winterfell,
she might have said.
I smell snow and smoke and pine needles. I smell the stables. I smell Hodor laughing, and Jon and Robb battling in the yard, and Sansa singing about some stupid lady fair. I smell the crypts where the stone kings sit, I smell hot bread baking, I smell the godswood. I smell my wolf, I smell her fur, almost as if she were still beside me.
“I don’t smell anything,” she said, to see what he would say.
    â€œYou lie,” he said, “but you may keep your secrets if you wish, Arya of House Stark.” He only called her that when she displeased him. “You know that you may leave this place. You are not one of us, not yet. You may go home anytime you wish.”
    â€œYou told me that if I left, I couldn’t come back.”
    â€œJust so.”
    Those words made her sad.
Syrio used to say that too,
Arya remembered.
He said it all the time.
Syrio Forel had taught her needlework and died for her. “I don’t want to leave.”
    â€œThen stay . . . but remember, the House of Black and White is not a home for orphans. All men must serve beneath this roof.
Valar dohaeris
is how we say it here. Remain if you will, but know that we shall require your obedience. At all times and in all things. If you cannot obey, you must depart.”
    â€œI can obey.”
    â€œWe shall see.”
    She had other tasks besides helping Umma. She swept the temple floors; she served and poured at meals; she sorted piles of dead men’s clothing, emptied their purses, and counted out stacks of queer coins. Every morning she walked beside the kindly man as he made his circuit of the temple to find the dead.
Silent as a shadow,
she would tell herself, remembering Syrio. She carried a lantern with thick iron shutters. At each alcove, she would open the shutter a crack, to look for corpses.
    The dead were never hard to find. They came to the House of Black and White, prayed for an hour or a day or a year, drank sweet dark water from the pool, and stretched out on a stone bed behind one god or another. They closed their eyes, and slept, and never woke. “The gift of the Many-Faced God takes myriad forms,” the kindly man told her, “but here it is always gentle.” When they found a body he would say a prayer and make certain life had fled, and Arya would fetch the serving men, whose task it was to carry the dead down to the vaults. There acolytes would strip and wash the bodies. The dead men’s clothes and coins and valuables went into a bin for sorting. Their cold flesh would be taken to the lower sanctum where only the priests could go; what happened in there Arya was not allowed to know.