Episode 124: A CLASH OF KINGS, ARYA IX: "The Third Wish (Part 1)" SHOW NOTES! (Patreon)

Hello and welcome to the Not A Cast … podcast: the one true chapter-by-chapter podcast going through A Song of Ice and Fire one chapter a week. I’m one of your hosts Jeff better known as BryndenBFish. 

And I’m your other host Emmett, better known as PoorQuentyn.          

Welcome to the one hundred and twenty-fourth episode of the Not A Cast, titled: “The Third Wish, Part 1: An Analysis of ACOK, Arya IX,” in which Arya witnesses some quote-unquote prisoners arriving at Harrenhal before staring down her magical mentor Jaqen H’ghar and making her third wish.

Introduces Zack

This episode is brought to you by our NotASmallCouncil: 

• Hand of the King WolfmanZack 
• Grandmaester Timbob, troubleshooter of systems and designer of circuit boards
• Lord Commander of the Kingsguard Mark N. 
• Lord Travis, Master of Ships and Warden of the Waves, Captain of the war galley NIGHT WOLF, the ship that stalks the Seven Seas, and Wielder of the Valyrian Steel trident SUMMONER, the blade that brings the Deep Ones
• Ser Keith J, Master of Whisperers
• Lord Philip the Merciful, Master of Laws
• Archmaester June, Healer of the Lesser Poxes
• Ragged Michael, Warden of the North
• Nelson the Hammer, Prince of Dragonstone
• Scarlett the Other Red Woman and Mistress of Whisperers
• Lord Micah, the Quilled Lion, Warden of the West, Herald of the Golden Tooth, Master of the Banefort and the Kraken’s Bane
• Lord James: the Jim that was Promised
• The High Bearded Priest
• Lord Jake, Assistant (to the) Hand of the King
• Lady Xena Valyrian
• Ser Jack, Lord of Ser Arthur Dayne and Prince Rhaegar Targaryen's Sad Prophecy Boys Club
• His Grace’s High Inquisitor Frank
• Ser Jasper the Cruel, the King’s Justice
• Laurence, Prince of Dorne
• Kelly, Warden of the East and Mistress of (Old) Bay of Crabs
• Steven the Steadfast, Master of Hounds
• The Blue Winter Rose Knight of Highgarden
• Lady Stephanie
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• Ser Sourcedelica 
• Prince Matthew of House Targaryen - Proud Soy Boy of Summerhall, Defender of the 5th Book and Swing Dancer with Dragons
• The artist formerly known as Ser K.W. Dent, Elsie of the Blackwood Guard, and Batman of the Seven Kingdoms has now directed that he shall be henceforth known as Low Energy Dent, Master of the Banefort, Master of Coin. Lord Gene, the true Master of Coin believes this to be treason. Lord Micah, the true master of the banefort has declared that Dent better relent. 
• Lord Penchant for Nostalgia
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• Lord Clint, Esq., Master of Absolutely, Positively NOT Serving As A Spy for Several Unnamed High Lords and Ladies In Order to Further the Secret Blackfyre-Style Conspiracy to Overthrow The Oppressive Small Council
• Haldivar, The Waiter for TWOW
• A-a-ron Damphair Prophet of the Forsaken and High Priest of Euron Crows Eye
• Lieutenant Glenn Lord of H town
• Vanerys of the House Colgaryen, the First of Her Name, Princess of Dragonstone, Mistress of Art, The Overworked, Queen of the Pencils, the Eraser and the First Draft, Queen of Monochrome, Devotee of the Great GOT, Portraitist of the Realm, Lady Realist of the Seven Kingdoms, Blender of Paints and Maker of Drawings
• Lord Adam T
• Lady Alexandra of Tarth
• Ser Kristoph Logas, Bloody Scorpion of the Red Field, Defender of the Letter of Kin, and the Wolverine of house Qorgyle
• Lady Elizabeth, Mistress of Horse (Faced Lesbians)
• Ser Josh Snow Bastard Bounty Hunter of the North
• Ser Veyor, Chief of Parties in the Frozen Wastes
• Lord Peter
• Lady Ashley
• The Dead Sheppard Reborn, Preacher of the Poor Fellows
• Marshall Harrison—Absent, shipwrecked in the Jade Sea
• Grave-Robb Stark, the Cadaver King and Horror of Harrenhal
• Olaf, proponent of establishing a feudal, pseudodemocratic system of Great Councils, wherein every count votes
• Ser Tim: The Knight Who Was Guided By Voices
• Lord Nick
• Thucydides, Lord of Plagues
• Ser Jack, Lord of Ser Arthur Dayne and Prince Rhaegar Targaryen’s Sad Prophecy Boys Club
• Lord Gene the Splendid, Master of Coin, Warden of Tampa Bay who believes that the sudden vacation plans made by certain witnesses clears him of all charges  
• Lady Anna, The Lovely Castellan
• Pat Yronwood, the bloodroyal and guardian of the Boneway
• Lord Charles Tyrell of Highgarden, Lord Paramount of the Mander, Defender of the Marches, High Marshal of the Reach, Warden of the South, and The Heir of House Tyrell
• Luke, Lord of Lone Leaf & The Pillar of Autumn
• Squid Pro Quo
• Master of Zorse

Question

Ser Manu of the Many Names, a Sworn Sword, asks:

More of a personal ASOIAF question: as you enter the back half of ACOK, the thread of Theon “killing Bran and Rickon” and the grief/sadness that follows to the end of the book reveal that he's aIive was something that hit me hard my first time reading the books (not knowing how Martin plays with cliffhangers and thinking killing characters was his “MO” as a first time reader).

Is there something specifically from your first time reading the books (outside of Baelor/Red Wedding etc) that has stuck with you like that?

So, thank you Manu for the question. We’ll see you at the end of ACOK! If you’d like to ask us questions here on the NotACast pod-cast, you are welcome to become a Sworn Sword or higher patron over at patreon.com/NotACastASOIAF where you can get show notes, access to the NotASlack at our two highest tiers, monthly Fevre Dream chapter-by-chapter episodes and, of course, bonus ASOIAF/pop culture episodes like our recently-released (if you’re listening on release day) part 4 of “The Second Coming”: our five-part analysis of TWOW, The Forsaken!

And if you are not a patreon subscriber, check your regular podcast feed as we released part 1 of “The Second Coming” as a patreon sample for everyone! Hope you all have enjoyed that, and if you like what you hear, please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com/NotACastASOIAF! Our next stretch goal is to do a full analysis of George’s 1998 novella The Hedge Knight. Be there or be square.

But enough about patreon. When we last checked in with Arya, she had used her second wish against Weese as Tywin Lannister rode out from Harrenhal. Let’s find out what happens in Tywin’s wake in this synopsis of ACOK, Arya IX!

Synopsis

“There's ghosts, I know there is." Hot Pie was kneading bread, his arms floured up to his elbows. "Pia saw something in the buttery last night."

Arya Bronx-cheers Pia’s notions. Besides, the ghosts she sees are usually dudes. Weird, that. She asks for a tart, but Hot Pie says that Amory wants the whole tray. Fine. How about we spit on those tarts? Hot Pie looks around and is like, uh, no. Amory will know. Arya responds that no Amory wouldn’t. Spit doesn’t taste like anything. Fact-check: depends on what you’re dipping.

"If he does, it's me they'll whip." Hot Pie stopped his kneading. "You shouldn't even be here. It's the black of night."

It was, but Arya never minded. Even in the black of night, the kitchens were never still; there was always someone rolling dough for the morning bread, stirring a kettle with a long wooden spoon, or butchering a hog for Ser Amory's breakfast bacon. Tonight it was Hot Pie.

Hot Pie warns Arya that Pinkeye will have a thing or two to say if he finds her gone, but Arya waves him off. Pinkeye, you see, was actually named “Mebble.” Why? I don’t know. We’re in a slew of ACOK chapters where parents are giving children shitty names. You can’t name you boy Bill or Sam or any damn name besides Mebble or Werlag? God. Parents in those days. Mebble had gotten the nickname Pinkeye from his runny eyes, and he always fell into a deep sleep after he would get good and drunk after drinking all day long. Arya would wait for him to pass out and then move out silently up the stairs and through the darkness just like Syrio had told her to do.

"I bet we could escape, and Pinkeye wouldn't even notice I was gone," she told Hot Pie.

"I don't want to escape. It's better here than it was in them woods. I don't want to eat no worms. Here, sprinkle some flour on the board."

Arya cocked her head. "What's that?"

"What? I don't-"

"Listen with your ears, not your mouth. That was a warhorn. Two blasts, didn't you hear? And there, that's the portcullis chains, someone's going out or coming in. Want to go see?" The gates of Harrenhal had not been opened since the morning Lord Tywin had marched with his host.

Hot Pie says no thanks. He’s making bread. He’s not about the dark the way Arya is. Arya asks if she could have a tart as a treat? Hot Pie says no, but she steals one anyways, eating it as she runs out, admiring the nut, fruit, cheese taste and flaky texture and singing to herself that she’s the ghost in Harrenhal.

Outside, men wake from sleep and come into the courtyard, and Arya falls into the gaggle. She sees carts rumbling through the portcullis and even sees a bear coming through the gate. She realizes that these are the fucking Bloody Mummers, and she retreats into the shadows. Arya sees more of the ordinary and extraordinary. Carts full of food and treasure and a zorse. She’d like to have some roast pork now that she thinks about it. 

And then she sees a prisoner. She realizes that he’s a lord given how he holds his head (I guess not bowing his head), and she sees mail under his torn red surcoat. Arya thinks this man of a man is a Lannister, but then she sees that his hands are tied with rope. Then she sees a column of prisoners marching in a quite literal lock step with one another. 

She tried to judge how many prisoners there were, but lost count before she got to fifty. There were twice that many at least. Their clothing was stained with mud and blood, and in the torchlight it was hard to make out all their badges and sigils, but some of those Arya glimpsed she recognized. Twin towers. Sunburst. Bloody man. Battle-axe. The battle-axe is for Cerwyn, and the white sun on black is Karstark. They're northmen. My father's men, and Robb's. She didn't like to think what that might mean.

Bloody Mummers get off their horses as stable boys tend to the horses. ZZ Top cosplayer Vargo Hoat reins up below the Kingspyre Tower, and Ser Amory Lorch stumbles out to see what all the commotion is.

"My lord cathellan," Vargo Hoat said. He had a thick, slobbery voice, as if his tongue was too big for his mouth.

"What's all this, Hoat?" Ser Amory demanded, frowning.

"Captiths. Rooth Bolton thought to croth the river, but my Brafe Companions cut his van to pieceth. Killed many, and thent Bolton running. Thith ith their lord commander, Glover, and the one behind ith Ther Aenyth Frey."

Amory Lorch looks down from his balcony with disdain at Vargo, which yeah, a human moment for Amory. He orders the northmen to be taken to the dungeons. But then the lord, who isn’t a lord. He’s just a handsome man with handsome plans looks up and says hey wait, what about that honorable treatment?

"Silenth!" Vargo Hoat screamed at him, spraying spittle.

Ser Amory addressed the captives. "What Hoat promised you is nothing to me. Lord Tywin made me the castellan of Harrenhal, and I shall do with you as I please." He gestured to his guards. "The great cell under the Widow's Tower ought to hold them all. Any who do not care to go are free to die here."

Everyone rolls out all glumly, and Arya catches sight of Pinkeye. She decides to duck out before she catches a beating or whipping from him — though she never saw him do any beating or whipping despite his threats to do so. But she’s not willing to take any chances. So, she slips out past some Brave Companions gathered around the bear. Gee, George, you keep bringing up that bear. I wonder.

Arya moves through the mostly-deserted castle as the noise of the Brave Companions fade behind her. Winds scream through the Wailing Tower and leaves fall from the trees in the godswood making a faint skittery sound as the wind drives them across the stones. (That is a great line!) Okay, the rest of the para is so good, I’m just going to quote it:

Now that Harrenhal was near empty once again, sound did queer things here. Sometimes the stones seemed to drink up noise, shrouding the yards in a blanket of silence. Other times, the echoes had a life of their own, so every footfall became the tread of a ghostly army, and every distant voice a ghostly feast. The funny sounds were one of the things that bothered Hot Pie, but not Arya.

Arya moves through Harrenhal, able to traverse the castle easily without the presence of Tywin’s guards to stop and question her. She makes her way over to the armory and hears banging. She stops and peers in to find Gendry muscled like a maiden’s fantasy banging a hammer on a breastplate. Nope. Not detecting any romantic overtones in this whatsoever.

Arya slithers through a window and drops down beside him, wondering if Gendry will be impressed with her stunting. But no. He’s not. He tells her to get back to bed, but he wonders what all the noise was. Arya tells him that Vargo Hoat has returned with prisoners: her father’s men

“I saw their badges. There's a Glover, from Deepwood Motte, he's my father's man. The rest too, mostly." All of a sudden, Arya knew why her feet had brought her here. "You have to help me get them out."

Gendry laughed. "And how do we do that?"

Arya says that they’re down in the dungeons. Swing your hammer, Thor! Gendry thinks this is not going to work. What about the guards? They’ll kill them. Uh huh. All of them? Of course. But if there’s more than two, then Gendry is a no. Besides, Vargo Hoat will cut off their feet and hands. 

Arya accuses Gendry of being scurred, but Gendry tells her to piss off. Arya tries reasoning with Gendry, telling him that there were a hundred northmen. They can free them and escape. Gendry shoots back that Arya can’t save anyone. Just ask Lommy, Gendry says offering an icepack for that bruise before asking where they’d go if they escape:

"Winterfell," she said at once. "I'd tell Mother how you helped me, and you could stay-"

"Would m'lady permit? Could I shoe your horses for you, and make swords for your lordly brothers?"

Sometimes he made her so angry. "You stop that!"

"Why should I wager my feet for the chance to sweat in Winterfell in place of Harrenhal? You know old Ben Blackthumb? He came here as a boy. Smithed for Lady Whent and her father before her and his father before him, and even for Lord Lothston who held Harrenhal before the Whents. Now he smiths for Lord Tywin, and you know what he says? A sword's a sword, a helm's a helm, and if you reach in the fire you get burned, no matter who you're serving. Lucan's a fair enough master. I'll stay here."

Arya says that the queen will catch her, but Gendry says they probably didn’t even want him. Bullshit, Arya responds. Gendry is somebody.

"I'm a 'prentice smith, and one day might be I'll make a master armorer . . . if I don't run off and lose my feet or get myself killed." He turned away from her, picked up his hammer once more, and began to bang.

Arya's hands curled into helpless fists. "The next helm you make, put mule's ears on it in place of bull's horns!" She had to flee, or else she would have started hitting him. He probably wouldn't even feel it if I did. When they find who he is and cut off his stupid mulehead, he'll be sorry he didn't help. She was better off without him anyhow. He was the one who got her caught at the village.

Despite the anger, Arya thinks back to the village and the march up and all the horrible, shitty mountain’s men that she encountered. But she also thinks about the victims too. She wasn’t able to do anything but try to hide, and it was only Jaqen who made her brave, made her a ghost.

Arya had been avoiding Jaqen since Weese’s death. She was cool with the logistics of how Chiswyck got pushed from a wallwalk, but really, how did Jaqen pull off the dog thing with Weese? Moreover, there was the whole deal with how Jaqen ended up in the black cells. Was Jaqen some sort of wizard and Rorge and Biter demons? Arya is only asking questions here.

Jaqen still owed her one death. In Old Nan's stories about men who were given magic wishes by a grumkin, you had to be especially careful with the third wish, because it was the last. Chiswyck and Weese hadn't been very important. The last death has to count, Arya told herself every night when she whispered her names. But now she wondered if that was truly the reason she had hesitated. So long as she could kill with a whisper, Arya need not be afraid of anyone . . . but once she used up the last death, she would only be a mouse again.

Arya doesn’t want to go back to bed, and not knowing where else to go. She decides to make for the godswood. She loves the smells of the trees, the feel of the grass and dirt and the sound of wind. And there was a stream there

There, beneath rotting wood and twisted splintered branches, she found her hidden sword.

Arya hiding her sword away is a theme for Arya’s story I see. Anyways, this sword isn’t precisely a real sword since Gendry, who is so goddamn hot and frustrating, refused. Instead, it was the broken handle of a broom. And she was practicing on the drills that Syrio had taught her back in the day. At night, she’d whack at the leaves on the trees, pretending they were Ser Ilyn, Ser Meryn, Cersei or Sandor. When she got tired of killing her leafy enemies, she’d climb up to the top of the branches, rest and then climb down. Back at Winterfell, she’d be able to climb down and see her father Ned under the branches of the great heart tree, but that was there. Harrenhal is here. 

Arya stares at the face of the great weirwood tree with a terrible face of a twisting mouth and eyes full of hate. She wonders if that’s what the gods would look like. Could the gods be hurt? This leads Arya to prayer.

Arya went to her knees. She wasn't sure how she should begin. She clasped her hands together. Help me, you old gods, she prayed silently. Help me get those men out of the dungeon so we can kill Ser Amory, and bring me home to Winterfell. Make me a water dancer and a wolf and not afraid again, ever.

Was that enough? Maybe she should pray aloud if she wanted the old gods to hear. Maybe she should pray longer. Sometimes her father had prayed a long time, she remembered. But the old gods had never helped him. Remembering that made her angry. "You should have saved him," she scolded the tree. "He prayed to you all the time. I don't care if you help me or not. I don't think you could even if you wanted to."

"Gods are not mocked, girl."

Arya jumps to her feet and draws her sword and finds Jaqen H’ghar standing in the darkness. He says that the gods are not to be mocked, but now that he’s here, could Arya maybe give him that third name? Arya asks how he knew she was there, and Jaqen says a man sees, hears and knows. 

She regarded him suspiciously. Had the gods sent him? "How'd you make the dog kill Weese? Did you call Rorge and Biter up from hell? Is Jaqen H'ghar your true name?"

"Some men have many names. Weasel. Arry. Arya."

She backed away from him, until she was pressed against the heart tree. "Did Gendry tell?"

"A man knows," he said again. "My lady of Stark."

Maybe the gods had sent him in answer to her prayers. "I need you to help me get those men out of the dungeons. That Glover and those others, all of them. We have to kill the guards and open the cell somehow-"

"A girl forgets," he said quietly. "Two she has had, three were owed. If a guard must die, she needs only speak his name."

"But one guard won't be enough, we need to kill them all to open the cell." Arya bit her lip hard to stop from crying. "I want you to save the northmen like I saved you."

Jaqen responds that he owes her one more life. BTW, have I mentioned not to mock the gods? Arya says she was mocking, but then she asks if he would kill anyone. 

"A man has said."

"Anyone?" she repeated. "A man, a woman, a little baby, or Lord Tywin, or the High Septon, or your father?"

"A man's sire is long dead, but did he live, and did you know his name, he would die at your command."

"Swear it," Arya said. "Swear it by the gods."

"By all the gods of sea and air, and even him of fire, I swear it." He placed a hand in the mouth of the weirwood. "By the seven new gods and the old gods beyond count, I swear it."

He has sworn. "Even if I named the king . . . "

"Speak the name, and death will come. On the morrow, at the turn of the moon, a year from this day, it will come . A man does not fly like a bird, but one foot moves and then another and one day a man is there, and a king dies." He knelt beside her, so they were face-to-face, "A girl whispers if she fears to speak aloud. Whisper it now. Is it Joffrey?"

Arya put her lips to his ear. "It's Jaqen H'ghar."

Arya puts her hands behind her head and whispers “Checkmate, fundie.” No. She doesn’t do that. But she does see real distress in Jaqen’s face. He asks if she’s fucking joking. She’s not. He swore an oath. And suddenly, there was a knife in Jaqen’s hands. Jaqen mournfully says Arya will lose a friend, her only friend. But Arya knows that Jaqen isn’t her friend. A friend would help her. And he ain’t helping.

Jaqen’s smile rises and falls, and he says that Arya might name another name if he helps. And Arya agrees. The knife vanishes, and he orders her to follow him.

"Now?" She had never thought he would act so quickly.

"A man hears the whisper of sand in a glass. A man will not sleep until a girl unsays a certain name. Now, evil child."

I'm not an evil child, she thought, I am a direwolf, and the ghost in Harrenhal. She put her broomstick back in its hiding place and followed him from the godswood.

It gets me in the funny bone whenever I read Jaqen calling Arya an evil child. 

And that is ACOK, Arya IX, part 1! Remember how the penultimate episode of Game of Thrones, always the episode 9 in early seasons was the best episode of the season? It sure feels this way as we arrive at the penultimate chapter in Arya Stark’s ACOK arc, which coincidentally is also her ninth chapter in ACOK!

Depth

This is probably my favorite Arya chapter in ACOK. Her next (and last) one is great as well, but this is such a perfectly structured puzzlebox of a chapter, every element setting up and paying off in ways that are unexpected in the moment but inevitable in retrospect. Arya IX is the climax of her story in this book in multiple respects: in terms of plot, theme, and character, all at once. What did you think of it, Zack?

What I love about this chapter, and Arya as a character, is directly related to her distance from royal & political bullshittery, and the grittiness of experiences, events, and characters she encounters on her full arc through Westeros. She’s not removed from the politics of the story, of course, but right now she’s not scheming around with courtesans and Lords and knights, her scheming here starts with Hot Pie for fucks sake. 

When Gendry & Hot Pie reject her notions of escape, that’s one more nail in the coffin of her highborn Stark ties - an identity that has in fact changed multiple times since Ned’s execution.

[But] outside the specifics of this chapter, what captures my attention in fantasy fiction is not the courts and politics and interpersonal dramas of the royal coterie, but the struggles and adventures of the folks on the ground. Give me hobbits and unshaven rangers in an autumn tavern any day over the tedium of Targaryen family trees and betrayals and conspiracies blah blah blah blah blah - Give me Arya under the hill witnessing the unquestionable power of a silent, mysterious fire god over all the pristine springtime realms of Elves and, knights with their circular tables. Varys’ origin story from the recently-and-expertly-covered Tyrion X is one of the most captivating passages in the entire series, for my money. And while Arya’s journey through this book is already very much quote-unquote “gritty” and “real” - this chapter, for me, is the point where her dive into the beautiful ugliness of magic and murder truly begins.

This is still a transitional phase in Arya’s overall journey and there is lots of tension here between her old familiar life and the unfamiliar places where she lands by the close of Book 5. Up until this point, she has only killed accidentally or in self-defense, not in cold blood. By the end of the chapter, she’s responsible for a full-on slaughter. Gendry and Hot Pie are familiar, safe faces that Arya feels are most directly able to help fulfill her stated goal of getting back to Winterfell, as Emmett will discuss here in a bit - because after all, compared to the nightmarish existence of Harrenhall  there’s no place like home... 

I like that a lot Zack! I tend to incline more toward the high conspiracy, political intrigue, battle tactics and strategies, but getting down in the shit with magic murder genies is a fun turn in George’s storytelling — one he’ll employ throughout Arya, Jaime, Brienne and Quentyn’s arcs going forward.

Along those same lines, I was thinking about the curse of Harrenhal in that small-ball way. We came down to the idea that Harrenhal is cursed, and I was thinking about the curse in the context of all these smaller characters and how they become fairytale monsters in this abattoir of a castle. An extremely minor character like Pinkeye drinks all day and night with his eyes running. There’s the Bloody Mummers: no mere sellswords: they perform sickening acts of cruelty and ride not horses but zorses. There’s Weese who is no mere overseer but a psychopath who siccs his dog on people who annoy him. Rorge and Biter are nightmare human beings whose evil becomes refracted through Harrenhal’s dark light. Jaqen was just a weirdo before he came to Harrenhal. Now he’s a magical assassin. Now, I’m a believer in the Curse of Harrenhal, but even if I wasn’t, this castle does things to people. No, it doesn’t cause people to be evil, but magnifies it. It helps breed and multiply the evil that dwells in the hearts of men, and it’s in that literal and metaphorical darkness that the curtains open to Arya and Hot Pie in the dark.

• Hanging with Hot Pie
  • This chapter takes us to some suspenseful, and then weird, and then bleak places, but it starts on a note of intimate humor in the kitchens
  • As with the food-chain imagery in Arya VIII we talked about w/Michal, as with the range of political and magical power at work in the castle, George captures the full emotional spectrum in this chapter, painting w/every color
  • Harrenhal, as I’ve said before, is just gargantuan enough to serve as a stand-in for the realm itself, every structure reified within its walls
  • “There’s ghosts. I know there is.” Whether or not Hot Pie is literally correct is less important than that he knows this to be true. It is accepted wisdom
  • Arya scorns the accepted wisdom, as she so often does, given that it hasn’t protected her and never seemed to have a place for her anyway
  • As she points out, Pia is always seeing things in the buttery. Usually, they’re not ghosts--they’re flesh-and-blood men come to fuck her
  • That’s the lived reality of Harrenhal, the visible tangible stuff of the day-to-day mundane existence Arya inhabits in contrast to the other POVs
  • You are being screwed, literally and figuratively, not by ghosts, but your fellow man; Arya wades neck-deep into manmade conflict in this chapter
  • Hot Pie whispers about ghosts, the fairytale legend at the core of Harrenhal’s dark reputation...while his arms are elbow-deep in flour
  • That, right there, is where Harrenhal’s power actually comes from, as far as Arya is concerned. Sustenance, resources, physical political power
  • The hierarchy of Harrenhal is not that of the dead v. the living, it’s the people who want tarts v. the people who have to wake up and make them
  • Hot Pie covered in flour, talking about ghosts should remind us of the story Arya remembered when she was down in the tunnels under the Red Keep when Robb took her, Sansa and Bran down to the crypts warning that there were ghosts who wanted blood:
    • When the spirit stepped out of the open tomb, pale white and moaning for blood, Sansa ran shrieking for the stairs, and Bran wrapped himself around Robb's leg, sobbing. Arya stood her ground and gave the spirit a punch. It was only Jon, covered with flour. 
  • When we talked about that moment, we talked about how the story hinted at future story development for Jon (becoming a ghost) and the likelihood of the dead rising in the crypts like we saw in Season 8’s “The Long Night.”
  • Here, I’m hoping that the foreshadowing doesn’t have Hot Pie becoming a ghost! But I do see how this speaks to the past, present and future of Harrenhal.
  • It’s a castle of ghosts, the hubris of man brought low by magical fire-breathing dragons who killed everyone inside the castle.
  • And soon this castle will be haunted by more ghosts, more death.
  • So, Hot Pie and Pia aren’t wrong. There are ghosts in the crypts. There is a history of blood, fire and death here. 
  • The castle is haunted by its evil history and sinister reputation, and the flour stands in for that truth.
  • And in that context, Arya wants to spit in Amory Lorch’s tarts. A private intimate way of expressing her hatred of the men who rule her world
  • Hot Pie glances around nervously, even though no one is watching. He thinks they’ll get caught, even though as Arya says, you can’t taste spit
  • Hot Pie is attaching supernatural properties to the men who run Harrenhal. They are the ghosts of the castle, in his mind, as Varys supposedly uses black magic. It’s not literal sorcery, but the paranoia as though it were
  • Life under men like this, bullies who rule with an iron fist, is akin to life under possession, never knowing if Euron or the Others are listening
  • Arya is right to want to strike back. But if Amory can’t taste the spit, what’s the point of her protest? It does nothing but give her temporary catharsis
  • I think we look at Hot Pie and see a laughable character with a silly name.
  • And we also see a character who doesn’t have Arya Stark’s temperament, and the residue of the noble upbringing which contributed to her ability to shrug off danger and death.
  • What I’m saying is that Arya is an outlier to how people should behave given the circumstances that these kids have gone through.
  • Hot Pie is the norm: a scared kid who has seen things that no child should see.
  • He fought a battle at the God’s Eye, and he watched people die in battle and burn to death.
  • Hot Pie was there when Cutjack and Tarber abandoned them in the riverlands, demonstrating that no adult would protect him.
  • And he watched as Raff the Sweetling murdered Lommy Greenhands before he was force-marched through the hell of Gregor Clegane and the Mountain’s Men to Harrenhal.
  • And then he got beaten with wooden spoons for giving Arya an extra tart just two chapters prior which makes what Arya does at the end of this scene when she steals a tart a less than admirable rather than daring.
  • OF COURSE Hot Pie is reluctant to take a wrong step or do something that would potentially get himself tortured or killed.
  • This is the life that Hot Pie has led, and he’s not about to step out of line to get killed for a meaningless act of defiance.
  • That said, Hot Pie knows who Amory Lorch is, and he doesn’t immediately reject this small act of defiance.
  • It’s clear that Hot Pie isn’t as comfortable with his confinement in the same way that Gendry proves later.
  • Hot Pie knows who Amory Lorch is, knows that it was he was the perpetrator of the atrocity against Yoren at the village back in Arya IV.
  • So, he considers this meaningless act of defiance for a moment before wisely deciding it’s stupid. 
  • She feels light as she steals Ser Amory’s tart, she feels daring, lightfoot underfoot, the ghost of Harrenhal, no longer a powerless mouse
  • Starvation on the streets of King’s Landing made it hard to remember why her father taught her not to steal. She’s not exactly starving in Harrenhal, but stealing from Amory is a way to avoid the pure void of despair
  • As readers, we get to share in Arya’s intimate little triumphs, giving her a fond smile and thumbs up as she tastes the flavorful tart
  • But keep in mind what Hot Pie said about the tarts. If Amory notices one missing, it’s not Arya who will suffer for it. It’s Hot Pie who will suffer
  • This is not to cast Arya as cruel and careless; she does want to escape Harrenhal with Hot Pie and Gendry, after all
  • But because of her age and how she was raised, she is unable to fully comprehend that their perspective on all this is very different from hers
  • For Arya of House Stark, that tart is a symbol of her defiance. For Hot Pie, it is the proof of his utility to the powerful, which is what keeps him alive
  • In other words, this simple tart means completely opposite things to these two children, because of their different relationships to power
  • Even before Vargo Hoat shows up with his Northern “prisoners,” Arya is talking escape. That’s what this whole chapter is geared towards even as it moves through so many situations and characters: Arya getting out
  • Harrenhal, to her mind, was nothing but a big-ass detour on her road home to Winterfell. Now that Weese is dead, she has a chance to escape
  • This is Arya trying to fold her second wish, the one she immediately regretted, back into an affirming narrative of her flight toward freedom
  • In the moment of Weese’s death, Arya felt horror and sickening shame at the realization that she wasted the one leverage she has over power
  • Weese was personally abusive to her, but he wasn’t at the heart of why this is happening, unlike (say) Tywin. She has to find some way of recasting what happened in a way that allows her to move forward
  • Weese was replaced by Mebble, aka Pinkeye, a man as unthreatening as Weese was threatening. He gets drunk, he passes out, Arya does whatever she wants. I mean, they call him Pinkeye! Not intimidating!
  • Of course, Arya is able to wander around Harrenhal basically doing as she pleases not only because she had Weese killed, but because as she did so, the army left, and there’s too few men to keep track of everyone
  • That’s the larger picture over which she still has no power, even as Jaqen’s ability to kill at will seemed to give her a way to strike back
  • To your point- according to Jaqen himself, when Arya is preparing to speak a 3rd name- he says it could be days or even years before the person is actually assassinated
  • In order to feel like her decisions, her will, still carries weight, Arya has to steal the tart, and she has to keep working towards her goal of escape
  • The lessons Syrio taught her keep coming back, allowing her to use her senses to master her environment, hearing what Hot Pie cannot
  • “Listen with your ears, not with your mouth.” Soak in what’s happening rather than blundering over everything with your own noise
  • It’s good advice! It helps Arya! But it does not cure her of her own blind spots, her figurative (not literal) inability to see and hear the truth
  • What Arya cannot accept is that Hot Pie does not want to escape Harrenhal. He wouldn’t even conceive of that as an escape, not really
  • As far as Hot Pie is concerned, Harrenhal is the escape from the world outside, the deprivation they went through when they were on their own
  • It’s better in here than out there, because out there, we ate worms, and in here, we are making bread. Nothing motivates man like hunger
  • As I said in previous Arya chapters here, George is complicating our perspective on Harrenhal and Arya’s story within it by calling our attention to multiple kinds of horror and asking which of them is more important
  • For Hot Pie, the ghosts are real, but Harrenhal is still preferable to him because of the more mundane physical realities. For Arya, the ghosts are not real, but the mundane physical realities are only a temporary salve
  • So while Arya is more materialist and grounded than Hot Pie when it comes to the supernatural, her head is firmly in the clouds when it comes to the question of how they are to live in this age of wonder and terror
  • Winterfell was never endgame for Hot Pie. The bosom of hearth and home was never waiting for him at the end of the hero’s journey
  • He was headed to the Wall for a lifetime of servitude, freezing his ass off in exchange for three square meals a day, sacrificing for a realm that will neglect him, abandon him, rely on him while forgetting he was ever there
  • For Arya, the difference between Harrenhal and Winterfell, Lannister and Stark, is night and day. The heart of the matter. For Hot Pie, life at Harrenhal is a better deal than he was likely to achieve elsewhere
  • Neither of them are wrong. Both reach conclusions that make sense to them. They inhabit the same world and yet at the same time, they do not
  • What is important? Whose story matters? Whose truth matters? How do we reconcile our values, our life stories? Arya must confront these questions again and again in her chapters; there are no easy answers
  • Even as George carefully builds the tension and excitement leading to the prison break with one hand, the other hand is busy undercutting all of that in order to force us to contemplate our own perspective and limitations
  • This is a great perspective, and I wonder whether George is doing a little meta here — not the last time he’ll do that, not the last time in this chapter.
  • Arya could be a stand-in for readers of fantasy, constantly urging other people in the stories to do the brave, heroic, daring thing, because that’s what we as readers want them to do.
  • Like us readers of fantasy, Arya has been immunized from the depredations that effect the Hot Pies, Pias and Gendrys of this world for most of her life.
  • We think people can run into certain-death situations and come out unscathed. It’s just fantasy, right!?
  • But this is where George’s melding of different genres into ASOIAF crystalizes things.
  • Marching into certain death in ASOIAF won’t have the protagonist coming out the other side grinning and unhurt. It will lead to … certain death.
  • Arya’s story in Harrenhal in ACOK is the dark side of fantasy — where the monsters get you, where horror creeps in, forcing readers to understand that bad things will happen to good people.
  • And Hot Pie realizes this. He knows he’s one of those elf soldiers from the battle under Mount Doom who Sauron swats to death, not the hero Sauruman Frodo.
• Vargo Hoat and the “prisoners”
  • Having played a neat little game with the shifting perspectives of Arya and Hot Pie, George now extends his gamesmanship to the plot itself
  • Arya arrives at the gate to find plunder that is not plunder, prisoners that are not prisoners, Lannister cronies who no longer fit that description
  • What seems forthright to her at first, a phenomenon both logistically and morally simple to explain, ends up more complicated than she can grasp
  • What Arya thinks of as plunder is actually a bribe. The Northmen she thinks of as Vargo Hoat’s prisoners are actually his new comrades-in-arms
  • Life in Harrenhal, in the realm at war, in the fallen world of adults, is considerably more corrupt than she imagined. Even Amory Lorch is caught flat-footed, naive in his own way about how his world works
  • George lingers with his narrative camera on Robett Glover, commander of the Northmen in question, so that we invest sympathy and desperate hope in him as Arya does. I know those banners! Those are my father’s men, and Robb’s! They remind me of the home to which I long to escape
  • She doesn’t want to think about what that might mean. Of course, what she thinks it means is that the Northmen lost a battle. That’s what Vargo Hoat tells Amory. The truth is both better and worse from Arya’s POV
  • Better, in that the Northmen didn’t lose a battle, and are about to take Harrenhal away from Amory. Worse, in that they are not actually the enemies of the cruel hateful Bloody Mummers. They are new best friends!
  • Roose Bolton’s master plan passes right over the heads of both Arya and Amory Lorch, locked as they are into different sides of the same oppositional mindset. I can’t blame Arya for hating the Lannisters, but “West Bad, North Good” is not an accurate view, and blinds her here
  • George keeps us distracted with Vargo’s lisp, his mutual enmity with Amory, and the fate of the Northern prisoners, so we don’t question any element of Vargo’s story, which really doesn’t make sense
  • Everything we know about the Bloody Mummers suggests that they are cowardly bullies, only picking fights with people who can’t fight back
  • Moreover, there’s just not very many of them. Is it really likely they were able to defeat Roose Bolton, a canny commander with ~10,000 men?
  • Just like Arya, just like Amory Lorch, the reader has a limited perspective and so cannot grasp what’s really happening here until it has already happened. We feel George pulling the wool from our eyes to show us truth
  • I’m still not over AGOT, Tyrion VIII when George RR Martin told me that Roose Bolton was not intentionally throwing the Battle at the Green Fork.
  • Okay, okay. George WASN’T addressing me, but it felt personal to me, because here we see how when Roose wants to win, he comes up with smart battle plans.
  • Right away, we see the sense in the plan itself. Arya repeatedly says that Amory Lorch has one hundred men to hold the castle.
  • Again, it’s wild how hard Tywin tried to cross into the Westerlands that he took all but a handful of his army with him.
  • It’s also wild that Harrenhal can be held with one hundred men, but I digress.
  • So, Roose Bolton sends one hundred northmen as captives of the Bloody Mummers to infiltrate the castle.
  • Add in the Bloody Mummers, and the anti-Amory folks have the westermen at a significant force disparity.
  • Plus, the advantage of the walls of Harrenhal is immediately mitigated by getting these guys into the castle itself without the hassle of building siege equipment and assaulting the walls and getting a lot of soldiers killed.
  • Note that Roose Bolton’s MO throughout the narrative is to keep his main army preserved while risking others in his service.
  • Note, too, that Ramsay will use the same trick of posing as the ally of Theon Greyjoy in order to gain entry into Winterfell later in this same book.
  • So, Robett Glover and Aenys Frey are in charge of the river and northmen in this fight while Roose and Steelshanks don’t show up until after the castle is taken.
  • Confusingly, Robett is called “lord commander” here, and is referred to as a lord in this chapter and the next Arya chapter. George seemed to have trouble with Robett’s role in House Glover as the appendix entries for Robett don’t have him as heir to Deepwood Motte in ACOK/ASOS, but he becomes heir in the appendices for AFFC/ADWD.
  • Regardless, Emmett mentioned aspects of Vargo Hoat’s story that don’t make sense, and yes, man, Amory is a ding-dong.
  • Something I caught in this re-read is how Vargo rolls up with all these captured goods (or I assume they’re captured goods. They could be forage) but claims to have cut off Roose Bolton’s “van” — that is the forward element of the main army while the baggage trains are typically kept in the rear of the army in order to prevent their capture.
  • Amory’s reaction is one of displeasure, not suspicion which, of course, dooms him
  • Why Amory Lorch is displeased is unclear. Does he simply just hate Vargo Hoat? I understand this one! Maybe he wanted the glory of defeating Roose Bolton. Or maybe he figures he’ll have more mouths to feed.
  • But he’s Tywin Lannister’s dog, and Vargo Hoat is Tywin’s dog too. So, he’ll hug Vargo Hoat like he did back in Arya VII, because he has to, because he’s a sworn Lannister man.
  • Vargo Hoat’s loyalty lies elsewhere though.
• Arguing with Gendry
  • As Arya wanders away from the gate, George takes some time to viscerally ground us in the funhouse topsy-turvy world of Harrenhal
  • Echoes do strange things to sound here. Winds shriek, leaves skitter. For those already inclined to fear ghosts, reading into the Rorschach blot of the castle like the red comet above, this is proof of the supernatural
  • Again, Arya knows better. They aren’t literal ghosts; it’s just the way the castle is shaped. But the castle is what it is because of dragonfire
  • Harrenhal was conceived as Black Harren’s tribute to his own political power...rendered moot by the game-changing arrival of magical power
  • The castle is left this grotesque overgrown maze, simultaneously reaching for the stars and crashing back down to earth. “There are ghosts, I know it” is a way of processing life in a place that just feels so damn wrong
  • These magical elements don’t act on their own. Harrenhal is not haunted in the campfire story sense, with literal agency and consciousness
  • But there is something about the place that kindles dark fires in the human heart, magical radiation seeping out from the very bones of the castle
  • It gives a framework for the seething inchoate consciousness of humanity, a shadow on a wall for us to project into. Arya thinks of herself as “the ghost in Harrenhal,” a way for her to feel in control of her environment
  • Harrenhal is a crucible that burns away lies and exposes your true self, as we’re going to see with Jaime in ASOS. It’s a wellspring of power, but it’s frozen in architecture. It has to be acted upon, taken possession of, but everyone who does so succumbs the curse. The wages of the fiery ladder
  • In its current state, Harrenhal renders its occupants absurd for even trying to possess it. Amory Lorch does not have enough men to really hold this place together, much like Theon at Winterfell in our last episode
  • He has a hundred men to guard a thousand doors, a perfect encapsulation of how the powers that be in the civil war jealously guard what they have seized without realizing the war has emptied it all out
  • If Harrenhal is the realm, then the realm is bereft of occupancy, life and laughter. We are left alone with the ghosts, frozen memories of our will
  • Who we were weighs down like a crushing stone on who we are. 
  • Sorry
  • Everyone who holds Harrenhal reenacts its rise and fall; it cannot be any other way, for Harrenhal is the crossover point of all kinds of power
  • You fight like hell to lay claim to your prize, only to find that all the fighting reduced the prize to ash and dust. You have what you wanted: a mausoleum draped with your banners, a graveyard of which you are king
  • In the middle of this wax museum, Arya stumbles upon warm moving living flesh: Gendry hard at work in the forge like Hot Pie in the kitchens
  • That parallel is very clear on reread. As Arya puts it, when Gendry is at work, nothing exists for him but fire and metal and his own will within them
  • It’s the raw moment of creation, elements transformed and reborn, the spark of inspiration (like writing!) that makes life worth living in the end
  • Hot Pie feels the same way about flour and sugar that Gendry feels about flame and steel. From the pieces of this broken world, I rebuild myself
  • For Arya, home and family is what gives her meaning, and the only pieces she can lay claim to in order to get there are the instruments of death
  • Before she tries to do that, however, she pauses to watch Gendry work, clearly experiencing early sexual stirring at the sight of his body
  • Expressing both fear and desire is necessary to avoid crushing miserablism in which the story simply becomes a parade of torments
  • There is no lesson to be learned from that, nothing to take away. Desire without fear is indulgence; fear without desire lacks the crucial ingredient of temptation. Arya must want, reach out, and then recoil from the result
  • Sex and death, the haunting extremes of the human experience, with the body as the battleground between the two. Gendry shapes his own body with the disciplined movements with which he shapes steel
  • You can see a glimmer here of the united body and soul, the crossover point between art and action discussed by the ancient Greeks and pushed forward by Japanese poet/philosopher/nationalist activist Yukio Mishima
  • But Mishima’s idealism ran aground on the realities of politics, his own included, and the same thing happens with the idealized image of Gendry
  • He’s muscled like a maiden’s fantasy, as his father Robert was before him. Yet just as Robert’s image withered and died when he had to rule, Arya’s own maiden’s fantasy of Gendry is complicated by their power dynamic
  • Arya realizes all at once why she came here, why she’s so restless, why she can’t stop bothering her friends. This is her chance to get out
  • And once more, as with Hot Pie, Gendry tells her not only that he doesn’t want to come, but that she has no idea what she’s talking about
  • Hot Pie, however, is intimidated by Arya. Gendry is not, and puts things more bluntly. He says Arya learned nothing from what they went through
  • You’re still playing the spunky princess? You still think that’s going to work? You still think you can just transform material reality that way?
  • The fact of the matter is that two guards would be enough to stop and kill them both if they were stupid enough to try what Arya is proposing
  • If Arya had internalized the lesson of Gregor Clegane’s ultraviolence, she would not even be thinking of doing this. What is that lesson, exactly?
  • As Gendry argues: the lesson is that you survive by being useful. The people with the power to kill you think of you as (at best) a resource. The solution is to be a useful resource--the chilling worldview of chattel slavery
  • There is no way outside that system. There is no better world out of the stories and songs Gendry can reach if he just tries hard enough
  • In this chapter, we get another reference to Gendry being Robert Baratheon’s bastard when it’s mentioned that Gendry’s hammer was like part of his arm which connects oh so beautifully to Robert in his prime with his warhammer
  • But there are other parallels between father and son that are less flattering.
  • I understand where Gendry is coming from as I’ll talk about in a bit, but you get the sense that he’s growing comfortable in his setting. Too comfortable if you ask me.
  • And that’s what happened with Robert too.
  • Robert became too comfortable with life at court. He had no battles to fight, no lost love to fight for. So, he grew comfortable and got fat and lazy as king.
  • Gendry isn’t quite at the fat and lazy state of things, and as his story progresses, he’ll prove much more dynamic than his sire and fight for the right with the Brotherhood without Banners.
  • But through Gendry, you can see the early stages of Robert Baratheon in the immediate years following Robert’s Rebellion and his coronation.
  • Would love to see the AU where Gendry sticks with Arya and buys into the magical elements as well
  • Winterfell means an end to suffering for Arya. It simply cannot mean that for Gendry, because all it would mean in practical terms is that he is sweating for someone else. That’s not liberation for Gendry
  • All that would change is that he, Gendry, would have risked getting his limbs hacked off by Vargo Hoat in the process. Now, unfortunately, the powers that be won’t let honest laborers like Gendry stay neutral
  • But Gendry’s larger point remains: Arya is not recognizing that the danger facing Gendry and Hot Pie is a permanent proposition for them
  • Arya is acting as though Winterfell means home and hearth for Gendry, instead of just another place to make horseshoes for rich people
  • And in truth, Gendry doesn’t even mind making horseshoes for rich people, as long as he also gets to work the forge on his own account. The stirrings of IRL labor history, craft potentially leading to independence
  • What Gendry can’t stand any more is this narrative Arya keeps pushing, wherein the Lannisters are their political foes as members of Team Stark
  • Robett Glover is not Gendry’s friend any more than Amory Lorch is Gendry’s friend. There is literally no reason for him to think as Arya does
  • As Jorah said: the people just want to be left alone. A sword is a sword; a helm is a helm; fire burns, no matter who you’re working for. These material facts of the world are meaningful to Gendry, not Stark v. Lannister
  • As Gendry reminds Arya, she couldn’t save Lommy. Her plan is less a sensible strategy than a desperate desire to make up for that failure
  • Arya calls him a coward. That doesn’t work; Gendry is unimpressed. Arya then reminds Gendry that the queen wanted him, that he’s important
  • You can understand Arya’s perspective. She cares about Gendry and wants him by her side, within her same social and cultural milieu
  • But as she is inadvertently exposing, Gendry’s noble status is not something he can make use of to better his life. It’s a target on his back
  • He wants no part of it. You’re somebody, Arya insists. Yep, Gendry replies. I am a smith. Someday a master armorer, if I don’t get myself killed
  • My counterpoint to Gendry is that there is a measurable distinction between the Starks and the Lannisters in this war.
  • Now, it’s entirely unfair to dispute Gendry’s perspective from the justification for northern independence, Robb calling the banners, all that macro political shit.
  • Gendry isn’t playing the game of thrones (yet), but we can see a distinction in how Gendry himself is treated by the Lannisters at least.
  • It’s the gold cloaks who came galloping up on Yoren’s band, demanding Gendry to be surrendered to them at the queen’s order so as to be murdered by them.
  • It’s Amory Lorch and his goons who murder Yoren and the Night’s Watch recruits at the abandoned village.
  • It’s Gregor Clegane who leads the death march to Harrenhal of the smallfolk.
  • All of the bad things that happened to Gendry came at the behest of Tywin and Cersei Lannister, not the Starks.
  • Gendry isn’t making a moral equivalency argument the way that some fans do. He’s making a “I’m going to live a lot longer if I stay out of everything” argument.
  • The problem with this is that the Lannisters will leave Gendry in and only allow him to live as he can provide valuable slave labor for their war crime of a campaign in the riverlands.
  • The thing is: Gendry’s argument about not taking a side to stay alive will be proved correct in the next Arya chapter when Roose Bolton and Vargo Hoat turn out to be even worse monsters that Tywin Lannister and Amory Lorch were.
  • And this leads to my singular criticism of this chapter: this scene would have been more effective had it come in Arya X rather than Arya IX.
  • Because there, Gendry could make the effective argument that there’s no real functional difference to the lives of the smallfolk under Lannister or Stark loyalists.
• Jaqen in the godswood
  • Gendry does finally force Arya to reckon with the potential human cost of her antics and shenanigans, and so reckon with why she’s doing this
  • She says she wants to free the Northmen in order to Save The Day, and she does believe that. But this is also about her own agency and control
  • Gendry asked whether she learned anything during their torturous stay in that village by the lake; what she learned was to hate powerlessness
  • I think it’s rare that a human being gives themselves 100% over to submission, body and soul. Even Aeron doesn’t in “The Forsaken”
  • Everyone has strategies, little outs, things that are theirs and no one else’s, that they cling to in the midst of hell. It’s how we keep going
  • For Hot Pie, it’s cooking. For Gendry, it’s smithing. The lifeblood of labor, the tasks that make them useful to their overseers. Even if the fruits of their labor do not belong to them, the labor itself does, always, forever
  • Arya, though, does not have this sacred apprentice relationship to her work. There’s no real aesthetic sense to it, no craft, and she wasn’t raised with it. Then again, she hated the activities with which she was raised
  • So Arya had to find a different escape valve, something that was hers and could not be taken away like Needle, like Lommy, like Ned
  • As she thinks to herself, she lost all control over her own life in that village, and it was Jaqen H’ghar and his three wishes that really changed that
  • This is the first time Jaqen comes up in Arya’s thoughts in this chapter, and that’s because Weese’s death left her afraid of her magical mentor
  • Chiswyck was easy, anyone can push someone off a wall, but turning Weese’s beloved dog against him? That must’ve been sorcery!
  • Now, we know as rereaders that Jaqen used basilisk blood to enrage the dog. No magic involved. But Jaqen does have magic, as we’ll see soon
  • It’s not that this is a world in which magic explains everything, nor is it a world in which magic explains nothing. It’s both at once, difficult to discern
  • As such, Arya is increasingly concerned about who (and what) Jaqen really is. He’s starting to feel like a figure out of the stories and songs, like one of the grumkins that Old Nan said offer wishes to little protagonists
  • This is a great meta moment on George’s part, as he shows how the process of storytelling and story analysis helps Arya navigate her life
  • Arya knows that she has to be careful with this third wish, because in Old Nan’s stories, the third and final wish is the most important one...and it’s the one in which the grumpkin/djinn tries to screw you over and escape
  • Often in ASOIAF, the lessons of the stories and songs fail. They were there to blind you to bleak truths, as Sandor says in Sansa’s next chapter
  • But sometimes, those lessons act as psychic armature, preparing our characters to do battle with a confusing and dishonest world
  • In this case, Arya knows from the stories that she has to take this wish seriously, use it effectively...but part of her wants to never use it at all
  • If she uses her last wish, she’s out of power. She’s back to being a mouse scurrying around the echoing empty spaces of castle and country
  • As long as she could use that wish on anyone, she need not fear anyone. Everyone she encounters is a name she could whisper and erase
  • But as soon as she picks one person, the second that potential power is actualized, it’s gone, and she has no way to keep the fear from returning
  • Which is part of why we see her try to retain that third wish, even after Jaqen helps her slaughter the Lannister men
  • This is a feeling that applies to so many situations in life, not just lethal ones. Anticipation can be a stronger feeling than consummation. The potential for getting what you want can outweigh actually getting it
  • Time gets away from us, and so looking forward to a future moment can feel more rewarding than getting it and then suddenly it’s in the past
  • How to solve this dilemma? How can Arya reconcile her desire to use her power with her fear of what happens when it’s gone? As always with the Starks, her oasis is a godswood, a liminal space of privacy and peace
  • This is where the natural world flourishes, outlasting our petty personal disputes. This is where the noise of the daily grind fades. Even Tyrion finds peace in such an environment in Shae’s manse (but for how long?)
  • When Sansa visits the godswood in King’s Landing, when Bran visits the godswood in Winterfell, when Arya visits the godswood in Harrenhal, it is as if these far-flung siblings are briefly sharing the same space
  • These woods are broken pieces of home scattered to the four winds, like the Stark children themselves. Videogame hubs linking them together
  • As Arya thinks to herself, she can almost believe she’s in the Winterfell godswood, that if she climbs down she’ll find her father waiting for her
  • We want to cross the gaps between us, breaking down the borders of war and death. We can’t. But for a moment, we can feel as though we can
  • Of course, each Stark has a different activity in their respective woods. Bran hunts as Summer. Sansa prays and conspires. Arya trains to fight
  • She lacks a sword, so she has a branch: a child with a wooden sword, nature itself as our first and last weapon. Thus she maintains the lessons Syrio taught her, Weasel preserving a fragile thread to Arya Stark’s life
  • It’s fun how Arya swats at the leaves for Cersei, Ilyn Payne, Ser Meryn and the Hound.
  • It’s a very child-like reaction: one that I fondly recall doing when I was 34, er, 4.
  • But I deeply love how Joffrey is a broken branch here. You get it, right? Joffrey is the broken branch of Robert Baratheon. It’s where the line of kings ended, because Joffrey wasn’t actually the son of Robert Baratheon.
  • I adore how George puts these little touches into the narrative. Anyways, carry on, ser!
  • The old gods, too, are part of that old life. Arya stares down the Harrenhal heart tree, with its terrible snarling face. Arya wonders not whether it hates her, but whether it is suffering. Can gods feel pain, pass away, and die?
  • It speaks to Arya’s empathy that she reacts not with fear but curiosity as to what lurks behind this monstrous face (shades of Sandor and Sansa here)
  • But it also speaks to her need to know the unknowable, running around underfoot learning everything, impatient with sanctity and decorum
  • She tries to pray, silently and politely asking for help against Amory, for help getting home, for help never having to feel afraid again
  • But then she remembers how her father used to pray, and how that didn’t save him when Joffrey ordered him beheaded. It makes her angry
  • I understand why! Arya feels forsaken like Aeron, like Job. My dad made a deal with you, and you didn’t hold up your end of the bargain. So either you’re evil, or you’re powerless; back to Epicurus’ questions about god
  • Arya scorns the world of gods and sorcery, saying it can’t help her...and then Jaqen emerges as if born out of fog and mist to castigate her
  • Gods are not mocked, girl. They’re not here to help you, and they will happily hurt you if you defy them. Rethink your relationship to them
  • And he would know, because Jaqen functions like a god. He comes in response to Arya speaking to the heart tree; he came in response to her kill list, whispered at night like a prayer; he speaks on behalf of the gods
  • The godswood is his little pocket universe, like the steamy bathhouse in Arya VIII; Harrenhal is the magical world nestled inside the political world
  • He allows Arya to engage w/multiple kinds of power hands-on, which is exhilarating but also terrifying: a sword without a hilt, no safe way to wield 
  • Arya is worried that sword is about to cut her. Gods are not mocked, and grumkins can’t be trusted. How should she handle her third wish?
  • Before she answers that question, she has questions of her own: what’s your deal? How did you know I was here? Are Rorge and Biter demons you summoned up from hell? Is “Jaqen H’ghar” even your true name?
  • Jaqen doesn’t even bother with most of these questions. A man sees and hears and knows; that’s all you’re going to get, Job, quit bothering god!
  • The only one he cares about is the one about his name, and as with many confrontations with faith, as with Catelyn in the Stormlands, he turns it back on her. I have many names, sure. So do you: Weasel, Arry, Arya
  • I think these questions are good ones by Arya, and I really like Jaqen’s non-responses! 
  • Arya is picking up on that there is something unnatural occurring in this castle!
  • And Jaqen turns up the creep factor to 11 when he reveals that he knows what Arya’s true name is.
  • On a side-note, I wonder whether Jaqen might have been taking a little listen when Arya whispered her prayers and put it all together, or maybe there was another magic involved that we’ll find out about in TWOW.
  • Regardless, Rorge and Biter were not magicked up by Jaqen. We talked about this in a previous Arya chapter, but GRRM had a backstory in mind Rorge and Biter backstory where Rorge was a bar owner in Flea Bottom who found an orphan named Biter, and Rorge put Biter into fighting pits with wild animals for sport.
  • They aren’t demons. They’re beasts in human flesh, made only worse by the magic surrounding them.
  • This is a turn on George’s part that I've noticed that proximity to magic makes people more deathly, more disconnected from life.
  • We’ll encounter a version of this in three-weeks time when we meet the Undying. And when we encounter Bloodraven (the three-eyed crow, BTW), we’ll see another version of this.
  • And with Arya, we start to see George doing the shaping work for her journey to Braavos and her half-assed attempt to join a death cult and become no one while taking on new names and identities.
  • We see the seeds of that arc here in ACOK that Jaqen helpfully summarizes. Weasel, Arry, Arya.
  • In AFFC/ADWD/TWOW, it’s Cat of the Canals, Blind Beth, The Ugly Little Girl, Mercy, and at some point, it’ll be Arya again. 
  • We all wear masks. It’s just a question of why, where, when, how effectively. Who we are is a question with no permanent answer
  • Jaqen is an exaggeration of the state of alienation from the self, a metaphor for losing one’s identity as you grow up in a world at war
  • He’s already gone. There’s no one left underneath all the masks. Arya is the one whose identity is really at stake, so he turns it back on her
  • The question isn’t who I am, little spunky fantasy protagonist. It’s who you are, because this is your Hero’s Journey; I am but your magical mentor
  • Names have power, binding words sinking into the soul; Arya responds to her name being spoken aloud by retreating to the heart tree behind her
  • The very gods she mocked are still her source of strength when faced with devastating self-recognition, alienation from one’s own face in the mirror
  • But there’s a flipside to Jaqen knowing her true name. That means he knows her true cause. Maybe the gods had sent him--again, as a magical mentor, Jaqen is linked (like Jojen and Melisandre) to divine will
  • Alas, the gods do not answer prayers, and Jaqen has not come to help Arya, not exactly. He has come to fulfill this sacred deal they made
  • He won’t help her free the Northmen any more than Gendry, but for different reasons. Gendry wants to stay beneath the war; Jaqen hovers above it. Gendry will work for anyone; Jaqen works for no one, is no one
  • You saved three lives. You owe three deaths, to bring the world back to balance, to the absolute zero of the gods. This is not about the Stark cause. Jaqen doesn’t care about that any more than Melisandre cares about the Iron Throne. I’m not your political mentor, but your magical one
  • The war we keep being told is what the story is about doesn’t actually mean anything to these characters, or at least not what it means to Arya
  • She has to juggle all these priorities that keep complicating her easy narrative, which is all part of the process of growing up
  • Arya considers for a moment, and then springs a trap on Jaqen that is so beautifully constructed that I would say it’s her most clever moment
  • You can kill anyone, she asks? Any powerful person? And Jaqen eagerly agrees, thinking he’s about to be sent to kill Joffrey. He swears it by every god, old and new, ice and fire, the world in his hands and therefore Arya’s
  • But then Arya makes her move. I want you to kill Jaqen H’ghar. I want you to kill yourself. Arya has mastered her own master, a brilliant maneuver
  • Jaqen thought Arya was putting him up against power, drawing from the lesson she learned with Weese’s death. She, however, has dodged right around that insight to a more useful one in the moment. What happens if I force this nowhere man to look in the mirror and implicate himself?
  • That’s the one life Jaqen really doesn’t want to take, and yet he is hoisted on his own petard, having already promised he could and would do it
  • Arya learned the lessons from Old Nan’s stories, combining them with the lessons Gendry wanted her to learn from Gregor’s ultraviolence. Her literary analysis has proved the key to mastering her power dynamics
  • Instead of losing herself in the possibilities and pitfalls of sorcerous power, she has turned sorcerous power against itself and so taken control of it
  • It’s one hell of a move, and you can tell by the way Jaqen briefly smiles that he’s impressed by it even as it makes a ton of extra work for him
  • He tries to wriggle out of it by saying that without him, Arya will feel isolated and friendless. But that was inevitable as soon as she used her third wish, no matter who she used it on. So instead, she threatens his life in order to get him to agree to her unorthodox use of the wish
  • One aspect that struck me this time around is how Arya’s thoughts about Harrenhal are all sourced to her own observations and Old Nan’s stories.
  • Arya is ever-observant, taking the lessons that Syrio Forel taught her to look with your eyes to figure out so much about the castle.
  • The sounds the winds make: Arya knows. How your feet sound when they patter against the ground: Arya knows. Which doors are guarded and who might ask questions if she passed by: Arya knows.
  • Much of this observation on Arya’s part is her close analysis on how she can escape the castle, looking for weaknesses and potential escape routes out of the castle.
  • Factor in Old Nan, and we see the sordid history of Harrenhal’s more ancient memory. Stories of Harren the Black, Aegon the Conqueror, ghosts, etc.
  • But now that Arya is in the haunted castle, she’s not afraid of the castle or the ghosts in it.
  • She’s seen far worse things done by men than done by spooks. So, she’s not scared of the haunted castle any longer.
  • There’s a significant omission in what Arya knows about Harrenhal though: Ned! We don’t have Arya recalling a time when Ned told her about oh … say the tourney of Harrenhal!
  • Ned so tightly guarded his secrets that he only recalled it in his fevre dream in his final AGOT chapter and seemingly never spoke of it to his children.
  • We see some evidence of this in ASOS when Jojen twice asks Bran if Ned had ever told him the story of the Tourney of Harrenhal, and Bran says no. Old Nan told stories. His dad never spoke of those types of things.
  • Here, it’s all omission. Arya never once thinks of a story Ned told her about Harrenhal despite it being a formative experience in Ned’s life.
  • This connects with R+L=J and how Ned tried to save Jon’s life by rarely speaking of the past and nev
  • Ned was gone now, and his loves and his secrets had all died with him.

Foreshadowing/Groundwork

Arya hiding her sword is something that will happen again in AFFC when Arya hides Needle instead of throwing it into the Braavosi harbor

Theory/Discussion

One of the more fascinating element’s of Arya’s arc that makes it among my favorite in the series is her relationship to magic. She’s not birthing dragons or resurrecting the dead, but is bearing witness to revenants and shapeshifters and absorbing it instead of rejecting it, like Tyrion with ser Alliser’s cold dead hand. ACOK Arya IX really broadens Arya’s concept of magic being an attainable skill, not just legend but something you can reach out and touch - and one can begin to see clearly the path that will eventually lead her to Braavos, explicitly so when Jaqen hands her a Golden Ticket.

And then there is Jaqen Hagar himself: shapeshifter, speaker of riddles, assassin - man of mystery. Names have both no meaning and the heaviest possible meaning to Jaqen. He (and Arya) shed names as easily as someone changing their socks- yet when Arya names him as her third death, his death is clearly and instantly inevitable, from her lips to the god of death’s ears - until Jaqen is able to negotiate his way out, very much to his own relief. And the reason that Jaqen is so deathly afraid, the reason he would have had to kill himself if Arya stuck to her original naming, the very thing that binds the naming to the foregone death - is hidden in the mystery of his training and backstory, planting the seeds of curiosity within Arya and showing her another way, a different way to channel her fear and anger and developing relationship with death as she tries to hang on to any semblance of control over her own life. 

I’ll jump in here

Quick hits: I see Arya’s witnessing Jaqen change his face is, among other things as we’ve discussed, foreshadowing her encounter with the magical elements of R’hllor and the Brotherhood.

And- among other things- I see her ongoing focus on her kill list as analogous to Stoneheart’s quest for vengeance. Whether that leads to an encounter between the two or only serves for us to draw certain parallels as readers I think remains to be seen.

In the world of Westeros, there is a type of gratification far beyond stealing Ser Amory’s treats. Arya yearns desperately for power and agency as chapter after chapter after chapter she has been reminded that she has none to speak of, as you laid out so succinctly in the Depth portion. Jaqen gives her an indirect taste of that power by explicitly laying responsibility for the slaughter at Arya’s feet- and gives the girl her death mantra: Valhar Morghulis. The distance between spitting in or stealing someone’s food and being directly implicated in all these brutal murders is … vast. We see the long-term foundation of the bridge across that divide being built right here in this chapter. And if you follow that thought far enough, you arrive at the question: can “revenge, omerta, re-wen-gey” fill the hole in Arya’s heart?

I’ll go here.

I’m admittedly not as tuned into the timelines and intersections and even theories as much as some of us with *ahem* clearer minds, but to me the endgame fate of Arya Stark and her… mother… can intersect in a really bittersweet and poignant way. I think you can look at LSH as George’s most tragic agent of grief & revenge, and in conjunction with Arya’s kill-list-prayer it can either be parallel thematic character work, or it can be a foreshadowing of their eventual reunion. Will Arya be the one to lay her mother to final, cathartic rest? I truly believed the show whiffed by omitting the Stoneheart character, but at the same time I’m pretty happy that this and other mysteries of the books weren’t spoiled in any way by the adaptation. It’s highly unlikely that George would have Arya be the one to ultimately defeat the cosmic and eldritch horrors that we will see in TWOW and beyond, so Arya’s journey therefore must come to a different climax. Having to face Stoneheart is just as plausible as any other. What I love about this chapter is all the potential possibilities that it opens up for Arya’s journey, equal parts hopeful, tragic, nihilistic, and pure.

Conclusion

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