scarfnerd

[lemueladeliers]

Chapter 18 | Page 27

[madaboutasoiaf]

Canon Arya Stark: Kindness and compassion

I could have chosen from quite a few scenes for this prompt. I thought about writing a detailed meta with a number of examples but others have covered quite a lot of the scenes over the last day, which is great. So I’ll just focus on one of the best examples, the one at Stoney Sept, because it’s a favourite.

In the market square at the town’s heart stood a fountain in the shape of a leaping trout, spouting water into a shallow pool. Women were filling pails and flagons there. A few feet away, a dozen iron cages hung from creaking wooden posts. Crow cages, Arya knew. The crows were mostly outside the cages, splashing in the water or perched atop the bars; inside were men. Lem reined up scowling. “What’s this, now?” “Justice,” answered a woman at the fountain. “What, did you run short o’ hempen rope?

We’re told straight away that these men have committed crimes, and that the crow cages are their punishment. There’s also an indicator straight away that it isn’t the normal punishment. The sentence is usually hanging, a quicker death, and the scene with the crow cages is not a pretty sight, a hard experience for Arya and not just because of the condition the men are in.

“It was the Mad Huntsman caught these wolves.” Wolves. Arya went cold. Robb’s men, and my father’s. She felt drawn toward the cages. The bars allowed so little room that prisoners could neither sit nor turn; they stood naked, exposed to sun and wind and rain. The first three cages held dead men. Carrion crows had eaten out their eyes, yet the empty sockets seemed to follow her. The fourth man in the row stirred as she passed. Around his mouth his ragged beard was thick with blood and flies. They exploded when he spoke, buzzing around his head. “Water.” The word was a croak. “Please... water,..” The man in the next cage opened his eyes at the sound. “Here,” he said. “Here, me.” An old man, he was; his beard was grey and his scalp was bald and mottled brown with age.

Arya is confronted with the knowledge that these are Stark men. She has witnessed and experienced terrible things by now, especially on the way to Harrenhal and during her time there. She has a good idea of what goes on with the fighting, but these men being “wolves” understandably shocks her, because Robb is her brother, he’s fighting on the side that is right. She has learned with Roose Bolton that not all Northmen are the same but this is something entirely different.

“Whose men were you?” she asked them.At the sound of her voice, the fat man opened his eyes. The skin around them was so red they looked like boiled eggs floating in a dish of blood. “Water... a drink...” “Whose?” she said again. “Pay them no mind, boy,” the townsman told her. “They’re none o’ your concern. Ride on by.”“What did they do?” she asked him. “They put eight people to the sword at Tumbler’s Falls,” he said. “They wanted the Kingslayer, but he wasn’t there so they did some rape and murder.” He jerked a thumb toward the corpse with maggots where his manhood ought to be. “That one there did the raping. Now move along.”

They are Arya’s concern. She can’t move along. She’s a Stark of Winterfell, and these are Stark men. Arya takes this very seriously, as we saw with the captured Northmen at Harrenhal. If they are her father’s men, Robb’s men, then they are her men too.

She looked at their filthy hair and scraggly beards and reddened eyes, at their dry, cracked, bleeding lips. Wolves, she thought again. Like me. Was this her pack?

They are not like Arya, of course, but that doesn’t stop her feeling some kind of responsibility, even if they don’t know who she is and she could just walk away. Nobody else is intervening. These men have been in the cages for quite some time. They might have committed crimes, but this isn’t justice, it’s torture, and Arya can’t walk away, even if she’s distressed and furious about what they have done.

How could they be Robb’s men? She wanted to hit them. She wanted to hurt them. She wanted to cry. They all seemed to be looking at her, the living and the dead alike. The old man had squeezed three fingers out between the bars. “Water,” he said, “water.” Arya swung down from her horse. They can’t hurt me, they’re dying. She took her cup from her bedroll and went to the fountain. “What do you think you’re doing, boy?” the townsman snapped. “They’re no concern o’ yours.” She raised the cup to the fish’s mouth. The water splashed across her fingers and down her sleeve, but Arya did not move until the cup was brimming over. When she turned back toward the cages, the townsman moved to stop her. “You get away from them, boy - “She’s a girl,” said Harwin. “Leave her be.”

They are dying, but she gets them water anyway. Her action prompts action from those with her. They didn’t agree with the crow cages, but it’s Arya who shows these men mercy, who shows them compassion before they die.

The bars were too narrow to pass a cup through, but Harwin and Gendry offered her a leg up. She planted a foot in Harwin’s cupped hands, vaulted onto Gendry’s shoulders, and grabbed the bars on top of the cage. The fat man turned his face up and pressed his cheek to the iron, and Arya poured the water over him. He sucked at it eagerly and let it run down over his head and cheeks and hands, and then he licked the dampness off the bars. He would have licked Arya’s fingers if she hadn’t snatched them back. By the time she served the other two the same, a crowd had gathered to watch her.

Arya has a strong sense of justice. She doesn’t do it to save their lives, she knows they’ll die for their crimes, and they do. This is such a good example of Arya’s kindness and compassion, even when her actions here anger others who are threatening action against her and those she’s with.

“The Mad Huntsman will hear of this,” a man threatened. “He won’t like it. No, he won’t.” “He’ll like this even less, then.” Anguy strung his longbow, slid an arrow from his quiver, nocked, drew, loosed.

The men still died in the end, but that doesn’t diminish the importance of Arya’s actions. This is a perfect example to show that Arya is not merciless as some in the fandom accuse her of being, and that her ideas of justice are not violence for the sake of violence. Arya hasn’t forgotten Ned’s teachings, and she knows that this isn’t right, and she cannot help but act and that’s exactly why I love her.