#or the real heartbreaker: the lands of the old faith hunt down the children of megabird and the last one is forced into contract by the void

[paleodictyoptera]

I keep seeing sky:cotl tags and i instinctually say in my head Sky: Cult of the Lamb. New unhinged AU idea?

[agentrouka-blog]

Arya and Weasel - sending your inner child off into the woods

Weasel is an orphaned, traumatized girl of around two years of age whose story is absolutely heartbreaking. We meet her in A Clash of Kings and she accompanies us for the span of three Arya chapters, which takes place over just about a month, most of which takes place off page. 

We meet her at the end of Arya III, she has her first interaction with Arya in Arya IV and then tags along with Arya, Lommy, Hot Pie and Gendry in the woods until she runs off into the unknown at the end of Arya V.

I’ll follow the story and try to give some sense of time and location to justify my time estimates, simply because GRRM chooses to be so vague. 

Gods, Arya’s chapters in ACOK are among the very finest in the entire book series. 

Warning: Long. As always, excessive use of quotes.

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ACOK, Arya III (chapter 9)

Yoren and his gang have been traveling the Kingsroad since King’s Landing. She beat Hot Pie bloody in Arya I and they had a tense encounter with goldcloaks looking for Gendry in Arya II. Now they change course westward of the Kingsroad close to the beginning of the chapter.

“We’re not far from Gods Eye,” the black brother said one morning. “The kingsroad won’t be safe till we’re across the Trident. So we’ll come up around the lake along the western shore, they’re not like to look for us there.” At the next spot where two ruts cut cross each other, he turned the wagons west. 

Here farmland gave way to forest, the villages and holdfasts were smaller and farther apart, the hills higher and the valleys deeper. Food grew harder to come by.

They spend an unspecified amount of time, likely about two weeks, traveling and living off the land. Enough for two days delay to still matter but long enough to form habits, see landscapes change, have hunting adventures.

Outside a holdfast called Briarwhite, some fieldhands surrounded them in a cornfield, demanding coin for the ears they’d taken. (…)

The next day Koss came racing back to warn Yoren of a camp ahead. (…) “Might be one side, might be t’other. If they’re hurt that bad, likely they’d take our mounts no matter who they are. Might be they’d take more than that. I believe we’ll go wide around them.” It took them miles out of their way, and cost them two days at the least, but the old man said it was cheap at the price. (…) 

Arya saw men guarding the fields more and more when they turned north again. (…) At one place, she spotted a man perched up in a dead tree, with a bow in his hand and a quiver hanging from the branch beside him. (…) 

A day later Dobber spied a red glow against the evening sky. “Either this road went and turned again, or that sun’s setting in the north.”

Weasel’s tragedy begins when her village is put to the torch. The blaze is enough to light up the night sky from half a day’s travel away. Judging from what we see in Arya IV, the violence was likely unspeakable.

By dawn the fire had burned itself out, but none of them slept very well that night. It was midday when they arrived at the place where the village had been.

It’s butchery and desolation. Yoren goes to investigate the destroyed holdfast. 

When they finally returned, Yoren had a little girl in his arms, and Murch and Cutjack were carrying a woman in a sling made of an old torn quilt. The girl was no older than two and she cried all the time, a whimpery sound, like something was caught in her throat. Either she couldn’t talk yet or she had forgotten how. The woman’s right arm ended in a bloody stump at her elbow, and her eyes didn’t seem to see anything, even when she was looking right at it.

I knee-jerk assumed the woman to be Weasel’s mother, but that is never explicitly stated in the text. For all we know, they aren’t related at all. They are not shown to interact, and even if the woman was Weasel’s mother, she is too far gone from her severe injury to be coherent, let alone care for the child. 

 She talked, but she only said one thing. “Please,” she cried, over and over. “Please. Please.” Rorge thought that was funny. He laughed through the hole in his face where his nose had been, and Biter started laughing too, until Murch cursed them and told them to shut up. Yoren had them fix the woman a place in the back of a wagon. “And be quick about it,” he said. “Come dark, there’ll be wolves here, and worse.” “I’m scared,” Hot Pie murmured when he saw the one-armed woman thrashing in the wagon. “Me too,” Arya confessed. He squeezed her shoulder. “I never truly kicked no boy to death, Arry. I just sold my mommy’s pies, is all.” Arya rode as far ahead of the wagons as she dared, so she wouldn’t have to hear the little girl crying or listen to the woman whisper, “Please.” She remembered a story Old Nan had told once, about a man imprisoned in a dark castle by evil giants. He was very brave and smart and he tricked the giants and escaped . . . but no sooner was he outside the castle than the Others took him, and drank his hot red blood. Now she knew how he must have felt. The one-armed woman died at evenfall. Gendry and Cutjack dug her grave on a hillside beneath a weeping willow. When the wind blew, Arya thought she could hear the long trailing branches whispering, “Please. Please. Please.” The little hairs on the back of her neck rose, and she almost ran from the graveside.

I almost inserted a long paragraph about the textual parallels to Lyanna and Sansa here. But I refrained because this is merely meant to document Weasel. 

The woman and the child (and the murdered men I didn’t include in my quotes) are Arya’s first direct confrontation with the vicious of this war. She and Hot Pie are so humbled in the face of it, they forget their original enmity, their posturing. They become children again. They admit their bone-deep fear. 

The human suffering is an unbearable horror and Arya, understandably, tries to block it out and get away from it. 

So this tiny little girl Weasel has just watched every person she has ever known being murdered by scary, angry strangers and then spent that night and half a day among the charred ruins and the bodies. Hungry, thirsty, scared. No one shows up to comfort her until another stranger picks her up and carries her away. 

It goes on:

“No fire tonight,” Yoren told them. Supper was a handful of wild radishes Koss found, a cup of dry beans, water from a nearby brook. The water had a funny taste to it, and Lommy told them it was the taste of bodies, rotting someplace upstream. Hot Pie would have hit him if old Reysen hadn’t pulled them apart.

We’ll return to this lovely image.

Arya encounters wolves as she relieves herself in the woods at night. They do not harm her, but she is clearly shaken by everything that has happened. 

The crying girl travelling alonside her and the wolves prowling the woods. Two sides of Arya.

She tells Yoren she doesn’t care. She just wants to go home. The chapter ends on:

“Go to sleep, boy. Hear me?”

She did try. Yet as she lay under her thin blanket, she could hear the wolves howling . . . and another sound, fainter, no more than a whisper on the wind, that might have been screams.

Followed by a lovely thematic transition at the beginning of Davos I.

The morning air was dark with the smoke of burning gods. They were all afire now, Maid and Mother, Warrior and Smith, the Crone with her Pearl eyes and the Father with his gilded beard; even the Stranger, carved to look more animal than human. The old dry wood and countless layers of paint and varnish blazed with a fierce hungry light. Heat rose shimmering through the chill air; behind, the gargoyles and stone dragons on the castle walls seemed blurred, as if Davos were seeing them through a veil of tears. Or as if the beasts were trembling, stirring . . .

Arya is about to enter the warzone for real.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

ACOK, Arya IV (chapter 14)

We open not too far from where we left Yoren’s merry band. They have reached the river flowing straight south from the Gods Eye. 

It seemed a peaceful place . . . until Koss spotted the dead man. “There, in the reeds.” He pointed, and Arya saw it. The body of a soldier, shapeless and swollen. His sodden green cloak had hung up on a rotted log, and a school of tiny silver fishes were nibbling at his face. “I told you there was bodies,” Lommy announced. “I could taste them in that water.”

He tasted them in the brook, this is a river. Usually brooks flow into rivers, not the other way around. But not too much travel time can have passed for Lommy to make that remark. A day? Two days?

We get a location.

It was midday when the others returned. Woth reported a wooden bridge half a mile downstream, but someone had burned it up. Yoren peeled a sourleaf off the bale. “Might be we could swim the horses over, maybe the donkeys, but there’s no way we’ll get those wagons across. And there’s smoke to the north and west, more fires, could be this side o’ the river’s the place we want to be.” He picked up a long stick and drew a circle in the mud, a line trailing down from it. “That’s Gods Eye, with the river flowing south. We’re here.” He poked a hole beside the line of the river, under the circle. “We can’t go round west of the lake, like I thought. East takes us back to the kingsroad.” He moved the stick up to where the line and circle met. “Near as I recall, there’s a town here. The holdfast’s stone, and there’s a lordling got his seat there too, just a towerhouse, but he’ll have a guard, might be a knight or two. We follow the river north, should be there before dark. They’ll have boats, so I mean to sell all we got and hire us one.” He drew the stick up through the circle of the lake, from bottom to top. “Gods be good, we’ll find a wind and sail across the Gods Eye to Harrentown.”

We don’t know what hour the sun sets but it’s early autumn in Westeros and I’m guessing they’re about 7 to 8 hours from the south shore of the God’s Eye, at wagon and donkey travel-speed.

We have our first mention of Weasel among a heartbreaking instance of Arya’s remaining faith in humanity.

Hot Pie was being silly; it wouldn’t be ghosts at Harrenhal, it would be knights. Arya could reveal herself to Lady Whent, and the knights would escort her home and keep her safe. That was what knights did; they kept you safe, especially women. Maybe Lady Whent would even help the crying girl.

Sadly, we don’t hear who has been taking care of the little girl since her mother died. Arya makes no mention of it.

They reach the deserted town.

The black brother left ten to guard the wagons and the whimpery little girl, and split the rest of them into four groups of five to search the town.

There are no boats, they decide to spend the night at the holdfast. Lots of descriptions of the holdfast and the town. No mention of the little girl. Seriously, who is minding this little toddler? 

When the food was ready, Arya ate a chicken leg and a bit of onion. No one talked much, not even Lommy. Gendry went off by himself afterward, polishing his helm with a look on his face like he wasn’t even there. The crying girl whimpered and wept, but when Hot Pie offered her a bit of goose she gobbled it down and looked for more.

Ah, at least someone is feeding her. Thank you, Hot Pie. Weasel is hungry, she wants to live.

Hot Pie went off and let her alone and Arya curled up on her pallet. She could hear the crying girl from the far side of the haven. I wish she’d just be quiet. Why does she have to cry all the time?

Getting some sister parallels in here.

Jeyne Poole had been confined with her, but Jeyne was useless. Her face was puffy from all her crying, and she could not seem to stop sobbing about her father.

"I'm certain your father is well," Sansa told her when she had finally gotten the dress buttoned right. "I'll ask the queen to let you see him." She thought that kindness might lift Jeyne's spirits, but the other girl just looked at her with red, swollen eyes and began to cry all the harder. She was such a child. (AGOT, Sansa IV)

Don’t like others crying around you when you’re scared, Stark Sisters, do you? There’s a Robb parallel, too.

"Rickon needs you," Robb said sharply. "He's only three, he doesn't understand what's happening. He thinks everyone has deserted him, so he follows me around all day, clutching my leg and crying. I don't know what to do with him." He paused a moment, chewing on his lower lip the way he'd done when he was little. "Mother, I need you too. I'm trying but I can't … I can't do it all by myself." His voice broke with sudden emotion, and Catelyn remembered that he was only fourteen. She wanted to get up and go to him, but Bran was still holding her hand and she could not move. (AGOT, Catelyn III)

They tend to have other characters reflect their inner emotions. That crying, overwhelmed child that they are trying to ingore: themselves. 

Arya, likely through warg power, wakes up to warn the others of the imminent attack. Amory Lorch’s riders are putting the town to the torch. Arya is watching from the holdfast parapets.

Something bumped against her leg, and she glanced down to discover the crying girl clutching her. “Get away!” She wrenched her leg free. “What are you doing up here? Run and hide someplace, you stupid.” She shoved the girl away.

No room for soft feelings when you have to function to survive.

Lorch is not inclined to spare Yoren on account of being with the NW. They attack and throw torches, the barn has a secret tunnel and Yoren orders them to escape. But the barn is already on fire.

As they were running toward the barn, Arya spied the crying girl sitting in the middle of the chaos, surrounded by smoke and slaughter. She grabbed her by the hand and pulled her to her feet as the others raced ahead. The girl wouldn’t walk, even when slapped. Arya dragged her with her right hand while she held Needle in the left. Ahead, the night was a sullen red. The barn’s on fire, she thought. Flames were licking up its sides from where a torch had fallen on straw, and she could hear the screaming of the animals trapped within. Hot Pie stepped out of the barn. “Arry, come on! Lommy’s gone, leave her if she won’t come!” Stubbornly, Arya dragged all the harder, pulling the crying girl along. Hot Pie scuttled back inside, abandoning them . . . but Gendry came back, the fire shining so bright on his polished helm that the horns seemed to glow orange. He ran to them, and hoisted the crying girl up over his shoulder. “Run!”  

In this moment of absolute mortal danger, Arya decides to take charge of the traumatized toddler to ensure her survival, stubbornly, violently even. Just like Yoren did with her. Hot Pie would have left her. Ouch. Gendry soon takes over, luckily. 

The open trap was only a few feet ahead, but the fire was spreading fast, consuming the old wood and dry straw faster than she would have believed. Arya remembered the Hound’s horrible burned face. “Tunnel’s narrow,” Gendry shouted. “How do we get her through?” “Pull her,” Arya said. “Push her.” “Good boys, kind boys,” called Jaqen H’ghar, coughing. “Get these fucking chains off!” Rorge screamed. Gendry ignored them. “You go first, then her, then me. Hurry, it’s a long way.” “When you split the firewood,” Arya remembered, “where did you leave the axe?” “Out by the haven.” He spared a glance for the chained men. “I’d save the donkeys first. There’s no time.” “You take her!” she yelled. “You get her out! You do it!” The fire beat at her back with hot red wings as she fled the burning barn.

Even having grabbed the little girl and knowing there is a path to escaping, Arya cannot simply flee. She hands over the charge of Weasel to Gendry and proceeds to save the lives of the three captives from the black cells. Because Arya doesn’t just let people die. Not unless she wants them dead herself. A force of nature.

She gets the axe from outside in the battlezone, walks back into the blazing barn, throws the axe into the wagon and dives down to safety. The chapter ends thus:

Arya rolled headfirst into the tunnel and dropped five feet. She got dirt in her mouth but she didn’t care, the taste was fine, the taste was mud and water and worms and life. Under the earth the air was cool and dark. Above was nothing but blood and roaring red and choking smoke and the screams of dying horses. She moved her belt around so Needle would not be in her way, and began to crawl. A dozen feet down the tunnel she heard the sound, like the roar of some monstrous beast, and a cloud of hot smoke and black dust came billowing up behind her, smelling of hell. Arya held her breath and kissed the mud on the floor of the tunnel and cried. For whom, she could not say.

So that went from dire to catastrophic.

I love how this chapter was structured. It starts out quiet, the unease builds in the empty town, they create a moment of respite eating dinner in the perceived safety of the holdfast, but even there they have doomed themselves by lighting the cookfire. Then it escalates, the howling of the wolves, the phony negotiations, the blaze they saw in the distance the chapter before now comes to them, and everything sinks into cacophony, until the last second of dubious escape. Arya’s helpless tears are such a well-earned release of panic and tension. There is no safety, only momentary escape, only confusion. It’s monstrous.

She cries, like Weasel cried.

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ACOK, Arya V (chapter 19)  

We open to Arya high up on a tree observing a village on the Western lakeshore. 

Someone’s there. Arya chewed her lip. All the other places they’d come upon had been empty and desolate. Farms, villages, castles, septs, barns, it made no matter. If it could burn, the Lannisters had burned it; if it could die, they’d killed it. 

They have been traveling in the woods a while since the night of the blaze. Arya remembers them returning the next night, burying Yoren and joining up with three survivors. The route is North along the Western lakeshore.

Cutjack opened the door at Gendry’s shout, and when Kurz said they’d be better pressing on north than going back, Arya had clung to the hope that she still might reach Winterfell. (…)

To the east, Gods Eye was a sheet of sunhammered blue that filled half the world. Some days, as they made their slow way up the muddy shore (Gendry wanted no part of any roads, and even Hot Pie and Lommy saw the sense in that), Arya felt as though the lake were calling her. (…)

North along the shore, past a number of deserted rural settlings. 

At the end of the day she would often sit on a rock and dangle her feet in the cool water. She had finally thrown away her cracked and rotted shoes. Walking barefoot was hard at first, but the blisters had finally broken, the cuts had healed, and her soles had turned to leather. The mud was nice between her toes, and she liked to feel the earth underfoot when she walked. 

This process will have taken some time. A few weeks.

From up here, she could see a small wooded island off to the northeast.

While the Isle of Faces is not truly small, there is no mention of other wooded islands on the lake. This would place Arya less than halfway up the western shore of the lake. This would match the wagon travel speed of a few weeks from the kingsroad to the holdfast on the south shore. They are slow because they avoid roads, trudge through vegetation and mud, and because they are encumbered by injury and a toddler.

The food situation is not great.

She had broken her fast on some acorn paste and a handful of bugs. Bugs weren’t so bad when you got used to them. Worms were worse, but still not as bad as the pain in your belly after days without food. Finding bugs was easy, all you had to do was kick over a rock. Arya had eaten a bug once when she was little, just to make Sansa screech, so she hadn’t been afraid to eat another. Weasel wasn’t either, but Hot Pie retched up the beetle he tried to swallow, and Lommy and Gendry wouldn’t even try. Yesterday Gendry had caught a frog and shared it with Lommy, and, a few days before, Hot Pie had found blackberries and stripped the bush bare, but mostly they had been living on water and acorns.

The kids are on their own. Kurz the poacher was kind to them and gave them some survival training. But he died four days after they set off from an infected wound. The other two adults abandoned them directly after. Echoes of Dany with Drogo and the khalasar. Up and gone when he died, leaving behind the weak and the slaves.

Maybe Tarber and Cutjack figured they would stand a better chance without a gaggle of orphan boys to herd along. They probably would too, but that didn’t stop her hating them for leaving.

This is horrific. Four children between 14 and 9 years old, plus a little toddler. Sneakily abandoned by the two remaining adults. The Hansel and Gretel vibes are strong. Like Hansel and Gretel, they will be captured looking for food. Like Gretel, Arya will free them using cooking as a weapon, eventually. But that’s for later.

Very much of Arya’s chapters echoes Dany, actually. All from opposite sides. The violence, the abandonment, the eventual enslavement, the starving. The comparison to sheep. It all shows the bottom side of Dany’s war at Drogo’s side, and her travels through the desert with the baby dragons. Even Vaes Tolorro mirrors the Gods Eye town. Food and rest, and visitors that will lead them to another large settlement, eventually. But back to the kids in the woods.

Arya rejoins the others and we see Weasel again. 

At the sound of her voice, Weasel came creeping out from the bushes. Lommy had named her that. He said she looked like a weasel, which wasn’t true, but they couldn’t keep on calling her the crying girl after she finally stopped crying. Her mouth was filthy. Arya hoped she hadn’t been eating mud again.

“Did you see people?” asked Gendry. “Mostly just roofs,” Arya admitted, “but some chimneys were smoking, and I heard a horse.” The Weasel put her arms around her leg, clutching tight. Sometimes she did that now.

So Weasel is all cried out. It’s been a month or so since she lost her family after her village was set ablaze, followed soon after by another such violent, fiery attack. She went from a stationary life in a vilage with her family, meal time, bed time, cuddles and playing, to a life of being scared, confused, hungry, dirty and constantly on the move. 

Like Arya, Weasel stopped crying, like Arya, Weasel doesn’t mind mud in her mouth.

“If it’s a fishing village, they’d sell us fish, I bet,” said Hot Pie. The lake teemed with fresh fish, but they had nothing to catch them with. Arya had tried to use her hands, the way she’d seen Koss do, but fish were quicker than pigeons and the water played tricks on her eyes. “I don’t know about fish.” Arya tugged at the Weasel’s matted hair, thinking it might be best to hack it off. “There’s crows down by the water. Something’s dead there.” “Fish, washed up on shore,” Hot Pie said. “If the crows eat it, I bet we could.” “We should catch some crows, we could eat them,” said Lommy. “We could make a fire and roast them like chickens.”

I love these kids. They are hungry and grumpy and irritated and listless, in their way. They have no clue what to do and injured Lommy is the most anxious of them all. His leg was wounded and infection is setting in. He is the most helpless, and it makes him the most annoying of them. Yield, he says. Yield.

Like Yoren did to her, Arya contemplates hacking off Weasel’s hair. Matted, tangled. Like a bird’s nest, perchance? 

A lovely parallel highlighting the role of privilege, with another taumatized orphan cared for by a Stark daughter:

Alayne smoothed his hair. Lady Lysa had never let the servants touch it, and after she had died Robert had suffered terrible shaking fits whenever anyone came near him with a blade, so it had been allowed to grow until it tumbled over his round shoulders and halfway down his flabby white chest. He does have pretty hair. If the gods are good and he lives long enough to wed, his wife will admire his hair, surely. That much she will love about him. (TWOW, Alayne I)

Arya is trying to care for this child, for her inner child, but she does it listlessly, no practice, no plan. She doesn’t talk to Weasel, at all. Numb.

“Whoever it is, you should yield to them,” Lommy whined. “I need some potion for my leg, it hurts bad.” “If we see any leg potion, we’ll bring it,” Gendry said. “Arry, let’s go, I want to get near before the sun is down. Hot Pie, you keep Weasel here, I don’t want her following.” “Last time she kicked me.” “I’ll kick you if you don’t keep her here.” Without waiting for an answer,  Gendry donned his steel helm and walked off.  Arya had to scamper to keep up. Gendry was five years older and a foot taller than she was, and long of leg as well. For a while he said nothing, just plowed on through the trees with an angry look on his face, making too much noise. But finally he stopped and said, “I think Lommy’s going to die.”

Ah. 

Gendry is the “adult” in the group and he’s definitely going through his own “Rickon in tugging on my leg” phase, and presenting Arya with a variant of an offer Dany gets from Xaro in Meereen later: Abandon this doomed, starving lot and take your chances elsewhere. Unlike Dany, Arya is not actually responsible for any of these children, not even little Weasel. Unlike Dany, she is not even close to tempted.

“I’m sick of carrying him, and I’m sick of all his talk about yielding too. If he could stand up, I’d knock his teeth in. Lommy’s no use to anyone. That crying girl’s no use either.” “You leave Weasel alone, she’s just scared and hungry is all.” Arya glanced back, but the girl was not following for once. Hot Pie must have grabbed her, like Gendry had told him. “She’s no use,” Gendry repeated stubbornly. “Her and Hot Pie and Lommy, they’re slowing us down, and they’re going to get us killed. You’re the only one of the bunch who’s good for anything. Even if you are a girl.”

I am cutting out the following super hilarious exchange around revealing her identity, along with the horrible description of the village with the gibbet and the “SS rounds up the villagers for questioning and deportation” imagery.

Gendry gets himself captured and hauled into the warehouse with the other prisoners. Arya will leave no one behind. Arya will defend her pack. 

Lommy and Hot Pie almost shit themselves when she stepped out of the trees behind them. “Quiet,” she told them, putting an arm around Weasel when the little girl came running up.

Hot Pie stared at her with big eyes. “We thought you left us.” He had his shortsword in hand, the one Yoren had taken off the gold cloak. “I was scared you was a wolf.”

She has her arms around Weasel, trying to comfort the child, keeping in touch with the last of her innocence. It’s her final interaction with Weasel. They thought she was a wolf. She will be. 

Hot Pie glanced at Lommy, at Arya, at Lommy again. “I’ll come,” he said reluctantly. “Lommy, you keep Weasel here.” He grabbed the little girl by the hand and pulled her close. “What if the wolves come?” “Yield,” Arya suggested.

Iconic, badass quote. Heartbreaking context. Their rescue mission is unsurprisingly doomed before it truly gets going. Hot Pie “yields” at the first instance and Arya receives a terrible blow to the head. They take Needle. They are made to lead guards to Lommy and Weasel. 

The man with the torch searched around under the trees. “Are you the last? Baker Boy said there was a girl.” “She ran off when she heard you coming,” Lommy said. “You made a lot of noise.” And Arya thought, Run, Weasel, run as far as you can, run and hide and never come back.

Hide, inner child. Run and hide, like Nymeria. Like the wolf.

So that is the last we see of little Weasel. 

Realistically, she will be dead within days. Exposure, poisoning, injury, starvation unless she has absorbed enough from the others to gather enough bugs for herself. Or eaten by wolves. Plus the fear, the feeling of abandonment. It’s a grim picture. It becomes unbearable when you try and picture any toddler you know in the place of Weasel.

I am going to headcanon hardcore that Baby Weasel is going to be found by loving people and taken away to safety, wrapped up warm and fed and gently raised. Alternatively, she is kindly raised by the giant wolf pack. And somehow not freezing to death. *hands over ears* Lalalalaalalalalaalalala!

We end the chapter with one more death, one that we will see avenged four books later:

“Can you walk?” He sounded concerned. “No,” said Lommy. “You got to carry me.” “Think so?” The man lifted his spear casually and drove the point through the boy’s soft throat. Lommy never even had time to yield again. He jerked once, and that was all. When the man pulled his spear loose, blood sprayed out in a dark fountain. “Carry him, he says,” he muttered, chuckling.

The echoes are beautifully done.

"Well," she said, "I don't know how you'll get there, then." "You'll need to carry me." See? thought Mercy. You know your line, and so do I. "Think so?" asked Arya, sweetly. Raff the Sweetling looked up sharply as the long thin blade came sliding from her sleeve. She slipped it through his throat beneath the chin, twisted, and ripped it back out sideways with a single smooth slash. A fine red rain followed, and in his eyes the light went out. "Valar morghulis," Arya whispered, but Raff was dead and did not hear. 

(TWOW, Mercy)

On the one hand, it’s poetic justice. On the other, it screams out that Arya is basically a child concentration camp survivor but the war is not over. She has had no peace, only ever more hiding, no play, only ever more working, no recovery, only ever more killing. She is in exile, still. But she will return home. And she will one day recover. But she will never ever forget.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In Arya VI, she chooses a new name herself for the first time. The concentration camp vibes are strong. Just read the chapter.

“Some farmer’s whelp, are you? Well, never you mind, girl, you have a chance to win a higher place in this world if you work hard. If you won’t work hard, you’ll be beaten. And what do they call you?” Arya dared not say her true name, but Arry was no good either, it was a boy’s name and they could see she was no boy. “Weasel,” she said, naming the first girl she could think of. “Lommy called me Weasel.”

Lommy and Weasel. Injured and young. No use. Dead and gone but not forgotten.

Ramsey names his dogs for the girls he killed. Sansa and Jon each want to name her future children for the family they lost. Arya names herself for the women and girls she cared about. Weasel. Cat. Nymeria, Nan. Even little Beth Cassel. Her kill list is one part of her. But the list of names that truly matters is another. She takes up their cause not in a hope for a peaceful future with personal happiness like Jon and Sansa but in the here and now, within the broiling whirlwind of injustices. But the very first name is for the little girl, for herself, essentially. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In conclusion:

Little Weasel is, to me, a personification of Arya’s inner child, as she struggles with her loss of innocence and the abandonment by adults. Because she shows up when they encounter their first hardcore warcrime scene. Arya tries to ignore her wailing and pays little attention to her, but attaches her to her hopes for help from Lady Whent and her Knights. She doesn’t take charge of Weasel until their adult caretakers, such as they are, become unavailable by way of being horribly murdered in battle. She is not really equipped to care for her, but she tries and she is determined not to abandon her. When she has disappeared, Arya doesn’t despair, she wishes her well, she has some remnant of faith and she attaches it to Weasel. Off into the wild, to escape certain death, perchance to survive, like she sent off Nymeria. 

It is no accident that Arya names herself Weasel when she enters the concentration camp hell that is Harrenhal, and it is a truly briliant stroke that her only direct memory of Weasel after that is when Arya enters service in the House of Black and White in AFFC, Arya II, which seems more empowering but draws up many comparisons in her mind to Harrenhal. The inner child has run off, but her spirit remains hovering over Arya, never quite fading.