In his own small strutting way, Weese was nearly as scary as Ser Gregor. The Mountain swatted men like flies, but most of the time he did not even seem to know the fly was there. Weese
It took him only three days to earn the place of honor in her nightly prayers. “Weese,” she would whisper, first of all. “Dunsen, Chiswyck, Polliver, Raff the Sweetling. The Tickler and the Hound. Ser Gregor, Ser Amory, Ser Ilyn, Ser Meryn, King Joffrey, Queen Cersei.” If she let herself forget even one of them, how would she ever find him again to kill him?
On the road Arya had felt like a sheep, but Harrenhal turned her into a mouse. She was grey as a mouse in her scratchy wool shift, and like a mouse she kept to the crannies and crevices and dark holes of the castle, scurrying out of the way of the mighty.
Sometimes she thought they were
And as lords and ladies never notice the little grey mice under their feet, Arya heard all sorts of secrets just by keeping her ears open as she went about her duties. Pretty Pia from the buttery was a slut who was working her way through every knight in the castle. The wife of the gaoler was with child, but the real father was either Ser Alyn Stackspear or a singer called Whitesmile Wat. Lord Lefford made mock of ghosts at table, but always kept a candle burning by his bed. Ser Dunaver’s squire Jodge could not hold his water when he slept. The cooks despised Ser Harys Swyft and spit in all his food. Once she even overheard Maester Tothmure’s serving girl confiding to her brother about some message that said Joffrey was a bastard and not the rightful king at all. “Lord Tywin told him to burn the letter and never speak such filth again,” the girl whispered.
King Robert’s brothers Stannis and Renly had joined the fighting, she heard. “And both of them kings now,” Weese said. “Realm’s got more kings than a castle’s got rats.” Even Lannister men questioned how long Joffrey would hold the Iron Throne. “The lad’s got no army but them gold cloaks, and he’s ruled by a eunuch, a dwarf, and a woman,” she heard a lordling mutter in his cups. “What good will the likes of them be if it comes to battle?” There was always talk of Beric Dondarrion. A fat archer once said the Bloody Mummers had slain him, but the others only laughed. “Lorch killed the man at Rushing Falls, and the Mountain’s slain him twice. Got me a silver stag says he don’t stay dead this time neither.”
Arya did not know who Bloody Mummers were until a fortnight later, when the queerest company of men she’d ever seen arrived at Harrenhal. Beneath the standard of a black goat with bloody horns rode copper men with bells in their braids; lancers astride striped black-and-white horses; bowmen with powdered cheeks; squat hairy men with shaggy shields; brown-skinned men in feathered cloaks; a wispy fool in green-and-pink motley; swordsmen with fantastic forked beards dyed green and purple and silver; spearmen with colored scars that covered their cheeks; a slender man in septon’s robes, a fatherly one in maester’s grey, and a sickly one whose leather cloak was fringed with long blond hair.
At their head was a man stick-thin and very tall, with a drawn emaciated face made even longer by the ropy black beard that grew from his pointed chin nearly to his waist. The helm that hung from his saddle horn was black steel, fashioned in the shape of a goat’s head. About his neck he wore a chain made of linked coins of many different sizes, shapes, and metals, and his horse was one of the strange black-and-white ones.
“You don’t want to know that lot, Weasel,” Weese said when he saw her looking at the goat-helmed man. Two of his drinking friends were with him, men-at-arms in service to Lord Lefford.
“Who are they?” she asked.