“The lightning lord is everywhere and nowhere, skinny squirrel.”

Synopsis: Arya and the Merry Men go looking for Robin Hood.

SPOILER WARNING: This chapter analysis, and all following, will contain spoilers for all Song of Ice and Fire novels and Game of Thrones episodes. Caveat lector.

Political Analysis:

For my money, Arya IV is where Arya’s time with the Brotherhood Without Banners really starts to pay off. There is a richness and depth to the worldbuilding of the Brotherhood’s place in the Riverlands that isn’t quite there in Arya III, and the connection between their story and the themes of Arya’s own story works just a bit better here than it does in previous chapters. This helpfully lends itself to the organization of this essay, which will analyze the Brotherhood in the first half and then devote the second half to Arya’s character specifically.

“The Guerrilla Must Move Amongst The People As A Fish Swims In The Sea.”

The chapter opens with Arya’s party making a rest stop at the keep of Lord Lychester, who is ultimately less important in and of himself (although there are some thematic resonances here as I’ll talk about later) than how the encounter reveals more about the full extent of the Brotherhood’s network in the Riverlands:

The small square keep was half a ruin, and so too the great grey knight who lived there. He was so old he did not understand their questions…the maester who cared for him was a young man, thankfully.

In previous chapters, all we’ve seen of the Brotherhood’s supporters was a morally ambiguous family of innkeepers. Here, we see that the Brotherhood Without Banners have support at other levels of society (although not always on the up-and-up). Lord Lychester might not be aware enough to voluntarily support them, but his young maester, who occupies a social rank a bit below his master but above the peasantry, is clearly an active supporter and a highly useful one at that. As the de-facto ruler of Lychester, he can provide refuge and shelter, and as a maester, he can provide access to the ravenry network and other sources of information.

Following up on the maester’s advice to “[ask] the Lady of Leaves” the group moves on from Lychester Keep to meet someone from a very different rung of society:

…Three days later, as they rode through a yellow wood, Jack-Be-Lucky unslung his horn and blew a signal, a different one than before. The sounds had scarcely died away when rope ladders unrolled from the limbs of trees. “Hobble the horses and up we go,” said Tom, half singing the words. They climbed to a hidden village in the upper branches, a maze of rope walkways and little moss-covered houses concealed behind walls of red and gold, and were taken to the Lady of the Leaves, a stick-thin white-haired woman dressed in roughspun. “We cannot stay here much longer, with autumn on us,” she told them.

For all that GRRM gets lauded as a deconstructionist, this hidden village is a High Fantasy trope, alongside Robin Hood’s forest hideout, the Inn of the Last Home from Dragonlance, Hidden Elf Village from Zelda games, or Tolkein’s Lothlorien. Which is something of an issue, given GRRM’s usual eye for class, because this particular trope doesn’t fit very well within the usual structures of medieval society. The Lady is clearly the leader but she’s not highborn, and it’s pretty clear that this hidden community of smallfolk aren’t really under the rule of any lord, which makes them something of an anomaly. (Were they outlaws before the Brotherhood showed up? Maybe smugglers or squatters?)

From there, it’s on to Sallydance, where we see that the Brotherhood Without Banner’s support crosses not just class lines but religious ones too:

The next night they found shelter beneath the scorched shell of a sept, in a burned village called Sallydance Only shards remained of its windows of leaded glass, and the aged septon who greeted them said the looters had even made off with the Mother’s costly robes, the Crone’s gilded lantern, and the silver crown the Father had worn…there were a dozen men living in the vault beneath the sept, amongst cobwebs and roots and broken wine casks….

I’ll get into the important thematic strands of the ransacked sept later, but what initially caught my eye is that the Brotherhood’s men are hidden and protected by a septon, despite the fact that the Brotherhood is openly R’hlloric in their faith, even at the cost of the destruction of his house of worship and the loss of its sacred relics. This suggests that there is a degree of faith in the Brotherhood as protectors that goes beyond sectarian boundaries, or possibly an ecumenical understanding that the Brotherhood are the only force in the RIverlands actively trying to prevent or punish attacks on septs. (More on that in Arya VII…) This incident also speaks to the revolutionary discipline of the Brotherhood, that they were able to keep quiet in the vault despite the sept being ransacked above their heads, which sounds like a scene out of a WWII Resistance movie like Flame & Citron or Anthropoid.

And then finally, this chapter ends with the group’s stay at Acorn Hall, where we meet:

It was a long day’s ride, but as dusk was settling they forded a brook and came up on Acorn Hall, with its stone curtain walls and great oaken keep. Its master was away fighting in the retinue of his master, Lord Vance, the castle gates closed and barred in his absence. But his lady wife was an old friend of Tom Sevenstrings, and Anguy said they’d once been lovers. Lady Smallwood welcomed the outlaws kindly enough, though she gave them a tongue lashing for dragging a young girl through the war. She became even more wroth when Lem let slip that Arya was highborn.

Lady Smallwood is clearly the highest social class supporter of the Brotherhood without Banners that we’ve seen to date. Her actions, in sharp contrast to those of Lord Mooton, suggests that the nobility of the Riverlands have not entirely abandoned their people.

The Many Deaths of Beric Dondarrion

As part of their journey through the southern Riverlands, Arya’s group go through a repeated exchange where they are told that Beric Dondarrion has died and they either deny the story outright or downplay the story’s import to the teller:

“I fear you seek a ghost. We have a bird, ages ago, half a year at least. The Lannisters caugh Lord Beric near the Gods Eye. He was hanged.” “Aye, hanged he was, but Thoros cut him down before he died…his lordship’s a hard man to kill, he is.”

There’s a lot going on here, so it’s worth taking a second to break it down. To begin with, because GRRM is a lapsed Catholic, I can’t help but notice a resemblance between these denials and Peter’s three denials of Jesus Christ, especially since Beric Dondarrion is very much a dying-rebirth martyr-figure. On a literary level, though, it’s clearly also part of GRRM’s threefold revelations strategy: first, GRRM subtly hinted something was up in Arya VII of ACOK, now he’s laying it on more thickly, and then in Arya VI of this book he’ll show it outright.

However, it’s also clear from this chapter that there is a morale purpose to these denials:

“He’s dead.” The woman sounded sick. “The Mountain caught him, and drove a dagger through his eye. A begging brother told us. He had it from the lips of a man who saw it happen. “That’s an old stale tale, and false,” said Lem. “The lightning lord’s not so easy to kill. Ser Gregor might have put his eye out, but a man don’t die o’ that. Jack could tell you.” “Well, I never did,” said one-eyed Jack-Be-Lucky. “My father got himself good and hanged by Lord Piper’s bailiff, my brother Wat got sent to the Wall, and the Lannisters killed my other brothers. An eye, that’s nothing.” “You swear he’s not dead?” The woman clutched Lem’s arm. “Bless you, Lem, that’s the best tidings we’ve had in half a year. May the Warrior defend him, and the red priest too.”

Because of what happens to the Brotherhood Without Banners in AFFC (more on this when I get to Book vs. Show), it’s absolutely crucial at this juncture to show that Beric and the Brotherhood mean so much to the smallfolk that the mere fact of his survival brings hope to them, that the Lannisters who have killed so many of their own cannot kill him, that their oppressors cannot take away their last hero. And Beric himself clearly sees his lives and deaths as a way to inspire the smallfolk of the Riverlands: his first death at the Mummer’s Ford was undertaken to bring the king’s justice to Gregor Clegane (more on this later); his second death was a deliberate strategy to lure Ser Burton Crakehall and his column into an ambush; the hanging described above was a deliberate self-sacrifice to try to save a beekeeper and his wife from Ser Amory Lorch’s noose; and his loss of an eye at the hands of Gregor Clegane and the arrow he took in a skirmish with the Bloody Mummers speak to his ongoing efforts to fight the reavers regardless of whether they fight for the Lannisters or the Boltons.

I’m also wondering whether the Brotherhood’s denials are either covering up the resurrection – although you’d think the “good word” that Beric Dondarrion literally came back from the dead would be incredibly powerful – or whether they’re in denial, given how increasingly implausible their cover stories get (from a lucky escape from a slow hanging to surviving a dirk stuck in your eye). (On a sidenote, I’d also note a religious syncretism at work here that follows on from the septon at Sallydance, with the Lady of Leaves invoking the Warrior to bless a priest of R’hllor.)

“I’m Beric Dondarrion!”

At the same time, GRRM does a neat trick of misdirecting the audience (a key part of how he often gets away with his threefold revelation strategy) by putting the discussion of Beric’s deaths in the larger context of an exploration of guerilla strategy:

…they had no word of Beric Dondarrion either. Not even their leader, who wore soot-blackened armor and a crude lightning bolt on his cloak. When Greenbeard saw Arya staring at him, he laughed and said, “the lighning lord is everywhere and nowhere, skinny squirrel.”

While a re-reader knows the truth, for a first timer, this can’t help but introduce doubt: are the multiple reports the result of an ingenious strategy of outfitting various members of the Brotherhood as imposter Dondarrions – a cross between Spartacus and V for Vendetta – thus creating the appearance that Ser Beric is everywhere and nowhere and can die repeatedly and come back from the grave? Are they improbable escapes from death or miraculous healing? Or are they something more?

Beyond theatrical costumery, this charpter goes further into detail as to how the Brotherhood operates as a guerilla movement in order to explain why Arya and company have to make this extended trek:

“If you’re their men, why do they hide from you?” Tom Sevenstrings rolled his eyes at that, but Harwin gave her an answer. “I wouldn’t call it hiding, milady, but it’s true, Lord Beric moves about a lot, and seldom lets on what his plans are. That way no one can betray him. By now there must be hundreds of us sworn to him, maybe thousands, but it wouldn’t do for us all to trail along behind him. We’d eat the country bare, or get butchered in a battle by some bigger host. The way we’re scattered in little bands, we can strike in a dozen places at once, and be off somewhere else before they know. And when one of us is caught and put to the question, well, we can’t tell them where to find Lord Beric no matter what they do to us.”

As I will explain in greater detail in the Historical Analysis section below, these methods are absolutely in keeping with real-world guerrilla forces. Incidentally, this also answers a question about how the Red Wedding 2.0 will take place: there’s actually many more Brotherhood Without Banners members than we’ve seen in any one place, and when they come together à la the Tet Offensive, they may well have enough manpower to overwhelm the unsuspecting defenders of Riverrun and accomplish Lady Stoneheart’s bloody work (although probably incurring Tet Offensive levels of casualties in the process, I’m sad to say).

But in the process, Arya’s group (and the reader) gets an explanation for why they have to spend so many chapters looking for Beric Dondarrion before they get to the Big Event:

“What matters is, we have the scent now. You’ll soon be seeing Thoros and the lighning lord, I’ll wager.” …Greenbeard lowered his voice to ask if her ladyship had word of the lightning lord. “Word?” She smiled. “They were here not a fortnight past. Them and a dozen more, driving sheep. I could scarcely believe my eyes. Thoros gave me three as thanks. You’ve eaten one tonight.” “…Did his lordship say where he was bound, milady?” asked Harwin. “Lord Beric never shares his plans, but there’s hunger down near Stoney Sept and the Threepenny Wood. I should look for him there.”

Speaking of needing to show the Brotherhood as a positive force in the Riverlands, it’s worth noting that a big part of how Arya’s group finds Beric’s “scent” is that Beric and Thoros have been driving sheep across the Riverlands and giving food away to hungry people. Not only is this proof that their good intentions are reflected in their actions, but it’s also a strategy employed by insurgent movements out of enlightened self-interest whether we’re talking about Marxist guerilla armies in various parts of Latin America in the 20th and 21st centuries, the Black Panther Party’s free breakfast programs (which Hoover and the FBI considered to be their most dangerous activity because it was helping to build a political constituency in the black community), or…Robin Hood taking from the rich to give to the poor.

The Ghost of High Heart

However, only part of the scent that Arya’s group picks up on is due to Beric and Thoros’ altruism, just as only part of the Brotherhood’s story belongs to the secular/mundane “game of thrones;” the other half belongs to the magical meta-plot, and thus requires magic to locate. Hence why Arya’s group takes this time to visit a highly significant location:

The next day they rode to a place called High Heart, a hill so lofty that from atop it Arya felt as though she could see half the world. Around its brow stood a ring of huge pale stumps, all that remained of a circle of once-mighty weirwoods. Arya and Gendry walked around the hill to count them. There were thirty-one, some so wide that she could have used them for a bed. High Heart had been sacred to the children of the forest, Tom Sevenstrings told her, and some of their magic lingered here still. “No harm can ever come to those as sleep here,” the singer said. Arya thought that must be true; the hill was so high and the surrounding lands so flat that no enemy could approach unseen. The smallfolk hereabouts shunned the place, Tom told her; it was said to be haunted by the ghosts of the children of the forest who had died here when the Andal king named Erreg the Kinslayer had cut down their grove. Arya knew about the children of the forest, and about the Andals too, but ghosts did not frighten her…

While I love the description of High Heart, I have to admit that I think this section probably doesn’t belong in what’s already a rather overstuffed chapter, and it might have worked better to combine this encounter with the one from Arya VIII. (It probably would also reduce a bit of the meandering in Arya’s storyline if the hollow hill and High Heart were the same place – with the roots of the murdered trees above forming the roof of the cave below – given that they’re pretty much in the same area, they’re both hills, and they’re both associated with weirwood trees.) However, one can’t argue with the way that the passage evokes High Heart as a place of dubious safety – after all, the magic of the Children of the Forest didn’t exactly protect them from Erreg the Kinslayer – a place of ghosts and tragic loss, and a place of mystery and magic. And tied to all these things is the chief Ghost herself:

Beside the embers of their campfire, she saw Tom, Lem, and Greenbeard talking to a tiny little woman, a foot shorter than Arya and older than Old Nan, all stooped and wrinkled and leaning on a gnarled black cane. Her white hair was so long it came almost to the ground. When the wind gusted it blew about her head in a fine cloud. Her flesh was whiter, the color of milk, and it seemed to Arya that her eyes were red, though it was hard to tell from the bushes. “The old gods stir and will not let me sleep,” she heard the woman say. “I dreamt I saw a shadow with a burning heart butchering a golden stag, aye. I dreamt of a man without a face, waiting on a bridge that swayed and swung. On his shoulder perched a drowned crow with seaweed hanging from his wings. I dreamt of a roaring river and a woman that was a fish. Dead she drifted, with red tears on her cheeks, but when her eyes did open, oh, I woke from terror. All this I dreamt, and more. Do you have gifts for me, to pay me for my dreams?”

This is a great example of how GRRM does prophecy: you have the correct prediction of a past event the audience will recognize (in this case, the death of Renly), then there’s the present/near-future prediction which is something of a misdirect (not that the prophecy is wrong, only that Balon’s death is largely tangential to the Brotherhood and Arya’s story, it’s not connected to R’hllor in the same way that the other two prophecies are, etc.), and then the third prophecy (the birth of Lady Stoneheart) is the really important part which bears directly and profoundly on the future of both the Brotherhood and Arya Stark.

As to who the Ghost of High Heart is, I’ll leave that mystery to Arya VIII. In the mean time, Arya doesn’t quite hear (and we don’t see) the Ghost of High Heart give the Brotherhood a clue as to where to head next, because it’s immediately after this that Tom Sevenstrings talks about getting Beric and Thoros’ location.

Tom Sevenstrings: Dirtbag Romantic

Before I move on to discuss Arya’s story, we get a bit more about the personalities of some of the main members of the Brotherhood Without Banners, in part because Arya’s still got another four chapters to go with them in this book, and in part because we’re going to see them again in AFFC and GRRM wants the audience to remember them when they come back. We start with someone we’ve already been spending some time with, Tom Sevenstrings:

“One good song, and we’d know who Ser Maynard used to be and why he wanted to cross this bridge so bad. Poor old Lychester might be as far famed as the Dragonknight if he’d only had sense enough to keep a singer.” “Lord Lychester’s sons died in Robert’s Rebellion,” grumbled Lem. “Some on one side, some t’other. He’s not been right in the head since. No bloody song’s like to help any o’ that.”

As we sort of already knew, Tom is an idealist, a capital-R Romantic, and very much a capital-A Artist. And here I think we see the two halves of GRRM’s mind in conflict here: on the one hand, GRRM is very much a Romantic himself and absolutely believes that songs bring a form of transcendant immortality (hence why it’s a song of ice and fire). On the other hand, he’s also very aware that there is an often brutal reality often ignored by the fantasy genre, a cost paid for every just war, every righteous rebellion. Indeed, one could argue that Tom is something of a critique of an excessive attitude to the priority of Art over the real concerns of life:

“And that son of his…a man who hates music can’t be trusted, I always say.” “It’s not music he hates,” said Lem. “It’s you, fool.” “Well, he has no cause. The wench was willing to make a man of him, is it my fault he drank too much to do the deed?” Lem snorted through his broken nose. “Was it you who made a song of it, or some other bloody arse in love with his own voice?” “I only sang it the once,” Tom complained. “And who’s to say the song was about him? ‘Twas a song about a fish.”

Here we see Tom not exactly enjoying or being willing to accept the consequences of satire (a rather familiar debate on the internet); the problem is that the artist cannot control how people will react to their work, especially the people whom the work is about. And just as it’s almost always bullshit when an artist reacts to criticism by saying that their work isn’t actually about real world issues, or isn’t actually trying to make any political statement and isn’t trying to say anything (in which case, why bother?), his complaint that the floppy fish song isn’t about Edmure Tully’s whiskey dick is clearly a lie. Moreover, it’s completely unreasonable for Tom to say that Edmure “has no cause” to be mad at him, when Tom damaged his reputation on a deeply, embarrasingly personal level for no cause. The Celts, who believed that song could literally remake the world as magic, had higher standards for their bards – satire was supposed to be used to bring down tyrants, not drunk teenagers.

At the same time, this passage is an amazing cross between a Brick Joke and a Chekov’s Gun, because without this clue, you wouldn’t know that Tom Sevenstrings was the singer brought in by Jaime Lannister (aping his father rather unimaginatively) to play the “Rains of Castamere” for Edmure Tully. Going back to my theories about the Red Wedding 2.0 above, since Tom Sevenstrings is sticking around at Riverrun to be the castle’s singer, it’s quite possible that he’s transmitted instructions from the Brotherhood (and/or “your sister”) to Edmure to set up the ambush from the inside, and if Tom becomes the castle’s singer it’s quite possible he’ll play an Abel role in the affair.

Finally, it also shows a continuing association between Tom Sevenstrings and the Rabelaisian world of lust and drink:

“Someone could make a rare fine song of that.” Tom plucked a string on his woodharp. Lady Smallwood gave him a withering look. “Someone who doesn’t rhyme carry on with Dondarrion, perhaps. Or play ‘Oh, Lay My Sweet Lass Down in the Grass’ to every milkmaid in the shire and leave two of them with big bellies…men will be calling you Tom Sevensons before much longer.”

Given how little of Tom’s bullshit she’s willing to put up with, while it’s clear that the “lady wife was an old friend of Tom Sevenstrings,” I’m less sure that “they’d once been lovers,” or if they had it’s pretty clear that she tired of him pretty damn quickly. It also suggests that, while Tom has pretensions of being a True Artist, he’s a bit of a hack who goes for the obvious rhyme (although to be fair, Dondarrion is a tough one) and who’s more interested in the groupies than the work itself.

Thoros Karamazov

After Tom, the next personality we get introduced to is actually we’ve met before, way back in AGOT but only as a mere background character (not that unlike his compatriot Beric Dondarrion), Thoros of Myr:

“Thoros herding sheep?” Anguy laughed aloud. “I grant you it was an odd sight, but Thoros claimed that as a priest he knew how to tend a flock.” “Aye, and shear them too.”

GRRM is doing an multilayered bit of misdirection here. While quietly suggesting that Thoros has become more assiduous in his pastoral duties, he hides that behind a portrait of a cheerfully corrupt man of the cloth, more interested in the world of the flesh:

“This Thoros,” Gendry said as they walked past the kennels, “is he the same Thoros who lived in the castle at King’s Landing? A red priest, fat, with a shaved head?…My master always scolded him about his flaming swords. It was no way to treat good steel, he’d say, but this Thoros never used good steel. He’d just dip some cheap sword in wildfire and set it alight. It was only an alchemist’s trick, my master said, but it scared the horses and some of the greener knights….He liked feasts and tourneys, that was why King Robert was so fond of him. And this Thoros was brave. When the walls of Pyke crashed down, he was the first through the breach. He fought with one of his flaming swords, setting ironmen afire with every slash….it’s only a trick.”

This is the bigger misdirect. Unbeknownst to the reader, this portrait of Thoros of Myr as Robert Baratheon’s Rabelaisian drinking budy whose magic was “only a trick” was accurate until fairly recently. Off-page, however, he’s experienced a profound spiritual awakening that has transformed the faithless mountebank into a righteous warrior of god, the trick into a genuine miracle. (It also works as yet another misdirect for Beric Dondarrion’s resurrection discussed above; a first-time reader is doubly unlikely to believe that he’s coming back from the dead if the only magic worker near him is a fraud.) It’s also interesting that this isn’t the first off-page transformation Thoros will experience; between the Epilogue of ASOS and his reappearance in Brienne VIII of AFFC, he’ll lose all of his hard-won faith.

Arya’s Story: on Torture and Justice

Now that we have exhaustively covered the Brotherhood Without Banners, we move on to what all of this means to Arya. The thematic parallels come thick and fast, in no small part because Arya’s story and the Brotherhood’s have been orbiting around eachother ever since she left King’s Landing:

He hesitated. “You know what it means, to be put to the question?” Arya nodded. “Tickling, they called it. Polliver and Raff and all.” She told them about the village by the Gods Eye where she and Gendry had been caught, and the questions that the Tickler had asked…Just thinking of it, she could hear the shrieks again, and smell the stench of blood and shit and burning flesh. “He always asked the same questions,” she told the outlaws solemnly, “but he changed the tickling every day.” “No child should be made to suffer that,” Harwin said when she was done. “The Mountain lost half his men at the Stone Mill, we hear. Might be this Tickler’s floating down the Red Fork even now, with fish biting at his face. If not, well, it’s one more crime they’ll answer for. I’ve heard his lordship say this war began when the Hand sent him out to bring the king’s justice to Gregor Clegane, and that’s how he means for it to end.”

The first and most obvious connection between Arya and the Brotherhood is that way that Arya has been a witness to (and victim of) the evils done by the Lannisters in their hunt for the Brotherhood. And just as much as her quest for vengeance was started by the murder of her father, from her list alone we know just as much of it was driven by what she saw in the Riverlands. And thus, Arya and the Brotherhood have many enemies in common: the Lannisters, Gregor Clegane and his men, and of course, the Hound.

However, the Brotherhood also introduces an interesting tension between vengeance and justice. While Beric will give the more high-falutin’ version in a couple chapters, if there is a higher purpose to the Brotherhood Without Banners, it’s in Harwin’s horrified insistence that “no child should be made to suffer.” This idea, that violence should be serve a higher purpose than blood for blood makes the Brotherhood something of a challenge to Arya’s worldview, and I wonder whether this will affect how Arya reacts to LSH when she gets back to the Riverlands…

The Wolves of War

Speaking of the costs of vengeance, one of the running threads that affects Arya deeply in this chapter is the repeated appearance (first at the treetop village and second at Sallydance) of the Karstarks off on their suicide run:

“A dozen wolves went down the Hayford road nine days past, hunting. If they’d chanced to look up they might have seen us.” “…Whose work was this?” said Lem Lemoncloak. “Mummers?” “No, the old man said. “Northmen, they were. Savages who worship trees. They wanted the Kingslayer, they said.” Arya heard him, and chewed her lip. She could feel Gendry looking at her. It made her angry and ashamed.

Lest anyone be deceived as to how virtuous Rickard Karstark’s quest for revenge was, note that the first thing these men do is to sack a sept, a sept that belongs not to their Lannister enemies but to the Riverlander allies they abandoned. Neverthless, this hits Arya hard – so much of her identity is tied up in being a “wolf” and now the wolves have become evil. Hence her feeling of intense shame, which will only become more profound and more intensely personal.

When she gets to Acorn Hall, however, we see a different side of Arya’s attitude to the Karstark men:

“You’d best know, I’ve had less pleasant callers as well. A pack of wolves came howling around my gates, thinking I might have Jaime Lannister in here.” Tom stopped his plucking. “Then it’s true, the Kingslayer is loose again?” Lady Smallwood gave him a scornful look. “I hardly think they’d be hunting him if he was chained up under Riverrun.” “What did m’lady tell them?” asked Jack-Be-Lucky. “Why, that I had Ser Jaime naked in my bed, but I’d left him much too exhausted to come down. One of them had the effrontery to call me a liar, so we saw them off with a few quarrels. I believe they made for Blackbottom Bend.” Arya squirmed restlessly in her seat. “What northmen was it, who came looking after the Kingslayer?” Lady Smallwood seemed surprised that she’d spoken. “They did not give their names, child, but they wore black, with the badge of a white sun on the breast.” A white sun on black was the sigil of Lord Karstark, Arya thought. Those were Robb’s men. She wondered if they were still close. If she could give the outlaws the slip and find them, maybe they would take her to her mother at Riverrun…

I love this sequence for a couple reasons, not the least of which is Lady Smallwood combining a brave stand (after all, we’ve just seen what the Karstark men are capable of) with a much-needed bit of comic relief (which ties back to the former, since the comedy is reminiscent of a Lysistrata-style affirmation of sexuality over violence). It also does a great job of tying in with Jaime III (and reminding us how close these POV characters actually are and how the disparate plots are actually interacting with one another all the time), as these doomed idiots don’t even realize that their prize has slipped through their fingers because they’re too busy hassling civilians.

Arya’s moment where she has second thoughts about running away despite having given her word to Harwin is proof that Arya still hasn’t had all of their childishness burned away with, but it’s also necessary to bring Catelyn front and center:

“Did they say how Lannister came to escape?” Lem asked. “They did,” said Lady Smallwood. “Not that I believe a word of it. They claimed that Lady Catelyn set him free.” That startled Tom so badly he snapped a string. “Go on with you,” he said. “That’s madness.” It’s not true, thought Arya. It couldn’t be true.

Catelyn’s involvement in Jaime’s release makes all of the built-up shame intensely personal – the figure who represents safety more than anyone else in the world, the one she so desperately wants to get back to that she’s willing forswear herself and run away to join up with marauding Karstarks, is the one responsible for the Karstarks’ marauding in the first place. Her mother, the oldest remaining member of House Stark, has betrayed House Stark (unbeknownst to Arya, to rescue her, which would only make matters worse had she known). This reaction is critical for understanding Arya’s behavior later in the chapter.

Ransom and Self Worth

Fairly early on in the chapter, we get a sense of how everything that Arya’s experienced throughout all of her travails in ACOK has affected her state of mind when the topic of ransoms comes up. Initially, it’s a source of tension between her and the Brotherhood:

Lem and Gendry played tiles with their hosts that night, while Tom Sevenstrings sang a silly song about Big Belly Ben and the High Septon’s goose. Anguy let Arya try his longbow, but no matter how hard she bit her lip she could not draw it. “You need a lighter bow, milady,” the freckled bowman said. “If there’s seasoned wood at Riverrun, might be I’ll make you one.” Tom overheard him, and broke off his song. “You’re a young fool, Archer. If we go to Riverrun it will only be to collect her ransom, won’t be no time for you to sit about making bows. Be thankful if you get out with your hide. Lord Hoster was hanging outlaws before you were shaving…”

Everything that should make the Brotherhood and Arya get along – their common enemies, their admiration for her spirit, Anguy’s guileless friendliness – is constrained by the simple fact that the Brotherhood are outlaws who are holding Arya for ransom (while at the same time recognizing that Arya’s family are noblemen who would see it as their duty, as part of upholding law and order, to hang them). As much as someone like Anguy would like to treat Arya like a person, the “Cause” requires the Brotherhood to treat her as a bargaining chip:

“What did he mean about ransom?” “We have sore need of horses, milady. Armor as well. Swords, shields, spears. All the things coin can buy. Aye, and seed for planting. Winter is coming, remember?” He touched her under the chin. “You will not be the first highborn captive we’ve ransomed. Nor the last, I’d hope.” That much was true, Arya knew. Knights were captured and ransomed all the time, and sometimes women were too. But what if Robb won’t pay their price? She wasn’t a famous knight, and kings were supposed to put the realm before their sisters. And her lady mother, what would she say? Would she still want her back, after all the things she’d done? Arya chewed her lip and wondered.

What’s interesting about Arya’s psychology in this moment is that Arya doesn’t actually resent Harwin for putting the good of the Brotherhood – their need for war materiel to allow them to fight on more even terms with the occupiers, as well as their redistribution of agricultural goods to starving peasants for whom one more harvest will mean the difference between life and death. Rather, her disquiet comes from a lack of self-worth, that she doesn’t believe that her mother would “still want her back” because of “all the things she’s done,” a clear sign of the lasting damage that trauma has done to her psyche. (Incidentally, Arya’s statement that “kings were supposed to put the realm before their sisters” is a nice counter to the argument that Robb was slighting his sisters in his negotiations with the Lannisters.)

And connected to Arya’s self-image is the tricky issue of gender.

Acorn Hall and Femininity

While Acorn Hall has its relevance for the Brotherhood, its major thematic importance for Arya’s story is that it’s the first really female space she’s been in since Winterfell, and Lady Smallwood is the closest thing to a mother figure to appear in any of Arya’s POV chapters:

“Who dressed the poor child in those Bolton rags?” she demanded of them. “That badge…there’s many a man who would hang her in half a heartbeat for wearing a flayed man on her breast.” Arya promptly found herself marched upstairs, forced into a tub, and doused with scalding hot water. Lady Smallwood’s maidservants scrubbed her so hard it felt like they were flaying her themselves. They even dumped in some stinky-sweet stuff that smelled like flowers. And afterward, they insisted she dress herself in girl’s things, brown woolen stockings and a light linen shift, and over that a light green gown with acorns embroidered all over the bodice in brown thread, and more acorns bordering the hem. “My great-aunt is a septa at a motherhouse in Oldtown,” Lady Smallwood said as the women laced the gown up Arya’s back. “I sent my daughter there when the war began. She’ll have outgrown these things by the time she returns, no doubt. Are you fond of dancing, child? My Carellen’s a lovely dancer. She sings beautifully as well. What do you like to do?”

Arya’s discomfort with all of this comes from a far more complicated place than Benioff and Weiss’ “most girls are idiots” line. Yes, Arya has strong “tomboyish” leanings but they’re also linked into generally childish leanings – she lilkes running around outside and getting dirty, she doesn’t like taking baths, and she doesn’t like sitting still. Moreover, her feelings towards femininity as a concept aren’t simple rejection:

She scuffed a toe amongst the rushes. “Needlework.” “Very restful, isn’t it?” “Well,” said Arya, “not the way I do it.” “No? I have always found it so. The gods give each of us our little gifts and talents, and it is meant for us to use them, my aunt always says. Any act can be a prayer, if done as well as we are able. Isn’t that a lovely thought? Remember that the next time you do your needlework. Do you work at it every day?”

The scuffing of the toe, the evasive dialogue – these are signs of embarrassment and uncertainty, because Arya is insecure about her femininity as she knows she’s bad at performing it. Instead, Arya looks to other identities – she knows or thinks that she can’t be “a proper young lady” so she tries to be “a wolf” instead. (Notably, this line of thinking falls away when Arya gets to Braavos, where she gets a lot better at performing in general.)

At the same time, Lady Smallwood’s reaction, which is about as close as we get to GRRM’s feelings on the matter that we get in this chapter, is more complicated than either approving or rejecting Arya’s position. The idea that “the gods give each of us our little gifts and talents, and it is meant for us to use them” at the very least implies that some people are good at traditional feminine handicrafts (needlework as Lady Smallwood understands it) and other people have other gifts (needlework as Arya means it) and that both paths are equally valid, that “any act can be a prayer.” (Incidentally, there’s some interesting echoesthere of Arya’s future tenure at the House of Black and White, where all kinds of violent actions are considered prayers.)

However, Arya’s encounter with femininity in this chapter is somewhat unsettling for her because in this chapter (and even more so in the next Arya chapter when we get to “The Peach”) it’s associated with puberty* and how that will change her relationships with men:

*(I’m not going to go down the well-trodden road of discussing how GRRM’s writing on this topic is problematic – only to note that this section would work a lot better if, following the show’s aging up of its main characters, Arya was 12 going on 13 in this chapter instead of 10 years old.)

“You look different now. Like a proper little girl.” “I look like an oak tree, with all these stupid acorns.” “Nice, though. A nice oak tree.” He stepped closer, and sniffed at her. “You even smell nice for a change.” “You don’t. You stink.”

While Gendry has known intellectually that Arya was a girl for a long time, now that she’s actually wearing women’s clothing for the first time since AGOT he’s starting to treat her differently. And all of the guilt and shame about the Karstark raiders and Catelyn freeing Jaime Lannister, and all of her discomfort with her situation and the way that Gendry is treating her differently, comes pouring out of her and the two of them have a scuffle, which for a moment restores their previous mode of interaction. Unfortunately for Arya, this doesn’t get to last:

Harwin took one look at them and burst out laughing, and Anguy smiled one of his stupid freckly smiles and said, “Are we certain this one is a highborn lady?” But Lem Lemoncloak gave Gendry a clout alongside the head. “You want to fight, fight with me! She’s a girl, and half your age! You keep your hands off o’ her, you hear me?”

This way of thinking, that turns something innocent and child-like into something forbidden because of Arya’s gender, is also part of what Arya rails against – and well she should. But even here, GRRM doesn’t end the note on a straightforward note:

Lady Smallwood gave her breeches, belt, and tunic to wear, and a brown doeskin jerkin dotted with iron studs. “They were my son’s things,” she said. “He died when he was seven.” “I’m sorry, my lady.” Arya suddenly felt bad for her, and ashamed. “I’m sorry I tore the acorn dress too. It was pretty.” “Yes, child. And so are you. Be brave.”

Rather than being unmitigatedly happy about no longer having to wear girls’ clothes and getting a new set of boys’ clothes, Arya experiences a moment of sympathy and shame by coming to understand what it meant for Lady Smallwood to give her her children’s clothes, that the clothes have personal meaning beyond gender signifiers. The common ground of shared loss provides a synthesis similar to what we’ve seen above: Arya has a moment of appreciating the feminine, and Lady Smallwood suggests that one can be both “pretty” and “brave.”

Historical Analysis:

As I discussed briefly above, the Brotherhood’s organizational model – dispersing manpower into small groups rather than one main force, having those cells operate independently of one another, carefully controlling information so that groups can’t betray one another or the leadership – these are common real-world strategies of insurgent movements. For example, see this scene from Battle of Algiers (1966), one of the best films on the subject ever made:

http://www.criticalcommons.org/Members/nmirzoeff/clips/Battle%20of%20Algiers.m4v/embed_view

And there’s a reason so why this model is so common: it works. There have been other models, most notably the revolutionary secret society that flourished in Europe after the French Revolution. The Italian Carbonari who pushed for Italian unification in a number of revolutions are the most famous of these, but there were similar groups in France, in Germany, in Spain and Portugal, and in Russia operating throughout the 19th century. The problem that the secret societies ran into was that, as they attempted to grow from a nucleus of committed radicals to a mass movement, they inevitably found themselves infiltrated by government agents and informers who cared less about the binding nature of their oaths to preserve the secrecy of the organization, leading to their exposure and destruction.

Food is another common element of resistance movements. Because so much of political, economic, and social conflict in Latin America revolved around the unequal ownership of land and the direction of land use towards export commodities, food has been a central concern for guerrilla movements. In addition to political demands for redistribution of land and rhetorical calls for lower food prices, guerrilla armies have frequently seized and redistributed food as a way to gain support in rural areas.

Similarly, European resistance movements during WWII focused intensely on food, because war-time economic dislocations and German looting of food supplies lead to severe shortages of food in France, in Greece, and in Yugoslavia. Resistance groups responded by establishing food committees to redistribute food to the people, by raiding rationing offices and stealing ration coupon books (which also disrupted the mechanisms of state control and surveillance), and of course by operating in the black market which also allowed for the smuggling of information, radios, guns, and munitions as well as foodstuffs and luxury goods.

And of course, peaceful resistance movements also focus on food as a means of organizing. While the Black Panther Party gained more headlines by carrying guns in public, it was their free breakfast program that really won them support in black neighborhoods; indeed, J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI (the most inveterate enemy of the Black Panthers) stated that the breakfast program “represents the best and most influential activity going for the BPP and, as such, is potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities.”

What If?

There’s not a good opportunity for hypotheticals in this particular chapter, because there aren’t a lot of choices that Arya makes. We may have to wait for Arya VI and the duel under the hollow hill…

Book vs. Show:

This is going to repeat somewhat what I said about Arya II and Arya III, but this chapter is an excellent example of why Benioff and Weiss’ habit of over-anticipating character change is a huge problem. Unless we’ve seen the Brotherhood Without Banners in the beginning and what they meant to the smallfolk of the Riverlands, their fall from grace has no context and thus has no impact.