Game of Thrones didn’t leave Arya Stark in a great place at the end of Season 5. After going rogue and killing Meryn Trant to take a name off her list, she was punished by her House of Black and White mentor, Jaqen H’ghar, by having her eyesight taken from her.

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Blindness might seem like the worst curse for a fighter like Arya, but Tom Wlaschiha promises that his character is only out to help the young Stark. “I think Jaqen really likes Arya,” Wlaschiha told me during a recent interview, “otherwise he wouldn’t have taken her on as an apprentice, and he sees something with her.“He sees a lot of potential in her, but he wants her to learn and to be the best woman she can be. If she had gone off a couple of seasons ago and started killing off her list of victims, probably she wouldn’t have succeeded. He wants her to be somewhere up there.”Jaqen has been an important figure to Arya since Season 2, ever since they first crossed paths on their way to the Wall. Though their paths were circuitous until they found themselves together again in Braavos, Wlaschiha subscribes to the theory that Jaqen’s plan all along was to get close to Arya.“We still don’t know how he ended up in the prison in King’s Landing in the first place. I really hope George Martin has a bigger plan and is going to explain that at some point,” he said. “It all looks like, from the get-go, that he had his plan with Arya and he was pursuing them. He wasn’t in that cage for nothing. I hope there’s going to be some sort of resolution, some sort of bigger picture.”Little is known about the Faceless Men, and some fans believe that the House of Black and White could have some big picture goals (a theory which is only fueled by the fact Wlaschiha believes Jaqen is aware of the White Walkers and the Night’s King ). Of the Faceless Men’s true goals — and whether they might involve, say, getting a dragon — Wlaschiha admits he’s still in the dark.“Personally, I have no idea, but the way I see it, maybe they’re like a counterforce to the White Walkers. They’re very zen. There’s old religion, there’s old cult, everybody’s equal. It’s like a balancing thing, for me,” he said, adding with a laugh, “That’s what I like about the philosophy about the House of Black and White and the Faceless Men is that all people are created equal. For me, it’s like a mix between the Bible and the Communist Manifesto.”

Game of Thrones: Season 6 premieres Sunday, April 24th at 9 p.m. ET/PT on HBO.Terri Schwartz is Entertainment Editor at IGN. Talk to her on Twitter at @Terri_Schwartz