The air on this new continent was thick with the scent of spices and strange flowers, but Arya ignored the beauty. She kept her eyes on the structure before her: a tiered monastery of jade-green stone, built into a cliff face high above the churning sea.
It had taken her three years of relentless sailing, relying on sheer will and inherited Stark stubbornness, to find the edge of the map. It had taken her three weeks on this shore to realize that the legends of the western lands weren't about gold or jungles, but about this.
This was no civilization; it was a fortress.
She crouched beneath the dense canopy of an ironwood-like tree, the dark leather of her traveling clothes blending into the shadows. From her hidden vantage point, she watched the sentries. They wore robes of undyed linen, and their weapons—short, curved blades that looked brutally efficient—were made of a gleaming, unfamiliar pale metal.
They were disciplined. Too disciplined for simple monks.
Arya had tracked them for days, watching them patrol the cliff paths and observing the quiet procession of supply boats that left their hidden harbor every other night, always heading east. She hadn't known what they were smuggling until three nights ago, when she slipped close enough to the docks to hear their language—a High Valyrian dialect, sharp and ancient—and see their cargo.
It wasn't spices. It was knowledge. Volumes of texts, rolled parchment sealed in waterproof tubes, and heavy, lead-lined chests. Information that, if put into the wrong hands in King's Landing, could destabilize the fragile peace her siblings had fought so hard to secure.
She touched the hilt of Needle, a familiar comfort beneath her hand. The time for exploration was over. The time for being No One—or at least, the girl who remembered how to be—had begun.
She needed to get inside. She needed to know who was behind this and what they intended to do with Westeros's secrets.
The sun began its slow descent, painting the western sky in angry reds and oranges. As the first star-lanterns began to glow within the jade monastery, Arya pulled a small, stitched leather pouch from her belt. Inside, carefully folded, was the face she'd taken from a minor trading magnate she'd met on the journey. A plump, harmless face that smelled faintly of rosewater and false prosperity.
A girl has a name, she thought, breathing a silent promise to the Many-Faced God. And a mission.