Chapter Thirty-Three
**Jaqen H'ghar's POV**
Jaqen was frowning when he heard what the girl had done, but it was bound to happen, he was just happy it had a positive outcome.
"A man is on an important mission," he said, stepping closer to Arya, his voice carrying its usual measured calm. "A girl knows this." He looked her over carefully. "A girl also knows of some of the monsters that have been given the gift." He paused. "A girl knows what it sometimes takes to get closer to these monsters. And while a man would be willing to trade places, he is..." he let the pause hold precisely long enough, "ill equipped, for some of these things."
He turned and walked to his satchel, checking it was secured for the night, his back to the room.
"What the Star Goddess has offered the Servants of the Many-Faced God is a potion that would make recruiting far too young boys and girls unnecessary, a girl knows this. Do not ruin this for a man or a girl will find herself getting the gift"
He hated it, that was the truth of it, beneath everything else...the calm and the careful distance and the precise economy of every word he spoke. He hated that the temple had no other choice, and had not had one for longer than any living member of the order could remember.
They could change their faces, they could alter their voices to a degree. What they could not change was their height, or their sex. And so the temple had been forced, on occasion, to take measures that no person with a conscience could examine too closely. Young children recruited for work that should never have touched them. Some of them very young indeed. Some of them sent on errands from which they did not return, because the target was the kind of creature that a grown man could not approach without raising suspicion, and a child could.
The Faceless Men had been fighting the influence of these devils since the very beginning of their order, when they had still been slaves and the order had not yet had a name. They had never found a way to vanquish them all. What they could do...what they had always done...was delay. Remove the host, slow the spread. Wait use that time to take on jobs some maybe for the funds but more often then not for the justice not afforded to all even at the cost of there own life.
Occasionally something larger had occurred and a devil had been driven out by some other force entirely. It was not until the Dragon Lords had banded together in a last stand to contain them that the explosion had been triggered...the one that had nearly wiped the dragons from existence. At that time all but two of the devils had been defeated, with that thing stuck in the North they alone were left to cause chaos. Since then, those that remained had done everything within their considerable power and influence to ensure the Targaryen's ceased to exist.
The Faceless Men had done what they could to protect them, as they always did...from the shadows, when they could, without acknowledgment, leaving no trace of their involvement. First the devils had tried poisoning the bloodline by introducing them to cursed partners directly, hoping to kill the magic in there blood. The Targaryen body had simply adapted, learning to breed with itself without the usual consequence, the magic in their blood burning out what would have destroyed any other family. Then they had found a more subtle approach...turning the family against itself, ending the dragons from the inside out. And when that nearly succeeded, they had used the Maesters to introduce slow poisons over generations, careful and patient, enough to cause madness without ever clearly leaving a cause.
It had worked, for a time. For several generations it had worked very well.
But with this generation...with the rebirth of the dragons...the madness was finally gone. Especially now that the three Dragons had found their balance.
Jaqen was special among the Servants which was why he was sent. He had been blessed by the God of Death with the ability to see the aura of a person's life. Every person carried it differently...some clear and steady, some flickering, some already beginning to dim. It made the question of a person's remaining time easier to read than their face, and it made certain other things clearer as well. Girls always had a brighter more positive aura, men carried more of a metallic sheen to theirs.
He had known the moment he was placed in that cage, when his own aura and those of the two men with him had shifted to deep red, that they were meant to die. He did not know how or when but he knew that he would not be leaving that cage alive.
Then he had seen the wolf girl. Her aura was bright and genuinely wild...the kind that moved differently from everyone around it, restless and alive it moved like a stalking beast. He had seen auras not unlike it before, but very rarely. Sometimes a person carrying that kind of energy could change destiny of those around them but usually at a cost. He had done his best to make an impression on her, with the tools available to him in a cage.
She had taken pity, he had repaid the debt, even though she was a greedy girl and the cost of his freedom had been very high indeed, he had to give the gift to far more then the agreed upon amount.
He had offered her a place partly because it was owed and partly because he had never seen anyone more naturally suited to the work. She had taken to everything with a speed that was quiet remarkable. Even the Waif had needed ten years before she was ready for the final trial, Arya had managed it in under two.
The sad truth was that they needed young and capable girls, and had for a very long time, and he had never once been comfortable with it. He still remembered his own first kill, he had been nine, the man had liked the company of young boys, but after that night, the man liked nothing ever again, and Jaqen had carried the memory of the his first gift to the world, how he could feel it in the air the world was better from his gift.
He had been different from the others in the order in one particular way...his mother had placed him on the steps of the House of Black and White as a newborn, blind and entirely without other options. This life was the only one he had ever known, he had never had anything to mourn its replacement.
But if he could help stop the need for children to be used this way...if this meeting went as he needed it to go...he would not hesitate.
He needed the morning to go well, he was not worried about what the cost might be, because whatever it was, he would pay it.
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**Aemon Targaryen's POV**
Aemon had not felt better in decades.
He was not any younger...that much was plain and he had no illusions about it...but all the pains and aches and small daily indignities of extreme old age had been addressed with a thoroughness that still surprised him when he thought about it. The wonderful Star Goddess had told him she expected him to live a good ten to fifteen years longer, which had brought a smile to his face, he knew his time was coming and he had been entirely prepared for its eventual day. He had thought he had made his peace with the nearness of the end. It turned out a little more time, offered unexpectedly, still meant something.
She had even restored his sight, he was still adjusting to seeing the world again. The world was so much brighter than he remembered, and the life he was living now was far more peaceful.
Aemon had told her everything he had learned about Oldtown about how certain powers had been working to keep the masses ignorant, and he had even found evidence...carefully gathered over years, secretly stashed away and given to her so she could do her own investigation, of what had been done to his family. By the time he had found out, it was already far too late to matter, his entire world had already ended. He thought the Gods cruel to test him at the time. He was a sworn brother, old beyond usefulness, forgotten by time, slowly fading in the cold.
Then the Star had arrived.
She had taken to calling his great niece sister, which filled his heart with absolute joy. He was not a man given to excessive sentiment normally but some things bypassed the parts of you that were careful and went directly to the parts that were not.
Today, he and she would be helping the Stark boy, she was doing something he in his wildest dreams had never even believed possible
A number of the discs in the boy's spine had fused over the years since his fall, the destroyed nerves leaving him without pain but also without the use of his legs. The lady had prepared a room for the work...the boy asleep, face down, suspended at table height by what appeared to be great swaths of spider silk, every part of him supported so perfectly that when he witnessed her wave a wand and the spine just disappeared from his body. His body did not shift in the slightest, truly remarkable.
With a few careful spells she had seen to it that everything would hold in position. The potion that would regrow the spine from the inside would be administered through a straw the boy could drink thru after he woke up. The boy was kept unconscious for now, and here she had been blunt in a way Aemon appreciated. "Once feeling starts to return to the lower half of his body, he would not thank us to be awake for it, I assure you of that, but he should be about ready soon."
Aemon had spent the past hour setting out the needles in a careful row. He had heard of a similar technique from Yi-Ti...a very long ago, very fine needles placed at specific points along the body to relieve inflammation and encourage healing. She was using the same principle, but as a channel for magic at the most delicate scale, directing the regrowth of nerves with a precision that made his own considerable medical knowledge feel clumsy by comparison as she showed him detail pictures from her medical books.
The runes she had written in ink at the hands and feet and base of the skull and along the spine would protect the healing nerves from reacting to the bone growing around them. She could use neither general magic nor sedative once the process began...she needed to be able to tell, at every stage, whether the healing was taking correctly, and apply power to certain needles in a certain order.
The boys would probably be glad to feel anything, Aemon thought, even pain, after years of nothing at all, of this he was certain.
Around this time the door opened, and a tall man in brown robes entered with a young girl at his side.
Aemon looked at her, and remembered. Jon had talked about this one. His favorite little sibling, so wild and carefree and short, he chuckled to himself as he made his way across the room toward them, slowly. The knee pain was gone but he was still an old man and shuffling was simply the honest pace of things at this point, he was just lucky he didn't need to use the chamber pot.
"Ahh," he said, smiling at her, "You must be the little wolf that your brother goes on and on about."
The girl looked at him without flinching, with one raised eyebrow she asked back, "Which brother would that be?"
He liked her immediately, "I mean my great grandnephew, you know, your cousin, Jon Targaryen."
She looked at him with the particular expression of someone who was still in the process of adjusting to certain pieces of information. "Who are you, old man?"
Aemon paused to catch his breath after the walk across the room, which he felt was a reasonable moment for a pause regardless. "My father was Maekar, the First of His Name. My brother Aegon the Fifth reigned after him when I refused the throne, and he was followed by his son Jaehaerys, and finally by Aerys the Second...also known by, being the Mad King, though we can set that particular detail aside for the moment." He looked at her warmly. "My name is Aemon Targaryen former Brother of the nights watch, former Prince of the seven Kingdoms and currently a very old man, and I must say, it is a pleasure to meet the famous sister of Jon. Perhaps later you can tell me some stories of him when he was younger."
A half-cocked smile appeared on the girl's face. "I know quite a few embarrassing ones I wouldn't mind telling."
Before the conversation could continue a pointed cough interrupted them. Everyone looked toward the table where Hermione stood with her arms crossed and the expression of someone who had been awake since yesterday and had lost all patients with things.
"I am about to begin if you're interested," she said. "I have a great deal to do still and I haven't managed to sleep since yesterday, so if we could perhaps move things along."
Aemon took his place.
He noticed, as she began arranging the needles in the air above the boy's spine, that she was using a different wand than usual. This one was older...but it felt like death or maybe just the absence of life, he could feel something in it that he found difficult to name, a quality he associated with things that were very nearly spent.
*She truly had an odd assortment of relics*, he thought to himself
Slowly...with a patience and steadiness that even Aemon found himself holding his breath to watch...the needles descended into their pre-marked positions along the boy's spine, from the base of the skull all the way down to the tailbone, each one placed with an exactness that admitted no error. Then the quill and ink moved along the same path, runes appearing in careful sequence at the hands and feet and skull and along the full length of the spine, as the lady made fast work of the task.
The potion followed, after the boy had woken and asked if everything had worked out so far, the boy's breathing remained steady throughout, as the lady used certain tools to aid in supporting a body while breathing with no spine.
After a while Aemon took a seat, he was to old to be standing so long, and helping prepare the tinctures and mixing the potions had been more than his back and knees wished to sustain indefinitely. He settled into the chair and watched the room in peace instead.
The young wolf girl had moved to sit at her brother's head, cross-legged on the floor, smiling up at him. The boy would occasionally grunt in discomfort or make his feelings about the taste of the Skele-Gro potion extremely clear, *such a clever name* he thought to himself as the boy sipped it every five turns of the small hourglass, the two of them recounting their separate adventures since they had last seen each other the girl was far more restrained then he would have thought being so young, but he supposed she had to grow up far to quickly in this life to remain a child for long.
Aemon sat and listened and thought about his own life.
All the victories and the defeats, the choices not taken, like when he had refused the throne. He thought about that sometimes...whether he would still be King today, whether any of it would have gone differently. He thought about it now with less weight than he once had, because the madness had been confirmed at last. Mercury poisoning, introduced slowly every generation, only the magic in the Targaryen blood able to burn the toxins away enough to keep them alive over time but not enough to defeat the madness that follows. Dany's magic was strong enough to burn it clean entirely, well that and the help of the Lady restoring her to what the old Dragon Lords had been before the poison had done its work. The Lady had already identified and quietly addressed the few individuals she had found working toward further harm in there own camp. Aemon had not asked for details and she had not offered them, he knew she was good, but he also knew she could be terrible in her fury, he had seen the aftermath or the Red Witches Massacre. The lady not only pierced the heart with the sword she exploded the entire inside of the body just to be sure. Then incinerated everything with that blue fire of hers.
He watched the room, he watched the girl and her brother trading stories. He watched the Lady working with the worn-out wand and the careful hands.
He thought about Dany, that bright and beautiful young girl, who seemed to have taken a quiet fancy to the young and handsome King Rob...a good match, by any measure his family being one of the few that could truly be trusted. He thought about Jon, the best of both families. The fire of the dragon and the patience and cunning of the wolf together in one person, when Jon finally learns to kill the boy and let the man be born and flourish, that is when he will truly shine. Jon seemed rather taken with a certain red-headed Wildling girl, who was, Aemon was willing to admit, quite stunning once she had been introduced to regular bathing and smelled somewhat less of a pig's pen.
Both of them gave him hope, real hope, for the first time in his long memory he didn't fear for the future as much.
He felt content.
It was not a feeling he had much experience with; he found he did not mind it at all.
He finished the last of the small tasks remaining to him and leaned back in the chair. A nap, he thought, would not hurt anyone. The afternoon sun was coming through the high window in a warm and unhurried column of light, and the sounds of the room, the boy's voice, the girl's quiet laugh, the occasional soft movement of the Lady at her work, were pleasant and close and real.
He closed his eyes.
His thoughts moved easily, without the weight they usually carried, and settled on the faces he had loved. His family, all the generations of them, especially the small children. The ones he had known and the ones he had only read about in letters writing long ago. They were all there, clear and warm and present all welcoming each with a look of welcoming and family.
On that average and unremarkable warm afternoon, the sun high and steady in a sky without a single cloud, with the sound of happy family around him and a smile already finding its way to his face, Aemon Targaryen, son of Maekar Targaryen and Dyanna Dayne, left this world in his sleep.
With a smile on his face.
And love in his heart.