Up in the tower, Arya relaxed her grip. She watched Joffrey's head roll into the crowd, watched it get kicked back and forth, watched the people who had once knelt before him now kick his head around like a ball.
But she did not smile. She remembered how she had once stood down there just like them, watching with her own eyes as her father was beheaded on Joffrey's orders.
The crowd back then had been just like this one. There had been nothing but excitement in their eyes as they roared, as though all their pent-up feelings were spilling out with the splattering blood.
Yet now, Arya felt only a heaviness in her chest, as though a great stone were pressing down on it. She turned away from the head rolling through the crowd and fixed her gaze on Viserys instead.
He simply stood there, straight-backed, watching everything below without expression, as though the bloody execution before him had nothing to do with him at all, yet also as though everything lay within his control.
Sunlight fell across his long silver hair, and his deep violet eyes held nothing but a fathomless calm. Arya suddenly felt that this man was stranger than she had known, and more dangerous, yet all the more compelling.
She felt that the things he had told her in Valyria, his understanding of human nature among those at the bottom, had been so very right. Perhaps from now on, all she needed to do was remain by his side, just as she was now.
At that thought, she looked at Sansa again. Though they had only been reunited for a day, she could still sense that Sansa had fallen for Viserys, just as she had imagined.
Sansa's face was as pale as paper. Her hands