Chapter 23: Arya Survives King's Landing-upon-Thames

She had been running for four minutes and thirty seconds before she remembered that Forelli had told her not to.

Not that instruction, precisely — he had said nothing so specific as *do not run in the immediate aftermath of an event that has made you conspicuous*, because he had been teaching her footwork and the philosophy of water and not, as it happened, the logistics of surviving a public execution in the capital city of a kingdom that had just imprisoned her father and was now, with all the efficiency that Cersei Lannisford brought to bear on any undertaking she considered worth managing, presumably turning its attention to the remaining Starkton children. He had said: *the man who runs tells every eye in the street which direction to look*. He had demonstrated this by walking with great deliberateness across the orangery at Wintermere Park while Arya pelted after him and then stood, breathing hard, while he arrived at the far wall and looked back at her with an expression of composed expectation.

She had been eleven seconds slower, and she had been the one whom Thomas the footman would have noticed, if Thomas had been paying attention, which on that occasion he had not been.