After aiding in the fall of Harrenhal, Arya is now serving Lord Roose Bolton as his cupbearer, "Nan". She is bothered by the killing and head-staking of many of the servants who worked for Lord Tywin, most of them inherited from Lady Shella Whent who held Harrenhal prior to Lord Tywin.[1] Arya does not wish to reveal herself to the Lord of the Dreadfort, even though she knows Roose to be one of King Robb Stark's bannermen.
Arya overhears a meeting between Bolton and his advisors, mainly Freys. The Freys believe that Robb will lose, and that they should sue for peace and leave Harrenhal. Roose states that he is not a man to be undone, like Stannis Baratheon was. Arya learns that Winterfell has fallen and is horrified when she finds out that her brothers are dead. Roose dismisses the Freys and has Arya remove the leeches.
Qyburn reads a letter from the Lady Walda, Roose's s new wife. Lord Bolton orders the letter burned, and a message sent to Helman Tallhart, who has recently taken Darry from the Lannisters. Roose orders Helman and Robett Glover to burn the castle and put the people within to the sword in the name of King Robb, and then to strike east for Duskendale. Roose says that both men will wish vengeance for what has transpired to their families and homes in the north.
Roose announces that he will hunt wolves that day, for he cannot sleep with all the howling at night. Meanwhile, Arya practices her water dance in the godswood of Harrenhal.
That evening, Lord Bolton returns with nine dead wolves, and he tells Arya that he means to give Harrenhal to Vargo Hoat when he returns to the north. Arya is to remain at Harrenhal to serve the goat. Outside the Wailing Tower, which is occupied by the Freys, she hears much shouting within and sees Elmar crying on the steps. The young son of Lord Walder Frey says, "We’ve been dishonored. There was a bird from the Twins. My lord father says I'll need to marry someone else." Elmar was promised a princess originally, but whether or not he knows it to be Arya[2] is unknown.
Arya decides to flee Harrenhal, and eventually convinces Gendry and Hot Pie to come with her that night. They meet at the Tower of Ghosts, Gendry says the postern gate is guarded, and Arya says she will get rid of the Bolton guard. She approaches him openly and tells him that Lord Roose has her giving a silver piece to all the guards for their service. She takes out the coin Jaqen gave her and drops it, when the guard reach for it, she slits his throat and the three ride out through a sally port and away from Harrenhal.
Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good. Hence a prince who wants to keep his authority must learn how not to be good, and use that knowledge, or refrain from using it, as necessity requires.
Finally, the book can be browsed through and picked apart for entertainment, for an enjoyable ride through the foibles and great deeds of our predecessors in power. A warning, however, to those who use the book for this purpose: It might be better to turn back. Power is endlessly seductive and deceptive in its own way. It is a labyrinth your mind becomes consumed with solving its infinite problems, and you soon realize how pleasantly lost you have become. In other words, it becomes most amusing by taking it seriously. Do not be frivolous with such a critical matter. The gods of power frown on the frivolous; they give ultimate satisfaction only to those who study and reflect, and punish those who skim the surfaces looking for a good time.
The book has also been designed for browsing and for examining the law that seems at that particular moment most pertinent to you. Say you are experiencing problems with a superior and cannot understand why your efforts have not lead to more gratitude or a promotion. Several laws specifically address the master-underling relationship, and you are almost certainly transgressing one of them. By browsing the initial paragraphs for the 48 laws in the table of contents, you can identify the pertinent law.
The 48 Laws of Power can be used in several ways. By reading the book straight through you can learn about power in general. Although several of the laws may seem not to pertain directly to your life, in time you will probably find that all of them have some application, and that in fact they are interrelated. By getting an overview of the entire subject you will best be able to evaluate your own past actions and gain a greater degree of control over your immediate affairs. A thorough reading of the book will inspire thinking and reevaulation long after you finish it.
The laws have a simple premise: Certain actions almost always increase one's power (the observance of the law), while others decrease it and even ruin us (the transgression of the law). These transgressions and observances are illustrated by historical examples. The laws are timeless and definitive.
Consider The 48 Laws of Power a kind of handbook on the arts of indirection. The laws are based on the writings of men and women who have studied and mastered the game of power. These writings span a period of more than three thousand years and were created in civilizations as disparate as ancient China and Renaissance Italy; yet they share common threads and themes, together hinging at an essence of power that has yet to be fully articulated. The 48 laws of power are the distillation of this accumulated wisdom, gathered from the writings of the most illustrious strategists (Suntzu, Clausewitz), statesmen (Bismarck, Talleyrand), courtiers (Castiglione, Graian), seducers (Ninon de Lenclos, Casanova), and con artists ("Yellow Kid" Weil) in history.
Finally, you must learn always to take the indirect route to power. Disguise your cunning. Like a billiard ball that caroms several times before it hits its target, your moves must be planned and developed in the least obvious way. By training yourself to be indirect, you can thrive in the modern court, appearing the paragon of decency while being the consummate manipulator.
People are of infinite complexity and you can spend a lifetime watching them without ever fully understanding them. So it is all the more important, then, to begin your education now. In doing so you must also keep one principle in mind: Never discriminate as to whom you study and whom you trust. Never trust anyone completely and study everyone, including friends and loved ones.
Power is a social game. To learn and master it, you must develop the ability to study and understand people. As the great seventeenth-century thinker and courtier Baltasar Gracian wrote: "Many people spend time studying the properties of animals or herbs; how much more important it would be to study those of people, with whom we must live or die!" To be a master player you must also be a master psychologist. You must recognize motivations and see through the cloud of dust with which people surround their actions. An understanding of people's hidden motives is the single greatest piece of knowledge you can have in acquiring power. It opens up endless possibilities of deception, seduction, and manipulation.
Half of your mastery of power comes from what you do not do, what you do not allow yourself to get dragged into. For this skill you must learn to judge all things by what they cost you. As Nietzsche wrote, "The value of a thing sometimes lies not in what one attains with it, but in what one pays for it what it costs us." Perhaps you will attain your goal, and a worthy goal at that, but at what price? Apply this standard to everything, including whether to collaborate with other people or come to their aid. In the end, life is short, opportunities are few, and you have only so much energy to draw on. And in this sense time is as important a consideration as any other. Never waste valuable time, or mental peace of mind, on the affairs of others that is too high a price to pay.
It is a game. Your opponent sits opposite you. Both of you behave as gentlemen or ladies, observing the rules of the game and taking nothing personally. You play with a strategy and you observe your opponent's moves with as much calmness as you can muster. In the end, you will appreciate the politeness of those you are playing with more than their good and sweet intentions. Train your eye to follow the results of their moves, the outward circumstances, and do not be distracted by anything else.
Power is essentially amoral and one of the most important skills to acquire is the ability to see circumstances rather than good or evil. Power is a game this cannot be repeated too often and in games you do not judge your opponents by their intentions but by the effect of their actions. You measure their strategy and their power by what you can see and feel. How often are someone's intentions made the issue only to cloud and deceive! What does it matter if another player, your friend or rival, intended good things and had only your interests at heart, if the effects of his action lead to so much ruin and confusion? It is only natural for people to cover up their actions with all kinds of justifications, always assuming that they have acted out of goodness. You must learn to inwardly laugh each time you hear this and never get caught up in gauging someone's intentions and actions through a set of moral judgments that are really an excuse for the accumulation of power.
If deception is the most potent weapon in your arsenal, then patience in all things is your crucial shield. Patience will protect you from making moronic blunders. Like mastering your emotions, patience is a skill it does not come naturally. But nothing about power is natural; power is more godlike than anything in the natural world. And patience is the supreme virtue of the gods, who have nothing but time. Everything good will happen the grass will grow again, if you give it time and see several steps into the future. Impatience, on the other hand, only makes you look weak. It is a principal impediment to power.
The Korean known as Hangul, Sejong the Great Joseon Dynasty in 1443 Korea and North Korea. There 14 and 10 basic vowels. Letters have shapes.
Alexander Graham in 1876. Early each to other. During the 20th century.
You cannot succeed at deception unless you take a somewhat distanced approach to yourself unless you can be many different people, wearing the mask that the day and the moment require. With such a flexible approach to all appearances, including your own, you lose a lot of the inward heaviness that holds people down. Make your face as malleable as the actor's, work to conceal your intentions from others, practice luring people into traps. Playing with appearances and mastering arts of deception are among the aesthetic pleasures of life. They are also key components in the acquisition of power.
Power requires the ability to play with appearances. To this end you must learn to wear many masks and keep a bag full of deceptive tricks. Deception and masquerade should not be seen as ugly or immoral. All human interaction requires deception on many levels, and in some ways what separates humans from animals is our ability to lie and deceive. In Greek myths, in India's Mahabarata cycle, in the Middle Eastern epic of Gilgamesh, it is the privilege of the gods to use deceptive arts; a great man, Odysseus for instance, was judged by his ability to rival the craftiness of the gods, stealing some of their divine power by matching them in wits and deception. Deception is a developed art of civilization and the most potent weapon in the game of power.
You begin by examining the mistakes you have made in the past, the ones that have most grievously held you back. You analyze them in terms of the 48 laws of power, and you extract from them a lesson and an oath: "I shall never repeat such a mistake; I shall never fall into such a trap again." If you can evaluate and observe yourself in this way, you can learn to break the patterns of the past an immensely valuable skill.
The other face of Janus looks constantly to the past though not to remember past hurts or bear grudges. That would only curb your power. Half of the game is learning how to forget those events in the past that eat away at you and cloud your reason. The real purpose of the backward glancing eye is to educate yourself constantly you look at the past to learn from those who came before you. (The many historical examples in this book will greatly help that process.) Then, having looked to the past, you look closer at hand, to your own actions and those of your friends. This is the most vital school you can learn from, because it comes from personal experience.
