The oldest were men grown, seventeen and
eighteen years from the day of their naming. One was past twenty.
Most were younger, sixteen or less.
Bran watched them from the balcony of Maester Luwin’s
turret, listening to them grunt and strain and curse as they swung
their staves and wooden swords. The yard was alive to the clack of
wood on wood, punctuated all too often by thwacks and yowls of pain
when a blow struck leather or flesh. Ser Rodrik strode among the
boys, face reddening beneath his white whiskers, muttering at them
one and all. Bran had never seen the old knight look so fierce.
“No,” he kept saying. “No. No. No.”
“They don’t fight very well,” Bran said
dubiously. He scratched Summer idly behind the ears as the direwolf
tore at a haunch of meat. Bones crunched between his teeth.
“For a certainty,” Maester Luwin agreed with a deep
sigh. The maester was peering through his big Myrish lens tube,
measuring shadows and noting the position of the comet that hung
low in the morning sky. “Yet given time . . . Ser Rodrik has
the truth of it, we need men to walk the walls. Your lord father
took the cream of his guard to King’s Landing, and your
brother took the rest, along with all the likely lads for leagues
around. Many will not come back to us, and we must needs find the
men to take their places.”
Bran stared resentfully at the sweating boys below. “If I
still had my legs, I could beat them all.” He remembered the
last time he’d held a sword in his hand, when the king had
come to Winterfell. It was only a wooden sword, yet he’d
knocked Prince Tommen down half a hundred times. “Ser Rodrik
should teach me to use a poleaxe. If I had a poleaxe with a big
long haft, Hodor could be my legs. We could be a knight
together.”
“I think that . . . unlikely,” Maester Luwin said.
“Bran, when a man fights, his arms and legs and thoughts must
be as one.”
Below in the yard, Ser Rodrik was yelling. “You fight like
a goose. He pecks you and you peck him harder. Parry! Block the
blow. Goose fighting will not suffice. If those were real swords,
the first peck would take your arm off!” One of the other
boys laughed, and the old knight rounded on him. “You laugh.
You. Now that is gall. You fight like a hedgehog . . . ”
“There was a knight once who couldn’t see,”
Bran said stubbornly, as Ser Rodrik went on below. “Old Nan
told me about him. He had a long staff with blades at both ends and
he could spin it in his hands and chop two men at once.”
“Symeon Star-Eyes,” Luwin said as he marked numbers
in a book. “When he lost his eyes, he put star sapphires in
the empty sockets, or so the singers claim. Bran, that is only a
story, like the tales of Florian the Fool. A fable from the Age of
Heroes.” The maester tsked. “You must put these dreams
aside, they will only break your heart.”
The mention of dreams reminded him. “I dreamed about the
crow again last night. The one with three eyes. He flew into my
bedchamber and told me to come with him, so I did. We went down to
the crypts. Father was there, and we talked. He was sad.”
“And why was that?” Luwin peered through his
tube.
“It was something to do about Jon, I think.” The
dream had been deeply disturbing, more so than any of the other
crow dreams. “Hodor won’t go down into the
crypts.”
The maester had only been half listening, Bran could tell. He
lifted his eye from the tube, blinking. “Hodor won’t . . . ”
“Go down into the crypts. When I woke, I told him to take
me down, to see if Father was truly there. At first he didn’t
know what I was saying, but I got him to the steps by telling him
to go here and go there, only then he wouldn’t go down. He
just stood on the top step and said ‘Hodor,’ like he
was scared of the dark, but I had a torch. It made me so mad I
almost gave him a swat in the head, like Old Nan is always
doing.” He saw the way the maester was frowning and hurriedly
added, “I didn’t, though.”
“Good. Hodor is a man, not a mule to be beaten.”
“In the dream I flew down with the crow, but I can’t
do that when I’m awake,” Bran explained.
“Why would you want to go down to the crypts?”
“I told you. To look for Father.”
The maester tugged at the chain around his neck, as he often did
when he was uncomfortable. “Bran, sweet child, one day Lord
Eddard will sit below in stone, beside his father and his
father’s father and all the Starks back to the old Kings in
the North . . . but that will not be for many years, gods be good.
Your father is a prisoner of the queen in King’s Landing. You
will not find him in the crypts.”
“He was there last night. I talked to him.”
“Stubborn boy,” the maester sighed, setting his book
aside. “Would you like to go see?”
“I can’t. Hodor won’t go, and the steps are
too narrow and twisty for Dancer.”
“I believe I can solve that difficulty.”
In place of Hodor, the wildling woman Osha was summoned. She was
tall and tough and uncomplaining, willing to go wherever she was
commanded. “I lived my life beyond the Wall, a hole in the
ground won’t fret me none, m’lords,” she
said.
“Summer, come,” Bran called as she lifted him in
wiry-strong arms. The direwolf left his bone and followed as Osha
carried Bran across the yard and down the spiral steps to the cold
vault under the earth. Maester Luwin went ahead with a torch. Bran
did not even mind—too badly—that she carried him in her arms and
not on her back. Ser Rodrik had ordered Osha’s chain struck
off, since she had served faithfully and well since she had been at
Winterfell. She still wore the heavy iron shackles around her
ankles—a sign that she was not yet wholly trusted—but they did not
hinder her sure strides down the steps.
Bran could not recall the last time he had been in the crypts.
It had been before, for certain. When he was little, he used to
play down here with Robb and Jon and his sisters.
He wished they were here now; the vault might not have seemed so
dark and scary. Summer stalked out in the echoing gloom, then
stopped, lifted his head, and sniffed the chill dead air. He bared
his teeth and crept backward, eyes glowing golden in the light of
the maester’s torch. Even Osha, hard as old iron, seemed
uncomfortable. “Grim folk, by the look of them,” she
said as she eyed the long row of granite Starks on their stone
thrones.
“They were the Kings of Winter,” Bran whispered.
Somehow it felt wrong to talk too loudly in this place.
Osha smiled. “Winter’s got no king. If you’d
seen it, you’d know that, summer boy.”
“They were the Kings in the North for thousands of
years,” Maester Luwin said, lifting the torch high so the
light shone on the stone faces. Some were hairy and bearded, shaggy
men fierce as the wolves that crouched by their feet. Others were
shaved clean, their features gaunt and sharp-edged as the iron
longswords across their laps. “Hard men for a hard time.
Come.” He strode briskly down the vault, past the procession
of stone pillars and the endless carved figures. A tongue of flame
trailed back from the upraised torch as he went.
The vault was cavernous, longer than Winterfell itself, and Jon
had told him once that there were other levels underneath, vaults
even deeper and darker where the older kings were buried. It would
not do to lose the light. Summer refused to move from the steps,
even when Osha followed the torch, Bran in her arms.
“Do you recall your history, Bran?” the maester said
as they walked. “Tell Osha who they were and what they did,
if you can.”
He looked at the passing faces and the tales came back to him.
The maester had told him the stories, and Old Nan had made them
come alive. “That one is Jon Stark. When the sea raiders
landed in the east, he drove them out and built the castle at White
Harbor. His son was Rickard Stark, not my father’s father but
another Rickard, he took the Neck away from the Marsh King and
married his daughter. Theon Stark’s the real thin one with
the long hair and the skinny beard. They called him the
‘Hungry Wolf,’ because he was always at war.
That’s a Brandon, the tall one with the dreamy face, he was
Brandon the Shipwright, because he loved the sea. His tomb is
empty. He tried to sail west across the Sunset Sea and was never
seen again. His son was Brandon the Burner, because he put the
torch to all his father’s ships in grief. There’s
Rodrik Stark, who won Bear Island in a wrestling match and gave it
to the Mormonts. And that’s Torrhen Stark, the King Who
Knelt. He was the last King in the North and the first Lord of
Winterfell, after he yielded to Aegon the Conqueror. Oh, there,
he’s Cregan Stark. He fought with Prince Aemon once, and the
Dragonknight said he’d never faced a finer swordsman.”
They were almost at the end now, and Bran felt a sadness creeping
over him. “And there’s my grandfather, Lord Rickard,
who was beheaded by Mad King Aerys. His daughter Lyanna and his son
Brandon are in the tombs beside him. Not me, another Brandon, my
father’s brother. They’re not supposed to have statues, that’s only
for the lords and the kings, but my father loved them so much he
had them done.”
“The maid’s a fair one,” Osha said.
“Robert was betrothed to marry her, but Prince Rhaegar
carried her off and raped her,” Bran explained. “Robert
fought a war to win her back. He killed Rhaegar on the Trident with
his hammer, but Lyanna died and he never got her back at
all.”
“A sad tale,” said Osha, “but those empty
holes are sadder.”
“Lord Eddard’s tomb, for when his time comes,”
Maester Luwin said. “Is this where you saw your father in
your dream, Bran?”
“Yes.” The memory made him shiver. He looked around
the vault uneasily, the hairs on the back of his neck bristling.
Had he heard a noise? Was there someone here?
Maester Luwin stepped toward the open sepulchre, torch in hand.
“As you see, he’s not here. Nor will he be, for many a
year. Dreams are only dreams, child.” He thrust his arm into
the blackness inside the tomb, as into the mouth of some great
beast. “Do you see? It’s quite empt—”
The darkness sprang at him, snarling.
Bran saw eyes like green fire, a flash of teeth, fur as black as
the pit around them. Maester Luwin yelled and threw up his hands.
The torch went flying from his fingers, caromed off the stone face
of Brandon Stark, and tumbled to the statue’s feet, the
flames licking up his legs. In the drunken shifting torchlight,
they saw Luwin struggling with the direwolf, beating at his muzzle
with one hand while the jaws closed on the other.
“Summer!” Bran screamed.
And Summer came, shooting from the dimness behind them, a
leaping shadow. He slammed into Shaggydog and knocked him back, and
the two direwolves rolled over and over in a tangle of grey and
black fur, snapping and biting at each other, while Maester Luwin
struggled to his knees, his arm torn and bloody. Osha propped Bran
up against Lord Rickard’s stone wolf as she hurried to assist
the maester. In the light of the guttering torch, shadow wolves
twenty feet tall fought on the wall and roof.
“Shaggy,” a small voice called. When Bran looked up,
his little brother was standing in the mouth of Father’s
tomb. With one final snap at Summer’s face, Shaggydog broke
off and bounded to Rickon’s side. “You let my father
be,” Rickon warned Luwin. “You let him be.”
“Rickon,” Bran said softly. “Father’s
not here.”
“Yes he is. I saw him.” Tears glistened on
Rickon’s face. “I saw him last night.”
“In your dream . . . ?”
Rickon nodded. “You leave him. You leave him be.
He’s coming home now, like he promised. He’s coming
home.”
Bran had never seen Maester Luwin took so uncertain before.
Blood dripped down his arm where Shaggydog had shredded the wool of
his sleeve and the flesh beneath. “Osha, the torch,” he
said, biting through his pain, and she snatched it up before it
went out. Soot stains blackened both legs of his uncle’s
likeness. “That . . . that beast,” Luwin went on,
“is supposed to be chained up in the kennels.”
Rickon patted Shaggydog’s muzzle, damp with blood.
“I let him loose. He doesn’t like chains.” He
licked at his fingers.
“Rickon,” Bran said, “would you like to come
with me?”
“No. I like it here.”
“It’s dark here. And cold.”
“I’m not afraid. I have to wait for
Father.”
“You can wait with me,” Bran said.
“We’ll wait together, you and me and our wolves.”
Both of the direwolves were licking wounds now, and would bear
close watching.
“Bran,” the maester said firmly, “I know you
mean well, but Shaggydog is too wild to run loose. I’m the
third man he’s savaged. Give him the freedom of the castle
and it’s only a question of time before he kills someone. The
truth is hard, but the wolf has to be chained, or . . . &rdquo He
hesitated
. . . or killed, Bran thought, but what he said was, “He
was not made for chains. We will wait in your tower, all of
us.”
“That is quite impossible,” Maester Luwin said.
Osha grinned. “The boy’s the lordling here, as I
recall.” She handed Luwin back his torch and scooped Bran up
into her arms again. “The maester’s tower it
is.”
“Will you come, Rickon?”
His brother nodded. “If Shaggy comes too,” he said,
running after Osha and Bran, and there was nothing Maester Luwin
could do but follow, keeping a wary eye on the wolves.
Maester Luwin’s turret was so cluttered that it seemed to
Bran a wonder that he ever found anything. Tottering piles of books
covered tables and chairs, rows of stoppered jars lined the
shelves, candle stubs and puddles of dried wax dotted the
furniture, the bronze Myrish lens tube sat on a tripod by the
terrace door, star charts hung from the walls, shadow maps lay
scattered among the rushes, papers, quills, and pots of inks were
everywhere, and all of it was spotted with droppings from the
ravens in the rafters. Their strident quorks drifted down from
above as Osha washed and cleaned and bandaged the maester’s
wounds, under Luwin’s terse instruction. “This is
folly,” the small grey man said while she dabbed at the wolf
bites with a stinging ointment. “I agree that it is odd that
both you boys dreamed the same dream, yet when you stop to consider
it, it’s only natural. You miss your lord father, and you
know that he is a captive. Fear can fever a man’s mind and
give him queer thoughts. Rickon is too young to
comprehend—”
“I’m four now,” Rickon said. He was peeking
through the lens tube at the gargoyles on the First Keep. The
direwolves sat on opposite sides of the large round room, licking
their wounds and gnawing on bones.
“—too young, and—ooh, seven hells, that burns, no,
don’t stop, more. Too young, as I say, but you, Bran,
you’re old enough to know that dreams are only
dreams.”
“Some are, some aren’t.” Osha poured pale red
firemilk into a long gash. Luwin gasped. “The children of the
forest could tell you a thing or two about dreaming.”
Tears were streaming down the maester’s face, yet he shook
his head doggedly. “The children . . . live only in dreams.
Now. Dead and gone. Enough, that’s enough. Now the bandages.
Pads and then wrap, and make it tight, I’ll be
bleeding.”
“Old Nan says the children knew the songs of the trees,
that they could fly like birds and swim like fish and talk to the
animals,” Bran said. “She says that they made music so
beautiful that it made you cry like a little baby just to hear
it.”
“And all this they did with magic,” Maester Luwin
said, distracted. “I wish they were here now. A spell would
heal my arm less painfully, and they could talk to Shaggydog and
tell him not to bite.” He gave the big black wolf an angry
glance out of the corner of his eye. “Take a lesson, Bran.
The man who trusts in spells is dueling with a glass sword. As the
children did. Here, let me show you something.” He stood
abruptly, crossed the room, and returned with a green jar in his
good hand. “Have a look at these,” he said as he pulled
the stopper and shook out a handful of shiny black arrowheads.
Bran picked one up. “It’s made of glass.”
Curious, Rickon drifted closer to peer over the table.
“Dragonglass,” Osha named it as she sat down beside
Luwin, bandagings in hand.
“Obsidian,” Maester Luwin insisted, holding out his
wounded arm. “Forged in the fires of the gods, far below the
earth. The children of the forest hunted with that, thousands of
years ago. The children worked no metal. In place of mail, they
wore long shirts of woven leaves and bound their legs in bark, so
they seemed to melt into the wood. In place of swords, they carried
blades of obsidian.”
“And still do.” Osha placed soft pads over the bites
on the maester’s forearm and bound them tight with long
strips of linen.
Bran held the arrowhead up close. The black glass was slick and
shiny. He thought it beautiful. “Can I keep one?”
“As you wish,” the maester said.
“I want one too,” Rickon said. “I want four.
I’m four.”
Luwin made him count them out. “Careful, they’re
still sharp. Don’t cut yourself.”
“Tell me about the children,” Bran said. It was
important.
“What do you wish to know?”
“Everything.”
Maester Luwin tugged at his chain collar where it chafed against
his neck. “They were people of the Dawn Age, the very first,
before kings and kingdoms,” he said. “In those days,
there were no castles or holdfasts, no cities, not so much as a
market town to be found between here and the sea of Dorne. There
were no men at all. Only the children of the forest dwelt in the
lands we now call the Seven Kingdoms.
“They were a people dark and beautiful, small of stature,
no taller than children even when grown to manhood. They lived in
the depths of the wood, in caves and crannogs and secret tree
towns. Slight as they were, the children were quick and graceful.
Male and female hunted together, with weirwood bows and flying
snares. Their gods were the gods of the forest, stream, and stone,
the old gods whose names are secret. Their wise men were called
greenseers, and carved strange faces in the weirwoods to keep watch
on the woods. How long the children reigned here or where they came
from, no man can know.
“But some twelve thousand years ago, the First Men
appeared from the east, crossing the Broken Arm of Dorne before it
was broken. They came with bronze swords and great leathern
shields, riding horses. No horse had ever been seen on this side of
the narrow sea. No doubt the children were as frightened by the
horses as the First Men were by the faces in the trees. As the
First Men carved out holdfasts and farms, they cut down the faces
and gave them to the fire. Horror-struck, the children went to war.
The old songs say that the greenseers used dark magics to make the
seas rise and sweep away the land, shattering the Arm, but it was
too late to close the door. The wars went on until the earth ran
red with blood of men and children both, but more children than
men, for men were bigger and stronger, and wood and stone and
obsidian make a poor match for bronze. Finally the wise of both
races prevailed, and the chiefs and heroes of the First Men met the
greenseers and wood dancers amidst the weirwood groves of a small
island in the great lake called Gods Eye.
“There they forged the Pact. The First Men were given the
coastlands, the high plains and bright meadows, the mountains and
bogs, but the deep woods were to remain forever the
children’s, and no more weirwoods were to be put to the axe
anywhere in the realm. So the gods might bear witness to the
signing, every tree on the island was given a face, and afterward,
the sacred order of green men was formed to keep watch over the
Isle of Faces.
“The Pact began four thousand years of friendship between
men and children. In time, the First Men even put aside the gods
they had brought with them, and took up the worship of the secret
gods of the wood. The signing of the Pact ended the Dawn Age, and
began the Age of Heroes.”
Bran’s fist curled around the shiny black arrowhead.
“But the children of the forest are all gone now, you
said.”
“Here, they are,” said Osha, as she bit off the end
of the last bandage with her teeth. “North of the Wall,
things are different. That’s where the children went, and the
giants, and the other old races.”
Maester Luwin sighed. “Woman, by rights you ought to be
dead or in chains. The Starks have treated you more gently than you
deserve. It is unkind to repay them for their kindness by filling
the boys’ heads with folly.”
“Tell me where they went,” Bran said. “I want
to know.”
“Me too,” Rickon echoed.
“Oh, very well,” Luwin muttered. “So long as
the kingdoms of the First Men held sway, the Pact endured, all
through the Age of Heroes and the Long Night and the birth of the
Seven Kingdoms, yet finally there came a time, many centuries
later, when other peoples crossed the narrow sea.
“The Andals were the first, a race of tall, fair-haired
warriors who came with steel and fire and the seven-pointed star of
the new gods painted on their chests. The wars lasted hundreds of
years, but in the end the six southron kingdoms all fell before
them. Only here, where the King in the North threw back every army
that tried to cross the Neck, did the rule of the First Men endure.
The Andals burnt out the weirwood groves, hacked down the faces,
slaughtered the children where they found them, and everywhere
proclaimed the triumph of the Seven over the old gods. So the
children fled north—”
Summer began to howl.
Maester Luwin broke off, startled. When Shaggydog bounded to his
feet and added his voice to his brother’s, dread clutched at
Bran’s heart. “It’s coming,” he whispered,
with the certainty of despair. He had known it since last night, he
realized, since the crow had led him down into the crypts to say
farewell. He had known it, but he had not believed. He had wanted
Maester Luwin to be right. The crow, he thought, the three-eyed
crow . . .
The howling stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Summer padded
across the tower floor to Shaggydog, and began to lick at a mat of
bloody fur on the back of his brother’s neck. From the window
came a flutter of wings.
A raven landed on the grey stone sill, opened its beak, and gave
a harsh, raucous rattle of distress.
Rickon began to cry. His arrowheads fell from his hand one by
one and clattered on the floor. Bran pulled him close and hugged
him.
Maester Luwin stared at the black bird as if it were a scorpion
with feathers. He rose, slow as a sleepwalker, and moved to the
window. When he whistled, the raven hopped onto his bandaged
forearm. There was dried blood on its wings. “A hawk,”
Luwin murmured, “perhaps an owl. Poor thing, a wonder it got
through.” He took the letter from its leg.
Bran found himself shivering as the maester unrolled the paper.
“What is it?” he said, holding his brother all the
harder.
“You know what it is, boy,” Osha said, not unkindly.
She put her hand on his head.
Maester Luwin looked up at them numbly, a small grey man with
blood on the sleeve of his grey wool robe and tears in his bright
grey eyes. “My lords,” he said to the sons, in a voice
gone hoarse and shrunken, “we . . . we shall need to find a
stonecarver who knew his likeness well . . . ”
The oldest were men grown, seventeen and
eighteen years from the day of their naming. One was past twenty.
Most were younger, sixteen or less.
Bran watched them from the balcony of Maester Luwin’s
turret, listening to them grunt and strain and curse as they swung
their staves and wooden swords. The yard was alive to the clack of
wood on wood, punctuated all too often by thwacks and yowls of pain
when a blow struck leather or flesh. Ser Rodrik strode among the
boys, face reddening beneath his white whiskers, muttering at them
one and all. Bran had never seen the old knight look so fierce.
“No,” he kept saying. “No. No. No.”
“They don’t fight very well,” Bran said
dubiously. He scratched Summer idly behind the ears as the direwolf
tore at a haunch of meat. Bones crunched between his teeth.
“For a certainty,” Maester Luwin agreed with a deep
sigh. The maester was peering through his big Myrish lens tube,
measuring shadows and noting the position of the comet that hung
low in the morning sky. “Yet given time . . . Ser Rodrik has
the truth of it, we need men to walk the walls. Your lord father
took the cream of his guard to King’s Landing, and your
brother took the rest, along with all the likely lads for leagues
around. Many will not come back to us, and we must needs find the
men to take their places.”
Bran stared resentfully at the sweating boys below. “If I
still had my legs, I could beat them all.” He remembered the
last time he’d held a sword in his hand, when the king had
come to Winterfell. It was only a wooden sword, yet he’d
knocked Prince Tommen down half a hundred times. “Ser Rodrik
should teach me to use a poleaxe. If I had a poleaxe with a big
long haft, Hodor could be my legs. We could be a knight
together.”
“I think that . . . unlikely,” Maester Luwin said.
“Bran, when a man fights, his arms and legs and thoughts must
be as one.”
Below in the yard, Ser Rodrik was yelling. “You fight like
a goose. He pecks you and you peck him harder. Parry! Block the
blow. Goose fighting will not suffice. If those were real swords,
the first peck would take your arm off!” One of the other
boys laughed, and the old knight rounded on him. “You laugh.
You. Now that is gall. You fight like a hedgehog . . . ”
“There was a knight once who couldn’t see,”
Bran said stubbornly, as Ser Rodrik went on below. “Old Nan
told me about him. He had a long staff with blades at both ends and
he could spin it in his hands and chop two men at once.”
“Symeon Star-Eyes,” Luwin said as he marked numbers
in a book. “When he lost his eyes, he put star sapphires in
the empty sockets, or so the singers claim. Bran, that is only a
story, like the tales of Florian the Fool. A fable from the Age of
Heroes.” The maester tsked. “You must put these dreams
aside, they will only break your heart.”
The mention of dreams reminded him. “I dreamed about the
crow again last night. The one with three eyes. He flew into my
bedchamber and told me to come with him, so I did. We went down to
the crypts. Father was there, and we talked. He was sad.”
“And why was that?” Luwin peered through his
tube.
“It was something to do about Jon, I think.” The
dream had been deeply disturbing, more so than any of the other
crow dreams. “Hodor won’t go down into the
crypts.”
The maester had only been half listening, Bran could tell. He
lifted his eye from the tube, blinking. “Hodor won’t . . . ”
“Go down into the crypts. When I woke, I told him to take
me down, to see if Father was truly there. At first he didn’t
know what I was saying, but I got him to the steps by telling him
to go here and go there, only then he wouldn’t go down. He
just stood on the top step and said ‘Hodor,’ like he
was scared of the dark, but I had a torch. It made me so mad I
almost gave him a swat in the head, like Old Nan is always
doing.” He saw the way the maester was frowning and hurriedly
added, “I didn’t, though.”
“Good. Hodor is a man, not a mule to be beaten.”
“In the dream I flew down with the crow, but I can’t
do that when I’m awake,” Bran explained.
“Why would you want to go down to the crypts?”
“I told you. To look for Father.”
The maester tugged at the chain around his neck, as he often did
when he was uncomfortable. “Bran, sweet child, one day Lord
Eddard will sit below in stone, beside his father and his
father’s father and all the Starks back to the old Kings in
the North . . . but that will not be for many years, gods be good.
Your father is a prisoner of the queen in King’s Landing. You
will not find him in the crypts.”
“He was there last night. I talked to him.”
“Stubborn boy,” the maester sighed, setting his book
aside. “Would you like to go see?”
“I can’t. Hodor won’t go, and the steps are
too narrow and twisty for Dancer.”
“I believe I can solve that difficulty.”
In place of Hodor, the wildling woman Osha was summoned. She was
tall and tough and uncomplaining, willing to go wherever she was
commanded. “I lived my life beyond the Wall, a hole in the
ground won’t fret me none, m’lords,” she
said.
“Summer, come,” Bran called as she lifted him in
wiry-strong arms. The direwolf left his bone and followed as Osha
carried Bran across the yard and down the spiral steps to the cold
vault under the earth. Maester Luwin went ahead with a torch. Bran
did not even mind—too badly—that she carried him in her arms and
not on her back. Ser Rodrik had ordered Osha’s chain struck
off, since she had served faithfully and well since she had been at
Winterfell. She still wore the heavy iron shackles around her
ankles—a sign that she was not yet wholly trusted—but they did not
hinder her sure strides down the steps.
Bran could not recall the last time he had been in the crypts.
It had been before, for certain. When he was little, he used to
play down here with Robb and Jon and his sisters.
He wished they were here now; the vault might not have seemed so
dark and scary. Summer stalked out in the echoing gloom, then
stopped, lifted his head, and sniffed the chill dead air. He bared
his teeth and crept backward, eyes glowing golden in the light of
the maester’s torch. Even Osha, hard as old iron, seemed
uncomfortable. “Grim folk, by the look of them,” she
said as she eyed the long row of granite Starks on their stone
thrones.
“They were the Kings of Winter,” Bran whispered.
Somehow it felt wrong to talk too loudly in this place.
Osha smiled. “Winter’s got no king. If you’d
seen it, you’d know that, summer boy.”
“They were the Kings in the North for thousands of
years,” Maester Luwin said, lifting the torch high so the
light shone on the stone faces. Some were hairy and bearded, shaggy
men fierce as the wolves that crouched by their feet. Others were
shaved clean, their features gaunt and sharp-edged as the iron
longswords across their laps. “Hard men for a hard time.
Come.” He strode briskly down the vault, past the procession
of stone pillars and the endless carved figures. A tongue of flame
trailed back from the upraised torch as he went.
The vault was cavernous, longer than Winterfell itself, and Jon
had told him once that there were other levels underneath, vaults
even deeper and darker where the older kings were buried. It would
not do to lose the light. Summer refused to move from the steps,
even when Osha followed the torch, Bran in her arms.
“Do you recall your history, Bran?” the maester said
as they walked. “Tell Osha who they were and what they did,
if you can.”
He looked at the passing faces and the tales came back to him.
The maester had told him the stories, and Old Nan had made them
come alive. “That one is Jon Stark. When the sea raiders
landed in the east, he drove them out and built the castle at White
Harbor. His son was Rickard Stark, not my father’s father but
another Rickard, he took the Neck away from the Marsh King and
married his daughter. Theon Stark’s the real thin one with
the long hair and the skinny beard. They called him the
‘Hungry Wolf,’ because he was always at war.
That’s a Brandon, the tall one with the dreamy face, he was
Brandon the Shipwright, because he loved the sea. His tomb is
empty. He tried to sail west across the Sunset Sea and was never
seen again. His son was Brandon the Burner, because he put the
torch to all his father’s ships in grief. There’s
Rodrik Stark, who won Bear Island in a wrestling match and gave it
to the Mormonts. And that’s Torrhen Stark, the King Who
Knelt. He was the last King in the North and the first Lord of
Winterfell, after he yielded to Aegon the Conqueror. Oh, there,
he’s Cregan Stark. He fought with Prince Aemon once, and the
Dragonknight said he’d never faced a finer swordsman.”
They were almost at the end now, and Bran felt a sadness creeping
over him. “And there’s my grandfather, Lord Rickard,
who was beheaded by Mad King Aerys. His daughter Lyanna and his son
Brandon are in the tombs beside him. Not me, another Brandon, my
father’s brother. They’re not supposed to have statues, that’s only
for the lords and the kings, but my father loved them so much he
had them done.”
“The maid’s a fair one,” Osha said.
“Robert was betrothed to marry her, but Prince Rhaegar
carried her off and raped her,” Bran explained. “Robert
fought a war to win her back. He killed Rhaegar on the Trident with
his hammer, but Lyanna died and he never got her back at
all.”
“A sad tale,” said Osha, “but those empty
holes are sadder.”
“Lord Eddard’s tomb, for when his time comes,”
Maester Luwin said. “Is this where you saw your father in
your dream, Bran?”
“Yes.” The memory made him shiver. He looked around
the vault uneasily, the hairs on the back of his neck bristling.
Had he heard a noise? Was there someone here?
Maester Luwin stepped toward the open sepulchre, torch in hand.
“As you see, he’s not here. Nor will he be, for many a
year. Dreams are only dreams, child.” He thrust his arm into
the blackness inside the tomb, as into the mouth of some great
beast. “Do you see? It’s quite empt—”
The darkness sprang at him, snarling.
Bran saw eyes like green fire, a flash of teeth, fur as black as
the pit around them. Maester Luwin yelled and threw up his hands.
The torch went flying from his fingers, caromed off the stone face
of Brandon Stark, and tumbled to the statue’s feet, the
flames licking up his legs. In the drunken shifting torchlight,
they saw Luwin struggling with the direwolf, beating at his muzzle
with one hand while the jaws closed on the other.
“Summer!” Bran screamed.
And Summer came, shooting from the dimness behind them, a
leaping shadow. He slammed into Shaggydog and knocked him back, and
the two direwolves rolled over and over in a tangle of grey and
black fur, snapping and biting at each other, while Maester Luwin
struggled to his knees, his arm torn and bloody. Osha propped Bran
up against Lord Rickard’s stone wolf as she hurried to assist
the maester. In the light of the guttering torch, shadow wolves
twenty feet tall fought on the wall and roof.
“Shaggy,” a small voice called. When Bran looked up,
his little brother was standing in the mouth of Father’s
tomb. With one final snap at Summer’s face, Shaggydog broke
off and bounded to Rickon’s side. “You let my father
be,” Rickon warned Luwin. “You let him be.”
“Rickon,” Bran said softly. “Father’s
not here.”
“Yes he is. I saw him.” Tears glistened on
Rickon’s face. “I saw him last night.”
“In your dream . . . ?”
Rickon nodded. “You leave him. You leave him be.
He’s coming home now, like he promised. He’s coming
home.”
Bran had never seen Maester Luwin took so uncertain before.
Blood dripped down his arm where Shaggydog had shredded the wool of
his sleeve and the flesh beneath. “Osha, the torch,” he
said, biting through his pain, and she snatched it up before it
went out. Soot stains blackened both legs of his uncle’s
likeness. “That . . . that beast,” Luwin went on,
“is supposed to be chained up in the kennels.”
Rickon patted Shaggydog’s muzzle, damp with blood.
“I let him loose. He doesn’t like chains.” He
licked at his fingers.
“Rickon,” Bran said, “would you like to come
with me?”
“No. I like it here.”
“It’s dark here. And cold.”
“I’m not afraid. I have to wait for
Father.”
“You can wait with me,” Bran said.
“We’ll wait together, you and me and our wolves.”
Both of the direwolves were licking wounds now, and would bear
close watching.
“Bran,” the maester said firmly, “I know you
mean well, but Shaggydog is too wild to run loose. I’m the
third man he’s savaged. Give him the freedom of the castle
and it’s only a question of time before he kills someone. The
truth is hard, but the wolf has to be chained, or . . . &rdquo He
hesitated
. . . or killed, Bran thought, but what he said was, “He
was not made for chains. We will wait in your tower, all of
us.”
“That is quite impossible,” Maester Luwin said.
Osha grinned. “The boy’s the lordling here, as I
recall.” She handed Luwin back his torch and scooped Bran up
into her arms again. “The maester’s tower it
is.”
“Will you come, Rickon?”
His brother nodded. “If Shaggy comes too,” he said,
running after Osha and Bran, and there was nothing Maester Luwin
could do but follow, keeping a wary eye on the wolves.
Maester Luwin’s turret was so cluttered that it seemed to
Bran a wonder that he ever found anything. Tottering piles of books
covered tables and chairs, rows of stoppered jars lined the
shelves, candle stubs and puddles of dried wax dotted the
furniture, the bronze Myrish lens tube sat on a tripod by the
terrace door, star charts hung from the walls, shadow maps lay
scattered among the rushes, papers, quills, and pots of inks were
everywhere, and all of it was spotted with droppings from the
ravens in the rafters. Their strident quorks drifted down from
above as Osha washed and cleaned and bandaged the maester’s
wounds, under Luwin’s terse instruction. “This is
folly,” the small grey man said while she dabbed at the wolf
bites with a stinging ointment. “I agree that it is odd that
both you boys dreamed the same dream, yet when you stop to consider
it, it’s only natural. You miss your lord father, and you
know that he is a captive. Fear can fever a man’s mind and
give him queer thoughts. Rickon is too young to
comprehend—”
“I’m four now,” Rickon said. He was peeking
through the lens tube at the gargoyles on the First Keep. The
direwolves sat on opposite sides of the large round room, licking
their wounds and gnawing on bones.
“—too young, and—ooh, seven hells, that burns, no,
don’t stop, more. Too young, as I say, but you, Bran,
you’re old enough to know that dreams are only
dreams.”
“Some are, some aren’t.” Osha poured pale red
firemilk into a long gash. Luwin gasped. “The children of the
forest could tell you a thing or two about dreaming.”
Tears were streaming down the maester’s face, yet he shook
his head doggedly. “The children . . . live only in dreams.
Now. Dead and gone. Enough, that’s enough. Now the bandages.
Pads and then wrap, and make it tight, I’ll be
bleeding.”
“Old Nan says the children knew the songs of the trees,
that they could fly like birds and swim like fish and talk to the
animals,” Bran said. “She says that they made music so
beautiful that it made you cry like a little baby just to hear
it.”
“And all this they did with magic,” Maester Luwin
said, distracted. “I wish they were here now. A spell would
heal my arm less painfully, and they could talk to Shaggydog and
tell him not to bite.” He gave the big black wolf an angry
glance out of the corner of his eye. “Take a lesson, Bran.
The man who trusts in spells is dueling with a glass sword. As the
children did. Here, let me show you something.” He stood
abruptly, crossed the room, and returned with a green jar in his
good hand. “Have a look at these,” he said as he pulled
the stopper and shook out a handful of shiny black arrowheads.
Bran picked one up. “It’s made of glass.”
Curious, Rickon drifted closer to peer over the table.
“Dragonglass,” Osha named it as she sat down beside
Luwin, bandagings in hand.
“Obsidian,” Maester Luwin insisted, holding out his
wounded arm. “Forged in the fires of the gods, far below the
earth. The children of the forest hunted with that, thousands of
years ago. The children worked no metal. In place of mail, they
wore long shirts of woven leaves and bound their legs in bark, so
they seemed to melt into the wood. In place of swords, they carried
blades of obsidian.”
“And still do.” Osha placed soft pads over the bites
on the maester’s forearm and bound them tight with long
strips of linen.
Bran held the arrowhead up close. The black glass was slick and
shiny. He thought it beautiful. “Can I keep one?”
“As you wish,” the maester said.
“I want one too,” Rickon said. “I want four.
I’m four.”
Luwin made him count them out. “Careful, they’re
still sharp. Don’t cut yourself.”
“Tell me about the children,” Bran said. It was
important.
“What do you wish to know?”
“Everything.”
Maester Luwin tugged at his chain collar where it chafed against
his neck. “They were people of the Dawn Age, the very first,
before kings and kingdoms,” he said. “In those days,
there were no castles or holdfasts, no cities, not so much as a
market town to be found between here and the sea of Dorne. There
were no men at all. Only the children of the forest dwelt in the
lands we now call the Seven Kingdoms.
“They were a people dark and beautiful, small of stature,
no taller than children even when grown to manhood. They lived in
the depths of the wood, in caves and crannogs and secret tree
towns. Slight as they were, the children were quick and graceful.
Male and female hunted together, with weirwood bows and flying
snares. Their gods were the gods of the forest, stream, and stone,
the old gods whose names are secret. Their wise men were called
greenseers, and carved strange faces in the weirwoods to keep watch
on the woods. How long the children reigned here or where they came
from, no man can know.
“But some twelve thousand years ago, the First Men
appeared from the east, crossing the Broken Arm of Dorne before it
was broken. They came with bronze swords and great leathern
shields, riding horses. No horse had ever been seen on this side of
the narrow sea. No doubt the children were as frightened by the
horses as the First Men were by the faces in the trees. As the
First Men carved out holdfasts and farms, they cut down the faces
and gave them to the fire. Horror-struck, the children went to war.
The old songs say that the greenseers used dark magics to make the
seas rise and sweep away the land, shattering the Arm, but it was
too late to close the door. The wars went on until the earth ran
red with blood of men and children both, but more children than
men, for men were bigger and stronger, and wood and stone and
obsidian make a poor match for bronze. Finally the wise of both
races prevailed, and the chiefs and heroes of the First Men met the
greenseers and wood dancers amidst the weirwood groves of a small
island in the great lake called Gods Eye.
“There they forged the Pact. The First Men were given the
coastlands, the high plains and bright meadows, the mountains and
bogs, but the deep woods were to remain forever the
children’s, and no more weirwoods were to be put to the axe
anywhere in the realm. So the gods might bear witness to the
signing, every tree on the island was given a face, and afterward,
the sacred order of green men was formed to keep watch over the
Isle of Faces.
“The Pact began four thousand years of friendship between
men and children. In time, the First Men even put aside the gods
they had brought with them, and took up the worship of the secret
gods of the wood. The signing of the Pact ended the Dawn Age, and
began the Age of Heroes.”
Bran’s fist curled around the shiny black arrowhead.
“But the children of the forest are all gone now, you
said.”
“Here, they are,” said Osha, as she bit off the end
of the last bandage with her teeth. “North of the Wall,
things are different. That’s where the children went, and the
giants, and the other old races.”
Maester Luwin sighed. “Woman, by rights you ought to be
dead or in chains. The Starks have treated you more gently than you
deserve. It is unkind to repay them for their kindness by filling
the boys’ heads with folly.”
“Tell me where they went,” Bran said. “I want
to know.”
“Me too,” Rickon echoed.
“Oh, very well,” Luwin muttered. “So long as
the kingdoms of the First Men held sway, the Pact endured, all
through the Age of Heroes and the Long Night and the birth of the
Seven Kingdoms, yet finally there came a time, many centuries
later, when other peoples crossed the narrow sea.
“The Andals were the first, a race of tall, fair-haired
warriors who came with steel and fire and the seven-pointed star of
the new gods painted on their chests. The wars lasted hundreds of
years, but in the end the six southron kingdoms all fell before
them. Only here, where the King in the North threw back every army
that tried to cross the Neck, did the rule of the First Men endure.
The Andals burnt out the weirwood groves, hacked down the faces,
slaughtered the children where they found them, and everywhere
proclaimed the triumph of the Seven over the old gods. So the
children fled north—”
Summer began to howl.
Maester Luwin broke off, startled. When Shaggydog bounded to his
feet and added his voice to his brother’s, dread clutched at
Bran’s heart. “It’s coming,” he whispered,
with the certainty of despair. He had known it since last night, he
realized, since the crow had led him down into the crypts to say
farewell. He had known it, but he had not believed. He had wanted
Maester Luwin to be right. The crow, he thought, the three-eyed
crow . . .
The howling stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Summer padded
across the tower floor to Shaggydog, and began to lick at a mat of
bloody fur on the back of his brother’s neck. From the window
came a flutter of wings.
A raven landed on the grey stone sill, opened its beak, and gave
a harsh, raucous rattle of distress.
Rickon began to cry. His arrowheads fell from his hand one by
one and clattered on the floor. Bran pulled him close and hugged
him.
Maester Luwin stared at the black bird as if it were a scorpion
with feathers. He rose, slow as a sleepwalker, and moved to the
window. When he whistled, the raven hopped onto his bandaged
forearm. There was dried blood on its wings. “A hawk,”
Luwin murmured, “perhaps an owl. Poor thing, a wonder it got
through.” He took the letter from its leg.
Bran found himself shivering as the maester unrolled the paper.
“What is it?” he said, holding his brother all the
harder.
“You know what it is, boy,” Osha said, not unkindly.
She put her hand on his head.
Maester Luwin looked up at them numbly, a small grey man with
blood on the sleeve of his grey wool robe and tears in his bright
grey eyes. “My lords,” he said to the sons, in a voice
gone hoarse and shrunken, “we . . . we shall need to find a
stonecarver who knew his likeness well . . . ”