Alebelly found him in the forge, working the bellows for Mikken.
“Maester wants you in the turret, m’lord prince.
There’s been a bird from the king.”
“From Robb?” Excited, Bran did not wait for Hodor,
but let Alebelly carry him up the steps. He was a big man, though
not so big as Hodor and nowhere near as strong. By the time they
reached the maester’s turret he was red-faced and puffing.
Rickon was there before them, and both Walder Freys as well.
Maester Luwin sent Alebelly away and closed his door. “My
lords,” he said gravely, “we have had a message from
His Grace, with both good news and ill. He has won a great victory
in the west, shattering a Lannister army at a place named Oxcross,
and has taken several castles as well. He writes us from Ashemark,
formerly the stronghold of House Marbrand.”
Rickon tugged at the maester’s robe. “Is Robb coming
home?”
“Not just yet, I fear. There are battles yet to
fight.”
“Was it Lord Tywin he defeated?” asked Bran.
“No,” said the maester. “Ser Stafford
Lannister commanded the enemy host. He was slain in the
battle.”
Bran had never even heard of Ser Stafford Lannister. He found
himself agreeing with Big Walder when he said, “Lord Tywin is
the only one who matters.”
“Tell Robb I want him to come home,” said Rickon.
“He can bring his wolf home too, and Mother and
Father.” Though he knew Lord Eddard was dead, sometimes
Rickon forgot . . . willfully, Bran suspected.
His little brother was stubborn as only a boy of four can be.
Bran was glad for Robb’s victory, but disquieted as well.
He remembered what Osha had said the day that his brother had led
his army out Of Winterfell. He’s marching the wrong way, the
wildling woman had insisted.
“Sadly, no victory is without cost.” Maester Luwin
turned to the Walders. “My lords, your uncle Ser Stevron Frey
was among those who lost their lives at Oxcross. He took a wound in
the battle, Robb writes. It was not thought to be serious, but
three days later he died in his tent, asleep.”
Big Walder shrugged. “He was very old. Five-and-sixty, I
think. Too old for battles. He was always saying he was
tired.”
Little Walder hooted. “Tired of waiting for our
grandfather to die, you mean. Does this mean Ser Emmon’s the
heir now?”
“Don’t be stupid,” his cousin said. “The
sons of the first son come before the second son. Ser Ryman is next
in line, and then Edwyn and Black Walder and Petyr Pimple. And then
Aegon and all his sons.”
“Ryman is old too,” said Little Walder. “Past
forty, I bet. And he has a bad belly. Do you think he’ll be
lord?”
“I’ll be lord. I don’t care if he
is.”
Maester Luwin cut in sharply. “You ought to be ashamed of
such talk, my lords. Where is your grief? Your uncle is
dead.”
“Yes,” said Little Walder. “We’re very
sad.”
They weren’t, though. Bran got a sick feeling in his
belly. They like the taste of this dish better than I do. He asked
Maester Luwin to be excused.
“Very well.” The maester rang for help. Hodor must
have been busy in the stables. It was Osha who came. She was
stronger than Alebelly, though, and had no trouble lifting Bran in
her arms and carrying him down the steps.
“Osha,” Bran asked as they crossed the yard.
“Do you know the way north? To the Wall
and . . . and even past?”
“The way’s easy. Look for the Ice Dragon, and chase
the blue star in the rider’s eye.” She backed through a
door and started up the winding steps.
“And there are still giants there,
and . . . the
rest . . . the Others, and the children of the
forest too?”
“The giants I’ve seen, the children I’ve heard
tell of, and the white walkers . . . why do you
want to know?”
“Did you ever see a three-eyed crow?”
“No.” She laughed. “And I can’t say I’d
want to.” Osha kicked open the door to his bedchamber and set
him in his window seat, where he could watch the yard below.
It seemed only a few heartbeats after she took her leave that
the door opened again, and Jojen Reed entered unbidden, with his
sister Meera behind him. “You heard about the bird?”
Bran asked. The other boy nodded. “It wasn’t a supper
like you said. It was a letter from Robb, and we didn’t eat
it, but—”
“The green dreams take strange shapes sometimes,”
Jojen admitted. “The truth of them is not always easy to
understand.”
“Tell me the bad thing you dreamed,” Bran said.
“The bad thing that is coming to Winterfell.”
“Does my lord prince believe me now? Will he trust my
words, no matter how queer they sound in his ears?”
Bran nodded.
“It is the sea that comes.”
“The sea?”
“I dreamed that the sea was lapping all around Winterfell.
I saw black waves crashing against the gates and towers, and then
the salt water came flowing over the walls and filled the castle.
Drowned men were floating in the yard. When I first dreamed the
dream, back at Greywater, I didn’t know their faces, but now
I do. That Alebelly is one, the guard who called our names at the
feast. Your septon’s another. Your smith as well.”
“Mikken?” Bran was as confused as he was dismayed.
“But the sea is hundreds and hundreds of leagues away, and
Winterfell’s walls are so high the water couldn’t get
in even if it did come.”
“In the dark of night the salt sea will flow over these
walls,” said Jojen. “I saw the dead, bloated and
drowned.”
“We have to tell them,” Bran said. “Alebelly
and Mikken, and Septon Chayle. Tell them not to drown.”
“It will not save them,” replied the boy in
green.
Meera came to the window seat and put a hand on his shoulder.
“They will not believe, Bran. No more than you did.”
Jojen sat on Bran’s bed. “Tell me what you
dream.”
He was scared, even then, but he had sworn to trust them, and a
Stark of Winterfell keeps his sworn word. “There’s
different kinds,” he said slowly. “There’s the
wolf dreams, those aren’t so bad as the others. I run and
hunt and kill squirrels. And there’s dreams where the crow
comes and tells me to fly. Sometimes the tree is in those dreams
too, calling my name. That frightens me. But the worst dreams are
when I fall.” He looked down into the yard, feeling
miserable. “I never used to fall before. When I climbed. I
went everyplace, up on the roofs and along the walls, I used to
feed the crows in the Burned Tower. Mother was afraid that I would
fall but I knew I never would. Only I did, and now when I sleep I
fall all the time.”
Meera gave his shoulder a squeeze. “Is that
all?”
“I guess.”
“Warg,” said Jojen Reed.
Bran looked at him, his eyes wide. “What?”
“Warg. Shapechanger. Beastling. That is what they will
call you, if they should ever hear of your wolf dreams.”
The names made him afraid again. “Who will call
me?”
“Your own folk. In fear. Some will hate you if they know
what you are. Some will even try to kill you.”
Old Nan told scary stories of beastlings and shapechangers
sometimes. In the stories they were always evil. “I’m
not like that,” Bran said. “I’m not. It’s
only dreams.”
“The wolf dreams are no true dreams. You have your eye
closed tight whenever you’re awake, but as you drift off it
flutters open and your soul seeks out its other half. The power is
strong in you.”
“I don’t want it. I want to be a knight.”
“A knight is what you want. A warg is what you are. You
can’t change that, Bran, you can’t deny it or push it
away. You are the winged wolf, but you will never fly.” Jojen
got up and walked to the window. “Unless you open your
eye.” He put two fingers together and poked Bran in the
forehead, hard.
When he raised his hand to the spot, Bran felt only the smooth
unbroken skin. There was no eye, not even a closed one. “How
can I open it if it’s not there?”
“You will never find the eye with your fingers, Bran. You
must search with your heart.” Jojen studied Bran’s face
with those strange green eyes. “Or are you afraid?”
“Maester Luwin says there’s nothing in dreams that a
man need fear.”
“There is,” said Jojen.
“What?”
“The past. The future. The truth.”
They left him more muddled than ever. When he was alone, Bran
tried to open his third eye, but he didn’t know how. No
matter how he wrinkled his forehead and poked at it, he
couldn’t see any different than he’d done before. In
the days that followed, he tried to warn others about what Jojen
had seen, but it didn’t go as he wanted. Mikken thought it
was funny. “The sea, is it? Happens I always wanted to see
the sea. Never got where I could go to it, though. So now
it’s coming to me, is it? The gods are good, to take such
trouble for a poor smith.”
“The gods will take me when they see fit,” Septon
Chayle said quietly, “though I scarcely think it likely that
I’ll drown, Bran. I grew up on the banks of the White Knife,
you know. I’m quite the strong swimmer.”
Alebelly was the only one who paid the warning any heed. He went
to talk to Jojen himself, and afterward stopped bathing and refused
to go near the well. Finally he stank so bad that six of the other
guards threw him into a tub of scalding water and scrubbed him raw
while he screamed that they were going to drown him like the
frogboy had said. Thereafter he scowled whenever he saw Bran or
Jojen about the castle, and muttered under his breath.
It was a few days after Alebelly’s bath that Ser Rodrik
returned to Winterfell with his prisoner, a fleshy young man with
fat moist lips and long hair who smelled like a privy, even worse
than Alebelly had. “Reek, he’s called,” Hayhead
said when Bran asked who it was. “I never heard his true
name. He served the Bastard of Bolton and helped him murder Lady
Hornwood, they say.”
The Bastard himself was dead, Bran learned that evening over
supper. Ser Rodrik’s men had caught him on Hornwood land
doing something horrible (Bran wasn’t quite sure what, but it
seemed to be something you did without your clothes) and shot him
down with arrows as he tried to ride away. They came too late for
poor Lady Hornwood, though. After their wedding, the Bastard had
locked her in a tower and neglected to feed her. Bran had heard men
saying that when Ser Rodrik had smashed down the door he found her
with her mouth all bloody and her fingers chewed off.
“The monster has tied us a thorny knot,” the old
knight told Maester Luwin. “Like it or no, Lady Hornwood was
his wife. He made her say the vows before both septon and heart
tree, and bedded her that very night before witnesses. She signed a
will naming him as heir and fixed her seal to it.”
“Vows made at sword point are not valid,” the
maester argued.
“Roose Bolton may not agree. Not with land at
issue.” Ser Rodrik looked unhappy. “Would that I could
take this serving man’s head off as well, he’s as bad
as his master. But I fear I must keep him alive until Robb returns
from his wars. He is the only witness to the worst of the
Bastard’s crimes. Perhaps when Lord Bolton hears his tale, he
will abandon his claim, but meantime we have Manderly knights and
Dreadfort men killing one another in Hornwood forests, and I lack
the strength to stop them.” The old knight turned in his seat
and gave Bran a stern look. “And what have you been about
while I’ve been away, my lord prince? Commanding our
guardsmen not to wash? Do you want them smelling like this Reek, is
that it?”
“The sea is coming here,” Bran said. “Jojen
saw it in a green dream. Alebelly is going to
drown.”
Maester Luwin tugged at his chain collar. “The Reed boy
believes he sees the future in his dreams, Ser Rodrik. I’ve
spoken to Bran about the uncertainty of such prophecies, but if
truth be told, there is trouble along the Stony Shore. Raiders in
longships, plundering fishing villages. Raping and burning. Leobald
Tallhart has sent his nephew Benfred to deal with them, but I
expect they’ll take to their ships and flee at the first
sight of armed men.”
“Aye, and strike somewhere else. The Others take all such
cowards. They would never dare, no more than the Bastard of Bolton,
if our main strength were not a thousand leagues south.” Ser
Rodrik looked at Bran. “What else did the lad tell
you?”
“He said the water would flow over our walls. He saw
Alebelly drowned, and Mikken and Septon Chayle too.”
Ser Rodrik frowned. “Well, should it happen that I need to
ride against these raiders myself, I shan’t take Alebelly,
then. He didn’t see me drowned, did he? No? Good.”
It
heartened Bran to hear that. Maybe they won’t drown, then, he
thought. If they stay away from the sea.
Meera thought so too, later that night when she and Joien met
Bran in his room to play a three-sided game of tiles, but her
brother shook his head. “The things I see in green dreams
can’t be changed.”
That made his sister angry. “Why would the gods send a
warning if we can’t heed it and change what’s to
come?”
“I don’t know,” Joien said sadly.
“If you were Alebelly, you’d probably jump into the
well to have done with it! He should fight, and Bran should
too.”
“Me?” Bran felt suddenly afraid. “What should
I fight? Am I going to drown too?”
Meera looked at him guiltily. “I shouldn’t have
said . . . ”
He could tell that she was hiding something. “Did you see
me in a green dream?” he asked Jojen nervously. “Was I
drowned?”
“Not drowned.” Jojen spoke as if every word pained
him. “I dreamed of the man who came today, the one they call
Reek. You and your brother lay dead at his feet, and he was
skinning off your faces with a long red blade.”
Meera rose to her feet. “If I went to the dungeon, I could
drive a spear right through his heart. How could he murder Bran if
he was dead?”
“The gaolers will stop you,” Joien said. “The
guards. And if you tell them why you want him dead, they’ll
never believe.”
“I have guards too,” Bran reminded them.
“Alebelly and Poxy Tym and Hayhead and the rest.”
Jojen’s mossy eyes were full of pity. “They
won’t be able to stop him, Bran. I couldn’t see why,
but I saw the end of it. I saw you and Rickon in your crypts, down
in the dark with all the dead kings and their stone
wolves.” No, Bran thought. No. “If I went
away . . . to Greywater, or to the crow,
someplace far where they couldn’t find
me . . . ”
“It will not matter. The dream was green, Bran, and the
green dreams do not lie.”
Alebelly found him in the forge, working the bellows for Mikken.
“Maester wants you in the turret, m’lord prince.
There’s been a bird from the king.”
“From Robb?” Excited, Bran did not wait for Hodor,
but let Alebelly carry him up the steps. He was a big man, though
not so big as Hodor and nowhere near as strong. By the time they
reached the maester’s turret he was red-faced and puffing.
Rickon was there before them, and both Walder Freys as well.
Maester Luwin sent Alebelly away and closed his door. “My
lords,” he said gravely, “we have had a message from
His Grace, with both good news and ill. He has won a great victory
in the west, shattering a Lannister army at a place named Oxcross,
and has taken several castles as well. He writes us from Ashemark,
formerly the stronghold of House Marbrand.”
Rickon tugged at the maester’s robe. “Is Robb coming
home?”
“Not just yet, I fear. There are battles yet to
fight.”
“Was it Lord Tywin he defeated?” asked Bran.
“No,” said the maester. “Ser Stafford
Lannister commanded the enemy host. He was slain in the
battle.”
Bran had never even heard of Ser Stafford Lannister. He found
himself agreeing with Big Walder when he said, “Lord Tywin is
the only one who matters.”
“Tell Robb I want him to come home,” said Rickon.
“He can bring his wolf home too, and Mother and
Father.” Though he knew Lord Eddard was dead, sometimes
Rickon forgot . . . willfully, Bran suspected.
His little brother was stubborn as only a boy of four can be.
Bran was glad for Robb’s victory, but disquieted as well.
He remembered what Osha had said the day that his brother had led
his army out Of Winterfell. He’s marching the wrong way, the
wildling woman had insisted.
“Sadly, no victory is without cost.” Maester Luwin
turned to the Walders. “My lords, your uncle Ser Stevron Frey
was among those who lost their lives at Oxcross. He took a wound in
the battle, Robb writes. It was not thought to be serious, but
three days later he died in his tent, asleep.”
Big Walder shrugged. “He was very old. Five-and-sixty, I
think. Too old for battles. He was always saying he was
tired.”
Little Walder hooted. “Tired of waiting for our
grandfather to die, you mean. Does this mean Ser Emmon’s the
heir now?”
“Don’t be stupid,” his cousin said. “The
sons of the first son come before the second son. Ser Ryman is next
in line, and then Edwyn and Black Walder and Petyr Pimple. And then
Aegon and all his sons.”
“Ryman is old too,” said Little Walder. “Past
forty, I bet. And he has a bad belly. Do you think he’ll be
lord?”
“I’ll be lord. I don’t care if he
is.”
Maester Luwin cut in sharply. “You ought to be ashamed of
such talk, my lords. Where is your grief? Your uncle is
dead.”
“Yes,” said Little Walder. “We’re very
sad.”
They weren’t, though. Bran got a sick feeling in his
belly. They like the taste of this dish better than I do. He asked
Maester Luwin to be excused.
“Very well.” The maester rang for help. Hodor must
have been busy in the stables. It was Osha who came. She was
stronger than Alebelly, though, and had no trouble lifting Bran in
her arms and carrying him down the steps.
“Osha,” Bran asked as they crossed the yard.
“Do you know the way north? To the Wall
and . . . and even past?”
“The way’s easy. Look for the Ice Dragon, and chase
the blue star in the rider’s eye.” She backed through a
door and started up the winding steps.
“And there are still giants there,
and . . . the
rest . . . the Others, and the children of the
forest too?”
“The giants I’ve seen, the children I’ve heard
tell of, and the white walkers . . . why do you
want to know?”
“Did you ever see a three-eyed crow?”
“No.” She laughed. “And I can’t say I’d
want to.” Osha kicked open the door to his bedchamber and set
him in his window seat, where he could watch the yard below.
It seemed only a few heartbeats after she took her leave that
the door opened again, and Jojen Reed entered unbidden, with his
sister Meera behind him. “You heard about the bird?”
Bran asked. The other boy nodded. “It wasn’t a supper
like you said. It was a letter from Robb, and we didn’t eat
it, but—”
“The green dreams take strange shapes sometimes,”
Jojen admitted. “The truth of them is not always easy to
understand.”
“Tell me the bad thing you dreamed,” Bran said.
“The bad thing that is coming to Winterfell.”
“Does my lord prince believe me now? Will he trust my
words, no matter how queer they sound in his ears?”
Bran nodded.
“It is the sea that comes.”
“The sea?”
“I dreamed that the sea was lapping all around Winterfell.
I saw black waves crashing against the gates and towers, and then
the salt water came flowing over the walls and filled the castle.
Drowned men were floating in the yard. When I first dreamed the
dream, back at Greywater, I didn’t know their faces, but now
I do. That Alebelly is one, the guard who called our names at the
feast. Your septon’s another. Your smith as well.”
“Mikken?” Bran was as confused as he was dismayed.
“But the sea is hundreds and hundreds of leagues away, and
Winterfell’s walls are so high the water couldn’t get
in even if it did come.”
“In the dark of night the salt sea will flow over these
walls,” said Jojen. “I saw the dead, bloated and
drowned.”
“We have to tell them,” Bran said. “Alebelly
and Mikken, and Septon Chayle. Tell them not to drown.”
“It will not save them,” replied the boy in
green.
Meera came to the window seat and put a hand on his shoulder.
“They will not believe, Bran. No more than you did.”
Jojen sat on Bran’s bed. “Tell me what you
dream.”
He was scared, even then, but he had sworn to trust them, and a
Stark of Winterfell keeps his sworn word. “There’s
different kinds,” he said slowly. “There’s the
wolf dreams, those aren’t so bad as the others. I run and
hunt and kill squirrels. And there’s dreams where the crow
comes and tells me to fly. Sometimes the tree is in those dreams
too, calling my name. That frightens me. But the worst dreams are
when I fall.” He looked down into the yard, feeling
miserable. “I never used to fall before. When I climbed. I
went everyplace, up on the roofs and along the walls, I used to
feed the crows in the Burned Tower. Mother was afraid that I would
fall but I knew I never would. Only I did, and now when I sleep I
fall all the time.”
Meera gave his shoulder a squeeze. “Is that
all?”
“I guess.”
“Warg,” said Jojen Reed.
Bran looked at him, his eyes wide. “What?”
“Warg. Shapechanger. Beastling. That is what they will
call you, if they should ever hear of your wolf dreams.”
The names made him afraid again. “Who will call
me?”
“Your own folk. In fear. Some will hate you if they know
what you are. Some will even try to kill you.”
Old Nan told scary stories of beastlings and shapechangers
sometimes. In the stories they were always evil. “I’m
not like that,” Bran said. “I’m not. It’s
only dreams.”
“The wolf dreams are no true dreams. You have your eye
closed tight whenever you’re awake, but as you drift off it
flutters open and your soul seeks out its other half. The power is
strong in you.”
“I don’t want it. I want to be a knight.”
“A knight is what you want. A warg is what you are. You
can’t change that, Bran, you can’t deny it or push it
away. You are the winged wolf, but you will never fly.” Jojen
got up and walked to the window. “Unless you open your
eye.” He put two fingers together and poked Bran in the
forehead, hard.
When he raised his hand to the spot, Bran felt only the smooth
unbroken skin. There was no eye, not even a closed one. “How
can I open it if it’s not there?”
“You will never find the eye with your fingers, Bran. You
must search with your heart.” Jojen studied Bran’s face
with those strange green eyes. “Or are you afraid?”
“Maester Luwin says there’s nothing in dreams that a
man need fear.”
“There is,” said Jojen.
“What?”
“The past. The future. The truth.”
They left him more muddled than ever. When he was alone, Bran
tried to open his third eye, but he didn’t know how. No
matter how he wrinkled his forehead and poked at it, he
couldn’t see any different than he’d done before. In
the days that followed, he tried to warn others about what Jojen
had seen, but it didn’t go as he wanted. Mikken thought it
was funny. “The sea, is it? Happens I always wanted to see
the sea. Never got where I could go to it, though. So now
it’s coming to me, is it? The gods are good, to take such
trouble for a poor smith.”
“The gods will take me when they see fit,” Septon
Chayle said quietly, “though I scarcely think it likely that
I’ll drown, Bran. I grew up on the banks of the White Knife,
you know. I’m quite the strong swimmer.”
Alebelly was the only one who paid the warning any heed. He went
to talk to Jojen himself, and afterward stopped bathing and refused
to go near the well. Finally he stank so bad that six of the other
guards threw him into a tub of scalding water and scrubbed him raw
while he screamed that they were going to drown him like the
frogboy had said. Thereafter he scowled whenever he saw Bran or
Jojen about the castle, and muttered under his breath.
It was a few days after Alebelly’s bath that Ser Rodrik
returned to Winterfell with his prisoner, a fleshy young man with
fat moist lips and long hair who smelled like a privy, even worse
than Alebelly had. “Reek, he’s called,” Hayhead
said when Bran asked who it was. “I never heard his true
name. He served the Bastard of Bolton and helped him murder Lady
Hornwood, they say.”
The Bastard himself was dead, Bran learned that evening over
supper. Ser Rodrik’s men had caught him on Hornwood land
doing something horrible (Bran wasn’t quite sure what, but it
seemed to be something you did without your clothes) and shot him
down with arrows as he tried to ride away. They came too late for
poor Lady Hornwood, though. After their wedding, the Bastard had
locked her in a tower and neglected to feed her. Bran had heard men
saying that when Ser Rodrik had smashed down the door he found her
with her mouth all bloody and her fingers chewed off.
“The monster has tied us a thorny knot,” the old
knight told Maester Luwin. “Like it or no, Lady Hornwood was
his wife. He made her say the vows before both septon and heart
tree, and bedded her that very night before witnesses. She signed a
will naming him as heir and fixed her seal to it.”
“Vows made at sword point are not valid,” the
maester argued.
“Roose Bolton may not agree. Not with land at
issue.” Ser Rodrik looked unhappy. “Would that I could
take this serving man’s head off as well, he’s as bad
as his master. But I fear I must keep him alive until Robb returns
from his wars. He is the only witness to the worst of the
Bastard’s crimes. Perhaps when Lord Bolton hears his tale, he
will abandon his claim, but meantime we have Manderly knights and
Dreadfort men killing one another in Hornwood forests, and I lack
the strength to stop them.” The old knight turned in his seat
and gave Bran a stern look. “And what have you been about
while I’ve been away, my lord prince? Commanding our
guardsmen not to wash? Do you want them smelling like this Reek, is
that it?”
“The sea is coming here,” Bran said. “Jojen
saw it in a green dream. Alebelly is going to
drown.”
Maester Luwin tugged at his chain collar. “The Reed boy
believes he sees the future in his dreams, Ser Rodrik. I’ve
spoken to Bran about the uncertainty of such prophecies, but if
truth be told, there is trouble along the Stony Shore. Raiders in
longships, plundering fishing villages. Raping and burning. Leobald
Tallhart has sent his nephew Benfred to deal with them, but I
expect they’ll take to their ships and flee at the first
sight of armed men.”
“Aye, and strike somewhere else. The Others take all such
cowards. They would never dare, no more than the Bastard of Bolton,
if our main strength were not a thousand leagues south.” Ser
Rodrik looked at Bran. “What else did the lad tell
you?”
“He said the water would flow over our walls. He saw
Alebelly drowned, and Mikken and Septon Chayle too.”
Ser Rodrik frowned. “Well, should it happen that I need to
ride against these raiders myself, I shan’t take Alebelly,
then. He didn’t see me drowned, did he? No? Good.”
It
heartened Bran to hear that. Maybe they won’t drown, then, he
thought. If they stay away from the sea.
Meera thought so too, later that night when she and Joien met
Bran in his room to play a three-sided game of tiles, but her
brother shook his head. “The things I see in green dreams
can’t be changed.”
That made his sister angry. “Why would the gods send a
warning if we can’t heed it and change what’s to
come?”
“I don’t know,” Joien said sadly.
“If you were Alebelly, you’d probably jump into the
well to have done with it! He should fight, and Bran should
too.”
“Me?” Bran felt suddenly afraid. “What should
I fight? Am I going to drown too?”
Meera looked at him guiltily. “I shouldn’t have
said . . . ”
He could tell that she was hiding something. “Did you see
me in a green dream?” he asked Jojen nervously. “Was I
drowned?”
“Not drowned.” Jojen spoke as if every word pained
him. “I dreamed of the man who came today, the one they call
Reek. You and your brother lay dead at his feet, and he was
skinning off your faces with a long red blade.”
Meera rose to her feet. “If I went to the dungeon, I could
drive a spear right through his heart. How could he murder Bran if
he was dead?”
“The gaolers will stop you,” Joien said. “The
guards. And if you tell them why you want him dead, they’ll
never believe.”
“I have guards too,” Bran reminded them.
“Alebelly and Poxy Tym and Hayhead and the rest.”
Jojen’s mossy eyes were full of pity. “They
won’t be able to stop him, Bran. I couldn’t see why,
but I saw the end of it. I saw you and Rickon in your crypts, down
in the dark with all the dead kings and their stone
wolves.” No, Bran thought. No. “If I went
away . . . to Greywater, or to the crow,
someplace far where they couldn’t find
me . . . ”
“It will not matter. The dream was green, Bran, and the
green dreams do not lie.”