The sound was the faintest of clinks, a scraping of steel over
stone. He lifted his head from his paws, listening, sniffing at the
night.
The evening’s rain had woken a hundred sleeping smells
and made them ripe and strong again. Grass and thorns, blackberries
broken on the ground, mud, worms, rotting leaves, a rat creeping
through the bush. He caught the shaggy black scent of his
brother’s coat and the sharp coppery tang of blood from the
squirrel he’d killed. Other squirrels moved through the
branches above, smelling of wet fur and fear, their little claws
scratching at the bark. The noise had sounded something like
that.
And he heard it again, clink and scrape. It brought him to his
feet. His ears pricked and his tail rose. He howled, a long deep
shivery cry, a howl to wake the sleepers, but the piles of man-rock
were dark and dead. A still wet night, a night to drive men into
their holes. The rain had stopped, but the men still hid from the
damp, huddled by the fires in their caves of piled stone.
His brother came sliding through the trees, moving almost as
quiet as another brother he remembered dimly from long ago, the
white one with the eyes of blood. This brother’s eyes were
pools of shadow, but the fur on the back of his neck was bristling.
He had heard the sounds as well, and known they meant danger.
This time the clink and scrape were followed by a slithering and
the soft swift patter of skinfeet on stone. The wind brought the
faintest whiff of a man-smell he did not know. Stranger. Danger.
Death.
He ran toward the sound, his brother racing beside him. The
stone dens rose before them, walls slick and wet. He bared his
teeth, but the man-rock took no notice. A gate loomed up, a black
iron snake coiled tight about bar and post. When he crashed against
it, the gate shuddered and the snake clanked and slithered and
held. Through the bars he could look down the long stone burrow
that ran between the walls to the stony field beyond, but there was
no way through. He could force his muzzle between the bars, but no
more. Many a time his brother had tried to crack the black bones of
the gate between his teeth, but they would not break. They had
tried to dig under, but there were great flat stones beneath,
half-covered by earth and blown leaves.
Snarling, he paced back and forth in front of the gate, then
threw himself at it once more. It moved a little and slammed him
back. Locked, something whispered. Chained. The voice he did not
hear, the scent without a smell. The other ways were closed as
well. Where doors opened in the walls of man-rock, the wood was
thick and strong. There was no way out. There is, the whisper came, and it seemed as if he could see the
shadow of a great tree covered in needles, slanting up out of the
black earth to ten times the height of a man. Yet when he looked
about, it was not there. The other side of the godswood, the
sentinel, hurry, hurry . . .
Through the gloom of night came a muffled shout, cut short.
Swiftly, swiftly, he whirled and bounded back into the trees,
wet leaves rustling beneath his paws, branches whipping at him as
he rushed past. He could hear his brother following close. They
plunged under the heart tree and around the cold pool, through the
blackberry bushes, under a tangle of oaks and ash and hawthorn
scrub, to the far side of the wood . . . and
there it was, the shadow he’d glimpsed without seeing, the
slanting tree pointing at the rooftops. Sentinel, came the
thought.
He remembered how it was to climb it then. The needles
everywhere, scratching at his bare face and falling down the back
of his neck, the sticky sap on his hands, the sharp piney smell of
it. It was an easy tree for a boy to climb, leaning as it did,
crooked, the branches so close together they almost made a ladder,
slanting right up to the roof.
Growling, he sniffed around the base of the tree, lifted a leg
and marked it with a stream of urine. A low branch brushed his
face, and he snapped at it, twisting and pulling until the wood
cracked and tore. His mouth was full of needles and the bitter
taste of the sap. He shook his head and snarled.
His brother sat back on his haunches and lifted his voice in a
ululating howl, his song black with mourning. The way was no way.
They were not squirrels, nor the cubs of men, they could not
wriggle up the trunks of trees, clinging with soft pink paws and
clumsy feet. They were runners, hunters, prowlers.
Off across the night, beyond the stone that hemmed them close,
the dogs woke and began to bark. One and then another and then all
of them, a great clamor. They smelled it too; the scent of foes and
fear.
A desperate fury filled him, hot as hunger. He sprang away from
the wall loped off beneath the trees, the shadows of branch and
leaf dappling his grey fur . . . and then he
turned and raced back in a rush. His feet flew kicking up wet
leaves and pine needles, and for a little time he was a hunter and
an antlered stag was fleeing before him and he could see it, smell
it, and he ran full out in pursuit. The smell of fear made his
heart thunder and slaver ran from his jaws, and he reached the
falling tree in stride and threw himself up the trunk, claws
scrabbling at the bark for purchase. Upward he bounded, up, two
bounds, three, hardly slowing, until he was among the lower limbs.
Branches tangled his feet and whipped at his eyes, grey-green
needles scattered as he shouldered through them, snapping. He had
to slow. Something snagged at his foot and he wrenched it free,
snarling. The trunk narrowed under him, the slope steeper, almost
straight up, and wet. The bark tore like skin when he tried to claw
at it. He was a third of the way up, halfway, more, the roof was
almost within reach . . . and then he put down
a foot and felt it slip off the curve of wet wood, and suddenly he
was sliding, stumbling. He yowled in fear and fury, falling,
falling, and twisted around while the ground rushed up to break
him . . .
And then Bran was back abed in his lonely tower room, tangled in
his blankets, his breath coming hard. “Summer,” he
cried aloud. “Summer.” His shoulder seemed to ache, as
if he had fallen on it, but he knew it was only the ghost of what
the wolf was feeling. Jojen told it true. I am a beastling. Outside
he could hear the faint barking of dogs. The sea has come.
It’s flowing over the walls, just as Jojen saw. Bran grabbed
the bar overhead and pulled himself up, shouting for help. No one
came, and after a moment he remembered that no one would. They had
taken the guard off his door. Ser Rodrik had needed every man of
fighting age he could lay his hands on, so Winterfell had been left
with only a token garrison.
The rest had left eight days past, six hundred men from
Winterfell and the nearest holdfasts. Cley Cerwyn was bringing
three hundred more to join them on the march, and Maester Luwin had
sent ravens before them, summoning levies from White Harbor and the
barrowlands and even the deep places inside the wolfswood.
Torrhen’s Square was under attack by some monstrous war chief
named Dagmer Cleftjaw. Old Nan said he couldn’t be killed,
that once a foe had cut his head in two with an axe, but Dagmer was
so fierce he’d just pushed the two halves back together and
held them until they healed up. Could Dagmer have won?
Torrhen’s Square was many days from Winterfell, yet
still . . .
Bran pulled himself from the bed, moving bar to bar until he
reached the windows. His fingers fumbled a little as he swung back
the shutters. The yard was empty, and all the windows he could see
were black. Winterfell slept. “Hodor!” he shouted down,
as loud as he could. Hodor would be asleep above the stables, but
maybe if he yelled loud enough he’d hear, or somebody would.
“Hodor, come fast! Osha! Meera, Jojen, anyone!” Bran
cupped his hands around his mouth. “HOOOOODOOOOOR!”
But when the door crashed open behind him, the man who stepped
through was no one Bran knew. He wore a leather jerkin sewn with
overlapping iron disks, and carried a dirk in one hand and an axe
strapped to his back. “What do you want?” Bran
demanded, afraid. “This is my room. You get out of
here.”
Theon Greyjoy followed him into the bedchamber.
“We’re not here to harm you, Bran.”
“Theon?” Bran felt dizzy with relief. “Did
Robb send you? Is he here too?”
“Robb’s far away. He can’t help you
now.”
“Help me?” He was confused. “Don’t scare
me, Theon.”
“I’m Prince Theon now. We’re both princes,
Bran. Who would have dreamed it? But I’ve taken your castle,
my prince.”
“Winterfell?” Bran shook his head. “No, you
couldn’t.”
“Leave us, Werlag.” The man with the dirk withdrew.
Theon seated himself on the bed. “I sent four men over the
walls with grappling claws and ropes, and they opened a postern
gate for the rest of us. My men are dealing with yours even now. I
promise you, Winterfell is mine.”
Bran did not understand. “But you’re Father’s
ward.”
“And now you and your brother are my wards. As soon as the
fighting’s done, my men will be bringing the rest of your
people together in the Great Hall. You and I are going to speak to
them. You’ll tell them how you’ve yielded Winterfell to
me, and command them to serve and obey their new lord as they did
the old.”
“I won’t,” said Bran. “We’ll fight
you and throw you out. I never yielded, you can’t make me say
I did.”
“This is no game, Bran, so don’t play the boy with
me, I won’t stand for it. The castle is mine, but these
people are still yours. If the prince would keep them safe,
he’d best do as he’s told.” He rose and went to
the door. “Someone will come dress you and carry you to the
Great Hall. Think carefully on what you want to say.”
The waiting made Bran feel even more helpless than before. He
sat in the window seat, staring out at dark towers and walls black
as shadow. Once he thought he heard shouting beyond the Guards
Hall, and something that might have been the clash of swords, but
he did not have Summer’s ears to hear, nor his nose to smell.
Awake, I am still broken, but when I sleep, when I’m Summer,
I can run and fight and hear and smell.
He had expected that Hodor would come for him, or maybe one of
the serving girls, but when the door next opened it was Maester
Luwin, carrying a candle. “Bran,” he said,
“you . . . know what has happened? You
have been told?” The skin was broken above his left eye, and
blood ran down that side of his face.
“Theon came. He said Winterfell was his now.”
The maester set down the candle and wiped the blood off his
cheek. “They swam the moat. Climbed the walls with hook and
rope. Came over wet and dripping, steel in hand.” He sat on
the chair by the door, as fresh blood flowed. “Alebelly was
on the gate, they surprised him in the turret and killed him.
Hayhead’s wounded as well. I had time to send off two ravens
before they burst in. The bird to White Harbor got away, but they
brought down the other with an arrow.” The maester stared at
the rushes. “Ser Rodrik took too many of our men, but I am to
blame as much as he is. I never saw this danger, I
never . . . ” Jojen saw it, Bran thought.
“You better help me dress.”
“Yes, that’s so.” In the heavy ironbound chest
at the foot of Bran’s bed the maester found smallclothes,
breeches, and tunic. “You are the Stark in Winterfell, and
Robb’s heir. You must look princely.” Together they
garbed him as befit a lord.
“Theon wants me to yield the castle,” Bran said as
the maester was fastening the cloak with his favorite
wolf’s-head clasp of silver and jet.
“There is no shame in that. A lord must protect his
smallfolk. Cruel places breed cruel peoples, Bran, remember that as
you deal with these ironmen. Your lord father did what he could to
gentle Theon, but I fear it was too little and too late.”
The ironman who came for them was a squat thick-bodied man with
a coal-black beard that covered half his chest. He bore the boy
easily enough, though he looked none too happy with the task.
Rickon’s bedchamber was a half turn down the steps. The
four-year-old was cranky at being woken. “I want
Mother,” he said. “I want her. And Shaggydog
too.”
“Your mother is far away, my prince.” Maester Luwin
pulled a bedrobe over the child’s head. “But I’m
here, and Bran.” He took Rickon by the hand and led him
out.
Below, they came on Meera and Jojen being herded from their room
by a bald man whose spear was three feet taller than he was. When
Jojen looked at Bran, his eyes were green pools full of sorrow.
Other ironmen had rousted the Freys. “Your brother’s
lost his kingdom,” Little Walder told Bran.
“You’re no prince now, just a hostage.”
“So are you,” Jojen said, “and me, and all of
us.”
“No one was talking to you, frogeater.”
One of the ironmen went before them carrying a torch, but the
rain had started again and soon drowned it out. As they hurried
across the yard they could hear the direwolves howling in the
godswood. I hope Summer wasn’t hurt falling from the
tree.
Theon Greyjoy was seated in the high seat of the Starks. He had
taken off his cloak. Over a shirt of fine mail he wore a black
surcoat emblazoned with the golden kraken of his House. His hands
rested on the wolves’ heads carved at the ends of the wide
stone arms. “Theon’s sitting in Robb’s
chair,” Rickon said.
“Hush, Rickon.” Bran could feel the menace around
them, but his brother was too young. A few torches had been lit,
and a fire kindled in the great hearth, but most of the hall
remained in darkness. There was no place to sit with the benches
stacked against the walls, so the castle folk stood in small
groups, not daring to speak. He saw Old Nan, her toothless mouth
opening and closing. Hayhead was carried in between two of the
other guards, a bloodstained bandage wrapped about his bare chest.
Poxy Tym wept inconsolably, and Beth Cassel cried with fear.
“What have we here?” Theon asked of the Reeds and
Freys.
“These are Lady Catelyn’s wards, both named Walder
Frey,” Maester Luwin explained. “And this is Jojen Reed
and his sister Meera, son and daughter to Howland Reed of Greywater
Watch, who came to renew their oaths of fealty to
Winterfell.”
“Some might call that ill-timed,” said Theon,
“though not for me. Here you are and here you’ll
stay.” He vacated the high seat. “Bring the prince
here, Lorren.” The black-bearded man dumped Bran onto the
stone as if he were a sack of oats.
People were still being driven into the Great Hall, prodded
along with shouts and the butts of the spears. Gage and Osha
arrived from the kitchens, spotted with flour from making the
morning bread. Mikken they dragged in cursing. Farlen entered
limping, struggling to support Palla. Her dress had been ripped in
two; she held it up with a clenched fist and walked as if every
step were agony. Septon Chayle rushed to lend a hand, but one of
the ironmen knocked him to the floor.
The last man marched through the doors was the prisoner Reek,
whose stench preceded him, ripe and pungent. Bran felt his stomach
twist at the smell of him. “We found this one locked in a
tower cell,” announced his escort, a beardless youth with
ginger-colored hair and sodden clothing, doubtless one of those
who’d swum the moat. “He says they call him
Reek.”
“Can’t think why,” Theon said, smiling.
“Do you always smell so bad, or did you just finish fucking a
pig?”
“Haven’t fucked no one since they took me,
m’lord. Heke’s me true name. I was in service to the
Bastard o’ the Dreadfort till the Starks give him an arrow in
the back for a wedding gift.”
Theon found that amusing. “Who did he marry?”
“The widow o’ Hornwood, m’lord.”
“That crone? Was he blind? She has teats like empty
wineskins, dry and withered.”
“It wasn’t her teats he wed her for,
m’lord.”
The ironmen slammed shut the tall doors at the foot of the hall.
From the high seat, Bran could see about twenty of them. He
probably left some guards on the gates and the armory. Even so,
there couldn’t be more than thirty.
Theon raised his hands for quiet. “You all know
me—”
“Aye, we know you for a sack of steaming dung!”
shouted Mikken, before the bald man drove the butt of his spear
into his gut, then smashed him across the face with the shaft. The
smith stumbled to his knees and spat out a tooth.
“Mikken, you be silent.” Bran tried to sound stern
and lordly, the way Robb did when he made a command, but his voice
betrayed him and the words came out in a shrill squeak.
“Listen to your little lordling, Mikken,” said
Theon. “He has more sense than you do.” A good lord protects his people, he reminded himself.
“I’ve yielded Winterfell to Theon.”
“Louder, Bran. And call me prince.”
He raised his voice. “I have yielded Winterfell to Prince
Theon. All of you should do as he commands you.”
“Damned if I will!” bellowed Mikken.
Theon ignored the outburst. “My father has donned the
ancient crown of salt and rock, and declared himself King of the
Iron Islands. He claims the north as well, by right of conquest.
You are all his subjects.”
“Bugger that.” Mikken wiped the blood from his
mouth. “I serve the Starks, not some treasonous squid
of—aah.” The butt of the spear smashed him face first into
the stone floor.
“Smiths have strong arms and weak heads,” observed
Theon. “But if the rest of you serve me as loyally as you
served Ned Stark, you’ll find me as generous a lord as you
could want.” on his hands and knees, Mikken spat blood.
Please don’t, Bran wished at him, but the blacksmith shouted,
“If you think you can hold the north with this sorry lot
o’—”
The bald man drove the point of his spear into the back of
Mikken’s neck. Steel slid through flesh and came out his
throat in a welter of blood. A woman screamed, and Meera wrapped
her arms around Rickon. It’s blood he drowned on, Bran
thought numbly. His own blood.
“Who else has something to say?” asked Theon
Greyjoy.
“Hodor hodor hodor hodor,” shouted Hodor, eyes
wide.
“Someone kindly shut that halfwit up.”
Two ironmen began to beat Hodor with the butts of their spears.
The stableboy dropped to the floor, trying to shield himself with
his hands.
“I will be as good a lord to you as Eddard Stark ever
was.” Theon raised his voice to be heard above the smack of
wood on flesh. “Betray me, though, and you’ll wish you
hadn’t. And don’t think the men you see here are the
whole of my power. Torrhen’s Square and Deepwood Motte will
soon be ours as well, and my uncle is sailing up the Saltspear to
seize Moat Cailin. If Robb Stark can stave off the Lannisters, he
may reign as King of the Trident hereafter, but House Greyjoy holds
the north now.”
“Stark’s lords will fight you,” the man Reek
called out. “That bloated pig at White Harbor for one, and
them Umbers and Karstarks too. You’ll need men. Free me and
I’m yours.”
Theon weighed him a moment. “You’re cleverer than
you smell, but I could not suffer that stench.”
“Well,” said Reek, “I could wash some. If I
was free.”
“A man of rare good sense.” Theon smiled.
“Bend the knee.” one of the ironmen handed Reek a
sword, and he laid it at Theon’s feet and swore obedience to
House Greyjoy and King Balon. Bran could not look. The green dream
was coming true.
“M’lord Greyjoy!” Osha stepped past
Mikken’s body. “I was brought here captive too. You
were there the day I was taken.” I thought you were a friend, Bran thought, hurt.
“I need fighters,” Theon declared, “not
kitchen sluts.”
“It was Robb Stark put me in the kitchens. For the best
part of a year, I’ve been left to scour kettles, scrape
grease, and warm the straw for this one.” She threw a look at
Gage. “I’ve had a bellyful of it. Put a spear in my
hand again.”
“I got a spear for you right here,” said the bald
man who’d killed Mikken. He grabbed his crotch, grinning.
Osha drove her bony knee up between his legs. “You keep
that soft pink thing.” She wrested the spear from him and
used the butt to knock him off his feet. “I’ll have me
the wood and iron.” The bald man writhed on the floor while
the other reavers sent up gales of laughter.
Theon laughed with the rest. “You’ll do,” he
said. “Keep the spear; Stygg can find another. Now bend the
knee and swear.”
When no one else rushed forward to pledge service, they were
dismissed with a warning to do their work and make no trouble.
Hodor was given the task of bearing Bran back to his bed. His face
was all ugly from the beating, his nose swollen and one eye closed.
“Hodor,” he sobbed between cracked lips as he lifted
Bran in huge strong arms and bloody hands and carried him back out
into the rain.
The sound was the faintest of clinks, a scraping of steel over
stone. He lifted his head from his paws, listening, sniffing at the
night.
The evening’s rain had woken a hundred sleeping smells
and made them ripe and strong again. Grass and thorns, blackberries
broken on the ground, mud, worms, rotting leaves, a rat creeping
through the bush. He caught the shaggy black scent of his
brother’s coat and the sharp coppery tang of blood from the
squirrel he’d killed. Other squirrels moved through the
branches above, smelling of wet fur and fear, their little claws
scratching at the bark. The noise had sounded something like
that.
And he heard it again, clink and scrape. It brought him to his
feet. His ears pricked and his tail rose. He howled, a long deep
shivery cry, a howl to wake the sleepers, but the piles of man-rock
were dark and dead. A still wet night, a night to drive men into
their holes. The rain had stopped, but the men still hid from the
damp, huddled by the fires in their caves of piled stone.
His brother came sliding through the trees, moving almost as
quiet as another brother he remembered dimly from long ago, the
white one with the eyes of blood. This brother’s eyes were
pools of shadow, but the fur on the back of his neck was bristling.
He had heard the sounds as well, and known they meant danger.
This time the clink and scrape were followed by a slithering and
the soft swift patter of skinfeet on stone. The wind brought the
faintest whiff of a man-smell he did not know. Stranger. Danger.
Death.
He ran toward the sound, his brother racing beside him. The
stone dens rose before them, walls slick and wet. He bared his
teeth, but the man-rock took no notice. A gate loomed up, a black
iron snake coiled tight about bar and post. When he crashed against
it, the gate shuddered and the snake clanked and slithered and
held. Through the bars he could look down the long stone burrow
that ran between the walls to the stony field beyond, but there was
no way through. He could force his muzzle between the bars, but no
more. Many a time his brother had tried to crack the black bones of
the gate between his teeth, but they would not break. They had
tried to dig under, but there were great flat stones beneath,
half-covered by earth and blown leaves.
Snarling, he paced back and forth in front of the gate, then
threw himself at it once more. It moved a little and slammed him
back. Locked, something whispered. Chained. The voice he did not
hear, the scent without a smell. The other ways were closed as
well. Where doors opened in the walls of man-rock, the wood was
thick and strong. There was no way out. There is, the whisper came, and it seemed as if he could see the
shadow of a great tree covered in needles, slanting up out of the
black earth to ten times the height of a man. Yet when he looked
about, it was not there. The other side of the godswood, the
sentinel, hurry, hurry . . .
Through the gloom of night came a muffled shout, cut short.
Swiftly, swiftly, he whirled and bounded back into the trees,
wet leaves rustling beneath his paws, branches whipping at him as
he rushed past. He could hear his brother following close. They
plunged under the heart tree and around the cold pool, through the
blackberry bushes, under a tangle of oaks and ash and hawthorn
scrub, to the far side of the wood . . . and
there it was, the shadow he’d glimpsed without seeing, the
slanting tree pointing at the rooftops. Sentinel, came the
thought.
He remembered how it was to climb it then. The needles
everywhere, scratching at his bare face and falling down the back
of his neck, the sticky sap on his hands, the sharp piney smell of
it. It was an easy tree for a boy to climb, leaning as it did,
crooked, the branches so close together they almost made a ladder,
slanting right up to the roof.
Growling, he sniffed around the base of the tree, lifted a leg
and marked it with a stream of urine. A low branch brushed his
face, and he snapped at it, twisting and pulling until the wood
cracked and tore. His mouth was full of needles and the bitter
taste of the sap. He shook his head and snarled.
His brother sat back on his haunches and lifted his voice in a
ululating howl, his song black with mourning. The way was no way.
They were not squirrels, nor the cubs of men, they could not
wriggle up the trunks of trees, clinging with soft pink paws and
clumsy feet. They were runners, hunters, prowlers.
Off across the night, beyond the stone that hemmed them close,
the dogs woke and began to bark. One and then another and then all
of them, a great clamor. They smelled it too; the scent of foes and
fear.
A desperate fury filled him, hot as hunger. He sprang away from
the wall loped off beneath the trees, the shadows of branch and
leaf dappling his grey fur . . . and then he
turned and raced back in a rush. His feet flew kicking up wet
leaves and pine needles, and for a little time he was a hunter and
an antlered stag was fleeing before him and he could see it, smell
it, and he ran full out in pursuit. The smell of fear made his
heart thunder and slaver ran from his jaws, and he reached the
falling tree in stride and threw himself up the trunk, claws
scrabbling at the bark for purchase. Upward he bounded, up, two
bounds, three, hardly slowing, until he was among the lower limbs.
Branches tangled his feet and whipped at his eyes, grey-green
needles scattered as he shouldered through them, snapping. He had
to slow. Something snagged at his foot and he wrenched it free,
snarling. The trunk narrowed under him, the slope steeper, almost
straight up, and wet. The bark tore like skin when he tried to claw
at it. He was a third of the way up, halfway, more, the roof was
almost within reach . . . and then he put down
a foot and felt it slip off the curve of wet wood, and suddenly he
was sliding, stumbling. He yowled in fear and fury, falling,
falling, and twisted around while the ground rushed up to break
him . . .
And then Bran was back abed in his lonely tower room, tangled in
his blankets, his breath coming hard. “Summer,” he
cried aloud. “Summer.” His shoulder seemed to ache, as
if he had fallen on it, but he knew it was only the ghost of what
the wolf was feeling. Jojen told it true. I am a beastling. Outside
he could hear the faint barking of dogs. The sea has come.
It’s flowing over the walls, just as Jojen saw. Bran grabbed
the bar overhead and pulled himself up, shouting for help. No one
came, and after a moment he remembered that no one would. They had
taken the guard off his door. Ser Rodrik had needed every man of
fighting age he could lay his hands on, so Winterfell had been left
with only a token garrison.
The rest had left eight days past, six hundred men from
Winterfell and the nearest holdfasts. Cley Cerwyn was bringing
three hundred more to join them on the march, and Maester Luwin had
sent ravens before them, summoning levies from White Harbor and the
barrowlands and even the deep places inside the wolfswood.
Torrhen’s Square was under attack by some monstrous war chief
named Dagmer Cleftjaw. Old Nan said he couldn’t be killed,
that once a foe had cut his head in two with an axe, but Dagmer was
so fierce he’d just pushed the two halves back together and
held them until they healed up. Could Dagmer have won?
Torrhen’s Square was many days from Winterfell, yet
still . . .
Bran pulled himself from the bed, moving bar to bar until he
reached the windows. His fingers fumbled a little as he swung back
the shutters. The yard was empty, and all the windows he could see
were black. Winterfell slept. “Hodor!” he shouted down,
as loud as he could. Hodor would be asleep above the stables, but
maybe if he yelled loud enough he’d hear, or somebody would.
“Hodor, come fast! Osha! Meera, Jojen, anyone!” Bran
cupped his hands around his mouth. “HOOOOODOOOOOR!”
But when the door crashed open behind him, the man who stepped
through was no one Bran knew. He wore a leather jerkin sewn with
overlapping iron disks, and carried a dirk in one hand and an axe
strapped to his back. “What do you want?” Bran
demanded, afraid. “This is my room. You get out of
here.”
Theon Greyjoy followed him into the bedchamber.
“We’re not here to harm you, Bran.”
“Theon?” Bran felt dizzy with relief. “Did
Robb send you? Is he here too?”
“Robb’s far away. He can’t help you
now.”
“Help me?” He was confused. “Don’t scare
me, Theon.”
“I’m Prince Theon now. We’re both princes,
Bran. Who would have dreamed it? But I’ve taken your castle,
my prince.”
“Winterfell?” Bran shook his head. “No, you
couldn’t.”
“Leave us, Werlag.” The man with the dirk withdrew.
Theon seated himself on the bed. “I sent four men over the
walls with grappling claws and ropes, and they opened a postern
gate for the rest of us. My men are dealing with yours even now. I
promise you, Winterfell is mine.”
Bran did not understand. “But you’re Father’s
ward.”
“And now you and your brother are my wards. As soon as the
fighting’s done, my men will be bringing the rest of your
people together in the Great Hall. You and I are going to speak to
them. You’ll tell them how you’ve yielded Winterfell to
me, and command them to serve and obey their new lord as they did
the old.”
“I won’t,” said Bran. “We’ll fight
you and throw you out. I never yielded, you can’t make me say
I did.”
“This is no game, Bran, so don’t play the boy with
me, I won’t stand for it. The castle is mine, but these
people are still yours. If the prince would keep them safe,
he’d best do as he’s told.” He rose and went to
the door. “Someone will come dress you and carry you to the
Great Hall. Think carefully on what you want to say.”
The waiting made Bran feel even more helpless than before. He
sat in the window seat, staring out at dark towers and walls black
as shadow. Once he thought he heard shouting beyond the Guards
Hall, and something that might have been the clash of swords, but
he did not have Summer’s ears to hear, nor his nose to smell.
Awake, I am still broken, but when I sleep, when I’m Summer,
I can run and fight and hear and smell.
He had expected that Hodor would come for him, or maybe one of
the serving girls, but when the door next opened it was Maester
Luwin, carrying a candle. “Bran,” he said,
“you . . . know what has happened? You
have been told?” The skin was broken above his left eye, and
blood ran down that side of his face.
“Theon came. He said Winterfell was his now.”
The maester set down the candle and wiped the blood off his
cheek. “They swam the moat. Climbed the walls with hook and
rope. Came over wet and dripping, steel in hand.” He sat on
the chair by the door, as fresh blood flowed. “Alebelly was
on the gate, they surprised him in the turret and killed him.
Hayhead’s wounded as well. I had time to send off two ravens
before they burst in. The bird to White Harbor got away, but they
brought down the other with an arrow.” The maester stared at
the rushes. “Ser Rodrik took too many of our men, but I am to
blame as much as he is. I never saw this danger, I
never . . . ” Jojen saw it, Bran thought.
“You better help me dress.”
“Yes, that’s so.” In the heavy ironbound chest
at the foot of Bran’s bed the maester found smallclothes,
breeches, and tunic. “You are the Stark in Winterfell, and
Robb’s heir. You must look princely.” Together they
garbed him as befit a lord.
“Theon wants me to yield the castle,” Bran said as
the maester was fastening the cloak with his favorite
wolf’s-head clasp of silver and jet.
“There is no shame in that. A lord must protect his
smallfolk. Cruel places breed cruel peoples, Bran, remember that as
you deal with these ironmen. Your lord father did what he could to
gentle Theon, but I fear it was too little and too late.”
The ironman who came for them was a squat thick-bodied man with
a coal-black beard that covered half his chest. He bore the boy
easily enough, though he looked none too happy with the task.
Rickon’s bedchamber was a half turn down the steps. The
four-year-old was cranky at being woken. “I want
Mother,” he said. “I want her. And Shaggydog
too.”
“Your mother is far away, my prince.” Maester Luwin
pulled a bedrobe over the child’s head. “But I’m
here, and Bran.” He took Rickon by the hand and led him
out.
Below, they came on Meera and Jojen being herded from their room
by a bald man whose spear was three feet taller than he was. When
Jojen looked at Bran, his eyes were green pools full of sorrow.
Other ironmen had rousted the Freys. “Your brother’s
lost his kingdom,” Little Walder told Bran.
“You’re no prince now, just a hostage.”
“So are you,” Jojen said, “and me, and all of
us.”
“No one was talking to you, frogeater.”
One of the ironmen went before them carrying a torch, but the
rain had started again and soon drowned it out. As they hurried
across the yard they could hear the direwolves howling in the
godswood. I hope Summer wasn’t hurt falling from the
tree.
Theon Greyjoy was seated in the high seat of the Starks. He had
taken off his cloak. Over a shirt of fine mail he wore a black
surcoat emblazoned with the golden kraken of his House. His hands
rested on the wolves’ heads carved at the ends of the wide
stone arms. “Theon’s sitting in Robb’s
chair,” Rickon said.
“Hush, Rickon.” Bran could feel the menace around
them, but his brother was too young. A few torches had been lit,
and a fire kindled in the great hearth, but most of the hall
remained in darkness. There was no place to sit with the benches
stacked against the walls, so the castle folk stood in small
groups, not daring to speak. He saw Old Nan, her toothless mouth
opening and closing. Hayhead was carried in between two of the
other guards, a bloodstained bandage wrapped about his bare chest.
Poxy Tym wept inconsolably, and Beth Cassel cried with fear.
“What have we here?” Theon asked of the Reeds and
Freys.
“These are Lady Catelyn’s wards, both named Walder
Frey,” Maester Luwin explained. “And this is Jojen Reed
and his sister Meera, son and daughter to Howland Reed of Greywater
Watch, who came to renew their oaths of fealty to
Winterfell.”
“Some might call that ill-timed,” said Theon,
“though not for me. Here you are and here you’ll
stay.” He vacated the high seat. “Bring the prince
here, Lorren.” The black-bearded man dumped Bran onto the
stone as if he were a sack of oats.
People were still being driven into the Great Hall, prodded
along with shouts and the butts of the spears. Gage and Osha
arrived from the kitchens, spotted with flour from making the
morning bread. Mikken they dragged in cursing. Farlen entered
limping, struggling to support Palla. Her dress had been ripped in
two; she held it up with a clenched fist and walked as if every
step were agony. Septon Chayle rushed to lend a hand, but one of
the ironmen knocked him to the floor.
The last man marched through the doors was the prisoner Reek,
whose stench preceded him, ripe and pungent. Bran felt his stomach
twist at the smell of him. “We found this one locked in a
tower cell,” announced his escort, a beardless youth with
ginger-colored hair and sodden clothing, doubtless one of those
who’d swum the moat. “He says they call him
Reek.”
“Can’t think why,” Theon said, smiling.
“Do you always smell so bad, or did you just finish fucking a
pig?”
“Haven’t fucked no one since they took me,
m’lord. Heke’s me true name. I was in service to the
Bastard o’ the Dreadfort till the Starks give him an arrow in
the back for a wedding gift.”
Theon found that amusing. “Who did he marry?”
“The widow o’ Hornwood, m’lord.”
“That crone? Was he blind? She has teats like empty
wineskins, dry and withered.”
“It wasn’t her teats he wed her for,
m’lord.”
The ironmen slammed shut the tall doors at the foot of the hall.
From the high seat, Bran could see about twenty of them. He
probably left some guards on the gates and the armory. Even so,
there couldn’t be more than thirty.
Theon raised his hands for quiet. “You all know
me—”
“Aye, we know you for a sack of steaming dung!”
shouted Mikken, before the bald man drove the butt of his spear
into his gut, then smashed him across the face with the shaft. The
smith stumbled to his knees and spat out a tooth.
“Mikken, you be silent.” Bran tried to sound stern
and lordly, the way Robb did when he made a command, but his voice
betrayed him and the words came out in a shrill squeak.
“Listen to your little lordling, Mikken,” said
Theon. “He has more sense than you do.” A good lord protects his people, he reminded himself.
“I’ve yielded Winterfell to Theon.”
“Louder, Bran. And call me prince.”
He raised his voice. “I have yielded Winterfell to Prince
Theon. All of you should do as he commands you.”
“Damned if I will!” bellowed Mikken.
Theon ignored the outburst. “My father has donned the
ancient crown of salt and rock, and declared himself King of the
Iron Islands. He claims the north as well, by right of conquest.
You are all his subjects.”
“Bugger that.” Mikken wiped the blood from his
mouth. “I serve the Starks, not some treasonous squid
of—aah.” The butt of the spear smashed him face first into
the stone floor.
“Smiths have strong arms and weak heads,” observed
Theon. “But if the rest of you serve me as loyally as you
served Ned Stark, you’ll find me as generous a lord as you
could want.” on his hands and knees, Mikken spat blood.
Please don’t, Bran wished at him, but the blacksmith shouted,
“If you think you can hold the north with this sorry lot
o’—”
The bald man drove the point of his spear into the back of
Mikken’s neck. Steel slid through flesh and came out his
throat in a welter of blood. A woman screamed, and Meera wrapped
her arms around Rickon. It’s blood he drowned on, Bran
thought numbly. His own blood.
“Who else has something to say?” asked Theon
Greyjoy.
“Hodor hodor hodor hodor,” shouted Hodor, eyes
wide.
“Someone kindly shut that halfwit up.”
Two ironmen began to beat Hodor with the butts of their spears.
The stableboy dropped to the floor, trying to shield himself with
his hands.
“I will be as good a lord to you as Eddard Stark ever
was.” Theon raised his voice to be heard above the smack of
wood on flesh. “Betray me, though, and you’ll wish you
hadn’t. And don’t think the men you see here are the
whole of my power. Torrhen’s Square and Deepwood Motte will
soon be ours as well, and my uncle is sailing up the Saltspear to
seize Moat Cailin. If Robb Stark can stave off the Lannisters, he
may reign as King of the Trident hereafter, but House Greyjoy holds
the north now.”
“Stark’s lords will fight you,” the man Reek
called out. “That bloated pig at White Harbor for one, and
them Umbers and Karstarks too. You’ll need men. Free me and
I’m yours.”
Theon weighed him a moment. “You’re cleverer than
you smell, but I could not suffer that stench.”
“Well,” said Reek, “I could wash some. If I
was free.”
“A man of rare good sense.” Theon smiled.
“Bend the knee.” one of the ironmen handed Reek a
sword, and he laid it at Theon’s feet and swore obedience to
House Greyjoy and King Balon. Bran could not look. The green dream
was coming true.
“M’lord Greyjoy!” Osha stepped past
Mikken’s body. “I was brought here captive too. You
were there the day I was taken.” I thought you were a friend, Bran thought, hurt.
“I need fighters,” Theon declared, “not
kitchen sluts.”
“It was Robb Stark put me in the kitchens. For the best
part of a year, I’ve been left to scour kettles, scrape
grease, and warm the straw for this one.” She threw a look at
Gage. “I’ve had a bellyful of it. Put a spear in my
hand again.”
“I got a spear for you right here,” said the bald
man who’d killed Mikken. He grabbed his crotch, grinning.
Osha drove her bony knee up between his legs. “You keep
that soft pink thing.” She wrested the spear from him and
used the butt to knock him off his feet. “I’ll have me
the wood and iron.” The bald man writhed on the floor while
the other reavers sent up gales of laughter.
Theon laughed with the rest. “You’ll do,” he
said. “Keep the spear; Stygg can find another. Now bend the
knee and swear.”
When no one else rushed forward to pledge service, they were
dismissed with a warning to do their work and make no trouble.
Hodor was given the task of bearing Bran back to his bed. His face
was all ugly from the beating, his nose swollen and one eye closed.
“Hodor,” he sobbed between cracked lips as he lifted
Bran in huge strong arms and bloody hands and carried him back out
into the rain.