No roads ran through the twisted mountain valleys where they
walked now. Between the grey stone peaks lay still blue lakes, long
and deep and narrow, and the green gloom of endless piney woods.
The russet and gold of autumn leaves grew less common when they
left the wolfswood to climb amongst the old flint hills, and
vanished by the time those hills had turned to mountains. Giant
grey-green sentinels loomed above them now, and spruce and fir and
soldier pines in endless profusion. The undergrowth was sparse
beneath them, the forest floor carpeted in dark green needles.
When they lost their way, as happened once or twice, they need
only wait for a clear cold night when the clouds did not intrude,
and look up in the sky for the Ice Dragon. The blue star in the
dragon’s eye pointed the way north, as Osha told him once.
Thinking of Osha made Bran wonder where she was. He pictured her
safe in White Harbor with Rickon and Shaggydog, eating eels and
fish and hot crab pie with fat Lord Manderly. Or maybe they were
warming themselves at the Last Hearth before the Greatjon’s
fires. But Bran’s life had turned into endless chilly days on
Hodor’s back, riding his basket up and down the slopes of
mountains.
“Up and down,” Meera would sigh sometimes as they
walked, “then down and up. Then up and down again. I hate
these stupid mountains of yours, Prince Bran.”
“Yesterday you said you loved them.”
“Oh, I do. My lord father told me about mountains, but I
never saw one till now. I love them more than I can say.”
Bran made a face at her. “But you just said you hated
them.”
“Why can’t it be both?” Meera reached up to
pinch his nose.
“Because they’re different,” he insisted.
“Like night and day, or ice and fire.”
“If ice can burn,” said Jojen in his solemn voice,
“then love and hate can mate. Mountain or marsh, it makes no
matter. The land is one.”
“One,” his sister agreed, “but over
wrinkled.”
The high glens seldom did them the courtesy of running north and
south, so often they found themselves going long leagues in the
wrong direction, and sometimes they were forced to double back the
way they’d come. “If we took the kingsroad we could be
at the Wall by now,” Bran would remind the Reeds. He wanted
to find the three-eyed crow, so he could learn to fly. Half a
hundred times he said it if he said it once, until Meera started
teasing by saying it along with him.
“If we took the kingsroad we wouldn’t be so hungry
either,” he started saying then. Down in the hills
they’d had no lack of food. Meera was a fine huntress, and
even better at taking fish from streams with her three-pronged frog
spear. Bran liked to watch her, admiring her quickness, the way she
sent the spear lancing down and pulled it back with a silvery trout
wriggling on the end of it. And they had Summer hunting for them as
well. The direwolf vanished most every night as the sun went down,
but he was always back again before dawn, most often with something
in his jaws, a squirrel or a hare.
But here in the mountains, the streams were smaller and more
icy, and the game scarcer. Meera still hunted and fished when she
could, but it was harder, and some nights even Summer found no
prey. Often they went to sleep with empty bellies.
But Jojen remained stubbornly determined to stay well away from
roads. “Where you find roads you find travelers,” he
said in that way he had, “and travelers have eyes to see, and
mouths to spread tales of the crippled boy, his giant, and the wolf
that walks beside them.” No one could get as stubborn as
Jojen, so they struggled on through the wild, and every day climbed
a little higher, and moved a little farther north.
Some days it rained, some days were windy, and once they were
caught in a sleet storm so fierce that even Hodor bellowed in
dismay. On the clear days, it often seemed as if they were the only
living things in all the world. “Does no one live up
here?” Meera Reed asked once, as they made their way around a
granite upthrust as large as Winterfell.
“There’s people,” Bran told her. “The
Umbers are mostly east of the kingsroad, but they graze their sheep
in the high meadows in summer. There are Wulls west of the
mountains along the Bay of Ice, Harclays back behind us in the
hills, and Knotts and Liddles and Norreys and even some Flints up
here in the high places.” His father’s mother’s
mother had been a Flint of the mountains. Old Nan once said that it
was her blood in him that made Bran such a fool for climbing before
his fall. She had died years and years and years before he was born,
though, even before his father had been born.
“Wull?” said Meera. “Jojen, wasn’t there
a Wull who rode with Father during the war?”
“Theo Wull.” Joien was breathing hard from the
climb. “Buckets, they used to call him.”
“That’s their sigil,” said Bran. “Three
brown buckets on a blue field, with a border of white and grey
checks. Lord Wull came to Winterfell once, to do his fealty and
talk with Father, and he had the buckets on his shield. He’s
no true lord, though. Well, he is, but they call him just the Wull,
and there’s the Knott and the Norrey and the Liddle too. At
Winterfell we called them lords, but their own folk
don’t.”
Jojen Reed stopped to catch his breath. “Do you think
these mountain folk know we’re here?”
“They know.” Bran had seen them watching; not with
his own eyes, but with Summer’s sharper ones, that missed so
little. “They won’t bother us so long as we don’t
try and make off with their goats or horses.”
Nor did they. Only once did they encounter any of the mountain
people, when a sudden burst of freezing rain sent them looking for
shelter. Summer found it for them, sniffing out a shallow cave
behind the greygreen branches of a towering sentinel tree, but when
Hodor ducked beneath the stony overhang, Bran saw the orange glow
of fire farther back and realized they were not alone. “Come
in and warm yourselves,” a man’s voice called out.
“There’s stone enough to keep the rain off all our
heads.”
He offered them oatcakes and blood sausage and a swallow of ale
from a skin he carried, but never his name; nor did he ask theirs.
Bran figured him for a Liddle. The clasp that fastened his
squirrelskin cloak was gold and bronze and wrought in the shape of
a pinecone, and the Liddles bore pinecones on the white half of
their green-and-white shields.
“Is it far to the Wall?” Bran asked him as they
waited for the rain to stop.
“Not so far as the raven flies,” said the Liddle, if
that was who he was. “Farther, for them as lacks
wings.”
Bran started, “I’d bet we’d be there
if . . . ”
“ . . . we took the kingsroad,”
Meera finished with him.
The Liddle took out a knife and whittled at a stick. “When
there was a Stark in Winterfell, a maiden girl could walk the
kingsroad in her name-day gown and still go unmolested, and
travelers could find fire, bread, and salt at many an inn and
holdfast. But the nights are colder now, and doors are closed.
There’s squids in the wolfswood, and flayed men ride the
kingsroad asking after strangers.”
The Reeds exchanged a look. “Flayed men?” said
Jojen.
“The Bastard’s boys, aye. He was dead, but now
he’s not. And paying good silver for wolfskins, a man hears,
and maybe gold for word of certain other walking dead.” He
looked at Bran when he said that, and at Summer stretched out
beside him. “As to that Wall,” the man went on,
“it’s not a place that I’d be going. The Old Bear
took the Watch into the haunted woods, and all that come back was
his ravens, with hardly a message between them. Dark wings, dark
words, me mother used to say, but when the birds fly silent, seems
to me that’s even darker.” He poked at the fire with
his stick. “It was different when there was a Stark in
Winterfell. But the old wolf’s dead and young one’s
gone south to play the game of thrones, and all that’s left
us is the ghosts.”
“The wolves will come again,” said Jojen
solemnly.
“And how would you be knowing, boy?”
“I dreamed it.”
“Some nights I dream of me mother that I buried nine years
past,” the man said, “but when I wake, she’s not
come back to us.”
“There are dreams and dreams, my lord.”
“Hodor,” said Hodor.
They spent that night together, for the rain did not let up till
well past dark, and only Summer seemed to want to leave the cave.
When the fire had burned down to embers, Bran let him go. The
direwolf did not feel the damp as people did, and the night was
calling him. Moonlight painted the wet woods in shades of silver
and turned the grey peaks white. Owls hooted through the dark and
flew silently between the pines, while pale goats moved along the
mountainsides. Bran closed his eyes and gave himself up to the wolf
dream, to the smells and sounds of midnight.
When they woke the next morning, the fire had gone out and the
Liddle was gone, but he’d left a sausage for them, and a
dozen oatcakes folded up neatly in a green and white cloth. Some of
the cakes had pinenuts baked in them and some had blackberries.
Bran ate one of each, and still did not know which sort he liked
the best. One day there would be Starks in Winterfell again, he
told himself, and then he’d send for the Liddles and pay them
back a hundredfold for every nut and berry.
The trail they followed was a little easier that day, and by
noon the sun came breaking through the clouds. Bran sat in his
basket up on Hodor’s back and felt almost content. He dozed
off once, lulled to sleep by the smooth swing of the big
stableboy’s stride and the soft humming sound he made
sometimes when he walked. Meera woke him up with a light touch on
his arm. “Look,” she said, pointing at the sky with her
frog spear, “an eagle.”
Bran lifted his head and saw it, its grey wings spread and still
as it floated on the wind. He followed it with his eyes as it
circled higher, wondering what it would be like to soar about the
world so effortless. Better than climbing, even. He tried to reach
the eagle, to leave his stupid crippled body and rise into the sky
to join it, the way he joined with Summer. The greenseers could do
it. I should be able to do it too. He tried and tried, until the
eagle vanished in the golden haze of the afternoon.
“It’s gone,” he said, disappointed.
“We’ll see others,” said Meera. “They
live up here.”
“I suppose.”
“Hodor,” said Hodor.
“Hodor,” Bran agreed.
Jojen kicked a pinecone. “Hodor likes it when you say his
name, I think.”
“Hodor’s not his true name,” Bran explained.
“It’s just some word he says. His real name is Walder,
Old Nan told me. She was his grandmother’s grandmother or
something.” Talking about Old Nan made him sad. “Do you
think the ironmen killed her?” They hadn’t seen her
body at Winterfell. He didn’t remember seeing any women dead,
now that he thought back. “She never hurt no one, not even
Theon. She just told stories. Theon wouldn’t hurt someone
like that. Would he?”
“Some people hurt others just because they can,”
said Jojen.
“And it wasn’t Theon who did the killing at
Winterfell,” said Meera. “Too many of the dead were
ironmen.” She shifted her frog spear to her other hand.
“Remember Old Nan’s stories, Bran. Remember the way she
told them, the sound of her voice. So long as you do that, part of
her will always be alive in you.”
“I’ll remember,” he promised. They climbed
without speaking for a long time, following a crooked game trail
over the high saddle between two stony peaks. Scrawny soldier pines
clung to the slopes around them. Far ahead Bran could see the icy
glitter of a stream where it tumbled down a mountainside. He found
himself listening to Jojen’s breathing and the crunch of pine
needles under Hodor’s feet. “Do you know any
stories?” he asked the Reeds all of a sudden.
Meera laughed. “Oh, a few.”
“A few,” her brother admitted.
“Hodor,” said Hodor, humming.
“You could tell one,” said Bran. “While we
walked. Hodor likes stories about knights. I do, too.”
“There are no knights in the Neck,” said Jojen.
“Above the water,” his sister corrected. “The
bogs are full of dead ones, though.”
“That’s true,” said Jojen. “Andals and
ironmen, Freys and other fools, all those proud warriors who set
out to conquer Greywater. Not one of them could find it. They ride
into the Neck, but not back out. And sooner or later they blunder
into the bogs and sink beneath the weight of all that steel and
drown there in their armor.”
The thought of drowned knights under the water gave Bran the
shivers. He didn’t object, though; he liked the shivers.
“There was one knight,” said Meera, “in the
year of the false spring. The Knight of the Laughing Tree, they
called him. He might have been a crannogman, that one.”
“Or not.” Jojen’s face was dappled with green
shadows. “Prince Bran has heard that tale a hundred times,
I’m sure.”
“No,” said Bran. “I haven’t. And if I
have it doesn’t matter. Sometimes Old Nan would tell the same
story she’d told before, but we never minded, if it was a
good story. Old stories are like old friends, she used to say. You
have to visit them from time to time.”
“That’s true.” Meera walked with her shield on
her back, pushing an occasional branch out of the way with her frog
spear. Just when Bran began to think that she wasn’t going to
tell the story after all, she began, “Once there was a
curious lad who lived in the Neck. He was small like all
crannogmen, but brave and smart and strong as well. He grew up
hunting and fishing and climbing trees, and learned all the magics
of my people.”
Bran was almost certain he had never heard this story.
“Did he have green dreams like Jojen?”
“No,” said Meera, “but he could breathe mud
and run on leaves, and change earth to water and water to earth
with no more than a whispered word. He could talk to trees and
weave words and make castles appear and disappear.”
“I wish I could,” Bran said plaintively. “When
does he meet the tree knight?”
Meera made a face at him. “Sooner if a certain prince
would be quiet.”
“I was just asking.”
“The lad knew the magics of the crannogs,” she
continued, “but he wanted more. Our people seldom travel far
from home, you know. We’re a small folk, and our ways seem
queer to some, so the big people do not always treat us kindly. But
this lad was bolder than most, and one day when he had grown to
manhood he decided he would leave the crannogs and visit the Isle
of Faces.”
“No one visits the Isle of Faces,” objected Bran.
“That’s where the green men live.”
“It was the green men he meant to find. So he donned a
shirt sewn with bronze scales, like mine, took up a leathern shield
and a three-pronged spear, like mine, and paddled a little skin boat
down the Green Fork.”
Bran closed his eyes to try and see the man in his little skin
boat. In his head, the crannogman looked like Jojen, only older and
stronger and dressed like Meera.
“He passed beneath the Twins by night so the Freys would
not attack him, and when he reached the Trident he climbed from the
river and put his boat on his head and began to walk. It took him
many a day, but finally he reached the Gods Eye, threw his boat in
the lake, and paddled out to the Isle of Faces.”
“Did he meet the green men?”
“Yes,” said Meera, “but that’s another
story, and not for me to tell. My prince asked for
knights.”
“Green men are good too.”
“They are,” she agreed, but said no more about them.
“All that winter the crannogman stayed on the isle, but when
the spring broke he heard the wide world calling and knew the time
had come to leave. His skin boat was just where he’d left it,
so he said his farewells and paddled off toward shore. He rowed and
rowed, and finally saw the distant towers of a castle rising beside
the lake. The towers reached ever higher as he neared shore, until
he realized that this must be the greatest castle in all the
world.”
“Harrenhal!” Bran knew at once. “It was
Harrenhal!”
Meera smiled. “Was it? Beneath its walls he saw tents of
many colors, bright banners cracking in the wind, and knights in
mail and plate on barded horses. He smelled roasting meats, and
heard the sound of laughter and the blare of heralds’
trumpets. A great tourney was about to commence, and champions from
all over the land had come to contest it. The king himself was
there, with his son the dragon prince. The White Swords had come,
to welcome a new brother to their ranks. The storm lord was on
hand, and the rose lord as well. The great lion of the rock had
quarreled with the king and stayed away, but many of his bannermen
and knights attended all the same. The crannogman had never seen
such pageantry, and knew he might never see the like again. Part of
him wanted nothing so much as to be part of it.”
Bran knew that feeling well enough. When he’d been little,
all he had ever dreamed of was being a knight. But that had been
before he fell and lost his legs.
“The daughter of the great castle reigned as queen of love
and beauty when the tourney opened. Five champions had sworn to
defend her crown; her four brothers of Harrenhal, and her famous
uncle, a white knight of the Kingsguard.”
“Was she a fair maid?”
“She was,” said Meera, hopping over a stone,
“but there were others fairer still. One was the wife of the
dragon prince, who’d brought a dozen lady companions to
attend her. The knights all begged them for favors to tie about
their lances.”
“This isn’t going to be one of those love stories,
is it?” Bran asked suspiciously. “Hodor doesn’t
like those so much.”
“Hodor,” said Hodor agreeably.
“He likes the stories where the knights fight
monsters.”
“Sometimes the knights are the monsters, Bran. The little
crannogman was walking across the field, enjoying the warm spring
day and harming none, when he was set upon by three squires. They
were none older than fifteen, yet even so they were bigger than
him, all three. This was their world, as they saw it, and he had no
right to be there. They snatched away his spear and knocked him to
the ground, cursing him for a frogeater.”
“Were they Walders?” It sounded like something
Little Walder Frey might have done.
“None offered a name, but he marked their faces well so he
could revenge himself upon them later. They shoved him down every
time he tried to rise, and kicked him when he curled up on the
ground. But then they heard a roar. ‘That’s my
father’s man you’re kicking,’ howled the
she-wolf.”
“A wolf on four legs, or two?”
“Two,” said Meera. “The she-wolf laid into the
squires with a tourney sword, scattering them all. The crannogman
was bruised and bloodied, so she took him back to her lair to clean
his cuts and bind them up with linen. There he met her pack
brothers: the wild wolf who led them, the quiet wolf beside him,
and the pup who was youngest of the four.
“That evening there was to be a feast in Harrenhal, to
mark the opening of the tourney, and the she-wolf insisted that the
lad attend. He was of high birth, with as much a right to a place
on the bench as any other man. She was not easy to refuse, this
wolf maid, so he let the young pup find him garb suitable to a
king’s feast, and went up to the great castle.
“Under Harren’s roof he ate and drank with the
wolves, and many of their sworn swords besides, barrowdown men and
moose and bears and mermen. The dragon prince sang a song so sad it
made the wolf maid sniffle, but when her pup brother teased her for
crying she poured wine over his head. A black brother spoke, asking
the knights to join the Night’s Watch. The storm lord drank
down the knight of skulls and kisses in a wine-cup war. The
crannogman saw a maid with laughing purple eyes dance with a white
sword, a red snake, and the lord of griffins, and lastly with the
quiet wolf . . . but only after the wild wolf
spoke to her on behalf of a brother too shy to leave his bench.
“Amidst all this merriment, the little crannogman spied
the three squires who’d attacked him. One served a pitchfork
knight, one a porcupine, while the last attended a knight with two
towers on his surcoat, a sigil all crannogmen know well.”
“The Freys,” said Bran. “The Freys of the
Crossing.”
“Then, as now,” she agreed. “The wolf maid saw
them too, and pointed them out to her brothers. ‘I could find
you a horse, and some armor that might fit,’ the pup offered. The
little crannogman thanked him, but gave no answer. His heart was
torn. Crannogmen are smaller than most, but just as proud. The lad
was no knight, no more than any of his people. We sit a boat more
often than a horse, and our hands are made for oars, not lances.
Much as he wished to have his vengeance, he feared he would only
make a fool of himself and shame his people. The quiet wolf had
offered the little crannogman a place in his tent that night, but
before he slept he knelt on the lakeshore, looking across the water
to where the Isle of Faces would be, and said a prayer to the old
gods of north and Neck . . . ”
“You never heard this tale from your father?” asked
Jojen.
“It was Old Nan who told the stories. Meera, go on, you
can’t stop there. “
Hodor must have felt the same. “Hodor,” he said, and
then, “Hodor hodor hodor hodor.”
“Well,” said Meera, “if you would hear the
rest . . . ”
“Yes. Tell it.”
“Five days of jousting were planned,” she said.
“There was a great seven-sided mêlée as well, and archery and
axe-throwing, a horse race and tourney of
singers . . . ”
“Never mind about all that.” Bran squirmed
impatiently in his basket on Hodor’s back. “Tell about
the jousting.”
“As my prince commands. The daughter of the castle was the
queen of love and beauty, with four brothers and an uncle to defend
her, but all four sons of Harrenhal were defeated on the first day.
Their conquerors reigned briefly as champions, until they were
vanquished in turn. As it happened, the end of the first day saw
the porcupine knight win a place among the champions, and on the
morning of the second day the pitchfork knight and the knight of
the two towers were victorious as well. But late on the afternoon
of that second day, as the shadows grew long, a mystery knight
appeared in the lists.”
Bran nodded sagely. Mystery knights would oft appear at
tourneys, with helms concealing their faces, and shields that were
either blank or bore some strange device. Sometimes they were
famous champions in disguise. The Dragonknight once won a tourney
as the Knight of Tears, so he could name his sister the queen of
love and beauty in place of the king’s mistress. And
Barristan the Bold twice donned a mystery knight’s armor, the
first time when he was only ten. “It was the little
crannogman, I bet.”
“No one knew,” said Meera, “but the mystery
knight was short of stature, and clad in ill-fitting armor made up
of bits and pieces. The device upon his shield was a heart tree of
the old gods, a white weirwood with a laughing red face.”
“Maybe he came from the Isle of Faces,” said Bran.
“Was he green?” In Old Nan’s stories, the
guardians had dark green skin and leaves instead of hair. Sometimes
they had antlers too, but Bran didn’t see how the mystery
knight could have worn a helm if he had antlers. “I bet the
old gods sent him.”
“Perhaps they did. The mystery knight dipped his lance
before the king and rode to the end of the lists, where the five
champions had their pavilions. You know the three he
challenged.”
“The porcupine knight, the pitchfork knight, and the
knight of the twin towers.” Bran had heard enough stories to
know that. “He was the little crannogman, I told
you.”
“Whoever he was, the old gods gave strength to his arm.
The porcupine knight fell first, then the pitchfork knight, and
lastly the knight of the two towers. None were well loved, so the
common folk cheered lustily for the Knight of the Laughing Tree, as
the new champion soon was called. When his fallen foes sought to
ransom horse and armor, the Knight of the Laughing Tree spoke in a
booming voice through his helm, saying, ‘Teach your squire
honor, that shall be ransom enough.’ Once the defeated
knights chastised their squires sharply, their horses and armor
were returned. And so the little crannogman’s prayer was
answered . . . by the green men, or the old
gods, or the children of the forest, who can say?”
It was a good story, Bran decided after thinking about it a
moment or two. “Then what happened? Did the Knight of the
Laughing Tree win the tourney and marry a princess?”
“No,” said Meera. “That night at the great
castle, the storm lord and the knight of skulls and kisses each
swore they would unmask him, and the king himself urged men to
challenge him, declaring that the face behind that helm was no
friend of his. But the next morning, when the heralds blew their
trumpets and the king took his seat, only two champions appeared.
The Knight of the Laughing Tree had vanished. The king was wroth,
and even sent his son the dragon prince to seek the man, but all
they ever found was his painted shield, hanging abandoned in a
tree. It was the dragon prince who won that tourney in the
end.”
“Oh.” Bran thought about the tale awhile.
“That was a good story. But it should have been the three bad
knights who hurt him, not their squires. Then the little crannogman
could have killed them all. The part about the ransoms was stupid.
And the mystery knight should win the tourney, defeating every
challenger, and name the wolf maid the queen of love and
beauty.”
“She was,” said Meera, “but that’s a
sadder story.”
“Are you certain you never heard this tale before,
Bran?” asked Jojen. “Your lord father never told it to
you?”
Bran shook his head. The day was growing old by then, and long
shadows were creeping down the mountainsides to send black fingers
through the pines. If the little crannogman could visit the Isle of
Faces, maybe I could too. All the tales agreed that the green men
had strange magic powers. Maybe they could help him walk again,
even turn him into a knight. They turned the little crannogman into
a knight, even if it was only for a day, he thought. A day would be
enough.
No roads ran through the twisted mountain valleys where they
walked now. Between the grey stone peaks lay still blue lakes, long
and deep and narrow, and the green gloom of endless piney woods.
The russet and gold of autumn leaves grew less common when they
left the wolfswood to climb amongst the old flint hills, and
vanished by the time those hills had turned to mountains. Giant
grey-green sentinels loomed above them now, and spruce and fir and
soldier pines in endless profusion. The undergrowth was sparse
beneath them, the forest floor carpeted in dark green needles.
When they lost their way, as happened once or twice, they need
only wait for a clear cold night when the clouds did not intrude,
and look up in the sky for the Ice Dragon. The blue star in the
dragon’s eye pointed the way north, as Osha told him once.
Thinking of Osha made Bran wonder where she was. He pictured her
safe in White Harbor with Rickon and Shaggydog, eating eels and
fish and hot crab pie with fat Lord Manderly. Or maybe they were
warming themselves at the Last Hearth before the Greatjon’s
fires. But Bran’s life had turned into endless chilly days on
Hodor’s back, riding his basket up and down the slopes of
mountains.
“Up and down,” Meera would sigh sometimes as they
walked, “then down and up. Then up and down again. I hate
these stupid mountains of yours, Prince Bran.”
“Yesterday you said you loved them.”
“Oh, I do. My lord father told me about mountains, but I
never saw one till now. I love them more than I can say.”
Bran made a face at her. “But you just said you hated
them.”
“Why can’t it be both?” Meera reached up to
pinch his nose.
“Because they’re different,” he insisted.
“Like night and day, or ice and fire.”
“If ice can burn,” said Jojen in his solemn voice,
“then love and hate can mate. Mountain or marsh, it makes no
matter. The land is one.”
“One,” his sister agreed, “but over
wrinkled.”
The high glens seldom did them the courtesy of running north and
south, so often they found themselves going long leagues in the
wrong direction, and sometimes they were forced to double back the
way they’d come. “If we took the kingsroad we could be
at the Wall by now,” Bran would remind the Reeds. He wanted
to find the three-eyed crow, so he could learn to fly. Half a
hundred times he said it if he said it once, until Meera started
teasing by saying it along with him.
“If we took the kingsroad we wouldn’t be so hungry
either,” he started saying then. Down in the hills
they’d had no lack of food. Meera was a fine huntress, and
even better at taking fish from streams with her three-pronged frog
spear. Bran liked to watch her, admiring her quickness, the way she
sent the spear lancing down and pulled it back with a silvery trout
wriggling on the end of it. And they had Summer hunting for them as
well. The direwolf vanished most every night as the sun went down,
but he was always back again before dawn, most often with something
in his jaws, a squirrel or a hare.
But here in the mountains, the streams were smaller and more
icy, and the game scarcer. Meera still hunted and fished when she
could, but it was harder, and some nights even Summer found no
prey. Often they went to sleep with empty bellies.
But Jojen remained stubbornly determined to stay well away from
roads. “Where you find roads you find travelers,” he
said in that way he had, “and travelers have eyes to see, and
mouths to spread tales of the crippled boy, his giant, and the wolf
that walks beside them.” No one could get as stubborn as
Jojen, so they struggled on through the wild, and every day climbed
a little higher, and moved a little farther north.
Some days it rained, some days were windy, and once they were
caught in a sleet storm so fierce that even Hodor bellowed in
dismay. On the clear days, it often seemed as if they were the only
living things in all the world. “Does no one live up
here?” Meera Reed asked once, as they made their way around a
granite upthrust as large as Winterfell.
“There’s people,” Bran told her. “The
Umbers are mostly east of the kingsroad, but they graze their sheep
in the high meadows in summer. There are Wulls west of the
mountains along the Bay of Ice, Harclays back behind us in the
hills, and Knotts and Liddles and Norreys and even some Flints up
here in the high places.” His father’s mother’s
mother had been a Flint of the mountains. Old Nan once said that it
was her blood in him that made Bran such a fool for climbing before
his fall. She had died years and years and years before he was born,
though, even before his father had been born.
“Wull?” said Meera. “Jojen, wasn’t there
a Wull who rode with Father during the war?”
“Theo Wull.” Joien was breathing hard from the
climb. “Buckets, they used to call him.”
“That’s their sigil,” said Bran. “Three
brown buckets on a blue field, with a border of white and grey
checks. Lord Wull came to Winterfell once, to do his fealty and
talk with Father, and he had the buckets on his shield. He’s
no true lord, though. Well, he is, but they call him just the Wull,
and there’s the Knott and the Norrey and the Liddle too. At
Winterfell we called them lords, but their own folk
don’t.”
Jojen Reed stopped to catch his breath. “Do you think
these mountain folk know we’re here?”
“They know.” Bran had seen them watching; not with
his own eyes, but with Summer’s sharper ones, that missed so
little. “They won’t bother us so long as we don’t
try and make off with their goats or horses.”
Nor did they. Only once did they encounter any of the mountain
people, when a sudden burst of freezing rain sent them looking for
shelter. Summer found it for them, sniffing out a shallow cave
behind the greygreen branches of a towering sentinel tree, but when
Hodor ducked beneath the stony overhang, Bran saw the orange glow
of fire farther back and realized they were not alone. “Come
in and warm yourselves,” a man’s voice called out.
“There’s stone enough to keep the rain off all our
heads.”
He offered them oatcakes and blood sausage and a swallow of ale
from a skin he carried, but never his name; nor did he ask theirs.
Bran figured him for a Liddle. The clasp that fastened his
squirrelskin cloak was gold and bronze and wrought in the shape of
a pinecone, and the Liddles bore pinecones on the white half of
their green-and-white shields.
“Is it far to the Wall?” Bran asked him as they
waited for the rain to stop.
“Not so far as the raven flies,” said the Liddle, if
that was who he was. “Farther, for them as lacks
wings.”
Bran started, “I’d bet we’d be there
if . . . ”
“ . . . we took the kingsroad,”
Meera finished with him.
The Liddle took out a knife and whittled at a stick. “When
there was a Stark in Winterfell, a maiden girl could walk the
kingsroad in her name-day gown and still go unmolested, and
travelers could find fire, bread, and salt at many an inn and
holdfast. But the nights are colder now, and doors are closed.
There’s squids in the wolfswood, and flayed men ride the
kingsroad asking after strangers.”
The Reeds exchanged a look. “Flayed men?” said
Jojen.
“The Bastard’s boys, aye. He was dead, but now
he’s not. And paying good silver for wolfskins, a man hears,
and maybe gold for word of certain other walking dead.” He
looked at Bran when he said that, and at Summer stretched out
beside him. “As to that Wall,” the man went on,
“it’s not a place that I’d be going. The Old Bear
took the Watch into the haunted woods, and all that come back was
his ravens, with hardly a message between them. Dark wings, dark
words, me mother used to say, but when the birds fly silent, seems
to me that’s even darker.” He poked at the fire with
his stick. “It was different when there was a Stark in
Winterfell. But the old wolf’s dead and young one’s
gone south to play the game of thrones, and all that’s left
us is the ghosts.”
“The wolves will come again,” said Jojen
solemnly.
“And how would you be knowing, boy?”
“I dreamed it.”
“Some nights I dream of me mother that I buried nine years
past,” the man said, “but when I wake, she’s not
come back to us.”
“There are dreams and dreams, my lord.”
“Hodor,” said Hodor.
They spent that night together, for the rain did not let up till
well past dark, and only Summer seemed to want to leave the cave.
When the fire had burned down to embers, Bran let him go. The
direwolf did not feel the damp as people did, and the night was
calling him. Moonlight painted the wet woods in shades of silver
and turned the grey peaks white. Owls hooted through the dark and
flew silently between the pines, while pale goats moved along the
mountainsides. Bran closed his eyes and gave himself up to the wolf
dream, to the smells and sounds of midnight.
When they woke the next morning, the fire had gone out and the
Liddle was gone, but he’d left a sausage for them, and a
dozen oatcakes folded up neatly in a green and white cloth. Some of
the cakes had pinenuts baked in them and some had blackberries.
Bran ate one of each, and still did not know which sort he liked
the best. One day there would be Starks in Winterfell again, he
told himself, and then he’d send for the Liddles and pay them
back a hundredfold for every nut and berry.
The trail they followed was a little easier that day, and by
noon the sun came breaking through the clouds. Bran sat in his
basket up on Hodor’s back and felt almost content. He dozed
off once, lulled to sleep by the smooth swing of the big
stableboy’s stride and the soft humming sound he made
sometimes when he walked. Meera woke him up with a light touch on
his arm. “Look,” she said, pointing at the sky with her
frog spear, “an eagle.”
Bran lifted his head and saw it, its grey wings spread and still
as it floated on the wind. He followed it with his eyes as it
circled higher, wondering what it would be like to soar about the
world so effortless. Better than climbing, even. He tried to reach
the eagle, to leave his stupid crippled body and rise into the sky
to join it, the way he joined with Summer. The greenseers could do
it. I should be able to do it too. He tried and tried, until the
eagle vanished in the golden haze of the afternoon.
“It’s gone,” he said, disappointed.
“We’ll see others,” said Meera. “They
live up here.”
“I suppose.”
“Hodor,” said Hodor.
“Hodor,” Bran agreed.
Jojen kicked a pinecone. “Hodor likes it when you say his
name, I think.”
“Hodor’s not his true name,” Bran explained.
“It’s just some word he says. His real name is Walder,
Old Nan told me. She was his grandmother’s grandmother or
something.” Talking about Old Nan made him sad. “Do you
think the ironmen killed her?” They hadn’t seen her
body at Winterfell. He didn’t remember seeing any women dead,
now that he thought back. “She never hurt no one, not even
Theon. She just told stories. Theon wouldn’t hurt someone
like that. Would he?”
“Some people hurt others just because they can,”
said Jojen.
“And it wasn’t Theon who did the killing at
Winterfell,” said Meera. “Too many of the dead were
ironmen.” She shifted her frog spear to her other hand.
“Remember Old Nan’s stories, Bran. Remember the way she
told them, the sound of her voice. So long as you do that, part of
her will always be alive in you.”
“I’ll remember,” he promised. They climbed
without speaking for a long time, following a crooked game trail
over the high saddle between two stony peaks. Scrawny soldier pines
clung to the slopes around them. Far ahead Bran could see the icy
glitter of a stream where it tumbled down a mountainside. He found
himself listening to Jojen’s breathing and the crunch of pine
needles under Hodor’s feet. “Do you know any
stories?” he asked the Reeds all of a sudden.
Meera laughed. “Oh, a few.”
“A few,” her brother admitted.
“Hodor,” said Hodor, humming.
“You could tell one,” said Bran. “While we
walked. Hodor likes stories about knights. I do, too.”
“There are no knights in the Neck,” said Jojen.
“Above the water,” his sister corrected. “The
bogs are full of dead ones, though.”
“That’s true,” said Jojen. “Andals and
ironmen, Freys and other fools, all those proud warriors who set
out to conquer Greywater. Not one of them could find it. They ride
into the Neck, but not back out. And sooner or later they blunder
into the bogs and sink beneath the weight of all that steel and
drown there in their armor.”
The thought of drowned knights under the water gave Bran the
shivers. He didn’t object, though; he liked the shivers.
“There was one knight,” said Meera, “in the
year of the false spring. The Knight of the Laughing Tree, they
called him. He might have been a crannogman, that one.”
“Or not.” Jojen’s face was dappled with green
shadows. “Prince Bran has heard that tale a hundred times,
I’m sure.”
“No,” said Bran. “I haven’t. And if I
have it doesn’t matter. Sometimes Old Nan would tell the same
story she’d told before, but we never minded, if it was a
good story. Old stories are like old friends, she used to say. You
have to visit them from time to time.”
“That’s true.” Meera walked with her shield on
her back, pushing an occasional branch out of the way with her frog
spear. Just when Bran began to think that she wasn’t going to
tell the story after all, she began, “Once there was a
curious lad who lived in the Neck. He was small like all
crannogmen, but brave and smart and strong as well. He grew up
hunting and fishing and climbing trees, and learned all the magics
of my people.”
Bran was almost certain he had never heard this story.
“Did he have green dreams like Jojen?”
“No,” said Meera, “but he could breathe mud
and run on leaves, and change earth to water and water to earth
with no more than a whispered word. He could talk to trees and
weave words and make castles appear and disappear.”
“I wish I could,” Bran said plaintively. “When
does he meet the tree knight?”
Meera made a face at him. “Sooner if a certain prince
would be quiet.”
“I was just asking.”
“The lad knew the magics of the crannogs,” she
continued, “but he wanted more. Our people seldom travel far
from home, you know. We’re a small folk, and our ways seem
queer to some, so the big people do not always treat us kindly. But
this lad was bolder than most, and one day when he had grown to
manhood he decided he would leave the crannogs and visit the Isle
of Faces.”
“No one visits the Isle of Faces,” objected Bran.
“That’s where the green men live.”
“It was the green men he meant to find. So he donned a
shirt sewn with bronze scales, like mine, took up a leathern shield
and a three-pronged spear, like mine, and paddled a little skin boat
down the Green Fork.”
Bran closed his eyes to try and see the man in his little skin
boat. In his head, the crannogman looked like Jojen, only older and
stronger and dressed like Meera.
“He passed beneath the Twins by night so the Freys would
not attack him, and when he reached the Trident he climbed from the
river and put his boat on his head and began to walk. It took him
many a day, but finally he reached the Gods Eye, threw his boat in
the lake, and paddled out to the Isle of Faces.”
“Did he meet the green men?”
“Yes,” said Meera, “but that’s another
story, and not for me to tell. My prince asked for
knights.”
“Green men are good too.”
“They are,” she agreed, but said no more about them.
“All that winter the crannogman stayed on the isle, but when
the spring broke he heard the wide world calling and knew the time
had come to leave. His skin boat was just where he’d left it,
so he said his farewells and paddled off toward shore. He rowed and
rowed, and finally saw the distant towers of a castle rising beside
the lake. The towers reached ever higher as he neared shore, until
he realized that this must be the greatest castle in all the
world.”
“Harrenhal!” Bran knew at once. “It was
Harrenhal!”
Meera smiled. “Was it? Beneath its walls he saw tents of
many colors, bright banners cracking in the wind, and knights in
mail and plate on barded horses. He smelled roasting meats, and
heard the sound of laughter and the blare of heralds’
trumpets. A great tourney was about to commence, and champions from
all over the land had come to contest it. The king himself was
there, with his son the dragon prince. The White Swords had come,
to welcome a new brother to their ranks. The storm lord was on
hand, and the rose lord as well. The great lion of the rock had
quarreled with the king and stayed away, but many of his bannermen
and knights attended all the same. The crannogman had never seen
such pageantry, and knew he might never see the like again. Part of
him wanted nothing so much as to be part of it.”
Bran knew that feeling well enough. When he’d been little,
all he had ever dreamed of was being a knight. But that had been
before he fell and lost his legs.
“The daughter of the great castle reigned as queen of love
and beauty when the tourney opened. Five champions had sworn to
defend her crown; her four brothers of Harrenhal, and her famous
uncle, a white knight of the Kingsguard.”
“Was she a fair maid?”
“She was,” said Meera, hopping over a stone,
“but there were others fairer still. One was the wife of the
dragon prince, who’d brought a dozen lady companions to
attend her. The knights all begged them for favors to tie about
their lances.”
“This isn’t going to be one of those love stories,
is it?” Bran asked suspiciously. “Hodor doesn’t
like those so much.”
“Hodor,” said Hodor agreeably.
“He likes the stories where the knights fight
monsters.”
“Sometimes the knights are the monsters, Bran. The little
crannogman was walking across the field, enjoying the warm spring
day and harming none, when he was set upon by three squires. They
were none older than fifteen, yet even so they were bigger than
him, all three. This was their world, as they saw it, and he had no
right to be there. They snatched away his spear and knocked him to
the ground, cursing him for a frogeater.”
“Were they Walders?” It sounded like something
Little Walder Frey might have done.
“None offered a name, but he marked their faces well so he
could revenge himself upon them later. They shoved him down every
time he tried to rise, and kicked him when he curled up on the
ground. But then they heard a roar. ‘That’s my
father’s man you’re kicking,’ howled the
she-wolf.”
“A wolf on four legs, or two?”
“Two,” said Meera. “The she-wolf laid into the
squires with a tourney sword, scattering them all. The crannogman
was bruised and bloodied, so she took him back to her lair to clean
his cuts and bind them up with linen. There he met her pack
brothers: the wild wolf who led them, the quiet wolf beside him,
and the pup who was youngest of the four.
“That evening there was to be a feast in Harrenhal, to
mark the opening of the tourney, and the she-wolf insisted that the
lad attend. He was of high birth, with as much a right to a place
on the bench as any other man. She was not easy to refuse, this
wolf maid, so he let the young pup find him garb suitable to a
king’s feast, and went up to the great castle.
“Under Harren’s roof he ate and drank with the
wolves, and many of their sworn swords besides, barrowdown men and
moose and bears and mermen. The dragon prince sang a song so sad it
made the wolf maid sniffle, but when her pup brother teased her for
crying she poured wine over his head. A black brother spoke, asking
the knights to join the Night’s Watch. The storm lord drank
down the knight of skulls and kisses in a wine-cup war. The
crannogman saw a maid with laughing purple eyes dance with a white
sword, a red snake, and the lord of griffins, and lastly with the
quiet wolf . . . but only after the wild wolf
spoke to her on behalf of a brother too shy to leave his bench.
“Amidst all this merriment, the little crannogman spied
the three squires who’d attacked him. One served a pitchfork
knight, one a porcupine, while the last attended a knight with two
towers on his surcoat, a sigil all crannogmen know well.”
“The Freys,” said Bran. “The Freys of the
Crossing.”
“Then, as now,” she agreed. “The wolf maid saw
them too, and pointed them out to her brothers. ‘I could find
you a horse, and some armor that might fit,’ the pup offered. The
little crannogman thanked him, but gave no answer. His heart was
torn. Crannogmen are smaller than most, but just as proud. The lad
was no knight, no more than any of his people. We sit a boat more
often than a horse, and our hands are made for oars, not lances.
Much as he wished to have his vengeance, he feared he would only
make a fool of himself and shame his people. The quiet wolf had
offered the little crannogman a place in his tent that night, but
before he slept he knelt on the lakeshore, looking across the water
to where the Isle of Faces would be, and said a prayer to the old
gods of north and Neck . . . ”
“You never heard this tale from your father?” asked
Jojen.
“It was Old Nan who told the stories. Meera, go on, you
can’t stop there. “
Hodor must have felt the same. “Hodor,” he said, and
then, “Hodor hodor hodor hodor.”
“Well,” said Meera, “if you would hear the
rest . . . ”
“Yes. Tell it.”
“Five days of jousting were planned,” she said.
“There was a great seven-sided mêlée as well, and archery and
axe-throwing, a horse race and tourney of
singers . . . ”
“Never mind about all that.” Bran squirmed
impatiently in his basket on Hodor’s back. “Tell about
the jousting.”
“As my prince commands. The daughter of the castle was the
queen of love and beauty, with four brothers and an uncle to defend
her, but all four sons of Harrenhal were defeated on the first day.
Their conquerors reigned briefly as champions, until they were
vanquished in turn. As it happened, the end of the first day saw
the porcupine knight win a place among the champions, and on the
morning of the second day the pitchfork knight and the knight of
the two towers were victorious as well. But late on the afternoon
of that second day, as the shadows grew long, a mystery knight
appeared in the lists.”
Bran nodded sagely. Mystery knights would oft appear at
tourneys, with helms concealing their faces, and shields that were
either blank or bore some strange device. Sometimes they were
famous champions in disguise. The Dragonknight once won a tourney
as the Knight of Tears, so he could name his sister the queen of
love and beauty in place of the king’s mistress. And
Barristan the Bold twice donned a mystery knight’s armor, the
first time when he was only ten. “It was the little
crannogman, I bet.”
“No one knew,” said Meera, “but the mystery
knight was short of stature, and clad in ill-fitting armor made up
of bits and pieces. The device upon his shield was a heart tree of
the old gods, a white weirwood with a laughing red face.”
“Maybe he came from the Isle of Faces,” said Bran.
“Was he green?” In Old Nan’s stories, the
guardians had dark green skin and leaves instead of hair. Sometimes
they had antlers too, but Bran didn’t see how the mystery
knight could have worn a helm if he had antlers. “I bet the
old gods sent him.”
“Perhaps they did. The mystery knight dipped his lance
before the king and rode to the end of the lists, where the five
champions had their pavilions. You know the three he
challenged.”
“The porcupine knight, the pitchfork knight, and the
knight of the twin towers.” Bran had heard enough stories to
know that. “He was the little crannogman, I told
you.”
“Whoever he was, the old gods gave strength to his arm.
The porcupine knight fell first, then the pitchfork knight, and
lastly the knight of the two towers. None were well loved, so the
common folk cheered lustily for the Knight of the Laughing Tree, as
the new champion soon was called. When his fallen foes sought to
ransom horse and armor, the Knight of the Laughing Tree spoke in a
booming voice through his helm, saying, ‘Teach your squire
honor, that shall be ransom enough.’ Once the defeated
knights chastised their squires sharply, their horses and armor
were returned. And so the little crannogman’s prayer was
answered . . . by the green men, or the old
gods, or the children of the forest, who can say?”
It was a good story, Bran decided after thinking about it a
moment or two. “Then what happened? Did the Knight of the
Laughing Tree win the tourney and marry a princess?”
“No,” said Meera. “That night at the great
castle, the storm lord and the knight of skulls and kisses each
swore they would unmask him, and the king himself urged men to
challenge him, declaring that the face behind that helm was no
friend of his. But the next morning, when the heralds blew their
trumpets and the king took his seat, only two champions appeared.
The Knight of the Laughing Tree had vanished. The king was wroth,
and even sent his son the dragon prince to seek the man, but all
they ever found was his painted shield, hanging abandoned in a
tree. It was the dragon prince who won that tourney in the
end.”
“Oh.” Bran thought about the tale awhile.
“That was a good story. But it should have been the three bad
knights who hurt him, not their squires. Then the little crannogman
could have killed them all. The part about the ransoms was stupid.
And the mystery knight should win the tourney, defeating every
challenger, and name the wolf maid the queen of love and
beauty.”
“She was,” said Meera, “but that’s a
sadder story.”
“Are you certain you never heard this tale before,
Bran?” asked Jojen. “Your lord father never told it to
you?”
Bran shook his head. The day was growing old by then, and long
shadows were creeping down the mountainsides to send black fingers
through the pines. If the little crannogman could visit the Isle of
Faces, maybe I could too. All the tales agreed that the green men
had strange magic powers. Maybe they could help him walk again,
even turn him into a knight. They turned the little crannogman into
a knight, even if it was only for a day, he thought. A day would be
enough.