Gilly

"Bran!" Gilly called up to him, laughing because Rickon was shouting "Wheeeee!" as they flew, at the same time as yelling at his brother to put him down – "Bran, you put your brother down!" she called. Bran growled back and she laughed in a mixture of amusement and alarm – "No, no, no Bran, don't visit the woods!"

Gilly was quick to alarm, quick to worry, even now that she was happy and secure. Even security could worry Gilly; it felt so unnatural to her, even after all these years. Sam said she was like a frightened deer; a girl transformed into a doe by magic, a spell that could only be broken when somebody looked at her and knew straight away who she was. She loved those stories, though she shook her head at the idea of herself as the heroine of one – although being rescued by having somebody know her at first glance – that she could understand. It had been very like that for her.

There was a time when she had thought that she was broken for having any kind of idea of who she was. But she had. She had always had a desperate little flame of a thought that she was somebody beyond Craster's property. None of the others seemed to feel this, or if they did they kept it down. They made her keep it down too, and she had thought at the time they were being mean and harsh; but she knew now that they were just trying to help her. She sometimes wished she missed her sisters more, but she did not.

It had not occurred to her that she was strong. When she first escaped with Sam, she had put all of their success down to him. She had thought that she latched on to him because he was so much better than her and had laughed it away when he told her he had been in awe of her, thinking she was so much better than him. In the end she had realised – and she taught him to know it too – that their relationship did not thrive on being in persistent awe of one another, but in the realisation that they were in many ways equal. There were things she did better and things he did better and they taught one another and learned.

She had thought at first that Sam would do, that she was in both debt and awe to him because he rescued her; eventually she had realised it was very far from just that – that what kept her delighted in him was nothing less than him himself, a far better thing, she realised, than what he had done for her.

She remembered one of those early conversations, the ones where realisation came to her, so well. It was one of the early – though not the first time she had brushed off his suggestion that she was strong; in many ways stronger than he was.

"You're a slayer though," she said – "I'm just a – a gillyflower!"

"No, but flowers are strong though!" Sam had argued straight back as though it should be obvious. He always did that and sometimes it irritated her and at other times, like this, it was sweet. She laughed.

"I mean it though!" he went on, in that earnest little boy manner she found more endearing than anything else about him – "Flowers are hardy and – and persistent, you can plant just the littlest bulb and soon there's a whole wall just covered in blooms! And – with enough time they can eat the wall away – you see the flowers last longer than stone in the end and that's – that's you, strong and powerful as a weed –"

"A weed?" She laughed; she had not known – until Sam – that she had the power to tease, that she could pretend to be affronted to make him be sweet. He blushed so red she almost regretted it.

"I meant it as a – as a good thing".

"I know," she smiled, taking pity on him.

She remembered how sad he had been when he told her they would never be able to marry; how sorry he was that as a Maester he could not. She had struggled to see why this was anything he should be sorry about. She had been married to Craster; it was the only example of marriage she knew, and as such she could not see why it was something she should want. Better just to be as they were now, and nobody said anything about it, or nothing bad anyway. That was good.

She had spent the early days and weeks at Winterfell alternately in awe at its size and structure and frightened and suspicious of it. Sam told her stories, and in them she saw herself in roles she never could have imagined. Some days she would panic; she would hear the sky calling her, drawing her back over the wall – "This place is not for wildlings! Not for me, not for free folk!" she would cry, half way towards leaving before the Weirwood called her back, the warm stone and the smell of books.

In the end three people had helped her to stay; to find her place in this place and herself within it. The first, of course, was Sam; he showed her how things worked and in return she found herself helping him – it helped her more to help him than to be helped.

The second was Shireen. Again she found herself helping the girl to find her place here; in return Shireen finished the reading lessons she had started what felt like so long ago. She did not quite understand it – not just at first but for the longest time. She half thought herself some kind of witch to be able to make sense of all those shapes. She liked that though; herself as magic, it felt right and tingly and powerful. The first time she read a full story and pictured it in her head she had felt like she could fly –

"It's like magic!" she said – "It's – it's freedom!" She had smiled apologetically because that was silly; Craster had talked so much about freedom but had so little time for books. But Shireen just smiled as though she had gone her whole life thinking herself the only one who understood.

"Freedom," she echoed – "Yes". She nodded. There was a story there too; Gilly could see it; One that Shireen would tell her when it felt like the right time. She began to see that there were stories everywhere, within all the disparate people who came to Winterfell in those early months and knitted themselves together like a garment. More than anything she saw a group of girls and women, women from everywhere bearing the stories of how they found freedom, clinging to images and tales of what each freedom meant. She grew to know too that what she saw in the people around her was select and that everyone saw everyone else differently. They held their new found selves and their new freedoms like scraps of fabric, all different colours and textures. Hers was made of words, though she knew she had so many more to learn. She began to gather more and more an idea that one day she would have enough to write down their collective story and in so doing stitch all those beautiful colours together.

She was learning to know what freedom meant; she was getting such a grip on it she had not realised there was more to learn. Not until she met Bran. She had not been afraid, not for a moment. Many of them were and she wondered if that made her deficient in some way. But when she saw him for the first time in the sky she saw a colour of freedom she had not known existed. She had known from the very beginning she would ride him and she would have no difficulty. All those days and nights beyond the way with nowhere to look but up; gazing at the clouds and the stars and wondering what stuff they were made of. Now she would know; now she would touch them.

She did not heed a word of Sam's advice – his concern in this matter. This was a sort of freedom to – to not heed someone and know they would still love you.

Reading had felt to her something as strange and wonderful as flying. Flying was as natural as breathing. Gilly held her arms out to the wind, screamed into the sky on Bran's back as the wind hugged her right back, whipping in her hair and streaming cold and fresh right through her bones. She could do this. She could do anything. She was the most important person in all the seven kingdoms. She yelled and laughed into the wind and sun, closer to them than the birds were. There was gold in her hair when the sun touched it up high like this; she had never known that. Knowledge was wonderful. She felt as though she were in possession of the most powerful secret in all the world; let the silver girl on the Iron Throne keep it; the wildling girl had a power so much greater.

_x_

She laughed at herself as much as she laughed at Bran – to hear herself talk with a dragon – she never got used to it, not ever. When he came down low enough she swung onto his back like she was water running uphill. She supposed there was so much she could begin to learn from talking with dragons, though for now she was content to just fly. Maybe one day she would write a book about that too.

_x_

I love Gilly, She's a powerful little flower. I might give Shireen a chapter next what do people think? Giving her a happy ending seems apt right now yes? :-)