Author's Note: So you were getting a Daenerys chapter next but ever since I wrote the Bran chapter, Meera Reed has been in my head. Don't blame her. Meera's amazing. Blame me. I had to get this one down first, before she vanished into the swampy underbrush forever. As always, thanks for your faves/reviews! Xo

Meera

Several weeks later…

Every pond surrounding Greywater Watch was frozen solid, from the shallow pools to the deepest holes in the ground. The patchwork of swamps decorating the Neck were all draped in latticed frost. The mire surrounding the crannogs had gone hard as stone. The slouching willows, hollow reeds and floating islands were all locked in ice.

Meera was accustomed to stepping on unsteady ground. The mire of the swamplands, the way it moved and flowed under her huntress steps, had always been hers to command. She was a Reed. This was her country. But the land had gone cold and fallow, like the silence of a buried tomb.

Or the heart of a Three-Eyed Raven. Meera frowned grimly as she kept her balance, sliding across a sheet of ice to the edge of the brown-spotted swamp. The air was so crisp, like the crunch of autumn foliage or the bite of a green apple. Meera wished she had a green apple. She wished she could hop up into the branches of the nearest swamp-apple tree and pluck a half dozen, all with glossy skin and tart flavor…because that would mean it was late summer again, with all its long days, warm nights and honey-sweet caresses.

She was too young to remember the last winter but this one had left a bad taste in her mouth already.

Winter was an unforgiving season. It was bitter, all wrath and fury. And so greedy in its rage. Its storms were never satisfied. The last one kept Meera and her father locked up in their Tower for weeks. The storm wailed against Greywatch Tower like a bog-chained banshee, with blinding snows and deep freezes that went on and on, until it had turned the whole of Westeros into a frozen wasteland.

All wrath and fury and hard edges. And when the wrath and fury was spent, it was silence. The kind of silence that whispers hopeless thoughts of loneliness and death.

Meera didn't like the silence at all. All her life, the swamps around her home had hummed, whistled, croaked and buzzed, with the sound of winged insects and slippery amphibians. Gnats, dragonflies, frogs, toads, hummingbirds, crickets—their constant chatter was music to Meera's ears. When she was young, she would occasionally sleep in the trees out here in the bogs and lagoons, lulled to sleep by the swamp's many-voiced folk songs.

Winter hushed up the swamp's voice and left it shivering and forlorn. Meera only hoped all the frogs and toads had found warm ground to sleep in.

She ducked into the grove of birch wood on the other side of the swamp. The trees were frosted over and bare-limbed, their papery bark frozen stiff. Meera let her gloved hands slide around the trunks of the birch and ash. She went to the center of the grove and there she knelt on snow-covered moss. Beneath the moss, she started digging.

Her father, Howland Reed, was dying. He would never admit it to her but he was dying just the same. She was tempted to cry about it in the birch wood but it wouldn't change anything and her tears were all dried up. That's why her father kept this news to himself.

He'd seen her grief-worn expression when she returned from Winterfell, her errand finished, Jojen lost, her association with Brandon Stark at its end. The things she'd seen above the Wall would haunt her until the end of her days. And her father would never heap sadness upon his sad daughter. Not if he didn't have to.

"I couldn't save him, Father," she had said as soon as she walked into Greywater Watch, in a small voice colored with a thousand regrets, her eyes pooling in hot tears that she let fall onto her face without wiping them away. She was speaking of Jojen or Bran, Hodor or Summer, or all of them together.

She couldn't be sure herself.

All she knew was that she felt broken inside. Her mission was complete. She'd done what her father asked her to do. She did what was required, battling magic and dead men and mysticism, watching every last one of her companions fall before her. Jojen was dead. Hodor was dead. Summer and the Children of the Forest. All dead. And Bran? Bran was dead too, replaced by a cold, supernatural presence, far beyond all of them, incapable of human emotion. No fear, no sadness, no love.

Travelling back to Greywater Watch from Winterfell, Meera felt the sting of Bran's cruel words in every mile.

The Three-Eyed Raven's words, she amended in her head, although it didn't make her feel any better.

The road home seemed long this time. She'd made the trek before, at a hurried, excited pace, but Jojen had been with her. This last time, she'd been entirely alone and she felt it keenly. She'd never felt more alone in her life. When she walked into her father's house, she couldn't stop the tears. Sadness and relief all mixed together in a potent brew. She was so tired. She missed Jojen and her mother. And Bran's words wouldn't stop echoing in her head, over and over and over again.

No, I don't need you.

Seeing her tears, her father embraced her tightly and let her cry at his shoulder. The unconditional love and warmth in her father's embrace only made the tears come faster. These were old tears, pent up from all those months and years above the Wall. Images flashed through her head. The mutineers at Craster's Keep. The scarlet stripe across Jojen's throat. Dead men digging through the ceiling of the Three-Eyed Raven's cave. Hodor's screams, as he followed her frantic, desperate command to the last.

Hold the door!

"Meera, my brave child. You're home now," her father promised with gentleness. He held her for a long time, letting her cry herself dry. When she was finished, she wiped her eyes with her fingers. As he had when she was a child, her father lifted her chin to make sure she was all right. She managed a small, brave smile and nodded wordlessly.

She was home. She was with her family and that was all that mattered now.

But her father was dying. He had a cough that he couldn't shake. It had lingered through the long autumn and had recently turned hoarse and bloody. That morning, Meera had boiled him a honey-sweetened tea of crushed green leaf that he accepted gladly.

"Do you remember your mother's mint and mushroom soup?" her father asked, as he sipped down the tea. "She always made so much from so little. You're very like her, Meera."

Meera decided that she would make her mother's soup for him. Practical and resourceful as always, she knew where to look for mushrooms, even in the dead of winter. In the birch and ash wood, on that snow-covered bed of wiry moss, she dug deep. She knew these swamps and all their creatures and vegetation like no one else. And the swamp was resilient. It would outlast the winter yet.

There they were. Little, cold-weather mushrooms, hiding under the bed of moss. With a blade from her belt, she cut a fistful. It would make enough for the two of them. It was a frivolous thing and not worth the effort she put into it. But she loved her father and would take on far more to secure a single moment of his happiness.

For what was life without love?

Bleak as the long winter. Meera thought to herself, holding back stupid tears that sprung to her eyes, uninvited. Cold as a Three-Eyed Raven.