MEERA
She had begun to forget the feel of wind on her face. Sunlight dappling in trees, running water, blue sky, the good warm sun, what it was like when she moved through the marshes as one with the mud and moss, flying on her feet. All of it might have been some dream, vivid at first but now beginning to inexorably fade. Even Greywater Watch, where she had been born and spent her life, was blurring. Her mother's smile she could only guess at. And sometimes she would wake, lie in the darkness, and realize that she was not entirely sure of her own name.
This was the price. Jojen had never told her if he'd foreseen her fate, and now of course it was too late to ask. But Meera did not need to be a greenseer to understand what was becoming of her. Blood and bone and bronze. Dreams and more than dreams. And then Leaf with the knife, cutting into her flesh and drawing a new ward. The protection would hold out only so long as Meera did, and they were very deep under the hill by now. The darkness was living, tangible, Meera's only true companion as she lay awake in the witching hours, too sore to sleep. She made crude dressings for her wounds, but the makeshift wards needed more than blood to hold. They needed strength, soul, memory, and Leaf's knife took that as well with every new cut.
No, it was not Jojen who had told her of this fate. It was Lord Bloodraven.
Bran had barely gone with Hodor, leaving her with her brother's lifeless body, when the three-eyed crow reappeared out of the darkness, silently as a shade. In fact he had given Meera a terrible turn; she had looked up and there he was, watching her with an utterly inscrutable expression. He inclined his head halfway, apologizing for her fright. Then he said, "I grieve for your loss, Meera Reed."
Meera had wanted to ask angrily if he was mocking her – for what else could he be doing, Jojen only hours dead by the children's hands, sacrificing him bit by bit and drop by drop, to bleed out his greensight into Bran? But there was no levity in Bloodraven's face, no smile or even a hint of one. Then he seated himself with a rustle of leaves, fixed that fey red eye on her, and said, "He died too soon."
"He did," Meera agreed tightly. "Is that what you have come for, my lord? To mourn with me? There are songs of the crannogs I meant to sing to him. I doubt you know them."
"I imagine not," said Lord Brynden, failing to bridle at her bitterness. "Though I will gladly listen. Yet in truth, that is not what I desire from you. The Others push deeper under the hill with each passing moment, and there is no time to lose. With the battle that looms nigh, your prince's eyes and skins may make the difference, if he can master them in time. The wards must be forged again."
Meera frowned. "You said they had broken."
"So I did. The children's wards."
"I. . . I do not understand."
"In this great game we play, of ice and fire and children of the forest and skinchanger and Other, we oftentimes forget that there remains a strange power in simple mankind. Your blood will, for a time, work to hold the defenses. Jojen might have served that purpose for us, but now he is gone. You are the last hope that remains to all of us."
Meera opened her mouth, then shut it. She was astounded at his effrontery, furious at his presumption that she and her brother were nothing but opportune mortal pawns, sickeningly aware that he was telling the truth, and feeling a cold breath on the back of her neck that seemed to whisper at the inevitability of her doom. In that instant she loathed fate and all its quackery, that the days of every man and woman's life could somehow be written in the stars. Was this truly why she had been born, why she had learned what she knew and done what she did – to lead her here to death in the darkness?
"It is a noble purpose," Lord Bloodraven said, still watching her face. "And we do not intend to let so much go to waste. But the wards will be much stronger if they are made by your will."
Meera took a deep, ragged breath. She heard very well what he had just told her: that they would have her blood one way or the other. To the children, who lived for centuries and centuries, it must not seem even that much of a loss; humans came and went like leaves on the wind, changeable as tides. Bran was a skinchanger, prince of the green, in the process of becoming one of the very old gods to whom his family had always prayed, and so he was accorded the benefit of their knowledge and protection. She and Jojen were merely the victims he had chanced to bring with him. Only death can pay for life.
Meera looked up. "Will it hurt?" she whispered. A foolish question, a child's question. "Will I survive?"
Lord Bloodraven glanced down at her. "Anything is possible in these days, Meera Reed."
Still she had sat motionless. Silent sobs shook inside her. I want to go home. I want to go home. But she knew in that moment that she would never see Greywater Watch again, nor hear the crickets shirr on a summer's evening, or paddle her skinboat among the trailing willows. She must merely hold it to her heart in memory, must hold her head high and keep her word. I swore it at Winterfell. By bronze and iron. By earth and water. By ice and fire.
She lifted her head. In a voice that barely sounded like hers, she said, "So be it."
Lord Bloodraven nodded again, once. Then he beckoned to the darkness, and then Leaf emerged with the curious graven blade in hand. Then it cut her flesh and heart and soul, and Meera Reed screamed.
How long it had been since that first sacrifice, she could not say. She never saw what became of her blood once it had been taken, or how the children worked the wards. They had not all been devoured by the Others yet, so she had to suppose it worthwhile, but aside from that it was a complete mystery. The children fed her honey and sap and leaves, but remembering what they had fed Bran turned Meera's stomach. She wondered when her strength gave out, if they would turn to Hodor instead. Lord Bloodraven had said that Hodor was a man, that Bran could not enter in and out of him as he pleased, but there was no way for the big stableboy to understand what was happening, or to give his consent to it. At times Meera felt that he was the greatest victim of all. At least she and Jojen had known full well what they were in for when they had chosen to venture north of the Wall with Bran, but Hodor had only done what he was told to.
She had not even seen Bran, the reason for her sacrifice, since he had gone to the trees. It was enough to make her wonder, suddenly, if she ever would again. She had dreamed of something last night that might have been home, a dream sharp enough in its clarity to make her think that some of the fraught foresight of this place had trickled into her. It hadn't been much, but she had seen a young brown-haired woman growing heavy with child and cold with sorrow, tears freezing on her cheeks as blood crept across the floor. In the dream Meera had known the young woman's name, and why she was crying, but both had fled on her return to waking. She was merely left to lie in the darkness like a thousand sunless days before, listening to it turn to dust and shadow.
It was now, whenever now was, that there was finally some change in the half-life that she had fallen into. She had been almost asleep but not entirely, pursued by demons with her brother's face, when a hand grasped her by the shoulder and shook her.
Meera looked up muzzily, expecting to see Bloodraven or Leaf; they were the only fleshly entities who visited her anymore. But neither of them human. It was to her vast surprise, therefore, when she saw her prince's face pale and fragile in the dark.
"Bran?" Meera's tongue felt clumsy around the name. She could see the concern in his eyes; the light was the strange pale glow that the weirwood roots gave off periodically, and in it she must look even more a corpse than she felt. "What's wrong?"
"I wanted to see you." He looked embarrassed. "I had a dream about you. That you were. . ."
He mustn't know. Meera pushed herself upright, feeling the tremble in her arms and the dancing reel of blood in her head. What I still have of it. "I dreamed of you too, my prince," she said, which was true. Seen him farther away than even he was, his eyes turning red and his hair turning white, calling in his turn to another broken boy. "It has been a long time."
"I know." Awkwardly, he reached out and fumbled for her hand. "I don't know how long. Lord Brynden wants me to shift into all his ravens at once and he says that the great breaking is near, that I must be with them by then. . . I went into the trees and I saw them, who you told me the story about. The wolf maid and the dragon prince with purple eyes, at Harrenhal. It wasn't just a story, they were real."
"Surely you knew that, my prince." Meera's voice sounded disused and rusty. "Stories always contain at least a kernel of truth, even the strangest and most fantastical of all. Men see, and then men dream."
"But I asked about Coldhands, and what was supposed to happen." Bran's voice, by contrast, sounded small and frightened. "I saw him too, I saw him in the weirwood grove with a horn, and. . . Meera, the Wall is under attack. By the Others. There are thousands of them."
"We are under attack here as well." Meera coughed, tasting blood in her mouth. She ran her fingers through her tousled brown braid, but the knots were too tightly pulled to loosen. "Every night and every day that passes in the world above, the Others come closer to us here in the hill's heart."
Bran looked at her with anguished eyes, and she was reminded suddenly of how young he was. She had seen sixteen years herself, almost seventeen, a woman grown, but he had not yet ten, and was being asked the impossible. "What will stop them?"
I will. But that was not an answer to give him. "You'd do better to ask your friend, my prince. Or learn to see farther in the trees."
Bran balled a fist and hit his useless leg. "I'm trying! I can see pretty well, when I'm there. . . but I never know how to control it. And Jon. . . I think Jon. . ."
"Aye?" Meera said wearily. "Your brother is at the Wall, I know, but – "
"No," Bran interrupted. "Meera. . . I think he's dead."
"Many men are dead these days." She lay back down.
"No. . . listen to me!" His hand grasped her again, urgently. "They said the ranger's dead too. For sure. I need to know who he was, why he was hiding the horn there, in the grove. And the Others, all of them, we can't just let them. . ."
"You're the skinchanger, my prince. You're the one that all this is for." She wanted to comfort him, she did, but she was so tired, and no longer strong, and the secret on her shoulders was riding her down to the depths. "I don't know the answer to this. I don't know how. I don't remember anything anymore."
"Meera?" His hand touched her forehead; light, darting, a boy's hand still, not a tree's or a spirit's or a demon's. "You're so cold. I know. . . I know this. . . that Jojen. . . I'm sorry. I want to take care of you and Hodor, I just don't know how either, and it's hard to come back when I've been with them so long. When I've been up there in the trees, I. . ."
"You never wanted to come back when you were with your wolf," Meera said, eyes still closed. She had forgotten the wolf's name. "We always had to pull you back, feed you, smear honey on your lips and trickle water down your throat so you would not starve. Told you a thousand times and one that you could not live on what he killed. To learn how to change your skin, you must learn which one is your own. Who you are."
"Lord Brynden said that as well." His fingers closed around hers again. "Meera, what's wrong?"
She did not want to worry him. She had already been too harsh. "Nothing, my prince. Nothing."
"Meera. . ."
"The girl is weary," a voice said, near at hand. "She would rest. And you are needed, now. The children have almost fetched him back from the death of his wolf. You must show him where to find the horn."
Bran looked up with a start. "What? I don't understand. Who?"
Towering above them both, Lord Bloodraven looked more eerie than ever. "You know."
Bran remained blank for one, two, three moments, then his look turned desperately hopeful. "You mean he's not dead after all? What I saw. . . I thought. . ."
"Oh no," the tree-man said. "He is dead. No living man could set foot where he must go. He dreams. You must meet him there. In the grove. Show him the horn."
"Why?" Bran asked. "I don't – "
"Because this darkness is only a pale shadow of the darkness that will cover the world, if they find it first. He is what I was, what I am. A son of the dragon not by name, but by blood. A crow. Come, boy. Now."
"Jon's a Stark," Bran said. "Not a – "
Bloodraven smiled oddly. "He is. But not that alone. And the only one who can do what must be done. Tell me, child. What do you know now of the Others, that you did not know before?"
Bran hesitated. "That they march on the Wall in all their numbers."
"Very good. And what do you know of the counterbalance to all that ice?"
Bran looked blank again. Meera said, "Fire."
"It is so, Howland's daughter. There are Others of flame so well as Others of ice, and they are no less dangerous. Both sides would take the world for their own, mold it in their image and sweep over any dissenter in a flood tide. They speak of a battle that constantly rages, two forces at work in the world and seeking always for its domination, and they are not wrong. . . but what becomes of a battle when it is over? They created each other. They feed into each other. One can never die while the other lives."
"I. . . what Others of flame?" Bran wrinkled his brow. "Old Nan never told stories about those."
"It is another half of the world, my lord. And they think themselves champions of all that is, but they are wrong. Night and day. Good and evil. Pain and pleasure. There are no shades of grey for them, only absolutes. We will burn and we will freeze. That is why the seasons are as they are, Lord Stark. That is why the Wall was raised, why the Others endure still, why they come now – Others of flame and ice alike. Both of them must be destroyed."
"But without. . ."
"The balance is tipped too far. It must be broken completely if it is ever to rise again. Your kinsman must do it. That is why he was born. Rhaegar Targaryen may have been a noble fool in aught else, but he saw clearly in this. Show Jon Snow the horn."
Yet again, Bran hesitated, but Meera began to feel a horrible thread of sense forming in her head. She had never had any occasion to make acquaintance with the worshipers of the faith of R'hllor, but there were stories and stories about the red priestess that had come mysteriously from across the narrow sea, from Asshai, to champion Stannis Baratheon's cause as a mystic hero reborn. No one ever knew why, no one has ever been able to work out the sway she holds on him, why it is that he has given himself to her. . . and what lies in it for her. No man, or woman, with such power at their disposal was ever mistaken for an altruist. For what it was worth, the red priestess was supposedly sincere in her convictions, but how would she be able to fathom a dread secret that lay at the very heart of her order, veiled even from its masters by now? Even the greatest of all the sorcerers in Asshai might not know, or only guess at it. A secret that went back to the founding of the world and the unbalancing of the seasons. The Others grow too strong. Both of them.
And Jon Snow. . . Meera had long known that he was no brother to Bran, but it had never been her place to tell him. Their father had said very little about the mysterious origins of Ned Stark's supposed bastard, but Jojen had said that it was plain that Jon was no seed of the Lord of Winterfell. He'd said that he dreamed of the wolf maid and the dragon prince, the very ones that Bran had told her he'd seen in his vision. He asked to see what was happening. He did. By all the gods, he did. Coldhands and the horn and Lady Lyanna and Prince Rhaegar. The end and the beginning.
But who was Coldhands? Did it even matter? The children had saved him from death to carry out the task of finding and delivering this horn. Just as, unless Meera was very wrong, they had now saved Jon Snow: to finish what was begun. Jojen died too soon, she thought, and once more heard Bloodraven asking her to take his place. But in this case, Coldhands was only ever meant to lay the path.
"Lord Brynden," she said. She had to cough again. "And with all this so, why does it matter to you?"
He smiled faintly. "You told me who I was. Before."
Meera had a vague recollection of doing so, but could not pin it down. It took her another moment to be sure. "A Great Bastard," she said at last. "A thousand eyes and one. Once the Lord Commander of the Night's Watch. A black dragon."
"A black dragon," Brynden agreed, "but still a dragon."
Bran started. Apparently he had not worked out the identity of his tutor as expeditiously as she had.
"Would you then not want fire to sweep over the world?"
"Gods, no." His chuckle was dry and papery, bare branches whispering in a rising autumn wind. "I am gone far beyond that. Look at me. Do you think it would be any concern of mine at all who raises their standards in the world of men, what cloth animals were sewn on a banner and raised to flap above hollow suits of armor, with the black blood leaking from beneath their visors? Red dragon or black, both of them live – for now. Fire cannot kill a dragon, but ice may yet."
Meera's head hurt with a dull, pounding throb. But she noticed that her knife lay not that that far away, and suddenly she was seized in the throes of a terrible plan. Inch by inch, her body screaming with every motion, she moved as unobtrusively toward as it as she could.
"I still don't – " Bran was saying.
"Then you have learned little and less, summer child, and we are all dead."
"No." He bristled. "Please. Just tell me what – "
"Lord Bloodraven." Meera spoke over both of them. Her hands felt so shaky that it was a wonder she hadn't stabbed herself on accident, but this was her only chance. Their only chance. "Do as he says. Elsewise I'll end it for all of us, now."
Bran looked at her, aghast. "Meera! No!"
Meera paid him no mind. Hearing her own breath rasp in her ears, she gave the knife another twist against her stomach, letting a few fat drops of precious blood run down and absorb into her tattered leathers. "I swear it," she said, half a sob. "I will."
Lord Bloodraven looked caught off guard. This, at least, he had not foreseen. "Don't, girl. What is at stake is more than all of us, and the wards – "
"What do I care? Not any more."
He was caught. If she killed herself, their protection would last only as long as the last ward held out, and that would not be nearly enough. Whatever flimsy shield was keeping out the dark, keeping the Others away from Bran, the only way to show Jon Snow where to find the horn. . . but what horn?
Bloodraven divided a cold, deliberate glance between both of them. He does not like being tricked. Fine, then. Neither had she. "My lord. If you'd be so kind?"
"What is it you wish to know?" Brynden Rivers snapped.
"Who is Coldhands?" Bran blurted out. Not the question Meera would have chosen, but the circumstances left little time for reflection.
"Another kinsman of yours. He found the two horns far beyond the Wall, but did not know what they were. On his return journey, he was killed by the Others. To let the horns fall into their hands was unthinkable, so the children were forced to intervene. Preserve him long enough for him to reach the Fist of the First Men, to leave the Horn of Dawn and the cache of dragonglass there in hopes they'd find it, and take the Horn of Winter to where he thought it never would be."
"My kinsman, you said it was my kinsman. . ." Bran paused. "Was he in the Night's Watch as well? Like you, and Jon?"
"He was."
"Then it must have been. . ." Bran suddenly looked much younger than his years. In half a whisper, he said, "It was my uncle Benjen."
"He was a Stark. He was Ice. Your own lord father's greatsword was called that, after all. Always it has been part of you, but his part is done. He is dead. At rest. Leave even the thought of him behind. We have already had enough of the dead that rise."
"But the Wall. . . the Others. . ."
"I came to you first in your dream directly after you fell," Lord Brynden said. "I taught you to fly, so that you would not die. You are my heir as well. The three-eyed crow changes from fire, to ice. Always in balance. Tell Jon of the horn. Tell him to warg into the trees, to see what he needs to know, to find out once and for all who he is. Do you doubt me now?"
"I didn't fall. I never fell."
"It makes no matter now. That life is gone so much as your uncle. Come. You as well, Meera Reed."
This unexpected inclusion put Meera's hackles up. "Why?"
"It is best that you should be together," Bloodraven said, with the eclipse of a smile. "At the end."
"The end?" Bran demanded. "Which horn am I going to show Jon? Which horn?"
Bloodraven did not answer. Instead he clicked his fingers, and the roots writhed up to ensnare them both, propelling them up into the high seat at speed. They wrapped around Bran's arms and withered legs, snaked across his shoulders and burrowed into his flesh, and he opened his mouth to cry out in pain, but his eyes were rolling back into his head. Then with a gasp and a jerk, he was gone.
"He goes to meet his cousin in the weirwood grove," Bloodraven said, intercepting Meera's shocked look. "And to find his wolf. Summer is bringing us to Winter even now."
Bringing us to Winter. Dread coiled in her stomach like a snake. "Don't," she whispered. "It's the Horn of Winter in that grove, isn't it? Not the Horn of Dawn."
"Ice and fire," Bloodraven said, for mayhaps the thousandth time. "It is never solely one or the other. It will not be long."
Meera waited, heart racing, but indeed it wasn't. Bran's eyes opened again with another gasp, and he sat up slowly, dazed. "I did see Jon. I told him what you said. . . and Summer was there, Summer brought him to me. Is he dead too?"
"Your wolf lives as long as you do," Bloodraven said. His voice was beginning to grow. . . strange somehow. Coarse and rough, like bark. "And now we wait."
Questions raced through Meera's head hard enough to leave bruises, but she knew there was no point in asking them. Instead, she convulsively reached for Bran's hand, and he grasped back. She could feel the tremor in his cold fingers, matched in her own, could hear the darkness. And for the first time, she knew the white walkers who waited at the gate. Could feel their coldness boiling out into the hill's heart. They were only a few hundred yards away. In the gathering dark, she saw their eyes burn blue.
"They are here." Bloodraven sounded sad, even almost amused, but not frightened. "We must hope your kinsman is quick to understand what he must do, otherwise. . ."
Otherwise we are dead, all of us. Meera squeezed Bran's hand harder. "Hodor," she whispered hoarsely. "Where is he?"
Bran's voice shook like his fingers. "I don't know."
Time both seemed to speed up and go horribly slowly. She gasped a sob, could hear Bran's in answer, felt the warm salt tear fall on their interlocked fingers. The last warmth I will ever know. The pain was driving through her like a spear, as the Others beat on the wards drawn in her blood, trying to tear their way through. When the horn sounds. . .
She couldn't stand it, she knew. She was going to die. It would be a relief now, a welcome. It was said every soul found its way home in the afterlife.
"No," she found herself saying aloud. "No. . ."
"No?" said Bloodraven, even more softly. Like the rustling of leaves – except it was leaves. And she understood, then. "No. Now."
And then the horn sounded.
Like the icy blast of winter itself, it tore through the hill's heart and echoed in every chamber, every space, every darkness, even though it was leagues upon leagues away. Every thing that ever was or would be heard it, Meera imagined. Calling to powers ancient beyond knowing, rising now, wakening to the command of the one who'd called. The Horn in the hands of Jon Snow – but he was no Snow, nor Stark.
Fire, Meera Reed thought. Ice.
To every side, the Others were swarming – but away from them, not towards them. Then Bloodraven uttered a sharp scream, half in agony and half in ecstasy, and before her very eyes, his mortal body, long-lived past its time, cracked and collapsed to ash. It swirled around the roots, up into them, Brynden Rivers taking his place among the old gods. His red eye was the last to go, drifting up into the flame that lit the cavern in unholy visage around them. Crackling up toward the ceiling, flame beyond anything she had ever seen. The old powers unleashed at last.
In her bones she could feel it coming down. The Wall she'd once climbed at the Nightfort, step by harrowing step, out into the abyss. Feel the unraveling of the spells and the breaking of the guard. Hear the crack directly above her, as the barrow split like a dropped fruit and the searing cold of winter rushed in. Starlight showed, unfathomably distant. Wind on my face. The memory returned at last.
"Meera," Bran gasped in her ear. His other hand felt out for hers. Two small human things, in the middle of the end of all things. "I love you."
She wanted to say something back to him, but the time for words was so ludicrously gone. Instead she let go with one hand, grasped him by the chin, and fleetingly, tenderly pressed their lips together.
Bran paused a split second, then leaned back into her. It was a boy's kiss, one small human thing. Light and dry and desperate, tasting of salt and snow and starlight. And for all that she could feel herself fading, going down with it, silken ribbons of soul blown on the breeze, it was the sweetest thing she'd ever known, and the last. Then she was falling, never landing only falling, never hitting the ground, only in midair, shattered darkness, and all she heard was screaming.
