THE SKINCHANGER
The wolfswood was quiet tonight. Pine needles and frostbitten leaves crackled beneath his bare feet as he crept along. Bran could feel the wolf's heart beating fearful in her chest; she was less strong than Summer was, and despite her teeth and her claws she still feared men. She wanted to flee back to her nest, to her cubs, and cower inside herself, but he held her firm, his thoughts a tight vice on hers. He could feel her life-force fluttering, delicate as a moth inside her. Not only did it flutter as a moth did, but it had that singular incessant attraction to freedom. That freedom was freedom from him, and that freedom was denied her.
Quiet now, he told the she-wolf. You be quiet now. And she obeyed, her whimpers ebbing into silence, for he was the lord of all creatures, wolves included. She knew of the three-eyed crow and she feared him. And well she should.
She crept closer to the clearing. The air rustled. And then, from below the ridge, came the voices. "Oh, we will play with them a little while longer," said the first, the man's voice. Euron Greyjoy. The voice of the man who, while he was sleeping, took out his eye. "They call you the three-eyed crow. No man should have more than two."
It hurt. He did not feel the pain in his body, but he felt it nonetheless; it shocked him, it tore him apart, it made him scream, though he had no mouth to scream with. On the floor of the Winterfell cell the boy's body jerked and convulsed, the reaction of whatever life force remained tethered within it. The blade dug deep; it tore through his eye and left him with darkness.
The she-wolf tried to break free again. No. He said it more firmly this time. Stay.
"Mother always told me not to toy with my food, it is true," said Euron. "Though I do not think she ever meant it. She was harder than you might suppose, this wife of Quellon. I do not think my father reckoned on her strength. When she died he sought out softer, weaker women."
Then the Night's Queen spoke. The she-wolf went rigid, her bones freezing instantly in place. Her voice was shards of ice. "And you still seek a woman like her?"
"I thought the dragon queen might suit, truth be told. That was my plan for a time. But then I remembered you."
The Queen laughed, and the sound cut through him, and burned cold. "Ever the romancer, Greyjoy. But I am married, you forget. And no woman." She paused. "This the crow knows well."
So: she could hear him. She always could. It meant nothing, only that it was time to lose the she-wolf. He let her free, and leapt from her skin into the branches above, and grabbed one of the nesting ravens in his noose. The bird struggled a moment, then allowed him to enter, spread its wings, and fled the grove. Below, he felt the she-wolf go limp, instantly dead of terror.
He rose above the army. He could not count the numbers of those not-life forces, but the raven had eyes same as he did, and he had the mind of hundreds of other beasts, of the trees, and he had enough of them to send the message on. So he whispered it across the world, for all who would hear. Ten thousand, a hundred thousand. North and south of the Wall. They are coming. They are coming. The time is now. And to a few in particular, he whispered, through dreams and secret ways, he whispered wake the dragon, he whispered this is your calling, he whispered you must save yourself.
Then he felt the Queen reaching out to him, and he leapt away violently, out of the raven's skin, out of all of them. His head jerked back and he lay there on the cold stone ground of the cave, choking down great gulps of the man-air which he had not breathed for so long. It tasted bitter.
Summer sat on all fours in the mouth of the cave, staring out into the forbidding night. Somewhere beyond the treeline were the Night's Queen and Euron Greyjoy. He did not doubt that the Queen knew he was here. But he did not think she had told Euron about him yet. They were not as strong an alliance as he thought they were.
The fire had burned down low. Bran did not feel the cold from it, though, and his eyes had adapted somehow so that seeing in the dark was natural, too. More than that, it was familiar. What was it Brynden Rivers had said, under the hill? Darkness will be your cloak and your shield. The wights would never find him here.
"Here, Summer," he called. "Here, boy." The wolf obeyed instantly, coming to nuzzle at his cheek. His fur was very warm. Bran brushed a hand over his snout and cast his mind back to when they had first met, in those long-ago snows. You will care for them yourselves, Father had said. And you will bury them yourselves. He had sounded so assured then. But he could never have foreseen this, a time when his children would not just walk beside their wolves, but within their wolves. Sansa had lost that ability when Lady was killed by the Trident, and Robb and Grey Wind had lost their communication within minutes of one another, at the Red Wedding. But him, Jon, Arya, and Rickon—
Best not to think about Rickon, he thought sorrowfully. And as for Jon and Ghost… well, that was not quite the same thing, was it?
His thoughts drifted back to Father. Maybe he should ask. He had asked Father for advice before, down by the pool, while Father was cleaning Ice after an execution and he came and he raised a question. It was not a verbal question, but it was a feeling that meant a questioning; to his father's ears it sounded like Father… And Lord Eddard looked up, confused, because the boy's voice was not Robb's, nor Jon's, and Bran was only a newborn babe, too young to talk. He spoke to his mother, too. She was in the weirwood grove, after the blooding of the Lannister lions. She looked up and saw him, or thought she saw him. He wondered if she would recognise him. His hair had grown lank and thick, down to his shoulders, and one of her boy Bran's blue eyes had turned to the crow Brandon's bright, endless green.
No more climbing, she said. But he had to climb. He had to climb so he could fall, so he could fly. Fly or die, the crow screeched, and the Kingslayer said "the things I do for love" and pushed him from the tower, and the wights tore into his body with their hands and their teeth beneath the weirwood tree. He woke up, and it was morning again.
He wondered how the Sworn Brothers of the Night's Watch had fared last night against Euron's forces. No worse than usual, he judged, rising to his feet.
Walking was still something that unsettled him. This was because he knew that his legs were still broken. His spine was still twisted and the vertebrae remained shattered. The muscles that you needed to walk or piss or do anything in the lower part of your body did not work in him. And yet he could walk, as he was walking now, out of the cave.
But he had a theory.
When you are alive, there are two parts to you: your soul, which is you, and who you are, and what you feel, and your skin. The skinchanger is able to move between skins while keeping his soul in one place, but he is always fated to return to his original skin eventually, and he will need to keep that skin alive if he is to stay truly alive. There is a tether.
But when the wights killed him beneath the heart tree, that tether broke. It was still broken now, and irreparable, as far as he knew. The soul that was Brandon Stark no longer had a body to return to. In that sense, he was free.
But old habits die hard. He had spent the first sixteen years of his existence in that body, and so it was only natural that he would seek it out, and return to it, if he found it. And he had. The body had been torn and broken beyond repair at first, but he got into it somehow, and repaired the shattered parts. He bound the wounds up in fibres of green glowing light and made an eye out of that same light, as a god would. And much as he repaired his eye with those divine bands, he repaired the legs as well. They were still broken, but for so long as they occupied the body, he could move them, as a puppeteer moves the strings of his creation and makes them dance. He was no longer a permanent resident in his body. He was now a mere tenant, keeping it from crumbling any further.
Strange and stranger.
The next morning he set out for the Great Barrow.
It was some fifty miles to Barrowton, where the barrow was housed, but he and Summer made that in a few hours. He climbed onto Summer's back and held tight to the direwolf's fur as they rode. At times he was inside Summer himself, feeling the power in his legs and feet as they ripped up the snow. Other times he fell back into himself, or drifted up, among the birds, and watched them from miles off, his wings lazily adrift. He was so quiet that the bird hardly noticed his presence there. This was, of course, of his own volition; if he wanted to take control he could flood the bird's mind, as he had done to the wolf and the raven the night before. Faintly, he reached for the life-force of both, though they were hundreds of miles away. There was no response.
Next he drifted to the Wall, to Samwell Tarly and Melisandre and Jon. He watched, in a bird's form, from a ledge as the men of the Night's Watch brought in the bodies that had fallen in the yard the night before. The faces bringing them in were restless, but they should have settled themselves. Castle Black would not fall today.
And now Winterfell. Through the eyes of the heart tree in the godswood he looked upon drifting snow and broken walls. Euron had not burned it – his nephew Theon had not, and neither had Ramsay Bolton – but he had left it in a poor state, and the garrison he had left behind was a sorry one too. It was Victarion Greyjoy – or rather, his revived corpse, who garrisoned the castle now. And Victarion, at his brother's order, was amassing a host, though, of course, he did not know it. Bran could feel them coming – hundreds of wights, thousands of wights, the murdered remainder of the North's people, all shambling towards Winterfell.
He opened his eyes. Summer slowed to a halt. At first Bran saw nothing but a tall, snow-drowned hill, with no way in. But as he approached he noticed that the snow had packed up in such a way as to conceal something – a cleft in the rock, he realised. Beyond that was the cave.
It took him and Summer the better part of an hour to shovel a way through, digging with fingers that were frozen at the start and frostbitten by the end. But he was not too worried. If a hundred knives could not kill him, what could frostbite do? Though the snow remained solidly packed, there was now a narrow path through. He went down on his hands and knees and crawled towards it, scrabbling ahead blindly as the tunnel grew darker and darker—
And emerged abruptly in a cavern filled with bright blue light. The first thing he saw was the ceiling, bright with icicles, reflecting the glimmer of some source in the chamber below. Then he looked down and saw where the light was emanating from. It was an altar of sorts, and on it lay a bright blue stone of sorts, casting out radiant pools of light which played across the ceiling. As Bran walked towards it, it began to hum, as if it had been expecting him. Euron was here, a part of him thought. This could be a trap for you. But that part of him was the fearful boy. The part that was the crow knew better. Touch it. Touch the stone.
Bran took a deep breath, then placed his hand on the smooth surface of the stone. Blue light flooded his eyelids, harsh and cold enough to leave him dizzy. He stumbled, caught his balance on a spur of – weirwood?
So it was: pale white weirwood bark, veiny with red. And it was not just that was familiar, but the whole setting; red fallen leaves, blue cloudless sky. Old Nan had said that they all lived inside the eye of a blue-eyed giant named Macumber, and this seemed proof. And then, from somewhere across the pool of water, he heard the hiss of Valyrian steel, and he knew it was Ice.
And, turning his head to look in the direction of the hissing, he knew exactly what – or rather, who – he would see.
"Father."
Lord Eddard Stark stood silent, with the greatsword clasped in his hands, staring back at him across the stillness of the godswood. It was something he had seen a hundred times before, but here, now, Father's eyes were on him, rather than seeing through him.
"Bran," he said, a little hoarsely.
He was sure Father must be a mirage. But he did not look it. He seemed solid, and when Bran took a step forwards his shape did not flicker or waver, but remained fixed in place. A thin smile creased his lips. "You are walking."
"I am." His voice sounded different: somehow younger, as if it were the young boy who had fallen speaking again. "My legs were broken, but they were healed again. I can run now. I can climb… if I wanted to."
"And do you want to?" Lord Eddard said. It was a simple enough question, but Bran knew that underneath there were much bigger ones: questions of who a man was, and what he valued.
"I would. Sometimes I wish I could turn it all back, and be ten again. But… I am a man grown now. And a man has his duty, and he cannot desert it even if that is what he wants."
Father raises an eyebrow. "Which means…"
Now he understood. "Which means you are not what I came here for, Father."
"I know." His father turned Ice so the light spun through the blade. "Which means…"
Which means you are not Father, only the image of him. "Do you know what knowledge I seek?"
"I do," said his father. "I trust you have worked out the secrets of Winterfell, Brandon?"
"The Night's Queen."
Lord Eddard nodded. "Indeed. It took me some time to realise them for myself. My father Lord Rickard only ever told the secret to Brandon – my brother, that is. They died within minutes of each other, so my father was never able to tell me the secrets that had been passed down through generations of Starks.
"Luckily, my father left precautions. And among them was Old Nan."
"Old Nan?"
"She had been my nurse, and his nurse before me," explained Lord Eddard. "Father proved to have good judgement in trusting Old Nan… better than mine, in any case. I neglected to tell Robb. I did not think things would happen so suddenly… I thought, foolishly, that if there was ever a danger of my death, it would come not from the Lannisters but from Robert turning on me his anger. I assume you understand why?"
"Jon," said Bran.
"Jon," said Father. "And the promise I made to my sister Lyanna. Alas, the decisions I made for Lyanna turned out to be…"
"Bad ones. Female Others can only migrate into female bodies. So when you put Aunt Lyanna into the crypt, the Queen began to migrate into her, to build her form up from bones—" He stopped, realising this memory might be painful for his father. If this was his father at all.
"Father," he said, very suddenly. "Where you are… in this place… have you found Mother? And Robb? And Jon?"
Lord Eddard thought that over for a moment. "They never left me, Bran. As they, and I, never left you. That is not to say that we have met… but as a man wanders, as in life, it is inevitable that he comes across places where his path meets the paths of others. Imagine… imagine there is a blizzard, and the snow falls so thick you cannot see three feet in front of you. But then you see a campfire, burning inexplicably through all the snow. You approach, and around the fire you meet everyone you ever met in life, and for that one night… and afterwards you are never sure who you met, or what you said, but you know that you were happy… do you understand?"
"Not really."
"Ah," said Father. "That may be for the best." Lord Eddard sat for a moment longer, looking up to the sky. His eyes were strange, somehow brighter than they had ever been in life. "I suppose I should get to the point. You came to the Great Barrow because you wanted to be told where to go next."
"Yes. I know Euron Greyjoy came here, and it told him—"
"You are not Euron Greyjoy, Bran. So why should it work for you as it did for him?"
That was true. Why hadn't he thought of that? "I hoped—"
"Who do you think Euron saw when he put his hand on the altar?"
Bran did not answer.
"I would wager that it was not those he had loved and lost," said his father. "Rather those he had murdered and whose deaths he had grown to regret." A moment's pause. "His time will come, have no fear."
"I'm not afraid."
"You are," said Lord Eddard. "That is why you are running. That is why you are hiding."
"I'm not hiding—"
"You are," his father repeated. "If you were not, we would not be having this conversation. Because you would not be here in Barrowton; you would not be thinking about Winterfell, or the Nightfort, and you would certainly not be thinking about going north of it. You would have remembered the most important thing, what is always the most important thing. You say your duty is to follow the Others—"
"—to find a way to defeat them."
"Yes," said Lord Eddard. "And yet you do not need to follow them in person. You are the three-eyed crow, aren't you? Every beast and every tree of this land is at your command. But there is only one of you, Brandon. And there is, really only one place for you to be. Your duty is not to go north, as mine as not to go south. Nor is your duty the most important thing. As I am sure your mother reminded you, with her house words."
"Words are wind," Bran said.
"Don't interrupt me," his father replied, stonily. "Your duty is your family, Bran. And they are your honour, too. You have a thousand eyes and one; you can do without two of them in the distant north. You are the lord of Winterfell, remember…"
"Winterfell is captured now. Euron—"
"Winterfell is not only a place. Winterfell is House Stark. And if House Stark is not in Winterfell, then its lord should not be there either."
"I can't go back—"
"Because you are afraid, yes. You are afraid they will see you walking, and they will not accept you. I think your fears are unfounded. But even if they are not, and you are afraid with good reason… well, Brandon, can a man be brave even if he is afraid?"
What else to say? "That is the only time a man can be brave."
"Then you know where you have to go." Lord Eddard looked down at Ice, then laid the blade down on the snow. He smiled at Bran, and it was a smile full of rueful sadness. "I used to think that love was the death of honour, and of duty. But…" And though he trailed off into silence there, Bran did not need him to finish.
