BRAN
"The boy was counting. "One... two... three... four... five... five and a half... six... seven... eight..." Bran continued looking at Arya to see what she might do, where she might head to first. She was decided. They both hurried up towards the third floor, where the bats nested.
Hide-and-seek at Harrenhal was among the best, most exciting things that Bran had ever done, and he was still a prince from House Stark and Tully combined, having grown up in the Red Keep all his life, he thought. He was certainly luckier than most, as his mother constantly told him.
The castle was enormous, a massive stone eternity stretching away before him like a grey wasteland or the inside of a mountain, through enormous halls of stone, death, cool shadows, grey numbness and howling ghosts echoing through the invisible holes in the walls. That had mostly scared him during the night, but now that he knew that it was daytime outside, he was not as scared.
The bats had not scared him either. Well, not much at least. When the big black bat flew out of a hole in the ceiling above and flapped loudly right at Septa Mordane's face, he had become frightened, in truth, but it was more to do with the shock of it than the bat itself. Bran liked bats. He thought they were ugly, certainly yes, but also... sweet somehow. He found that he had a hard time explaining it to anyone else, but he knew at least what he meant to himself. He had seen pictures of bats in Grand Maester Pycelle's bestiary books, although only some of them were painted lifelike, and others so strange that he was certain the maester who drew them must have been drunk, mad or ill.
There had once been a small bat at the Red Keep, it was only a baby, that had fallen down from the roof somewhere and lay flat on the ground in the outer courtyard. Bran had laid down to look at it, hurrying to do so before Ser Mandon accidentally stepped on it with his massive boots, and then he had picked it up and taken it with him all the long way up to his bedchamber, to let it rest on a towel on the side of his bed.
After an hour or two it had awakened for true, and then begun to flap about wildly on the floor inside his chamber, screeching and peeping with its shrill voice which Bran imagined sounded like one of the Seven Hells, or perhaps the sound that came when one was struck by lightning. At any rate, he had become too afraid to pick it up, and instead called out to Erryk to come and help him. Erryk had taken a look at the bat, pulled his greaves off laboriously and then helped the bat out through the window. They had both watched as it flapped its way towards the sky, flying away rapidly in succession, flapping as quickly with its strange wings as fast and queer as no bird ever could, and then it had flown over to the other side of the keep, to land on a wall of Maegor's Holdfast, seemingly content to stay there for a while more.
He would go up to the window first of all, however, to try and get a good look at what the courtyard looked like from above. Arya did not seem to want to come with him, though.
"What are you going to do there? Are you going to hide in the window?" She said.
"There might be a balcony there", he suggested. "Or a rafter leading up to the next window, so that we can climb up without scaring the bats", he replied.
Arya only shrugged off his explanation. "Fine. You go and stay there, then. I'll go and look for a better place to hide."
Bran watched her as she slid away further into the corridor, then jumped up to the great windowsill. He thought again of the bat that he and Erryk Glover had helped out of his chamber that time. He wished that they would come again. He had asked Grand Maester Pycelle after how to build a small house for the bats, and Pycelle had shown him some old construction drawings from one of the Targaryen children some hundreds of years ago who had held a similar fascination. His father had agreed to the building and asked the castle carpenter Hugor Brown to help him out. The finished bathouse had been a nice [ ], but it was made to sit on the bark of a tree, and so they had put it up on one of the smaller oaks to the left in the godswood, just beside a large pine. Bran hoped that the bats would like their new home, but they had still not seen any to take roosting in it. Sometimes he would go the godswood and pray for it, among many other small things.
The bats at Harrenhal seemed to be somewhat larger, though, and mostly black instead of brown, Bran thought to himself as he went further and further into the castle, under arched vaults and archways stretching further in an enormously long corridor which somehow seemed to sway slowly to the right at first and then slowly towards the left. It was the opposite way to how the sun went on the sky. He supposed that was a bad sign about the makers of the castle.
Grand Maester Pycelle had told him about King Harren the Black, of how he had bled the Riverlands dry in his enormous attempt to build the castle, his thralls and labourers toiling for forty tears to build the enormous castle, and how Aegon the Conqueror had destroyed King Harren and his sons in little more than an hour. Most of the castle was intact, though, thought Bran. It was only the top of the towers that were truly damaged and melted, looking like melted candles. Especially the Tower of Ghosts and Kingspyre Tower were swayed and dismayed to either side, the former one having three holes that seemed to almost form a ghostly face sighing to its onlookers from hundreds of years of sadness, and with huge flocks of hundreds of bats flying out of its confines at nightfall to hunt.
That was what one of the guards had told him at least, about the flocks of bats there. He had still not seen it with his own eyes, as they had been restricted to be indoors after the sun was down by the castle walls yesterday, but he thought that he might have heard some faraway sound of it when going to sleep, even under the downy thickness of his coverlets. He doubted that today would be any different, especially as him and his sister would not receive a glad welcoming back once their Mother and Father got note of their escape.
All the better reason to go as far as he could before being caught, he thought to himself. Because when else would he ever find the opportunity to see the towers of Harrenhal with his own eyes? They were spoken of in old stories and legends. He simply had to see it. Especially the Tower of Ghosts. The others were the bigger ones, of course, like the truly ruined Kingspyre Tower and the very tallest Tower of Dread with its truly terrifying rise up to the northeast, but the Tower of Ghosts had ghosts. Bran had always wanted to see a ghost. He had heard the stories that there were ghosts in the Red Keep, and many times he had heard strange noises, but never seen anything. Grand Maester Pycelle and Erryk had both told him that if anywhere in the Seven Kingdoms there was bound to be ghosts, it would have to be at Harrenhal, where King Harren and all his sons and grandsons burned while Aegon the Dragon melted the stone atop his dragon Balerion the Black Dread. And besides, what harm could a ghost do to him? They only howled, and wailed. And the old man Rennifer Longwaters, the gaoler of the dungeons, had told him once that if you are ever to meet up with a ghost, and you want to be rid of them, or to help them come to their peace, you should ask them what they want. For then, Rennifer had said, the ghosts will answer to oneself and to themselves and then they will finally be finished with life on earth and free to be on their way to the other side.
Bran went down from the window at last, and heard that the boy was almost finished counting. He ran up to him, tapped him softly on his shoulder and asked him how far he had come.
"I had come to fifty once, and then twenty and six now this time...-" the boy said.
"Count again from the beginning", said Bran. "Count to fifty again, but four times, instead of two."
The boy looked uncertain, but then agreed.
"All right, my prince", he said, closing his eyes to count from the beginning again, and Bran hurried past him and in to the corridor following after where Arya had gone.
His sister was not there anymore, or at least he could not see her, as he followed the corridor all the way to where they had found the boy sitting earlier, scrubbing the stairway, and then even further down. Here there was another stairway up to the floor where the bats were, but Bran ignored it and went on. He guessed that if he continued down, he would reach the back entrance of the tower soon enough, and then he could go across the inner part of the keep, where noone of the King's party was stationed, and go all the way across the grass to the Tower of Ghosts.
He soon heard a noise behind him, as a great wooden door on the right side of the corridor swung its way open, and he hurried further into the corridor. He would not get caught so soon. He hoped that anyone who saw him might not think twice about it, but then he also thought about his clothes. When Arya went on her usual outside trips, she would tear away her clothing, or else sneak away in the clothes of some servant. Bran did not have the chance to run back and switch clothes with the boy now that the door between them was opening, and neither did he particularly want to.
He hopped quickly over the mop and broomstick of where the boy had sat cleaning the stairway before, and for a moment he considered taking up his mop and pail to make himself look more like a servant. But no, that would most like not work. His doublet was covered in the grey direwolf of Stark on a white field background, and outside of that a greyish blue in a silk fabric. Noone would believe that he was anything but prince Brandon. And so instead he simply hurried down the steps, not even looking back to see if there had come out someone from the door.
As he got further down the stairs, he saw a number of doors to his right, and one of them was open, leading in to a room of old wooden carpentry. Shelves, planks, barrels and much more took up the majority of the room. Wooden barrels, most of all, along with spikes and nails and hammers hanging from the walls, and thick black iron bands in great piles on the floor.
It would have been fun to hop inside of one, Bran thought, and so he did, sneaking in to the room on quick feet and placing his shoes inside the iron ring on the floor, but Bran soon heard steps from the other room nextby, and so hurried out again to continue along the corridor.
He ran and ran, feeling the hardness of the stone through his soft shoes. Why could he not have worn his harder shoes today? The ones with the leather lacing on them.
He began feeling hungry all of a sudden. They had not eaten since breakfast, and while the breakfast at Harrenhal had been large and proper, he was far too enthralled by Lady Shella's stories to remember to eat much, even though Septa Mordane had tried her best prompting him on. Later when they had gone outside, he had looked around the Flowstone Yard, where the jousting practice was to be held, and then spoken at length with Ser Jory and ser Arys, as always, and then gone over to the smithy to check it out. He had spoken to the old smith, called Old Ben Blackthumb, and the smith had shown him how he made iron nails and spikes, and even a finely made helmet.
As he saw some servants approaching at the edge of the corridor, he decided to show himself to them and ask them for some food. After all, he was a prince. He could simply command them to not tell anyone where he was, and unless his mother or father, or Lady Shella Whent herself told them otherwise, they would obey.
"You there!" he shouted. The servants looked at each other strangely, but then seemed to notice his prince's attire and the way he carried himself.
"What child is that? Is it one of the King's party?" he heard one of them mumbling quietly to the other. Bran's hearing was impeccable. Even better than Arya's, as he always prided himself on when they played their other games.
"I am Prince Brandon Stark!" he called out. "Approach!"
The two woman servants, cleaning women by the look of them, looked terrified but slowly approached to him, kneeling down slightly.
"My prince", one mumbled.
"M'lord", the other said.
"Is there any food to be had nearby here?" Bran asked them.
"Food? I don't think so, my prince... Though there is an apple orchard some ways down the corridor to the right. But it's quite a long ways there..."
"Okay", said Bran, disappointed. "Thankyou, my ladies."
He nodded at them, precisely in the way he had seen his royal Father do hundreds of times, with a gaze of ice, and they bowed themselves again, and curtsied deeper than anyone had ever curtsied to him before, as he continued on his brisk way forward down the eternally long grey corridor, leaving the washerwomen to stay behind with a look of large bewilderment if he ever saw one.
He continued walking, mulling over his sudden hunger and wondering if the boy was done counting by now. He certainly should be. Bran was sure that it had been at least a quarter of an hour by now, if not more... He wished he had not told him to count for so long. The most fun part of hide-and-seek, after all, was the immediate chase back to the counting wall after one had been found out.
But no, he just then realized. He had not told the boy that they were playing hide-and-seek with dunking. That meant that he would be found where he was, without the counter needing to go and run all the way back to dunk him found. Bran kicked the air in front of him, cursing inside.
Seven stinking stallions... he mumbled inside his head.
But he blamed Arya at least somewhat. She was his elder, and usually put up all the games they played, and so had now as well. He knew that Arya mostly preferred hide-and-seek with dunk as well, but not when she was in her tight dresses, for then she was always at a disadvantage to try and outrun him. He was far faster than her, especially when he was wearing regular breeches and she was wearing a dress for girls. Well, she was a girl, of course, Bran supposed, but she always did her best to somehow try and not be...
Even Rickon could outrun her when she was stuck inside her tightest dress and corset, like she had been on Lord Jon's funeral, he reflected. And that had been an eternity ago already now, but still so recently that he remembered all of it. How he had seen Lord Robert approach, entering through the great Sept of Baelor's doors, as tall as any man in the room, even taller than his Father King Eddard, and even taller than Ser Arys and Ser Barristan, as well...
Lord Robert had worn a black doublet with the sigil of his house, but his banner boys had carried the banners of both Baratheon and Arryn with them... It was a note to Lord Jon for Robert and Ned both having been fostered by him when they were young, Bran knew. Robert did not have any close kin to the Arryns, although his father said that House Stark did, some generations back through House Royce.
At any rate, Lord Robert had looked grand and impressive, in his and with his black beard and long, finely combed shining black hair, but he had also looked sad, more sad than Bran had seen any grown man be before in his entire life. It was so strange to see it. And Bran had felt it was somehow wrong... Lord Robert was always laughing otherwise, with his face red and flustered, a horn of ale in one hand and the other one slapping his Father over the back with a hearty laugh at feasts. But when he went through the columns at the Sept, everything silent but for his echoing footsteps and those of his wife Lady Cressina and his children Eldyn and Steffon behind him, he had looked pale as a corpse, and his eyes were strained, concentrated and held up in a dark and dangerous face as to try and not turn red with tears.
He had approached towards the altar, while Bran tried waving at Eldyn and Steffon, but they had not seen him, only walking onwards following in their father's steps, and seeming almost as sad as him. Lady Cressina seemed slightly less sad, but she wore a long black veil over her eyes, the same colour as her raven black hair, not letting anyone see whether that was true or not.
Bran had been sad too, but he had been glad to see Eldyn and Steffon. He had cried when the High Septon had spoken about Lord Jon, and hid his tears in the robes of Mother until he turned red and sniveling green around the nose. Some others cried too, both grown men and women, some in silence and a few more loudly.
Bran kept thinking about Lord Jon's funeral, becoming somber as he did so, and slowing down with his steps. His mind was already somewhere else. He did not even longer think that the boy might come into the corridor far behind him and find him. He had most like given up counting, or else he had taken another corridor and looked in the wrong places, Bran thought.
His thoughts went to the rest of their journey thus far. The wheelhouse was a great construction, as Bran had noticed after his first day of riding together alongside Robb. Whenever he grew tired in his legs, as his thighs chafed together above the saddle and back of [Dancer?], he could simply hop back into the wheelhouse to sit with Mother and Sansa and Arya and the others. Rickon had done so, too, after only one hour of riding in the lap of Erryk.
Their second day they had reached Rosby and Duskendale, and stopped there for the night, staying at Lord Gyles's keep.
Their third day they had continued up north along the Kingsroad, and the fourth day they had reached the Inn at the Crossroads, where they had stayed for one night before turning west, and west again, and then south.
On their sixth day of riding, they had reached Riverrun. They had visited his grandfather Lord Hoster and his uncle Edmure. Lord Hoster was very sick, sitting in a stretcher chair and almost falling asleep midway through dinner. His maester stood beside him, helping him while Edmure did his best to entertain the guests in his stead.
They had met Lady Daenerys as well. She had been beautiful, with long silvery white hair, the same as her brother Viserys, who he had seen twice before when he had visited the Red Keep along with Lord Stannis to talk to Father.
Lady Daenerys went to the table arm in arm with Robb. Bran almost thought it looked as if they meant to be married. Then she had sat down at the table, next to his brother Robb and the others.
The dinner had been a great one, for Lord Hoster had surely brought the best for the visit of the King. They had been served a whole roast aurochs, being wheeled in from the right where the trees grew flushing green by six grown men pushing it on a frame with wheels under it, as well as cooked trouts in a lemon sauce, roast quails, two roast swans, buttered leeks and carrots, minced meat pie, kidney pie, smoked salmon, crayfish with dill, wine, ale and spiced cardimum snaps for the grownups, along with apple cider, salty crackers, hardbread, inlaid herrings, wine sweetened/[ ] pears, grapes and gorgeous cheeses of many different kinds.
As the aurochs was being rolled in, Lord Edmure had mumbled a polite apology for not being able to fix more than one aurochs in time for the dinner, and did his best to try and not indicate that the king's note of arrival had been so very soon before. The aurochs had been caught in the thick woods northeast of the Trident, killed and prepared, and thereafter transported to Riverrun with horse and wagon over the course of two days, after which it had been marinated in a thick dark brown sauce of bayleaf, hickory, dill, lemon, honey, mushroom oil, red wine, ale, onions, carrots and black pepper. They had not managed to find another aurochs closer to Riverrun, though, even as all the farmers and hunters along the Red Fork had been asked to try and find one. They were growing shyer from men and harder to find for each passing generation, as Maester Vyman explained. But the King merely thanked him and Lord Edmure and said that it was quite enough with only one, and that he knew all about the troubles with hunting wild beasts.
"The beasts of the woods do not know when it is time for the king to come and visit, and neither would they lay down their necks for me before the hunters' axe if they did know", he had japed. Lord Edmure had laughed, bowed his head, and thanked him again for his understanding.
As Bran thought about the dinner, the corridor suddenly stopped in front of a great stairway to the left, leading up. He checked carefully to see that noone stood guarding it, but too late. There were indeed two guards there, both dark of hair and wearing halfhelms, though one with [ ] and one with [ ]. In their hands they held hauberks, and at their sides, each a shield.
"Who goes there?" one of them called out.
Bran was too afraid to answer at first, but then he reminded himself and called out.
"Prince Brandon of House Stark!"
The two guards looked uncertainly at each other, as if they did not believe him, but when he made himself visible, they both bowed slightly before him and sunk down to greet him.
"My prince. What brings you here, if I may ask?"
"My royal father once said that servants don't ask. They only obey the orders that they are given."
"No, of course not, my prince. Yes, my prince. I beg your pardon, my prince."
"I would like granted passage to the floor above", Bran said.
"Certainly, my prince. Have you any-..." He stopped himself. "As you wish, my prince."
The two guards stood down, lowering their hauberks to let him pass through, and he made his way quickly up the stairs, running and taking to the ground with his hands like a fantastic four-legged animal. It made him faster, and it was way more fun than simply walking like all the grownups did.
The third floor was much like the second one, though more dusty and slightly darker. The windows were smaller as well, compared to the vast open windows of the second floor. He looked to the left, wondering if he would be able to see back to where the bats' nest had been earlier, but it was too far away to see, and where the corridor bent, a big fat guardsman stood blocking what was behind him.
Bran went back to the stairs again and ran up to the fourth floor. Here, the guards seemed more alert, and bowed quickly as he came up to stand before them. He surveyed the corridor to the right, and found a couple of boys and girls who sat on some stools, all of them sewing and mending nets. Bran did not know how to sew nor mend a net. It looked relatively easy when the servant children did it, though. One of the overguards, a man with a hard, calloused face and grey stubbled chin and shrewd eyes, stood watching the children and tugging them by their hair when they made a mistake. The children only squirmed and squealed slightly, and their hair was already tussled up in raggedy toves from hundreds of earlier mistakes. It seemed like they were treated badly most of the time, Bran thought. He wondered what Lady Shella thought of this, or even if she knew about it.
"What are they doing?" he asked, to noone in particular.
The second guard, the one standing closest to the wall, almost leaning on it, replied.
"Mending and fixing some things that have gone broken", the guard said.
"Are those fishing nets?"
"Aye, my lord", said the guard again. "They took 'em up from the God's Eye and they were spruck with large holes in them. There are salmon, and braxen, and malefish and mothfish, and bigger things still lurking in the waters there. Small wonder the nets need mending."
Bran nodded only ever so slightly, as he saw the little blonde-haired girl making a mistake, and the overguard snatched her in her little towy-headed tug of hair, making her wince and cry out.
"Got to keep an eye on them, my prince", the overguard said, "make sure that they don't do it wrong. Elsewise the fishermen will have even more trouble, and they say that the long summer will be growing to a halt soon. Time like never before to fish as much as they can before autumn comes, with its storms and else."
"Is there enough fish to go around?" Bran asked carefully, trying his best to not look at the poor girl who was now crying more and more.
"Oh, enough and enough, all right! There's more fish than a thousand for each fisherman, and good fortune that too, for we only have about three or four dozen of them here at the keep. Fishermen, I mean. The rest of the fishermen are a ways off, on either side of the shore, far east and west of here, and the haul starts to stink after more than a day's ride on the road. They salt it, of course, but still... Any man or woman would prefer fresh fish, I reckon. Lady Shella certainly does."
As he was speaking, Bran was trying to imagine the sight of all the fishermen taking off from the shore in their wooden boats and ekes, paddling to come within the sight of huge shoals of fish, or giant salmons, or malefish and mothfish and sea monsters and worse further out, but he found that he could not barely think about anything else with the sight of the poor raggedy children sitting close by, and the mean overguard leaning over them with every stitch of their little hands.
He wished that he could say something to the guard, but even as the prince that he was, he feared that the man would not abide by his orders. He did owe his immediate loyalty to Lady Shella, after all. Perhaps the children would only get hurt even more if he said anything about it, and so he chose to not intervene. He only gave them a small, cold nod of understanding, as they looked up puzzled on him, and then he continued on. The climbing was becoming tiresome, as each step was taller than those at the Red Keep, and there were many of them.
At last, however, he reached the fifth floor, where there stood four guards on patrol staring down angrily at him. They did not seem to recognize the Stark direwolf on his doublet, and before he could say something, they shouted down at him.
"What are you doing, boy?! Get out of here!"
"Do you need some bats' dung to fill in the mortar with? Or has Magda not got enough buckets to clean with? Be on your way!"
Their faces were ugly, angry, some pock-marked and pale and some a flustered red, with snankled teeth and practically spitting out their words making the spittle fly from their mouths and into the emptiness of the black air in front of them, drunk and annoyed at the intruder as they seemed. Bran might have shot something back, but the men were rough and rude, and not the ones who seemed to doubt at using their spears and hauberks at him, so he simply turned back, descending the stairs again instead.
So those four angry trolls guard the lower part of the tower from all the ghosts up above... he reflected. He wondered what it must be like to stand there, on patrol all day and surely half of the night in the shadow of the lofts, covered in dust and cobwebs with only a handful of candles to light up the dark of the castle.
It must surely get lonely. But the men had a table of food and drink, he had seen briefly. Porridge, sausages, figs and ale on wooden platters and dark dimly shining tin plates. Bran would have asked for some of it to eat, but since they took him for nothing more than a simple servant boy, he was forced to go hungry again. Nor did he chance to ask the guards on the fourth floor for a talk with their brothers in arm. Instead he hurried all the way back down to the first floor and the corridor again, nodding to the two dark-haired guards there as he continued on his way.
I bet there is some other stairway that is not guarded here in the tower, he thought to himself. It was an enormous place. Surely Lady Shella could not have placed guards at every stairway up? But he was not certain, of course. Perhaps she had.
Bran got down past the sewing children again, and asked the guards whether they could not get any of the grown women or men to mend the nets instead.
"They do, my prince", the overguard replied. "But there are many nets, and so everyone who has idle hands must use them and help to".
Bran only nodded, in silence, and tried telling himself that he had done what he could for the children. Perhaps they would grow better in time, he hoped.
"For how long have they been doing this?"
"Today, my prince?"
"No. I mean for how many days, or weeks, or moons."
"Almost a moon now, I believe. They are learning to get the right way of it. Though some are slower to learn and others..."
Bran nodded again, taking his leave at last, and walking all the way down again, as his legs began to ache slightly. He shook it off for the moment, however, and continued all the way back down to the corridor at the second floor again.
Time passed slowly as he trailed along the doors, watching them, counting them, whistling on his favourite songs in the corridor, as the sunlight had begun rising higher in the sky outside, braving its light in shining beams in on the corridor's right side along the tower's back side. Bran hated getting the sun on him. He was a Stark, like his royal father King Eddard, and as such did not particularly like the heat of anything. He tried pushing down his long locks over his ears, but the sunlight burned over his hair all the same, annoying him to no wit's end. Finally, he decided to crawl beneath the windows for a while, making his way forward past another four or five rooms. He stopped when a servingwoman came out from one of the doors, however, and stood up again, holding up his hand against the terrible, burning, uncomfortable heat of the hot summer sun.
He thought that he saw the fruit orchard with the apple trees that the servingwomen had talked of earlier, a couple of hundred feet outside the window in the enormous inner park between the two westernmost of the five towers, but found that his stomach was no longer hungry and instead had gotten stale in its starvation, as it so often did. Bran often thought that he was much like a snake. Grand Maester Pycelle's book told of great snakes from the Summer Isles and Sothoryos, and all the way to Slaver's Bay, great big snakes that could eat only once in a full year and then be finished until the next year came around, only sleeping and resting all the while. But Bran did not even need to rest; he could walk and jump and climb all the same once he had gotten past his first or second threshold of hunger. He wondered if the poor orphan children who were starving in Flee Bottom at times had the same type of stomachs.
To the end of the corridor, after at least twenty more rooms of echoing silence, there was a large [gatehouse entrance/[ ]], where the ceiling opened up significantly and a large stone stairway and ladder beside it both led up to the floor above. Now he seemed finally to be closer to the backpart of the tower, and he realised that the entrance to the gatehouse loft looked much like the place the boy had described to them, a large wooden ladder leading from the second story up to the third and so forth, where the older youths of Harrenhal had played around. He could imagine them, running up and down the wooden ladder as some old castellan or other came in and swore at them, cursing them for waking him from his sleep with their shouts and laugther, and perhaps even giving some of them a good hitting. Bran's father had only ever hit him a couple of times in his entire life, and all of those times he had known that he had truly deserved it. But the servants were not always so fortunate, he knew.
There was no angry watchman to come out and yell at Bran, though. It was completely silent, silent as in the grave, at the [ ]. Bran studied the wooden ladder for a while, feeling the wood, sniffing at it carefully. It smelled like pine wood, or possibly grane.
The eighth floor was darker than any of the previous ones, without any firelight, but he had brought a torch from the second to last sconce of the [uppgång] from the fifth floor, and so held it in front of him as he began walking forth.
He saw now how truly abandoned the castle was up here, even during the day. There was dust and spiderwebs everwhere, and he suddenly felt cold, far colder than he had been all day.
When he looked back, he saw only more darkness, along with a couple of barrels partly blocking the way, and so he took that as a sign to perhaps stop his exploring at last. At any rate, he wanted to go down and see the gatehouse.
He got his way down again, managing to sneak past the guards this time as well, though now it was far harder, and he had to throw a piece of stone down onto the corridor to get one of them to go after the sound, and then silently sneak down and past the other one.
At last he was down all the way to the second floor again, where the boy had said that Pia and the others had been playing hide-and-seek and all that it was. It was a far nicer place than anywhere else in the tower. Bran could see why they had chosen this particular location for their game.
He continued on, hopping over the gap in the floor which separated the main part of the tower from the small gatehouse outcrop to its northwestern side, looking out at the Tower of Ghosts and the courtyard forest in the middle of all the five towers of Harrenhal. Here, the stones were somewhat smaller, and he could see more of the mortar before. Like reddish grey clay lines, though super hard to the touch when he scraped his fingers along them. He continued walking, passing by a few doors and, finally again, large windows, looking out to the green outside.
Suddenly Bran heard a strange sound coming from somewhere far behind. His first thought was that it was the boy who had come to find him, but the steps sounded different. Hustling, sprinting, faster than the boy seemed like in his mild manners...
His next thought went to the angry guardsman the boy had told him about, Weese, but then he heard even clearer the steps...
Slinting along the stone floor, a soft yet terrifying clinking... Padding... Slinting... It was the clawed footsteps of a beast.
And then, soon after, a deep, dark snuffling growl, as deep as the sound of the earth deep down beneath.
Bran became terrified.
What was it? Was it a dog? No, it sounded much larger and more terrifying. A wolf? A bear? He knew that Harrenhal had a bear pit, just behind the Widow's Tower and between it and Kingspyre Tower. Perhaps one of the bears had escaped from it. Bran thought that it could be a bear.
But the sounds were even stranger than that, surely. It sounded growling, even larger. Enormous. And fast, somehow, fastly approaching, faster than any bear he had seen. Bears were large, lumbering beasts, he had read in Grand Maester Pycelle's bestiary book, but this was surely something swift and fast, padding along, something growling, something on the hunt for prey, something on the hunt for... Him.
He called for help, for some man or woman, some guard close by, as loudly as he dared, but noone answered. The guards above were a story away, at any rate, and in the main tower, not here, in the small gatehouse outcrop which was much like a bridge of sorts. Noone answered him, but the sound of the beast continued, increasing in volume, increasing in its horrific, fastly approaching proximity. It would come for him and take him. He simply knew it. His heart was beating red hot.
Bran looked desperately to his side to the left, running faster and faster into the side corridor while the terrifying noises of the main corridor were getting louder and closer, echoing against the cold stone like the sound of a bag of flesh being pushed together and out again, soft, slicking, snuffling, disgusting sounds of something horrible, closing in on him.
He hurried to the side again, found the door out, but alas, it was closed. He panicked.
He saw a window to his left, however, just as the sounds were nearing the edge of the corner of the side corridor. He would not even let himself be seen. He would rather climb out on the outside, and hope that the beast did not follow after, or otherwise jump. He looked quickly at the stone of the outside. It did have ridges, to be sure, but they seemed somewhat rougher and harder to grab onto than the ones at the Red Keep.
He looked down instead, just as he heard the snarling, growling sound of the beast breaking past the edge of the side corridor, some thirty feet behind him to his left. He only had two seconds to look down before he decided, at seeing something of a yellow colour beneath, and then he jumped."
"