A CLASH OF KINGS / A BRAWL OF BROTHERS – CHAPTER I – BRAN

"At home at the Red Keep, Grand Maester Pycelle had once remarked that Bran had the memory of a raven. But to be a raven or a crow in truth did not seem quite as fun anymore.

He felt more like a bird now than a boy, at times, sitting high up in the upper bunk bed in the room that Mother had picked out for them. They might have reached White Harbor, but they were not out of harm's way just yet.

"The Fat Lord has his men all around the city", Osha had told him, "and might be that they are looking for some small boys just like you and your brother. They will scour the ground here, until they find you, or the wolves, if they should come back to us, or both. But... They won't bother too much about a quiet little raven".

Mother had told her to be silent, but Bran could tell that she thought much the same herself.

Bran remembered how the last few days on the march had felt, as he saw the pine needles of the forest floor give way to fields of wheat and barley, and leaves from birch, alder and elm trees. They had reached the northwestern confines of White Harbor, the North's equivalent to King's Landing, or as close as it could be, Bran supposed.

But White Harbor was not like King's Landing. Not at all. It was a grey and green and white city, filled with thick grey dreary walls, much like Winterfell, and houses with thatched rooves and wooden palisades almost everywhere one looked.

And then the mermaids. Everywhere they saw, on the few instances when they ventured outside the inn, were small statues, pillars and walls with fish and merman motifs.

They had only stayed for less than an hour in the city before venturing back again, and finding a small inn at the villages on the northern outskirts instead, safely outside the city walls.

Mother was knitting as he finally gathered the courage to ask her again.

"May we please go outside and play, Mother?"

"I thought you said you didn't play anymore", Mother teased him sourly, the only thing she could do in order to not scowl instead.

"I only want to go out and see the sky. It's so grey in here."

Queen Catelyn sighed, but relented.

"Fine. But you are going out with Erryk. And you are not to stray anywhere. Is that understood?"

"Yes, Mother."

"Bring your brother with you as well", she said, "before he cries to come after."

Bran did as told, Ser Erryk lifted him down from the confines of the high lofty ceiling bed, and Jojen and Meera came with him outside, as they had before.

The snow swirled softly around them in flings as they padded around, the direwolves at their sides. Summer was grey, now even in the white of snow around him, and Shaggydog stood out like a shadow in a world of white and more white. It was well luck that the inn only had two other customers, who had promised not to tell anyone of the wolves. Still, Bran knew that they must have already been found out. It would only be a matter of time before the Manderlys rode up to greet them, either with bowed heads or with steel and manacles, to await the judgement of his uncle Lord Benjen, and of Lady Cersei.

...

"Do you think they will have heard us?" He asked Jojen.

"Yes", the boy replied truthfully. "I think they knew even before we came here."

The thought made him uneasy, but he had suspected as much.

"Why won't Mother take us there? If they already know."

"I know many things, but I cannot read thoughts like that, my prince", the green boy said.

Bran stroked Summer's grey fur, thinking of their siblings, of Arya's little wolf pup whom she had named Nymeria just before he fell. He had not seen her since. He missed her more than ever now. He thought that Arya must be missing him as well.

They had played hide-and-seek at Harrenhal, and promised eachother to do it again when they came back down south, even though they both knew that they would never dare to do it again. Still, perhaps in some other, smaller castle, without any guard dogs or monsters...

He missed her, yes.

"My sister... Arya... And Sansa... And Robb... They are all down south at home, in King's Landing", he said. "We need to get back to them. Then everything will be good again."

Except that I will still be a cripple, the thought came back to him suddenly again, unbidden. A broken boy, unable to walk, to climb, or to run. And Father will be ashamed of me, but he will pretened that he is not. I will never spar with him or Robb in the courtyard, like I had always wanted. I will never be a Kingsguard like Erryk or Jory...

He felt almost like crying, but it was no use. He had cried enough over it before. And he would not let Jojen ever see him cry. Not again.

"Some things, some doors in this world close", Jojen said, "whilst others open..."

Bran looked at him, annoyed. Jojen claimed that he could not read minds, but he acted as if he did.

"What are you talking about? I'm still a prince."

"You know what you are, Bran", Jojen said. "Why you are different now. Why you cannot go back to only being a prince down south, and take your wolf with you."

"What?"

Meera looked to her brother, pleading, as if to keep him from saying it.

"Warg", said Jojen.

Bran looked at him, his eyes wide.

"What?"

"Warg. Shape-shifter. Beastling. That is what they will call you, if they should ever hear of your wolf dreams."

The names made him afraid once again.

"Who will call me that?" He demanded.

"Your own. Those who serve you, mayhaps even those who love you... Your own people, in fear. Some will hate you if they know what you are. Some will even try to kill you."

"They already have tried to kill me", Bran protested. "At Winterfell. And it was not because I'm a… Because I have the wolf dreams."

"How do you know?" Jojen countered.

Bran had no answer for that.

"The power is strong within you", Jojen said. "You can feel it, in the link between you and Summer."

"I don't want this power. I want to be a knight of the Kingsguard, to serve my father and brother. I want... I want to become a maester at the Citadel."

"A maester is what you want. A warg is what you are", Jojen said. His words were terrible to hear.

"You can't change that, Bran. You can't deny it or push it away. You are the winged wolf. But you will never fly, unless you open your eye."

He went up to Bran and poked his two fingers together, poking Bran at the forehead. When he raised his hand from the spot, Bran felt only the smooth, unbroken skin. There was no eye there, not even a closed one.

"How can I find the third eye if it's not there?"

"You will have to search with your heart. And come with us. North. Where the crow lives."

Jojen studied Bran's face with those strange green eyes. "...Or are you afraid?"

"Maester Luwen at Winterfell said that there's nothing in dreams that a man need fear."

"There is.", said Jojen.

"What?"

"The past, the future, the truth.

The Reeds left him more muddled than ever.

...

It was not long after that that Erryk decided they had been outside for enough for the day. The sky was beginning to turn a greyer shade of white and the snows had stopped falling, but more was soon to come. They turned back before Rickon could soak his cloak entirely in the soggy mud and snow on the ground. He had already gotten himself brown with dirt and soot from the fireplace earlier, so that Senelle had to wipe him off with her old mudged-up handkerchief.

"Thankyou", Mother said to Ser Erryk as the knight put his princes down on the ground and chairs in front of them. Bran looked down at his useless legs, as Senelle helped clean him off and change his trousers and other clothes before the cold crept up through him more than he could sense it.

"We will need to send for more clothes soon, Your Grace", she told Queen Catelyn.

"That is true...", Mother considered.

"Shall I go and ask straight away?"

"No", Mother urged. "Wait until the morrow."

Senelle nodded, as she put another one of his socks to dry close by the firepit in the middle of the room, and Osha wrung it diligently to get the snow out. She was almost coming to terms with being a type of rough-hewn maid, Bran thought as he watched her, in spite of being a wildling. She had even learnt to call Mother "Your Grace" as well.

The innkeeper was an old and skinny woman with grey hair put up in ivory needles atop her head, her innkeeper's apron grey and brown, lowborn but handsome, even in her high age, with high cheekbones, a bird-like nose and large, intelligent, blueish grey eyes.

He could not tell whether she had told anyone of their whereabouts, but as soon as she had greeted them, she had recognized her as Queen Catelyn Tully, queen consort to Good King Ned, and curtsied down on the wooden floor of the inn so deep that Bran thought her knees would crack. She was as nimble as a linen doll, however, and soon got up again, promising that she could sort out ample room and confines for the entire royal party. She did, however, dare to ask about the wolves.

"They will not harm you", Mother had promised. "But if they concern you, we can keep them afar, in the woods or somewhere close by, so long as they are not tethered. They do not abide by it."

...

[

]

...

That night Bran dreamt a strange dream. He dreamt that he looked up and away to the northeast, towards Winterfell where they had come from, and saw a flock of a dozen birds standing on the ramparts and crenellations of the castle walls. The birds were very large, so huge in fact that he wondered if they could even be regular ravens, or if they were some other type. Then, just as he was thinking that, they hopped down on to the ground and turned into a flock of wolves instead. He supposed that he should not have been surprised. The flock of wolves came running, howling and snarling down the Kingsroad and then to the east, to follow after them through the woods, to find them where they dwelt in the little village on the outskirts of White Harbour, to catch and eat them.

They climbed up, high up towards the ceiling, and Bran was somehow able to climb in his dream, despite his real body being broken. Then there were other children in the village as well, all around, that came and wanted away from the wolves, and they jingled and scrambled with the ropes up on the lofts, to make themselves seem bigger than they were. Children of two and three and four and five, children as young as his brother, as young as Rickon and younger still, all of them, climbing and clamouring to scare away the wolves, to climb up sufficiently high in the rafters close to the ceiling and the roof before they could reach and caught them.

The adults came somehow thereafter, the villagers and hard-working farmers and cobblers and smiths and townspeople of White Harbour, managing miraculously to kill the wolves, to slay them before they had a chance to eat their children. They even burned most of them. Bran looked and saw that the wolves were dead now, their pink bodies with the fur and even some small parts of the skin having been torn away, burnt away by the fires of men. He shuddered from the sight, even though he knew that it had been justice. The wolves would have killed their children if not for the fire. There was a young girl then, he saw, who held one of the wolves, and the poor beast had almost gotten its ears and most of its eyes and nose burnt away by the fire as well, but somehow, it seemed that it might still live, Bran saw after a small while. He flinched when she turned to introduce the wolf as her pet.

They had spared some few of the wolves, apparently, the least fierce two or three or perhaps four ones, saving them alive and keeping them as their guardians, just the way Bran and Rickon had their own wolves in the real world, in the awake world, but for some reason, Bran did not think of that just then. These were not direwolves, but rather their smaller cousins, but they had been fierce enough even still. The wolves and the children of the village did not have the bond that he had with Summer, either. He wondered whether one generation would truly be enough for them to distance themselves from their wild kin and to serve the humans they had so recently hunted after as their guardians, as simply as dogs. But then again, according to some theories, as Grand Maester Pycelle had told him, all dogs were once wolves, many hundreds and thousands and thousands of years ago...

That was among the last things that he dreamt before he woke up, to the sniffling sound of his younger brother's nose in the cramped space of the sleeping loft, to the news that Rickon had fallen ill again."