BRAN IV

"They had been travelling east for ten days, but it seemed like an eternity already.

The forest was cold, already now, during the late summer. The young Prince Brandon Stark could barely imagine what it would be like here, in the North, when the winter came.

Their food was almost gone, the small provisions that they had taken with them from the castle. Only some hard stale bread and cheese remained, as well as a skin of wine that was for if someone needed to clean their wounds with it. Bran did not understand how one could clean wounds with wine, but he trusted that Ser Erryk and Ser Mandon knew how.

Instead, they had taken to hunting and looking around for their food. Summer was hunting, and Shaggydog too, bringing hares and deer and other prey, so that they did not need to burden themselves too much. Only to light the fires and to put up shelter, which they got help to do from the wildling woman. Osha, her name was, as she had told them before, and repeated again, whenever Ser Erryk berated her with a lesser name than that.

She still walked beside them, in her ragged pelt skins and clothes, as they did not trust her with a horse of her own, nor could they spare it out of the three that they had. Meanwhile Bran would be carried around by Ser Erryk when they went afoot to let the horses rest. His lady mother preferred to ride as much as she could, as she was constantly fearing that someone might be on their trail, and wanted a high place to look.

Lady Eresa and Lady Leona had been complaining, praying and crying for the better part of three days, about the cold, and the weather, and the swift pace, but after that they had finally accepted that it would not get any more comfortable than this. If Bran had had it in him to be grateful, he might have been so. Grateful that his legs no longer gave any feeling that could chafe him from the horse saddle underneath.

But he did not often ride, at any rate. He mostly sat in Erryk's lap, while he was the one keeping track of the horses.

His royal Mother and her handmaiden, Senelle, sat on their brown filly at the front, the one that Mother had named Steady East, for lack of a better idea, or perhaps for her own worries. Bran had simply wanted to call her Molly, as she was brown, and more often than not covered in mud up to her knees, and sometimes he used that name as well. Rickon did too.

The forest was growing more dense around them for every day, it seemed, as the thick green and ruddy moss of the ground threatened to swallow the hooves of their horses from time to time. Summer and Shaggydog were loving it, and Bran often saw in through their eyes and had a chance to feel it too, to feel how the world was through the eyes and ears and nose of a wolf.

But for the horses, it was harder. They barely had any sufficient food, only small patches of grass where there was a small glen in the woods that allowed it. Otherwise, only brush, brambles and berries, as well as leafs and pine needles, as far as the eye could see. Molly, Mother's brown horse going steadily east, was the roundest one out of them, and was still fine.

Ser Mandon's red destrier at the back was a huge, strong beast, and required more food than the others, but so far, the great stallion was keeping up his thick hide without any cause for concern.

Ser Erryk's and Bran's horse, the pale grey one, however, was thin and starving already.

Erryk had named it Grey Lightning, and Bran thought it a good name, but just now, he was worried that the horse would not make it another ten days, as it had so far, nor even five.

"He needs to rest", Bran said as he heard the horse's strained breath from beneath him, as they slowly trotted along the forest floor. "He needs time to rest. I can feel it on him."

"We cannot rest yet, Brandon", his Mother told him. "They might still be after us."

"But he is starving!" Bran protested.

"Grey light is starving!" Rickon agreed. "Grey light is starving!"

"We have not seen a rider for seven days, my Queen...", Ser Mandon argued carefully. "Perhaps we need to preserve our forces."

His Mother sighed, as she gathered her reigns together, and made to stop.

"Fine."

They put up shelter next to a small clearing and tied the horses to trees, while Senelle, Ser Erryk and Osha helped eachother to put up the tiny make-shift tent they had fashioned out of the old food sacks. It would only help perhaps two or three people dry against the rain or snow, if there came any, but it was far better than no shelter at all.

Bran wished that they were back at home in King's Landing. At the Red Keep. Back at home, where it was always warm, too warm even, stifling hot days in the sun with Grand Maester Pycelle's lessons in the Common Hall and warm dinners of roast beef and blackberry jelly and oranges, melons and lemoncakes, and where Jory would chase him around as he climbed on the castle walls, those were the best days of all...

But they were not in the Red Keep anymore. They were not in King's Landing anymore. They were not even in the South anymore. And climbing was precisely what had gotten them here. Elsewise they would all have gone south with Father and Robb and Sansa and Arya... and Jory. He thought that he missed Jory and his Father most of all.

"What are you thinking about, my prince?" Ser Erryk suddenly turned to ask him. Bran was taken aback by the question.

"What? … Nothing", he said.

Nothing at all. It is my fault that we are here.

"I will go and find food for the horse", Erryk said, as he gave Grey Lightning a soft pat on the side of its head and put Bran down carefully underneath the little tent where Rickon, Lady Eresa Goodbrook and Leona Woolfield already waited.

...

"We might as well put up shelter here", Ser Mandon said after a while. "We are not like to find a better place for shelter before nigthfall. And the horses need their rest."

Mother sighed again, but relented and went along with the suggestion.

Lady Leona, Lady Eresa and Mother began tending to their knitting after a little while, despite it all. They had not allowed themselves any such pleasures until the last two days, but they had to do something to keep the time going in the short precious moments that they were not ahorse.

Bran meanwhile sat listening to the sounds of the forest all around them, as well as feeling the presence of Summer, who was still out running close by. He could hear the sounds coming from him as well, if he really concentrated, and he almost thought that he could feel where he was, though he could not explain it. He was awake, and thus the wolf dreams were harder to come by now, than they were by night, but still he felt the strange feeling of the bond to his furry friend.

Summer was out running, searching, exploring to their north, Bran knew. Shaggydog would be close by as well, but further to the northeast, he felt. His black brother was ever the one to run ahead, with his hot blood and excitable temper.

Around him were the soft padding of moss and the reddish brown humus of the forest floor, as always, along with pine needles, fallen yellow and brown leaves, now and here in late summer, the smell of summer snows, the irresistably fluffy lithe feathers of grey birds and furs of small voles and pudgy grey mouses. He always felt the wolf's hunger and sensation of longing for them. He liked to eat the little birds, or at least to try and get a more proper sniff of them, and to taste them, if he could. And the soft little mice and rhodents of the underground as well. He particularly loved to look for those, when there were no deer or hares about.

He had had other dreams of late as well. He had dreamed of his father again, and of Robb and his sisters down in King's Landing. He had seen Sansa and Robb and their wolves, running and playing in the green grass, and Arya, fighting and struggling with a sword, even though she was a girl, and he had seen Father in a boat travelling across Blackwater Bay to speak with Prince Viserys, and Father looked grim in his face.

After that, he had dreamt that he saw a green feather on the stone floor of a wine cellar, but when he bent forward and down to try and pick it up, it was impossible to touch. It was invisible, but the opposite. There was only the colour of it, but it had nothing to grasp. He tried again and again to pick it up, to show it to Father for some reason, but he found that he could not.

Then he saw something horrible, as a darkness descended on the Red Keep, and blood and red wine crept through the red of the walls, turning the world red and dark and terrible with death. He saw his sister, but she was seeming to be all right, and Arya too. But the blood stained them at their feet, making their dresses and shoes red with blood, and it crept back into the walls in some places, and stayed on in others.

Then, finally, just before he was about to feel the onset of the dawn all around him in the outside world that awaited somewhere outside his world of dreams, he had seen the green and blue and grey feathers again, and the bird where it came from had whistled somewhere far away. Then he had seen the black feather again, and then the three-eyed crow, which had pecked at his third eye again and awoken him. That was two nights ago now. Bran still did not fully understand all of it.

The wildling woman, Osha, somehow knew about his dreams, though. She had seen him as he woke up one time, staring at him from across the camp while all the others slept, and spoken to him.

"Them sleeps not giving you any rest, boy?" She had said.

"What?" He had replied, shocked.

"Dreams, you call them. But they are more than that. They are sights of what's to come. The old gods send them to you. Maybe they have something in store for you."

"I haven't dreamt anything", he had said, trying to protest it, trying to deny it out of fear.

"Liar."

"Don't you call me a liar. I am Prince Brandon of House Stark. My Father is King Eddard."

"What your name is or who your father was doesn't change if you lie or not."

"I don't have dreams", he had said again.

"Fine. But if you want to talk about it, little prince... Here I am."

That was two nights ago now. He had only asked her once, briefly. About the three-eyed crow from his dreams. She had flinched back, then, and quietly told him that it was a bad sign north of the Wall. And then she had stopped asking about his dreams again.

A sudden sound moved him back to the present, as Summer had apparently found something or someone. Bran tried to feel inside of him, to try and see what it was, but he found that he could not. Not while he was awake, at any rate. But it was something that had made his other self upwards, excited, or scared, whichever it was.

They could all hear it now. The sound of the wolf barking and howling from the woods some half mile or else to the north of them. Mandon raised up his alert, and his sword as well.

"The beast has found something", he declared.

Lady Leona and Lady Eresa immediately became nervous with the thought, as they gathered up their things and held them tight to their chests.

"It seems to be coming closer", Mandon said, as he shifted around in his armor and prepared to shield them from harm's way as best he could, with Erryk still being away from the camp. He could not call out to him either, for that would mean reying away their position.

And so they simply waited.

Bran was tired of waiting. And he was even more tired, if possible, of the soft meek tears of Lady Eresa, and her constantly snivelling nose. He wished he was Summer, he wished that he was inside the body of his wolf, free to roam the woods without all the courtesies and politeness of being a crippled prince.

"Halt! Who goes there?" Mandon called.

A small little figure then appeared from beneath the green of the forest, although he was so green himself that at first he was barely visible at all.

It was a tiny little old man, or perhaps a boy, Bran thought, with grey-brown scruffy hair, green eyes with a deep alware to them, and wearing a mossy green cloak clasped with the bronze sigil of something which Bran could barely make out from the distance.

"Who goes there?" Mandon shouted out yet again.

"It's a boy", Bran said, before Mandon could go ahead charging at the little person.

"Aye... But what boy? Does he have a bow and arrow underneath that cloak, perhaps? Or a knife? Who does he owe his allegiance to?"

He has been following us, Bran realized then, with a sudden shock, just as if Summer had told him. The wolf did not seem afraid of the little green boy, however, and so Bran decided he was no threat.

"Name yourself!" Mother called out to the small boy, who was only a little bit taller than Bran was himself. "Who are you?"

"You need not fear, my Queen", the boy replied. "My name is Jojen Reed. I owe my allegiance to the direwolf of House Stark, and to you."

"The direwolf of Stark is parted up into two packs these days", Erryk said, where he came upon the boy from the eastern side, turning back towards camp to encircle him with his sword. "Which one do you serve? Did Lord Stark or Lady Cersei send you? Or the ward, Theon Grejoy, perhaps?"

"My father, Lord Howland Reed, sent me", the boy said, as calm as if he were standing by himself. "Noone else."

He did not seem frightened by the two kingsguard knights in the slightest, nor of Summer. Instead, he took a few slow steps forward, his deep green boots – yes, his boots were even green too, Bran saw now, the same as all the rest of his clothes – almost seeming to hover lightly atop the moss of the forest floor, as he went up to Summer and stroked the direwol'fs fur, making it lower its head and sniff him gently.

"Seven hells... " Mandon grumbled, annoyed. "Now we have a Northern warg on our hands as well. He will steal the wolves away, and the horses as well, if he can."

"I am no warg", Jojen promised, "the wolf merely trusts me."

He stopped stroking Summer for a moment, looking towards Bran with a meaningful glint in his green eyes.

"But your prince here certainly has the gift."

They did not care ot hear what more he had to say, but instead showed their swords once again, threatening to attack if the boy took another step.

He is just a small boy, Bran thought, wondering why they were so afraid, but he supposed that the boy could very well have some dagger or else hidden away. After all, he had not expected the poisoning at Winterfell, and so this could also be something like that.

Rickon became upset, of course, as he always did.

"Who are you?" He cried out. "Who are you, dumb boy? You dumb boy, you don't go here, boy!"

"My name is Jojen Reed", the boy repeated, just as they heard something rustle about in the trees above them. "This... is my sister Meera", Jojen announced.

Then, another shape came jumping down from high above. Bran was startled to the core of his back to see and feel the motion of it, another figure, slightly taller perhaps, but similar in shape and colour, and holding a small spear in its hand, jumped down from a height of what must have surely been twelve feet or more, to land close to perfectly on the soft moss of the ground next to the boy.

This one was a girl, Bran saw, most like the elder sister to the young boy, though she had only a half-long head of dark hair, and wore the thick camouflage of mud and moss on her face, in the stead of his sister Sansa's strawberry lipstick. She grunted as she took ground, though. It sounded like the grunt that a girl would make, not a boy's voice.

Meera. Jojen and Meera Reed...

House Reed were the overlords of the Neck, Bran remembered, the vast swampy, seemingly endless region of linden trees and slimy alders and lilypads and midges and mosquitoes which they had travelled through on their way up north, when they'd all gotten sick, before coming to Winterfell. He had not expected to see the bogmen of his father's old friend so high up nort – or east, for that matter.

Bran saw how Mother first flinched back, even more terrified at the sight of the girl, who had tumbled from the tall pine tree like a Myrish acrobat, but after a little while, she stilled herself.

"You are... You are... Jojen and Meera Reed...", she repeated, nodding, trying her best to believe it herself.

"We are, Your Grace", Jojen confirmed for a third time. "My father is Lord Howland Reed of Greywater Watch, and we serve House Stark, with all hour honour and strength."

"The Starks of Winterfell or the Starks of King's Landing?" Ser Erryk asked again, coming in from the side now, and joining up with Ser Mandon to protect their group of ladies, horses and princes from the tiny little green-eyed boy with the wolf touch and the somber tone of voice.

"It is all the same", Jojen Reed said. "We answer to our liege lord, and we answer to our king. Brother must not fight brother. Especially not when kings and high lords are concerned. Or the land and people will bleed.

There is a greater threat before us, one that will make all the seven kingdoms bleed unless we can stop it."

"Threat? More threats?" Mother asked, clearly annoyed with this yet another stranger, or this time a pair, who seemed to impede them on their way eastwards to the safety of White Harbour. "We have already heard talk of white walkers from our lady Osha here. I do not know what threats you have come to give us heed of, but...-"

"It is the same one", the little Jojen said. "Your lady speaks truly." He hindered himself for a moment. "...Though... I fear she may be a wildling, from the looks of her."

"And I fear you may be a frog!" Osha lashed out, trying to jump at the boy in anger, but Senelle and Mother managed to hold her back.

"Such bad manners. Most definitely a wildling", Meera declared.

"And you, then, my lady...?" Mother said, dangerously wavering in her voice now. "Are you not too a type of wildling then? Skulking about in the woods, taking consort with wolves, and wearing nothing but mud and moss on your face? You are the daughter of a Northern lord, but you do not wear a dress", she noticed.

"I have a dress, at Greywater Watch. It gets in the way", she explained, carefree, as she tapped lightly on the tree next beside her, the one she had jumped down from, and a pinecone fell down right into her hand. She took it up, sniffed at it, and then licked a little piece of yellow sap from it, which she then put on a small pile of blueberries in her hand, and ate it up, as quick as a squirrel.

Bran thought she reminded him of Arya a bit, if only Arya had grown up in the wilderness of the Neck, with a frog hunting spear in her hand, and yellow sap and blueberries as her sweetest treats. Although Arya did like blueberry pie, he had to remind himself. They had had it at Winterfell more than once.

"Why are you here? Have you come to take us back to the castle? We will not", Mother said sternly.

"We have not come to take you back", Meera assured her. "You fear for you son. Jojen has told me. There was an attempt on his life at the castle. Poison or otherwise... But you may rest assured. The only thing we are here to do is to help you guide your way forward. It is not to Winterfell you must go, but to the sea first, and then... Well, then we shall see where we take our paths."

Mother examined the girl closely, before looking to Mandon and Erryk and giving her signal for them to at last put their swords and shields down. They did as the Queen ordered, slowly but surely.

"Come here", Mother told the young Reed girl. "Let me have a look at you, if you are indedd my lady, and if your father is truly Lord Howland, the bannerman of my royal husband, as you both say."

She was as skinny as a stick, as if she were made of twigs and moss herself, Bran thought. That was surely the only possible explanation for how she could have climbed so high up on those thin pine tree branches, and then jump down again so deftly without even so much as hurting herself in her shoulder as she had turned mid-air. He was in awe.

Mother inspected her as well, at first looking to see that she had no concealed weapons on her, other than the frog spear that she still held in her one hand, though Mandon was soon to grapple it from her with little protest. Then he tossed it aside on the moss of the forest floor, discarding it without a second look.

"I would like it back later, please, good ser."

The great Kingsguard knight merely gave a gruff scowl and a closing of his visor as a reply.

"And you are truly from the Neck?" Mother asked again for confirmation.

"We have said so, and we speak the truth", Jojen said.

"If that is true, then why did your lord father not come out to greet us when we rode past on our way north? My husband is an old friend of your father's, from what I know and recall myself. Is that no longer the case?"

"He is", Meera nodded, agreeing, "but you rode north with a very great party... Our castle is small. It can easily get lost in the mist and the swamps, either by the will of the water, or by us. We did not have the space to host you all, and so my father chose to not come out."

"He could surely still have come out to greet his old friend, if they truly are such to eachother", Mother said, clearly not letting the issue go before she had a proper explanation and apology for it, Bran guessed. He knew that Mother did not like the bogmen, and she was taking it out on them.

"The king's party all fell ill from the mists of the swamps as well", she said. "Was that your doing, to halten our arrival at Winterfell, so that we might have been easier caught?"

"Mother, please...-" Bran tried, but Senelle held a small hand in front of him in the air, to make him hush.

He scowled, as a true prince did and should, from the annoyance of being told of what to do from his Mother's simple handmaiden, but held silent after that. Septa Mordane wasn't here, after all, and Senelle had become the closest thing to her in the past ten days or so, comforting Rickon when he cried, combing Bran's hair when Mother did not, and singing songs from the Seven-Pointed Star to them on occasion, before they went to sleep under the stars of the Northern sky, peeking down towards them between the tops of great firs and sentinel trees.

Senelle had earned his trust and loyalty, he supposed, but once they got safely back to King's Landing again, he would never again be hushed, neither by Septa Mordane nor by Mothers' servants. Servants did not hush princes.

Meera did her best to answer Mother's accusing question the best way she could.

"The swamps are heavily laden with many smells and mists, of plants and flowers of a thousand different kinds. It is, or it can be, a dangerous place... But our people did not do this. Nor could we have helped you much. Most southerners begin to become ill after a few days spent there. And we do not have enough medication to treat more than a dozen, perhaps."

Mother looked down at her, weighing her words and deciding what to think of it all, when suddenly Osha called out to her.

"Why did you come all the way up here?" She asked. "You are from south of here! Take us back there! Take us south with you, and then we will be on our way, as fast as you please, lady moss."

"Reed", Meera corrected her, annoyed.

"Lady Reed", Osha said. "We need not go to the sea. We need to go south. Straight south. You know what we are running from... Don't you?"

"Yes", Meera confirmed. "There is a cold coming from up north that will savage the realms of men."

"I told you! See? I'm not the only one who says it!" Osha shouted at Mother and Ser Mandon, and all the rest of them.

"Quiet!" Ser Mandon roared.

"There is no need for that, Mandon", Mother said. "Let our newest pursuers speak, if they would. Will you show us the way south?"

"If you truly want to go south, then we will help you", Meera promised. "But it is not south you should go. We have travelled a long way to find you."

She turned to Bran.

"...Brandon Stark."

Bran became nervous, all of a sudden. Why was she only looking at him, and not at Mother or Rickon?

Her brother soon did the same, even as Ser Erryk began to come forth from the trees some hundred feet away, and Mandon held his blade out, ready to strike the two young children at any moment.

"Put your blade down, Mandon. They want him no harm", Mother said.

Mandon did as told, but grumbling all the while. She did not wait for Meera to explain further. Perhaps that was for the best, Bran realized, as he looked into the green little crannogwoman's eyes, and felt a sudden mysterious calm. It was fear, as well, but also... something that made him relax.

Mother finished her thought, just as they saw Ser Erryk slowing down his grip behind them, and Mother commanded him to stay as well.

"These young people... Are Lord Jojen and Lady Meera of House Reed. Son and daughter to Lord Howland Reed of Greywater Watch. They are friends to my husband, the King."

She turned to Ser Erryk, making certain that he too understood what was going on, though he had just returned from his surveying the woods around them. He looked annoyed that he had not found the young children himself, but resignated to Mother's tone of voice, and put his sword down into itss scabbard, the same as Mandon, after a little while.

"If it would help you feel at ease, Your Grace, we could swear you our father's oath of fealty. He instructed us to do so when we found you, and the princes", Meera said.

"Thankyou, my lady", Mother said. "That would be most welcome."

The Reed siblings looked at eachother, the small lean girl, and the even smaller boy, and they knelt down before them on the ground of the forest floor, as they began to recite the oath.

"To House Stark, we pledge the faith of Greywater", they said together. "Hearth and heart and harvest we yield up to you. Our swords and spears and arrows are yours to command. Grant mercy to our weak, help to our helpless, and justice to all, and we shall never fail you. "

"I swear it by earth and water", said the boy Jojen, in his thorough-green moss clothing.

"I swear it by bronze and iron", said the girl, Meera, in her greens and browns, and bronze.

Meera and Jojen: "We swear it by ice and fire.", they both said, finishing the speech together.

Bran could see them looking straight at him, once again, instead of to Mother. He supposed that it was because he was the prince, the male heir to his Father, instead of his mother the Queen. If the Reeds owed their loyalty to his royal father, King Eddard, he would have to speak on his behalf.

He groped for words, wondering whether he should swear something back in turn. Theirs was a type of oath that he had not heard before. A northern oath, but even stranger than that. A crannogman's oath. Something that Grand Maester Pycelle nor Father had never taught him so far.

Mother also saw that they were looking to him, but she reluctantly accept it, nodding towards Bran.

"Thankyou,... " he said, "my lord and lady, for your oath of fealty. My father the King will be glad to hear of it when we return to him. I know that His Grace remembers his friend Lord Howland well. He has spoken of him often. "

Bran thought hard on what more to say. These were northereners, even though they were from the Neck, in the very south of the North, and so he said something that Father had said when they all had first arrived at Winterfell, and he'd spoken to some of the bannermen.

"May your winters be short, and your summers bountiful. … You shall always have meat and mead at our hearth, and a place at our table."

That usually was a good thing to say, especially to Father's northern bannermen, where he was from himself from the beginning.

...

They all stood still for a moment, waiting, as the little crannogmen siblings rose up to their feet again. Bran could see on the look on Mother's face that she had finally let go of her fear with the reciting of the ancient oath.

"These... are loyal friends to the crown", Mother said, speaking with a trembling voice, yet trying her best to calm herself and the others, first to Mandon and Erryk, and then as well as to her ladies.

"They... Are now our guests", she declared, "to be accompanying us on our way. As Northerners, who might better know this land, I expect that we will have good and further use for them.

They will guide us. We are going south still. To White Harbour, and then back home to King's Landing. And they will show us the way."