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It’s cold, colder than anything he’s ever experienced in Winterfell but then again, this was beyond the Wall where even the dead freeze when they rise.
It’s a lot quieter as well, as if no one has spoken here for a hundred thousand years, the words freezing in their mouths before they could be spoken.
Meera had built a small fire but it isn’t enough. Bran welcomes the warmth on his face while Jojen shrinks from the light in a fit of coughs, sending the flames flying wildly like desperate fingers clawing at the icy walls of the tiny enclave they’ve found to sleep in.
It’s then, while watching the shadows whirl around the cave that Bran realises that he has completely forgotten what Jojen looks like when he’s not half-dying.
Even when he close his eyes and tries to remember when they first met at summer’s end, all he sees are sunken green eyes icing over to a cold, unforgiving blue.
“It’s alright, Meera,” Jojen says, closing his glassy eyes when his sister lays a hand over his shoulders, still so narrow with all the furs covering them and Bran fears that if he takes off his cloak, they would find that he has all but disappeared underneath. “This is not the day I die.”
“You keep saying that,” Bran cuts in and wonders if he looks as desperately helpless as he feels. Meera sends him a sharp look with her eyes, quietly asking him not now. He forges on, through the glare that feels like knives of ice, cutting and slashing their way through his skins. “But how will we know the day you die? You would be long dead then, Jojen.”
The fire crackles, the small kindling popping in a flurry of sparks. Meera turns away from the light but it is Jojen’s face that disappears into the shadows, the darkness filling the hollows of his cheeks and the hollows of his eyes until it has swallowed the boy whole.
His coughs make his lungs sound as if they are full of cold wind, a deep-chested howl that threatens to tear apart his throat.
“The dead does not speak, Jojen,” he continues, biting like Summer through flesh and bone. “The dead cannot tell you the day they die.”
“The dead cannot dream either, my prince,” Jojen takes a shuddering breath, the sound reminding Bran of old, dried parchment, the sort in the rare books that Maester Luwin used to keep on the highest shelves. The ones that caught on fire first, he remembers dully. “But I am not dead.”
Meera urges him to drink, melting a handful of snow in her cupped hands and whispering words of their home, a thousand leagues away to the south. Jojen makes to take a sip but pulls back at the last second, doubling over in another fit of coughs and his sister immediately pulls him into her arms.
She casts a fearful look back at Bran and he recognizes something deep in her own green eyes, the colour of the wet leaves that sits at the tops of trees, drinking up the sunshine and leaving the rest for dead.
He sees the resignation and knows she will let go. When the time comes, she will let Jojen go.
The realisation sends a chill down Bran’s spine, colder than any northern wind could ever be, and all he wishes for now is that they never made this journey so that perhaps they would all live, for years to come instead of walking towards their deaths, one snowy step at a time.