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The whole of the wild world belonged to him. Here, things lived in a richer and deeper way. He could smell it, in the earth and springy lichen, in the dew that hung to frosty sprigs and snow-capped firs. Everything hummed with a tangible vibrancy. The world to the south, the before-place, was by now but a hazy memory.
The world of men, and he had been but a spectator. He and his brothers and sisters too, living and dead. He was far from them now, separated, but they had not faded from the recesses of recollection. Still, they seemed part of a different life, left behind on a different world.
The days were short up here, and the nights deep, dark, and full with the promise of prey. For days at a time, he would roam the forest alone on the hunt. Other beasts, packs of great size but small stature, tried and failed to challenge him.
He did not relish the fight as some of his brothers might. The hunt was a serious thing, and he did not long abide separation from the manpack, who depended on him as any four-legged pack might.
The girl-cub, long and bandy-legged, hunted too, with a pronged arm she wielded as part of herself. But she could not go as far afield as he, not without tiring and being too long apart from the other cubs.
His own cub depended upon him. The man-prince.
The elk’s blood was warm in his throat, its flesh taut and firm in his jaw. The body scraped smoothly against snowy earth. It had been a quick kill, and he had not needed to venture far.
He heard the man cubs as soon as he could smell them: girl and boy, brother and sister, growling and snapping at each other.
They’re fighting. His man-cub, wakening within him, Fighting again. Listen!
He could not. The man-tongue was not his own; his was to hunt and prowl and sustain his pack. Their workings, their squabbles, were beyond him. A pack should not fight among itself, not if it should endure to survive.
I know, petulant, older than him but younger still, So help me stop it!
He could not be commanded by any man, not even the boy-prince. Not even...
“Stop!” the word exploded from his lungs, hoarse and scratchy like a hail of thorns had forced themselves up his windpipe so he may speak.
The Reeds stopped their bickering, though, turning to look at him, surprised that he had stirred.
“Hodor,” Hodor muttered resentfully, turning fitfully in his sleep.
Summer hovered at the edge of the little glen in which they had camped for the night, the elk carcass they had brought down together...
That he brought down , the little voice that reprimanded him sounded eerily like Jojen, You are not Summer. Summer is the beast and you the boy. The broken boy. You’ve never brought down an elk and you never will.
The direwolf was watching him. Bran wondered if it could tell his thoughts as easily as he could tell his, and how well he understood them.
“Bran,” Meera’s voice was strained too, from shouting. She was quiet now and, Bran imagined, resentful, “You should be asleep.”
“I was,” he lied, not at all convincingly. He’d been quite good at fibbing once, when he’d had his legs and his home and his family. Growing up with Old Nan’s stories, you became quite adept at exaggeration. His mother would declaim in exasperation how skillful he’d become at tale-telling.
“ At this rate, you could tell Hullen you needed a horse to ride down to Dorne and slay a dragon, and I half-expect he’d give one to you. ”
It didn’t do to think of his mother. He told himself this as much as he could, as he told himself the same for his father and his brothers and sisters, dead and alive, but he thought of them all the same.
There was precious little else to think about, short of their own treacherous journey northward, and the fearful promise of its conclusion, sooner or later.
“Are you alright?” he asked, embarrassingly meek. A real lord...a real prince...would command the Reeds to explain their quarrel, recant for it, and reaffirm their bond of family and friendship.
“Of course we are alright,” Meera said stiffly, her eyes red as her chilled cheeks, “Better now that Summer’s brought food.”
She drew her dagger and got to work skinning the elk. Summer padded the long way around her, spreading near Bran in a manner that ought to have been leisurely, but on the direwolf looked almost regal.
The wolf’s nearness emboldened him, “You were fighting about something. We... I heard...”
“You shouldn’t eavesdrop, my prince,” Jojen said stiffly, “It’s undone.”
It sounded almost like a jape, but he spoke with so little inflection it was hard to be sure. He didn’t even sound angry over whatever disagreement he’d had. Meera, on the other hand, seemed to be going through contortions just to keep from crying.
Bran wanted to chastise Jojen for making his sister cry. It would be quite hypocritical of him, who’d once taken delight in the pranks Robb and Jon (Jon always apologetically, but never without a smile) would play on Sansa.
Summertime, a world away.
Meera resumed her work on the elk, determinedly avoiding looking back at them. Jojen lapsed into his usual serene silence, looking off into the forest. By the dying fire, his green eyes seemed like sole shimmering lights of life in a freshly dead corpse.
Their progress was slow and staggered. Bran wondered how much ground they could possibly cover, him on Hodor’s back, the Reeds on foot, and Jojen in particular growing wearier by the day.
They didn’t speak much, mostly because they were too tired, though Bran was painfully aware of the tension between Meera and Jojen. Even more, a coldness had sprung up between himself and Meera. He didn’t understand that. Meera had always been kind to him. Though it may be foolish, he’d sometimes fancied she had taken a liking to him. He wasn’t sure what he’d have done that she might suddenly go cold...that is, colder than all were already, every moment of every day with no reprieve in sight.
It may be as easy as that: that she resented this treacherous journey beyond the world’s end. Bran couldn’t blame her. He hadn’t wanted to make this trek either and, as much as he wanted to see the three-eyed crow, to finally have some inkling as to his purpose in the world, if there was a purpose at all, he couldn’t deny he’d sooner be anywhere else than borne upon a giant’s back like a rucksack, crippled and freezing and depending constantly upon increasingly exhausted friends.
There was that, as well: Meera was tired . Hunting and trapping, putting up their crude shelter every night and taking it down again every morning. Her face had a gray, wan pallor to it. More and more, Bran noticed tear tracks on her face.
She and Jojen kept arguing too, bickering in hushed yet heated tones at the edge of their camp. Summer made a poorer spy than Bran suspected the Reeds thought. He preferred to hunt and, usually, Bran much preferred accompanying him. He felt more alive in his wolf’s skin than he ever felt in the skin he was otherwise confined to.
But Jojen was always reminding him he must be careful about his warging, that he risked becoming more beast than man every time he slipped his skin. So, really, they should all be pleased he was making an effort to remain as himself, whatever his motivations.
Bran’s ears could never be as keen as Summer’s, and his infirmity meant he couldn’t draw himself near to them. Still, lying on his side in the stillness of the Haunted Forest, he strained his every sense as much as he was able.
Meera was the one upset: that became clear straightway. These regular quarrels always began with her going up to Jojen and saying something. He spoke little, if at all, which was his wont, though his silences increasingly grated on Meera, who would storm off to bed or, more frequently, into the woods to hunt.
And it was dangerous in the woods. Bran didn’t need Summer to tell him what things were stirring nearer and nearer at hand.
She returned every time, though, always before dawn.
He didn’t sleep much.
A prince was supposed to be noble and upright. A king was too, certainly, and if Robb was dead now, then Bran was a king in name if nothing else. Or perhaps not. Perhaps the title passed cripples over; he was sure Maester Luwin had said something at one time or another, but without a doubt he had forgotten.
Regardless, it wounded him to know he was at the heart of his friends’ trouble. And surely he was , wasn’t he?
“There isn’t anything else they can fight over,” he mused to Hodor one evening, after watching Meera stump miserably in the direction of a narrow stream, perhaps to jab at it angrily with her spear until she found a singular anemic fish to mitigate her misery.
“I’m the reason they’re here. Everything that’s happened to them since they came to Winterfell has been my doing. Why shouldn’t they be angry? Why shouldn’t they hate me?”
“Hodor,” Hodor agreed.
“You ought to hate me too, you know,” said Bran, “I’ve caused you a lot of trouble.”
“Hodor.”
“Don’t argue with me,” he propped his head up in one hand, “You know you’d rather be somewhere warmer.”
“Hodor.”
Bran rolled his eyes, turning laboriously onto his other side.
“You oughtn’t presume your subjects’ wishes, Bran. That’s how tyrants are made.”
Jojen was standing opposite the fire, evidently having silently returned from the edge of the grove, where he and Meera had had their latest battle. He was wan and drawn as he’d ever been; in the firelight, the hollows of his face were more pronounced than usual.
“I don’t have any subjects,” Bran said shortly.
“You do, certainly.”
“Well, I don’t want any subjects. Especially not the sort that make their sisters cry.”
Jojen didn’t smile, but his voice was a little lighter, “You see much.”
“It isn’t good for you to be fighting.”
“No, it isn’t,” Jojen agreed.
“You should apologize to her.”
A muscle in Jojen’s throat twitched; in most other men this might have accompanied a laugh, but he remained solemn, “I’ve done nothing I feel sorry for.”
Bran wrinkled his nose up, “It’s craven to put things on your sister. Arya told me that once.”
“After you put something on her?”
Bran shrugged, “Meera does a lot for us.”
“I don’t dispute that she does,” he cocked his head to the side, “You see and you hear, Bran, but...if you will forgive me...you don’t always understand.”
“Maybe I don’t,” he conceded, “You should explain”
Jojen sat down by the fire, a little nearer to him, “Not long ago, you didn’t want to hear my explanations. They frightened you.”
Bran frowned, discomfited by the allusion, “The green dreams would frighten anyone. I didn’t want to believe them...but then they came true.”
“Nobody ever wants to believe the worst will come to pass,” Jojen acknowledged, “But Bran, if I turned a blind eye to every ill omen I’ve dreamed, I’d be happier for a short time and sorrowful much longer.”
“And alive for who knows how long?” Bran tried for a quip, smiling a little just to see if he might lighten the cast on Jojen’s face, but he merely nodded as if this was perfectly sound logic.
“The dreams give knowledge, not comfort. Knowledge is rarely comforting.”
Bran considered, wondering if Jojen was telling him without telling him; spelling out a riddle so he could reach the answer for himself, “You dreamed something, then? And Meera doesn’t like it?”
“It’s an old dream,” Jojen acknowledged, “Though Meera has only lately heard of it.”
“Well, what was it?”
Jojen did not answer right away. The fire crackled on, embers sparking into the night. Bran imagined he heard Summer’s howl and briefly felt the unmooring from himself that preceded skingchanging.
“I can tell you nothing if you’re on four legs,” he said it casually enough. Bran pouted, “I wasn’t going to.”
“If you keep as you are, you may not have a choice in the matter,” his fingers traced inscrutable patterns in the earth, runes of an imagined ancient race.
“Was...the dream about me?” Bran ventured.
“Why should it be?”
“You ought to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’. It’s important to get to the point.”
“The dreams are beyond ‘yes’ and ‘no’.”
“But you aren’t,” Bran was, briefly, emboldened, “You might act like it, but you’re a man still, just like I am.”
“You are a little more than a man,” Jojen pointed out.
“Can’t you tell me?” Bran pleaded, at wits’ end, “Please, Jojen. I don’t like feeling so helpless all the time! If there’s something I’ve done, or I can do, and you dreamed about it...”
“Bran, if I told you what I dreamed, you would become as distraught as Meera. I do not often make mistakes,” he paused, “Telling her was one.”
He felt a cold dread settle on him, “Was it so awful?”
“Green dreams are never anything less.”
“But you told Meera?” he knit his brows together, “You must’ve wanted her to know, somewhere.”
“Somewhere,” Jojen repeated, “Somewhere, a boy has a nightmare and feels neither shame nor grief going crying to his sister so she can chase his hurts away. ‘Somewhere’ is many leagues gone.”
“No it isn’t,” which was so petulant and stupid he ought to have been laughed off as a whining babe, “If you wanted to tell your sister, you were right to, especially if...”
“If it was so troublesome?” his lips twitched, “Why? So she might stop it? You remember your efforts to save your men at Winterfell. The men whose deaths I’d dreamed.”
Bran winced, “I still don’t understand what the good is in showing you bad things that can’t be changed.”
“Why should there be good or bad? A dream is a dream...”
“Until it becomes a nightmare. A nightmare is bad .”
“But green dreams are neither good nor bad. They are only...”
“Green?” Bran offered, partially as a nervous joke.
“...true. It is not a matter of whether they will come true. They already are. The dreams are knowledge. Not good, not bad, but true. Fate can’t be avoided, only prepared for.”
“Then it was right for Meera to be told, so she could prepare,” Bran hesitated, “And if she could be told...”
“Bran, I’ve made up my mind.”
“Well, so have I, and I’ve made up that you’re going to tell me what you dreamed so I can decide whether you or Meera were wrong.”
Jojen rubbed his hands together, “I didn’t say she was wrong to be upset.”
“So you admit you were wrong, then?” Bran was almost disappointed Jojen had folded so easily; he thought he may finally have one-upped the older boy.
“I never claimed to be right,” Jojen repositioned himself, pressing his palms into snowmelt and sighing a shaky, cold sigh. Bran realized how badly he was shaking.
“Do you need another wrap?” he asked.
Jojen shook his head, “I can suffer the cold.”
“You might freeze,” though he suspected Jojen’s response and he didn’t disappoint.
“I will not. Today is not the day I die.”
Bran watched Jojen’s fingers, which were the stricken white of a corpse. He wanted to start snapping off brusque orders, like his mother might’ve.
“Can’t you at least put on some gloves?” he asked at length, “Or did a dream say you wouldn’t?”
Jojen made another ghost-of-a-laugh, but his fingers remained in the snow, “Are you not cold?”
“All the time,” Bran acknowledged, “I don’t feel it so much anymore though.”
“Because of Summer?”
“Maybe,” he considered, “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
Jojen seemed satisfied, “We survive in our own ways, Bran, for as long as we need to.”
He pondered these words, thinking of Meera’s tears and the stolid, stubborn way she concealed them. Bran supposed he’d feel the same way if he were caught crying...not that he could easily escape to hide his tears anymore.
“How long have you known when you were going to die?” he asked at last.
“As long as I’ve had the dreams. When the fever came on me, I hovered between life and death.”
“Did you see the crow?”
“The crow is not mine to see,” Jojen pointed out, “The first dream I had, I told to none, not even my father, not until Meera.”
Bran’s irritation dissipated as understanding came to him. Jojen’s caginess would never be easy for him, but he could almost comprehend his motives.
“This dream, then...your first green dream...It was your death?”
The fire sparked in his eyes: jade facets on a grave mask, “It was my journey. The entire path of my life. A mummer’s show: the players in my story spelling out my works and deeds to the end of my days.”
Bran remembered, or tried to remember, the things he had dreamed in the many days he had reposed after his fall from the tower. The crow struck out most prominently in his mind’s eye, but there had been other things: the world spread beneath him like a tapestry, glimpses of his sisters on the kingsroad and scenes closer to home, at Winterfell.
There had been no story. Or, if there had been, he hadn’t the senses to read it.
“You must have been frightened.”
“Frightened at first...” Jojen answered after a prolonged pause, “I woke weeping from a fevered sleep, crying out for my father, my sister, my dead mother...”
“Jojen...” he spoke his name softly, remembering his own waking, his mother’s pained cries, Summer sitting on legs that couldn’t feel, an assassin’s blood dripping from his jaw. He couldn’t imagine Jojen afraid...a sick and frightened child, saved from death’s door and assailed with new knowledge.
He wanted to reach out and put his arm around him, to take his hand in a show of solidarity, gather him in his arms as Robb had done him once, to tell him his fears were not borne out alone.
But Jojen held himself to the other end of the fire; Bran could not go to him, and he wasn’t sure if Jojen would want him to.
“It’s brave to be afraid,” Bran offered at last, though he knew he could never sound as sure of it as his father had, “I didn’t believe that myself at first, but it’s true.”
“Nor did I,” Jojen admitted, “But after the fear, there came a sort of calm such as I’d never known. That’s what knowledge does, once you bring yourself to accept it.”
“And you accepted it.”
“I make no claim that it was easy. But when a thing is inevitable...”
“Is it? Your fate? Is there really nothing that could be done to change what you dreamed? The day of your death and...” another piece of the puzzle dropped into place, “Jojen. Your dream...your death...is it to be here? Beyond the Wall, with...” he faltered, “...because of me ?”
Jojen didn’t answer. Hodor was snoring balefully.
“You can tell me,” Bran insisted, “I won’t yell at you. I won’t even cry.”
“Bran...”
“That’s why Meera’s been so funny around me!” he interrupted, “Because you’re going to die up here, because you went north with me...”
“It isn’t right that Meera should hold you responsible. In time, she’ll understand.”
“But Jojen...what is going to happen? Why should you die?”
“Why should anyone?” again, he almost smiled, “You’re doing it again: good and bad, right and wrong... They exist, yes, but some things are exempt from those titles. A life is good if it is lived well, bad if it is lived poorly. Death is the same.”
Bran considered, “I suppose you’ve had a lot of time to work that out. But Jojen...”
“You cannot convince me to abandon the course.”
“I’m your prince, aren’t I?”
“No man is prince of fate. You don’t need poor Maester Luwin to tell you that.”
Bran felt his lip tremble, a boyish concession to tears, “I wouldn’t ask you to die on my account.”
“Men die in service to their liege lords every day. Men rode south with your brother, fully expecting to fight or die in his name. My sister and I knelt before you at Winterfell and swore fealty the same as any other bannerman.”
“But this isn’t a battle! I’m no commander.”
“No, and you are better for that,” Jojen’s voice lightened, “Bran, don’t weep for me.”
“I’m not...” but he felt this to be a lie, hot tears clinging to his lashes, “You’re my friend , just as Meera is. I could never...”
“Bran, you are not being asked to.”
“But if I’d known...”
“...nothing could change,” he inclined his head, “Nothing would change.”
“Don’t be so calm!” Bran blurted, “No wonder Meera is so upset. That you could...could talk like it was nothing...”
“It’s not nothing. For me, it is everything .”
“Then you should be angry!”
“At first I was. When the dreams were new, I lay in resentful terror, dreading the day I knew was coming. Why should I die so that a lordling I’d never met should safely gain audience with a three-eyed crow? I was still a boy. I should be allowed to become a man. I raved and ranted and became so miserable I considered wading into the bog and never emerging. I could do it, couldn’t I, and prove fate wrong? If I am to die, let me choose my own death. Let me prove dreams are only dreams, no matter their color.”
Bran knew too well yawning emptiness. Lying in his bed, newly crippled, the world reduced in scope and promise, wondering how he should have been allowed to survive, why he should continue to live a broken, fragmented life, forever stripped of possibility.
“You didn’t die.”
“I couldn’t die,” said Jojen, “Meera pulled me from the bog and forced air back into my lungs, and so I lived,” he tossed a twig into the fire, watching it splinter, “We cannot choose the lot we are given, Bran. But we can grow into the armor that has been forged for us.”
“Armor,” Bran repeated, “I used to think I’d make a knight.”
“You still shall,” said Jojen, “Armored in feathers.”
“But Jojen...” Bran blinked through his tears, “...if there was some way...”
“There is only the one way, Bran. And I am at peace with it.”
It didn’t sound like he was putting on a brave face. Bran could believe he meant it, that, in a few short years of knowing the hour and manner of his own death, he had completely accepted it as incontrovertible fact.
“How can you be?”
“After coming this way, how could I not? Bran, I accepted my fate not because I was resigned to it. Even on the road to Winterfell, I had my doubts.”
“But you reached Winterfell and...didn’t doubt anymore?”
Jojen watched him, unblinking, “It became clear to me, somewhere between Winterfell and this campfire, that the dream didn’t set my course, no more than they set yours, or Meera’s, or Ramsay Snow, or any of the men who perished when Winterfell was taken. The dreams don’t make things happen. They show what people will do because they will do them. Because it is in their nature to do those things. There is no other option because they would not take it if it were offered.”
Bran moved about as best he could, repositioning himself on his stomach and holding his head up in his hands, “So...you were always going to die the way you dreamed...”
“...because I’d have found something to die for,” Jojen finished, “The fate was not forced upon me, nor did I choose it. It may not have been what I’d have done the day I dreamed it...”
“But now...”
“It is the only thing I could do.”
There was a pregnant pause. Jojen for a moment looked like he would say more; that muscle in his throat was working. Bran felt like he must say something too, though he could not see how it would be helpful. All he wanted to do was repeat, over and over, that it wasn’t fair and Jojen shouldn’t have to die at all, and he wasn’t sure how he could ever expect to live with Jojen’s death on his conscience.
But Jojen seemed utterly at peace.
“And...what happens then? Jojen, what would be so important that you’d die without complaint?”
For the first time, Jojen smiled, “You live, Bran. And you fly.”
Game had been scarce tonight. A rabbit, scrawny and lean...pittance for him, but a meal for the mancubs, who had leaner appetites.
There would be other hunts.
The fire had burnt out at the manpack’s ( Our pack’s... ) camp. He could hear the breathing of sleepers: giant and girl and boy...his boy...
I’m here. Don’t push back.
He never did. The man-prince was a welcome passenger.
The fourth one, the green one, sat away from the others, awake. Setting his catch down near the remains of the fire, he padded over to him, close enough to smell him...lichen and earth and the salt of new tears. He turned at his approach, tear tracks plain on his face.
He spoke in the man-tongue, soft and sad.
He leaned into the green boy, pressing his nose into his side. The boy started as though surprised, though he didn’t draw back. With a quiet affection, he pressed his lips into his fur, between his ears. He licked him in kind.
The boy slept eventually, head resting in his fur. He’d have shaken him off in any other circumstance, but his cub welcomed the company, and so he would endure.
He won’t dream tonight.
As far as wolf or boy could ever determine, he didn’t.