The Song Of Ice and Fire (85 page)

“What are they saying?”

“They’re sad. Your lord brother will get no help from them, not where he’s going. The old gods have no power
in the south. The weirwoods there were all cut down, thousands of years ago. How can they watch your brother when they have no eyes?”

Bran had not thought of that. It frightened him. If even the gods could not help his brother, what hope was there? Maybe Osha wasn’t hearing them right. He cocked his head and tried to listen again. He thought he could hear the sadness now, but nothing more than that.

The rustling grew louder. Bran heard muffled footfalls and a low humming, and Hodor came blundering out of the trees, naked and smiling. “Hodor!”

“He must have heard our voices,” Bran said. “Hodor, you forgot your clothes.”

“Hodor,” Hodor agreed. He was dripping wet from the neck down, steaming in the chill air. His body was covered with brown hair, thick as a pelt. Between his legs, his manhood swung long and heavy.

Osha eyed him with a sour smile. “Now there’s a big man,” she said. “He has giant’s blood in him, or I’m the queen.”

“Maester Luwin says there are no more giants. He says they’re all dead, like the children of the forest. All that’s left of them are old bones in the earth that men turn up with plows from time to time.”

“Let Maester Luwin ride beyond the Wall,” Osha said. “He’ll find giants then, or they’ll find him. My brother killed one. Ten foot tall she was, and stunted at that. They’ve been known to grow big as twelve and thirteen feet. Fierce things they are too, all hair and teeth, and the wives have beards like their husbands, so there’s no telling them apart. The women take human men for lovers, and it’s from them the half bloods come. It goes harder on the women they catch. The men are so big they’ll rip a maid apart before they get her with child.” She grinned at him. “But you don’t know what I mean, do you, boy?”

“Yes I do,” Bran insisted. He understood about mating; he had seen dogs in the yard, and watched a stallion mount a mare. But talking about it made him uncomfortable. He looked at Hodor. “Go back and bring your clothes, Hodor,” he said. “Go dress.”

“Hodor.” He walked back the way he had come, ducking under a low-hanging tree limb.

He
was
awfully big, Bran thought as he watched him
go. “Are there truly giants beyond the Wall?” he asked Osha, uncertainly.

“Giants and worse than giants, Lordling. I tried to tell your brother when he asked his questions, him and your maester and that smiley boy Greyjoy. The cold winds are rising, and men go out from their fires and never come back … or if they do, they’re not
men
no more, but only wights, with blue eyes and cold black hands. Why do you think I run south with Stiv and Hali and the rest of them fools? Mance thinks he’ll fight, the brave sweet stubborn man, like the white walkers were no more than rangers, but what does he know? He can call himself King-beyond-the-Wall all he likes, but he’s still just another old black crow who flew down from the Shadow Tower. He’s never tasted winter. I was
born
up there, child, like my mother and her mother before her and
her
mother before her, born of the Free Folk. We remember.” Osha stood, her chains rattling together. “I tried to tell your lordling brother. Only yesterday, when I saw him in the yard. ‘M’lord Stark,’ I called to him, respectful as you please, but he looked through me, and that sweaty oaf Greatjon Umber shoves me out of the path. So be it. I’ll wear my irons and hold my tongue. A man who won’t listen can’t hear.”

“Tell
me
. Robb will listen to me, I know he will.”

“Will he now? We’ll see. You tell him this, m’lord. You tell him he’s bound on marching the wrong way. It’s north he should be taking his swords.
North
, not south. You hear me?”

Bran nodded. “I’ll tell him.”

But that night, when they feasted in the Great Hall, Robb was not with them. He took his meal in the solar instead, with Lord Rickard and the Greatjon and the other lords bannermen, to make the final plans for the long march to come. It was left to Bran to fill his place at the head of the table, and act the host to Lord Karstark’s sons and honored friends. They were already at their places when Hodor carried Bran into the hall on his back, and knelt beside the high seat. Two of the serving men helped lift him from his basket. Bran could feel the eyes of every stranger in the hall. It had grown quiet. “My lords,” Hallis Mollen announced, “Brandon Stark, of Winterfell.”

“I welcome you to our fires,” Bran said stiffly, “and offer you meat and mead in honor of our friendship.”

Harrion Karstark, the oldest of Lord Rickard’s sons, bowed, and his brothers after him, yet as they settled back in their places he heard the younger two talking in low voices, over the clatter of wine cups. “… sooner die than live like that,” muttered one, his father’s namesake Eddard, and his brother Torrhen said likely the boy was broken inside as well as out, too craven to take his own life.

Broken
, Bran thought bitterly as he clutched his knife. Is that what he was now? Bran the Broken? “I don’t want to be broken,” he whispered fiercely to Maester Luwin, who’d been seated to his right. “I want to be a knight.”

“There are some who call my order the knights of the mind,” Luwin replied. “You are a surpassing clever boy when you work at it, Bran. Have you ever thought that you might wear a maester’s chain? There is no limit to what you might learn.”

“I want to learn
magic,
” Bran told him. “The crow promised that I would fly.”

Maester Luwin sighed. “I can teach you history, healing, herblore. I can teach you the speech of ravens, and how to build a castle, and the way a sailor steers his ship by the stars. I can teach you to measure the days and mark the seasons, and at the Citadel in Oldtown they can teach you a thousand things more. But, Bran, no man can teach you magic.”

“The children could,” Bran said. “The children of the forest.” That reminded him of the promise he had made to Osha in the godswood, so he told Luwin what she had said.

The maester listened politely. “The Wildling woman could give Old Nan lessons in telling tales, I think,” he said when Bran was done. “I will talk with her again if you like, but it would be best if you did not trouble your brother with this folly. He has more than enough to concern him without fretting over giants and dead men in the woods. It’s the Lannisters who hold your lord father, Bran, not the children of the forest.” He put a gentle hand on Bran’s arm. “Think on what I said, child.”

And two days later, as a red dawn broke across a windswept sky, Bran found himself in the yard beneath the
gatehouse, strapped atop Dancer as he said his farewells to his brother.

“You are the lord in Winterfell now,” Robb told him. He was mounted on a shaggy grey stallion, his shield hung from the horse’s side; wood banded with iron, white and grey, and on it the snarling face of a direwolf. His brother wore grey chainmail over bleached leathers, sword and dagger at his waist, a fur-trimmed cloak across his shoulders. “You must take my place, as I took Father’s, until we come home.”

“I know,” Bran replied miserably. He had never felt so little or alone or scared. He did not know how to be a lord.

“Listen to Maester Luwin’s counsel, and take care of Rickon. Tell him that I’ll be back as soon as the fighting is done.”

Rickon had refused to come down. He was up in his chamber, red-eyed and defiant. “
No!
” he’d screamed when Bran had asked if he didn’t want to say farewell to Robb. “
NO farewell!
”

“I told him,” Bran said. “He says no one ever comes back.”

“He can’t be a baby forever. He’s a Stark, and near four.” Robb sighed. “Well, Mother will be home soon. And I’ll bring back Father, I promise.”

He wheeled his courser around and trotted away. Grey Wind followed, loping beside the warhorse, lean and swift. Hallis Mollen went before them through the gate, carrying the rippling white banner of House Stark atop a high standard of grey ash. Theon Greyjoy and the Greatjon fell in on either side of Robb, and their knights formed up in a double column behind them, steel-tipped lances glinting in the sun.

Uncomfortably, he remembered Osha’s words.
He’s marching the wrong way
, he thought. For an instant he wanted to gallop after him and shout a warning, but when Robb vanished beneath the portcullis, the moment was gone.

Beyond the castle walls, a roar of sound went up. The foot soldiers and townsfolk were cheering Robb as he rode past, Bran knew; cheering for Lord Stark, for the Lord of Winterfell on his great stallion, with his cloak streaming and Grey Wind racing beside him. They would never cheer for him that way, he realized with a dull ache. He
might be the lord in Winterfell while his brother and father were gone, but he was still Bran the Broken. He could not even get off his own horse, except to fall.

When the distant cheers had faded to silence and the yard was empty at last, Winterfell seemed deserted and dead. Bran looked around at the faces of those who remained, women and children and old men … and Hodor. The huge stableboy had a lost and frightened look to his face. “Hodor?” he said sadly.

“Hodor,” Bran agreed, wondering what it meant.

DAENERYS

W
hen he had taken his pleasure, Khal Drogo rose from their sleeping mats to tower above her. His skin shone dark as bronze in the ruddy light from the brazier, the faint lines of old scars visible on his broad chest. Ink-black hair, loose and unbound, cascaded over his shoulders and down his back, well past his waist. His manhood glistened wetly. The
khal
’s mouth twisted in a frown beneath the droop of his long mustachio. “The stallion who mounts the world has no need of iron chairs.”

Dany propped herself on an elbow to look up at him, so tall and magnificent. She loved his hair especially. It had never been cut; he had never known defeat. “It was prophesied that the stallion will ride to the ends of the earth,” she said.

“The earth ends at the black salt sea,” Drogo answered at once. He wet a cloth in a basin of warm water to wipe the sweat and oil from his skin. “No horse can cross the poison water.”

“In the Free Cities, there are ships by the thousand,” Dany told him, as she had told him before. “Wooden
horses with a hundred legs, that fly across the sea on wings full of wind.”

Khal Drogo did not want to hear it. “We will speak no more of wooden horses and iron chairs.” He dropped the cloth and began to dress. “This day I will go to the grass and hunt, woman wife,” he announced as he shrugged into a painted vest and buckled on a wide belt with heavy medallions of silver, gold, and bronze.

“Yes, my sun-and-stars,” Dany said. Drogo would take his bloodriders and ride in search of
hrakkar
, the great white lion of the plains. If they returned triumphant, her lord husband’s joy would be fierce, and he might be willing to hear her out.

Savage beasts he did not fear, nor any man who had ever drawn breath, but the sea was a different matter. To the Dothraki, water that a horse could not drink was something foul; the heaving grey-green plains of the ocean filled them with superstitious loathing. Drogo was a bolder man than the other horselords in half a hundred ways, she had found … but not in this. If only she could get him onto a ship …

After the
khal
and his bloodriders had ridden off with their bows, Dany summoned her handmaids. Her body felt so fat and ungainly now that she welcomed the help of their strong arms and deft hands, whereas before she had often been uncomfortable with the way they fussed and fluttered about her. They scrubbed her clean and dressed her in sandsilk, loose and flowing. As Doreah combed out her hair, she sent Jhiqui to find Ser Jorah Mormont.

The knight came at once. He wore horsehair leggings and painted vest, like a rider. Coarse black hair covered his thick chest and muscular arms. “My princess. How may I serve you?”

“You must talk to my lord husband,” Dany said. “Drogo says the stallion who mounts the world will have all the lands of the earth to rule, and no need to cross the poison water. He talks of leading his
khalasar
east after Rhaego is born, to plunder the lands around the Jade Sea.”

The knight looked thoughtful. “The
khal
has never seen the Seven Kingdoms,” he said. “They are nothing to him. If he thinks of them at all, no doubt he thinks of islands, a few small cities clinging to rocks in the manner
of Lorath or Lys, surrounded by stormy seas. The riches of the east must seem a more tempting prospect.”

“But he must ride
west,
” Dany said, despairing. “Please, help me make him understand.” She had never seen the Seven Kingdoms either, no more than Drogo, yet she felt as though she knew them from all the tales her brother had told her. Viserys had promised her a thousand times that he would take her back one day, but he was dead now and his promises had died with him.

“The Dothraki do things in their own time, for their own reasons,” the knight answered. “Have patience, Princess. Do not make your brother’s mistake. We will go home, I promise you.”