A Clash of Kings (A Song of Ice and Fire 2)

"Do you fall every night, Bran?" Joien asked quietly.

A low rumbling growl rose from Summer's throat, and there was no play in it. He stalked forward, all teeth and hot eyes. Meera stepped between the wolf and her brother, spear in hand. "Keep him back, Bran."

"Jojen is making him angry."

Meera shook out her net.

"It's your anger, Bran," her brother said. "Your fear."

"It isn't. I'm not a wolf." Yet he'd howled with them in the night, and tasted blood in his wolf dreams.

"Part of you is Summer, and part of Summer is you. You know that, Bran."

Summer rushed forward, but Meera blocked him, jabbing with the three-pronged spear. The wolf twisted aside, circling, stalking. Meera turned to face him. "Call him back, Bran."

"Summer!" Bran shouted. "To me, Summer!" He slapped an open palm down on the meat of his thigh. His hand tingled, though his dead leg felt nothing.

The direwolf lunged again, and again Meera's spear darted out. Summer dodged, circled back. The bushes rustled, and a lean black shape came padding from behind the weirwood, teeth bared. The scent was strong; his brother had smelled his rage. Bran felt hairs rise on the back of his neck. Meera stood beside her brother, with wolves to either side. "Bran, call them off."

"I can't!"

"Jojen, up the tree."

"There's no need. Today is not the day I die."

"Do it!" she screamed, and her brother scrambled up the trunk of the weirwood, using the face for his handholds. The direwolves closed. Meera abandoned spear and net, jumped up, and grabbed the branch above her head. Shaggy's jaws snapped shut beneath her ankle as she swung up and over the limb. Summer sat back on his haunches and howled, while Shaggydog worried the net, shaking it in his teeth.

Only then did Bran remember that they were not alone. He cupped hands around his mouth. "Hodor!" he shouted. "Hodor! Hodor!" He was badly frightened and somehow ashamed. "They won't hurt Hodor," he assured his treed friends.

A few moments passed before they heard a tuneless humming. Hodor arrived half-dressed and mud-spattered from his visit to the hot pools, but Bran had never been so glad to see him. "Hodor, help me. Chase off the wolves. Chase them off."

Hodor went to it gleefully, waving his arms and stamping his huge feet, shouting "Hodor, Hodor," running first at one wolf and then the other. Shaggydog was the first to flee, slinking back into the foliage with a final snarl. When Summer had enough, he came back to Bran and lay down beside him.

No sooner did Meera touch ground than she snatched up her spear and net again. Jojen never took his eyes off Summer. "We will talk again," he promised Bran.

It was the wolves, it wasn't me. He did not understand why they'd gotten so wild. Maybe Maester Luwin was right to lock them in the godswood. "Hodor," he said, "bring me to Maester Luwin."

The maester's turret below the rookery was one of Bran's favorite places. Luwin was hopelessly untidy, but his clutter of books and scrolls and bottles was as familiar and comforting to Bran as his bald spot and the flapping sleeves of his loose grey robes. He liked the ravens too.

He found Luwin perched on a high stool, writing. With Ser Rodrik gone, all of the governance of the castle had fallen on his shoulders. "My prince," he said when Hodor entered, "you're early for lessons today." The maester spent several hours every afternoon tutoring Bran, Rickon, and the Walder Freys.

"Hodor, stand still." Bran grasped a wall sconce with both hands and used it to pull himself up and out of the basket. He hung for a moment by his arms until Hodor carried him to a chair. "Meera says her brother has the greensight."

Maester Luwin scratched at the side of his nose with his writing quill. "Does she now?"

He nodded. "You told me that the children of the forest had the greensight. I remember."

"Some claimed to have that power. Their wise men were called greenseers."

"Was it magic?"

"Call it that for want of a better word, if you must. At heart it was only a different sort of knowledge."

"What was it?"

Luwin set down his quill. "No one truly knows, Bran. The children are gone from the world, and their wisdom with them. It had to do with the faces in the trees, we think. The First Men believed that the greenseers could see through the eyes of the weirwoods. That was why they cut down the trees whenever they warred upon the children. Supposedly the greenseers also had power over the beasts of the wood and the birds in the trees. Even fish. Does the Reed boy claim such powers?"

"No. I don't think. But he has dreams that come true sometimes, Meera says."

"All of us have dreams that come true sometimes. You dreamed of your lord father in the crypts before we knew he was dead, remember?"

"Rickon did too. We dreamed the same dream."

"Call it greensight, if you wish . . . but remember as well all those tens of thousands of dreams that you and Rickon have dreamed that did not come true. Do you perchance recall what I taught you about the chain collar that every maester wears?"

Bran thought for a moment, trying to remember. "A maester forges his chain in the Citadel of Oldtown. It's a chain because you swear to serve, and it's made of different metals because you serve the realm and the realm has different sorts of people. Every time you learn something you get another link. Black iron is for ravenry, silver for healing, gold for sums and numbers. I don't remember them all."

Luwin slid a finger up under his collar and began to turn it, inch by inch. He had a thick neck for a small man, and the chain was tight, but a few pulls had it all the way around. "This is Valyrian steel," he said when the link of dark grey metal lay against the apple of his throat. "Only one maester in a hundred wears such a link. This signifies that I have studied what the Citadel calls the higher mysteries - magic, for want of a better word. A fascinating pursuit, but of small use, which is why so few maesters trouble themselves with it.

"All those who study the higher mysteries try their own hand at spells, soon or late. I yielded to the temptation too, I must confess it. Well, I was a boy, and what boy does not secretly wish to find hidden powers in himself? I got no more for my efforts than a thousand boys before me, and a thousand since. Sad to say, magic does not work."

"Sometimes it does," Bran protested. "I had that dream, and Rickon did too. And there are mages and warlocks in the east . . . "

"There are men who call themselves mages and warlocks," Maester Luwin said. "I had a friend at the Citadel who could pull a rose out of your ear, but he was no more magical than I was. Oh, to be sure, there is much we do not understand. The years pass in their hundreds and their thousands, and what does any man see of life but a few summers, a few winters? We look at mountains and call them eternal, and so they seem . . . but in the course of time, mountains rise and fall, rivers change their courses, stars fall from the sky, and great cities sink beneath the sea. Even gods die, we think. Everything changes.

"Perhaps magic was once a mighty force in the world, but no longer. What little remains is no more than the wisp of smoke that lingers in the air after a great fire has burned out, and even that is fading. Valyria was the last ember, and Valyria is gone. The dragons are no more, the giants are dead, the children of the forest forgotten with all their lore.

"No, my prince. Jojen Reed may have had a dream or two that he believes came true, but he does not have the greensight. No living man has that power."

Bran said as much to Meera Reed when she came to him at dusk as he sat in his window seat watching the lights flicker to life. "I'm sorry for what happened with the wolves. Summer shouldn't have tried to hurt Jojen, but Jojen shouldn't have said all that about my dreams. The crow lied when he said I could fly, and your brother lied too."

"Or perhaps your maester is wrong."

"He isn't. Even my father relied on his counsel."

"Your father listened, I have no doubt. But in the end, he decided for himself. Bran, will you let me tell you about a dream Jojen dreamed of you and your fosterling brothers?"

"The Walders aren't my brothers."

She paid that no heed. "You were sitting at supper, but instead of a servant, Maester Luwin brought you your food. He served you the king's cut off the roast, the meat rare and bloody, but with a savory smell that made everyone's mouth water. The meat he served the Freys was old and grey and dead. Yet they liked their supper better than you liked yours."

"I don't understand."

"You will, my brother says. When you do, we'll talk again."

Bran was almost afraid to sit to supper that night, but when he did, it was pigeon pie they set before him. Everyone else was served the same, and he couldn't see that anything was wrong with the food they served the Walders. Maester Luwin has the truth of it, he told himself. Nothing bad was coming to Winterfell, no matter what Jojen said. Bran was relieved . . . but disappointed too. So long as there was magic, anything could happen. Ghosts could walk, trees could talk, and broken boys could grow up to be knights. "But there isn't," he said aloud in the darkness of his bed. "There's no magic, and the stories are just stories."

And he would never walk, nor fly, nor be a knight.

Chapter Twenty-nine

TYRION

The rushes were scratchy under the soles of his bare feet. "My cousin chooses a queer hour to come visiting," Tyrion told a sleep-befuddled Podrick Payne, who'd doubtless expected to be well roasted for waking him. "See him to my solar and tell him I'll be down shortly."

It was well past midnight, he judged from the black outside the window. Does Lancel think to find me drowsy and slow of wit at this hour? he wondered. No, Lancel scarce thinks at all, this is Cersei's doing. His sister would be disappointed. Even abed, he worked well into the morning - reading by the flickering light of a candle, scrutinizing the reports of Varys's whisperers, and poring over Littlefinger's books of accounts until the columns blurred and his eyes ached.

He splashed some tepid water on his face from the basin beside his bed and took his time squatting in the garderobe, the night air cold on his bare skin. Ser Lancel was sixteen, and not known for his patience. Let him wait, and grow more anxious in the waiting. When his bowels were empty, Tyrion slipped on a bedrobe and roughed his thin flaxen hair with his fingers, all the more to look as if he had wakened from sleep.

Lancel was pacing before the ashes of the hearth, garbed in slashed red velvet with black silk undersleeves, a jeweled dagger and a gilded scabbard hanging from his swordbelt. "Cousin," Tyrion greeted him. "Your visits are too few. To what do I owe this undeserved pleasure?"

"Her Grace the Queen Regent has sent me to command you to release Grand Maester Pycelle." Ser Lancel showed Tyrion a crimson ribbon, bearing Cersei's lion seal impressed in golden wax. "Here is her warrant."

"So it is." Tyrion waved it away. "I hope my sister is not overtaxing her strength, so soon after her illness. it would be a great pity if she were to suffer a relapse."