Winter is coming
Will slid in underneath, flat on his belly in the snow and the mud, and looked down on the empty clearing below.
His heart stopped in his chest. For a moment he dared not breathe.
Moonlight shone down on the clearing, the ashes of the firepit, the snow-covered lean-to, the great rock, the little half frozen stream.
Everything was just as it had been a few hours ago.
They were gone. All the bodies were gone.
"Gods!" He heard behind him. A sword slashed at a branch as Ser Waymar Royce gained the ridge. He stood there beside the sentinel, longsword in hand, his cloak billowing behind him as the wind came up, outlined nobly against the stars for all to see.
"Get down!" Will whispered urgently. "Somethings wrong."
Royce did not move. He looked down at the empty clearing and laughed.
"Your dead men seem to have moved camp, will."
Will's voice abandoned him. He groped for words that did not come. It was not possible. His eyes swept back and forth over the abandoned campsite, stopped on the axe. A huge double-bladed battle-axe, still lying where he had seen it last, untouched. A valuable weapon...
"On your feet, Will ," Ser Waymar commanded. " there's no one here. I won't have you hiding under a bush."
Reluctantly, Will obeyed.
Ser Waymar looked him over with open disapproval.
" I am not going back to castle Black a failure on my first ranging. We will find these men." He glanced around. "Up the tree. Be quick about it. Look for fire." Will turned away, wordless. There was no use to argue.
The wind was moving. It cut right trough him. He went to the tree, a vaulting grey-green sentinel, and began to climb. Soon his hands were sticky with sap, and he could not digest. He whispered a prayer to the nameless gods of the wood, and slipped his dirk free of its sheath. He put it between his teeth to keep both hands free for climbing. The taste of cold iron in his mouth gave him comfort.
~~~
Down below, the Lordling called out suddenly, "who goes there?"
Will heard uncertainty in the challenge. He stopped climbing; he listened; he watched.
The woods gave answer: the rustle of leaves, the icy rush of the stream, a distant hoot of a snow owl.
The others made no sound.
Will saw movement from the corner of his eye. Pale shapes gliding through the wood. He turned his head, glimpsed a white shadow in the darkness. Then it was gone. Branches stirred gently in the wind, scratching at one another with wooden fingers. Will opened his mouth to call down a warning, and the words seemed to freeze in his throat.
Perhaps he was wrong.
Perhaps it had only been a bird, a reflection on the snow, some trick of the moonlight. What had he seen, after all?
~*~
"Will where are you?" Ser Waymar called up. "Can you see anything?" He turning
in a slow circle, suddenly wary, his sword in his hand.
He must have felt them, as Will felt them. There was nothing to see.
"Answer me ! Why is it so cold?"
It was cold. Shivering, Will clung more tightly to his perch. His face pressed hard against the trunk of the sentinel. He could feel the sweet, sticky sap on his cheek.
A shadow emerged from the dark of the wood. It stood in front of Royce. Tall, it was, and gaunt and hard as old bones, with flesh pale as milk. Its armour seemed to change colour as it moved; here it was white as new-fallen snow, there as black as a shadow, everywhere dappled with the deep grey-green of the trees. The patterns ran like moonlight on water with every step it took.
~~~
The morning had dawned clear and cold, with a crispness that hinted at the end of summer. They set forth at daybreak to see a man beheaded, twenty in all, and Bran rode among them, nervous with excitement. This was the first time he had been Deemed old enough to go with his lord father and his brothers to see the Kings justice done.
The man had been taken outside a small holdfast in the hills. Rob thought he was a wildling, his sword sworn to Mance Rayder, the King-beyond-the-wall. It made Bran's skin prickle to think of it. He remembered the hearth tales Old Nan told them. The wildlings were cruel men, she said, slavers and slayers and thieves. They contorted with giants and ghouls, stole girl children in the dead of the night, and drank blood from polished horns. And their women lay with the Others in the Long Night to sire terrible half-human children.
But the man they found bound hand and foot to the holdfast wall awaiting King's justice was old and scrawny. He had lost both ears and a finger to frostbite, and he dressed all in black, the same as a brother of the Nights watch, except that his furs were ragged and greasy.
~~~
Over their heads flapped the banner of the Starks of Winterfell: a grey dire wolf racing across an ice-white field.
Bran's father sat solemnly on his horse, long brown hair stirring in the wind. He had a grim cast to his grey eyes this day, and seemed not at all the man who would sit before the fire in the evening and talk softly of the age of heroes and the children of the forest.
He had taken off his father's face, Bran thought, and donned the face of Lord Stark of Winterfell.
His Lord father gave a command, and two of his guardsmen dragged the ragged man to the iron wood stump In the centre of the square. They forced his head down onto the hard black wood.
Lord Eddard dismounted and his ward Theon Greyjoy brought forth the sword. "Ice", that sword was called. The blade was valerian steel, spellforged and dark as smoke. Nothing held an edge like valerian steel.
His father peeled of his gloves and handed them to Jory Cassel, the captain of his household guard.
He took hold of Ice with both hands and said, "In the name of Robert of the house Baratheon, the first of his Name, King of the Andels and the Roynar and the First Men, Lord of the seven kingdoms and protector of the Realm, by the word of Eddard of the house Stark, Lord of Winterfell and the Warden of the North, I do sentence you to die."
He lifted the greatsword high above his head.
Bran's bastard brother Jon Snow moved closer.
"Keep the pony well in hand," he whispered. "And don't look away. Father will know if you do."
Bran kept his pony well in hand, and did not look away as his father took off the mans head with a single sure stroke.
Blood sprayed out across the snow, as red as summer wine.
Bran could not take his eyes from the blood. The snows around the stump drank it eagerly, reddening as he watched.
The head bounced off a thick root and rolled. It came up near Greyjoy's feet.
~~~
Tommen and Myrcella were ecstatic as they read their brother's letter.
Cersei watched as her youngest childrens faces lit with excitement with a sad, tiny smile.
Her second eldest son was finally returning home after seven years.
~~~
They found Robb on the riverbank north of the bridge, with Jon still mounted beside him. The late summer snows had been heavy this moonturn.
Robb stood knee-deep in White, his hood pulled back so the sun shone in his hair. He was cradling something in his arm, while the boys talked in hushed, excited voices.
The riders picked their way carefully through the drifts, groping for solid footing on the hidden, uneven ground. Jory Cassel and Theon Greyjoy were the first to reach the boys.
Greyjoy was laughing and joking as he rode. Bran heard the breath go out of him. "Gods!" He exclaimed, struggling to keep control of his horse as he reached for his sword.
Jory's sword was already out.
"Robb, get away from it!"he called as his horse reared under him.
Robb grinned and looked up from the bundle in his arms.
"She can't hurt you,"he said." She's dead Jory."
Bran was afire with curiosity by then . He would have spurred the pony faster, but his father made them dismount beside the bridge and approach on foot. Bran jumped off and ran.
By then Jon, Jory, and Theon Greyjoy had all dismounted as well.
"What in the seven hells is it?" Greyjoy was saying.
"A wolf," Robb told.
"A freak,"Greyjoy said. "Look at the size of it."
Bran's heart was thumping in his chest as he pushed through a waist-high drift to his brother's side.
Half buried in bloodstained snow, a dark shape slumped in death. Ice had formed in its shaggy grey fur, and the faint smell of corruption clung to it like a woman's perfume.
Bran glimpsed blind eyes crawling with maggots, a wide mouth full of yellowed teeth. But it was the size of it that made him gasp.
It was bigger than his pony, twice the size of the largest hound in his father's kennel.
"It's no freak," Jon said calmly. "That's a direwolf. They grow larger than the other kind."
Theon Greyjoy said, "There's not been a direwolf sighted south of the Wall in two hundred years."
"I see one now," Jon replied.
Bran tore his eyes away from the direwolf. That was when he noticed the bundle in Robb's arms. He gave a cry of delight and moved closer.
The pup was a tiny ball of grey-black fur, its eyes still closed. It nuzzled blindly against Robb's chest as he cradled it, searching for milk among his leathers, making a sad little whimpery sound.
Bran reached out hesitantly.
Robb told him."You can touch him."