Chapter 47: The Imp in the Hall
Bran was falling.
He had been falling for a long time — long enough that the sensation had stopped being frightening and become simply the condition he existed in, the wind a constant roar past his ears, the void below him without bottom or end.
"Fly," something said.
He looked up. A crow was keeping pace with him in the fall, which should not have been possible but was, its black wings motionless, its red eyes fixed on him with an attention that felt old.
It had three eyes. The third was in the center of its forehead, closed.
"I can't fly," Bran said. "I'm falling."
"All flight begins with a fall," the crow said. The third eye opened. "Have you tried?"
"I don't have wings."
"You have more than you think."
Below him the continent was rushing up — he could see all of it, every river and mountain and forest, the Wall a line of white in the north, the sea glittering at the edges — and somewhere in the roaring wind he heard his own voice, much smaller, asking his father something.
Can a man still be brave if he's afraid?
That is the only time a man can be brave.
He spread his arms.
The fall became something else.
He was flying — genuinely flying, the air alive around him, the land spread out below in every direction, and it was better than climbing had ever been, better than anything he had words for yet.
"I'm flying," he said.
"I know," the crow said, and drove its beak into the center of his forehead.
Bran sat up.
The basin went off the side of the table with a crash that brought the maid to her feet and then out the door at a run, shouting things down the corridor. He was aware of cold air from the open window. He was aware of the room — stone walls, candles, the smell of a sickroom. He was aware of weight at the foot of the bed, and he looked down.
The direwolf pup was not a pup anymore.
It had been a pup when he fell. Now it regarded him with golden eyes from the foot of the bed, fully grown, its white coat thick, its size improbable in a space built for people. It jumped up and covered most of his face with its tongue.
By the time Robb arrived, out of breath from running, Bran had managed to push the wolf back enough to see.
"Summer," he said, stroking the animal's enormous head. "I'm going to call him Summer."
Robb stood in the doorway looking at his brother with an expression that took a moment to resolve itself, and then he crossed the room and held on to him without saying anything for a while.
Two days later, Robb came to the room in different clothes.
Mail and boiled leather, sword at his hip — not riding gear, not household wear. The clothes a man puts on when he is about to be a lord rather than a brother.
He sent the nurse out.
"Bran." He sat on the edge of the bed. "Do you remember anything? About the fall. About before."
Bran thought about it seriously, the way he had been thinking about it since he woke up — searching the period before the void for anything solid. There was nothing. Just the morning, and the tower, and then the falling.
"No," he said.
Robb nodded, accepting it. "We have visitors. I need you in the hall."
"I can't walk."
Robb looked at the door and called a name.
The man who came through had to duck under the doorframe. He was perhaps the largest person Bran had ever seen — not in the way of Walder, his father's tall guard, but older, broader, built like something that had been put together for endurance rather than speed. His face was gentle in the way that very large men's faces sometimes are, as though the size itself was enough and there was nothing left to prove.
"This is Hodor," Robb said. "He'll help you get where you need to go."
Hodor said "Hodor," which appeared to be his position on most things, and lifted Bran from the bed with the careful ease of someone who understands both strength and fragility.
They went down through the corridors and into the great hall.
Twenty Stark guardsmen stood in two rows along the walls, hands on their hilts, facing inward. The hall had the quality of a room that has been arranged for a purpose.
In the center of it, Tyrion Lannister stood with two Lannister men-at-arms and the particular expression of a man who has walked into a situation and is rapidly reassessing his understanding of it.
Yoren stood to one side with three Night's Watch brothers, the four of them having the studied neutrality of men who have decided that whatever is about to happen is not their business but are positioned in front of the door, which was perhaps not entirely accidental.
Hodor carried Bran up the steps and set him carefully in the chair beside the lord's seat. Robb took the lord's seat, which he did without hesitation now in the way that he had not done without hesitation two weeks ago, and that difference was visible to anyone who had known him before.
"Lord Stark," Tyrion said, with a small bow. "The hospitality was warmer on my last visit."
"Winterfell welcomes any man of the Night's Watch," Robb said, nodding to Yoren and his brothers.
Yoren and the others expressed appropriate appreciation.
"And men who travel with the Night's Watch?" Tyrion looked at Robb with the slight lifting of an eyebrow that suggested he already knew the answer. "Are they included in Winterfell's welcome?"
"No," Robb said.
Tyrion spread his hands. "There really is no need for this to be unpleasant. I even brought gifts. No one has offered bread and salt, which is unusual for—"
"Look at him, Bran," Robb said, not looking away from Tyrion. "Do you remember him? Do you remember anything?"
Bran looked at Tyrion. He searched the face — the mismatched eyes, the compact frame, the expression of a man doing several things with his face simultaneously — and found nothing. No memory connected to it. No edge of recollection.
"No," he said.
"You think one look at a dwarf heals a boy's memory?" Tyrion said, his tone dry but careful now, measuring the room. "That's not how injury works."
Robb stood.
"Tyrion Lannister." His voice had found the register that Eddard Stark's voice occupied when Eddard Stark meant something to carry. "In my father's absence I am Lord of Winterfell. You came to this castle as a guest. You ate the bread and salt of House Stark. And then you used that welcome to put poison within reach of my unconscious brother."
Tyrion went still.
It was not the stillness of guilt, Henry would have noted, had he been present. It was the stillness of a mind receiving new information and processing it at speed.
"That's a serious accusation," Tyrion said, quietly.
"It is," Robb agreed. "In the name of King Robert, I'm placing you under arrest to await the king's judgment." He looked at the guards. "Take him."
Swords came out of scabbards. Twenty-one blades, the sound of it overlapping, the points finding Tyrion and his two guards at the center of the hall. Tyrion looked at the steel, looked at Robb, looked at the Night's Watch men arranged in front of the door with the incidental solidity of men who happen to be standing exactly there.
The two Lannister guards looked at the twenty-one swords pointed at them and made the correct calculation.
Tyrion looked around the hall one more time. At the guards. At Bran in the chair beside the lord's seat, small and still and watching him with grey Stark eyes that gave nothing away. At Robb standing with his sword across his knees and the patience of someone who has decided and does not need to decide again.
"My lord," Tyrion said finally, with a careful precision to the words — conceding the title without conceding anything else. "I did not poison your brother."
"Then you'll have the opportunity to say so to the king," Robb said. "Take him to the cells. Keep him comfortable. He is a Lannister and a lord, and he will be treated accordingly until judgment."
Hodor had moved to stand beside Bran's chair during the confrontation, and he stood there now — very large, very present, in the uncomplicated way of someone who does not entirely follow events but understands the part where he is supposed to protect the person next to him.
Bran watched Tyrion being escorted toward the door, the guards moving around him with the careful efficiency of men who had been told comfortable and intended to deliver it.
At the door, Tyrion paused without turning around.
"The boy should know," he said, to the room in general, "that the wolf saved his life. Maester Luwin's records will show it. The wolf wouldn't leave the window. Every time they closed it his condition worsened." A pause. "Whatever else you think of me, that particular fact has nothing to do with me and everything to do with the animal."
He went through the door.
The guards closed it behind him.
The hall was quiet except for the sound of swords returning to scabbards, one by one, and the fire settling in the hearth, and Summer's quiet breathing from somewhere behind Bran's chair where the direwolf had followed them down through the castle and taken up a position it apparently considered permanent.
Bran looked at his brother.
Robb looked back, and for a moment the lord's face went away and it was just Robb — seventeen years old, managing a great castle with their parents gone south and a prisoner in the cells and a brother who had just woken up from something none of them fully understood yet.
"How do you feel?" Robb asked.
"Strange," Bran said. "But better."
Robb nodded. He set the sword down.
"Good," he said. "That's enough for now."
[Goal Tracker]
PS 500 → 1 Bonus Chapter
Reviews 10 → 1 Bonus Chapter
If you enjoyed it, consider a review.
P1treon Soulforger has 25+advance chapters