Back for the second chapter, we switch to Meera's perspective! Sorry this chapter took so long, I've been very busy at work and sometimes I get home so late and so tired that it's all I can do to take a shower before crashing into my bed so I've been going at it a few hundred words at a time. Thank you all so much for your positive feedback and reviews!
Shafts of dappled half-light on her face and the crackling sounds of a dawn frost punctuating the otherwise silent forest in her honed ears stirred Meera from her comfortable sleep, nestled in the crook of Brandon Stark's neck. In an instant she was awake, checking for danger.
Moss-green eyes diligently surveyed their surroundings for a few moments before she was satisfied that shadowcats, ice bears or worse weren't out there among the trees. Last night's fire had burned out to ashes and a few wispy tendrils of smoke, the last embers guttered out in the cold although visibility was still relatively good.
Meera sighed with no small amount of reluctance at having to get herself up from what had admittedly been a very . . . comfortable position. She firmly prodded Bran's ribs in an attempt to rouse him and all she got out of him was an inarticulate "mmmpfh" of displeasure.
'Unusual of Bran', the Crannog girl thought to herself. More often than not, Bran was usually a light sleeper, up at the slightest provocation, in part due to the justified paranoia that only comes to those who grow up hunted but Meera suspected that Bran's "gift" of Greensight, much stronger in him than it had ever been in Jojen also played a part in his nocturnal discomfort. She knew it refused to sleep with him and what it showed him in the darkness was something Bran seldom wanted to divulge. You didn't need to have the sharp instincts of a Crannog huntress to recognize that his nights weren't as restful as they could be. Her heart ached for him whenever she saw him wake up just staring like he was somewhere else or worse, something else.
Now though, he was as sluggish as one of the cold-blooded lizard lions who lurked in the bogs and swamps of the Neck who took hours to warm up in the day to become active. In this way, he reminded her achingly of her brother Jojen, always unwilling to arise from sleep, trying fruitlessly to snatch a few moments more of rest. Reluctantly she extricated herself from their mutual embrace and leaned close to whisper in his ear.
"Come on Bran, its dawn. Time we were off."
"Mmmmeera" he mumbled, blinking repeatedly up at her, eyes all glassy and unfocused. She was pleased to see that there weren't any bags under his eyes this time. The wonders of what a good night's rest can accomplish, she mused to herself.
"Wake up, lazybones! You may be the Prince of Winterfell but time stops for no one!" she said, grinning as she prodded him again, this time with her foot.
She was rewarded with yet more of his half-literate mumbling.
'Nothing for it, then' she decided as she scooped up a handful of snow in her right hand and slipped it down his collar, rubbing it all over the nape of his neck and down his back, giggling uncontrollably his squirming, indignant and suddenly very animated discomfort as she rubbed ice cold slush all over his bare skin.
"Ach, Meera NO!" grumbled Bran as he batted away her hand, now irreversibly wide awake. He glared up at her, though out of annoyance and not with any real malice, mirth and irritation fighting a fierce battle for superiority on his face and in his voice.
"Devil girl!" he muttered as he frantically tried to wipe away the offending snow. "I knew Crannogmen had a reputation for being underhanded opportunists in combat but I never expected you to stoop so low as to attack a sleeping cripple!" The tone of mock outrage in his voice brought on more hoots of laughter from Meera and before long she could even see the paleness of Bran's teeth in the gloom as he quickly flashed her a small smile.
'He really should smile more' she thought to herself. 'He doesn't do it often but when he does . . .'
Meera loved getting Bran to smile. From what she could remember of what her own father had told her about Ned Stark, Bran was definitely his father's son when it came to his demeanor. He was usually always so somber and serious most days, despite his young age. He could be as grim and cold as any Stark of Winterfell before him worthy of the name. Always he was trying to put it upon himself to take responsibility for his actions or for the wellbeing of others such as last night's misgivings over the Night King's mark on his arm. Bran's smiles were a rare thing but when they appeared, Meera felt like she had discovered something fragile and precious hidden behind his Stark stoicism. Getting him to lower his shields with her and lighten up sometimes felt like an exercise in patience but the rewards was always worth it to her.
"The results speak for themselves, my Prince. Do you think you can find us an animal to carry you with? The sooner you get us to Castle Black, the quicker we can enjoy a hot meal, a solid roof over our heads and the Wall between us and what's out here."
Bran furrowed his brow in contemplation whilst rolling his shoulders and neck with a series of clicks and pops.
"It may take time and I make no promises" he said, somewhat unsurely. Meera suddenly realized that this would be his first time skinchanging into another creature since Summer and Hodor died that night in the Cave when they brushed within inches of suffering a fate worse than death. Like the sun slipping behind a bank of clouds, the brief but joyful mirth of boy and girl had given way once again to the dispassionate pursuit of day to day survival. With Meera's help, Bran got himself onto his front in preparation for communion with the Heart Tree.
"If the Dead and their masters haven't driven away or devoured the herds and their predators, there is a chance that the cold has already done so. I may be a while before I return with something suitable for us both."
"Don't you take too long , alright!" said Meera, giving Bran's shoulder an affectionate squeeze. In response, Bran closed his fingers over hers and rubbed his thumb along the back of her hand in a reassuring, circular motion. They locked eyes for a brief moment as he nodded in wordless agreement before he reached out for the face on the tree and bodily shuddered as his eyes rolled up into his head as soon as his palm made contact with the Weirwood.
As his body gradually went slack like puppet with the strings cut, Meera gently rolled him over onto his back and squatted down next to him, resigned to what could be a long wait.
As the weak sun inched its way up into the sky and the light began to turn from gloom to something approximating daylight this far North during Winter, Meera began to chew absentmindedly on one of the last few strips of dried rabbit meat that Benjen had cut and cured for them the day before he left them here in this forest within striking distance of Castle Black. Bran had tried to give her the majority of the meat, reasoning that she needed her physical strength more than him but she had insisted on splitting the supplies evenly. Bran may have been unable to walk but she knew that his abilities were more taxing than he let on, try as he might to put a brave face on it whenever he shuddered awake from subconsciously Warging or Greenseeing .
Looking over at Bran's still form, motionless save for his shallow breathing, Meera inwardly kicked herself when she realized that she had forgotten to remind him to eat before his mind left for parts unknown. Jojen and Meera had always been reminding him of the importance of looking after his body whenever he went hunting for extended periods of time in Summer.
"Bloody Stark stoicism" she muttered under her breath. As soon as they got to Castle Black, she was going to insist on a hot meal for the both of them before anything else. Any castle worth keeping in the North would have significant stockpiles of food preserved for the lean Winter years. Images of salted meats and fish and fruits and greens stored in barrels of oil in the permanently cold storerooms carved into the very ice of the Wall itself danced through her mind. Her stomach pointedly rumbled in sympathy with her brain. Oh how she longed for fried eggs, bacon and blood sausage. She could practically taste it whenever she glanced up at the Wall looming above the tops of the trees.
Trying to ignore the cravings twisting in her guts, Meera drew her dragonglass dagger from its sheath and studied it in an effort to pass the time.
Fully two and a half hands long from hilt to tip, it was a thing of lethal beauty to her. The dragonglass seemed to drink in all the light that struck it, so dark it was but shiny and brittle as well like glass. It had been given to her by Samwell Tarly of the Night's Watch when their party had crossed his path in the Nightfort. The black brother had told of how he had found a stockpile of ancient dragonglass blades and arrowheads wrapped in a long buried Night's Watch cloak at a place called the Fist of the First Men and of how he had used it to slay a White Walker, the first to do so since the time of the Long Night. Back then it was an unsightly and uncomfortable weapon to use as the blade was roughly carved and the tang was bare, lacking any kind of handle but it was sharper than any steel Meera had ever seen in her life. It had been a crude but effective weapon.
When their party had made it to the safety of the Three-Eyed Raven's sanctuary, one the last of the Children named Leaf deigned to show Meera their secret arts on how to improve and care for dragonglass weaponry as her kind had been the very first to work the material during the Dawn Age when the First Men had yet to arrive in Westeros. Very carefully, they had worked away at the rough edges, bit by bit until it had gone from being a merely good blade to being sharp enough to shave with without having to use soap or water if one was careful enough.
Armed with this new knowledge, Meera had taken it upon herself to carve a fuller into the blade to prevent it from getting stuck in anything she intended to stab with it be they human or demon. She had found that working dragonglass was similar to knapping flint; all it took was time, more than a few cuts on her fingers that were so thin that they hurt like paper cuts and a meticulous application of pressure in the right places.
To improve her grip, she had covered the tang in a handle made of an oversized finger bone she had found in a Giant's skeleton that was half buried in the snow once on their travels which she then wrapped in a piece of tough hide which she had tanned while Bran was training with the Three-Eyed Raven. Meera felt proud of herself knowing that she had created a blade that even the Night King would be wise to fear if He ever got close enough to Bran for Meera to stand in between the undead abomination and her Prince although she still shuddered when she thought of the Night King and His dreadful hoarfrost scimitar purposefully and fearlessly striding through the Children's fiery defenses around the Cave's main entrance, a sick rictus leer upon His terrible face as He strode forth, flanked by His White Walker honour guard.
With a jolt of horror, Meera suddenly realized that her home, Greywater Watch would lose its main defensive advantage if the Army of the Dead ever made it as far South as the Neck. Unique among strongholds, castles and holdfasts of the Noble Houses, the strength of Greywater Watch lay not in redoubtable curtain walls, sturdy battlements or high stone towers but in its ability to move unseen in the bogs and hidden waterways of the Neck, navigable only by the native Crannogmen. No outsider had ever found Greywater Watch without the consent of the Crannogmen but if the White Walkers ever came to her homeland, they could simply freeze the waters of the Neck at will, trapping Greywater Watch and the other Crannog dwellings in an inescapable sheet of ice. She could already imagine the sight of wights crawling up the sides of the floating home of House Reed like swarming ants.
'None of us stand a damned chance if they get South of the Wall before we can bring back warnings and mobilize our soldiers' thought Meera despondently. Unlike humans, anything converted into a wight could fight ferociously without feeling pain, fatigue, remorse or fear. Too many times, they had seen Wildling villages eerily abandoned down to the last hut. She had seen wights of all shapes and sizes in the Army of the Dead; men, women, children and beasts. Those kinds of numbers would be impossible for every army in the Seven Kingdoms combined to stop if they ever got South of the Wall barring a miracle and she knew that the Seven Kingdoms were bitterly divided and likely worn down from years of civil war as the High Lords squabbled over who got to sit on the Iron Throne while death came for all regardless of the sigil they bowed to.
With these grim ruminations running through her head, Meera could only breathe out one thing to herself to summarize the terrible state of it all.
"Fuck . . ."
She looked down at Bran's still form and wondered how he was going to stand up to the Night King when the real war began in earnest as Benjen said he would. He was honorable and courageous to be sure and he was stronger in the Greensight than she had ever thought was possible for a person before meeting him but he was just one youth without the use of his legs against Winter itself. Greenseers and Wargs and the ancient magic of the Children and the White Walkers were things far removed from the factors she was used to in a fight. Steel, spears and arrows were what she understood in the mud and blood of hunting and combat but against the ancient powers that were stirring in the land once again, Meera felt dwarfed by the sheer scale of the challenge that lay ahead. She was sure that Jojen would be wise enough to comprehend their place in the grand scheme of things if he still lived. If she could talk to him now, Meera was sure that he would tell her to stand by Bran, no matter what and that was what she intended to do.
The frosty morning silence was suddenly broken by the sound of creaking timber, heavy rumbling footfalls that seemed to vibrate the forest floor itself and an ear splitting trumpeting call that sounded like no beast Meera had ever encountered before. Something was rapidly coming their way, something huge. She sprang to her feet and only had enough time to mutter a brief "What the bloody hell-" before what could only be described as a brown, shaggy boulder on legs crashed into the clearing in an explosion of snow, splinters and pine needles.
Huge wasn't an apt word for it. It was absolutely enormous, as big as a thatched Crannog hut with two fearsome tusks that were longer than she was tall, ears as large as shields and a great, snakelike nose that almost touched the ground. The beast was covered in a thick winter coat of wool like fur through which, its dark eyes brimmed with patience and wisdom. With a start, Meera saw that it was wearing crude but functional straps fashioned by inhumanly large hands into a saddle not made for human riders. Meera remembered hearing stories of the Giants who lived North of the Wall as a young girl sitting on her father's knee and she had heard tell of the mammoths they were said to have domesticated as Men would break horses but the old tales fell utterly short of meeting an actual mammoth in the flesh. This one must have lost its way from its Giant master.
Rooted to the spot by fear and wonder, Meera watched as the mammoth raised its trunk towards her with surprising dexterity for something so large. She up at it and realized that it was looking right at her.
"Bran?" she said hesitantly as she lifted up her hand to reach out and touch the mammoth's trunk. The beast gave a great huff and dipped its head in affirmation as her palm made contact.
She couldn't help but laugh in the face of this amazing, absurd situation. This was definitely something to tell her grandchildren about one day.
"By the Old Gods Bran, I was expecting an elk or deer not . . . this!"
Quick as a striking serpent, the mammoth snaked its trunk around Meera's waist and lifted her high up off the ground. Caught off guard by what Bran was making the animal do, she let out a surprised yelp before Bran put her down in the saddle as gently as he could before the mammoth picked up Bran's body and placed it in front of her where she positioned him to be as stable as possible, one arm around Bran's front and holding him close to her, the other wrapped around a loose piece of rope that had once been a part of the reigns.
"We're secure back here, Bran" she said, prodding the flanks of the mammoth with her heels as if riding a horse.
With a great bellow and trumpeting cry, the mammoth lumbered forwards out of the clearing and towards the Wall. Meera let out a whoop of joy in reply, they were on the move once again and Castle Black beckoned. Already she could see that the trees were beginning to thin out as they drew ever closer to the Wall. In ages past, the Rangers and Stewards of the Night's Watch would sally forth with axes in hand and fell all the trees within a half league of the Wall's northern face all the way from Eastwatch-by-the-Sea to Westwatch-by-the-Bridge back when the Night's Watch numbered in the thousands. Now it seemed they had difficulty keeping the trees that far away at Castle Black alone.
As they cleared the treeline, it didn't take Meera long to spot the gate at the tunnel that led to Castle Black. Craning her neck to look up at the top of the Wall, she could make out the silhouettes of mangonels, onagers and ballistae against the blue sky and if she squinted hard enough, she could just about see the shapes of men in black cloaks rushing to their positions as they caught sight of the pair riding a mammoth right up to the gate.
Bran made the mammoth halt a mere stone's throw away from the gate itself and for an uncomfortable amount of time, they waited for a response. Upon closer inspection, Meera realized that parts of the gate were damaged, wooden planks ripped away exposing the cold rolled steel portcullis underneath. Someone or something had clearly been bold enough to attack the Wall already but she could see no evidence of bodies in the snow surrounding them. Either the Watch had the good sense to burn them or the Night King had taken His due from right under their noses. She fervently hoped it was the former.
"Halt! Who approaches?!" called a grizzled looking man of the Night's Watch looking out through one of the gaps in the gate where some of the bars had actually been bent and buckled. He was hooded and all cloaked in black but a bushy, dirty blonde beard rimed with frost covered his neck and brushed his chest.
"We're human! We seek sanctuary at Castle Black! I'm Lady Meera Reed of Greywater Watch!"
"Well your eyes aren't blue, that's all that counts now! Who is the boy? Why can't he speak for himself?"
"He's Prince Brandon Stark of Winterfell, Jon Snow's brother. It's . . . complicated but he's controlling our mammoth."
The man sucked air through his teeth in thought at this before nodding in understanding.
"A Warg? We've seen their kind among the Wildlings before but never among people from south of the Wall. Its not the strangest thing we've seen these days, milady."
"On that we can agree. It's urgent that we speak to Jon Snow. We know brother Samwell Tarly as well, he'll vouch for us!"
The Ranger withdrew from the grille briefly as if to confer with his brothers before he came back.
"Come on in! Every soul we allow past the Wall is one less body that'll be coming for us later and the Lord Commander will want to hear what you have to say!"
With a grinding scrape of wood on ice and the rattle of well oiled chains, the gate slowly inched up to reveal the torch lit gloom of a tunnel high enough to let them ride through on the mammoth without having to duck.
As Meera shouted her thanks as the mammoth passed by the Rangers on watch, the light of the day was shut off when the heavy gate slammed back down. Meera's heart leapt in her chest to see light at the opposite end of the tunnel where she knew that at long last, respite lay for the both of them. At last, they were back in the Seven Kingdoms for better or worse.
Meera, you are the real MVP and something of an unsung hero in the great Song of Ice and Fire. I hope you guys all enjoyed that but as ever, your feedback and suggestions are always appreciated! I'll try to get the next chapter out within a week as that is when things start to get interesting as Bran and Meera catch up on what has been happening in the Seven Kingdoms!
Until then, Valar Dohaeris. All men must serve.