[Look To The Stars] Chapter 67: The Assassin and the Lord (Patreon)

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction and all rights for character, plots and settings belong to GRRM and George Lucas/Disney. I have no ownership.

A/N: Bran doing Bran stuff. Hope you enjoy the chapter!

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Year 299 AC/8 ABY

Winterfell, The North

Bran's breath made a little cloud against the weirwood's white bark, and he watched it dissolve into the grey morning air. The heart tree's carved face stared down at him, its left eye crusted with frozen red sap that caught the first light bleeding through the canopy. Before Luke came, Bran had only seen a face his father prayed to. Now, looking at the pale wood, he could feel the heavy, slow current of the Force moving through the roots, waiting for him to push the door open.

Master Luke had allowed him to practice at the tree, but the permission had come with a warning, delivered in the careful voice he used when a lesson was important enough to repeat. Do not reach further than you can hold, Bran. The Wall is a wound in the Force, and a wound can pull you in if you stand too close. Bran had nodded as a padawan should. He had meant it, too. Bran had been sitting here every morning, trying to keep his sight close to Winterfell, but he could feel the deeper roots opening under him like a door that wanted to be pushed.

Summer was somewhere behind him, lying in the frost-killed bracken with his golden eyes half-closed. Summer did not like it when Bran went into the tree. The wolf whined low in his throat whenever the boy's eyes went white, and Bran had learned to send a feeling back through the bond before he slipped under, something like I will coming back. It was how he calmed a horse before tightening the girth.

He closed his eyes. The bark pressed into his palm. He breathed in as Luke showed him, slow through the nose, counting to four, holding for four, letting it out for four. The cold in his wrist deepened. The roots stirred under the earth like a sleeping dog hearing its master's step.

South, Bran thought. I want to go south.

The roots resisted for a moment, as a river resists when you try to wade against the current. The cold in his wrist sharpened, and Bran felt the weirwood's whole trunk vibrate against his palm, a deep hum that traveled up through his bones and settled in his teeth. Then the roots opened. The sight unspooled beneath him, following the roots south along the Kingsroad, through the wolfswood, past the barrowlands, and Bran felt the world tilt as it always tilted when the sight took him, except this time the tilt went the other way.

He landed in the sunlight of Torrhen's Square, the Tallhart seat, south-west of Winterfell.

He knew it as you know a place you have never been but have heard described a hundred times at supper. A wide dirt street ran through the middle of the holdfast, packed hard by cart wheels and boots. A baker was pulling loaves from a stone oven built into the side of a low building. The bread was golden on top, the kind with seeds pressed into the crust, and Bran could smell it, or thought he could. The scent was warm and yeasty and it made his stomach remind him that he hadn't eaten since last night.

A girl about Rickon's age walked a brown dog along the packed earth, the dog's tongue hanging out one side of its mouth. The girl carried a wooden bucket that bumped against her knee with every step. She was singing something, a tune Bran didn't recognize, and the dog's tail wagged in time with it.

Smoke rose from a chimney at the far end of the street, where a man in a leather apron stood in a doorway, arms folded, watching the road. A woman hung washing on a line strung between two posts, her hands red from the cold water. Near her, a boy a little older than Bran was mending a fence post near the holdfast wall, tapping a wooden peg with a hammer that made a sound like a slow heartbeat.

None of them saw him. Bran watched the ordinary scene with fascination.

It was the most ordinary thing Bran had seen in months, and he watched it like a hungry person watching someone else eat. These people did not know about the Wall, the screaming trees, the ships from the sky, or the silver beast that could fly without wings. They lived freely only thinking about problems they could see and for a long, quiet moment, Bran envied them so fiercely it made his chest ache.

The sight held him there as Bran let out a breath he'd been holding and felt the corner of his mouth move.

He let the Torrhen's Square vision fade. The baker, the girl, the dog, the singing, the smoke, all of it dimmed as a candle dims, and the roots waited under him, patient, ready.

West, Bran thought. Go more west.

The roots opened again, easier this time, as if the first direction had loosened something. The sight moved westward, past the Rills, toward the coast where the land broke into shingle and the grey sea began. The warmth of the Torrhen's Square noon bled out of him as the roots carried him further west, replaced by a creeping damp that started in his fingers and spread inward.

Salt rime crusted his tongue and burned the lining of his nostrils. Every breath carried stagnant brine and rotten things, a suffocating slickness that clung to the back of his throat.

Bran opened his eyes in the sight and saw longships.

Dark hulls cut through the chop of the grey tide. Their prows crested the surf, carved into writhing krakens with blind wooden eyes staring down the shore. Bran tried to count them as Maester Luwin had taught him. Left to right. One, then two, then three, then four. Heavy timber ground against the shingle as the ships beached. Men began spilling over the gunwales into the shallows, their boots kicking up sprays of freezing saltwater.

The sea spat forth another wave of longships. Oars tore at the churning surf, driving heavy timber onto the stones. Down on the shingle, the first raiders were already surging up the coastal path toward a miserable cluster of thatched hovels. Peat smoke drifted from a drying house. A fisherwoman froze in the muck. The wicker basket slipped from her hands, spilling a silver cascade of dead herring across the rocks. For a heartbeat, the only sound was the crash of the tide. Then the screaming began.

Bran watched two Ironborn drag a boy from the nearest hut. The boy was kicking and shouting, his bare feet scraping the dirt. He was small, smaller than Bran, and his shirt was torn at the shoulder. The boy slashed at one of them and his knife cut at his captor's sleeve. The ironman cuffed him so hard he fell in the mud. The woman who had been screaming ran after them, grabbing at one of the men's arms with both hands. He shoved her down without looking back. She hit the doorframe with her shoulder and crumpled into the dirt and lay still.

Twelve. Maybe there were twelve. The last ship was still coming in, half-hidden by the spray.

A sudden, violent pressure snapped behind his eyes. The shrieks of the fisherfolk were only part of it because the world itself was tearing. Bran locked his fingers into the deep grooves of the pale wood. The tree felt terrifyingly alive, vibrating with the sudden death of so many souls. The sight threatened to swallow him whole and drag his spirit down into the mud with the reavers.

He ripped himself free. The vision severed with a violence that left him choking on winter air. Bran knelt at the base of the heart tree, his lungs burning as they pulled in the sharp air of Winterfell. He stared up at the bloody canopy, waiting for the screams to fade from his ears, but the weeping face carved into the wood merely watched him gasp.

He could not keep his hands still. He pressed them flush against the pale trunk, squeezing his eyes shut against the crimson leaves above. His lord father always said a man must find his courage when he is afraid, but Bran was not a man. He was a child alone in the snow, desperately trying to unsee the heavy swing of iron and the frantic kicking of a boy dragged into the mud. He pushed against the freezing wood until his knuckles turned white, burying the horror deep in his chest as a true Stark must.

I have to tell Master Luke.

A sudden clarity cut through his panic. Bran reached into his cloak with a hand that still trembled and found the comlink Luke had given him. It was small and flat, the color of dull iron, with a single red light on one end. He pressed the button with shaking fingers and the green light came on. Static filled the air between his palm and his ear, a crackling hiss that sounded like fat in a pan.

"Master Luke! Can you hear me?"

The static swallowed his words. He pressed the button again, harder.

"Master Luke. Please. I need to speak to you!"

A burst of noise, louder than the rest. Then a voice, tinny and small, but clear enough.

"Bran." Master Luke did not ask if this was a child's prank. "I hear you. Are you safe?"

Bran tried to speak calmly, the way his father would, but the horror shattered his voice. "I obeyed your warning. I kept my mind away from the Wall." Bran swallowed hard, gripping the device with both hands as if it could keep him from falling over. "I looked toward the sunset sea. The Stony Shore. They are there, Master Luke. Ironborn raiders. I counted twelve hulls. They are slaughtering the fisherfolk…I watched… I watched them take a boy and strike his mother down. She bled out in the dirt while I was helpless to do anything. Please, tell me what to do."

His voice gave out on the final word. Bran curled tightly around the comlink, resting his chin against the unyielding metal as he fought to pull winter air into his aching lungs. The static crackled.

"Bran." Luke's voice again, slower this time. "Take a breath."

Bran breathed. In for four. Hold for four. Out for four. The shaking in his hands eased. The edge of the comlink dug into the soft skin under his jaw, and he focused on that small pain as Luke had taught him, using it to anchor himself back in his own body instead of the screaming village on the other side of the world.

"Good," Luke said. "Now tell me again. Slower. You went south first?"

"Yes. To Torrhen's Square. I could see the street and the people and they couldn't see me."

"And then you went further west?"

"To the Stony Shore." Bran swallowed. "There are dark longships. Men with axes and mail jumping into the water. They went up to the village and they started attacking."

For a long moment, the device offered nothing but a hollow hiss. Bran held his breath. Beneath the static, he could hear the faint, muffled roar of wind and the distinct creak of heavy riding gear.

Beneath the static, another sound bled through the tiny speaker. It was Robb. The voice was faint, chewed up by the howling wind and the metallic hum of the alien machine, but Bran recognized the rhythm instantly. His brother was muttering in a low, heavy cadence.

"Did the Ironborn forget we have Theon at Winterfell too?"

Bran squeezed his eyes shut. He tried to picture his father's ward, the older boy who always smiled too widely and treated Bran like a younger brother. But the face of the boy who lived in his home blurred horribly against the faces of the men spilling out of the longships. They wore the same boiled leather. They shared the same dark, mocking eyes. A sudden sickness twisted in Bran's stomach. He wondered if Theon would ever shove a mother into the freezing mud, or if the salt sea did that to men only when they finally went home.

A shuffle of heavy wool bled through the speaker before a new voice anchored the chaotic air. It was Jon.

"Bran. Listen to me."

Bran stood straight now.

"Do not tell Theon anything about the Ironborn. Nothing about the ships, nothing about the raids. Can you do that?"

"Yes."

"Good. Tell Lady Catelyn. She will know which lords to send ravens to along the Stony Shore and the western coast. The Tallharts, the Glovers, the Mormonts. She can have warnings out by midday."

He squeezed the little device until his knuckles ached.

"We have almost reached King's Landing," Jon continued. "We will deal with the Ironborn after the city has been taken. Your mother can hold the North together until we are done in the south in a few days."

The leagues between them were a death sentence. Bran did not need a map to know it. By the time riders reached the coast, the longships would be gone and the village would be nothing but ash. It was a brutal, unforgiving certainty. It was not supposed to be this way.

"I understand," Bran said. His voice came out small, the way it did when he was trying to sound older and the words wouldn't cooperate.

"Good. And Bran?"

"Yes?"

"You did exactly what you were supposed to do. But right now I need you to be the Lord of Winterfell. Fear not, we will be with you soon."

"…I will," Bran said.

The comlink clicked. The static died and the green light went dark.

No Theon. That was easy. Bran rarely spoke to Theon anyway. Theon made jokes that had a bigger bite underneath, every day.

Tell your mother. That was the hard one.

His gaze shifted from the alien device to the pale roots of the weirwood, and finally to the snowy path winding back toward the Great Keep. Somewhere behind those thick stone walls, his mother and sisters were waking to a quiet morning, completely blind to the slaughter happening on the western shores. A sudden, nauseating fear gripped him. He had always believed Winterfell was invincible. Now he knew it was just another castle waiting for the longships. He had to reach them before the monsters in his vision came for Sansa and Arya.

Bran halted where the keep's shadow swallowed the morning cold. If he stumbled into the solar with terror still wet on his cheeks, Mother would take the device. He could already see her face, the mask she wore for anything sharp and strange. But Jon's voice from the static still pressed behind his eyes: Be the Lord of Winterfell.

Winterfell was waking up, but the familiar sights of guards and kitchen boys now felt like obstacles to be avoided. He kept his chin high and his pace steady, moving with the cold purpose he had seen in the Jedi. He bypassed the Great Keep entirely, heading straight to where he sensed his mother and sister.

The corridor felt longer than it ever had before. When he finally reached the open door of the solar, the smell of beeswax reached him first. It was a soft, familiar scent that usually meant safety. Today it only reminded him of how much he had to lose.

Bran slowed.

Every puncture of the needle sounded like a small bone snapping in the quiet. Bran heard the rough groan of the silk as it followed the steel. He did not need his eyes to know who sat by the hearth. His mother was the anchor of the room, a weight of duty and love that pressed against the door. Sansa was a softer echo. She felt like a song heard through deep water, a sweet and lonely calling that searched for a hand to hold.

He opened the door but froze as he looked at his family.

Mother sat in her high-backed chair with the morning's sewing in her lap, her auburn hair pinned up, her needle rising and falling in the steady pace. She was entirely focused on her task at hand, not noticing Bran entering. Sansa sat on the bench beside her, her own hands idle in her lap, her blue eyes on the courtyard below the window.

He could have ended the quiet with a single breath. The words were right there, shaped and ready: Mother, there are Ironborn on the Stony Shore. The words would have entered the room and changed it. But his mother looked so tired. She had looked tired since Father rode south. Time seemed to have caught up with her in a single, cruel rush. The lines around her eyes were deep and permanent, like cracks in ancient stone.

Bran did not want to give her one more thing to carry. And he did not want to watch from a window while everyone else went south.

He stood in the doorway and felt the moment pass like a leaf on a river, turning once and then gone.

The shadow in the doorway caught her attention. Catelyn raised her head, and for a second, the grim set of her jaw surrendered to a weary smile. The sharp, watchful light in her eyes faded into something kinder. It was as if she had been holding her breath since dawn and only now remembered how to let it out.

"Bran. What are you looking for so early?"

The lie came out before he had finished choosing it. "I cannot find Arya."

He offered up his sister’s name like a shield. Arya was a ghost in the castle even on the best of days, so the lie required no effort. Catelyn’s face shifted into a familiar mask of exasperation, her thoughts clearly turning toward the stables and the kitchens. That's what Bran wanted to see, his mother dealing with everyday frustrations of a daughter who would not stay put. Not reavers.

"Have you checked the yards?" Catelyn said, her needle pausing. "She must be watching the guards drill even though I keep telling her to stay away."

Sansa’s gaze shifted from the window and locked onto his face. She had always been the one to notice a crooked pin or a forced smile, and now she was looking at him like a riddle she was afraid to solve. Her idle hands went rigid in her lap. She sat so perfectly still that she seemed to be holding her breath, listening to something only she could hear.

Her silence was heavier than any question. He felt her focus like a sudden, freezing draft in a closed room. She was looking straight at the truth he had tucked behind his words. It was a silent, animal recognition. She felt the shift in the room like a wolf sensing a storm long before the first cloud broke the horizon.

"I expect she went toward the kitchens, Mother," Sansa spoke with the effortless grace of a girl who had been raised to keep the peace at any cost. "One of the scullery maids mentioned a tray of honey cakes going missing during the early bake. Arya is likely hiding near the ovens until the fuss dies down."

Catelyn sighed. "That girl. Go find her, Bran. And tell her to come to me to start her sewing."

Bran nodded and turned to leave.

"Bran."

He stopped. His heart was loud in his ears.

"Be careful in the godswood… with your magics. Winter is coming faster than the maesters predicted."

"I will, Mother."

He left.

Sansa had seen through him. He was certain of it. There was no other word for the look she gave him. He did not know when his sister had learned to read the shadows on his face, but she had looked into the hollow space he was trying to hide and chose to pull the curtain shut. By speaking for him, she had made herself his accomplice. It was a mercy he had never expected from her.

He set the riddle of his sister aside like a pebble dropped into a dark well. He did not let the memory of her face distract him from the task at hand. He kept his stride steady and his chin high, moving toward the rookery with a heart that felt as heavy and as silent as iron.

Bran took the stairs of the rookery with a desperate rhythm. The higher he climbed, the louder his heart beat.

Maester Luwin stood silhouetted against the morning light, his head bowed over a great black raven. He did not look up as the door creaked open. His gnarled fingers moved with a practiced, rhythmic grace, tightening a message cylinder around the bird’s leg. The rookery smelled of damp feathers and the bitter tang of ink. Three more birds stirred on their perches, their dark eyes tracking Bran’s shadow as he stepped into the room. Luwin’s chain clinked softly against the stone, the sound of a man bound to his duties even at the edge of the world.

"Bran." Luwin looked up. "You are awake early."

"I need ravens sent." Bran had practiced the words on the stairs. He kept his voice level, as Master Luke did when giving an order that did not invite questions. "To the western coast. The Tallharts at Torrhen's Square, the Glovers at Deepwood Motte, and the Mormonts on Bear Island."

Luwin set the raven back on its perch with careful hands. His chain clinked as he turned, each link a different metal catching the light. "Ravens to three houses on the western coast? Whatever for, my lord?"

The "my lord" was new. Maester Luwin had started using it after the Great Hall emptied and the rest of the Starks were swallowed by the south. Bran felt the urge to look behind him for a grown man, but there was only the cold stone of the rookery. When he finally spoke, his voice was a stony, echoing hollow, forcing the old man to see a lord instead of a student.

"The Ironborn are attacking."

Luwin's hands stilled on the perch. "You have received word?"

"Yes, there are longships on the Stony Shore. Twelve of them. Armed men moving inland." Bran's palms were sweating inside his cloak. "The coastal holds need to fortify. Send riders to rally the smallfolk inland."

"From whom did you receive this intelligence?" Luwin's eyes were sharp behind his spectacles. He had the look he got when a passage in a book said something that did not fit the shape of what came before it.

"From a reliable source." Bran did not blink. "I cannot name them."

Luwin studied him for a long moment. The maester's chain hung between them, tin and copper and iron and lead and silver and gold, each link a subject mastered, each subject a world of its own. The Valyrian steel link was near the bottom, dark and heavy, the one that meant the maester understood things most men did not.

"Your mother should be informed," Luwin said.

"My mother is occupied." The lie was already in place, the same one he would use again in ten minutes when he passed the solar. "The ravens should go now, Maester. Every hour matters."

Luwin's eyebrows rose. He looked at Bran as he might look at a passage that said something unexpected, reading him for context he could not find. Then he nodded, slowly, and turned to the writing desk.

"Very well, my lord. I will have them away within the hour."

Bran watched Luwin unroll a sheet of parchment and dip his quill. The ink was black and the maester's hand was steady, and the words formed on the page in careful strokes that would fly on raven's wings to the western coast. The warning would reach the Tallharts and the Glovers and the Mormonts. It would be days before anyone could act on it, as Jon had said, but the words would be there, carried by birds that knew the way home.

He left the rookery while Luwin was still writing. The old man called something after him about breaking his fast, but Bran was already on the stairs, taking them one at a time on the way down because his legs were shaking and he did not trust them to hold if he went faster.

He came out of the tower stair into the lower bailey and walked straight into Theon.

"Easy, little lord." Theon caught his shoulder. "Where are you running off to?"

For one heartbeat Bran saw the raider's face under Theon's. The same dark hair. The same easy eyes. His stomach turned over and he was certain Theon could see the Stony Shore looking out of him.

"The kitchens," Bran said. The lie came easier now. "I missed breakfast."

Theon laughed, the laugh that always had a bite under it. "It seems all that magic training has made you forget you're still a growing boy. You should get there before Arya makes the leftovers disappear."

Bran’s throat felt like the floor of the crypts, choked with the dry grit of ages. He cleared it with a short, rough rasp before he could find his voice.

"I should head there right now then," he said, and maneuvered his way past Theon before the older boy could find another hook to hang a question on.

He walked toward the kitchens until he was certain Theon was gone, then turned for the Great Keep.

The detention cells were in the lower level of the Great Keep, past the warming cellars, where the walls were thick enough to muffle a scream. Two guards stood at the door, Stark men in grey wool, their hands resting on their sword hilts. They straightened when they saw Bran.

"I want to speak with the prisoner." The request was quiet, yet it cut through the morning air with the edge of a honed blade. Bran did not waver or look for permission. He spoke with a flat, unshakeable certainty that left no room for a servant's argument. He kept his gaze fixed and his breathing slow, wearing his new authority like a suit of plate armor that he was finally strong enough to carry.

The guards exchanged a look. The older one, a man named Porther who had served at Winterfell since before Bran was born, frowned.

"Your lady mother said no one was to see her without—"

"I am a Stark of Winterfell," Bran said. The words came out firmer than he expected. "And the current Lord Of Winterfell while my father and brothers are away. I am speaking with the prisoner. You may wait at the end of the corridor."

Porther's frown deepened, but he stepped aside. The younger guard looked like he wanted to say something, but Porther shook his head once, and they both moved to the far end of the corridor, their boots scraping on the stone.

The latch was cold under Bran's hand as he lifted it and pushed the door open.

The cell was larger than a true dungeon with a narrow window high on the wall that let in a shaft of grey light. Mara Jade sat on the edge of the cot with her back to the door, her red-gold hair hanging loose past her shoulders. It had grown since Bran had last seen her, or maybe she had stopped tying it back.

She spun with the fluid grace of a cat. Her green eyes were wide and unblinking, boring into him with a terrifying, quiet focus. Bran felt a heavy, suffocating attention settle over his shoulders. He felt stripped bare in the doorway, knowing she saw the fear he was hiding.

"Ah," Mara said. Her voice had the sharp, practiced grit of a whetstone. "The Jedi sends his apprentice. Should I be flattered or concerned?"

"I need your ship," Bran said.

A single eyebrow twitched upward, the only crack in her smooth face. She looked Bran over with the coiled silence of a shadowcat, judging how quickly he could turn to run and whether there was enough meat on his bones to justify the effort of the chase. Bran felt his skin go tight, certain she was counting every weakness he was trying to hide.

"My ship. You, who threw me to a wall, want my ship."

"You were sneaking around my home. And you killed a man. But yes, I need your ship. The one in the clearing outside the walls."

"And why," Mara said, leaning back against the wall, "would I give my ship to a child who cannot reach the controls without a step stool?"

Bran had rehearsed this on the stairs, building the words before he spoke them so they would come out convincing. But, standing in the cell with Mara's green eyes on him, the rehearsed words scattered like sparrows from a rooftop.

"I saw something," he said. "Through the force. The Ironborn have begun attacking the Stony Shore." He swallowed. "I need you and your ship to help repel them."

"Define," she said. "Stony Shore. Ironborn. Why this concerns me."

"The Stony Shore is on the western coast. Days…weeks from here." Bran swallowed. "The Ironborn are reavers. They live on islands and they raid the coast in longships and they take what they want." His voice caught. "I saw families being—"

He did not finish. The vision was too close to the surface, and before he could lock it down he felt it leave him: the salt smell, the cold of the longships' shadow, a woman shrieking after she hit a doorframe with her shoulder, the small panicked shape of a boy lifted off the ground. It left him before he could hold it back, like a sob that escapes before the decision to make it.

Mara's head snapped back a fraction. Something had struck her in the face that was not there.

Her eyes had changed.

"You can see…" Mara said. It was not a question. "I have read at the archives about—no, that doesn't matter now. Why does this concern me?"

"I can grant you your freedom," Bran said as he straightened. The morning had stripped something from him on the way down through the castle, and he found what was underneath.

"I am the acting Lord of Winterfell," he said. "When my father and brothers are in the south, the keep is mine. I can have you freed. Your ship, your weapons, your road. If you help me get to the Stony Shore and back, you will be free."

Every line in her face locked into place at once. She did not blink or breathe. She looked at him with the frozen intensity of a statue in the crypts. The mockery was gone. In its place was a terrifying, vacant focus that made the hair on Bran’s arms stand up.

"And what makes you think," she said carefully, "that I will keep my word? I take you up in that ship and the first thing I do is fly anywhere but the Stony Shore."

"I threw you into a wall once," Bran said. "If you do not keep your end of the deal, I will just do it again."

He had no idea if he could yet as he spoke, he reached for the granite and iron of his father’s justice. The words did not sound like they came from a boy. They fell between them with the heavy finality of an executioner’s axe.

The cell was very quiet.

Bran could not read the rapid flicker of her green eyes, but he felt the shift in the room as she gathered the jagged pieces of her reality. She was locked in a primitive cage, miles from her ship, staring at a boy who had more power than he had the right to. The fierce gaze suddenly flickered and went entirely cold.

"If we go," Mara said, "I need answers to two questions. First. If your father's men are on the wrong side of a fight I am in, do you stop me from finishing it?"

"They will not be. My father is in the south."

"Answer the question."

Bran swallowed. "If they are in the wrong, I will not stop you."

"Second." Her green eyes held his. "When we reach the shore, and there are children on the other side of the longships — Ironborn boys your age, holding axes — will you stop me from firing my weapon?"

A cold sickness crept up his throat. Until this moment, the raiders had just been a word, a distant threat spoken of by the master-at-arms. Now he saw faces beneath the iron helms that looked just like Theon, men who probably laughed at the same jests and practiced in the same yards before they sailed. But he also saw the dead boy and mother staring blindly at the sky.

"No," he said.

"Why?"

"I always wanted to be a knight," Bran said.

The words spilled out of him before his mind could catch them. It was a hunger he had tried to starve, yet here it was, loud and foolish in the quiet cell. The heat in his face felt like a brand. He had wanted to stand tall and silent, but he had let the truth out like a frightened bird.

"Now I wish to be a Jedi. A Jedi would go protect the weak and so I must go," he finished.

Mara reappraised him.

The exasperation was there, plain on her face. Bran knew that look well. It was the face Ser Rodrik made when a green boy swung a wooden sword too wildly. But beneath the sharp annoyance, there was something else. Through the strange connection humming between them, Bran felt a sudden echo of old shame. He saw a flash of a younger girl in those green eyes. She knew exactly what his red face felt like, and she remembered the exact, brutal cost of the lessons that had taught her to swallow it down.

"You," she said slowly, "are going to be a problem the Empire would have built a school to study. And I once worked under a man who Force-choked admirals for bringing him the wrong tea."

She dismissed him with a turn of her shoulder and knelt by the rotting wood of the cot. She dragged a pair of heavy, scuffed boots and a jacket of some sort from beneath it. The boots she pulled on without looking.

"If we are doing this," Mara said, her voice muffled as she pulled the jacket on, "we are doing it my way. You sit where I tell you. You touch nothing I have not shown you. And if I tell you to duck, you duck. Is that clear?"

"Yes," Bran said.

"And if your Master finds out and comes to strike me down, I am telling him it was your idea."

"It was my idea."

"I know." She did not turn around. "That is what makes it so annoying. My weapons, where are they?"

"In a chest three doors down."

"And the key."

"The chest does not need a key for me."

Mara turned to face him for the first time since she had begun pulling on the jacket. "Does it not."

"Master Luke says there is no real difference between the steel and the air." Bran lifted his chin, trying very hard to sound like a teacher instead of a boy. "He says the hardness is only a rule that men believe in, and the Force does not have to obey it."

"Of course he does."

"There is also another problem," Bran said. "The guards at the end of the corridor."

Mara closed her eyes for a single breath. "Lord Stark."

"Yes."

"You came down here to offer me my freedom. And you did not have a plan for the men in the corridor."

"…No."

She let out a single sound that was not quite a laugh. "What can you actually do."

"I can put them to sleep."

Mara crossed her arms. "…Of course you can."

Bran drew in a breath of damp dungeon air and held it in his chest, sinking into the quiet focus Master Luke demanded. Down the corridor, the two guards were more than just muffled voices. He could feel the dull, tired rhythm of their heartbeats through the stone. He reached out to them, ignoring the urge to strike. Instead, he wrapped their thoughts in a heavy, comfortable fog, feeding them the sudden and overwhelming desire to close their eyes and let the warmth of their cloaks take over.

The talking stopped.

He heard the soft slide of two bodies down a wall, the dull thump of two sets of mail meeting stone, and then nothing.

Bran opened his eyes. His hand was shaking against the wood of the door, but the corridor was quiet.

"Done," he said.

Mara stared at him from the shadows of the cell. Her arrogance had settled back over her features like a layer of frost, but the air between them felt completely different. She was no longer looking at him as a clumsy boy to be mocked. Instead, she watched him as Lord Bolton watched his father at the high table. She knew exactly how dangerous he was now, and she was choosing to keep her next move locked tightly in the dark.

"Let's go." Mara crossed to the door and pushed it open. The corridor stretched out in front of them, two slumped Stark men at the far end. "Before I change my mind."

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Summer rose from the frost-killed bracken as Bran approached the heart tree and fell in at his heel without a sound. They left through the godswood. A gap in the wall behind the heart tree's roots led to a tunnel that ran under the outer wall and came out in the wolfswood beyond the castle's footprint.

Mara followed in total silence. Her footsteps were light and predatory, lacking the heavy clatter of Winterfell guards. She asked no questions about the dark path, simply shadowing him with her eyes sweeping the corners. It was a strange relief. For the first time an adult was watching his back without treating him like glass.

They emerged into a thicket of sentinel pines. The biting morning wind hit Bran like a splash of water, washing away his lingering dread.

Then Mara stopped.

Her hand came up, palm out, the gesture of someone feeling a change in the air. Her green eyes narrowed, scanning the tree line. Bran felt it too, a warmth in the clearing that had no source, a presence Bran knew without naming, like a voice known before the speaker is placed.

"Someone is here," Mara whispered. Her voice dropped to a barely audible rasp, taking on the tone of a huntsman who has just spotted fresh wolf tracks in the snow.

Bran knew who it was before he saw her.

Sansa stepped out from behind a pale birch. Lady moved out of the trees beside her, grey against grey, golden eyes fixed on Mara. She was a jarring sight in the rugged woods. She wore her soft indoor slippers, now ruined with thick mud, and her grey wool dress clung damply to her freezing ankles. Her auburn hair was a tangled, unbrushed nest. She looked exactly like a girl who had woken in the dark and bolted into the trees without a single thought for where she was stepping.

"I am coming," Sansa said.

Bran stared at her. "How did you know where I was?"

"I felt you." Sansa spoke in a fragile whisper, yet the words carried a strange, heavy weight. "I felt you lying to Mother, and then I felt you moving away from the castle, and the feeling was wrong. Panicked. Like you were running toward something instead of away from it."

The words stripped away the last of Bran's lordly composure. He swallowed hard, entirely unsure of what to say. He knew his sister carried the same spark he did, but he never imagined she could simply reach through the dark and grab hold of his panic. She had hunted his secret across the entire castle without needing to see a single footprint.

"Sansa, you cannot come with us," Bran said, because that was what he was supposed to say. "Please, just head back."

"And tell Mother what?" Sansa said, her blue eyes narrowed. "That I saw my younger brother running off with a prisoner not of this world? No, I am coming with you. Someone needs to keep an eye on you and you can tell me the why on the way."

Mara watched them from the shadow of the pines. She looked from Bran to the shivering girl in the mud, her green eyes sharp and intensely focused.

"Is there anyone else in your family who might appear from behind a tree?" Mara asked.

"Not unless Rickon has learned to follow feelings," Bran said.

"That is not a no."

Sansa stepped past them, her thin boots leaving deep tracks in the freezing mud. Bran watched her march toward the silver ship, a hard knot forming in his throat. She had stripped away all his lies back at the castle, yet here she was, walking blindly into the wild just because he was here. It was a terrifying kind of trust.

The ship was smaller than the Millennium Falcon, and darker. Its hull was the color of old iron, angular and sharp-edged, with no windows that Bran could see. It sat in the clearing like a beetle that had landed and decided to stay, its landing struts sunk into the soft earth, its hull beaded with morning dew.

Mara pressed her palm to a panel beside what looked like a seam in the hull. The seam hissed and parted, revealing a ramp that lowered itself with a groan. Red light spilled from the interior, dim and warm, the color of embers.

"Inside," Mara said. "Quickly."

Bran stepped onto the ramp. The strange steel hummed beneath his boots, a deep, restless vibration that felt like the purr of a massive, sleeping hound. The belly of the ship was suffocatingly tight. Everywhere he looked, tiny jewel-bright fires blinked against the dark walls. He saw a pair of rigid seats hung with heavy leather harnesses.

They sat behind a high main chair that faced a massive window, where glowing, alien runes shifted and crawled across the glass like living things. The straps fell across his chest and he fumbled with the clasp until Sansa, who already figured out the mechanism, reached over and clicked it shut for him.

Mara dropped into the main chair and her hands moved across the panels with a speed that made Bran's eyes hurt. Lights came on. The red deepened. A sound rose from somewhere beneath them, a low vibration that was more felt than heard, like thunder in the chest before the ears catch it.

"The repulsor coils are iced over, but the primary ion drives are green," Mara muttered, her fingers flying across a sequence of illuminated toggles. "It will get us out of the atmosphere."

A sudden, musical trill broke the low hum of the cabin. Bran did not know what the strange noise meant, but he understood the immediate, terrifying result. Mara’s fingers froze dead on the glowing panels.

A second chime. Then a third, faster, urgent.

He could only see the rigid line of her shoulders from his seat but he felt the exact moment she understood what the glowing runes on her console meant. A hollow, rushing terror spiked through the Force.

"What is it?" Bran asked.

"No outside channel should have been able to reach me," Mara said. "A system pulse just went out."

"What does that mean?"

Mara did not answer immediately. She pressed a sequence of buttons and the chime stopped, replaced by a low tone that pulsed like a heartbeat. On the panel, a symbol Bran did not recognize was blinking red.

"It means—" Mara began but stopped.

Bran saw the rigid line of her neck twist as she looked back over her shoulder, staring past him into the dark belly of the ship. She did not say a word, but he heard the soft, deliberate creak of leather. Her right hand slid down to the heavy blaster at her hip. It was the smooth, terrifyingly slow motion of a warrior preparing to kill something hiding in the shadows.

Bran turned to search for what she was looking at only to find a new figure sitting on the floor at the back of the cabin. Nymeria lay pressed against her side, head on her paws, golden eyes catching the red cabin light.

Bran's breath stopped.

"Arya," he said.

"Hello, Bran." Her voice was flat and even, the voice she used when she was pleased with herself and trying not to show it. "Took you long enough."