It was as wide across as a man's hand, and taller even than Robb.

Lord Eddard Stark dismounted and his ward Theon Greyjoy brought forth the sword. They forced his head down onto the hard black wood. Finally his lord father gave a command, and two of his guardsmen dragged the ragged man to the ironwood stump in the center of the square. There were questions asked and answers given there in the chill of morning, but afterward Bran could not recall much of what had been said. He had taken off Father's face, Bran thought, and donned the face of Lord Stark of Winterfell. He had a grim cast to his grey eyes this day, and he 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. His closely trimmed beard was shot with white, making him look older than his thirty-five years.

Over their heads flapped the banner of the Starks of Winterfell: a grey direwolf racing across an ice-white field.īran's father sat solemnly on his horse, long brown hair stirring in the wind. A faint wind blew through the holdfast gate. Robb and Jon sat tall and still on their horses, with Bran between them on his pony, trying to seem older than seven, trying to pretend that he'd seen all this before. The breath of man and horse mingled, steaming, in the cold morning air as his lord father had the man cut down from the wall and dragged before them. He had lost both ears and a finger to frostbite, and he dressed all in black, the same as a brother of the Night's Watch, except that his furs were ragged and greasy. And their women lay with the Others in the Long Night to sire terrible half-human children.īut the man they found bound hand and foot to the holdfast wall awaiting the king's justice was old and scrawny, not much taller than Robb. They consorted with giants and ghouls, stole girl children in the dead of night, and drank blood from polished horns. The wildlings were cruel men, she said, slavers and slayers and thieves. He remembered the hearth tales Old Nan told them. It made Bran's skin prickle to think of it. Robb thought he was a wildling, his sword sworn to Mance Rayder, the King-beyond-the-Wall. The man had been taken outside a small holdfast in the hills. It was the ninth year of summer, and the seventh of Bran's life. This was the first time he had been deemed old enough to go with his lord father and his brothers to see the king's justice done. They set forth at daybreak to see a man beheaded, twenty in all, and Bran rode among them, nervous with excitement. The morning had dawned clear and cold, with a crispness that hinted at the end of summer.

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