Chapter Text
"What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness.
— John Steinbeck
ARYA
The godswood was always coldest before dawn.
Arya had learned that in the weeks since the Long Night ended– there was not much time to notice such things earlier when she had initially returned to Winterfell. They had been occupied, then, with fighting the dead. The cold came down from the north in those hours; it crept past the high granite walls of Winterfell to settle into the bones of the ancient trees. It seeped into the black water of the geothermal pool, it chilled the steam, and frosted the pale, weeping face of the heart tree until everything in the grove wore the cold like a second skin.
It was not the cold of the dead, she thought to herself. That cold smelled of rot and shattered ice. But this was only winter. This was only the North.
She moved through the shadows of the courtyard, her footsteps making no sound against the hard-packed snow. To her left, near the armory, the steady, rhythmic clang-clang-clang of the blacksmith's hammers was already ringing out. They were forging steel for a southern war. She knew that was all everyone had to talk about now… they had spent a few days mourning the dead, and then the Queen had wanted to focus on the Iron Throne again. It was almost as if she were impatient. To her right, Dothraki warriors were huddled around the roaring bonfires in the lower bailey. They sat wrapped in stolen sheepskins and stoen blankets. They murmured to one another in the harsh guttural tongue that she had been to dislike… she knew some Braavosi from her time in Essos, but that was all. All the same, they looked almost diminished here, stripped of their usual vigour by the biting wind. huddled around roaring bonfires in the lower bailey, the Dothraki warriors sat wrapped in stolen sheepskins and stolen blankets. They murmured to one another in their harsh, guttural tongue, staring into the flames as if trying to remember the blistering heat of the grass sea. They looked diminished here, stripped of their terrifying speed and swagger by the biting wind.
The Unsullied were different. They stood at attention near the Hunter's Gate, and their spears were perfectly vertical and their faces frozen like obsidian. Frost gathered on their bronze helmets but they did not shiver. Arya watched them from the cover of a shadowed archway.They moved the way she had been taught to move, but she did not trust them. They belonged to the Dragon Queen, and the Dragon Queen was a stranger who demanded the North bow its head.
Arya slipped past a pair of Cerwyn guardsmen who were passing a flask of sour ale back and forth. They were entirely oblivious to the girl walking less than three feet behind them.
She had spent her entire childhood running through these courtyards, of course. She used to chase cats, swing wooden swords with the butcher's boy, and hide from Septa Mordane. It was her home. But the Winterfell she had returned to was not the Winterfell she had left. The stone walls were the same, but it was overstuffed, paranoid, and bleeding.
She left the noise of the armies behind and slipped beneath the heavy iron portcullis that guarded the entrance to the godswood. The transition was immediate, or perhaps the effect was just in her mind. She knew that Sansa preferred the Faith of the Seven to their father’s house. As for her, she was not entirely sure anymore. The noise outside vanished, swallowed instantly by the ancient, looming presence of the trees.
Arya found him exactly where she always found him ever since she had returned to Winterfell.
Her brother sat before the massive weirwood with his hands resting open in his lap. The heavy furs draped over his ruined legs were thick with frost, but he did not shiver. His eyes were open, and were fixed on nothing she could see. To anyone else, he looked like a statue left out in the snow, as if he were just anotherpiece of carved stone abandoned in the godswood.
He did not look up when she approached, though she knew he heard her. Her footfalls were lighter than falling leaves, but Bran heard everything now. Or seemed to. It was one of the many things she had stopped being certain about.
"You're not sleeping again," she said.
"I don't sleep the way you do."
She crouched beside his chair so they were level and she didn't have to look down at him. She'd started doing that without thinking about it over the past few weeks.
"Rickon was shouting last night," she said quietly. "Could you hear it from here?"
Bran finally shifted his gaze. He seemed to look through her rather than at her. "Yes."
"He's having the dreams again." Arya studied him closely. His eyes were as calm and placid as still water. Almost as if they are dead, she thought, suppressing a shiver that had nothing to do with the wind. "He wakes up screaming about wolves and green fire. Half the eastern wing heard him. He wants you to teach him, Bran. You know that."
"I know."
"And you keep saying you can't."
"I can't."
Arya was quiet for a long moment. She had spent a long time being angry at Bran for that answer... or not angry, exactly, but something much harder to name. Frustration, perhaps. Or grief.
She had watched Rickon go red-faced and tight-jawed, slamming his fists onto the high table before storming out of the Great Hall twice now. It had happened three nights ago, during the evening meal. The Great Hall had been suffocatingly warm, the air thick with the smell of roasted mutton, spilled ale, and the sweat of a hundred Northern lords and squires.
Rickon had been seated at the high table, tearing at a haunch of meat with his bare hands, his chin slick with grease. He ate the way Shaggydog ate. Lord Ned Umber, a boy not much older than Rickon himself, had stood up to propose a toast to the new Lord of Winterfell. But in his cups, the Umber boy had stumbled over his words, and mistakenly calling Jon the "true King" before immediately correcting himself to praise Rickon.
The insult had been entirely accidental, of course. Most people would have let it pass. But to a boy who had been hunted through the snow by hounds and flayed men, there were no accidents.
Rickon had gone entirely still. He dropped the meat. His hands curled into fists so tight his knuckles went white. He hadn't shouted. He hadn't offered a polite, lordly reprimand the way their late father would have done. He had simply stared at Ned Umber with eyes so wild and full of violence that the entire hall had fallen deathly quiet.
It was Alys Karstark who had moved. She had leaned over, her long dark hair brushing Rickon's shoulder, and placed a delicate hand over his white-knuckled fist. She had whispered something in his ear that no one else could hear. Even Arya, who was seated three seats down,hadn't been able to hear the words, but she had seen the result. Rickon had shoved his chair back, his face flushed a dark, angry red, and then stormed out of the hall without a single word of dismissal to his bannermen.
Alys had remained seated. She had offered the lords a serene, apologetic smile. But Arya had seen the glint in the girl's eyes. Alys wasn't embarrassed.
She thinks she can tame him, Arya had thought, watching Alys sip her wine. He was the Lord of Winterfell now, but he wore the title like a wolf wearing a collar. She could not deny, however, that he was an exceptional swordsman. The wolfs blood, she supposed.
She had heard those lords whispering about Bran in the courtyards and the armories. Bran being difficult. Bran being distant. The broken boy. Bran, who could not walk, who could not swing a sword, who could not give any woman he took as his wife strong children. He was useless to them. And now, he would not even give his brother this one thing.
She closed her eyes for a moment, and turned to him with a slightly resigned expression.
"You look ill," she said. Now that the words were out, she found it easier to speak. "For weeks now. I've been watching."She kept her voice completely even. Don't let them see you looking . "Not all the time," she continued. "Just sometimes. When you think no one's watching. You grip the arms of your chair. Your breathing goes shallow. Like something hurts." She almost reached for his hand, but she decided against it at the last moment.
"Bran." She said his name deliberately. Not 'the Three-Eyed Raven', the way some of the lords and servants were starting to call him. To be fair, Arya had no idea what that title exactly meant, either, except that he 'sees' things. Some of the Ironborn had whispered about him warging into flocks of ravens while facing the Night King, and certainly, she knew exactly what he had done to Littlefinger in the Great Hall. But other than that, the name was meaningless to her. He was her brother.
"Bran," she repeated, leaning in an inch closer. "What is it?"
"The memories are vast," Bran said quietly. His breath plumed white in the freezing air. The only sign that he was truly alive, she thought with vague amusement. "All of them at once, sometimes. It is difficult to hold the shape of things."
She turned that thought over in her mind. To hold the shape of things.
She thought about the House of Black and White. She thought about the scent of stagnant water and death, and the moment Jaqen H'ghar had looked at her, and she had looked back, and there had been no Arya Stark behind her eyes for a moment and that terrified her now.. There was no daughter of Winterfell, no girl who had watched her father lose his head. There was only No One, a hollow vessel, a servant of the Many-Faced God who simply wore her face. She remembered the terrifying, suffocating weight of having her identity dissolved. Like salt poured into the sea.
To hold the shape of things.
She still remembered the exact smell of the poison pool in the center of the House of Black and White. It smelled faintly of bitter almonds and old, sweet dust. She remembered thevastness of the Hall of Faces, the massive stone pillars stretching up into the impenetrable dark, lined with thousands upon thousands of cured, leathery skins.
She had fought her way out of that darkness.
But Bran had not fought his way out… or at least that’s what she told herself was the reason. Nothing else seemed right to her. He had surrendered to the abyss. The Three-Eyed Raven was a tide that had swept over him, drowning the boy who loved Old Nan's scary stories, and left only this bottomless ocean in his place.
Jon was here, of course, sleeping beneath the same roof as her for the first time in years, but he felt further away than when he had been at the Wall. Her cousin… no, my brother, she reminded herself. But she had been thinking of that fact more than often ay any rate. He was consumed by the silver-haired Queen. Arya had watched Daenerys Targaryen closely since the woman had ridden through the gates. The Queen was beautiful, yes, in a harsh, unearthly sort of way. Ethereal, if she preferred to admit it to herself, and she didn’t. But Arya had spent too long studying the faces of killers not to recognize one. Daenerys Targaryen looked at the North not as a kingdom of people, but as a piece of property that had been stolen from her family.
Jon was blind to it. Or worse, he wasn't blind to it, but he was too honorable to do anything about it. He had bent the knee to save them from the dead, and now the dead were gone, but the heavy iron chains of the Dragon Queen remained.
If Jon was lost to the Targaryen girl, and Rickon was lost to his own feral rage and Alys Karstark's whispers, and Sansa was lost in her grain ledgers... that left only Bran.
Arya pushed the heavy wooden chair over the packed snow of the courtyard. She looked down at the top of her brother's head, at the auburn hair dusting his collar. Sansa’s hair. She felt as if she was the only person who understood, but Bran didn’t even look like. Rickon had the same look, of course, but Sansa was comparatively closer to him in age than Rickon Stark was.
She breathed out slowly through her nose. "You're not going to ask me for help," Arya said."You're not going to ask anyone for anything. That's not–"
She stopped. A sudden, violent part of her wanted to lunge at him. She wanted to grab him by the collar of his furs and shake him until he looked at her with anything other than his usual, maddening placidness. It was like talking to a frozen river. She knew, with absolute certainty, that if she drew Needle right now and held the Valyrian steel to his throat, he would just stare at her blankly.
Could he even feel pain the way others could? she wondered. If I cut him, would he bleed, or would sap run out of his veins? The thought almost made her laugh bitterly.
"That's not how you are anymore," she finished softly.
"No."
"I'm not asking your permission," she said, shifting her weight slightly on the moss-covered roots of the weirwood. "I'm telling you. I'm going to help you."
The ghost of something crossed his face then. On anyone else she might have called it amusement.
"There is no need, Arya."
"There is." Her voice came out harder, sharper than she intended.
She thought of Robb, bleeding out at the Twins. Of her mother, her throat cut to the bone. Of the long, bloody list of names she had muttered like a prayer, which she carried south and east and across the narrow sea. The list she had fed herself on when there was no bread. And then she thought of Bran at seven years old, laughing at the top of a stone tower, looking out at the sprawling North like the entire world had been built just for him to climb, and suddenly felt tears well up in her eyes.
"There is need," Arya said, her jaw set. "You just can't see it."
"What would you do?" Bran asked. "If you could."
"I don't know yet." She sat down fully on the cold ground beside his chair, her back coming to rest against the smooth, bone-white bark of the weirwood roots. She hadn't planned to stay. She had a dozen places to be, but she stayed anyway. "Talk to you, maybe. Just... talk. The way we used to."
"We didn't talk much when we were children," Bran stated. "Except–" His voice trailed off for a moment.
"Except what?" she said.
For a second, it seemed as if he were going to tell her something, but then he relapsed into his usual silence, his eyes drifting back to the red sap weeping from the carved face above them.
"Do you remember the crypts?" Arya asked, refusing to let the silence win. "You used to go down there. With Rickon, sometimes, before–" She caught herself. Before the fall. Before the Ironborn. Before the world ended. "Before."
"I remember," Bran said flatly.
"You'd come back smelling like cold stone and old dust," she said, a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. "Rickon would be white as milk, trembling like a leaf in the wind, and neither of you would say what you'd seen down there in the dark with the dead Kings of Winter. I used to think you were just trying to frighten him."
"Sometimes I was."
Arya turned her head to look at him. "So you do remember," she said quietly. "Being him."
He didn't answer immediately. "It is there," Bran said at last. "All of it. It is simply... very small. Against everything else."
She thought about the salt in the water again. She thought about standing in the cavernous, echoing Hall of Faces in the dark, surrounded by the flayed skins of a thousand strangers, and saying her own name out loud like a password. She remembered the terrifying, sickening moment where she had not been entirely sure whether it would work. Whether anyone named Arya Stark would answer.
"I don't think Alys liked you refusing to teach her husband," Arya continued. Perhaps it was best to change the subject. “She thinks you are hoarding your sight. That you don't care about your brother having his..."
Green dreams was the phrase, she believed. That's what Samwell Tarly had called them when they poured over the old tomes in the library. Bran didn't explain much. But Arya had seen the way Alys Karstark looked at her new husband. Alys was a Northern lady to her bones, calculating and proud. She had married a wild, feral boy-lord, and she wanted him to be a King of Winter in truth. A greenseer husband was a powerful weapon. A brother-in-law who refused to help was a political obstacle.
She watched his face carefully again, and then Arya sighed and dropped the topic. If Alys Karstark tried to move against Bran, Arya would simply slip a dagger between the woman's ribs in the dark. It was a simple enough solution.
She sat with him in the biting cold for a while longer. The red eyes of the heart tree watched them both, weeping sap like thick blood, while the black pool remained as still as held breath beside them.
She was not sure how long they sat there. I twas long enough that the black sky above the canopy began to pale at its eastern edges, and the darkness began to thin toward a bruised grey. The godswood was always coldest before dawn. She remembered how her mother used to laugh about how their castle had been built in the wrong place, seeing as they all minded the cold so much.
But looking at Bran, she couldn't tell if he even felt the temperature drop. The heavy furs piled around his ruined legs seemed practically useless to her. He wasapparently sustained by something else entirely. When was the last time she had seen him want something? Food, warmth, a smile, a cup of wine? He existed merely to observe.
When she finally stood, her knees popping slightly from the cold damp of the ground, she didn't say anything else about helping him. She looked questioningly at the wooden handles of his chair. Bran gave a slow, barely perceptible nod. Arya stepped behind him, gripped the handles, and wheeled him away from the weeping tree.
As they broke the tree line and the sprawling, waking noise of Winterfell hit them--the distant shouts of Unsullied drills, the whinnying of Dothraki horses, the clatter of the forges preparing for a war in the south--a single, broad weirwood leaf drifted down from the canopy onto her cheek. Her hand brushed across it.
The wheels of Bran’s chair crunched loudly against the hard-packed snow as they crossed the lower bailey again. Arya didn't mind the strain. The burn in her calves and shoulders kept her warm.
As they approached the heavy oak doors of the Great Keep, two guards in the grey-and-white of House Stark snapped to attention. One was a grizzled veteran missing half his left ear; he was a survivor of the Red Wedding who had managed to crawl back north. The other was a boy of perhaps six-and-ten, his beard coming in patchy and blond.
"My lady," the veteran said, bowing his head respectfully to Arya. But when his eyes shifted to the boy in the chair, he stiffened. "My lord."
Bran did not look at him. He was looking at the iron hinges of the door, his gaze vacant again.
Arya watched the young guard. The boy was shivering, but not from the cold. He was looking at Bran the way the smallfolk of Braavos looked at the doors of the House of Black and White--with a deep, superstitious dread. He gripped his spear so tightly his knuckles were white.
They are afraid of him, Arya realized, her grip tightening on the chair’s handles. They followed Jon because he fought with a sword. They follow Rickon because he is a warrior. But Bran...
"Open the doors, Bennard," the veteran muttered, elbowing the younger guard.
The boy scrambled to obey, putting his shoulder into the heavy oak and shoving it inward. A blast of warm, smoky air spilled out from the corridor, carrying the scent of roasting porridge and wet wool.
"Shall I fetch Maester Wolkan, my lady?" the veteran asked, keeping his eyes firmly fixed on Arya's chin. "To assist his lordship to his chambers?"
"I have him," Arya said, her voice sharp. "Go back to your watch."
"As you command."
She wheeled Bran past them, feeling the collective sigh of relief from the guards the moment they were out of the cold. The corridors of the Great Keep were dimly lit, and the torches sputtered in the drafts. It took her several long minutes to navigate the chair down the sloped passages that had been hastily built over the stone stairs for him.
When they finally reached his chambers, the room was stiflingly hot. Two massive braziers were burning, filling the air with the smell of charcoal. Maester Wolkan had insisted Bran be kept warm, fearing the chill would rot his unmoving legs.
Arya wheeled him to the center of the room and stepped back. "Do you need the Maester?" she asked.
"No," Bran said. He was already looking toward the frosted window. "He is busy drafting letters for Sansa. Lies about our grain stores."
Arya didn't ask how he knew that. She had learned it was better not to ask. "I'll come back tonight," she promised.
Bran gave no indication that he heard her. He was already gone, his mind flying somewhere high above the snows, leaving only his breathing shell behind. Arya closed the heavy door quietly.
The corridor outside Bran’s chambers was empty, but Arya had not taken ten steps before she heard the rustle of heavy skirts.
She melted back into the shadows of an alcove instinctively, a habit she could not break. A moment later, Alys Karstark turned the corner.
The new Lady of Winterfell wore a gown of thick, dark grey wool, bordered in the white fur of a snow fox. Pinned at her breast was the snarling direwolf of House Stark, wrought in silver. She looked every inch the proud Northern lady, her dark hair braided back tight against her scalp. Her hands resting delicately over her stomach. She was flanked by two Karstark guardsmen, their sunburst cloaks a stark contrast against the drab stone.
Arya stepped out of the shadows.
The two guardsmen flinched, their hands dropping to their sword hilts, but Alys simply paused. A polite, practiced smile spread across the older girl's face.
"Arya," Alys said smoothly. "You are up early. Or perhaps you never went to sleep?"
"I was with Bran," Arya said.
Alys’s smile didn't falter, but it didn't reach her eyes, either. "Ah. The Godswood. You spend a great deal of time with him. It is... kind of you. Such a heavy burden he bears."
"He is my brother. Not a burden."
"Of course," Alys agreed seamlessly. She stepped closer, waving her guards back a few paces. "I only meant that it is a tragedy. For a boy of his noble blood to be so broken. Rickon aches for him, you know. It pains my lord husband deeply to see his elder brother sitting useless in a chair while the North prepares for war."
Arya’s grey eyes locked onto Alys’s face. Liar, she thought. Rickon doesn't ache for him. Rickon is furious that Bran won't give him what he wants. And you are furious because a living older brother, even a crippled one, threatens your husband's claim.
"Bran isn't useless," Arya said, her voice dropping to a dangerous tone. "He sees more than anyone in this castle. He sees things before they happen. He sees the truth behind the lies people tell." She took a single step forward, invading Alys's space. "He sees what happens in the shadows, Lady Alys. You would do well to remember that."
Alys Karstark held her ground, but Arya saw the subtle tightening of the muscles in the woman's neck. "Is that a threat, good-sister?"
"A fact," Arya said simply. "Rickon is wild. The winter has made him a wolf. But a wolf doesn't need a handler to point him at his prey. He just needs his pack. Don't try to put a collar on him, Alys. He'll just bite your hand off."
For a moment, the polite mask slipped. Alys’s eyes flashed with a cold, fierce ambition. "I am his wife. I am the Lady of Winterfell. It is my duty to guide him, and to protect the future of this House." Her hand dropped subtly to rest over her stomach again. "The Starks need strong sons, Arya. Not broken seers."
"The Starks need to survive," Arya countered. "And we won't survive if we turn on each other."
She didn't wait for Alys to respond. She slipped past the Lady of Winterfell and her guards, leaving Alys standing in the drafty corridor.
Arya altered her path, taking the winding servant stairs down toward the kitchens. As she descended, she noticed that the freezing drafts were replaced by the suffocating heat of hearths and boiling cauldrons. The air was thick with the scent of baking bread, roasting oats, and the sharp, metallic tang of butchered blood.
Three servant women were kneading dough near the massive ovens, their forearms white with flour. They were talking in low, hurried voices.
"...saying Lord Glover is near ready to pack up his tents and march home," a plump woman with a flour-streaked nose whispered, casting a nervous glance toward the doors. "The dead are dealt with. The men don't want to march south for a Dragon Queen who looks at us like we're dirt beneath her boots."
"It's Lord Rickon who should be leading us, not Lord Snow," a younger girl muttered, furiously working a lump of dough. "But the boy is half-mad, isn't he? Snarls at the high table. Lady Alys has to whisper in his ear just to keep him from biting his own bannermen."
"The whole family came back wrong," an older woman hissed, slapping the younger one on the wrist. "The wolf boy is feral. Lord Snow looks like a ghost who lost his soul. And the crippled one..." She shuddered, making the sign of the Seven over her breast, though she was miles from any sept. "The crippled one is the worst of them all."
"I brought him his supper three nights ago," the plump woman whispered. She leaned in. "He didn't even look at me. Just stared out the window. His eyes were completely white. Like milk. I swear to you, he wasn't in that room. He's not a boy anymore. He's a demon wearing a Stark face."
"And the little sister," the young girl added. "I saw her in the yard yesterday. She moves like a wraith. No sound at all. They say she fed a man his own sons down in the Riverlands."
Arya listened from the shadows, her hand resting lightly on the hilt of her dagger.
A demon wearing a Stark face. They didn't understand Bran.
She belonged to the dark, and so did he.
"I am standing right here," Arya said softly.
The three women shrieked. The young girl dropped her dough onto the ash-covered floor. They spun around, their faces draining of color as they stared at the small, dark-haired girl leaning against the pillar.
Arya pushed off the stone and walked toward them. She stopped in front of the terrified women, her grey eyes flat and unreadable. She reached out and took a loaf of bread from the cooling rack,
"My brother is not a demon," Arya said. Her voice was barely a whisper.. "He is a wolf among sheep. If I ever hear you speak of him again, I will take your faces and wear them myself."
She took a bite of the bread and walked out the back door into the predawn gloom, leaving the terrified servants trembling in the heat.
She heard the rhythmic ringing of steel before she saw the forge. The armory was a glowing orange beacon in the grey morning. Arya approached the open archway, expecting to find Gendry stripped to the waist.
But it wasn't Gendry standing by the anvil. It was Jon.
He was fully dressed in his dark leathers and heavy wool cloak. He stood by the sharpening wheel, He was holding a plain castle-forged longsword in his gloved hands, but h wasn't sharpening it. He was just holding it, staring into the roaring fires of the forge. He looked exhausted, as if he were crushed by some invisible weight. The dark circles under his eyes were bruised and heavy, and he looked entirely removed from the castle around him.
There was a time, not so long ago, when seeing Jon looking so miserable would have broken Arya’s heart. Jon had been her favorite. Her pack. The only one who had ever understood her when they were children.
But looking at him now, bathed in the orange light of the forge, she felt a strange, cold distance. Jon was tied to the Dragon Queen. He was tied to honor, to titles, to the politics of the living. He was a man of the surface world.
"You're going to ruin the edge if you hold it like that," she said as she stepped into the immense heat of the forge.
Jon blinked. He looked down at the sword, then up at her. A weak, exhausted smile touched his lips. "Arya. I didn't hear you."
"Nobody hears me," she said, hopping up to sit on a heavy oak workbench. "You look terrible, Jon."
"The North is restless," Jon said softly, resting the tip of the sword on the stone floor. He looked back into the fire. "The dead are gone, but the living are harder to manage. The lords don't want to march south. Daenerys is losing her patience. He stopped, swallowing hard.
Arya studied his face. He is so perfectly ordinary, she thought, and the realization surprised her. Jon was noble, and tragic, and burdened, but his pain was so painfully human.
"Where is Bran?" Jon asked quietly, his eyes still on the flames. "I saw you walk into the godswood earlier whilst he was there."
"In his chambers," Arya said.
Jon sighed. "I went to see him yesterday. To ask his counsel. He just looked at me. He didn't offer a word of comfort or advice. He is completely lost to us, Arya. The magic took whatever was left of our brother."
The words scraped against Arya’s nerves like a rusted blade. A fierce, sudden wave of jealousy and protectiveness flared up her spine.
He is not lost, she thought, her teeth grinding together. You just don't know how to look at him.
She pictured Bran sitting in the Godswood, his dark, ancient eyes staring into the black pool. She remembered the way he had looked at her when she promised to help him. The way he had been about to say something and had then stopped himself. It had been meant for her, even if he had not intended it so. Not for Jon. Not for Sansa. Not for Rickon. Only for her.
A strange, twisted warmth bloomed low in her belly. She didn't want anyone else to touch it. She didn't want anyone else to try and fix him. She wanted to be the only one standing on the shore.
"He's not lost," Arya said aloud. She slipped off the workbench, landing silently on the stone floor. "He just doesn't belong to your world anymore, Jon."
Jon finally looked away from the fire; he frowned slightly in confusion at her tone. "Arya... what do you mean?"
"Good luck with your Queen," she said softly, ignoring his question.
She turned and walked out of the forge, leaving the heat and the ringing steel behind. The cold air of the courtyard hit her face, but she didn't feel it. She was thinking of the way Bran's hands had looked, resting open in his lap, and the way the red sap had wept from the tree above him.
She stopped suddenly, her heart pounding, as she watched a wolf turn around a corner. "Summer?" she said instinctively, before she caught herself. Of course not. It was just Ghost. She smiled at it before looking in the direction of the castle again. Summer's dead, Arya thought to herself bitterly as she continued on her way. His wolf is dead and I am worried he is too.