A Game of Thrones 4-Book Bundle

all?”
    â€œI guess.”
    â€œWarg,”
said Jojen Reed.
    Bran looked at him, his eyes wide. “What?”
    â€œWarg. Shapechanger. Beastling. That is what they will call you, if they
should ever hear of your wolf dreams.”
    The names made him afraid again. “
Who
will call me?”
    â€œYour own folk. In fear. Some will hate you if they know what you are. Some
will even try to kill you.”
    Old Nan told scary stories of beastlings and shapechangers sometimes. In the
stories they were always evil. “I’m not like that,” Bran said. “I’m
not.
It’s only dreams.”
    â€œThe wolf dreams are no true dreams. You have your eye closed tight
whenever you’re awake, but as you drift off it flutters open and your soul
seeks out its other half. The power is strong in you.”
    â€œI don’t want it. I want to be a
knight.
”
    â€œA knight is what you want. A warg is what you are. You can’t change that,
Bran, you can’t deny it or push it away. You are the winged wolf, but you will
never fly.” Jojen got up and walked to the window. “Unless you
open your
eye.
” He put two fingers together and poked Bran in the forehead,
hard.
    When he raised his hand to the spot, Bran felt only the smooth unbroken skin.
There was no eye, not even a closed one. “How can I open it if it’s not
there?”
    â€œYou will never find the eye with your fingers, Bran. You must search with
your heart.” Jojen studied Bran’s face with those strange green eyes. “Or are
you afraid?”
    â€œMaester Luwin says there’s nothing in dreams that a man
need fear.”
    â€œThere is,” said Jojen.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œThe past. The future. The truth.”
    They left him more muddled than ever. When he was alone, Bran tried to open his
third eye, but he didn’t know how. No matter how he wrinkled his forehead and
poked at it, he couldn’t see any different than he’d done before. In the days
that followed, he tried to warn others about what Jojen had seen, but

it didn’t go as he wanted. Mikken thought it was funny. “The sea, is it?
Happens I always wanted to see the sea. Never got where I could go to it,
though. So now it’s coming to me, is it? The gods are good, to take such
trouble for a poor smith.”
    â€œThe gods will take me when they see fit,” Septon Chayle said quietly,
“though I scarcely think it likely that I’ll drown, Bran. I grew up on the
banks of the White Knife, you know. I’m quite the strong swimmer.”
    Alebelly was the only one who paid the warning any heed. He went to talk to
Jojen himself, and afterward stopped bathing and refused to go near the well.
Finally he stank so bad that six of the other guards threw him into a tub of
scalding water and scrubbed him raw while he screamed that they were going to
drown him like the frogboy had said. Thereafter he scowled whenever he saw Bran
or Jojen about the castle, and muttered under his breath.
    It was a few days after Alebelly’s bath that Ser Rodrik returned to Winterfell
with his prisoner, a fleshy young man with fat moist lips and long hair
who smelled like a privy, even worse than Alebelly had. “Reek, he’s called,”
Hayhead said when Bran asked who it was. “I never heard his true name. He
served the Bastard of Bolton and helped him murder Lady Hornwood, they
say.”
    The Bastard himself was dead, Bran learned that evening over supper. Ser
Rodrik’s men had caught him on Hornwood land doing something horrible (Bran
wasn’t quite sure what, but it seemed to be something you did without your
clothes) and shot him down with

arrows as he tried to ride away. They came too late for poor Lady Hornwood,
though. After their wedding, the Bastard had locked her in a tower and
neglected to feed her. Bran had heard men saying that when Ser Rodrik had
smashed down the door he found her with her mouth all bloody and her fingers
chewed off.
    â€œThe monster has tied us a thorny knot,” the old knight told Maester Luwin.
“Like it or no, Lady Hornwood was his wife. He made her say the vows before
both septon and heart tree, and bedded her that very night before witnesses.
She signed a will naming him as heir and fixed her seal to it.”
    â€œVows made at sword point are not valid,” the maester argued.
    â€œRoose