cp7

Chapter 7

Jon had been gone for over a month, and much had occurred. Builders and smiths and commonfolk from all the North over had piled into the surrounding area's of Winterfell, ready to do as needed in order to stave off the cold that winter made to bring. Trenches were starting to form, group training sessions were beginning to take shape into something notable, and fletchers and smiths and leatherworkers readied arrows and arms and armors for the battles to come.

Perhaps the greatest contribution to labor that had occurred happened when the smiths banded together to create a great axe twice as tall as Brienne herself was. It was a massive thing, wrought onto the thick naked branch of an Ironwood tree, bound by steel pikes so that the wood would not break or weaken with stress.

Wun Wun loved his new weapon. He loved to swing it, loved to just lift it, and was more than glad to use it to fell the heavy trees of the Wolfswood. From the wood he brought were stakes formed into pikes and fences to line the trenches being dug, and slowly but surely, we looked as if we were readying for the great war to come.

In the wake of all of this, there was surprisingly little needed of me, the king. Sansa was taking care of the day-to-day, competent in her craft as she was. The other lords of the North too were doing their own things; near and far as they were. Wyman Manderly had returned to White Harbor awaiting instruction from Jon on Dragonstone, Cley Cerwyn had returned to his own lands to make talks with the mountain clans nearby for more fighting men, and others too had left to grab what they could from their homes. The remaining lords were the ones taking charge over the trainings and the workers all around.

My exercises with Brienne were lessening during this time, though they were not finished by any notion. She was noted by both Sansa and I as being a fierce warrior, and none were better suited to beginning the training of the women of the North, we felt. Podric Payne was surprisingly well suited to teaching the children how to fight, and had earned… appreciation, from various single mothers and widowed wives.

And me? What was I doing? Well…

I was training in a different way.

"You must be one with the beast, boy." Old Gerjuni said, her voice raspy with age. "You are not separate, you are not you and it is not it. You must be one and the same."

"But how?" I asked, wincing. "How do I do this?"

"Words do not exist that can answer your question. You simply must do it."

Gerjuni was a woman of the free folk, an elder that was well loved and well respected. Her words were wise and often to be heeded among the young and old alike, for none were her elder and few more vigorous. Were she not nearing her eightieth year and were she not frail in body, I had no doubt that she would have run for the Wall along with her fighting kin to guard the realms of men.

But she was here, and that suited me well.

We were sat in my solar, alone save for Ghost and a single white raven, the same bird borne of Old Town that told tale that winter had finally come. They were not albino, but instead a separate species of raven entirely, larger and smarter and near as large as a hawk. Normally, a maester would send a return letter back to the Citadel using that same raven that told tale of the coming of winter with words of understanding and acknowledgement. Alas, Winterfell had gone through a battle and was cleaning up when the raven had appeared. Maester Wolkan was not the one to receive word first, busy as he was with the injured and the restructuring of the castle. I was.

And I ordered the raven to be caged and kept in Winterfell, never to be returned to the Citadel.

Why?

Because I didn't have Shaggy any longer. I missed that wolf, missed him dearly, and I looked longingly back at our last moments together. I felt the headsmans axe cut through his neck as if a phantom had done it to mine own, and from the dreams past where I would run the hills of the North and scream against the confines of my cage in the Last Hearth. Rickon did not understand, not really. But I did.

Rickon was a warg.

I was a warg.

And I wanted to learn how to use that power. I wanted to be able to change skins on command. I wanted to use this raven to scout the North, colored the same as the falling snow. And Gerjuni was the last wildling left in Winterfell that could help me with that.

Gerjuni was a warg herself. She shared the skin of a squirrel, a chubby creature that was keen on running all around the upper ramparts of Winterfell. Gerjuni had wandered the clans and offered wisdom to all that would hear it, wargs included. She knew how to teach them their craft.

She knew how to teach me.

I stared the bird down, and it back at me. I focused all that I could into it, all that I was, whatever possible. I could feel my face go red with exertion, trying and trying and trying, but nothing came. I breathed out and closed my eyes, another failure of an attempt.

"You're a damn sight little king," Gerjuni cackled, slapping her knee.

"What am I doing wrong?!" I asked, rounding on her.

"You're trying, that's what you're doing wrong. You're thinking that you can just force it, that you can just become the bird and that's that. But you're wrong, boy. Wrong as all could be. Gods, but what do southerners even teach their skinchangers?"

"Nothing," I told her, to her surprise. "As far as I know, there hasn't been a warg south of the Wall in generations. Nobody knows how to teach it. Magic became rarer and rarer after the Wall was built, until only fragments remained."

"But you say you travelled with a greenseer, aye? How'd he not teach you?"

"Bran was more focused on himself than anything," I grumbled. "Him and Jojen, who had greendreams."

She mulled that through, then nodded shortly. "Fine, seems I'll need explain it to you proper."

"That would be grand," I drawled.

An unimpressed look was shot my way. I mimed putting my hands over my mouth, and she nodded shortly as she began to speak. "The essence of being a skinchanger is to hate, little king."

"…Hate?" I asked, uneasily.

Gerjuni grunted in affirmation. "Hate of the world, hate of the damn animal you're taking over, hate of anyone that would step over what's yours. But stronger than all, hate of yourself."

"But I don't hate myself." I protested.

"You said you had wolf dreams when your beast was alive, aye?"

"I did…"

She snorted. "Then you hate yourself well enough." I made to speak against that, but she silenced me with a quick glare. "Don'tbother arguing, don't put no pretense over me. I don't care what you think of yourself. All wargs hate themselves in some way. It's almost needed."

"But why?" How could hate be the deciding factor in a warg?

"Because a man's got no reason to slip into another skin if he's comfortable in his own," Gerjuni stated, eyeing the window outside. Her squirrel was sat on the ledge, chittering brightly towards us.

I shut my eyes and thought. If that was true then… then that meant my understanding of this magic was vastly incorrect. Bran had been devastated beyond belief to no longer be able to walk, to no longer climb or have the chance to squire or even father children. It hit him hard, and he turned sullen quickly. I had thought that Bran was always a warg, that he'd always been able to don the skins of others, that his fall only awakened the ability, trapped in a coma as he was. That it was in his blood.

But if Gerjuni's words were to be believed, then that wasn't the case... It wasn't blood, it was hatred. Hatred that pooled in his gut, hatred of what he had become, hatred of what he had lost. Those that are born downtrodden can get mad at tragedy and hate, but they will always expect it. Highborn children such as Bran losing the one thing he loved above all others… Hatred indeed.

How much hate did it take for a warg to become a greenseer?

Rickon had a bit of hatred himself. He hated his family for leaving him, hated Theon for taking Winterfell, he'd even hated Bran and Jojen and Meera for making him leave, especially when that brought him to the Umbers who took him prisoner. He hated them too.

But even though I was Rickon, even though we were one and the same, his hatreds were not my hatreds. Had he survived and become king, had I not been there at all, Rickon would have seen Ned Umber executed, friend or not. Such was his hatred of the Umbers. He would have happily let Last Hearth be torn down, damn anybody else. I couldn't let that happen.

Sometimes his thoughts overpower me, the memories of the child overtaking the mind of the man. When Sansa hugged me, my eyes would wet at times, just as Rickon did as a child. When I entered Maester Wolkan's study, melancholy for his predecessor, Maester Luwin, would fill my stomach. But the hatreds of the past were not easily drug up. They were even harder to wield.

Could I summon up the right amount of hate to do this?

"Can you give me an example?" I asked Gerjuni. "Your own first skinchange maybe?"

Gerjuni's throat rumbled in warning. "Don't ask that. My past is mine, my first slip of the skin only for me to know."

I bowed my head, not fully understanding but not willing to make an issue. "I'm sorry."

She snorted. "Don't apologize. Now you know and you'll not ask again. I'll tell you one different though. One of my sons. He was an ugly man, he had a squat face and a pinched nose and some great big ears, and he was small besides. None of the women of our clan would take him, and I taught well of him not to fall to rape. He hated himself fierce, and the dreams followed."

I blinked. "What happened then?"

She sighed. "The dreams did their thing and he ended up taking the skin of a rabbit. Another thing to know, you take traits of the skin you don; plant eaters make the man skittish, meat eaters make the man aggressive, birds make the man unwieldy, fish make the man dull. And should you stay in the skin for too long, it becomes harder to leave it. My son turned strange because of that rabbit. In the end, he was hunted by a hawk while still in the skin. When the rabbit died, he went lame."

"I'm sorry to hear that."

Gerjudi scoffed. "No you're not. You're sorry you heard it. Bah, it's done. For the betterment of the clan we used him as bait, and from the bear that set upon him, we too hunted. That meat helped us survive winter, and so my son was celebrated."

I mulled that story over, and readied another inquiry when the solar door was opened without warning. A woman in ratty furs entered the room, her long black hair a riot of curls, her long face expressive and those black eyes were wide. She smiled a bright thing my way, breathy and excited, and she lunged at me with a hug. I encircled my hands around her instinctively and knew who this was.

Meera Reed had come. She was here.

Bran was here.

Just the thought alone brought forth a stream of memories that I could not control, and before I really understood what was happening, I was looking at the scene of Meera hugging a tall child from behind a cage. I blinked and looked down, speculatively looking towards my feathers, ruffling them.