The first Howland Reed heard of Flann of the Green Fork had been when the watchers of the southern First Men ruins in The Neck sent word they'd found a young girl of Targaryen features wandering the deadly place on her own. The incident had been very odd, and not just because a child had appeared in an area where even his best hunters only ever ventured in groups. It had happened a few short years after the siege of Dragonstone and the final ousting of the last Targaryen survivors from the continent... or so most people thought. Howland Reed knew better, and while the girl could have been a dragonseed, the weight of the secrets he bore made him suspicious of such a coincidence.
So he sent a group to investigate the old ruin in the black bog, a party of a dozen men. Nine returned with word about a rotting derelict half-sunk in the swamp, of their three missing fellows disappearing into the mists, of them being chased by the screams of vengeful spirits as soon as night fell. Unlike the followers of the Seven in the South, crannogmen knew when to leave well enough alone. The girl had been adopted by a retiring watcher, the warnings against venturing into the black bog had been redoubled and Howland had turned his attention to other matters - such as Balon Greyjoy's mad ambitions. Nothing had come of those events for years.
Then the second message came. The now twelve-year-old girl had started venturing into the black bog on her own and was having Green dreams. The majority of Howland's hunters did not know what those were, not truly, and yet the woman raising the girl had given him a very accurate description of one - a description he'd taken from the girl herself. The retired watcher had also decided to train the girl on her own initiative. An oddity of a situation was turning problematic; prophetic abilities always did as Howland knew quite well. He decided to deal with it in person as soon as he found some time away from more immediate duties... but he never did.
His son fell sick with greywater fever, that rare but deadly sickness that had plagued Reed lands since the Andal invasion. Few survived it, fewer still who were Jojen's age. The healers he brought, wise in the ways of the swamp, could only alleviate the symptoms. His own talents had never leaned towards healing, something he'd lamented since the Tower of Joy. Then, not a week after his son's sickness begun, word of the new healer reached them; the silver-haired, purple-eyed girl who could banish injury and sickness as if they'd never been with just the blood of live animals.
He'd gathered a war party and set out from Greywater Watch immediately, both his children in tow. A dozen men, four of them trained in the secret ways of the Neck, seven of them the better hunters and trappers in his employ, both forewarned of what they might be facing. Howland Reed had stopped believing in coincidences twelve years before; if a new mad witch was responsible for his son's condition he'd end the girl himself. But just in case it was the far rarer positive confluence and the girl had been sent his way to help, he'd also brought live sacrifices as the rumours claimed she wanted.
The actual meeting was the oddest Howland had ever had with another gifted individual. Not the girl walking up to them covered in blood and wearing torn leathers - that was even nostalgic of his time in the Isle of Faces - but how direct and grounded she'd sounded. Flann of the Green Fork did not talk like a witch or a prophet; she even explained what she was doing, something no gifted individual ever had. Even Howland who'd never been more than an apprentice kept his thoughts to himself and his tongue still unless necessary; some habits were hard to break. Was the girl gifted at all?
Then she'd scorched the ground with her bare hands, set blood alight in unnatural fire with a gesture. Sorcery, blatant and undeniable. It was all Howland could do not to jump into the burning circle to stand by Jojen's side, a resolve sorely tested when his son started screaming. Half his men were raising weapons to strike down the witch and he with them when the first bleeding cut appeared on the girl's skin. Then another and another and another, dozens of bleeding scrapes and gouges as she joined his son in screaming.
Howland's spear dropped from his hands as an unseen fist hammered into his head. He felt the magic in his bones, as if a circle of green men were calling the storm before him. Four of his men, the ones with the gift and some training, also recoiled though their reactions were more subdued. He forced himself to speak, telling everyone to stand down. If they interrupted a spell that powerful... he didn't know what would happen. He'd only studied in the Isle for a winter and such things were the work of a lifetime.
Jojen stopped screaming. The girl's scrapes stopped bleeding and started smoking. The purple flames in the circle dwindled, then guttered, the ominous presence he could feel from them ebbing away. Howland could wait no longer; he vaulted over the circle and reached for his son. His boy was unconscious but his skin was warm and flushed with health, though he remained as thin as a starved urchin. He did not have the shakes, he was not breathing shallowly, he was not moaning every so often. Howland tried to pull him into an embrace, but the girl's hands still held his head down. He made to pull them away but they wouldn't budge, as rigid and unmoving as old roots and twice as stubborn. Then the ebbing magic traveled up his arm and hammered into his brain.
Mud. Stone. Roots. Bones. A man older than anyone he'd ever seen, half-sunk into a root as thick as a tree trunk, screaming as he bled from both eyes and the center of his forehead. Then the image shattered, replaced by a roaring inferno. Two eyes, lidless, glowing with purple fire, surrounded by milky skin, with an ever brighter purple star between them. The second image lasted a single moment yet also forever, that glowing gaze burning itself indelibly in Howland Reed's memory. He felt as if his skull had been split, his memories and thoughts bared to that searching glare.
Then his hand finally left the girl's and the image vanished.
xxxx
"Wake up Flann!" someone shouted in my ear, ending a very pleasant dream of bathing in molten rock with two other people and two sets of stones. The people's features shifted and blurred except for their crowns, one white-gold, the other iron black. The stones were three and seven and happily danced through the lava, but all other details slipped through my fingers as the dream faded.
I woke up with a pounding headache and hunger gnawing at my guts. That last bit surprised me. When was the last time I'd gone even a little hungry? I did not remember, and the insistent poking at my cheek stopped further attempts to remember. A one armed fumble proved it wasn't an annoying winged furball doing the poking as I'd half-expected, but a person. A suspiciously small person.
"Yay!" someone shouted way too loudly. "Look, Jos! Look! I woke up Flann! Even Auntie couldn't but I did it!"
"Kellen, is that you?" I groaned and tried to blink odd afterimages from my eyes. Ruins, a sunken boat, and a very young me stomping on a lizard-lion's tail? That did not make sense.
"Yep!" the too-loud voice admitted. "Now get up! You been sleeping for ages and ages!"
"Jos?" I asked.
"I'm here," the other boy said in a thankfully more normal tone.
"Kick your brother for me, will you?"
"Flann, no!" the aforementioned miscreant cried as if I'd deeply maligned him.
"Flann, yes!" I said. "Get him, Jos." Sounds of struggle followed and despite both the hunger and the magical hangover they brought a smile to my lips. Opening my eyes, I found myself in the swamp. Trying to get up had me almost faceplanting into mud because instead of a bedroll I'd been sleeping in a hammock. I never used hammocks for precisely that reason, so someone else must have put one up for me. Seeing Aunt Keera presiding over the Twins messily wrestling on the ground it wasn't hard to guess who.
"How are you feeling?" she asked when she saw me getting up.
"Hungry. Also, kinda bloated." My guts groaned in protest loudly enough to hear. "How long was I out?"
"Three days."
"Shit." No wonder she looked worried. "I hate rapist bastards."
"...WHAT?!"
"Not so loud!" I hissed, wincing at another spike of pain into my brain.
"Explain! Now!" Keera looked even more pissed now. A quick review of what exactly I'd said made me wince again. Poor choice of words, Flann.
"Bastard mage from beyond The Wall wanted to hollow out Jojen's mind, make the kid a puppet, or worse." I tried to reach for my magic to fix myself but my Pyromancy spell guttered and died. Gods, I felt even more spent than I had after the basilisk. "Then he saw me when I tried to heal the kid and decided to have me instead. Stronger magic, you see."
"...Flann, the Wall is fifteen hundred miles from here," the older huntress said with an air of incredulity.
"Really? I thought it was only a thousand." She glared at me. Why do people glare at poor Flann? I shook my head, more to clear away the cobwebs than anything else. "Anyway, it doesn't matter. Brynden Rivers is many things but incompetent is not one of them. I had prepared the ground, raised the magic equivalent of a wall, was ready for an attack and he still nearly took over my body to wear like a coat." I wasn't sure how close the fight had been actually, and since I had no idea where that power boost had come from I felt like preparing for the worst interpretation was a good idea.
"You're talking about Bloodraven...rumours and old wives' tales," Keera muttered. "Plus he's been dead since I was a little girl. Maybe you should sit down and rest some more."
"He disappeared beyond the Wall but did not die," I told her tiredly. She would believe me or she wouldn't. I was too worn to make my case then and there. "And he was using one of the greatest works of magic in Westeros to boost his powers."
"Oooh! Magic!" Kellen interrupted by ramming my size and giving me a hug. "Tell us! Tell us more!"
"Are you a witch now?" Jos asked. "Can you show us?" he begged even as Aunt Keera shook her head in negation from behind their backs.
"Now, kids, Flann has to talk to Lord Reed," she said as she collared the two boys who were now protesting vehemently. They really wanted to see some magic.
"He's still here?" If I'd been out for three days.... Keera must have correctly interpreted my confusion because she explained.
"He really wanted to talk to you," she told me, then sighed. "Wouldn't tell me why."
"Well, we can't keep Lord Reed waiting," I said.
"Nooo!!!" the Twins shouted as one and tried to escape their jailor's grip; a futile endeavor if I ever saw one.
"But first..." I drew on my magic but it guttered before the spell could form properly and I swayed. Keera gave me a worried look but I wouldn't allow a bit of exhaustion to tell me what I could and couldn't do. I pressed through the momentary weakness, took hold of a bit of power and forced it into the proper shape. Then I was holding a torch-sized purple flame in the palm of my hand.
"Oooooh!" both boys looked on in awe. Their astonished yet happy expression was what I imagined my face would have shown if someone had shown me the same spell back on Earth.
And it was worth every bit of further strain and effort.
xxxx
"...and that's pretty much what happened," I finished telling the whole story to a fiercely scowling Crannogman lord. And while it was a story, the details of the strange dream-city nowhere in it, the information it did give was the truth. "As far as I could tell of the bastard's intentions anyway."
"Is my son still at risk?" was his first question, as every father's should be. Unfortunately, it wasn't one I could answer for certain.
"I cannot predict future attacks, from Brynden or any other mage," I admitted. "What I am more sure of is that they'd need an opening. There was more than one reason the bastard went for a boy of seven and not someone older. Teach your boy to mistrust mental visitors, train him in discipline and what magic he does have and Brynden would go for some easier target."
"Could you protect him?" Could I? Another difficult question. I'd felt the rough weight behind Bloodraven's mental attacks. They'd been daunting but not insurmountable. But to make a defense he could not bypass for sure, not even when my attention was elsewhere, one that would last?
"Yes," I said, deciding on the truth. "But at a terrible cost neither of us would pay."
"I'd pay a lot for my son," he countered.
"Would you pay the lives of men? Ten? A hundred? A thousand?" I saw his expression curdle like week-old milk and nodded. "Training and discipline and a minder. Brynden has bigger problems than putting effort to take a child he knows won't be of use to him."
"Very well," he nodded back and he even sounded... relieved that I hadn't taken him up on his offer of payment? What was that about? "You healed my son, as I asked. You risked your life for him. What would you have of House Reed?"
"Three things," I replied without even having to think about it. I had been planning this bit for some time. "Ten golden dragons," or about double the price of a good horse or a knight's armor, "the lizard-lions in Moat Caillin's, well, moat," the use of which should be obvious "and a message to the Warden of the North that winter and war and darkness are coming in six years."
"Is the last a prophecy?" he asked seriously, with none of the doubts anyone else might have shown a thirteen-year-old girl.
"Yes. You will know the time has come by the death of Jon Arryn and the coming of the Red Comet." Those were not a sign they'd miss.
Howland Reed stared at me. I stared back at him. We both stared at each other in silence for a good five minutes.
"I see now why my teachers were vague," he muttered. "You're leaving the Neck, yes?"
"Yes. Too many things to do."
And so little time...
The bowstring snapped through the air and slapped against my bracer, hard. Sixty feet away, the arrow struck the bog pig in the head, the bodkin point drilling through its thick skull and into its brain, killing it instantly. A small jolt of invigorating energy flowed through me at the kill as our boat moved up to the bank. An annoying owl hooted overhead but I ignored it, leaping off the two-man canoe and up to my kill. With no need to confirm its death, I lifted the hog by the legs and carried it to the boat. We'd be eating well tonight and for the rest of the week.
"You're getting better," Keera noted as we started rowing again. Despite the extra weight the canoe still slid silently across the bog like water across glass and we made better time than we would have on foot. The further we went from the area known as the black bog we passed thickets of trees half-drowned in various species of fungi, dozens of flowers and reeds that seemed almost tropical despite the cooler climate, and countless parasitic plants of all types. I was quite surprised by how green everything was; compared to where we'd lived for years this area was impossibly overgrown, almost choking in vegetation. "In fact, I'd say you're improving very quickly," my adopted Aunt continued. "Another year or two and you'd be as good as any crannogman twice your age, I'd say."
"And yet I still can't hit a log at a hundred yards," I grumbled, pulling at the rows hard enough that the boat's prow dipped dangerously low in the water. That made me stop, silently count to ten twice, then continue rowing at a more normal pace.
"Most archers start training as children and continue for life. You have been training for less than one," the older woman told me in an exasperated tone. "The same is true for Southron boys at tiltyards, if they want to be proper warriors. You shouldn't be leaving so soon. You aren't ready."
"Time waits for neither gods nor men, Auntie. Events are already moving towards their appointed end," I explained, adjusting my rowing to put the boat into a slow turn. We picked the smaller of three paths, a narrowing waterway that seemed to disappear into batches of reeds. Without Aunt Keera's knowledge of the area or the occasional bird's eye view courtesy of an annoying owl I would never have known of how that passage widened after a mile while the larger ones ended up in an enormous mire a couple miles later, one with a shallow layer of water over enough quicksand to swallow a much larger boat than ours. "Six years is all we have to derail it."
"...de-rail?" she asked curiously after another minute of silence. Of course. Railways were not a thing in this world.
"Change the course of events," I explained. "There are a lot of bad things coming up that I want to stop." Or at least ensure certain people could not take advantage of while I benefited.
"You're having those dreams again, aren't you?" The owl hooted and we stopped before the boat could pass under an archway of tangled tree branches. A spear throw dealt with the ten-foot-long snake waiting to drop on anyone passing under it and a minute later I'd retrieved the weapon and we were continuing on with another jolt of energy that made the constant rowing so much easier.
"The dreams come and go," I finally admitted when we stopped for the evening half an hour later. My muscles had settled into a pleasant burn, made even better by the knowledge we'd made excellent time for yet another day. Five miles a day was a struggle for most people in the swamps, even with boats. Experienced crannogmen often did three times as much and we'd done twice that in turn, for the fourth day in a row. Soon enough, we'd arrive at our destination.
"Do they always show you events to come?" Keera asked as we hung the boar from a tree branch overhead and got down to the usual business of making camp.
"Ha, no," I told her with a shake of my head. With a bit of mental effort I forced the somewhat damp wood in the firepit to catch fire anyway; no need to waste time searching for dry branches or tinder. "I can't even remember them most of the time. I just know they're odd because of the colors." Green lights, purple flames, a giant black disc in the sky with a red ring around. You know, the usual.
"Is that why you're so frustrated in the mornings?" she asked while she set up the first hammock. I left that to her while I started working on the pig; I'd never gotten the hang of anything but bedrolls. "How do you interpret them if you can't remember?"
"That's the problem; I don't!" I shot back and blood gushed out of the pig's severed throat, making a mess. Too much power on the bleeding spell; at least the meat had been drained quickly even if my boots would need a wash. My frustration wasn't with how I couldn't remember the dreams though; it was about having them in the first place.
Turns out that beating Bloodraven in the dream-world had marked another milestone. Instead of ending up with more power to feed the flames with though, the well had been drained completely dry and two of the flames had already benefited. The first flame I didn't mind getting stronger as its theme of "Nobility" was the best way I had to get all-around better, but the white eighth flame? Not only had I lost half the milestone to Divination of all things, but now I had to deal with jumbled, incomprehensible visions coming at random during my sleep. At least training with my adopted Aunt and months upon months of hunting meant the seventh flame of Subterfuge had also grown through those efforts.
"Maybe..." the older woman hesitated uncharacteristically before pushing on. "Maybe you should wait until you can read those visions of yours better? Better future knowledge can only help in what you're trying to do, right?"
"I can't, Auntie," I told the worried older huntress. A hard pull forced my knife through the pig's guts, the bronze no longer as sharp as it had once been. "Staying might seem safer now but when the great war starts we might all die if we aren't ready. My magic is mostly fire and blood; it wasn't meant for the swamps. It needs its proper environment to grow until the people who'd kill me for being a witch can no longer do so, let alone those who'd kill all of us for just being alive." And however full of life the Neck was, animal kills had started to give diminishing returns.
You'd know best, I suppose," the older woman said reluctantly. Overhead, an annoying owl hooted loudly.
"Nobody asked for your opinion, Featherball!" I shouted back at the winged menace.
In response, the damn owl dropped a dead snake on my head.
xxxx
We hit the Causeway three days later. The stretch of the kingsroad in the North and the only dry passage through the Neck that groups of any size could use was a raised log-and-plank road, crooked and rotting. East of the road was a bleak and barren shore and the cold salt sea of the Bite, while to the west were the swamps and bogs of the Neck, impassible and deadly. The air was damp and clammy and I'd bet anything the so-called road hadn't seen maintenance for decades, snaking crookedly through increasingly darkening bog.
The previously verdant vegetation gave way to peat and rot and unnaturally large expanses of quicksand that always shifted yet never dried, steadily fed by streams of brine from the sea and at least two sizable rivers. The further we went up towards the Saltspear and the Fever river at the narrowest point of the Neck, the worst the area became. Even with the dismal excuse of a road an army wouldn't be able to camp properly; even a smaller war party of a couple of hundred would be forced to camp on the rotting planks of the causeway every night for the two weeks a normal crossing took. It was as if everything here had been designed to impede the passage of armies as much as possible which, of course, it had been.
While otherwise useless, the jumpstart of my Divination abilities showed me the truth of history in this place. Even after millennia, the barest traces of ancient magic were still there; I could hear them in the water with every stream we crossed. I could feel them in the earth with every piece of black basalt that had once been part of ancient buildings. I could smell them in the air as the northern chill mixed with the humidity of the nearby sea to make the heavy mists that cut off our visibility. Faint, barely perceptible lines of power converging dozens of miles to the North, so much weaker than even Keera's dim spark of life-force but still present and different enough from the background flora and fauna to be noted as artificial.
We discarded most of the pig's remains and only kept half dozen pounds of salted and campfire-seared meat each. The boat we pulled behind us with a rope for those parts of the causeway that had enough water for it next to them, while I carried it overhead for those that didn't. It wasn't heavy, merely awkward. So was our conversation, or lack thereof. We didn't hunt either, preferring to make as much speed as possible and stopping only for some wet, dismal hours of rest overnight. Making campfires on the wooden causeway would be a bad idea after all.
Two days later the three surviving towers of Moat Cailin peeked through the mists ahead. Once it had been a great stronghold of the First Men, with twenty towers, a wooden keep, and a great basalt curtain wall as high as that of Winterfell's. Nowadays only great blocks of black basalt lay scattered about, half sunk in the ground where the wall once stood, and the keep had long since rotted away. The remaining three towers which were covered with green moss and white ghostskin, commanded the causeway from all sides so that enemies must pass between them. Attackers would face constant fire by crannogmen archers from the other towers should they attempt to attack any one tower, wading through chest deep water and crossing a moat that was a ring-shaped quicksand pit under the thin layer of water. And then there were the moat's living occupants.
We were met by half-dozen of Moat Cailin's defenders, led by a short, grizzled man that nodded to Keera with familiarity and respect but gave me a critical once-over with narrowed eyes, wordlessly conveying the idea that he was not impressed. I rolled my eyes at the obvious snubbing. Maybe his attitude would have annoyed a real thirteen-year-old but I'd been over forty back on Earth and half a decade of harsh living plus magic in Westeros meant I was not so easily riled up. My tolerance for bullshit, on the other hand, had been considerably diminished.
"Well?" I demanded of our apparent host after more than five minutes of silence where he gave no sign of further action. Instead of speaking he made a gesture to one of his men, who provided two pieces of salted flatbread from his travel pack, one for Keera and one for me. We chewed the hard, dry, repurposed travel ration and swallowed.
"Moat Cailin welcomes you under its roof," the old man told us drily. "Such as it is. Its halls are drafty, the hearth only has peat to burn and there are no beds."
"We'll manage, old man." Surprisingly, Keera beat me to those words, though from the smiles she exchanged with the guy it was obvious they were both familiar and fond of each other. They made smalltalk in a near-whisper and I left them to it. I had no interest in getting to know some fifty-year-old semi-retired swamp ninja whose first act upon meeting us had been to get a rise out of me.
Our group of eight marched towards the squattest, widest, best-preserved of the three surviving towers. It was covered in green moss, and a gnarled tree grew sideways from the stones of its north side. There were fragments of broken wall still standing to the east and west and an only slightly crooked gate was attached to it. The main hall was indeed drafty, with high walls and ceiling of black basalt. A massive table of that same stone took up much of the hall's space, though the chairs around it were made of treated wood and hardened swamp weeds in the style of crannogman craftmanship. The hearth was lit and smoked with a heavy smell like old, cheap cigars so thick I had to use a lick of pyromancy to keep the smoke off my head to avoid it. Naturally, none of the others seemed nearly as annoyed bit it as I was.
"You, girl," our most gracious host called out gruffly after we'd all settled around the ancient stone table that must have served the tower's occupants for half a dozen millennia. Talk about being built to last. "There's some packages for you from Greywater Watch."
"They're already here?" All my annoyance at his attitude evaporated before a wave of excitement and I leaped off my seat. "Where?"
"We have them in the armory," he told me with another grunt. Seriously, man, if you were so old you kept grunting all the time what were you doing running the second most important keep in the Neck? Retire already and leave the post to someone with more energy! I did not say that, of course, but at least half of us must have been thinking it. "'cept I think they made a mistake."
"What mistake?" I asked, suspiciously. Neither Lord Reed's family nor their retainers would be that careless and my requests had been simple enough.
"Ye'll see," he told me and soon enough one of his men came in carrying a long bundle wrapped in green linen. At his commander's gesture he handed it over and I eagerly unwrapped it, revealing a thick but supple wooden stave. It was slightly longer than I was tall and it came in a lambskin leather case along with several coils of milkweed strings, a lambskin quiver and a thick pack of arrows with bodkin arrowheads of top-quality bronze.
"Yes, I see what you mean," I told him, examining the yew shaft. "They went overboard. This is far higher quality than I'd expected." When we'd gone to the nitty gritty details of my impending travels, it had become clear that finding the gear I wanted in the Neck on my own would take too long even with ten gold dragons to spend. It was not a matter of money but availability. Hearing what I wanted, Lord Reed and his daughter had immediately offered to get the gear for me at fair value from the stocks of Greywater Watch then send it ahead to Moat Cailin while I finished my preparations. But the bow and arrows they'd sent were far better than what I'd asked for.
"Lord Reed must think highly of you," the old man said in a very odd tone. "Well go ahead then. Such a gift deserves to be used properly."
He was... probably right. Returning it would be an insult, never mind the effort and time needed to take it back to wherever the floating, mobile seat of House Reed was hiding these days. Sighing in acceptance, I took out one of the pale white, fibrous strings. Not only was milkgrass fiber strong enough for bowstrings but the plant's natural latex made it water and rot resistant even more than oiling or waxing would have. Nocking it on one end of the bowstave, I bent it in my arms enough to string it in the other. Then I drew the newly strung bow fully, pulling the string back to my ear with a modicum of effort.
"Not too light but not too heavy," I muttered, mostly to myself. No risk of the bow breaking apart in my arms if I was careless, though I suspected I'd have to change to an even heavier version when I grew stronger in the future. Maybe weirwood or steel? Strider's people were known for steelbows. Then I noticed the old guy was shooting me a decidedly sour look. "What?" I challenged.
"Nothing, he's just strange like most old guys," Keera said with a chuckle. "Come on, I want to see the rest of the package." And showing more excitement than even I felt, she pulled me towards the tower's upper floors and some privacy. We couldn't try on the clothes with the men around after all.
xxxx
"This is some sort of joke," I said, staring dubiously at what was supposed to have been a leather jerkin. It wasn't.
"Who did you pass on the order to?" my aunt asked as we looked at the offending bit of clothing... and the pieces missing from it.
"Meera," I told her, remembering the cheerful ten-year old who'd been entirely too friendly and not at all in awe of me like most of Lord Reed's men had been. Aunt Keera laughed.
"That was your mistake," she replied with a snort, trailing the leather suit's neckline with a finger. "Girls her age think a lot about boys and gallant knights and pretty dresses." She shot me a look. "Girls your age too, but noo, you have to be a player in the Great Game."
"Well what was I supposed to do?" I demanded, entirely ignoring her comment about my goals. "All the others were men. Was I supposed to let them take my measurements?"
"You should have asked me, was what you should have done," the older woman admonished. "But hey, we all make mistakes and live to learn from them... or not. Now don't be shy," she gave me a shit-eating grin that made me suspect the... modifications to my request had not been entirely Meera Reed's idea. "Put it on to see if it fits you."
"I'm not putting on a leather... dress. The guys below will laugh at me."
"I'm pretty sure they'll be too stunned to do so," she told me with saccharine sweetness. "Besides, what else can you do? Your hunting leathers were wrecked and what you are wearing now will burst if you move too much. You've grown, you need new things to wear."
"Stop being so reasonable, damn it," I growled in annoyance and snatched the offending half-dress half-hunting-leathers from her arms. "And get me a cloak so I can cover everything up."
xxxx
The lizard-lions in the moat were rather disappointing. Yes, they were giant lizards strong enough to tear a man apart, with armored skin that could bounce a knight's sword or a hunter's arrows with ease, and fast enough to run down either in short distances even if the knight was on a horse. Anyone stupid enough to jump into the moat would die... but they were still in a moat and they couldn't bounce armor-piercing arrows from a heavy warbow from thirty feet away, especially with me being able to hold each of my targets still long enough to aim at them properly.
Each of the dozen kills was still a significant amount of power, in total getting me a good way towards the next milestone. Yet gone were the days where just one of the things would have been a deadly fight gotten thought with loads of luck and netting most of a milestone's power by itself. In less than a year I'd grown... not beyond them but still enough that they were no big deal. One of three things I asked Lord Reed for and the payoff was far less than my new gear, let alone the letter to Lord Stark.
We left Moat Cailin behind us along with Keera's boat and our camping gear. My Aunt would pick them up on the return trip, not that she would go too far. She'd just insisted on escorting me till the end of the swamps and the beginnings of the Barrowlands. We kept on the Kingsroad as the humidity became less and less, the fog thinned and stone and hard-packed earth replaced the mud and bog. Vegetation thinned out further and further, trees and ferns and almost tropical undergrowth replaced by hard, thorn-covered shrubbery and brown weeds.
The Neck was coming to an end. Beyond were flat and windswept plains, interrupted only by the occasional town and hundreds, even thousands of little hills, or what appeared to be hills. In reality, the mounds were artificial, the millennia-old barrow-tombs of the First Men that gave this area its name. Curiously, the couple of barrows we passed by were entirely blank areas to my magical sense, as if nothing whatsoever was there. Quite the opposite of what I'd expected from the ancient tombs and rather curious.
"Where will you go after this place?" Keera asked as we came to a slow turn of the Kingsroad around an almost castle-sized mound.
"I will probably explore for a bit, see if I can do anything with the area's resources." Because come on! Millennia-old tombs nobody had entered since before Winterfell was built; they were practically an invitation for the enterprising sorceress. "Then I'll probably go to White Harbor, once I've tested out a few things." Because as inviting as the ancient tombs were, the clock was still ticking.
"I see..." The older huntress trailed off and once again she looked and sounded uncharacteristically uncertain. "Look, Flann-"
"Wait," I told her, slowing to a stop and looking at the snowed-over ground suspiciously. Sleet, mud, ancient boulders leading to the half-buried entrance of the barrow, nothing seemed out of place. And yet... with a bit of mental effort I shared senses with Featherball who was flying half a mile overhead. A quick glance down from the owl's perspective showed me several figures huddling suspiciously in the ruined entrance, just behind the boulders closest to the road. "Five men," I whispered to the older woman. "They must have seen us coming earlier and hid." And they were very few reasons five men would hide from two women in the wilderness.
"You want to flank or avoid them?" she asked, immediately readying her own bow with none of her earlier hesitation.
"No," I said as I looked at the men closer through Featherball's eyes. "No, I don't feel like doing either." I readied my spear and mentally readied myself for what was about to happen. "Let me deal with them, OK?"
"You said they were five," Keera said.
"So I did." I got off the road and went around just enough that the closest guys couldn't jump me the moment I passed the ambush point. "Just keep that bow at the ready in case something goes wrong."
"Marching up to bandits is already wrong," she muttered but followed at a short distance. Soon we came to where the five of them were waiting and from above I saw them tense as they heard our approach. Their surprised reaction when we came into view a good thirty yards beyond the road and their immediate reach was hilarious.
"Ho there!" the small group's apparent leader greeted us with a cheeky grin, recovering from his surprise quite quickly. He was a blond man in his thirties, wearing what must have once been an expensive coat that had seen better days. Now it was worn and dirty and the black leather's luster had been eaten away or covered by grime. "What's a pair of ladies doing in the king's road?" He was still a pretty guy and maybe that corny approach and his grin had worked for him before... or maybe he was a shameless bastard. His leer was nasty either way, and so were those of his companions.
"I'm curious," I said as I walked closer, keeping an eye to the sword strapped to his belt and the knife in his left boot. "Has that line ever worked?"
"Ye'd be surprised," he said with a laugh, dropping the posh noble speech he'd been trying to affect. "Quims are stupid, ey? Especially to travel all alone." More laughter came from his friends.
"I dunno, the bandits don't seem that bad." I looked him up and down critically. "What now?"
"Pay up, Ned!" a fat guy with an axe and dressed in studded leather said with another laugh. "Told ya they were whores!"
"Shut up, Lum," the leader snapped before turning to us again. "Now lass, ye entertain us. If we're happy ye'll be happy too."
"Oh? Let's put that to the test." I walked up to the guy and he let me. What did he have to fear from a girl, even one several inches taller and a couple stone heavier? I grabbed his head with both palms as if I'd pull him in for a kiss... then I drew on my Pyromancy hard. Skin burned and blackened where I touched, fat sizzled and the man screamed. Reflexively he tried to pull my hands off but he'd probably have failed even if his face wasn't cooking off his skull. He screamed again then dropped to the ground, shaking and sobbing. "Huh, he was wrong. I'm happy and he definitely isn't."
"Witch!" one of the remaining four screamed, pulling the others out of their shock. The only archer among them, he shakily raised his bow and drew an arrow. I waved in his direction and sent a burst of power. The oiled string of his bow ignited like kindling and he dropped it with a fearful yell.
A shorter, leaner guy with a scruffy look charged me with a makeshift spear. Compared to Keera he was a total amateur; a simple deflection pushed his crude weapon out of place, a rap against his fingers forced him to drop it and probably cracked them, then a hard sweep of his legs ended in a scream of pain and a nasty crunch as something below his left knee shattered.
Then the axeman was upon me and unlike the rest he didn't suck. In fact, the fat guy was surprisingly fast, with economic, efficient blows aiming to either messily disarm me above the wrist or stick the axehead in my torso. He knew to close the distance and engage where the spear was weakest and he was fast and skilled enough he'd overwhelm me before long. So I mentally punched him in the brain as hard as my limited Greensight abilities allowed.
Compared to an animal's malleable mental presence, his mind felt like striking rock, but even a boulder would crack if you hit it hard enough. I wasn't trying to possess him, I didn't care about information, all I wanted was to cause damage and for all my limited abilties I was doing this point-blank, with a form of attack he had never expected, one he didn't even know existed. The psychic blow sent him reeling, stumbling drunkenly for a few moments. That was more than enough time for a two-handed swing with as much power as I could put behind it. Bone cracked and he fell, where I swung twice more for good measure.
The fifth guy dropped his knives, turned around and fled at a dead sprint. For his troubles he got ten pounds of Featherball to the face, beak biting, talons rending. The damn owl wasn't even warged; it was attacking on its own volition and from what I could pick up of its feelings it was because only she was allowed to mess with me. Already too panicked to respond properly, the guy was soon blind and bloodied. And with that, the five-man bandit group was done.
"You've grown," Keera said as she approached, bow no longer ready to shoot. "At your age I'd have just avoided bandits entirely."
"It's the magic," I told her. Without sharing senses with Featherball I wouldn't have known they were even laying in wait. Without Pyromancy either the leader or the archer would have been trouble and without the mental assault I'd learned from Bloodraven of all people the axeman would have beaten me. And those guys were still the bottom of the barrel, basically scrubs.
"What do you want to do about them?" Keera asked in a serious tone as we both show the archer running away from Featherball in fear.
"What I would prefer is for vile men like these to have never existed, but since when do we get what we want?" I scowled. How many people had these guys attacked before? How many women had they raped? "The penalty for rape is still gelding or beheading and for outlawry hanging in the North, right?"
"It is," she confirmed.
"Then I'd like to give to you back a little of what you've given."
I dragged the bandits off the road and by the boulders marking the ruined entrance of the ancient barrow. The archer was the only one still able to resist, which he did with a lot of wailing and pleading until I slapped him insensate. I dropped the five of them into a rough circle then drew my bronze knife, the one with which I'd done every sacrifice in a proper ritual so far. The yellowish metal had a faint aura of magic into it already but soon it would be more.
"I dedicate these deaths to these scum's victims, past and intended," I declared and cut the archer's throat. More power than a lizard-lion flowed into my veins. "Let their strength serve a worthy goal." I cut the blind guy's throat next and the electrifying wave of power doubled. "Let their evil be destroyed and feed into protection." I slew the spearman and my blood felt like it would boil. "Let their death empower life." I killed the axeman then and my shadow grew, seemingly drinking in the light. "Let ingnominy and failure of the wicked become success and fortune of the deserving." I cut the leader's throat last and the power of five human lives swirled around me like a whirlwind.
I turned to my Aunt, the person who'd helped and protected me the most in this new life, who'd saved me more than once and helped me learn how to take care of myself. With half of my power I layered a protection from fire around her wrist. With the other half I heated the bronze knife until it softened in my hands and easily bent around said wrist. I fused the metal into a handmade bracelet, crude and simple. It was not pretty, but then the most important things were not. Then I stopped heating it and as it slowly cooled I pushed all the temporary boost from the ritual into it, into something smaller but far more longer-lasting.
"There. Healing, good fortune and a bit of a physical boost," I told her. "Not as much as an active spell but it'll keep... as long as you don't lose the arm to some lizard-lion, I guess."
"Thank you, Flann," Aunt Keera said with a strange tone. Was she a bit... teary-eyed? "Safe travels to you, too."
"I'll write you letters," I told her, my own eyes a bit wet, too. It was all the damn dust in those wind-swept plains.
"The Neck doesn't have rookeries or Maesters, silly," she shot back.
"Then I'll learn how to visit you in your dreams," I promised.
We parted after a few more awkward minutes, neither of us very good at goodbyes or final words. And with that, the first part of my journey in Martin's death world was complete