The caves were timeless, vast, silent. They were home to more than three score living singers and the bones of thousands dead, and extended far below the hollow hill. "Men should not go wandering in this place," Leaf warned them. "The river you hear is swift and black, and flows down and down to a sunless sea. And there are passages that go even deeper, bottomless pits and sudden shafts, forgotten ways that lead to the very center of the earth. Even my people have not explored them all, and we have lived here for a thousand thousand of your man-years."

Though the men of the Seven Kingdoms might call them the children of the forest, Leaf and her people were far from childlike. Little wise men of the forest would have been closer. They were small compared to men, as a wolf is smaller than a direwolf. That does not mean it is a pup. They had nut-brown skin, dappled like a deer's with paler spots, and large ears that could hear things that no man could hear. Their eyes were big too, great golden cat's eyes that could see down passages where a boy's eyes saw only blackness. Their hands had only three fingers and a thumb, with sharp black claws instead of nails.

And they did sing. They sang in True Tongue, so Lyanna could not understand the words, but their voices were as pure as winter air. "Where are the rest of you?" Lyanna asked Leaf, once.

"Gone down into the earth," she answered. "Into the stones, into the trees. Before the First Men came all this land that you call Westeros was home to us, yet even in those days we were few. The gods gave us long lives but not great numbers, lest we overrun the world as deer will overrun a wood where there are no wolves to hunt them. That was in the dawn of days, when our sun was rising. Now it sinks, and this is our long dwindling. The giants are almost gone as well, they who were our bane and our brothers. The great lions of the western hills have been slain, the unicorns are all but gone, the mammoths down to a few hundred. The direwolves will outlast us all, but their time will come as well. In the world that men have made, there is no room for them, or us."

Leaf seemed sad when she said it, and that made Lyanna sad as well. It was only later that she thought, Men would not be sad. Men would be wroth. Men would hate and swear a bloody vengeance. The singers sing sad songs, where men would fight and kill.

One day Meera and Jojen decided to go see the river, despite Leaf's cautions. "I want to come too," Bran said. Lyanna wanted to come but she wanted to stay with Bran.

Meera gave him a mournful look. The river was six hundred feet below, down steep slopes and twisty passages, she explained, and the last part required climbing down a rope. "Hodor could never make the climb with you on his back. I'm sorry, Bran."

When the Reeds and Hodor left. Bran spoke "You can go, Lyanna"

"I'm not going to leave you alone" she told him.

"I can always go into Hodor" Bran half smiled.

"Bran, you sneaky little mouse" She joked.

It was a long way down to the river, Hodor would blurt out "Hodor" from time to time, and he could follow Meera and Jojen, grinning happily, only Lyanna knew it was really Bran inside Hodor. He often tagged along, whether he was wanted or not. In the end, the Reeds were glad he came. Jojen made it down the rope easily enough, but after Meera caught a blind white fish with her frog spear and it was time to climb back up, his arms began to tremble and he could not make it to the top, so they had to tie the rope around him and let Hodor haul him up. "Hodor,"

The moon was a crescent, thin and sharp as the blade of a knife. Visenya dug up a severed arm, black and covered with hoarfrost, its fingers opening and closing as it pulled itself across the frozen snow. There was still enough meat on it to fill her empty belly, and after that was done he cracked the arm bones for the marrow. Only then did the arm remember it was dead. Lyanna ate with Visenya and her pack, as a wolf along with Summer.

Lord Brynden seemed less a man than some ghastly statue made of twisted wood, old bone, and rotted wool. The only thing that looked alive in the pale ruin that was his face was his one red eye, burning like the last coal in a dead fire, surrounded by twisted roots and tatters of leathery white skin hanging off a yellowed skull.

The sight of him still frightened Lyanna-the weirwood roots snaking in and out of his withered flesh, the mushrooms sprouting from his cheeks, the white wooden worm that grew from the socket where one eye had been. She liked it better when the torches were put out. In the dark he could pretend that it was the three-eyed crow who whispered to him and not some grisly talking corpse.

The moon was a black hole in the sky. Outside the cave the world went on. Outside the cave the sun rose and set, the moon turned, the cold winds howled. Under the hill, Jojen Reed grew ever more sullen and solitary, to his sister's distress. She would often sit with Bran beside their little fire, talking of everything and nothing, petting Summer where he slept between them, whilst her brother wandered the caverns by himself. Jojen had even taken to climbing up to the cave's mouth when the day was bright. He would stand there for hours, looking out over the forest, wrapped in furs yet shivering all the same. Lyanna was worried more rather than for Bran. She needed Jojen, she missed him, he did not spoke for days, and she missed the sound of his voice. She need to hear him again, and feel his warm hands.

"He wants to go home," Meera told Bran and Lyanna. "He will not even try and fight his fate. He says the greendreams do not lie."

"He's being brave," said Bran. The only time a man can be brave is when he is afraid, his father had told her once, long ago, on the day they found the direwolf pups in the summer snows. She still remembered.

"He's being stupid," Meera said. "I'd hoped that when we found your three-eyed crow ... now I wonder why we ever came."

"His greendreams," he said.

"His greendreams." Meera's voice was bitter. "Hodor," said Hodor. Meera began to cry.

"Don't cry," Bran said.

Lyanna lowered her head, she wondered if Jojen saw his fate, and maybe that was why he was like that.

He can't go... His task was done he said, he only came to Winterfell for Bran, and get him to the three-eyed crow.

Lord Brynden told Bran it was time to take the next step, Bran had mastered half of his gifts. He will enter into the weirwood tree, Bran will do what the greenseer does. Lyanna waited and waited for Bran to wake up, Leaf gave him something to eat that awaken more of his gifts.

When Leaf woke Bran up,"Tell us what you saw." She told him.

"Winterfell." Bran said, "I was back in Winterfell. I saw my father. He's not dead, he's not, I saw him, he's back at Winterfell, he's still alive."

Lyanna was almost happy and excited until the child spoke.

"No," said Leaf. "He is gone, boy. Do not seek to call him back from death."

"I saw him." Bran said, "He was cleaning Ice."

Ice was the name that Ned Stark gave to his big Valyrian sword.

"You saw what you wished to see. Your heart yearns for your father and your home, so that is what you saw."

"A man must know how to look before he can hope to see," said Lord Brynden. "Those were shadows of days past that you saw, Bran. You were looking through the eyes of the heart tree in your godswood. Time is different for a tree than for a man. Sun and soil and water, these are the things a weirwood understands, not days and years and centuries. For men, time is a river. We are trapped in its flow, hurtling from past to present, always in the same direction. The lives of trees are different. They root and grow and die in one place, and that river does not move them. The oak is the acorn, the acorn is the oak. And the weirwood ... a thousand human years are a moment to a weirwood, and through such gates you and I may gaze into the past."

"But," said Bran, "he heard me."

"He heard a whisper on the wind, a rustling amongst the leaves. You cannot speak to him, try as you might. I know. I have my own ghosts, Bran. A brother that I loved, a brother that I hated, a woman I desired. Through the trees, I see them still, but no word of mine has ever reached them. The past remains the past. We can learn from it, but we cannot change it."

"Will I see my father again?"

"Once you have mastered your gifts, you may look where you will and see what the trees have seen, be it yesterday or last year or a thousand ages past. Men live their lives trapped in an eternal present, between the mists of memory and the sea of shadow that is all we know of the days to come. Certain moths live their whole lives in a day, yet to them that little span of time must seem as long as years and decades do to us. An oak may live three hundred years, a redwood tree three thousand. A weirwood will live forever if left undisturbed. To them seasons pass in the flutter of a moth's wing, and past, present, and future are one. Nor will your sight be limited to your godswood. The singers carved eyes into their heart trees to awaken them, and those are the first eyes a new greenseer learns to use ... but in time you will see well beyond the trees themselves."

"When?" Bran wanted to know.

"In a year, or three, or ten. That I have not glimpsed. It will come in time, I promise you. But I am tired now, and the trees are calling me. We will resume on the morrow."

Hodor carried Bran back to his chamber, muttering "Hodor" in a low voice as Leaf went before them with a torch. He had hoped that Meera and Jojen would be there, so he could tell them what he had seen, but their snug alcove in the rock was cold and empty. Hodor eased Bran down onto his bed, covered him with furs, and made a fire for them. A thousand eyes, a hundred skins, wisdom deep as the roots of ancient trees.

Once the Reeds came back, Jojen was unhappy as usual and Meera brought fishes. While Lyanna was lying on the ground as she was tucked in by furs, she glanced at Jojen, who settled down on the ground then lay down on the ground and the fire was lighting between them both. He turned his head towards her, looking at her, she never looked away this time, she stared at him like the way she never looked at anyone before, and the way he once looked at her that night at the feast in Winterfell when he first arrived. But he did the way she did before... he looked away.