A Dance With Dragons: Bran I (Chapter Summary)

Bran, Hodor, Meera, Jojen, Summer, and Coldhands trudge through a forest north of the wall.  Bran is strapped to Hodor’s back while Meera, Jojen, and Coldhands are mounted on an elk.  Coldhands’s face is pale, his hands black and hard as iron; he is wrapped in layers of wool, boiled leather, and ringmail, and a black woolen scarf conceals the lower half of his face.  The elk stops suddenly and Coldhalds vaults lightly into the snow – he announces that the group is being followed.  He instructs Hodor and the children to carry on ahead where they will find a lake, and to follow its shoreline north to a fishing village; he will take care of the men following them himself and rejoin the group later.  The children discuss Coldhands’s peculiarities: he does not eat or drink, he cannot feel the cold, he never sleeps, and he has no breath.  Bran suspects their mysterious companion is a monster.

The children try following the lake’s shoreline, but are uncertain where the lake ends and the shore begins – they become lost.  Bran enters Summer to help locate the fishing village.  The direwolf smells ashes and races toward the scent; the group follows, finding a village beside the lake.  Hodor and the children take shelter within the village’s longhall.  Supper is a fistful of acorns, crushed and pounded into paste.  Unable to sleep, Bran enters Summer. The direwolf is hunting and discovers a pack of wolves picking over the remains of five dead men dressed in black.  The wolves are Old Eye, Stalker, and Sly.  Old Eye challenges the direwolf and the two beasts lunge at one another.  Ultimately the old wolf submits, along with his two pack-mates.  Summer goes from man to man picking away the best meat; he allows the three wolves to scavenge the remains. 

Fire and the smell of roasting meat waken Bran.  Coldhands has returned with a pig.  Bran accuses Coldhands and his ravens of killing the men he saw through Summer’s eyes, men of the Night’s Watch.  Coldhands does not deny it.  “Who are you?  Why are your hands black,” Bran asks.  Coldhands explains that after death a man’s blood runs down into his extremities, where it thickens and congeals, turning the hands and feet black.  The children begin to question Coldhands: Meera asks who the three-eyed crow is – a dreamer, a wizard, the last green-seer, he answers; Bran calls him a monster – your monster, Brandon Stark.  Meera asks Jojen what they should do, to which he replies “we go with Bran’s monster, or we die”.