Inside Game Of Thrones

Episode 13

He would break, just like that little clay Bran.
Bran’s seven-year-old mind had only one answer for that. “But I never fall. Never.” And that was that.

His mother used to tell him that he had learned to climb before even learning to walk. Bran doesn’t know whether that was true, but he doesn’t remember how it was back then either, so he supposed it was true.
There was even a time when Bran had decided to stop climbing. But his vow lasted only a fortnight before he couldn’t resist any longer. He was caught climbing again, and his father told him to go and spend the night in front of the heart tree and pray the gods for forgiveness. It was scary, spending the night out in the open on the bare ground, and Bran had jumped up into the tree for safety. They found him sleeping in its branches the next morning.

His father had laughed over the episode, and finally agreed that there was really no way they could keep his feet on the ground.
Bran just loves being up on the rooftops, because it takes him out over Winterfell and gives him a bird’s eye view of all its buildings and its people and makes him feel like he’s the owner of it all. And there’s really nobody who can climb half as well as him, which means there’s no one who can bring him down even if he’s seen.
He finally reached the broken tower. The building on whose rooftop he had gone from the weirwood ran into the side of the tower, and from there it was a matter of climbing the stonework all the way to the uneven top.
Maester Luwin used to tell him that there was a ravens’ nest up there and that they would peck out his eyes if he tried to go there, but Bran usually went there with a pocketful of corn which the birds usually showed particular interest in. They never bothered with his eyes at all.

When Bran reaches the top of the Broken Tower, he hears this sound from inside the building. There are people inside! It’s two people talking, conversing, almost arguing. A man and a woman. They talk first about his aunt Lysa, then about his father, Lord Stark, and whether the King will listen to him. Bran can register who they’re talking about, but he doesn’t understand what exactly they’re talking about.

And he’s burning with the desire to know who the man and woman are and what they are doing in the abandoned tower, so he can tell his parents and siblings everything he heard.

Winterfell has gargoyles on top of some of the roofs of the buildings, and the Broken Tower has one, too. A stone gargoyle, leaning a little off the top of the roof. The room where the man and woman are in is just below him, and he’s hearing their voices from a bare window just under his feet. There’s a small ledge outside the window which he contemplates jumping onto, but the ledge is too narrow, and there’s every chance he can fall two or three stories once he jumps on it.

The boy looks at the gargoyle beside him, then at the window below, and comes up with this crazy idea. The boy was confident it would work, which makes me think he has done something like that before.

What he does is he uses two legs to grip the sides of the gargoyle, then, using it to support his weight, he lowers his upper body gently down till he’s outside the window looking in, hangingupside-downlike a spider on a web. As he’s doing it, he hears this sudden slap of skin on skin, and when he looks in, he sees the man and woman kissing at the far wall, engaging in the act and oblivious to him.
But then Bran makes one single sound of surprise and the woman turns her head, sees him and screams. Bran instantly recognizes Queen Cersei. The sound startles the boy, makes him try to pull himself back up using his legs and fail, and then his legs lose their grip.

Bran falls— upside-down —but then manages to get one hand on the windowsill as he’s falling past. Bran’s heart is in his mouth as he realizes how close he came to falling, but he’s still not clear of the fire yet. He’s hanging his whole body on only one hand, and he’s feeling his fingers start to slip.

From the window, a man’s face appears, identical to the Queen’s. He looks down at Bran, then stretches down his hand. Bran grabbed then hand as hard as you wouldn’t believe, and the man easily pulls him up to the window level, one-handed. Inside the room, the woman is still screaming, “He saw us, he saw us!”

The boy is still terribly shaken, standing on the ledge outside the window and holding the sill with both hands, but he recognizes the man. Ser Jaime Lannister, the Queen’s twin, the one they called Kingslayer.

Ser Jaime ignores his sister’s screaming and sighs. “The things I do for love,” he says, and gives Bran a little shove.
And that’s it.

Bran is falling again, but this time there’s nothing to hold on to. The only sound he hears as the hard ground breaks his fall is the sound of his direwolf, still howling.