Ch 56 Things I Do For Love... Part 2
Bran could still remember how his Father always lectured him when he was just a 5-year-old lad, about how he should always introduce himself as a Northerner and how he should take pride in his heritage and that he came from a Noble family of Hornwood.
But Bran never understood what it meant... About what it meant to be a 'Hornwood'.
Did his ancestors have some kind of horns on their heads? Or did they live in an area where there were a lot of trees with horns? Did they cut wood for a living? Were they lords? Were they rich? Do they have an army? Do they even know about him?
He knew nothing at all...
The only thing he was aware of was that dastard 'story' that had been fed to him countless times since he was a child. The story of Torrhen Stark, the last king in the North... the King who knelt.
The story of how the King in the North, three hundred years ago, kneeled in front of the Dragons to save his kingdom and its people from being burned to ashes. Which was an absolutely sane decision from his perspective, but alas... his 'very brave' ancestors didn't think so and didn't like their King's decision very much.
His ancestors abhorred the very thought of surrendering to the Targaryens. In fact, they hated it so much that they decided that they would abandon their family, abandon their land and leave the North rather than stay under the dragons. They gathered all the 'brave' like-minded people they could find from all the nearby strongholds in North and then went on a voluntary exile from Westeros... forever. (Idiots!)
And that was the beginning of their journey...
While he didn't know the exact path they took, he knew that a few years down the line almost all of them ended up in Essos.
Obviously being the brute-minded people that they were, the only thing they knew how to do was drink, fight, fuck, kill and drink again. And the only way to make money off of doing that is to set up a sellswords company. So, The Company of the Rose, was established, named after the winter rose, a unique species of flower only found in the North.
And now about three hundred years later they were still a small sellswords company living, killing and dying, for a few pieces of gold. Over the years they've fought in countless wars and skirmishes, some times they were on this side while other times they were on that side. From guarding goods and mansions to looting caravans, they had taken all kinds of jobs and travelled all across the Essos.
There were a few times when the company came really close to extinction or being disbanded but somehow they always held on and still existed to this day. Maybe it was something about the Northern blood that made them especially hardy and stubborn.
But even though the name of the company may have remained unchanged, the same can't be said about the people inside it.
At present, less than half of the five hundred-something warriors in it are Northerners and even fewer actually look like they are from the North. It was something bound to happen after years of people dying, settling down, marrying locals, and other such things.
In fact, the number would have been a lot lower if not for the occasional infusion of new blood from the bastards and other low-born from the North who came to Essos to make a name for themselves and found out that the Company was the only place who would take them.
Another thing that changed a lot over the years, was the leadership. Bran didn't know who the first leader of the Company was, he assumed it was a second son of a Stark or some other family. But after a lot of fighting, shuffling, coups, deaths and other things, not a lot of the original families survived and now a Hornwood had come out on the top to become the leader of the present-day Company of the Rose, and he just so happen to be Bran's father.
"Wait! Wait! Wait!" Jon interrupted Bran's story with an incredulous look on his face, "So you mean to tell me that not only do you belong to the Company of the Rose, you are also the son of its leader," he asked to which Bran nodded, "Then why did you say that you came from Pentos?"
"Oh! Well, that's because It's only been five months since I joined the company, before that I lived in Pentos along with the children and the families of the other members of the Company..."
"B-But how did you get captured if you were the son of the company's leader?" Sam asked with a look of incomprehension on his face. After all, it should be almost impossible for a few men to capture the son of the leader of a sellswords company from their midst.
"Um... It was mostly my own fault..." he said with a flushed look on his face, "I-I was angry at my father for something and ran out of the camp in the middle of the night without telling anyone, and unfortunately I was unlucky enough to get caught soon after that..."
"Oh... And why did you run away?"
Bran hesitated for a while before he answered, "Well, there's this girl... Lea..."
'Of course there is' thought Jon and Sam simultaneously while nodding their heads.
Bran couldn't remember the first time he saw Lea... it was probably when they were just toddlers. He just knew that he had been friends with her since he could remember.
They lived in the same house and were of the same age, his father was the leader and her father was the second in command of the company so they had grown up spending almost every single day with each other.
Whether it was eating, training, or playing, they were always together. In fact, they even joined the Company of the Rose at the same time, him as a fighter and her as a cook... even though she could fight almost as well as him.
Lea was the most cheerful person he had ever known, she could brighten up any room just by being in there, there was not a single evil bone in her body and she was a rare kind soul in this World...
And now she was dying...
He didn't know why. He didn't know how. He didn't even know when...
All he knew was that he had never seen a person look so pale and lifeless, it was as if someone had sucked all the life out of her. And it had all happened so abruptly. One day she was there laughing, gossiping, and cooking dinner for the camp with the other cooks. And the very next day she had suddenly fallen gravely sick. She couldn't even get up from her bed and was constantly coughing, sometimes so harshly that she even spat blood...
The useless camp healer couldn't even determine the cause of her sudden sickness, all he could diagnose was that she had some kind of fever and that only a city healer would be able to cure her.
As if it was so easy to get a city healer...
First of all, you needed an absurd amount of money to even get in through the door to have a chance to see a city healer. And even if you were able to collect the money he may as well not help you for some absurd reasons such as he didn't like the way you look or that you smell funny.
Only rich Merchants and powerful Magister had the power to move them. For mercenaries or smallfolks like them, he may as well have the power of a god... and the healer knew that fact very well...
But even if it didn't work out in the end, even if it was all fruitless, Bran still wanted to give it a try in a bid to save Lea. And the first hurdle to do that was to get money as he didn't have any.
So he immediately went for his father to demand that he give him the money to help him. But his father said there was no money to give, as they barely had enough to run the Company and that they would only get more money when their current job was completed.
He knew that it was very unreasonable and that his father was helpless in this situation but it didn't matter to Bran at that time, he raged and cursed at his father for his denial to help him before storming out of his tent.
He drank himself into a stupor for the first time that night. He had lost all hope by that point and was drowning himself in his sorrows... when he heard something that filled him with hope once again.
A guard was telling another guard that the son of a magister was going to have a name day celebration in a few days in Pentos and that the only gift the son demanded was to have a lion as a pet. And now there was a bounty of about a thousand gold out for anyone who could get them a lion cub.
Being in the haze of alcohol that he was, he didn't think too much and immediately set off during the night on a hunt without telling anyone, only taking a horse and some ration with him. He had no concrete plan in his mind on how he would accomplish it, he just knew that it was his last hope.
"So you set out alone... hoping to somehow stumble on a lion, kill it and then capture its cub..." Sam asked with an incredulous look on his face, trying to decide if he was stupid or brave.
"Y-Yes..." Bran answered while looking down in embarrassment since he knew how foolish his decision was in retrospect.
"So did you find it?" Jon asked curiously, "Did you find a lion?"
"No. I didn't even get a chance to search for them..." Bran shook his head disappointedly, "I don't know if I was just unlucky or something but somehow the very next day I found my camp surrounded by those sellswords from the Gallant men..." He shivered as he thought back to the cruel torture he had to endure under their care and how close he came to being sold as a slave... if it wasn't for these Northerners.
'That seems all too convenient...' Jon thought with a frown on his face. He could smell something fishy in this situation, even though he couldn't put his finger on what it was.
"I just hope I don't run into any more problems on the way back..." He said with a depressed look on his face.
"You don't need to worry about that," Jon said with a smile, "We'll bring you back to the Company of Rose safely..."
"You will?" Bran asked as his eyes went wide from surprise, "But... why?"
"Because we have the same destination."
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