Winter In My Heart | ROBB STARK.

XXXIII. To Save Someone

Letting his limp body fall to the ground, Yara stepped over the carcass without care as her boot clipped his shoulder, and made her way down the hallway to the room at the end of it.

A chorus of dogs barking began to ring out as she neared, and she wondered briefly if they were entrapped or not. Thankfully as she rounded the corner, she saw that they were. Now she wondered if the man had been lying, for why would her brother be along with the dogs?

But sure enough, upon further inspection, there he was. In a cage of his own, dirty and frail looking. The light of the torch shone over and brightened up the cage to show his face, the eyes staring back at her frightened her half to death. He looked absolutely terrified of her presence.

Not knowing what else to say, she settled for a nod and a "we're going home." But it did little to ease his fright.

Lifting her axe, she brought down the heel of it until it broke the lock on his cage. Confusing her entirely, Theon shouted back "no". As if he didn't want to be rescued.

He scampered back in his cell to get away from his own sister, Yara placed this down to simple trauma, and continued to push forward and try to reach him.

"It's alright," she assured the figure that she wasn't even entirely sure was her brother any more. "It's me, Yara."

"You can't trick me!" He muttered in terror, gripping on for dear life to the bars of his cell as Yara crouched down to enter it.

"I'm not tricking you, Theon! I'm saving you!"

"Not Theon! Reek! Reek! My name is Reek!"

"We can't just sit here, we're trapped!" Barten called in at her, anxiously bouncing on his feet and looking back and forth between the spectacle in the cage and the entrance to the room.

"Help me with him!" Yara shouted back, reaching in and losing her patience, she gripped onto her younger brother and started to drag him out of the cell.

"No! No! You can't!"

"You're Theon Greyjoy!"

"I know who I am! I know who I am! Reek! Reek!"

The smell of him surely warranted such a nickname. The sight was something Yara would never forget, her younger brother, who was once so cocky and larger than life - now gripping onto the bars of his cell and refusing to be rescued out of absolute terror for the repercussions.

Still shouting when they managed to wrestle him out of the cage, Yara clamped her hand over his mouth before he drew any more attention to them. Entirely focused on handling her brother, Yara and Barten failed to see the figure who came in from the doorway until a sword was suddenly impaling Jones' body.

Their heads snapped up to reveal a man, looking upon the scene with an uninterested expression. His hair was shaved close to the scalp, neither Yara nor Barten seemed to recognise him. But Theon did. His body stopped flailing for a second to look upon the figure with absolute shock and horror, his face reminded him so much of an old life. He looked like he had seen a ghost.

"What's going on here then? You mean to trespass and kidnap?" The man spoke, a cutting undertone to his voice. Yara noticed his rather strange demeanour, he kept twitching. Not in a nervous way, more like if the anger of a thousand men had been injected into his bloodstream.