The Ghost of High Heart

A tiny old woman who sees what is coming, hates it, and trades her dreams for songs.

The prophecy

High Heart is a bare hill in the riverlands, higher than anything around it, with a ring of weirwood stumps on its crown ÔÇö thirty-one of them, cut down by the Andals thousands of years ago and never replaced. The country people say the children of the forest kept the place, that no one who sleeps on the hill can be harmed by the dead, and that no one should sleep there anyway. The woman who lives on it is very old and very small, dwarfish and white-haired with red eyes, and the smallfolk call her a ghost because they never see her by daylight and would rather not by night.

She belongs to the tradition of the woods witches ÔÇö country practitioners with no order, no temple and no maesterÔÇÖs chain ÔÇö but she is not selling charms. She dreams, and the dreams come whether she wants them or not, and by the time the story finds her she has been having them for a very long time and is sick of them. The Brotherhood Without Banners visit her because she is worth visiting. She will not take coin. Her price is singing: a song or two by their fire, which is the only thing she still enjoys, and in exchange she tells them what has come to her in the night. Arya Stark is present at one of these exchanges and gets a long, unfriendly look for it.

The dreams arrive as images with no explanation and she reports them flatly, as a woman reciting a list of things she has been forced to look at. She speaks of a girl at a feast with purple snakes twisted through her hair, poison beading on their teeth, and of that same girl afterwards killing a brute of a giant inside a castle made of snow. She speaks of a faceless man standing on a swinging bridge with a drowned crow on his shoulder. She speaks of a river roaring, and a woman in it who was somehow also a fish, drifting dead with red on her cheeks, and of her eyes opening ÔÇö which is where the dream stopped and the old woman woke screaming. And she speaks of a wedding: drums, a feast, and men butchered at a table by their hosts.

None of these come with names, dates, places or instructions. She has no theology to fit them into and no interest in building one. She does not tell the Brotherhood what to do about any of it, because she does not believe there is anything to be done, and she is visibly angry with them for asking. Of every seer in this collection she is the only one who treats her own gift as an affliction and says so.

Where it comes from

Woods witches are the oldest surviving strand of prophecy in Westeros and the least documented. They are not priestesses of the seven nor servants of any foreign god; they belong to the countryside, to the old gods and to the practices that were there before the Andals came with their star and their books. The Citadel does not study them. The nobility consults them occasionally and denies it afterwards. What little the histories record of them concerns the two or three occasions when one was brought to court and taken seriously, usually with unhappy results.

The hill itself is the strongest hint about her. Weirwood stumps in a ring on a high place are the signature of the children of the forest, and the northern greenseers ÔÇö BranÔÇÖs line of sight, the weirwood net, the whole apparatus described elsewhere in this collection ÔÇö draw their power from exactly such trees. Whether a woman living among dead stumps is drawing on the same source, or is simply an unusually gifted dreamer who chose an atmospheric address, is never explained.

There is a persistent and well-supported suggestion that she is older and more consequential than she appears. A woods witch was brought to the Targaryen court in living memory by Jenny of Oldstones, the smallfolk woman a prince married for love, and that witch gave the royal family a prophecy about which of their line the promised prince would be born from ÔÇö a prophecy that pushed a king towards a particular marriage and, by most accounts, drew another towards a fire at a summer palace that killed him. The old woman on the hill remembers that court, and remembers it personally. If the identification is right, then a great deal of Targaryen history over the last two generations traces back to a person now living alone on a hilltop, eating songs.

How it has been read

Her dreams are the most reliable in the books, and the reason is structural: she does not interpret them. Every other seer in this collection hands over a reading along with the vision ÔÇö Melisandre tells you what the fire means, the warlocks frame their images as a liturgy, Maggy answers a question that was asked. The Ghost of High Heart describes what she saw and stops. Because she adds nothing, nothing has to be subtracted, and readers who go back over her lines afterwards find them accurate in ways that are almost mechanical.

Her images are also unusually decodable, because she uses heraldry. A fish is a Tully; a wolf is a Stark; a golden stag is a Baratheon; a kraken is a Greyjoy. Where a prophecy in this world is normally impenetrable, hers can be read by anyone who has looked at a banner, which raises the obvious question of why nobody in the story bothers to. The answer is that the people receiving them are outlaws in a wood with no way to reach anyone who could act, which is a joke the books make repeatedly and never soften.

The genuinely contested images are the ones where the heraldry is mixed or where a person is described as a thing. A woman who is also a fish, drifting dead in a river, and whose eyes then open, is not a straightforward Tully; something has happened in between that the dream does not describe. A faceless man on a swaying bridge could be a member of a particular Braavosi order, a man who has lost his identity, or a figure whose face the dreamer simply could not see, and the drowned crow on his shoulder points towards the islands without settling anything. Readers have proposed confident answers to both and the books have confirmed neither.

The purple snakes in a girlÔÇÖs hair are almost universally read as a hairnet of amethysts, and the giant killed inside a snow castle is generally taken as a person of great importance destroyed by a small person in a small place. Beyond that, opinions divide sharply on whether the girl is an agent or an instrument ÔÇö whether the dream shows somebody doing a thing, or somebody being used to do it.

One further pattern is worth noting. Her dreams are almost all about the riverlands and the families entangled in them, and almost none are about dragons, ice, or the end of the world. Whatever gift she has appears to be local. She is not receiving a cosmology. She is receiving the news, early.

The problem with prophecy

Her scenes make the bleakest argument in the collection, and it is not that prophecy is false. It is that prophecy is useless even when it is perfectly accurate and delivered in plain heraldic language to people of good intent. The Brotherhood Without Banners are decent men. They hear an accurate warning about a slaughter. They cannot reach anyone who would believe them, they have no proof, they hold no castle, and they are outlaws whose word would be worth nothing at any table in the realm. So the warning is given, received and understood, and nothing whatsoever happens.

She knows this. That is why she asks for songs instead of gold and why she is contemptuous of the people who come to her. She has been carrying accurate foreknowledge for decades and has never once been able to spend any of it, and the only thing she has found that makes the nights bearable is a man with a woodharp singing something old by the fire.

How it has played out ÔÇö open at your peril

The wedding at the crossing

The feast she dreamed ÔÇö drums, a bedding, and men killed at the table by the lords who had guaranteed their safety ÔÇö is the Red Wedding, and she reported it to the Brotherhood before the news reached the riverlands by any ordinary means. Robb Stark, his mother, his queen and the greater part of the northern host were murdered at the Twins by Walder Frey and Roose Bolton, under a Lannister arrangement, in the worst breach of guest right the story records.

Nothing was done with the warning. The men who received it were sitting in a cave with no horses to spare and no standing to be heard, and the wedding party was already inside the castle. Both tellings stage the event; only the books put a woman on a hilltop who saw it coming and had to watch it arrive anyway.

The girl with snakes in her hair

The amethyst hairnet was Sansa StarkÔÇÖs, given to her by Petyr Baelish through Ser Dontos, and a stone was missing from it after the wedding feast at which Joffrey Baratheon choked to death on poisoned wine. Sansa did not know what she was wearing. That is the point of the image: the snakes were in her hair, not in her hand.

The second half of the dream ÔÇö the same girl killing a savage giant inside a castle built of snow ÔÇö pays off in the Vale, where Sansa builds a snow model of Winterfell and her cousin Robert Arryn smashes it in a tantrum; and where, shortly afterwards, that boyÔÇÖs life depends entirely on people who have reasons to want him gone. Many readers take the giant as Joffrey and the snow castle as the wedding at which he died; others take it as the Vale sequence, which is literally a castle of snow. The books have not chosen between them and the two readings may both be intended.

The show cut the Ghost of High Heart entirely, along with most of the BrotherhoodÔÇÖs prophetic material, so none of this exists on screen. The poisoning happens; the dream that predicted it does not.

The woman who was a fish

The river dream is the one she woke screaming from, and it is the darkest thing in her repertoire. Catelyn StarkÔÇÖs body was thrown into the Green Fork after the Red Wedding, and three days later the Brotherhood pulled her out of it. What was returned to her afterwards, by a red priest who had learned the trick from a man he could not save, was not Catelyn Stark. Lady Stoneheart does not speak above a whisper, hangs Freys and Lannisters and anyone who has helped them, and has no interest in explanations.

The dream reported all of this in a single line ÔÇö dead, drifting, red on the cheeks, and then the eyes opening ÔÇö and reported it before the woman had died. It is the most precise piece of prophecy in the books and the least useful, since there was no action anyone could have taken at any point that would have altered it.

None of it happens on screen. The showÔÇÖs Catelyn dies at the Twins and stays dead, a choice the production defended and a great many readers have never forgiven.

The dark heart in the room

The old woman knew what Arya Stark was the moment she saw her, called her a wolf child and a dark heart, and wanted her out of the cave. She could not have known the girlÔÇÖs name or her house from anything visible; a filthy child in boyÔÇÖs clothes among outlaws gives nothing away. Whatever she read in Arya, she read directly, and she did not like it.

Nothing came of the encounter at the time. Arya was sold, traded, lost and eventually crossed the sea to Braavos, where she joined an order that removes faces from the dead. It is worth putting that beside the other dream about a faceless man on a swinging bridge, which the books have never explained and which remains open.