Grey Wind

A war-wolf who fought in every battle the Young Wolf won.

The wolf itself

Grey Wind is smoke-grey all over, a shade darker along the spine, with eyes of a hard clear yellow that do not soften when he is being spoken to. As a pup he was the largest of the litter and stayed that way. By the time his boy was leading an army he stood tall enough at the shoulder that a grown man in mail could rest a hand there without stooping, and he was heavier than he looked ÔÇö a broad-chested, long-legged animal built for running down something that had a head start. He moves like a soldier on the march: economical, tireless, always in position. He does not fidget. In camp he lies where he can see the whole of the tent flap and does not move for hours.

His temperament is his boyÔÇÖs temperament, which is to say disciplined rather than gentle. He does not snap at people for the pleasure of it and he does not have to be held; he simply places himself between his Stark and whatever the room contains and waits to be told. Under provocation he does not growl first, which is the frightening part ÔÇö the warning is a stillness rather than a noise, ears forward, weight shifted, and then it is over. His voice, when he uses it, is a long low howl that carries a mile in cold air, and the northern host learned early to take that sound as a piece of information rather than as noise. Around men he distrusts he becomes unbearably quiet.

The bond

The pups were found together in the summer snows beside their dead mother, and the eldest Stark boy took the biggest ÔÇö which was the obvious choice and also, as it turned out, the correct one. The naming came later and was RobbÔÇÖs own: not a hunterÔÇÖs name or a war name, but a description of how the animal moved.

Of the six Stark children Robb is the least developed as a warg, and that is worth saying plainly rather than dressing up. He is the eldest, the busiest, the one buried in maps and bannermen and supply lines, and he has no time to sit still and go looking inside an animalÔÇÖs head. What comes through comes uninvited: a scent he should not be able to smell, a certainty about a man he has just met that he cannot justify, an occasional dream in which he is running low to the ground on four legs and everything is louder than it should be. He is a king with a talent he never had the leisure to learn.

The wolf, meanwhile, has no such difficulty. Grey Wind knows exactly where his boy is at all times and gets there without being called. Whether that is the bond or simply an extremely good animal is one of those questions the story enjoys leaving open.

The wolf in the war

He went south with the northern host and fought in it. At the Whispering Wood, in the dark, in among the trees, he was among the first things the Lannister outriders knew about; at Oxcross he went through the sentries ahead of the attack, and the accounts of that morning read less like a battle than like something happening to men who had not woken up properly. He tore out throats. He did it repeatedly, and the northern lords loved him for it, because a king who fights beside a direwolf is a very effective thing to tell your bannermen about over a fire.

That is the practical half of it. The other half is that Grey Wind made Robb Stark legible to the rest of Westeros in a way no herald could. The Young Wolf, with an actual wolf ÔÇö the name and the sigil and the animal all saying the same thing at once. Southern lords who had never been north of the Neck and thought the Starks were a joke about snow adjusted their opinions quickly.

The warning nobody heeded

The more important thing Grey Wind did was refuse to like people. He would not settle around certain of the river lords. He objected, loudly and physically, to men of a particular house from the moment they came near ÔÇö snarling in corridors, having to be held back, having to be shut away. He behaved worse at one castle in the riverlands than he had behaved anywhere in the entire campaign, and he did it from the moment they arrived.

Robb, being a decent young man raised to be courteous to his hosts, put it down to a strange castle, a crowded hall and the smell of too many dogs. Every reader who has ever owned an animal reads those pages with their teeth clenched. The wolves in this story are not symbols; they are functioning instruments, and this one was giving a clear reading that its boy was too well brought up to trust.

What became of it ÔÇö if an ending is written, it is here. Spoilers.

Grey Wind was penned away from Robb at the Twins and killed with crossbows during the Red Wedding. His head was sewn onto Robb's body afterwards, which tells you exactly how much the Freys understood about what they were mocking.

The separation was the whole trick. Nobody was getting to Robb Stark with that animal in the room, and everyone in the castle knew it ÔÇö so the wolf was flattered into a kennel and the boy was flattered into a hall, and the two things that had never once been beaten while they stood together were beaten apart in the space of an hour.