Summer

The wolf who guarded a broken boy and taught him what he actually is.

The wolf itself

Summer is silver-grey with a darker saddle across the back and eyes of a deep gold that seem, more than any of the others, to be actually looking at you. He grew into a heavy, thick-coated animal, broad in the head, and he moves without noise ÔÇö a boy in a bed on the far side of a room will not know he has come in. He can be up a flight of steps and across a hall before a man has finished turning. In the godswood he lies in the snow beside the heart tree for whole afternoons without shifting, and visitors regularly walk past him twice without seeing him at all.

His temperament is patience, and it mirrors his boy so exactly that it is almost uncomfortable. Bran spent years unable to move from a bed, forced to watch, wait and think about things nobody had asked him to think about; Summer waits in the same way. He does not bark for attention or press himself on anyone. He tolerates handling from people his boy trusts and ignores everybody else. He is not gentle in the way Lady was gentle ÔÇö there is nothing well-mannered about him, and when he moves against something he moves without any warning at all ÔÇö but he is calm, and he is watchful, and he has a habit of sitting where he can see a door. His howl is long and mournful and he uses it rarely, and when he does it is generally because something is about to happen that nobody else has noticed yet.

The bond

Bran did not name his wolf for a long time ÔÇö none of them did, and the naming, when it came, was done from a bed by a boy who had fallen a long way and woken up unable to feel his legs. He called him Summer, in a season that everyone kept saying was ending.

Of the six children Bran is the strongest warg by a considerable distance, and Summer is the door he goes through. It begins in dreams and it is not comfortable: he is on four legs, the world has gone sharp and loud, and he can smell fear on people two rooms away as a distinct and rather interesting scent. Then it stops being dreams. He learns to slip in while the wolf is awake, and then to stay, and then to take over ÔÇö running the body, hunting in it, feeling the shock of cold water and the pull of a full stomach and, above all, feeling legs.

That is the part the story is careful about. A boy who cannot walk has been handed a body that can run, and being inside it feels better than being inside his own. He is warned, repeatedly and by people who know, that a man who spends too long in an animal starts to lose the shape of himself and does not always notice going. The warning is given because he needs it.

The guard dog

Before any of the mysticism, Summer was simply the reason Bran survived his childhood. A man came into a sickroom in Winterfell with a Valyrian dagger and clear instructions, and got as far as raising it. The wolf came through the door and made the rest of the conversation unnecessary.

It set a pattern. Summer put himself between Bran and armed men on more than one occasion afterwards, took a spear once and kept going, and hunted for the party when the party had nothing. Two boys, a simple giant of a stableman and a pair of crannogmen crossed a very hostile country on very little, and a large part of the reason they arrived anywhere at all was that they were travelling with a predator that could feed them and would not leave.

North of the Wall

The further north Bran went, the less the wolf was a pet and the more the two were a single arrangement with two bodies. Wolf dreams stopped being dreams. Summer began finding the paths, scenting the way through country nobody had mapped, and Bran began spending more of each day behind his eyes than behind his own.

It is also through Summer that Bran learns what he actually is ÔÇö not a crippled lordÔÇÖs son with an odd talent, but something the free folk have names for and are frightened of, and something older powers north of the Wall have apparently been waiting for. Every step of that road was taken on four legs first. The wolf did not merely carry him there; the wolf is how he found out there was anywhere to go.

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

Summer died defending Bran in the cave beneath the weirwood, buying the seconds needed for the boy to get out. Every wolf in this litter dies covering a Stark child's retreat, which is either very touching or very grim depending on the hour you think about it.

There is a bleaker reading available. Bran's power kept growing, and the wolf kept being the vehicle for it, and by the end the animal had carried him as far as an animal could ÔÇö and what he became afterwards, he became without him.