For the first week, Raymun waited to wake up.
A coma made sense.
A stroke on the kitchen linoleum made sense.
Even a fever dream brought on by bad chicken and radiator heat was easier to swallow than the room around him.
The dark-haired woman came whenever his lungs started up.
She had bruised hollows under her eyes and hands that smelled of mutton fat and boiled linen.
She fed him, wiped him down, bound him tight in scratchy wool, and murmured a steady stream of syllables he could not parse.
The man was never far behind her.
Broad across the collarbone, short in the beard, with split fingernails that caught on the swaddling cloth.
He would stand over the cradle for ten minutes at a time, staring down at Raymun like a carpenter admiring a joint he had cut in the dark.
There were no plastic tubes behind the headboard.
No recessed lights in the timber and haired plaster.
When the sun went down, the room ran on tallow dips and turf smoke.
Hunger did not ask permission; it twisted his belly until his throat opened on its own.
A draft through the shutter made him bawl.
Ten minutes of staring at a roof beam knocked him flat into sleep.
Worse was the rest of it.
One morning, a wet heat spread beneath his hips.
Raymun locked every muscle he had.
*No.*
The woman’s shadow fell across the cradle.
*Walk away.
Leave it.*
Her fingers unpinned the wool.
Raymun fixed his eyes on a blackened knot in the oak joist overhead while cold air hit his legs and a warm rag wiped him clean.
He had a job.
She tucked a dry square of bleached hemp under his backside.
He paid taxes.
She pinned the wool snug around his ribs.
He was a grown man, and he had just fouled his own linen again.
She bent down and pressed her mouth to his forehead.
When she straightened, she tapped two fingers against her breastbone.
“Mara.”
Raymun blinked up at her.
She tapped her chest again.
“Mara.”
Then she turned her chin toward the low doorway, where the bearded man was ducking under the lintel with an armful of split birch.
“Garran.”
The man looked over from the woodbox, his beard twitching.
*Mara.
Garran.*
The sounds had edges he could hold onto.
If they had names, the noise in their mouths was a language.
And if it was a language, he could learn what country he had died into.
The cold months dragged into mud, and the mud dried into summer dust.
Raymun learned the house by ear and nose long before his tongue could shape a word.
He learned that Garran snored with a wet click at the back of his palate.
He learned the iron grate of the front latch, the heavy thump of the dough trough, the sour drift of spilled small beer rising through the floorboards.
There were always boots downstairs.
Heavy hobnails, soft riding leather, wooden clogs clattering across the pine.
Men laughed below the floorboards until the tallow candles shook.
Other nights the voices went hard and high, benches scraped back, and once an earthenware jug smashed against the wall hard enough to set Raymun wailing in the dark while Garran’s heavy voice barked from the stairs.
An inn.
His parents kept a roadside tavern.
The rest took longer to settle in his chest.
No alarm was going to ring at six-thirty.
Nobody at the office was waiting on his freight waivers anymore; they had probably posted his job before the month was out and boxed up the desk plant by the window.
Not a single soul from Earth knew what had happened to him.
Some nights that weight came down on him after the house went still, and his small chest hitched until the noise woke Mara in the bed beside his box.
She never asked what was wrong.
She just hauled him up against her shift, tucked his chin into the hollow of her neck, and walked the floorboards from the press to the chimney until his breathing slowed.
For the first month he stiffened against her collarbone, fighting it.
By autumn, he buried his face in the wool and let his eyes shut.
The words came in pieces once he got his knees under him.
“Bread.”
“Fire.”
“Horse.”
“Mama.”
“Dada.”
He spent his afternoons under the long trestle tables where the rushes smelled of dry mint and hound hair, chewing on a carved wooden spoon while boots shifted around him.
Nobody minded a baby on the floor.
Most of the talk was turnips and wheel ruts.
The bridge at the creek had lost a plank.
Wool was down a penny a stone.
A tinker had sold a leaky kettle to the miller’s wife.
Then an autumn squall drove four soaked carters inside before dusk.
One of them peeled his wet cloak off by the hearth and spat into the cinders.
“Should’ve stayed in the stables at Duskendale.
Mud’s up to the axle past the fork.”
Raymun’s gums stopped on the handle of the wooden spoon.
*Duskendale.*
He sat back on his heels under the bench, staring at the man’s steaming boots.
Half the market towns in England sounded like that if you mumbled them through a mouthful of ale.
Two moons later, when the frost was rattling the shutters, three men in boiled leather rode in from the south and took the bench by the barrel.
“Three days out of King’s Landing and my arse still feels the cobbles,” the oldest one said, knocking the clay plug out of a jug.
Raymun let go of the table leg he was holding.
He landed hard on his padded rump in the rushes.
“You didn’t have to drink the whole street dry before we cleared the Mud Gate,” the younger rider said, reaching for a heel of brown bread.
“Castle was buying up every cart of salt pork on the river anyway,” the third man said.
“They say the king’s holding another feast for the storm lords.”
The older rider snorted into his mug.
“Robert Baratheon?
Tell me when the bastard isn’t feasting.”
The wooden cup slipped out of Raymun’s fingers and clattered across the pine boards.
Over by the kettle, Mara turned with the iron ladle in her hand.
“Raymun?”
He did not look up.
*Robert Baratheon.
Duskendale.
King’s Landing.*
A log settled in the hearth, sending a shower of orange sparks up the chimney.
At the counter, Garran set a fresh pitcher on the oak and swept three copper pennies into his palm.
The rider in boiled leather tore his crust of bread in half with his teeth.
Raymun sat on the cold boards between the table legs, staring down at his own small, dirt-smudged fingers.
He remembered the maps he had scrolled through on his phone in the dark.
He remembered the river roads burning, the heads on the spikes above the gatehouses, the dragons across the narrow sea, and the dead things walking through the snow in the north.
Raymun swallowed.
*Oh no.*