The easiest place to hide a drop of water was the sea. Along the White Knife, roads joined villages and market towns through the lands of half the North's great lords. Traffic moved between White Harbor and the country around Winterfell every day. Two more travelers disappeared among it without difficulty.
Oliver's wounds were another matter.
His breathing quickened. His head hurt; bouts of nausea and dizziness came and went. Blood and yellow fluid seeped from nine separate wounds, and the muscles around them twitched painfully whenever he moved. He knew what infection looked like. Without treatment, it could kill him.
He told Kellan none of it. He kept riding. Perhaps dying here would send him home. Back to Earth, away from a place where every road seemed to end with killing or being killed.
On the third morning out of Bellwick, he fell off Old Bones.
Kellan dropped beside him and lifted his head.
“Master? What's wrong?”
Oliver's face was red. His eyes rolled back, and each breath came fast and shallow.
“Here. Water. You'll feel better.”
Kellan pulled the stopper from his waterskin. Water spilled from the corner of Oliver's mouth and ran down his neck. He wasn't swallowing.
“You'll be all right.”
The boy hauled him back onto the horse and tied him in place. They had passed a village yesterday. Someone there might know a healer, a wandering wise woman, anyone. At least there would be a bed.
An hour along the return road, Oliver was still muttering to himself, no better. Kellan's father had told him how men survived battles only to die of little wounds afterward. Fever, wandering thoughts, and then nothing. He wiped his eyes with his fist and walked faster.
“You'll get better,” he said. “You will.”
A bald man in a gray hooded robe stopped beside the road. A satchel hung from his shoulder.
“Your father? He looks very ill.”
Kellan looked at him warily. The stranger met his eyes without moving closer. Then a little metal hammer caught the light at his throat.
“You serve the Seven?”
“Brother Joren. I serve the Smith. I'm making a pilgrimage, following the road my teacher took.”
Kellan bowed.
“Kellan Turner, of the Fingers. This is Ser Oliver Evans. I'm his squire.”
“He's hurt?”
“He fought some robbers to help a child. Nine wounds. He hasn't woken since this morning.”
Joren opened Oliver's clothes and examined him.
“Wounds that won't heal bring fever. Sometimes death. You must stop traveling. Keep on like this and you'll be digging his grave.”
“Can you help? He has money. I'll pay.”
“Later. First we need shade, and somewhere he can lie down.”
They left the road for a flat piece of riverbank. Kellan unloaded the supplies, propped a blanket on branches, and laid Oliver beneath it. Joren sent him for water to boil, then went into the woods. He returned carrying leaves, flowers, and plants with their roots still attached.
With hot water he cleaned the wounds. He crushed herbs beneath a stone, spread the paste over the injured places, and bound them in clean cloth. The rest went into a pot. When the brew had cooled, he fed it to Oliver a little at a time.
His breathing eased. Joren listened with an ear against his chest, then sat back.
“This is a beginning. He still needs a proper house and rest. I'll see whether anyone on the road can give us a ride. Stay with him.”
He gathered his robe and climbed the bank. Kellan knelt beside the blanket, brushing mosquitoes away.
After a while, Oliver opened his eyes.
“Fainted again.” He managed a weak smile.
Kellan didn't return it.
“You should have kept me with you.”
“I sent you away on purpose. My mistake. Mine to put right.”
“One blade, against all of them, in their own house. It was...” Kellan stopped himself. “It wasn't a sound plan.”
“No. I should have watched the place. Learned when he came and went. Chosen my way in and out, waited for a dark night. With luck, I'd have been gone before they knew he was dead.” Oliver drew a breath. “I didn't dare wait.”
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“Why?”
“Because I might have calmed down. Started wondering whether one child I'd met a few times was worth fighting a gang for. I was afraid I'd discover what a cold, cowardly bastard I was.”
He looked at his pupil.
“Was it worth it?”
Kellan considered that.
“I don't know. My father said a knight must protect the weak and uphold justice. Even if it costs him his life.”
“He taught you well.”
Oliver didn't mention the knight whose name Rask had tried to use before the blade opened his throat.
“I asked myself before I went in. Asked again when it was done, hiding underwater from the guards.”
“What answer did you find?”
“None. You can't put a price on justice. There's no sum to work out. What you call justice might be worth nothing to me, or a thousand dragons.” He turned his head toward the sky. “But beating a child to death so you can rob somebody else? A child who earned his living with his own hands? That isn't justice anywhere.”
The words came more quickly now.
“Perhaps the lords would call it a little thing. Charge a fine. Perhaps not even that, with a friend in the right place. Call it suicide, shut the case. Who'd complain? Tobin had nobody. He came into the world quietly and went out the same way.”
His face was growing red again.
“It shouldn't be like that. Good people dying for being decent, the others thriving because they're shameless. A murderer wears gold while the man who builds the road doesn't get a grave. It shouldn't...”
The Common Tongue slipped away. He went on in English, words Kellan couldn't follow. The boy touched his forehead, wetted a cloth, and laid it across the burning skin.
“Rest, Master.”
Oliver kept murmuring after his eyes closed.
“Shouldn't be like this.”
* * *
Joren found a cart carrying potatoes. Its owner asked ten copper stars to take the sick man to the next village. Kellan counted out a silver moon, a copper star, and fourteen pennies, and helped lift Oliver onto the load.
The brother rode beside the driver. Kellan followed on Swiftfin, leading Old Bones and the packhorse, Drudge.
Ten miles brought them to a village with neither inn nor tavern. Joren spoke to a farmer, and they rented an empty storehouse. Even here, where most people kept the old gods, a wandering brother's reputation could find them a roof.
Oliver woke in the middle of the night to rain hammering outside. Wind worried at the building. He lay listening until he could bear it no longer and called Kellan over.
“If I die, everything's yours.”
“Master.”
“One thing in return. Bury me somewhere sunny. I've had enough of cold and damp. And put up a stone.” He paused. “Oliver Evans. An unlucky sod who died before he could save the world.”
Kellan frowned.
“Brother Joren's looking after you. Rest, and when you're well we'll go north.”
Oliver closed his eyes and waited for death.
It failed to arrive.
Two more days of fever passed. On the third his temperature fell, and the wounds began to scab. By the tenth day he was well again, with nine ugly scars and a great deal of self-pity to feel foolish about.
Joren was almost as surprised as his patient. Had Brother Gerren's remedies always been this effective?
He was no great healer. At the monastery he had learned to wash wounds, apply certain herbs, and make a few medicinal brews. He used the combinations his teacher had taught him; he didn't know enough to alter them for different illnesses. Throughout Oliver's sickness he had changed the dressings and prepared the medicine, but he had spent more time praying than doing either.
To Joren, the Seven had plainly answered.
Oliver doubted that. Why would gods he had never worshipped take an interest in him? If anyone deserved the credit, surely his own ancestors had a better claim than this foreign collection. He kept the thought to himself. He had a knight's reputation to maintain, and more importantly, the man had saved his life. There was no need to hurt him for it.
Nor was keeping his mouth shut adequate payment.
He offered Joren a gold dragon.
“The Seven saved you, ser. My hands were only their instrument. If you wish to give thanks, donate food at the next sept. Others will benefit.”
Oliver had read too much about what supposedly holy places could conceal: money wrung from the desperate, children abused, sex dressed up as sacred duty, relics made from the dead. Every lurid story he had ever found online seemed to come back at once. He would sooner throw the coin into the river and enjoy the splash.
He caught Joren's hand and tried to press the dragon into it. When that failed, he went for the man's pocket.
“Ser, please!” Joren backed away. “Do you want me to show that coin by mistake on some road, and have a stranger follow me into the woods and beat me to death for it?”
Oliver stopped. He saw Tobin's bed again.
He put the money away.
“You're going to Winterfell?”
“Yes.”
“So are we. Come with us.”
* * *
Joren had been born in the riverlands, a carpenter's eldest son. At seventeen he had gone with his father to work at a monastery. An old brother, impressed by his workmanship, had called him favored by the Smith and recommended that he join them.
There he had learned his letters and his little store of medicine. He had added ironwork and masonry to the carpentry he already knew. He had also seen things he preferred not to discuss, brothers straying far enough from their vows to shake his faith.
Gerren had traveled in his youth. Joren decided to follow him: a long journey around the coasts, from west to east, doing useful work and testing his faith against hardship. He had been on the road for four years.
Winterfell was his next destination. Most northerners worshipped the old gods, but southern servants, guards, and their descendants lived there too. Noble marriages brought households with them; fostered children came with attendants. Three hundred years of a united realm had left worshippers of the Seven even in the northern capital. Few as they were, Joren believed they deserved someone to guide them.
The faith itself had crossed the narrow sea with the Andals. The Father judged, the Mother nurtured, the Smith worked and made. The Warrior governed battle, the Maiden innocence, the Crone wisdom. The Stranger waited where knowledge ended and death began. They were seven aspects of one god, Joren explained, rather than seven separate gods.
Between them they covered much of a person's life, and the faith had rooted itself in Andal law, government, and ordinary habits. South of the Neck it had largely displaced the gods of the First Men. Hence the new gods, however old they had become.
Oliver privately thought it sounded like a religion halfway through turning many gods into one, with work still to do.
“Will a handful of worshippers be able to keep you fed?” he asked.
Joren lifted the hammer at his throat.
“I'm still a carpenter.”
He had demonstrated that during their stay. He checked Oliver morning and evening, leaving Kellan to bring water and handle the ordinary nursing. In between, he repaired villagers' houses and made tools, earning food and coppers while giving the Smith something tangible to show for his presence.
He accepted the invitation to travel north gladly. Oliver bought him a donkey. Five silver moons was a modest enough gift, and it would keep the brother from holding up three horses by walking.
This time Joren accepted without argument.