In this world, there are Takers of Life and there are Givers of Life. Sometimes the winds of the seasons bring them together, and sometimes the lines get blurred.
Feverfew and Spring water
The Brother threaded his way behind the falls and into the grotto, donkey in tow. They picked their way hastily through the thicket of blanched vines and roots veiling the narrow switchback fissure that lead upwards. Thorns tore at his simple vestments, robes that bespoke of piety, poverty. When the pair stepped into the fading light of the courtyard they broke a run.
"Tulharts! Tulharts! I need you!" he shouted to the modest house beyond the broken remains of the three towers. "Nestor, help me!"
The two residents met him in the yard. He started hurriedly unloading the donkey. "Unburden my beast. Make haste, we need him! Woman, boil wine, make a fever tea." She saw dark blood on his hands and sleeve. "Do you have milk of the poppy? Prepare!" The men rushed away back through the hidden portal in the bank.
Lady Tulhart went to her work quickly, gathering comfrey, feverfew, white willow, yarrow, elderflower, strongwine, wax-sealed vials of pale liquid, her mortar and pestle. She rushed to the great table by the hearth. Two vessels she shoved into the embers, one of wine, one of water, both fetched from a beyond a hidden door behind the hearth. She began bruising the herbs; some she cast into the wine, some, the water. She unrolled a length of clean linen and rent it into strips and dunked them into the simmering wine.
The pots were near to rolling boil when the men burst through the door, half dragging a broken bleeding mess of a man on a great sodden cloak. "Open the door, make way!" They drug him through the door behind the hearth, into the spring grotto, to the shallow pool where the spring box drained through to the sluice hole.
The man was caked in black dried blood, and looked dead but for his white-rimmed, unseeing eyes. They rolled in their sockets and a weak groan rasped from this throat. The men began to peel his armour and clothing from him. Every inch and layer stunk. A pile of metal, leather and mail amassed beside him before they dragged him into the cool clear water. His leg was ripe with rot, his hair with blood and sweat, his clothes with soured mud and piss. She touched his forehead; his flesh was hot as a hearthstone. "Drink this." She poured a measure of white liquid down his throat. He coughed weakly, but swallowed well enough. "Wine," he croaked, looking up through her, more than at her. She obliged. "Kill me," he mouthed, barely a whisper. His lips begged for death but his eyes begged for salvation.
She soaked a cloth in the merciful cool water and began wiping the blood and mud away from his face. A man began to appear from beneath the filth. "Mother's mercy!" she gasped. She knew this man. Nestor couldn't know. A man's brother's crimes are not his own, but Lord Tulhart was wont to curse the house and all of its name, not the single criminal.
Nestor and the Brother uncovered his leg wound. It was grave; it stunk and leaked thick green pus and crawled with tiny maggots. They began to wash it and pick away the maggots. "Don't lose them," she said and handed them a bowl. She had learned a few things as the maesters' pest and crones' shadow when she'd been passed around as a child. She felt him wince with pain as they stripped away the sticky bandages. Another draught of strongwine, another swallow of the milk, and they pulled more at the stinking bandages, crusty bits of flesh tearing with them. A weak cry parted his lips and wet his eyes, and he passed out. His ragged breathing calmed; his body stopped shaking so violently. Mother's mercy, indeed, for a time.
Nestor left to tend to the Brother's donkey and the horse that had followed them when they had collected his master by the river. The remaining two continued their task of cleaning his wounds and his body. When they poured the boiled wine he did not stir. She heated her sharpest knife in a flame and trimmed away the rotting flesh at the edges of the worst of his wounds, but some was too deep to reach. When it was clean as she could make it, she gently washed the maggots and sprinkled them back in to finish her work, while the Brother watched intently. She laid a poultice on it and bound it first with the wine-scalded cloth strips, then with wide clean strips on the outside.
He lay unconscious in the shallow cool water, heat steaming off him. That fever would cook his brain if they didn't bring it out, she knew. She soaked a cloth again in the cool water draining from the spring box and mopped his brow with it, then motioned the Brother to follow her to the hearth. Nestor had returned, and could tend him for a time.
At the great table, she pushed her mortar toward the Brother, and handed him a basket of lush green ribwort, while she began measuring out mustard, ginger, and Dornish pepper powder. His thick arms and strong hands made easy work of crushing the leaves into a mucilage. She then had him mash some onion. She compounded her ingredients and his, tipping in just enough vinegar and flour to bring it together to a thick paste.
Back in the grotto, the woman knelt at the broken man's feet. The plaster should help draw some heat down from his head. She lifted his heavy feet to the edge of the shallow pool. They were white and spongy, and smelled like bad milk or good cheese, too long mouldered in wet boots. She rubbed them briskly to draw some blood back into them. She felt them begin to warm in her hands. She smeared the plaster over them and bound them in rags and let them down but out of the pool. The pungent smell of the compound masked some of the foul odor that hung around him.
Nestor carried in the remaining impediments they had hastily taken off the donkey in the yard; it would not serve for dew to settle on them. That done, he went to try again to tend the broken man's horse, who was proving to be a challenge. Nestor had found him grazing in the yard, but could do little for him but offer him a bucket of water, which he'd kicked to splinters. The hardy aging man would tend to all the undone chores, the tasks that would not wait while time stood still in the cool dim annex behind the hearth. Inside, the woman and the Brother took turns watching their charge, washing him, rinsing away the soil and dark humours that seeped and spewed from within and without, each catching a rest when they could. Only when he'd rest could they; the barely intelligible filth that flowed from his mouth waxed as foul as his body's leakings, and when it waned it was pitiful as a whimpering babe.