SAMWELL

Why had he come to the Citadel in the first place?

He must had been mad when he agreed to be shipped off to Oldtown. Maybe I was. The novices had been learning about the mysteries of the mind of late, courtesy of Archmaester Mollos, a tall, portly man from the stormlands whose prodigious beard quivered alarmingly whenever he opened his mouth to shout instructions at them. "The fevered mind is a feeble mind! A madman will often imagine such events as justify his actions. Are you listening?" Put that way, Sam was almost certainly insane.

Why had he come to the Citadel in the first place?

There was no time to sleep or eat or think in the crowded halls of the bastion of knowledge, only learn. Each night Sam would return to his chambers exhausted, yet loathe to close his eyes. The archmaesters each demanded treaties and diagrams and observations, to be completed in their scant hours of free time, yet each seemed blissfully unaware that their students attended the lessons of the others, and worked them accordingly.

At first light the novices would file from their musky chambers into the grand dining hall, with its painted roof and Myrish tapestries. The archmaesters were permitted a raised dais on which to break their fast; the novices and acolytes squeezed into the narrow benches provided for them, and fought over the meagre farings laid out for them. Of late the kitchens had been struggling, Sam had heard: the Citadel was more crowded than ever.

Usually, a handful of the more intrepid apprentices would escape the confines of the dining hall before the stewards came to wake them, slipping off into the great city's brothels and taverns. He'd tried to join them, once, but the seneschal had caught him and threatened to expulse him if he did it again. It might even be worth it. No. Jon gave me a mission. The Lord Commander gave me a mission. He was a sworn brother, and neither his blood, name or cowardice could change that. Sam the Slayer. Sam the Crow. It was almost laughable.

After breaking their fast, the novices and acolytes would each march to their first lessons of the day; the acolytes had their choice of which archmaester's teaching to attend, but the novices had to be present at each and every one. Unless they wanted the seneschal to expulse them.

Sam's first course was always with curt Archmaester Perestan, whose chain and rod were copper. There, in silence, the apprentices would pore over the dusty books of the library, and note all that they had learned. The tomes were diverse, of course – accounts of the great wars of the past, the Starry Sept's records of marriages, births and funerals, a diary that claimed to record the construction of the Red Keep in King's Landing, the daring memoirs of a pirate who sailed from Tyrosh to Qarth and sampled the whores of every pleasure house and brothel along the way. When Perestan had discovered Mollander reading that one, he'd had him dragged away by the City Watch, who were permitted to guard the library - half the books stored there were the only surviving copies, most having been burned by Baelor the Blessed in his madness – and put in the stocks for a day and a night. The tomes themselves were worth a king's ransom each, not to mention the knowledge written within them. Sam had never seen the diary again, however, although the others all swore that it must be somewhere.

After almost an hour of frantic copying, their tutor would simply stand and wander off, leaving them to gather up their quills and scrolls and rush to the next Archmaester, kindly old Ebrose. The ancient hunchback was nothing if not wise, and Sam enjoyed his lessons far more than he did Perestan's… the only problem was the content of the classes themselves. Ebrose's ring and rod were silver, the metal of healing, and such was his teaching. They began with simple things: the medicinal properties of urine, how the heart would contract and send blood flowing through the veins, how the muscles would pull and stretch to move your limbs.

All that Sam understood, in fact he excelled at it. The drawings and diagrams were clean and far away, little more than paintings to be copied and studied. I have seen worse. He presented them with a model of the body that showed how each of their parts would react to pain and pressure, and taught them how to grind herbs and spices into potions and poultices. And then, one tiring morning, Ebrose announced that, on the morrow, they were to prove all that they had learned to determine how worthy they might be of a silver link. Roone raised his hand. "And how might we do that, archmaester?"

"You shall extract, observe and categorise a man's organs, noting which herbs and roots would be of best aid to common illnesses that they may suffer from. I will be joined by Archmaester Mollos, who will help me determine who is, and isn't, ready to advance to the rank of acolyte in the discipline of healing." His piercing eyes seemed to be watching Sam.

He'd risked the wrath of the hardened Archmaester Ryam to stay a while and plead with Ebrose. "Archmaester, I cannot—"

"You cannot or you will not?"

"I can't cut up a body and—"

"Why can you not?" Ebrose's tone was placid, although a faint smile played beneath his snowy beard. His chain clanked as he shuffled towards Sam.

"I can't," he told him. "I'm not a warrior, I'm not a killer. I'm a craven. The sight of blood, it…" Father was right. Father knew.

"Blood does not flow in a corpse, Sam. I thought you'd learned that."

"I—"

Ebrose quieted him with a gesture. "Every man was a boy until he chose not to be. Every maester was a novice until he chose to be better."

"My father said the same thing."

"Your father was correct. They are only dead men, Sam, nothing more. You have naught to fear." Only dead men. Sam had killed dead men, and worse. He could do it.

Following the healer's lessons they would heave their way into one of the many towers of the Citadel, overlooking the Honeywine. Archmaester Ryam would wait for them at the door, tapping his foot incessantly. Should you arrive late you would find the heavy oaken door locked in your face.

Ryam, of the golden chain, taught the art of numbers and incomes to the apprentices. At this Sam struggled, unlike the healing. If only Bowen Marsh were here. The friendly steward had a head for sums, or he wouldn't have found himself in the position he was in. Many a night Sam would lay crumpled at his bedside, surrounded by torn and crushed papers bedecked with figures and letters.

Of course, the same could be said for the other apprentices, as well. Mollander didn't even try: he would sit and stare listlessly at the meaningless diagrams, more than once nodding off to sleep. Roone did slightly better, filling his scrolls with pointless wanderings and doodles. Sam suspected that none of them would attain their golden links any time soon.

Out of all of them, Alleras alone seemed to have any head for figures at all. When they asked him how he did it, the slim dornishman only shrugged. "My mother was a merchant." When they asked him to explain the work he only laughed.

Following their two hours with Ryam their small group would return, once again, to the dining hall for lunch. Usually, luncheon was far more appetising than breakfast, and since there was no time to slip off, regardless, all tended to attend. River pyke basted in breadcrumbs, a warming stew filled with chunks of carrot and onion, a pie stuffed with sage, barley and beef. There was no wine for any but the archmaesters, but cider for those who wanted it.

And then it was back to work.

Their afternoons were generally filled with more practical lessons, although first they joined with Archmaester Mollos in his sanctum. He was possibly the least likeable of their tutors, despite his strange appearance and fierce wit. Mollos could be terrible when roused, bellowing orders at them from the other side of the room, spittle spraying through his crooked, yellow, teeth. There was no fooling or japery during his teachings; somehow even less than the other archmaesters allowed.

Mollos taught the higher mysteries of life, such as the inner workings of the brain, the concept of time and space, the realm of the gods… A task he was singularly ill suited for. Sam doubted that he'd learned anything apart from the fact of his own insanity from Mollos.

Fortunately, their next tutor was Archmaester Nymos of the iron, who taught the art of warcraft. Despite the grim subject, Nymos was a jovial man, with a smooth, round, face and a rounder belly. "The lords you serve will oft be blinded by dreams of honour, or glory, or chivalry. It shall be up to you to remind them of the reality of war. Honour shall not win a battle, and luck can smite past glory in an instant. You must see the battle, not the songs they'll sing of it," he told them.

To prove his point, Nymos' solar contained a large map, on which were drawn trees and rocks, passes and foothills, oceans and streams. A battlefield, thought Sam when he first beheld it, and he was right. Every day, Nymos would first instruct them in the strengths or weaknesses of a particular weapon and the men who wielded it, be it cavalry or crossbowmen, and how best to deploy and lead them on the field of battle. The next hour would be devoted to the 'game', as Alleras called it.

They would lay their men, horses, and engines of war on the battlefield, opposing Nymos' own. Each day a new novice would command; the others would lead various divisions and flanks. Invariably, Nymos would win. They had only come even close to victory when Roone was general, and decided to risk all in a foolish, full-on, charge. While the archmaester reeled under the initial result, he soon surrounded them. They were slaughtered to a man, and for a week Roone was confined to his own table in the dining hall, well away from the others.

Following warfare, when the sun was beginning to set and the moon to shine, their last class of the day would be with old Vinegar Vaellyn, who taught the apprentices stargazing. As a boy, growing up in the woody confines of Horn Hill, Sam had often spent the night with his sisters, staring up at the stars. The stars will look after you, even if I can't, mother used to say. Sam was a man now, however, and too old to believe in such nonsense, as Vaellyn oft reminded him. The stars were not the gods or spirits, he declared in his famously acid tones, they were balls of burning gas. Armen had laughed so hard at that, he had to leave the class for an hour in order to catch his breath, while Vaellyn sighed disapprovingly.

Only after their stargazing was over were the novices allowed to leave the confines of the Citadel. On his first night at the Citadel, Sam had ridden a wagon down to the city gates with Gilly, where a sour ox-driver, Feggus, was waiting for them. Xhondo knew him from half a hundred past stays in Oldtown, and apparently he was a great friend of his. Feggus gave no indication of this whatsoever.

Sam had taken Gilly's hand, that night. "Remember, you must tell them that I sent you. My father has no love of… lawless wildlings, nor mothers with young children." Women in particular, in fact. "Though if he knows that the babe is my blood, he should…" Words failed him. Silently, Samwell bent down to place a gentle kiss on the babe's head. He hadn't kissed Gilly; it was too painful. Instead they'd held each other in their arms for a sweet heartbeat. Then Sam let go, and trudged away.

"You do well, black Sam," Xhondo told him, but he was too morose to care.

Supper was not supplied by the kitchens; they would have to wander out into the city, into Oldtown's inns and taverns, in order to buy their own food. Most days, Sam would forego dinner entirely, owing to the piles of work he had to do. On the rare days that Sam did go with the others, they would inevitably head down to a mossy tavern called The Quill and Tankard near the docks. The handsome, if aged, owner, Emma, was always pleased to feed the novices… so long as they paid.

The group, Mollander, Roone, Alleras, Armen and Sam, would squeeze around a table on the deck, overlooking the Honeywine. Mollander would regale them with stories of dragons and krakens in the far east between drinks, while Roone listened intently and shook him when he stopped. Armen the Acolyte would listen, too, before ridiculing the tales as nonsense. Alleras would speak little, only opening his mouth to warn them of arrows, while Lazy Leo Tyrell, another visitor who all seemed to hate, would boast of how his father was Commander of the City Watch. The Arbor had fallen, he told them, but Paxter Redwyne was leading his fleet across Dorne, and Willas Tyrell from the north.

And then there was Pate.

The pasty-faced novice was silent more often than not, sitting with them at the tables but never quite a part of them. His face had a queer sheen about him, as if he were always sweating, and his eyes seemed hooded and dark. Sam had the luck to share a room with him, and when he went to sleep, more often than not Pate would still be away in the city, drinking or whoring or who knew what else. Rosey, Emma's pretty daughter, seemed to dote on him, yet Pate showed her little regard, as he did food. Mollander said he hadn't eaten in days, but Pate simply shrugged and said he had no appetite.

Once, after a nearly sleepless night of copying Maester Gyldayn's History of the Targaryen Kings, Sam woke with a start. He though he'd overslept, as usual; there would be no breakfast for him now. And yet it was dark outside. The moon was still at its zenith, and the stars shone down on him from above. Sam took a hesitant look about his room, bathed in pale blue light, and saw that Pate's bed was empty. The coverlets and pillow were tidily folded away, his few sets of clothes tucked beneath, but of the boy himself there was no sign. He tried the door, but it was locked.

Sam slept uneasily that night.

Next up: The Knight