…:Chapter Two: Coram:…
George Cooper, King or Rogues was behind the Dancing Dove in his personal stables grooming his bay mare. He heard hoof beats coming along the alley beside the building that lead to his stables. He turned around and slid two of his knives out of their sheaths in his sleeves, ready for anything as a man in his position had to be.
A horse came around the corner. George knew the horse, but the hooded man slumped over its neck wasn't its owner. He narrowed his eyes. Moonlight stopped in the middle of the cobbled courtyard and her rider fell sideways off onto the cobblestones. He struggled up onto his hands and knees, vomited, and then fell sideways, the hood falling back from his face revealing that it was Coram.
George dashed foreword, re-sheathing his knives and kneeled beside the man, checking his pulse and breath. Once he had determined that he was still alive, although barely, he picked up the man and slung him over his shoulder, carrying him up the backstairs to his personal suit. George's head was filled with questions, most of them about the safety of the owner of the horse that bore Coram to him.
Once up in his room he stripped off Coram's soiled outer cloths and laid him on his own bed. The man was hot with fever, his eyes red and irritated and his breathing shallow. The stubble on his cheeks revealed that he had not shaved in several days. But he did not seem to be in immeadeatly fatal danger.
George dashed downstairs and quickly led Moonlight to a stall and gave her water. She did not have her tack on so there was nothing to remove. She must have brought Coram here by herself…George thought. Promising the horse that he would give her the currying that she deserved later George leaped onto his own bay gelding and galloped off to the only healer that he trusted, his own mother.