MEERYA

It had been quite a coincidence, Meerya thought, looking back on the afternoon when she had found him.

Usually, she never prowled the riverbanks as far as she had that day because there just wasn't a whole lot of food to be found; yet this time she had come up dreadfully short in the fields and woods around her house. Of course, it couldn't actually be called a house anymore after the wolves and the lions had chosen parts of the area to stage some of their worst battles on. Amidst the chaos their house had burnt almost to the ground but for a small part that miraculously survived, consisting of four barely preserved rooms where she lived with her father, her two brothers and her younger sister. Most of the people that inhabited the area had either died or fled and with them the chance to trade food and clothes – anything really to make sure they would survive the cold that was by now steadily drifting in from the North. Her family had not been able to leave, though, not with her father wounded and weakened from the fire that had ravaged their house and lands, and so they tried their best to hunt for food, be it the occasional bit of game that her brothers would shoot with their bows and arrows, their quivers steadily emptying as time went by, or fish from the river, or anything else that was edible and possible for them to lay their hands on.

She would be the one to have her sister Liya in tow, now that their mother was no longer around and their father too weak to be of any use to anyone, but as the little girl was afraid of the vast amounts of water the river carried, she had decided to scour the banks on her own and send her sister back to the house with her brothers who had just reappeared from the woods.

At first, she thought she had stumbled upon yet another corpse washed ashore by the river even though the number of dead bodies had significantly decreased over the past few weeks. When she had come closer to examine the man lying between the reeds, his legs still in the frothing water, she noticed somehow that his chest was still rising and falling with each erratic, laboured breath of air he took. From what she could see at first glance, there were at least five broken arrows sticking out of his body. His heavy leather clothes were stained with the remnants of what must be his own blood, and his face was an ugly mess of wounds and scrapes undoubtedly caused by the same people who'd loosed their arrows at him.

She had tried to haul him out of the water herself, but he was a big, heavy man and his drenched clothes and boots seriously weighed him down so she had to abandon the attempt. She decided to warn her father and asked her brothers to bring the man into the house so that she could at least make him comfortable in the last moments of his life.

That he had made it through the first week, though, was entirely beyond her comprehension, as he bled copiously after she removed the ragged arrowheads from his body; leaving her to stitch up the gaping wounds as fast and as best as she could with what little means she had at her disposal. She had cleaned him as best she could, taking off his leather tunic, finding rich linens underneath, his breeches and boots stained by the water that had dragged him downstream but of still clearly expensive make. It had been strange to strip him of every last stitch of his ruined clothing; his naked body wretched and doomed under her trembling hands. Her brother's smallclothes fit him well enough after the bleeding had finally stopped and she made sure the blankets on top kept him warm. Yet only after her father had offered the fur from his bed, the only one her family possessed these days, to cover him with as well, did she notice how her fever-wracked patient finally stopped shaking.

She had discovered cruel, purple bite marks in his neck that stunned her beyond belief, as they were of such size that she asked herself what creature could possibly have sunk its teeth into the man's skin. On closer inspection she found the same, deeper marks in the neckline of the heavy leather tunic; the holes the giant teeth had left behind loose and frayed, and she realised that whatever had bitten him had dragged him along as well.

He wasn't as old as she first assumed either after she had cleaned the wounds in his face and neck; giving him no more than sixteen or seventeen years. He'd probably be scarred for the rest of his life, but she could tell he had been handsome before the attack. His jaw was square, his cheekbones high, and he had a full head of reddish curls. She had waited until the worst of the cuts and scrapes that disfigured his face had closed before she set about the delicate task of removing his beard, anything to abate the fever, noticing she was probably right when she thought he couldn't be much older than she was herself.

Her brothers had eyed him suspiciously as she tended to his wounds, gauging the quality of his clothes, searching for any sign that might give away who he was or where he was from. Her eldest brother Maaric had stood with the heavy leather garment in his hands, sliding a finger across the fabric while deep in thought, and had then stared at her patient for the longest time. He told her about the rumours that had filtered through of a massacre having taken place at the Twins, the enormous Frey Keep many miles further upstream, where Edmure Tully of Riverrun had married Walder Frey's daughter Roslin. King Robb Stark's massive army had been quartered around the castle for the duration of the festivities but had apparently been betrayed and attacked by Walder Frey's army within the halls, thereby breaching every possible law of hospitality and safe passing. What had become of the northerners or their King, the stories had not yet disclosed, but Meerya was quite certain that somehow more news of the abomination would ultimately travel to even their obscure little corner of Westeros.

"He's a Northman," was all Maaric had said at the end of that first week, before leaving her to continue her vigil by the side of the wounded man's bed.

Now Meerya pushed the heavy curtain out of the way, stepping into the room that smelt of sweat and blood and death. She had tended to her father in this room, who'd been lying on the same bed, staring up at the same blackened ceiling, and – even though he was frail – had made it as she had fought to keep him alive. Sitting down, placing the basket of fresh bandages in her lap, she looked down at this man that she didn't know, not his name or his age or even the colour of his eyes, and found herself mumbling the same vow that she had muttered when her father had been fighting for his life. It was a vow that she had whispered so many times since she'd begun tending him – that he would keep breathing and heal and pull through and live, not merely because she wanted to know who he was but because she had seen too much death and despair to last her a lifetime.

Carefully unwrapping the bandages and looking at the state the wounds were in, though, caused her stomach to drop. Not one of them had fully closed yet and the stitching was messy at best. Her only experience with tending to the sick and dying had been her own father and he had suffered burns; many of them, yes – but of a rather superficial nature as her brothers had been able to pull him out of their burning house much faster than they had their mother. Meerya found she was not prepared, really, for these deep, ghastly, gaping holes caused by arrows that had obviously been shot from too close a range, as her second brother had been kind enough to explain.

"Shot by a traitor's weapon in a traitor's hands," Merell had observed the day they brought him in, dipping his chin at the bed. "He will be dead soon." Whether it was from exhaustion or the ever-present hunger or something else she didn't know, but once Merell had left the room after his ominous words, she could not keep herself from crying for her stranger's fate.

"This doesn't look good…" she muttered into the silence of the room. "Why aren't these closing up?" She dabbed at the moist edges, purple and black, checking the stitches, reapplying fresh bandages, covering the whole nasty wound up again. The sight and smell of the wounds made her realise she could no longer push the notion aside anymore: she needed help. Her patient had lived for so much longer than anyone – including herself – had wanted to bet on, she couldn't abandon him now.

A Maester lived at a small keep not twenty miles away, but after broaching the subject, there was no one in the household willing to seek him out, hard-pressed as they were to survive the barren land and the increasingly colder weather themselves. Yet, with the passing of each day in which the stranger kept stubbornly drawing breath but not healing in the way she had hoped he would, she knew she had to go and find this Maester herself, or allow him to die like her brothers predicted he would – before the month was out.

After all the effort she had put her patient and herself through it was a consequence she found herself unwilling to face. Her daily chores she had carried out without a single complaint, her sister remaining in her care as well and not suffering from lack of attention, and every other free moment of her time she had sat with the stranger, watching his ugly, yet somehow still oddly handsome face, cleaning and redressing his wounds diligently, listening for any sounds coming from his mouth. She had spent weeks wiping his feverish brow, washing those parts of his body that had survived unscarred, clothing him as far as she could manage, trying to get him to swallow a little water by wetting his lips and talking to him to let him know at least someone was around who cared for him even though he never responded in any way; hadn't opened his eyes once. Now all she wanted was for him to live, to pull through, to heed her prayer of survival.

It had taken her two days to reach the keep, trying to steer clear of bands of raiders that were prowling the roads ever since the wolves and the lions had retreated, her boots the worse for wear. A maid let her in, allowing her a few bites to eat in the warm kitchen while announcing her to her mistress, and Meerya thought of home.

She'd left the stranger in the care of her father and her sister, telling to the latter to not be repulsed by the wounds she would have to redress every day during her absence, while hoping the former would be able to somehow send word to her when things went wrong. It was an idle thought, she feared, because with their limited means the man would probably be dead by the time the message reached her, but she had arranged for it anyway, giving in to the odd attachment she had started to feel for her patient.

"The Maester will speak with you," the maid said on coming back into the kitchen, giving her a pointed look. "Follow me."

Meerya stood, brushed some crumbs from her dress, and followed the girl through the dark hallways of the house to the Maester's quarters. She was shown into a room filled with countless books on shelves and multi-coloured jars on tables and two big, black ravens in a cage. Maester Ellard she recognised immediately, of course, as he walked around his desk towards her, while the maid closed the door on her way out.

"Meerya," the man said, coming to stand in front of her. "That is your name if I remember correctly?" Meerya nodded, startled when one of the ravens started screeching and flapping around in its cage. "Oh, just ignore that," he said, walking back to his seat. "What can I do for you?"

She took a deep breath, feeling nervous all of a sudden, ridiculously afraid the Maester would refuse her for some reason. She looked up at him and squared her shoulders.

"I have a stranger in my house," she said. "I found him on the bank of the river and he is wounded." She swallowed, pushing the images of the bleeding wounds out of her mind's eye. "Arrows… They fired arrows at him, and I have tried to remove them and stitch up the holes, but…" She faltered, no longer able to block out the horrific images of the open gaping wounds, and Ellard smiled softly at her, patting her shoulder. "He doesn't heal, Maester, and I don't know what to do. You've got to help me." She shuddered through another breath. "My father wouldn't let me come here at first, but I asked him how he expects me to allow a strange man to die in the same room where I tended to his wounds not so many moons before."

The Maester nodded in understanding. "Arrows, you say…" He gave her a sharp look. "How many?"

She held up her hand, her fingers spread apart.

"No other wounds beside the bolts?" he asked again.

"Oh, yes," Meerya answered. "He has some stab wounds, not too deep, and his face is scratched and cut." She waited for a second. "He also has terrible bite marks in his neck which I found in his leather clothes as well. Holes this big," and with her thumb and forefinger she indicated to the Maester the size of the marks she had discovered in the stranger's clothing. Ellard stared at her hand, still mid-air, and contemplated for a few moments.

"Go back to the kitchen and wait until I call you again." He stood, leaving no room for more words.

DACEY

When Maester Ellard finally stepped out of the room, closing the door as quietly as he could, Dacey jerked to attention, inwardly scolding herself for her terrible lack of watchfulness.

"He's sleeping again," he said, folding his hands in his robes, lifting his chin to look her in the eye. "I have good hopes he will make it, now that he's awake and almost free of fever." He walked a few paces towards the stairs before halting, his shoulders hunched, as if in thought. When he turned around, Dacey cocked an eyebrow, silently prompting him to speak.

"A girl arrived today," he muttered, clearly debating with himself if this information was of any value to Dacey, but speaking again nonetheless. "She lives upstream with her family; her father and her siblings. I know of them, their mother died in a fire, leaving the house as nothing but a blackened ruin, courtesy of the war…" Dacey narrowed her eyes, stepping closer to Ellard, wondering where he was going with his words, but before she could say anything, the Maester was already continuing. "She's asked me to help her tend to a wounded man that she's keeping alive in her father's house." He paused and swallowed, a thoughtful look on his face. "It might be one of your lot."

"My lot…" Dacey repeated carefully, her hand resting on the pommel of the unfamiliar sword by her hip. "That almost sounds as if you are uneasy with your master's shifting allegiances, Maester." She slowly moved her hand away from her sword, folding her arms in front of her chest – ignoring the stabbing pain in her shoulder – not a flinch across her face.

"I am not uneasy at all, my lady," he answered smoothly. "I only mean to serve this family and you will have to agree that I have so far tended to you and your friend in the room behind you to the best of my abilities." It was something Dacey could not deny and she shifted on her feet, unfolding her arms, her face a stern mask.

"What do you suggest?" she asked instead, realising she was still too weak to ride a horse; too weak even to travel much farther than the dining room at the bottom of the stairs. "Will you go and see this man?"

"If my master gives me leave, yes I will." He stared at Dacey for the longest time. "I'll see what I can do for him, if he can be helped or even moved here." He waited a second before adding, "or if he's likely to die soon."

With those words he left her at Smalljon's room and she allowed the tension to release from between her shoulders, adjusting the sword at her hip. It had been a bad omen when she had to part with her sword inside Walder Frey's great hall as no Kingsguard should ever have to, and she remembered how naked she'd felt without it, realising there was no way she could defend Robb, or herself for that matter, if anything went wrong. She had taken her current sword from a dead Stark soldier who, like her, had washed up on the riverbank, and although it more or less matched her own in length and weight, it definitely wasn't hers and thus it felt strange on her hip. She could only hope to get used to the blade in time, when it became necessary to wield it again. Maybe she should take more rest in order for her shoulder to heal, she thought, and realised she and Smalljon really did have no other option but to trust the family that had taken them in; along with their somewhat slippery Maester.

MEERYA

When the Maester returned, he found her in the kitchen on a bench in front of the roaring cook fire. "Come with me," was all he said and she followed him through the same corridors until they arrived at his room again. When she entered there were two things she noticed: the two broken arrows lying on the desk and, in the corner of the room, an awfully tall, fierce-faced lady that she did not know. On closer inspection, the woman was wearing a heavy leather jerkin over a pair of leather breeches and a particularly nasty sword on a belt across her hips, and it made Meerya feel more than uneasy. This woman was a warrior, she realised as she studied the long, heavy braid draped over one shoulder, the fingers of her right hand resting gently on the pommel of a dagger strapped to her other hip, while her eyes missed nothing. The woman was also wounded, Meerya realised with a shock, when she caught a glimpse of a white bandage underneath her tunic, possibly to cover a wound near her collarbone.

"Who is that?" she heard herself say and the woman narrowed her eyes at her.

"We'll come to that later," Maester Ellard said and motioned for her to step closer to the table. "I'm more interested in the arrows you mentioned." He rested his fists on the table in front of him and looked at the broken arrows lying on it, Meerya's eyes following suit. "Did you look at them?" He dragged his eyes away from the counter and squinted at her. "You kept them, right?"

Meerya nodded. She knew enough about warfare these days to understand that arrows could tell entire stories, and she had to swallow hard when she remembered how she had pulled the five barbed arrows out of the stranger's body, causing nauseating amounts of blood to spill, trying to stitch each of the five holes to the best of her abilities. While working with needle and thread the man had shuddered beneath her hands, and Meerya knew it must have been pain even though he wasn't conscious, which made her try and work even faster. The remains of the bolts she had rolled into a rag, which she kept under her bed. "They're at home," she muttered, lifting one of the arrows in her hands, examining the fletching. "They're safe." She slowly twirled the arrow between her fingers. "And I think these are quite the same."

The Maester glanced at the warrior woman still standing by the hearth like a sentinel.

"Can your patient be moved?" he asked and it snapped Meerya out of her thoughts and back into the room. She looked up at the Maester, eyes wide. She shrugged; she had no idea.

"He's wracked by fever," she offered. "And the wounds I closed will not heal. They're damp and purple and have a yellowish edge." She had rehearsed describing the wounds in her head over and over as she travelled the road to the Wilford, making sure not to leave any detail out. "His skin is clammy and pale."

"What did you do to fight the fever?" Ellard asked and she mentioned everything, from the regular changes of cool rags to shaving off the man's beard. "Maybe I should have cut his hair as well," she began, thinking of how she always thought his hair was the only thing about him that hadn't been maimed and butchered and how she couldn't have brought herself to cut it. She briefly watched the Maester contemplate the situation before allowing her gaze to drift to the woman in the corner once more. Then it struck her.

"She's wearing almost identical clothes."

"Is she now?" the Maester said and this time his look at the woman wasn't merely a fleeting glimpse but a very pointed look. "I think," he said, slowly turning his head to face Meerya again, "that I shall travel back to your home with you, and we shall see if this stranger you're talking about can still be helped." He stood, once again with an air of finality Meerya didn't exactly like, but she left the room, glad the Maester had decided to come back home with her.

It took about a day to prepare everything, a wayn having to be prepared in case her patient had to be taken to the Wilford. Master Gerad allowed Ellard to take the necessary materials, which also meant his sturdiest wagon and his best horse. The only thing no one really had a solution for was their safety. The Wilford was not a big keep and the few armed men they housed needed to guarantee the safety of the people remaining behind.

"I'll come," the tall, dark-haired woman offered that evening.

"You're still healing," the Maester threw in but the woman only shrugged.

"If he's one of ours I need to protect him, whoever he is."

"Why?" Meerya blurted out, fully aware she was not supposed to interfere, and she involuntarily clapped a hand over her mouth. For the first time, she saw the woman smile. It was a measured, short smile, but a smile nonetheless.

"Soldiers protect each other," she ended up answering Meerya's question. "And I'm a soldier."

"I have never met a woman like you," Meerya said. "A woman soldier, I mean."

"Where I come from I'm nothing special," the woman said, a hint of her earlier smile still in place, her eyes slightly out of focus – another first. "My mother is a warrior, my sisters are as well."

"Where do you come from?" Meerya ventured, but from the look on the lady's face she could tell that question would not get an answer.

"I'm Dacey," the woman said instead, dipping her chin at Meerya. "I'll come with you tomorrow – I have had worse," she snapped in the Maester's direction before he could open his mouth to utter his obvious objections. "Anyone who may perhaps survive what we've been put through at the Twins deserves my protection, and that's all I have to say on the matter." With those words the lady stood, and Meerya once again noticed how tall and formidable the woman was, her sword and dagger and heavy leather hauberk equally mighty. She pushed her thick braid over her shoulder, coming to rest between her shoulder blades, the end of it nearly reaching the small of her back, and Meerya watched her leave the room, her stride confident and strong.

Tomorrow, she would be going home.