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“No.” Sam felt the old man’s brow. His skin was damp with sweat, cool and clammy to the touch, his every breath a soft wheeze. “It’s night, maester. You’ve been asleep.”

“Too long. It’s cold in here.”

“We have no wood,” Sam told him, “and the innkeep will not give us more unless we have the coin.” It was the fourth or fifth time they’d had this same conversation. I should have used our coin for wood, Sam chided himself every time. I should have had the sense to keep him warm.

Instead he had squandered the last of their silver on a healer from the House of the Red Hands, a tall pale man in robes embroidered with swirling stripes of red and white. All that the silver bought him was half a flask of dreamwine. “This may help gentle his passing,” the Braavosi had said, not unkindly. When Sam asked if there wasn’t any more that he could do, he shook his head. “Ointments I have, potions and infusions, tinctures and venoms and poultices. I might bleed him, purge him, leech him. but why? No leech can make him young again. This is an old man, and death is in his lungs. Give him this and let him sleep.”

And so he had, all night and all day, but now the old man was struggling to sit. “We must go down to the ships.”

The ships again. “You’re too weak to go out,” he had to say. A chill had gotten inside Maester Aemon during the voyage and settled in his chest. By the time they got to Braavos, he had been so weak they’d had to carry him ashore. They’d still had a fat bag of silver then, so Dareon had asked for the inn’s biggest bed. The one they’d gotten was large enough to sleep eight, so the innkeep insisted on charging them for that many.

“On the morrow we can go to the docks,” Sam promised. “You can ask about and find which ship is departing next for Oldtown.” Even in autumn, Braavos was still a busy port. Once Aemon was strong enough to travel, they should have no trouble finding a suitable vessel to take them where they had to go. Paying for their passage would prove more difficult. A ship from the Seven Kingdoms would be their best hope. A trader out of Oldtown, maybe, with kin in the Night’s Watch. There must still be some who honor the men who walk the Wall.

“Oldtown,” Maester Aemon wheezed. “Yes. I dreamt of Oldtown, Sam. I was young again and my brother Egg was with me, with that big knight he served. We were drinking in the old inn where they make the fearsomely strong cider.” He tried to rise again, but the effort proved too much for him. After a moment he settled back. “The ships,” he said again. “We will find our answer there. About the dragons. I need to know.”

No, thought Sam, it’s food and warmth you need, a full belly and a hot fire crackling in the hearth. “Are you hungry, maester? We have some bread left, and a bit of cheese.”

“Not just now, Sam. Later, when I’m feeling stronger.”

“How will you get stronger unless you eat?” None of them had eaten much at sea, not after Skagos. The autumn gales had hounded them all across the narrow sea. Sometimes they came up from the south, roiling with thunder and lightning and black rains that fell for days. Sometimes they came down from the north, cold and grim, with savage winds that cut right through a man. Once it got so cold that Sam had woken to find the whole ship coated in ice, shining as white as pearl. The captain had taken down their mast and tied it to the deck, to finish the crossing on oars alone. No one had been eating by the time they saw the Titan.

Once safe ashore, though, Sam had found himself ravenously hungry. It was the same for Dareon and Gilly. Even the babe had begun to suck more lustily. Aemon, though.

“The bread’s gone stale, but I can beg some gravy from the kitchens to soak it in,” Sam told the old man. The innkeep was a hard man, cold-eyed and suspicious of these black-clad strangers beneath his roof, but his cook was kinder.

“No. Perhaps a sip of wine, though?”