Chapter 189

In truth the ague was a contagion born of a leaf-shaped parasite, carried by mosquitoes. Upon the continent of Westeros it was a common sickness, owing chiefly to how little heed men paid to cleanliness and to the keeping down of insects. Each year highborn and smallfolk died of it by the tens of thousands, and there was no treatment that truly served.

Domeric was troubled. The War of the Five Kings stood at a critical hour, and Lord Gyles Rosby—the foremost of the Crownlands lords who upheld the new rule—had taken the ague. In the campaign now planned those Crownlands houses would play no small part. They would not send men of their own, yet they must furnish great stores to Domeric’s host and to the army of the Vale. Lord Gyles was already old and much afflicted; should he die of the fever, Domeric would be hard put to find another lord who possessed both standing enough to command respect and a firm will to sit in the same boat as the new regime in King’s Landing.

Silence filled the bedchamber. Time slipped past.