GOT: I Plunder Skills — Chapter 398 - The Man from the Citadel

The coronation of the King in the North had played out like something between a farce and a triumph , chaotic, undignified, and utterly indisputable.

The moment Joffrey was dragged from the hall, Winterfell erupted.

The lords had their king. A real one. A man who could lead them into the Long Night and not break.

The common folk, for their part, were too busy laughing about the little king pissing himself in front of everyone to care much about the politics.

The feast ran until well past midnight.

Lynn didn't stay. He handed the remaining details to Ned and Tyrion, and went back to his chambers. He had a North to reshape, and that meant thinking , really thinking , about how to do it.

Plans, as always, had other ideas.

The following morning, a ragged, desperate cry split the quiet of Winterfell's dawn.

"Help! Please — someone help my child!"

A farmer in a threadbare linen shirt staggered into the courtyard, a boy clutched in his arms. The boy was seven, maybe eight. His calf was laid open to the bone , a deep, ugly gash, the kind a farm tool leaves when it bites wrong. Mud and grass were packed into the wound. Blood soaked through everything.

"Fetch Maester Luwin! Now!"

The guards moved fast , one to hold back the growing crowd, another running for the Maester. Luwin arrived minutes later, medicine chest in hand. He knelt beside the boy, took one look at the wound, and his brow drew tight.

"Too deep. It needs to be treated immediately."

He opened his chest. Out came a small knife, not particularly clean, some strips of gauze, and a glass jar crawling with leeches.

He was reaching for the knife when a lazy voice drifted in from the back of the crowd.

"I'd think twice before doing that."

Tyrion made his way through, rocking slightly on his feet. He looked at the tools in Luwin's hands, looked at the half-dead boy on the ground, and curled his lip.

"Luwin is a good man," he said, drifting toward Lynn. "Pity his treatment will probably kill the boy faster than the infection would." He dropped his voice. "Bloodletting a child who's already lost blood. That's like pouring lamp oil on a fire to put it out."

Lynn was already staring at the jar of leeches.

He knew this world's medicine. He'd had time to think about it. Bloodletting. Prayers to the Seven. Cauterizing wounds with iron heated until it glowed.

In a world with no concept of disinfection, a common surgical infection killed almost everyone it touched.

Poor Robert had learned that the hard way.

"Maester Luwin."

Luwin looked up. When he saw who was speaking, he stood and bowed quickly.

"My lord."

"Put the leeches away."

Lynn walked over and crouched beside the boy, examining the wound himself.

"We are going to save this child today. Not drain whatever blood he has left."

Luwin blinked. "But , Your Grace , the bloodletting is to balance his humors, to expel the corrupt blood. The Citadel's texts are quite clear that ,"

"Can the Citadel's texts raise the dead?" Lynn looked up at him. "Because in my experience, bloodletting kills nine patients out of ten. The sickness isn't the real danger. The treatment is."

Luwin's face went red. He said nothing.

Then an older voice cut through the crowd.

"Lord Lynn! You are questioning a thousand years of wisdom!"

An old Maester pushed his way to the front , grey robes like Luwin's, but heavier with chain links, more metals, more years. His name was Archibald, sent from the Citadel in Oldtown by the Grand Maester himself, dispatched to observe this curious new lord with his dragon. He had the bearing of a man who had never once doubted himself.

"You may know war, my lord. But healing the sick is our domain. Maester Luwin and I are the professionals here."

There was a condescension to it , polite, but unmistakable.

Lynn looked at him for a moment.

"Professional," he said, and smiled. "Your professionalism is going to let this child die in agony, and then you'll tell his father it was the will of the Seven. That's your expertise?"

Archibald opened his mouth. Nothing came out.

"Enough."

Lynn stood. He was done talking.

He turned to the nearest attendant and issued his orders, one after another.

"Boil water. A large pot — full rolling boil."

"Find the cleanest linen cloth you have. Boil that too, then bring it here."

"Go to my chambers. Bring the bottles of spirits I keep there , the strong ones."

"Sewing needles and silk thread, the finest you can find. Boil those as well."

The attendants didn't understand a word of it. They ran anyway.

The courtyard went very still.

Nobody knew what Lynn was doing. The logic of it made no sense to any of them. Archibald's face cycled through confusion, then disbelief, then something approaching outrage.

Boiling water. Spirits. Sewing needles.

This was madness. An insult to the gods. A desecration of a child's life dressed up as medicine.

"My lord, you cannot —"

"One more word," Lynn said, his voice going flat and cold, "and I'll have you thrown out the gates. You can walk back to Oldtown through the snow."

Archibald stiffened. The pressure coming off Lynn was not the kind a man argued with. He closed his mouth. His jaw was tight, his eyes burning , but he stayed quiet.

He would write everything down. Every absurd detail. He would send a raven to the Citadel tonight. All of Westeros would know what kind of man the new King in the North truly was.

The attendants returned with what he'd asked for. Lynn moved quickly.

He poured spirits over his hands first, rubbing them clean. Then he took the boiled cloth and cleared the wound , careful, methodical, removing every trace of dirt and debris without rushing.

He nodded to two guards. "Hold him still."

He picked up the bottle of spirits and poured it directly into the wound.

The boy had been unconscious. He wasn't anymore. A scream tore out of him, sharp and raw and awful, and then he went limp again.

"What are you doing?!" The father lurched forward, eyes wild. "You can't —"

"Hold him back," Lynn said, without looking up.

He worked through it. Cloth soaked in spirits, cleaning every grain of soil, every thread of grass from the wound. The crowd flinched away. Several people turned their heads.

When the wound was clean, Lynn picked up the needle and thread, both soaked in spirits, and began to stitch.

The silence in the courtyard became something else entirely.

Maester Luwin and Maester Archibald stood absolutely still. Their mouths were open. Neither of them spoke.

A needle and thread.

Closing a wound in human flesh.

They had never seen it. They had never imagined it. There was no precedent for it in any text either of them had read , not one volume in the entire Citadel's collection. To both of them, in that moment, it looked like sorcery.

Lynn worked until the last stitch was tied. He cut the thread. He wrapped the wound with the boiled, dried linen , clean, tight, thorough.

Then he stood up and looked at the farmer.

"Take him home. Let him rest."

"Change the bandage every day, exactly like I just showed you. Keep everything clean , boil the cloth each time."

"Don't let anything else touch the wound. Not water. Not dirty hands. Nothing."

"If he heals well, he'll be walking in seven days."

The farmer looked at his son , still unconscious, but breathing steadily now, his color already better. He didn't have words for it. He dropped to his knees.

Lynn had already turned away.

He looked at the two Maesters. They looked like men who had watched the ground open beneath their feet.

"That's my treatment," he said.

"Simple."

"Effective."

"Don't believe me? Wait and see."

He walked away and left them standing in the middle of it.

---

Archibald didn't sleep well that night.

He told himself it wouldn't work. He was certain of it. Three days , fever, festering, a slow and agonizing death. That was the natural order of things. That was what the texts described. That was what always happened.

Day one: no fever.

Day two: the boy woke up. His wound hurt, but he drank broth on his own.

Day three: no pus. The wound had begun to close.

Archibald checked it himself. He couldn't not look.

He didn't say anything.

He just kept checking.

Day seven.

The boy walked into the courtyard on his own two feet, one hand on his father's arm, his gait still a little unsteady , but upright. Moving. Alive.

Archibald stood and watched until they were gone.

Then he went back to his room, and he started pulling books off the shelves.

Not carefully. He grabbed them by the spine and threw them at the floor, one after another, until there was a pile of them at his feet , every volume he had spent his life treating as scripture.

"Liars," he said. His voice was shaking. "All of it. Liars."

He wasn't talking to anyone.

"Hundreds of years of research. Thousands of years of tradition." He stared at the books on the floor. "And a bottle of spirits and a pot of water beats all of it. All of it."

He sat down in the chair. His breathing was ragged. His face felt old in a way it hadn't before. Confused. Hollowed out.

And then something shifted.

It came to him slowly at first, and then all at once , the full weight of what he'd actually witnessed.

If this worked , and it had worked, he'd seen it , what did that mean?

It meant every year, across every corner of Westeros, soldiers who should have died from infected wounds wouldn't. Common folk who should have been buried wouldn't be. Tens of thousands of them, year after year, alive because of boiled water and silk thread.

This wasn't sorcery.

This wasn't an aberration.

This was the most important discovery in the history of medicine. More significant than anything the Citadel had ever produced. Greater than any war.

Archibald's hands were shaking when he sat down at the desk.

He spread out a piece of parchment. Dipped his quill.

He had to write this down. He had to send it to Oldtown tonight.

He set the quill to the page and wrote.

To the esteemed Conclave of the Citadel.

I, Archibald, swear by every link I wear, that I have witnessed something in Winterfell that I cannot explain away and will not attempt to.

I have seen the dawn of a new era.

An era in which we no longer beg the gods for mercy , because we no longer need to.

The man who opens that era is our King in the North.

He has shown us a truth. A truth so simple it shames every one of us. A truth more profound than everything in our archives laid end to end.

We were wrong.

Terribly, catastrophically wrong.

➤ Next: The Reward for Brienne