She was getting up to go when Ser Hyle arrived. “My lady. Podrick.” He glanced at the cups and plates and the half-eaten sausages cooling in a puddle of grease, and said, “Gods, I hope you did not eat the food here.”
“What we ate is no concern of yours,” Brienne said. “Did you find your cousin? What did he tell you?”
“Sandor Clegane was last seen in Saltpans, the day of the raid. Afterward he rode west, along the Trident.”
She frowned. “The Trident is a long river.”
“Aye, but I don’t think our dog will have wandered too far from its mouth. Westeros has lost its charm for him, it would seem. At Saltpans he was looking for a ship. ” Ser Hyle drew a roll of sheepskin from his boot, pushed the sausages aside, and unrolled it. It proved to be a map. “The Hound butchered three of his brother’s men at the old inn by the crossroads, here. He led the raid on Saltpans, here.” He tapped Saltpans with his finger. “He may be trapped. The Freys are up here at the Twins, Darry and Harrenhal are south across the Trident, west he’s got the Blackwoods and the Brackens fighting, and Lord Randyll’s here at Maidenpool. The high road to the Vale is closed by snow, even if he could get past the mountain clans. Where’s a dog to go?”
“If he is with Dondarrion.?”
“He’s not. Alyn is certain of that. Dondarrion’s men are looking for him too. They have put out word that they mean to hang him for what he did at Saltpans. They had no part of that. Lord Randyll is putting it about that they did in hopes of turning the commons against Beric and his brotherhood. He will never take the lightning lord so long as the smallfolk are protecting him. And there’s this other band, led by this woman Stoneheart. Lord Beric’s lover, according to one tale. Supposedly she was hanged by the Freys, but Dondarrion kissed her and brought her back to life, and now she cannot die, no more than he can.” Brienne considered the map. “If Clegane was last seen at Saltpans, that would be the place to find his trail.”
“There is no one left at Saltpans but an old knight hiding in his castle, Alyn said.”
“Still, it would be a place to start.”
“There’s a man,” Ser Hyle said. “A septon. He came in through my gate the day before you turned up. Meribald, his name is. River-born and river-bred and he’s served here all his life. He’s departing on the morrow to make his circuit, and he always calls at Saltpans. We should go with him.”
Brienne looked up sharply. “We?”
“I am going with you.”
“You’re not.”
“Well, I’m going with Septon Meribald to Saltpans. You and Podrick can go wherever you bloody well like.”
“Did Lord Randyll command you to follow me again?”
“He commanded me to stay away from you. Lord Randyll is of the view that you might benefit from a good hard raping.”
“Then why would you come with me?”
“It was that, or return to gate duty.”
“If your lord commanded—”
“He is no longer my lord.”
That took her aback. “You left his service?”
“His lordship informed me that he had no further need of my sword, or my insolence. It amounts to the same thing. Henceforth I shall enjoy the adventuresome life of a hedge knight. though if we do find Sansa Stark, I imagine we will be well rewarded.”
Gold and land, that’s what he sees in this. “I mean to save the girl, not sell her. I swore a vow.”
“I don’t recall that I did.”
“That is why you will not be coming with me.”
They left the next morning, as the sun was coming up.
It was a queer procession: Ser Hyle on a chestnut courser and Brienne on her tall grey mare, Podrick Payne astride his swayback stot, and Septon Meribald walking beside them with his quarterstaff, leading a small donkey and a large dog. The donkey carried such a heavy load that Brienne was half afraid its back would break. “Food for the poor and hungry of the riverlands,” Septon Meribald told them at the gates of Maidenpool. “Seeds and nuts and dried fruit, oaten porridge, flour, barley bread, three wheels of yellow cheese from the inn by the Fool’s Gate, salt cod for me, salt mutton for Dog. oh, and salt. Onions, carrots, turnips, two sacks of beans, four of barley, and nine of oranges. I have a weakness for the orange, I confess. I got these from a sailor, and I fear they will be the last I’ll taste till spring.”
Meribald was a septon without a sept, only one step up from a begging brother in the hierarchy of the Faith. There were hundreds like him, a ragged band whose humble task it was to trudge from one flyspeck of a village to the next, conducting holy services, performing marriages, and forgiving sins. Those he visited were expected to feed and shelter him, but most were as poor as he was, so Meribald could not linger in one place too long without causing hardship to his hosts. Kindly innkeeps would sometimes allow him to sleep in their kitchens or their stables, and there were septries and holdfasts and even a few castles where he knew he would be given hospitality. Where no such places were at hand, he slept beneath the trees or under hedges. “There are many fine hedges in the riverlands,” Meribald said. “The old ones are the best. There’s nothing beats a hundred-year-old hedge. Inside one of those a man can sleep as snug as at an inn, and with less fear of fleas.”
The septon could neither read nor write, as he cheerfully confessed along the road, but he knew a hundred different prayers and could recite long passages from The Seven-Pointed Star from memory, which was all that was required in the villages. He had a seamed, windburnt face, a shock of thick grey hair, wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. Though a big man, six feet tall, he had a way of hunching forward as he walked that made him seem much shorter. His hands were large and leathery, with red knuckles and dirt beneath the nails, and he had the biggest feet that Brienne had ever seen, bare and black and hard as horn.
“I have not worn a shoe in twenty years,” he told Brienne. “The first year, I had more blisters than I had toes, and my soles would bleed like pigs whenever I trod on a hard stone, but I prayed and the Cobbler Above turned my skin to leather.”
“There is no cobbler above,” Podrick protested.
“There is, lad. though you may call him by another name. Tell me, which of the seven gods do you love best?”
“The Warrior,” said Podrick without a moment’s hesitation.
Brienne cleared her throat. “At Evenfall my father’s septon always said that there was but one god.”
“One god with seven aspects. That’s so, my lady, and you are right to point it out, but the mystery of the Seven Who Are One is not easy for simple folk to grasp, and I am nothing if not simple, so I speak of seven gods.” Meribald turned back to Podrick. “I have never known a boy who did not love the Warrior. I am old, though, and being old, I love the Smith. Without his labor, what would the Warrior defend? Every town has a smith, and every castle. They make the plows we need to plant our crops, the nails we use to build our ships, iron shoes to save the hooves of our faithful horses, the bright swords of our lords. No one could doubt the value of a smith, and so we name one of the Seven in his honor, but we might as easily have called him the Farmer or the Fisherman, the Carpenter or the Cobbler. What he works at makes no matter. What matters is, he works. The Father rules, the Warrior fights, the Smith labors, and together they perform all that is rightful for a man. Just as the Smith is one aspect of the godhead, the Cobbler is one aspect of the Smith. It was he who heard my prayer and healed my feet.”
“The gods are good,” Ser Hyle said in a dry voice, “but why trouble them, when you might just have kept your shoes?”
“Going barefoot was my penance. Even holy septons can be sinners, and my flesh was weak as weak could be. I was young and full of sap, and the girls. a septon can seem as gallant as a prince if he is the only man you know who has ever been more than a mile from your village. I would recite to them from The Seven-Pointed Star. The Maiden’s Book worked best. Oh, I was a wicked man, before I threw away my shoes. It shames me to think of all the maidens I deflowered.”