Knowing the name of the king changed how Raymun listened.
Every town a carter cursed became a pin on the map in his head.
Maidenpool.
Dragonstone.
King’s Landing.
The Crownlands.
Duskendale lay less than a day’s ride down the east road.
He was in Westeros, and Robert’s Rebellion was already in the ground.
That left one question he could not ask out loud.
When the grown folk clapped just because you pointed at a red hen and said “chicken,” you could not very well pull a merchant aside and ask him the year since Aegon’s Conquest.
So he kept his mouth shut and waited for his tongue to catch up with his ears.
By his second winter, he could follow the talk across the common room.
By his third, he forgot himself often enough to make Mara stop and stare at him.
One morning he was perched on the three-legged stool by the flour bin while she drove the heels of her hands into a lump of barley dough.
“Your tongue never sits still,” Mara said, flipping the dough over on the floured board.
Raymun banged his heels against the rungs of the stool.
“I only ask questions.”
“Too many of them.”
“How else do you learn anything?”
Mara’s hands stopped in the dough.
Raymun shut his teeth together.
Three-year-olds did not talk like annoyed clerks.
He looked down and poked a spilled oat hull across the pine with one stubby finger.
Mara looked at him for a long beat.
Then she flicked her wrist, and a cloud of white flour caught him square across the nose.
Raymun coughed, spitting dry dust off his lip.
Mara laughed and dropped a wooden bowl of unshelled peas into his lap.
“Less questions.
More thumbs.”
Outside the front door, a painted board hung from iron hooks: a thorny briar branch curled around a red flame.
Under the roof sat the great stone chimney, the common room, four private bedchambers, and a long sleeping loft under the rafters.
Out back lay the stable, the hen coop, the cabbage patch, and several acres of scrub pasture.
Garran and Mara held the place in their own names.
They owed yearly tax to the Dun Fort and silver to the chandler and the smith, yet every beam and iron hinge belonged to their house.
Garran kept the stalls, the beasts, the cordwood, and the timber work.
Mara ran the rest of the world from the kitchen chopping block.
In a single morning, Raymun watched her turn salt pork in the iron skillet, talk down a drover who swore a rat had chewed his saddlebag, count a week’s copper pennies into a leather sack, haggle a turnip seller down a halfpenny, and tell Garran from the window that he had overpaid two groats for a cord of green ash.
Garran just picked up his splitting maul and went back to the woodpile.
There was always bacon in the rafters and meal in the bin, and there was never enough silver in the strongbox to stop worrying about the next leak.
When the winter rain rotted the thatch over the stalls, Garran climbed the ladder with a bundle of reed himself.
When a weasel got under the boards and killed two laying hens, Mara cursed those lost eggs for a sennight.
When the mud season kept the wagons off the road, the ladle didn’t go quite as deep into the stewpot.
To Raymun, the bones of the place were old friends.
Spoilage, labor, stock, upkeep, customers, and coin.
Nobody was going to let a three-year-old touch the tallies, so he hauled dirty mugs to the wash tub, crawled through the rushes after dropped horn spoons, threw cracked corn to the hens, and listened.
Two winters later, he was sitting on the warm stones by the andirons while Garran poured small beer for two wool merchants up from the bay.
“The king will have to answer it,” the heavier merchant said, scraping dried road mud off his boot heel with a belt knife.
“You can’t let them burn ships at anchor and walk away.”
“River talk,” Garran said, setting the clay pitcher between them.
“Every time a cog sinks in a squall, somebody blames the ironmen.”
“This came off a royal rider at the crossroads,” the second merchant said, leaning over his mug.
“Balon Greyjoy put a driftwood crown on his own head.
Robert’s already calling the western ships and the storm lords to the water.”
Raymun’s fingers went still on the handle of the tin cup he was holding.
*Balon Greyjoy.*
He knew that war.
The ironborn rose up a few years after Robert took the throne, long before the trouble in the books ever started.
Raymun counted his own winters on his fingers behind his knee.
He was five years old.
*289 AC.*
The number settled into his gut.
Jon Arryn was still sitting in the Red Keep.
Ned Stark was up in Winterfell with a house full of small children.
Robert Baratheon was thirty and looking for a fight, Daenerys was a toddler across the Narrow Sea, and whatever was sleeping in the snow beyond the Wall was years from waking up.
He had nearly ten years before the realm tore itself open.
Right now he was not tall enough to throw a saddle over a pony.
Out in the yard, a wooden gate banged against its post, and Garran went to the door to shout at the stable boy for leaving the paddock unlatched.
“Raymun!” Mara called from the scullery.
He scrambled up from the hearthstones with the tin cup in his fist.
“Yes, Mother?”
“Clear the far trestle before the tallow sets on the boards.”
Raymun tucked two more dirty cups against his chest and walked over to the table.