For Raymun, the Greyjoy war was six months of mud tracked across the common room floor and horses lathered white at the trough.
Outriders in royal mail changed mounts in the yard at dawn.
Wool merchants pulled in before dark to ask whether the coast roads were safe.
Every bench around the hearth had a different war going on.
“Pyke’s down,” a man in a salt-stained wool cloak said one evening, knocking his boot heel against the trestle leg.
“The king’s ships went right through the sea wall.”
“Pyke’s sitting on its rock where it always sat,” a drover across the table shot back.
“My cousin drives mules on the west road.
The ironmen burned Lannisport to the waterline.”
“Half the fleet, I heard.”
“All of it.
Every hull from the Crag to the bay.”
“Then how’d the king hang Balon Greyjoy on Tuesday?”
“If Balon’s dead, why are his boys still burning fishing boats off Seagard?”
Raymun listened from behind the counter while he rinsed horn spoons in a bucket of warm water.
On Earth, he could have pulled a phone from his pocket and had the truth in ten seconds.
Here, a man with a loud voice and a mug of ale in his fist could carry a lie across three lordships before anyone thought to ask where he had been standing when it happened.
So Raymun began watching the men instead of the stories.
A factor straight off a river barge in Maidenpool knew which harbors were taking cargo.
Men in mail shirts knew which lords had marched, though every soldier added fifty dead ironmen to the tally after his second cup.
The carters knew the only things you could take to the strongbox: where the mud was up to the hubs, which bridges were jammed with baggage wagons, and what a bushel of oats cost in Duskendale.
Anyone passing along a tale he had heard from another man at a crossroads was just making noise to fill the room.
By autumn, the war reached the grain bins.
Hob, the miller’s carter, backed his wagon up to the storehouse door with four sacks of barley in the bed.
Mara came down the porch steps wiping her hands on her apron, the leather coin pouch already out in her fist.
“Where’s the rest of my eight?”
“In the king’s wagons heading west,” Hob said, keeping his boot braced on the brake block.
“Purveyors came through Duskendale with royal tallies and cleared two-thirds of the mill.”
“You’re four groats higher a sack than harvest,” Mara said, looking at the chalk mark on the tailboard.
Hob spat over the wheel into the ruts.
“I can drop the four here, or I can drive a mile up the lane and get six groats more from the bailiff.
Up to you, mistress.”
“You’ve been drinking our small beer since your beard came in, Hob.”
“And the king’s horses are eating my barley.” He gathered the reins in one gloved hand.
“Do I untie the rope or keep rolling?”
Mara pulled the strings on her pouch and counted the silver out onto the tailboard one piece at a time, each coin clicking hard against the oak.
She only bought two sacks.
The next week, salt went up two pennies a pound.
Oats followed.
The oil seller came through two days late because three hundred stormlanders had blocked the stone bridge at the creek, and the fishmonger who brought their salted herring from the bay never showed up at all.
On Sunday night, after the last carter climbed the ladder to the loft, Garran tipped the week’s iron box out across the scrubbed pine table.
Copper pennies, halfpennies, and silver groats spilled out in a heap wider than both his hands.
Garran leaned back on his stool and tapped a thick fingernail against a silver piece.
“Best sennight we’ve had since the spring fair.”
Mara walked out of the larder and set a half-empty crock of salt on the boards right beside the coins.
Then she went back and brought out the tallow jar, a single twist of lamp wicks, and the notched tally stick from the woodcutter.
“The barley bin’s down to the bottom plank,” she said, setting her knuckles on the table.
“That pile buys back half of what they ate since Monday.
If the stable thatch gives out before frost, we’re paying the reed-cutter out of the seed money.”
Garran looked from the heap of coin to the salt crock.
He reached out, raked the pennies back into the iron box without counting them a second time, and dropped the lid shut.
When the first sleet started blowing off the bay, three different riders came up the high road on the same afternoon with the same story.
The curtain wall at Pyke had come down under the trebuchets.
Balon Greyjoy had gone to his knees in the wet yard, and Robert was riding back to King’s Landing with a Greyjoy boy for a hostage.
That night a wool buyer stood on a bench by the fire and paid for two gallons of spiced ale for the room.
By the second pitcher, Garran had his arm hooked around a blacksmith’s neck, roaring out a song about a maid from Maidenpool three beats behind the rest of the table.
Mara stood in the kitchen doorway with the heavy iron skillet in her hand.
“Take that noise out to the horse trough or I’ll grease this pan with your ears.”
Garran winked at Raymun over the smith’s shoulder and sang the next verse louder.
Raymun sat on the bottom stair with his knees pulled up to his chin, laughing until his ribs ached.
Yet when he went into the larder the next morning to fetch the oatmeal scoop, two of the three big barrels stood empty, their wooden lids propped against the dry plaster.
By the next moon-turn, the road went quiet again.
Raymun turned five, carried greasy horn mugs to the wash tub, scattered kitchen scraps to the hens in the frozen grass, and learned to duck under Mara’s elbow when she was swinging the soup kettle off the hook.
Then the hard frost locked the creek solid, and in the middle of the night, little Ellyn started coughing in her bed until she couldn’t catch her breath.