Ten days passed.
The second woodcutter run happened, similar to the first, the bird call again from the eastern tree line, the same tense quality of a darkness that had something in it.
They came back with the timber and reported to Hoster and he wrote in his ledger and life continued.
Alex checked the sequence parchment at the bottom of his pack one evening.
Looked at the three words.
Added nothing.
Duskendale hadn’t happened yet.
— Glenn was in the common room when they got back.
Sitting at the far end of the table with food and the specific quality of a man who had developed a settled relationship with waiting, not impatient, not content, just present in the way of someone for whom common rooms were simply where you were between the things that mattered.
5’10, blonde, blue-eyed.
The Riverlands-Reach border combination that made a man look unremarkable in either region.
His sword was at his hip with the ease of something he’d stopped noticing years ago.
The broader Blackwood man-at-arms caught Mikal’s eye across the room and nodded toward Glenn.
“Between contracts,” he said quietly.
“Had work with a Vance merchant house until last month.
Before that Bracken side.” Mikal looked at Glenn.
“Bracken side.” “Three years ago.
Left on his own terms apparently.” The man shrugged.
“Ask him.” Mikal crossed the room.
Alex followed and found a bench nearby and sat down with his book open.
The negotiation was short.
Mikal asked what Glenn could offer.
Glenn said sword and road knowledge, he knew the Riverlands routes better than most maps did, having walked most of them at one point or another.
Mikal asked about the Bracken work.
Glenn said he’d done it, it was work, he’d left when something he didn’t elaborate on made leaving the right decision.
Mikal didn’t push it.
“The pay is fair,” Mikal said.
“Not generous.
The work is steady for as long as the Blackwood contract holds.
After that we’ll see.” “After that we’ll see,” Glenn agreed, the way someone agreed to terms they found acceptable without finding them exciting.
He nodded once and went back to his food.
Alex noted three things while this happened.
Glenn answered questions exactly, not more, not less, no padding around the edges of anything.
When the Bracken history came up something moved behind his eyes that didn’t move his face.
And his boots were worn evenly across both soles, a man who walked many different roads rather than standing in one place.
“His name?” Alex asked Mikal afterward.
“Glenn,” Mikal said.
— *— Glenn POV —* The knight was straightforward, which Glenn appreciated.
He’d worked for enough lords and merchants and minor noblemen to know the difference between a man who said what he meant and a man who said what he needed you to hear.
The hedge knight — Mikal, no house, said what he meant.
Fair pay, steady work, no promises beyond the current contract.
Glenn had heard worse opening offers from men with considerably more to back them up.
The Bracken question he’d expected.
It always came up in the Riverlands when you’d worked both sides of a long dispute.
He’d given the answer he always gave, true enough to satisfy, incomplete enough to stay his own.
The knight had accepted it without pushing, which meant he was either perceptive enough to know pushing wouldn’t get him more or practical enough not to care as long as the work got done.
Either way — acceptable.
What Glenn hadn’t expected was the boy.
Sitting on the bench with a book open, not reading it.
Watching the negotiation the way Glenn had seen experienced men watch negotiations, not the words, the spaces between the words, the things that got decided before anyone said them out loud.
Eight years old by the look of him.
Maybe nine at a stretch.
The midnight black eyes doing the kind of work that shouldn’t be possible in a face that young.
Glenn had worked with hedge knights who brought their sons along.
Boys who played at swords and got underfoot and had to be managed like a third problem on top of whatever job you were actually doing.
This one wasn’t that.
Glenn filed it.
Went back to his food.
He’d see what the boy actually was when the work started.
*— End Glenn POV — Alex POV resumes —* — Hoster’s office the following morning.
The map, the candle, the ledger.
“Merchant escort,” Hoster said.
“Cloth.
River road east to the Crossroads Inn.” He looked at Mikal.
“Straightforward protection.
Open road, no disputed territory.” “Pay?” Mikal asked.
Hoster named it.
Mikal nodded.
“The Crossroads Inn,” Hoster said, and paused in the way of a man deciding how much to add to a statement.
“Pay attention to what merchants coming from the north know versus what merchants from the south know.
Different information.
Different value.” Another pause.
“The innkeeper — Masha.
She knows everyone who passes through.
Worth being civil.” He closed the ledger.
Alex looked at the space where Hoster’s elaboration had been and found it more interesting than most people’s full explanations.
— The road east was everything the woodland jobs weren’t, open, daylight, no tree lines pressing close.
The merchant was nervous for the first hour, settled when nothing happened, became almost chatty by midday in the way of people whose anxiety had somewhere to go once it was no longer needed.
Glenn rode at the front beside Mikal.
Alex at the rear on Cloud.
At a rest stop Glenn ended up near Alex, geography, not arrangement.
He ate.
Alex read the worn story book, third time through, the spine soft from handling.
Glenn glanced at it.
“How old are you?” “Eight,” Alex said.
The look.
The same look Alex always got when the answer didn’t match the question someone had actually been asking.
Glenn went back to eating.
After a while: “Blackwood work suits you?” “First time,” Alex said.
“We were on the Reach circuits before.
Tourney work mostly.” Glenn nodded.
“Different here.” “Yes,” Alex said.
“I noticed.” Glenn almost smiled.
Not quite.
“Glenn,” he said.
Just the name.
The way you offered something small to someone who hadn’t asked for it but might find it useful.
“Alexander,” Alex said.
Glenn looked at him.
At the eight year old the name didn’t fit yet.
“People call you that?” he asked.
“Not yet,” Alex said.
“But they will.” Glenn looked at him for a moment longer than necessary.
Went back to his food.
Cloud shifted his weight beneath Alex, not restless, just present, the ears orienting toward Alex in the specific way they’d developed over the weeks.
Glenn watched this from the corner of his eye without appearing to.
Said nothing.
Alex noticed Glenn noticing.
Filed it.
— The Crossroads Inn announced itself before it was visible, the traffic thickening on the road, more horses, more carts, the specific density of a place that pulled people toward it from multiple directions simultaneously.
Then the building itself.
Bigger than Alex had expected.
A proper establishment at the junction of two roads, the kingsroad running north to south, the river road east to west, the crossing point that made this location inevitable.
Three storeys, stabling for forty horses at least, the yard busy with the organised chaos of a place that never fully emptied.
Inside, loud, full, layered.
Different conversations at different volumes.
Different accents pulling from different directions.
The smell of food and fire and damp wool and horses and the specific energy of a place that served as a temporary home to everyone and a permanent home to nobody.
Masha was behind the main counter.
Short, somewhere between forty and sixty, the kind of face that watched people so consistently it had stopped being a conscious activity.
She looked at Mikal the way she probably looked at everyone, the quick complete assessment of a woman who had catalogued ten thousand travellers and found an efficient system for it.
“Ser Mikal,” she said.
Not warmly, not coldly.
Just accurately, which meant she’d been told to expect them.
“Innkeeper,” Mikal said.
The merchant went to arrange his business.
Glenn went to find food.
Mikal went to speak with Masha about the return journey timing.
Alex found a corner table and sat down and opened his book and became invisible.
— The evening told him things.
He’d been listening to common rooms his whole life, the habit was old enough that he didn’t think of it as a habit anymore, just how he moved through spaces where people talked.
But Hoster’s comment sat in his head now as a tool rather than just an observation, and tools changed what you did with the same materials.
North versus south.
Different information.
Different value.
The table to his left, two merchants, Reach accents, talking about grain prices.
Specific numbers that only made sense against a recent harvest.
Coming from the southwest.
Two tables over, a man complaining about the kingsroad north of the inn.
Specific mud, specific section, the kind of detail that only came from recent personal experience.
Coming from the north, within the last week.
Near the fire, a woman talking about a new tax on river traffic.
Tully territory, somewhere east.
Three conversations.
Three directions.
Three different pieces of what the realm currently looked like from its middle, assembled from fragments the way Alex assembled everything.
None of it individually significant.
Together, a picture.
He listened for another hour.
Most of it was ordinary — prices, weather, road conditions, the small commerce of people moving between places.
Then a merchant two tables over said something to his companion about King’s Landing, about the mood there, and stopped saying it when he noticed the table nearby had gone quiet.
Alex hadn’t gone quiet.
He’d just been quiet already.
The fragment was small.
Just the quality of unease that appeared now whenever people talked about King Aerys in public — the specific way voices dropped and topics changed and eyes moved to nearby tables.
At Lannisport it had been different.
The king had been wrong in small ways, a door hung off its hinges.
Whatever was happening in King’s Landing now was producing a different quality of careful in the people who’d recently come from there.
He connected it to the wildfire fragment.
To the word he still didn’t know.
Filed it carefully.
‘This,’ he thought, looking at the busy room, at the crossroads outside the window where two major roads met and everything in the realm eventually passed through.
‘This is the actual value.’ Not the escort fee.
This.
— They rode back to Raventree Hall the next morning.
The merchant delivered, the job done, Hoster’s fee waiting.
Glenn rode at the front.
Alex at the rear on Cloud.
At one point on the river road Cloud responded to something Alex hadn’t consciously communicated, a shift in direction, a slight adjustment in pace, the horse moving before the instruction arrived.
The intent read before the command formed.
Glenn watched it from the front without turning his head.
Still said nothing.
Alex looked at the back of Glenn’s head and thought about a man who noticed things and kept what he noticed to himself.
He understood that quality.
He found it reassuring in the specific way of recognising something familiar in an unexpected place.
Cloud’s ears tracked him all the way back to Raventree Hall.
Alex treating it as an intelligence asset rather than just a waystation felt true to who he is at this point in the story.
Glenn will be around for a while.
Make of that what you will.
See you in Chapter 23.