“My lord, the recruiting has eaten every dragon the iron earned in the first half of the year.
If it runs on like this, the books will not see next spring.” The steward stood with a sheaf of parchment and the look of a man who had already counted the ending.
Lonehill lived on one trade.
Coal and iron came out of the hills, the forges made goods of them, and the goods went into the Seven Kingdoms and across the Narrow Sea to the Free Cities.
Dig.
Hammer.
Sell.
The open faces had made the digging cheap.
The labor had made it cheaper: broken folk, clansmen, wildlings.
Of the hundred thousand and more who now sat the valley, most of them served the mines and the fires.
Smiths took a wage.
Most of the men at the face took a roof and a full bowl and called it enough.
After those costs the iron still threw off a fortune.
In less than three years the holding’s take had begun to look like the income of seats with older names.
The spend that mattered was the host.
Fewer than a hundred thousand souls, and three thousand of them under arms.
The men ate until they were done.
There was meat in the pot.
There were rooms, coin, women, and a place for the children and the old.
Lords in this country did not keep soldiers that way.
Domeric did.
And he meant to put two thousand more on the roll.
Five thousand swords on a hill holding.
The steward could not make the number sit still on the page.
The weight of it sat on Domeric as well.
He did not take the policy off the table.
If the coin ran out, he would find more coin.
He would not stop raising men.
Mouths and arms.
A larger host before the war.
That was the work of this year, and the next, and he was not going to blink at it.
A fat valley with a thin guard would only dress a table for whoever won the War of the Five Kings.
A neighbor who stayed home and planted was a larder, if you had the men to open it.
He was still on the parchment when the river brought him a guest.
Horas Redwyne came out of the cabin into the smell of wet, rotting wood.
The air was heavy and close.
He sniffed, tipped his head, and found a sky the color of a bruise.
Rain was thinking about it.
He had a plain face: orange hair, a square jaw gone to freckles.
He was the elder son of Paxter Redwyne, Lord of the Arbor, and he had a twin, Hobber, who wore the same blood.
“Lonehill is three years old,” the servant said, settling a wool cloak on him.
“Bolton land, newly opened.
No castle.
They say there is only a hall.
Stone and iron.
Not much else.” “The iron is the else,” Horas said.
“Men claim these hills already hold half the realm’s trade in it.
The Seven Kingdoms buy it hot.
So does Essos.” “Half?” The servant knew enough of ledgers to feel the size of that and not enough of trade to believe it.
The holding had barely been given a name.
Horas did not answer.
He stepped onto the dock.
The town behind it was raw.
The dock was not.
It had been built to last, wide and heavy, as if someone expected the river to earn its keep.
“The hall.
I want Ser Domeric.” “My lord—ought we not wait?
A reception.
We have come a long way.” Guests were cheap here.
Trade was not.
He kept that behind his teeth.
“Find horses.” House Redwyne sat the Arbor, a fat island south of Whispering Sound.
Their fleet was one of the three that mattered: the Iron Fleet, the royal fleet, and this.
It was the largest of them.
Two hundred warships, and five times that in cogs, wine-barges, trading oars, and whalers.
They took the horses the dock kept ready and went up the slate road along the water.
The animals were northern plains stock, coats like money.
Horas could not see why a mine-town wanted so many of them.
They were not cart-beasts.
“Ser Horas.
White Harbor.” A single-masted sail was sliding off the quay, the current taking it down the Last River.
The banner was a white merman on blue-green, a black trident in the fist.
House Manderly.
The hull sat high.
The hold was full.
Horas nodded as if it did not touch him.
It did.
The Manderly ships had grown.
White Harbor kept a fleet not a quarter the size of the Arbor’s and already moved half the cargo.
Lord Paxter had said it plain: if the iron ran on another ten years, White Harbor would be the fourth fleet in the realm, and then it would start looking the Arbor in the eye.
Horas had not come north to watch that happen.
His father meant to buy every blade and bar Lonehill could make, at three parts in ten over the going price if that was what the floor required.
There would still be profit in it, if the market could be held.
Lonehill steel sold before the gangplank finished rattling.
In a country that settled its arguments with iron, good iron did not sit.
The trouble was holding it.
The yards along the dock were stacked to the eaves.
And there was the other rumor: Wynafryd Manderly, Lord Wyman’s granddaughter, and the lord of these hills writing letters as if a match were already half-made.
Putting the Arbor’s hand in that trade was taking meat from a wolf’s mouth.
The hall stood in the middle of the town.
The guards read the badge and went in at a run.
When they brought Horas through, Domeric was already in the high seat.
“Ser Domeric.
A pleasure.” “Ser Horas.
Sit.” Domeric clapped once.
Girls came with the table.
Spiced beef.
Smoked salmon.
Snails in their shells.
Beef in red wine.
Cheese running in its milk.
Roe.
A roast fowl.
Broth that still moved in the bowl.
Some of it Horas had no name for.
Finding a feast like that in a raw hill town was a stranger thing than the dock.
He did not waste manners on false refusal.
The Arbor to Lonehill, around the Summer Sea, had taken him a fortnight even with the wind.
A fat-bellied trader would have wanted twenty days.
There had been no proper galley on the ship: salt meat, wheat cakes, water that had begun to think for itself.
The steam off the plates found him at once.
Breeding kept his hands correct.
Across the board Domeric ate like a man who had decided the old rules could wait.
“We are not our fathers,” Domeric said.
“Eat, Ser Horas.
The food will not take offense.” “My thanks.”