Bramble had held the western farm since the feud.
Aldric walked the overgrown boundary with the morning mist still thick on the ground and the Hearthright’s Stores-band gnawing under his ribs like a hunger he couldn’t feed.
It was good land.
Two fields of dark river-soil gone to thorn, a cottage with half its roof fallen in, a well silted but cleanable.
Land that would grow barley shoulder-high if you got the bramble out and the plough in.
Land that turned a hall into a holding.
And every mouth I add, he thought, is a mouth the empty granary can’t feed.
Beside him Hollis studied the ruined cottage with the flat gaze of a man too well acquainted with ruins to be moved by another.
The old knight had been quiet since they left the hall.
Not hostile.
Guarded, the way men go guarded when they are waiting for somebody else to make the mistake.
“The eastern farm is worse,” Hollis said.
“The roof is gone entirely, the well is dry.
You could resettle it by spring, if the rains come.
Not before.”
“How many could the western hold?”
“A family.
Two if they shared the cottage.
The land would carry them, the soil’s good, the drainage is right, the well can be cleaned.
But—”
“But every family we settle is a family we feed until first harvest.
And the granary is empty.”
“Yes.”
Aldric stood at the edge of the bramble-field and let the Stores-band do its slow arithmetic.
The Keeping, whatever it was, whatever made a just hall’s stores stretch further than the sticks said they should, was real and it wasn’t magic.
It conserved what was there.
It did not create what was not.
And after the cellar-theft and the refugees, the granary was running on margins that would have made a Riverrun steward weep.
“One farm,” he said.
“The western.
The eastern waits for spring.”
“And the folk who come asking for shelter between now and spring?”
“We turn them away.”
The words tasted of ash.
He had been the unwanted one all his life, the bastard, the ward, the extra mouth at another man’s table, and turning away folk who were exactly what he had been opened a wound he hadn’t known he carried.
But the fire was clear and the Stores-band was clear.
The hall could stretch to survive.
It could not stretch to save everyone.
Hollis watched him with something short of approval and short of disappointment both.
“That’s the right call,” he said.
“A hard one.
But right.”
“It doesn’t feel right.”
“It isn’t supposed to.
If it felt right it would be the easy call, and the easy call is usually the wrong one.” The source of this chapter is novelping.com.
They walked back toward the hall in silence.
Frost lay heavy on the ground and Aldric’s boots, still mended with mismatched leather, were soaking through.
He had meant to find better ones.
He had meant to do a dozen things the empty granary and the early frost had shoved aside.
At the gate they found three families waiting.
They had come from the east, out of a failing holding whose lord had died of the same winter sickness creeping through the villages.
They had heard the rumour: a hall in the western marches that kept its fire lit, that fed its folk, that would take anyone who worked.
They had walked three days through the cold to reach it.
Aldric counted them as he came up.
Eight adults.
Five children.
A cart loaded with everything they owned: three blankets, a cracked pot, a sack of turnips frozen solid on the road.
Nella was at the gate with the bread-board in her hands, halfway through carrying the morning’s loaves to the mill and stopped dead by the sight of them.
She looked at Aldric.
Aldric looked at the families, and they looked back at him with the same hungry watchful hope Orlen the wheelwright had worn at the ford crossing.
“The hall is full,” he said, and the words were stones in his mouth.
“We have taken in all we can feed.
I cannot offer you shelter.
I can offer you bread for the road, and a promise that when spring comes and the eastern farm has a roof, there will be a place for anyone who returns.”
The silence after it was worse than weeping.
“We walked three days,” one of the women said.
She was young, perhaps twenty, with a baby at her breast and frost in her cloak.
“We were told.
We heard.”
“What you heard was true.
The fire is lit.
The hall is warm.
But the granary is empty, and I will not take your children into a hall that cannot feed them.
That would be a different sort of lie.”
“You are turning us away.”
“I am giving you bread and a date, and asking you to come back when I can keep my word.”
She stared at him.
The baby stirred and whimpered, and she hushed it with the automatic gentleness of long practice.
The smell of Nella’s bread, warm off the hearth, filled the cold air between them like an accusation.
“You said the hall keeps its folk fed,” she said.
Her voice was hoarse and steady.
“You said the fire was lit.
We walked three days on that word.
Three days through the cold, with a baby and five children between us, because we heard there was a hall in the western marches that did not turn folk away.”
“I did not turn you away.
I am giving you bread and a date.”
“A date is not a roof.
A date is a promise from a man who may not be here in the spring.” Her eyes, grey and tired and wholly without hope, held his.
“I have had promises from men before.
I have a baby and no husband because of one.
I walked three days because I believed yours was different.”
She was right, and he was turning her away, and the fire would not judge him for it, because the fire asked only whether he was just, and justice sometimes meant turning away the folk you would give anything to keep.
“When spring comes,” he said, “I will be here.
The hall will be here.
The eastern farm will have a roof and a well and a hearth.
When you come back, if you come back, there will be a place.
That is not a lord’s promise.
It is a bastard’s promise, and it is the only one I have.”
She took the bread.
Her hands were cracked and blue, the knuckles swollen from a winter of carrying children and hauling water.
She broke the loaf in half and gave half to the old man behind her, and wrapped the rest in a strip of cloth and tucked it into the sling where the baby lay.
“If you are not here in spring,” she said, “I will find your grave and spit on it.”
“If I am not here in spring, I will deserve it.”
She turned away without another word, and the others followed.
The cart creaked, one wheel wrapped in the same rags that had wrapped Orlen’s cart at the ford, and Aldric wondered how many families in the Riverlands were pushing carts wrapped in rags toward halls that might not last the year.
The children cried.
The old man put a hand on the young mother’s shoulder and she leaned into it, once, briefly, before straightening and walking on.
Aldric stood at his own gate and felt the fire in his chest pulse with something that was neither approval nor condemnation.
Witness, and nothing more.
This is what keeping the fire lit costs, he thought.
Not the wood.
Not the labour.
The faces.
Nella had not moved.
Her face was pale and her jaw was tight, and when she spoke her voice was smaller than he had ever heard it.
“Will they come back?”
“I don’t know.”
“Will we be here if they do?”
He looked at her: thin, watchful, the girl who had baked that bread and had learned in one afternoon that a hall’s promises were worth exactly as much as the keeper who made them.
“Yes,” he said.
“We will be here.
Whatever the court decides.
Whatever Rushford does.
The fire will be lit and the hall will be standing, and anyone who walks through that gate will be fed.”
“You can’t promise that.”
“No.
But I can mean it.”
Hollis put a hand on his shoulder, the first time the old knight had touched him since he arrived, and said nothing, because there was nothing to say.
Then he took his hand away and looked east down the road after the cart, and after a moment he said, “Then we’d best get that farm roofed before the deep frost, and there’s no roofing it with three men.”
“No,” Aldric said.
“There isn’t.”