Rushford’s hall kept a fire larger than Blackmere’s entire granary, and half as warm.
Lord Bertran Rushford sat at the head of his own long table with a cup of mulled wine growing cold in his hand and his man-at-arms standing before him with his cap in his fist and a report on his lips that Rushford already knew he wouldn’t like.
The man-at-arms had ridden in at dusk, mud-spattered and sullen, and his face had told the whole story before he opened his mouth: the bastard hadn’t been baited.
“Tell me again,” Rushford said.
“My lord.” The man-at-arms, a lean, hard-faced man named Serjeant Cregan, who had served Rushford’s house for twenty years and had never once failed to provoke a target, shifted his weight.
“We placed the post as instructed.
One stride inside the Blackmere line.
We waited beyond the treeline.
We expected the bastard to come in hot, to draw steel, to make a threat, to do something we could carry to Riverrun.
He did none of those things.”
“What did he do?”
“He brought a witness.
A measuring-rod.
He quoted boundary-custom at us, the iron stake, the old marks.
He called the distance aloud so we could hear it, and then he asked us, politely, my lord, very politely, to move the post ourselves, or he would move it and note the incident for the Tully review.”
“Politely.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“And you moved the post.”
Cregan’s jaw tightened.
“He left us no grounds to refuse.
Had we refused, had we drawn on him, we would have been the aggressors, on another lord’s sworn ground, with a witness standing by.
The story we would have carried to Riverrun would have been his story: Rushford men attack a lawful boundary-claim.”
Rushford set his cup down very carefully.
The wine was cold.
Everything in this hall was cold tonight, despite the fire that was larger than a commoner’s house.
“He out-lawyered you,” Rushford said.
“A bastard.
A baseborn ward who has been in that hall for less than a season.
He out-lawyered my best sergeant on my own boundary.”
“He knew the marks, my lord.
He knew the custom.
He knew exactly what to say and how to say it.
He was —” Cregan stopped.
“Go on.”
“He was composed, my lord.
Courteous.
Immovable.
Refusing him would have looked like the unreasonable act, somehow.
I have served this house for twenty years, and I have never met a bastard who carried himself like a lord.”
Rushford said nothing for a while.
The fire crackled.
The wind moaned in the chimney.
From the far end of the table, his heir, Ser Domeric, a young man of twenty-three with his mother’s quiet eyes and his father’s stubborn jaw, was watching with an expression that Rushford didn’t care for.
“Speak,” Rushford said. This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
“Father?”
“You have something to say.
You always have something to say when you wear that face.
Say it.”
Domeric set down his own cup.
He was careful, always careful, this son of his, the way a man is careful when he has learned that his father’s temper is weather.
“I have heard from the eastern villages,” he said.
“The ones near the Blackmere march.
The ones that should be starving.”
“And?”
“They are not starving.
The Blackmere folk did not go hungry this winter.
The mill is turning.
The farms are being resettled.
A family of refugees was taken in at the ford, fed, warmed, kept through the frost.
The bastard is not just holding the hall.
He is, or he appears to be, doing it well.”
“Appears to be.”
“The reports are consistent.” Domeric met his father’s eyes.
“I am not praising him.
I am reporting what the villages are saying.
The bastard’s hall is eating while our marches grumble.
That is a fact.
Whether we like it or not.”
Rushford stared at his son.
The boy was near enough a man now to be right, and that was the worst part.
The bastard’s hall was eating.
The bastard’s folk were warm.
The bastard’s border was held.
And every one of those facts was an argument the bastard could carry to the Tully review, if he was clever enough to frame it right.
Blood is right, Rushford thought, and a bastard is nothing.
So why does his hall eat when mine grumbles?
He did not say it aloud.
He would never say it aloud.
The thought itself was a betrayal.
“The march,” he said to Cregan.
“Push harder.
Before the review.
No more post-planting; that game is lost.
I want something the bastard can’t answer with a measuring-rod.
I want him to look weak.
I want him to look lawless.
“And if he doesn’t break?”
“Everyone breaks.
Everyone has a line.
Find his.”
Cregan nodded and withdrew.
Domeric did not move.
“You disapprove,” Rushford said.
“I did not say that.”
“You didn’t have to.” Rushford picked up his wine again, still cold, still bitter, and drank.
“You think the bastard is competent.
You think competence should be rewarded.
You think a man who feeds his folk and holds his border is a man worth respecting, regardless of his blood.”
“I think—”
“I know what you think.
Hold your tongue.”
Domeric held his tongue.
But his eyes said what his mouth didn’t, and Rushford, who had spent a lifetime reading men before his son had learned to, saw the first crack in his heir’s belief in the natural order of blood.
The bastard was getting in.
Not through the border.
Through the ledger.
Through the reports from the eastern villages.
Through the simple, infuriating truth that a baseborn man with no seal and no blood and no name worth speaking was doing a better job of being a lord than half the blooded houses in the Riverlands.
“Go,” Rushford said.
Domeric went.
And Rushford sat alone at his long table with his cold wine and his warm fire and the uncomfortable, unshakable knowledge that the nameless, baseless, unfailingly reasonable bastard was beginning, against every law of blood and custom, to be the better lord.
The fire crackled.
The wind moaned in the chimney.
Somewhere in the hall his servants were clearing the remains of a supper he hadn’t tasted, and his careful, competent, quietly dissenting son was probably in the yard, staring at the stars and thinking thoughts Rushford didn’t want to hear.
Domeric will be lord one day, he thought.
When I am dead and this hall is his and the border stands quiet.
And the first thing he will do, the very first, is ride to Blackmere and ask the bastard how he kept his folk fed through the winter.
Because Domeric believes in results.
Domeric believes in competence.
Domeric believes that doing a thing well earns a man respect, regardless of his blood.
And I have spent my whole life teaching him the opposite.
He drained the last of the cold wine and set the cup down on the table.
The fox on his banner seemed to mock him from the wall: the running fox, the sigil of a house that had been swift and clever for three generations and was now being outrun by a bastard with a measuring-rod.
“Push harder,” he said to the empty room.
“Find his line.
Make him break.”
But somewhere beneath the anger, beneath the blood-pride and the wounded vanity and the stubborn refusal to admit that a baseborn man could out-lord him: a small, quiet voice was asking a question he wasn’t ready to answer: What if he doesn’t have a line?
What if the bastard is exactly what he appears to be, and the only way to beat him is to be better than him?
And what if being better than him is the one thing I can’t do?