First to fail the walk was the barn.
Aldric stopped in front of it with the frost crunching under his boots and watched the sagging roof-beams of Blackmere’s only hay-barn lean toward the ground like an old man too tired to stand.
The thatch was black with rot in three places.
The south wall had pulled a hand’s width off its footing, and through the gap he could see the flat grey fields beyond.
Dead furrows.
Frozen mud.
Nothing planted.
“The spine,” he said.
Hollis came up behind him with the lantern still lit out of habit rather than need.
“It’s a barn.”
“A hall has a body.
This is its spine.” Aldric laid his palm flat on the leaning wall.
The stone was cold enough to sting.
“How long has it stood like this?”
“Two winters.
Ser Willem said the barn could wait.”
“And the winter after that one?”
“Ser Willem was dead by then.” Hollis blew the lantern out and the flame went with a small wet sound.
“Walk if you mean to walk, boy.
My feet aren’t young.”
They walked.
Aldric had risen before the light, left the great-hearth burning low, and come out with nothing to guide him but the warmth under his ribs.
It hadn’t left him since the fire caught.
It also wasn’t even.
It ebbed and thickened as he moved, a tide with no moon, and he was beginning to suspect that the tide wasn’t random.
At the hall door the warmth had been steady, a banked coal.
Inside the barn, in the rot-smelling dark with the roof groaning overhead, it thinned to a thread.
He could feel the difference as plainly as he could feel the cold on his face.
Something here was wrong.
Not broken, not dead.
Wrong, in the sense a joint is wrong when it has gone unoiled, or a field when it has gone unrested.
“You’ve stopped again,” Hollis said.
“The mill-race.
How badly is it silted?”
“Choked solid to the sluice-gate.” A pause.
“You haven’t been down there.”
“No.”
“Then how do you—”
“Show me the well-house.”
Hollis looked at him for the space of three breaths, and then led him past the byre without another word.
Aldric felt the ground answer him as he went.
The frozen mill-race registered as a dull ache, pressure without pain, a bruise on a limb he hadn’t known he owned.
The well-house came up as a cold spot, and not cold in temperature: cold in the strange interior grammar of the fire, a place where the warmth thinned and pulled itself back from something.
“Rot in the timbers,” Aldric said.
“Low down.
Near the water.”
Hollis crouched, worked a thumbnail into the frame of the well-house door, and came up with a curl of soft black wood.
He turned it over.
He looked at it a long while, and then he looked at Aldric.
“Who told you?”
“Nobody told me.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“It’s the only one I have this morning.”
Past the treeline the warmth stopped.
Not faded.
Not weakened.
Stopped, as suddenly as a door closing.
One step inside the hall’s ground and the fire in his chest was a living thing, bright and breathing.
One step beyond the last marker-stone and it was gone, and there was nothing left but the ordinary cold of a Riverlands winter and the ordinary ignorance of a man walking blind.
He stood with a boot on either side of the stone.
“Rushford’s grazing lies beyond that,” Hollis said.
“Or it will, if his stewards keep walking it.”
“What’s on it now?”
“How should I know?
I’m no hawk.”
“No.” Aldric stepped back over the line, and the fire came up in him again like a held breath let go.
“Nor am I.”
The silence in his chest hadn’t frightened him.
It had clarified him.
The fire had borders.
The fire had limits.
It would tell him what happened on its own ground and nothing whatever about anything beyond it.
Which will make me exact, he thought, turning back toward the hall.
Exact is not the same as safe.
The granary was worse than the barn.
Hollis led him there himself, walking ahead with the stiff gait of a man determined to be seen doing his duty even while he expects it to end badly.
The granary was stone, built into the side of a low hill, cold and dry and meant to carry fourteen souls through a winter with room to spare.
Hollis unlocked the door with an iron key the size of Aldric’s palm and pushed it open without a word.
The smell that came out was not rot.
It was worse.
It was absence: the dry, papery nothing-smell of a room that ought to be full of grain and isn’t.
Aldric stepped inside and let his eyes take the dimness.
The tally-sticks hung in bundles from a rafter, notched wood telling one story.
The sacks and barrels on the floor told another.
The sticks claimed forty measures of barley, thirty of rye, twenty of oats.
The sacks held perhaps half of that.
Perhaps less.
He counted in silence, touching each sack, reading each barrel-mark by the thin light from the high window.
When he was done he turned.
Hollis stood in the doorway with his arms crossed and his jaw set, waiting.
“The sticks say ninety measures across all grains,” Aldric said.
“I count forty-three.”
“I know.”
“How long has it been short?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you suspected.”
Hollis’s jaw tightened.
“I suspected the last lord was not careful with his counts.
Then I suspected someone was taking from the low cellar.
Then the lord died, and there was no one left to suspect anything to.”
Someone has been eating this hall’s death, a measure at a time.
Aldric kept the thought behind his teeth.
He could feel the cold, not the weather-cold but the deep interior cold with no name, pointing toward the low cellar door at the back of the granary.
The same cold he had felt at the well-house.
The same tug with no face and no name and no explanation attached to it.
“A third of what we need,” he said.
“Winter is six weeks off and we have a third of what we need.
The rest?”
“Gone.
Or never was.
The difference matters less than the fact.”
“The difference matters if someone is still taking.”
Hollis said nothing to that.
But his shoulders came down a fraction, and Aldric understood he had been brought here to break: that the old man had expected the bastard to look once at the empty sacks and the lying sticks and decide the horse was the better offer after all.
He did not break.
He stood in the cold granary with the smell of absence in his nose and the ache of the hall’s wrongness under his ribs and did the one thing his mind knew how to do with a ruin.
He reframed it.
Not a rescue.
Never a rescue.
Rescues are what heroes do, and heroes die young in Westeros.
Tenure.
Husbandry.
A hall is a thing you hold, and holding is done by maths and law and patience.
The fire will tell me where it hurts.
Finding out why is mine.
“The mill-race needs clearing,” he said, walking back past Hollis into the grey morning.
“The barn needs a new roof before the snow.
The well-house has rot in the timbers.”
“How do you know about the well-house?
You’ve been near it once, for as long as it takes to piss.”
Aldric didn’t answer.
He was already walking, building a list in his head, and the warmth in his chest was a map he had only begun learning to read.
Behind him the iron key turned in the granary lock, and then the old knight’s boots came after him through the frost, unhurried, keeping pace.
Neither of them said anything the whole way back.
At the hall door Hollis stopped, looked at the smoke standing straight up out of the chimney in the still air, and grunted once.
“Tallies,” he said.
“Tonight.
If a man’s taking from us I’d sooner know which door he uses.”
“Bring the rushlights,” Aldric said.
“We’ll be at it a while.”