The raven came at noon.
Aldric was in the yard, the mud frozen hard under his boots and his breath smoking in the air, facing the nine souls who hadn’t yet run.
He had asked them to gather.
Asked, not ordered, because a bastard could order no one, and they had come slowly, with the cautious shuffle of folk who had been promised things before by men with better names and worse intentions.
Hollis stood at his right shoulder.
Wat the miller stood at the gate with his daughter half-hidden behind his hip.
The rest — three cottars, a herdsman’s widow, two field hands, an old woman who smelled of herbs and silence — waited in a loose crescent with their faces closed and watchful.
“I have one bargain to offer,” Aldric said.
His voice went flat across the yard, no oratory in it.
He had never learned to make speeches, and he suspected these people had heard too many already from lords who promised better harvests and delivered famine.
“Work this hall through the winter.
Haul wood, mend the barn, clear the mill-race, dig the root-cellar deeper.
In return I will hold guest-right and a fed hearth over every one of you.
Your children eat before I do.
Your fires burn before mine.
I will not turn you out and I will not sell your labour to another house.”
He stopped there.
The yard stayed silent.
The old herb-woman watched him with eyes that had seen too many winters to be moved by a promise.
“I am a bastard,” he said.
“I know what that means.
It means my word is worth less than a lord’s seal, and you have no reason to trust it except that you are here and I am here and the winter is coming whether we trust each other or not.”
“That’s a thin offer,” said the herdsman’s widow.
Her voice was hoarse, and there was no fear in it.
Only the flat pragmatism of a woman who had buried a husband and three lambs in one season and was still on her feet.
“It’s the only one I have.”
“A bastard’s word is worth nothing in a court.”
“I am not asking you to take it to a court.”
Before she could answer, the raven came.
It dropped through the grey sky like a thrown stone and landed on the yard wall with a hoarse croak, a scroll bound to its leg in Riverrun blue.
Hollis untied the message with hands that trembled only a little and read it in silence, his lips moving over the words.
When he looked up his face was the colour of old ash.
“The Tully under-steward,” he said, loud enough for the yard, “writes that the escheatment of Blackmere has been entered for the season’s review.
The hall is to be surveyed and assessed.
A finding of vacancy will be entered if no lawful heir presents.”
The silence that followed went deeper than the cold.
The herdsman’s widow looked at the ground.
Wat pulled his daughter closer.
One of the cottars, a young man with a burned hand and a twitch in his jaw, took a step back toward the gate.
“Then the clock is already running,” Aldric said, and was pleased with how steady his voice held.
Somewhere in Riverrun a clerk had begun the slow, patient work of erasing a house, and no malice was needed for it.
Only ink and a season.
“That means we do not have a year.
We have until the season’s review.
Spring, perhaps sooner.
A court will look at this hall and decide whether it is a hall or a vacancy.
Nine folk who have already scattered is a vacancy.
Nine folk working, eating, burning the hearth, is harder to erase.”
“You want us to be your proof,” said the burned-hand cotter.
“Your numbers.
Bodies to show a court.”
“I want you to be a household.” Aldric stepped forward, near enough for the man to see his face.
The cotter flinched.
Not from fear, from the plain shock of being looked at directly by someone who was supposed to stand above him.
“I will not lie to you.
If the court rules against us, you scatter anyway.
But if the court never sees a hall worth keeping, if Blackmere is an empty ruin with a dead lord’s name on it, then the ruling is written already.
Our only chance is to make this hall a fact before the review can make it a memory.”
“How?” said Wat, speaking for the first time.
His voice was rough as his millstones.
“How do nine folk make a dead hall a fact?”
“Work,” said Aldric.
“The mill-race cleared.
The barn roofed.
The root-cellar deep enough to hold through the frost.
The hearth burning.” He looked at the miller directly.
“And you told me you’d stay if the race was cleared.
I mean to hold you to that.”
Wat’s jaw worked.
His daughter, a thin girl of perhaps twelve with watchful eyes, tugged at his sleeve, and he didn’t look down at her.
“And if it’s not cleared?”
“Then you leave, and I don’t blame you.”
The miller stared at him a while.
Around them the yard was still and cold, and the only sound in it was the hoarse breathing of the raven on the wall.
Then Wat nodded, one jerk of his chin, and said, “Clear the race.
I’ll stay.”
One down.
Eight to go.
Hollis stepped forward then, and Aldric felt a flash of something close to gratitude when the old man spoke.
“I have served three lords of this house,” Hollis said, “and I watched each one die thinking the next would outlast him.
The boy is asking you to work through a winter.
Not to swear fealty.
Not to die for a name none of you owe.
To work, and eat, and keep a fire burning.
I have seen worse bargains from better men.”
The yard shifted.
Not a decision, not yet, but the beginning of one.
The herdsman’s widow looked at Hollis, then at Aldric, then at the raven on the wall, and something in her face gave by a degree.
“I’ll stay the winter,” she said.
“Not because I believe you.
Because the road east is frozen and my sister’s village is full and I’ve nowhere else to walk.”
“That’s reason enough,” said Aldric.
One by one the others nodded: the cottars, the field hands, the old herb-woman, each for their own reasons and none of them because they trusted him.
That was fine.
Trust was a crop you planted in winter and harvested in spring, if you lived to see it.
The raven went back with a blank scroll.
Let Riverrun wonder what that meant.
When the yard had emptied Aldric stood by the gate and watched the first flakes come down out of the grey.
They’ll stay to watch me fail slower, he thought.
That’s not nothing.
That’s a door cracked open, and I have spent a lifetime walking through doors that were only cracked.
The hearth was burning behind him.
The fire in his chest was burning with it, steady and wordless.
Then Wat’s girl came past him at a run with her sleeves pushed up and flour to the elbow, headed for the mill-house door, and shouted something over her shoulder about ground meal and a fire that wanted feeding, and Aldric turned and followed her in out of the snow.
⚜ ━━━━ ROYAL PROCLAMATION ━━━━ ⚜
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