The boy was doing it with beans.
Ser Hollis Vyrwel stood in the doorway of the steward’s room with his arms crossed and his jaw set and watched the bastard lay out the future of Blackmere on a scarred oak board with dried beans and pebbles and knotted lengths of string.
A whole grey morning had gone this way.
Aldric bent over the board like a maester over a corpse, shifting markers from one field to the next, untying knots, tying them again, muttering numbers under his breath that matched no arithmetic Hollis had ever been taught.
He is making it up, Hollis thought.
He has to be.
Nobody reckons a winter with beans.
“The near field,” Aldric said, without looking up, “has two seasons of rye in it and no fallow.
The soil is thin.
Put barley there in spring and it fails.
Move the rye to the east strip and put beans here—” he tapped a cluster of pebbles “—and the ground comes back.
Beans mend the soil.
The rye returns stronger the year after.”
“How do you know the rye will fail?”
“The bean-count says so.” Aldric gestured at the board as though the thing were plain.
“Forty measures last harvest.
Twenty-two the year before.
The fall is steady.
The soil is tired.
It wants a rest crop.”
Hollis stepped closer and frowned down at it.
Beans and pebbles and string.
It was children’s play.
And yet the numbers.
The boy had the numbers.
He had walked the near field in the frost and the east strip in the dark and the south meadow at dawn, and come back with counts that matched what Hollis remembered from the old lord’s better years.
Counts Hollis had assumed nobody living still kept.
“There are three fields,” Aldric went on, “so the rotation rests one each season.
Clear the mill-race by week’s end and let the mill run through winter, and Wat can grind what’s left of the stores and whatever we can trade for in the charter town.
The root-cellar wants to be a third deeper than it is.
The frost will go hard this year.
Dig it now, before the deep freeze, and it will hold.”
“How do you know the frost will go hard?”
“The hoarfrost lies too thick on the stones for the season.
The well-water has gone sweet and heavy, which it does before a killing cold.
Cottars read weather off worse signs than those and go to bed dry.” Aldric looked up, and his eyes were calm in a manner Hollis found unsettling.
“Is there a problem with the sums?”
Hollis opened his mouth to say that yes, of course there was a problem, the problem being that a bastard with no maester’s chain and no lord’s schooling was doing sums a Riverrun steward would sweat over, doing them with beans, and getting them right.
What came out was: “The south meadow.
You said oats there.
Why not barley?”
“Because the drainage is poor and barley rots in wet ground.
Oats will bear it.
And we need the oat-straw for the barn roof, which will come down on us if we don’t re-thatch before the snow.”
“You know thatching too.”
“I know that a roof with three holes in it is not a roof.”
Hollis stared at him.
The boy was perhaps twenty, twenty-two at the outside, with the lean face of someone who had never once eaten quite enough and the steady hands of someone who had learned early that panic was a luxury for other people.
He was dressed in rough-spun wool that had belonged to the old lord’s steward, too short in the arm and too broad in the chest, and his boots were mended with leather patches that didn’t match.
He looked like a clerk.
He talked like a steward.
He thought like a lord.
The last trueborn Blackmere is dead.
The escheat is written.
The fire is supposed to go out.
“Then why do the numbers say otherwise?” he muttered, and didn’t know he had said it aloud until Aldric looked up.
“The numbers don’t say anything.
They describe what’s there.
The ground is tired and not dead.
The stores are thin and not gone.
The mill can run.
The roof can be mended.
None of it is impossible.
It is only difficult.”
“Difficult is another word for—”
The door banged open.
Both men turned.
The factor stood in it with snow melting on his shoulders and his face wind-scoured raw: a lean, nervous man in a Rushford badge who had ridden through the cold to deliver nothing good.
Hollis knew the type.
Good news walked.
Bad news galloped.
“Ser Hollis.” The factor nodded to Aldric as an afterthought.
“I ride from Lord Rushford’s boundary-riding.
His lordship’s stewards have been walking the old Blackmere march.
Surveying the line.
For the records, they say.”
Hollis felt his stomach drop.
Walking the march.
Surveying the line.
In riverlands custom that meant one thing.
A neighbour was measuring what he meant to take.
“Which part of the march?”
“The western strip.
The grazed land past the treeline.”
“That’s Blackmere ground.”
The factor spread his hands.
“I only carry the word, ser.
Lord Rushford’s stewards will send their findings to Riverrun before the season’s review.
I thought you should know.”
He was gone before Hollis could answer, the door banging shut behind him, and neither man spoke for the space of a dozen heartbeats.
“Hollis,” Aldric said.
“I know.”
“Rushford is measuring the border while we do maths.”
“I know.”
“How much of the western strip does he claim?”
Hollis shut his eyes.
He had served the old lord long enough to have the boundary-marks by heart: the standing stone at the ford, the oak that lightning took in the year of the great flood, the iron stake the first Blackmere drove into the ground before Aegon’s Conquest.
The western strip was Blackmere’s best grazing.
Without it Brynna had nothing to herd.
Without it the hall wasn’t a hall but a house with a garden.
“All of it,” he said.
“If his stewards are walking it, he means to have all of it.”
Aldric was quiet a moment.
Then he reached across the board and moved one pebble, the one marking the western strip, to the table’s edge, where it sat by itself.
“Then it goes into the reckoning,” he said.
“The border. Visit g.com for the full chapter.
The stores.
The mill.
The roof.
The escheat.
It’s all one problem.
A house that is not yet a fact, surrounded by men who would prefer it stayed an idea.”
“And how do you plan to make it a fact?”
“The same way anything is made a fact,” Aldric said.
“You refuse to let it be erased.”
Hollis looked at the board.
Beans, pebbles, string.
A winter’s survival laid out in a language only the boy seemed to speak.
It should have been ridiculous.
It was not ridiculous.
The sums held.
The rotation made sense.
The stores, thin as they were, would last if the mill ran and the cellar held and the border did not vanish before spring.
“Brynna,” he said.
“What about her?”
“If the border goes, she has no grazing.
Her flock dies.
She leaves.”
“Then we don’t let the border go.”
“It’s not so simple.
Rushford is a blooded lord.
You are a—”
“A bastard.
I know.
His word against mine, his seal against my nothing.” Aldric picked the lonely pebble up and set it back exactly where it had been.
“But the boundary-marks are older than his house.
The iron stake was driven before your grandfather drew breath.
The law is ours.
The only thing Rushford has is an assumption that a bastard will not fight.”
Hollis looked at the steady hands, the calm eyes, the board of beans and string and impossible sums, and felt something shift in his chest.
Not hope.
Hope was for young men and fools, and he was neither.
The beginning of a decision to stop waiting for the hall to die.
“We should start naming which folk to keep for spring planting,” he said, and hated himself a little for saying it, and hated himself more for meaning it.
Aldric looked up, and the corner of his mouth moved.
“You just argued for the future.”
“I argued for the planting.”
“Same thing.”
Hollis did not answer that.
He went out into the passage thinking about the western strip and how to hold it, and caught himself walking with his shoulders straighter than they had been in a year.
In the yard, Wat and two cottars were already dragging poles and rope toward the frozen mill-race, and the bastard came past him at a jog to join them, shrugging out of his good tunic as he went.
⚜ ━━━━ ROYAL PROCLAMATION ━━━━ ⚜
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