Rowan carried the second body down from the wall himself, the canvas gone stiff with frost overnight.
Nobody had asked him to.
But letting someone else carry what the fort had paid felt like skipping a debt he hadn’t earned the right to skip.
Two dead.
Nine left standing.
A granary that would kill the rest of them slower than the Trollocs had tried to do it fast.
The warmth was still there under his boots.
Patient.
Waiting on something Rowan didn’t understand yet.
Below, Maddoc Vane directed the rest of the burial detail.
The sergeant hadn’t looked at Rowan since they’d barred the door.
Hadn’t spoken to him either, except to say “my lord” in a tone that made the title sound like an accusation.
Rowan could not blame him.
The words he’d spoken at the gate last night he could still taste them on his tongue, shapes his mouth had never learned but his throat had known anyway.
Old Tongue.
He’d read enough to recognize it, even if he couldn’t have said what it meant before it came spilling out.
Old Blood, they called it in the books.
The dead reaching up through the living when the Pattern needed them.
He pressed his palm flat against the stone, and that buried warmth answered, steady as a pulse.
The granary squatted in the corner of the inner yard like a broken tooth.
Rowan took the steps down slow, feeling each one settle under his weight.
The men gave him room too much room, the gap you leave around a dog that might bite or a torch that might spit.
The door was off one hinge.
Inside, the morning light slanted through gaps in the roof and painted stripes across near-empty grain bins.
Rowan never had to count.
The knowing dropped into his gut same as last night bypassing his eyes entirely and writing itself somewhere deeper.
Fourteen days of grain at current rations.
Eleven if they didn’t cut portions.
Seven if another raid came and they had to feed wounded men who couldn’t work.
The numbers weren’t guesses.
They carried a debt’s weight, once written down heavy, exact, impossible to argue with and Rowan made himself hold it instead of flinching from it.
He turned and found Maddoc in the doorway, blocking the light.
“How bad?” the sergeant asked.
“Midwinter,” Rowan said.
“We starve three weeks before it.”
Maddoc took the number like a blow he’d half-expected, silent a beat too long.
“You counted that fast?”
“I know what I’m looking at.”
“Do you.” It wasn’t a question.
Maddoc stepped inside, and the door creaked shut behind him.
The granary went dim.
“You know what you’re looking at. You knew where the raiders would hit last night before they hit it. You spoke words no man’s spoken in this fort since my grandfather’s time.” He stopped two paces away.
“What are you?”
The thread between them between Rowan and Bili, thin and warm and impossible was still there behind his ribs.
Constant as his own heartbeat.
“I don’t know,” Rowan said, and it was true enough to hold weight.
“Old blood. Old words. My House goes back to Manetheren, and last night something woke up that I didn’t know was sleeping.”
“Manetheren’s dead.”
“So they say.”
Maddoc studied him the way a man studied a cracked blade deciding if it would hold one more fight or break in his hand.
“The words you spoke. Bili said they weren’t for him.”
The question found a nerve Rowan hadn’t known he still had.
He made himself hold Maddoc’s eyes anyway.
“They weren’t. I don’t know who they were for.”
“Pattern,” Maddoc said quietly.
“Prophecy. The kind of thing that gets a man killed if the wrong people hear about it.”
“I’m not asking you to follow prophecy. I’m asking you to hold a fort.”
“And feed nine men on fourteen days of grain.”
“Eleven,” Rowan corrected.
“We cut rations starting today.”
Maddoc’s expression held still, but something behind it moved a recalculation happening in real time.
“You always this sure of numbers you pulled out of the air?”
“I’m sure.”
The sergeant let the silence stretch.
Outside, someone was hammering fixing the gate, probably, or what was left of it.
The sound rang flat in the cold.
“I’ve held this fort five years,” Maddoc said finally.
“Kept it standing when lords with real names couldn’t be bothered. I’ve buried better men than you.”
“I know.”
“You don’t know a damned thing.” Maddoc turned for the door, stopped with his hand on the frame.
“But you counted the grain right. I checked the bins last week. Fourteen days. Maybe thirteen.”
He left.
Rowan stood in the cold granary and felt the warmth under his feet like an approval he hadn’t earned.
The toll-books were in what passed for the fort’s record room a corner of the main hall with a table, two chairs, and a chest that smelled like mice.
Rowan spread the ledgers out and read them as he’d once read supply manifests: not for what they said, but for what they hid.
Three caravans in the last two months.
Tolls paid in copper and clay ingots low-margin scraps that said the road wasn’t worth taking unless you had no choice.
Expenditures logged in a cramped, tired hand that had stopped believing the numbers would ever turn.
The garrison payroll was four months in arrears.
Rowan closed the book and sat back.
His chest ached not the warmth, something else.
Something that felt like grief for a place he’d never seen before last night.
The door opened.
Bili stood in the gap, still wearing the same stained leathers from the wall.
He had a bowl in his hands.
“Maddoc said you didn’t eat,” the boy said.
Rowan hadn’t.
“You shouldn’t be spending rations on me.”
“Wasn’t asking.” Bili set the bowl on the table.
Thin porridge, more water than grain.
“He said you knew. About the granary.”
“I knew.”
“Is it” Bili’s hand went to his chest, right over his heart.
He dropped it fast, but not fast enough.
“Do you feel it too?”
The thread between them pulled taut.
Warm.
Thin as spun glass.
Terrified and true.
“Yes,” Rowan said.
Bili swallowed hard.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know yet.” Rowan picked up the bowl.
The porridge was cold, but it was food, and the fort didn’t have enough to waste.
“But we’re going to find out.”
The boy nodded and left, and Rowan sat alone in a room that smelled like mice and old failure, eating rations the fort couldn’t spare.
Outside, the men were burning the dead.
He could feel the fort under him LAND, the knowing named it, warm and certain and the thread tied to Bili burning small and bright behind his ribs.
SWORN.
The granary’s hollow weight sat in his gut.
PROVISION.
Eleven days, and winter coming down like a hammer.
The warmth pulsed, patient.
Rowan set the empty bowl aside and pulled the ledgers close.
If the fort was going to starve, it would starve under a lord who knew exactly how many days they had left.
He started counting.