Rowan ran his thumb along the gate’s cracked hinge in the morning cold and felt the iron’s grain give under the pressure, brittle as old bone a jagged seam that had been widening since before he woke in this body, iron that should have been replaced a decade past.
“Timber first,” Maddoc said from behind him.
“Gate holds or nothing else matters.”
Rowan turned.
The sergeant stood with his arms crossed, close enough that the conversation stayed between them.
Past his shoulder, the yard was waking men rolling bedrolls, Nalen’s caravan guards hitching their teams in the pre-dawn gloom.
“The wall-walk’s rotted through in three places,” Rowan said.
“A man went through it last winter.”
“Broke his leg. I know. I set it.”
“And if the next raid comes over the wall instead of through it?”
“Then eleven men die on a wall they can’t hold instead of behind a gate that might.” Maddoc’s tone was flat, not arguing.
Laying out the map.
“You want the work split, my lord, or you want it done?”
Rowan looked back at the hinge.
The crack ran deep, a failure slowly opening every time the gate swung.
Fix it wrong and it’d shear clean through the first time a Trolloc put weight against it.
“How long to replace the hinge?”
“Two days if Anselm’s forge is cold. Four if it’s not.”
“And the wall-walk?”
“A week. Maybe more, if the timber’s as bad underneath as I think it is.”
The numbers had the blunt weight of a debt already called in.
Rowan did the sums eleven men, two hands each, and work enough for forty.
Even spending every crown from the toll wouldn’t hire the bodies he needed, not this close to winter, not for a fort most of the pass thought was already dead.
“We do the hinge,” Rowan said.
“Gate first. Then we shore the wall-walk enough that it doesn’t drop a man, and we live with the rest until spring.”
Maddoc’s mouth twitched.
Not quite a smile.
“That’s sense.”
“You were testing me.”
“I was seeing if you’d pull rank or think it through.” The sergeant glanced past Rowan toward the yard, where Bili was hauling a water pail twice his size toward the caravan’s horses.
“Thinking it through keeps men breathing longer.”
Something in Rowan’s chest eased half a notch not the surge of a new thread kindling, just the old ones, Maddoc and Bili and Aeldra, holding a degree steadier than they had yesterday.
He felt the fort’s small web like a pulled stitch under the skin, taut and too thin, but no longer unraveling.
“I’ll talk to Anselm,” Rowan said.
The smith’s forge sat against the outer wall, a low stone hutch with a chimney that hadn’t smoked in weeks.
Rowan found him outside it, splitting kindling in the same even rhythm a man falls into after the ten-thousandth time, each stroke landing where the last one had.
Harl Anselm was broad through the shoulders and gray through the beard, and he looked up when Rowan’s shadow crossed his axe-line without stopping his swing.
“Forge is cold,” Harl said.
“I need it hot.”
“Then you need coin.” Another swing.
The wood split clean.
“Or grain. I’m not particular.”
Rowan crouched and picked up one of the billets, turning it over in his hand.
The kind of wood a man kept because it was worth keeping.
“The fort’s gate hinge is cracked,” Rowan said.
“It needs replacing before the next raid, or we lose the gate. Lose the gate and we lose the wall.”
“Lose the wall and you lose the fort.” Harl set another log on the block.
“I know the song, my lord. Doesn’t change that my daughter’s still hungry and my coal-bin’s empty.”
“How much to fire the forge and work the hinge?”
Harl stopped, axe halfway raised.
He studied Rowan for a long moment, and Rowan saw the arithmetic happening behind the man’s eyes weighing the fort’s odds against his family’s winter, tallying what a dead lord’s coin was worth if the fort went under.
“Four sacks of grain,” Harl said.
“And first call when the next caravan comes through.”
It was twice what the work was worth and they both knew it.
Rowan held the man’s gaze and felt the shape of the bargain underneath the coin not just payment, but a test.
Harl was asking whether Rowan valued the fort enough to pay what it cost, or whether he’d balk and try to bargain a man’s family down to desperation rates.
“Four sacks,” Rowan said.
“And you’re first call. But I want the hinge done in two days, and I want it done right.”
Harl’s shoulders loosened a fraction.
He set the axe down and held out his hand.
They shook on it.
Rowan walked back across the yard with the bargain settling in his gut like ballast four sacks gone from a store that had barely started, but a forge he could use and a smith who’d just learned that Rowan’s word held weight.
The math still didn’t balance.
He could fix the gate, shore the wall, and keep the granary stocked through midwinter if nothing else broke and no one else needed feeding.
But the fort had nine men on the wall and space for two hundred, and the weight of that empty perimeter sat in his chest like a slow cold ache.
He was halfway to the barracks when the shout came from the north watchtower.
Rowan turned and ran.
The guard was already down from the tower by the time Rowan reached the yard, his horse lathered and blowing hard.
Donal, one of Maddoc’s scouts, gray-faced and shaking in a way that had nothing to do with cold.
Maddoc got to him first.
“Report.”
“Sign,” Donal said.
His voice cracked.
“Trolloc sign, fresh. North ridge, maybe eight miles up the pass.”
“How many?”
“Tracks for twenty. Maybe more.” Donal swallowed.
“There’s a warg print the size of my head, Sergeant. And they’re not raiding. They’re ranging.”
The yard had gone quiet.
Every man within earshot had stopped moving, and Rowan felt their fear like a draft against his neck.
“How old?” Maddoc asked.
“Two days. Maybe three.”
Rowan stepped forward.
“Ranging for what?”
Donal’s eyes flicked to him, then back to Maddoc, uncertain who he was supposed to answer.
“A way down, my lord,” Donal said.
“They’re scouting the ridgeline. Looking for a way to come at the Gap from above instead of through it.”
The cold in Rowan’s chest deepened.
A raid through the gate was one thing a chokepoint he could defend with eleven men if they held their ground and didn’t break.
But if the Trollocs found a way over the ridge and came down on the fort from the high ground, eleven men wouldn’t be enough.
Forty wouldn’t be enough.
He turned to Maddoc.
“Can they find one?”
“There’s goat-tracks up the north face,” Maddoc said.
“Narrow, but passable if you’re mean enough and don’t care how many you lose getting down. A Fade’d care. Trollocs wouldn’t.”
Rowan looked at the wall cracked, rotted, half-repaired and felt the three threads he held like a child’s string-web stretched across a gap meant for steel cable.
Maddoc, steady and wary.
Bili, bright and fragile.
Aeldra, solid but untested.
Three threads to hold a wall built for two hundred, against a claw that was scouting the ridges and learning the ground.
He thought about the bargain he’d just struck with Harl.
Four sacks for a forge.
Coin for timber.
Grain for labor.
All of it arithmetic, all of it falling short of the one number that mattered.
Bodies.
The Oath could grow those.
He’d felt it the moment Bili’s thread had kindled a warmth that was also a weight, a bond that made the boy stronger and bound Rowan to keep him fed and armed and whole.
He could Swear more men.
He could bind them to the fort and to him, and they would stand where they wouldn’t have stood before.
It was the kind of certainty he didn’t trust yet quiet and cold as the scout’s news, and just as easy to mistake for knowing the whole of it.
How many men could he bind before the claws arrived?
“Double the north watch,” Rowan said.
“I want eyes on that ridgeline every hour of the day until we know whether they’ve found a path or moved on.”
“And if they’ve found one?” Maddoc asked.
Rowan met his gaze.
“Then we’ll need more than eleven men.”
He walked back toward the gate, past the forge where Harl was already splitting coal, past the granary where forty sacks sat stacked like a promise that still wasn’t enough.
The wall stretched out on either side of him, old and cracked and far too long, and the threads he held hummed in his chest thin, warm, insufficient.
The gate’s hinge would hold.
The wall-walk would hold.
But the line itself the thing that mattered needed more than repair.
It needed men who would stand when the Trollocs came down from the ridge.
And Rowan was starting to understand that the only way to grow that kind of loyalty was to bind it in his blood.
PHASE I LAND 1 · SWORN 3 · PROVISION 1/XII · ROADS 0 · STEEL 1 · WORD 0 (/XII)