The hidden crawlspace beneath the western granary led to a web of smaller thefts.
Once the keeper broke, others followed. A mule driver admitted to moving sealed sacks at night under orders stamped from the steward's office. A town broker, cornered between debt and fear, confessed to reselling county grain through three merchants, one of whom supplied Lord Berengar's household. A stable hand reported that twice a month carts marked for the abandoned eastern forts had in fact unloaded at store sheds behind the south guest wing.
Ghost garrisons, Adrian thought.
Men paid in books, fed in ledgers, absent in life.
He spent the next night turning evidence into sequence.
Alderwatch. Eastmere Tower. Black Step Post. All either abandoned or barely inhabited. Yet all still drew ration allotments. The grain was officially justified as frontier necessity and quietly converted into private consumption, patronage, or sale.
By dawn he knew two things with certainty.
First, the missing forty days of reserve were not gone to famine or monster raid. They had been eaten by administration.
Second, one theft connected the whole structure. Household indulgence, branch-family hospitality, falsified military expense, broker sale, debt service, steward certification. Not random opportunism. A system.
He ordered the keep's old counting hall opened for inspection.
No one used it now except for quarterday tallies because its acoustics carried voices into every adjoining passage. That was precisely why he chose it. By midmorning sacks from the west granary had been hauled in and stacked beneath the rafters where every clerk and servant passing through the yard could see them. Adrian had the false ration lists nailed beside the pile.
Hugo Pell, still pale from two nights under guard, was brought in to identify his own entries.
He trembled visibly.
Lord Berengar arrived before the third nail had gone in.
"What circus is this?" the old man demanded.
Adrian did not turn. "Inventory."
"In the public hall?"
"Transparency suits theft badly."
Berengar's face darkened. "You are humiliating your own house."
Only then did Adrian look at him. "No. Your house humiliated mine. I am merely reading the account aloud."
The old lord stepped closer, lowering his voice. "Enough. Send the men away and we will settle this privately. You have made your point."
"I have not yet begun to make it."
He nodded to Hugo. "Read the Alderwatch entries. All of them."
The accountant looked like he might faint. Under Adrian's stare, he began.
Ration allotments. Mule feed. lamp oil. winter salt. hazard bonus for garrison men not present. Month after month. Name after name. A company that did not exist consuming grain that should have kept town and keep through late winter.
Clerks stopped writing to listen.
Servants gathered at the doors.
One of Berengar's men slipped away, likely to carry warning deeper into the manor. Adrian let him go. Panic was a courier too.
When Hugo finished, the hall remained silent.
Adrian addressed the gathered staff without raising his voice. "From this day, all stores held under county right are to be counted in open record once each week. Any sack moved without signed order under my seal will be treated as theft from Greyfen itself. Not from me. From Greyfen. There is a difference, and you will learn it."
He then turned to the granary keeper, who was on his knees near the entrance. "You kept false books and obeyed criminal orders. But you also kept copies. That was either cowardice or caution. Decide which. For now you remain in place under watch. If a single measure goes missing, you follow Hugo into confinement. If none do, you may keep your post until I choose a better man."
The keeper wept with gratitude sharp enough to be disgusting.
So be it. Better grateful disgust than efficient ruin.
That afternoon Adrian signed his first clean grain order as Count of Greyfen.
Half the recovered stores went directly to the county seat reserve.
A quarter went to restore winter allotments in the family apartments, kitchens, and guard barracks.
The last quarter he held back visibly, because reserves people could not see invited stories people liked too much.
He had just set down the seal when the System text appeared.
Objective 3 progress updated.
Grain reserve recovery underway.
Parasitic node one identified but not yet neutralized.
He read the final line twice.
Not yet neutralized.
Quite right.
He had exposed a theft route. He had not removed the men who designed it.
And men who designed theft routes seldom surrendered because numbers embarrassed them in public.
They waited.
Then they struck where they still believed the lord weakest.
At supper a maid came white-faced to report that Lady Evelyne's chamber firewood had once again failed to arrive.
Adrian set down his cup without drinking.
The house, it seemed, had chosen its battlefield.