Chapter 17 – Two Years Later
The siege at the ridge turned into a story long before the year was out. Traders brought it with flour and salt, telling it the same way in every village: Hawk Keep held when it should have fallen. Valeor men and Hawk men stood in one line. The heir of House Delsar threw the enemy's champion from the wall and ended him in the field. People repeated it because it felt good in the mouth. They said the name Delsar the way a man says something sturdy.
Two winters passed.
The keep smelled of bread again, not pitch. Stone was patched smooth; braces were set true. Where ladders once broke and men bled, a hard-packed square now held rows of sparring posts and straw dummies. Hammer rings from the new forge rolled through the yard in a steady beat. Beyond the ditch, the fields were green to the river, and the river was busy—barges under Hawk tallies and Valeor tallies, the numbers chalked onto one board instead of two.
Aric had been seventeen when the ridge broke. Now he was nineteen. He had the height his father carried and more width at the shoulders, muscle corded tight without softness. The old cuts on his forearms were the color of his skin again; even fresh bruises faded in a day. Every morning he woke a little stronger, and by now the men saw it as plainly as the sun. No one said "boy" to his face.
He trained before dawn, when the yard was still blue with cold. The Steelwind Forms had been built for the field—loose earth, close press, short kills—but Aric pushed them in ways the old masters hadn't written. He worked footwork until it felt like breath, then he worked it more. He taught the basic frame to soldiers who weren't born Delsar because footwork doesn't care about blood.
Lysandra was the only one who made him think. They circled in the chill with spear and hatchet, boots loud on hard ground. She drove him backward with a long reach, sharp as a needle. He let her, step by step, until the men along the rail began to grin because they thought they knew the end. Then he caught the shaft under his arm, turned his hips, and used her weight to put the spear into a post. The ash snapped with a clean crack. His hatchet tapped her gorget.
The yard held still for a heartbeat. Then it roared. Someone thumped a shield on a post until the rivets rattled.
Lysandra tore off her helm. She was flushed and irritated and pleased all at once. "Keep this up and you'll have no one left to make you honest."
"Then I'll train them until they can," Aric said, giving her the broken spear and the look that meant, again, after breakfast.
The men who had watched straightened their backs. They whispered his name quietly, as if not to cheapen it by shouting.
Inside the hall, the talk had changed shape too. The alliance with Valeor hadn't thinned once the drums went quiet; it had thickened. Lady Nyra came often with rope, timber, and boatmen who knew more knots than most men knew words. Hawk sent carpenters and steel and coin the other way. Her banner hung beside the hawk now without men looking sideways at it.
Arion liked numbers done in one hand. Joint tallies pleased him. River tolls stayed steady. Grain moved faster than the crown's clerks had expected, and even they had to write that down. When they came to count, they found no stolen measure and no extra hands in the grain bins. They left with neat pages and faces that did not know what to do when a frontier house did not give them an easy wrong to mark.
"They're watching," Sir Malrec said one night, his quill tapping a blot dry. "Not angry. Curious. They won't move if numbers keep looking like this."
"They'll move when they want what we've made," Arion answered. He wasn't smiling, but his voice had a taste of satisfaction in it.
Nyra sat with her steward and carved her bread with a knife you could trust. "If they move as partners, I'll pour wine," she said. "If not, I'll count spears."
Aric listened more than he spoke. He'd learned that a man who saves his words makes each one heavier. When he did speak, he asked for lists. He liked lists: posts that needed replacing, men who needed boots, hinges that squeaked and frightened horses, a shepherd with a grievance about a ford. It surprised him how much of keeping a keep was not killing anything.
He also walked. At night, when the yard quieted and the lamps made small warm circles, he walked the walls and the landing and the road bend. He touched the stone he had bled on and the rings in the landing he had counted in the worst nights. He watched the river drift without hurry toward a sea he had never seen, and the world beyond the hills felt bigger and closer at once.
Small things showed the new shape of the valley. A Valeor captain and a Hawk sergeant ran drills together at the mid-bank, the loser buying bread. A boy from the mill who had been caught skimming flour stood in front of Arion with his cap in both hands; he kept his fingers and his work, but he counted every sack for a month with a steward watching and learned to like the feeling of getting it right. Men from three villages argued about a ferry right and brought the matter to the hall without bringing knives. It wasn't peace—peace doesn't exist in places people want—but it was order, and order is better.
News came with trade, and it wasn't all about grain. A rider from the coast spoke of raiders driven back by galleys the crown finally sent in answer to Sir Malrec's ink. A packman told of a house upriver that had changed hands without a duel—old lord dead, young one untried, cousins counting, a hole men would try to fill with their own names.
Arion listened to that piece twice. "Invite the young lord to see our drills," he said. "Feed him. Send him home with two good laces for his boots and a list that shows how to keep a river watch without going poor. If he's greedy, we'll find out. If he's sensible, we'll get a neighbor who doesn't set fires to keep warm."
To the men in the yard, the horizon already seemed closer. In the second spring, Aric set a line of watch posts along the river bends—small towers more ladder than wall, just high enough for a horn and a pair of eyes. He took three boats and Valeor oars and ran night patrols until the men learned to steer without looking, to hear the river under the wind, to know by smell when pitch was near. Twice they chased off thieves who thought barges were banks that couldn't bleed. The third time they didn't chase; they turned a boat sideways in the narrow and let the thieves hit something that hit back.
None of that was a war. That was the point. He wanted fights small enough to end with a scuffle and a rope, not with a cairn.
Training changed too. Aric broke the Steelwind Forms into pieces the men could learn fast and use under fear. He named them things they'd remember: Cross-Current, when you step in and out to make a man miss; Stone-Notch, when you put your weight down a spear so it doesn't slide off; Hook and Throw, so even a farmer could put a ladder on someone else's head and make it stick. He made the captains teach, then watched the worst men until they got better.
In the third autumn, a crown clerk with soft hands and a sharper mouth came to "assist" with river books. He asked bad questions like they were good ones.
"Why is Valeor's mark on Hawk tallies?" he asked.
"Because we write what is true," Arion said.
"Who gave you leave to drill with Valeor at the mid-bank?"
"The river," Arion said, and the room laughed—not at the clerk, but at the answer—so the clerk lowered his chin and scratched something and decided to dislike the place instead of the people.
He found nothing to carry home but the truth. It looked odd on his paper. That wasn't their fault.
Lysandra changed in those years the way good steel changes—less shine, better temper. She held the left of the yard's drills and the left end of any line that needed holding. Men watched her when she spoke because she did not waste either breath or blade. If any of them remembered the girl who had once tried to beat her brother bloody in the practice ring, they remembered it as a good thing. It had made them both better.
Nyra's place in the hall settled the way a heavy bowl settles on a table. She didn't push, didn't play at coy. She brought what she said she would bring and took what was owed without making men feel robbed. Once a month she and Aric met at the mid-bank to drill crews together. After, she made sure the losers bought bread and never wine. "Bread fills the belly," she said. "Wine empties purses and makes men boast about nothing."
The crown sent an invitation in the first spring after the second winter—polite, rolled neat, sealed deep red—asking Arion to present his heir at the midsummer progress. The script was clean enough to count as a compliment.
Arion set it on the table and looked at Aric. "We'll go," he said. "We'll bow where bowing pays and stand where standing pays better. You will not break hands in the yard unless you mean to marry someone's cousin by accident."
"I'll watch my hands," Aric said.
Sir Malrec dabbed his pen and smiled with the corner of his mouth. "You might be asked to show the Forms. Or to show the strength people keep whispering about. If the king asks, you do it once, cleanly, and no more. Let men argue about what they saw, not what you gave them."
Aric nodded. He didn't enjoy the idea of dancing for a room, but he understood why rooms demand dances.
The week after the invitation, the young lord from upriver came with a banner that fluttered too much and men who looked at the walls like they were trying not to look at them. He had decent boots and worse counsel. He watched drills without breathing right, then tried to tell Lysandra the pikes were too short. She put a shaft in his hand and let him stand where the point bites. He changed his mind on pike length in less than a breath and asked decent questions the rest of the day. When he left, he took two good bootlaces and a list about river watches. He also took the look a man gets when he sees a thing done right and wants to copy it without stealing it. Aric marked that as a win.
Small frictions came and went. A Valeor oarman bloodied a Hawk teamster in the yard over a joke that wasn't; they were made to unload a barge together before either saw a cup. A steward was caught cooking the numbers on a salt levy; he lost his post and kept his fingers because he told on himself before the numbers told on him. Two men from the old enemy's villages came to the keep and asked to work the mill. They were given shovels first and proved hands before anyone let them near grain.
Aric liked those days. They felt like building, not mending. He slept hard and didn't wake with the taste of smoke in his mouth anymore.
He still woke with weight in his bones. It had never stopped. He didn't boast about it and didn't hide it badly enough to shame himself. The men learned what it meant without him saying a word. During one drill a new recruit lost his grip and a beam slid off a sawhorse. Two men jumped aside; one didn't see it coming. Aric caught the beam with both hands, felt it bite into his palms, and set it back like it had never moved. The recruit stared and stammered an apology.
"Watch your hands," Aric said. "I don't catch everything twice."
The recruit nodded hard and learned twice as fast after that.
On a cold morning near the end of the second winter, Arion asked Aric to walk the outer road with him. The sky was the color of old iron. Breath showed white.
"You've made the yard better," Arion said without preface. "You've made the line better. You've made the men better because they want to be seen by you and not be found light."
Aric waited. Praise from his father was never free-standing; it carried weight under it.
"We are steady now," Arion continued. "Steady buys time. Time buys reach. There will be a moment when we can set our hand outside our fence without leaving teeth marks on our own throat. I want you to see it before it arrives, not after."
Aric looked east along the road. The line of river posts stood like stitches in a long seam. "We'll see it," he said.
"Good," Arion said. "Because the world beyond those hills has its own stories. We kept a ridge. Keeping a map is different."
That night Aric walked the wall alone and tried to picture maps he hadn't seen. He thought of banners on roads, of fords farther off, of towns where people didn't care what a hawk looked like on cloth. He didn't feel fear in it. He felt the same thing he felt when he saw an empty yard in the morning—a place to put work.
Lady Nyra found him there a day later with her cloak thrown back and her hands red from cold. "Valeor adds two boats at the mid-bank in spring," she said. "You'll send boys to learn to read tide marks. If you send fools, I'll send them back with their ears boxed."
"I'll send the ones who hate being wrong," Aric said.
She nodded. "Good. People like that learn fast. Also—" She hesitated, rare for her. "People will say my banner beside yours means what it doesn't. Let them talk and make themselves happy. I have time. Do you?"
"I have more than most," he said, and for once he let the line sit there between them without softening it.
She huffed a laugh and thumped his shoulder like a captain would. "Then we'll both spend it well."
When spring finally broke, the river was high and polite, not angry. Boats ran under both colors like fish in the same current. On a clear evening, Lysandra stood beside Aric at the parapet, the wind pulling loose hair across her cheek.
"Do you ever think about what comes next?" she asked.
"Every day," he said.
She tipped her head toward the horizon. "So does Father."
They stood there a while. The world past the hills looked wide and close at the same time. Somewhere out there, men were making their own lists and drawing their own lines and saying their own names like law. Aric felt the weight in his body and the pull in his chest and knew the next thing would not be another siege on a ridge. It would be larger, messier, with more words and more numbers and more places where a line could bend. He would stand where it bent and straighten it. That was the work.
He went down to the yard at first light the next day and started again, because that is how you meet a world: one drill, one post, one list, one oath at a time.