Chapter 23 – Discipline Before the Throne
The host field woke before the sun. Canvas sighed, ropes creaked, cookfires snapped to life, and rumor moved faster than steam—who'd argued at a banquet, which house tried to shift its tent-line in the dark, what the valley heir had refused to do at another man's table. By the time the first bell sounded, the Hawks already had boots on, shields stacked, and lines set straight.
Aric dressed as he always did: clean coat, workable edges, nothing that gleamed for the sake of it. Wren made a single round, touching buckles with two fingers and saying little. Sir Malrec sorted notes with a strip of bread between his teeth, ink already on his knuckles like he'd slept with a pen in his fist.
They took the palace road without talk. At the inner gate, the clerk who once tried to confiscate their gifts now checked a slate, returned a token, and stepped aside. The lesser audience hall waited cool and bright, black-and-white marble reflecting the high windows, servants moving like thoughts at the edge of hearing.
The king sat beneath a modest canopy: dark wool, a narrow border, a circlet that showed more iron than fire. His eyes measured without malice or kindness.
"Arion's son," he said. "You brought numbers to my table. Speak on your river. Then show me how your men keep it."
Aric didn't clear his throat. He ordered words the way he would set a line.
"We watch three bends and a ford," he said. "Two hands tally—Hawk and Valeor—and swap sheets before they sign. We drill to move a boat sideways when thieves expect forward. We post a boy with a horn on the far bank when the water rises. We pay the man who listens when stone speaks."
"Show me," the king said.
They had been given a square of floor and four pikes. Wren stood where he belonged and the line arranged itself. Aric named forms as if stating the day of the week.
"Cross-Current." Feet slid, shields turned, a point bit air where a chest had been, not flesh.
"Stone-Notch." Weight traveled the shaft; the head held true, did not skid on polished floor.
"Hook-and-Throw." Two men turned an invisible ladder as if rope and oak were really there. Every soldier in the room saw the ladder anyway; ladders never truly leave a hall.
The king lifted a hand once. "Again."
They did it again. Then Aric raised a palm and the ten stood at ease without moving their feet. He kept his eyes on the throne. Looking anywhere else is another kind of bow.
"What do you do when the river gives you fog?" the king asked.
"Slow our feet, sharpen ears," Aric said. "Put the man who hears best where the line bends first."
"If a levy commander is a fool?"
"We answer his title as if it has sense," Aric said, "then put a sergeant where his men won't break."
A captain in a half-cape tried to keep his mouth set and failed. A scribe forgot to write for three breaths. From a shadowed arch, Lord Fenrel watched in a place he thought hid him.
The Master of Coin stepped forward when the king crooked a finger. Plain robe, careful hand, a page of fresh lines.
"The tallies are clean," he said. "They speak the world, not the man."
"Men tell me you refused to drink at a rival's table and refused to break furniture for sport," the king said. "Discipline is rarer than strength."
Aric let the words hang. Praise is a hook. He did not bite.
"You will remain in the host field until the progress enters the high hall," the king said. "When it does, your house will stand near the chamberlain's table. If your numbers stay true, you will keep that place. If your men stop looking like that when I am not watching, you will lose it faster than you gained it."
"As it should be," Aric said.
A thin smile moved the king's mouth and was gone. "Go."
They left the way they came, steps returned by marble without judgment. In the corridor a gray-bearded duke leaned against a pillar and watched them pass. "Once is enough," he said to the air. "Good. The court has too many men who show twice."
Fenrel waited beyond the arch with a careful smile that wasn't apology and wasn't defiance. "The king enjoys your numbers," he said. "Numbers change."
"They do," Aric said. "We count every day."
Fenrel's smile stayed because it had to. He moved aside. Aric didn't.
Back in the host field, the air felt thinner—tents a finger-width farther apart, voices pitched lower. Wren set shields where they belonged. Malrec burned a small scrap after writing two lines he didn't show anyone. When he spoke, it was as if he were noting weather.
"You've been weighed," he said. "Not found heavy. Not found light. Marked as something to watch."
"Good," Wren said. "Eyes make men tidy."
They drilled before noon on a strip of ground between their ropes and a row of stalls. Aric spoke the forms without raising his voice; the line moved like one arm. The half-caped captain returned and watched with arms folded, the set of his mouth undecided, then left still undecided. The coastal knight from earlier brought his men and asked for corrections without pride poisoning the request. Aric set a heel, turned an elbow, and made strikes land where they meant to rather than where they had been landing. The knight left with his chin higher and voice lower, which is how men sound when they've just learned something that matters.
A clerk with a polished scalp met them in a side chamber smelling of wax and salt. The Master of Coin laid three pebbles on a table and pushed them one by one along inked lines on a sheet of vellum.
"Call your river as if this were flood," he said.
Aric placed a finger to mark a horn-boy on the far bank, moved a pebble sideways to block an imagined thief's boat, then drew a second line showing where a levy could cross without drowning its carts.
"Why not here?" the Master asked, indicating a prettier bend.
"Because reeds show the true wind there only after the water turns," Aric said. "Pretty kills people."
The Master made a small sound and did not write it down only because he had already decided to remember it.
By midday cheap offers came dressed as favors. A lord whose banner once meant something offered "warmth near the table" if Aric would share levies. Another slid a charter that shifted a slice of toll into a paragraph three lines long. Malrec smiled and declined them all with a new sentence each time, never repeating a no long enough for men to learn around it.
A woman in a steward's sash watched Wren lay a picket line square and told Aric, "Your men love you." She expected vanity. He gave her practice.
"They love that none of them has to trip to teach the others where the rope goes," he said.
"Same thing," she said, almost amused, and left with a useful truth.
Toward evening, the first test that wasn't an invitation arrived. Two teams met at the water cart, both thinking it theirs. Voices rose. A jug cracked, then silence took its place—the heavy kind before something stupid happens.
Wren moved first, then two shields. Aric stepped to the cart and put two fingers on the spigot.
"This runs once," he said softly. "Left line first, then right. Then the next two tents come. If you don't like it, bring me a better rule. If you can't, follow this one."
A man from a northern house opened his mouth, looked at the shields, and shut it. They watered in order. The cart rolled back to the store-line without further poetry.
When the stars came, so did a runner in crown blue with a strip of parchment: the Master of Coin wanted another set of charts in three days, the same hand that had brought the last. Tucked under was a second, smaller note, neat and likely a clerk's: The Duke of Sable will watch your morning drill. He does not clap. That is a kindness.
"No clapping suits me," Wren said.
"Me too," Aric said, and meant it.
They slept in turns. In second watch, Wren found a cut rope that hadn't carried weight—someone learning the tent like a blind man learns a room. In third, Aric woke without a touch and stood under the stars counting breaths and not counting at all; breath is measure and measure is footing.
Dawn lifted the lid on the field. The Duke of Sable came as promised: a black cloak, a narrow face, eyes like flint under a steady brow. He watched from the edge of the square without speaking. Aric ran the line through Cross-Current and Stone-Notch; then he had the front rank drop to a knee and the rear pass spears forward without tangling feet or dropping points. The duke did not move until the drill ended, then inclined his head once and left the way men leave when they have seen what they came to see.
A boy from the tally tents arrived with a complaint written in a furious hand and undersigned by House Keld: Hawk and Valeor tallies "extorted" smaller trains, charged for "river delays," and "stacked men in lines meant to profit the valley." Malrec read the lines twice, smiled without warmth, and led Aric to the minor petitions court—a long room with a line of benches and a bored clerk who came awake only when numbers landed on his desk.
Keld's agent spoke first, offering indignation as proof. Aric waited until the man ran out of the same sentence rearranged five ways, then put the joint tallies on the table and pointed to three columns and a date.
"We charged for time on flood days because men were waiting anyway," he said. "We moved their carts in order of arrival. We kept their men above water. Ask them. They are alive to answer."
"Do you have a witness?" the clerk asked.
A raftsman with scarred knuckles stepped forward from the door, hat in hand. "We waited," he said. "Flood don't care about paper. These kept us from drowning our own carts."
The clerk inked a mark. "Complaint denied," he said. "Next."
Keld's agent left red-faced and tight-lipped. Malrec's quill scratched once on a private list.
That afternoon, a "hunt" invitation arrived with a horse already tacked and a groom ready to be offended by refusal. Aric refused with thanks. "I count footwork first," he said, which sounded polite and was true. The groom sniffed and left to be offended at someone else.
Toward late day, a pot simmered too hot behind Fenrel's ropes. Two men, shirts damp with wine, staggered near the Hawks' line and tried to begin a fight that looked like it had been practiced badly. Wren let them bump into two shields and bounce like children into a wall. Aric said nothing. He didn't have to. The men stumbled away, laughing too loudly. An hour later a boy brought sugared fruit to the Hawks' fire with a look on his face that said he hadn't eaten any of it himself. Aric fed him bread, sent him away with a coin for honesty he hadn't shown, and watched the tray walk back where it had come from. No one ate the fruit and no one said why aloud.
Night settled with the city's hum under it like a river under reeds. Aric checked the ropes once, then the wagons, then the men, then nothing at all, because part of discipline is knowing when to stop touching things that are already right. He slept like a man who expected to wake and did.
Two days later, at second bell, the Master of Coin received Aric in a room with no windows and three lamps placed solely for reading. The man had the charts Aric had promised, a blank page, and a question ready.
"How do you keep bribes out of a tally?" he asked.
"We don't," Aric said. "We keep it out of two tallies with two hands. Then we let the other house's steward read ours aloud and his own besides. Lies prefer the dark and prefer one mouth at a time."
The Master wrote one word. "Good," he said. "Now pick five men from the host field other than your own, and we will have them read your numbers."
Aric chose a scribe-lord, a raftsman, a captain with clean boots, a steward with a neat sash, and a boy old enough to count straight. They all read. The numbers held. The Master watched their faces and did not bother to hide that he was doing it.
When Aric left that room, the clerk with the polished scalp who had once been eager to take things from him stepped neatly aside without being asked.
By then Lady Merine's steward had found his way back to the Hawks' ropes, her smile neat and her hands empty of cakes this time. She asked a question without using the word marriage. Aric answered without using it either.
"The valley holds rivers, not seas," he said. "Oaths there are counted by current."
Her mouth tightened and smoothed like silk stroked once too hard, and she left with dignity intact and interest not entirely gone.
At the next dawn, the Duke of Sable returned, this time with a single man in a dark cloak and a bone-handled baton. The duke watched the drills once through, then spoke without preface.
"Trade me three of your forms," he said. "I'll send you two of mine."
Aric considered a heartbeat, looking not at the duke but at the baton. It had nicks where a man who taught had corrected hands without breaking them.
"Cross-Current, Stone-Notch, Hook-and-Throw," Aric said. "Your two in return will be chosen by you. We'll adopt only if they hold on wet ground and in poor light."
"Fair," the duke said. He did not smile. He didn't need to.
By midmorning, a Crown runner brought a brief strip of parchment with the chamberlain's hand and nothing wasted: House Delsar would stand near the chamberlain's table when the high hall opened for the progress; not close—near. The strip bore a tiny stabbed dot after the word near, as if the tip of the quill had lingered. Wren grunted approval. Malrec folded the strip, tucked it where it would not crumple, and said nothing. Saying nothing was its own kind of victory.
The day after, a small commotion rose at the edge of the host field. A wagon had collapsed a wheel in a shallow rut and leaned toward a cook fire that wasn't watching where its sparks went. Two men pulled the wrong way. A child stood too close. Aric covered the space in even steps, put his hands to the wagon frame, and set it upright with one lift while Wren kicked dirt over the fire's edge. He didn't hold it long. He didn't need to. Four hands dropped a spare wedge into place and the wagon stood as if it had never meant to fall. The child stared. Aric put a finger to his lips, not for secrets but for quiet, and the boy nodded as if he understood.
By evening, word came that a foreign envoy would be admitted to the high hall the same day the progress opened. The crown's blue in the message meant nothing; the neatness of the letters meant everything. Foreign eyes liked pageants. They liked spectacles even more. If there was to be "discipline" on show, it would be weighed not just by a king but by men who reported to other ones.
"Be where we are," Aric said, as if that were a new order. It wasn't. It was the same order every day.
They drilled that night not with spears but with rope and pegs and quiet. Wren timed the setting of a line, then the moving of it, then the resetting of it straight when someone intentionally slanted a peg to see if anyone would notice. Someone always noticed. They ran a water line from cart to tent to tent and back to cart without spilling, twice. They rehearsed speaking in a hall the way they rehearsed moving on a wall—answer what is asked, do not answer the part that isn't, never show anything twice.
When the stars came up, they were sharper than they had been the week before. Or perhaps men simply saw them differently now that the field had learned a new way to look at a tent with straight lines.
On the last night before the high hall opened, the host field settled early, like a camp that knows a march will start before breakfast. Wren made his final round, touching shoulders instead of buckles. Malrec stacked pages and burned three that didn't need to exist anymore. Aric stood once at the rope and listened to the sound that meant nothing was wrong—the small noises of men who have work in the morning and sleep that belongs to them.
Dawn would bring drums, banners, and the kind of silence that only large rooms can make when important people look at something together. The court would watch again, and weigh again. Foreign eyes would watch too. That was their work.
The Hawks would do theirs.