***
The scaffolding went up while the ground was still frozen.
Castor stood on the south wall before dawn, watching lanterns move below.
A hundred men working by torchlight because daylight was short and the ground didn't stay soft long enough to waste it.
He could hear them from up here — iron stakes driven into frozen earth, surveyors calling measurements across the dark, the low constant sound of people working in cold that they'd rather not be working in but were anyway because they were being paid.
He'd drawn the grid himself.
Three months of revision, the parchment going soft at the folds from handling.
Streets running north-south and east-west in a proper cross-hatch instead of the rat-runs that naturally accumulated around a castle over generations.
Craft quarters separated by what they produced and what they smelled like.
The smiths east, where the wind took their smoke.
The tannery further east still, downwind of everything, because no one wanted to live near a tannery regardless of how much they needed leather.
The brewery northwest near the stream tributary.
A market square in the center, large enough for permanent stalls rather than the twice-weekly chaos that passed for commerce in the existing settlement.
The Cholas never built above the fiftieth parallel. I'm working from first principles on the cold-weather adaptation. Shared walls for heat. Covered walkways at street level so trade keeps moving when it snows, which is most of the year.
The hovels that had clustered against the Dreadfort's south face for as long as anyone could remember were mostly gone now. A few holdouts remained — older families who'd been here three generations and regarded the new construction with the suspicion of people who'd survived by not trusting sudden improvements. Castor had left them alone. They'd move or they wouldn't. He wasn't going to drag old women out of houses to make way for a forum they'd never asked for.
It wasn't efficient.
The first grey light came over the Lonely Hills. Surveyors' flags appeared in it — hundreds of red markers in the frozen mud, two rows of them where the forum's foundation would be, the stakes already driven. A crew was moving toward it with a stone wagon. He could see the mortar barrel on the back of the cart, wrapped in wool to keep from freezing solid before they got it where it needed to go.
Bolton cement
His own formula — rubble cores with mortar facing rather than the all-cut-stone construction that made Northern building slow and punishing and expensive.
Less elegant.
Considerably faster.
The smiths' quarter had gone up in six weeks where dressed-stone construction would have taken four months. Tybald had inspected it and said nothing complimentary and nothing critical, which Castor had learned to read as the maester's form of reluctant approval.
The settlement needed a name that would survive on maps and deeds.
Weeping Town.
For the Weeping Water three miles east. Geographic. Grounded. Nobody will confuse it for anything else or mistake who it belongs to.
He'd told Tybald two weeks ago. The maester wrote it in the ledger without looking up.
Below, the first foundation stones were going down.
Castor watched until his hands ached from the cold, then turned from the wall.
***
The road crews had started it.
Four months ago, ordinary road work — cold labour, men with picks breaking frozen ground, laying gravel beds along the Lonely Road south toward Barrowtown.
Castor had paid every fortnight, on the exact day he'd said he would, in silver coin rather than scrip. That single unremarkable consistency had done more than any proclamation.
Word moved through poor villages faster than ravens moved between castles and considerably more accurately widely.
Bolton's paying real silver.
Lord's healer sees the injured without charge.
The merciful one feeds the peasents.
The smiths' quarter was already finished — six forges in a row, two-story stone, upper floors housing the workers, proper chimney stacks drawing smoke up and away rather than through the living space.
The smiths who'd taken his offer came from villages where they'd worked cramped single-forge operations with intermittent charcoal and no one within three days' ride who understood what they were doing.
Here they had bulk contracts, iron stock from the storehouses, and five other smiths within earshot to argue technique with. Output quality had risen within the first fortnight without Castor telling anyone to improve anything.
The paper workshop had come online in the fifth moon. A former miller from near Widow's Watch — patient hands, mechanical instinct, the kind of man who improved a process quietly rather than announcing he was going to. Woodpulp reduced and pressed and dried into sheets.
The first batches were uneven, fibrous where the pulp hadn't broken down fully, too thick at the edges. By the twelfth batch the sheets were consistent enough to write on without the quill catching.
Not parchment.
Didn't need to be.
Cheaper than imported parchment by a third and available in quantity, which was the actual requirement.
A test crate went south to White Harbor. An order came back within a moon.
The Citadel always needs paper. Every castle with a maester needs paper. Every merchant running a ledger needs paper.
***
Bethany was alone in the great hall when he came down, working through a bowl of porridge with the focused efficiency of a woman eating because she needed to rather than because she wanted to.
Six moons
She moved differently now — one hand finding the table edge when she sat, a slight recalibration in every doorway. She'd stopped commenting on it on it a moon or so back, the same way you stop commenting on weather after you've lived somewhere long enough.
She looked up. Looked back at her porridge.
"Wall again."
"Before dawn."
She pushed a cup toward him without being asked. He sat and poured wine and drank it and said nothing for a while, which was a thing they did now — sat in the same silence without needing to fill it. The hall was empty at this hour except for one servant banking the east hearth who was doing his level best to be invisible.
"Tybald says the northeast block has cracks," she said.
"Moisture in the aggregate. We adjusted the mix."
"He thinks you don't know."
Castor drank.
"He also says the town will bankrupt us within three years." She said it the same way she'd said the other thing. Factual. Not her opinion, just something she'd heard.
"Tybald doesn't have the Hill accounts."
"No." A pause, spoon scraping the bowl. "Should he?"
"No."
She nodded, the smallest movement, and finished her porridge. Outside the high windows the light was coming up properly now, pale and cold. The sound of hammering drifted in from somewhere south — muffled by walls and distance but continuous.
"The baby dropped two days ago."
He set his cup down.
"Tybald says within the fortnight." She met his eyes. "I'm not frightened. Don't look at me like that."
"Like what."
"Like you're calculating something." She pushed her empty bowl aside. "It's a baby. Women have them. I'll be fine."
He held her gaze for a moment, then looked back at his cup. She was right that he'd been calculating — not from coldness but from the habit that had become so total he sometimes forgot it wasn't natural. Everything that happened went through the same mechanism. Even this.
"After," he said. "What do you want."
She looked at him. Really looked, the way she occasionally did, like she was deciding how much of what she saw to say out loud.
"Time," she said finally. "Just — time." She looked away first. "That's all."
The hammer sounds came through the walls. The servant finished with the hearth and slipped out without either of them acknowledging him.
***
The training yard was cold and smelled like effort.
Twenty-three left from thirty-one. The missing eight were a fact, not a failure — three unable to meet the physical standard, two cut for problems that hadn't resolved despite patience, two who'd tried to walk in the sixth moon and hadn't gotten far, one who'd simply vanished one night without explanation that Castor had ultimately decided not to spend resources pursuing.
Aldric was running blade work when Castor came through the gate. Paired drills, close range, the particular economy of motion that only emerged after months of the same movement done ten thousand times. They felt him before they saw him — the quality of attention in the yard changed without anyone stopping or visibly reacting, just tightened slightly, like a room where someone closes a window and the air pressure shifts.
Aldric crossed to him between drill rotations, face expressionless in the way of men who'd had it broken enough times that expression required conscious effort.
"Six are ready," he said, without preamble. "Actually ready. Eight more within two moons if the weather holds and we don't lose anyone else."
"The six."
Aldric named them. Castor listened.
Across the yard, one candidate was running the drill with her left hand because her right had been wrapped since yesterday — some training injury Castor hadn't been told about. She was compensating well. Not perfectly — the left-hand form was half a beat slower — but the fact that she was compensating rather than sitting the session out said something.
"Her," Castor said.
Aldric glanced over. "Lisa. Former cutpurse out of White Harbor. Best instincts in the group. Worst discipline."
"Keep her."
"Planned to." A pause. "Spring intake — you want another thirty?"
"Same process. You'll need another senior trainer."
"I know someone. Costs."
"Costs what."
Aldric told him. Castor nodded. The conversation ended with the efficiency of two people who understood each other's constraints.
He stayed to watch the drills for a while. Nothing he learned from watching he hadn't already known, but there was something useful about being visible that had nothing to do with observation. They trained differently when he was there. Not better or worse — just aware. That awareness had its own value.
***
The rookery stairs in late afternoon.
The birds shifted when he came in, a few hopping toward him out of what had become habit over months of conditioning. He hadn't brought food today. Three of them came anyway and then lost interest when nothing materialized and went back to their beams.
He stood in the center of the room and let the day fall away and reached.
[RAVEN]
Cold.
Always the cold first, total and complete, every feather reading the air independently. Then height — the Dreadfort below, walls and courtyard and the south settlement where torches were starting to appear as the early dark came on.
He pushed east. The Weeping Water caught the last light, a pale thread through white fields, ice-covered but visible where it ran fast over rocks and hadn't frozen fully. Beyond it the Lonely Hills, dark against the sky, and somewhere under them the gold that had made everything else possible.
He held it longer than was wise.
The drift started at the edges — the raven's hunger pushing in at the corners of his attention, the instinct to bank and look for movement in the fields below, small things, vole-shaped shadows. He let it push for a moment before pulling back.
[HUMAN]
Stone floor.
His hand on the window frame. Nosebleed starting before he'd fully settled, blood on his upper lip tasting of copper.
He stood with his head slightly back until it stopped. The raven he'd been in was preening its flight feathers on a beam above him, utterly indifferent.
He wiped his face and went to the window.
Below, Weeping Town's lanterns were coming on one by one in the early dark. The smiths' quarter first — the forges needed light to keep working. Then the brewery, then the residential blocks along the eastern street. The forum site was dark still, just the outline of foundation stones.
He watched until the cold from the open window became impractical.
Then shut it and went down.
***
CHAPTER END