The dust raised by Elyse's southbound carriage lingered on the mountain path leading to the lowlands, like a slowly healing scar. William stood on the highest tower of Blackcliff Keep, watching that moving blemish until it vanished, his arms feeling empty. Little Edric's gurgling laughter, the last trace of his wife's jasmine scent—all were gone. What remained was this stone prison, a king-granted pension barely sufficient for respectable poverty, and two silent witnesses: himself, and the mountain.
He had been a climber, a conqueror, a secret architect. Now, he was a steward. A caretaker guarding empty vaults and dusty halls for the king. The Royal Guard garrisoned the towers; their captain reported to him with polite thoroughness, but the reports were notifications, not requests for instruction. Taxes were collected directly by the king's reeves at the pass, coins clinking southward, leaving only a meager trickle to maintain the castle's pulse—to buy candles, mend roofs, pay the few servants loyal to the point of foolishness.
The first weeks passed in a cold numbness. He inspected his "kingdom": the empty training yard, the silent ruin of the Silverflow Mine—its entrance barred by a royal engineer's fence with a "Danger - Keep Out" sign, like a tombstone for his failure. He entered the great hall; the echoes were louder than ever. He sat in the high-backed chair, with no one below him. No petitioning peasants, no quarreling vassals, no Kael's gruff advice, no Elric's silent, solid presence. Only drafts, and the meaningless, trembling patches of color cast on the floor by the stained glass (one of Elyse's gifts).
What broke the numbness was a minor matter. A villager from Ironwood Valley, not the headman, just a common shepherd, leading a lame goat, had loitered outside the castle for a full day before being brought before William by guards almost equally idle. The man dared not enter the hall; he stood in the castle's muddy inner bailey, clutching a tattered hat.
"My lord," the shepherd muttered, not looking at him, staring at his own broken boots. "The stream at the head of the valley changed course this spring, flooded Old Tom's best meadow. Old Tom says the meadow is his, but the miller downstream says the stream changing broke a stretch of his fence, so the meadow should count as compensation. They… they fought. The miller broke Old Tom's son's arm."
William listened numbly. In the past, he would have handed such a dispute to Kael or the local headman to adjudicate, or sliced through it based on vague precedent and the parties' strength. Now, Kael was somewhere in the north, probably sneering at his cousins. The headman? The Ironwood headman, after the last levy of "voluntary" labor for the watchtowers, offered only surface obedience.
"The royal magistrate?" William asked, his voice dry. "The toll-house has an arbitrator."
The shepherd's head hung lower. "Went to ask, my lord. Magistrate said he'd handle it during his circuit after harvest. But… but the livestock can't wait for harvest, the meadow's drowning, the families' tempers can't wait for harvest. If it goes on, there'll be killing."
William looked at this humble man, caught between neighbors' strife and bureaucratic delay. There was no awe or expectation for his lord in the man's eyes, only desperate anxiety. The fragile inner workings of the "kingdom" he had once held together with an iron fist and secret metal were beginning to unravel through such tiny cracks. The king's peace was a vast net cast over a wide realm, its mesh large enough to let such specific, gnawing pains slip through.
He was silent for a long time. The shepherd began to tremble, thinking the lord was annoyed. Then, William stood. "Show me."
He rode with the shepherd to Ironwood Valley, taking only one guard—who looked more confused than he was. They saw the diverted stream, the flooded meadow, the broken fence, and the young man lying on a crude pallet, his arm swollen grotesquely. Old Tom and the miller stood before their respective homes, like two old bulls confronting each other. Seeing William, their eyes showed surprise, then deeper suspicion and wariness.
William didn't enter either house. He walked through the mud to the stream, knelt, and tested the water's force and direction with his hand. He studied the soil and rock structure of the banks. He recalled words from long ago, when his father Roland taught him to read terrain: "Water always takes the path of least resistance, same as men. Managing water isn't about blocking, it's about guiding."
He stood and addressed the two men. "At sunrise tomorrow, bring every able-bodied man from both your households to the stream. Bring picks and shovels."
Both men stared, dumbfounded.
"Not to work for either of you," William continued, his voice quiet but clear over the water's sound. "We work for the stream. We'll dig it a new channel here, diverting it around Tom's meadow, away from the mill's fence. The earth and stone we dig out will be used to shore up the downstream bank. The land on either side of the new channel will be shared grazing for both families. Whoever doesn't work, loses their share. Whose kin is injured, the other family tends them until healed."
He looked at the miller. "Your son's arm, I'll have the old stablemaster from the keep look at it; he knows bones. As your price for the injury, this autumn you'll grind ten extra bags of grain, given free to the poorest households in the village."
He looked at Old Tom. "Your meadow, we'll drain as fast as we can. As compensation, you may buy a portion of the miller's extra grain first, at a low price."
This was not a judgment based on any written law. It was on-the-spot arithmetic based on terrain, resources, and minimal fairness. It was mountain-survival arithmetic, not court-law arithmetic.
The two men glared at him, digesting this sudden, impossibly specific directive. No legal citations, no punitive fines (they couldn't pay them), only labor, sharing, and a small compensation. Finally, the miller nodded first, grunting, "I… I'll bring men." Old Tom gave a sullen "Aye."
The next day, William came. He shed his earl's surcoat, wearing only an old brigandine, took up a pick, and struck the first blow at the marked spot. The villagers' expressions shifted from doubt to astonishment, then to silent following. Digging the ditch was hard labor: mud and rock, sweat and occasional grumbles. William spoke little, just worked, his skill and stamina drawing silent respect from the burliest villagers. During breaks, he sat on a rock, listening to them talk, complain about the weather and the taxmen, sometimes speak of mountain lore. He learned Old Tom's grandson had just learned to walk, that the miller's wife made the best rye bread in the valley.
Three days later, the new diversion channel was done. The stream obediently flowed into the new course, the meadow gradually reappeared, the downstream bank was fortified. William had the old stablemaster set the miller's son's arm, using salve from the keep's dwindling reserves. When he left, there were no cheers, but the men from the two feuding families gave him a stiff, joint bow. The shepherd saw him out of the valley, slipping him a cloth-wrapped piece of cheese hard as stone. "Homemade, my lord. Don't scorn it."
William held the cold cheese, riding back to the keep. Weariness seeped into his bones, new blisters rose on his palms, but something frozen in his chest had cracked slightly. Not warmth, but a… solidity. He had touched the real texture of this land, no longer through maps, tax rolls, or strategic reports, but through soil, stone, and the specific, minute suffering of ordinary people.
He returned to the keep, not to the hall, but to the study that had once been his father's, later transformed beyond recognition by Elyse. He pushed aside the fine parchments and philosophical tomes, and in a dusty corner, found the small wooden desk and rolls of coarse blank ledger books he had used as a boy in the Weeping Valley to practice accounts. He carried them to better light, dusted them off.
Then he sat. He didn't record gold or silver (there was none to record), or arms (he had no authority to deploy them). On the first page of the new ledger, he wrote, clumsily, forcefully:
Ironwood Valley stream diversion.
Labor: Tom's household three, Miller's household four, tenants seven. Total fourteen. Three days labor.
Expended: One measure of keep salve (for arm).
Result: New channel complete, meadow restored, dispute quelled for now.
Follow-up: Miller to grind ten extra bags grain autumn, distribute to village widows/orphans.
The handwriting was stiff, unadorned, purely factual. But writing it brought him a strange peace. This was not the grand design of rule; it was the record of mending. A steward taking stock of the few things left in his care that he could still do something about.
From that day, William Marren, Earl of Blackcliff, began his long, silent career of mending. He rode through villages and hamlets, no longer with a guard of honor, often alone. He inspected drought-stricken fields, small bridges washed out by flash floods, listened to widows complain of wild boars ruining their gardens. He no longer attempted imposing "judgments," but proposed concrete "solutions" that often required his own labor: rebuilding a terrace together, constructing a boar-proof fence cooperatively, coordinating the scarce water allocation between valleys.
He carried the rough ledger with him, recording each intervention in simple, almost childish words and lines: how many people, how many days, what was consumed (often things squeezed from his meager pension), the outcome. The ledger held no glory, no expansion, only maintenance, the tiny effort to prevent things from getting worse.
He became an odd fixture in the valleys. A lord with no real power, yet always appearing in the mud. They still feared him, but grew accustomed. They called him "the Ditch-Digging Lord" or "the Earl of the Stone Bridge." He heard these names and did not comment.
He sometimes gazed at the northern mountains', thinking of Kael, of the brief, powerful alliance built on secrets and metal. Those were epic chapters from a book now closed in his life. Now he read a ledger written in endless, trivial suffering and minuscule need.
In autumn, the miller truly sent ten extra bags of coarse-ground meal to the keep. William, following his ledger, personally oversaw their distribution to Ironwood's poorest households. Old Tom was there too, grumbling as he bought a small sack below market price. The two old adversaries didn't speak, but they didn't fight either.
That night, William recorded in his ledger: Ironwood compensation grain distributed. Dispute not renewed. Then, below, as if afraid to be seen, he added in smaller script: Stream flows calm. Men somewhat calmer.
The candlelight flickered over his prematurely lined face and eyes that had once burned with wildfire, now holding only weary focus. The vast shadow of Blackcliff loomed over everything, its depths holding the corpse of the silver mine, the ashes of the secret forge, and a secret that could shake a continent. But here, in this small study, before the rough ledger and weak candle, William Marren was merely the most diligent repairman on his estate. He had lost his kingdom, his allies, his family. But he had found a crack in a dam not yet fully breached, and with his remaining will and hands, had begun to patch it, bit by bit.
The climber's era was over. Now was the season of the bookkeeper. And in this endless, trivial mending, something tougher than title or territory was taking root, agonizingly slow, between the lonely lord and his silent mountain people.