The wind that screamed through Blackcliff's valleys was no longer merely the herald of a reluctant spring; it had become the strained breath of the kingdom itself, a low, constant moan of impending fracture. In his stone study, William felt its pressure like a physical weight. The warning from the Norse camp—strike the heart, look to his own walls—had transformed the board. His kingdom was no longer a collection of disparate crises to be managed, but a single, tightening knot, with Blackcliff at its center.
The following days were a masterclass in grim logistics. The fortress, a brooding monument to stubborn endurance, was forced into a state of twitching, hyper-alert life. William's orders, once concerned with distant coasts and southern plagues, now turned inward, focused on the calculus of siege.
He stood with Jonas Hiller on the elevated fighting platform behind the Murdoch Gate, the main and weakest point in the curtain wall. Below, the once-orderly outer bailey was a churned sea of mud and purposeful chaos. Teams of oxen strained against sledges loaded with great blocks of granite, dragged from a nearby quarry that now operated through the night by torchlight. The rhythmic clang of the masons' hammers was a frantic, metallic heartbeat.
"The reinforcement to the gatehouse will be complete in four days, Majesty," Hiller said, his voice calm amidst the din. He held no wax tablet; the numbers were in his head. "We've prioritized the purchase and production of quarrels for the wall-mounted ballistae. The merchant consortium's contacts in Greyport have delivered two hundred barrels of quality lamp oil. It can illuminate, burn, or be rendered down for wound salve."
William nodded, his eyes tracking a column of spearmen marching in from the east. Their banners were mud-spattered, their faces set in lines of grim fatigue. These were the border troops recalled from watching Ferdinand. Every soldier pulled back to defend the heart was a province left exposed. It was a brutal subtraction.
"And the food?" William asked.
"The granaries are at eighty-seven percent capacity for a garrison of this size, projecting a six-month siege with half-rations in the final month," Hiller recited. "The private stocks held by the noble households within the keep, including those of our… guests… have been inventoried but not yet requisitioned. That would be a political decision, sire."
A political decision. A neat phrase for theft, even from potential traitors. William filed it away. "Water?"
"The cisterns are sound and full. The real vulnerability is the underground conduit from the Black Tarn spring. It is exposed for two hundred yards outside the walls. If an enemy finds it and poisons it or diverts it…"
"Then we're drinking from the rain barrels within a month," William finished. "Double the guard on the conduit's exit point inside the walls. And have your engineers look at whether we can create an internal, secondary source. Even if it's just digging a deep well in the lower bailey."
Hiller's eyebrows rose slightly. Digging through mountain rock was a herculean task. "The cost in labor and tools—"
"Is less than the cost of thirst. Do it."
A messenger, panting, climbed the wooden steps to the platform. He bore the sigil of the southern courier service. William's stomach tightened. News from Riverton.
He broke the seal, expecting Prefect Corwin's desperate script. Instead, it was a shorter, more precise report from the captain of the scouts he'd diverted from the Silver Vale.
"Have observed Riverton from western ridges. Quarantine lines are broken. Fires in granary district. A banner flies there—a white hand on a black field, not the city colors. Witnessed a public gathering in main square. Speaker: male, late middle age, tonsured like a monk but armed. Proclaimed the 'Red Cough' a divine scourge for the 'Rule of Coin and the Hangman's King.' Crowd estimated one thousand. City guard either absent or mingled with them. No sign of organized resistance. Situation is not riot. It is rebellion. Awaiting orders."
The Purifiers. They had a name, a symbol, and a leader who knew the power of a phrase. Rule of Coin and the Hangman's King. William felt the words like a well-aimed dart. They reduced his brutal arithmetic, his deal with Hiller, the executions in Riverton, to a damning slogan. It was a weapon more dangerous than any Norse axe.
"Trouble in the south, sire?" Hiller asked, his merchant's instinct sensing a shift in the political weather.
"The plague has spawned a heresy. They hold part of Riverton." William handed him the scroll. "Your agents. Can they get a message to anyone still loyal inside the city? A guildmaster, a priest who hasn't joined the fanatics, a militia captain?"
Hiller read swiftly, his face impassive. "The risk is now exponentially higher. The cost will reflect that. But… it may be possible. The textile guilds owe my concerns money. Debt can be a powerful motivator for loyalty."
"Do it. I need to know if this 'Silas' is working alone, or if he has patrons. Find out where his weapons came from, where his confidence is born." William's mind was racing, adding a new, volatile column to his ledger: Internal Ideological Threat. Contagion: High.
He descended from the walls and made his way to the inner keep, to the chambers where Duke Daerlon and Count Maurice were housed. They were not in dungeons, but their apartments were spacious cages, with guards at the doors and on the balconies below. The corridors here were quieter, the air smelling of beeswax and aged wine instead of mud and sweat.
Daerlon received him in a solar warmed by a generous fire. The Duke was a large man, gone to fat but with sharp, clever eyes. He was playing a solitary game of kings and legions on an ornate board.
"Your Majesty," he said, not rising, moving a carved ivory cavalryman. "To what do I owe the intrusion? Come to conscript my household guard for your wall? I hear you are gathering every stray sword from the hinterlands."
William ignored the jab. He placed the scout's report on the gaming table, next to a depleted wine glass. "Riverton has fallen to religious fanatics. They preach against the Crown. They call me the Hangman's King."
Daerlon glanced at the parchment, his expression one of mild, detached interest. "A tragedy. The common mind, when frightened, often turns to superstition. A firm hand is needed. Though… perhaps a hand perceived as less… economically innovative might have been granted more innate spiritual authority by the masses." He took a slow sip of wine. "The 'Rule of Coin' is a pungent phrase. It will stick."
"Do you know this Silas?" William asked bluntly.
Daerlon's eyes glittered with amusement. "I know of many hedge-priests and disappointed minor clerics, Your Majesty. The kingdom is full of them. I make a point not to memorize their names unless they become useful." He leaned forward. "You are looking for a conspiracy where there may only be chaos. The people are sick, poor, and scared. You offered them arithmetic and the noose. This Silas offers them purity, purpose, and a divine excuse for their rage. It is a simpler, more compelling equation for simple minds."
The dismissal was too smooth, too philosophically tidy. William left without another word, the Duke's calm analysis more unnerving than outright defiance would have been. It confirmed his suspicion: the old nobility would watch the Purifiers burn, content to let the flames discredit William's rule, ready to step in as the restorers of order once the fire had consumed him.
Back in his study, the weight of the converging threats pressed down. He was preparing for a physical siege from Harald, while a spiritual and social siege was already eating at his kingdom from within. He opened his ledger, the entries sprawling and dense.
Harald: Fleet gathering (27+). Target: Blackcliff (per intelligence). Defensive prep: walls reinforced, supplies stocked (6-month estimate). Vulnerability: water conduit. Unanswered: precise timing, land route?
Purifiers/Riverton: Rebellion consolidated under Silas. Control granary district. Sloganeering effective ("Rule of Coin, Hangman's King"). Potential link to noble opposition (Daerlon's tacit approval). Action: Merchant agents infiltrating to ascertain backing, strength.
Finance/Internal Politics: Hiller's council operational, supplying siege needs. "League of Ancient Blood" forming in opposition. Daerlon/Maurice under watch, playing long game. Critical tension: merchant efficiency vs. noble legitimacy.
As he blotted the ink, a soft knock interrupted. Elara, the linen mistress, entered. She said nothing, merely placed a small, rough-spun pouch on the table beside the ledger, then withdrew.
William opened it. Inside was a single, perfect feather from a mountain hawk, and another slender scroll from Elyse. This message was longer.
"William,
The 'forgotten door' is not metaphor. In the War of the Two Brothers, a century past, our great-grandfather besieged a rebel lord in Blackcliff. The siege lasted two years. It was broken not by assault, but because a traitor within showed the rebels a path: an old mine tunnel, from the iron veins in the northern ridge, that emerges behind the shrine in the lower bailey. It was sealed with stone and rubble after. Few remember. The cliffs do.
Look to your maps. Look to your mason's records. And look, most of all, to those who would know such histories. The past is a weapon someone may try to wield again.
The air here is clear, but it carries the smell of distant smoke.
– E."
William's blood ran cold. He swept the kingdom maps aside, rummaging for the older, detailed surveys of Blackcliff's foundations and the immediate geography. He found a brittle vellum scroll from the master mason's archive. There, faint but clear, was the notation: "Iron Vein N-7, tapped out and collapsed, Season of Rains, Year 312." A rough line showed it snaking from the northern ridge towards the lower bailey, terminating near the site of the old family shrine.
A back door. Harald didn't need twenty-seven ships to storm the walls. He could land a smaller, elite force down the coast, march them through the mountains, and have them guided to a hidden entrance by a traitor within. It fit. It was clever. It was exactly the kind of strike-at-the-heart strategy a claimant would use.
He summoned Glenshaw and the captain of the guard. "The old shrine in the lower bailey. I want it surrounded by a palisade, tonight. No one in or out without my direct order. Then, I want a team of your most discreet, loyal men. They are to begin excavating the hillside behind that shrine. Quietly. They are looking for a collapsed tunnel."
The captain, a veteran named Brann, frowned. "Sire, the men are stretched thin already with the wall works—"
"This is more important than the walls," William cut him off, his voice low and fierce. "If I am right, this is the breach. Do it."
The next forty-eight hours were a blur of dual preparations: the loud, public fortification of the walls, and the secret, frantic digging in the lower bailey. William visited the site at dusk on the second day. The shrine, a small stone edifice, was now enclosed by a rough timber wall. Inside, men labored by the light of shielded lanterns, their picks and shovels biting into the rocky soil. They had found nothing but earth and stone.
Doubt gnawed at him. Was Elyse's information wrong? A misremembered tale? Or was he, in his paranoia, wasting vital manpower on a phantom?
The answer came not from the dig, but from the north. A scout, one of the few left to watch the high passes, stumbled through the Murdoch Gate near midnight, half-frozen and bleeding from a gash on his temple.
William was roused from a fitful sleep. He found the man in the gatehouse guardroom, shivering under a blanket, clutching a mug of mulled ale.
"Speak," William commanded.
"Sire… a war party. Not the main Norse host. Smaller. Fifty, maybe seventy. Hard men. They came over the Serpent's Back pass two days ago. We tracked them… lost two of ours doing it." The scout swallowed. "They're moving fast, light. Not heading for the coast. They're bearing south and east… skirting the foothills. Their path… if they hold it, sire, they'll come to the Black Tarn ridge by tomorrow night."
The Black Tarn. The source of the conduit. The water supply.
William's mind made the connection with terrifying speed. This was no mere raid. This was a precision operation. A small, elite force, moving stealthily overland, aiming not for the fortress gates, but for its water. Paralyze Blackcliff, then perhaps signal for the main fleet to attack a weakened, thirsty garrison. And who would know to guide such a force to the exact, vulnerable point of the water source? Someone with intimate knowledge of the fortress's anatomy.
"Brann!" William roared, his fatigue burned away by adrenaline. "Stop the digging! Arm every man you can spare who can still hold a sword. We ride within the hour."
He strapped on his own sword, a practical, unadorned blade, and donned a mail hauberk. In the lower bailey, under a sliver of a moon, he assembled a force of one hundred guardsmen and the freshest of the recalled border troops. They were outnumbered, but they had the advantage of knowing the ground.
As they mounted, Glenshaw hurried out, clutching a cloak. "Your Majesty, the risk—if this is a diversion for a main assault—"
"Then the walls will have to hold without me for a night," William said, pulling himself into the saddle. His mind was clear, the arithmetic sharp. "If they poison our water, the walls won't matter. Guard the keep. Double the watch on our guests. And if by some chance a hidden door opens while I'm gone… seal it with fire and steel."
They rode out through the postern gate, a thin, determined line into the darkness. The wind had dropped, leaving an eerie silence broken only by the jingle of harness and the crunch of hooves on frosted ground. William led them not by the main track, but by a hunter's path he remembered from his years as a repairman, a route that would bring them to the ridge above the Tarn's outflow.
They reached the vantage point as a dirty dawn bleached the eastern sky. Below, the Black Tarn was a sheet of obsidian, its outlet a rushing stream that vanished into the conduit's stone mouth. And there, moving with disciplined urgency around the conduit's entrance, were dark figures. More than fifty. They had sacks, and tools. One figure, taller than the rest, seemed to be directing them.
William gave no speech. He simply drew his sword, pointed it down the slope, and kicked his horse forward. The charge was a thunderous descent of men and metal, a cascade of violence onto the unsuspecting Norse below.
The fight was short, brutal, and merciless. Surprise was total. William's force hit the Norsemen like a hammer. He saw the tall leader—a man with a braided red beard and a helmet crested with raven feathers—shouting orders, trying to form a shield wall. It was too late. William rode straight for him, his guard clearing a path.
Their swords met with a shock that numbed William's arm. The Norseman, Harald's jarl no doubt, was strong, roaring with battle-fury. But William fought with the cold, precise desperation of a man defending his last source of water. He paried a wild slash, sidestepped, and drove his blade into the gap at the man's hip, below his mail shirt. The Norseman grunted, stumbling. William yanked the sword free and struck again, a downward cut that bit into the man's shoulder, dropping him to his knees.
Around him, the battle was turning to slaughter. The Norse, caught unprepared, were being cut down or driven into the icy waters of the tarn. As the red-bearded jarl fell, William saw something in the man's eyes—not just pain, but a flicker of furious recognition, as if William's face confirmed some vital piece of intelligence.
Panting, William stood over the dying man. "Harald sends his best through the back door," he grated. "Who showed you the way?"
The jarl spat blood, a grim smile on his lips. "The mountains… have many voices, King of Stone," he gasped. "Your walls… are not the only thing with cracks." Then his eyes glazed over.
It was not an answer. It was a taunt. William turned, surveying the scene. His men were securing the area, checking the sacks the Norsemen had carried. They contained not poison, but picks, mauls, and wedges. They hadn't come to poison the water. They had come to collapse the conduit entirely, to choke it with rubble. A more permanent solution.
As the sun rose, revealing the cost—a dozen of his own men dead, twice as many wounded—William felt no triumph, only a colder, deeper dread. The attack on the water was real, but it was also a confirmation. The enemy knew Blackcliff's secrets. They had used one—the overland route to the water—and alluded to another—the cracks in the walls, the forgotten door. And they had been guided.
He left a contingent to guard the Tarn and rode back to Blackcliff, his mind racing faster than his horse. The traitor was not necessarily Daerlon or Maurice. It could be a disgruntled castle official, a mason whose family was killed in the coastal raids, a soldier bribed or threatened. The list was long.
He returned to find the fortress in an uproar. Not from his absence, but from news that had arrived from the coast. A fast ship from Eagle's Beak had come.
Glenshaw met him at the gate, his usual composure shattered. "Your Majesty! The main Norse fleet… it was sighted at dawn. Not heading for Blackcliff. It's sailing south, with the wind. All twenty-seven ships."
South. Not towards the heart, but towards the coast of the Riverlands. Towards Riverton.
The arithmetic rearranged itself in William's mind with dizzying speed. The overland attack on the water? A feint. Or a complementary strike. The real hammer blow was falling elsewhere. Harald wasn't coming to besiege a prepared fortress. He was sailing to a region already in rebellion, where a fanatical populace hailed him as a scourge sent by their god. He would be welcomed as a liberator by the Purifiers, or at least not opposed. He would secure a fertile, plague-weakened landing zone, a base from which to starve the rest of the kingdom. And he would do it with the blessing of a homegrown rebellion that called William the Hangman's King.
William walked slowly to his study, the exhaustion of the night's ride and fight settling into his bones. He looked at the map. Harald's fleet was a blade aimed at the kingdom's soft, infected underbelly. Silas and his Purifiers had prepared the wound.
He sat and opened his ledger. The pen felt heavy as stone. He needed to write the new equation, but the variables were now in horrifying alignment. He had fortified the wrong place. He had anticipated a siege of stone, and instead faced a siege of ideology and opportunism. The storm was no longer gathering. It had made landfall, and it had found the perfect crack in his kingdom through which to pour its fury. The next move was not a matter of engineering or logistics. It was a matter of faith, loyalty, and a terrible, coming choice between his fortress and his people. The climb had just become a freefall.