Autumnshade, when Remus first walked its full boundary a week later, turned out to be forty thousand units of flat grassland bordered by a slow river to the east and the crumbling shell of an abandoned military fort to the west, cheap for reasons that became obvious within the first hour of scouting: Spriggans nesting thick in the old fort's collapsed walls, and at least two bears that had clearly grown very comfortable never once being disturbed.
"We deal with the monsters first," Remus said, watching Andrea's face light up in a way he'd started to recognize as pure, uncomplicated hunger for exactly this kind of problem. "I can't have Spriggans mauling potential customers before they've even finished admiring the architecture."
Item Retrieved from inventory: Stone Guardian, Wind Archer, Scorch Swordsman.
The three Constructs fell in alongside Andrea and Gregory as the party swept the property line, and Remus caught, more than once over the next two days, the distant crack of Scorch Swordsman's blade meeting something that shrieked back at it, small, wiry Spriggan shapes bolting out of the old fort's collapsed cellars only to be run down methodically by Wind Archer's steady, unhurried volleys. The larger of the two bears made a real fight of it on the second afternoon, charging Stone Guardian head-on with a weight that actually rocked the Construct back a full step before its shield arm came up and held, and Gregory finished the job himself a moment later with a grin that told Remus his brother had missed exactly this kind of uncomplicated danger a great deal more than he'd ever said out loud. By the time the sweep was done, the property held nothing more dangerous than a few startled deer, and Remus turned his own attention to the compound itself, sketching for two full days by lantern light until the design finally resolved into something worth crafting: a workshop floor big enough for a dozen forges running at once, a guest inn built to actually rest travelers rather than merely house them, a shop front for finished blades, a hot spring diverted in from an underground vein Identify had confirmed ran clean and mineral-rich beneath the property's northern edge, a small library for Leo's inevitable research habit, and a training arena with packed dirt floors for anyone who wanted to test a purchase before they trusted it in a real fight.
"Craft," he said, finally, laying his palm across the finished sketch.
Materials Used: extensive Stone, extensive Timber, moderate Salvaged Iron, 1 x Light Crystal.
Item Created: the Ember Works!
The whole compound rose up out of the flat grassland in a matter of hours rather than the seasons it would have taken ordinary masons, and Annabelle, watching it settle into place from the road with a ledger already tucked under one arm, registered the business's name that same afternoon and had adverts running through Oldtown's streets before the mortar had properly finished setting.
The grand opening drew a modest crowd, a few dozen collectors and curious traders trickling in past a sign still smelling faintly of fresh varnish, but word spread the way word always seemed to spread around Remus by now, and within two months Autumnshade's guest rooms were booked through the season and the Ember Works' order book ran three weeks deep on custom commissions alone.
Then, thirteen days after four of the kingdom's most influential guild leaders had each made a well-publicized visit, the visits simply stopped.
"Our sales are still good," Annabelle told him one grey afternoon, ledger open on the workshop table between them, "but they've fallen thirty-five percent in a month. The top guilds aren't buying from us the way they were. I called in a favor with an old contact at the Merchant Guild, and she told me, off the record, that the King's been leaning on every major buyer to quietly cut their orders."
"With what leverage?" Remus asked.
"Gold," Annabelle said, simply. "He has an enormous amount of it and absolutely no shortage of patience for spending it slowly enough that nobody can point to a single decision and call it what it is."
Andrea appeared in the doorway before Remus could answer that. "General Tacitus is here," she said, "and he isn't wearing his rank anymore."
Tacitus stepped into the workshop a moment later in plain traveling clothes instead of the uniform Remus had last seen him in, and something in the way he carried himself, still upright, still solid through the shoulders, but noticeably lighter, told Remus the news before the man himself said a word.
"I'm just Tacitus now," he said. "No longer General."
"What happened?"
"The King learned I let you into his armory," Tacitus said. "He was already unhappy about the Lion's Claw's theft before that, treated it like a personal wound, a national treasure walking out the door on my watch. Losing my rank over it is, frankly, the least he could have done to me and still felt he'd made a point."
"I'm sorry," Remus said, and meant it, feeling the full, uncomfortable weight of a cost someone else had paid for a door he'd walked through.
"Don't be," Tacitus said. "It's the kick I needed to finally do something that matters instead of watching a boy I don't respect play at ruling a kingdom I used to actually protect. The bigger problem isn't the King at all. It's his mother. She's the one who's actually running this. She's convinced him you're the greatest threat his reign has ever faced, and she's turned every guild leader and every adventuring company against you, one favor at a time."
Remus turned that over for a long moment, watching the workshop's forge fire settle into embers, and found, underneath the alarm, something closer to grim clarity than fear.
"First things first," he said. "Gregory's gone, and I need someone to run security for this place who actually understands what a battlefield looks like. Would you take the job?"
"I would be honored," Tacitus said, without hesitating. "But what do you intend to do about the Queen-Mother?"
"She doesn't need to keep hunting me from a distance," Remus said. "I'll go to her directly."
Gregory himself had left three weeks earlier, and the memory of that conversation still sat in Remus's chest like something swallowed wrong. His brother had come to him at dusk, awkward in a way Remus had never once seen from him, turning his own hands over like he expected them to give him better words than the ones he actually had.
"I've been accepted into the Blue Angels," Gregory had said. "I don't want to seem ungrateful, you've done more for me than I've earned twice over, but I need your permission to go."
"It's alright," Remus had told him, and meant every word of the sentence he actually said, hand warm on his brother's shoulder. "We're still family. I'll be here if you need me."
What he hadn't said, what he'd swallowed down behind a smile steady enough that Gregory rode off the next morning without ever once suspecting it was there, was the sudden, ugly, entirely disproportionate urge to grab his brother by the collar and ask him how many more times he intended to walk away from people the moment they'd finally started depending on each other properly. He hadn't said it. He'd told himself, watching the dust of Gregory's departure settle back over the road, that some costs weren't worth the argument it would take to collect them, and had gone back inside to keep building instead of sitting with the feeling any longer than he had to.
A letter arrived for him two days after Tacitus took up his new post, forwarded along with Annabelle's usual business correspondence from the Southlands, sealed with wax pressed by a signet ring Remus recognized instantly: Captain Ed's, the man who'd once told him, plainly, in front of the whole garrison, that he wasn't sure he fully supported Remus's methods even while agreeing to carry them out.
Master Remus, it read, in a hand blockier and more careful than Remus would have guessed the man capable of, word of the Forge Master title reached Quinoa a full week before your sister's letters did, which tells you something about how fast a good story travels compared to good news from home. I want you to know I remember exactly what I told you the day you left for Oldtown, and I haven't changed my mind about it. I still think a man ought to weigh what he's willing to gamble before he gambles it, and I still think you gamble more than most men would sleep easy doing. But I've watched the railroad survey crews mark out a line straight through Quinoa these last two weeks, and I've watched what that means for men who used to walk three days to sell a harvest, and I find myself, against my own better judgment, glad to have been wrong about how this would turn out for us so far. Duke Ferron's put me in command of the home garrison proper now, and I'll be the one standing at the new terminus gate when the first train actually rolls through. I wish you well, same as I did the day you rode out. I mean it a second time, now that it's cost me something to still mean it.
Yours in continued, cautious support, Captain Ed.
Remus read it twice, the way he read every hard-won piece of the truth anyone bothered to send him, and set it carefully aside in the same drawer where he kept Goruk's blade and the Lion's Claw, a small, growing collection of things he couldn't fully use but refused to let himself lose track of.
---