***
Barten was ankle-deep in construction mud when Castor arrived, shouting at a man on the drainage crew about a stone placed wrong-side up. He saw Castor coming, finished what he was saying — the full point, not abbreviated — and came over wiping his hands on his breeches.
"My lord."
"Progress."
Barten turned and looked at the road the way a man looks at something he has been fighting with for months and has nearly beaten. Two hundred yards of it visible from where they stood, the gravel bed tamped solid, surface stone going down in the eastern stretch — flat-face up, fitted tight, no gaps a cart wheel could catch in. Drainage channels cut into the verge on both sides, pitched away. Where a stream crossed above the grade, a stone culvert rather than timber, because timber rotted and stone did not.
"Rain three days ago," Barten said. "Heavy. The kind that turns track to soup from here to Barrowtown. New grade shed it clean. Ground under the base stayed dry." He said it like a man delivering a verdict he hadn't expected to deliver.
"Good."
"Men are asking how you knew it would work."
"Tell them I read it in an old book."
Barten nodded and asked nothing further. He'd been running road crews for twenty years — the permanent squint of a man who worked outside in Northern wind regardless of season, flat vowels of someone born within ten miles of where he'd spent his entire life.
When Castor had first handed him the specifications — cambered surface, two-foot gravel base, fitted stone, cut-stone culverts — he'd stared at them for a long moment and said, flat and certain: That's not how roads are built, my lord.
It's how they're going to be built now.
Barten had worked out the arithmetic on timeline against lifespan and decided the arithmetic was right.
Here he was in the mud.
They walked the eastern stretch together. Barten pointed out the sections that had given trouble — a frost-heave problem where the groundwater sat higher than expected, solved by cutting an interception channel into the bedrock above the road grade to turn the water aside before it reached the surface.
Castor crouched at the channel and ran his finger along the cut edge.
Clean work.
The kind that would hold in thirty years without anyone touching it.
Drainage. Always drainage. Everything else is decoration.
Some book in another life, a rainy Sunday in a Bangalore apartment, the afternoon stretching long. He couldn't remember the title. Used the principle without ceremony and didn't linger on where it had come from.
Further along, Barten stopped at a section where the surface stone hadn't gone down yet — just the gravel base, pale and compacted, three workers on their knees fitting the first course of surface stone with the deliberate care of men who'd been told twice what happened to poorly fitted stone under a loaded cart. One of them glanced up when Castor stopped nearby and immediately looked back down.
"Problematic stretch here," Barten said. "Bedrock's close to the surface on the right side, drops away on the left. Grade wants to pull left in heavy rain. We're pitching the camber steeper on this section — an inch and a half per foot instead of one."
"Will it hold the drainage?"
"Should do. If it doesn't I'll know by first thaw and can adjust the channel." Barten said it without apology — the pragmatism of a man who solved problems as they appeared rather than pretending they wouldn't appear. That quality was worth more than confidence.
They walked another hundred yards. The crew on this section were quieter than the eastern men, heads down, working at the pace of people who'd learned not to draw attention. The ground here was broken and uneven, frost-heaved badly through the last winter, and the preparatory work had clearly been harder — Castor could see it in the men's faces, in the deeper mud on their boots, in the way the gravel base had required extra material to level what the freeze and thaw had buckled.
The Lonely Hills ground was difficult. Always had been. Three previous attempts at road-building here in the last forty years had failed at this middle section, the broken terrain and high water table defeating every effort. The drainage engineering was why this one wouldn't.
The road passed within two miles of the canyon. That had always been the design.
The cover was true as far as it went — the road opened eastern Bolton lands, connected Long Lake villages that had traded only across water, gave isolated settlements reliable cart access before winter locked them in. Worth building for its own sake. But ore carts moving from the mine would now travel this road with proper paperwork, indistinguishable from any other mining traffic on Bolton private land.
Harwick met them at the canyon mouth.
Four months managing the operation. A steady man — not quick, not imaginative, reliable in the particular way of men who understood their value was in not creating trouble. He had the look of someone who'd picked up a weight heavier than expected and adjusted his posture quietly to carry it.
The place had grown.
The surface scraping was long finished. What existed now was a proper shaft — shored with timber, stone-reinforced at the entrance, deep enough that the bottom was invisible from above and the sound of picks came up from below bouncing off the walls, making the depth feel larger than measurements suggested.
Around it, without anyone quite deciding it should happen, a settlement: workers' barracks of rough-cut timber chinked with moss and clay against the cold, a cookhouse with a permanent chimney stack, the smell of something with onions drifting from it across the yard.
A smithy against the eastern wall, the ring of the repair hammer constant through the day — picks wore down, shovels cracked, the mine cart wheels ground themselves to nothing on the rocky floor.
A storage building, a well, a pen with two goats that nobody had explained and Castor didn't ask about.
Fifteen men visible in the yard. The ones not on shift below, taking the thin winter sun with the particular blankness of tired people doing nothing while they could.
They saw him and found reasons to be somewhere else.
"Walk me through the output," Castor said.
Harwick did.
Up nearly a third from the last inspection.
Three weeks ago the deeper shaft had broken into a wider section of the vein — the ore ran richer now, the men working shifts, twelve hours and twelve off, continuous. The transport running as designed: iron ore from a legitimate Bolton iron working twenty miles north, brought in and mixed into every load at set proportions, documented in written records that matched what any toll-keeper would see if he chose to look.
The gold sat at the heart of each load, smelted to bars, coated in iron oxide. Tym's work — six weeks perfecting the process, the color and texture and weight distribution, until a man probing with an iron rod felt rough ore throughout.
Nobody unloads a full ore cart on a public road. Nobody has reason to.
In his previous life he'd watched manifests get filed for shipments he himself had arranged not to ask questions about, sitting in a glass-fronted office while rain hit the windows outside. Some'd asked anyway. They'd learned things and that had set in motion a chain of events that had ended with their ass on road and their wife under my couch.
"The Karstark hunting party," he said.
Harwick's expression shifted — the tightening of a man delivering news he'd been sitting on. "Came within five miles, my lord. South slope, their outriders ranging wide. We put men in Bolton colors across their path and turned them back politely. The Karstark knights were courteous enough. Said they'd gotten turned around following a stag."
"Did they look turned around."
"No, my lord."
Castor looked north. Rickard Karstark was old and watchful, territorial in the Northern way — not aggressive, attentive. No reason to suspect what was in the canyon. But proximity was its own form of attention. A hunting party that ranged here once might have been lost. One that ranged here twice was noticing something whether they knew it or not.
"New patrol perimeter. Two miles out in every direction from the canyon mouth. Patrol routes and markers — no walls, nothing that draws attention. Any stranger who crosses within two miles gets intercepted, turned back, and the incident logged. Date, direction, numbers, what house they flew. Two appearances from the same party and I hear about it the same day."
"Aye, my lord."
"And I want a proper iron works built here. Real facility, real workers, real output. Smelting, not just cartage. Give anyone who comes within sight something that makes sense of the smoke and the noise and the traffic on the road."
Harwick was quiet a moment. "Draw the eye to the right building."
"So it doesn't look for the wrong one."
He nodded slowly.
They went down into the shaft last. Castor took a lamp, Harwick a step behind, the air changing immediately as they descended — damper, heavier, the cold of deep rock different from surface cold, the smell of tallow and disturbed earth and the sweat of men working in enclosed space.
The sound of picks grew louder and then resolved into individual strikes as they reached the lower gallery, three men working the face, a fourth moving a cart. They paused when the lamp appeared and resumed when Castor waved them on.
The vein ran along the far wall.
Grey quartz matrix, the gold visible where the lamplight hit the right angle — not the yellow of coins or jewelry but something warmer, closer to amber, the way it threw light back different from how iron or silver did it.
There was something in standing in front of it that didn't reduce entirely to calculation regardless of how much he tried to keep it there. In another life he'd had money — more than most, numbers on screens and in accounts, leverage that converted into things. He'd never stood in front of it in rock.
He stood with the lamp raised for one long moment.
Then turned for the entrance.
"Second gallery," he said to Harwick. "If the vein keeps widening with depth you'll need it within two moons. Start planning now, not when you're already behind."
"Aye, my lord."
They came back up into grey afternoon. Castor stood at the canyon mouth and looked at the road — surface stone pale against the darker verge, the transfer yard with its carts standing in a patient line, Barten visible in the far distance still occupied with the wrongly-placed stone.
Long Lake dock. Timber south by water to the road terminus, then overland. Four days faster than the current route.
He'd need someone who knew the lake properly. Not the geography — the currents, the ice patterns, where the floor was solid enough for pilings. There was a fishing village at the northern end. Three or four families who'd worked that water their whole lives and would know things that no survey could tell him.
He turned his horse south.
The road back was quieter than the morning ride, the light already falling, shadows long across the pale stone surface. They passed two villages — smoke rising from chimneys, a dog that ran alongside for fifty yards before losing interest, a woman at a well who saw Bolton colors and found somewhere else to look.
A cart was ahead of them on the road near the second village. Rough reddish ore heaped to the sides, canvas over the center, two drivers on the bench and a Bolton guardsman riding alongside with the bored expression of a man doing haulage he'd done a hundred times before.
Castor didn't slow. Didn't look directly at it.
He watched it in his peripheral vision until the road bent and the cart disappeared behind the treeline heading south.
Then he looked ahead and rode.
***
CHAPTER END