In the darkness before dawn, the candles in Deddington Castle's study threw a sickly yellow light across Lady Roslin's hollow face. She had not slept. Her eyes were sunken, threaded with red. The argument the day before had taken the last of her strength and left her feeling like an emptied scarecrow sitting in her husband's chair, feeling none of the authority that came with it.
The heavy oak door swung open and Solomon walked in, led by a handmaid.
He had changed into a clean military coat. He looked like a drawn sword in a room full of wilting flowers. Lady Roslin lifted her eyes, her gaze slow to focus.
He looked at the worn, lonely woman in front of him and broke the stillness. "My lady."
"I spent the night thinking."
He walked to stand before her, his expression carrying the settled gravity of someone who had worked through a problem all the way to the bottom.
"House Deddington's lands cannot be left to the Ironborn. Your people cannot keep suffering."
He paused a beat, each word landing deliberately on Lady Roslin's frayed nerves, pulling her attention back into focus one piece at a time.
"Allow me to lead the combined force out of the city and drive the Ironborn from Deddington's lands. I will push them out."
It hit like a thunderclap. Lady Roslin sat bolt upright. Hope crossed her face for a moment, then deeper fear came in behind it. She had spent the whole night turning over his suggestion to hold and wait for relief, and she kept coming back to old Ser Elak, to the thousand men who had marched out to meet the enemy and scattered completely. That broken battlefield felt like it was right in front of her.
Her voice came out unsteady. "But little Solomon... could your army end up the same way? Could it break like theirs did?"
Holding and waiting for relief might truly be the safer choice. As long as the land remained, she could find people to farm it again. The family vault still held plenty of gold dragons.
A small curve appeared at the corner of Solomon's mouth, quiet and confident and reassuring all at once. He did not run through tactical explanations or pile on empty promises. He just answered her simply and directly. "My lady, trust me. It won't."
Lady Roslin looked at him. He was nothing like the knights who only talked about loyalty, and nothing like the bannermen who only looked out for themselves. There was something in him that did not leave room for doubt.
That small smile and those two words moved through Lady Roslin's cold, knotted chest like a current of warm water. The heart that had been suspended in fear all night finally found something to rest against.
She rose from the chair, cheeks flushed with relief. "Good! Good! Little Solomon! I must reward you!"
Servants moved quickly. Five heavy purses were set on the table in front of Solomon, landing with a bright clinking sound.
Lady Roslin's voice had lost its tightness. She pointed to the purses. "Five hundred gold dragons. A reward for your family."
Solomon glanced at them calmly, then gave Brin, Rosso, and Ludo a small nod. The three of them stepped forward and collected the purses without ceremony.
He felt nothing particular about it. Yesterday she would not open the vault to offer a reward for enemy heads, because that money was going to farmers and she considered it beneath the dignity of good coin. This morning she opened it freely for a noble vassal, trying to buy loyalty with gold. The logic of the aristocracy was always this simple and this absurd.
Word spread through Deddington Castle like wind. When the bannermen's unit leaders and the assorted knights learned that Solomon had reversed his position and decided to strike out after all, every one of them went still.
"What happened? Weren't we agreed on holding last night?"
"Wasn't Ser Elak's lesson enough for anyone?"
"Taking what we have out there to brawl with the Ironborn is just dying on purpose."
Unease and suspicion moved through the castle. They had breathed easy the night before because of Solomon's caution, relieved they would not be used as cannon fodder. Then in a single night the whole direction had shifted. They felt like men lashed to a runaway cart driven by someone who changed his mind by the hour.
There was one exception. Young Patrick Morrison went red in the face from sheer excitement when he heard.
He drew his sword with a sharp ring, the blade catching the morning light, and came running to Solomon's door shouting at full volume. "Lord Solomon! Please let me and my men serve as your vanguard!"
Solomon stepped out and looked at this inexplicably fired-up young man, wondering whether he had ever actually seen blood in his life. But a willing volunteer who asked for nothing in return was rare enough that you used one when you found him. He walked forward and put a hand on Patrick's shoulder.
His voice was easy and warm. "You are as brave as your father, Patrick. You and your soldiers will march with my advance force. You'll be my sword."
Patrick straightened his chest and looked ready to charge a castle wall on his own.
For the others, the ones whose faces made their reluctance perfectly clear, Solomon's assignments were distributed without sentiment. The unit leaders called forward exchanged uncomfortable glances and swallowed their complaints. Advance contact, flank protection, preventing encirclement. That was a fine way of saying he was putting them in the most exposed and most breakable positions to absorb the first hit while keeping his own men intact.
But they looked at those steady eyes of his, and they looked at the silent, capable soldiers behind him, and not a single one of them opened his mouth.
The horns rang out. Deddington's drawbridge came down. In a strange and slightly unreal atmosphere, the so-called combined force of nearly three thousand men, which had never actually reached two thousand, assembled and marched out of the city in a long column.
Solomon rode at the front with the black lion banner cracking in the wind behind him. Lady Roslin watched from the walls, and as she looked at that banner and at the one sharply ordered formation in a column full of ragged ones, something that felt like genuine hope came back into her eyes.
The common people inside the city and the garrison soldiers had suffered the Ironborn's scattered raids for too long. They sent up a roar of cheering as the army marched out.
The army did not go looking for a fight.
It moved east for roughly ten miles, then stopped at an open piece of ground with a hill behind it. Solomon reined in his horse.
His voice carried cleanly across the whole force. "Orders! All units make camp here! Begin building field fortifications!"
Everyone except Solomon's core men looked confused.
"We're stopping?"
"What?"
"Making camp here?"
Patrick Morrison rode up beside him. "My lord, aren't we pressing on? The Ironborn are just ahead!"
Solomon pointed toward the thin lines of black smoke rising on the horizon, the mark of villages being stripped. "No. Our task is to make them leave."
What followed was a strange sight. Solomon's army set up a methodical, well-ordered camp on a hillside at a distance that kept them entirely safe from the Ironborn, cutting timber, digging ditches, planting sharpened stakes, as though they intended to stay for months. Cavalry were sent out to watch the enemy's movements from a distance but were told not to close in and never to initiate contact.
The unit leaders in camp were baffled, but relieved. At least Solomon was sensible enough not to throw them at the Ironborn. They considered that tantamount to suicide.
Solomon let them talk. He was waiting for news. News that might be devastating for others but useful for him.
He stood on the hillside and looked at the scattered fires in the Ironborn camp while his mind ran quietly through the arithmetic. All the provisions came from Deddington Castle, where Lady Roslin was sending food and supplies in a steady stream because this army was her hope. He was eating well at someone else's expense, doing nothing, and demonstrating loyalty and resolve to his liege and to the wider world at the same time. It saved his own domain's resources and left him free to watch for the moment when things shifted.
As long as this Ironborn force had not been destroyed, no one could pull him away. Or rather, no one would dare. His army, battle-ready and orderly on that hill, sat like a lion on a ridge, its existence alone enough to keep the wolves in the valley from ranging freely. The Ironborn, three thousand strong on paper, could no longer scatter into small raiding parties across the Riverlands lords' lands without risking being picked off in pieces. He had locked them in place simply by being there.
Inside the Ironborn camp the mood was dark and snappish. Rodrik Greyjoy, who was rarely sober enough to drop anything deliberately, knocked his favorite cup off the table without noticing. Wine spread across the ground.
His scouts had brought back the same report three days in a row. The Black Lion's army was cutting wood, digging trenches, building a camp that was starting to look like a small fortress, and refusing to move.
He stood and glared across at the black lion banner on the distant hillside, feeling like there was a fly buzzing next to his ear that he could neither swat nor shoo away.
That army had wedged itself into his side like a nail driven in flush with the wood.
The worst of it was that their formation was tight and their numbers were genuinely greater than his real Ironborn fighters. The hillside was easy to hold and brutal to take. Attacking it would cost him even if he won, and the Ironborn did not have lives to throw at a prepared position. But if he ignored them and did nothing, they hung over him like a blade. He could not break his force into small raiding parties the way he had before, because they would simply be cut apart one group at a time.
"Hadwin!" Rodrik shouted toward the corner of the tent where a lean, quiet man was sitting.
Bolon looked up and arranged his face into an expression of devoted attention while inwardly cursing without pause. What in the Seven Hells is Solomon doing?
He got up and moved to sit beside Rodrik. "Captain. What do you need?"
Rodrik drove his axe into the ground. "What do you make of it? This Riverlander called Solomon. What is he playing at?"
Bolon rose and squinted toward the distant hillside, putting on a look of careful analysis. "Captain, this man is very patient. The fact that he won't attack tells you that. He's waiting."
"Waiting for us to make a mistake. Or waiting for more reinforcements. The Riverrun relief force could arrive at any time. Right now he's using that army to pin us down. We can't raid freely. We can't pull back safely. He's stuck to us."
Bolon blinked.
"So perhaps we should hit them tonight while it's dark."
Rodrik's expression got darker. Everything Bolon had said was exactly what he himself had been thinking, and it made the enemy feel even more dangerous and calculated than before. Which was precisely why he chose to ignore Bolon's suggestion of a night attack. He had plans for after this war. He intended to be alive to pursue them.
Then something came to him and a cold laugh escaped him. When his uncle's good news arrived, when Seagard fell, this whole army of turtles would have nowhere to go.
In the end Rodrik gave the order he had least wanted to give. "Pass it down. Nobody moves out on their own. Gather the force together. Tighten the watch."
The raiding stopped. Ironborn who thirsted for blood and plunder sat penned up and grinding their teeth while the army on the hillside sat equally still, and a peculiar standoff stretched out across the open ground between them, two armies staring at each other from a distance with cook-fires rising peacefully from both camps, the silence so complete it barely felt like a war.
Only the wind moved between them, cutting across the empty plain and lifting dust from the ground.
Both sides were waiting for the news they needed to hear.
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