The horses' hooves beat a sharp rhythm across the loose stone.
Solomon rode hard with Brin and the riders, but his mind kept drifting back to Lady Rona — her gentle voice, her eyes that held no calculation, only an uncomplicated warmth.
He had stayed in Deep Valley Castle for several days. During those days, he had set down the weight of being a lord, and for a little while had been something closer to an ordinary young man — walking the garden paths beside her, listening to her talk about the stars and her flowers.
But that quiet had been broken, again and again, by Evelyn's messengers.
The early letters had been restrained — simply urging My Lord to return at his convenience, as various administrative matters required his attention.
The later ones were urgent. The domain was facing an emergency. His decision was needed immediately.
Evelyn did not cry wolf. He knew that. His brief holiday was over.
Solomon turned the results of his trials by combat over in his mind as he rode.
In Westeros, raw fighting ability was genuinely, practically indispensable.
Against lords who valued honor, tradition, and dignity above their own lives, it was a weapon with no real counter.
Lord Hoern Muir had sent out an aging family knight — technically skilled, genuinely accomplished — who had nonetheless been worn down by Solomon's fluid, relentless pressure, and in the end had a cut opened across his throat and fallen into the dust.
House Wayne had been smarter. They had found a young proxy knight — quick, talented, a real swordsman. But youth and talent were no substitute for patience, and after a long exchange the young knight had made a mistake, lost his sword, gone to his knees, and refused to yield. Solomon had killed him.
Rules. Working entirely within the rules. That was how he had recovered every parcel of disputed land without a single field engagement, leaving behind nothing but the iron-faced expressions of Vale lords who had run out of legal options.
The one remaining problem was the Onferd family — Frey vassals — who had simply refused trial by combat outright. Refused to let him set foot on their land. Preferred to be a laughingstock across Westeros rather than risk losing the territory, huddled behind their walls like a turtle with its head pulled in.
That could wait. Thirty years the east wind, thirty years the west wind. He had time. Let it sit.
A sudden burst of hoofbeats came from ahead, breaking his thought.
A scout came flying around the bend of the mountain track, trailing a rooster-tail of dust. His face held none of the ease of a man returning to good news. It was set hard.
He pulled up in front of Solomon, swung down, and dropped to one knee.
"My Lord!"
"Lord Olivier, Lord Lushen, and Lord Lauslin are waiting for you at the pass ahead — with the army."
Solomon's brow drew together.
A reception was normal. A reception with the army was not.
A premonition settled over him. Something had gone wrong. The war was over — every day the army remained mobilized was money burning. Grain, wages, both enormous expenses. Evelyn understood this better than almost anyone, and yet she had not stood down the mobilization.
He put his heels in. The horse threw its head and bolted.
The pass opened before him.
The army stood in dark ranks along both sides of the road, spears rising like a winter forest, order maintained — but every face carrying a weariness that went beyond tired, eyes shadowed with an anxiety they had stopped trying to conceal.
This was not how a victorious army looked. This was how broken men looked after a catastrophic defeat.
Olivier, Lushen, and Lauslin stood at the front of the formation. The moment Solomon's figure appeared, all three moved forward quickly and came to attention.
Their faces were worse than their soldiers'. The three of them saluted together, and the exhaustion in their voices was audible.
"Lord Solomon."
"My Lord Solomon."
Solomon swung down from the horse. His expression was steady and still, but it carried an edge.
"What has happened?"
Straight to it. His voice was level and not loud, but something cold ran through it.
"Why is the army still assembled here?"
Olivier stepped forward. He produced a small notebook from inside his coat, its edges soft with handling.
He took a breath, apparently working out how to order what he had to say. His voice, when it came, was heavy.
"My Lord, the situation is considerably worse than what Miss Evelyn was able to convey in her letters."
"In the past weeks, the domain has absorbed more than three thousand new residents."
Solomon's brow creased. Three thousand refugees — shouldn't that be a good thing?
Olivier opened the notebook and put his finger on the dense rows of numbers.
"My Lord, every parcel of land in the domain — including everything recovered from House Lege and the other houses — even if it were all distributed tomorrow, there would still not be enough to give everyone a plot."
"Even if we reclaimed portions of existing smallfolk's land and redistributed them to the newcomers, there would still be at minimum a thousand families with nothing — not a foot of ground. They are living like rootless drifting reeds, packed into temporary camps the domain threw up to receive them."
Solomon followed. The domain had absorbed more people than it could carry, faster than any system could adjust. Beyond the land problem there would be security problems, a dozen cascading crises.
But one thing was most urgent.
"Grain?"
Olivier exhaled slowly.
"For now, it will hold for a short time."
"But the domain is producing almost nothing at present. We are feeding the entire refugee population and our own smallfolk out of the same reserves. What we have is almost entirely what came back with us from Willowbrook — the Lege grain stores. At the current rate of consumption, it will be gone in half a month."
"After that, we will have no choice but to purchase from neighboring lords at whatever price they care to name. And however much gold is sitting in the treasury, it will drain away like water through a broken cask."
Solomon pressed a hand to his forehead.
So this is what it feels like to burn through a mountain without producing anything.
Lushen, seeing Olivier had finished, picked up the thread. His face was creased with worry.
"Too many people, My Lord Solomon."
"The old villages have capacity for a little over a thousand. The remaining two thousand or more are squeezed into makeshift shelters — row upon row of them, running together into a single sprawling mass."
"The waste and the filth are piling up outside the shelters. The stench carries a long way."
"Housekeeper Evelyn is deeply worried. Once the weather turns warm, if nothing changes, an outbreak of plague is almost certain."
Lauslin's face was equally tight. During the campaign he had been supposed to shift his forces westward to support Solomon after Vycam Pass was secured, but as the refugees poured in, he had found himself unable to move at all. Everywhere was chaos. If he had marched, the domain would have had no armed presence left to hold things together.
He looked at Solomon and spoke with the urgency he had been holding back.
"The security situation is on the edge of breakdown, My Lord Solomon."
"Theft and fighting break out every single day."
"New arrivals and longer-established residents — even the original smallfolk — and refugees from different villages among themselves: they go at each other over food, over a scrap of canvas to keep the rain off, sometimes over nothing more than a look. People come away with broken heads."
He paused, and lowered his voice.
"Three days ago, a man was killed over a winter shelter. Stabbed."
"If Housekeeper Evelyn had not insisted on Lushen and me keeping the army in constant patrol through every quarter — making sure people could see that My Lord's forces were still present and watching — I believe a full-scale riot would have broken out before now."