Lady Rona's castle had probably never been this busy.
On Solomon's orders, every soldier was spinning like a top, rushing back and forth inside and outside the walls.
Officers directed the castle servants and soldiers to load heavy chests of gold and silver, fine dishes and vessels, rolled bolts of beautiful tapestries, and anything else of value onto the wagons with careful hands.
Cart wheels groaned against the stone roads, the sound announcing just how heavy the loads were.
Old Nyken scraped the place to the bone. He left nothing untouched, not the leftover food in the kitchens nor the wine bottles in the cellar.
But the castle's true mistress, Lady Rona, noticed none of it.
Her world had narrowed to a single person.
She selected his riding clothes for him, took his arm, and walked with him through the rear courtyard, begging him to talk even though he was not much inclined to, asking to hear tales of the mountain clans, of the blood and battles she had never known. When night fell she wound herself around him like a vine, drawing from him the comfort and safety of someone who had barely survived.
Solomon lay on the soft bed with the faint scent of Lady Rona's perfume drifting around him, and felt the full weight of an old Eastern saying.
A tender embrace is a hero's grave.
He was almost sinking into it. His mind even drifted to the image of his royal uncle's lazy, satisfied face after a night of drinking.
Can't I enjoy this just a little?
That thought rose and was immediately strangled.
This world was full of dangers on every side. If he wanted to have everything, he could not stop here. Peace was always temporary. The shadow of war had never lifted. In a few years, when the fighting started in earnest, it would be kill or be killed.
The door was knocked urgently again.
Another raven had come.
This was not the first.
It carried a letter from Deddington Castle. From Lady Roslin. The handwriting was hurried and frantic, as though every letter of every word was pushing him to move faster. It shattered whatever fragile calm had settled around him.
The letters had gone from polite requests, to anxious urging, to something close to orders in tone. Every raven had brought heavier news than the last.
Lady Rona was sitting on his knee in the chair by the desk. Solomon unfolded the letter. Candlelight threw shifting shadows across his face.
What the letter confirmed was the worst of what he had suspected about Lady Roslin's situation. The ugly rules that lay beneath the polished surface of the feudal system were on full display in the face of crisis.
In Westeros's feudal structure, you needed one of a few things.
You could be like Eddard Stark, whose deep bond with the Northern identity meant that even when his house was ruined and all but destroyed in the eyes of outsiders, every Northern lord would still fight for that name.
Or you could be like Tywin Lannister, ruling your bannermen through fear. You would never earn real loyalty that way, but no one would dare defy you to your face. Though if you ever fell from power, your bannermen would happily walk over your grave and pack the dirt down.
At the very least, you could be like the Tyrells and have money, or have the Vale's tradition of knightly culture.
House Deddington seemed to have none of these things.
Solomon could almost picture Lady Roslin grinding her teeth as she wrote. The letter was drenched in helplessness and fury.
"House Deddington's bannermen either find excuses or send a handful of men to go through the motions. I have no more moves left."
"They watch their liege lord's lands being plundered and think only of protecting their own pitiful forces. My last hope rests on you alone, dear little Solomon."
That passage drew a strange smile from the corner of Solomon's mouth.
In the lady's eyes, he truly seemed to be House Deddington's most loyal and devoted servant. Perhaps that was how the world saw him too.
But as his eyes moved down the page, his smile faded.
The final piece of news in the letter was the kind that could bring an entire defensive line crashing down.
"Lord Lemon Letryce has taken his men and withdrawn without permission, returning to his own lands. He claims he is going to retake the family castle occupied by the Ironborn."
Solomon's fingers tapped the desk in a steady rhythm.
The excuse was airtight.
Defending one's home. Retaking one's own castle. That was something no liege lord, not even a king, could condemn. It was their sacred right. After all, answering a summons was fulfilling a duty, but protecting your own land was a matter of natural law.
But it set an extremely dangerous precedent.
Like the first crack in a dam, more cracks would follow quickly, and when they did, the flood would swallow everything.
He could almost see what would happen next. The other lords at Seagard would find their own perfectly reasonable excuses and leave with their armies, one after another.
Those lords did not know what he knew.
He knew the Ironborn's main force would very soon strike at Seagard.
And this so-called Riverlands alliance would fall apart on its own before that attack ever came.
After all, no reasonable person thought the way Balon Greyjoy did. Solomon genuinely could not work out what Balon had hoped to achieve by taking Seagard in the original timeline, other than draining his own forces.
He thought back to the skirmish at the forest's edge against the Ironborn.
Of those supposedly four or five hundred Ironborn, only a handful had been true Ironborn warriors. Most were Riverlands refugees who had been forced into their column. Their smooth raiding, the fear and rumors they had spread, all of it had rested entirely on the cowardice of the Riverlands lords.
He had reached a conclusion now.
The real number of Ironborn in this invasion was not large at all.
The reason they had been able to range so freely was not because of unbeatable strength. It was because of the cowardice and selfishness that ran bone deep in the Riverlands nobility, who had not managed a single real act of resistance.
Five hundred elite commoner soldiers. The four hundred new commoners at Deddington Castle. Four hundred more mobilized from Lady Rona's lands. Add House Deddington's own army and the forces of the bannermen, and he could pull together over a thousand, perhaps more.
Maybe he didn't need to wait any longer.
Destroying what everyone called three thousand Ironborn would make his name echo across all Seven Kingdoms.
The more he thought about it, the more it made sense.
It was time to move.
He turned to Lady Rona, who was still sitting on his knee.
"Get me paper and a pen."
He thought for a moment, dipped his quill, and dashed off a generous reply in one smooth motion.
He began by expressing, with great righteousness and solemn concern, his deep sympathy for his liege lord's difficult situation, and announced that he would immediately answer the summons and personally lead his army to meet the other lords at the crossing of the Greenfork.
Then he shifted smoothly and began laying out the state of his forces. He had mobilized nearly nine hundred soldiers, almost the full strength of his domain, holding nothing back for his liege lord's sake. The recent skirmish with the Ironborn had cost him casualties. Replacements needed food, grain, arrows, and equipment. On these perfectly reasonable grounds he boldly requested a substantial supply of provisions, arrows, and weapons from Lady Roslin.
The raven flew high and carried the letter to Deddington Castle.
Lady Roslin read it and felt as though she had seized the last rope above an abyss.
She wrote back immediately, overjoyed. Little Solomon was truly the most loyal servant her house had ever known.
She agreed to every one of his requests, and promised that weapons and equipment would be gathered and waiting for him at Deddington Castle when he arrived.
With what he wanted secured, Solomon moved at once.
The first thing he did was send old Nyken and Lady Rona away.
Lady Rona cried her eyes red but did not dare resist his decision. Through endless kisses and tearful pleading, she was half-reluctantly loaded into the carriage bound for the Lion's Den.
Once that last warmth was gone, Solomon's eyes turned completely cold.
He stood on the castle wall and called out to the soldiers Lady Rona had mobilized, his voice carrying clear across the courtyard below.
"Lady Rona has gone to safety. But as your liege, she has an obligation to contribute strength to her own lord in their time of need."
"Now, in her name, I will lead you to fulfill that obligation."
He gave no one a chance to refuse.
Hers was as good as his.
There would be no objections.
He simply conscripted the four hundred farmers Lady Rona had called up to defend the castle, promising the wide-eyed and terrified men that those who survived would receive land and generous reward when the war was done.
And so Solomon set out with his column toward the crossing of the Greenfork.
He drilled the soldiers hard on the march, stopping and starting, pushing them through emergency training in every spare moment.
When he finally reached the meeting point, he was treated to a masterclass in feudal shamelessness, and discovered precisely why he himself had been elevated to the status of House Deddington's loyal paragon.
The so-called Deddington bannermen's combined force was already gathered in a scattered, dispirited clump along the riverbank.
Solomon looked them over.
The only lord who had genuinely answered the summons and sent real strength was Lord Yokes, who had once served as the Legge family's envoy. He had sent over a hundred men with reasonably decent arms and armor.
Everyone else was a joke.
Some had sent thirty or forty men, yellow-faced and hollow-cheeked, their weapons either pitchforks or rusted short spears. Clearly just farmers dragged in to fill the numbers. Others hadn't even bothered to put up a pretense. They had sent twenty or thirty men who looked as though they had been grabbed off the road from among the Riverlands refugees and pressed into service on the spot.
The most laughable was a house called Payle. Their relief force consisted of exactly eight men. Not even as many as one relatively prosperous landed knight who had arrived on his own.
Solomon looked at the ragged, demoralised, half-collapsed wreck of a force before him, on the verge of scattering in all directions at any moment.
Then he looked back at his own column behind him.
Half of those were also farmers, it was true.
But they had been through emergency drilling. Veterans had been slotted in as officers. The ranks at least looked like a proper formation.
He said nothing.
He shook his head quietly.
He really was House Deddington's most loyal paragon.
No wonder Lady Roslin found him so easy to work with.
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