The castle kitchens lived beneath the great hall, where heat was a season of its own. Smoke curled from ovens; voices clanged and laughed; a boy with a mop bore the alphabet of spilled stew across the floor. Toby showed the steward’s token and was handed a trencher heavy with thick bread, a wedge of cheese, and a bowl of barley broth.

  He took his food to a quiet corner, sat with his back to a warm wall, and let his hands stop shaking. The first mouthful tasted like nothing at all. By the second, there was the clean, simple taste of a field after rain, something good settling in him.

  He chewed, closed his eyes, and found George the merchant in his mind the way a man finds a familiar road by feel. You can’t trade away grief. But you can build on it.

  Wool ruined by rain, bread saved from ash, two clean taps returned to a man who expected to walk through you like fog. Life waxes and wanes, George had said in other words. Sometimes you buy a cart of rot. Sometimes luck rides beside you for a mile and you don’t know her name until she leaves.

  Toby wiped the bowl with the last crust. Warmth spread slowly through his belly, through the raw places behind his ribs. He stood, shouldered the wooden sword again—no one had told him to put it down, so now he had two swords—and went in search of the castellan.

  He’d pictured a castellan as a thick-armed giant with a ring of keys heavy enough to be a weapon, a man who could lift a gate by himself and used his chin to hammer in nails. The man he found in a stone-vaulted office off the inner courtyard was not that. Lawrence was thin, with neat hands and a scholar’s ink-stain on his thumb, dressed in a dark doublet cut cleanly and made plain on purpose. His eyes were sharp, the kind that turned a room into a list within seconds.

  “Toby of Brindle Hollow,” Lawrence said before Toby could open his mouth, scanning a wax tablet. “Squire, by order of Sire Ray.” He didn’t offer a hand. Instead he flicked his gaze over Toby like a tailor measuring a customer. “You need lodging, a bundle of basics, and a bath.”

  “A bath?” Toby said, startled.

  Lawrence’s mouth twitched once. “We do that here. Come.”

  The castellan moved at a pace that dared the world to try and slow him. Toby followed through a series of corridors that taught him more about stone than a lifetime of field walls. The floors were flagged and clean; the air cool, a relief after the kitchens.

  They climbed a short stair and stopped at a narrow door in a gallery that overlooked the inner ward. Lawrence produced a key—not a ring of them, just one—and turned it.

  “Your room,” he said.

  Toby stepped in and stilled. It was small—smaller than the cottage’s main room had been—but it was his. A single bed with a real mattress; a little hearth with a swept ash-pan; a peg rail for gear; a chest with iron straps; a tiny window with leaded panes looking over the training yard. A chamber pot sat in the corner like a thing both humble and scandalously civilized.

  He put his hand on the bedpost. The wood was smooth. The mattress gave a little under his palm. He swallowed.

  “It’s mine?” he asked, stupidly.

  Lawrence made a neat note on his tablet. “So long as you serve.”

  Toby turned. “Sire Ray said I would… receive something? A stipend?”

  “Correct.” Lawrence’s tone did not warm, but it softened. He gestured and they stepped back into the corridor as two servants hauled a copper tub toward an alcove. “You’ll be paid two silver coins per week. That is your stipend.”

  “I don’t know what that means,” Toby admitted.

  “Payment for your services,” Lawrence said simply. “Coin you may spend or save as you see wise. Two silver per week is a squire’s rate under Sire Ray—modest, not mean.”

  “How much is that?” Toby asked, flushing. “I mean, I know coins, but… we used iron.”

  “Ah.” Lawrence nodded once, the smallest sign that he enjoyed being useful. “One silver is equal to one hundred copper coins. One copper equals one hundred iron coins.”

  Toby blinked. He did the math and it fell through him like a stone through water, deeper than he expected. “So… a silver is ten thousand iron.”

  “Correct.”

  “And two silver…” He stopped. His mouth moved. He had seen that many iron coins only as a fantasy when he counted seed money for a new pig. The number lived in his head, too large to fit easily. His throat tightened. “I’ve never… held that.”

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  “Few do for long,” Lawrence said dryly. “Do not let the number trick you. Things cost more here than in your hamlet. Bread, meat, cloth—everything asks a town’s price because a town has a town’s thirst. Hold your iron tight, as the saying goes, even when it’s silver.”

  Toby nodded, dazed. “What should I buy?”

  “Little,” Lawrence said. “You’ll be issued three sets of training clothes, a gambeson when you’re ready for it, and a decent pair of boots if those on your feet don’t fall to pieces first. We’ll provide oil for blade and leather, a razor, soap. If you serve well, there are boons—a better cloak before winter, a token at festival, a copper slip for sweet buns if some captain likes how you pick up his orders. We don’t feed men on promises.” That hint of humor again, dry as a winter apple.

  “Boons,” Toby echoed, tasting the word. In Brindle Hollow a boon had been a neighbor’s spare hands at harvest. Here, it seemed to be a ledger of favors that smelled like soap and iron.

  Lawrence tucked the tablet away. “Questions?”

  “Only… what do I do now?”

  “Now,” Lawrence said, “you learn where not to get lost.” He set off again, and after placing his stolen elven sword on the end of his bed, Toby followed.

  They moved through arteries of the keep, Lawrence narrating with a spare efficiency that made Toby think of knives—nothing extra on the blade.

  “This is the inner ward,” the castellan said as they descended a stair and crossed a flagged courtyard. “Training yard there. Mess hall for the garrison to the left. The well—don’t fall in, we’ve already a boy in our history to fill that story.” His eyes flicked to Toby’s face, just long enough to show he knew more than names. “Armory through those doors. Do not enter without leave. Kitchen deliveries come up that ramp; stay out of the cooks’ way or you’ll lose fingers faster than in the yard.”

  They passed the chapel—a cool, small room of quiet stone where a handful of candles moved like thoughts no one wanted to say aloud. Toby slowed instinctively; Lawrence didn’t. “Service at dawn on fifth-day. Optional. Sire Ray prefers deeds to kneeling, though he kneels well when he decides to.”

  As they turned a corner, Toby noticed an open door that lead through into a small courtyard. It was full of oddly shaped stones; a whole row of tall, pear-shaped stones—each one scarred with strange cuts and chips, some clean, others jagged, as if giants had been sharpening their knives there.

  Toby slowed. “What are those?”

  Lawrence followed his gaze but did not stop. “Old training stones. Marks of the men who came before you. Don’t trouble over them yet.”

  “They look… strange,” Toby said. “Like something tried to bite the stone.”

  “Perhaps something did,” Lawrence replied, already moving again. Then, as an afterthought, he added, “If you serve long enough, you may come to understand why we keep them. Until then, let the mystery rest where it belongs.”

  Something in his tone made Toby glance back once more. The stones stood silent, pale and scarred, like they were waiting for names they already knew.

  They crossed under a vaulted passage into the outer ward, where stable-muck and the smell of horses brawled for space with the wind. Lawrence nodded toward the far wall. “Beyond that lies the town. You’ll have leave occasionally. I recommend you don’t spend your first stipend on dice or kisses you can’t afford to remember.”

  Toby’s ears went hot. “I won’t.”

  “Good. Laundry there. Privies there; use them. I will know if you don’t.” He was not joking.

  They climbed again, up a turnpike stair that made Toby’s thighs burn—he didn’t mind the burn; it was honest—and emerged on a wall-walk between the inner and outer defenses. From here the castle made sense in the way fields made sense from the ridge above them. The two walls formed teeth within teeth. The keep sat like a molar set deep in a jaw. Men moved along the stone like a river held in its banks.

  “Why two walls?” Toby asked, the question slipping out.

  “Because one fails,” Lawrence said, as if explaining that fire burns and water drowns. “Because time erodes and a second thought often saves the first. Because we build for bad days, not good ones.”

  They halted by a merlon; a breeze lifted the corner of Lawrence’s neat hair. The town spread below, busy and bright. Toby tried to imagine it aflame and forced himself not to.

  “You’ll rise with first bell,” Lawrence said. “Run, drill, eat, drill again. You’ll carry more than you think you can, learn the weight of armor, the bite of blisters, the humility of bruises. You’ll listen more than you speak. You’ll keep your temper sheathed unless ordered to draw it. Do this long enough and one day someone will put iron where your wood is and call you Ser instead of boy.”

  Toby’s fingers tightened around the wooden hilt at his shoulder. He thought of the two quick taps he’d managed and the strange, thin second in which the world had leaned toward him like a forgiving tree. He thought of George’s lesson about loss and what you build after. He thought of his mother’s hands, dirt under the nails, and his sister’s doll’s cracked head.

  “I can do it,” he said.

  “I do not care if you can,” Lawrence replied without heat. “I care if you will.” He turned, already moving, because he was a man to whom stillness was only for sleeping. “Come. We’ll get you your bundle, your bath, and a billet number you can remember even when your bones forget your name.”

  As they walked, Toby glanced back once over the wall. The road south unwound like a pale line toward the marsh and beyond that the forests where bad stories kept their teeth sharp. Somewhere out there, elves ran, laughed, slept, tightened straps. Somewhere out there waited the thing he’d pointed his life at like a spear.

  He felt no lighter. He felt only that his feet were on a road he could name now, stone under leather, schedule under hunger, training under rage.

  In the yard below, a pair of squires crossed wooden blades in easy drills, laughter drifting up between the taps. One of them yelped as the other nicked his knuckles. “Again,” the yelped one barked, and they set to with grins.

  Toby looked away and followed the castellan into the stone’s cool mouth.