Winter in the Northern March was not idle.
This was something Junho had misunderstood before arriving. He had carried the assumption, absorbed from some half-remembered cultural context he couldn't source precisely, that agricultural medieval society slowed in winter — that it was a season of survival and waiting, of staying warm and enduring until spring. He had expected a pace reduction.
The pace did not reduce.
The work changed. You did not plant in winter. You did not plow. You did not harvest. But you repaired every tool that had been deferred during the growing season. You maintained every building. You planned every project for spring. You processed every material that had been stockpiled. You trained every person who could be spared from summer tasks for the development work that summer had been too busy to accommodate.
Junho's barony in winter was running at approximately the same intensity as it had in summer, just in different directions.
He added 'winter schedule' to the operational log as a distinct category and wrote down everything that was happening in it.
The list filled two pages.
* * *
The truss bridge design took eight days.
Not because the structure was complicated — the geometry of a Pratt truss was clean and teachable and he had designed variations of it more times than he could count in his previous life. Eight days because he was writing it for a foreman who had never built a truss, which meant the document needed to accomplish something different from a standard structural specification.
A specification written for an experienced engineer said: member sizes, connection details, tolerances. The engineer fills in everything else from knowledge.
A specification written for a capable builder who had never encountered the structural form needed to say: why each component exists, what it does, what happens if it is wrong, and in what order things must be assembled to avoid the structure being in the wrong state at the moment when a critical decision was made.
It was, in the end, less like a structural specification and more like a manual.
He wrote it in sections. The first section explained what a truss was and why it worked — the triangulated geometry, the way diagonal members transferred load from midspan to the support points, the fundamental principle that you couldn't deform a triangle without changing the length of its sides. He drew diagrams. Not technical drawings in the engineering sense — explanatory diagrams, the kind you drew to make a concept visible rather than to specify exact dimensions.
Section two was the member sizing, with the reasoning behind each size. Not just 'the top chord is this section' but 'the top chord is in compression and sized for this buckling length, which is why it must be this large — if it is smaller, it fails by buckling before yielding, and buckling failure is sudden, not gradual.'
Section three was the connection details. He spent two days on this section alone.
Connection details were where truss construction failed when built by someone working from incomplete information. A diagonal member connected to a chord at the wrong angle, a joint with inadequate bearing area, a bolt pattern that worked in the drawing but put the timber in a failure mode the drawing didn't anticipate — these were all failure modes he'd seen documented in the historical record of structures from various eras, and he described each of them explicitly. Not to alarm the foreman. To give him the information he needed to recognize a potential problem when he was standing at the joint with a chisel in his hand and the decision hadn't been made yet.
Skrrk— skrrk—
Eight days of writing. The charcoal stick wearing down. New ones cut from the stock by Ott, who had taken on the role of running small errands for anyone who needed it with the smooth invisibility of a useful person who had made himself indispensable.
When he was done, the document was eleven pages. He read it through twice and made corrections.
Then he sent one copy to Liss and one to Pol in Harren.
He thought about sending a third to Calder but decided the actual construction was more efficient.
* * *
The strategic designation arrived on day one hundred and eighty-nine.
Official letter, Crown seal, Northern March Command. Lord Ashmore of Ashmore Barony, Northern March, is hereby designated a Strategic Holding of the Crown in recognition of the territory's road position, developing productivity, and demonstrated managerial capacity. Garrison obligations as previously described attach from the date of this letter. Infrastructure support grants available per the Northern March Defense Infrastructure Fund. The territory's designation will be reviewed at the annual March assessment.
Also enclosed: a certificate of designation, suitable for display.
Junho looked at the certificate. It was a formal document with the Crown seal and the March Commander's signature and several lines of impressive calligraphic text.
Suitable for display.
I'm supposed to hang this in the hall.
He put it in the operational log instead and told Sera about the designation.
She said: 'Good. I'll write the wall design brief this week.'
He said: 'We have three years.'
She said: 'Yes, and I'll start the design brief this week.'
She does not consider three years to be a long time. Or rather, she considers it exactly long enough to do a thing properly if you start now and not long enough if you start later.
She is correct. I know she is correct. I just apparently need to hear it again.
He added the wall to the active project list.
Ping—!
―――――――――――――――――――――――――――
[ TERRITORY STATUS — DAY 189 ]
DESIGNATION: Crown Strategic Holding — Northern March
Active winter projects:
School: 19 students, 3x/week (Sera + Wyll as teaching assistant)
Woodshop (Calder): Foundation cleared, site prepared for spring build
Truss bridge manual: Sent to Liss and Pol — response pending
Wall design brief: In progress (Sera)
Liss foreman visit: Scheduled mid-winter (est. Day 210)
Road phase 2: Planned for spring (Carra)
Draft animal lease (spring plowing): Letter sent to Harwell
Mill status: Running at reduced winter pace (16 logs/day)
— Seasonal reduction due to lower forest crew availability
— Mechanism in excellent condition; Calder completed full maintenance
FINANCES:
Current funds: approx. 420 gold (post-settlement, post-grant)
Outstanding debt: 1,322 gold
Year-2 payment due: 386 gold (approx. 8 months from now)
Grain consortium advance: 35 gold (received)
Territory Status: ESTABLISHED
Days since arrival: 189
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Eight months to the year-two payment. 386 gold required. Currently holding 420.
I have the payment covered in current funds, which means everything earned between now and then goes toward the wall, the woodshop, the grain mill conversion, Calder's workshop, and whatever arrives that I haven't planned for.
That's a comfortable position. Not rich. Not secure in the sense of there being nothing left to worry about. But the kind of comfortable where you can take risks on good ideas without betting the whole operation.
I have not been in this position before. In my previous life I was always on one project or another that was two delays from financial stress. Here, finally, is some margin.
Don't waste the margin.
* * *
Liss's foreman arrived in mid-winter, as scheduled.
His name was Rek. He was forty, compact, with the ropey forearms of a man who had spent two decades managing physical construction and the permanently slightly squinted eyes of someone accustomed to reading site conditions in difficult light.
He arrived with a copy of the truss bridge manual that had clearly been read multiple times — the pages were soft at the edges and there were small marks throughout in a different hand from Junho's.
'These are questions,' Rek said, presenting the document.
Junho took it and looked at the marks. They were not random. Each mark was at a specific technical point, and beside most of them was a small notation — sometimes a number, sometimes a word, sometimes a small rough sketch of an alternative approach.
He read it as a working document. Not as an instruction manual. As something he was evaluating and interrogating.
That's the kind of reader who builds things that stand up.
'Let's go through them,' Junho said.
They spent the morning at the farmhouse table going through the marked passages. Rek's questions were precise and technical — he had understood the structural logic of the truss without difficulty, which confirmed that he was a man of genuine competence who had simply never encountered this structural form before. The questions were not about why the truss worked. They were about construction sequence details, about how to achieve the specific joint geometry with hand tools, about what to do when the available timber didn't quite match the specified dimensions.
The last category of question was the most important. Real construction never matched specified dimensions perfectly, and the design needed to accommodate that fact.
'The top chord splice,' Rek said. 'You specify that if available timber length requires a splice, it should be located at the panel point nearest to the quarter span. Why there specifically?'
'The bending moment in the top chord is lowest at the panel points,' Junho said. 'At midspan, the chord is in maximum compression. At the quarter points, the moment has reduced significantly. A splice introduces a weaker cross-section — by putting it where the stress is lower, you keep the critical structural zones intact.'
Rek looked at the diagram in the manual. He picked up a piece of charcoal from the table — he'd apparently been carrying one — and made a notation in the margin.
'What if the splice has to go somewhere else?' he said.
'If you're forced to splice at an unfavorable location, you increase the overlap length and add an additional bolt. More bearing area compensates for some of the section loss. It's not as good as the preferred location, but it's manageable if the overlap is at least—' he calculated briefly, '—1.5 times the chord depth.'
'1.5,' Rek repeated, writing it down.
They worked through twelve more questions over three hours. By the end of it Rek had a document with forty-three additional notations in his own hand, and Junho had the impression of a man who would go back to his river crossing site and build a good bridge.
After lunch, he asked to see the mill mechanism.
Not the bridge-related timber. The mill itself. The crank, the pitman arm, the saw frame.
He looked at it for twenty minutes without touching anything. He was not assessing the timber quality. He was studying the mechanism.
'A reciprocating saw driven by a waterwheel,' he said finally.
'Yes,' Calder said — Calder had stayed to run the mill during the visit, and Rek had been watching the mechanism operate.
'How long to build this, from start to running?'
'The original version: twenty-two days,' Calder said. 'The upgraded version: additional twenty-eight.'
'What's the cost?'
He's asking for the construction cost. He's thinking about whether to build one.
'Primarily labor,' Junho said. 'We had a salvageable foundation, which reduced the stone cost considerably. The ironwork — the crank fittings, the saw blade — was the main capital expense. Call it fifteen to twenty silver for a new installation with a stone foundation, depending on local iron prices.'
'Where does the design come from?' Rek said.
'I designed it,' Junho said.
Rek looked at him. Then at the mill. Then at Junho again.
'Liss said you were an unusual lord,' he said.
'I have an engineering background,' Junho said, which was the explanation he had settled on over the past months for conversations like this. Vague enough to be unverifiable, accurate enough to be true.
'Where did you study?'
'Far from here,' Junho said. 'A different kind of institution than what you'd find in the March.'
Rek accepted this with the pragmatic disinterest of a man for whom where knowledge came from mattered less than whether it produced results that worked.
'The bridge design,' he said. 'If I have questions during construction — can I send word?'
'Send word,' Junho said. 'I'll respond as quickly as I can.'
'I might also send one of my apprentices,' Rek said. 'If that's agreeable. To watch the mill operate and learn the mechanism principle. There are situations in my work where a reciprocating mechanism would solve problems I currently solve with more labor.'
He wants to learn the mechanism. And he wants to teach his apprentices.
The knowledge is moving. Not just the timber. The knowledge.
'Agreeable,' Junho said. 'The mill runs every working day. Your apprentice is welcome for as long as is useful.'
Rek left the following morning with his annotated manual and a sample piece of the northeast ridge heartwood that Calder had cut for him, and the expression of a man who had come to confirm things he'd been told and was returning with more than he'd arrived with.
* * *
The woodshop foundation started on the first clear week of late winter.
This was Calder's project in the way the bridge manual had been Junho's — he ran it, made the decisions, consulted where he wanted input and proceeded where he didn't. The site was on the north side of the mill, close enough for material transfer but far enough not to create access conflicts.
The foundation was smaller than the hall's — seven by five meters, a simple rectangle, stone over gravel just as the hall's had been. Hendry ran the stonework, which took three days. The frame was timber, much of it mill-cut to Calder's own specification, which he had drafted himself in a set of drawings that bore an uncanny resemblance in format and detail to Junho's engineering drawings.
Junho noticed this and said nothing.
The frame went up in two days. The roof — shale tiles, from Tomas's ongoing production — went on in another three. The interior fitting, which Calder had thought carefully about over the winter months, took a week: the workbench positions, the tool storage, the small forge alcove in the northeast corner where he planned to install a small charcoal forge for ironwork repair and fabrication.
'A forge,' Junho said, on the day Calder was describing the alcove.
'Small one,' Calder said. 'For blade maintenance, ironwork repairs, custom fittings. I keep going to Gorvan for things I could do here if I had the facility.'
'Gorvan won't like that.'
'Gorvan told me to build it,' Calder said. 'He's tired of making small things. He wants to focus on the larger commissions.'
Gorvan told Calder to build his own small forge.
The network of competent people in this territory continues to behave better than I have any rational basis for expecting.
'Build it,' Junho said.
The woodshop was complete by day two hundred and nineteen.
Calder moved his tools in on the first morning and spent an hour arranging them. He did not invite anyone to this process. It was the private ritual of a craftsman claiming a space.
When he was done, he opened the workshop door and looked at the interior — the bench, the tool walls, the forge alcove waiting for its small ironwork installation — with the expression he had worn looking at the hall's door frame.
Then he closed the door and went to do the day's mill work.
Junho did not remark on this.
Some things did not require remark.
* * *
The first day of spring came on the two hundred and eleventh day.
Or rather: Mara declared it was almost time.
She came to the farmhouse two mornings before Pell's official calendar marker for the spring season boundary, found Junho at the table with the operational log, and said: 'I want to be ready to plow in four days. Is the draft animal from Colwick confirmed?'
It was confirmed. Harwell had arranged it efficiently — a strong work horse, Colwick's own, on a two-week lease at a fair seasonal rate, arriving at Ashmore in two days. Mara nodded when she heard this, in the specific way that meant she was updating her mental schedule.
'The clover turn-in sequence,' she said. 'I want to walk it with you.'
'You know the field better than I do,' Junho said.
'I know the field,' she said. 'You know the soil chemistry. I want to make sure we agree on the timing.'
She's come to get a specific kind of input. Not direction. Consultation.
That's a different relationship than month one.
They walked the east field in the early morning. The clover was beginning its spring growth — small, new-green nodes at the base of the brown-dormant stems, the plant coming back from below with the indifferent persistence of something that had evolved to survive much more difficult conditions than a Northern March winter.
'Two more days minimum before the turn-in,' Mara said, crouching at the field edge and pressing the soil. 'The ground is still too cold in the lower ten centimeters. The roots need to release their nitrogen stores before we turn them — if the soil is too cold the microbial activity that converts the root nitrogen into plant-available form is suppressed.'
She knows the soil chemistry. She doesn't use the technical vocabulary but she knows the process.
She learned it from forty years of watching what happened when she planted in cold soil versus warm soil, from her father, from her mother, from the accumulated knowledge of people farming the same ground across generations.
My knowledge came from a university and from books. Her knowledge came from this field.
We're describing the same phenomenon with different words and different sources.
'Two days,' Junho agreed. 'When the overnight temperature stops dropping below — in your terms, when the morning frost is gone from the surface soil even in the shaded sections.'
Mara looked at the far end of the field, where a treeline shaded the northeast corner until mid-morning.
'That section always runs three days behind the rest,' she said. 'We plow everything else first and do that corner last. By the time we reach it the ground has had extra days to warm.'
'That's the right approach,' Junho said.
'I know,' she said, without any particular emphasis.
They walked back to the farmhouse. The morning light was still low and cold but had a different quality from winter morning light — something was beginning.
* * *
The east field clover was turned in on day two hundred and fourteen.
Three plows, three draft animals — the leased horse from Colwick supplementing Ashmore's two — working in parallel from the south end of the field northward. The clover disappeared into the turned earth, brown stems becoming black soil, the year's nitrogen work going underground where it would become next year's harvest.
Krrk— krrk— krrk—
Plowshares through earth that turned differently from how it would have turned a year ago. Less resistance. More crumble. The drainage had changed the soil structure at depth — less compaction, more air, the root channels from the clover opening paths for future root growth.
Mara walked alongside the last plow, watching the furrow, crouching occasionally to examine a slice of turned soil.
At midday she stopped beside Junho at the field edge.
'It's different,' she said.
'The soil structure?'
'The way it's turning. Last year — before the drainage — this field turned heavy. You had to lean into the plow handles. It came up in big wet clods that had to be broken separately.' She looked at the furrows behind the working plows. 'This is turning clean. The furrow holds its shape.'
Ping—!
―――――――――――――――――――――――――――
[ ENGINEER'S EYE — EAST FIELD SPRING ASSESSMENT ]
East Field — 1 year post-drainage installation
Soil structure change (visual and tactile assessment):
Water table depth (estimated): >90cm — below root zone (was: 20–40cm)
Aggregate stability: Improved — soil holds structure when turned
Pore space: Significantly increased vs. waterlogged baseline
Root penetration depth (clover roots visible): 35–45cm
(was: effectively 0cm — saturated soil prevented root penetration)
Nitrogen status: Clover root nodules abundant — excellent N contribution
Assessment: Soil recovery progressing ahead of Year 1 projections.
Field is likely viable for grain crop this year, not just Year 2.
Recommended action: Consult Mara Dunwick on planting decision.
Field knowledge required — this is a management call, not a technical one.
―――――――――――――――――――――――――――
He read the last line twice.
Field is viable for grain crop this year. Not Year 2.
If the soil has recovered faster than projected — which the clover root depth and the pore space data both suggest — then the conservative Year 2 timeline I gave the grain consortium was too conservative.
I could plant this spring. Potentially.
The system says: ask Mara.
The system is right.
'The field,' he said. 'What does it feel like to you?'
Mara looked at him. She had learned to recognize when he was asking a technical question disguised as a casual one.
'Ready,' she said slowly.
'For planting this year?'
She was quiet for a long moment, watching the plows work the far section.
'I've been farming for thirty years,' she said. 'I can tell you what soil wants. This soil wants to grow something.' She paused. 'The northwest corner, definitely. The central section, probably. The northeast corner where the drainage came last — I'd want another season on that section.'
'So a partial planting this year. Two-thirds of the field.'
'Maybe a little more. Mara's territory.' She almost smiled — a private, contained expression, the closest she came to one in professional contexts. 'My territory.'
Her territory. She's claiming the decision.
That's correct. This is her expertise and her land management and her judgment.
'The grain consortium contract is for Year Two,' Junho said. 'A Year One harvest wouldn't be covered under the forward purchase.'
'It would be surplus,' Mara said. 'Free to sell on the open market.'
'Or to hold as working capital seed stock,' Junho said. 'If we keep a portion back as seed for next year's full planting, we reduce our seed purchase cost.'
Mara looked at the field. 'Plant the northwest section for sale. The central section for seed stock. Leave the northeast corner fallow for the year.'
One-third for sale, one-third for seed, one-third fallow. That's a conservative and intelligent plan.
She just did in thirty seconds what I would have spent an evening calculating.
'What crop?' Junho asked.
'Rye,' she said immediately. 'Not wheat. Rye tolerates recovering soil better, germinates in cooler conditions, and we're already past the optimal wheat window for this latitude. A rye crop now gives us a harvest in late summer. We miss the grain consortium contract window, but the open market price for rye at harvest time is reasonable.'
'How much do you need for seed?'
'I have enough saved. I've been saving rye seed for two years.' She looked at him. 'I knew the drainage would work eventually. I planned for it.'
She's been holding seed for two years. Waiting for this field to be ready.
Her father's yield estimate. Her clover seed saved for three years. Her rye seed saved for two. This woman has been preparing for this moment since long before I arrived.
I gave her the drainage system. She gave the field everything else.
'Plant it,' Junho said.
'I intend to,' she said.
* * *
The grain consortium letter — informing them that a partial planting was happening this spring, a year ahead of the committed timeline, and that the consortium might wish to discuss whether their forward purchase terms could be applied to a portion of the early harvest — was written by Sera with the precise, professional warmth of someone who had been managing correspondence for four months and had developed an exact feel for tone.
She handed it to Junho for review.
He read it. Changed one word — 'anticipate' to 'expect,' which was more concrete — and handed it back.
'One word,' she said.
'One word,' he agreed.
'I'll send it today.'
The consortium replied in eight days with unconcealed interest. They were willing to discuss early purchase at the standard terms. They would send a representative to see the field.
They sent the representative six days later.
The representative's name was Eda Voss — no relation to Calder or Hendry, Voss apparently being the Northern March equivalent of Kim — and she was thirty, efficient, and assessed the east field in forty-five minutes with the compressed thoroughness of someone who had seen many fields and was looking for specific information.
She asked Mara more questions than she asked Junho, which was the correct ordering.
The result: the consortium agreed to purchase the northwest section's harvest at eighty percent of the contracted Year Two rate — a discount for the early and partial delivery — with a commitment to full contract terms for the Year Two main harvest.
Mara agreed to this without consulting Junho.
He found this entirely appropriate.
* * *
On the two hundred and twenty-eighth day, the school had twenty-two students.
Sera had been right about the capacity limit. Twenty-two was the edge of what a single morning session could manage — the barn space was adequate but the individual attention required at different learning levels was becoming difficult to distribute.
Junho had a conversation with Wyll.
It took approximately seven minutes.
He said: the school is at capacity for one teacher, you have been functioning as a teaching assistant for three months and you are better at it than you realize, I would like to formalize your role, the compensation is a small salary starting next month and a commitment to continue your own education alongside your teaching work.
Wyll said: yes.
He said: yes with the particular quality of someone who had been thinking about it for a long time and was relieved to be asked rather than surprised.
He said one other thing, after the brief silence: 'There are three adults who want to join but won't come to the children's session. They're too proud for that.'
'Evening sessions,' Junho said immediately. 'Separate from the children. Two nights a week, in the hall's public room — the school barn is too small and cold for evening sessions anyway.'
'Who teaches the evening session?'
'You do,' Junho said. 'You can manage the adult level. They don't need foundational literacy — they have some already. They need arithmetic and the kind of reasoning that Sera teaches in the afternoon sessions.'
'I've never run a session alone,' Wyll said.
'Sera will observe for the first two,' Junho said. 'After that, you're the teacher. She's available for questions.'
Wyll looked at his hands. The hands that had bored auger holes and driven cant hooks and hauled timber and learned to do grade checks along a millrace. He had been building things since he was twelve. He was twenty-one now.
'All right,' he said.
Ping—!
―――――――――――――――――――――――――――
[ SCHOOL STATUS — DAY 228 ]
Morning sessions (children): Sera Ashmore — 22 students
Morning sessions (older children/apprentices): Wyll Dunwick — 8 students
Evening sessions (adults): Wyll Dunwick — 3 students (starting Day 235)
Total enrolled: 33 (47% of barony population aged 6–50)
Subjects: Literacy, arithmetic, applied reasoning, natural observation
Note: School has outgrown its space within 5 months of founding.
Dedicated school building on forward project list.
Current timeline: Year 3 (after wall construction begins).
―――――――――――――――――――――――――――
47% of the barony's population aged 6 to 50 is in formal education.
That's not a number I could have predicted on day one. It's not even a number I was specifically building toward — the school was item six on a seven-item list, and I didn't have a plan for it beyond 'Sera said she could start it.'
It grew because people wanted it. You don't have to mandate something that people want. You create the space and they fill it.
He added 'dedicated school building' to the project list, alongside the wall design brief and the grain mill conversion and the road phase two and the woodshop irrigation ditch and the thirteen other items that had accumulated over two hundred and twenty-eight days of paying attention.
The list was now three pages.
* * *
Spring arrived properly in the two hundred and thirtieth day.
The east field was plowed and ready. The rye seed was in the ground on the northwest section — Mara had planted it herself, in the particular style of someone who had been waiting to do this for a long time and was not delegating it. The central section was prepared for seed rye storage, the surface tilth right for that purpose.
The mill was running at full spring pace — the forest crew had returned to full strength after the winter reduction, the extraction paths had been resurfaced by Carra's crew during the dry early-spring window, and the second forest section was producing steadily.
The road improvement phase two had started — Carra's crew working southward from the phase one endpoint, the new gravel arriving by cart from the Crestfall quarry source twice a week.
The hall was occupied. The Crown strategic designation was on file. The debt was 1,322 gold on a four-year schedule that Junho could cover from projected revenue without strain.
He stood on the northwest rise on a morning in early spring and looked at the territory.
Mill. School. Hall. Field. Forest. Road. Bridge. All of it visible from this rise, or implied by what was visible.
A year ago I woke up in a field with mud in my hair.
That's not quite right. A year ago I was in a hospital bed in Seoul dying of an ignored heart condition. I woke up in this field.
I've been here for — he counted quickly — two hundred and thirty days. That's not a year.
It feels like a year.
Or rather, it feels like the amount of time it takes to do the things that happened. The amount of time is a secondary fact.
Sera appeared at the bottom of the rise, walking up toward him with the easy uphill gait of someone for whom this rise was now a familiar path.
'Pell is looking for you,' she said. 'There's a letter from the March Office.'
March Office. Not the Defense Office — Renne's command. The general March administration.
What does the general March administration want with me?
'Did he open it?'
'He was waiting for you.'
He walked back down with her. Pell was at the farmhouse table with the letter in front of him, sealed, the March Office signet in the wax.
Junho sat down and opened it.
He read it.
He read it again.
...
Oh.
Ping—!
―――――――――――――――――――――――――――
[ SYSTEM NOTE — INCOMING ]
Northern March Administrative Office — Official Correspondence
Lord Ashmore is hereby invited to attend the Spring March Assembly
at Veldmark, in 30 days, as a newly designated Strategic Holding.
The Assembly convenes all March lords annually to:
→ Review regional defense obligations
→ Discuss infrastructure coordination
→ Address territorial disputes and boundary matters
→ Receive Crown policy updates from the March Commander
Attendance is expected of all Strategic Holdings.
Lord Colwick of Harren will be in attendance.
Aldous Crane of the Galden Group has been invited as a trade observer.
⚠ New context: Political arena.
Ashmore's rapid development will be known to all March lords.
Not all of them will find it welcome news.
―――――――――――――――――――――――――――
He looked at the last two lines for a moment.
Not all of them will find it welcome news.
I have been building. I have been focused on the building. I have not been paying attention to who is watching the building and how they feel about it.
The March Assembly is in thirty days. I am going to walk into a room with every lord in the Northern March and they are all going to know exactly what I've done in eight months.
Some of them will be Colwick — interested, professional, already in a working relationship.
Some of them will be something else.
Pell was watching him.
'You've been to the Assembly before,' Junho said. 'With the previous baron.'
'Twice,' Pell said. 'As steward, not as lord. I stood at the back.'
'What's it like?'
Pell considered the question carefully.
'It's a room where everyone knows each other's situation,' he said. 'Old debts, old grudges, old alliances. The actual agenda is almost beside the point. The important conversations happen in the corridors and at the dinners.' He paused. 'The previous baron hated it. He found the social navigation exhausting.'
The previous baron found social navigation exhausting.
I spent six years managing clients and contractors and site managers and review panels, all of whom had competing interests and needed to be kept pointed in the same direction.
I know how rooms like that work. I know how people in rooms like that behave.
I have thirty days to understand the political landscape of the Northern March well enough to navigate a room full of established lords who have known each other for decades.
'Tell me everything you know about the other March lords,' Junho said. 'Tonight. We'll start with whoever has the most complicated history with Ashmore and work outward.'
Pell looked at him.
'That would be Lord Trenn of Ealdgate,' he said. 'And the conversation is going to take more than one evening.'
Lord Trenn of Ealdgate.
I don't know that name yet.
I will.
'Then we start tonight and continue tomorrow,' Junho said. 'Get the records. Get everything you know.'
Pell stood. He had the particular quality of a man who had been waiting for this kind of conversation and was slightly relieved it had arrived.
'The records go back forty years,' he said. 'Some of it you'll want to know. Some of it—' He paused. 'Some of it is the kind of history that makes certain conversations complicated before they've started.'
'All of it,' Junho said. 'I'd rather know the complicated history than walk in without it.'
Pell went to find the records.
Sera, who had been sitting at the correspondence table through the entire exchange with the specific stillness of someone who was present and processing but had decided not to be in the center of it, looked up.
'I'm coming to the Assembly,' she said.
'I know,' Junho said.
'You were going to ask me.'
'I was about to.'
She returned to her correspondence.
Thirty days.
I built a territory in two hundred and thirty days by solving one problem at a time.
The March Assembly is a room full of people who have been solving a different kind of problem for much longer than that.
One thing at a time.
Learn the room first.
—
[ End of Chapter 18 ]
~ To be continued ~
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