The county rounds happened every Tuesday, without exception.
Rain, frost, and the occasional minor political crisis none of it had ever stopped Edric Ashveil from making his rounds. Caelan had asked him once, years ago, why Tuesday specifically. His father had considered the question with the seriousness he gave everything and said, "Because if I skip a Tuesday, I might skip a Wednesday, and a man who skips Wednesdays becomes a man who only shows up when something is already broken."[1]Then he had gone back to his ledger, apparently satisfied.
Caelan had written that down too.
Today, three days after Aldous Fenn's burial, the rain had cleared into a cold, pale autumn morning, and Edric had knocked on Caelan's door at the customary time, early enough to feel unreasonable, and said simply, "Come You should see this."
He'd never been invited on the rounds before.
He didn't ask why. He put his boots on and followed.
Greymaw County was nothing impressive on a map. No mountains worth defending, no rivers worth taxing, no silver hidden under its soil. The land tried its best—thin in the east, stubborn everywhere else and the village at its heart survived more out of habit than prosperity. Nine hundred souls on a crowded market day. A mill leaning slightly to one side. An inn that served Greymaw Stew, which tasted mostly of effort.
But it had people. And that, Caelan realized as he followed his father down the dirt road, was what mattered.
Not a population. Not a ledger entry. People with names his father spoke without hesitation. People whose worries he carried like small, invisible stones in his pockets.
At the grain store, Torven's voice thundered across the yard, his anger polished sharp by weeks of repetition. Bet stood opposite him, quiet but burning, with the kind of anger that sat low and steady. Edric listened to both with the calm of a man who believed time was better spent mending than winning.
Caelan watched carefully from just behind and to the right, where he could see everyone's face without being seen too much himself. His father asked two simple questions that weren't simple at all. The solution he offered gave neither farmer victory, only peace.
Torven deflated under Edric's steady gaze. Bet thanked him, not warmly, but with relief.
As they walked away, Caelan said softly, "You already knew who was right."
His father's smile was faint. "Knowing isn't the hard part. Making it last is."
Caelan felt that settle somewhere deep inside him. His father didn't just solve problems he protected the fragile space where people could keep living beside one another. And for the first time, Caelan understood that Greymaw wasn't small at all.
It was simply held together by someone who cared enough to remember every name.
The mill was everything the county said it was, which was to say it was structurally defiant of physics and running entirely on stubbornness. The miller, a dwarven man named Bok who had come down from the Lowmarch three decades ago and simply never left, met them in the yard with a look that suggested he had been expecting this visit and had been rehearsing his arguments.
"The eastern wheel," Edric said, before Bok could start.
"The eastern wheel," Bok agreed, with the grim satisfaction of a man whose problem has finally received its proper name.
They went to look at the eastern wheel. Caelan went with them. The wheel was not, technically, broken it was achieving a kind of motion, albeit a motion that seemed to involve a disturbing lateral wobble every third rotation and a sound Caelan could only describe as reluctant.
"Winter?" Edric asked.
"If we're lucky," Bok said. "And we're never lucky with that wheel."
"What do you need?"
Bok had a list. It was not a short list. Edric listened to the whole thing, and then they negotiated not harshly, but with the practical back-and-forth of people who each understood the other's constraints, and by the end they had something workable, and Bok was grumbling in the comfortable way of people who got what they needed and feel they owe the universe some nominal dissatisfaction.
Walking away, Caelan looked back at the mill once. The eastern wheel groaned through another reluctant rotation.
"He's been asking about that wheel for two years," he said.
"Three," Edric said.
"Why did you wait?"
His father was quiet for a moment. Not thinking about deciding whether to answer honestly or carefully. Caelan had learned to recognize the difference. Today, for some reason, he chose honesty.
"Because for two of those three years, fixing the wheel would have meant pulling resources from the eastern tenant road repairs, which would have meant three families spending another winter cutting a bad path through frost to get their goods to market." He paused. "The wheel is one man's problem. The road was three families' problem. So."
"You triaged it."
Edric looked at him. Something shifted in his expression not surprise exactly, but the recalibration of a man who has just learned his mental model of something needs updating.
"Yes," he said. "I suppose I did."
Caelan nodded and said nothing further. He didn't want to make his father self-conscious about the recalibration.
The Greymaw revealed itself in the last hour of the morning.
They had come round the county's eastern boundary, following a path between the last of the tenant farms and the long tree line that marked the edge of managed land. Here the air changed character, cooler and heavy with something that Caelan didn't have language for yet, a presence more than a smell. His chest felt odd. Not frightened, exactly. Attentive.
Then the trees thinned, and there it was.
A darkness in the earth. That was the only description that felt accurate not a cave, not a hole, but a darkness, as if the ground had opened to show what was underneath the world and what was underneath was the absence of light, patient and ancient and entirely unconcerned with them.
The grass around it was strange. Too bright. Too still. No birds flew within fifty yards of the entrance.
Caelan stopped walking. He hadn't meant to. His feet simply found reasons to be where they were.
Edric stopped beside him.
"There it is," his father said.
"The farmers call it a blessing." Caelan heard the question in his own voice without meaning to put it there.
"The farmers," Edric said, without judgment, "don't read survey records."
They stood there for a moment, the two of them, looking at the shape the world made when it decided to keep a secret. The Greymaw breathed cold air outward across the grass. Somewhere far below Caelan could feel it, a vibration below sound, below sensation, at some frequency he couldn't name something was very, very slowly waking up.
His father put a hand briefly on his shoulder.
"Come," he said. "There's still the southern holdings."
Caelan looked at the Greymaw for one more moment. Memorized it. Filed it.
Then he turned and followed his father, and the dungeon breathed behind them, and the morning was almost gone.
End of Chapter 2
[1] I kept Earth’s weekdays, because even in another world, Tuesday still feels like responsibility.