Outside the walls of Deddington Castle, the damp morning air grew thick with the heavy scent of leather, sweat, and packed grease. Solomon's combined host was gathering for the march. Common foot soldiers checked the bindings on their cross-guards with an unexpected focus, while the destriers pawed restlessly at the dirt track, kicking up a fine, gray dust that hung low over the lines.
The stark atmosphere of an impending campaign was hardening along the road. Lord Lymond Lychester stood beneath the timber shadow of the portcullis, watching the rows of spears with a troubled gaze, before stepping forward to approach Solomon's stirrup.
He lowered his voice into a tight whisper, as if sharing a treasonous text. "Solomon."
"I offer you this counsel. Do not spend your initial authority executing or stripping the manors from those Deddington bannermen who denied your call."
Solomon adjusted his grip on his reins, shifting his weight in the saddle to look down at the weary, half-dreaming old lord, waiting for the logic to unfold.
"Among the high seats of the Trident, preserving one's lances during an active raid, or even leaving a neighbor to hold his own gate, is an unwritten law we all practice. If you use your mandate to break them today, you will win a brief season of fear, but you will shatter the shared understanding that keeps the peace between our halls."
"Furthermore, by the letter of the law, those keeps have already met their basic feudal tax to the high seat this season."
The old man paused, his weathered face turning remarkably grave.
"The high lords of Westeros will look upon our vanguard as a pair of dangerous outcasts. Two madmen who refuse to honor the ancient customs of the soil. They will bar their gates against our merchants, ignore our ravens, and ultimately, they will find a method to cut our line."
"A stain like that will ruin the ledger you are trying to build."
Solomon listened to the old man's protective warnings without a trace of compliance showing on his features. Instead, a quiet, thin smile touched the corners of his mouth, an expression so thoroughly devoid of noble reverence that Lymond felt a cold stillness settle behind his ears.
He looked down into the old man's clouded eyes, his voice regular but possessing a metallic clarity that cut through the noise of the wagons. "Lord Lymond, if we hope to collect the winnings from this table, we must first master the arithmetic of the board."
"We must define precisely who is our friend, who is a merchant we can barter with, and... who is the true enemy we must remove from the field."
Without granting the old mind time to retreat into its familiar fog, Solomon shifted the lens to a completely separate, far more dangerous topic.
"In the seven seats of this kingdom, a man born to the plow dies with dirt beneath his fingernails. The grand architecture of the realm, from the Red Keep down to the smallest timber hold, does not provide a single rung for a commoner to lift his name from the mud."
The statement fell between them like an iron gauntlet, causing Lymond's brow to furrow instantly. The perspective caused a deep, instinctive discomfort to ripple through his thoughts, as if Solomon had just spat upon the altar of a sept.
The old lord answered with the immediate defensive custom of his class. "Why should a shepherd offer a ladder to his flock?"
"The septons teach us that the smallfolk are meant to live as quiet sheep, content with their pasture and obedient to the guidance of the staff. The rule of the ancient bloodlines is the natural order of the world, a balance written into the stars by the heavens."
Solomon dismounted with a slow, smooth movement, tossing his reins to a nearby guard. He stepped alongside Lymond, their boots aligned as they looked over the columns preparing for the western tracks. He lifted his hand, pointing his leather glove toward the Willowdale squads, where the common foot soldiers stood with eyes completely devoid of peasant fear, carrying instead the sharp, hungry look of men counting their prospects.
Then, his arm shifted toward the opposite side of the road. A loose collection of some forty landless hedge knights, hirelings, and household retainers from the broken estates stood near their mounts. Their armor was rusted at the hinges, their doublets frayed, and several lacked even a single boy to hold their shields.
"Look closely at those landless lances, Lord Lymond. Those hirelings and sworn swords who have no manors to leave for their sons."
"Consider those minor families whose fields are so thin and taxes so meager they will never see their names listed in the grand chronicles of the Citadel. If you strip away the hollow titles and the castle-forged steel, what is the true difference between their ledger and the ledger of a common plowman?"
The old man had spent his long life within the rigid borders of his class, where a gentleman was a gentleman and a peasant was mud, separated by an unbridgeable ditch. Now, the comparison struck his thoughts with the force of a heavy war-hammer, shaking the foundations of his worldview.
Lymond stared blankly at the rusted armor of the hedge knights, his lips parting but no words clearing his throat. The logic was clean.
The rungs of the ladder had been barred to the minor lances and the small keeps by the very weight of the great seats. Solomon's words acted like a skinning knife, peeling away the fine silk of feudal vanity to reveal the raw rot beneath. These landless swords had every reason to despise the grand lineages who held leagues of rich valley and valleys of gold, blocking every path to advancement.
Solomon did not relent. He turned his face to look directly into Lymond's milky eyes, his voice dropping into a low, compelling whisper that answered the old man's internal terror.
"Do you truly believe that among the lords of Westeros, there are no gentlemen who hate the grand seats?"
"Across the seven kingdoms, the actual authority is concentrated within the hands of barely a hundred supreme lineages."
"They sit at the apex of the food chain like greedy lions, monopolizing the richest fields, hoarding mountains of gold dragons within their private vaults, and reserving the finest marriages and titles for their own blood."
"They have drawn a circle in the dirt, an absolute, unyielding circle that opens only for themselves."
Each phrase landed behind Lymond's ears like a needle. Solomon stepped closer, his dark eyes sharp as an eagle marking its prey, searching the old lord's soul.
"And where does that leave our names?"
"You and I sit in the same ditch, my Lord."
The cold clarity of the statement caused Lymond's frame to shudder, a sudden tremor passing from his spine to his jaw as he remembered his dead sons and the slow, bleeding decay of his house.
"The standing of House Lychester in the high courts of the realm is no different from the standing of a second son from Willowdale. We are both outcasts."
"We are the names left scratching at the outside of their circle."
The old lord went perfectly quiet. The decades of humiliation he had blamed on bad winters, poor luck, or the strength of his rivals had been reordered by Solomon into a brutal, uncomplicated formula. They had not failed because their lances were weak, they had been born outside the gate.
Solomon retrieved his reins from the guard, vaulting back into his saddle with an easy grace before looking down at the shaken old man. "Therefore, my Lord, the arithmetic demands our focus."
"We must be precise in choosing our targets, precise in choosing whose hands we fill with coin, and precise in choosing who marches alongside our shields."
He used his riding whip to gesture toward the long column of infantry.
"We shall secure the absolute devotion of the common smallfolk because they possess nothing but their breath. They hunger for bread and a patch of soil they can call their own. For that soil, and for a structured path to lift their names, they will stand against any line of lances until the steel breaks."
"We shall open that same road to the landless hedge knights and the minor keeps, granting them the prospects the high seats have denied them for centuries. Once they understand that following our banner yields the rewards the Tullys would never dream of granting, they will become the truest shields in our ledger."
Solomon's voice turned instantly freezing, the conversational tone replaced by a raw, unvarnished murder.
"And the coin to pay for this expansion will be extracted from the grand lineages who refuse to share their fields."
"Their extinction is our profit."
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