Chapter 24: Iron Fist Keep
Before the mist had burned off Baywood the next morning, Maewyn was already riding out with six men at his back, carrying Henry's lordship documents and the royal recruitment warrant toward Mill Town. Corlen took ten sailors downriver on a small cargo vessel, the hold stacked with chests of silver — working capital for what needed to be bought in King's Landing. Henry and Maester Winston stayed behind and started walking the castle.
"The local timber — can we use it, or does it need seasoning?"
"It's oak," Winston said, running a hand along the frame of a doorway that had been stripped bare. "Good hard oak. We fell it, let it sit a week or two to shed the worst of the moisture, and it's workable. Stone is a different matter — there's a quarry about six miles west that produces bluestone close enough in color to match the existing walls. Anything we patch will blend. It won't look new."
Henry nodded and divided the men staying behind into two groups: one to go with Winston and mark timber, the other to start clearing the debris from the yard and leveling the ground for what was coming.
Corlen came back from King's Landing with what he'd been sent for. Through a contact of Maester Winston's — a former Citadel man who now ran a small trading house in the city — he'd found a crew worth hiring. The lead mason was a Riverlands man named Tom, heavyset and practical, who'd spent three years working on renovations to the Red Keep before the contracts dried up. He knew stone the way sailors know rope.
Corlen showed him the lordship documents, offered daily wages a fifth above King's Landing rates, and promised room, board, and a completion bonus on top. Tom didn't take long to agree. He brought fifteen stonemasons, twenty carpenters, and recommended ten apprentices who specialized in mortar work and joinery — the men who would hang the doors and reframe the windows. Corlen also hired thirty household staff: cooks, cleaners, a pair of grooms who knew horses, and a steward's assistant who turned out to be the most useful of the lot. They came back upriver by ship, crowding the deck.
The lordship of the Bay of Crabs was smaller than some and larger than others, and it held together reasonably well. At its center stood Iron Fist Keep. Beyond that, Greyhelmet was the largest settlement — a market town of perhaps four thousand, built where two trade roads crossed near the river, with a weekly market and a Sept that needed a new roof. Mill Town was what its name said: grain country, flat land along the river's edge, three mills working most of the year, the source of most of what the territory ate. Waterside Town sat further downstream where the river widened before the bay, a fishing and shipping settlement that smelled accordingly and moved goods more efficiently than its size suggested it should.
Nine villages lay scattered through the woods and along the riverbanks beyond the towns, most of them between three and four hundred people — smallfolk who farmed, cut timber, trapped, and fished, and who had seen lords come and go without much changing for them either way. One of the better-situated villages, a fertile stretch of bottomland along the river's eastern bank, Henry had already granted to Maewyn as a fief. It was a modest holding — less than four hundred people, a mill, a small sept — but it made Maewyn a landed knight in his own right, a vassal capable of raising his own men, which was the point.
The repairs took a month of hard work, with crews going from before dawn until torchlight made precision impossible. By the end of it, the keep was livable in the ways that mattered: the barracks could hold the expanded garrison, the granary had been patched and restocked, the stables could take warhorses again, and the great hall had a roof, a hearth, and doors that actually hung plumb.
Maewyn's hundred men had finished their basic training in the same period. They drilled in the yard every morning and were starting to move like soldiers rather than farmers who'd been handed weapons. Each man had been equipped from the stores: iron helms, padded gambesons lined with wool, surcoats bearing the Reyne red lion on white. They carried cavalry swords at their hips, steel-tipped ash lances, and kite shields. Their horses were solid stock, hand-selected, nothing flashy but nothing lame either. Watching them ride out in formation for the first time, Henry thought they looked like something. Not the Royal Household Guard, but something.
That evening, Henry and Maester Winston sat down with the ledger by candlelight in the maester's study.
Winston was methodical about it. He ran through every line with his finger before he read it aloud, which Henry had come to understand was simply how the man thought — he needed to verify before he spoke.
"The full equipping of the hundred-man cavalry unit came to four hundred and thirty gold dragons. That covers arms, armor, horses, and transport."
"Wages?"
"An ordinary soldier draws fifteen silver stags a month — half again what the Gold Cloaks make in King's Landing. Enough to keep good men from looking elsewhere. Your household guard earns thirty stags. Monthly food costs for the whole force run about seventeen gold dragons — grain, meat, ale, the usual." Winston paused. "In peacetime, total monthly military cost runs under thirty gold dragons. Wartime would roughly double that, once you factor in supply lines and death payments to families."
"The castle repairs?"
"Craftsmen's wages totaled forty-eight silver stags, room and board included. The timber cost nothing beyond labor — your men cut it themselves from Baywood. The household staff — twenty servants, cooks, grooms — runs two hundred silver stags a month combined. The labor tenants working off their customary obligations receive board but no coin." He turned a page. "That's an old arrangement and the smallfolk here expect it. I'd leave it as is for now."
"The smithy?"
"Two senior smiths and six apprentices out of King's Landing, seventy-four silver stags a month combined. The smithy itself — furnaces, anvils, tooling — came to two gold dragons to build out. Once it's running at capacity, it should cut equipment maintenance costs by roughly a third."
Henry rubbed his temple. "Everything else?"
"The maester's study runs ninety stags a month — ravens, medicines, experimental materials. The household kitchens, excluding the barracks, run about four gold dragons a month for meat, produce, and staples. Candles, cloth, salves — sixty stags."
"Give me the total."
Winston did the arithmetic in his head, which he was faster at than most men Henry had met. "Fixed monthly expenditure, excluding one-time costs, is approximately thirty-six gold dragons. Of the thirty thousand gold dragons granted by the King, four hundred and thirty-two have been spent on one-time items — equipment, horses, the smithy. That leaves twenty-nine thousand five hundred and sixty-eight in reserve. The smaller expenses covered from your private funds have been recorded separately."
Henry sat back. "Thirty thousand gold dragons."
"It's a significant sum, my lord."
"You could build ten castles this size for that." He thought about it for a moment. "How long would it actually take to build a castle from scratch — if you were using labor tenants and buying your own materials?"
"For a fortification of this scale, the primary cost is materials and skilled craftsmen. Call it twenty-two hundred gold dragons for the materials alone, assuming local stone and timber. The constraint is time — a proper castle takes at least two years, even pushing hard."
Henry was quiet for a moment. Then: "Tell Maewyn to start recruiting three hundred infantry. Prioritize men with hunting or fighting experience — woodsmen, river men, anyone who knows how to be useful in a fight rather than just how to hold a spear. At the same time, I want a hundred crossbows sourced from Myr — quality ones, not surplus. And allocate eight thousand gold dragons for expanding the keep: the gatehouse needs reinforcing, the watchtowers need height, and I want a moat dug before winter."
Winston made notes without comment. He'd learned, in the past month, that Henry generally meant what he said and didn't need it repeated back to him.
[Reader Event Active]
500 Power Stones = +1 Extra Chapter
10 Reviews = +1 Extra Chapter
Thanks for reading!
20+advance chapters on P1treon Soulforger