Chapter 6 : The River Gives
The Ashburn ran cold enough to numb my hands in thirty seconds.
Day nine. The fishing operation's sixth morning. I stood knee-deep in snowmelt current with my fingers locked around a wicker frame that was supposed to be a fish trap and was currently a fish suggestion—the kind of polite invitation that fish were free to ignore, and had been ignoring for two solid days.
PBS. There was a documentary. Indigenous fishing methods of the Pacific Northwest. Funnel traps—wide mouth, narrow throat, angled against the current so the fish swim in following the flow and can't figure out how to swim back out. The principle is sound. The execution is the problem.
The first design had failed because I'd placed the traps in the fastest section of the current. The wicker couldn't hold against the force. The frames twisted, the funnels collapsed, and twelve hours of weaving went downstream in pieces.
The second design failed because the openings were too large. Fish swam in and swam right back out. An old woman named Hilda—sixty-two, missing three fingers on her left hand, silent as a stone—had watched my second attempt, walked to the bank, and pointed at a bend in the river where the current slowed against a gravel bar.
She hadn't said a word. Just pointed.
I moved the traps to the bend. Rebuilt the funnels with tighter weave—Lira had appeared on the third morning with a bundle of river-willow shoots, perfectly uniform, that she'd cut at dawn. I didn't ask how she'd known I needed them. Weighted the baskets with river stones. Angled the mouths against the current at forty-five degrees instead of head-on.
Day three of the revised setup: the traps pulled in enough fish to feed forty people. Trout, mostly, with some kind of bottom-feeder that Widow Merrin identified as safe and nobody could name.
Day five—today—the haul was consistent. Fifteen baskets across the gravel bend, checked at dawn and dusk, producing a reliable surplus that Widow Merrin's team cleaned and Lira's improvised drying racks preserved.
The smell of smoked fish carried across the riverbank. A week ago, this stretch of shore had been mud and silence. Now it held drying racks built from salvaged timber, a smoking pit lined with river clay, and a rotation of workers who showed up not because I ordered them but because the work fed their families and the routine had become something to hold onto.
Food supply extended. Not solved—extended. The traps buy us time. The farm buys us a future. One is operational. The other is still a blueprint and eight gold crowns I haven't spent yet.
A notification pulsed:
[Quest Update: Stabilize Food Supply]
[Progress: 47%]
[Food Supply Extended to 56 Days]
[Days Remaining: 21]
Forty-seven percent. The fishing accounts for most of that. The farm needs to be planted within the week or the growing season window closes and the quest fails regardless.
I hauled the last basket to shore and dumped the contents into Hilda's sorting trough. She separated the fish by size with practiced speed—keepers in the left bin, too-small in the right, anything suspicious into a third bin that Widow Merrin inspected personally.
My hands were raw. The blisters from the first days had broken and begun to callus, which was progress of a kind—the body remembering how to be useful. My shoulders ached from hauling, my lower back protested every time I bent over the traps, and I was hungrier than I'd ever been in either life, which meant the body was recovering and demanding fuel.
Human moment. This is the first meal I've genuinely enjoyed since waking up in this world.
The midday break was bread and smoked trout and a mug of cold river water, sitting on the bank with my boots off and my feet in the current. The bread was coarse and the trout was salty and the water tasted like stone and snowmelt and it was the best lunch I'd had in two worlds.
---
[Ashwick Keep — Study, Evening]
The Skill Tree spread across my vision like a constellation map.
Three branches: Governance, Military, Development. Each branch splitting into sub-skills, each sub-skill showing five ranks with increasing costs. The total SP required to max everything was astronomical—hundreds of points that I'd earn at a rate of maybe five per quest.
This is a resource allocation problem. Classic optimization. I can't do everything, so I need to identify the highest-value investments for the current phase.
I had exactly one Skill Point. Earned from daily quests I'd been completing without realizing—"Inspect the walls" had triggered when I walked the perimeter with Harlan. "Hold a town meeting" had triggered from the assembly.
[Available SP: 1]
[Governance Branch:]
[— Tax Optimization I: Reduces tax collection waste by 5%]
[— Morale Beacon I: +2 morale passively while in town]
[— Population Magnetism I: Travelers 10% more likely to settle]
[— Administrative Insight I: Highlights most critical issue daily]
[Development Branch:]
[— Resource Prospector I: Nearest resource deposit visible on mini-map]
[— Construction Efficiency I: Building projects complete 5% faster]
[Military Branch:]
[— Drill Sergeant I: Training 10% faster under lord's oversight]
[— Fortification Savant I: Identifies weakest defensive point]
Resource Prospector. It's the move. I already know the mine isn't depleted—Resource Sense confirmed that. But Resource Prospector gives me persistent data. It puts the mine on the map permanently, shows me what else is out there, and it's the foundation for every economic decision I'll make for the next year.
Morale Beacon is tempting. Two passive morale would push us from 23 to 25, which isn't nothing when you're fighting an exodus. But morale is a symptom. Fix the food, fix the economy, fix the walls—morale follows. Resource Prospector attacks the root cause.
I invested the point.
[Skill Unlocked: Resource Prospector I]
[Effect: Nearest significant resource deposit now visible on mini-map]
[Passive — No AP cost]
The mini-map updated. The mine in the Greymist Hills glowed steady amber—iron deposits, confirmed, accessible with drainage work. And there, northeast of town, at the edge of the old-growth forest: a scatter of green markers I hadn't seen before.
[Resource Detected: Botanical — Spirit Herbs (Multiple Varieties)]
[Classification: High Value]
[Note: Requires trained herbalist for identification and safe harvesting]
Spirit herbs. The world bible calls them plants that grow in magically dense soil. Worth fifty to a hundred times their weight in gold in Heartland markets. And they're growing in my backyard, and nobody knows because nobody in Ashwick has ever had a trained herbalist who could identify—
Wait. Lira. The Talent Scout reading. Nature and Water affinity. Latent magical talent. She can feel plants growing—she said that, or something like it. If anyone could learn to identify spirit herbs...
I closed the Skill Tree and pulled up the quest board.
[Quest Update: Stabilize Food Supply]
[Progress: 47%]
[Recommendation: Invest in agricultural infrastructure to reach 90+ day threshold]
Twenty-one days to hit ninety days of food supply. The fishing covered some. The farm would cover the rest—if I planted in time, if the soil cooperated, if the weather held.
If, if, if. The urban planner in me wants certainty. This world doesn't sell certainty. It sells effort and odds.
---
[Ashburn River — Day 12, Midmorning]
The riders appeared on the southern ridge at mid-morning, when the light was behind them and their silhouettes cut sharp against the sky.
Two of them. Mounted. Stationary. Watching.
I was hauling the third basket of the morning when the shape registered—not townspeople, not guardsmen. The horses were wrong. Ashwick had no horses. These were lean animals, built for distance, and the riders sat with the easy posture of people accustomed to the saddle.
I kept hauling. Didn't look up. Didn't change my pace.
Sera materialized beside me. She'd been on the eastern bank, supervising the lumber crew pulling logs from the demolished buildings, but she moved through the riverside brush without a sound.
"You saw them."
"Southern ridge. Two mounted. Watching, not approaching."
Her expression didn't change. "They have been watching for three days."
Three days. She knew. Of course she knew.
"Crimson Fang?"
"Likely. The Crimson Fang operates south of the Greymist Hills. They have been growing bolder in the past year—raiding farms, extorting small settlements. Ashwick has been too poor to bother with." A pause. "That assessment may be changing."
A dying town has nothing worth stealing. A town with a fishing operation, a wall repair project, and a lord who's spending gold on infrastructure—that's a town with something to take.
"What's their strength?"
"Estimated forty to sixty. Mixed. Some former soldiers, some bandits with combat experience, a few who may have genuine martial training at the Apprentice level. Their leader is unknown to me—he operates through lieutenants."
"Expert-rank or above among them?"
"Unlikely. An Expert would not waste time raiding border villages. The most dangerous will be Journeyman-rank at best."
Journeyman-rank. In practical terms, that means someone who can shatter stone and move faster than a normal human can track. Against twelve guardsmen, most of whom are past their prime—that's a massacre.
But against Sera, who's Expert-rank and approximately one breakthrough from Master...
"How often do they raid?"
"Seasonal. Late spring, when provisions run low and the roads clear. They test targets first—scouts, observation, probing for weakness. If they find it, they come in force. If they don't, they move on."
"And right now they're testing."
"Yes."
The two riders held their position for another hour, then turned south and disappeared below the ridge. I watched the space where they'd been and did the math.
Forty to sixty bandits. Twelve guardsmen. One Expert-rank knight. A wall that wouldn't be finished for another two weeks. A food supply that was just beginning to recover.
"Commander. I want the observation points mapped. Every ridge, every clearing with a sightline to town. Where they've been watching from, how long, how many. If we can predict their patrol routes, we can predict when they'll escalate."
"That requires scouting the southern hills. Alone."
"Take who you need."
"I need no one." She said it without pride, without challenge. A statement of operational fact. "I will map their routes within two days."
She was gone before I could respond, moving upstream with the fluid economy of someone who'd spent half her life navigating terrain that wanted to kill her.
---
[Ashburn River — Day 14, Afternoon]
Old Callum caught me gutting a fish wrong for the fourth time and finally took the knife out of my hand.
"You're sawing. Don't saw." He held the trout belly-up, slid the blade from vent to jaw in one smooth motion, and the guts spilled into the waste bucket in a single mass. "One cut. Let the blade do the work."
"Like this?"
"No. Like—here." He wrapped his scarred hand around mine and guided the angle. "You're fighting the fish. Stop fighting it. It's already dead. Be gentle."
I tried again. The cut was cleaner. Still rough, still amateur, but the guts came out in one piece instead of three.
"Better." Callum leaned back against the sorting frame, his hand pressed to his lower back. "You'll get it. Your hands are learning."
For three minutes, the lord of Ashwick was just a young man with slippery hands, learning a simple skill from a patient old man who smelled like river water and pipe smoke. The sun was warm on my shoulders. The river gurgled over the gravel bar. Somewhere upstream, someone laughed—actually laughed—and the sound was so unexpected that I looked up.
Two women on the washing rocks, sleeves rolled up, scrubbing cloth and talking. One of them had said something funny, and the other was laughing, and the sound carried across the water like something that had been missing so long its return felt like weather changing.
When was the last time someone laughed in Ashwick? Mathis would know. He'd have it in a ledger somewhere. 'Laughter: last recorded instance, fiscal year...'
Callum watched me watching them.
"It's the fish," he said.
"What?"
"The laughter. When people eat, they talk. When they talk, they laugh. When they laugh—" He shrugged. Winced. His back again. "Your grandfather used to say a fed town is a happy town. Simple old man. But he wasn't wrong."
I cleaned two more fish. Badly. Callum corrected my grip each time without impatience, the way a man teaches when he's decided the student is worth the time.
---
[Ashwick Keep — Rampart, Evening]
From the rampart, the riverbank had transformed.
Drying racks stood in rows along the shore—simple wooden frames strung with cord, hung with split fish that cured in the late-spring air. The smoking pit sent a thin column of grey up into the sky, steady and purposeful. Workers moved between the racks and the sorting station, carrying baskets, adjusting the frames, doing the small repetitive work that turned raw catch into stored provisions.
Two weeks ago, that stretch of bank had been bare mud.
The northern wall was taking shape too—slowly, painfully, log by log. Harlan's crew had sunk the first new posts yesterday, and the sound of mallets driving timber into earth had been the percussion line of Ashwick's new rhythm. The eastern quarter was being eaten, building by building, its timber repurposed into something that might keep people alive.
Progress. Real, tangible, measurable progress. Population 203, no change. Morale 23—up five from when I started. Food supply 56 days and climbing. Defense still garbage, but the wall is under construction. Economy still functionally zero, but I haven't spent the seed money yet.
And on the southern ridge, Crimson Fang scouts are mapping our operations.
Sera returned at dusk with a mental map she translated into marks on my slate board. Six observation points, all on the southern ridgeline, each with clear sightlines to different sections of town. The scouts rotated between them on a two-day cycle. They were professional enough to vary their timing but predictable enough in their positions to profile.
"They are assessing our recovery," she said. "A town that was dying two weeks ago is now building walls and operating a fishery. That represents value."
"When will they move?"
"If their pattern holds—late spring. Three to four weeks. They will send a representative first. A demand for tribute. If we pay, they leave until next season. If we refuse, they raid."
"How much tribute?"
"For a town this size? Twenty gold. Perhaps thirty."
Twenty to thirty gold. We have twelve. Four in reserve, eight committed to the farm. Even if we had thirty gold to spare, paying tribute to bandits is a subscription to extortion. You pay once, you pay forever.
"We don't pay."
"Then we fight."
"Then we prepare." I picked up the chalk. Drew the northern approach, the ridgelines, the river. "Three to four weeks. The wall needs to be functional in two. After that, we drill the guardsmen—not patrol duty, actual defensive formations. You train them."
"They are not soldiers, my lord."
"Make them adequate. You have two weeks."
She studied the slate diagram. Her hand rested on her sword hilt—the habitual gesture, the resting position of a woman who'd been ready for violence for so long that readiness was indistinguishable from relaxation.
"Understood."
Smoke from the drying racks drifted up through the evening air, mixing with the last light, and the smell of smoked trout reached the rampart on a wind that carried the first real warmth of spring. Below, workers were banking the smoking pit for the night, covering the coals, preparing for tomorrow's catch.
I picked up the lockbox key. Eight gold crowns for seeds and tools. Tomorrow, someone would ride to Thornwall Market—the only option, the worst option, the necessary option—and Ashwick's survival would depend on soil that hadn't been worked in three years and a growing season that was already half-started.
The farm blueprint pulsed in my peripheral vision, waiting.
I turned to Sera.
"One more thing. I need someone who can ride to Thornwall Market and back in six days. Someone who can buy seeds and tools without drawing attention."
"Lena Breck," Sera said. No hesitation. "She knows the market. She has been there with her father. She is sharp enough to negotiate and young enough to be dismissed as a farmer's errand."
"Send her tomorrow. Eight gold crowns. Seed stock for wheat, barley, and root vegetables. Basic farming tools—hoes, spades, two good scythes. And Sera—tell her to buy a fishing net. A real one. Not the wicker disasters I've been building."
The ghost of something crossed Sera's face. Not a smile. Sera didn't smile. But the ghost of one, passing through like a cloud shadow.
"Understood, my lord."
The three moons rose over Ashwick, and beneath them, for the first time in a decade, something was being built instead of lost.
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