Chapter 41: The Ledger of a Lord

The silence after the storm was worse than the screaming wind.

The digging crews moved like ghosts through the blinding white glare of the morning. There was no path to the outer ring. The road was buried under a load of packed snow so dense it had to be hacked apart with iron spades.

Arthur stood waist-deep in a trenched path, his breath pluming in the still air, following the guards as they slowly carved a route toward the cut-off hovels.

Whff. Whff.

Every shovel strike that rang against the ice felt like a hammer hitting an iron bell inside his skull.

Thousands of tons of static weight, Arthur thought, staring at the sheer white walls. His eyes were bloodshot, rimmed with sleepless red. I built the iron stoves. But I didn’t engineer a way to move them through this load. The entire plan collapsed because of one uncalculated variable.

Those thoughts had gnawed at him for the whole week, refusing to let go.

Ahead of him, Marcus drove his spade into a solid wall of snow, finally breaching the front of a small, wood-slatted hovel. It was one of the homes that had been cut off from the wood rations ten days ago.

The timber door was frozen shut. Marcus didn’t bother finding the latch. He just kicked the door on the frozen iron hinges.

The wood splintered. The door collapsed inward with a heavy thud.

A wave of stale, freezing air rolled out of the dark interior. It smelled like cold ash and still dirt.

The old guard stepped inside first, ducking his head. Arthur followed, his boots crunching over the frost-coated floorboards.

The hearth was empty. A dusting of gray ash was all that remained of the fuel supply.

In the far corner, curled into a tight ball against the frost-covered wall, lay a man. He was stripped down to a thin, linen undershirt.

Arthur’s mind, desperate to rationalize the terror, recognized the grim reality of the freezing sleep—the body burning its last reserves of heat, tricking the man into feeling hot before his heart finally gave in.

“Gods have mercy,” a guard whispered from the doorway, touching the cold iron amulet beneath his collar.

Marcus didn’t speak. He stepped forward toward the center of the room. A massive, heavy wool winter coat lay in a heap on the wooden floor.

Slowly, he reached down and pulled the wool back.

Arthur’s breath caught in his throat.

A teenage girl was huddled underneath. Her blue lips were cracked, her skin the color of old parchment. Her chest barely rose up with each shallow breath.

But she wasn’t alone under the coat.

Her arms were wrapped fiercely around a little boy.

Marcus knelt. He gently reached out and touched the boy’s cheek. As he closed his eyes, the silence in the room deepened even further.

The little boy was completely rigid. Frost clung to his eyelashes. He had been dead for hours.

That wasn’t supposed to happen.

Not like this.

“Get the girl to the estate,” Marcus ordered, his voice cracking, completely devoid of its usual booming authority.

Arthur stood frozen in the center of the hovel. He looked at the dead father. He looked at the dead mother slumped near the wall. And then, he looked at the surviving girl.

He felt his stomach drop out.

He didn’t see a simple tragedy. He saw the direct consequences of his own choices.

Arthur tried to look away.

He couldn’t.

His eyes kept drifting to the boy’s frozen face.

The guards scrambled backward out into the snow.

Arthur backed out of the hovel into the blinding light of the snow trench. His boots caught on a hidden piece of frozen firewood, and he fell hard onto his knees.

He stared down at his trembling hands.

In his past life, when a grand design failed, the consequences were abstract. A flawed calculation meant red ink on a screen. A failed project meant a bruised ego and a penalty fee. You adjusted the numbers and moved on.

He had treated this world exactly the same way.

Weeks ago, he had stood in Roderick’s study, looking at the extortionate prices demanded by the Lumber Guild. He remembered his own arrogant, confident voice.

He had persuaded Roderick to cut the wood supply. He thought he was playing a brilliant game of economic strategy, perfectly optimizing the city’s resources.

He forgot that the gears of his grand machine were made of shivering horses, frozen mud, and fragile human lives.

Only the words—Do not fail me, Oliver—echoed in his mind. Words that cut deeper than any knife would have.

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Down the street, another heavy wooden door splintered inward under a guard’s boot. A few seconds later, a woman wailed—a thin, ragged sound that was immediately swallowed by the deadening snow.

Arthur bowed his head, pressing his forehead directly into snow, crushed under the absolute, unforgiving weight of his own hubris.

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Heavy, armored footsteps crunched in the snow behind Arthur, stopping just a few feet away.

The young heir didn’t look up. He kept his forehead pressed against the freezing snow, waiting for the executioner’s axe, waiting for the shouting, waiting for the blame. Just something that will extinguish the fire burning in his throat. Something that will bring salvation to his soul.

A massive, iron-gauntleted hand clamped down on Arthur’s shoulder.

It didn’t strike him. It simply gripped his tunic and hauled him to his feet with terrifying, effortless strength.

Arthur stumbled, his hands instinctively coming up. He found himself staring into the hardened, frost-scarred face of Lord Roderick.