Chapter 874: Men of Sin
The wells around the castle were working. There were enough of them, and enough hands. None of it mattered.
The fire had started without warning — no alarm, no early smell of smoke reaching the guards, nothing to distinguish its first minutes from any normal night until the smoke was already thick enough to keep rescuers out of the corridors entirely. By the time the First Army pulled back and sealed the perimeter, the interior of the dungeon was inaccessible. They waited it out. When the smoke finally thinned enough to allow entry, there was nothing left of the prisoners to recover.
The investigation was prompt. The temporary City Hall, established in Valencia’s administrative chambers, took charge of the inquiry, and the conclusion arrived quickly: a cell of the Rats — the Black Street criminal network that had festered in Valencia’s shadow for years, hollowed out by Wilion’s wartime requisitions and burning with accumulated resentment — had slipped into the dungeon through a hidden passage and set fire to the stored grain. A deliberate act of arson. An affront to the new order.
The First Army published the finding. Then it began the cleanup.
The operation moved on two tracks: root out the Rats, and feed the city. Captured grain from the nobles’ estate storehouses went into cookpots in the square. Job notices went up beside them — work available, silver and food both, no prior service required. The Rats were hunted through informant networks, rewards calibrated carefully: silver for names, grain for information, lenience for surrender. The city that Wilion had stripped to a fortified shell and half-starved over two years of preparation was coming back to something like life with a speed that surprised even Iron Axe’s officers.
That night, Bearpaw came again.
“Chief. We’ve spotted movement from the noble families — a dozen carriages left through the West Gate an hour ago. Heading for Seawindshire. The ruts were deep.” He paused. “Very deep.”
“Gold and jewelry.” Iron Axe didn’t look up from the documents on his desk. “I said at the beginning: their food stays here. Everything else is theirs to take.”
Bearpaw said nothing for a moment. “You knew they’d run.”
“It was the only rational move once the dungeon fire gave them the answer to the question they’d been sitting with.”
He set down the quill.
The noble families had come to Valencia with a negotiating position: survive the siege, wait for Roland to arrive in person, offer a ransom at a figure that would satisfy a king, walk away with titles and lands diminished but intact. It was the logic of their entire class, refined over generations of defeats and recoveries. A title could be inherited. A family could be rebuilt. Lands reduced by penalty could be worked back up. As long as the senior line survived, the institution survived.
The dungeon fire had communicated something different. Whatever happened to the nobles imprisoned there, it had happened quickly, with no trial, under the authority of a commander who had simply decided. The families outside the dungeon understood immediately that they were no longer operating inside the system they knew. In that system, there was always a transaction available — always something to offer, always a king who would take it. In this system, the calculus was different, and they did not know the rules yet.
Better to run to Seawindshire or beyond the kingdom’s borders entirely, taking the portable wealth and leaving the lands.
And Wilion had already left the lands in a state that made this choice easier. Two years of stripping the surrounding territory to fortify the city — every able body conscripted, every grain reserve commandeered, every road and waterway taxed or blocked — had left the surrounding farms in a condition that would take years to recover. The nobles were not abandoning a going concern. They were abandoning a ruin that had their name on it.
“You had one more question,” Iron Axe said. “Ask it.”
Bearpaw was quiet for longer than usual. “Did you set the fire yourself?”
“What makes you think so?”
“The secret passage was secured by an iron partition door. The Rats couldn’t have opened it — that’s not their skill set. Our garrison wasn’t lax enough to miss an infiltration. The burn pattern I found in the ruins started in the corridor, not in the cells. And the fuel pattern was consistent with oil, not grain.” He kept his voice even. “I’ve checked the dungeon twice.”
Iron Axe nodded. “The fire was set under my order.”
Bearpaw absorbed this. “Why?”
“Because this kind of thing is better handled by one person. Every additional person who knows a plan before it executes is a place it can unravel.”
“That’s not what I meant.” Bearpaw met his eyes. “They’d already surrendered.”
Iron Axe looked at him for a moment, then picked up the book on the desk and held it out. “Read the first section.”
Bearpaw took it. “This is a demographic report.”
“Found in the castle library. Five years ago, Valencia and its surrounding lands held two hundred twenty thousand people. It was the most productive territory in the Eastern Region — the trade routes, the harbor access, the farmland. This year, the population stands at sixty thousand. We’ve resettled thirty to forty thousand of the Eastern Region’s refugees back in Neverwinter. Round it up: that’s still a deficit of a hundred twenty thousand souls, before you account for the years of population growth that should have accrued on top of the original number.” He rose and moved to the candlestick, his hands clasped behind his back. “You know the reasons.”
“The flooding. The road blocking. The forced labor for the fortifications.”
“Wilion called up every person within reach to work his defenses. He did not have the authority for that conscription alone — not at that scale. The scope of what he accomplished required backing, coordination, and assistance from the other lords. They were not bystanders caught under his jurisdiction. They were participants.” He let that sit for a moment. “Does His Majesty accept the allegiance of participants?”
Bearpaw was quiet.
“They did not believe they’d done anything wrong,” Iron Axe continued. “I mean that precisely, not as a condemnation. From inside their understanding of the world, what they had done was ordinary. They had followed the Duke’s direction. They had managed their lands as they saw fit. Some farmland had been ruined in the process, but their storehouses were full. Even after two years of siege preparation, their cellars were still stocked — with grain, and with other preserved things.” He paused. “When a city is isolated long enough, and hungry enough, certain solutions become practical.”
He did not say it plainly. He did not need to. He watched Bearpaw’s face.
“The hundred twenty thousand,” Bearpaw said. His voice had gone flat.
“Not all of them. But enough that the preservation methods in the noble cellars were not only wheat and dried fish.” Iron Axe turned from the candle. “And to complete the calculation: if we had arrived here without the mortars, in the mud, with the standard field artillery that cannot be moved through soft ground — we would have been forced to storm the walls or starve them out. A siege in those conditions runs months. Wilion would not have opened the gates before he ran out of everything else to use.” He waited for Bearpaw to follow the logic to its end. “How many of the sixty thousand remaining would have survived that process?”
For a long moment Bearpaw stood with his head down.
“You’re right,” he said finally. “It was — more merciful than they deserved, probably.” He looked up. “But His Majesty didn’t give this specific instruction. When he hears—”
“When he hears, he’ll know everything I’ve told you.” Iron Axe picked up the quill. “I’ve written it out in full in the report. His Majesty gave me complete authority over this front. That authority includes decisions I make and must account for. I’ll account for this one.”
He returned to the desk and resumed writing.
“Any other questions?”