POV: Steward Arn Mertyns
Location: Driftspire and surrounding lands, The Fingers
The quill scratched like a dying rat.
Arn Mertyns muttered a curse and stabbed it back into the inkwell. His joints ached, not from age though age had done its work but from the endless cold seeping into Driftspire's bones. The Fingers were a punishment to any man who'd hoped for more in life. He had once been steward of a Gulltown manor with vineyards. Now he calculated fish guts and salt rations for a boy-lord with maps in his head.
And yet.
When he'd walked to the shore that morning, he saw the difference.
Lines. Painted in white lime on the wet earth. Stakes driven into the soil. Men digging in pairs. Ropes and chalk and shouted measurements. A survey, but one unlike any he'd ever seen. Even the maester looked more like an apprentice scribbler than a scholar, chasing Alester's words like rabbits in a storm.
And Lord Alester? Not in his tower, but waist-deep in mud, helping drive foundation stones.
Madness. Or vision. Arn wasn't sure which was worse.
"Here," Alester said that evening, hands still stained with clay. "The southern causeway must be flattened for carts. If we can't bring in timber and stone, the dock will die in the womb."
Arn looked at the map.
"No cart will run that slope without breaking an axle. The earth's too soft near the marsh."
"I'll pave it."
Arn blinked. "With what? We've no quarry near enough."
Alester knelt, drawing shapes on the stone floor with a charcoal stub. "I need ash. Limestone. Clay. Maester Colmar is helping with proportions. We'll make something new."
Arn grunted. "Stone from ash? Are you a mason or a wizard?"
Alester stood. "Neither. Just someone who doesn't like things falling down."
That night, in the hall lit only by tallow and smoke, Arn Mertyns met with Ser Harwin Stone.
"He's building faster than we can count," Arn said, rubbing his eyes. "Three days and already there's a sea wall taking shape. And roads—real roads. Flat. Measured. Not paths, but something… organized."
Harwin drank. "He works harder than most lords I've served."
"He doesn't rest. He doesn't brag. He's too quiet. Too… prepared."
"You're not liking that?"
"I'm not sure what I like. I'm wondering what we've got."
Harwin leaned back. "A boy with a mind too big for this coast, maybe. Or a man who sees something coming that we don't."
Arn looked out the window. In the moonlight, men moved like ants across dirt paths marked with chalk. Foundations, they said. But for what?
"Do you trust him?" Arn asked.
Harwin grinned, half shadowed. "No. But I trust the road he's laying. Even if I don't know where it ends."
Two days later, word arrived: the first caravan from Gulltown had arrived early. Lumber. Stone. Tools. Some paid for. Some bartered. Some owed.
Arn signed the ledgers. Watched the long flat stretch of earth that would become a main road. Thought of all the roads he'd traveled, none built by vision. Only conquest.
Lord Alester wasn't conquering.
He was constructing.
And that, Arn feared, might be worse.
Chapter Three preview
What Lies Beneath (POV: Ser Harwin Stone)
Alester orders a push into abandoned mine shafts and tests a cement mixture. As tensions rise with locals unsure of his changes, SerHarwin must balance discipline with diplomacy while watching Alester uncover something ancient buried in the earth.