ASOIAF: The Rise of House Ashenblade.

By the time Arlan reached the fields, the flames had already crossed most of the planted ground.

Wind drove fire through the wheat in long orange sheets, lifting sparks over the furrows and toward FireStorm’s wall. Men ran between the well and the fields with buckets; women soaked coarse cloth and passed it forward. Morton had tied a wet rag over his mouth and was shouting himself hoarse while dragging water beside men half his age.

Three bodies lay at the edge of the field; the watchmen had died before anyone in the village heard a warning. Their throats were cut cleanly, their pitchforks still close enough to suggest they had barely raised them; blood had soaked into the same earth now being blackened by the fire.

Arlan crouched near the nearest corpse long enough to look at the wound, then at the mud beyond it; boot prints crossed the edge of the field.

The prints were unlike those left by the mountain raiders’ rough hide footwear. Iron studs had bitten into the mud around the outlines of hard leather soles, the kind worn by men who expected long marches on wet ground. It did not prove who had killed the guards, but it made the convenient cry of another random raiding band much harder to accept.

”My lord!” Morton shouted. ”The wind is turning!” Arlan stood. Evidence could wait if the flames reached the houses. They fought the fire until nearly dawn, drawing from the well until arms failed and hands blistered around bucket handles.

Buckets emptied faster than the well could be drawn; men beat down flames with wet sacking and shoveled soil over burning furrows. When the last moving edge finally died beneath mud and water, less than ten acres remained untouched at the corners of the original eighty. The rest was ash.

The three dead men were carried back at sunrise; their wives met the bodies in the yard, and the sound that followed stripped the last triumph from the previous night’s victory.

Morton sat beside the well with both hands bleeding from splinters; his hair and beard were grey with ash. He had served House Ashenblade long enough to remember when parts of those fields were scrub and stone, and Arlan could see that history in the way the old steward stared at the blackened land.

The tax demand still stood; three hundred silver stags in three days, and now FireStorm had lost most of the crop that might have fed it through the coming months.

”My lord.” Morton rose slowly and came toward him carrying a small bundle wrapped in coarse cloth. ”There is something I should have given you sooner.” Inside lay three silver stags, a polished silver brooch, and a folded sheet of yellowed parchment. Arlan picked up the brooch first.

It bore the red sun element that had long appeared in Ashenblade heraldry, worked in old silver and worn smooth at the edges; Morton watched him touch it before explaining.

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”It belonged to Lady Ellyn. Part of her dowry.” His voice was rough from smoke. ”When your mother knew she would not live to see you grown, she left it with me. She told me that if House Ashenblade ever came to such need that there was nothing else left, I was to place it in your hand.”

The three stags were Morton’s own savings.

”For my burial,” he admitted. ”A foolish thing to save for, perhaps, when the living need coin more than the dead.” Arlan looked at the old man’s cut hands.

”Keep them.”

”No.” Morton had obeyed almost every order Arlan gave him since waking. This time he closed Arlan’s fingers around the coins himself.

”I have no wife. No sons. House Ashenblade has been my household longer than I have had anywhere else to call home. If these buy grain, iron, or one more day for FireStorm, they are already spent better than on a coffin.”

The memories belonging to Arlan’s body gave weight to the words. Morton had come to FireStorm in the years around Robert’s Rebellion with Arlan’s grandfather, had watched Ser Edwyn grow, taught him letters and riding, and later stood beside him as steward. When Ser Edwyn died, Morton recovered what he could, returned to the holding, and spent three days nursing a fevered heir while raiders approached.

He had never left. Morton lifted the parchment. ”Your father wrote this before he went out against the raiders. He told me to give it to you if he did not return.” Ser Edwyn’s handwriting pressed deeply into the page.

There was no great final speech; the letter warned Arlan not to rush to Nightsong seeking vengeance against House Caron. If FireStorm could not be held, he was to take Morton and seek refuge at Storm’s End, where Renly Baratheon might offer a path forward out of respect for old service. If he chose to remain, he was to hold the land with dignity and remember that the sword of House Ashenblade existed to protect those behind it rather than satisfy the pride of the man carrying it.

Dried marks darkened two corners of the parchment; Arlan folded it carefully and placed it inside his tunic. Michael Watson had received money, orders, and threats from men who considered loyalty another commodity; Ser Edwyn had written a dying instruction asking his son not to waste himself on revenge.

That difference lodged somewhere deeper than Arlan wanted to examine in the middle of a ruined field.

”Stand, Morton,” he said. The steward had bent his head again. Arlan helped him upright. ”The fields can be planted again. Grain can be bought. House Caron has not killed everyone here, which means this is not finished.” Morton’s eyes reddened, but he nodded.

That afternoon the old steward prepared to use the hidden path through the back hills. He packed more than a dozen bottles of distilled spirit and a similar number of glass vessels already available in FireStorm, hoping to reach black-market buyers around Rainwood without passing the checkpoints on the main road.

”You should not go alone,” Arlan said.

”No one knows that path better than I do, and fewer men make less noise.” Morton strapped the bundle to his back and tucked a rusty short sword into his belt. ”Rainwood is dangerous for you now. An old steward draws less notice.” Arlan disliked the logic and could not disprove it.

Before leaving, Morton checked the bundle twice, then walked the path through the village as though memorizing it. A dozen bottles and fragile vessels were a poor caravan, but they represented the only goods FireStorm could move quickly enough to matter before Raymond’s three-day deadline; Morton left under cover of darkness.

Arlan remained near the village entrance long after the old man’s bent figure disappeared into the trees. Near dawn, a scream came from the back hills; steel rang once, then again; a thin, familiar laugh followed through the dark.

Raymond Weil. The laugh carried from the same hidden route Morton had trusted precisely because official patrols were not supposed to know it, which meant the ambush had been prepared rather than stumbled upon; Arlan drew his sword and ran.