ASOIAF: The Rise of House Ashenblade.

Arlan began the answer with a question rather than a denial: would Elton Caron submit his troop rolls, warehouse books, and messenger accounts to the same inspection he demanded of FireStorm?

Rodrick had drafted six pages of rebuttal. Arlan cut them to two. The murdered carter stood alive. The eastern ford had been flooded. FireStorm possessed fewer wagons and fewer men than Elton’s inventories claimed. Those facts could be checked by someone who distrusted both houses.

The seal analysis remained an attachment. The hidden writing did not. Neither did the words egg and old blood, nor Rodrick’s suspicion of a Lannister cipher. One weak or frightening claim could give Elton a place to stand while he denied everything else.

”We should name the factor,” Wayne said.

”Then he runs tonight,” Rodrick replied. ”Or dies before Loras can question him.”

”If we do not name him, he keeps carrying lies.”

Brienne stood by the shutter, looking toward the fields where another camp had struck its tents. ”Ask for the inspection at once. If he runs after that, the running speaks.”

It did not prove guilt, but it created a choice Elton had not prepared to make. Arlan added a request that Renly send an officer empowered to inspect both sides before Robert’s arrival. FireStorm would open its stores, barracks, ledgers, and prisoner records. The officer should begin, the public copy said, when he reached the holding.

The private copy sent along the route known to leak named dawn at the east road and said the confiscated records would travel there under a grey-horse escort. The records would remain locked in FireStorm. A bay would leave the main gate carrying flour and two guards who knew they were being watched.

”If no one moves, we have learned nothing,” Morton said.

”If someone moves, we still prove only that this channel reached them,” Rodrick answered.

Arlan sealed the two copies. ”Then we follow what moves.”

The public packet went to Storm’s End beneath Morton’s inventory of enclosures. Copies of genuine store books traveled, never originals. The false route went through the Rainwood factor’s clerk. Within four hours, three mounted men left Elton’s shrinking camp for the east road. Two more rode hard toward Rainwood.

Wayne’s watchers did not challenge them. They followed far enough to see one party search a flour wagon and the other reach a warehouse behind a cooper’s yard. Men began removing small chests before dusk, not toward Nightsong but south along the old mill track.

The flour wagon belonged to FireStorm, but its driver wore a Rainwood carter’s faded coat and carried a genuine bill for meal. When the riders cut one sack, flour spilled across the road and revealed nothing beneath it. They searched the axle, cursed the driver, and rode away without noticing Wayne’s second watcher mending a fence fifty paces uphill. He saw the badge beneath one cloak and counted five horses, including a bay with one white hind foot that had stood in Elton’s camp that morning.

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At the warehouse, speed mattered less than authority. Brienne could have ridden down the laden men before the old mill. Doing so beyond FireStorm’s boundary would let them become victims of an Ashenblade attack while the contents of the chests vanished into dispute. She instead woke the cooper, the ward reeve, and two householders whose doors faced the yard. By the time she barred the southern track, she had six Rainwood witnesses and a property owner demanding to know who had entered his building.

The riders abandoned the heaviest chest and escaped with two smaller ones. Brienne did not pursue beyond the reeve’s marker. Wayne’s men followed at a distance until the tracks divided toward Nightsong and the king’s road, then returned with positions rather than prisoners. The choice left evidence beyond reach, but it kept the confrontation from becoming a private border battle on the same night Arlan requested neutral inspection.

The cooper owned the warehouse and disliked having his door broken by men who refused to name the goods they carried. Once the track was secure, he opened his own premises before the witnesses and demanded every chest be counted. The riders had taken the papers. They had left split sacks of arrowheads, bales of bowstrings, horse feed marked for household levies, and a payment board whose pegs corresponded to dates in the factor’s book.

No single object named Elton. Together they showed that a private courier route, military stores, and the forged campaign had shared the same hands and roads.

The factor fled before midnight. His clerk stayed. So did the cooper, the stable boy, and the miller’s cousin who had watched a Caron token change hands. Separate people had seen separate pieces; none could be frightened into recanting the whole chain because none carried it alone.

At the warehouse later that night, Rodrick began preparing the evidence for another officer to examine. Every sack and bundle stayed where it had fallen until the reeve marked its position. The cooper supplied wax for the door and complained about the price until Morton promised reimbursement. A broken chest was wrapped with cord beneath three different seals. The payment board remained nailed to the wall because moving it would erase which pegs had fresh scratches.

The clerk asked twice whether FireStorm would protect him. Arlan promised a bed within the walls and testimony before Renly, not safety from every enemy on the road. Brienne assigned two guards and made the clerk choose which belongings he wished carried, so no later tale could claim Ashenblade men had dragged him away empty-handed. His decision to come became another fact witnessed by Rainwood people, not a favor he could later deny receiving.

Before leaving, the cooper demanded a receipt for the split sacks, broken lock, and night spent beneath guard. Morton wrote one that named damage without admitting FireStorm had caused it. The ward reeve added his mark and kept a copy. The exchange seemed small beside fifteen hundred armed men, yet it fixed who owned the warehouse, who had entered it, and who would owe silver when Renly’s officer finished. Elton’s riders had depended upon confusion; the building now contained fewer things no one could account for.

Back in FireStorm, they found that the counterletter had produced a second result beyond evidence. Two remaining lords withdrew when word reached the camps that FireStorm had invited inspection of itself. One sent his own troop roll to Storm’s End before Elton could claim it had been hidden. The coalition fell below half its first strength without an arrow leaving the wall.

Rodrick watched wagons turn west through the spyglass. ”He can still attack.”

”And explain why he refused the same accounting he demanded from us,” Arlan said.

At dawn, horns sounded from the eastern road. No ambushers appeared. Twenty mounted men in crowned-stag colors rode behind a white horse, and polished plate chased with roses caught the first thin light. Ser Loras Tyrell had not followed the false route; he had come openly along the king’s road, carrying Renly’s authority and enough clerks to make the purpose plain.

Arlan left the document chest locked. If Loras wanted judgment, FireStorm would first give him work.

The gate opened only after both watches named the riders they had counted.