Chapter 94 — Rules for a Larger Holding

The feast lasted a day. Measuring the new lands and settling their rents would take longer.

Renly's grant added western hamlets, fields, pasture, and mountain land to FireStorm's demesne. Once Rodrick and Morton combined the existing rolls with the newly recognized settlements, the records listed more than twelve hundred households under Ashenblade authority, nearly half of them families displaced or resettled during the previous six months, including those already living in the western hamlets before the grant.

A holding that size could not be run by remembering which farmer owed what because Morton's father had once told him. Arlan called the household council the morning after the ceremony and ordered the entire system written down.

"Start with land," he said.

Morton unrolled the field maps. Teams would remeasure established holdings and newly reclaimed ground, marking boundaries before disputes became feuds. Each qualifying household could receive roughly ten acres of cultivable land and up to twenty acres of wasteland to clear where suitable ground existed.

The grant would be hereditary tenure under House Ashenblade rather than absolute ownership severed from feudal obligation. Families could pass it to heirs and work it without fearing that a steward would casually seize the field because another man offered more rent.

"No annexing a widow's strip because a richer neighbor wants a square field," Arlan said. "Boundary changes require agreement or judgment. Record every grant."

Morton nodded, already writing.

Agricultural dues would be fixed at a tithe of the harvest on established land. FireStorm would not add separate head taxes, tool fees, gate fees, or invented seasonal charges on top merely because the household could be squeezed.

Newly reclaimed wasteland would remain exempt for three years. After that it entered the same tithe system. The rule rewarded families for doing the expensive work of clearing and improving ground FireStorm currently gained nothing from.

"If the harvest fails?" Morton asked.

"Then a tenth of failure does not feed anyone. Assess disaster openly. Do not turn tax collection into seed-grain confiscation."

The second set of rules concerned the workshops. Glass, spirits, and metalworking had grown too important to remain informal extensions of the castle household. Rodrick would examine the glass accounts, Morton the distillery, while Cade would oversee military procurement from the smithies without pretending to be a master smith himself.

Craftsmen and miners received wages rather than subsistence alone, with a five-percent household due on cash earnings instead of the layered fees common elsewhere. Men permanently disabled in FireStorm's workshops would receive maintenance grain, and workers too old to continue could not simply be dismissed after spending decades in house service. Improvements that measurably increased output, reduced breakage, or created useful new products earned rewards beginning at five gold dragons, with profit shares possible for changes valuable enough to justify them.

"You will attract every ambitious smith between here and King's Landing," Rodrick said.

"That is the idea."

Blackstone Creek would eventually require a separate smelting complex once mining began. FireStorm would recruit skilled smiths and miners openly, pay on a set schedule, and forbid stewards from withholding wages to keep workers from leaving.

The third section drew the longest argument because law was less cooperative than arithmetic.

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Arlan did not invent a new kingdom's legal code; FireStorm remained under the King's peace and the laws and customs of the Seven Kingdoms. He added household ordinances governing the offenses its own officers were most likely to abuse.

Murder remained a hanging offense unless circumstances changed the judgment. Theft, assault, and injury could mean compensation, hard labor, or harsher penalties according to severity. Rape, violent predation on children or the helpless, and armed robbery by men using Ashenblade service as protection would be punished without regard to household rank.

Military treason, deliberate disclosure of defensive secrets to an enemy, and disobedience that directly caused deaths in battle could carry death. Arlan refused to make families criminal merely by blood; dependents could be removed from sensitive posts or expelled if they participated, but guilt would not automatically pass to children.

Brienne had listened in silence. "And if one of your own guards is accused?"

"He stands the same hearing."

Rodrick proposed a small petition council for grievances that did not belong directly before the lord's court. Respected elders, farm representatives, and craftsmen would collect complaints, identify recurring problems, and bring them before the steward or lord's court. It would not legislate over House Ashenblade, but it would create a route for grievances that did not require an illiterate farmer to force his way through castle guards.

Public hearings would be the default for ordinary disputes and criminal accusations unless safety, children, or sensitive military information required privacy. FireStorm officers were forbidden from keeping private cells or punishing people off the record.

Brienne received authority to inspect patrol conduct and bring household men before Arlan or the steward when complaints involved abuse. Her role as sworn sword made her independent of Cade's infantry chain for that purpose, preventing a company commander from quietly investigating himself.

The final policy concerned new arrivals. Refugees reaching FireStorm would first be registered, fed, and assessed for immediate need. Able-bodied adults could apply for farmland, workshop employment, construction work, or military selection; none entered the Black Armor Army merely because they needed supper.

The elderly, sick, injured, and orphaned would be supported through a poorhouse and household grain allocation rather than left outside the gate. Morton would keep that expenditure separate in the ledger so charity did not become an invisible hole in grain stores, while Rodrick would track whether able residents moved into work once they recovered.

The expense worried Morton until Rodrick compared it with the labor FireStorm already lost whenever disease and hunger turned manageable newcomers into emergencies.

"We cannot promise abundance," Arlan said. "We can promise not to let people freeze beside a full granary."

The first interruption arrived before the council ended. A survey clerk had copied "ten acres of cultivable land and twenty of wasteland" as an automatic allotment in a western hamlet where three families already shared twelve workable acres. Two men had begun moving boundary stakes before an older widow found someone who could read the notice to her.

Arlan had the stakes restored in front of the clerk and the claimants. The figures described an upper grant where suitable land existed; they did not authorize a surveyor to manufacture empty ground by erasing an occupied strip. Morton added the clarification to every copy and required one local witness who did not benefit from the measurement.

By the end of the meeting, Morton's ledger held more new rules than FireStorm had possessed in the previous generation. The misread notice had already shown what writing them down could not accomplish by itself.

Morton gave himself half a month to complete the first land survey, which Arlan considered optimistic and therefore useful. The old steward divided the teams by hamlet, assigned two witnesses to every boundary record, and ordered duplicate copies of each hereditary grant kept at the castle in case a household's parchment burned.

Survey teams left the following morning. Notices went up at village entrances, workshops, the mine road, and market ground. Because many residents could not read, clerks and sept-trained literate villagers read the rules aloud at fixed hours until people stopped gathering simply to hear whether the rumor about the tithe was true.

Disbelief turned into argument, then into lines at the land office.

Arlan watched one of those lines from the castle wall. Families were already disputing drainage ditches, inheritance claims, and whose goats had used which patch of scrub for ten years. Written rules had not made human beings less human, a tragedy bureaucrats across worlds had somehow failed to solve.

They had done something more useful. For the first time, many of those disputes had an answer other than whichever man had more cousins carrying sticks.

FireStorm had gained land through Renly's decree. These rules were the first attempt to make that land governable before growth turned victory into another kind of collapse.