Chương 23: CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: THE ROAD HOME

The assembly lasted two days. Marcus attended the formal sessions, presented the Greyhold accounts with the structure he and Aldwin had prepared, answered the Baron's questions during the review with the combination of precision and appropriate deference that the situation called for, and spent the social hours doing the careful work of a person who was building a map of the political landscape he inhabited. Lord Fenwick was the most interesting of the other castellans.

They had a conversation on the second afternoon — apparently casual, initiated by Fenwick with the practised ease of a diplomat who initiated all his conversations apparently casually — that Marcus recognised after the first few exchanges as a genuine intelligence-gathering exercise on both sides. Fenwick wanted to know what Marcus knew about the Ironfen. Marcus wanted to know what Fenwick knew about the Solennic situation to the east. They traded carefully.

Not secrets — neither of them had secrets to trade, or if they did, they weren't trading them at an initial meeting — but assessments, framings, the kind of information that revealed how a person thought about a problem rather than what they knew about it. Thinking styles were more durable intelligence than facts, in Marcus's experience. Facts changed. The way a person reasoned about facts was much more stable.

Fenwick reasoned carefully, with the bias of a man who had been managing a difficult border for fifteen years and had learned that the most important thing was to know what he didn't know and plan for the implications of that uncertainty rather than the implications of what he thought he knew. It was, Marcus thought, a good epistemological habit, and the territory of Lord Fenwick had probably survived better than it might have under someone with more confidence and less care.

"The Church situation," Fenwick said, at one point.

"The Theocracy of Solenne has been — active, lately. More interest in the western territories than I would normally expect."

"What kind of interest?" Marcus said.

"The visiting kind," Fenwick said.

"Inspectors. They call them theological advisors, but the function is inspection." He paused.

"They've visited two towns in my territory in the past year. Looking at the healers, primarily. The educational arrangements." He looked at Marcus with the careful neutrality he had maintained throughout the conversation.

"I understand you've been making changes to both." Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

"Improvements to both," Marcus said.

"Within the traditional framework." Fenwick held his gaze.

"Of course," he said.

"I only mention it because forewarned is forearmed. The Church's interest tends to develop over time rather than announce itself." It was, Marcus understood, a genuine warning. Fenwick had no obvious reason to warn him — they were not allied, not friends, had met for the first time two days ago. The warning was either the instinct of a decent man toward a fellow who didn't yet know the terrain, or the beginning of an attempt to establish reciprocal obligation. Possibly both.

"Thank you," Marcus said.

"Good luck," Fenwick said simply, and moved on. The road home was three days through the beginning of full spring, and Marcus spent most of it thinking. The Church of Solenne was a threat he had been aware of in the abstract since Okafor had first raised it.

The Theocracy controlled healing as a theological domain — healing magic was their primary claim to authority in the spiritual lives of the common people, and any expansion of non-Church healing capability was, by their doctrine, an incursion into their territory. The medical operation he was building in Greyhold was already, by Church standards, a problem. The school was potentially a larger one.

The Church controlled education throughout much of the region — reading, in their framework, meant reading scripture, and anything that decoupled literacy from religious instruction was doctrinally concerning. And the pharmacological operation that Washington was beginning to develop — the chemical synthesis work that Okafor had been waiting for — was something the Church would classify as either conventional herbalism, which they could manage, or something else, which they would find threatening.

He needed to understand the Church's timeline and attention better than he currently did. He needed intelligence from inside the Church's operations in the region. He needed — he thought about this carefully — someone in a position where the Church's information would naturally flow to them. He filed the problem. It did not have a solution yet. Solutions to problems with insufficient data were guesses, and guesses in situations with significant consequences were expensive.

He rode on through the spring, and thought, and watched the landscape, and arrived home in the late afternoon of the third day to find that in his absence, Briggs had started the foundations of the forge expansion without waiting for authorization.

"I knew you'd approve it," Briggs said, when Marcus looked at the foundation work.

"Figured waiting was waste."

"It is approved," Marcus said.

"Show me the design."