Chapter 78 — The Third Day

Autumn mist still lay over FireStorm when thirty Tauha men stopped outside the gate. They came with new spearheads, sound leather, and a sealed demand from Lyman Tauha, all three more expensive than the little tower across the boundary could usually afford.

Arlan admitted the deputy captain and two witnesses into the yard. The rest remained beyond the wall with weapons grounded. Lyman's letter accused FireStorm of stealing water, blamed House Ashenblade for two Tauha deaths the previous winter, and demanded that the downstream works be dismantled within three days. Every right to the spring would pass to Tauha, together with three hundred gold dragons in compensation. If Arlan refused, Lyman would cross with one hundred and fifty men.

Morton's ledgers lay ready. This had been a wet autumn. The upper and lower channels both ran full, and mill marks from two border villages showed no present shortage. Old agreements fixed each house's use without granting either ownership of the whole spring.

"My lord gives you three days," the deputy said. "Pay, surrender the water, or he takes justice by force."

Bor looked at the thirty men and flexed one hand. Brienne looked at the letter. "They leave unharmed with our answer," she said before anger in the yard could choose for them.

Arlan wrote beneath Lyman's demand that FireStorm would meet at the boundary with neutral witnesses, measure both channels, and submit the older agreements to Storm's End. Tauha could withdraw without payment or dishonor before noon on the third day. Any armed force crossing after that would be treated as an invasion; every man who laid down his weapon would receive quarter.

"Take both sheets," Arlan told the deputy. "You will sign that you received the answer."

The man hesitated, then marked it before Morton and two villagers. He had arrived to perform contempt and left carrying terms his lord would have to refuse in public.

The first day went to people rather than traps. Wayne rode the western farms with household clerks and moved families, livestock, and tools inside the next defensible line. No field was burned to deny it to Lyman. Grain already cut went into wagons; what still stood remained visible to the neighboring men invited to observe.

Evacuation proved slower than an order. One shepherd refused to abandon forty ewes during lambing, and a miller's mother would not leave the house where three children had been born and two buried. Wayne gave the shepherd six guards and drove the flock along the lower channel. Brienne put the old woman in her own saddle after allowing her to lock the door and carry the iron key. By dusk every western household had been marked as moved, remaining by choice, or still needing a cart. No clerk wrote cleared over people he had not seen.

The livestock filled the inner pasture and drank from the same stream Lyman claimed FireStorm had stolen. Morton measured grain for three extra days and opened the unfinished storehouse beside the kiln. Families slept among stacked boards because the hall could not hold them all. The movement protected them from the first advance but placed more mouths and frightened animals behind FireStorm's lines, a cost Cade had to include in every withdrawal route.

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Rodrick sent copies of demand and answer along three separate roads. A marcher knight with no affection for FireStorm agreed to witness the boundary. A Rainwood septon came because two of the disputed dead had once confessed to him. The millers above and below the spring brought their measuring sticks and years of notches. None owed Arlan enough to make agreement automatic.

On the second day they met beside the boundary stone. Water filled both channels. The Tauha deputy returned without Lyman and argued that old deaths mattered more than present flow. The upper miller admitted Tauha men had lost access for part of one winter day; the lower miller remembered those same men arriving armed. Their accounts disagreed on insults and agreed on which side crossed first.

The millers set boards beneath both channels and marked the rise for one full turn of the wheel. Tauha's branch carried slightly less water because silt had gathered behind an old stone lip on its own side. FireStorm laborers offered to clear it under witness. The deputy refused, saying the measurement itself accepted Ashenblade authority over the spring. The neutral knight wrote the refusal beside the heights on both boards; the water kept running while men argued over what measuring it meant.

Arlan repeated the offer to measure, arbitrate, and withdraw. He had the surrender terms read as well: weapons grounded in the marked lane, officers separated, wounded treated, no pursuit into Tauha land. White cloth was tied to posts along the road so frightened men would know where quarter existed before battle began.

Cade disliked advertising a path through the defense. "Lyman may use it to probe us."

"Then you guard it," Brienne said. "A promise no enemy can reach is decoration."

They placed no pits beside the cloth. The corridor would remain dangerous only if armed men tried to fight through it.

The third morning brought answers from neighboring houses. One refused involvement. Another sent two mounted observers but no soldiers. A third warned Lyman that crossing before Storm's End ruled would be his choice alone. Elton's expected shield of uncertainty had become thinner without FireStorm buying a single ally.

Inside the holding, villagers reinforced shutters, prepared bandages, and asked for weapons. Arlan recorded the volunteers and assigned them to houses, stores, and the mine instead of marching them toward glory. Fifty trained soldiers under Cade were worth more in broken ground than two hundred frightened people who had never practiced the same horn.

Morton placed older men at the well and ovens, women who had worked the harvest beside the infirmary stores, and youths as runners only within the inner markers. Each received one task and one place to report if horns changed. Arlan refused three farmers who demanded places in Cade's line. Their anger lasted until Cade made them try one shield rotation with trained files; the first collision left two on the ground and no one eager to repeat it with steel.

Just after noon on the third day, scouts saw Tauha's banners. One hundred and fifty men moved down from the upper road with twenty-four horses visible in the column and new steel on the front ranks. Lyman had not come to inspect water.

Wayne lit no warning fire until the first armed man passed the old boundary stone. The neutral knight watched from the ridge; the millers stood beneath guard; the septon held copies of both offers inside his robe. Lyman stopped long enough to read the white surrender posts and ordered them torn down.

His first men pulled two loose. A third remained upright when one soldier refused to touch it.

Arlan watched through Rodrick's spyglass. The uncertainty of the three days ended there. No messenger needed to explain who had crossed, and no later story could move the stone beneath one hundred and fifty pairs of boots.

"Now," he told Cade, "we decide how many of them can be brought home alive."

Behind him, the inner-gate horn sent civilians to the places they had practiced rather than toward the wall.