Chapter 119: The Gleaning (1)

Rael’s mercenary guild was officially chartered in the fourth month under the name Northern Free Company, which was the name they put on the paper and therefore the name that would appear in every official record from that day onward, but nobody on the Wall called it that.

They called it the Gleaning.

The name had existed long before Rael’s guild, back when the men who ventured beyond the stakes to cut cores from dead Roamers and salvage whatever could be recovered from the forest were simply called gleaners, and two hundred years of habit was not something a piece of paper could erase.

Encrid had expected the official name to matter eventually, but after hearing a quartermaster ask where the Gleaning crew was going and a Watch commander complain that the Gleaning had taken his best porter, he stopped trying to correct anyone.

The name had already won.

The guild hall itself was a disused grain store at the fifth mile, a long stone building that had been empty for years and had acquired the usual collection of problems that followed anything left unattended on the Wall.

The roof leaked in multiple places, one of the rear doors had warped badly enough that it had to be kicked open, and half the old storage racks had collapsed under their own weight.

Encrid acquired it from the Quartermastery through the simplest possible method.

He wrote the request himself.

Then he approved it himself.

There were several people who objected to that arrangement on principle, but none of them could explain why a Strategist was forbidden from assigning an unused building to a newly chartered guild when the building had already been sitting empty for years, so the matter eventually passed.

Rael and his men repaired the place themselves.

They replaced the roof, rebuilt the door, cleared the old grain dust from the floor, repaired the benches that could be salvaged, and turned the largest room into a common hall.

It took them nine days, and when they were finished the building still looked like a grain store, but it was dry, warm enough when there was a fire burning, and large enough to hold the people Encrid had intended it to hold.

The physician took slightly longer.

Encrid found her in the Shambles after asking three different people who the best surgeon in the district was, and all three gave him the same name with the same warning that he should not ask why she no longer practiced in the city.

She had been struck off somewhere south of the Wall for reasons nobody seemed particularly interested in explaining, but she was still the best surgeon north of the Riven, and she had no difficulty understanding why Encrid wanted her.

Her fee was also considerably lower than what the Wall would have paid for a healer’s assistant.

That part required no argument at all.

The roster was the important part.

The guild charter allowed a company to maintain its own rolls, and the rolls were considered the guild’s internal business so long as the people listed held legitimate positions and the guild fulfilled its obligations. More importantly, there was no clause in the Wall’s history of a law that required a mercenary company to explain to the Quartermastery why it employed a cook, a porter, a mender, or a junior stores steward.

Encrid had read that section of the law many times before he realized what it allowed him to do.

The first page of the Gleaning’s roster contained ninety-four workers.

The second contained sixty-one names under a heading that Rael initially thought was unnecessary until Encrid explained exactly why it mattered.

Dependents and Support.

The nineteen adults who could not properly work were given positions as porters, cooks, menders, and other support staff. Some could perform parts of those jobs and some could barely perform them at all, but every one of them now had a legitimate place on the guild’s books and, therefore, a legitimate reason for the guild to feed and house them.

Eight women with infants were listed as laundry workers.

The thirty-four children were recorded as dependents, a category that had existed in guild law for longer than anyone on the Council could remember.

Nobody was being hidden.

Nobody was being smuggled onto the rolls.

The guild simply had sixty-one people whose lives were now legally connected to it.

That was what Encrid had wanted.

Not charity or a temporary allowance that could be withdrawn the moment someone decided the Wall had more important problems.

A place where the people he had promised to protect could belong.

Wren became Junior Steward of Stores.

The title made her stare at Encrid for nearly a minute the first time she saw it written down.

She was thirteen years old, which meant that nobody took the position seriously until they saw what she did with it.

Within the first week she had begun recording the guild’s food expenditure.

By the second, she was asking Rael why three different crews were drawing different amounts of lamp oil.

By the third, she had started keeping a separate account for things that were bought irregularly because, as she explained to Rael with the grave seriousness of someone twice her age, irregular expenses were exactly the sort of things that became a problem when nobody remembered to count them.

The guild cost more than Encrid had originally expected.

Much more.

At the time, he was personally spending around five thousand silver a month to keep the arrangement running.

Five thousand silver.

That was around five gold.

The number was large enough that Encrid had checked the calculation four times before committing himself to it.

Fortunately, the money taken from the bandits he had robbed earlier had left him with enough reserves to sustain the expense, and his calculations showed that he could maintain the guild at that rate for roughly fourteen months.

By then, assuming the Gleaning’s contracts developed as expected, the guild should be earning enough to support itself.

It was a risk.

Encrid knew that.

He simply believed it was a risk worth taking, and unlike most risks he had taken since arriving at the Wall, this one had been calculated before he committed himself to it.

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