Chapter 132: Repairs Complete

The last candidate left a little after noon.

Emeric looked over his notes. Vellin and Phillip had lied. Tobin had read everything and done nothing. Serena Shay was good, but she knew it, and he didn’t want someone who would eventually decide she knew better than he did.

That left Dorn. The dwarf hadn’t tried to impress him.

He had pointed at a column of figures, said where the last baron went wrong, and then said what he would do with the land.

Emeric sent for him that evening.

Dorn took the small office beside the study the next morning and asked for better candles and every ledger in the house, including the ones Emeric had been told were lost. Within a week he had found eleven thousand gold the old steward had misplaced, plus a drawer of receipts that explained where Lord Verity’s parties had gone.

After that, the books stopped being Emeric’s problem.

Emeric stood in the courtyard of Greyfell Estate, watching the craftsmen work. The manor was alive with sound. Hammers. Saws. Chisels. Voices calling to one another. The creak of wood. The scrape of stone. The smell of fresh timber and mortar.

Bjorn stood beside him. The dwarf was covered in dust. His hands were dirty. His face was streaked with grime. But his eyes were sharp. Satisfied.

"The west wing is almost done."

Emeric looked at him. "Almost?"

"The structural damage was worse than we thought. The beams were rotted. The walls were cracked. We had to replace most of the interior. But we’re almost there."

He pointed at the west wing.

"We’ll need new scaffolding and I’ll like to allocate more workers to get it done faster." He said. "With your blessing of course." "Then some more fresh stone to finish the work."

"I appreciate the updates but you’re in charge. You don’t have to come to me for these things."

Bjorn nodded.

"A few more days. Maybe more. Then it’s done."

Emeric acknowledged

"The library?"

"Done. The water damage is fixed. The shelves are clean. The books are sorted. Your wife saw to that."

"The ballroom?"

"Next. We’ll start on it tomorrow."

"And the basement?"

Bjorn’s expression shifted to something he couldn’t make.

"The ward is still there. We’ve tried everything. It won’t break. We need someone with more magical knowledge than a dwarf blacksmith."

Emeric considered.

"I’ll look into it."

—-

By the fifth week, the estate repairs were finished.

Emeric stood on the front steps and looked at it.

The stone had been scrubbed back to its original pale color. The ivy was trimmed. Every window was whole and caught the sun. The east wall, which had been crumbling when he arrived, now had flower beds along its base.

Inside, the west wing had new oak beams and level floors. The ballroom floor was clean enough to see your face in. The great hall had its chandeliers back and its armor polished. The portraits in the corridor had been varnished, and the old barons glared down at a house they probably wouldn’t have recognized.

The village below was the same. New houses, a clean well, a roofed temple, a working market. Smoke came from every chimney. Past it, where the marsh had been, the fields had gone faintly green.

Emeric stayed there a minute. Then he started listing what was still wrong, because that was his habit.

The Guild had paid on schedule.

House Rowan had also left, but Graves had learned that a rider carrying a sealed letter had left their camp the next day, heading for the capital. He didn’t know who it was addressed to. Emeric filed it away, resolving to deal with it in due time.

The herd, at least, was good news. The Ironhide Bovines could pull a plow through ground that broke ordinary oxen, and Pip and Corin ran them in teams across the new fields. The Thunderhooves were fast and calm, and two of them now carried messages to the capital road in a third less time than a horse.

The Ashmanes had no real job. They kept the children entertained and the stables warm, and Corin had started calling them "my ladies."

Nyxie still slept. Every night Emeric put a hand on the crate and fed a thread of calm into it until the faint glow settled. It had become routine.

He had also dealt with his skill list. Twenty-five entries was absurd, so he used the merge perk and let the system sort it out.

[Skill merge complete]

Blade Dance, Phantom Step, Combat Frenzy and Duelist’s Resolve are now Warrior’s Flow (B).

Beast Sense, Herding Instinct and Terrain Sense are now Wild Reckoning (C).

Eleven redundant skills had been merged.

Then there was Isolde. They were in the library one evening, and she was reading aloud to him when she stopped and frowned at her blanket.

"My left foot tingles. Only for a second. Like it fell asleep and woke up."

"Does that happen often?"

"No." She waved it off. "Tatia says nerves misfire sometimes."

He nodded and said nothing else. He didn’t want to hope out loud.

Bjorn saved the basement for last.

They went down together on a grey afternoon, Bjorn carrying a lantern. At the bottom of the stairs a plain corridor ended at a plain door, and pale script drifted across its surface.

"Still there," Bjorn said.

"I see that."

"We tried salt, iron, three kinds of chisel. Lirael says the base layer is elven, and someone built something worse on top of it." He raised the lantern, and the script moved. "I don’t think it’s meant to keep people out. I think it’s meant to keep something in."

Emeric held a hand near the door without touching it. He felt nothing at all. The ward looked loud and registered as silent, which bothered him more than a hum would have.

"Everything else is done," Bjorn said. "This needs a scholar, or a priest. I’m a smith."

"I’ll handle it later."

"How much later?"

"The house is finished and the village is fed. I’d rather spend my time on problems I can actually solve."

Bjorn grunted. By now Emeric knew that was approval.

That night the system sent a summary.

[ESTATE STATUS: STABLE]

[RESERVES: 612,000 GOLD]

[REPAIRS: COMPLETE]