Chapter 221: The Bridge Bill

Dorvik tossed a folded sheet of heavy parchment onto the table. It landed half an inch from a pool of brown gravy. Elian slid his plate back, rescuing the paper before the grease ruined the ink.

Bruna wiped a nearby board with a damp rag. "The gravy might actually improve the numbers."

Elian opened the sheet. The sum at the bottom proved Bruna wrong. The ink detailed stone foundation shoes, a raised timber span to clear future floods, and a line of upstream debris deflectors. Below those figures sat the costs for fresh iron pins, deep bank reinforcement, and the necessary drainage channels to keep the slopes intact.

Elian picked up his pen to strike a line through the stone shoes. Dorvik caught his wrist and pressed his thumb over the cheaper alternative listed at the bottom.

"That was the version that fell in the river," Dorvik said.

Orra pulled up a chair and tapped the top of the page. "The old deck held until the ground gave out. The saturated soil beneath the shoulders failed because the load sat too close to the edge. The new crossing needs to transfer weight much farther back into stable earth."

Rask leaned over the bench. "That means longer ironwood members for the main span."

Elian calculated the board feet and leaned back against his chair. The price of long-cut ironwood from the Timber-Mane camps carried a severe premium. Rask met his gaze without offering a single copper of discount.

"Can we reuse the recovered deck boards?" Elian asked.

"If they survive inspection," Dorvik said. "I won't build on cracked wood to save your lockbox."

Elian evaluated the tavern's reserves. The Hearth had enough silver to pay the total, but handing over that much coin would leave the winter emergency fund dangerously depleted with weeks of bad weather still ahead. He took a clean piece of slate and divided the total into workable columns. He offered immediate coin for the raw materials and proposed a labor exchange for the earthwork. He deferred the noncritical finish carpentry until the spring thaw and assigned a salvage credit for any timber and iron they successfully dragged out of the ravine.

Dorvik grunted his agreement to the staggered terms.

Vane had been listening from the adjacent table. He set his teacup down and walked over to the negotiation.

"My Silver-Spoke wagon currently sits at the bottom of that ravine," Vane said. "The chassis still contains usable axle iron and reinforced bracing. I claim full salvage rights over the wreckage."

Elian kept his pen over the slate. "Your company contracted the transport. Several different merchants owned the cargo packed inside the hull. Claiming the wagon does not automatically grant you ownership of the sealed freight."

Vaelia walked out of the lower stairwell before Vane could build a legal counterargument. She had slept late, missing the morning rush entirely. Nobody had knocked on her door to assign her a patrol or a guard shift. She moved to the table, poured herself a mug of black tea, and looked down at the repair estimate.

"Expensive," Vaelia said, reading the numbers upside down.

"Thank you, Pack Mother," Elian said. "Your financial insight remains unparalleled."

Heda choked on a mouthful of water and started laughing into her sleeve. Vaelia ignored her entirely, reached across the table, and took a spiced sausage directly off Elian's plate.

The mud at Blackroot Run had frozen into jagged, ankle-twisting ridges. Elian walked along the south bank alongside Dorvik, Orra, Rask, and Talyra. They bypassed the ruined stone abutments and climbed down into the brush to locate the scattered pieces of the failed bridge.

Sections of the temporary Cloud-birch deck sat wedged between large boulders fifty yards downstream. Orra waded into the freezing shallows and pried three heavy iron pins out of the rotting wood. Rask hauled a massive structural beam onto the gravel. A deep fracture ran straight down the center of the grain.

Rask took a piece of chalk and wrote FUEL ONLY across the bark so no one would try to recycle the compromised wood into the new span.

They hiked farther down the gorge, pushing through dense thickets of frost-brittle thorns. A heavy shape rested beneath a tangle of broken pine branches. The Silver-Spoke freight wagon lay on its side, half-submerged in the frozen mud. The painted wheel spokes were shattered, and the canvas cover had torn away to reveal the cargo bed.

A heavy wooden chest sat jammed between the splintered sideboards. Vane's painted wheel symbol marked the exterior of the wagon chassis. The chest itself carried a different mark burned deep into the lid—a coiled serpent surrounding a merchant's scale.

Elian stood on the slippery bank. He looked at the painted wagon wheel, then at the burned seal on the trapped chest.

"Well," Dorvik said. "Now you have paperwork in the river."