"What do you mean, also?"
Aldric had not raised his voice. He did not, often. He had only said it sharply enough to put a stop to the dwarf-stewards' polite drift across the surface of the conversation, and it had worked; the head of the dwarven delegation, an oak-shaped man named Nálin son of Náldar, did Aldric the courtesy of taking the question seriously.
"My lord. Forgive the phrasing. Also was an indelicate word."
"It was a precise word."
"It was."
Nálin folded his hands together on the table. He had hands of the kind dwarven trade-leaders had — broad-knuckled, scarred along the second joint of every finger, with the small dark line under the nail that came from a lifetime of metalwork. There were five dwarves in his delegation. Three of them sat behind him in attendance; two of them, including Nálin, sat at the table.
Gorlim stood at Aldric's left shoulder.
He had been standing there for twenty minutes and had not, during the twenty minutes, shifted his weight more than the small unconscious adjustments a man made who was used to standing for hours at a time. His face was unreadable except to Aldric, who had learned in seven years exactly which of Gorlim's tiny muscular set-points indicated which kind of disagreement. The current set was I would like this faster, my lord, and I will not say so.
Aldric registered it. He left it registered.
"Nálin. I will repeat the question, because I want a complete answer this time. You have said that the Breeland merchants approached your people in the spring with an offer of similar terms. By similar terms, what do you mean."
"I mean — my lord — the terms were similar in shape and not in scale. The shape was: grain in trade for metalwork, exclusive arrangement, deferred payment in the first year. The scale was: less grain than we are discussing here, and a smaller exclusive territory. The Breelanders' country is not as broad as yours."
"Yet."
"Yet."
"And you came to us instead."
"We came to you instead because the grain you offer is better grain and there is more of it. And because" — a small careful pause — "because you have a Lady of the Greenwood under this roof who is named in your records, and Bree does not have a Lady of any people under its roof, and certain things are made simpler by which roofs have which Ladies under them."
"Simpler how."
"Lady Tauriel knows our smith-master at the Blue Mountain. She has known him for two hundred and forty years. He sent word south of you when she stood up in this hall last winter."
Aldric did not show, on his face, the small thing that did inside him at the sentence.
"She does not know I have invoked her name."
"You did not invoke her name, my lord. You signed it." A faint flicker, almost amused. "We hear what is signed."
Aldric set his hands on the table.
"Then let us be plain. You came because the grain is better. You came because the Lady's name is on our hall. You came also because Bree offered and the Bree offer was thinner than ours. I will not pretend the third reason does not exist. Will you?"
"I will not, my lord."
"Good."
He did not look at Gorlim. He could feel Gorlim relaxing, by half a notch, behind him.
"Now," he said. "The ridgelines."
The ridgelines were the harder matter.
Nálin had asked, that morning at the opening of the formal session, for mining rights to two specific ridges in the eastern regions of Northwatch — the long, grey-stoned Brackridge that ran north of the dwarven quarter, and the smaller, harder, iron-veined Hodspine that closed off the eastern entrance to the high pasturelands. Both ridges sat above land that had been settled by Aldric's incoming farmers in the wave after the refugee tide; both ridges had families on them whose grandparents' graves were marked there with stones the families would not allow to be moved.
Aldric could not grant the rights outright. He could not grant them at all, in fact; what he could do was create a circumstance in which the rights might eventually be granted by some process the families could find their way to consenting to.
He had been thinking, for three days, about exactly how to phrase that.
"You want the ridges."
"We want the ridges, my lord."
"You cannot have the ridges. Not by my hand."
A pause.
Nálin did not show surprise. He had expected the refusal. He had asked anyway because in dwarven negotiation one asked for the maximum and accepted the lesser. He sat with his hands folded and waited for the lesser.
"What I can offer," Aldric said, "is a survey commission."
"Describe it."
"A joint survey of both ridges, conducted in the third year of the compact. The commission will be five members — two of your naming, two of mine, and a fifth chosen by the dwarven quarter resident in Northwatch, who is neither one of yours nor one of mine but a third interest with knowledge of both. The commission will be charged to assess the ridges for mineral content, to assess the families resident on those ridges, and to propose terms by which mining might be conducted with the consent of those families. The terms proposed will require ratification by my council and by your own elders. If the families do not consent to any terms, no mining begins."
"Three years is long."
"Three years is the time it takes to know what is under a ridge without breaking the ridge to find out. Your own surveyors will say the same."
"They will." Nálin lifted his hands from the table, considered, set them down. "And in the three years?"
"In the three years, you have what you came for. Grain. Open passage. Trade priority on metalwork. The full schedule of terms I will set out today. The ridges sit. We do not pretend they are settled; we agree they are deferred."
"And if at the end of three years the families say no."
"Then the families say no. And the compact continues, and the ridges are not opened, and we look for the metal under other ground."
"And if the families say yes."
"Then the council ratifies, and your elders ratify, and we open the ridges under terms that the families have written into."
Nálin sat with this for a long time.
The dwarves did not, by custom, glance at each other in negotiation; they negotiated by single voice. The dwarf to Nálin's right — older, with a beard so heavy with iron-grey he had braided most of it back behind his ears to keep it out of his cup — kept his eyes on the table and did not move them.
"My lord."
"Nálin."
"That is a slower process than my elders desired."
"Yes."
"It is also a process that does not, in any of its years, ask me to bring back a treaty by which families have been moved."
"It does not."
"I have moved families in my time. I would rather not move more."
"I would rather not move any."
Nálin nodded once. It was the dwarven nod, which was nearly a bow.
"Then we will sign for the survey commission."
"We will sign for the survey commission."
The clerk wrote it down. The grain terms followed — they had been agreed in their broad shape over a week of preliminary work, and the formal session was for the fine numbers. The fine numbers took the rest of the morning. Aldric had been careful, in advance, to consult with Halbarad and with the two senior farmers of the food-council on what could be promised without endangering the next winter's reserves. The numbers came out high — higher than he was easy with — but not so high that the reserves slipped below the three-bad-winters mark.
It would cost.
He had known it would cost. He had counted the cost in nights at the desk before he had ever sat down at this table. The cost was that the dwarven metalwork — the proper metalwork, the kind that turned a fortress upgrade from a wish into a plan — was worth more than the grain it bought, and the projection his clerks had worked out put the realm's income up by roughly a quarter once the trade ran steady.
A quarter more income. A quarter more men in arms in two years. A quarter more in the granary stores in three.
And two ridges sitting, and families staying.
He could live with that.
"There is one further matter, my lord."
"Speak it, Nálin."
"The Blue Mountain compact, once signed, becomes a thing other parties will hear of. The Breelanders will hear of it. Lindon will hear of it. There may be — interest — from places further west and south. We would prefer, in the matter of who hears of it first, to be consulted as to the timing."
"You want to control the announcement."
"We want a voice in the announcement."
"You have one. The clerk will draft a joint statement. You will see it before it leaves the keep."
"My thanks, my lord."
"And Nálin."
"My lord."
"The smith-master at the Blue Mountain. The one who sent word south. Is he the same smith who sold us the iron-bound axles for the carts in the spring of the year before the great winter?"
Nálin looked up.
"You know that work."
"I know that work. Three of those carts are still on the road. They are the only carts in our service that survived all the drifts. I have been meaning, for two years, to send word to the smith who made the axles and say so."
"My master will be pleased to hear it. He will pretend not to be. He is old enough to have earned the right to pretend."
"Tell him from me," Aldric said, "that the axles held."
"I will tell him."
The compact was signed an hour later.
The dwarves left the keep at the second hour after noon. They went to their quarter for the customary feast that Grimgar held for visiting kin — Aldric had been invited and had, with the apology proper to a lord who had a great deal on his desk, declined. The compact was on its way to being filed. The first wagon of grain was due south in ten days. The first counter-load of dwarven steel would come north in the same week.
Gorlim came back to the chamber after the dwarves had gone.
He did not sit.
"My lord."
"Captain."
"Three years on the ridges is a long deferral."
"It is."
"I would have taken less."
"I know."
"I am saying so for the record."
"It is on the record. The clerk wrote it."
Gorlim did not, by any movement Aldric could see, react. But there was, behind the eyes, the small adjustment of a man who had wanted to register a disagreement and had been told, by a kindness he had not asked for, that it was already registered.
"The fortress upgrade, then."
"The fortress upgrade. With the first three months of steel from Blue Mountain, you will have the gate-irons you were waiting on. Begin the work in autumn."
"My lord."
"And, Gorlim."
"My lord."
"Your nephew."
A pause.
"My lord?"
"The class begins in two years. He will need to be there in early spring of that year for the candidate assessment. Send word to your sister this summer."
"My lord."
Gorlim went out.
Aldric stood at the table a moment with his hand on the compact.
The clerk had begun to roll it up for filing. He paused, holding the scroll, waiting for the lord to release it.
"File it under both."
"My lord?"
"Both archives. Civilian and military. This compact touches both."
"My lord."
The clerk filed it.
Aldric looked at the window. The light had shifted; it was late afternoon.
The Bree caravan was due in three days, and the steward had said this morning that the lady of the southern Greenway compact — Cathan's small woman with the long braid, whose name had turned out to be Mirren — wished an audience the following week on the matter of how the compact's harvest tithe should be calculated this first year.
He would see her.
He sat down at the table and began to draft his half of the joint statement.
⚜ ━━━━ ROYAL PROCLAMATION ━━━━ ⚜
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