Chapter 4: The Steward's Counsel
The fire’s heat didn’t reach the spot where Euphemia stood. The rushes underfoot were old, giving off a dusty, fungal smell. Eadund’s quill scratched once, twice more, then stopped. He didn’t look up immediately. He blew on the parchment, the sound loud in the hall’s quiet, then set the quill down with precise care.
Finally, his eyes lifted. They were a dark, watery brown, framed by lines that spoke of weather and watchfulness. They took her in—the clean apron, the worn shoes, the steady set of her shoulders. “Moray,” he said. His voice was like gravel shifting at the bottom of a bucket. “Your father tends the kail yard. Your mother’s hands are stiff. You tend the sheep. Yes?”
She hadn’t expected him to know. It threw her. “I do.”
“You’re here because the guard said the lord was absent. So you come to me. That’s sensible.” He leaned back in his chair; the wood creaked a protest. “Speak, then.”
She gathered herself. “Wolf sign. At the north burn, where the flock waters. Prints from today, maybe last night. A scout. The pack isn’t far. My father and others are watching the pen tonight, but that’s a cure for a single evening. The high field needs a watchtower. A proper one. Laird Campbell promised it for years. It was never built. Now, with a new pack moving in…” She let the sentence hang, the need stated plain.
Eadund listened, his hands steepled before his face. He didn’t fidget. He just absorbed. When she finished, he nodded, once. “A watchtower. Stone, or timber?”
“Timber would serve. On the rise above the field. A man could see the whole plateau and the tree line.”
“Materials. Labor.” He said it to the air, not to her. His gaze shifted to the map before him. “Laird Campbell promised. Promises from the absent are like smoke. You grasp nothing.” He looked back at her, and the knowing glint in his eye was sharp. “Lord De Haye does not promise. He allocates. He decides. A watchtower is his decision to make, not mine. I will tell him of your request.”
It was a dismissal. The same old delay. Frustration, hot and sudden, tightened her throat. “The wolves won’t wait for his decision.”
“No,” Eadund agreed, his tone flattening. “They will not. So we will not wait either.” He pushed himself up from the table, his movement stiff. He walked to the hall’s main doors, opened one, and called out into the courtyard. “Gawain! Find Donnchad and the MacLaren brothers. Tell them to come to me. Now.”
He returned to the table, but didn’t sit. “The watchtower is for tomorrow’s problem. The wolves are today’s. I will get hunters together from the keep. Men who know the land. They’ll find the den. They’ll handle it.”
It was more direct action than she’d had in a decade. She felt off-balance. “Thank you.”
He waved a hand, cutting her off. “Don’t. It’s not a favor. It’s an investment.” His tired eyes held hers. “You saw him on the road yesterday. The lord.”
She nodded. “The blue hose.”
A faint, grim smile touched Eadund’s mouth. “He noticed you noticing. Said ‘the shepherdess marked the color, not the man.’ He’s sharp that way.” He leaned a hip against the table. “You need to understand how this works now. From now on, you report to Lord De Haye about the sheep. Directly. Not through the priest. Not through whispers at the kirk door.”
“Father Clement—”
“—is a priest,” Eadund interrupted, his voice final. “His job is to save souls, or try to. Not to broker fleece counts or mediate pasture disputes. The sheep are not his concern. They are wealth. An asset. Unlike your last laird, we run this by the laws of account, not the laws of habit. The flock is how Lord De Haye justifies this king’s grant, how he pays his men, how he makes his money. You see wolves, you tell him. You see sickness, you tell him. The tower? You’ll make your case to him. Be clear. Be brief. He has no poetry in him.”
The words were a cold splash of reality. The flock was a column in a ledger. Her family’s life, their tenancy, was another. She was the keeper of an asset. It was brutal. It was also, in a strange way, transparent.
Three men entered the hall then, their boots scattering the rushes. They were keep men, but their faces were local— Donnchad, broad and red-bearded, and the MacLarens, lean and ferret-faced, alike enough to be twins. They wore studded leather, not mail, and their bows were well-used.
“Wolf pack,” Eadund said to them, no preamble. “Sign at the north burn, scouting the Moray flock and the others on the high field. Find the den. You know what to do.”
Donnchad grunted. “Aye. Kill the adults, the whelps?”
“The adults. Leave the whelps if they’re too small to travel. Without the dams, they’re nothing.” Eadund’s instructions were chilling in their clarity. “Take a boy from the stables. Have him run a message when it’s done. I want to know by dusk.”
The hunters nodded, turned, and left as silently as they’d come. The transaction took less than a minute.
Eadund looked back at Euphemia. “That is handled. As for the lord, he returns tomorrow from the monastery. Be here after the morning bell. Not at dawn. He’ll be reviewing accounts. After the bell.”
She understood she was dismissed. She dipped her head, a slight motion, not quite a bow. “After the bell.”
The walk back through the courtyard felt different. The sounds of the smithy, the chatter of men, the squawk of chickens—they were the same, but the lens had shifted. It was all an operation now, a machine with Aymen de Haye at its center. She was a cog in it, the shepherd-cog. The thought was isolating, but also, perversely, gave a shape to the chaos. She knew her value. She knew her chain of command.
Her father was asleep by the hearth, exhausted from the night watch, when she returned. Her mother was carding wool by the window’s thin light. Euphemia told them about the hunters, about the audience tomorrow.
“Direct to the Laird ?” her mother murmured, her hands never stopping their rhythmic pull. “There is no hiding then. No softening a bad season.”
“No,” Euphemia agreed. “There isn’t.”
She went out to relieve the man at the sheep pen. The sun was high, the day warming. From the pen, she could see the distant, dark line of the wood. Somewhere in there, Donnchad and the MacLaren brothers were moving, silent and intent. The problem of teeth and claw was being met with organized, sanctioned violence. It was efficient.
It should have been a comfort.
But as she leaned on the fence, watching Tam doze in a sunny patch, her mind kept returning to the steward’s words. He has no poetry in him. She thought of the blue hose, a ridiculous, vibrant statement in this grey-green land. That wasn’t poetry. But it was a message. A declaration of otherness, of power so assured it could wear impracticality like armor.
Tomorrow, she would have to speak to the source of that blue. She would have to translate the ancient language of wolf-prints and grassy rises into the new language of assets and allocations. She picked up a stray stone, rolled its cool smoothness in her palm.
The watchtower was just timber and labor. The real structure being built was between her people and that keep on the ridge, and she was being pressed, stone by stone, into its foundation.
The real structure being built was between her people and that keep on the ridge, and she was being pressed, stone by stone, into its foundation. She tossed the stone aside. It was a feeling, not a plan, and feelings didn’t feed anyone. Action did. She unlatched the gate and stepped into the pen.
The ewes shifted, a wave of wool and curiosity. Their blunt faces turned toward her, jaws working side to side. They looked whole. But looks were just wool-deep. “Right then,” she muttered, and grabbed the nearest by its dense fleece.
Her hands knew the work. Part the wool. Check the skin for ticks, for sores, for the tell-tale rash of scald. Run palms over the belly, feeling for the hard lump of a missed pregnancy. Check the hooves for rot, packed with last season’s mud and muck. She did it methodically, her mind emptying into the ritual of it. This ewe was clean. She pushed it toward the gate to the lower pasture. The next had a heat around one hoof. She noted it, cleaned the worst of the dirt away with her thumbnail, and sent it out too.
Her father found her there an hour later, her apron dirty, her braid coming loose. “Hunters?” was all he said, his voice raspy with sleep.
“Gone into the wood. Eadmund sent them.”
Angus Moray nodded, his long, grey braids swaying. He saw what she was doing and joined her without another word. His skinny frame held a stubborn strength. He took a ewe, turned it, his gnarled fingers probing with a gentleness that belied their roughness. They worked in a comfortable silence, the only sounds the bleats of the sheep and the distant cry of a curlew.
“He wants me to speak to the Laird tomorrow,” she said finally, not looking up from a ewe’s hoof. “About the flock. Direct.”
Her father’s hands paused for a second. Then he grunted. “Clement won’t like that.”
“Eadmund says Clement’s jurisdiction stops at souls. Fleece is the lairds business.”
“Aye.” Her father released the sheep. It trotted out. “Makes a cold sense. The old laird let the lines blur. Everything became a favor, a secret, a debt. This is… cleaner.”
He coughed, a wet sound deep in his chest. “Best get the fields ready for his tally, then. Can’t show him rotten stubble.”
They finished with the flock as the afternoon light began to slant, golden and long. Every sheep had been handled, assessed, and turned out into the fresh pasture. The pen stood empty, just trampled earth and dung. The work wasn’t done. It just changed shape.
But for now it was giving each sheep a closer examine and taking them out to start cleaning the fields of last year’s crops so planting could begin.
They took up their sickles. The north field was a scratch of poor soil, bordered by a low stone dyke. Last autumn’s oat stalks stood bleached and brittle, a pale, whispering forest knee-high. They started at the edge, working side by side. The sound was a steady, dry hush-hush-hush as the blades cut. Stalks fell. The earthy, rotten smell of the ground beneath rose up to meet them.
Her shoulders began to burn. The rhythm was hypnotic. Swing, gather, slice. The past week’s tension—the wolf, the blue-hosed lord on the road, Eadund’s calculating eyes—began to seep out into the sweat on her back. This was a problem she understood. You cut down the old to make room for the new. You cleared the rot so the seed could touch soil.
They’d cleared a broad, ragged swathe when her father stopped, straightening with a soft groan. He was looking toward the wood. She followed his gaze.
Two figures emerged from the treeline. Donnchad and one of the MacLarens. They moved with the loose, tired gait of men returning from hard work. Donnchad carried something dark and heavy slung over his shoulders. Even from this distance, Euphemia could see the long, limp legs of a wolf dangling against his chest.
“They’re back early,” her father said.
A cold knot tightened in her stomach. Dusk was still hours away. They hadn’t needed to search long. The hunters cut across the moor toward the keep, not toward their croft. They didn’t wave. The distance was too great for her to see their expressions, but the set of their shoulders wasn’t triumphant. It was grimly functional. A job done.
The MacLaren brother trailed behind, and he was carrying something else, smaller, wrapped in a cloak. It squirmed. A high, thin whine, sharp as a splinter, carried on the wind.
They hadn’t left the whelps.
She watched them until they disappeared into the shadow of the outer wall. The hush of the stalks was gone. The only sound was the wind and that phantom whine in her ears. She looked down at the clean, dark earth they’d exposed. It was ready for seed. It looked like a grave.She bent back to her work, her swings harder now, more forceful. The stalks fell like enemies. Every clean cut felt like a answer to something, though she couldn’t say what. Tomorrow she would stand before the man in the keep. She would speak of towers and assets. And now, she would also have to carry the image of what efficiency looked like, slung over a hunter’s back and crying from a bundle of cloth.
The whine faded into the wind’s constant moan across the ridge. Euphemia drove her sickle into the earth, leaving it standing upright like a marker. “Enough for today,” she said, her voice rough.
Her father nodded, wiping his brow with a sleeve. Neither mentioned the hunters or their bundles. Some images were better left without commentary, their weight allowed to settle in silence. They gathered their tools and walked back to the croft, the newly-shorn field a dark wound at their backs.
Mary had stew waiting, thin but hot. They ate without speaking much, the scrape of wooden spoons loud in the room. “You’ll see him tomorrow,” Mary finally said, not looking up from her bowl. “Best look like you manage an asset, not a disaster.”
Euphemia almost smiled. “I’ll try not to smell of sheep dung.”
“A bit of dung is honest,” her father grunted. “Just don’t let it be yesterday’s dung.”
Later, by the last of the peat glow, Euphemia re-braided her hair, tighter and neater than usual. She checked her one presentable apron for mends. It was a practical preparation, but her mind kept circling back to the ledger-book reality Eadund had described. She was the shepherd-cog. The wolf-killing was the proof of the machine’s functionality. She blew out the tallow candle, plunging the room into a darkness that felt newly watchful.
Dawn came grey and damp, a fine mist softening the jagged line of the keep. She dressed with deliberate care: the clean hose, the woolen kirtle, the apron with her mother’s handsome stitches. She plaited her auburn hair, still crisp from yesterday’s braid, tightly against her scalp. It was a form of armor.
She ate a cold oatcake standing by the door, the coarse grain sticking in her dry throat. Her mother gave her a nod, a silent press of the lips that meant ‘steady.’ Her father was already outside, feeding the few chickens they kept from the wolves. He didn’t look up as she passed, but his stooped shoulders seemed to tense. She walked into the mist.
The morning bell from the keep’s chapel tower was still an hour off. She used the time. She unlatched the sheepfold and called a low, rolling command. The flock flowed out around her skirts, a tide of wool and warm animal smell. She didn’t drive them toward the fresh green pasture. Instead, she turned them toward the strip of newly-cut stubble where she and her father had worked.
“Go on,” she murmured, clucking her tongue. The lead ewe, Tam, trotted forward, nostrils flaring at the earthy scent of the exposed soil. She lowered her head and began to clean up the fallen oat stalks, her jaws grinding the dry waste with efficient pleasure.
This was the way of it. You didn’t waste good grazing on what was already dead. You let the sheep wander the harvested fields, eating the neglected fallen stalks, cleaning the ground for the next planting. She walked alongside them, her stick tapping lightly, guiding them from one tenant farmer’s strip to another—the MacGregor plot, then the old Callahan holding—letting them tidy the shared landscape, their bodies turning waste into wool and manure. It was quiet, symbiotic work. It felt like a kind of truth, one she could show if asked.
The bell tolled, a dull bronze sound muffled by the mist. It was time. She left the flock nuzzling through the Patterson family’s leavings and climbed the path to the keep. The blackened stones seemed to bleed darkness into the damp air. The portcullis was up, the iron teeth dripping. A guardsman she didn’t recognize looked her over, his eyes lingering on her braid and apron before he jerked his head toward the inner yard. “Steward said you’d come. Main hall. Don’t touch anything.”
The great hall was less cavernous in the flat morning light, and more cluttered. A servant was sweeping last night’s rushes into a heap, raising dust. Eadund stood near the fireplace, speaking in a low, gravelly rumble to a man whose back was to her—a man in a dark green tunic, his sandy hair catching the light from the high window.
“—the render from the mill is less than quoted, but the mason for the curtain wall wants payment in iron, not grain,” Eadmund was saying.
“Then buy the iron. Don’t barter with our food.” The voice was younger than Eadmund’s, and clipped, with a Norman accent rounding the edges of the words. Aymen de Haye turned.
He was taller than she remembered from the road. The sharp blue eyes swept over her, not lingering, but missing nothing—the clean apron, the damp hem of her kirtle, the way her hands were clasped tightly in front of her. He didn’t smile. “The shepherdess.”
“Laird.” She inclined her head.
“Eadmund says you’ve come about wolves and towers.” He moved to the high table, scattering a few scrolls. He picked up a wooden cup, took a sip, and made a slight, sour face. “Which is the more pressing?”
“The wolves have been handled, my lord. Your hunters saw to it yesterday.”
He paused, cup halfway back to the table. “Did they.” It wasn’t a question. His gaze flicked to Eadmund, who gave a single, slight nod. “Efficient. And the result?”
“Two adults killed. I believe… they took the whelps.”
Aymen’s mouth tightened, a quick, almost imperceptible line. He set the cup down. “Whelps grow into wolves. You disagree with the action?”
She chose her words like stepping on stones in a swift river. “It was the action of a keep that protects its assets. I understand it.”
He watched her for a heartbeat, then gestured vaguely. “But you’re here for the tower.”
“I am.” She took a steadying breath. “The high field is the best summer grazing. It’s vulnerable. The trees crowd the northern edge. A watchtower on the rise would let a man see the whole plateau. A horn blast from there would reach the lower crofts in time for men to gather. Without it, we’re guarding with our backs to the dark.” She stopped, aware she’d spoken more than she’d planned.
He leaned back against the table, crossing his ankles. “Timber.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“Labour?”
“The tenant men would provide it, for a remission of winter salt dues.” She’d discussed this with her father at dawn; it was the only currency they had.
Aymen was silent, his fingers drumming once on the wood. He looked past her, out the narrow window, as if he could see the field itself. “Edmund. The mason wants iron. Do we have a woodsman who isn’t an idiot?”
“Old Finn,” Eadmund said promptly. “His back is bad, but his eye is true. He can direct the cutting and framing.”
“Do it. Salt remission as she says.” He pushed off from the table, the decision made in less than a minute. He turned those blue eyes back on her. “You manage the flock. How many lost last winter?”
“Eleven. Mostly to the wet rot after the floods, not predators.”
“And the lambing this spring?”
“Thirty-six live from forty ewes. Two sets of twins.”
A slight eyebrow lift. “You tally closely.”
“It is the asset,” she said, repeating his steward’s own word back to him.
For the first time, something like amusement touched his face, though it didn’t warm his eyes. “So it is.” He picked up a scroll, effectively dismissing her. “The tower will be built. You Report any further problems directly. Not through the priest.”
“I understand.” She hesitated, the image of the bundled cloak intruding. “My lord. The whelps. What will become of them?”
He didn’t look up from the scroll. “The kennelman thinks he can train them for guarding. If they die, they die. If they bite, they’ll be killed.” His tone was matter-of-fact, devoid of cruelty or concern. It was simply the next calculation. “Was there something else?”
There wasn’t. She had her tower. She had her direct line. The machine had processed her request and produced a result. She should have felt victorious. Instead, she felt chilled to the marrow. “No, my lord.”
She was halfway across the hall when his voice stopped her again, not louder, but slicing through the damp air. “Moray.”
She turned.
He held her look for a brief second. “After the bell tomorrow. I’ll want the tallies from the last three years. Find a scribe if you need one.” He returned to his scroll.