Raventree had been full again for three days.
The Blackwood banners snapped from every tower, the red and black raven stark against the grey morning sky. Men had come home from war, from mud and blood and half-remembered screams, and the old castle thrummed with the uneasy quiet of an army forced into peace.
Out in the training yard, the mist still clung low to the ground when Cade stepped before his thirty men.
He did not call for attention. He did not raise his voice. He simply walked out onto the packed dirt with his hands clasped behind his back, and the noise died as if someone had cut its throat.
"Quiet," he said. "And listen."
The fog muffled sound, wrapped the men in a wet chill. Cade let the silence settle until he could feel their eyes on him—tired, wary, waiting.
"You're not lords," he said. "You're not soldiers. You're not the sort of men songs are written about. Remember that."
"You think harder than the fools who command armies," Cade went on. "You move cleaner than knights who brag in their armor. I don't need you to look important—I need you to think. Deeper. Sharper. Better."
He paced slowly before them, boots whispering over dirt stamped flat by a thousand drills.
"If a lord needs seven men to guard his gate, I need one of you. If an army needs a thousand blades to win a field, I need you thirty standing side by side with me."
A few backs straightened. No one dared smile.
"This isn't the war anymore," Cade continued. "The bards are already lying about that. Names carved into stone. Stories embroidered by women who never saw blood spill. Lords pretending their banners won the day."
He stopped and let his gaze move over each face in turn, cold and dissecting. He knew every man: how they fought, how they broke, how they lied to themselves when they were afraid.
"You won't be in any of it."
The words dropped into them like stones.
"You'll kill more men now, in peace, than you ever did at the Trident," he said softly. "You'll decide which houses rise and which break. Not with banners. Not with glory. With silence. With precision."
He clasped his hands behind his back again.
"No maester will write about you. No bard will remember you. And you won't ask them to."
A few men swallowed. None looked away.
"But your families will eat," Cade said. "They'll be protected. They'll thrive. They'll live under the protection your shadows carve. Because you are the blade behind the blade. Their names will live on because you were the unseen edge that kept them safe."
He gave a single small nod, the closest thing he ever offered to warmth.
He unclasps the knife from his belt, holds it up so the light finds the steel. "This is the only reward the world ever gave me," he says. "Not a title. Not a banner. Just the right to take what's mine, and make sure those who follow me do the same."
"I will be loyal to you all," he murmured. "More than to kin. More than to any lord who wears a crown."
He said nothing else.
He didn't need to.
They remembered the war—
The nights they survived only because Cade decided they would.
The men they butchered because Cade willed it.
The oaths they never spoke, but lived.
His loyalty was a blade they had followed through blood and ruin.
And every man there knew: He didn't have to ask for their loyalty.
A man like that did not ask for loyalty.
They were former miners. Former butchers. Former farmhands. Men no lord had cared about until Cade Blackwood picked them out of the mud and gave them design.
They were what Cade made them—and they would never be anything else again.
The mist wrapped the words and held them.
"It is an honor to have you along this journey."
His tone hardened.
"But understand this—follow me, and you won't just survive this new peace. You'll carve it. Shape it. Break it. You'll change the course of history without a single soul knowing your names."
He took a step back.
"Now," Cade said, voice low. "Again from the top."
And the thirty men moved as one.
The rest of the morning was pain.
Cade, Eli, and Henry ran them through drills until the sun burned the mist away. No swords at first, no spears—only fists and forearms, bone and gristle.
Two men to a pair, then three, then four, bodies crashing together on the hard-packed earth. They fought until their knuckles split and their breath tore at their lungs, until every strike felt like swinging a stone through water. Cade waded into the fray when they faltered, tying up an arm here, sweeping a leg there, forcing them to think while they hurt.
"Use your fucking eyes," Eli barked at one man as he took a punch straight to the temple. "He drops his shoulder before he swings—see it coming."
"Work together," Henry snapped at another pair. "You're not boys in a tavern brawl. You're a knife with thirty edges."
By midmorning the men's muscles were so full of blood that lifting their arms was work in itself. Sweat cut pale tracks through the dust on their faces. One man went to his knees and stayed there, chest heaving, until Cade stepped in front of him.
"Up," Cade said.
"I—my legs—"
"Up."
The man forced himself upright, shaking.
Only when their bodies trembled, when their hands quivered just trying to make a fist, did Cade call a halt.
Inside one of the lower halls, they turned from violence to maps.
They sat at long trestle tables under the dim light of slit windows, thirty broad shoulders hunched over parchment. Eli unrolled a map of Westeros across the central board, weighed down at the corners with stones. Rivers, coasts, mountain lines, tiny inked names of towns and keeps; banners and sigils scratched in the margins; notes about crossings, ferries, fords.
Cade did not sit. He stood at the head of the table, arms folded, grey eyes moving.
"Again," he said. "Start from the north. Every major house. Sigil. Seat. Bannermen."
One man began, haltingly. "House Stark, direwolf, Winterfell. Um… Ryswells. Umbers. Karstarks. Boltons—"
Another corrected a mistake; a third added a smaller house. When one of them faltered, the others stepped in. When they argued, Cade let them for a moment, watching who backed down and who held their ground.
"Not good enough," Henry said when they stumbled over a minor house in the Vale.
"Outside," Cade said.
They stared at him, exhausted and incredulous.
"You heard him," Eli growled. "All of you. Move."
So they went back out.
Push-ups until arms shook. Squats until thighs burned. Sprints from one end of the yard to the other, boots slipping in old mud, men crashing into each other and dragging themselves up again. Breathing turned into ragged gasps; more than one of them retched into the dirt and kept moving.
Then back inside. Back to the map. Back to the river forks and coastlines and sigils.
"How many crossings do the Freys control?" Cade asked.
"Two," someone said.
Eli's lip curled. "Wrong."
"Think," Cade said.
Silence. Then, slowly: "The Twins, the Green Fork crossing… and they take coin from rafts and boats beneath the towers. Three."
"Closer," Cade said. "Next time, don't guess. Know."
An error—some small town misplaced, some bannerman misnamed—and they were outside again. Sweat, pain, breath. Then more ink and parchment. Little towns. Coastlines. Riverbanks. The sigils of houses great and small.
By late afternoon, even Cade's shirt clung to him with sweat, his hair damp at the temples. Eli had gone hoarse from shouting corrections. Henry's arms were streaked with chalk and dirt from jabbing fingers at maps and walls and chests.
The thirty were swaying on their feet.
Cade took them outside again anyway.
This time he divided them into three groups of ten and set them on each other with only their fists and feet. No breaking fingers, no gouging eyes—but everything else was fair. They fought in teams, trying to hold a line, to bait, to collapse a flank.
Boots thudded. Bodies slammed together. Men grunted and cursed, dragged each other down, locked arms around throats, battered ribs, stomped insteps, used every dirty trick Cade had ever taught them.
He watched, expression unreadable.
Halfway through the second bout, he felt eyes on him.
He looked up toward the balcony that overlooked the yard and saw a small dark shape peering through the carved stone.