Steward Aldith’s solar is an office that happens to have thick walls. A table. Ink. A chest with a lock that means “accounts,” not “dragon gold.” She is a woman with a pen behind her ear and a look that could weigh flour.

You give her Hew’s letter. She reads it as if paper were a millstone: carefully, for cracks.

“Miller-soke,” she says, and the word goes onto the roll as she talks, because a word on paper is a tool. “Folk grind at the manor mill and pay multure—a toll in grain or flour. If the stone is cracked, soke becomes a tax on nothing. That is an economic emergency dressed as a noise.”

She writes what you actually say. Salt, a ditch, a barge, a tally, a name—whatever you witnessed, it goes into the net of her script. If you brought only the letter, that is still a full fish.

“I can send a smith and waive a day’s toll so tenants do not riot with empty sacks. Or I can call hallmoot and put the mill on the same roll as the rest of Greyfen, because this is one manor whether the gossip says so or not.”

She does not sit on a throne. She sits on a stool that has known years.

“You witnessed what you witnessed. That is more useful than a knight on a poster.”