Clack. Clack. Clack.
Randell's polished shoes struck the cobblestones of the Ironwood Castle's servant entrance with the same practiced authority they always had. He straightened his tie, smoothed his coat, and lifted his chin. Twenty-two years of service. He had outlasted three head butlers, two different lords of Ironwood territory before Miller Hevel was given the Ironwood surname, survived Miss Maria's sharp tongue, and navigated the politics of this castle with the quiet confidence of a man who knew exactly how untouchable he was.
He pushed open the side door and stopped dead.
Where the entrance hallway used to flow freely into the servant quarters, a wooden partition had been installed against the wall. Mounted on it was a long board of neat, carved slots, each one labeled with a small name tag. Hanging in every slot was a rectangular wooden plank, no bigger than a man's palm, each one stamped with a unique personal symbol.
A young maid was already at the board, pulling her plank from its slot. She pressed it firmly against a small iron mechanism bolted to the side, and with a satisfying thunk, a clean notch was punched into the wood. She slid it into the lower section of the board, marked 'ON DUTY,' and walked away without a second glance.
Randell stared at the board. He found his name tag. Hanging beneath it was his plank, carved with the symbol he himself had chosen a small crown, naturally and completely unmarked save for the eight neat notches from the previous week.
He pulled it from the slot. It felt lighter than it should for something that apparently now governed his entire livelihood.
"First time?"
A voice came from beside him. One of the newer footmen, a lanky young man barely old enough to shave, was watching him with an expression that managed to be helpful and slightly pitying at the same time.
"The mechanism's stiff if you don't press it square," the footman offered. "Here—"
"I know how to use a piece of wood," Randell replied.
He pressed the plank against the iron stamp himself. Thunk. A clean notch. He slid it into the ON DUTY column and walked away from the board without looking back, his jaw tight.
The morning passed the way mornings used to pass, or so Randell tried to convince himself.
Except that the younger maids no longer needed him to sign off on the linen inventory because the head maid now did it herself on a fixed schedule. And the comfortable stretch of time he usually spent in the records room, not reading the records, simply being in the records room where nobody thought to look for him had been converted into a shared document office with a window that faced the main corridor. Very visible. Very inconvenient.
By mid-morning, he found himself actually walking the halls.
At noon, a junior clerk pressed a small printed slip into his hand without ceremony. Randell looked down at it.
It was his projected monthly pay summary. A column of numbers, clean and precise, calculated from his contracted hourly rate against his eight-hour shift across five working days per week.
He read the total at the bottom.
Then he read it again.
It was not less than what he used to earn. He had expected that, prepared his outrage for it. Instead it was almost the same number, perhaps marginally more when accounted for consistently.
But the number next to it was the one that made his eye twitch.
Hours contracted: 160. Hours worked last month: 94. Adjusted pay: see column B.
Column B was significantly smaller.
Randell stood in the corridor holding the slip for a long moment. Around him, two weekly maids walked past carrying freshly laundered curtains, chatting without sparing him a glance. A month ago, that task would have been waiting for him to authorize before it moved an inch. Now it simply... happened. On schedule. Without him.
He folded the slip and put it in his breast pocket.
"Randell."
He turned. The head maid, Mrs. Voss, was standing at the end of the hall with a clipboard. She had been with the castle longer than he had, a fact she never mentioned and never needed to.
"You're down for the east wing walkthrough this afternoon," she said, making a note. "Third week running it hasn't been completed."
"I've been managing the records transition—"
"The records transition finished twelve days ago. I have the completion note here." She tapped the clipboard without looking up. "East wing. Third floor corridor. The hinges on the storm shutters need inspection before the cold comes in."
She walked away.
Randell looked down at his hands. They were the hands of a man who had spent twenty-two years being important. They did not know what to do with a shutter hinge.
By the time the evening bell rang, Randell was back at the punch board.
He pulled his plank from the ON DUTY column. The notch from this morning stared back at him alongside seven others from the week: a neat, unambiguous record of every hour accounted for and several that weren't. He pressed it against the mechanism. Thunk. The end-of-day notch punched clean.
He stared at it. The wood didn't care that he had been here for twenty-two years. It didn't know about his arrangement with Miss Maria, or the trinkets, or the Shella that used to appear quietly in an envelope at the end of each month from the storehouse budget. It simply counted what it counted.
He replaced the plank in his slot.
Around him, a kitchen worker he didn't know the name of punched out with a cheerful sound, tucked his plank under his arm out of habit, then caught himself and replaced it properly. The young man caught Randell's eye and shrugged with a grin. "Still getting used to leaving it here," he said. "Keep wanting to take it home like it belongs to me."
Randell said nothing. He walked out of the servant entrance and into the cold mountain evening.
His small residence sat at the edge of the castle grounds, a perk of his senior position. He let himself in, poured himself a drink, and sat down at his narrow writing desk.
The pay slip was still in his pocket. He took it out and smoothed it flat on the desk, staring at column B.
There was a letter waiting beside his lamp. He almost didn't open it, he'd been expecting another circular about the new quarterly review process, which he had been successfully ignoring but the handwriting on the front wasn't the castle's standard clerk script.
He turned it over.
No seal. The paper was slightly expensive, the kind a person uses when they want to appear composed but can't quite afford composure.
He opened it.
“Mr. Randell,
I understand your current situation at the castle has become somewhat less comfortable than it once was. I believe we share a common interest in ensuring that certain things are properly understood by the people of this territory.
There are those in this city who might be very interested to hear about the true nature of their new Viscountess. Her methods. Her temperament. The kind of woman she really is behind that practiced smile.
I cannot demand anything of the Ironwood house directly. But a credible voice, someone with years of trusted service, carrying the right story to the right ears? That kind of voice has real value.
In exchange, I can ensure you receive documentation that could support a claim of wrongful contract restructuring. A legal letter. The right kind of pressure on the right house tends to produce a large settlement of Shella… you can easily secure what you have not been denied the last whole month.
If you are interested, leave a candle in your east window tonight.
— A.H.”
Randell read it twice. Then he set it down, leaned back in his chair, and looked at the ceiling for a long time thinking who it could be.
A.H.
Alan Hevel. It was pretty easy to figure out who the letter’s sender was.
He picked up the letter again. Then he looked at column B on his pay slip. Then he looked at the letter again. He stood up, walked to his east window, and placed a candle on the sill.