Huge Ajax's Arc

Chapter 368 of 619

The bunkhouse was done and the cooper hidden among the sworn. The guest rooms sat empty and clean. But the lodge itself was still a question Ajax had never answered. He knew what it cost him. He did not know what it earned. He found Aldric in the hall with his ledger and called for Grayson and Tucker to join them. "I want the count," Ajax said. "Every room. Every night. What the beds, the baths, and the bar bring in. I've been building blind." Aldric turned back three pages. He had ridden with Ajax since the port, a scholar with grey in his hair who kept every coin in a line. He read without looking up. "Six suites. Five filled most nights when a ship is in. The baths take silver from every guest and half the crews. The bar earns more than both together." He set his pen down. "On a good week, the lodge clears more than a hunt." Tucker leaned against the table. He wore his two flat chains and knew how they caught the light. He worked every captain who drank at that bar. "The count's short," he said. "Masters pay for the room. Then they pay again for a bath, a jug, a quiet corner to talk. Every one of them leaves lighter than he came." He grinned. "They think it's my charm." Grayson stood by the door. He answered to the gate, not to Ajax, and said so when it mattered. He had ridden from the first dawn when no other man would. "Full beds mean full ships," he said. "But every new room is a new stranger past the canal. You want more coin, you open more doors." His voice went flat. "I don't like more doors." Ajax looked at the numbers on the page. The lodge paid its own way and more. It fed his men without a single raid. That was the answer he had wanted for a year. "So it holds," Ajax said. "The lodge earns. Enough to keep every man fed through winter with no blood spent." "It earns," Aldric agreed. "But it can't reach the northern city. Carts don't sail. The bar buys you a captain's ear. It doesn't buy you his route." Ajax was quiet. The lodge was solved. It ran, it paid, it needed no more from him. But the money it made was silver in a vault, and silver in a vault bought nothing without a hull to carry his furs north. "Then we stop spending on rooms," Ajax said. "No more suites. No more baths. The lodge stays as it is." He put his hand on the page. "The next coin it clears goes to the keel. Aldric, tell the shipwright his gold is waiting. We build the hull." Grayson nodded once. Tucker pushed off the table. The lodge was finished as a question. Now it was a purse, and the purse would buy a ship.