Huge Ajax's Arc

Chapter 461 of 619

The bigger lodge needed more hands than the old one. Ajax counted the beds and did the sum. Twelve rooms now, then eighteen. Two more baths. Casks to haul, wine to pour, water to heat. His sworn brothers could not do it all and hold the walls too. He called Tucker to the bar at dawn and told him to hire fresh men. "Servers and room workers," Ajax said. "Strong backs. Quiet mouths. Enough to run the new floor." Tucker filled the beds in three days. He brought back eight men from the port, each one bound by a silver chain and sworn to silence about the gate and the canal. He trained them himself, standing at the bar with a cask and his easy grin. He showed them how to pour, how to lean close, how to hold a captain's eye without a word. "Stand still," Tucker told them. "Let the man come to you. A drunk captain talks more than a sober one, and a captain in a warm bath talks most of all." He tapped one man's chest. "You listen. You remember. You tell me." By the fourth night the new floor ran clean. Beds filled. Casks emptied. Coin came in and no captain went away angry. Marco rode in from the Crossing and sat by the wine as he always did. He read the masters dry while the new men worked the room around him. Ajax watched it hold and knew he had a bigger gap than beds. Marco held the eastern road with two sworn men. Marco worked the bar three nights a season. One man could not do both well. When Marco rode east, the bar had no reader. A spy could sit and drink and no one would hear the lie. He found Marco after the room emptied. "I need another like you," Ajax said. "A man who hears a lie land. One for the bar, one for the road. I can't keep pulling you off the gate." Marco set down his cup. He did not answer fast. He turned the gold bracelet on his wrist, the one he never took off. "There is one," he said. Ajax waited. "My brother," Marco said. "Same blood. Same gift. My grandmother sat us both at her table." He looked up. "He hears men the way I do. Maybe better." Ajax leaned in. "Trusted?" "By me. No one else has earned it." Marco held his eyes. "He answers to blood before coin. If I ask him, he comes." Tucker had drifted close with a fresh cup. He set it down and grinned. "Two readers," he said. "One on the wine, one on the road. That's a wall no spy climbs." Ajax turned the plan in his head and saw it whole. He clasped Marco's shoulder. "Send for him," he said. "I'll swear him myself." Marco nodded and reached for the caller ring on his cord.