The dining hall was warm, heated by a massive stone hearth, but it did nothing to dispel the chill of the blizzard howling against the frosted windows.

  Lord Roderick Ashborn sat at the head of the table. He looked like a man who had dragged himself out of a collapsed tunnel. His hands were heavily bandaged from forge burns, his eyes were sunken, and a faint layer of soot still clung to his hairline.

  But for the first time in days, Arthur saw him smiling.

  “Pour the wine,” Roderick commanded a servant, his raspy voice carrying a profound, exhausted relief. “The crates are in the capital. The King’s quota is fulfilled.”

  A collective breath left the table. Aria offered a small, polite nod of respect from her seat, while Cecilia let out a long, shuddering sigh, her shoulders visibly dropping.

  “They won’t strip our mining rights,” Roderick continued, raising his goblet. “The Ashborn family keeps its land for another season. The forgers worked themselves dry, day and night. But the fires are out now. The blast furnaces will shut down for the winter.”

  Arthur paused, his fork hovering over his plate. “Shut down? Why?”

  Roderick’s smile faltered, the heavy mantle of lordship settling back onto his shoulders. He set his goblet down, the victory suddenly turning bitter. “To keep the furnaces burning hot enough to forge that much Umbral Iron in a single week... we had to burn the territory’s winter wood reserves.”

  Arthur’s analytical mind immediately flagged it. “What are those reserves usually for?”

  “It’s a policy my father started, and one I still uphold,” Roderick explained. “During the three months of deep winter, the Ashborn estate distributes free firewood to the citizens of Ashford City. If we do not, they will freeze to death in their homes, especially the poorest in the outer rings.”

  Arthur did the mental math, a knot forming in his stomach. “How much wood is left in the storehouses?”

  “Enough for one month. Perhaps less, if this blizzard holds,” Roderick admitted, looking down at his plate. But then he straightened his posture, his jaw tightening with stubborn resolve. “But I will not let my people freeze. Tomorrow morning, I will ride to the inner city to meet with the Merchant Consortiums and the Lumber Guilds.”

  “Roderick, the winter mark-ups will be astronomical,” Cecilia said softly, her face pale.

  “I know,” Roderick replied firmly. “I will negotiate emergency lines of credit. I will leverage the spring yields if I must. Whatever the cost, we will buy enough wood to see Ashford through the winter.”

  Arthur sat silently, eating his meal, but his mind was racing.

  He’s a good lord, Arthur thought,watching his father

  ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ? ? ? ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

  An hour later, Arthur locked his bedroom door. He knelt beside his bed, pulled up the loose floorboard, and retrieved the territorial maps Layla provided him long ago.

  He spread the heavy parchment across his desk, uncorking a bottle of ink and grabbing his quill.

  To save the city without bankrupting his father, Arthur needed a denser fuel source. He needed coal. His eyes scanned the maps, landing on the jagged markings at the very edge of the lower rings.

  There, Arthur thought, tapping the parchment. The Ashborns did have coal veins.

  But Arthur remembered why they had been abandoned from his frantic research in the library. Decades ago, the family shifted all their resources to mining the different variants of iron to meet the increasing demand. The upper coal mines were left to rot, and the lower tunnels had severely flooded over the years.

  Even if he could figure out a way to pump the water out and get the coal, there was a second, deadlier problem.

  Arthur dipped his quill and began to sketch in his notebook. At first glance, the solution seemed obvious—why weren't the peasants already burning coal? The answer was just as obvious. Standard homes in Ashford City used open stone hearths. Burning raw coal in an open room would fill the house with toxic smoke and carbon monoxide.

  Entire families would suffocate in their sleep.

  The young heir’s quill flew across the page, drawing sharp, precise geometric lines.

  He didn’t just need to mine coal. He needed to engineer a way to burn it safely. He sketched out a thick, enclosed box with a hinged door, an air-intake vent at the bottom, and a drafted chimney pipe at the top. A cast-iron belly stove.

  He immediately started running the logistical math in the margins.

  Material: The Umbral Iron was gone, but the estate’s scrapyards had to be full of low-grade pig iron and broken tools.

  Production: He couldn’t have blacksmiths hammer thousands of stoves by hand. But with the blast furnaces shut down, the estate had a massive, idle workforce. If he carved a wooden prototype, he could use sand-casting—pressing the wood into wet sand to create a mold, then pouring molten scrap iron inside to mass-produce identical plates in minutes.

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Installation: The peasants likely already had crude chimneys or holes in their roofs for their open hearths. As long as they created enough draft, the smoke would pull upward instead of leaking into the room.

  Arthur dropped the quill, leaning back to look at the blueprint.

  The math worked, and the theory was sound. But he was operating entirely on assumptions. He had no idea how badly the mines were flooded, or what the architectural layout of the peasant homes looked like. He couldn’t build a massive industrial supply blindly.

  He looked out the window at the howling blizzard.

  Tomorrow morning he would return to Ashford City.

  And this time, he was going as an engineer with a plan that could change how the entire city survived winter.

  ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ? ? ? ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

  The blizzard had settled into a steady, biting snowfall by morning.

  Arthur dressed in heavy winter wool, strapped a thick cloak around his shoulders, and exited his room only to find Layla, his personal maid, about to knock on the door.

  “Ah... Young Master, I’m sorry. I came to call you for breakfast.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I will be heading to the library, and save my breakfast for later.”

  Layla looked confused by her master visiting the library this morning in clothes meant for a blizzard, but she bowed her head nonetheless. “Understood, Young Master.”

  After the small encounter, Arthur descended the stairs and walked directly to the library. Marcus was already there, poring over a ledger with a steaming cup of tea. He barely glanced up as the heavy oak doors clicked shut.

  “I need to go into the city,” Arthur said, skipping the usual pleasantries. “Specifically, the outer rings and the abandoned coal drops.”

  The High Mage stopped reading and looked up, his ember eyes narrowing. “The outer rings are a slum, Oliver. Lord Roderick has already departed for the inner city to secure the wood. You have no business in the freezing mud.”

  “My father is fighting to buy us a month or two,” Arthur replied smoothly. “I am going to buy us the rest of the winter. But I can’t do it sitting in this library. I need to see the architectural layout of the dwellings and also the water level in the old coal shafts.”

  Marcus stared at him, deciphering if this was the arrogant demand of a noble child or the calculated move of the otherworldly mind he had witnessed yesterday.

  “If you leave this estate alone, you will be robbed or killed,” Marcus said bluntly.

  “Which is why I’m not going alone. We have an arrangement, Marcus. Give me Elias.”

  A slow, humorless smile crept onto the High Mage’s face. He recognized the play. Arthur wasn’t rebelling; he was utilizing the chain of command. “Very well. But hear me clearly: if you run into any syndicate members out there, your blue fire will not save you from a dozen crossbow bolts. Observe, and come back.”

  “Rest assured, I won’t gamble my life away like that.”

  ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ? ? ? ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

  An hour later, Arthur sat atop a sturdy gray gelding, his face half buried in a thick wool scarf. Elias rode beside him, his hand resting tensely on the pommel of his sword as they passed the vast snowy fields.

  As they crossed the threshold into the outer rings, the paved stone roads turned into a frozen, rutted mud. And the cramped, dilapidated hovels built of rotting wood and loose mortar became visible.

  Arthur signaled Elias to stop near a cluster of particularly rundown homes. He slipped off his horse and walked up to the nearest hovel. An elderly man was huddling on the porch, shivering violently.

  The young heir pulled a small silver coin from his pouch. “May I step inside for a moment to warm myself by your hearth?”

  The man’s eyes widened at the silver. He snatched it greedily and pushed the wooden door open.

  Arthur stepped inside. The air was foul, but his eyes immediately locked onto the target: the hearth.

  It was a crude semi-circle of blackened stones pushed against the back wall. The fire burned weakly, its warmth barely reaching a few feet.

  In the dim light, he noticed a small child curled beside the hearth, wrapped in thin blankets. The boy's breath fogged in the cold air as he slept.

  The old man who had let him inside sat nearby, feeding small scraps of wood into the flames with shaking hands.

  Arthur's mind shifted instantly into analysis.

  The faster he could produce the stoves, the less suffering these people would have to endure.

  Above the hearth, a jagged hole had been cut into the thatched roof to let the smoke escape.

  Perfect, Arthur’s mind raced. The heat loss is catastrophic, but the vertical ventilation is already there. If I drop a cast-iron stove into that hearth and run the flue pipe straight up to that hole, the toxic smoke will vent cleanly outside.

  The stove design works.

  “Thank you,” Arthur said softly, stepping back out into the freezing wind.

  “To the old coal drops,” Arthur ordered as he remounted.

  Elias looked horrified but guided his horse toward the jagged cliffs at the very edge of the city.

  When they arrived, the reality of the Ashborn family’s neglect was laid bare. The entrance to the primary coal mine was a massive cavern carved into the rock face.

  Arthur dismounted, grabbed a lantern from Elias’s saddlebag, and walked cautiously into the mouth of the cavern. Less than fifty paces in, the tunnel sloped sharply downward and abruptly ended.

  The rest of the shaft was completely submerged in dark, stagnant water.

  He knelt by the water's edge, ignoring Elias’s worried whispers.

  He pulled his glove and dipped his fingers into the black liquid.

  It wasn’t frozen. Deep underground, the earth acted as a massive thermal insulator, keeping the groundwater at a stable, liquid temperature despite the blizzard outside.

  But it was deep.

  A standard hand-cranked suction pump won’t work, Arthur realized, his mind running the calculations. Atmospheric pressure can only push a column of water up about thirty feet. If the shaft is deeper than that, a surface pump will just create a useless vacuum in the pipe.

  “I need a completely different mechanical approach to lift this much weight.” He muttered.

  He didn’t have the answer yet. It was a massive problem that needed him to get back to his desk and think about it.

  “It’s flooded, Young Master,” Elias whispered, stepping up behind him. “Even if we had a hundred men with buckets, the underground springs would refill it faster than they could carry the water out.”

  Sigh. “Indeed, you are right about that.” Arthur replied.

  But as he stood up, his eyes caught something near the cavern wall.

  A fresh set of footprints in the dirt, leading toward a dry upper tunnel.

  Scattered near a discarded wooden crate were a handful of half-smoked cigarillos and a rusty iron bolt from a crossbow.

  Syndicate enforcers, Arthur realized, his blood running cold.

  Marcus had been right. The dry upper levels weren’t abandoned; they were occupied.

  Arthur’s mind raced through the logistical nightmare. Even if he went home, designed the perfect water pump, and mass-produced the stoves, it would all be useless. He couldn’t march a team of workers and loud machinery into a mine occupied by armed smugglers.

  They would be all slaughtered before they laid the first pipe.

  To save the city, he needed the coal. To get the coal, he had to drain the water. But to drain the water, he had to clear out whoever was occupying the upper mines.

  Arthur pulled his cloak tight against the biting wind, stepping back out into the snow.

  “Let’s go home, Elias,” Arthur said, his eyes hard.

  “Our business here is done.”

  (To be continued …)