They don't howl at my gates anymore. Howling is for packs that still believe noise changes anything. Now they count.
Last week a boy sat on the east ridge for six hours and watched this castle the way a man watches a debt. Not looking for a way in. Counting windows. Which ones are lit, which go dark, which never do. That is not hunger. That is arithmetic, and arithmetic is patient.
I should know. I taught it.
Three hundred years of holding a border teaches you the trick of it: you stop seeing enemies and start seeing numbers. How many carts cross in a month. How many of my people go out and do not come back. How many nights a stretch of wall goes unwatched. You tell yourself you count to protect them. Mostly you count because a number cannot ask you for anything.
The wolves have learned the same trick about me.
They know my hall seats four hundred and I keep forty of them armed. They know the east door was built for coaches and never rebuilt for a siege. They know the three families beneath me send me their sons as guests and their eldest as spies, and that I drink with both. They count my windows because a window is a question with an answer, and I have been answering it every night for three centuries without meaning to.
Here is what I do not say aloud.
I could end it. One night, one fold of wings, one walk down the east ridge, and the arithmetic stops. I have done it before, for less. I am not gentle, and I have never lied about that, not even to myself in the small hours when the castle is quiet enough to hear the snow land.
I don't. Lately I don't.
Not out of mercy. Mercy is a story I tell the court. The truth is smaller and harder to say: I have started to want to be seen more than I want to be feared, and a pack that counts my windows is at least paying attention. That is a shameful reason to let a threat breathe. It is also the truest one I have.
So let them count. Let the boy on the ridge map every lit pane and price my patience as weakness. I will let him finish the sum. Then I will walk down the hill and teach him what the number actually buys, and it will not be what he brought.
There are three dukes beneath me and one woman in the west tower who has not spoken to me in a week. The dukes I can hold. Her silence I am still counting, one window at a time, and the arithmetic does not come out in my favor.
They count my windows. I count hers.