I was locked in place, my heart pounding. The face swam forward through the gloom.

It turned out to be attached to a boy of about twenty, with pale skin dotted by dark flecks. He stooped, eyes never leaving me, and picked up a wood axe from the ground.

He looked me over, gray eyes darting from the ledger under my arm, to the keys at my belt.

"What's this?" he asked, gesturing at me with the axe.

The remnant of panic still pounding in my ears, I placed my ledger down on a stack of firewood, and without taking another step, set my back straight and held out my hand towards the boy.

"Sebastian Lewis. I'm the new administrator."

He looked at me for several seconds, before walking slowly forward and taking my hand.

"Aleth Green. I'm yard hand here."

"It's good to meet you," I said, keeping the recovering quiver from my voice.

"Same."

There was a beat of silence, before I went on. "You gave me a shock. I didn't expect anyone else to be awake, even less down in the cellar."

There was movement behind Aleth, and another boy appeared at the doorway to the third chamber, which I hadn't yet surveyed. He was about the same age as Aleth, with white skin and black hair.

"Who is it?" he asked.

Aleth turned back to face him. "The new Wilfram."

"Sebastian Lewis," I said, facing the newcomer.

Aleth turned and walked back to the doorway, sliding an arm around the other figure's waist.

"This is Jon," Aleth said. "He's the house servant for most of the fort."

For the first time I noticed that both were dressed in loose, crumpled clothes, and I suddenly felt that they had both come from sleep.

"Are you quartered down here?" I asked Aleth.

He glanced through the doorway behind him. "There's a groundskeeper's apartment set up down here. There's more servant rooms up top, but this is a bigger space."

"Then I'm sorry if I woke you," I said.

He gave a half-shrug, then twisted his head to look at me directly.

"Wilf gave us three days off a week," he said. "Friday through Sunday."

It hadn't occurred to me that these two men were my subordinates until now – a first in my career. I took my ledger in both hands, peering at the red leather cover while I thought.

"Well," I said to the ledger. "We'll have to see how things turn out, but I don't see any problem with that in principle."

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I heard a low sigh and looked up to see Jon disappearing back into their room.

"It was good to meet both of you, goodnight."

Aleth nodded at me and followed Jon back into the room, disappearing as the door closed after him.

I made sure to walk around more quietly as I finished my inspection of the undercroft, though I could hear low words being exchanged behind the door to the servants' apartment, so I knew there was no danger of waking them again.

The last dark corner of the cellar had several crates pushed up against the walls. I tried opening one, but they were nailed shut, and I lacked the tools to pry the lids loose. I had a vague hope that they might contain an emergency food supply, but they had more the feel of military equipment to me, and that they were nailed shut meant they couldn't have been opened recently or regularly.

There was a round metal trap-door in the deepest part of the room, of the kind that usually lead to the bare earth foundations of a building, but though it wasn't locked, it was too heavy to lift alone and without leverage, so I left it alone.

I wouldn't consider my inspection complete until I'd at least glanced beneath it – there were stories from the Reformation of people using the loose soil of a house's foundations as a hiding place for valuables, and even people – but it was something I could comfortably leave for another day.

Working from the undercroft upwards, I surveyed the rest of the fort. The kitchen's larder was well stocked, but the room was small, and none of its contents were kept in bulk. The buttery had five kegs of ale, which I thought might supplement our remaining food, but there was no spare grain to be found there. The second and third stories of the fort had visitors' quarters, which my keys opened, and rooms that I assumed were associated with the original military purpose of the fort, which I couldn't access, and a secondary storeroom that held bedding, rags, soaps, and clean laundry.

I avoided even trying my keys in any room I knew to be a bedroom for fear of disturbing any of my colleagues.

By the end of my inventory several pages of my ledger were covered in the names of all manner of items, with tallies I added to whenever I surveyed a new room. It was likely only due to the standardization of furniture and equipment in the fort that saved me from filling the book with a list of thousands of knick-knacks.

The final part of my inspection took me onto the roof. My keys unlocked a hatch in the ceiling of the fourth floor, and I found myself climbing out onto a tiled area the length and width of the entire fort.

The iron-gray sky spread out overhead. The rain had stopped, but there was still wetness in the air, smells of earthy mould and damp wood, and a cool breeze blowing from the north, where so far as I knew, there was no living civilization for as far away and as far back as anyone's records stretched, and certainly no road that led in that direction.

The trees of the forest just beyond the fort's outer wall swayed together in the wind, pointed tips rocking back and forth, brushing or clashing against their neighbors.

The sky was beginning to brighten, and I felt that it must be nearing dawn, meaning I'd spent several hours surveying and inventorying.

The tiredness I hadn't felt when I'd woken from my nightmare-haunted sleep had returned, though I couldn't afford to return to bed. I'd need to speak to the chef, and then likely arrange a meeting with Beatrix and the commander, if not the captain, to discuss what was to be done about the food situation.

As I mulled over my plans, I found myself wandering up to the battlements, where I stood, looking down into the courtyard.

The parapets were about a foot thick, the wall just above waist height at the low point of the crenellations, and head height at their tallest.

I peered down at the dead tree that grew from the courtyard.

It was about twelve feet away from the wall. Too far for me to hit it with a casual drop, but perhaps if I leapt...

For a brief moment I imagined climbing onto the wall and throwing myself at its upturned branches. I shook away the image and stepped back.

I didn't have time for flights of fancy. With the sun coming up, morning bell would be soon, and the chef would likely soon be at work in the kitchen down below.

A sunbeam briefly flared above, shining through some impossibly distant gap in the cloud, giving livid color to the treetops in the same moment it half blinded me, deep green foliage, black-brown wood.

It was gone a moment later, the gap closed, the uniform gray ceiling of cloud reasserting itself. I felt rain begin to spot on my skin, and I turned to head back down into the fort.