Chapter 348 --348
The man from the road — she still did not know his name — moved ahead of her and spoke to an older woman near the well, gesturing back at Elara. The woman looked at her. Then she straightened, with the dignity of someone who has been dealing with something terrible and has not yet surrendered it, and walked toward her.
"Your Majesty," she said. Her voice was steady. The steadiness of someone who had made a decision to be steady because the alternative was not useful. "Thank you for coming."
"Tell me what happened," Elara said. "From the beginning. Accurately."
The woman looked at her for a moment — assessing, which Elara noted and respected. Then she said: "It began six weeks ago. The garrison."
"Which garrison."
"The eastern garrison. The detachment that patrols this corridor." The woman’s voice remained steady. "They have always — there have always been payments. Informal ones. Everyone understood them. It was the arrangement." She paused. "Six weeks ago, the payments increased. Doubled, then more than doubled. We could not meet them."
"And when you couldn’t meet them."
"They took what they decided was equivalent. Livestock, first. Grain stores — we have very little left, Your Majesty, we have been rationing for three weeks. When some of the men tried to prevent the last collection—" She stopped. Redirected. "Three of our men were badly hurt. One of them will not walk correctly again."
Elara was quiet for a moment.
She was looking at the village — at the open granary, which she could now see had been not just emptied but roughly emptied, the structure’s interior visible through the damaged door, the shelving torn rather than cleared. At the stripped fields, which were not just harvested but stripped, the soil overturned, the kind of thorough removal that precluded the possibility of a second crop from anything missed in the first pass. At the children around the well, who were at the age where hunger shows in a specific way — not the dramatic way, not yet, but in the quality of attention, the slightly slowed movements, the eyes that were working harder than they should have to be working.