The King Who Broke Heaven’s Tithe

Chapter 111 The Root That Rang

The dead barley root rang against Asha's knife.

Daren heard the tiny note across the table. It was a sound that belonged to a cup, or a bell too small to call anyone home. It did not belong to something that had grown beneath a field.

Asha stopped cutting.

“Bring the dark cloth.”

On the seventy fifth morning, the yard had smelled of damp oats and woodsmoke until she unwrapped the plants. Now a sharper smell rose from the affected roots. Daren remembered the pale dust beneath the stoneback's neck and kept his hands away.

Asha laid the root across black wool. A white shell enclosed its fibers, hard enough to resist the knife. The healthy plant beside it bent when she pressed its roots between finger and thumb.

“Is it the same?” Daren asked.

“Which part?”

He looked at the separately wrapped samples: garden crust, boar grit, and soil from the clean ridge.

“The white stone.”

“White tells us where to look. It doesn't tell us what we've found.”

She broke one tiny piece from the root's outer shell and put it in a shallow dish. Equal pinches of the other samples went into their own marked dishes. Iven supplied clean water from the drinking barrel, and Asha measured the same amount into each.

The garden crust softened first. The boar grit scarcely changed. Around the root fragment, a cloudy ring slowly spread through the water, leaving a hard center behind.

Asha wrote down what happened. She tasted nothing.

Daren leaned closer. The cloudy ring seemed to tremble, though the dish had stopped moving.

He put his palm against the table. Ordinary wood, ordinary clay. His scar remained cool.

“There's something in the middle,” he said.

“Yes. Something that doesn't dissolve as readily. That isn't a name for it.”

She lifted the fragment onto fresh cloth. Within the pale shell lay a thread of greenish material, thin as a splinter. It might have been caught in the soil before the root grew around it. It might have entered with the water.

She needed to see where the plant had lived.

The field belonged to a widow named Nallis Venn, a day's road beyond Harrowmere. Asha had collected the barley there while inspecting seed stores before coming to Hearthfast. The western strip had sickened first. Nallis's upper rows, fed from a separate hillside spring, remained healthier.

“Could she have planted different seed?” Iven asked.

“She says both strips came from one jar. I'd like to compare the channels before I believe the water is the whole explanation.”

Daren looked toward the map room.

The Low Return lay in the same district as the uncrossed hearth. That was a reason to be careful, not proof that the old furnace had poisoned anything.

“How long?” he asked.

“Three days there at a sensible pace. Two days to inspect if she lets us. Three back.”

Eight days away. His shoulder still hurt when he lifted his arm, and the fort had less than a week's grain.

Iven saw him counting.

“We need food whether you stay beside the store or not. Rovan has repair work to place. I'll hear the offer.”

Brida would go because an old watercourse could mean unstable masonry. Osric would guide and watch the slopes. Asha knew the field. Daren's gift might help if they found a crafted spirit fitting; without one, he would have to earn his place with ordinary hands.

Before anyone answered, he set the map aside. An uncrossed hearth was tempting enough to make the field sound like an excuse. He told them that if the crops led nowhere near the ruin, the crops would still be their task.

He asked each of them separately.

Brida's condition was a cart for the road and no promises about entering ruins. Osric wanted a firm return date. Asha wanted the surviving plants left here for comparison, beyond curious fingers.

Iven would pack twelve pounds for the three resident travelers: eight days at their lean traveling allowance. Asha would supply her own food, buying more at Harrowmere. Roots and roadside broth would still matter.

Nothing about the expedition made the loan from Harrowmere disappear.

At noon, Daren told Orin.

The boy listened without touching his bowl.

“Are you going because it's dangerous?”

“I'm going because people might know how to stop the fields dying.”

“That wasn't what I asked.”

Daren sat down beside him.

He had once made departure sound noble because he could not make it painless. Orin had learned to hear the omission.

“There may be danger,” he said. “Brida can stop us. So can the woman whose field it is. I'll come home if we can't work safely.”

Orin pressed a small wooden peg into his hand. It had been whittled crookedly, one end blunt, the other split.

“For fixing something small,” he said. “Not a mountain.”

Daren closed his fingers around it.

By supper, the store held one hundred one and a half pounds. Departure provisions would be weighed tomorrow. Tonight, he checked the cart bench and the straps supporting his knee.

Asha called him back before the lamps were lit.

The cloudy water had settled. She had teased the green thread from the root and washed it in a separate spoonful.

Under the pale coating, a worked edge caught the light.

“Copper?” he asked.

“Possibly. Look at the end.”

Three identical notches crossed the sliver. Too regular for a thorn, too small to carry a readable mark.

Something made by human hands was coming apart in Nallis's water.