The King Who Broke Heaven’s Tithe

Chapter 113 The Woman Above the Return

Nallis met them with a hunting spear across her gate.

“If you've come to measure what I owe, you can measure it from the road.”

Daren kept his hands on the cart rail. Behind the spear, barley stood in uneven strips, green on the upper ground and yellow where a shallow channel crossed the slope. The contrast was harsher than Asha's two wrapped plants had made it seem.

“We came about your water,” Asha said.

“I sent you roots. Not an invitation to bring a lord.”

“He isn't my lord.”

“Then why does he look like one who's lost a battle?”

Daren almost smiled.

“Practice,” he said.

Nallis did not lower the spear.

It was the seventy eighth afternoon. They had left Hearthfast two mornings earlier, twelve pounds of grain weighed into their packs and no expedition ration taken twice from the store. The high road had brought them to Harrowmere by the second evening. Asha bought her remaining provisions there. Hessa heard their destination, confirmed that Daren's six workdays remained owed, and lent no new grain.

From Harrowmere, the road narrowed into orchard paths. Brida walked the steepest stretches beside the cart while Daren stayed seated, hating the relief it gave his knee.

Now their journey stopped at a woman's spear.

He introduced each traveler and explained why they had come. Asha showed the notched sliver from the barley root. Nallis leaned forward despite herself.

“That came from my western strip?”

“Yes.”

“Then you can look there. Nobody touches the upper spring.”

Brida asked where the water went below the field.

“An old stone trough, then the reed hollow. Don't suggest washing my trouble into my neighbor's turnips.”

“I wasn't going to.”

Nallis looked at Brida more carefully and lowered the spear enough to let them through.

Nallis led them past a row of empty drying racks. A child's old height marks climbed one shed post, stopping below Daren's shoulder. These were the things the map had omitted: seasons measured in food, and a family growing against the same piece of wood.

He asked where they could sleep without disturbing her work.

“The cart shed. Your own blankets.”

“And the animals?”

“Outside the seed fence. Your keeper title won't keep a hungry mule from eating my spring.”

Her adult son, Tor, helped unload the cart. He had the patient movements of someone who had spent months doing work that showed no improvement. When Asha asked about the sick rows, he pointed to a line of dead stems beside the channel.

“Last year it stopped there. This year it crossed the path.”

Daren crouched with support from the rail. White grit lay around the channel's western lip. A higher, dry groove ran parallel to it, disappearing beneath thorn at the edge of a mound.

“Did you cut this?”

“My grandfather cleared it,” Nallis said. “The older stones were already there.”

She took them to the threshold of her shed and unrolled a field sketch, patched at the folds with flour paste. Boundary stones, spring paths, a neighbor's grazing strip: nothing drawn to flatter a ruler.

Daren brought out Nera's copy of the linen map. The original remained protected at Hearthfast.

They placed the sketches beside each other without forcing their edges to agree.

The old river bend fit the hollow below the field. The uncertain square lay somewhere near the thorn mound, if the scale was even roughly right. The uncrossed hearth mark stood farther north, beyond ground Nallis owned.

“That's the Return House,” she said, touching the mound. “Or where it was. Nobody calls it a house now.”

“Do you know what it returned?”

“Water, perhaps. My grandmother said never sleep on its stones.”

“Why?” Osric asked.

“She said that about every ruin. Sometimes grandmothers want children home.”

Asha laughed. Nallis's mouth softened for the first time.

They agreed on the scope of the visit: inspection of the western channel and exposed stonework, no digging beneath the mound, no change to either spring without her approval. Tor would accompany them and mark what they touched.

The upper spring supplied drinking water. The western seep fed only the damaged strip, but its lower course crossed a neighbor's ground. Nallis sent Tor to ask that neighbor to attend before anyone proposed changing its flow.

Daren had pictured a hidden furnace waiting for his scar.

Instead he spent the evening tracing ordinary water with a woman who wanted her next planting to live.

Brida found the first worked fitting just before dusk. Beneath an overhanging stone at the western seep, a green bronze lip protruded from the earth. Three narrow notches matched the spacing on Asha's sliver.

Daren did not touch it until Brida had tested the bank above.

When his fingers met the metal, cold traveled through the scar in his palm.

A fragment of intent pressed against his thoughts.

Carry the bitter away.

Then came a second sensation: something strained sideways, unable to complete a movement it had once repeated without effort.

He pulled back, breathing hard.

Nallis watched him without awe.

“What did it tell you?”

“Part of what it was made to do.”

“Can it still do it?”

“I don't know.”

She nodded toward the yellow barley.

“Then don't promise my son.”

Across the field, Tor was returning with their neighbor. Neither had heard the old bronze speak. Both would have to live with whatever answer Daren brought out of it.

Under his fingertips, the fitting gave one faint, resisting shudder.

The water beside it continued flowing toward the barley.