The King Who Broke Heaven’s Tithe

Chapter 122 The First Day Owed

Hessa struck a line through Daren's first repair.

The catch had held under an empty test. Under a loaded sack, it slipped.

“You've made it look finished,” she said. “Try making it work.”

The eighty sixth morning had begun with introductions at Harrowmere's threshing shed. Daren had arrived the previous evening, dusty and stiff from the cart, and slept beside his own travel bag in a corner Hessa cleared for him.

Now a sack of old straw lay across his boot.

He bent with one hand braced on the bench and lifted it away from the damaged knee.

“What counts as a day?” he asked.

“Useful work we accept. Six hours at the bench, or equivalent output if your shoulder makes that wiser. Rest doesn't count. Advice doesn't count twice.”

They agreed to six hours of useful bench labor on each of six days, with pauses outside the count and completed fittings inspected before any day closed. Hessa wrote the terms beside the original obligation. Daren read them before starting again.

Her threshing frame was ordinary timber and iron. It had no buried vow for his scar to retrieve.

The return joint's pin had worn oval. A previous patch held the moving arm slightly crooked, so the catch seated when unloaded and skipped when resistance increased.

Daren had corrected the catch first because it was the visible failure.

Hessa waited while he admitted that to himself.

A worker named Fen handed him a straight rod. Together they checked the line between the pivot holes. The rod stopped before reaching the far side.

“There,” Fen said.

Daren nodded.

They supported the arm, removed the old patch, and set the joint square. Fen handled the heavier pieces. Daren worked at the bench, fitting a sleeve around the worn pin and filing the catch to meet the corrected path.

He wanted to hurry after the wasted first attempt. His shoulder answered every impatient stroke with a deep ache.

So he stopped, rested, and resumed.

The clock for his debt stopped with him.

By noon, the repaired joint held a loaded test without slipping. Hessa made him repeat it from a different starting position. Then she asked Fen to operate it without Daren's hand guiding the motion.

It held again.

Only then did she mark the first completed task.

Daren ate from his own provisions beside the shed door. Hessa brought a bowl of turnip broth as hospitality, naming it plainly so neither mistook a shared meal for payment or a new obligation.

“You look annoyed,” she said.

“I thought I understood that frame.”

“You understood what it did yesterday.”

He laughed, then looked toward the rows beyond the shed. Harrowmere had problems of its own: a sagging fence, a leaking store roof, children sent to gather fallen kindling rather than enough cut wood stacked for winter.

They had lent Hearthfast grain from this place.

The debt had been easy to remember when it was a line on Nera's board. It became harder to excuse when he could see what the people owed it were doing without.

“Your loan will still be repaid after a genuine surplus,” he said.

“I know the terms.”

“I wanted you to know I haven't forgotten.”

Hessa dipped her spoon into the broth.

“Finish the days you're here to finish.”

Fen sat beside him after Hessa went to answer a caller. His hands were broad, with one nail missing where a door had caught it years earlier.

“My wife said you'd find a reason to leave after the first morning,” he said.

“Did you agree?”

“I said I'd see.”

Daren looked toward the unfinished guides. He could have explained the siege, the injuries, the people who had needed him. Fen had heard enough stories about why somebody else's work always came first.

“Tell her what you see,” he said.

Fen nodded and finished his broth.

It was an uncomfortable kind of trust, built without the courtesy of being granted in advance. Daren found he preferred it to gratitude for a repair he had not yet completed.

In the afternoon, she set him to making two replacement guides for the frame's loose return strap. Fen showed him where the old ones had rubbed the leather thin. The first replacement pinched when the arm swung fully back.

Daren corrected it before asking for inspection.

The second fitted cleanly.

When six useful hours had passed, Hessa tested the guides and marked one day against the six owed. Five remained. The grain loan sat in a separate entry, unchanged.

Daren stared at the single mark with more satisfaction than he expected.

He had once received banners for campaigns that left other people to repair the damage. This mark belonged to a machine somebody could use tomorrow.

At dusk, Hessa found him looking through the small bundle of papers he had brought.

“The old hearth drawing?”

“A copy. I wanted to ask whether anyone here knows the center sign.”

She studied it beneath the shed lamp.

“No. But there's a woman sorting ruined chapel records in the lower store. Ossa Vey. She argues with people who burn wood with writing on it.”

“That sounds like someone I should meet.”

“After she's finished arguing. And after your work.”

Daren folded the copy away.

From the lower store came a sharp voice, followed by the crash of something wooden hitting the floor.

“Those aren't firewood,” the voice shouted. “They're names.”

Daren looked at Hessa.

She sighed.

“Tomorrow may be quieter.”

Neither of them believed it.