The King Who Broke Heaven’s Tithe

Chapter 29 The Price They Could Carry

Vann spread his hands over the cart’s empty bed.

“Four days by the lower road. Your people cannot eat a good deed.”

Daren stood beside him with a swollen knee and no answer that changed the distance. It was the ninth morning since the flight to Hearthfast. Iven expected him by the ninth evening. The borrowed mule was due back then too.

Harrowmere’s western crossing would take days to rebuild. Trying to drag a loaded cart around the broken sluice would only give the river another meal.

Halvek’s rope lay beside Daren, shortened where the farmer had cut it. His spear rested in Vann’s hands. Every decision now carried something already spent.

Jun arrived from the kitchen with a rough map scratched onto a board.

“Oren knows a charcoal path.”

Vann shook his head before seeing it. “No cart.”

“No cart,” she agreed. “Mules can pass. If the lower ford stays shallow, two days to Rillmarket.”

Daren looked at Selka, seated against the wall with her arm in a sling.

“Can you ride?”

“Better than I can walk.”

That required one mule for her. Grain would need more.

Hessa brought three householders to the shed. Oren followed, leaning on a stick. The children rescued from the cart watched from the doorway until Asha gave them work sorting empty jars.

They settled the exchange where everyone could hear it.

Harrowmere could release two hundred and forty pounds of edible barley now. The slower threshing and loss at the sluice had reduced what it could safely promise. Daren felt disappointment before shame. Hessa had families to feed too.

Of that total, twelve pounds would pay Vann’s original carrying f*e, now transferred to pack transport. Another six would pay for his extra day and return Daren’s spear. Six more would provision the road party.

Two hundred and sixteen pounds would reach Hearthfast if nothing was lost.

Three pack mules would carry eighty pounds of grain each at departure, along with only light tack. Halvek’s mule would carry Selka and their small shared bundle. Vann would leave his cart in Hessa’s yard and guide the train. Oren would lend his recovered pair; the village would provide the third.

“No ownership changes,” Hessa said. “Every beast comes back.”

Daren nodded.

He could offer completed work at the threshing shed and six days of his own labor repairing the crossing after Hearthfast had food. He could not promise Brida’s time, the village’s land, or the service of people absent from the bargain.

“Your knee may not give us six days,” Hessa said.

“Then six days of work it can give. Inspection, joinery, whatever is useful. If that’s too little, say so now.”

The households conferred. Oren spoke longest. Asha said nothing until Hessa asked her.

“The repair helped,” she said. “The rescue cost them a road as well as us. I’ll stand for the balance with my own f*e from the autumn trials.”

Daren turned toward her.

“Why?”

“Because I watched you hand the measuring board to a man who wouldn’t lift the stone.”

“That’s enough?”

“No. It is enough to risk a bounded amount.”

She would accompany them for three days at Hearthfast, inspect its possible growing ground, and return with Vann and the borrowed animals. Her seed stock stayed in Harrowmere under Hessa’s care. She would carry only marked samples, with no promise that any could feed the refuge soon.

Daren accepted before pride found a reason to make the offer harder.

Asha also named her limits. She would advise about water, seed, and soil. She would not become an officer in Daren's dispute with the Summit, and she would not leave Harrowmere's trials unattended through winter.

“If I refuse your field, you still return the animals,” she said.

“Yes.”

“If your people ask me to stay, I answer them myself.”

“Yes.”

Hessa scratched those points into the record. Daren found the care reassuring. A bargain that survived ordinary refusals might survive a difficult season; one held together by gratitude alone would fail at the first hungry argument.

Then they addressed Caster. Hessa would retain copies of both claims and the witnessed grain measures. Selka gave a signed account of the terms she had once approved, including the way they had been expanded. It could be used against her later.

Jun watched her finish.

“You could leave out your name.”

“Then he can say I’m someone who never saw the practice.”

“He’ll use it.”

“Yes.”

Jun took the paper to dry beside the stove. She did not offer forgiveness. Selka did not ask for it.

By noon the grain stood in six tied sacks, each weighed twice. Asha added the sample pouch herself. Oren showed Vann the charcoal marks used at the path’s forks and warned them about a leaning pine above the ford.

Daren wrote a message for Iven on a strip of bark. Hessa arranged to send it with a trader traveling toward Rillmarket by a separate footpath. It might arrive before them. It might not.

The message named the food, the delay, and the road. It did not tell her to wait without acting.

As they left, Asha looked back at the seed house.

Hessa raised one hand from its doorway.

At the first bend, Jun found a fresh bootprint beside the charcoal mark. Its heel bore the square nails worn by the steward’s guards.

Vann saw it too.

“Someone knows this road.”

Daren loosened his newly returned spear in its binding.

“Then we’ll learn where it narrows before they do.”