Chapter 7 - The Plea

  “Desperation lends a voice to the silent, though it rarely grants an ear to the powerful.”

  —Common Proverb

  No summons ever rode kindly into Winter Cw, and this one wore its malice thin, stretched over the bones of custom like a shroud on a corpse. At dawn, the Duke’s men tramped through the vilge—their boots cleaving the pale crust of snow, tally-sticks striking doorposts, voices blunted by the cold. Word chased their heels: a hearing, the first in memory, called beneath the stained beams of the old moot hall. Grievances would be aired, so the Duke might show account to his lords and the listening wind alike.

  Eike waited in the drift where the dark pressed closest, arms folded, Lucy’s scent of fever and old honey lingering on the sleeve he had pressed to her brow before leaving. The world outside felt skinned, every sound and movement peeled bare. Vilgers shuffled in, pressed close to one another—eyes wary, mouths dragged down beneath the weight of the day. Someone muttered a prayer, brief and hopeless. Grayna flicked Eike a look sharp with warning—Don’t dare, it said. Or perhaps: If not you, then who?

  Inside, the air tasted of damp wool, st year’s sweat, old resin worked loose from the timbers. The hall’s stone floor exhaled cold up through cracked boots; heat pooled only near the high hearth, where the Duke’s men loitered like shadows with the scent of steel wound through their furs. At the raised table, Duke Jargev perched—his face drawn, furs swallowing his shoulders, a ledger propped before him like a second jaw. On either side, Master Rend and a clutch of retinue eyed the vilgers with narrow disinterest. And a little apart, wrapped in that odd, dark poise, sat Amonvae: cloak pooled like ink around her, eyes fixed at a distance beyond the painted gss. Something about her presence warped the space—drew the cold tighter, the light thinner—though whether in warning or welcome, none could tell.

  A hush rode the assembly, heavy as a cowl. Jargev’s voice, when it rose, barely disturbed it.

  “The King’s need increases. I have called this hearing so all may witness our burdens—and so no lies shadow our truth. Speak your needs. Let them be counted with the rest.”

  A ritual, Eike thought, watching the ledger’s edge glimmer in the firelight. Just dust for the ledger’s taste, nothing more.

  One by one, folk stepped forward: a bent old man menting rotted beans, twins thin as shadow with frostbitten fingers, a woman whose cow had died calving, her voice breaking on each word. Master Rend scribbled notations, his face impassive as pond ice. Each plea was answered with the same—regret, the balding logic of necessity, the shifting of short measure from one starving palm to another. The hall’s hope trickled out, spat back with every refusal.

  Eike’s turn came with no ceremony. Someone behind prodded him with an elbow or a muttered curse—he could not be sure. His boots scraped the stones, leaving pale fans of melted snow in his wake. The Duke’s gaze flitted over him, dismissive at first—then sharpening, as if recognizing need where defiance sometimes grew.

  Eike stood, fist tight around the ribbon Lucy had tucked into his coat weeks earlier—blue, already faded to the color of old bruise. For a heartbeat, words fled him. The press of faces waiting—not hostile, but desperate. Grayna near the back, mouth thrummed thin. And at the Duke’s table, Amonvae unmoving, her eyes no longer flighted but anchored to him, deliberate.

  He heard himself begin—voice low, rough as the river stones that marked his father’s grave.

  “My lord Duke,” he managed, tongue novice to formality. Every sylble rasped its way up. “You have asked for what cannot be given. The soil is stone. The roots shatter, and what’s left starves where the tally cannot reach.”

  Rend coughed, a sharp, professional noise. “You repeat what’s already marked. Dearth is not dispute.”

  Eike’s jaw set. “My sister is nine. She weighs less than she did a year ago. When the tally came, you left us less than hope—enough, maybe, to spit in the wind. She hangs on to life by a thread and still you count her debt.”

  A heat worked up behind his breastbone—not anger, not yet, but something raw, a splinter pressed deeper the longer he spoke. Around him, the air shifted; folk leaned in, brittle with the ache of hearing their own trials said aloud.

  Jargev grunted, voice like a stone jar dragged on ste. “If hunger visits your house, it is at the bidding of the season, not my hand. All pay alike, by the scale and by the w—”

  “Your w,” Eike snapped, the word sharper than he intended. “Doesn’t bleed. Your w doesn’t cough up blood at midnight. Your w counts the dying same as it counts the living. That’s not justice. That’s memory with its eyes shut.”

  A hush fell—more even than before. Even the guards, hands dulled by routine, paused. Eike’s breath rattled in his throat. He clung to the memory of Lucy’s pulse—a flicker, a promise.

  From the periphery, a vilger muttered, “Speak, d.” Others nodded, silent solidarity grown bold in the shadow of one voice.

  Eike pressed on, voice rising despite the cold ache in his chest, aware—if only dimly—that each word drove him further onto uncertain ground, where courage and folly grew as close as twin shadows.

  “We’ve given you all there is to give. If you want more, take the dead. They’re the only ones left who owe nothing.”

  Behind the Duke, someone bristled, reaching for a stick or a sword—Eike didn’t see which, nor did he care. His arm flung wide, hand gesturing to the heap of grain sacks at the side—spoils of all the vilge’s bor, piled like an altar in a barren church. “Is this what feeds court? Or is it only good for weighing our bones?”

  What happened next bore no name he knew.

  A pulse—felt more than seen—ran up his spine, lightning in cold muck. He thought for an instant of his father’s dying breath, of Lucy’s hand limp in his. The grain shuddered. The edges of the world sharpened; the air hummed—a sound like ice fracturing underfoot.

  He saw, with excruciating crity, the way the sacks twitched. Not as if a beast moved beneath, but as if the grain itself recoiled, undone by a greater will. Threads of dust lifted, hung briefly in the threadbare sunlight pouring from the clerestory. Then, with a sound—a dry sigh, brittle as grass drawn against stone—the grain simply fell apart. Sacks sagged inward, spilling not kernels but something else: gray powder, inert, lifeless as ash. Where richness and effort should have in, now there was only the memory of food—unravelled.

  A collective gasp swept the hall—a tremor of horror, awe, and something sharper still, slicing the hush like a knife through thawing ice. The vilgers shrank back, some drew wards, one woman began half a prayer and let it die midsylble. Guards started, hands going to hilts; a chair toppled somewhere behind.

  Eike staggered, pain ncing through his wrist and up his jaw—white fire, not physical. His vision narrowed, blue spots chasing the mplight. He gasped once, twice; the ribbon in his fist slipped, spinning down.

  Jargev half-rose, his hands clenching the edge of the table, eyes bzing. “What trickery—what foulness—” The words caught; for a moment, he simply stared, jaw working but speech lost.

  Master Rend’s jaw worked, eyes furiously scanning, tally-stick snapping between thick hands.

  Amonvae alone did not move—her body a fulcrum of stillness amid chaos. But her eyes, flint-keen, locked to Eike’s, not with fear but with the recognition of something long sought and rarely found.

  So there it is—the gate torn open by grief, not training. No conjurer’s rote, no amulet. The rawness Adenar feared more than he would name aloud.

  Her mouth quirked, not quite a smile, not quite a warning. “He is no conjurer,” she said, voice carrying with quiet command over the din. “Nor a chartan. The Shroud walks, but not as pgue alone.”

  Vilgers shrank from Eike’s shadow; even Grayna’s hand wavered in uncertain air.

  Eike’s knees wobbled, the floor tilting underfoot. His gut hollowed out, a pit left after fire. Power—if that was what had swept through him—shadowed his veins, left his skin cmmy, his breath shallow and stale. He gripped the edge of a bench to keep from slipping to the stones. Morton, the butcher, crossed himself three times. Others edged for the door, their fear an animal thing, searching for any escape.

  The Duke gred—part accusation, part unease, his voice fttening with official terror. “What did you do, boy?”

  Eike’s tongue darted over lips gone dry as salt. “I did nothing,” he managed, the lie an old instinct, but already he knew the truth was rger. “I only—spoke.”

  For a moment, silence cimed the hall, the weight of the broken grain heavy as winter stone. The fire in the hearth sputtered, its heat failing to push back the cold knot tightening in the hall.

  Amonvae stood, moving with deliberate grace. “The world is not so empty it cannot answer pain,” she said, eyes meeting the Duke’s across the gulf. “Consider carefully, my lord, what debts are woken when power lies unasked-for, and hungry.”

  Jargev’s hand trembled on the ledger. Doubt battled the urge to cast bme, to restore the fragile order that had for so long survived on the bones of necessity. For all his station, he looked—at that moment—no stronger than the vilgers he so quietly starved.

  Outside, the wind struck the shutters, rattling wood and sense alike—like a beast testing the strength of walls. Inside, terror’s scent hung heavy, cut through only by the sharp tang of dust, of grain ruined, of magic spent too soon and on the wrong altar.

  Eike forced himself to remain upright, breath scraping in his chest, the echo of his words and the memory of spent power clinging to the rafters. Around him, fear and hope warred in the faces of all who remained. The Shroud—no longer rumor, no longer hidden—pressed on the hall like new-fallen snow, heavy and unyielding. Debt had been cimed; what reckoning would follow, none could yet name.