Osric nodded once, a small human gesture. "Then I will not keep you from your crank. Dreven will finish the weighing by tomorrow. We march with the carts the day after, if the weather holds."
He left them. The chickens resumed their pecking as if hierarchy were a human hobby.
"You intend to marry me when the world is quieter," Edric said, half smile, half shaken.
"I intend to marry you even if it is not," Miren said. "I was being polite to a king."
That afternoon a problem arrived that politeness could not dissolve.
A sergeant under Dreven's command—broad, sunburned, convinced of his own clarity—decided the village's sealed seed-store counted as "milled store" under a creative reading of the writ. He had already broken the wax when Corin found him. Voices rose. Pitchforks did not appear; Stonewell had learned from older disasters that tools raised in anger became evidence. But bodies crowded. Ralla's dog barked itself hoarse. Tobin put himself between the sergeant and Corin with the stubbornness of a man who had already ridden through an army once and disliked repeating thrills.
Dreven arrived at a run. Osric arrived at a walk that somehow cleared space faster.
"The seed is not levy," Sibley said, each word a nail. "Take seed and you take next year. Your own writ separates standing crop, milled store, and seed. Your sergeant cannot read, or will not."
The sergeant flushed. "Sire, the capital—"
"The capital eats next year too," Osric said. His voice had gone quiet, which was worse than shouting. "Reseal the seed-store. Sergeant Bramble, you will sleep with the horse lines tonight and recite the writ until Dreven is bored of hearing it. If you touch another seal without his word, you will walk home without wages."
Bramble stiffened, then bowed. Humiliation did the work blades did not need to. The crowd loosened. Jennet began melting wax for a new seal with hands that shook only after the King had turned away.
Miren watched Osric's face during the correction. He hated the theater of it—hated needing to perform fairness so that fairness would be believed. That hatred was not the same as loving justice, but it was a place to put a lever.
Toward evening she found Sibley alone in the shrine, oiling the hatch hinges with a feather and a cup of sheep fat.