"Captain," she said. "We know the levy. We have paid it eleven years running since the last war-mark. Show your writ and your measures. We will open what is owed. We will not open what is panic."
A murmur moved through the nearest foot soldiers—surprise, perhaps, that an old woman spoke to banners without kneeling. The captain's mouth twitched in something that might have been respect or indigestion.
"I am Dreven of the Lower March," he said. "The writ is sealed. The King himself follows within the hour. He wishes to see the valley." His eyes flicked, unwilling, toward Castle Veyne's broken silhouette. "He has not seen it since the burning."
Edric stood at Sibley's left with his staff grounded like a boundary stake. Miren stood at her right with empty hands held visible. Tobin had melted back among the mill hands; Ralla kept Pip and Nessa behind Mistress Keld's skirts. Corin had flour on him still, a white badge of ordinary work.
Dreven produced the writ. Sibley read it without haste. Miren watched the soldiers' faces: tired, young, older, a woman with a scar through one eyebrow who looked at the wheat the way a baker looks at flour—calculating, not cruel. An army was not one mind. That mattered.
"The levy asks a third of the standing crop and half the milled store," Sibley said at last. "Hard. Possible, if the weather holds and if your men do not trample what they mean to take."
"They will take marked lanes," Dreven said. "I am not a fool, Elder. Hungry cities make fools of kings; I prefer not to join them."
He meant it, Miren thought. That did not make him safe. It made him useful.
They opened the first granary. Corin measured with the village's own marked stick while Dreven's clerk measured with the crown's. The two sticks disagreed by the width of a thumbnail. An argument began that was almost comforting in its pettiness—numbers instead of swords. Edric fetched the second village stick, older, darkened by handling. The crown stick was newer and optimistic. They averaged, grumbled, averaged again.
While men argued over inches, Miren slipped away toward the shrine with a pail, as if for ritual water. No one stopped a woman doing piety in a crisis; piety looked like order. At the hatch she tapped twice, waited, tapped once.
Vetch pushed the stone from below just enough to show resin eyes and the tip of a wing.
"They're measuring," Miren whispered. "Not burning. Not yet. The King comes to look at the ruin."
Vetch made a low sound that vibrated in Miren's wrist bones when she rested her fingers on the rim. Then it pushed up into her hands the crimson scrap—and something else wrapped inside it: a thin plate of slate no larger than a palm, etched with a branching pattern of lines like veins or like tunnels.