"Stonewell," he said. "You sheltered northern stragglers the winter after the burning. My clerks still write it in the margins."
"We sheltered hungry people," Sibley said. "Hunger does not carry banners well. Some of them were yours before the lines moved. Some were not. We fed children. If your clerks want the names of the children, they may apply to the grave markers by the creek; fever took more than politics did."
A muscle jumped in Osric's jaw. Not rage—something older, nearer shame. "I did not come to litigate fever."
"Why did you come, then?" Miren heard herself ask, and felt Edric's warning glance like heat. "The levy could have been a sealed letter and a cart train. You brought an army through our wheat."
Dreven stiffened. Osric studied Miren as if she were a problem written in a language he almost remembered.
"Because the capital's stores failed in the drought," he said, plain. "Because the southern lords will sell grain at prices that buy rebellions. Because this valley still grows gold when other fields go to dust, and I will not apologize for feeding cities that did not choose their rain. And—" He looked again at the ruin. "Because I have postponed standing in sight of that hill for fifteen years, and postponement has begun to rot my judgment."
Honesty from a king was a kind of weather too: useful, unstable.
"Then stand," Sibley said. "Look. Take what the writ allows. Leave what will seed next year. Do not pretend an army is a conversation."
Osric almost smiled then, thin and unwilling. "Elder, you would have made a vicious councillor."
"I make bread and decisions," Sibley said. "Councils make speeches."
They housed the King—because there was no refusing it cleanly—in the miller's upper room, the only chamber with a whole shutter and a bed that did not sag into a hammock. Corin's wife, Jennet, stripped the good blanket from their own bed without comment and hung lavender from the beam. Soldiers camped in the marked lanes of the wheat, and true to Dreven's word they trampled less than they might have. Still the field looked wounded by morning, paths cut through gold like accusations.
Miren did not sleep much. Neither did Edric. They sat on the well's rim after moonrise, speaking softly while chickens muttered in their dreams.
"He is not a monster," Edric said.