"Monsters are easy," Miren answered. "Men with reasons are the ones who burn castles and call it necessity."
"You have the slate."
"Yes."
"If you show him, he may take the cisterns as crown property. Map them. Seal them. Hunt whatever still nests."
"If I don't show him, Vetch climbed for nothing, and the next drought he will come harder." She rubbed her thumb along the well rope's worn grain. "There is a third way. We show him with witnesses. With terms. Water-knowledge for grain-mercy. His clerks love terms."
Edric leaned his shoulder against hers. "You sound like Sibley."
"Sibley sounds like surviving."
From the dark of the shrine hatch, too far to see and near enough to feel, came a soft scrape—Vetch shifting in the deep. Miren wondered what a wellscale dreamed, if it dreamed: tunnels, or fire, or the particular sound of a bucket descending.
At dawn Pip found a crimson thread caught on the well crank and brought it to Miren with wide eyes. She closed her hand around it before any soldier could see and smiled at the boy as if it were only dye-shed lint.
"Good eyes," she said. "Keep them for counting sacks. Kings notice counters less than they notice runners."
Pip nodded solemnly, already practicing being necessary.
On the second day the King walked the village without his circlet.
He went alone enough that Dreven pretended not to hover at a distance of thirty paces. Osric looked into the dyeing shed and asked Mistress Keld about the indigo as if color were a treaty. He stood in the creek and watched Corin's wheel turn. He paused at the children's chalk marks on the shrine wall—Pip's crooked sun, Nessa's careful goat—and did not wipe them away. When he came to the well, Miren was there hauling water for Jennet's kitchen, sleeves up, apron damp.