He Freed the Kings He Once Chained, They Chose to Bind Him novel · Chapter 22 of 24
Chapter 22: The First Law
By midmorning the line of people reached the far end of the causeway.
The captain had stopped counting at a thousand.
Ren stood on the lake steps with the crown on his head and the same blue coat he had worn for a week.
"Who are they?" he asked.
"Bonded servants," Su Ming said quietly. "Debtors. Grooms, kitchen hands, the stable boys. Anyone the old law sentenced to a cuff for a stolen loaf or an unpaid tax."
"How many?"
"Every household in four kingdoms has one."
Ren closed his eyes.
"Mariam's law," he said.
"Her law," Ryu agreed. "Signed in the old king's name."
Ren opened his eyes and walked down the steps into the crowd.
He did not make a speech.
He took a file from the nearest smith's belt, and gripped the wrist of the woman at the front of the line.
She was perhaps fifty, with flour in the creases of her knuckles.
"What's your name?" he asked.
"A baker, my lord."
"Hold still, then."
The iron cuff gave way under the file in about the time it takes to say a long prayer.
It dropped into the dust, and she stared at her bare wrist and began to cry without making any sound.
Ren handed the file to Ken.
"Next," he said.
He worked through the afternoon with a smith on either side.
Ryu took the second file.
Su Ming took the third, and sat in the dirt with an old stable boy's hand in his lap, talking nonsense to keep the boy still.
A small boy tugged at Ken's sleeve and asked whether it was true that he turned into a tiger.
"It's true," Ken said.
"Can I see?"
"After the cuffs," Ken said gravely. "I have work to do."
The boy nodded. That seemed fair to him.
Ken did not need a file.
He broke the thin ones with his bare hands, and grinned at the children who gasped.
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