My Brother Bet I'd Be Dead by Spring, So I Made My Ruin the Strongest March in the Realm novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: Seed Grain

Maela stands on the last cart between the starving yard and the collector's spears, and arrows from the broken wall hand the carts to the bandits of the King's Road.

I climbed down from my cart and walked across the yard to the old woman in the mud.

Enora was already kneeling beside her with both arms around her neck.

The old woman was tiny and bent, with white hair under a cap and no front teeth.

She pushed Enora back far enough to look at her.

"You've got your mother's freckles," she said. "And you've come home with a princess and a mule."

"Her name is Maela," Enora said. "She's mine."

"Well, the mule had better be fast," the old woman said. "We ate the last one in spring."

I gave her my hand, and she let me pull her up.

She weighed about as much as my winter cloak.

"Gwenn," she said. "I'm headwoman here, since nobody else wanted it."

"How many of you are there?" I asked.

"Three hundred and four alive," she said. "Nineteen children buried last winter. I keep the count."

She pointed her stick at the six carts.

"That grain is next year's bread," she said. "Eat it now, and we bury the rest of them next winter."

I turned around to face the tax collector.

He was still smiling, with his ledger open against his chest.

"Penhal's debt is due at the Spring Court," I said. "Not today."

"The prince has ordered it collected early, my lady."

He took a folded letter from his coat and held it up for the yard to see.

The wax on it was blue, pressed with a stag.

"That's my brother's seal," I said. "Tax is taken under the king's seal."

"You know that," I said. "You've carried it into the Counting House every quarter for nine years."

"The king's seal is in Kerys," he said pleasantly. "Twenty spears are here."

His soldiers kept loading.

One of them dropped a sack, and it split, and a little boy ran forward to scoop grain off the frozen mud with both hands.

A soldier kicked the grain away from him.

The boy didn't cry.

He picked up the six seeds left on his palm and put them in his mouth.

I had come to Penhal with a mule, a maid and a ledger in my head.

None of it would stop twenty spears.

So I walked to the last cart, put my foot on the wheel and climbed up onto the sacks.

I sat down on them.

"Then you'll have to load me too," I said.

The soldiers stopped working and looked at the collector.

For one moment, nobody in the yard made a sound.

"My lady," the collector said, "you're making a fool of yourself in front of peasants."

"I make a fool of myself in front of lords every day," I said. "Peasants are an improvement."

Somebody in the crowd laughed.

It was a short, rusty sound.

The collector's smile went thin.

"Get her down," he told his sergeant.

The sergeant was a gray man with a scar through one eyebrow.

He didn't move.

"She's the king's daughter, sir," he said.

"She's the lady of a ruin," the collector said. "The king gave her away at supper. Get her down."

The sergeant walked to the cart and reached up for my ankle.

Gwenn stepped in front of him with her stick.

"Touch her and you'll touch me first, and I'm told I bruise," she said.

Then Enora was beside her grandmother.

Then a woman with a baby on her hip stood beside Enora.

The yard moved forward behind them, slowly.

Three hundred thin people stood around my cart without saying a word.

The soldiers lowered their spears.

The points were a foot from Gwenn's shawl.

"Last chance, my lady," the collector said. "Come down, or I let them do their work, and every scratch on these people is yours."

I looked down at Gwenn.

She looked up at me and shrugged with one bony shoulder.

"We've had worse than spears," she said. "Stay put."

So I stayed put.

The collector raised his hand to give the order.

An arrow hit the sack beside my knee and stood there quivering.

Grain hissed out of the hole onto the cart bed.

A second arrow cut the leather trace on the front cart, and the horse stepped sideways out of its harness.

A third went through the collector's ledger and pinned it to the cart's tailboard.

Everyone looked up.

Men stood along the top of the broken outer wall, twenty or thirty of them, with drawn bows.

They wore sheepskins and ragged wool, and their faces were wrapped against the cold.

One of them jumped down through the gap where the wall had fallen and walked into the yard.

He was big, with a short dark beard and a bow on his back, and he smiled with a broken front tooth.

He walked up to the collector and pulled the arrow out of the ledger.

"Thanks for loading it, Collector," he said. "Saves us the trouble."

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