All My Summons Become Divine Girls

Chapter 215: Greed Travels Faster Than Fear

The morning after the naming carried a strange lightness through the town, people trading Ash’s name in the street like they had each been handed a small share of it.

Vella’s clinic had a line out the door before the dew burned off, and for once most of it was not emergencies. Two families had walked in from an outer village on the strength of a rumor about a healer who fixed the regional fever, standing in line with the patience of people who had walked two days for a maybe.

A farmer near the front flinched when Vella’s violet hair caught the light, then bowed so deep his hat fell off when she healed his daughter’s infected hand anyway.

She watched him scramble after the hat, and Hajin watched her decide, visibly, that being feared a little was an acceptable tax on being needed a lot.

He left her to it and went looking for his scribe, finding him at the granary office buried in ration tables. The numbers had been shrinking all week, which Hajin knew, but the line that stopped him sat near the bottom of the page in Marrick’s careful hand.

One ration, marked waived.

"Your cuffs are looser than they were a month ago," Hajin said from the doorway, watching the man startle badly enough to smear his ink, "and now I find out my accountant has been feeding his own portion back into the count."

"The margin looks better this way, my lord," Marrick straightened the page with both hands, not meeting his eyes, "one waived ration is nothing against the whole ledger, and the fieldworkers need the calories more than a man who sits at a desk."

"You can’t count food if you faint into the ledger," Hajin pulled up the chair across from him and sat down, opening his inventory list between them, "so we’re doing this instead."

He transferred the deep stock he had been hauling since the capital, crates of preserved meat, sealed grain, and travel bread stacking themselves across the office floor while Marrick’s quill hung frozen over the page. It bought them weeks rather than months, and both of them knew it, but weeks of everyone eating beat months of quiet arithmetic starvation.

"Log it as a loan from the lord’s household," he stood and pushed the chair back in, pausing at the door, "and Marrick, if I see another waived ration with your name on it, I’m doubling your salary and making you eat all of it in front of me."

[ BreadWatcher: ] the lord threatening a man with food and a raise, this region is healing

[ MomOfThree: ] Marrick has been quietly starving himself for the books and I need someone to hug that man immediately

[ kernel_panda: ] respect for the quiet ones, every dev team I’ve ever worked on had a Marrick and none of them got thanked

Outside, the day’s real entertainment turned out to be Ash discovering the ore carts.

Somewhere between breakfast and noon he had decided that hauling was a game, gripping the yoke of a loaded cart meant for two oxen and towing it up the mine road at walking pace. The miners trailing behind him could not decide between cheering and praying, so most of them settled on doing both quietly.

The seamstress had given up asking him to stand still, jogging alongside with her measuring cord while he pulled, muttering numbers that got worse every time she checked them.

"Another two centimeters since the naming," she reported to Hajin with the cord held out as evidence, "at this rate I’m sewing him trousers with the hems rolled three times, and he’ll still outgrow them before the moon turns."

[ CringeSlayer91: ] the baby is doing teamster work while the adults panic, incredible

[ TaxpayerOnEarth: ] free child labor except he’s having the time of his life and also could level the town

[ ashley (Mod): ] He’s carrying that cart the way Hajin carried him down the mountain. He’s copying his dad.

Hajin read that last comment twice, then decided not to have feelings about it in public.

Elise and Sable came back from the southern border track in the late afternoon with dust on their coats and a merchant’s story in their pockets. The man had tried to reach the region through the old drover road, and Flint riders had escorted him off it "for his own safety," stamping his cargo papers with a fresh inspection seal before turning him around.

"Fourth caravan this week, and now they’re stamping paperwork," Sable dropped the copied seal impression on the table, tapping it twice, "they’re building a legal trail, so when the territory war gets declared, the blockade looks like border administration instead of a siege."

"Which means their lawyers are already working," Hajin turned the impression toward the light, reading the anvil crest pressed into the wax, "we’re being sued and starved at the same time."

Evening found him on the eastern wall with Ash asleep on his chest and Juna leaning on the parapet beside him, both of them watching the mine road empty out as the last shift came home. Lamps came on across the town below one at a time, spreading small points of warmth through the dusk.

"Back in the border forest, you told me what you wanted," Juna said quietly, her eyes staying on the lamps, "a home, people in it and a name on the door that nobody could take away from you again, which I thought sounded impossible for two nobodies."

"It was impossible," he agreed, feeling Ash shift and settle against his collar, "then it kept not stopping."

"That’s my point," she turned to look at him, and there was steel under her voice, "you almost have it, all of it, so whatever the Flints send at us next, don’t you dare trade yourself away to protect it. The home doesn’t work if you’re not in it."

He held her stare for a long moment, weighing the promise she was asking against every plan he had been quietly building, before the sound of a horn rolled up from the southern gate and took the choice away.

A single coach came up the trade road through the dusk, lacquered black with dark-red trim, flying a banner no caravan had dared fly at their border in weeks. A silver serpent coiled across the red field, but the coach carried no cargo at all, just a lone rider in courier gray who stopped at the gate without reaching for a weapon.

"Announce me to Lord Hajin," the envoy’s voice carried clear up the wall, unhurried and pleasant, "the Serpent Queen sends her regards to the new lord of the east, and she asks what he intends to do with a mountain of gold he cannot sell."

Juna’s ears flattened as her hand found the parapet edge, but Hajin just looked down at the serpent banner for a while, feeling the corner of his mouth pull.

’Greed really does travel faster than fear,’ he thought, adjusting the sleeping weight on his chest, ’and it apparently sends a nicer coach.’