"Thank you for coming," Tam said. "Don't judge us too harshly for what we did here. We didn't have many options left to us."
"Tell me what happened," Corren said, and Tam did, his voice steady with the calm of a man who had rehearsed this explanation enough times in his own head that saying it aloud no longer cost him anything extra: Duke Maravent's own agents had paid them to rebel against their actual lord, the Albino Duke, threatening exposure of some scandal unless he provided them arms and supplies, all of it aimed at a rival Maravent wanted destabilized rather than at any grievance the farmers themselves had started with.
"They came to us in the spring," Tam went on, "dressed as merchants, offering more coin for a season's grain than we'd see selling it honestly in three years. It was only after we'd taken the coin, and the swords that came with it, that they told us what the coin was actually for. By then refusing meant admitting we'd already taken a Duke's bribe to arm ourselves against our own lord. There was no honest door left open to walk back out of, not one that didn't end with all of us hanged for it either way."
"Why would Maravent stir up trouble inside his own Kingdom?" Corren asked, and heard, even as the words left him, how naive the question sounded against everything he'd already learned about the man in three short weeks of service.
"Because it isn't his Kingdom he cares about ruining," Tam said. "It's the Albino Duke specifically. We're just the tool that was lying closest to hand." He glanced past Corren's shoulder toward the boy with the scythe, and the weathered lines of his face cracked for the first time since the conversation had started. "My grandson has never held that blade for anything but harvest. I would like very much for that to still be true by the time this is finished, whatever it costs me personally to arrange it."
The conversation ended when the fort's own soldiers, mistaking Corren's absence for capture, attacked the barricade outright, and Corren spent the better part of an hour placing himself bodily between the two sides, shouting Rooke's men back into order and Tam's people back from the edge of a second slaughter neither of them wanted, before he could finally walk on to the Albino Duke's own pale stone castle to negotiate on the farmers' behalf.
The Albino Duke received him in a hall considerably less imposing than Maravent's, pale stone and pale banners and a weariness in the man's own bearing that seemed to have less to do with the rebellion than with decades of decisions that had never once gone quite the way he'd planned them. "I know their plight," he said, before Corren had finished the first half of his argument. "I have known it for years. The Duchy is in debt, and the crown expects its share regardless of whether my farmers can pay it."
"That's not a reason to starve people who've worked this land honestly their whole lives," Corren said. "It's a reason to find the money somewhere other than the people with the least of it to spare."
The Duke studied him a long moment, something almost like relief moving behind his tired eyes, as though he'd been waiting years for someone with enough standing to say the obvious thing out loud in a room where he could act on it without losing face for having thought of it himself. "You're a persuasive speaker, and you clearly care more for common folk than most men your age bother pretending to. Very well. Ten percent, effective this harvest. I'll have the scribes draw the writ before you leave the castle."
The relief lasted exactly as long as it took Corren to learn, from a steward too tired to soften the news, that the tax cut alone would do nothing at all for a village whose river had been drying up for a season already, the water that should have fed their fields diverted somewhere upstream that no one at the castle had troubled themselves to investigate.
He followed the riverbed on foot the rest of that afternoon, the exposed mud cracking under his boots in patterns that looked, from above, disturbingly like the same veined geometry Renwick had once shown him in a mana pathway diagram, and found the dam an hour upstream: an artificial wall of fitted stone, too deliberate and too recent to be anything but sabotage, bound with a working carved directly into the blocking wall itself.
Old Germanic runes had been cut crude and functional into the blocking stone, the same rough dialect his own father's clan still mangled every coming-of-age ceremony without ever once suspecting how badly, and Corren studied the phrasing a long moment before answering it: not simply fire thrown at stone, which would have done nothing but scar the surface and leave the binding itself intact underneath the char, but a correction of the binding chant's own grammar, reversing the imperative that held the water back into one that released it instead. The dam gave way in a single collapsing rush, water thundering downstream toward parched fields loud enough that he heard the first distant cheering from the village before he'd even finished catching his own breath, and the drain that followed left Corren's hands trembling faintly, a bigger cost than fire alone would have asked of him, precision always more expensive than force.
He returned to find the fort's soldiers already lining up the rebellion's captured leaders for execution, Tam among them, hands bound, face gone the grey of a man who has stopped expecting mercy to arrive in time.
"Who authorized this?" Corren's voice cracked across the yard loud enough to stop every soldier present.
"I did." Aurelle stepped forward, chin lifted, her voice carrying none of the doubt her expression, underneath the composure, was already betraying. "The third edict. Ruthlessness. Leaving them alive after this only invites the next rebellion."