Olivier's face drained of color.
The refugees stared at the figure on the rock. Their eyes were wide — but there was hunger in them. They wanted punishment. The worse, the bloodier, the better.
The men kneeling on the ground froze for a fraction of a second. They had heard the order and not quite believed it. Then the understanding arrived and they broke — screaming, pleading, all of it pouring out at once.
"Mercy!! Lord Solomon!! We swear we'll never do it again!!"
"My Lord Solomon!! Give us another chance!!"
"Please!! May the Seven bless you!! My Lord!! Please!!"
"You're a monster!! Cruel Solomon!! Monster!!!"
Solomon paid none of it any attention. He did not even look at them again.
Lushen did not hesitate. He walked to the first man kneeling in the dirt — still twisting, still cursing — and raised his sword.
It swept through the air in one cold arc. The sound it made was brief.
A head fell to the ground. The face on it was locked into an expression of pure disbelief. The body dropped sideways, and the blood that came from the neck came fast and hot, spreading into the packed earth and darkening it.
The refugee camp went utterly silent.
Only the wind, and the sound of breathing.
Lushen's motion did not stop. He moved to the next. There was nothing in his manner — no ceremony, no hesitation, no reaction. He was doing work. Second. Third. Fourth.
Solomon gestured to Brin. Brin brought several soldiers in to help Lushen move through the rest of them.
Swords rose and fell. Blood flew. Heads rolled across the ground. The blood pooled and spread and seeped, and the fear that moved through the crowd was soundless, absolute — the kind that closes around a throat and does not let go.
It was in the middle of this that Solomon's gaze found the boy.
He was being supported by two soldiers at the edge of the crowd — Margaret's son, the fifteen-year-old with the dried blood at the corner of his mouth, the boy who had tried to protect his mother's field.
Solomon pointed at him.
He crooked a finger.
"You."
"Come here."
The boy limped forward to the base of the boulder.
Solomon looked at Brin.
"Brin."
"Put him on your horse. Ride him through the camp. Let him point out the men who stole from his field and put their hands on him and his mother yesterday."
Brin lowered his blood-wet sword.
"Yes, My Lord!!"
He lifted the boy up and set him in the saddle in front of him. The horse walked slowly through the press of bodies, every person pulling back instinctively.
The boy's hand came up almost immediately. He pointed into the crowd.
"Those three!! Those three right there!!"
Soldiers pulled the men out and threw them onto the ground that was already dark with blood.
All three went white to the lips. They dropped to their knees and kowtowed without stopping, foreheads striking the earth.
"Lord Solomon!! Please forgive us!! Our food was stolen too!! We were starving — we had no choice!!"
"Our children and families had gone two full days without eating anything — that's why we went for the grain!!"
"Please, Lord Solomon. Please."
The weeping came in broken waves.
"We...didn't...want to...My Lord...if those men...hadn't taken...our rations in the first place..."
Solomon looked at Olivier again.
"And for this kind of offense?"
Olivier looked at the soldiers still working below the rock, at the blood, then back up at Solomon's unreadable face. He moistened his lips.
"My Lord, by law..."
"The sentence would be... amputation of one hand."
All three men started weeping harder immediately.
"No!! Lord Solomon!! Without a hand we can't work!! We can't farm!! Our whole family will starve to death!!"
"Please!! Lord Solomon!! Please!!"
They drove their foreheads into the mud, again and again, the impacts audible, the skin breaking.
Solomon watched them. A silence. Then, measured, unhurried:
"The three of you acted in desperation. That is a fact."
At those words, hope ignited in all three pairs of eyes.
"But—"
The hope contracted.
"Had you only stolen the grain, I could set aside the heaviest charge. You chose to use your hands. You struck my soldier's family."
"That cannot go unanswered."
All three were shaking badly now, tears streaming.
Solomon considered. Then he looked at the boy, still sitting in Brin's arms on the horse.
"You. Come down."
He looked at Brin.
"Give him your horsewhip. A hundred lashes each. Let him deliver them."
Brin held the whip out to the boy.
The boy held it. He looked at the three men — men who had seemed terrifying, bottomless, unstoppable, and who were now kneeling in the mud weeping like frightened children.
Solomon's voice came, quiet.
"Strike. This is the justice I give to you and your mother."
The boy's grip tightened on the whip.
The three men on the ground felt the transformation in an instant. Compared to a sword through the chest — compared to losing a hand — one hundred lashes from a boy's arms was a reprieve. They kept weeping, but now they were pressing their foreheads to the ground in gratitude, not despair.
"Thank you, Lord Solomon!! Thank you, Lord Solomon!!"
Everyone watched.
They watched the soldiers still carrying out the executions. They watched a boy raising a bloodied horsewhip against three grown men. And above everything, they watched the figure standing on the rock.
The camp was silent in the way that a place is silent when every person in it has stopped breathing at exactly the same moment.
The only sound was the crack of the whip, hitting like a percussion instrument, landing on skin and muscle, over and over, and somehow the sound felt like it was landing on every person there — not just on those three bodies.
At last, the striking stopped.
The boy dropped the whip. He sat down in the dirt with his legs going out from under him, laughing and crying at the same time, making sounds that were neither.
Even the people standing in the back of the crowd, who couldn't see past the heads in front of them, could smell the blood in the air.
Solomon stood looking at the fifty-odd headless bodies lying at the base of the rock, at the ground turned dark red and soft by what had come out of them, at the thousands of refugees standing rigid and motionless like animals caught in the open by lightning.
For a moment he said nothing.
He noticed, inwardly, that he felt nothing. No revulsion. No weight. He wasn't sure when that had become true.
The children had been pulled into their parents' arms, small hands pressed over small mouths, huge eyes wide in the dark, reflecting the image of the boy sitting in the dirt on the rock above them. No one moved. No one spoke.
Solomon stepped down from the horse.
He simply stood there. His gaze passed slowly across the faces — the relieved ones, the joyful ones, the blank ones, the terrified ones, the empty ones. Wherever his eyes moved, the crowd bowed their heads. The fear spread through them without a sound, rising and spreading like something that had been seeded, invisibly, in every person's chest.
Every eye was on him. Every person was waiting for what he would say.
Order had been established. The ground had been cleared. His next words would land in soil that was ready to receive them.
When the silence had been compressed to its limit, when every nerve in the crowd was stretched taut, he finally spoke.
His voice was not loud. It cut through the stillness without effort, and every person pulled themselves to full attention and listened with everything they had.
"You are my people now."
"I cannot and will not leave you here forever."
"Packed in like this."
"Living like maggots — in rot and filth."
The words were simple. Blunt. Without any ornament.
But they went in.
A tiny tremor moved through the crowd, a ripple passing through water, and then settled.