Solomon raised his arm and pointed toward the horizon — somewhere beyond the camp, beyond the mountains.
"I am going to build two new towns. New homes for you."
He let the words settle for a moment.
"Every blacksmith. Every carpenter. Every stonemason. Every leatherworker. Everyone who carries a trade and a skill."
His voice rose slightly.
"Six hundred of you will go to the King's Road. You will build a town there. I am calling it Cross Town."
"I will provide the tools. The materials. Even the gold."
"The King's Road carries merchants and travelers from one end of the Seven Kingdoms to the other."
"Your skills will earn you wealth that belongs to you."
In the crowd, men who had been curled in on themselves looked up. Something appeared in their eyes that had not been there a moment before — something that was not fear.
Solomon's arm moved, pointing toward the distant thread of water.
"Everyone who knows boats, fishing, and the same crafts and skills I just named."
"Six hundred of you will go to the banks of the Green Fork. You will build another town there. I am calling it River Town."
"That is the Green Fork — the same river that trade runs up and down all year. The water is full. Your labor will fill your stores with coin and catch."
More heads came up across the crowd. More breath quickened.
Solomon's hand moved again, to the outline of the mountains in the distance.
"Another six hundred. Two groups."
"Each group of three hundred will go to the edge of the high ground and establish large livestock farms."
He lowered his arm and looked out over the assembled mass.
"The rest of you will remain here for the time being, pending further arrangements."
"Lord Olivier will begin the specific assignments in the next day or two."
The refugees stood and stared.
Their minds could not process what had just been given to them. One moment they had been shaking in the middle of a blood-soaked execution, certain they were livestock waiting to be slaughtered. The next, their lord was laying out a vast, specific map of a future directly in front of them — new towns, new villages, new lives.
For people who had lost everything. For people standing in a filthy, violent camp.
It sounded like a dream told by someone who had never experienced the gap between promises and reality.
And yet the young man on the rock spoke without a single note of performance in his voice.
The crowd began to murmur. The fear was being displaced by something tentative and unsteady — the first movements of hope.
Then a voice broke through, trembling.
"Lord... Lord Solomon..."
The crowd went quiet immediately. Every head turned.
An old man with white hair pushed his way out of the mass of bodies. He looked like a farmer. He dropped to his knees on the ground and pressed his forehead to the earth.
"I am a carpenter, Lord Solomon."
"You saved us. You gave us food."
"We are grateful for your mercy..."
His voice was shaking badly and had tears in it. Carpentry was his secondary skill — farming was his life.
"But... but we have no land of our own... how... how are we to pay our taxes to you?"
The question hit the crowd like a stone dropped into still water.
The joy went out of the air immediately.
Yes — tax. In Westeros, even smallfolk who owned no land were required to pay their lord a crushing poll tax and a collection of other levies simply for existing on his land, simply as the price of protection. It made no difference whether you were a craftsman or a farmer — as long as you were alive, you paid. The tiny flame of hope that had just been lit guttered under the weight of it.
Everyone held their breath. Hearts rose into throats. They looked at Solomon with the careful, frightened attention of people waiting to hear a familiar answer — the one that had always come, from every lord, in every place they had lived, before everything fell apart.
They were afraid that this new lord would do what almost every lord in Westeros did: use taxes to squeeze out the last of the light they had just barely glimpsed.
Solomon looked at the old farmer kneeling in the dirt.
The pillow arrives just as the head goes down.
The faintest possible trace of a smile — barely there, but real — crossed his face.
"That is an excellent question."
He had been about to address this exact matter. According to his counts, excluding the land still occupied by the Moonstone Range clans, he had approximately ten thousand acres of arable land — forty-two thousand Solomon-acres — which was nowhere near enough to distribute to everyone, especially given that he had no intention of touching the existing smallfolk's commonland, and had military rewards to grant imminently.
Solomon turned to Olivier at his side.
Olivier understood immediately. He stepped forward, produced a scroll of parchment from inside his coat, and read aloud.
"After survey and assessment, the total arable land currently under Lord Solomon's governance amounts to forty-two thousand Solomon-acres!!"
The number sent a sharp breath through the crowd.
Forty-two thousand acres sounded large. But most of it was already allocated, and there were two thousand people here — over six hundred families. The land was plainly not enough to go around. The hope that had just begun to rise fell back down again. Disappointment spread through the crowd like fog.
Solomon watched all of it. He waited, letting the disappointment reach its peak — because what he was about to say would overturn the world as everyone here understood it, and then it would send Olivier off the rock and headfirst into the ground.
His voice rang out again. This time it came like thunder.
"I know!! The land is not enough to give every family a plot!!"
"Therefore—"
He weighted each word as though driving it into stone.
"On my lands!! For the time being!! There will be one tax!!"
He raised a single finger.
"The land tax."
Blank faces throughout the crowd. They had never heard the term.
"It means — the tax follows the land. Not the person."
"Everyone who receives land — no matter what you harvest — I will take one-tenth of your yield per acre!!"
"One in ten!!"
"Everyone who receives no land — whether you are a craftsman, a herder, a fisherman, or anything else—"
His voice carried across the entire camp.
"You owe me no taxes whatsoever. For the time being."
Silence.
A full, stretched-out, breathless silence — long enough that time itself seemed to stop.
Then the crowd detonated.
"What?!"
"One in ten?? Did I hear that correctly??"
"No land... means no tax??"
"By the Seven!! Is this real?!"
The noise was incomprehensible, a wave that went straight up into the sky. The refugee camp was in full eruption. A tax rate like this — they hadn't just never heard of it, they had never dared imagine it. Even the most generous lords in Westeros took three or four parts in ten of the harvest, and that was before the poll taxes, the property taxes, the inheritance levies, the marriage fees, the road tolls, the endless categories of extraction that followed a person from birth to death regardless of what they owned.
And now this lord — this young lord — was not only offering a harvest tithe at a tenth of the normal rate, but abolishing all taxation entirely for anyone without land.
This was not mercy. This was the Seven made flesh — no, that was slightly blasphemous — this was something that had never existed before and had no name yet.
The way they looked at Solomon changed.
Olivier stood with his eyes pressed shut, his entire body vibrating, entertaining serious thoughts about throwing himself off the rock.
Solomon raised his hand slowly.
The noise stopped. Like a flame going out. Every person fixed their burning, desperate, overheated gaze on him.
"One final matter."
"The things we brought back from the Lege lands. The farming tools. The livestock."
"I said they would be distributed to you."
His voice was measured, final, carrying the weight of a man who does not make statements he intends to revise.
"They will be."
"Olivier will assess your future assignments and the needs of each family and distribute these things fairly to every household."
He looked out over the crowd one last time, and spoke each word separately.
"I. Solomon. Do not say what I do not do."
The crowd lost all restraint.
People wept with something they had no word for — the physical sensation of a future arriving when you had stopped believing there would be one. They dropped to their knees and pressed their foreheads to the ground, bowing again and again toward the figure on the rock, praying, crying, laughing, using the oldest and most sincere gestures their bodies knew.
Sunlight broke through the clouds and fell on Solomon.
To the thousands of eyes watching below, it looked like gold.
Someone — no one could ever say who — called out first.
"Long live Lord Solomon!!"
And then the sound broke over everything like a flood tide, cresting and rolling and refusing to stop.
"Long live Lord Solomon!!"
"Long live!!"