I carried Torra back to Amanda's shop and collected Harold and Sia without a word.
Amanda stood in the doorway of her shop watching us go with an expression that had questions in it she was smart enough not to ask right now.
We went to the alley and I teleported us back to Eryndor.
We arrived at the Sequoia tree. Frostina was the first to notice.
She took one look at me, made a sound somewhere between a shriek and a sharp exhale, and stepped back three full paces.
She was magically sensitive enough to feel it even through everything I was doing to keep it contained.
The bloodlust was still there, sitting just under the surface, too fresh to fully push down.
An ancient dragon with a thousand years of survival instinct didn't need an explanation. She just needed to not be near it.
Favio came forward and I transferred Torra into his arms. Torra grabbed the front of Favio's shirt and looked back at me with red-rimmed eyes and said nothing.
I teleported away.
Behind me, Elder Elka turned to Harold.
Harold recounted it quietly and completely, the way he did everything. The knights. The grab. The bruises on Torra's wrists. What Leigh had done before sending them into the shop. What he had seen through the window after.
The settlement went still around the story.
"He might do something rash." Benneth said.
Nobody disagreed.
The capital of Amlada had more knights at the scene now. Someone had sent for reinforcements. They were gathered around the body and around the captain, who was in the middle of giving his account to a superior officer when I appeared in the center of them.
No alley. No preparation. Just there, between one breath and the next, in the middle of a circle of armed men.
The captain went rigid.
The superior officer's hand moved toward his weapon and then stopped. His training was good. His instincts were better. They were telling him very clearly that reaching for the sword was the wrong answer.
I looked at the captain.
"The next time anyone in this city touches my companions," I said, "Amlada ends."
Not loudly. Not with any of the performance that threats usually came wrapped in. Just the fact of it, laid down like something that had already been decided.
The captain held my gaze for exactly as long as his pride required. Then he exhaled.
"We won't interfere with you or yours when you come to the capital." He said. "You have my word on it."
I looked at him for one more moment.
Then I teleported back.
Torra hit me before I had fully arrived, launched from wherever he had been waiting, arms around my neck before my feet were steady on the ground.
"Where did you go." He said into my shoulder. Not a question. An accusation.
"To warn them." I said.
He leaned back and looked at my face, checking something. Whatever he was looking for he apparently found, because he settled back against me and didn't ask anything else.
The days that followed moved at spring's pace. The winter crops came out and went into storage.
The soil was turned and the tomato seedlings went in alongside everything else planned for the new season.
The settlement smelled like fresh earth and cut grass in the mornings and the children spent most of their free time at the playground while the adults worked through the fields in the particular rhythm they had developed together over the past months.
It was Nalvik who said it first.
He was standing at the entrance to the storehouse looking at the interior with a specific expression.
The one that appears when something has gone from a comfortable amount to a problem.
"We have too much." He said. "The crops alone. We can't eat all of this before the next harvest comes in. And the next harvest will be even larger."
I looked past him at the shelves.
He wasn't wrong.
"Sort what we don't need." I said. "Separate it from what we'll use."
Nalvik nodded and called the others over immediately.
I went up to the tarantula enclosure.
The mother tarantula was not alone. Seven smaller ones moved through the web-covered branches around her. She had laid her eggs and they had hatched and apparently decided they liked the enclosure well enough to stay.
The fabric situation had become its own version of the same problem.
Benneth and Frostina were doing collection rounds every morning and still falling behind. Oliver, Olivia, and Mikayla had been producing without stopping. Bedsheets. Pillowcases. Towels. Curtains. The tablecloth at the Sequoia tree dining area had been replaced three times because there was more fabric than they knew what to do with and replacing the tablecloth was at least a use for it.
I went to find Elder Elka.
She was in her garden on the south side of the residential zone, tending to something near the ground. She looked up when she heard me coming and saw my expression before I said anything.
She laughed.
Not at me. At the situation, at the shape of it, at whatever thought had crossed her face in the moment before she answered.
"I know that look." She said. "What's overflowing now."
"Everything." I said. "The crops, the herbs, the Glowfruits, the fabric. We're producing more than we can use and it's only going to get worse."
She straightened slowly and looked out toward the farm fields, then toward the storehouse, then back at me.
"We didn't have enough of anything for twenty years." She said. "And now we have too much." She shook her head, still smiling. "I didn't know this was a problem a person could have."
"Eryndor has no money." I said.
Her expression shifted. Something clear and practical moved into it.
"Then we sell." She said. "Use what we earn for the settlement's expenses going forward. We've been relying on your coin long enough. It's time Eryndor carried itself."
I had been about to say the same thing.
She had gotten there first, which was fine, but her version of the solution was pointed in a slightly different direction than mine. She was thinking about paying me back. I was thinking about sustainability. The same action, two different intentions behind it.
I didn't correct her.
I went to the storehouse and started pulling inventory. Surplus crops. Frostbloom herbs. Glowfruits. Bolts of Tarant fabric stacked to the ceiling. Everything beyond what the settlement would reasonably consume before the next harvest came in.
I left enough. Then I stored the rest.
Torra appeared at my elbow.
"Where are we going." He said.
"Selling."
He grabbed onto my arm before I had finished the word. A beat later a second hand found my other arm.
Frostina.
"I want to see." She said, with the particular expression of someone who had already decided and was now informing me of that decision. "I've never been to a human city properly. Just flying over them."
I looked at her.
She smiled.
I exhaled.
"Hide your mana completely." I said. "All of it. No magic. Nothing that could be detected. If you're exposed I'll find a volcano on the way back."
Frostina raised both hands. "Completely concealed. No magic. Acting fully human. I promise."
She picked up Torra and settled him against her side before I could say anything about it. Torra looked pleased with the arrangement.
Frostina looked at me over the top of his head with an expression that said she was well aware that Leigh was significantly less likely to follow through on volcano threats when Torra was in the vicinity.
She was not wrong. It was irritating.
"Stay close." I said. "We're going to Medalline."
Frostina's smile held but something behind it recalibrated.
Medalline. The empire. The center of Philantria's trade networks, known throughout the continent for buying anything of value and redistributing it under the empire's own name.
Corrupt to its foundations, which in this case made it useful. Goods sold in Medalline disappeared into the empire's supply chain.
No trail. No origin questions asked too loudly. Nothing that would point back to a hidden settlement in the mountains of Amlada.
I was a dead man in Medalline. Crescentine Fleur had fallen on the northern border of Branklore and the empire had celebrated it.
Nobody would be looking for him in the merchant guild with a child on a dragon's hip and a cart full of surplus herbs.
We arrived outside the merchant guild's main entrance. The building announced itself the way Medalline announced everything, with architecture that was meant to remind you of power before you had walked through the door.
The receptionist at the front desk looked up at us with the practiced neutrality of someone who had seen everything and found most of it unremarkable.
Then her eyes dropped to the fabric.
Her posture changed.
Not obviously. But enough.
The Tarant fabric was Singrael's most valuable export. A meter of it cost five gold coins from the source. What Oliver and Olivia had made from it wasn't just fabric, it was construction.
The cut, the fit, the details that came from having someone with modern design sense telling two talented seamsters exactly what to do with the best material in Philantria.
Nobody in Medalline dressed like this.
The receptionist excused herself.
The guild master appeared shortly after. He was the kind of man who had trained himself not to show interest too quickly in professional settings and was currently losing that battle because he couldn't stop looking at the fabric.
He shook my hand and led us toward his office, making the kind of pleasant small talk that was actually information gathering. He glanced at Frostina holding Torra. He glanced at the way I positioned myself relative to both of them.
"Your family?" He said pleasantly.
I didn't answer.
He took us into his office and closed the door.
This was where it would get complicated.