The administrative officer pointed at the Notice Board and made his solemn proclamation. "From this day forward, every command, every tax, every reward and punishment issued by Lord Solomon will be written here, for all to see!"
"Should any official act contrary to what is written, any man or woman may go to the Lion's Den and report it to the Lord directly!"
The entire market square fell into a long, stunned silence.
The Notice Board was Solomon's will made physical. Standing before that rough-hewn plank of fresh timber, people felt as if Lord Solomon himself stood before them.
Then, no one quite knew who moved first. One by one, every person in the square — men, women, the old, the very young — turned toward the board, toward the direction of the Lion's Den, and bowed deeply and silently.
The administrative officer picked up his carving knife and turned back to the wood. The blade bit hard, sending pale curls of timber spiraling to the ground. The letters cut deep and clean.
One: Every township shall erect a beacon fire station. Smoke means a warning. Fire means war. At the first sign, every man, woman, and child enters the fortress for combat readiness.
Two: Excluding the eldest son, every male in a household who reaches eighteen years of age shall be granted one plot of mountain land to clear and cultivate, to establish a household of his own.
Three: The families of those who die in battle: widows may choose freely to remarry or to remain. All shall receive compensation. All children shall have someone to raise them.
That night, the oil lamp in farmer Nal's house burned late.
In the dim, amber light, Nal and his two sons sat around the table. A small piece of dark bread was the only thing on the surface between them. Silence pressed into the room like a stone laid on the chest.
Nal's rough, calloused fingers tapped a slow rhythm against the wood. He looked at his eldest son, then at his second son, Tam.
"The family's public plot," he said. "You two. How are you going to divide it and work it?"
His eldest kept his head down. Under the table, Tam's fist closed slowly.
The conflict between the two brothers over those few narrow strips of tilled earth had been building for months, the heat of it threatening to set the thatched roof alight. Farm tools had been raised. Words far worse than tools had been swung.
But that afternoon's event at the market square had blown through every corner of the township, settling into the heart of every second son in the valley.
Tam finally opened his mouth. His voice came out rough. "Father. I want to leave. I'm going into the mountains to clear my own land."
Nal studied him. His youngest had always been like a young bull — stubborn, too much energy for one roof. It was why things had gotten this bad between the brothers. The guilt sat in his chest, heavy and familiar. But division was undeniably the cleanest answer.
"You've thought it through?" Nal asked. "That land is all in the Mountains of the Moon. It's all rock and wild grass. It's nothing like the tilled fields at your doorstep."
"I've made up my mind!" Tam's head came up, and his eyes were bright. "Lord Solomon said he'd grant the land! Five years free of taxes! I'm not afraid of hard work!"
"Mountain land, so what! If I'm willing to dig, I'll make something of it!"
His eldest finally raised his head. His lips parted. Something moved behind his eyes. Then he swallowed it back down and said nothing.
Nal exhaled a long, slow breath. He reached inside his shirt and drew out a small, wrinkled piece of flat wood — the household division order he had collected that afternoon from the community elder.
"This..." His hands trembled as he slid it across the table toward his son. "This is yours now. Lord Solomon's rule: the eldest stays, the second son goes."
"You go, then. From here on out, it's all yours to make of it."
Tam closed his fingers around the division order. He traced a thumb slowly over the carved surface. Then he stood up straight and turned to face his father and his brother with a wide, lopsided grin, showing every crooked tooth in his head.
"Wonderful!"
He turned and ran out the door. Nal sat listening to his retreating footsteps, then to the sound of poorly muffled celebration drifting in through the walls.
After a while, he looked out into the yard. In the pale moonlight, he could see Tam standing alone, pressing the back of his wrist quietly against his eyes.
The morning Tam left, his pack was simple: a roll of dried provisions, the household division order, and the old pitchfork his father had pressed into his hands to break the mountain earth.
"Eat slowly. Don't rush it all at once." Tam's mother stood at the door, her eyes red and puffy, stuffing another fistful of dried food deep into his pack. His eldest brother stood watching this time and, for once, did not raise his voice in complaint. He simply stood beside the door in silence, looking at neither of them.
Tam nodded. He kept his eyes on the ground, away from his mother's face.
The entire fortress community turned out to see the young men off. The road hummed with noise and movement. The crowd watched this cluster of landless sons — each one reshaped by the lord's new decree — as they shouldered their packs and set off down the narrow dirt road, their figures growing small, then disappearing around the bend of the valley.
Walking toward the mysterious, untamed Mountains of the Moon.
Elara sat beside the sleeping forms of her two boys and stared at nothing in particular.
Her husband had been dispatched by Lady Rosalyn to join Lord Solomon's campaign, and had not come back. He had died in the battle of the river valley — trampled in the press of bodies, his remains so broken they could not be carried home whole.
She was barely past twenty. One son was seven years old. The other was only three, and knew nothing about the world except how to grab her sleeve and cry that he was hungry.
Everyone in the fortress had told her to remarry. The blacksmith next door was willing to take her. He was not willing to take her children.
She had said no.
Her younger son stirred, then started wailing at some nightmare only he could see. Elara lifted him and held him against her chest, rocking until the crying softened.
She was afraid too. Without a man in the house, the weight of everything pressed down from all sides at once. She could not see a clear path forward. The only thing that steadied her was counting the ten silver stags over and over again — the cold, solid press of the coins in her palm the one thing that felt real.
If she had not been living on Lord Solomon's land — land that was orderly, land that was governed — if this were any other lord's domain, a young woman alone would have been stripped to the bone long ago. More accurately: the moment her husband fell, she and her children would have been handed their sentence.
She herself might have been kept for a time, still young, still useful in certain ugly ways. Her husband's children, though. They would have had no future at all.
Elara made her decision.
She laid the soothed toddler carefully back down on the sleeping mat. She found a small spade. She took the compensation coins outside and dug a hole in the dark, burying them deep under the packed earth, smoothing the ground back over them until there was no trace.
The next morning she arrived at the administrative office with both children, her eyes red from a sleepless night, every argument she had made to herself still echoing in her head. She found the administrative officer before he had time to sit down.
"My lord." Her voice was quiet but steady. She held her youngest against her hip, her elder boy gripping the hem of her skirt. "I want to work."
"I don't want to remarry."
"Can you find me a position?"
"I can do anything. As long as there is pay."
The officer looked her over — slight frame, pale, set jaw, not a single tear in her eyes, just a stubborn, digging kind of stillness. "You... what are you able to do?"
Her cheeks reddened. She kept going. "I have strength in my arms. Dirt doesn't bother me."
"I can do anything. As long as there is pay."
The officer thought for a moment. Something clicked behind his eyes. He told her with barely concealed excitement to go home and wait for word.
Three days later, Elara began work as a water sanitation worker.
It was a new position Lord Solomon had created across the domain, responsible for maintaining the township's wells and irrigation channels. The lord was obsessive about hygiene within his lands, and the officer had been struggling for weeks to find anyone willing to do the work.
The hours were punishing. Each evening Elara dragged herself home with her whole body aching. But something in her chest sat steady now, solid in a way it had not been in months.
She received her first wage: a handful of copper coins and a portion of grain.
Not much. But enough.
The quarterly bereavement allowance was paid out on schedule. Her name and her husband's name were registered together on a small wooden board hung beside the main Notice Board in the market square.
The first time she collected that payment, the tears came without permission. She sat down right there on the ground of the square and sobbed loudly, the force of it startling the distributing officer so badly he forgot to breathe.
The crowd gathered thick around them. People looked sideways at the officer, whispering that he must have threatened her, frightened her somehow. One man announced loudly that he was going straight to the Lion's Den to report it.
Under the officer's wide, panicked eyes, Elara finally raised her head. She looked at the trembling officer and the gathered crowd, and she spoke through the last of her crying.
"Our lord... Lord Solomon..." Her voice broke, steadied, and held. "May the Seven keep him."
She pressed her children against her side.
"My sons and I... will never forget what he has given us."
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