The next morning Eren dropped into a chair at the long kitchen table with Rosa's notebook open in front of him and a glass of tea already going cold at his elbow. The number at the bottom of the page was doing something to his stomach that breakfast hadn't fixed.
Two hundred and sixteen elves. Plus his parents. Plus Sofie. Plus two wolves who treated the chicken coop like a vending machine that paid out in eggs and never once took a coin. He'd been on the farm side of all this for days now and the daily food bill had stopped being a number on a page and turned into a thing he carried up to bed at night.
He ran the bottom line one more time and got the same ugly answer both times. He'd done bigger math than this back on Earth, sales targets and quarterly nonsense for a packaging company that paid him to care about cardboard. This was worse. Cardboard never got hungry.
"That's not a number, that's a ransom." He muttered it down at the page.
