Elara's feet were screaming.
She sat on the edge of the lumpy straw mattress in the servants' quarters. The room smelled like damp stone and old wool, but right now, Elara smelled entirely of sweat and spilled sour mead.
She reached down and rubbed her calves. Her bare thighs were covered in goosebumps from the freezing winter draft. The Keep's courtyard had been brutally cold. Lord Elaric's crazy rule about cutting their dresses above the knee was practically torture.
Sienna collapsed onto the mattress next to her, groaning loudly. Sienna's dress was just as short, her heavy shoulders slumped from carrying wooden trays for six hours straight.
"My legs are going to fall off," Sienna muttered, wiping a streak of sticky mead from her cheek. "And that fat merchant from the east kept staring at my chest like I was a roasted ham."
"I know," Elara sighed. She leaned back against the cold stone wall. "The Lord has finally gone mad. He made us serve them spoiled rot. He made us walk around half-naked in the frost."
"We should go back to the fields," Sienna said, sounding miserable. "At least the turnips do not stare at my knees."
Elara didn't answer right away. She reached into the deep pocket of her ruined wool apron. Her hand closed around something heavy.
She pulled her hand out and dumped the contents onto the rough blanket between them.
Clink. Clatter. Clink.
Sienna gasped. She sat up straight, her exhaustion instantly vanishing.
A mountain of silver stags and copper pennies caught the dim candlelight. It was more money than Elara had seen in her entire twenty-four years of life. It was more money than her father had made in ten years of breaking his back in the mud.
"They... they just gave it to me," Elara whispered, staring at the silver. Her athletic hands were actually shaking. "The Lord told me to ask for the 'upcharge.' So I leaned over the table. I smiled. And they just handed me the silver. They didn't even argue."
Sienna picked up a silver stag. She bit it. It was real.
"Men are completely pathetic," Sienna breathed.
"They are," Elara agreed. A new, terrifying feeling washed over her. It wasn't exhaustion anymore. It was power. She realized Lord Elaric wasn't just a pervert. He was an evil genius. He understood exactly how stupid men were.
The heavy wooden door to their quarters creaked open.
Lord Elaric walked in. He looked tired but smug. He carried his special woven wicker basket—the one he used for his weird, degenerate 'Sniff Shrine' collection.
Elara and Sienna immediately sat up, covering the pile of silver with their hands.
"Relax, ladies," my Lord said lazily, leaning against the doorframe. His eyes immediately dropped to their bare, toned legs. He let out a slow, approving breath. "You keep your tips. That's the beauty of capitalism. I just came for the uniform tax."
Normally, Elara thought this was the creepiest thing in the world. Her Lord actively demanded their unwashed, sweaty clothes at the end of every day. But tonight, as she looked at the mountain of silver on her bed, her perspective completely shifted.
If giving this weird man my dirty apron means I never have to eat weeds again, Elara thought, he can have the boots too.
Elara stood up. She didn't hesitate. She untied her sticky, sweat-soaked apron and held it out. She even rolled her shoulders back, just like he had taught her to do for the merchants.
"Excellent work today, My Lord," Elara purred, dropping the heavy, musky apron right into his basket.
Lord Elaric blinked. He looked genuinely surprised by her enthusiasm. He looked down at the apron, took a deep breath of the air around her, and smiled a completely unhinged smile.
"Rest up, Team A," he grinned. "Tomorrow, we introduce the 'Happy Hour' upcharge."
He left the room. Elara sat back down next to Sienna. They looked at the silver. They looked at each other.
"Tomorrow," Elara said seriously, "I am going to leave another button undone."
The next morning, the village well was surrounded by freezing wind, deep mud, and very angry women.
Greta stood on a large, slippery rock, holding a rotten turnip like a weapon. Greta was forty years old but looked seventy. She was missing three front teeth, smelled like a wet dog, and was the undisputed champion of village gossip.
"It is a systemic disgrace!" Greta shrieked, waving her skinny arms at the five other starving peasant women gathered around the well. "Did you see them yesterday? Lord Elaric has turned the Keep into a den of sin! He is enforcing the Turnip Patriarchy! He is weaponizing the male gaze to exploit our sisters' bodies for silver!"
Old Hilda, who only had one good eye, nodded aggressively. "I saw Bess! Her dress was cut down to her navel! It is toxic feudal masculinity!"
In a village where people literally died of dysentery and ate boiled tree bark, complaining about 'toxic masculinity' was utterly ridiculous. But Greta was on a massive roll.
"He is creating completely unrealistic standards of medieval beauty!" Greta yelled, her voice echoing over the muddy huts. "Think of the emotional labor we already do! I spend fourteen hours a day churning gray butter and trying not to die of the bloody flux. I do not have the emotional bandwidth to compete with Elara's bare, sweaty knees!"
Another peasant woman, missing an ear from an old frostbite incident, chimed in. "My husband looked at Sienna's shoulders yesterday and told me to take a bath! In the middle of winter! He wants me to freeze to death in the river just so I can smell like lye soap! It is a hate crime!"
"Exactly!" Greta spat into the mud. "It is an attack on our authentic, unwashed womanhood! They are erasing our lived experiences! Next, the Lord will expect us to have all our teeth! It is unnatural! We must dismantle this tavern culture! We must strike! We will refuse to boil their bark! We will—"
Greta froze.
The heavy wooden gates of the Keep swung open. Marta walked out.
The Head Maid looked massive, intimidating, and completely exhausted. But that wasn't what stopped Greta's rant. It was what Marta was carrying.
Marta had a fifty-pound sack of pure, premium, milled white flour slung over her massive shoulder. Not the gritty, gray rock-dust the peasants usually ate. This was rich-man flour. The kind of flour bought with heavy merchant silver. It smelled like heaven.
The village women went completely silent. They stared at the sack of flour. Saliva literally pooled in Greta's mouth.
Marta walked past the well, her heavy boots squelching in the mud. She didn't even look at the "protest." She just casually reached into a side pouch and tossed a smaller, five-pound canvas bag of the premium flour right into the mud at Greta's feet.
"The Lord decrees a village stimulus package," Marta said in her deadpan voice, not stopping her stride. "Bake some bread. Stop whining."
Greta dropped her rotten turnip.
Her feminist uprising vanished in less than a second. A lifetime of fierce moral outrage was immediately destroyed by the promise of basic carbohydrates.
Greta fell to her knees in the mud, hugging the bag of flour to her chest like a newborn baby. She looked up at Marta's retreating back with wide, desperate eyes.
"Praise the Turnip Patriarchy!" Greta cried, her missing teeth on full display. "Praise Lord Elaric's toxic silver! Tell me, Iron Maid... does the OnlyMaids tavern need any plus-sized, toothless representation? I am a girlboss! I can show my ankles! I can carry a bucket!"
Marta didn't even turn around.
"No," Marta said flatly, disappearing into the village.
Old Hilda immediately dropped to the mud next to Greta, clawing at the canvas bag. "Greta, sister, we must share the flour to fight the patriarchy!"
"Get your own flour, you one-eyed bitch!" Greta hissed, kicking Hilda in the shins and sprinting toward her hut with the bag.
Two hundred miles away, in the gleaming capital city of Aldoria, King Alden the Fickle was having a panic attack.
King Alden sat on the Golden Throne. He was a skinny, nervous man wearing a crown that was slightly too big for his head. He was currently trying to figure out if he could legally marry his own horse to avoid paying a massive debt to the Iron Bank of the South.
"Your Grace," a slippery voice echoed in the throne room.
The King flinched. His Spymaster, Lord Vane, stepped out from the shadows of the marble pillars. Vane held a tiny, rolled-up piece of parchment.
"What is it, Vane?" the King chewed on his fingernail. "Did the Usurper cross the river? Are the peasants revolting again? Is the horse marriage legal?"
"Worse, Your Grace," Vane said gravely. "I received a pigeon from one of our illiterate toll collectors near the northern border. It concerns Ravenhold Keep."
The King groaned. "Lord Elaric Voss? That miserable bastard? I gave him that mud-rock so he would starve quietly. What has he done?"
Vane unrolled the tiny parchment. He squinted at the crude charcoal scratches. Because the toll collector could barely read or write, the message was broken, terrifying, and completely lacking context.
"The message says..." Vane cleared his throat. "'Voss strips women. Poison mud water. Takes all merchant silver. Army of merchants in courtyard. Making everyone drink sour poison.'"
King Alden's face went completely white.
In reality, Kevin was just selling bad beer with hot waitresses. But in the King's paranoid, desperate mind, the broken message painted a terrifying picture.
"By the Gods," the King whispered, gripping the armrests of his throne. "Voss has gone mad. He is stripping the peasant women to buy armor! He has invented some kind of magical poison water! And he is using it to brainwash an army of merchants to fund a rebellion!"
"It appears so, Your Grace," Vane nodded seriously. "He is gathering all the silver on the border. If he funds a mercenary army with this new 'sour poison,' he could march on the capital."
The King stood up, his oversized crown slipping down over his left ear. He was terrified. He couldn't afford a war. He didn't even have enough silver to fix the roof of the castle.
"We cannot let him build his forces!" the King shouted. "But we cannot attack him directly! If his poison is that powerful, it will wipe out our knights!"
"What are your orders, Your Grace?"
King Alden paced back and forth. His weak mind raced for a solution.
"We must use the law," the King declared. "Send the Royal Inspector. Tell the Inspector to ride to Ravenhold immediately. Tell him to audit Lord Elaric's treasury. If Voss has hidden silver, we will tax it at ninety percent and crush his rebellion before it starts."
"Brilliant, Your Grace," Vane bowed. "And if the Inspector discovers the secret of the poison water?"
"Then we steal it," the King said, his eyes wild with desperate paranoia. "Whatever dark magic Lord Voss is brewing in that border keep... the Crown will take it."