Chapter 81

POV: Elsbeth, Elder of Stonemill

The news of the King's death arrived in Stonemill not as a thunderclap, but as a confusing whisper carried by a traveling tinker. He spoke of a feast, of poison, of the King's heart failing, and of the Master of Whispers being run through in the Great Hall. It was a story so lurid and chaotic that most dismissed it as a tavern tale. But then, a week passed, and the royal tax collector, a man who had been a fixture in their lives for twenty years, simply vanished. His small, fortified post at the edge of the village stood empty, its door swinging in the wind.

The silence that followed was more unnerving than any royal decree. Stonemill was a small village nestled in the forested foothills of the Dragon's Spine, a place that existed to cut timber for the kingdom's cities and pay its taxes on time. For generations, their lives had been governed by the distant, unyielding power of the Crown. Now, that power was gone. The world felt untethered.

Into that vacuum stepped Garris.

Garris had been the captain of the local garrison, a dozen men who mostly dealt with poachers and drunken brawls. He was a bull of a man, his authority derived from his loud voice and the fine steel sword at his hip. On the tenth day of the silence, he and his men marched into the village square.

"The King is dead!" he bellowed, a fact that was now undeniable. "The lords are squabbling like crows over a corpse. There is no law but the one we make here!" He planted his sword in the hard-packed earth of the square. "I am the law now. Stonemill is under my protection. And my protection requires payment."

It was the old way, the way of the strongest fist. Garris and his men seized the village granary. They declared a new "Lord's Tithe"—a quarter of all timber cut, a third of every hunter's catch. It was not a tax for a kingdom; it was simple extortion. Fear, a familiar and weary companion, settled back over Stonemill. The people grumbled in their homes, but they complied. Garris had the swords.

Elsbeth, whose memory stretched back to the reign of Theron III, had seen this before. It was the cycle of things. When the great lions fought, the small deer were trampled. When the lions died, the wolves came out to feast. Garris was just another wolf.

The challenge came from an unexpected quarter. Not from a warrior, but from a boy. Tomas was a carter's son who had traveled the western roads before the troubles, hauling timber and hearing stories. He had seen the first Oakhaven Freighters, had spoken to men whose lives had been changed. He stood up at the next public "decree" from Garris.

"We do not need a lord," Tomas said, his voice trembling but clear. "We need a council."

Garris laughed. "A council? Of woodcutters and turnip-farmers? What will you do, talk the bandits to death?"

"It is what they do in Oakhaven," Tomas insisted, his courage growing as the villagers turned to listen. "They have laws. Written on tablets for all to see. They have a Lord Protector, but he serves the law, he does not invent it. They have a currency, the Crown, that is worth the same today as it is tomorrow. They built a nation from dust because they worked together, not because one man with a sword told them to."

The name 'Oakhaven' was a legend, a whispered tale of a bastard prince and his impossible city in the wastes. To the people of Stonemill, it was a fairy tale. But Tomas spoke of it as if it were real, as if its ideas were as solid as stone.

"He offers you stories," Garris sneered, his hand resting on his sword. "I offer you protection. Pay the tithe, or I will take it."

It was Elsbeth who spoke next, her old voice cutting through the tension. "And who will protect us from you, Garris?"

The question hung in the air. The villagers looked at Garris, then at each other. They had lived their lives in fear of a distant king. Now they were being asked to live in fear of the man next door. The stories of Oakhaven, of a place with laws and shared purpose, no longer seemed like a fairy tale. It seemed like a choice.

"We will have a council," Elsbeth declared, standing beside Tomas. "We will choose five elders to speak for the village. We will write our own laws. We will protect our own granary. You and your men, Garris, can either be citizens of Stonemill and live under its laws, or you can be outsiders."

Garris looked at the faces around him. He saw not fear, but a dawning, defiant resolve. His authority rested on a dozen swords. But a sword can fight a man. It cannot fight an idea. He was one man against a village that had just decided to become a community. He spat on the ground, pulled his sword from the earth, and stalked away. His men, seeing the tide turn, hesitated, and then one by one, they quietly dispersed, melting back into the village. The reign of Lord Garris had lasted less than a fortnight.

That evening, in the main tavern, the first Stonemill Council met. It was clumsy. They argued for an hour about how to fairly ration the grain. But it was a start.

A week later, a lone rider approached the village. She was not a royal knight in polished steel. She was clad in simple, sand-colored leathers, her face weathered by the sun, her movements economical and precise. She rode a desert horse of a breed they had never seen. She was a Desert Ranger.

She met with the new village council, not to make demands, but to talk.

"I am Captain Shada," she said, her eyes taking in the scene with a quiet, assessing intelligence. "The Wastes Confederacy recognizes the sovereignty of Stonemill. We have heard you have timber. We have steel. We propose a trade."

Elsbeth looked at the calm, confident woman, an agent of a power that had unmade a kingdom. But the woman spoke not of taxes or fealty, but of trade and respect. She looked at Tomas, now a member of the council, his face alight with the impossible made real. Elsbeth realized that the fall of the King had not just created a vacuum. It had created an opportunity. The old world of lions and wolves was dying. A new world, built on roads and laws and the courage of a carter's son, was being born. The Wastes were no longer a place. They were becoming a promise.