Ellyn survived.
The debt remained.
By the following winter, Raymun was old enough to understand that the Briar Hearth had a problem.
The storeroom looked wrong.
Too much empty floor.
Too few sacks.
Mara stood inside with a scrap of parchment while Garran counted what remained.
“Again,” she said.
Garran sighed.
“Counting it twice won’t make more grain appear.”
“It might prove you counted badly.”
“I didn’t.”
“Then count again.”
Raymun hid a smile.
He had been keeping his own crude records for months.
Nothing sophisticated.
He had simply started tracking how quickly the inn consumed grain, vegetables, firewood, lamp oil, and animal feed.
Numbers were harder here.
Measurements weren’t standardized the way he remembered.
Records were inconsistent.
But patterns were still patterns.
And the pattern was ugly.
They didn’t have enough.
Raymun sat near the hearth that evening with his little notebook.
He estimated. This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
Recalculated.
Adjusted for expected travelers.
Then stared at the result.
Roughly seventeen sacks of grain.
That was the gap between what they could reasonably afford and what they would likely need before conditions improved.
Seventeen sacks.
For a kingdom, nothing.
For the Briar Hearth, a serious problem.
Raymun rubbed his forehead.
Think.
They couldn’t magically produce more grain.
But perhaps they didn’t need to.
Maybe they simply needed to waste less.
His first suggestion was portion control.
Mara rejected it immediately.
“You want smaller bowls?”
“Consistent bowls.”
“They are consistent.”
Raymun looked toward three bowls waiting for customers.
They contained visibly different amounts.
Mara followed his gaze.
Silence.
“Mostly consistent,” she amended.
His second idea involved reorganizing storage so older goods were used first.
That worked better.
His fourth involved comparing suppliers instead of automatically buying from familiar ones.
Garran disliked that.
“Harbert’s supplied us for years.”
“He’s also expensive.”
“He’s reliable.”
Raymun paused.
That mattered.
Cheap goods that never arrived weren’t cheap.
“All right.
Keep Harbert.
But compare the others.”
Garran stared at him.
Raymun waited.
His father finally grunted.
It wasn’t agreement.
But it wasn’t no.
The changes were small.
Almost embarrassingly small.
Mara adjusted portions.
Old stock stopped disappearing behind new stock.
Kitchen scraps were used more carefully.
Garran negotiated harder with suppliers.
Raymun discovered that one supposedly cheaper merchant