The figure silenced the courtyard more effectively than a drawn sword.
Three hundred silver stags was not a debt FireStorm could pay; Ser Edwyn's entire holding had never produced anything close to that in spare coin, and the recent fighting had reduced even its miserable reserves. Ten stags a year for three years would already have hurt; multiplying the alleged arrears tenfold turned collection into a sentence.
Several families had never held one silver stag at the same time. Three hundred represented grain, animals, tools, and years of labor beyond anything FireStorm could liquidate in three days.
"You're lying." One of the wounded young men stepped forward on a crude crutch, a pitchfork clenched in his free hand. "We paid. Morton has the receipts."
Raymond Weil turned toward him with offended delight. "Seize him." Two guards drew their swords.
"Move another step and see what happens," Arlan said. The guards stopped. His voice had not risen, but both men had passed the field of Blacktooth corpses outside the gate. Their eyes went to the hand-and-a-half sword at Arlan's hip, then back to his face.
Arlan stood from the threshold. "Where are these missing payments recorded? Rainwood, or Nightsong?"
"The accounts belong to Lord Elton at Nightsong," Raymond said. "Do you question his books?"
"I question a collector who destroys receipts while demanding a sum no landed knight here could pay." Arlan stepped into the yard, close enough that Raymond's guards shifted around him. "If Lord Elton wants something from FireStorm, he can say what it is without this performance."
The villagers moved before Raymond could answer; pitchforks, hatchets, and sharpened poles appeared behind Arlan in a rough line. These were the same people who had stood over forty Blacktooth dead only hours earlier; the change in them was not discipline; their spacing was poor and half the weapons were farm tools. What mattered to Raymond's guards was that none of them stepped back when steel came out.
Raymond saw it. So did his guards.
"You threaten a lawful officer of Nightsong," Raymond said, though the certainty had left his voice. "I could have every one of you hanged."
"Then bring the lawful order and the men willing to enforce it."
No one advanced; the standoff lasted long enough for Raymond to understand that ordering an arrest was not the same as carrying one out. His men had entered expecting peasants who would scatter at a uniform; instead they faced people still spattered with the blood of raiders who had tried the same assumption.
Raymond stared at Arlan, then at the villagers, and finally jerked his hand toward the gate. "Three days. When I return, I collect three hundred silver stags or I seal this holding and take what the debt allows." His men withdrew with him.
The threatening formation held until they were outside the wall. After that, their pace increased noticeably. Arlan did not waste time watching them leave. "Morton, count everything. Grain, coin, weapons, animals, land, anything we can use or sell. I want the numbers within the hour."
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The accounting was worse than even Arlan expected; an hour later, the hall smelled of wet wool, charcoal, and old grain while Morton rebuilt FireStorm into numbers on a single sheet of parchment. Nothing was omitted because there was too little of everything to hide behind estimates.
Morton spread a sheet of parchment across the scarred table and read from marks made in charcoal. "Twelve sacks of rye. About six hundred pounds. Rationed carefully, enough for forty-seven people for one month. Three old hens. Two barrels of pickled vegetables. No stored meat." He moved to the next line.
"Seventy-two copper stars in the village stores, worth perhaps seven-tenths of a silver stag. We recovered five silver stags from the raiders. Total coin on hand: five point seven silver stags."
"Weapons?"
"Three usable steel swords if we count yours. Seven rusted blades that might still cut. Twelve stone spears. Four longbows and fewer than thirty arrows. Eight pieces of leather armor, most damaged. No plate." Arlan said nothing.
Morton continued because stopping would not improve the list. "Forty-seven people. Seven can take up arms, and three of those are wounded. Eighty acres of planted wheat outside the village, twenty acres of wasteland, the well, and the old iron mine in the back hill. No one has surveyed the mine in years."
The numbers lay between them.
A month of grain. Less than six silver stags. A handful of weapons. Three hundred demanded in three days; the eighty planted acres were the only meaningful future food supply, and the abandoned mine was only a hole in a hill until someone proved there was workable ore left inside it. FireStorm could not eat land, and it could not pay Raymond with an unsurveyed vein.
"That's everything," Morton said. "And if Nightsong closes the road through Rainwood, we may not even be able to sell the liquor."
Arlan ran a finger down Morton's figures once more before opening the Forging Shack; the system could not create money from nothing, and its no-credit rule made that explicit. Any solution still required something FireStorm could produce, sell, or list, and he sent Larry a question.
"What Common goods turn into money quickly?"
The dwarf answered almost at once; refined glassware and highly distilled spirits, Larry said, could command strong prices where the crafts were scarce. Fine steel farm tools might also sell, though more slowly, because farmers bought tools out of necessity rather than novelty. Weapons were a poor choice for a titleless boy whose neighbors could call private arms dealing a threat.
That advice matched what FireStorm already possessed in embryo: rye, wood, a crude still, and knowledge that did not depend on buying finished goods from Nightsong. The problem was time. Raymond had given them three days, and any trade route he controlled could be closed before a new product earned a single stag.
Arlan was still reading when screaming came from outside. The sound came from the direction of the fields rather than the gate, followed by the frantic ringing of metal and a voice shouting for water.
Orange light struck the shutter. Morton turned first, and the color on his face vanished. The planted wheat represented nearly everything on the parchment that might still improve with time. A sentry burst into the room with blood on his face and tears cutting paths through soot. "My lord! The wheat!"
Arlan was already on his feet.
"The fields are burning. The three men guarding them are dead." The smell arrived a heartbeat later: smoke, charred straw, and hot earth carried by the wind through every crack in the old hall.
Outside, flames were climbing into the night over FireStorm's eighty acres; villagers ran toward the fields with buckets and wet cloth while sparks blew toward the low roofs. Three dark shapes lay at the field edge where the watchmen had fallen, motionless against the red light.
The one asset on Morton's parchment that could not be carried away or hidden was burning in front of them; every bucket carried toward it now represented food they might never recover.