She thought about Dari, who had written everything down because she had been asked to and because she had trusted the process enough to do it.
She thought about the forty-three.
She thought about twenty-nine other villages whose specific numbers she was going to learn, and the learning was going to be the kind that settled into the bones and stayed there.
She closed the audit documentation.
She put it in the formal case that Demerti would take to the judiciary.
She sat back and looked at the ceiling of her study for a moment — the same ceiling she had looked at on her first night, when the empire had been a stack of documents and an unresolved succession and a throne that existed in fact but not yet in law.
The empire was different now.
