[TAURIEL]
"How many barns."
She said it from the head of the council table.
The courier from the Seventh Region had been brought into the council chamber wet to the knees and not yet given water; he had ridden from the Seventh in five hours by a route Tauriel had not, on the council map last spring, known existed, and he was standing at the foot of the table with his cap in his hand. The cap had been on his head for the ride. He had taken it off when he came into the chamber.
He was, by Tauriel's reading, seventeen years old.
"Three barns, my Lady. The granary, the smaller store at the holding's foot, and the village's old long-store that we had been using for the next year's seed."
"All three burned."
"All three, my Lady. The granary at the second hour after midnight. The other two before the first watch could turn the wind."
"Wind from where."
"East, my Lady. Hot east-wind. Off the bracken."
"Cause."
"My Lady — we do not yet know. The reeve has the men of the holding searching the ground at the granary. There has been no rain in three weeks. The dry — anything could have set it. We are not, yet, drawing a conclusion."
She inclined her head.
"How much grain lost."
"All of it, my Lady. The three holdings' winter supply. The seed for the autumn planting. The hay for the cattle at the lower meadow. Six hundred and seventy souls in the three villages, by the last roll."
The number landed.
Six hundred and seventy was — she registered the number with the small flat administrative calm she had learned in the petition-wing year and which she had been deepening, in the four years since, into the deeper administrative calm she had been working into the bones of her — the number of a small region's life-or-death over a single winter. Six hundred and seventy souls did not, by any council formula, hold without a winter's grain. They would not all die. Most would, by the slow desperate measures a country took, find a way through. Some would not. The number was — at the upper edge of might lose ten, might lose thirty, might lose a hundred if the winter was hard.
Aldric was six days north of here.
She had told the courier-master at the third bell, when the rider had come in, to send a fast pair after him on the eastern circuit; the pair would not, by the courier-master's count, reach Aldric for four days. The villages needed an answer in two.
The villages needed an answer that was Tauriel's.
She turned to her left.
Celwyn was at the side. The senior steward had been at the table for the morning's business already; she had not, on the courier's coming in, moved from her chair. She had been writing in her small bound book. She had stopped writing on the courier's first sentence and had set the pen across the spine of the book in the small flat way she set it when she was paying full attention and was, by her own habit, going to be silent until asked.
To Tauriel's right, Gorlim.
The captain was in the chair he took when he sat at the council table — the one the old Halbarad had sat in for a decade and which the captain had, by the small private acknowledgment of seven years of councils, taken over in the year past. He had his hands folded on the table. He was watching Tauriel without watching her.
She did not, yet, look at him.
"Celwyn."
"My Lady."
"The regional reserve."
"My Lady. Four hundred and ten bushels of grain in the Seventh's regional store. The reserve was set, by the last census, at the level appropriate for a six-week shortfall in one of the four villages. It was not set for the simultaneous loss of three. It will support the three villages for — by my count this morning before the courier arrived, which was prepared knowing this might be on the table — six weeks at half-ration. Seven at quarter."
"And the winter."
"Five months."
"Five months at quarter ration."
"My Lady, quarter ration through five months is not — quarter ration is starvation. By the calculation I have run twice."
"Yes."
Tauriel set her hand flat on the table.
She turned to Gorlim.
"Captain."
"Lady."
"The military provisions in the southern depot."
A long breath out of Gorlim.
He had known the question was coming the moment Celwyn had given the bushel-count. He had been waiting for the question. He had not, by any movement, prepared to refuse the question. He had also not, by any movement, prepared to like the question.
He answered it.
"Lady. The southern depot holds, by the second steward's count last week, twenty-two hundred bushels of grain at the standard military quality. The reserve was set, by my own hand four winters ago, at the level appropriate for a full standing army on a three-month campaign without resupply. We have not, in three winters, had occasion to draw on it. It is — by the standard accounting — untouchable. By the standard practice we do not, in any peacetime year, draw on the military reserve for civilian purposes. The argument, Lady — and I will state it once, plainly, because it is the argument and not a refusal — the argument is that the reserve is the country's last shield. If we draw it now, for a fire, we are committing the principle that the country's last shield is available to be drawn for any sufficiently large civilian failure. The principle, once committed, is a hard principle to walk back."
She listened to the whole of it.
She did not interrupt.
When he was done she said: "And by the standard practice, what is the answer."
"Lady — by the standard practice, the answer is to ride to Bree. To buy grain at this season's emergency rate from the Bree weighing-house, which will sell it at a half-again markup because the Bree weighing-house has been holding stocks against exactly this kind of contingency for thirty years. We will pay over the market. We will buy enough. The Bree route would have the grain in the Seventh in eight days at the earliest."
"Eight days."
"My Lady, the villages need an answer in four."
"They do."
She set her hand on the table.
She thought.
She thought, in the small clean way she had been thinking on the petition bench for four years, about the two arguments stacked against each other on the table. Gorlim's was right. Standing arguments did not, by their nature, defeat the standing case — they survived as the standing case, and the right thing for a regent to do, in the absence of the lord, was generally to keep the standing case standing.
The standing case did not, this morning, have a way to feed six hundred and seventy souls in four days.
She turned the small private fact of what would Aldric do over in her mind for the count of one breath, and she set it down. Aldric was not at the table. The standing case Aldric had built was at the table, in the form of Gorlim and the southern depot and Celwyn's bushel-count and the principle of the last shield. The standing case was a thing. The thing did not, by itself, decide. She was the regent.
She decided.
"Draw on the military reserve. Eight hundred bushels — enough to take the three villages through to the new planting, at full ration. Celwyn — within the hour, ride to Bree yourself. Carry a letter under my seal. The letter will state plainly that the realm has drawn on its military reserve for civilian relief in a sudden emergency, and that the realm requests, as a matter of commerce and not of any concession of weakness, the Bree weighing-house's preferred-customer rate on a same-volume purchase to refill the reserve. The refill will be at this season's standard rate, not the emergency rate. I am betting on Bree's interest in being seen by the country as the source of the refill, not on Bree's charity. You will be in Bree by the third evening and back by the fifth. The refill will arrive at the southern depot within three weeks. The reserve will be whole by the year-mark."
A pause.
Gorlim was watching her.
"Captain."
"Lady."
"The principle that the standing case is a hard principle to walk back, I accept. The principle is sound. I am not, today, walking it back. I am, today, drawing on the reserve for a reason that the standing case, by my own reading, has not — by being a standing case — anticipated. The principle of the last shield presupposes that the last shield will be raised against the next great enemy from outside. It does not, in its form, contemplate the small slow enemy of a fire on a dry summer in three villages of our own. I am drawing on it today because I think the principle, as it stands, is a principle a country at peace and a country at war can hold together — but only by being held by the regent who, in the absence of the lord, makes the call. That regent is me. The call is mine."
A long pause.
Gorlim drew a breath.
"Lady, you have made the call."
"Yes."
"I have, by my place at this table, the responsibility to register a captain's disagreement when one stands. I disagree with the call. The disagreement is registered. I will not, by any further movement of this morning, set my hand against the call. The eight hundred bushels go out from the southern depot this afternoon. I will go to the depot myself to oversee the loading. The matter is in the record."
"Thank you, Captain."
"Lady."
He rose.
He went out.
Celwyn was already at her desk drafting the Bree letter when Tauriel walked into the administration wing fifteen minutes later. The senior steward had read Tauriel's face on the way out of the council and had drafted, in the time it took Tauriel to walk the corridor, two paragraphs of the letter — clean, formal, with the small administrative phrasing that would land with the Bree weighing-house exactly the way Tauriel intended.
Tauriel read the paragraphs.
She added two lines at the bottom in her own hand. She set the seal. She gave it back.
"Ride."
"My Lady."
"Take two Rangers from the south circuit. Set out within the hour. The road is dry; the horses will hold."
"My Lady."
Celwyn was out of the administration wing in seven minutes by Tauriel's later count, and out of the keep gate in twelve, and on the south road by the half hour.
The three villages had their grain by the afternoon of the next day.
The reserve was whole by the year-mark, at the standard rate plus a small additional clause Hardbristle the Elder had added in his own hand to Celwyn's signing — the Bree weighing-house notes, with the realm's letter on file, the precedent of the realm's preferred-customer treatment in emergencies. The note is filed for both sides.
Aldric rode back into the keep six days later.
He read the record of the week in the chamber before he came up to the upper rooms. He read it standing. He read Celwyn's note on the Bree side, and Gorlim's registered disagreement, and the Seventh Region's reeve's note that the cause of the fire had been a careless apprentice with a pipe on a dry night and not an act of any enemy.
He came up the stair.
He found Tauriel in the upper room, with Cael on her lap.
He said, before he sat down: "You were right."
She inclined her head.
She did not, then, say anything more about the matter.
She set Cael on her knee, and reached up, and pulled Aldric down by the wrist to sit beside her on the long bench under the window.
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