The worst part was holding mother by the hand.
The same hand with which she had ripped out my heart.
Chapter 2 The Financial Crisis
Degrees of Enlightenment: Empty
Attributes: none
Skills: none
States: none
“Teshimi was our finest harvester. There’s no replacing him. He was the only master harvester who had achieved rank nine in Deep Spices skill.”
At that, mother scoffed. “That’s merely omega. Forget about Teshimi. Teshimi is a nobody.”
A categorical statement, but not enough to silence Camai.
“Still, we have no one else. And nowhere to recruit from. Which means no spices for the foreseeable future.”
Camai prefers silence in all situations. A warrior born to a warriors’ order, where speech is far from a prized value, there had been week-long stretches when he spoke fewer words than this in my presence. I nearly dropped my two-pronged fork at this sudden outburst of eloquence. Granted, it was uncomfortable as hell to hold, and so bloody narrow that if you shaved another fraction of an inch, you could call it a chopstick. On the plus side, it did wonders for the fingers’ motor functions—as did the rest of the traditional local utensils.
Except for my own stubborn fingers, which apparently never got the memo.
Mother, for her part, was equally oblivious to my failures.
As she was to most things...
Unfazed by the comment about the spices, Treya was peering into the local equivalent of a newspaper with keen interest. It was a scroll of cruddy rice paper slotted into a simplistic device comprising a pair of wooden rollers set a couple of hand-widths apart. Slowly turning the lower handle unfolded the rolled parchment affixed to the higher one, allowing the reader to peruse the full text without touching the flimsy material unnecessarily.
Camai always brought back the same exact thing: a monthly bulletin of the Empire’s most significant tidings and social happenings. Mother’s desire to be cited in these annals was as evident as a fox’s dream of snatching itself a fattened rabbit. And it was laughable—I had a better shot of being recruited into an elite guard troop than she did of meriting even a passing mention.
Getting no reaction to his words, Camai continued.
“Without spices, how are we going to pay for maintenance of your son’s amulet?”
Uh-oh, it’s getting real now. This wasn’t something mother would just ignore.
And she didn’t.
“We’ve got plenty of rye in our granary. We’ll sell some of the supplies while we look for a new master harvester. We’re going to have spices again.”
Camai shook his head.
“Those supplies are of seed rye, Mistress. If we sell it, we won’t be able to sow a new harvest.”
“I did say that we need to replace Teshimi, didn’t I? The wretch stole for his worthless kids, and the new master harvester won’t dare repeat his mistakes, knowing what kind of fate befell his predecessor. We’ll end up with spices to spare—enough to buy back all the seeds we’ll need. Don’t you worry about that.”
“But I am worried, Mistress. It is my duty to worry about Clan Crow’s prosperity,” Camai said, turning up the pathos to mimic mother’s. “We’re not going to find another master harvester on Teshimi’s level. He alone could grow fine spices on this miserly soil. There’s no replacing him. There’s not going to be any more spices. Rye is all we have to rely on. Except it isn’t worth much, and we don’t have a lot of it. We don’t have a lot of anything, in fact, which is why the farmers go hungry every winter. The soil is just atrocious. Teshimi wasn’t stealing for himself. The peasant kids are ailing—primarily from hunger. He alone was in a position to get them food. So he risked everything. Not just for his kids, either. He fed them all—his own children, and those of his neighbors.”
I could hardly believe my ears. A year’s worth of words for Camai, condensed to a single monologue...
At last, mother looked up from her reading material. She gave the warrior a hard stare, hissing her next question, serpent-like.
“You’re saying he fed other people’s kids?”
“Yes, Mistress.”
“And I am finding out about it only now?”
“I myself have only found out an hour ago, Mistress. I knew Teshimi well, and found it hard to believe he would be so foolish. It’s just not realistic to have the theft go unnoticed. So I surmised he must have been sharing with others to keep them quiet. I put some pressure on a few peasants with a reputation for loose tongues. Turns out your laborers had assembled in secret some time ago. They were desperate. Their children were starving, and they had no spices, which is harmful for developing their attributes. Children are the future for even the lowliest worker. So it was decided at the gathering to exchange the stolen spices for food. This is why nobody ratted on Teshimi. If he hadn’t screwed up the accounting himself, he could have continued thieving, and we’d be none the wiser.”
“So it’s a conspiracy,” Treya stated in the same unsettling tone. “I want the conspirators rounded up and punished immediately.”
“This brings us to our second problem, Mistress. Forget the spices for a moment. Yes, stealing from the clan is punishable by death. But what do we do if all of your shudras are guilty? All of them, without exception. Do we execute the heads of all the families? If so, we’re going to end up with not even a handful of rye. Women and children aren’t capable of tilling the land while fighting off predators from beyond the river. We’ve been balancing on the brink of destitution for a while now. Teshimi’s death brings us one step closer to the edge. Executing all the men, however, would
