Solomon's voice was calm in a way that was frightening.
"Bring the boy."
He snapped the reins. The horse threw its head back with a cry and drove forward.
Behind him, the cavalry column followed in silence — forty riders moving as one, wrapped in chainmail that caught no light, raising a wall of dust that moved like a storm coming to claim everything in its path.
The appearance of the riders was sudden enough that the four hundred soldiers already stationed throughout the refugee camp had no warning before the mounted column swept in. They fell in from every direction, converging on a single point, and the noise of the camp — the arguments, the weeping, the low constant sounds of suffering — was cut off as though a hand had come down over a mouth.
Refugees pressed their faces against the gaps in their makeshift shelters, staring out at the blank-faced armored riders.
Solomon did not dismount.
He guided his horse up onto a large, flat-topped boulder at the entrance to the camp and held it there. The horse's iron-shod hooves scraped and struck at the rough stone surface, its breath coming out in hot, visible bursts of white.
From above, mounted on the rock, he looked down.
Below him were several thousand frightened faces. In front of him, four hundred infantry standing at attention in their chainmail, heads up, and forty riders at the flanks.
He was not here to negotiate. He was here to render judgment. To build order out of force.
His voice came low, directed at the tall figure riding beside him.
"Brin."
"Go into the crowd and bring me the thinnest person you can find."
Brin said nothing. He gave a single heavy nod, swung down from the saddle, and walked into the camp. His massive frame moved like a hill that had decided to relocate. The refugees parted before him without any instruction to do so, driven back by a pressure that needed no words.
Shortly, a skeletal man was half-carried, half-dragged back to the base of the rock.
The man's legs shook like leaves in autumn wind. He could barely keep himself upright. His head was buried so far into his chest that it seemed he was trying to pull it inside his body.
Solomon's voice came down.
"Lift your head. Look at me."
The man trembled. Slowly, millimeter by millimeter, he raised his face. His eyes were clouded and full of terror.
Solomon asked, "Tell me. Is the food not enough to eat?"
The man's lips moved. Something was trying to get out and being held back by something much larger. His gaze flickered — once, quickly — to several different points in the crowd around him. Something moved through his eyes: hesitation.
Solomon caught it.
He raised his voice to a shout that reached to the back of the crowd.
"Answer me!!"
"Tell the truth — your family will receive double rations, and my protection."
"Lie to me, or say nothing — you and your family will be the first people driven off this land."
The words hit like a key into a lock.
The man's mouth opened. His voice came out wrecked and halting, broken into pieces.
"My Lord....the food is there......but it gets taken away......they take it....they take it from us......"
Under the steady pressure of Solomon's gaze, the man told it all.
The grain Olivier had been sending in was not insufficient. There was enough for everyone to get by. But in the time since the refugees had arrived, several groups of men had established themselves as the camp's internal rulers. They were, in the main, large and strong. They had seized control of the key distribution points by force, and every time Solomon's soldiers delivered grain into the camp, these men moved through the crowd and took it — most of it, sometimes all of it — before the intended recipients could hold onto it.
These men and their circle — their families, their allies, their favorites — ate their fill. They had surplus, which they traded for other things.
The widows and orphans, the old, the sick, the weak, received whatever was left over. On bad days, nothing reached them at all. The people who had raided Margaret's field earlier that morning were almost certainly among those who had been systematically starved of the rations they were owed.
Solomon's expression darkened as he listened.
The thing he found most intolerable — above everything else, in any situation — was for people to take shelter under his rules and then openly build their own rules on top of them.
He drove the horse forward to the very edge of the rock and looked out over the mass of people below.
He gave the order to the four hundred soldiers.
"Get everyone out here."
"Every single person. No exceptions."
The soldiers moved at once. They surged into the camp, using sword-scabbards to beat against the walls of shelters and tents, dragging out anyone who tried to hide, pushing the entire population of the camp into the open ground in front of the rock.
Several thousand refugees pressed together in one space, packed in tight, like animals waiting in a yard. Fear and anxiety moved through the air like something physical.
Solomon's voice came again. This time it came like winter — not loud, but cutting, going through every ear without effort.
"I gave you food. I gave you shelter. I gave you something to live for."
The words pressed down on the whispering and silenced it.
"But some among you took my mercy and used it as the capital for their cruelty."
"They stole rations from the weak. They put their hands on the families of the soldiers who fight for me."
"People like that do not deserve to live on my land."
He paused. Each word that came after landed like a separate weight.
"I will give you one chance."
He raised his voice — not to a shout, but to the pitch that carries without straining, the voice of a man who expects to be heard.
"All of you. Point them out. Identify the people who have been tormenting you."
"If thirty people simultaneously identify the same person—"
"Your lord is standing here in front of you. He will carry out the judgment himself."
He gestured to his riders. They spurred their horses into the crowd, repeating the words at full volume, carrying the message to every corner of the assembled mass.
The crowd went completely still.
The refugees looked at each other. In their eyes alongside the fear was something that had been compressed for a long time — rage — and beneath that, almost invisible, the fragile edge of hope.
They were afraid. The kind of fear that goes into the bones, the fear of what happens after the lord and his soldiers leave and the strong men are still here, still walking the same ground. That fear had been sitting on them since they arrived. It sat on them now and kept them quiet.
Time passed. The silence felt like a physical weight on every person's chest.
Then, from a corner of the crowd, a thin woman raised her arm — she was nothing but skin and bone — and her arm shook as she lifted it, and she pointed.
Her voice came out high and wrecked.
"It's him!!"
"It's him!! He took the bread from my child!! He broke my arm!!"
That voice was a spark landing in dry grass.
An old man pointed at someone else.
"And him!!! Him!!! He broke my grandson's leg!! Because my grandson looked at his food too long!!"
A young woman bent double with weeping, barely able to form words.
"That one — that one — he — he forced me to—"
"That's him!!"
"Him!!"
"And him!!!! And him!!!!"
Once the dam broke there was nothing left to hold it. Arm after arm went up. Name after name was called. The rage that had nowhere to go for weeks poured out in a single torrent.
The men being identified felt the color leave their faces. They tried to turn and use the looks that had always worked — the look that said I will find you later, and you know what that means — but the eyes around them that had always dropped away were not dropping now. They were knives.
The soldiers walked in without expression and pulled the identified men out of the crowd one by one, handling them the way you handle livestock at a market, dragging them to the open ground in front of Solomon's rock and throwing them down.
Screaming. Cursing. Begging. All of it at once.
When it was done, more than fifty men were kneeling in the dirt in front of the boulder. They had been the lords of the refugee camp. They knelt now like the same slaughtered animals they had made of everyone else, the color completely gone from their faces.
Solomon's gaze moved across those fifty-odd faces. One by one. His expression did not change.
He turned to Olivier.
"Olivier." His voice was conversational. "Under the laws of the Seven Kingdoms, what is the standard punishment for these crimes?"
Olivier looked at the men weeping on the ground, then looked at Solomon's unreadable face. He took a moment to consider.
He wants to make an example of them. But fifty-plus men — all of fighting age, all capable of labor — perhaps he is looking for something proportionate. Something that establishes authority without wasting the manpower.
"My Lord, under the laws of the Seven Kingdoms, for robbery and assault, the standard sentence would depend on the severity — typically flogging, or in more serious cases..."
He paused.
"The removal of a hand or several fingers."
Solomon nodded.
"Good."
Then he turned to Lushen, and gave an order that froze the blood in every person within earshot.
"Lushen."
"Take their heads."