Dessert #4
Before Ojalla loosened her grasp, Esme darted across her shadows to the ledge of her window.
She fiddled it open and threw herself inside, spilling the papers across her living-room floor.
She lay there panting but couldn’t help but grin.
The Void was the only way Ojalla could reach her in this world, and that would have been a stretch even before the portal had been destroyed.
But every now and then, Esme felt her goddess like a palm at the base of her spine, urging her along.
“Thank you,” Esme told the moon. It grinned back.
She gathered her stolen letters and took them to her desk, sorting them out into two piles, bloody and non-bloody, judging the stained ones to be the most recent.
She was lucky that there were two copies of each royal letter: one kept by the king, the other sent to its recipient.
She should have a complete record of Turiel’s last few months of correspondence.
She poured herself a glass of wine, sat down, and picked up the first letter in the bloody pile.
It was a thank-you letter from Turiel to Lukas Rivellion, the Lake King and Janos’s father, written just before the king was murdered.
The tone was dripping in grease, informing Lukas that Turiel would be taking a bigger cut from Lukas’s “regional activities” to fund development in the south.
It was a labor just to read. Song’s balls, Turiel definitely didn’t inherit his father’s penmanship.
Esme found Lukas’s reply, written on thick blue paper and stamped in the corner with his sigil: a drowning sailor. He was fine with Turiel demanding more taxes. He didn’t seem to really care about the smugness, either. Esme could almost hear a sigh in his loose script.
Another group of non-bloody letters was on yellow, finely pressed paper from Yavere Gustoe, general of another one of Micrea’s armies, the Wail.
The first was from five years ago, reporting a staggering 17,209 men in the Wail.
The next year, though, those numbers had dropped to 16,981.
The next year saw another chunk of men gone, and the next, until this year, when they reported 15,203 soldiers around a month ago.
What was picking off their men?
Esme put that group of letters aside to mull over later. She found a letter with slightly darker paper—from a humbler place, probably.
It was from Balthazar. In it, he requested funds from the crown to handle a natural disaster in Prelyn.
A flood and earthquake combined, he said, had destroyed most of the buildings.
Esme checked the date of the letter—barely two months ago.
Liar. Prelyn had been a perfect town just last week.
He asked for ten thousand talons. That was a third of what Turiel had just asked from Lukas.
Esme dug through the letters and found Turiel’s reply. He said it would be an expensive repair, but he gave Balthazar the amount he requested.
Then she went back to the first letter, Turiel’s reply to Lukas.
Prelyn must have been the southern development he’d mentioned needing to fund in that—but he’d requested an extra twenty thousand talons.
He was evidently using Bal’s situation as justification to wring Lukas dry, skimming the majority of the money off for himself.
Esme took sip of wine. This was getting good.
The next letter, though, was a kindly written note from Turiel to the owner of a brothel asking if they’d found a pair of shoes he’d accidently left there months ago.
Other letters were similarly useless, a few being from Lukas about taxes and Lake things.
One mentioned that Janos, lord of the courts, and Yavere Gustoe would be handling tax collection, “as they always do.” Esme scrunched her nose at that.
Since when did generals collect taxes? Then again, Bal was practically Lord Joh’el of Prelyn, asking for disaster aid and being trusted to distribute it.
Esme sorted all letters from Bal to Turiel into date order.
They went back five years, to about a month after Bal became general.
The two had traded twenty-six letters in all—Song’s balls, they were practically married—and Esme read each one.
A drought, a flood, a freeze, a heatwave.
Every so often, a calamity landed on Prelyn, and the Good General wrote some pitiful letter to Turiel asking for money.
The sums weren’t too large, not until one added them up, and then—
Ten million. In the past five years that Balthazar had been general, he’d scammed the crown out of ten million talons.
Was all of that money in Prelyn? Obviously the town had funds, but it wasn’t rich, merely comfortable.
But then again, comfort was wealth. The Foot could barely feed its people, let alone provide them with warm houses with sizable plots.
And Micrea wasn’t selfish with her poverty.
Villages just scraping along could be found all over the country.
But not Prelyn, where women survived childbirth and the streets were paved.
Esme added another fact to Balthazar’s lore.
Prelyn’s peace had been purchased with stolen money. Balthazar commanded an army of fierce, ready warriors. The Good General was soaked in blood up to his chin.
But perhaps goodness was a metered commodity in Micrea. Perhaps the only way to get it was to snatch it. And when the pulling didn’t work, maybe goodness had to be carved from the hands of those who hoarded it.
Maybe Bal had done lots of carving.