Laryn stared at Kenna, surprised.

  “By attacking Harrat?” Laryn asked. “That’s just the chaos of battle. Nobody saw it but me. I won’t press you on that.”

  “No,” Kenna said. “It’s been bothering me ever since you brought Zaremba into the kingdom. The code. The six laws. A blow for a blow and a hand for a hand.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I killed Devlin, Laryn. Are you going to kill me?”

  Laryn shook his head, his brow furrowed. “No,” he said. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Listen to me,” Kenna said. “You’re a ruler. You have made laws, and your kingdom will be looking to you to see how you apply them. Are you fair and just? Do you bend the rules for your friends?”

  “Stop,” Laryn said. “My word is final. What I say goes.”

  Kenna nodded. “And what do you say?”

  “I stand by the laws I made,” Laryn said. “Do you remember them?”

  Kenna paled. “A life for a life,” she said. “A bone for a bone. You established a law of reciprocity.”

  “No,” Laryn said. “I was very specific in my language. The first law: If a subject intentionally takes another subject’s life, his life shall be forfeit. You did not take the life of a subject of Vallor. Your life will not be taken.”

  Kenna looked relieved. Had she really thought he was going to execute her for that? His heart ached at the kind of abuse she must have endured at the hands of Harrat, to believe that a person would be capable of such blind cruelty in the name of justice.

  “But you’re right about disobedience,” Laryn said. “You violated my direct order, and took away leverage that we held against Harrat. The punishment for that is whipping, and labor to make restitution.”

  Kenna nodded, tears in her eyes.

  “I don’t want to punish you for what you did. Not when you felt you had no other path forward.”

  “You must,” Kenna said. “For the good of Vallor.”

  “Nobody else knows the situation,” Laryn said. “You could say that you killed him in self defense.”

  “That is a lie. You cannot build a strong kingdom on a foundation of lies.”

  “Do you care so much about Vallor, that you would endure punishment? All for the sake of a kingdom far from your own, in a distant land away from everyone you know and love?”

  “Vallor is my home now. I care about you, holding to your word. With the addition of Goblins to the kingdom, order is more essential than ever.” Kenna’s voice softened. “I’ve seen too much; backstabbing, lies, deception. I’m sure it was all reasonable, all done for a good cause.”

  “You want to be punished,” Laryn said.

  “Publicly,” Kenna said. “I’ll endure it. Whip me. Assign me to labor. I’d rather bleed than be the crack in this kingdom’s foundation. It’s the only way we survive.”

  “I… That’s not…”

  “Your word is law,” Kenna said. “But if you cannot bring yourself to execute your own laws, then… perhaps you aren’t the [Ruler] I hoped for. I will go into exile.”

  Laryn’s throat tightened, and he was touched by the passion of this woman. She really cared about the way that things were done here. He wanted to reach for her, to extinguish the haunted look in her eyes.

  “You’ve set a trap for me,” he said. “If I show you mercy, I am weak. If I execute this justice you demand, I am becoming a tyrant. Where is there room for mercy in your words?”

  “Mercy is the first excuse of the corrupt,” Kenna said. “Without first having justice, there can be no mercy.”

  “We need you, Kenna. We need you in this kingdom.”

  “Because I can lead you to a spell module?”

  “No,” Laryn said, and he meant it. “Because you can lead men and women.” He rubbed the back of his scalp. “We do need to recover that module still, though.”

  “Then administer justice,” Kenna said. “And then we can consider the place of mercy in the law you established.”

  Laryn took a deep breath, and nodded. “Vallor needs champions, and we should have a law that builds them up, not one that tears them down.”

  “Will you stay with us?”

  He extended his hand to her, reaching across the border of the claimed tiles. Kenna took it, and he pulled her toward him, into the kingdom. She wrapped her arms around him, in an embrace. Laryn returned it, filled with the strength of human connection.

  If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

  They spent the remainder of that day getting things organized. The damaged siege bridges were stripped down and used to construct a sturdier, higher bridge across to the main island.

  Goblins gathered and began setting up their tents on the north bank of the river. Zaremba had begun adding them to the population of Vallor, which grew rapidly as the day wore on.

  Bodies of fallen soldiers were carted across the river to the kingdom core, and sifted for essence. Each sift produced significantly more essence than sifting a normal barrel of matter. Laryn thought back to old Orf, desperate to maintain his life and influence. The old man, if he’d had more strength and power, might have killed his entire population in an attempt to save himself.

  As it was, only about a dozen of them had survived.

  Kenna was right. The actions of a leader had powerful consequences in the lives of his subjects. The burden of ruling required Laryn to be very careful with what he said and did. And unlike simple mistakes made in battle, the ability to reverse time wouldn’t help him much, because those consequences might not manifest for many years.

  Laryn found Zaremba once her royal tent had been constructed. She received him in her chambers.

  “Why do you stay hidden, in this tent or in your palanquin?” he asked her.

  “Have you seen how the lowest goblins react in my presence?”

  Laryn nodded. Even Lobix seemed to have a hard time with her appearance. The creatures were obsessed.

  “Then that should be all the explanation you need.”

  They discussed the establishment of a goblin settlement on the north shore of the Ebil. Laryn mapped out a road, leading from the bridge through the northwest gap, and indicated where he thought they could construct orderly settlements. He didn’t want this side of the river turning into a goblin slum.

  Zaremba laughed at his suggestions.

  “If left to themselves, low goblins might build something like that,” she said. “But I am Zaremba, of the highest bloodline. I was trained in the halls of the library in Alvanasara. Your ideas are fine, human, and this arrangement might be temporary. But I’ll be buried in Horel’s sweet ground before I build something so… lopsided.”

  Laryn scoffed. “It’s reasonable!”

  “It’s uneven,” Zaremba said. “We’ll put together something more symmetrical. Trust me, it will be for the best.”

  Laryn decided to keep out of Zaremba’s management of her people unless there was actually a problem.

  A different problem presented itself to Laryn. He’d captured about two dozen soldiers on the island, and Harrat had left behind about forty more, who were too injured to retreat.

  He needed to figure out what to do with them, but for the time being, they were bound and tied to stakes on the north shore. Laryn had Hela organizing medical attention for them, and a contingent of goblins guarding them.

  The casualty reports were finalized that evening. Harrat had lost 78 men; killed, and 63 left behind, wounded or captured. That was about 16% of his banner of fighting men.

  The goblins had over 120 dead, and nearly 200 more wounded. Laryn never got a count of how many goblins had been in the original horde, but it was over one thousand. In all, an unsurprising outcome. He was lucky it wasn’t worse for the goblins; if Harrat had chosen to stick around longer and press the issue, many more would have died.

  Laryn would have won the day in the end though, so Harrat’s decision to pull out was reasonable. It just meant that Laryn had to start thinking about the next attack right away.

  Laryn reclaimed the tiles neutralized by Harrat’s claim stakes, and regained his stat buffs. He would need to claim additional tiles soon so that he could grant Zaremba her promised mages, but he wanted to increase core essence first.

  The construction of the new bridge delayed the [Sifting] of the deceased. A mage could sift about one body at a time, which meant that there were 198 siftings to perform. Each body produced around 10 essence, with humans providing slightly more than goblins.

  Laryn worked alongside his mages; Gall, Gaten, Widan, and Kenna. Zaremba did not participate in the sifting, despite being a mage. Goblins carted the bodies across the river, but the work was still draining and gruesome. Seeing the faces of so many dead weighed down on Laryn. He’d killed many of these men himself.

  Because the flood waters had not yet fully receded, about a half meter of water flowed around the base of the kingdom core. Reaching the core required wading through ten meters of shallow water.

  Because each mage could only cast sift once every 12 minutes, they worked in rotations, helping each other pull the cart containing a few bodies to the core. When these were sifted, they would haul the cart back onto the beach, add a few more bodies from the pile created by the goblins, and repeat.

  The smell of death etched itself in Laryn’s nostrils. The day wore on, and a few short hours after the battle, the bodies became stiff with the stoniness of death.

  After working for several hours, they had managed to sift 81 bodies, adding 812 essence to the kingdom core.

  Zaremba had managed to add all her goblins to the kingdom. 938 in total, bringing the population of Vallor to 1021.

  Kenna was right about feeding so many mouths. Already Laryn was worried about what might happen; even just feeding the prisoners seemed like a big order. They were going to have to work for their keep.

  Luckily there was a lot of food to go around now. The elven fields to the south of the river, once tended by the inhabitants of Annar, had proven fruitful.

  Laryn couldn’t think about any of the problems of managing a kingdom until he’d dealt with Kenna’s concerns, though.

  That night, he gathered his human population around the camp fire, just as they’d often done in days past.

  They celebrated their victory over Harrat, and Laryn told them of his trip to Grekhol.

  He knew he was delaying the inevitable, though, sucking much of the delight from the evening for him. He needed to get to the point.

  “On that night, when I destroyed Harrat’s core and rescued Kenna from the river,” he began, searching for the right way to approach the topic. A few people cheered at his statement, but he waved them down.

  “A crime was committed that night,” Laryn said. “And justice must be served.”

  The kingdom fell silent. Sounds of merry-making goblins wafted in across the river, but not a human made a sound.

  Kenna stepped forward into the light of the fire.

  “It was I,” she said. “I murdered Devlin, against the direct order of Laryn.”