The agromagus looked mollified. “They’ll burn to a crisp?”
She pinched the bridge of her nose. “Yes.”
“Nevertheless, ask the Magus Supreme to consider a ban on northerners. I await your reply.”
He was off before she could snap thatthisnortherner had no intention of writing back.
“I,” she muttered to no one, “am not Kadra’s errand girl.”
“Keep telling yourself that.” A heavy hand came down on her shoulders. Harion snorted when she flinched and darted away. “Howdoesour Magus Supreme handle this jumping?” His brows rose. “Does he restrain you during a fuck? That’d be excellent material for a new volume ofThe Alternate Histories of the Sidran Tower Girl.”
Usten’s magi had given up all pretense at work and were blatantly staring now. An intricate sculpture of a desert ironwood bled water behind them.
Had she been in better spirits, she would have given voice to the epithets burgeoning on her tongue, perhaps ribbed him for the bruise-like colors he had chosen upon becoming Tetrarch—sapphire blue and emerald green—or perhaps she wouldn’t have reacted at all to the jibes of a man who, for as long as she’d known him, sought self-aggrandization at everyone else’s expense. But now, scarcely a day after the Hearing, she just felt raw. Looked at and judged so much that parts of her had been scraped off.
“What the fuck do you want?” A hiss like a dagger through air.
Harion’s brows rose, sly levity winking out in his eyes. “Touchy. Inform Kadra to calm down with his inspections of Guild wagons leaving Edessa. The new Grains Guildmaster is highly displeased with this interference into how he runs his business.”
Anger bristled up her spine. “This would be the same Grains Guild that insists that their crop yielded poorly this year and that they can’t meet their obligations under the Distribution Act? The one that’sdirectlyled to the northern riots?”
Harion adjusted the button at the notch of his throat with a shrug. “The truth is vastly overrated, mountain girl. Quell the riots the old-fashioned way and spill some northern blood. You and Kadra are slim on allies, and going after the Guilds won’t do you any favors.”
It wouldn’t. But blame for the riots could be laid at the feet of all fifty-eight Guilds. Once hailed as bastions for the working class where they could earn some shred of power during Ur Dinyé’s monarchical era, thesouth’s Guilds had evolved from independent mercantile coalitions to powerful institutions, largely unbeholden to the law in the name of good business. The only leash that kept them from bleeding every Urd dry was the Distribution Act—a centuries-old contract between north and south stipulating that resources mined, harvested, or collected in both regions must be shared with the other as per the Act’s percentages. Percentages dictated by the Guilds, of course.
Despite their wealth of ore, limestone, and clay, the north had little viable farmland. And the snobbish south had refused to barter food for metal without the Guilds as intermediaries. Thus had come a trade bargain worthy of Ruin herself. The coalition of northern Praetors hadn’t stood a chance during the “negotiation” of the Distribution Act. Only the Guilds had the coin for investing in mining operations and the numbers to ensure nationwide supply of gathered resources. Or to destroy any northern business that attempted to compete with them. The choice had been to bleed or bow, and the north had folded forward. Centuries later, the results remained catastrophic. Northern locales had no claim to their resources, and their peoples were little more than the Guilds’ indentured labor.
“The Tetrarchy legislates crime and social governance. It has no oar in the free market,” Ioratius, the newly appointed Grains Guildmaster, had reminded Sarai when she’d raised the subject weeks ago. Iron-gray beard trimmed neatly, he wore a genial smile like a sword and had emptied a pouch of aurei on the table between them like a shield. “Your visit is an unjustifiable incursion into Guild business.”
“Not if Magus Supreme Kadra is receiving petitions on the matter.” She ignored the bribe. “Every northern locale is entitled to an allotment of grain under the Distribution Act. You can’t halt wagons on the basis that your yield was poor.”
He tossed a gold coin in the air and caught it. “We must care for our own first.”
“Last I examined, the north is still part of Ur Dinyé and barely has the farmland to grow a few ears of wheat.” Her nails had dented the seat of his plush armchair. “It’s half ice and half desert.”
Ioratius had merely raised a brow and offered her a bound copy of the Distribution Act. “Point it out. Show me what the consequences are for putting Edessa first and halting wagons elsewhere.”
She had nearly bitten through her tongue trying not to snap that they both knew that the Act only slapped a paltry fine on the offending Guild equivalent to two weeks of profit.
A grin had crawled over Ioratius’s austere features at her silence. “It seems that the Tetrarchy has a quarrel with the Distribution Act not the Grains Guild,” he’d said, smoothly. “Please inform your Tetrarch that he may amend the Act if he finds it lacking. The Guilds will, of course, respond accordingly and reject any government overreach.”
Her teeth ground together at the memory of departing the Grains Guild compound only to spot sacks of grain perched atop the unyoked wagons outside the horrea—outbuildings that were part granary and distribution warehouse.An artificial shortage so he can inflate prices.
“Harion, I know that Guild votes got you elected, but they aren’t just stealing resources from the north. Your hometown, Dídtan, received only fifty-two percent of its grain allocation last month.”
“And?”
She stared. “Your people are starving.”
The smirk slipped from his mouth and, for a rare moment, she saw him as he was: twenty years old, with an inferiority complex the size of the Occidens Sea, dwarfed only by his hunger for power. And yet, there was feeling there, smothered under both. Because like the north and like her, Harion had learned early on that the only paths left to the powerless were to bleed or to bow, and he had folded forward.
“Is that how you justify it?” His voice was low gravel. “Someone’s dead or dying, so you break every one of our laws to put things right. Don’t yousee the precedent you set? If a Petitor defies the framework of this land, then why shouldn’t everyone else? If a man kills a passerby for coin so he can afford to take his sick wife to a healer, will that cease to behomicidiumbecause she wasdying, Sarai?”
The use of her name alone robbed her of speech for a few seconds. “That’s a disingenuous hypothetical, and you know it. That man would have killed an innocent. The Guilds are anything but.”
He laughed incredulously. “One of the many things Aelius had right was that people are fools. Look around. No one cares about innocence or guilt. People only want their needs met, and thanks to you and our resident madman, they now believe that they can spill blood to do so. And if you say that they can’t, they’ll ask whyonlyyou and Kadra have that power.”
“Iknow, godsdammit,” she grit out, bitterness weaving through the hollow spaces in her ribs. “So, your solution is to let the north and poorer southern towns starve?”
