Raven Meadows's Arc

Chapter 13 of 25

The stall worked for one night. By the next morning, it broke. Raven handed one portion to each creature in line, but she had no way to remember who she'd already fed. A frog-thing came back twice. A bird-woman swore she'd gotten nothing. Two newcomers shoved at the boards, snarling over a strip of dried elk. Raven's rule was simple and fair, and yet she could not prove it. Trust alone would not hold twenty hungry stomachs. She stood behind the stall with her hands flat on the driftwood, thinking, when a stocky woman came up the mud path. She wore a green dress under a stained apron, her hair in two long braids. She lifted a full grain barrel off her cart like it weighed nothing and set it down without a grunt. Raven had never seen her before. "You're feeding a village with no ledger," the woman said. She looked at the shoving line, then at Raven. "That's how a fair stall goes crooked." "And you are?" "Hilda Green. I ran a shop in Voglenauch forty years, near enough. My father before me." She nodded at the fighting pair. "Honesty's cost me plenty. I won't watch another stall turn rotten if I can help it." Raven crossed her arms. "So help." Hilda reached into her apron and drew out a fistful of small clay tokens, each stamped with a bird. "One token, one portion. Handed out at dawn. Spent, it's gone until tomorrow." She pressed one into Raven's palm. "No one argues with a token. It's in their hand or it isn't." The Gemini Brothers stood at the treeline, watching. The still one had come to drop off the last of the smoked elk. He looked at the tokens, then at his brother. Neither spoke for a moment. "We counted our father's people this way once," the restless one said. "A stone for each mouth. No fighting over stones." "We can make more," the still one added. "Cut from bone. Marked the same." Raven turned the token over in her fingers. It was cold and plain and it could not lie. She thought of the frog-thing coming back twice, the bird-woman's flat, cheated eyes. A token didn't care who begged loudest. It just counted. By dusk they had ninety tokens laid out on the boards. Raven walked the line and pressed one into each waiting hand. When the frog-thing came back a second time, empty-palmed, she only shook her head, and it slunk off without a fight. The line moved. Bellies filled. No one shoved. Hilda watched the last portion cross the boards, then loaded her empty barrel back onto her cart. "I'll bring flour next week," she said. "And more clay." Raven had a fair way to feed them now. But ninety tokens meant ninety mouths counted, written plain for anyone to see. Somewhere out past the reeds, someone was surely counting too.