Reborn as the Psycho Villainess Who Ate Her Slave Beasts' Contracts

Chapter 351 --351

The amounts collected, the frequency, what happened when villages could not meet the collection, and where the collected goods and money are currently located."

Silence.

She waited.

She was good at waiting.

"Your Majesty," he said, in the tone of a man attempting to shift the ground of a conversation to somewhere more comfortable, "perhaps this would be better discussed in a more formal setting, where the full administrative context—"

"The men of Tarven village who are standing behind my guards," she said, "include one whose leg will not heal correctly because of what happened during your last collection. He walked four miles through forest terrain to be here today." She looked at Harwick steadily. "I think the current setting is adequate."

Harwick looked at the Tarven men. His jaw tightened.

"The accounting records for this garrison," she continued, "will be reviewed by imperial auditors who will arrive within the week. The chain of reporting above this garrison — Commander Solt’s district administration — will be reviewed simultaneously." She watched his face when she said Solt’s name and she saw what she had expected to see. "In the interim, I am issuing the following instructions."

She turned to Arek. He produced the document she had written in the carriage during the first four hours of the journey — not this document specifically, but the form of it, the imperial instruction template she had brought because she had learned to bring the tools for decisions she hadn’t made yet. She had filled it in during the three minutes she had waited at the treeline.

"All collection activity in this corridor is suspended, effective immediately," she said. "Any goods currently held in this garrison that were obtained through supplementary procurement in the past eight months are to be inventoried and held pending the audit. The garrison’s current food and material stores — the garrison’s own operational stores — are to be made available for transfer to the three affected villages in amounts sufficient to address the immediate shortfall, which the imperial auditors will calculate against the village records."

She looked at the thirty-seven soldiers.

"The soldiers of this garrison are doing their duty to the empire," she said. "The actions that have been taken in this corridor were taken under command, and command is where the responsibility sits. This is not directed at you." She looked back at Harwick. "It is directed at Commander Harwick, who will remain in this garrison under the supervision of the shadow unit currently positioned throughout this installation—"

She watched the thirty-seven soldiers look at each other, and then look at the spaces around them, and realize, in the way people realize when they suddenly understand the shadow guards are present, that several things they had believed about the last hour were not accurate.

"—until the auditors arrive. At which point the relevant legal process begins."

Harwick’s face had lost its last attempt at confidence. What remained was the expression of a man calculating how bad this was going to be and arriving at numbers he did not like.

She turned to the garrison’s second-in-command — she had identified him by the way he was standing, the quality of his attention, the specific way he had positioned himself during the conversation. "Your name."

He straightened. "Lieutenant Caen, Your Majesty."

"You are in operational command of this garrison pending the audit. Your first instruction is to begin the inventory I have described. Your second is to ensure that Commander Harwick remains on this installation." She looked at him steadily. "Can you do both of those things?"

He looked at Harwick. Then back at her. The look contained a full conversation — not a comfortable one, but an honest one.

"Yes, Your Majesty," he said.

She nodded.

Then she turned and walked back out through the gate, and Petr led her back through the forest, and the shadow guards folded themselves back into the trees, and the Tarven men walked back toward their village with the specific quality of people who have been carrying something heavy for a long time and have just been allowed to put it down for long enough to remember what their arms feel like without it.

She did not speak during the walk back.

She was thinking about Solt, and the chain above Solt, and how far up a chain like this one typically went before it found its ceiling.

She was thinking that she was probably not going to make it to the training post on the original schedule.

She was thinking about sixty-one people becoming forty-three, and the specific arithmetic of that, and what it meant when the people responsible for protecting a population were the ones the population needed to be protected from.

She walked.

The forest moved around her, old and indifferent and green.

She emerged from the treeline into Tarven’s cleared ground, and Dari was waiting at the edge of it, and Sana was beside her, and the forty-three people of the village were arranged behind them in the particular formation of people waiting for news they have already decided they are going to face regardless of what it is.

Elara looked at Dari.

"It’s handled," she said. "Not finished — there’s a process that follows, an audit, legal proceedings. That will take time. But the collections stop today. And they will be returning what they have."

Dari looked at her for a long moment.

Then she did something that Elara had not expected, which was that she did not cry, did not thank her, did not produce any of the emotional responses that the situation might have warranted. She simply nodded, once, with the dignity of a woman receiving information she had worked very hard to make possible.

"We will need to replant," Dari said. "The season is late but not impossible if we start this week."

"I know," Elara said. "I’ll have a supply allocation sent from the capital ahead of the audit completion. Seeds, not just food. What you need to rebuild the next harvest."

Dari nodded again.

Then, quietly: "Thank you, Your Majesty."

Elara received it.

"I need your written account," she said. "Both villages you mentioned. Everything, dated, witnessed by your community. It becomes part of the audit record." She paused. "It matters. What happened here, documented accurately, is what makes the legal process work. I need you to trust that process enough to put what happened into writing."

Dari looked at her steadily. "We will write it."

"Good."

Elara looked at the village once more — the granary, the stripped fields, the damage and the forty-three people and everything that the gap between forty-three and sixty-one contained.

Then she went back to her carriage, and she sat down, and she picked up her pen, and she began writing the instructions for the auditors who were going to be very busy very shortly.

Outside the window, the forest was the same forest it had always been, old and enormous and completely indifferent to the complicated human business of empires.

She wrote.

The auditors left the capital four days later.

Elara had selected them personally, which was not standard procedure — the standard procedure was to assign audit teams through the Imperial Accounting Office, which maintained a roster of certified examiners and distributed them according to availability and seniority. The standard procedure was also, she had discovered during her first week of reviewing the accounting office’s own records, a reliable way to ensure that audits of sensitive matters were staffed by people who had existing relationships with the people being audited.