"You're still in Oxwood," she says.
"Still." I lean against the door frame. "I've been looking at the village records."
She pulls the cloth aside again and picks up a set of tongs. Whatever she was working on is gone from the table. "And?"
"They're incomplete. Several quarters of collection data don't align." I watch her hands. They don't slow. "You don't seem surprised."
"I'm not." She sets a bar of iron into the coals. "Why would I be?"
"Because it's evidence of exploitation under my governance."
She looks up at that—not sharply, but with the measured attention of someone deciding how honest to be. "My lord." She sets the tongs down. "Villages like Oxwood exist because dark elf nobles let them exist this way. The records being wrong isn't a surprise. It's a Tuesday."
"That's a broad accusation."
"It's a pattern." She moves to the bellows. "How many border villages have you ridden through in the last year? How many of them looked like this?"
I don't answer, because the answer is most of them.
"Dark elves talk about order," she continues, pumping the bellows in a slow rhythm. "Order and stability and the importance of proper governance." She glances at me over her shoulder. "And then villages like mine go twenty years without a single inspection and everybody acts shocked when the records don't match."
"I inspect my territories."
"You ride through them." She turns to face me fully. "There's a difference."
I straighten off the door frame. "I'm here now."
"Yes, you are." She crosses her arms. "Why?"
"Because I govern this region and something is wrong in it."
"Or," she says, "because you walked through this town and saw what happens when nobody with real authority actually pays attention, and it bothered you." She tilts her head. "Which bothers you more—that it's happening, or that it took you this long to notice?"
The fire behind her snaps, but she doesn’t move or look away.
"Both," I say, which is the same thing I told Cyran, and no less true.
She uncrosses her arms. "My mother died when I was nine." She says it plainly, without performance. "We couldn't afford the healer's fees because the harvest tax that year took everything past the basic grain reserve. Papa worked the forge seven days to try to make it up." She picks the tongs back up. "That's one family. In one year. Multiply it."
I am quiet. "I'm not going to tell you that's acceptable."
"No." Her voice hitches slightly. "But are you going to tell me it stops?"
"I'm telling you I'm looking at it."
"Looking at it isn't the same as fixing it." She wipes some sweat from her brow and leaves a streak of ash. "If you want to prove that dark elves are capable of more than tolerance for human suffering, prove it. Do something for this village." She turns back to the fire. "Otherwise, we've had a very interesting conversation and nothing changes by morning."
I watch her work for another moment—the set of her shoulders, the precision in her hands, the complete absence of the deference every other person in Oxwood shows me. She's not performing courage. She simply doesn't have patience left for anything less than honesty.
I leave without answering her.
Back at camp,I write two letters.
The first goes to the regional trade office under my seal—a directive reducing import and export tariffs for Oxwood and the three nearest settlements by thirty percent, effective immediately, citing an administrative review correction. It will process quietly, without announcement.
The second letter I don't write. I sit with the blank page for a while, thinking about what to say to the territorial council about Malrec, and then I fold it away. Not yet. I need more than altered ledger entries before I move against a sitting magistrate.
Cyran appears at the tent entrance. "Messenger ready."
