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

Chapter 348 --348

The man from the road — she still did not know his name — moved ahead of her and spoke to an older woman near the well, gesturing back at Elara. The woman looked at her. Then she straightened, with the dignity of someone who has been dealing with something terrible and has not yet surrendered it, and walked toward her.

"Your Majesty," she said. Her voice was steady. The steadiness of someone who had made a decision to be steady because the alternative was not useful. "Thank you for coming."

"Tell me what happened," Elara said. "From the beginning. Accurately."

The woman looked at her for a moment — assessing, which Elara noted and respected. Then she said: "It began six weeks ago. The garrison."

"Which garrison."

"The eastern garrison. The detachment that patrols this corridor." The woman’s voice remained steady. "They have always — there have always been payments. Informal ones. Everyone understood them. It was the arrangement." She paused. "Six weeks ago, the payments increased. Doubled, then more than doubled. We could not meet them."

"And when you couldn’t meet them."

"They took what they decided was equivalent. Livestock, first. Grain stores — we have very little left, Your Majesty, we have been rationing for three weeks. When some of the men tried to prevent the last collection—" She stopped. Redirected. "Three of our men were badly hurt. One of them will not walk correctly again."

Elara was quiet for a moment.

She was looking at the village — at the open granary, which she could now see had been not just emptied but roughly emptied, the structure’s interior visible through the damaged door, the shelving torn rather than cleared. At the stripped fields, which were not just harvested but stripped, the soil overturned, the kind of thorough removal that precluded the possibility of a second crop from anything missed in the first pass. At the children around the well, who were at the age where hunger shows in a specific way — not the dramatic way, not yet, but in the quality of attention, the slightly slowed movements, the eyes that were working harder than they should have to be working.

"The garrison commander," she said.

"A man named Harwick," the woman said. "He arrived with the new detachment eight months ago. Before him—" She shook her head. "Before him, it was not like this."

"Is the garrison post marked on the standard military maps?"

"I don’t know military maps, Your Majesty."

"That’s fine." She turned to the guard on her left — one of the newer beast knights, young, whose name was Arek and who had demonstrated in the experimental cohort the specific quality of noticing things that other people had decided were not worth noticing. "Do you know the eastern garrison distribution in this corridor?"

"Approximately, Your Majesty," he said. "There are three fixed posts. The main one would be approximately four miles northeast of the road."

"Approximately four miles from here, then."

"Approximately."

She turned back to the woman. "How often do they come?"

"No regular pattern now. That’s — that’s part of what makes it—" She stopped. Composed herself. "In the beginning, it was predictable. Now we don’t know when."

Elara nodded. She looked at the village again — the whole of it, the systematic picture, the specific shape of what Harwick’s detachment had been doing, which was not simple theft but something more organized and therefore more deliberately sustained. This had a structure to it. The irregular timing was not carelessness but strategy — the way that unpredictable pressure works differently on a community than predictable pressure, how it prevents the kind of collective response that a known schedule would allow.

Whoever Harwick was, he had thought about this.

She found that she had feelings about that which she set aside, because feelings were not useful right now and assessment was.

She turned to her guards. "Unload what we have in the carriage. Food, water supplies, anything medical."

"Your Majesty, those are travel supplies for—"

"Unload them," she said. Not sharply. Simply as a statement of what was going to happen.

They unloaded them.

She watched the village’s response to the appearance of food with the careful, non-intrusive attention she gave to things she needed to understand. The way it was received — not frantically, not with the desperate scramble that acute starvation produces, but with the careful, organized efficiency of people who had been managing scarcity for long enough to have developed protocols for it. That told her the three-week rationing had been genuinely organized, that there was functioning leadership in this community, that the woman she had been speaking to was probably not the only competent person here.

She found the man who had been badly hurt during the last confrontation. He was inside one of the less-damaged buildings, lying on a low cot, his left leg immobilized by a splinting arrangement that was improvised but not unintelligent — someone here had field medical knowledge, or had worked out the principles under pressure.

She looked at him. He was conscious, watching her with the specific expression of a man who has been through enough that the arrival of an empress in his sickroom registers as simply another development in an already eventful period.

"Can you tell me exactly what happened?" she said.

He told her. Exactly, with the detail that comes from having replayed something many times. She listened without interrupting, storing the specifics — the number of soldiers, the configuration of them, which ones had been most aggressive, the specific instructions Harwick had apparently given that his men had been following, the words that had been said before it escalated.

When he finished, she thanked him. She meant it.

She went back outside.

The woman was waiting.

"I need to know how many people are here," Elara said. "Total. And I need to know what skills you have in this community — specifically anyone with military background, craft expertise, administrative experience. Anyone who has worked outside this village."

The woman looked at her with those assessing eyes. "You’re not just going to send a letter to the garrison."

"No," Elara said. "I am not going to send a letter to the garrison."

Something shifted in the woman’s face — not relief yet, still too cautious for relief, but the beginning of a recalculation. "We have forty-three people. Including children. We had sixty-one before Harwick arrived." A pause that contained more than it said. "As for skills — my husband was a military surveyor before he retired here. He knows this forest better than anyone. There are two brothers who worked as carpenters in the capital, came home five years ago. We have a woman who was a licensed physician’s assistant before her husband died and she came back to her family here."

Elara was already thinking. "The physician’s assistant. Where is she?"

"Here." A different voice — direct, from behind her. She turned.

The woman who had spoken was perhaps forty, with the specific quality of someone who had decided at some point in their life that other people’s opinions of them were not the most important information available and had arranged themselves accordingly. She was holding a cloth in one hand that she had been using as a compress on something, and she was looking at Elara with the straightforward appraisal of someone who was used to looking at people and determining what was actually wrong with them.