The eastern provinces looked different from a map than they did from the back of a horse, I discovered three weeks after Aeric's exile, riding the final stretch toward the grain district that had nearly become the staging ground for my own murder.
"You didn't have to come personally," Aldric said, riding beside me, still visibly uncertain about the wisdom of an empress touring provincial granaries so soon after surviving an assassination attempt. "A commissioner could have overseen the reserve redistribution just as effectively."
"A commissioner wasn't recruited from Millbrook's desperation," I said. "I want to see, myself, what actually drove twenty people to accept a fugitive's coin. Reports on parchment tell me numbers. This tells me why the numbers matter."
