by Jon Skovron
“Nice place this,” said the fourth, seeming to feel more awkward in the silence than the others.
“Thank you,” Will said, as evenly as he was able. “My parents built it.”
“Keep saying to the missus we should get a place like this,” the guard continued, “but she doesn’t like the idea of farm living. Likes to be close to the center of things. By which she really means the alchemist. Gets a lot of things from the alchemist, she does. Very healthy woman. Always adding supplements to my diet.” He patted his stomach, metal gauntleted hand clanking against the chain mail. “Doesn’t ever seem to do any good.” He looked off into the middle distance. “Of course my brother says I’m cuckolded by a drug-addled harpy, but he’s always been a bit negative.”
The guard seemed to notice that everyone was staring at him.
“Oh,” he said. “Sorry. Obviously none of that is related to why we’re officially here. Just wanted to, well, you know…” He withered under his commanding officer’s stare.
The lead soldier looked away from him, down to a piece of browning parchment paper that he had retrieved from his pouch. Then he turned the gaze he had used to dominate his subordinate upon Will.
“You are Willett Altior Fallows, son of Mickel Betterra Fallows, son of Theorn Pentauk Fallows, owner and title holder of this farmstead?” he asked. He was not a natural public speaker, stumbling over most of the words. But he kept his sneer firmly in place as he read.
Will nodded. “That’s what my mother always told me,” he said. The fourth soldier let out a snort of laughter, then at the looks from the others, murdered his mirth like a child tossed down a well.
The lead soldier’s expression, by contrast, did not flicker for an instant. Will thought he might even have seen a small flame as the joke died against his stony wall of indifference. The soldier had the air of a man who had risen through the ranks on the strength of having no imagination whatsoever. The sort of man who followed orders, blindly and doggedly, and without remorse.
“The dragon Mattrax and by extension the Dragon Consortium as a whole,” the officer continued in his same stilted way, reading from the parchment, “find your lack of compliance with this year’s taxes a great affront to their nobility, their honor, and their deified status. You are therefore—”
“Wait a minute.” Will stood, ladle in his hand, knuckles white about its handle, staring at the man. “My lack of what?”
For a moment, as the soldier had begun to speak, Will had felt his stomach plunge in some suicidal swan dive, abandoning ship entirely. And then, as the next words came, there had been a sort of pure calm. An empty space in his emotions, as if they had all been swept away by some great and terrible wind that had scoured the landscape clean and sent cows flying like siege weaponry.
But by the time the soldier finished, there was a fury in him he could barely fathom. He had always thought of himself as a peaceable man. In twenty-eight years he had been in exactly three fights, had started only one of them, and had thrown no more than one punch in each. But, as if summoned by some great yet abdominally restrained wizard, an inferno of rage had appeared out of nowhere in his gut.
“My taxes?” he managed to splutter. He was fighting against an increasing urge to take his soup ladle and ram it so far down the soldier’s throat he could scoop out his balls. “Your great and grand fucking dragon Mattrax took me for almost every penny I had. He has laid waste to the potential for this farm with his greed. And there was not a single complaint from me. Not as I gave you every inherited copper shek, silver drach, and golden bull I had.”
He stood, almost frothing with rage, staring down the lean, unimpressed commander.
“Actually,” said the fourth soldier, almost forgotten at the periphery of events, “it was probably a clerical error. There’s an absolutely vast number of people who fall under Mattrax’s purview, and every year there’s just a few people whose names don’t get ticked. It’s an inevitability of bureaucracy, I suppose.”
Both Will and the commanding officer turned hate-filled eyes on the soldier.
“So,” said Will, voice crackling with fire, “tick my fucking name then.”
“Oh.” The soldier looked profoundly uncomfortable. “Actually that’s not something we can do. Not our department at all. I mean you can appeal, but first you have to pay the tax a second time, and then appeal.”
“Pay the tax?” Will said, the room losing focus for him, a strange sense of unreality descending. “I can’t pay the fucking tax a second time. Nobody here could afford that. That’s insane.”
“Yes,” said the guard sadly. “It’s not a very fair system.”
Will felt as if the edges of the room had become untethered from reality, as if the whole scene might fold up around him, wither away to nothingness, leaving him alone in a black void of insanity.
“Willett Altior Fallows,” intoned the lead soldier, with a degree of blandness only achievable through years of honing his callousness to the bluntest of edges, “I hereby strip you of your title to this land in recompense for taxes not paid. You shall be taken from here directly to debtors’ jail.”
Also by Jon Skovron
THE EMPIRE OF STORMS
Hope and Red
Bane and Shadow
Struts & Frets
Misfit
Man Made Boy
This Broken Wondrous World
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