”I figured out a solution for you,” Adi said. Laryn wiped his bleary eyes, staring up at her beaming face.

  He sat up and looked around. He lay in the large communal shelter that some of the Jardenvalers had built yesterday. A bed of leaves softened the sandy ground beneath him.

  No light shone through the gaps in the log walls.

  “How early is it?” Laryn groaned.

  “The sun will be up soon enough. Come on, I want to tell you what I figured out!”

  Laryn stretched then rose, trying to avoid waking others as he slipped out of the hut. A man sat outside, on watch. He gave Laryn and Adi nod. He couldn’t remember the man’s name, but figured he should be able to look it up in the core interface.

  He walked over to the kingdom core. Gaten and Widan had done a good job of improving the water sifting setup. They’d reinforced Laryn’s water diverting wall, so all the sand around the core had been able to dry out.

  A deep channel—lined with stones to slow erosion—ran over to the kingdom core, bringing water in to a pool just within the fence.

  They’d formed a hollow in the sand and placed the barrel in it. By unblocking the channel, they could send water flowing into the barrel. When it was full, they’d stop the channel up and Laryn would sift the water in the barrel. The small stream could fill the barrel in a matter of minutes. The limiting factor now was the sift ability cooldown.

  “You want to keep the fact that the core doesn’t have a burn rate a secret,” Adi said. “But whenever you add essence to the core, it changes the kingdom, and people are going to notice that eventually, even if I mess with the interface data.”

  “That’s right,” Laryn said.

  “I thought about it a lot, and I realized that the core does have a feature that can imitate essence burn,” Adi said, delight practically dripping from her. She couldn’t stop smiling.

  “What is it?”

  “I’m such a good administrator,” Adi said. “You just have to stop sifting water.”

  Laryn looked over at the new setup. “They’ll know I’m not adding essence to the core,” he said. “And wonder how influence is being maintained. Besides, Gaten and Widan worked so hard on this!”

  “No, I mean you have to get other essence. Stop sifting water. Put the core out of balance. Intentionally!”

  “Oh,” Laryn said, beginning to see. “You mean the debuff?”

  “Yes!” Adi squealed, clapping her hands together. “I’m so not used to thinking of that as a possible benefit, that I almost didn’t think about it at all! But then I realized that if you added, say, twelve life essence to the core right now, it would increase the influence debuff, so instead of getting twelve more influence, you’d only get four. How’s that for imitating a burn rate?”

  Laryn nodded as her plan started to make sense to him. “I get it… And then if I switch back to water sifting, each essence will add more than one influence, because I’ll be reducing the debuff by balancing things more… Okay, I think that could work. Does anything bad happen if the core gets too out of balance?”

  “I don’t know!” Adi said with delight. “Probably, but I’ve never tried it. Never purposefully unbalanced it. As far as I know, it’s just the influence debuff.”

  “Well, I guess we’ll have to shift to sifting something else then,” Laryn said. “Wood maybe? Sand? Water was just so convenient. They’re all going to wonder why I’m switching…”

  Figures stirred around the camp as the sky brightened. Laryn pursed his lips at having to eat more gobo berry paste, and decided to go check on his rations. Even a hardtack cracker went a long way toward making gobo more palatable.

  After that first night, when Laryn had hastily made room in his shelter for the soaking and tired refugees, he hadn’t paid much attention to the supplies from the wagon. People had been using them, but he was always asked before something was taken.

  The food stores had been organized, carefully stacked in a hollow between two rocks, nearer to the trees.

  Laryn pulled back a covering made of large leaves meant to divert rain water.

  Everything was gone. He looked around, as though he might see someone carrying crates and barrels away. Strange. He would have sworn it was here last night.

  He walked back over to the man who’d been on watch when he awoke.

  “Adi,” he thought as he approached. “What’s that man’s name?”

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  “He’s in the system as Gall.”

  “Gall,” Laryn said, smiling broadly. The man rose and bowed his head respectfully. He had a large scar across his right cheek. "Have you seen anyone over by that rock lately?”

  “No,” Gall said, shaking his head. Laryn turned to look. Gall only had a partial vision of the storage spot from his position.

  “All my food stores are missing,” Laryn said. “Do you know if someone moved them?”

  “Sorry, I’m not sure,” Gall said. “Haven’t heard anything.

  “Who else was on watch last night?”

  “Tasam took the watch before mine.”

  Laryn bit his tongue. He didn’t want to deal with a power struggle between Tasam and Coril. It had been a mistake to talk to Coril yesterday without including Tasam.

  Tasam worked at the fire, helping serve people more gobo paste for breakfast. Laryn watched him working, looking for signs of a guilty conscience.

  He had to admit the man was resourceful. Tasam had done a good job organizing the gobo preparation. He had already started making racks for drying the paste, so that it could be stored.

  Coril walked up beside Laryn. “Good morning,” he said with a grin.

  “Sleep well?” Laryn asked, suspicious of everyone.

  “Best I’ve slept in weeks,” Coril said. “It’s good to have a full belly and a roof overhead. Even if it is made of leaves.”

  “Tell me more about what happened to Jardensvale,” Laryn said. “Why would you come out here in the wildlands?”

  “Land,” Coril said. “Most of the land between the Ebil and the Withwyn is claimed. All the fertile land at least. For an enterprising, ambitious man like my brother, that leaves only two choices. Fighting elves, or fighting goblins. The elves tend to be a bit more friendly toward humans, so…”

  He spread his hands, as though his point was made.

  “But why set up a new kingdom core to begin with?” Laryn asked. “It would be safer and easier to live life in an established town or kingdom.”

  Coril frowned. “You tell me,” he said. “You did it too. Isn’t it obvious? How else for a man to prove his worth?”

  Laryn scratched his prickly scalp. Coril didn’t seem to understand his question.

  “Anyways we were doing well. At first there were a few goblin attacks, but as the years passed they must have realized that we weren’t a soft target, so they mostly left us alone. We spread influence—”

  “What are you talking about?” Tasam said, walking up and eying Coril suspiciously. A bitter look marred Tasam’s face.

  “My friend,” Coril said, with a broad smile. He clapped a hand on Tasam’s shoulder. Tasam shrugged him off. “I’m just telling our [Ruler] about Jardensvale.”

  “It was a mistake from the beginning,” Tasam said.

  “Tasam’s just bitter that Jarden sometimes questioned his advice.”

  “Jarden—none of us, really—didn’t know what he was getting into. Just because things seemed to be going well on the surface—”

  “We were building the future,” Coril said, his friendly demeanor shifting. He stepped up closer to Tasam, leaning in. Tasam didn’t budge. “We poured our blood, sweat, piss, and tears into Jardensvale,” Coril hissed. “At least, some of us did. Some of us believed in the vision.”

  “It was doomed from the start,” Tasam said. “Nothing we could have done would have prepared us for—”

  Laryn stepped between the men.

  “I understand you have your differences of opinion,” Laryn said. “How did you end up with this arrangement? Co-leading your people?”

  “He’s too stubborn,” the men said in unison, each pointing at the other.

  “He was supposed to read the maps and guide us out of the wildlands,” Coril said.

  “He was supposed to lead defense and hunting,” Tasam said.

  They glared at each other.

  “I haven’t had a bite of meat in weeks,” Tasam accused. “Not since the cows got loose.”

  “You’re one to talk,” Coril spat. “If you had been able to navigate, we wouldn’t have wandered—”

  “I’d like to see you do better!” Tasm cut in, jabbing a finger into Coril’s chest.

  “Please,” Laryn said, placing a hand on each man and pushing them apart. “We’re still in a tenuous situation here. We need to work together. I need your help, and you need mine.”

  The men glared at each other.

  “I have a problem that we need to resolve,” Laryn said. “My supplies of rations are not where I left them; someone has moved them.”

  “Stolen?” Tasam breathed.

  “I’m not jumping to that conclusion yet,” Laryn said. “But I’d like to recover them as soon as possible. Can I rely on the two of you to search among the Jardenvalers, and help me find out what happened?”

  He hoped that by setting the two of them against each other in this task, that he’d get to the truth. If one of them had done it, surely the other would turn him in.

  “Have you talked to his daughter?” Coril asked, venom lacing his words. "She’s got light fingers—”

  Tasam slapped Coril across the face. “Don’t speak of my daughter!”

  Coril laughed. “She stole Arda’s bracelets, didn’t she?”

  “Stop!” Laryn shouted, stepping directly between the two. He placed a hand on each man’s chest, physically separating them. “I doubt Talia is strong enough to quietly move all those crates in the middle of the night. I don’t care who moved that stuff; it must still be on the island somewhere and I just want it found.”

  Tasam and Coril grasped their weapons. People sitting at the fire stared. Laryn waved. “Everyone back to what you were doing. Tasam, Coril, find my rations. You have till tonight. Tasam, you start there,” he grabbed Tasam and turned him toward the campfire. “Coril, you start over there.” He pushed Coril toward the trees, where some of the men worked.

  The two overseers stalked off, grudgingly.

  “What have I done wrong?” Laryn groaned.

  Adi popped up in front of him. “Well, people are one of the trickiest parts of managing a kingdom. In the future, you may want to have class locked storage areas. While your subjects generally have the benefits of influence across your whole kingdom, you can designate areas of differing affect. I recommend setting up a storehouse area. Then set the influence for that structure to make things harder for anyone who isn’t you or an overseer. That’s something you can do with a tier two kingdom!”

  “Yeah, I should have done that before,” Laryn said. “Probably still should. But the rations are missing, and we need to find out what happened to them. If someone here is stealing things… that’s bad. But Tasam and Coril are also bad. I shouldn’t have agreed to their terms. I know having two people co-equally in charge of something rarely works.”

  “You could pick one of them,” Adi said. “Make them the overseer. Just because they agreed to work together doesn’t mean you have to work with both of them.”

  “I could? But the contract?”

  “Basically says that they do what you want or leave. So they have an out if they don’t like it.”

  Laryn nodded. “I’ll probably have to do that. I could never trust the two of them here as co-stewards while I went to find a coresmith.”

  “True,” Adi agreed.

  “Let’s see what they turn up for us today,” Laryn said.