The Regent Octavia leaned back, the silk of her throne cool against her skin, as another peasant mumbled his justifications.
Blight, drought, a thieving neighbor, a sick goat – the litany of misfortunes was as predictable as the changing seasons, and, she suspected, often as embellished as the court minstrels' tales. Each year, a fresh wave of petitioners would arrive, their eyes downcast, their hands twisting, offering stories of woe that, true or not, always culminated in the same empty pockets. She wondered if they rehearsed these narratives, if there was a hidden guild of excuse-smiths somewhere in the countryside, churning out novel ways to explain an empty coffer. While a sliver of her, the part that remembered her own less gilded youth, could acknowledge the harsh realities of their lives, the pragmatist, the ruler responsible for an empire's coffers, heard only the draining chorus of avoidance, a constant erosion of the resources needed to keep the realm itself from crumbling.
