Chapter 14 — The Queen's Table
The first grain wagons reached the border at dawn — and stopped there.
"They're waiting on law, Majesty, not roads," Orin said. He set the royal ledger on the table in her borrowed study and opened it to a page marked with faded silver ribbon. "Famine relief at this scale isn't charity. Under crown law it's the Queen's Table — the sovereign feeding a people from her own stores, by her own hand. And the custom is older than the capital itself: the sovereign's bread flows only from beneath the sovereign's own roof."
Sierra read the old script twice. "Meaning the grain moves only while I live where it's eaten."
"To the letter. The day you cross back over that border, the wagons stop at it. The custom has never been broken — it can't be, short of a full counc
