Flush with supplies, John hoped they would be right on Jessica’s trail. This did not happen.

  Barleyfield's expedition was pegged to its slowest member—cow, chicken, or child—and it took the hamlet seven days to reach the prairie Elsifeya City lay on. None of them had ever laid eyes on it before. To the humble serfs of Barleyfield, the capital was as mythical and fantastic as the legendary city of Tampa.

  As they made their way along the King’s Road people stopped and stared at the strange entourage. Adventurers, with their gaudy outfits and colorful hair and personalities, would not have made half the impact. Their astonishment was all the greater upon noticing the procession was led by a teenage boy with a toad on his shoulder.

  “Do you uh… have any goods to declare?” the stunned customs official asked.

  “Soap and three milking cows,” John said.

  “How much soap?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Having nothing else to busy themselves with, the Barleyfielders had produced more soap on the way until most of one wagon was filled with baskets of the stuff. But even if they'd had the money to pay the dues on the soap, the seasoned cookpots, lye, tallow, and wood ash counted as production goods for soapmaking which ran afoul of the Alchemist Guild’s monopoly.

  “So what are we supposed to do?” John asked, ignoring the long line of annoyed merchants behind him.

  “The alchemical supplies must be surrendered and if you can’t pay the duties on the soap, those will have to be surrendered too,” the customs official replied.

  “Can’t we pay in kind?”

  The official pointed at a wooden sign which read ‘Currency Only, Trades in Kind Not Accepted.’

  Barleyfielders were as leery of money as they were of trade. They paid their taxes in barley flour and their local economy ran on barter, good faith, and IOUs. On the rare occasions a Barleyfielder found themselves in possession of a coin, it was rapidly exchanged for a good or service to prevent it from lingering and turning into a best of the foul things. This was, as it turned out, not a great policy outside the confines of a small hamlet.

  “Suppose we were to sell the soap outside the city walls?” Eric Blackhill-Serf asked.

  “That's illegal,” the customs official helpfully explained.

  “Whatever for!?” Rosemary said.

  “So people don’t circumvent customs,” the official replied in the irritated tone of someone who explained this multiple times a day.

  “But we saw folks selling stuff on the way in!” said Jenny Eriksson-Serf.

  “Unprocessed food meant for direct consumption and services consumed immediately can be sold outside city walls. Not manufactured goods.”

  “So bread’s fine?” Jenny asked.

  “Bread is processed.”

  “How about melons?”

  “Melons are fine.”

  “Well we haven’t got any melons to sell!” Jenny yelled.

  The customs official looked at her, mouth agape in confusion. “Okay?”

  “So we can’t sell nothin’ to get in!”

  “Then get out of the line!”

  With a bit of difficulty the hamlet turned itself around and meandered off the road. The atmosphere in their bivouac was sullen. The heat kept the children inside the wagons leaving the adults to stew in silence over the matter of getting into the city.

  This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “How far away ya think they enforce the ban?” said Jenny’s husband Billiam.

  “Pretty far, I’d wager,” Rosemary said. “Cleverer folks’ve tried everythin’ already and I sure didn’t see any roadside shops on the way, did y’all?”

  “Ugh! Folks need this damn soap, don’t they?” said Auntie Alice. “How come they’re keepin’ us from ‘em?”

  “Just how it is,” Charles replied.

  While they talked, John stared numbly at the passing wagons. If something happened to Jessica because they couldn’t pay some stupid taxes he would never forgive himself. He was thinking of going in empty-handed and hoping for the best, but his entire plan hinged on bringing all of Barleyfield up to petition the queen.

  Morkal croaked in his ear, startling him out of his stupor.

  Looking up with new eyes, John watched the wagons roll by. On most, road dirt had splattered up and onto the carriage, yet the wagons rolling southward to sell the city’s wares abroad were shiny and waxed. Someone inside the city was cleaning these wagons.

  “Excuse me, sir?” John said, calling out to the next wagon that came by. Its back was loaded with mailed helmets and gauntlets and mud.

  “What’d’ya want, boy?” the grizzled merchant said.

  “How much do you pay for your wagon to get cleaned inside Elsifeya?”

  The merchant rolled his jaw in his hand. “For the works? Costs me a silver and twenty coppers. Keep tellin’ ‘em I don’t need the wax and shine business but that’s how they getcha, ain’t it? They won’t sell ya just the scrub.”

  “How much would you pay for just the scrub?” John asked.

  He raised an eyebrow. “If it’s a good job? Thirty-five copper.”

  Starting to get a handle on this ‘trading’ business, John saw something in the man’s eyes that said he knew what John was angling at. Under normal circumstances, John would have happily accepted this, since the process of squeezing people for better offers felt amoral. But every little bit extra meant they rescued Jessica that much quicker.

  “How about sixty?” John asked.

  “Fifty and not a cent over,” the merchant replied.

  John took a cue from Kenneth the steward and shook the man’s hand and within the hour Barleyfield was running a wagon wash for fifty coppers a pop. Bribed with promises of fancy city treats, the children washed the crevices of wheels and axles while the adults wiped down the sides and beds.

  With so many hands on deck they could wash five wagons at a time and by sundown their proceeds exceeded what any Barleyfielder had the arithmetic ability to count. They were, however, aided in their reckoning by an oddly intelligent toad who tallied their earnings in their dirt. They had made around 9,150 copper pieces.

  “I didn’t know so much money existed in all the world,” Charles said, wiping soap suds from his brow.

  “Looks strange just sittin’ there. I don’t like it,” replied Rosemary, pointing at the heavy sack of copper coins.

  “Well the city folk sure do,” Uncle Junior replied.

  Between their new coins and the depletion of their soap supplies, Barleyfield was able to enter Elsifeya City before dusk with hardly a dent in its communal coffers.

  “Where should we bed down for the night?” asked Eric Whitehill-Serf. “There’s gotta be some place’ll give us room and board and stable our animals. We’ve got enough, haven’t we?”

  “After we talk to the queen,” John replied.

  Although this was the reason the Barleyfielders had all come, their internal clocks moved only as fast as the harvest demanded. Anything faster felt unnecessarily hasty.

  “I dunno, Johnny. We’ve had a long day. I think we oughta talk to Her Highness tomorrow,” Charles said.

  John shook his head. “Every minute could make the difference. We have to try tonight.”

  Although no one was happy, they understood John was calling in a favor for inventing the wagon wash idea. They humored him for the sake of being square, which was much more how they preferred to do business.

  With directions from locals who were positively tickled to tell them, the Barleyfielders made their way to the tunnel out to the promontory. The moment they exited onto it a squadron of guards rushed out and leveled their pikes.

  “Hold there! What business do you have here?” asked a neatly-armored man at their lead.

  “The hamlet of Barleyfield seeks audience with Her Royal Highness, the Queen of Elsifeya. Or the King too. Either'll do,” John said.

  The sergeant squinted. “What business, precisely, does a random settlement have with— is this the entire hamlet? All of you?”

  “What you see before you is what is left of Barleyfield. The rest was burnt to the ground by adventurers,” John replied.

  “Insurance claims are filed at the Reckoner’s Bureau and are paid out to the owner of the land. If this is for your feudal lord they will need to file the claim themselves. The Royal Court does not—”

  “We’re here,” John said, “cuz a member of our community was wrongfully arrested as a witch simply cuz she made medicine to help ease Her Royal Highness’s pains. As such, we've come with this medicine in hand and wish to give it to the queen as a token of good will. We're only askin’ Jessica Moon be pardoned and released a’ all crimes.”

  John wasn’t sure where his confidence was coming from, but his words carried a plain and simple charisma which arrested the guard sergeant and forced him to take this humble serf as seriously as an adventurer.

  The sergeant craned his neck to examine the full line of six wagons, three cows, and fifty or so Barleyfielders who weren’t asleep in the wagons. He looked between them and John several times and then back at his guards.

  “Well, let’s see the medicine then!”