Wanagiri's manor house sat at the edge of a valley thick with terraced rice fields gone brown at the margins, two seasons of poor yield written plainly into soil that should have been greener by now, and Ki Branggah met them at his own gate with an honor guard of eight men who carried their spears like men who'd rehearsed the posture rather than earned it.
"The capital sends a scribe and a foreign strongman to lecture me about my own district," Ki Branggah said, before Wibawa had finished dismounting, his voice pitched loud enough to carry to the small crowd of tenants gathering at a careful distance. He was a broad man running to softness at the middle, robes finer than anything Rama had seen since the palace, rings on three fingers that caught the afternoon light with deliberate flash. "I've collected tribute in this valley for eleven years, foreigner. I don't need a stranger's blade to explain arithmetic to me."
