The town proclamation was nailed to the oak bulletin boards outside every public bakery in Haven-Hold at sunrise.
Beneath the official seal of the Lord Master builder—a transit compass crossed with a mason’s trowel—the text was short, clear, and devoid of legal ornament:
Town COMMODITY MANDATE: Section Eighty-One. Effective right away across all sovereign territories of Haven-Hold: One twenty-five-pound sack of approved stone-ground whole wheat flour shall be sold for one copper silver coin. One two-pound loaf of fresh sourdough bread shall be sold for one copper penny. Price manipulation, private hoarding, or grain dilution is classified as gross town sabotage.
The proclamation was read aloud in the central market square of the refugee quarters. Then, total silence gripped the crowd of twenty thousand souls.
Men who had spent decades under feudal lords paying half their harvest in tithes, who had seen their children starve whenever greedy barons hoarded grain to drive up prices, stared at the wooden boards in stunned total numbness.
Then an old woman with white hair and bent shoulders stepped up to the counter of Municipal Bakery Number Three.
With trembling, arthritic fingers, she laid a single tarnished copper silver coin onto the scrubbed pine counter.
