Winter arrived in Cloudford Town not with a gentle frost, but with a blizzard of wet, grey sleet that turned the streets into channels of freezing mud.
On the morning of the winter solstice, the grand town square was packed with iron and weeping flesh.
Fifty heavy freight carts, built of six-inch oak baulks bound with cold-rolled hard dark metal plates, stood in five neat columns. Each cart carried ten tons of high-grade magnetic iron and cold-iron ore, quarried from the mountain shafts by three shifts of conscripted laborers working through the winter nights. The heavy iron wheels had sunk four inches into the frozen mud, their hubs locked with iron chains.
Behind the ore wagons stood the true tribute.
One hundred iron-barred cages, mounted on two-wheeled cart chassis, were arranged in a wide semicircle before the town judge’s hall.
Inside the cages were five hundred children.
They were boys and girls between the ages of four and ten, gathered from every commandery, county, and hamlet across the six provinces of Great Yan. Some were the children of northern frontier sergeants. Some were the toddlers of southern river fishermen. Some were the daughters of merchant clans whose wealth had failed to buy exemption from the royal heralds. They wore coarse burlap tunics tied with straw ropes. They shivered in the freezing sleet. Their small hands grabbed the cold iron bars as their mothers cried behind the outer edge ropes held by three hundred armored county spearmen.
