Loreen's POV
Carthen met his gaze briefly and then looked back at his papers. "The process of individual disbursement across these households requires great administrative coordination, your highness. Officers would need to be deployed. Verification would need to be carried out at each household. The timeline alone would stretch across several months and the cost of…."
"The cost," Loreen said quietly, "of returning money that was wrongly taken."
Carthen stopped.
The room was very still for a moment.
"That is what we are discussing," Loreen continued. "Not a grant. Not a gift from the crown. Money that was collected in excess of what was owed and that belongs to the people it was taken from."
He looked at the lord steadily. "I want to be sure we are all using the correct language when we speak about this."
Carthen's expression did not change. But something behind his eyes shifted in the way it does when a man realises he has been understood more completely than he intended.
