Wendel Corvos is a land-factor of the Honey Lords, sent up the coast from Fozyader to settle what Roule calls the water question on the Ver Neles. He is not a soldier and makes a point of saying so. He comes to the autumn convocation at Kro Shiik with a clerk, a chest of trade-silver, two interpreters who half-understand Rakiten sign, and a schedule of payments already drawn up — an annual sum, renewable, in exchange for the colony's continued draw on the lower river. He calls it generous. Measured against how Roule has settled other peoples, it is.
The offer cannot be accepted and cannot be refused, and that is the work it was built to do. To accept is to name a price for the Ver Neles, and the Rakiten hold the river to be one living body from its western springs to the sea — a thing that has a price is a thing that can be sold, and a people that takes coin for a sacred river has sold something it swore could never be sold. To refuse is to stand in front of an open ledger and patient courtesy as the side that turned down a fair settlement. That refusal is the precedent Corvos actually came for. Roule does not want the convocation to agree; it wants the convocation on record declining payment, so the next dam, and the farms pushed up-valley toward Kro Shiik behind it, can be called the lawful use of water that nobody would buy.
What unsettles the colonists who travel with him is that Corvos does not seem to be lying. He has learned a dozen Rakiten signs and uses them badly, and he cannot tell whether the riders across the fire read the effort as respect or as insult. He believes the river is water and that water can be priced, and he believes it so completely that the Rakiten refusal reaches him as a superstition he is being unfailingly polite about. He has displaced people before and expects to again. He sleeps well. The riders watching from the dark grass have counted the tents in his camp and learned which one is his, and that he does not know either.