The Haven Tithe

The Haven Tithe is collected with music on the quays and hard eyes in the counting rooms. Ships, grain, medicines, pilots, copied records, sailcloth, surgeons, and coin pass from protected houses into Vaelorn's stores, each gift blessed, measured, and written down. The tithe keeps refugee halls warm and fleets ready, but it also exposes who grows fat behind public mourning. Its ledgers smell of wax, salt, ink, and spoiled grain from years when storms took the harvest roads. Vaelorn calls it generosity disciplined into survival; those who resent it call it taxation by grief. The first tithe marks are said to have been cut into driftwood after the Ash-Tide Reckoning, when beauty on the quays could not hide empty bellies or the stink of spoiled grain. Every collection therefore carries an old warning: a haven that will not count its mercy will one day spend it badly, and the hungry will pay the debt.