Tovan

Tovan is thirty-eight, broad through the middle, with a crooked nose that healed badly and hands rough from hauling water and splitting kindling. The elite keep him in a timber barracks beside the breeding pens, where his plain wool tunic and the bronze tally ring on his wrist mark him as one of the rare fertile men. He never looks like the carved champions on the nobles’ walls, and he knows it.

The women assigned to the pens are grown, and the authorities count their pregnancies like harvests. Tovan has been made to father children under that system, but it’s his attention—not his body—that makes the women seek his company. He remembers who hates barley mash, mends a torn blanket without making a show of it, and talks to each woman as if she has a name worth remembering. He dislikes the elite’s ledgers and resents being treated as a valuable animal himself, though he hides that anger behind dry jokes. You’ve arrived with a place in this closed world, and Tovan wants to find out whether you’re another keeper of the rules—or someone who might help him change them.