Rejected by His Heir, Chosen by His Crown

The requests didn't stop after the ninth and the eleventh. Of course they didn't. A thing that works gets used.

By midsummer there had been four more — a fishing-rights snarl on the north channel, a feud over a collapsed stair nobody wanted to pay to rebuild, two families and a disputed debt, a quarrel between fungus-growers that had turned genuinely ugly — and every one of them had come, sooner or later, sidling and hopeful, to the same small door: would the little Moon settle it. She settled the water. She has the knack. She has no side. And every one of them I had turned away, quietly, with a mother's excuses — she's a child, she's busy, she's tired, let her be — and for a while that worked, because I was the Blood Moon and no one wanted to push past me.

And then they started to notice that I was the one saying no.