One Honest Sicilian

Palermo, 1586: the loaf shrinks a thumb's width, a famine crowd tears the grain deputy to pieces, and the port storehouses are found stacked to the rafters. Vincenzo Amato, the Crown's fiscal advocate and a net-mender's son, is ordered to hang the guilty before Madrid's auditor lands in spring. But the first name denounced is his own nephew's, the paper trail climbs toward the palace, and somewhere in the ledgers waits a mill that Vincenzo himself has been quietly paid by.