Wait, so food isn't a problem? So what the hell was with the first half? They made it seem like food was a major issue. Especially considering even moving the reserves to a new location during an invasion is considered a capital offense. So crime isn't the problem and food isn't the problem.
The things we do know are:
- There's a murderer in the capital who kidnaps, skins and eats people (allegedly)
- The capital has an extremely high tax rate
- People are fleeing the capital and heading to the North where the Esteban conflict was occurring.
- Anyone who commits a crime in the North gets sent back to the capital
- Also there are blatantly bigoted people in the military who hate vagrants and blame them for non-existent problems such as food and crime.
I'm not sure how all of this ties together. The simplest way to stop the vagrants is to find out why the taxes are so high in the capital.
Are they specifically driving people away so that they can kidnap certain people during the confusion of the migration and use the skin eater as a coverup story?
Or perhaps they want to drive all of the refugees to the Northern lords lands to deplete his food stores. Basically block the vagrants from going anywhere but the North lands until the North lands can no longer sustain the amount of people being housed in the area, then siege the city while it's in a state of chaos?
The problem with the first one is that you can't be certain that the person who want to abduct will leave due to high taxes making it very inefficient.
The problem with the second one is if you don't know how long it would take to starve off the North, you might deplete your tax base to the point where you can't muster an army to take control of the chaos.