Chapter 75: Ready to Grow
The next day they rode out early, the three of them, same as the day before.
Seren worked through the second section of the farmland while Darion and Garren stood at the edge and watched.
They had watched yesterday when she had done it, so they ought to be watching with less interest today.
Well, it was the opposite, instead of watching with less interest, they were watching with more focus than they had yesterday.
If the act had been simple as just pouring dusts at different sections of the field and just stopping there, they wouldn’t have decided it was something they had to immense their eyes in again.
The sight of different colors of dusts rolling and swirling around was just breathtaking. And the act before that? The dusts coming together and shooting up?
It was a magnificent sight to be hold. The most pleasant thing to see Darion enjoyed since arriving in this world.
The whirlwind came, smaller than the first day’s, the soil responding to a section that was damaged differently from the first. It settled. The ground darkened.
Another portion done. One more session and the primary planting area would be ready.
They rode back.
Darion was quiet on the return, turning something over that he had been putting off thinking about because the soil problem had felt like the immediate problem. The soil problem was largely handled. Which meant the next problem was now the immediate problem.
Restored farmland needed planting. Planting needed farmers. He had been thinking about hiring outside labor, someone with farming knowledge brought in specifically for the work, but hiring people cost money, and the castle’s coin situation remained what it had been since before he arrived, which was close to nothing.
The meat sales were good but now they had stopped selling the meats in the large quantity they had initially started. That was because they had reduced hunting occasionally.
And the prices the meat had been sold for were cheap and he was certain they wouldn’t be enough to pay for workers.
He went to the barracks after they returned.
The knights were in various states of the morning, some had already been through training, some were eating, a handful were doing maintenance on weapons that Gregor hadn’t gotten to yet.
They gathered when Darion came in, the way they gathered now, without the reluctant dragging-of-feet that had characterized the first days.
"Who here knows how to plant?" Darion asked.
He gestured slightly: "Seeds...rows, the actual work of farming. Not in theory but in practice."
He waited.
Then forty-one hands went up.
He looked at them. More than a third of his entire knight order. He hadn’t expected that number and he took a moment to absorb it without letting the surprise show too much on his face.
It made sense when he thought about it. Percvale had been a farming barony. The people who had stayed through the decline were the ones who had nowhere else to go or who had chosen to stay, and most of them had grown up here when the farmland was perhaps still working.
The younger ones hadn’t though but then...
These were men who had been born into a place that grew food for a living. Of course they knew how to plant.
"Good," Darion said. "I’ll be back to you on when."
He left.
Inside, he met Garren and they discussed about the seeds. Darion was ready to ask for seeds from the people of Percvale.
Then almost forgetting to mention it, he remembered as he was standing to leave.
"The armor sets, has Gregor received them?"
"Delivered this morning," Garren said. "I sent knights with the twenty-six worst ones first, same as he asked. He’s already started on them."
Darion nodded. "Good."
———
Darion sent six knights out that morning with baskets, tightly woven ones that Maret had found in a storage room off the kitchen, the kind used for carrying produce, which felt appropriate.
The message they carried was simple. The Baron was asking for seed donations for the farmland restoration. Whatever people could spare, any variety and any amount.
They weren’t being forced. No obligation and no consequence for declining. Just an ask.
He didn’t go further beyond that. The townspeople of Percvale had been watching the last few weeks happen right in front of their faces.
They had seen the hunting parties go out and come back with meat. They had watched him and the knights return from Gonnb with livestock and food stores.
They had cheered on the road. They knew something was changing, and they had formed their own opinions about it before he had said a word to any of them directly.
The ask would land differently because of that context. He didn’t need to make a speech about it.
He waited.
Garren came back to the castle around midday and told him the knights were still out making their rounds.
Darion ate something and tried to check on the farmland situation through the window out of habit, he couldn’t see the eastern fields from the castle but he looked anyway.
The Valdenmoor deadline was inside two weeks now. He had the infiltration, the slow spread of what the venomous undead had delivered through the barracks, but he had no information yet on what effect it had produced.
Word traveled slowly between territories when it wasn’t carried by an official messenger, and he had no official messenger to send without creating the kind of paper trail he didn’t want.
He would hear something soon though. He had to, so he would know his next move.
The farmland was the thing he could actually move forward on today, so he focused on that.
The knights came back in the late afternoon.
Six of them, coming through the castle gate one after another, and the baskets were full. Not ’little’ full, but densely full, the kind of full that
clearly showed people had given more than the minimum.
Some of the baskets had cloth tied over the top to keep smaller seeds from spilling. One knight was carrying two baskets instead of one because a woman on the eastern street had apparently insisted he take everything she had and hadn’t accepted a partial collection.
Darion stood in the courtyard and looked at what had come back.
Different seeds in different containers within each basket, some wrapped in cloth parcels, some in small clay pots, some loose in paper that had been folded carefully at the corners.
He saw wheat, clearly, the golden grain recognizable. Root vegetables of several kinds. Legumes. Herbs that he couldn’t identify by sight. Corn and a handful of something dark and small that one of the knights said a farmer on the northern road had called winter grain, good for the cold season.
More variety than he had expected. More quantity than he had expected. Roughly two thousand people had responded to a simple ask by producing something substantial.
"Did anyone refuse?" Darion asked.
"A few," the knight said. "Older woman on the western side said she had nothing to spare and was sorry about it. Man near the market said he’d give more come spring when his back plot produced again."
Not exactly refusals, but apologies and deferrals. The distinction mattered.
He looked at the baskets lined up in the courtyard and felt... pleased.
"Store them carefully," he said. "Dry, away from moisture. I want them sorted by type before tomorrow morning."
He walked out to check on the animals before the light went.
The goats and cattle were on the farmland’s outer section, the area not yet restored, penned loosely by the seven assigned knights and what temporary fencing had been rigged from available materials.
It wasn’t elegant. The fence was a collection of stakes and rope and a section of old wooden rail that Wulfric had found somewhere and contributed without being asked. The animals had tested it in the first day and apparently decided it was sufficient, which was the main thing.
Feeding them was the labor-intensive part.
The farmland section they were on had no grass, the soil there was as stripped as the rest of it, nothing growing on it worth eating.
So the knights assigned to animal watch were spending part of each day cutting grass from the bush land further east and hauling it back, which was exactly as tedious as it sounded but was being done without complaint.
Water was hauled from the well twice a day.
The goats were doing what goats did, which was eat, move around, and fight themselves sometimes.
The cattle were doing what cattle did, which was eat, stand in the same spot, and radiate calm. Both species were healthy. None of them had died. The breeding pairs were intact.
In a few months, twenty-one goats would be more than twenty-one goats, same with the cattles.
Darion stood at the fence and looked at them for a moment, then turned and walked back toward the castle.
He stood in the courtyard that evening and looked at what he had assembled.
The third section of farmland would be done tomorrow, Seren had one more session to cover the primary planting area. Forty-one knights who could plant, ready to be deployed. Baskets of donated seeds sorted and stored. Livestock alive and multiplying on a slow schedule that didn’t require anything from him except maintenance.
The soil was ready. The farmers were ready. The seeds were there.
Tomorrow they planted.