Chapter 76: New Ground
Seren came downstairs at the usual time, pack over one shoulder, bundle of tools under her arm. The two knights assigned to escort her were waiting in the courtyard. She walked past Darion without stopping, said "morning" without looking at him, and went through the gate.
Darion watched her go.
He stayed where he was for a moment after she disappeared through the gate, looking at the empty courtyard. He stared at nothing exactly for sometime then turned and went to find Garren.
"Take the forty-one to the farmland," he told the man when he found him. "The first two sections Seren completed. Start planting today."
Garren nodded.
They had managed to get some tools. It was nothing too normal in terms of farming but then that was what they had and they would be going with it.
"About the tools, just use what there is and improvise the rest."
Garren didn’t ask what improvise meant in farming terms. He had grown up in Percvale same as most of the people here and had a practical sense of what could be substituted for what when the proper tool wasn’t available.
He went to the barracks.
Darion followed at a distance an hour later, walking out to the farmland to see how it was going.
What he found was forty-one knights farming.
It was not an elegant sight. Several of them were using tools that had been designed for other purposes, a broad flat blade meant for clearing brush was being used as a rough hoe by a knight at the near end of the first section, working it through the soil with determined concentration.
Two knights were sharing a single proper hoe, trading off in short intervals. Several were planting by hand, pressing seeds into the dark restored soil with their fingers, spacing them by eye and by memory of whatever farming they had done growing up.
Garren moved through them, not directing every action, they didn’t need that, but checking spacing, checking depth and making suggestions to the ones who looked uncertain.
The soil was dark and worked easily. That was visible even from the edge of the field, the difference between the restored sections and the untouched pale ground further out was stark enough that you could see the boundary clearly from thirty feet away.
The dark soil took the seeds cleanly. Where a man pressed his fingers in and withdrew them, the holes held their shape rather than collapsing.
Seren had said the crops would grow faster than normal. Fuller and more nutritional. He couldn’t see that yet, nothing was above ground, nothing would be for some time, but standing at the edge of the field watching forty-one men press seeds into good dark soil where there had been pale dead ground a week ago, he believed it.
He watched for a while without interrupting anything.
There was something about the scene that he hadn’t expected to feel anything about and was feeling something about anyway. These were knights. Men who had trained for combat, who had been eating horse meat to survive weeks ago, who had refused to go into the forest because the forest had been killing them for years. Now they were farming.
On land that a young woman had restored one section at a time by humming at colored dust. In a barony that everyone in the region had written off as finished.
It was absurd in a way that was also just true.
He stayed until he was satisfied that the planting was going properly, then walked back toward the castle.
Seren returned in the early afternoon with the two knights behind her.
Third section done, she told him when she came through the gate. The primary planting area was fully restored. She said it without particular excitement, the way she said most things: as information being delivered rather than an achievement being announced. Then she went upstairs.
Darion went inside.
In the kitchen Maret was starting the evening meal, the smell of it already coming through the corridor.
———
Morning...
Darion was halfway through his breakfast when he heard her on the stairs.
He had been eating alone, which was the usual situation at this hour, Garren had already been out to the barracks and back and was somewhere in the castle doing something administrative, Wulfric was at the stable, Maret and Aldra were in the kitchen. The great hall was quiet and the food was better than it had been three weeks ago, which he still noticed every time and suspected he always would.
Seren came off the last stair and looked at him.
She had her pack, but not the tool bundle, she wasn’t heading to the farmland. She was dressed for walking rather than working, which in practice meant the same tattered gown but without the leather pack’s strap across her chest.
"I want to go for a walk," she said.
"All right," Darion said.
"Just around the castle." She looked at him. "Where are the knights who’ll be escorting me?"
There was something in how she said it. Not angry, too calm for anger, and he suspected Seren kept her anger in places where it didn’t show easily. Just a very precise delivery of a question that was also a statement about the question itself.
He set down his spoon.
"I’ll come with you," he said.
She looked at him for a moment, apparently deciding something, then said nothing and waited while he stood up.
The two guard knights at the gate acknowledged him when they came through.
"Morning m’lord," They greeted in unison.
"Morning," Darion replied them.
Then they took up their posts to either side of the gate and Darion and Seren walked out into the courtyard and turned to follow the outer wall.
It was a small circuit. The castle wasn’t large, and the ground around it — courtyard at the front, a narrow service path along the sides, the enclosed rear yard where Wulfric worked — didn’t offer much. Maybe five minutes at a comfortable pace to go all the way around.
They walked.
Darion looked at the wall, at the ground and at the grey morning sky. Seren walked beside him with her hands at her sides and her attention on nothing in particular.
He decided to ask.
"Where are you from originally? Before Gonnb."
She glanced at him. "Why would I tell you that?"
Darion shrugged. "Because I’m asking?"
"I know you’re asking." She looked ahead again. "What do I actually know about you? You’re the Baron who took me from a burning village and told me I was free while sending escorts with me everywhere I went." She paused, perhaps to catch her breath then continued . "You haven’t told me anything about yourself."
He thought about that for a step or two, then decided. To make her feel comfortable about sharing her life details to him, he realized he had to tell her his.
"All right," he said.
She looked at him.
"My father is the Emperor," he began.
Seren was surprised with that.
Son of the Emperor?
She was definitely wondering why he was ruling over a Barony like this if he was truly the son of the Emperor.
"Emperor Valdris. I’m his bastard, his illegitimate son, born from a woman he apparently visited once at a brothel and never acknowledged beyond the fact that I existed." He kept his voice even. "I grew up in the imperial palace. Not as a prince, nothing like that. As the thing that was awkward to ignore but inconvenient to address. My half-siblings barely tolerated me at best. Most of them didn’t bother with tolerance."
Seren said nothing. They turned the corner of the wall and started along the side path.
"When noble children come of age here they go through an awakening ceremony," Darion continued. "Touch an orb, the orb tells you your class. The idea is that your class defines your path, what role you’ll have and what value you bring to the empire." He paused. "Mine went dark. The orb lit up for a moment and then went back to nothing. Everyone saw it. My half-siblings included. The Empress specifically."
"What happened?" She asked.
"What usually happens when an emperor’s bastard fails his awakening in front of the court. They decided I was classless and gave me a barony." He glanced at her. "This one. Percvale. A place that everyone in that hall reacted to like they’d announced a death sentence, because that’s functionally what it was. A dying barony, no food, no coin, a debt that nobody had any intention of paying, and knights who were starving."
He thought about the prison cart, the two knights talking about whores and the cost of marriage, watching the imperial roads get worse as they traveled further from the capital.
"They sent me here in a prison cart. Not even a carriage."
They were at the back of the castle now, the enclosed yard, Wulfric’s domain: where he normally worked, trimming the grass and all. The grass he kept trimmed was the only maintained ground in the whole property.
"Everyone said I wouldn’t last a week," Darion said. "The Empress said it to my face before I left."
Seren was looking at the ground as she walked. "How long has it been?"
"Just under a month. Almost a month actually."
She was quiet for a moment, processing the arithmetic of that against what she had seen since arriving — the livestock, the farmland, the skull on the dining hall wall, the forty-one knights she had seen walking out to plant seeds two mornings ago.
They turned the last corner and the gate came back into view, the two guard knights at their posts.
Darion had said enough. More than he had said to anyone here, maybe Garren, who knew most of it from observation rather than telling.
He waited.
They were nearly back to the gate before she spoke.
"My mother is a sorceress," she said.
He looked at her.
She was looking ahead, at the gate, at the two knights standing there doing their job.
"Not a good one," she said.