Page 5 of Valdemar

Now that Restil and his father were into the “half-finished town” part of Haven, the sights, sounds, and smells were reflective of the trades and building going on. Lots of fresh-cut wood. The forge fires were much too hot to smoke, but they did give off their own distinct aroma. Hammering assaulted them on all sides. Adolescents from the farms drove pony carts laden with foodstuffs for sale up and down the streets, and building or work got interrupted when someone needed to buy from them. From everything Restil had heard, those carts seldom returned to the farms with anything but traded goods in them. Right now the big currency was nails and those oh-so-desirable pins and needles.

Restil was highly amused by his father’s discomfort with all the greetings as they trotted their horses down the beautifully finished streets between the decidedly unfinished house-shop-whatever plots. Instead of waving hands and calling something along the lines of “Mornin’, Baron,” which was mostly how people had greeted him on the barge convoy, it was a brief bow—sometimes abbreviated into a mere nod—and a “Well met, your Majesty.” And every time the word “Majesty” came out of a mouth, Kordas winced.

He’s going to have to get used to it. They want a King and they want the King to be him.

Oh, Restil knew very well why his father was not in the least interested in the title of “King,” but the reaction was, well, rather silly, considering that he wasn’t declaring himself a monarch, he was being elevated into the position by even the least of his people. In Restil’s opinion, his father should just relax and go along with it all. If anyone had any objection to him in the role, they hadn’t voiced it in Restil’s hearing, nor in the hearing of all the little birds he had out in the populace that reported back to him of problems, unease, or unrest.

Well . . . not entirely true, but the people who would have objected already packed up and left.About a thousand people, all told; unlike those who had stayed behind at Crescent Lake, who were entirely farmers, most of these folk were the families and retainers of a handful of nobles, who didn’t want a “new” life, they wanted the old life, but with them in charge. Kordas had let them go. In fact, he had allowed them to take almost everything they wanted to take with them. Which, in Restil’s estimation, was the smartest thing he could have done. Restil’s “little birds” had welcomed their departure. A few folks had even thrown an impromptu celebration.

Kordas had his own network of information, of course, but Restil and Beltran felt that a second, less formal network had a great many benefits and no real drawbacks, so Restil had made use of the highly varied friends he’d made to create what he called “gossip gatherers.” There were mostly servants in this network, people he’d worked with as a page and more or less an equal, not a highborn; people he first knew before anyone found out he was Kordas’s son. The ones he knew introduced him to others, and they, in turn, to more, so at this point, while he didn’t have an ear in every household, he at least had one in every nascent neighborhood.

That network was why he was less concerned about Hakkon’s misdeeds than the Baron was. Hakkon was basically a good egg that hadn’t yet learned the three most important things about “friends.” First, that not everyone who called themselves your friend actually was, second, that anyone could act nice but not all are sincere, so pleasantness was not enough basis for friendship, and thirdly, that until you sorted out who liked you for who you were, not for what you were or what you could do for them, it was a lot smarter to take your cues from the adults you respected than from any other source. Restil had learned those lessons because he’d spent a good part of his childhood with everyone assuming he was Uncle Hakkon’s bastard child. And while Hakkon had been living under the same presumption, he hadn’t been old enough for it to really affect him and how he viewed others.

Right now Restil was pretty satisfied with his circle of friends. The pages he used to serve alongside? Rock solid. Didn’t matter if now they were squires (otherwise known as knights-in-training), the falconer’s apprentice, or highborn heirs. A very few of the other highborn offspring his age, though? The ones who had never had to work at all, and even still had parents sheltering them from dirtying their hands? Wouldn’t trust their opinion on the color of the sky, much less anything important. Maybe when they matured a bit—if they ever did.

Stanzia gave him a quick backward look, prelude to shenanigans. Rather than wait for the stallion to act out, Restil gave him a stern glare and said aloud, “Don’t even think about it, Stanzia.” Correction before the behavior was always more effective than after, and Golds were smart enough to understand when he used certain phrases and intonations.

And as he expected, Stanzia snorted, as if in surprise that Restil had figured out what he was about to try, then went back to sulking.

Not unlike Hakkon, really.This morning his little brother had been just as sulky, playing with his porridge until their mother reminded him it was going to be unpleasant to eat cold, and slouching out to his lessons with Beltran like a condemned man on the way to the gallows.

Just wait until he starts work in the stables.

Restil himself had done his stints in the stables, and would again, but not as punishment. It was because there had been several times when they were short of hands, and while he admittedly wasn’t up to the kind of all-day manual labor that a seasoned stablehand was, at least he could muck out and groom his own little herd of horses—and, besides that, he could clean tack while sitting down to rest from the mucking-out. He rather liked working in the stable. Horses and horsemen were fine company. Horse shit wasn’t all that bad, not like pig. Or human, that was the worst. I think I like horses better than people, to be honest.

They left the spiderweb of streets, then passed through a passage in what was going to be an actual city wall when the Mother Below got done growing it—“Mother Below” was what the Hawkbrothers called the thing that grew walls and sewers. He’d taken to the name; Kordas had not. Right now the wall was just about chin high on him when he was standing, so the passage was just a gap where the road went through. This wall was growing a lot slower than the wall around the Palace had; there was a lot more of this wall, for one thing, and for another, the magic that had been so abundant when the Heartstone was active was slowly dropping back to the level they’d had back in the Duchy. Eventually, so the Hawkbrothers said, the magic would drop down to a point where the Mother would go dormant, and they’d be on their own so far as public works went, so it was best to ask the Mother to make things that benefited everyone, like walls and sewers. Not houses. Certainly not the highborn manors the nobles all wanted to get back into.

There had been some grumbling about that among the highborn, and some pointed remarks about the Palace, but Father had provided quite a number of salient points in a full Court Assembly speech. First, that the Palace (he called it the Baronial manor, of course), was the size it was in order to shelter the largest number of people, and that quite a few of the highborns complaining were, in fact, currently taking advantage of that. He also made the argument that the manors they wanted built weren’t going to do anyone a lot of good if the cellars filled with shit every time it rained because they’d wasted the Mother on building homes instead of a sewage removal system. Then he followed it up by reminding them all that having proper city walls meant that minor threats that a simple wall could deter would mean that the still-frequent alarms didn’t send half the population or more to be crammed inside the Palace—err, manor—walls until the threat had been dealt with. Logic and clear heads prevailed. Especially when people with rank and wealth figured out that getting common laborers—or mages, as there were a couple of manors being put up in the Imperial fashion—to work for them meant that those people had to actually like them. Because those with labor to sell were far fewer than those who were putting in labor on their own homes and farms, and they could pick and choose whom to work for.

This was a new experience for many of the highborn and wealthy. They were quite used to ordering what they wanted, and dealing with any complaints or problems with silver.

It wasn’t nearly the disaster some people made it out to be. It really wasn’t even an inconvenience. The highborn might be cramped in the Palace, but they had the best place to live in the entire Barony. And they weren’t starving either, anything but. The highborn had brought their personal flocks and herds and stores of seed and supplies, and they had their own personal farms out here past the city wall, staffed by the same servants who had tended their manor farms back home, so they weren’t without resources. In fact, they were in a better position to offer something valuable like food or materials in return for the labor on their new manors than, say, a candlemaker or shopkeeper, so their manors were going up in a conventional fashion . . . but of course it was never going to be fast enough to suit them.

Nothing was happening fast enough to suit people, truth to tell. He had the feeling that people had had this vague idea that “once we’re settled, we’ll get buildings and all up in no time, and everything will be back to the lives we knew in a year.”

No.

There was an astonishing number of things that the Valdemarans had been forced to do without once the initial supply ran out. Well, for one thing, they’d had to learn how to do joinery with pegs and dovetails and whatnot, not just on furniture, but on the houses, because there just were not enough nails! That ate into your time something fierce. For another, there were all the shortages. I’m pretty sure not even Father thought about all the potential shortages. There were some things they’d begun running out of in the first six months, and that was with Hawkbrother help!

Like Father keeps saying: trade. We need to establish trade. They had the Hawkbrothers, who were generous enough, but they were also very self-sufficient, and philosophically they made, grew, or otherwise created just enough and no more. There were many things they just had never seen the need for—like nails!—and they could not supply those gaps in what the Valdemarans needed and didn’t have.

Huh. . . . There was an idea tickling the back of his mind, but it wasn’t fully formed enough to come popping up yet.

Still, they’d also learned things from the Hawkbrothers—alternatives they could use to substitute for the things they were running out of, for a start. Thorns instead of pins. Pegs instead of nails. There was plenty of wool and linen for fabric, and even something the Hawkbrothers called “raimie” and a kind of hemp that made good, strong, soft canvas that was better than they’d ever had before.

“Make do” should be our motto, not “There is no one, true way.”

The deliberate maze of the half-built city’s streets gave him an oddly unsettled feeling of this isn’t quite right.But once they were outside the Haven wall, the landscape began to look more like the countryside he remembered as a child, with farms dotting the landscape. Out here were the farms—the real farms, not the limited one inside the Palace wall. Because a lot of these farmers had their own work crews, most of them were full-scale homesteads now, with actual houses, not rows of barges. Rows of barges serving as laborers’ cottages weren’t quite so obvious out here. And because the farmers were far more used to self-sufficiency than the city dwellers and tradesfolk, their homesteads looked “normal” to his eyes. The barges had become cottages, storage sheds, pig sheds, chicken, duck, and goose coops. A lot of those had been walled in with wattle-and-daub walls, then covered with roofs of thatching, both for insulation and so that the barge decks and roofs could be used for dry storage, making them look more “normal.” There were actual barns and stables, and fields had been measured out, assigned to farmers on the basis of what their old farms had looked like. And then had come the “best part,” as far as the farmers were concerned: the means to delineate all those fields and farms so there were no arguments about borders and boundaries. And how the Hawkbrothers had chosen to help with that had endeared the Tayledras to the Valdemaran farmers for all time.

Every single farmer’s field, whether it was growing something or grazing something, had been delineated by a stout briar hedge, reinforced at intervals by handsome “young” trees. All of these had been grown by one of the Tayledras “green mages” who grew the enormous trees of their Vales. And while it had not been overnight, it had all been done within the first year, and for a very, very good reason.

The farmers needed to be outside the walls of the city of Haven creating food, immediately, and they could not do that if their herds and flocks were preyed on by wild animals, or their crops eaten by deer and wild boar.

And the Hawkbrothers had an answer for that: the hedges. It was a system they used themselves, in fact, though not to the extent that the Valdemarans had needed.

Restil had been fascinated when he’d gotten a chance to watch the growing hedges in action—you could, literally, watch the hedges grow. They weren’t spindly and weak, either, but good, stout branches with wicked thorns to discourage creatures from trying to get through. Meanwhile the Hawkbrother would just be sitting there with their eyes closed, perhaps humming under their breath. Only when Restil started to grow into his own magic was he able to see the complicated Working that they were doing.

And, sadly, for the life of him, he could not do it himself.