Page 6 of Valdemar

He’d have loved to have been a Green Mage. The discipline was something that appealed to him on a fundamental level, whereas the combat magic he was actually good at did not. But at least he had earth-sense, like his father, and if he could not affect the land, he could at least tell where it was in distress and why.

The people other than farmers might not realize it, but if it had not been for the Hawkbrothers, there would have been hunger and even starvation. We’d probably be down to half the people we arrived here with, if we’d had to settle by ourselves. Between starvation, wilderness dangers, disease, and insects—so many insects!

Well, we probably couldn’t have survived the attack of the Red Forest when it followed us. We wouldn’t have been here when the damned thing caught up with us, and without the Tayledras mages and the Mother Below’s wall, we’d have become Forest food in short order.

So ten years after the Hawkbrothers had first brought the Valdemarans here, life outside the walls was much more like what the farmers of Valdemar had been used to—barring the fact that back home they hadn’t often had to contend with bears, wolf packs, and the other hazards of wilderness or the magically altered versions of the same creatures. An insect plague had been solved, and quickly, by sending all the avians that weren’t raptors out of the protection of the Veil to gorge on bugs. The raptors had come out too, but not to eat bugs—though Restil had more than once laughed himself silly over an earnest eagle waddling through a field ambushing the hellish, hand-sized, flying crickets that had turned up. The bondbirds had been there to guard the little birds from the wild birds of prey—which had taken the hint and abandoned the neighborhood until the insect plague was over.

Nominally, everyone except the thousand or so people who’d just packed up and gone downriver was directly under Kordas’s rule. But pretty much “in charge” of everyone outside the walls was the Young Squire. The farmers revered Kordas for getting them all out from under the Empire’s rapacious rule, and they obeyed his laws with far less questioning than the highborn, but it was to the Young Squire that they looked for their day-to-day leadership.

The Young Squire was son Old Squire Lesley, who had been the tacit leader of the farmers back home. But the Old Squire had settled in an extant village back at Crescent Lake with his prize, precious sow the Empress and a modestly sized herd of his very fine swine to keep him in comfort. Without the old man’s leadership to fall back on, people had naturally gravitated to the eldest son (who was Kordas’s age, so “young” was relative).

The Young Squire was well placed to be the agrarian leader. The highborn here were “absent landlords,” leaving the handling of their farms to the Stewards who had come with them. None of the Stewards had any interest whatsoever in anything other than making sure their masters’ farms prospered, so these large “manor farms,” which might otherwise have swung a disproportionate amount of influence outside the city walls, in fact left “local governance” to others. Meanwhile, Young Squire Lesley had himself a “manor-sized” farm. He had gotten the greater number of his family’s farmhands and servants when the split of the family had taken place, because his father had decided on semi-retirement, and didn’t need that much help. Besides, thanks to his pigs, the Old Squire had more than enough people who wanted to hire on with him back at that village he settled into. Bacon was well known for its persuasive properties. Plenty of people wanted to hire on for the sake of the shoat every hired hand got as a Harvest bonus for working for the Squire. Aside from his personal servants, housekeeper, house servants, and cook, all he’d needed was a few folk to take care of the much smaller herd of swine that was all he’d kept with him.

So the Young Squire was the happy owner of the largest herd of swine in the Barony, as well as the Empress’s finest daughter, whom he was calling the Queen. He had the most laborers, farmhands, and house servants in all of the settled farms. Which made him the biggest landowner.

Although, initially, he hadn’t assumed the same position his father had held back in the Barony.

That didn’t last long. After the first defection, the farmers had voted to establish a formal grange as opposed to the informal one they’d had back home, and needed a leader for it. By virtue of both the size of his holdings, and his education at his father’s side, the Young Squire was the obvious choice. He merely waited gracefully for his friends and neighbors to press him to take it. And when they did, the Young Squire had seamlessly stepped into the position of leadership his father had held. A good choice; the other farmers trusted him more than someone highborn, and he’d absorbed or inherited a lot of his father’s wisdom and solid good sense. And Restil knew that Kordas depended on Young Squire Lesley’s acumen and canny knack for sorting through gossip and hearsay to get to things that actually mattered.

“I know horses. Young Lesley knows everything,” Kordas had once said.

Restil didn’t know about that, but Lesley knew everything that was worth knowing about the state of the Valdemaran farms and their occupants, and Kordas often said that none of this would be going as smoothly without him.

The hedges stood proud sentry on either side of the road, coming to chin high on a man on horseback; Restil and Kordas were just barely tall enough that they could see over the tops of the hedges into fields beyond. And in a welcome change from back home, every farmer had enclosed enough land to put his fields in full rotation: fallow in the ones most recently used for grains, grazing in the next oldest, legumes in the ones that would take grains the next year, and cereals in the current “bread crop” part of the rotation. It made for a pretty picture, but far more important was that this made for a sustainable use of the land. It was the same system the Tayledras used, so of course they approved as well.

The pleasantly bitter scent of hops drifted over the hedge to the right, and Restil smiled a little to himself. Now there was one commodity that everyone appreciated—beer! Taverns in town might be nothing more than stump pieces set up around a trestle table inside a peeled-log building with a pounded-dirt or crude puncheon floor, but there was a lot less grumbling about conditions than there might have been because of the steady supply of beer coming from the farms. A fellow was inclined to overlook a bit of hardship when he could count on a filling meal followed by a good pint at the end of his day.

All the houses out here had the same sort of architecture, and that, too, was due to the Young Squire’s influence. He’d shown everyone how quickly a home made from squared-off logs could be put up, how spacious it was, how sturdy it was even without a frame, and how well it kept out the weather. But then he’d gone a step further, and organized all the farmers into what he called “friendship groups,” which were committed to helping each other, particularly with building. So instead of one family and their hands working on a house, a barn, or a stable and taking a long time about it, the entire group would drop all but essential chores to descend on the property and have what they called a “rising” to get the thing built in a day. It made for something like a holiday, because there would be a communal dinner and perhaps a bit of entertainment when the structure was finished. If Kordas got wind of the rising, he’d have a meat animal sent from his farm over to it, so there would be a roast. It hadn’t taken more than a year and a half to get most of the necessary buildings up out here on the farms, because of those friendship groups. And even the least social of people had swiftly seen the virtue in at least putting a good face on, because of the advantages the groups brought to everyone.

I would have thought that the folks up in the town would have noticed how well that system works, and adopted it. But maybe they’re more suspicious of their neighbors than the farmers are.

He set aside his ruminations as they neared their first goal. A break in the hedges opened to the lane to Inglenook Hall, Squire Lesley’s home. This was a simple dirt lane, not a Pebble-laid road, and although it, too, was lined with hedges, the Squire had also planted a great many more trees among the hedges than there were along the roadways, and now that the trees were almost ten years old, they formed a lovely green tunnel leading to Inglenook Hall. The Squire could have taken advantage of Pebble’s services for this private lane, but he hadn’t, which had only earned him more trust, Restil figured. The Hall lay right at the end of the lane, and was the only building around that was two stories tall.

Not that it was a “proper manor,” by any means. It was still more than a bit crude, and showed a much less welcoming face than the Squire’s old home had. Windows were small and unglazed, because there were, at the moment, very few sources of pure enough sand to make much glass. So, instead, the tiny windows were protected by cloth screens in summer and stout shutters in winter. Restil had been inside many times, and knew that this made for very dark rooms. Water came from a well, waste went into a conventional cesspit. Every inch of space was utilized, because Lesley preferred that his farmhands all be under the same protected, communal roof unless they really insisted on having their own space. In that case, they could live in the crude extension that held their barges, because cottages were not a priority at the moment. There were no corridors in the Hall; the building style was a very old-fashioned, even ancient style in which the rooms led into each other, with bedrooms farthest from the front and rear doors, and common rooms closest to them. Lesley had had the place painted with sap boiled until it became tar, so it was dark brown, with a thatched roof. It looked nothing like the laid-stone beauty back in Valdemar, with big windows and a lane of little cottages to the side, but as far as Restil could tell, the people living there were satisfied with their lives.

Normally they’d have ridden up to the house, found the housekeeper, asked her where her master was, and gone out to find him. But almost as soon as they turned into the lane, one of the Squire’s youngest children, who must have been on the watch for them, came pounding up to them on an absurdly short-legged pony. “Papa needs you!” the child cried as soon as he was in earshot. “Follow me!”

With a jolt to the gut, Restil glanced at his father, who cast his eyes up to heaven. They both knew what this meant. It happened about twice a month at some point in the Barony, though not often at the Squire’s farm. “Boar or bear?” Restil asked, as he reined in Stanzia, who wanted to go into a full gallop and probably would have bowled that poor little pony over in the process.

“Could be a catamount, or a pard,” Kordas replied. “That would be a nice change. But it’s generally a boar.”

Wolf packs could be discouraged merely by fences, and thank the gods there hadn’t yet been any of those flying or running horrors they’d encountered on the river. But roughly half the wild things around here were natural—which farmers could take on—and half were magic-touched, which they generally could not.

“Whatever it is, it must have stormed the hedges today, or Lesley would have sent for you,” Restil replied, keeping Stanzia to a lope so he didn’t overtake the pony.

“Without a doubt. Almost makes me suspect the Hell Beasts around here have gotten hold of my social calendar.” It was a feeble joke, but Restil laughed at it.

The child led them to the Squire’s largest barn, the one nearest the house, where he kept the sows with piglets until the piglets were old enough to go into the fields. There they found Squire Lesley purposefully—but not grimly—arming his male hands with stout iron-tipped hayforks in lieu of boar spears, which were useless against the enormous creatures touched by magic.

“Pig again, is it?” Kordas called from the doorway, where he and Restil stopped their horses.

The Young Squire turned; Restil was pleased to see that he looked more annoyed than alarmed, his square jaw set with determination, and his sandy-brown hair raked to the side to get it out of his eyes. “Aye,” the man replied, in a pleasant baritone. “Heard it last night, trying the hedges. Wants to et up piglet, I’ve no doubt.”

Restil and Kordas both nodded; long acquaintance with the Lesleys made them a great deal more familiar with the ways of pigs than most highborn, and Restil knew that a boar would often kill and eat a sow’s piglets to put her back into breeding condition so he could have her himself.

“He’s on up in that thicket they allus like to hole up in,” the Squire continued. “Looks like he’s ’bout the size of one of your False Golds.”

“Not horrible enough to need any more mages then,” Kordas concluded. “Actually, a bit on the small size. Maybe that means the Pelagirs are running out of monsters to send us?”