Chapter 58 - The Farm in Irttat

 

Chapter 58: Harvest and Hibernation 02

The next morning, Lucita woke to the rooster’s crow and lay there, disoriented for a moment.

She turned over in bed, opened her eyes a little, saw the wilting lily on the windowsill. Then her gaze drifted past the dust-streaked glass to the wisteria in the backyard, and only then did she remember.

When had she started thinking of this as home?

This drowsy Lucita had no time to contemplate the question. She turned over, pulled the soft quilt around herself, and went back to sleep.

By the time she woke again, the sun was well up.

Lucita stretched contentedly, washed up, and felt her way toward the kitchen in search of food.

She rummaged through the kitchen and found only a leftover heel of dry bread, and was quietly questioning the meaning of life when Violet came in: "That bread's mine. I didn't finish it, I was saving it for fish bait."

"Is there nothing to eat?" Lucita asked blankly.

"There is." Violet shrugged, and held out a storage shell. "Linnea and I paid Lily to process a batch of bread, pea shoots, venison, and tomato soup all at once. It cost fifty silver coins in total, and we've been eating off it for a whole month."

There was a faint undertone of suffering in Violet's words, and Lucita felt a genuine pang of guilt.

"And furthermore," Violet added, presenting a second shell with brutal frankness, "our funds have halved. We're down to two hundred silver coins."

That was more or less what Lucita had expected.

Their household's accumulated resources were barely past the starting stage. They needed to tend sheep and work the fields, but with no mature wool sheep yet and too little farmland, neither would produce income anytime soon. And both tasks consumed nearly all of Violet’s day.

Hunting and fishing to supplement their finances was therefore something Violet barely had time for. Inevitably, their expenses had overtaken their earnings, and their savings had begun to shrink.

If they could cook, they might have saved on daily costs. But one of them was a menace in the kitchen, and the other was still a child. If they wanted anything fresh, it meant the tavern. Over time, money had simply flowed away.

Even so, Lucita was not disheartened. She was back now, and their workforce was replenished. As long as she picked up her storage necklace business again, the money would come back quickly.

She took the food from Violet and sat at the living room table, eating slowly and enjoying every bite.

She had to admit, Lily’s skill was something else. The bread was pan-fried crisp and golden on the outside, the roasted meat fragrant with rendered fat, the soup piping hot and rich. It was a thoroughly satisfying meal.

Lucita took another bite of the venison, and her tongue, long deprived of spices, could almost identify each one individually: generous rosemary, thyme, marjoram, pepper. The flavors mingled into something extraordinary. She nearly bit her own tongue.

Besides everything, she wouldn't want to go anywhere else, just for the food.

Violet sat beside her, speaking casually as she ate. “We did one pea harvest while you were gone. Earned two hundred silver coins. The peas in that bed have about two more harvests left before we need to start thinking about the next planting.”

"Let's plant rice." Lucita had recently recovered some of her old memories, and had finally identified the source of that vague, nameless dissatisfaction she'd had with food: there was no rice!

"Rice? The rice Aurora brought back a couple of years ago when she was campaigning for town leader?"

It had to be said, Violet had integrated into Irttat so perfectly that she was even up to date on old gossip like this. That was entirely thanks to Durani’s industrious mouth during her month of farm labor.

Violet looked puzzled: "Didn't everyone say the food made from that crop was unpleasant? That it gets stuck going down?"

“That’s because they don’t hull it properly,” Lucita said with deep feeling. “Trust me, my dear sovereign, a life without rice is an incomplete life.”

"How do you know? Is it a popular food in the human world now?"

“Not exactly.” Lucita couldn’t explain properly, so she improvised. “Not many humans eat it either. I just happened to have some once, properly hulled and steamed, and discovered it’s actually delicious. People just don’t know how to prepare it.”

Violet nodded, neither confirming nor denying, but agreed to try it.

Just then, Linnea came running in from outside, flushed and sweaty, her hair flying: "Sister Violet, I slept in, we need to go take the sheep out now —"

She reached the living room and saw Lucita sitting there eating her breakfast. The words stopped dead in her mouth.

Delphine, who had been drifting around the yard, floated over to see what was happening, and circled Linnea with close-up curiosity.

"Don't stare at people like that. It's rude." Lucita scolded Delphine, and the girl retreated with a slightly put-out expression, settling on the tall tea table, legs swinging idly.

Linnea looked dazed: "Sister Lucita?"

"Yes, I'm back." Lucita smiled and stood, giving Linnea a hug.

Linnea still hadn't recovered: "Who were you just talking to?"

"Our new friend." Lucita smiled warmly. "Come here, Delphine."

Delphine drifted over: "They can't see me. What's the point of introducing me?"

"No, if someone is a friend, they need a proper introduction. We'll all be living together from now on." Lucita pretended not to notice Delphine's sulk, and told Linnea: "You might not be able to see her, but she's standing right in front of you. This is Delphine."

Then to Delphine: "This is Linnea. She comes from the deep sea. She's a mermaid."

At the word mermaid, Delphine brightened noticeably: "I thought elves and merfolk had gone extinct! At the time the dragon race was wiped out, they were already on the edge of extinction too."

Linnea looked to Violet, and received a confirming nod before deciding Lucita wasn't pulling her leg.

She immediately lit up: "Wow! That's amazing! Where is she right now, is she talking to me?"

Delphine laughed and couldn't help circling Linnea again.

"She is." Lucita smoothed Linnea's hair. "She's playing with you right now."

She lifted her head to look out at the yard, already bright with morning light, and quietly let out a soft sigh.

Was Delphine going to stay like this forever?

In daylight, the yard came fully into view, details she hadn’t been able to make out the night before now clear.

Near the well in the front yard stood a small red-roofed wooden house. Its red tiles were neatly laid. The wooden walls had been painted with pale willow-yellow lacquer made primarily from mignonette, lighter than primrose yellow, but brighter, almost luminous.

The house had only recently been completed. The golden primrose wreath hung on the wooden door to celebrate its finish was now half-dried.

The side facing the road had a broad horizontal pine window, with two hanging pots of white spider plants placed symmetrically on either side. Transactions could be conducted directly through that window. If necessary, clients could be brought into the yard and into the shop to browse. At the very least, it was separate from their living quarters.

Violet had already moved the tall cabinet that Skloot had given them from the living room into the small shop. The shelves were still empty for now.

Lucita flipped the sign at the front gate — which had read "Out on business, temporarily closed" — to show the plum-red painted characters reading "Storage Necklaces" outward, and propped it by the gate.

She squeezed a pea pod. The second crop had produced tender young pods. At this stage they could be picked and cooked as vegetables. In another week, once the peas were fully mature, she could shell them. Another ingredient, another product to sell.

She went around to the back yard and found that Violet had extended it further out on all sides.

Like many farms in this area, their land backed directly onto the forest — a naturally convenient condition for expansion.

The newly cleared ground hadn't been planted yet, but the sheep pen had already been extended to take advantage of the extra space.

On the far side stood a small storage house, also red-roofed and painted the same mignonette yellow. This one was different: closely set windows for ventilation, and a handsome circular brick chimney rising from the roof.

She went inside to look. The floor was laid with dense, compact green tiles.

Two stacks of dried forage were piled in one corner, winter feed for the lambs. Against the wall by the entrance stood a stove, still clean except for a small heap of ash from a test fire. In another corner, a row of round wooden poles had been erected, clearly intended for hanging cured meat.

Behind the main house, two new structures had been built close alongside, visible more clearly from the back yard.

Linnea's new bedroom was directly adjacent to Lucita's own room; on the other side was Violet's new bedroom. The original study had been cleared out again and restored to its original purpose.

An outdoor corridor ran behind the kitchen and along the outer wall of Violet's bedroom, connecting the front and back doors and ending at a small outdoor balcony beside the back door, outside Violet's bedroom window.

The crumbling walls had been patched and freshly painted in a bright orange-red lacquer, set off by the newly repaired blue-grey tiled roof.

Both new bedroom windowsills were wide, their extended ledges holding several pots of white iris. They had been planted recently and were not yet in bud, but the fresh green leaves looked lively and healthy.

Lucita shouldered the large wicker basket from beside the sheep pen, tucked her sickle into her storage space, opened the pen, and herded the sheep out the gate.

"Off to graze!" Lucita called out. Linnea and Delphine's voices rose almost simultaneously: "Wait for me, I want to come too!"

Violet pushed open her window: "Could you bring some vegetables back this afternoon?"

"Of course!" Lucita agreed, already planning the evening's menu in her mind.

Linnea bounced ahead, with Delphine floating alongside her, endlessly curious about the town, letting out little gasps of amazement every few steps.

Watching them, Lucita smiled to herself. "Linnea, Delphine is walking right alongside you. Would you like to tell her about all the good things to eat and do around here?"

Linnea nodded with enthusiasm: "Yes!"

A little girl walked down the street, chattering happily to thin air. (To Lucita’s ears, two girls were clearly chatting.) Behind them, Lucita followed with five small sheep in tow, the group moving at an unhurried pace.

Neighbors smiled warmly and called out greetings to Lucita as she passed.

"You're back!"

"Open for business tomorrow?"

"..."

Lucita answered each one. On the way past Teresa's bakery she stopped to buy two rounds of sour cheese and a warm loaf, tucking them into her storage space. This would be Linnea's lunch. There was still venison and most of a bucket of tomato soup from Lily's batch, but Linnea had grown thoroughly tired of those and had absolutely no desire to eat them again, making them now entirely Lucita's food.

Lucita was perfectly happy to claim them.

The pasture grass in this season was not as tender as it had been in spring. The blades had grown longer, coarser, tougher, but they grew thick enough that Lucita could cut them easily, bringing down a handful with each stroke of the sickle.

She worked selectively all morning. By the end, the basket was packed full. Most of it was sudangrass, mixed with some alfalfa and crimson clover. She hadn’t sorted them by type, simply bundled everything together to dry at home.

At noon, she prepared dried cheese and sheep’s milk for Linnea. For herself, she poured tomato soup, fried bread in a pan, and ate roasted venison. They settled beneath their usual patch of shade for lunch.

The sunlight was lazy and warm, the grass beneath the shade soft. The basket of forage was set aside carelessly, and Linnea was sprawled by a tree root, fast asleep.

Lucita lay back on her arm, picked a blade of grass idly from beside her, and let her consciousness sink in. In this thin, spare medium she added a few spatial nodes of her own condensing, and opened out a space.

A space of one cubic meter, large enough to swallow the entire basket.

She crushed the blade of grass absentmindedly and tossed it aside, then looked at Delphine.

Delphine's golden eyes lit up as she drifted closer: "You just used the power of space, didn't you?"

Lucita met those golden pupils, and felt something stir in her. She nodded slowly.

← Previous Chapter Next Chapter →