Hakkon looked even more enthused, and even younger, when he replied, “And they don’t have Circles in the City, do they?”

Kordas just grinned back, holding the door open with a flourish for his friend.

For what they needed to inspect, they needed horses. Kordas was certainly not going to take a nursing mare away from her new foal, and he didn’t particularly want to draw attention to the fact that Duke Valdemar was going out for a ride, either. So once outside in the sweet air of Valdemar, he sent the stableboy for two of the Sweetfoot palfreys, a pair of geldings named Penta and Kery, both ordinary-looking bays—or at least, as ordinary as horses in the Valdemar stables ever got.

It was a good morning for riding; the rain had cleared away every hint of dust, flowers were in bloom in all the meadows, and even in the worst of situations, riding a Sweetfoot palfrey was always a pleasure. Kordas liked to boast that you could put a baby in a Sweetfoot’s saddle and it wouldn’t fall off, and he’d come very close to proving that with his insistence that the children of the household learn to ride as soon as they could toddle. So the ride to a peculiar yet nondescript building at the edge of the manor’s grounds brought him a feeling of vast content, even if his mind was still racing.

They dismounted and tied up their horses at rings on the side of the building and went in.

It was a vast storage building, with a workshop attached. And it was here that the other main cash “crop” of the Duchy was produced.

The forests of the Duchy were too valuable to squander as a crop for export. The fields produced mostly hay and grass—every bit of grain stayed right here, and so did the produce. But a clever discovery here had given them something else that was even more valuable to the Empire.

But now Kordas wondered about that discovery, because it seemed so unlikely . . .

The objects in question were stored on racks that reached all the way to the ceiling and filled the entire storage building. To the uneducated eye, there was absolutely no way of telling what they actually were. They looked like dull, brownish-gray oblongs with flat bottoms, flat tops, pointed ends, and obtusely-angled sides. They were as long as three common wagons and about an arm-length taller than a man.

In fact, they were barge hulls.

Valdemar had been producing them for as long as there had been a Valdemar, after the first Duke—also a mage—had discovered how to create them almost entirely by accident. As much of a botanist as he had been a mage, he had taken to experimenting with fungi he had found here.