Anyone in the Duchy could come here and get a hull for the very special cost of about the price of two goats. Newlyweds got one free. Anyone outside the Duchy paid more than that, of course; this was a “cash crop.” In a pinch they could be used as houses on land as well as on the canals, but because they were so light, they were dangerous in a windstorm unless heavily weighted with a layer of paving stones in the bottom.

“How many of these things are there in the Duchy, do you think?” Kordas asked Hakkon.

“It’ll be in the records, but at a guess, I’d say three for every family,” Hakkon replied, his lips moving a little as he counted hulls under his breath. “We could ship out every grain of the emergency stores in the manor at once using about three quarters of these hulls stored here.” He turned to his cousin. “So it might be time to start the half-year plan.”

—

Like all of the Dukes before him, on every fine day, Kordas rode out to some part of the Duchy to personally see that all was well. This served several purposes. It kept him in touch with almost all of his people. With thousands of them, obviously he couldn’t know them all by name, but he could ensure that they saw him, saw him as approachable, and would not hesitate to talk to him if there was something that needed his personal attention. It also drove the Imperial spies mad, because it meant that they would have to leave their comfortable little niches where they were pretending to be road workers, itinerant laborers, or some other unnoticable entity and follow him around on foot while he was on horseback. And it reinforced that image he so carefully cultivated, of a jumped-up gentleman farmer; bucolic, more concerned with drains than politics, and utterly dismissable.

So today he was going to visit one of his very favorite people in this part of the Duchy. Squire Lesley, the pig farmer.

Lesley was not just any old pig farmer. Half the Duchy depended on him and his herds to grub up and manure their fields every year once they were harvested. He not only had his own herds of pigs, but for a fee he kept individual pigs for anyone who wanted one to butcher in the fall and didn’t want the trouble of tending it. Lesley was the supplier of all things pig to the manor, and he knew as much about breeding and raising them as Kordas knew about horses.

And it drove the spies insane when Kordas went to visit.