The Kindred were to meet again at a village west of Danos. Before they did, however, Barad arrived on the Cape of Fallon with King Grae and his brother, Ganet. The trio traveled inland and together explored the region for several days. The area’s loamy soil produced bountiful crops of sweet potatoes, carrots, onions, and massive turnips the size of a man’s head. Unlike the plantations of northern Talay or the state-run croplands of the Mainland, the region was too rocky to be sectioned off in a grid pattern. The land was irregular, broken by hills and stands of recalcitrant short pines, and not suited to mass labor forces. Instead, small family farmsteads patchworked the area, as they had for centuries. And, as had been the case for centuries, these farmers were forced to pay such a large portion of their crops into the empire’s coffers that they little more than subsisted from their labor and their land’s bounty.

That was what Barad had wanted the Aushenians to see for themselves. Was it not a crime, he asked as they toured the area on borrowed mules, that these farmers worked their hands into calloused claws? They woke before the sun each morning and labored as long as the orb traversed the sky and sometimes into the night. They were at the mercy of the vagaries of the weather, required to deliver their produce on good and bad years both.

Was it reasonable that after all that labor—over all the years these farming families had worked this land and helped feed the world—that these people’s children were rail thin, that their elders died without the care physicians offered the wealthy of Alecia and Manil—not to mention Aos, with its school for training in the healing arts? These farmers shipped away great wagons of foodstuffs, but not one of them grew fat on it. Not one of them acquired any of the luxuries enjoyed by the merchants of Alyth or Bocoum.

Disguised in laborers’ rags, the three men pitchforked a wagonload of turnips into a massive storage facility guarded by Acacian soldiers. They added to the mountain of vegetables already collected there. Sitting in the back of the wagon as they jolted away, Barad explained that those stores were for the empire. Such was the way it always had been; such was the way the queen wished it to continue. They walked among the rows of kale and greens, of sugar hearts and blood beets. They saw children thin as waifs, met young men strong about the shoulders, older men slowed with the weight of work, and even older ones stooped by a lifetime of carrying such burdens. As their group rode past the corner of one field, a small girl looked up at them from a muddy trench. Just what she was engaged in was unclear, but it was not play. She was coated in muck, her legs sunk up to the ankles in the stuff, a bucket in one hand and a hooked tool in the other. Barad thought to pause and question her, but changed his mind just before he spoke. She set large, lovely brown eyes on him, framed by a cascade of unkempt curls. She was a small beauty, and he deemed her message one best delivered through her eyes. How would the years treat her? Her eyes asked this silently, so he did not need to speak out loud. He kept the group moving.