A hand gripped his shoulder and yanked him around. He thought that it must be an Ishtat soldier or Rialus or a leagueman. It was none of these. He spun to see a person with a thin whitish-blue face and a long nose, a woman whose hair sprang from her head like the plumage of some bird. The next instant, someone wrapped an arm around his torso, lifted him off the ground, and began running. It was not the bird person who carried him, however, but rather a gray, muscled bulk of a being.

On Love and Dragons

C HAPTER
N INETEEN

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.