Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1927: Iskaris Agricultural Development Program

The problem was a letter.

The old invitation the dwarven herald had left at the western gate weeks ago still sat on the stones of the fire circle where Skarn had thrown it, unopened, unburned, read by every soul who passed close enough to see the wax.

That morning, the same herald had knocked at the same gate and left a second one, and the second one had a date on it.

"By grace of the peoples of Iskaris," Vargis recited from his bench, the new letter open in his hands. "We invite the honored Beastman Confederation to the unveiling of the Iskaris Agricultural Development Program, a development we believe will shape the future of our continent."

He read the rest to himself, then aloud. "A delegation of any size. Three days hence, on the old border." He lowered the page and took up his whetstone. "It carries the seals of three rulers."

"It’s bait," Skarn growled from the palisade stairs. "You do not walk into a predator’s den because the predator holds the door open for you."

"We are predators too," Rajah murmured.

"..."

Under the argument, steady as rain, ran the sound that had run under every council since the mobilization began: Vargis Ironfang’s whetstone, circling the edge of his great war axe.

The whetstone stopped.

Heads turned at the silence before they turned toward the sound of the dogkin lord standing up. Vargis folded the invitation and put it inside his coat.

"I have sharpened this axe enough. Before I swing it, I will see what it is meant to cut. I invite you three to do the same."

Nobody spoke. Outside the palisade, the drums went on keeping their rhythm for a war nobody in that circle had named in weeks.

"The letter says any size," Vargis added, already turning. "I am merely one man."

"...Then I am two." Gorruk, lord of the bearkin, set down his slates and rose to his full mountain of height beside him. "Four eyes read a den better than a written report."

"Ah, damn it all." Rajah poured himself off his bench and stretched until his spine crackled. "Someone must count their soldiers while you two count granaries."

Skarn dropped off the stairs with his hackles up. "Have you all gone mad?! The council of the Confederation does not deliver itself to the enemy in one basket!"

"Then stay," Gorruk said.

"Hold the walls, mighty wolf," Rajah purred.

The wolfkin lord held rigid, and everyone at that fire watched the two things he could not survive fight it out on his face: walking onto the Villain’s ground, and letting other eyes see it first.

"I trust no eyes but my own," Skarn snarled at last. "The watch doubles while we are gone. Every den stays woken."

"And each den sends at least one of its young with us," Gorruk added, "so the Confederation cannot call four old men liars when we return."

On the appointed morning the four great lords of the Beastman Confederation walked the western pass together, a dozen young of the dens at their backs, and the drums kept their rhythm behind them until the border took the sound away.

...

On the empire’s side of the pass, the road was waiting for them.

Rosie Elysiar’s living root ran beside the pass road all the way down the valley, thick as a rampart, and when the delegation stepped onto the trade path the root’s back rose gently under their boots and began to move.

"The enemy is carrying us," Skarn said through his teeth, standing absolutely still on wood that would not stop being helpful.

"Try to enjoy it," Rajah murmured, already sprawled across the moving timber like furniture. "Your dignity can only take so much."

The young of the dens listened to the tiger lord and abandoned dignity inside the first mile. By the second they were racing each other up and down the root’s spine.

At midday the road dropped out of the pass, and the letter’s promise stood waiting in a valley the scouts’ reports had described and entirely failed to convey.

The empire had chosen its ground with intent.

These were the dead fields of the old Vraven-Elvardia border, land an older war’s battle-magic had salted gray three centuries ago, so famously ruined that both kingdoms had simply drawn their maps around it.

Nothing had grown here since.

Today, across the nearest of those dead fields, rose a platform hung with the banners of three peoples, and around it a crowd big enough to garrison a fortress: farmers in their thousands, smiths, white-robed elven maidens, noble delegations under every seal in Vraven, and children everywhere underfoot.

And at the very back of the crowd, where nobody important stands, Skarn found the Villain.

Quinlan Elysiar stood among ordinary farming families, his women around him, his arms lazily crossed around two thin waists, watching the platform like any other spectator.

He had brought no throne, no honor guard, and no stage.

Skarn’s hackles rose and stayed risen. The most dangerous creature alive was thirty paces away, unarmored, and paying the four great lords of the Beastman Confederation no attention whatsoever, because today, apparently, belonged to a plow.

Jasmine Argentis waited on the platform in governor’s white, with the rulers of three peoples filling the row beside her: Queen Felicity of Vraven, chin high, taking the occasion very seriously; her father the retired king one step behind her; Governor Myrasyn of Elysaria, who had signed the empire’s grain pledge that morning.

At the row’s far end waited Isveth, at the head of her white-robed maidens, with Brokk of the Royal Smithy beside her in the only formal coat she owned, counting the minutes until she could take it off.

When Jasmine raised one hand, the crowd noise fell away.

"Three races built what you are about to see, so it carries all their names at once: the Iskaris Agricultural Development Program." The Tyrant of Commerce let the name settle over the valley. "Dwarven runecraft. Elven growth-song. Human alchemy and hands. Today they go into one harness for the first time, and here is what it means for you."

She counted it off the way she counted coin, one finger at a time.

"Your soil grows richer every season instead of poorer. Your harvest stops being a hostage of the weather. One field feeds what two fed before, and the surplus sells at a fair price, because the royal granary pledges to buy it all."

The farmers’ side of the crowd had gone very quiet, in the manner of people afraid to believe something out loud.

"And while the fields learn to need fewer backs," Jasmine went on, "the Youth Program teaches your children letters, numbers, and craft. Your daughter will work a field because she chose it, if she chose it. That is the Program."

"Letters?!" a man repeated to the person beside him, checking that he had heard it right. "That’s a noble’s privilege..."

"Girls too?"

"For everyone’s," his neighbor said. "She said everyone’s."

She did not open it alone. A charter board came up onto the platform on the shoulders of four apprentices, and the rulers put their marks on it one after another in front of the whole valley.

Felicity signed with her entire arm. Myrasyn added the elven seal beneath hers, and Isveth pressed her palm into the wax rather than take a pen to it. Brokk cut her hammer-mark into the board with a knife and handed the knife back, unrepentant.

"Now then," Jasmine smiled. "Miss Alchemist."

Aurora Lorien knelt at the edge of a strip of field that had been dead for three hundred years. Her parents flanked her, and between the three of them stood a row of casks that had taken the House of Lorien six weeks of very loud joy to brew.

"Soil restoration tincture," the alchemist told the valley. She had tested it two hundred times. "One cask wakes forty paces of dead earth. We can brew thousands."

She broke the first cask’s seal and poured, working down the strip.

Where the tincture soaked in, the frost line retreated and the gray dirt darkened, until the strip of murdered field lay black and rich, steaming gently in the winter air.

The valley went silent.

"That ground’s been dead since my grandfather’s grandfather," a voice said somewhere in the press, unsteady. "That’s cursed ground. Everyone knows it’s cursed ground."

An old human farmer ducked the rope line before anyone could stop him, knelt at the strip’s edge, and worked the new loam through his fists.

"It’s warm," he called back, and his voice cracked through the middle of it. "The dirt’s warm! It smells like planting week!"