Read Novel Full Chapter 1928: The Gap Widens
Chapter 1928: The Gap Widens
The roar started at the rope line and rolled the whole length of the valley.
"Note the color!" Gideon Lorien lectured the front row, which contained a queen. "Verdanal chased this seven thousand years ago and got mud! My daughter got soil you could grow a ship’s mast in! Of course, she was already brilliant at six, there was the time she transmuted my-"
"Dad!"
"Dear," Naomi smiled and planted an elbow in her husband’s side.
"Ah. Got carried away," Gideon wheezed through gritted teeth.
Down on the new loam, Kaelira had the plow teams lined up, and there was no shy elf anywhere in her.
"First team, walk it in," the Runeweaver Titan called down the row, sleeves rolled in the cold.
The enchanted plow parted half-frozen earth like a keel through still water, and the furrow it left glowed faintly along its edges before the glow sank in and faded.
"No oxen," a farmwife at the rope said, to nobody, to everybody. "It’s cutting frozen ground and there’s no oxen."
"What does one cost?!" a man shouted toward the platform, and the crowd laughed, then hushed itself, because it wanted the answer too.
"The state will fund every registered farmland with one over the coming months," Jasmine called back without missing a beat. "And if you desire to buy more, they will cost less than a season of ox-feed."
Multiple seasoned farmers could be seen falling unconscious, only to be caught by their teary wives and children.
The men who went down were thinking the same thing: a nation that had finally treated them better than the lowest rung of society, a nation already investing in their future.
Although Quinlan said nothing the entire time, dozens of gazes aimed at him with overwhelming gratitude.
Half the teams on that strip were dwarves, who had come down out of the mountain to watch the thing work and pushed it themselves inside an hour, sleeves rolled like Kaelira’s.
When a rune stuttered on the third plow, Kaelira was in the dirt at the coulter before anyone called for her, redrawing the line freehand with one finger, apologizing for the delay the whole time she did it. "It’s still a work-in-progress prototype!!" she promised the audience.
Behind the plows came Isveth’s maidens, palms open over the turned earth, singing the growth blessing.
"The Holy Son wills a garden of this world," one of them whispered under her breath.
And in the middle of all of it, unguarded and unescorted, stood the four great lords of the Beastman Confederation.
Gorruk was running sums under his breath, slow and thorough: paces of dead field to casks, casks to seasons, seasons to grain in a storehouse.
He reached a total, stopped, and started the count over, because the total could not be right.
It came out the same.
"Say it," Rajah murmured.
"Their worst valley will out-yield our best land by first harvest," the bearkin lord rumbled, quiet enough that only the lords heard it. "And they will have a hundred valleys."
Rajah looked down the white trade road toward the pass, at the wagon queues already forming to carry the Program to provinces that were not his, and for once the tigerkin lord found nothing playful to lay on top of anything.
Skarn hunted the crowd one more time for the trap.
He counted soldiers and found vendors. He counted watchers and found none, because nobody in that valley was tracking the enemy council standing in the open on imperial ground.
He found farmers weeping over dirt instead, and a villain at the back of his own festival, laughing about something with his girls, letting his people hold the stage.
The first furrow reached the strip’s end. The crowd’s roar hit the ridge lines and came back down like a landslide.
"The Program is officially open! Register your farms at your local administrative hubs and you will join the waiting list," Jasmine called over it, grinning, and threw her arm toward the field’s edge, where trestle tables ran longer than the furrow itself.
"Now, then. Three nations cooked for their farmers today. Eat well, dance, and go home ready for the greatest spring of your lives!"
The crowd did not need telling twice.
Somewhere between the platform and the tables, farmers who had never spoken to a dwarf in their lives were toasting the mountain.
An old man kept telling anyone who would listen that the dirt was warm, that his grandson would read, and that he had lived to see both.
...
They were given no minders, so the lords went four separate ways into the festival.
Gorruk walked the model farmstead the Program had raised beside the field: granary, stables, workers’ quarters. He read the frames like border slates, joint by joint, to the end.
Behind them stood a children’s house for the farmhands’ families, first of its kind outside the capital. He went in and counted the beds twice.
Rajah found a skewer stall. He ordered by pointing, paid double out of pure suspicion, and ate the best thing he had tasted all winter standing up, furious about every bite. He went back for a second one.
"Cold out, my lord?" the human vendor asked the tigerkin lord of the Beastman Confederation, conversationally, entirely unafraid. "The dwarves built the braziers. Stand closer if you like."
Vargis leaned on the fence of the children’s row, watching dwarven masters walk human children down a beam on miniature scaffolds, when the crowd behind him produced his daughter.
Kitsara arrived already mid-hug, five tails everywhere, cheek against his chest plate.
"You came!!"
"Daughter." The dogkin closed one arm around the foxkin and held on, and his war-council face lasted less than a breath.
"You look fed," he managed.
"I look radiant," she corrected into his chest. "Right?"
"Radiantly well fed."
She leaned back to inspect him, eyes bright. "That’s right! Quinnie feeds- wait, no, allow me to change topic," the white-haired beauty realized it was best to keep her protein-rich diet hidden from her father. "Stubborn wolf let you come?"
"Nobody lets me do anything, girl." He glanced past her at the festival, at the children, at the plows, and took his time about the next one. "Are you happy?"
"Stupidly~" Kitsara beamed, instantly.
"Good."
"Letting me be Quin’s might’ve been the best decision of your life," Kitsara giggled, hugging tight.
"No."
"Eh?" Kitsara’s eyes widened, taken aback.
"That’s a close second. But the best decision was taking in a little foxkin all those decades ago."
"F-father!!" Kitsara laughed, hug tightening even further.
At the far edge of the festival, a small human girl with a Program badge planted herself in front of Skarn and looked all the way up at him.
"Mister wolf. Are your ears soft like Miss Blossom’s?"
Skarn bared his teeth on pure reflex, the display that made veteran soldiers step backward.
"Do it again!!" the girl demanded, delighted.
The fastest of the four great lords left the area at a speed that was technically not fleeing.
The delegation recrossed the pass the next day, and none of the four lords said one word on the whole descent, while the drums rose to meet them.
The young were louder.
Within a moon their stories had crossed every den in the heartlands: the road that carried you, the field that came back from the dead in an afternoon, the dwarf masters who put hammers in human hands and called it an honor, the children. Above all, the children.
At the cubs’ drill field, a den-mother waited at the fence through an entire evening of forms, listening to a young delegate talk. Then she crossed the trampled snow to the instructor, in front of everyone.
"You drill our cubs for a war that won’t come. The Villain has upheld the non-aggression pact all this time. Their cubs are handed hammers and an education while ours are starving in the cold, doing stupid drills..."
"The war-lodge sets the drills," the instructor said.
"Then I will speak to the war-lodge." The den-mother collected her cub off the line by the scruff.
...
On winter’s last moon, with the pass streams running loud under thinning ice, the senior watcher on the western ridge counted wagons for what the manifest claimed was the final time.
The column crossed at midday, and the paper posted at its head read the same on every copy: by declaration of Quinlan Elysiar, the reparations owed the honored Beastman Confederation, final installment, settled in full, weeks ahead of any schedule the ledgers had implied.
The crews unloaded, stacked, checked every seal twice, bowed to the gate wardens, and rolled home into the dusk.
Then the road went empty.
No column crossed the next day.
None crossed the day after that.
The watchers had spent the whole winter counting lanterns crawling the pass at every hour, and now they stood their rotations over a road that lay white and bare from ridge to ridge.
"The bill is paid," the younger watcher said on the third empty evening. "This was supposed to bleed him, sir. A generation, they told us, that’s what the council said, a whole generation of him paying us and he-" He lost the sentence and found a worse one. "He paid it early. And now he’s stopped coming."
"He has."
"The steel, the roads, the armor, the villages he rebuilt with his own coin. He showed us everything he has."
The younger one’s slate hung forgotten at his side. "Then he settled his account and closed the door. Like we’re... finished, sir. Like there’s nothing on this side of the pass he still needs."
The senior watcher looked down at the bare road for a long while before he answered.
"All winter I dreaded the day that road would bring an army," he said. "Nobody taught me to dread the day it brought nothing at all."
Their report went down the ridge that night, and it was one line long.
The road is empty.
...
The war-lodge fire received the one-line report at dusk, into a circle already crowded with things no one wanted to say first.