Ghost in the Yew by Blake Hausladen

Author:Blake Hausladen [Hausladen, Blake]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780983607120
Publisher: Rook Creek Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

BE IT KNOWN TO ANY MAN THAT

TRAVELS THE ENHEDU ROAD

You are under the protection of a Yentif

Arilas, and by his decree, any man who would

conspire to harm you has forfeit his life.

* * *

We also made a stop at Erom’s shop to ask him to carve the same message upon a pair of heavy road stones so the same could be declared more permanently at both ends of my road. He was only too happy see it done.

I would have worried about so pointedly challenging Kuren, but Leger was right. A Zoviyan Prince who just purchased two brigades worth of horses would do no less.

Our next stop was out by the grain barns to prepare for the throngs of farmers who would arrive the next morning. We raised a tent just west of the bridge by the mill and new barns, and, afterward, Leger walked us south to the wide, fenced prairie so we could work out the details of who owned which ponies. I was again too generous in my dealings, calling 300 head the property of Gern and Company outright, but the Chaukai did agree to take on the debt for all the animals the farmers, quarrymen, and timbermen did not.

I returned to the tent where Urs and I set to reviewing the long list of farmers and what they wanted. They did not keep us waiting, and it took three days to see them all. I had been worried about the boredom of such work, but it proved thoroughly engaging. Every man who had come hoping to borrow a single sack of wheat took twenty and a pair of speckled grays instead. A dozen men with large families and ambition took as many as 300 sacks, a dozen ponies, and several score of cattle or sheep. They all put their names upon a promise to pay and raced home to break new ground. They emptied my barns of the high-quality seed and paid their rents with what they could. The sacks of oats and barley they delivered, I suspected, came from “wild patches” like the ones the Dame had used to keep us fed through most of the spring—all of it planted here and there in the years since the garrison had departed Urnedi. Enhedu could not have sustained its thousands with the tiny parcel each village had been allowed. I made the occasional comment so that they would know I was wise to it, but did nothing a Yentif would have done—fine them, beat them, or declare them churlish and take their families as my slaves. They were living lean in order to make good their rents, and they had done me no harm. The rest of the year’s crops, especially the crop of spring wheat and apples, would put things right. By all accounts they would enjoy a marvelous harvest, and with their rents already paid, what the crop earned them would be entirely profit. Enhedu’s villages were poised to become Urnedi’s first customers.

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