Chapter 231: Dealing with the crops

Chapter 231: Chapter 231: Dealing with the crops

Dawn found Sunny Vale in a state no one had ever seen it in.

The first light came up pale gold over the eastern hills and spilled across fields that no longer looked like fields. The Aether-Thread Wheat stood shoulder-high, its silver threads grown so long that they drifted overhead in loose, shimmering ropes. The Verdant Crown Tomatoes had swollen to the size of melons, their skins stretched taut and glowing. The Amethyst Solar Squash sprawled across three terraces at once, vines thick as wrists, fruit heavy enough to bend the trellises. Down by the river, the Azure Dew Berries had burst their bushes and begun to ripple outward in a wild blue tide, beaded with dew that sparkled even in the thin light.

It was beautiful. It was also, Sophia understood with growing dread, about to be ruined.

"Overripe by noon," Maren said grimly, standing at her shoulder with a scythe over one arm and a lifetime of experience in her face. "Rotten by dusk. Look at the Frost-Melons."

Sophia looked. In the greenhouse, the pale blue melons had begun to crack along their rims, thin white lines spreading across the skin like frost across glass. Every few seconds, one let out a low, ringing note and split open, spilling frozen pulp across the gravel.

"They’re mature," she said slowly. "Past mature."

"And a day late means cracked teeth, if anyone’s foolish enough to eat them. Rowan taught you that, didn’t he?" Maren’s mouth twitched. "Well. Today everything is a day late. We harvest, and we harvest fast."

She turned to the farmhands gathered in the yard, a dozen weary, wide-eyed faces still dazed from the night. Several of them had faint, shimmering lines beneath their skin, the same pale tracery Sophia had noticed on her own wrists, and one young man kept flexing his hands and staring at them as though he’d never seen them before. But they were standing. They were waiting.

"Right," said Maren. "Sophia’s in charge of the stabilizing. The rest of you do as I say and mind your fingers. Baskets, knives, carts. Start with the ripest and work backward. Nobody cuts what they can’t carry, and nobody carries what they can’t hold. Understood?"

"Understood!" came the ragged chorus.

"Then move."

The harvest began in a rush.

Sophia worked the Magma-Lily greenhouse herself, because someone had to, and because the lilies were the most dangerous thing in the valley. The air inside was thick and shimmering, so hot that the glass sweated and her hair stuck to her neck. The blossoms had grown to the size of dinner plates, deep crimson and glowing from within, their petals curling and uncurling like flames in a draft.

She stepped carefully between the beds with her hands held out, palms down, the way Rowan had shown her. Don’t fight it, he had said. Don’t push. Be still. Her heart was hammering and her head was full of noise, but she forced herself to breathe, slowly, in and out, until the noise dropped away and the lilies’ restless rhythm rose to meet her.

They were frightened. That was the strangest part. Under the heat and the shimmer, she could feel it, a thin, high thread of fear, like a child lost in a crowd. The mana was too much, too fast, and they didn’t know what to do with it.

"It’s all right," she whispered, and the words came out unexpectedly steady. "I’ve got you. Just breathe."

She laid her palm against the nearest blossom. The petals trembled, then quieted. A small, warm pulse ran up her arm, and she let it come, and gently, gently, drew a little of the excess away. The flower’s glow softened from furious red to a deep, steady ember. She snipped it free with her knife and laid it in a padded crate, and moved to the next.

By the time the sun cleared the hills, the greenhouse was nearly cleared. Her arms ached, and sweat ran down her spine, but the lilies lay quiet in their crates, glowing faintly, and not one had flared.

Outside, the fields were a blur of motion.

The farmhands moved in pairs, one cutting and one carrying, calling to each other over the rustle of leaves. Baskets of Verdant Crown Tomatoes rolled across the yard on creaking carts. The young man who had been staring at his hands discovered, to his own astonishment, that he could lift a full crate of squash in one arm without effort, and spent the next hour grinning like a boy at a fair. Two older women worked the wheat fields side by side, bundling the silver threads into thick, shining sheaves, and sang an old harvest song in cracked, cheerful voices to keep the tangles from forming.

Maren strode between them like a general in a battle, barking orders, mending baskets, and now and then plucking a half-ripe fruit from a vine with a sniff of disapproval. She did not stop moving once.

Sophia had never worked so hard in her life. She had also never felt so alive.

By mid-morning, they had cleared the greenhouses, the berry terraces, and half the orchard. By noon, the last of the squash was on the carts. The Aether-Thread Wheat stood harvested in neat, gleaming bundles along the edge of the field, and the farmhands collapsed onto the grass in clusters, sharing water and bread and laughing in the exhausted, giddy way of people who have survived something together.

But the ground was another matter.

Sophia noticed it first when she stepped out of the last field and felt the soil hum beneath her boots. It was not the steady, slow rhythm she had come to know. It was a restless, uneven drumming, wild and stuttering, like a pulse running a fever. The mana from the surge had not drained away with the harvest. It had soaked into the earth, and the earth was struggling to hold it.

"It’s still too much," she said aloud.

Maren turned from the cart she was loading and followed her gaze across the bare, churned terraces. For a long moment she said nothing. Then she walked over, knelt, and pressed a weathered palm to the soil. Her face tightened.

"Aye," she said. "I can’t read the mana the way the Viscount can, but I can read ground, and this ground’s sick. If it’s left like this, whatever we plant next season will come up twisted. Or not at all." She looked up at Sophia, and for the first time that day, her sharp eyes were uncertain. "Can you do anything about it, girl?"

Sophia stared at the terraces.

She thought of the thread-thin sprout on her windowsill, how it had grown, and how she had never meant for it to. She thought of the lilies, shivering under her hand. She thought of Rowan, saying: You’re the one the wheat curled around.

"I don’t know," she admitted. "But I can try."

She walked to the center of the largest terrace, where the three main fields met, and knelt in the dirt.

The farmhands noticed, one by one, and the laughter faded. A hush fell across the yard. Even the old women in the wheat stopped singing.

Sophia closed her eyes.

Be still, she told herself. Don’t push. Listen.

At first, there was only chaos, a roaring tangle of wild mana in the earth beneath her knees. It pulled at her, tugged her in a dozen directions at once, and for a moment she felt dizzy and lost. Then, slowly, something rose out of the noise. It was a faint, low beat, steady as a heartbeat, the deep, old rhythm of the ground itself. It had never stopped. It was only drowned.

She laid both palms flat against the soil, and she let her own mana go.

It came up from deep inside her, a thin, bright current she had barely known she possessed. The pale lines beneath her skin flared, tracing her wrists and forearms in delicate silver, and warmth poured out of her hands and into the dark, crumbling earth. She did not force it. She let it flow, the way a stream finds its way downhill, spreading outward through the soil in slow, widening ripples.

It was nothing like what Rowan could do. She knew that. Her mana was thin and unpracticed, and she had no technique to speak of, only instinct and stubbornness and the memory of a kind voice saying listen. But the earth did not seem to mind. It took what she offered, and it answered.

Beneath her, the wild stuttering began to steady.

She felt it first in her palms, a gradual softening, like a clenched fist unclenching. Then in her chest, where the frantic beat of her own heart slowly fell into step with the ground’s. The restless surge of mana drew inward, gathering itself, folding into the deeper currents of the soil rather than fighting against them. Around her, the churned earth darkened, the crumbs of dirt settling into a rich, even loam.

The strain was enormous. Sweat ran into her eyes. Her arms trembled, and a dull ache gathered behind her ribs. She had not eaten since the night before, and she had not slept at all. Twice she felt herself waver, felt the current thin and almost break, and twice she gritted her teeth and held on. Just a little more. Just a little further.

The channel widened. The pulse of the earth deepened and slowed. Somewhere at the edge of her awareness, she felt the other fields answer, one after another, each taking up the steadier rhythm like a choir picking up a hymn.

Then, quite suddenly, it was done.

Sophia opened her eyes. She was on her hands and knees, gasping, and the world swam gently around her. But the ground beneath her palms was warm and calm and still, humming softly with the old, familiar rhythm of Sunny Vale. Across the terraces, the churned soil lay smooth and dark in the noon light, and a faint green mist was rising from it, the first sign of the earth drawing breath.

Nobody spoke.

Then the young farmhand who had been flexing his hands let out a long, low whistle.

"Well," he said. "That’s something."

A ripple of laughter ran through the group, tired and relieved and a little awed. Someone started to clap, and then the whole yard was applauding, cheering, whooping like a crowd at a festival. Sophia sat back on her heels, wiping her face with a filthy sleeve, too dazed to do anything but stare at her own trembling hands.

A shadow fell across her. She looked up.

Maren stood over her with her arms folded and her weathered face unreadable. For a long moment the old woman simply looked at her, and Sophia braced herself for criticism.

Instead, Maren bent, took her by the elbow, and hauled her to her feet with surprising strength.

"Not bad, girl," she said gruffly. "Not bad at all." Something flickered across her face that might, on someone else, have been pride. "Now sit down before you fall down. Somebody get this child a bowl of Vitality Grain and a Verdant Crown Tomato. Rowan said she wasn’t to manage a farm on an empty stomach."

"That was Mrs. Vance," Sophia mumbled, swaying slightly.

"Same difference," said Maren. "Eat."

Someone pressed a bowl into her hands. She sat on an upturned crate in the warm noon light, with the sun on her face and the soft hum of the stabilized earth beneath her feet, and ate the plain, rich porridge with the focus of a woman who had never tasted anything so good.

In the farmhouse window behind her, the little sprout on her sill had grown tall and strong, and it leaned toward the open glass, as if listening.