CHAPTER 539: TWO TREES FOR ONE (2)

"Write it like a story," Lyan said. "People will remember stories when they forget clauses."

She tried, and the clause read: Let the road sleep in the wet months so hooves don’t wake the mud into grief. It would make a clerk snort. It would make a woodcutter smile and comply. That was the point.

Day five: merchant compacts and the first morning where calm came in with the light and stayed until second bell. The solar sounded different; even the walls knew the panic had thinned. Arielle measured it by her tea, which cooled before a runner burst through the door. It had not done that for weeks. She wrote slowly on purpose just to enjoy it, letting her penscratch fall into an easy rhythm.

Midmorning, bootheels clattered in the hall and a courier swept in with a blue-silk ribbon and a grin too large to be anything but good news. He gave the kind of bow that spilled enthusiasm and produced a letter whose seal had been pressed too hard—someone in a hurry at a desk too small. Rewards en route, privileges ratified, and a scribbled stick figure with tiny hearts that made Arielle choke on her drink and press the page flat so it wouldn’t crinkle.

"Coin is on the road," she reported, cheeks warm. "Also... some teasing."

Josephine, who had drifted in without anyone noticing and was now inverted over the back of a chair like a cat sunning in a window, peered upside down at the letter. "He draws like a baker’s child, but the money spends the same," she declared. "If we’re lucky, it arrives in sacks we can repurpose as curtains."

"Please do not hang the Crown Prince’s burlap in my office," Arielle said without looking up, which only made Josephine grin wider.

By noon, three ledgers trimmed to one. The column of IOUs she hated most shrank to a polite list that did not glare. The scrip for the millstones had dates next to them instead of promises. She could feel the difference in her shoulders; they settled by a finger’s width, and the line between her brows smoothed. When the last petitioner left, she set her quill down and looked at the empty chair across the desk. The chair had dents where Lyan’s elbows had leaned for five mornings in a row. She was alone for the first time all week, and the quiet touched her like a friend.

"How does he know these things?" she asked the room. The window answered with the scratch of a sparrow.

Because he pays attention, she answered herself. To river speeds and lamp oil, to the way a man scratches his nose under a hot mask, to the way she holds her breath a second too long when the math turns into luck. And he had paid attention to her.

They met again before the light slanted to gold, that hour when the city’s loudness softened and decisions felt like they might keep. The table was bare except for Arielle’s neat stack of pages—her favorite kind, the ones that turned numbers into food. She aligned their corners to stop her hands from shaking with eagerness.

"This is the program," she said, sliding the first sheet across. "Control site. A model farm other farmers can copy without guessing."

Lyan read. He had that look again—the one that said he was not just seeing the page but what it would look like built and muddy and real: a ridge with a small cistern, shallow trenches catching the first decent rain, children chasing a frog between rows because someone forgot to block the ditch properly. He smiled at the frog thought and kept reading.

"Baseline soil tests," Arielle went on, tapping each line. "We borrow the auger wand from the masons and test every five paces until the dirt stops smelling sweet and turns tired. We start where it’s tired. Then seed ratios we can measure. Barley, rye, and a legume for the soil. We’ll rotate so the soil eats and rests like a person. Windbreak hedges here and here—hazel and willow—to stop the topsoil from running away on windy days. I want the hedges planted close enough that birds nest. Birds mean fewer beetles."

"Gravity cistern on the ridge," she continued, warming to it. "Stone ring lined with tar, rune trickle lines down each furrow so we waste less water. The rune mark is simple. Any village boy who can draw a circle can refresh it when it fades."

"Any village girl," Lyan said, not looking up from the page.

"Any village girl," she corrected, hiding a smile. "We’ll add a small ’learning shed’—just a roof and three chalk walls—where we write the week’s notes in big letters. ’Weed this row Tuesday. Pinch beans at sunrise. If your beans sulk, water at root, not leaf.’"

He turned the page. She’d drawn the shed with a round stone in front of it because she knew someone would be holding a baby and need to sit. "We count yield per row, water per day, labor hours per task," she said. "We hang a board near the gate with numbers that mean something. ’This week: two buckets for ten rows.’ We keep the gate low and the welcome high. Farmers can walk the rows every market day and ask questions. A chalk bucket waits at the gate with a note: ’Write your trick. We’ll try it and credit your name if it works.’ We hire three, train thirty."

"Beehives?" Lyan asked, finally glancing up. "If the hedges flower, bees earn rent."

"I thought of that." She flipped to a side page with messy enthusiasm and one ink blot. "Two hives to start, with a strip of lavender to keep them busy and a sign that says ’don’t kick the buzzing boxes.’ Honey sold funds seed next spring."

He laughed, low. "Write it just like that."

"Security?" he asked once the laughter faded and the sober business returned. "We don’t want it to feel like a fort."

"Low fence, high trust," she said. "A waist-high rail to keep goats from treating our beans like a fair. A bell at the gate tied to a ribbon so my aunt can tug it and someone will come answer, even if the shed is empty. And the mountain women on the perimeter as friendly guardians, not guards. People ask them questions anyway."

His brows lifted, inviting.

"Lara for the bow," she said. "Tara for herbs and smoke and reading the wind. Sigrid because no fence post argues with her twice." A beat. "And because they scare away the kind of mischief that watches for unattended baskets."

He had that listening face again, and for a moment she saw the field already staked out, felt the tug of a measuring cord in her hand, heard a mother call to a child to stop jumping on the chalk board. It put a bright, precise ache in her chest. This was hers. Numbers that turned into beans; rules that turned into bread.

"You want to turn a field into a book people can read with their feet," he said, thumb smoothing a wrinkle on the page.

"Yes," she said simply. "And I want it neat enough that a busy mother can walk through at dusk and still learn three tricks before the pot boils over."

He nodded slowly, as if he could see her imagined mother in the lane already, baby on hip, basket empty, hope thin as soup. "Let’s go choose the ground ourselves." His voice softened on the last word, and her heart did a strange little step she did not authorize.

"Good," she managed, then stacked the papers to keep her hands from doing anything foolish like reaching across the table for his sleeve.

"We’ll take Lara, Tara, Sigrid," he added, almost an afterthought, as if security were something you remembered alongside bread and rope. The words dropped into her tea like a small pebble. Ripples of nerves spread out—those three moved like a story told at a campfire, and Arielle’s stories had usually lived on shelves. She kept her smile steady.

"Of course," she said. "Security. And their eyes on wind and weather are better than a book."

He looked relieved she had said it first, and that was a small victory she pressed between the pages of her day.

Dawn began in her mirror the way it always did, with light on glass and Arielle measuring herself like a list she could read. The window’s first gold climbed the wall, slid across the polished edge of her looking glass, and broke into thin bars along the floorboards. She loved this hour—the castle still breathing the last of night, the corridors quiet except for the low cluck of the kitchen’s first fires catching and the sleepy coo of the gossip pigeons in the rafters. Her dressing table was as tidy as her ledgers: combs aligned by tooth width, her little bottle of lavender ink water corked tight, spare pins sorted by size in a shallow porcelain dish. The cool air smelled faintly of starch and paper, with a ribbon of woodsmoke from the courtyard below.