Published at 24th of February 2024 10:33 am

Chapter 54

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It turned out the Arborists didn’t live much better than the rest of us. Their homes were made from the same mud-and-clay bricks, had the same thatch roofs, and were about the same size. Their houses were arranged in a circle with a dozen buildings in the middle of the Arbor, which took a bit of looking around to understand the logic of.

It was a giant circle with the Arborists in the center. There were six sections, all accessible from the center. One part contained fruit trees. Another had only trees that grew straight, good for timber. A third section had the thickest canopy and a number of herbs with medicinal uses grew under those boughs.

A second ring of buildings containing greenhouses circled the houses, something I was extremely surprised to find. There’d been very little glass in the village, and we had no glass blower. What windows there were had obviously been created with magic. Finding not one but three long greenhouses was highly unexpected, and I immediately started eyeing them up. It would be expensive in terms of mana spent, but I might just be able to grow a few specialty herbs to do a bit of alchemy with.

As we got closer, I realized that more than a few of the panels had been replaced with pieces of wood. Shel noticed me looking and said, “A few bad storms over the years. Lord Emeto built these many years ago, but since he’s been gone, there’s no one left to replace them. We used to have five greenhouses, but we’ve scavenged so many panes of glass that we tore down two of them. About three years ago, we ran out of spares and had to make do with the patch jobs.”

“And you’re hoping I can help with that,” I said.

“Among other things.”

“I know the spell to transmute sand to glass,” I said. “I could probably be persuaded to make some new panes in exchange for some space to grow a few herbs for my own projects.”

I’d need to make some glassworks as well, but I’d hold off on that until I finished my mana lattice and confirmed the plants I had in mind would actually grow here. Even in a magically controlled glass box, some plants just couldn’t thrive. That was a problem for later, though. It’d be months before I was ready to make an attempt at alchemy.

“There’s a spell for that?” Shel asked, surprised. “Lord Emeto used to just glass a section of the desert with some fireballs and we’d cut the panes out after it cooled.”

“Did he?” I laughed. “What an incredibly inefficient way to go about that. I suppose if it works, it works. I wonder why Noctra never replaced the panes if that was how you were all going about doing it.”

“Too expensive,” Shel told me. “He needed the mana for other things. At least that’s what he told us.”

There was a hint of bitterness in her voice, well-masked and only detectable because I was listening for it. Nobody was happy about Noctra bilking the village out of years of mana. On the bright side, he’d made it extraordinarily easy for me to take his place since I was actually capable and willing to spend mana on the village’s behalf. If they wanted to keep the tithe going, I’d happily make them glass panes and keep their barrier going and whatever else they liked, though I’d be keeping a fraction of the mana for my own use as a labor cost.

It was better than the last guy. He’d kept all of their mana and done none of the work.

We made our way past the greenhouses and into the circle of houses. Some of them were occupied, others were dark. One major difference between these houses and the ones back in the village was the presence of doors and shutters. It wasn’t hard to guess why. This cluster of homes was surrounded by trees, and there were more than a few small animals living in them. Nobody wanted to come home to find raccoons and squirrels had raided the larder.

“This is the house you’ll be staying in,” Shel said, stopping in front of what was undoubtedly the most run-down building of the lot. “It’s been empty for a while and we’ve been using it as storage, but I let everyone know to clean their things out, so it should be ready for you.”

“You don’t sound very sure about that,” Father said.

Shel pushed the door open, revealing a dark interior that had nothing but dust in it. There was a lot of dust, so much so that I decided it was worth a bit of mana to use elemental manipulation to collect it all. “Step back for a second,” I said.

I cast the spell, summoning all the dust into one clump of dirt and sending it flying out into the trees to break apart. It wasn’t a substitute for a thorough cleaning, but for a five second job, it would suffice. Unfortunately, I had another problem.

“There’s no furniture,” I pointed out.

“Uh, yeah. This was all kind of last notice.”

I turned to Father. “When you go back to fetch Nermet, could you bring my pallet out for me?”

“I’ll have some of my guys bring Nermet’s stuff over from my place as well,” Karad added.

“Some food would be nice too.” I hadn’t eaten all day and only the trickle of mana energizing my body was keeping me going at this point. I wasn’t willing to show weakness to my new allies, who were still potential enemies, so I’d kept myself upright and energetic.

“So, this is where you’ll live for the time being. You aren’t allowed to leave this house without an escort, and I’ll have somebody guarding you at all times,” Karad said. “You’ll teach other people at a designated location to be decided later. We’ll bring a few candidates by in the next day or two for you to get started with. Once a day, I will personally escort you to collect mana for the ward stone.”

I managed to hold back a laugh. Karad was deadly serious, but everyone here knew there was nothing he could do to stop me if I decided to leave. His only recourse would be to turn the village against me and make it impossible to live here peacefully. To an outside observer, it must have looked ridiculous to have a grown man in his forties threatening a small child like this. I wondered if Karad felt a bit foolish about the whole thing.

“I understand,” I told him. “I’ll stay right here and wait until you’re ready for me to do some work.”

That earned me a suspicious glare, and not just from Karad either. Both my parents and Shel hit me with it. The de-facto governor of the community watched me wordlessly for a moment before shaking his head, turning to Shel, and saying, “Keep an eye on him like you said you would.”

Then he grabbed my father, said, “Let’s go,” and walked off.

“Well, that was fun,” I told everyone. “What should we do while we wait?”

***

“Please stop asking me questions now,” I said, exhaustion in my voice.

Shel was relentless. I’d spent two hours fielding questions that basically amounted to a staggering variety of issues the Arbor had and her wanting to know if there were magical solutions for all of them. The answer was usually “Yes, but…”

I had a suspicion I knew where the bulk of the mana the Arborists produced once they’d ignited their cores was going to go, and it was going to be some spectacularly boring chores like warding trees against burrowing insects and increasing the yields when they harvested fruit.

“But I had a follow up question about magically reinforced panes of glass,” Shel said. She flipped through the notebook she’d produced until she got back to the page where she’d recorded what I’d told her about enchanting the greenhouses and asked, “So you told me that we can set up an enchantment that will power itself with ambient mana, or we could if there was any here. I scrapped that idea before, but what if we hooked the trees up to the enchantments directly? It wouldn’t be mana in the air, but it would still be mana, right?”

“It would kill the trees,” I said. “Yes, it would work for a year or two if we kept the draw low enough, but eventually everything would wither. I don’t think most of these trees could even grow in such a dry environment without mana to fortify them.”

“We already have a watering rotation,” Shel said. “Maybe if we increased the frequency on that, it would work.”

“Maybe. But most likely they’d die.”

It was about then that a group of men stepped out of the trees and approached. Father had my pallet carried in a bundle in his arms along with a familiar basket with some food, Karad was carrying another significantly larger pallet, and Nermet had a pair of chairs and a small table.

“Hey there, Gravin,” Father said. “I hope I’m not interrupting.”

“No, you’re fine,” I said. Shel let out a huff that was half annoyance and half amusement, but didn’t say anything.

“Got you a few things for your first night. We’ll bring you some more stuff tomorrow. Everyone’s pretty tired from this whole ordeal,” Father said. I held the door open for him to carry everything in.

As we were setting things up, he leaned over and said in a low voice, “Has she really been going for hours?”

“Yes,” I groaned.

“Best to just tell her you’re tired and call it a night,” Father said. “Is Nermet going to be alright here? It’s not too much distance or anything?”

“No, it’s fine. It’ll draw a bit harder on your mana reserves than normal, but this is only a mile or so. I’m going to make removing his subjugation a priority.”

Karad, who’d been listening without participating, glanced over at his nephew, then gave me a nod. “Thank you,” he said softly. “Have a good night, you two. Gravin, do not leave this house.”

Father left soon after, leaving me with Nermet, who’d been instructed to get some rest, and two Garrison members positioned outside. Neither seemed happy about that arrangement, and I suspected there would soon be some new construction to build something that more closely resembled a prison with multiple rooms.

Shel, thankfully, left me alone at that point. I spent an hour or so thoroughly going over the subjugation enchantment in Nermet’s mind again and began making plans for what order I’d need to cut pieces of it and where I’d need to place my own temporary enchantments to hold pieces of the spell in place until I’d fully disconnected a section. It was going to be a delicate job, that was for sure.

All in all, this hadn’t been a total disaster of a day. More people knew my secret than I was happy with, but I was in a position to rapidly advance my core to stage two thanks to not only my own mana, but the village reserves I could skim from. I was technically a prisoner, but nobody was really under the illusion that I’d stay here. At some point, Karad would try to get rid of me, but that was a way down the road still and I’d only grow stronger between now and then.

Things weren’t perfect, but this was a good start.

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