“Still.” Her gaze goes soft, assessing. “It eases an old farmer’s heart, knowing our Lord no longer walks alone.”
Something squeezes behind my breastbone.
We move on.
It’s like that the whole morning.
Fields and terraces and carved-out plots. People call out blessings and jokes.
“Lord Dagan, keep the blight away this year, eh?”
“And the hail!” another farmer shouts. “Last season took half my yield!”
“You planted too late,” someone else calls. “Blame your dice games, not the sky!”
Dagan grumbles, but he stops each time he’s hailed.
A woman with dirt under her nails presses a handful of tiny, bright blue seeds into his hand for her herb garden.
An older man with a limp offers him a single, perfect bulb he’s been breeding for seasons, asking for strength against rot.
Each time, Dagan does his thing.
Palm to seeds. Eyes gone distant. The ground hums, then settles.
I stand there, useless and awestruck, while genuine relief washes over these people as if someone just paid off their mortgage and handed them a year’s worth of groceries.
Once, halfway down a ridge, a farmer with a wide hat looks between us and grins.
“Looks right, this,” he says. “Earth Lord and his viyella, walking the lines together.”
I choke a little. “You don’t even know me.”
“We know what the land says,” he replies simply.
“What does it say?” I ask before I can stop myself.
He tips his head, listening to some frequency I can’t quite catch.
“That she belongs,” he answers at last. “If the Marches didn’t like you, milady, you wouldn’t be standing this close to the Lord without tripping over your own feet.”
Dagan snorts. “The Marches have always been opinionated.”
“Wonder where they learned it from,” I mutter.
He shoots me a look that is pure exasperated affection.
We keep walking.
To me, it feels like tracing survey lines—only instead of dragging seismographs and swearing at faulty batteries, I have a twelve-foot, winged seismic sensor in demon form and some kind of magical inner GPS that hums under my skin whenever something is wrong.
We move along ridges where the rock feels thin.
Like a scab over an unhealed wound. At those spots, my chest tightens before Dagan even reaches for the stone.
“There,” I say, pointing. “That section’s under more stress. You can see it in the fracture angles.”
He plants his palm against the rock. I follow his lead and lay my hand beside his.
