The Towers of the Sunset - L. E. Modesitt [185]
“Our population’s still small. The thirty or fifty golds we might net out of the distillery every season or so might buy enough food to make the difference. But what happens two years from now when we have another couple of thousand people here?”
“That won’t happen.”
Creslin catches her eyes. “We’ll either have three thousand people or more on Recluce in two years or we’ll be dead. We can’t survive with fewer. We’re getting a score every couple of eight-days already.” He waits. “I need to be going. Will you tell Hyel about Gidman?”
“I’ll tell him, along with the explanation. I’ll also tell Fiera.”
“How is she? I keep thinking about talking to her, but she didn’t seem to want to face me. She avoids me even when I’m practicing.”
“She feels like she failed, and nothing you say can help now. But she’ll need to deal with it, and with you, sooner or later.”
“I dreamed about her for a time, you know.”
“I know. She knows, and so does Megaera. But that was in a different world.”
Creslin nods, but the words, “That was in a different world,” run through his head as he walks back down through the keep toward the stable. In less than two years, all Candar has been changed. Yet has it been only because of his and Megaera’s actions?
He steps into the exercise yard, where he sees a familiar blond head duck back into the newly constructed guard quarters.
“Good day, your grace,” offers a guard, saluting with a practice wand.
“Good day.” His eyes linger on the empty doorway where Fiera had stood. Then he crosses the stones as though he walks alone through the high forests of the Westhorns, as though he scales the towers of the sunset against the demons of the light. The remaining guards draw back.
Even as he saddles Vola, the mare neither skitters nor whinnies, as though he is a storm that walks on two feet, bearing terrible lightnings poised like swords to fall from the Heavens.
By the time he reaches the Black Holding, he is silent, and Vola offers her opinion with a whickering as he unsaddles her.
“It’s not that bad,” he murmurs to the mare. “We only need to remake the rest of the world in a season.” He slams the saddle on the rack and hangs the saddle blanket in place before dishing out one of the few remaining oatcakes into the manger. “Enjoy it. It may be your last for a long time.”
He stops by the kitchen, since he can feel that Megaera is there, washing up.
“Begging your pardon, your grace, but is there anything you can do about the bread?” Aldonya looks up from a pot of soup on the stove and through the cloud of steam that fills the kitchen despite the two open windows.
“What about it?” he asks.
“There isn’t any left, and no one seems to know when there will be more.”
“I don’t know either. The Dawnstar won’t be back for at least another eight-day, and Freigr may not have been able to get flour, not with the drought in Candar. Lydya thinks that the first of our maize will be ready to harvest in two or three eight-days. But it needs to be dried before it can be ground into flour.”
“We have not even maize flour? It will be a sad day when cornmeal is too dear for even the rich.”
“We’re scarcely rich, Aldonya.”
“The fisherfolk think you are a great lord, and who am I to argue with those who toil on the great Eastern Ocean?”
Creslin snorts. “You know what we eat, and what I have to wear. Great lord?”
“They have even less, your grace.”
“I know, I know.”
“What do you know?” asks Megaera, her hair wrapped in a towel and her body garbed with the thin blue robe, clinging suggestively to her damp curves. Creslin cannot help but look longingly at her.
“Not that! It’s been a long day,” she says firmly. “Some idiot didn’t . . . never mind. I don’t want to get angry about it again. We lost an entire crucible of colored crystal.” She adjusts the towel around her head. “Cleaning up after cleaning up. Now, best-beloved, what do you know?”
“Oh . . . about how little flour we have left, and how there’s even less for the fisherfolk.”
“They asked me, too.” Her lips tighten. “When will