Month 2 – Week 1

Dara – The Treaty Line Farmhouse,

Life in the country was, different. Dara had never farmed before. She wasn’t even certain she’d seen actual dirt before Esep and May’s farm. The mud which caked people’s shoes in the city wasn’t real dirt. It pretended to be the dirt it wanted to be when it grew up. And the colored pebbles and carefully cultivated humus that filled the planters and coiffed gardens of the Matriarch’s compound or the private school she attended were nothing compared to what she had actually found here.

The matriarch had assigned her to a farm out beyond the named lands. So far from the center of civilization, she was to live, that the nearest town didn’t even have a name officially. It was just the Orc end of The Matriachy. So, it was called Orc’s End. Dara’s new home was less than twenty miles from the nearest Horde hive, and according to the map she held in her hand the border between human and orc territories ran through the property she was to be living on.

If this zoning map were to be believed then less than thirty feet north of her kitchen table, the table she sat at right this moment, was the territory of the orc Horde. Trust the Matriarchy to break a truce that had been in place for centuries by farming right on the border. And Matriarch intended her to be the one, to be their representative in this act of war. Although… farming Horde land might not be certain to enrage the orcs. How was she supposed to know?

Her farmland had been mapped out long ago and recently resurveyed. The house had only just been built in the last month. Dara sat in the cold kitchen at a table so fresh it still oozed nearly uncolored sap. She’d be scraping the walls for a year at least. And she’d have a devil of a time keeping this place warm after the boards shrunk over summer. But there’d be no one round to see the stains on her clothing and tisk at her.

Dara had a list; things to grow, when to plant, when to harvest, how much to water, expected yields, and acceptable losses. She may have been banished by the Matriarch, despite being so far from the domineering woman it was impossible for her to say the words great-grandmother even in her head, but she still had rent to pay. So typical. They never stopped taking.

The one consolation to her banishment was that the land was beautiful. Her fields were freshly cleared; there were still tree trunks in it with roots she’d have to dig out by hand or burn. Matriarch had made sure that she had everything she needed though. Seed would come at the appropriate times, and Dara was expected to communicate regularly as well as pay off the farm and repay any equipment she was provided. Her grandmother had granted her this parcel on the condition that she earned it.

Since the first date of work on her calendar was still three weeks away, Dara had ample time to explore the town and her land. Supposedly her land extended quite a way into the orc territory. The very back of her property in the furthest northwestern corner was according to the map what looked like a spring-fed stream. She was hoping that somewhere along that stream there was a pool. Of course, that stream turned all the low-lying land behind her fields into a swamp.

Already Dara thought of it as her stream, and her stream ran right down through the forest to end in a swampy bog at the eastern edge of her fields. Where it came from, she had no idea. Today that was where she was heading, as soon as it was bright enough to see, she was going to follow the stream to its source. It might be dangerous so close to orc territory, but she couldn’t live the rest of her life in terror.

Besides, Dara had worked very hard to force herself to think of her banishment as a romantic adventure. To that end, every single day she was going to do something new and different. Today she was going to swim naked in a mountain stream, mere miles from an orc stronghold. Some might call it suicidal. Dara chose to call it flirting with danger. If anything went wrong, she could always chase the Orcs away with her powers of glowing and hair waving. She chuckled at the ridiculous thought.

Inheritance

Flirting With Danger