The Tired Mercenary Just Wants to Farm in Peace (Seneca Farm #2)

1. Back To It

Back To It

The fire popped in the cast-iron stove behind him as Kain lowered himself into the chair at the kitchen table. A plate of eggs sat at his elbow, small and a little burnt, pushed off to the side where he wouldn't have to look at them while he worked.

The almanac lay open in front of him instead, its pages dog-eared and stained from a winter of reading, and he smoothed the top one flat against the wood with the side of his hand.

The book had come from Sam, who'd been holding it on the chance Mark might come back for it someday.

Mark had spent an afternoon at the store going through the crop charts and filling the margins with notes in that loose scrawl of his, and he'd told Sam he would pick it up next time through, and then he never came through again.

Sam handed it across the counter without saying much about why. Kain had read it cover to cover twice since the first snow, and he was reading it a third time now because the seeds were waiting at the store and the planning was always easier than the doing.

Seneca Farm. The farm Mark wanted.

"All right," he said to the empty kitchen. "Let's get on with it."

He turned to the back of the almanac, where Mark's writing crowded the last clean pages.

The planting guide from the flask had given him a handful of lines for the second year and nothing past them, the lines folded into two sheets of paper because two sheets was all the flask had ever held: expand by a few plots, try potatoes and onions, put an herb garden close to the house, and set fruit trees for the years that hadn't come yet.

The margins of the almanac filled in some of the rest, and the parts the margins missed, Kain carried in his own head from the road.

Mark would have started him on potatoes. He had talked about potatoes. Plant them deep, hill the dirt up around the stems as they grow, and wait for the tops to die back before you dig.

Easy crop, hard to kill, and it filled a man up when the rest of the garden gave out.

He had picked all of that up from a farmer they guarded outside Greyhaven one winter, and he had repeated it on the road so many times that Darien finally swore he'd start peeling the things and throwing them at his head.

Kain took a bite of the eggs without looking down at the plate. Mark had a way of circling back to the same point, and the point never changed once he got there. You didn't quit a thing once you'd started it.

He'd used the basilisk to prove it, the young one down in the old sewers under Greyhaven, the one Kain could barely scratch through its hide. Eight hours he'd spent on that fight, grinding it down by inches until the thing finally stopped moving. Mark had laughed about it for years afterward.

Half a day to kill something you should've walked away from, he'd say, and you'd do it again tomorrow, and that was the whole trouble with you. He'd meant it as a complaint, and they'd both always known that it wasn't one.

The almanac had a line near the bottom of the last page, underlined once in pencil. Farming was a forty-year job, and nobody finished one in a hurry. Mark had said the same thing on the road, more or less, in the flat way he said everything, like a fact instead of a comfort.

Forty years from the day a man struck out on his own to the day his back gave out and he handed the work down to somebody younger.

Kain had most of those years still ahead of him.

Every contract he'd ever taken had ended the day the coin changed hands, and this was the first work he'd put his hands to that was meant to outlast him.

He set the page down and didn't move for the length of one slow breath. Then he reached for the stack of seed receipts on the counter, pulled the top one free, and turned it over to the blank side.

He smoothed it flat against the table and started a list of what to buy and what to break ground on once the frost let go, ordered. There was work that didn't need a thaw to get done, and no good reason left to put it off.

When he finished the list he folded it twice and pushed it down into his pocket. His plate was empty when he glanced at it, the eggs eaten somewhere in the middle of the reading without his noticing he was doing it.

He carried the plate to the basin, rinsed it, and went out into the yard.

The cold was waiting for him the moment he opened the door. Snow lay over the whole of the yard, packed down to ice along the paths his boots had cut into it over the last weeks, and his breath stood white in the air in front of him.

He pulled his cloak tight at the throat and crossed toward the barn. The cold was one more thing standing between him and the work, and he had long since stopped letting it slow him down.

Roan stood ready in his stall, breath steaming in the cold air. Kain set the saddle across the horse's back and reached under for the girth, and Roan filled his chest with air.

Kain stood and waited him out, the way he'd learned to with this horse. The breath came out of Roan in a long huff, and Kain drew the girth snug, set a flat hand on the warm neck, and swung up into the saddle.

The road out from the farm ran frozen and hard underfoot, and a few wagons rolled along it with their drivers hunched down into their collars, none of them in a mood for more than a nod. Kain nodded back and put Roan into an easy trot.

The walk into Tillamore was long enough to be a chore on foot, and on Roan it was nothing at all, which was most of the reason he had wanted a horse of his own. The wind cut at his face as the town came up out of the white.

He passed the Copper Kettle on his way into the square. Sasha wasn't out front, so he didn't stop.

He owed her a hand with a few odd jobs around the place, a shelf bracket and a door that had started to stick, and he would get to them before the week was out. Today the list in his pocket was his own.

He tied Roan to the post outside the general store and went in out of the wind. Sam looked up from behind the counter as the door swung shut.

"Kain. You about had enough of this snow yet? I know I have."

Sam ran more cheerful than Kain had patience for most mornings, but the two of them got on well enough for all that.

"Trying to put the time to good use," Kain said.

"Came for your seed, then." Sam turned and started shifting boxes on the shelf behind him. "Set it aside when it came in. How's the place holding together out there?"

"Standing," Kain said.

"Better than just standing, I'd wager." Sam came up with a small sack and set it on the counter. "Paid in full when you ordered, so that one's yours. Anything else while you're in out of the cold?"

Kain looked toward the seed rack along the wall, where the packets sat sorted by crop, and his eye settled on the white pumpkins, the Greyhaven variant, the clean cream-white kind that nobody in Tillamore bothered to grow.

His last one had taken a streak of orange across the rind as it came in, and the judges had thrown it out of the white class at the harvest festival before they so much as picked it up, disqualified on the purity standard.

He hated losing, and losing on a technicality sat worse with him than an honest defeat ever had.

"One of those," he said.

"Giving it another go?" Sam pulled a packet from the rack. "Six copper."

Kain laid the copper coins down on the counter between them. "Want a clean one this time," he said.

"Can't fault a man for that." Sam swept the copper off the wood into his palm. "Pleasure as always. Stay warm getting home."

Kain pushed the packet down into the sack with the rest of the seed and went back out into the cold.

Roan was shifting his weight at the post, ready to be moving again, and Kain freed the rein and pulled himself back up into the saddle. The ride home ran faster than the ride in, and he passed the Kettle a second time without slowing his pace.

The farm rose up ahead of him with snow banked along the roofline and a column of smoke standing straight up off the chimney into the still air.

He led Roan into the roped-off stretch of yard where the horse could stretch his legs, and he unclipped the lead from the halter. Roan stood still, then dropped his head and broke into a short hard run, kicking up snow behind him, pulling himself up well short of the fence.

Kain watched him circle back around and clipped the rope gate shut behind him. "Good," he said.

Ghost came over the stone wall while he watched, a gray shape clearing the top of it without seeming to spend any effort, and crossed to the patch of garden Kain kept shoveled down to bare ground. The wolf turned a slow circle, then another, and lay down with its muzzle resting on its paws.

One eye found Kain and held on him, and Kain dipped his head to it in return. The eye stayed open a moment longer, then slid shut.

The rope fence sagged under a load of wet snow, and he went down the line shaking it off until the rope hung clear again, one small thing handled before he turned to the larger ones. He looked over the rest of the place and counted the bigger jobs.

The front fence still stood half-mended, the new rails bright against the gray weathered ones. A run of shingles had worked loose along the south edge of the roof, the price of a man learning the trade of hammer and nail a year later than he should have.

Inside the barn, the loft floor was laid only halfway across the joists, and two of the support posts leaned far enough that he wouldn't trust them under a load yet. He squared his shoulders and got to it, because the list never got any shorter for being looked at.

He spent the rest of the daylight on the jobs that didn't need a thaw to do.

He braced one of the leaning posts with a length of scrap timber, sorted a coffee can of bent nails out from the good ones, and hauled the loose shingles down off the roof so they wouldn't come down on their own and split on the frozen ground.

By the time the light went orange along the ridge and then gray, his hands were raw and his back had its own opinion about the cold, and he had made the kind of progress that didn't show but counted.

Evening found him in the chair beside the fire with the heat working slowly into his legs. Ghost came in through the front door, crossed the room, and settled onto the hearthstones with a heavy sigh.

Kain let the warmth sit on his face a while before he reached for the almanac again and turned to the page on herb gardens.

The diagram showed a small bed laid out along the south wall of a house, where the stone soaked up the day's heat and gave it back through the night and stretched the season a little longer at both ends.

Mark's hand had been over it in the margin, the spacing between plants, a note to keep the soil damp without letting it go wet, and an arrow aimed at the south wall with two words beside it. Do this.

Kain traced the outline of the bed once with a finger, then turned the corner of the page down to mark it and set the book on the floor beside the chair.

He leaned back and let his eyes fall closed. A wolf on the hearth, a horse in the barn, a packet of seeds on the counter, and a house that was his and stood because he kept on making it stand.

The thaw was a week out, maybe two, and then the seeds would go into the ground. The work would be there waiting in the morning, the same as it had every morning since he came, and he found that he didn't mind the thought of it at all.